Thoroughfare

“ Think of the noble thoroughfare, with its special lanes for high speeding surface cars, its quadruple roadways, one for fast moving and one for slow moving vehicles in each direction, its lines of trees and shaded walks ”

“ A wide street, that is, broad spaces between fences, by no means implies a broad roadway. All we need in the principal thoroughfare of a busy village is such a width as will allow of the easy passing of vehicles in the middle of the road, and the standing of one vehicle at rest at each side. ”

“ Then comes the department of street cleaning, with its extraordinary ideas of the use of a thoroughfare. The new-comer is taught that the street is not the place for dead cats and cabbage stalks, and other trifles for which he has no further use. ”

“ Years have rolled over our scene, and converted the forest-track into a dusty thoroughfare, which, being intersected with lanes and cross-paths, may fairly be designated as the Main-street. On the ground-sites of many of the log-built sheds, into which the first settlers crept for shelter, houses of quaint architecture have now risen. ”

“ Indeed there are places in our larger towns where the wideness of the main thoroughfare is a positive inducement to blocks caused solely by the meeting at right angles of large concourses of vehicles. ”

“ Only by its use in some cases can the full advantage of an improved thoroughfare be secured by providing abutting lots of size and shape adapted for suitable structures. Only by selling surplus land under restrictions can the city most effectively control the fringe along the widened thoroughfare. ”

“ Another favorite location is the end of a mountain pass, or a gap that is a thoroughfare between two valleys. If rivers are difficult to cross, settlements will spring up at the safest ferries or fords. In a level plain, a town will be near its center, and a focus of roads or railroads in such a plain, fertile and populous, will almost surely make a city. ”

“ Grand avenue, an extension of the main business thoroughfare of the city, runs out into the country some two miles, broad, with a solid road, a stately avenue, lined with fine dwellings, many of them palaces in size and elegant in design. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The acreage of our model city allows room for three wide main streets or boulevards, which run from east to west, and which are the main thoroughfares. Beneath each of these is a railway along which the heavy traffic of the city is carried on. The streets from north to south which cross the main thoroughfares at right angles, and the minor streets which run parallel, are all wide, and, owing to the lowness of the houses, are thoroughly ventilated, and in the day are filled with sunlight. ”

“ Even my organ of locality well-nigh failed me in the intricate maze.
Among all these zigzags you discover the leading thoroughfares only by the busy appearance, the continuous stream of citizens going and coming, straggling all across the narrow roadway, now darting aside to escape a passing carriage, or slowly giving place to a long lumbering dray that rolls past with deafening rumble, the horses clattering on shoes with tall calkins that put you in mind of pattens. Here, too, are the best shops, displaying attractive wares behind coarse and uneven panes. ”

“ You are in rabbit-land, traveling its highways—the most complicated and entangling system of thoroughfares that was ever constructed. The individual roads are straight and plain enough, but at a glance one can see that the plan of the system is intended to bewilder and lead astray all who trespass here. ”

“ Some lie in what were once town or village thoroughfares, and will be so again; others by the side of railway stations and goods yards, houses or factories, in arable or pasture fields, parks, gardens and the like. ”

“ The chief business streets, such as Commissioner Street, Market Street, President Street and Pritchard Street, run east and west. In these thoroughfares and in several of the streets which intersect them are the offices of the mining companies, the banks, clubs, newspaper offices, hotels and shops, the majority being handsome stone or brick buildings, while the survival of some wooden shanties and corrugated iron buildings recalls the early character of the town. ”

“ Modern improvements in the streets of our towns have [Pg 64] cost us several examples that could ill be spared. It would be as foolish as futile to decry the opening out of narrow thoroughfares to the sweet influences of sun and air, or to grumble when growing towns make due provision for growing traffic ”

“ The Inspector of the Seventeenth Ward writes: “The two following localities present the appearance of dung-hills rather than the thoroughfares in a civilized city, viz.: Sixth Street, between Bowery and Second Avenue, and Eleventh Street, between First and Second Avenues.” ”

“ Since the dawn of history, the great thoroughfares have belonged to the people, have been known as the king’s highways or the public highways, and have been open to the free use of all, on payment of a small uniform tax or toll to keep them in repair. ”

“ It consists, in fact, of certain centres of shops and public buildings, with intervening tracts of streets, collieries, factories, and furnaces, and occasional intervening fields. The streets are composed of thoroughfares between dingy cottages, with volumes of smoke rolling over and frequently enveloping them. ”

“ For the advantage of commerce and the facility of communication, distant waters have been united and noble thoroughfares constructed from one section of the country to the other; mountains have been levelled and plains elevated. ”

“ The city is squalid and sinister,
With the silver-barred street in the midst,
Slow-moving,
A river leading nowhere. ”

“ The streets of the great towns of antiquity, the streets of the great towns of the East, the streets of all the mediæval towns, were not intended for any sort of wheeled traffic at all—were designed primarily and chiefly for pedestrians. So it would be, I suppose, in any one's ideal city. Surely Town, in theory at least, is a place one walks about as one walks about a house and garden, dressed with a certain ceremonious elaboration, safe from mud and the hardship and defilement of foul weather, buying, meeting, dining, studying, carousing, seeing the play. ”

“ The municipal transportation and communication question has developed a large literature which is to be found in many separate works on the telephone, telegraph, radio, street-car systems, busses, automobile, mail service, newspaper, and railways as well as in municipal reports, technical and administrative journals, and textbooks on the city.
3. The existence of streets, pavement, alleys, sewers, and other devices of the same sort that characterize the city as a physical mechanism influence the behavior of the person and the group, and as such are of interest to the sociologist. ”

“ Land values are an important index to the boundaries of these local areas. Streets, rivers, railroad properties, street-car lines, and other distinctive marks or barriers tend to serve as dividing lines between the natural areas within the city. ”

“ After your farthest wandering, you are never surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway, to strike the centre point of branching alleys, or to find the aqueduct trailing, thousand-footed, through the brush. ”

“ Ordinarily, city streets are first a means of communication and* later furnish frontage for buildings, but in waterfront cities this may be reversed. The principal business streets usually have some definite point of origin, such as a ferry or a railroad station within a city, or a country town or district outside of it, and long distance or through traffic is a prime essential for business streets, those which are cut off at one or both ends being almost useless for retail business, even though immediately contiguous to main arteries of traffic. ”

“ When common convenience required a street, a street appeared. There were no yards or gardens, for beyond the narrow ravine filled with straggling cabins, only grew sage-brush. The miners thrived and the city grew. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The lower one lies in the valleys. The streets of the upper town are connected by bridges; and when you stand upon one [Pg 158] of these bridges, and look down, you see a street instead of a river below, with ranges of strange and antique-looking buildings on each side, for banks, and a current of men, women, and children flowing along, instead of water. ”

“ After highways, town-ways, streets, causeways, and bridges have been established, they are to be kept in such repair as to be reasonably safe and convenient for travellers at all seasons of the year at the expense of the town or city in which they are situated. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A town or city has a right, in repairing a highway, to so raise the grade or so construct the water-bars within its limits, as to cause surface water to flow in large quantities upon adjoining land, to the injury of the owner thereof ”

“ 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. ”

“ The streets, or rather lanes, are close and confined. Indeed, there is but one principal street, which is transversed by a multitude of lanes, which on one side lead down to the sea, and on the other scramble up a steep hill. ”

“ The long straight road that goes northwards up through the town and out of the town, rising, at first by slow degrees, and latterly by a steep ascent, to a point from which one can look down upon town and sea, soon leaves small shops for queer old-fashioned rows of houses ”

“ Cities originate at their most convenient point of contact with the outer world and grow in the lines of least resistance or greatest attraction, or their resultants. The point of contact differs according to the methods of transportation, whether by water, by turnpike or by railroad. The forces of attraction and resistance include topography, the underlying material on which city builders work; external influences, projected into the city by trade routes ”

“ 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. ”

“ We can’t find any names on the streets, we can’t read a sign except the few that are in English; the streets wind in any and every direction; they are long and short and circular, while a big canal circles through the part of the city where we are and we seem to cross it every few minutes; every time we cross it we think we are going in the same direction as the last time we crossed it. ”

“ It grew, under the law that regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious situations, not in extent, but in height and density. Public buildings were forced, wherever there was room for them, into the midst of thoroughfares; thoroughfares were diminished into lanes; houses sprang up story after story, neighbour mounting upon neighbour's shoulder, as in some Black Hole of Calcutta, until the population slept fourteen or fifteen deep in a vertical direction. ”

“ 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. ”

“ During the progress of the work the convenience of the public and of the residents along the street must be provided for as far as practicable. Convenient access to driveways, houses and buildings along the street must be maintained wherever possible. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As they came through Buttermilk Channel, they beheld [Pg 112] with delighted astonishment the fort, the church, the governor's house, the great dock jutting out into the salt river, the Stadt Huys, the rondeel, and a goodly assemblage of houses, with the gable ends to the street, as before the villanous introduction of new fashions, and at the extremity of the city, the gate and wall, from whence Wall-street deriveth its name. ”

“ Some urban authorities insist that the roadways shall be [196] paved with granite setts or wood blocks, the footpaths being flagged or paved with asphalte, while others are content with ordinary macadamised roadways and gravelled paths.
There can be no doubt that the town surveyor must use considerable discretion in deciding what class of work should be demanded, and he must be greatly guided by the situation and requirements of the street in question and the description and value of the adjoining property. ”

“ It is simply an opening. Not a wall but can by some fissure give passage to an agile and slender person. The large streets necessary to general traffic, and to an ordered mechanical life, would be of no use here. Here merely collective alleys and passages are provided. ”

“ Street and road construction and maintenance, including curbs, sidewalks, street lights, and devices to control the flow of traffic on streets and roads constructed by counties and municipalities or any combination thereof. ”