Street corner

“ "I do," she protested; "I want to stand on the street corner like a sandwich man, informing all the passers-by." ”

“ Had any one been present on the opposite side of the street, or looking from the windows of the houses opposite, they might have seen another man cautiously come from a corner of the little courtyard in front, and, after a careful look up and down the street, return the signal in the same cautious manner. ”

“ He is approaching another street, less lonely and better lighted than the one he is in. There are more people about, and he sees several women loitering up and down near the corner. Instinctively he crosses the street so as to avoid them. ”

“ The streets generally are four or five to eight feet wide and as crooked as a corkscrew. You go along one of these gloomy cracks, and look up and behold the sky like a mere ribbon of light, far above your head, where the tops of the tall houses on either side of the street bend almost together. ”

“ The arc light at the corner of Main Street vied with a faint moon in illuminating the passages and corridors of the old Corner House. Deep shadows lay in certain corners and at turns in the halls and staircases; but Neale O'Neil was not afraid of the dark.
The distant laughter spurred him to find the girls' room. He wanted to get square with Agnes, whom he believed had put the bag of crackers beside his bed. ”

“ Roger said, “I like you in brown.”
I love going down Fifth Avenue in the dark of a winter evening. The traffic of business is over. Motors and carriages go spinning by, carrying people [Pg 61] to dinners. The big glistening street is like an artery with the joyous blood of the city racing through it, coursing along with the throb, throb, throb of a deathless vitality. ”

“ People along the street set up a shout when they beheld Neale O'Neil leap right down on the pole of the wagon and stretch out perilously to seize the reins at the hames. He had them and was back in the seat before the horses had run another block.
As he passed Ralph Avenue where the Corner House girls stood, he had lost his hat; his hair, which had grown long again, was blowing back in the wind, and his white face was a mask of determination.
"Oh! he'll be killed!" whispered Ruth.
"He's going to stop them!" crowed Agnes, with assurance. ”

“ He passed block after block of trim work-men’s houses, as still and silent as the sleepers within them, and at last he turned the horse’s head into Broad Street, the city’s great thoroughfare, that stretches from its one end to the other and cuts it evenly in two. ”

“ The street itself was dim, lit only by stray lanterns, hanging at long intervals, on ropes that ran across from house to house, but the pavement was awake to the tramp of passing feet, and men and women flitted before us like gray shadows, or stood out in bold silhouette against the lights from the doors of a cabaret, or the windows of a shop, or maybe dwelling-house. ”

“ The fact is that the streets are so narrow that there is no room for display of street architecture in these lanes, culs de sac, and thoroughfares, that allow no wheeled conveyance to pass up and down. ”

“ At the corners figures of men are often seen, holding up the story above on their shoulders and making horrible faces at the weight. When I state that in all these narrow streets which constitute the greater part of the city, there are no sidewalks, the windows of the lower stories with an iron grating extending a foot or so into the street, which is only wide enough for one cart to pass along, you can have some idea of the facility of walking through them, to say nothing of the piles of wood, and market-women with baskets of vegetables which one is continually stumbling over. ”

“ Aunt Sarah stalked up the main stairway without a word. She knew her way about the Corner House.
She took possession of one of the biggest and finest rooms in the front part, on the second floor. When she had lived here as a young woman, she had been obliged to sleep in one of the rear rooms which was really meant for the occupancy of servants.
Now she established herself in the room of her choice, had the expressman bring her rocking-chair up to it, and settled with her crocheting in the pleasantest window overlooking Main Street. ”

“ Enough of the town: the streets are narrow, hot, and dusty; the day, too, advances; but the gardens are yet cool. So we dash at a venture through a labyrinth of byways and crossways till we find ourselves in the wide street that runs immediately along but inside the walls. ”

“ When still blinded by the over powering rays of the sun with which the square is flooded, and which beat in all their intensity on the white walls and granite pavement, the eye, at first dazzled by the glare, sees only after a few moments another street cutting this one at right angles, and forming with it a dark cross-road. ”

“ You must know, reader, that King street is our Boulevard of fashion; and though not the handsomest street in the world, nor the widest, nor the best paved, nor the most celebrated for fine edifices, we so cherish its age and dignity that we would not for the world change its provincial name, or molest one of the hundred old tottering buildings that daily threaten a dissolution upon its pavement, or permit a wench of doubtful blood to show her head on the "north sidewalk" during promenade hours. We are, you see, curiously nice in matters of color, and we should be. ”

“ A mighty Boulevard, marching on with progress as relentless as Juggernaut’s car, had cut the narrow, dingy old street across, at right angles, letting daylight in upon all its shabbiness, its teeming life, its contented poverty, its secret crime, squalid miseries, and sordid vices. ”

“ The street elects a king and queen, plasters itself with bunting, arches itself with electric lights, lines its curbs with temporary booths, fills its corners with shows, sells confetti until the pedestrian swims in it—and then whoops it up for a week. ”

“ Besides the direct rays, the white pavement throws a furnace-heat up into one's face; the shady margin of the street is barely tolerable; but it is like going through the ordeal of fire to cross the broad bright glare of an open piazza. The narrow streets prove themselves a blessing at this season, except when the sun looks directly into them; the broad eaves of the houses, too, make a selvage of shade, almost always. ”

“ The chief streets are of stone, are paved with stone, and have remarkably tall buildings, and so with the side streets: the sole difference being that while the principal thoroughfares contain the shops, every side street leading out of them is a more or less dirty slum, where dirty little bare-legged, ragged-tailed boys and girls play in the road or spit out of windows on the passing stranger. ”

“ The streets are some four and some five feet across; in threading them you pass under a succession of archways, for every house desiring more space has thrust forth a couple of storeys over the street, sustained by an arch. The exhalations from the dirt-heaps, the foulness of every house, the general condition of tumble-down, compose a something to make a sanitary officer's hair stand on end. ”

“ He set off, therefore, through several byways, coming out at last on a water-front street of more prominence. Here were stores and tenements. The gutters were crowded with noisy children, and the street with traffic. ”

“ Walking down the long main street with its paved causeways and pebbly roadway, with its straight lines of symmetric houses, coquettish in their marble balconies and brightly-painted shutters and railings, one might fancy himself in Brock or Delft but that the roofs are flat, that the gables are not turned to the street, and that the sky is a cloudless blue. ”

“ A street, court, lane, alley, or other place, where the number of houses or poverty of the inhabitants will not afford a watchman on the terms before mentioned, should be gated in, and the inhabitants let in and out by the watchman of the street. ”

“ In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called 'places.' These 'places' make strange angles and curves. One street crosses itself a time or two. ”

“ Their fathers and grandsires tell them how, within a few years past, the forest stood here, with but a lonely track beneath its tangled shade. Vain legend! They cannot make it true and real to their conceptions. With them, moreover, the Main Street is a street indeed, worthy to hold its way with the thronged and stately avenues of cities beyond the sea. ”

“ The street is broad, the shops are spacious, the noise of passing vehicles, the footsteps of a perpetual stream of people—all the busy sounds of traffic, resound in it from morn to midnight, but the streets around are mean and close ”

“ Everything seems to be piled into the street; old houses made over, and new ones going up everywhere. You know the kind of street Main Street always used to be in our section—half plank-road and turnpike, and the rest mud-hole, and a lot of stores and doggeries strung along with false fronts a story higher than the back, and here and there a decent building with the gable end to the public ”

“ After four years the crudity of it all astonished her––the stark vulgarity of Main Street in the sunshine, every mean, flimsy architectural detail revealed––the dingy trolley poles, the telegraph poles loaded with unlovely wires and battered little electric light fixtures––the uncompromising, unrelieved ugliness of street and people, of shop and vehicle, of treeless sidewalks, brick pavement, car rails, hydrants, and rusty gasoline pumps. ”

“ Neale banged to the door behind him and tramped down the hall. They heard him open the outer door and slam that. Then he thumped down the steps and made for the Willow Street gate.
“Oh, Ruth! what have you done?” gasped Agnes, wringing her hands. “Poor Neale!”
“I want that album!” exclaimed Ruth, jumping up.
“It—it can’t be worth anything—that money,” murmured Agnes, but followed her sister.
“It is good money. I’m sure of it!” snapped Ruth.
She hurried to the porch. There was Neale’s old bag in the dark corner. Ruth pounced upon it.
“Oh, Ruth!” cried Agnes. “It’s never there.” ”

“ The population of these dismal abodes appeared to consider the sidewalks and middle of the street as their common hall. In a drama of low life, the unity of place might be arranged rigidly according to the classic rule, and the street be the one locality in which every scene and incident should occur. ”

“ At that hour the brilliant merry little street would be filling, between its walls of blazing windows, across the breadth of its asphalte road, with a stream of men and women; men of fine carriage and women with splendid eyes ”

“ Blindfold a man and tell him to walk across a field, and he will unconsciously bear to the left, I believe; and he will oscillate too.
Between the High Street and its neighbour there could not well be a greater difference; for the High Street is all bustle and business, and its neighbour is all quietude and residential repose. ”

“ The upper storeys of the houses jut out into the street in such a manner that they constantly meet, forming an archway underneath, and yet the streets are never dark, from the dazzling whiteness of all the walls, which reflect the light in every direction and gild and brighten the darkest corners. ”

“ The first cross street—little more than an alleyway between the houses—is barricaded at its farther extremity by a steep, grass-grown embankment that towers almost to the same altitude as the chimney pots of the house tops below. ”

“ There is the central High Street, a jumble of old half-timbered houses and staring modern red-brick buildings, and sprouted from it a series of lateral roads, lanes and alleys, dwindling in importance to the High Street tip, and each petering out into the sweet country vagueness of hedges and fields. ”

“ Foul slums there are in the East End, of course, as there are in the West; want and misery there are, as wherever a host is gathered together to fight for food. But they are not often spectacular in kind.
Of this street there are about one hundred and fifty yards—on the same pattern all. It is not pretty to look at. A dingy little brick house twenty feet high, with three square holes to carry the windows, and an oblong hole to carry the door, is not a pleasing object; and each side of this street is formed by two or three score of such houses in a row, with one front wall in common. ”

“ If the town street gets undesirably long, a second street or a third will be made, on one or both sides of the main street, and thus the town acquires breadth as well as length. The houses are built immediately upon the roadside, and sidewalks are quite unusual. ”

“ At right angles to the main street or streets, run narrow alleys, upon which open the yards or courts in which the houses are situated. Even the buildings which happen to stand contiguous to the main street offer nothing to the gaze but an expanse of dead wall. ”

“ Passing through the Stone Bow, as the city-gate close by is called, we ascended a street which grew steeper and narrower as we advanced, till at last it got to be the steepest street I ever climbed,— so steep that any carriage, if left to itself, would rattle downward much faster than it could possibly be drawn up. ”

“ Every few steps, as you go, you see some little court or alley boring toward it through the close-pressed houses. It is full of that delightful element of the crooked, the accidental, the unforeseen, which, to American eyes, accustomed to our eternal straight lines and right angles, is the striking feature of European street scenery. ”

“ The cars drew up in a street—if street that could be called which was only a wide, cleared space, intersected by rails, with here and there a stump, and great piles of sawn logs bulking big in the moonlight, and a number of irregular clap-board, steep-roofed houses, many of them with open fronts, glaring with light and crowded with men. ”