New York Sketches

by Jesse Lynch Williams

I

These are the streets which visitors to New York always remark; the characteristic cross streets of the typical up-town region of long regular rows of rectangular residences that look so much alike, with steep similar steps leading up to sombre similar doors and a doctor's sign in every other window. Bleak, barren, echoing streets where during the long, monotonous mornings "rags-an-bot'l" are called for, and bananas and strawberries are sold from wagons by aid of resonant voices, and nothing else is heard except at long intervals the welcome postman's whistle or the occasional slamming of a carriage door. Meantime the sun gets around to the north side of the street, and the airing of babies and fox-terriers goes on, while down at the corner one elevated train after another approaches, roars, and rumbles away in the distance all day long until at last the men begin coming home from business. These are the ordinary unromantic streets on which live so few New Yorkers in fiction (it is so easy to put them on the Avenue or Gramercy Park or Washington Square), but on which most of them seem to live in real life. A slice of all New York with all its layers of society and all its mixed interests may be seen in a walk along one of these typical streets which stretch across the island as straight and stiff as iron grooves and waste not an inch in their progress from one river, out into which they have gradually encroached, to the other river into which also they extend. It is a short walk, the island is so narrow.

An Old Landmark on the Lower West Side.

(Junction of Canal and Laight Streets.)

Away over on the ragged eastern edge of the city it starts, out of a ferry-house or else upon the abrupt water-front with river waves slapping against the solid bulwark. Here are open, free sky, wide horizon, the smell of the water, or else of the neighboring gas-house, brisk breezes and sea-gulls flapping lazily. The street's progress begins between an open lot where rival gangs of East Side boys meet to fight, on one side, and, on the other, a great roomy lumber-yard, with a very small brick building for an office. A dingy saloon, of course, stands on the corner of the first so-called avenue. Away over here the avenues have letters instead of numbers for names. Across the way—and it is easily crossed, for on some of these remote thoroughfares the traffic is so scarce that occasional blades of grass come up between the cobble-stones—is a weather-boarded and weather-beaten old house of sad mien, whose curtainless gable windows stare and stare out toward the river, thinking of other days.... Some warehouses and a factory or two are usually along here, with buzz-saws snarling; then another lettered avenue or two and the first of the elevated railroads roars overhead. This is now several blocks nearer the splendor of Fifth Avenue, but the neighborhood does not look it, for here is the thick of the tenement district, with dingy fire-escapes above, and below in the street, bumping against everyone, thousands of city children, each of them with at least one lung. The traffic is more crowded now, the street darker, the air not so good. Above are numerous windows showing the subdivisions where many families live—very comfortably and happily in numerous cases; you could not induce them to move into the sunshine and open of the country. Here, on the ground floor of the flat, is a grocery with sickening fruit out in front; on one side of it a doctor's sign, on the other an undertaker's. The window shows a three-foot coffin lined with soiled white satin, much admired by the wise-eyed little girls.

Up Beekman Street. Each ... has to change in the greatest possible hurry from block to block.

As each of these succeeding avenues is crossed, with its rush and roar of up-town and down-town traffic, the neighborhood is said to be more "respectable," meaning more expensive; more of the women on the sidewalks wear hats and paint, and there are fewer children without shoes; private houses are becoming more frequent; babies less frequent; there is more pretence and less spontaneity. The flats are now apartments; they have ornate, hideous entrances, which add only to the rent.... So on until here is Madison Avenue and a whole block of private houses, varied only by an occasional stable, pleasant, clean-looking little stables, preferable architecturally to the houses in some cases. And here at last is Fifth Avenue; and it seems miles away from the tenements, sparkling, gay, happy or pretending to be, with streams of carefully dressed people flowing in both directions; New York's wonderful women, New York's well-built, tight-collared young men; shining carriages with good-looking horses and well-kept harness, mixed with big, dirty trucks whose drivers seem unconscious of the incongruity, but quite well aware of their own superior bumping ability. Dodging in and out miraculously are a few bicycles.... And now when the other side of the avenue is reached the rest is an anti-climax. Here is the trades-people's entrance to the great impressive house on the corner, so near that other entrance on the avenue, but so far that it will never be reached by that white-aproned butcher-boy's family—in this generation, at least. Beyond the conservatory is a bit of backyard, a pathetic little New York yard, but very green and cheerful, bounded at the rear by a high peremptory wall which seems to keep the ambitious brownstone next door from elbowing its way up toward the avenue.

Under the Approach to Brooklyn Bridge.

These next houses, however, are quite fine and impressive, too, and they are not so alike as they seem at first; in fact, it is quite remarkable how much individuality architects have learned of late years to put into the eighteen or twenty feet they have to deal with. The monotony is varied occasionally with an English basement house or a tall wrought-iron gateway and a hood over the entrance. Here is a white Colonial doorway with side-lights. The son of the house studied art, perhaps, and persuaded his father to make this kind of improvement, though the old gentleman was inclined to copy the rococo style of the railroad president opposite.... Half-way down the block, unless a wedding or a tea is taking place, the street is as quiet as Wall Street on a Sunday. Behind us can be seen the streams of people flowing up and down Fifth Avenue.

By the time Sixth Avenue is crossed brick frequently come into use in place of brownstone, and there are not only doctors' signs now, but "Robes et Manteaux" are announced, or sometimes, as on that ugly iron balcony, merely Madame somebody. By this time also there have already appeared on some of the newel-posts by the door-bell, "Boarders," or "Furnished Rooms"—modestly written on a mere slip of paper, as though it had been deemed unnecessary to shout the words out for the neighborhood to hear. In there, back of these lace-curtains, yellow, though not with age, is the parlor—the boarding-house parlor—with tidies which always come off and small gilt chairs which generally break, and wax wreaths under glass, like cheeses under fly-screens in country groceries. In the place of honor hangs the crayon portrait of the dear deceased, in an ornate frame. But most of the boarders never go there, except to pay their bills; down in the basement dining-room is where they congregate, you can see them now through the grated window, at the tables. Here, on the corner, is the little tailor-shop or laundry, which is usually found in the low building back of that facing the avenue, which latter is always a saloon unless it is a drug-store; on the opposite corner is still another saloon—rivals very likely in the Tammany district as well as in business, with a policy-shop or a pool-room on the floor above, as all the neighbors know, though the local good government club cannot stop it. Here is the "family entrance" which no family ever enters.

Chinatown.

Then come more apartments and more private residences, not invariably passé, more boarding-houses, many, many boarding-houses, theatrical boarding-houses, students' boarding-houses, foreign boarding-houses; more small business places, and so on across various mongrel avenues until here is the region of warehouses and piano factories and finally even railway tracks with large astonishing trains of cars. Cross these tracks and you are beyond the city, in the suburbs, as much as the lateral edges of this city can have suburbs; yet this is only the distance of a long golf-hole from residences and urbanity. Here are stock-yards with squealing pigs, awful smells, deep, black mire, and then a long dock reaching far out into the Hudson, with lazy river barges flopping along-side it, and dock-rats fishing off the end—a hot, hateful walk if ever your business or pleasure calls you out there of a summer afternoon. There the typical up-town cross street ends its dreary existence.