Town house

“ The public buildings, which are the town-house, of two stories, with low pillared arches, and the church, are all that strike the eye of the stranger; the others are comprised of some few one-story dwelling houses and stores, with huge doors and barred windows, occupied by citizens and small dealers. ”

“ The city is a beautiful one, and cannot fail, I should imagine, to impress all strangers very favourably. The private dwelling-houses are, for the most part, large and elegant; the shops extremely good; and the public buildings handsome. The State House is built upon the summit of a hill, which rises gradually at first, and afterwards by a steep ascent, almost from the water’s edge. In front is a green enclosure, called the Common. The site is beautiful: and from the top there is a charming panoramic view of the whole town and neighbourhood. ”

“ The grey stone house, separated from the garden by a thick privet hedge and moss-grown court, is the last dwelling at this end of the quiet market-town, and, with its slate roof and substantial double storey, is of a class greatly superior to its neighbours, whose warm red tiles are just visible over the walls. ”

“ We should not like to imitate it; while on the other hand, a part of our town-houses are almost always let, the proprietors inhabiting only the ‘bel étage.’ This again appears very strange to the English, and certainly is extremely inconvenient, for the presence of several families in one house is not favourable either to order or cleanliness. ”

“ The houses in Meeting-street and the back part of the town, are in general lofty and extensive, and are separated from each other by small gardens or yards, in which are the kitchens and out-offices. Almost every house is furnished with balconies and verandas, some of which occupy the whole side of the building, from top to bottom, having a gallery for each floor. ”

“ And town life is one in which, as already observed, the majority of familiar objects are symmetrical. We instinctively feel the naturalness of this association. Out amid the fields, a formal house, with a central door flanked by an equal number of windows to right and left, strikes us as unrural—looks as though transplanted from a street ”

“ The town has not a dozen in all, and not one of that [Pg 173] stature is an apartment or tenement house. Having felled her surrounding forests of cypress and drained the swamps in which they stood, she has at command an open plain capable of housing a population seven times her present three hundred and fifty thousand, if ever she chooses to build skyward as other cities do. ”

“ The Local Government Board does not seem to recognise that circumstances alter cases, and that the regulations which may be beneficial in the crowded and filthy slums of a great city, may he mischievous in a village or country town. Andover is an exceedingly healthy little town, as the table on p. 99 will show, and in it there must be very few, if any, houses more than 50 feet high, and the great majority of the houses and cottages have large yards or gardens. ”

“ Old dwelling-houses are too thick on the ground in England to have any distinction unconnected with famous persons and events; this was no more to the town of D—— in 1908 than it was to us when we left it for the modern four-square house with the pillared portico and stone lions on the lawn, down there near the station. ”

“ The first evidence of social quaintness in the town is the way the first families live. Here comes the strain of French blood. The venerable houses are placed among dense foliage, the side, never the front, of the house facing the street. In this side are the parlor and upper bedroom windows, which are never open to the public streets, but covered with wooden shutters. Instead of a front doorbell to ring, there is a small gate with a bell. This you tinkle, and a servant lets you in. There is a long piazza running the full side length128 of the house, which is often used as a sitting room. ”

“ The centre of the town is a big square, pleasantly tree-planted, so large that the facing rows of shops and houses have a remote and dwarfed appearance, and in the middle of it is the great pillared State-house, American style. ”

“ They should be taught to see in the town common or village green a survival of that primitive institution of land-community upon which town and state are based. They should be taught the meaning of town and family names; how the word 'town' means, primarily, a place hedged in for the purposes of defence; how the picket-fences around home and house-lot are but a survival of the primitive town idea; how home, hamlet, and town live on together in a name like Hampton, or Home-town. They should investigate the most ordinary thing for these are often the most archaic. ”

“ For well nigh thirty years it had been called in town “the new house.” The building of it had been a great event. The citizens of the Inner Town used to make excursions on Sundays to see it. They looked at it, discussed it, and shook their heads. ”

“ A few of these houses are situated in the skirts of the town, on one of the streams, where the eye rests on the luxuriant vegetation of garden and wood: others are in the heart of the city: a flight of steps conducts to them from the sultry street, and it is delightful to pass in a few moments from the noisy, shadeless thoroughfare, where you see only mean gateways and the gable-ends of edifices, to a cool, grateful, calm place of rest and refreshment, where you can muse and meditate in ease and luxury, and feel at every moment the rich breeze from the river. ”

“ We sat within the farm-house old, Whose windows, looking o'er the bay, Gave to the sea-breeze, damp and cold, An easy entrance, night and day. Not far away we saw the port, The strange, old-fashioned, silent town, The lighthouse, the dismantled fort, The wooden houses, quaint and brown. We sat and talked until the night, Descending, filled the little room; Our faces faded from the sight, Our voices only broke the gloom. We spake of many a vanished scene, Of what we once had thought and said, Of what had been, and might have been, And who was changed, and who was dead; ”

“ Even the great plate-glass windows lined within and without by comfortable chairs commanding, as they did, the principal public square or park and all the fascinating forces of so vigorous and young a town, were such as would naturally be occupied by the bloods and sports of the village, the traveling salesmen, and the idling big-wigs of political and other realms. ”

“ But where the broad avenue, at midway, spreads still wider, forming a spacious square, are thickly clustered the public buildings of the town and county,—together with the meeting-houses, the taverns, the bank, the shops, and a few handsome dwellings, whose large dimensions and ornate style show them to be the abodes of people of wealth and consideration. ”

“ When we go from a big modern manufacturing town into an old town or village, we cannot help noticing the old buildings, the ancient churches, the old town hall, the alms-houses, and the old houses with their plastered fronts, tiled roofs, and huge chimney-stacks. ”

“ 4 Ah me, why did they build my house by the road to the market town? ”

“ There are certainly many more houses out of the town than in it, and they all stand apart, yet near, hiding in their own shrubberies, or behind the green rows of elms which wall in the secluded lanes on either side. ”

“ HALFWAY down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm. ”

“ The dwelling-houses also are nearly all detached, standing each one in an allotment of its own, so that the residential part of the town straggles over an immense area, stretching out in fragmentary streets for miles from the main city. ”

“ But the old and the rich days are also the most aloof. The towns withdraw, as it were, to ponder on their past. By some magic of their own they eliminate all the latest features, such as a library, a garage, or a new town hall, and show you nothing but winding alleys filled with leaning walls and mossy roofs. ”

“ The grim old building which, when it was new, gave its name to the town, is one for which no search needs to be made; its blackened and time worn walls are seen from the train windows by every traveller who enters the city from the south. ”

“ As we pass through the city we notice numerous edifices substantially built of brick, the residences of native merchants, temples with a sculptured granite façade, and a large customs station; but the houses in the suburbs which border the creek are raised above the water, on piles, and their temporary, miserable appearance is in striking contrast to the abodes and evidences of wealth which we encounter in the heart of the town. ”

“ Hence town sections bordering on the "belt" are rated at higher values, and outside of this "tapu" boundary the suburbs spread out fan-like, with neat and trim-looking cottages, and well-kept gardens, studding the valleys and hill sides; while nearest to the "belt," both on the town and suburban sides, many of the more successful citizens have built themselves picturesque and commodious villas that add to the beauty and attractiveness of the landscape. ”

“ We have been hunting about for a permanent country home in the neighborhood, but no house is so difficult to get as one which has at once seclusion and convenience of position, which is neither of the suburban-villa style nor of the grand hall and castle dimensions. ”

“ Beyond the walls the town assumes a very different character; elegance, taste, and comfort, and those features which mark the progress of art and refinement, are brought into immediate view; while numerous cottages, and several villas of handsome design and finely situated, throw an air of luxury and domestic comfort over the rural suburbs, the natural character of which is highly favourable to buildings of this description. ”

“ When the villages increased in size and became important, usually in the 13th century, many of them claimed municipal privileges, were called towns, and erected "town halls," which are often highly-picturesque structures. ”

“ Then, again, the neighbourhood of the town has a charm for a wanderer from the old country; the roads are excellent, the fields and gardens are tidied up, creepers are led up the cottage walls, suburban villas abound, everything looks more clean, more soigné, more snug, more filled and settled than the neighbourhood of any other city I visited in America, and thus forces back upon the mind associations and reflections of dear old home. ”

“ To English eyes accustomed to dingy brick houses in the suburbs of big cities, to the dreary squalor of some new [Pg 71] little town which straggles around a filthy railway station, with refuse-heaps in undeveloped fields, and a half-finished "High Street," where a sweetstuff-shop, a stationer, and an estate agent establish themselves in the gloomy hope of business, these American villages look wonderfully clean, bright, and pleasant! ”

“ The air is pure and the scenery bold. On a hill about a mile to the southward of her habitation is a village which flourishes in the sunshine of her favour and protection. Her house is a neat building, a mixture of Oriental and English. From the entrance gate a passage (on either side of which is a guard room and some apartments for soldiers and servants) leads to a square yard, half way across which is a terrace with three steps, round which terrace are the different apartments of servants, interpreters, as also spare rooms for visitors. ”

“ Here we find houses that are really homes, old enough to be mellow, lived in enough to have character, and architecturally unconscious enough to have charm. "This is the part of town I love the best of all." ”

“ As we ride to town through the new part, the city looks exceedingly bright and attractive; the streets are very broad; the handsome square houses—ornamented villas, with balconies, pillared piazzas, painted with lively figures and in bizarre patterns—stand behind walls overgrown with the convolvulus, and in the midst of gardens; plats in the center of open spaces and at the angles of streets are gay with flowers in bloom—chiefly scarlet geraniums. The town wears a spring aspect, and would be altogether bright but for the dust which overlays everything, houses, streets, foliage. ”

“ One straight main street pierces the town, with old gates at each end. In the middle of the market-place there is a quaint old town-hall. The whole town is quaint, “bizarre” as the French call it; small in scale irregular, brown and yellow and black, oddly gabled, and swarming with dirty children. ”

“ Beyond that the residential part, with quiet streets, gardens open to the road, shady verandahs, and homes, generally of wood, that are a deal more pleasant to see than the houses in a modern English town. ”

“ In time of peace, however, the visitor passed unscathed through the gate into a vast courtyard enclosed by huge battlemented walls or towers; a courtyard that is almost a village, for it contains the church, the knights’ quarters, the squires’ house, the lodgings for pages and servants, the barracks, the cottages of the artisans and labourers on the estate, the bake-house, the kitchen, the walled and gated fish-pond, the fountain, the washing-place, the stables, the barns, etc. A second gate, a second portcullis, lead to a smaller court, where—huge, swart, and sombre—towers the keep. ”