New York Sketches

by Jesse Lynch Williams

II

Down-town it is so different.

Down-town—"'way down-town," in the vernacular—in latitude far south of homes and peace and contemplation, where everything is business and dollars and hardness, and the streets might well be economically straight, and rigorously business-like, they are incongruously crooked, running hither and thither in a dreamy, unpractical manner, beginning where they please and ending where it suits them best, in a narrow, Old-World way, despite their astonishing, New-World architecture. Numbers would do well enough for names down here, but instead of concise and business-like street-signs, the lamp-posts show quaint, incongruous names, sentimental names, poetic names sometimes, because these streets were born and not made.

It still remains whimsically individual and village-like.

They were born of the needs or whims of the early population, including cows, long before the little western city became self-conscious about its incipient greatness, and ordered a ready-made plan for its future growth. It was too late for the painstaking commissioners down here. One little settlement of houses had gradually reached out toward another, each with its own line of streets or paths, until finally they all grew together solidly into a city, not caring whether they dovetailed or not, and one or the other or both of the old road names stuck fast. The Beaver's Path, leading from the Parade (which afterward became the Bowling Green) over to the swampy inlet which by drainage became the sheep pasture and later was named Broad Street, is still called Beaver Street to this day. The Maiden Lane, where New York girls used to stroll (and in still more primitive times used to do the washing) along-side the stream which gave the street its present winding shape and low grading, is still called Maiden Lane, though probably the only strollers in the modern jostling crowd along this street, now the heart of the diamond district, are the special detectives who have a personal acquaintance with every distinguished jewellery crook in the country, and guard "the Lane," as they call it, so carefully that not in fifteen years has a member of the profession crossed the "dead-line" successfully. There is Bridge Street, which no longer has any stream to bridge; Dock Street, where there is no dock; Water Street, once upon the river-front but now separated from the water by several blocks and much enormously valuable real estate; and Wall Street, which now seems to lack the wooden wall by which Governor Stuyvesant sought to keep New Englanders out of town. His efforts were of no permanent value.

A Fourteenth Street Tree.

Nowadays they seem such narrow, crowded little runways, these down-town cross streets; so crowded that men and horses share the middle of them together; so narrow that from the windy tops of the irregular white cliffs which line them you must lean far over in order to see the busy little men at the dry asphalt bottom, far below, rapidly crawling hither and thither like excitable ants whose hill has been disturbed. And in modern times they seem dark and gloomy, near the bottom, even in the clear, smokeless air of Manhattan, so that lights are turned on sometimes at mid-day, for at best the sun gets into these valleys for only a few minutes, so high have the tall buildings grown. But they were not narrow in those old days of the Dutch; seemed quite the right width, no doubt, to gossip across, from one Dutch stoop to another, at close of day, with the after-supper pipe when the chickens and children had gone to sleep and there was nothing to interrupt the peaceful, puffing conversation except the lazy clattering bell of an occasional cow coming home late for milking. Nor were they gloomy in those days, for the sun found its way unobstructed for hours at a time, when they were lined with small low-storied houses which the family occupied upstairs, with business below. Everyone went home for luncheon in those days—a pleasant, simple system adhered to in this city, it is said, until comparatively recent times by more than one family whose present representatives require for their happiness two or three homes in various other parts of the world in addition to their town house. This latter does not contain a shop on the ground floor. It is situated far up the island, at some point beyond the marsh where their forebears went duck-shooting (now Washington Square), or in some cases even beyond the site of the second kissing bridge, over which the Boston Post road crossed the small stream where Seventy-seventh Street now runs.

Such as broad Twenty-third Street with its famous shops.

Now, being such a narrow island, none of its cross streets can be very long, as was pointed out, even at the city's greatest breadth. The highest cross-street number I ever found was 742 East Twelfth. But these down-town cross streets are much shorter, even those that succeed in getting all the way across without stopping; they are so abruptly short that each little street has to change in the greatest possible hurry from block to block, like vaudeville performers, in order to show all the features of a self-respecting cross street in the business section. Hence the sudden contrasts. For instance, down at one end of a certain well-known business street may be seen some low houses of sturdy red brick, beginning to look antique now with their solid walls and visible roofs. They line an open, sunny spot, with the smell of spices and coffee in the air. A market was situated here over a hundred years ago, and this broad, open space still has the atmosphere of a marketplace. The sights and smells of the water-front are here, too, ships and stevedores unloading them, sailors lounging before dingy drinking-places, and across the cobble-stones is a ferry-house, with "truck" wagons on the way back to Long Island waiting for the gates to open, the unmistakable country mud, so different from city mire, still sticking in cakes to the spokes, notwithstanding the night spent in town. Nothing worth remarking, perhaps, in all this, but that the name of the street is Wall Street, and all this seems so different from the Wall Street of a stone's-throw inland, with crowded walks, dapper business men, creased trousers, tall, steel buildings, express elevators, messengers dashing in and out, tickers busy, and all the hum and suppressed excitement of the Wall Street the world knows, as different and as suddenly different as the change that is felt in the very air upon stepping across through the noise and shabby rush of lower Sixth Avenue into the enchanted peace of Greenwich village, with sparrows chirping in the wistaria vines that cover old-fashioned balconies on streets slanting at unexpected angles.

A Cross Street at Madison Square.

Across Twenty-fourth Street—Madison Square when the Dewey Arch was there.

The typical part of these down-town cross streets is, of course, that latter part, the section more or less near Broadway, and crowded to suffocation with great businesses in great buildings, commonly known as hideous American sky-scrapers. This is the real down-town to most of the men who are down there, and who are too busy thinking about what these streets mean to each of them to-day to bother much with what the streets were in the past, or even to notice how the modern tangle of spars and rigging looks as seen down at the end of the street from the office window.

Of course, all these men in the tall buildings, whether possessed of creative genius or of intelligence enough only to run one of the elevators, are alike Philistines to those persons who find nothing romantic or interesting in our modern, much-maligned sky-scrapers, which have also been called "monuments of modern materialism," and even worse names, no doubt, because they are unprecedented and unacademic, probably, as much as because ugly and unrestrained. To many of us, however, shameless as it may be to confess it, these down-town streets are fascinating enough for what they are to-day, even if they had no past to make them all the more charming; and these erect, jubilant young buildings, whether beautiful or not, seem quite interesting—from their bright tops, where, far above the turmoil and confusion, Mrs. Janitor sits sewing in the sun while the children play hide-and-seek behind water-butts and air-shafts (there is no danger of falling off, it is a relief to know, because the roof is walled in like a garden), down to the dark bottom where are the safe-deposit vaults, and the trusty old watchmen, and the oblong boxes with great fortunes in them, along-side of wills that may cause family fights a few years later, and add to the affluence of certain lawyers in the offices overhead. Deep down, thirty or forty feet under the crowded sidewalk, the stokers shovel coal under big boilers all day, and electricians do interesting tricks with switchboards, somewhat as in the hold of a modern battle-ship. In the many tiers of floors overhead are the men with the minds that make these high buildings necessary and make down-town what it is, with their dreams and schemes, their courage and imagination, their trust and distrust in the knowledge and ignorance of other human beings which are the means by which they bring about great successes and great failures, and have all the fun of playing a game, with the peace of conscience and self-satisfaction which come from hard work and manly sweat.

Here during daylight, or part of it, they are moving about, far up on high or down near the teeming surface, in and out of the numerous subdivisions termed offices, until finally they call the game off for the day, go down in the express elevator, out upon the narrow little streets, and turn north toward the upper part of the island. And each, like a homing pigeon, finds his own division or subdivision in a long, solid block of divisions called homes, in the part of town where run the many rows of even, similar streets.