III
At last Grace Church, with its clean light stone, is reached; and the green grass and shrubbery in front of the interesting-looking Gothic rectory. It is a glad relief. And now—in fact, a little before this point—about where stood that melancholy building bearing the plaintive sign "Old London Street"—which was used now for church services and now prize-fights and had never been much of a success at anything—about here, the up-town walkers notice (unless lured off to the left by the thick tree-tops of Washington Square to look at the goodliest row of houses in all the island) that the character of Broadway has changed even more than the direction of the street changes. A short distance below the bend all the stores were wholesale, now they are becoming solidly retail. Instead of buyers the people along the street are mostly shoppers. Down there were very few women; up here are very few men. This is especially noticeable when Union Square is reached, with cable-cars clanging around Dead Man's Curve in front of Lafayette's statue. Here, down Fourteenth Street, may be seen shops and shoppers of the most virulent type; windows which draw women's heads around whether they want to look or not, causing them to run you down and making them deaf to your apologies for it. Big dry-goods stores and small millinery shops; general stores and department stores, and the places where the sidewalks are crowded with what is known to the trade as "Louis Fourteenth Street furniture." All this accounts for there being more restaurants now and different smells and another feeling in the air.
... Diana on top glistening in the sun.
From the upper corner of Union Square, with its glittering jewellery-shops and music-stores and publishers' buildings, and its somewhat pathetic-looking hotels, once fashionable but now fast becoming out-of-date and landmarky (though they seem good enough to those who sit and wait on park benches all day), the open spaciousness of Madison Square comes into view, the next green oasis for the up-town traveller. This will help him up the intervening blocks if he is not interested in the stretch of stores, though these are a different sort of shop, and they seem to say, with their large, impressive windows, their footmen, their buttons at the door, "We are very superior and fashionable."
Seeing the Avenue from a stage-top.
The shoppers, too, are not so rapacious along here, because they have more time; and the clatter is not so great, because there are more rubber-tired carriages in the street. Nor are all these people shoppers by any means, for along this bit of Broadway mingle types of all the different sorts of men and women who use Broadway at all: nuns, actors, pickpockets, detectives, sandwich-men, little girls going to Huyler's, artists on the way to the Players'—the best people and the worst people, the most mixed crowd in town may be seen here of a bright afternoon.
When they get up to Madison Square the crowd divides and, as some would have us think, all the "nice" people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue, while all the rest go the left, up the Broadway Rialto and the typical part of the Tenderloin.
But when Madison Square is reached you have come to one of the Places of New York. It is the picture so many confirmed New Yorkers see when homesick, Madison Square with the sparkle of a clear, bracing October morning, the creamy Garden Tower over the trees, standing out clear-cut against the sky, Diana on top glistening in the sun; a soft, purple light under the branches in the park, a long, decorative row of cabs waiting for "fares," over toward the statue of Farragut, and lithe New York women, wearing clothes as they alone know how to wear them, crossing Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street while a tall Tammany policeman holds the carriages back with a wave of his little finger.
... people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue.
It is all so typically New York. Over on the north side by the Worth monument I have heard people exclaim, "Oh, Paris!" because, I suppose, there is a broad open expanse of asphalt and the street-lights are in a cluster, but it seems to me to be as New Yorkish as New York can be. It has an atmosphere distinctively its own—so distinctly its own that many people, as I tried to say on an earlier page, miss it entirely, simply because they are looking for and failing to find the atmosphere of some other place.
A seller of pencils.