New York Sketches

by Jesse Lynch Williams

THE CROSS STREETS

A CITY should be laid out like a golf links; except for an occasional compromise in the interest of art or expediency it should be allowed to follow the natural topography of the country.

But this is not the way the matter was regarded by the commission appointed in 1807 to lay out the rural regions beyond New York, which by that time had grown up to the street now called Houston, and then called North Street, probably because it seemed so far north—though, to be sure, there were scattered hamlets and villages, with remembered and forgotten names, here and there, all the way up to the historic town of Haarlem. The commissioners saw fit to mark off straight street after shameless straight street with the uncompromising regularity of a huge foot-ball field, and gave them numbers like the white five-yard lines, instead of names. They paid little heed to the original arrangements of nature, which had done very well by the island, and still less to man's previous provisions, spontaneously made along the lines of least resistance—except, notably, in the case of Greenwich, which still remains whimsically individual and village-like despite the attempt to swallow it whole by the "new" city system.

This plan, calling for endless grading and levelling, remains to this day the official city chart as now lived down to in the perpendicular gorges cut through the hills of solid rock seen on approaching Manhattan Field; but the commissioners' marks have not invariably been followed, or New York would have still fewer of its restful green spots to gladden the eye, nor even Central Park, indeed, for that space also is checkered in their chart with streets and avenues as thickly as in the crowded regions above and below it.

Across Trinity Church-yard, from the West.

However, anyone can criticise creative work, whether it be the plan of a play or a city, but it is difficult to create. Not many of us to-day who complacently patronize the honorable commissioners would have made a better job of it if we had lived at that time—and had been consulted. For at that time, we must bear in mind, even more important foreign luxuries than golf were not highly regarded in America, and America had quite recently thrown off a foreign power. That in itself explains the matter. Our country was at the extreme of its reaction from monarchical ideals, and democratic simplicity was running into the ground. In our straining to be rid of all artificiality we were ousting art and beauty too. It was so in most parts of our awkward young nation; but especially did the materialistic tendency of this dreary disagreeable period manifest itself here in commercial New York, where Knickerbocker families were lopping the "Vans" off their names—to the amusement of contemporaneous aristocracy in older, more conservative sections of the country, and in some cases to the sincere regret of their present-day descendants.

An Evening View of St. Paul's Church.

Now, the present-day descendants have, in some instances, restored the original spelling on their visiting cards; in other cases they have consoled themselves with hyphens, and most of them, it is safe to say, are bravely recovering from the tendency to over-simplicity. But the present-day city corporation of Greater New York could not, if it so desired, put a Richmond Hill back where it formerly stood, southwest of Washington Square and skirted by Minetta River—any more than it can bring to life Aaron Burr and the other historical personages who at various times occupied the hospitable villa which stood on the top of it and which is also gone to dust. They cannot restore the Collect Pond, which was filled up at such great expense, and covered by the Tombs prison and which, it is held by those who ought to know, would have made an admirable centre of a fine park much needed in that section, as the city has since learned. They cannot re-establish Love Lane, which used to lead from the popular Bloomingdale road (Broadway), nearly through the site of the building where this book is published, and so westward to Chelsea village.

They wanted to be very practical, those commissioners of 1807. They prided themselves upon it. Naturally they did not fancy eccentricities of landscape and could not tolerate sentimental names. "Love Lane? What nonsense," said these extremely dignified and quite humorless officials; "this is to be Twenty-first Street." They wanted to be very practical, and so it seems the greater pity that with several years of dignified deliberation they were so unpractical as to make that notorious mistake of providing posterity with such a paucity of thoroughfares in the directions in which most of the traffic was bound to flow—that is, up and down, as practical men might have foreseen, and of running thick ranks of straight streets, as numerously as possible, across the narrow island from river to river, where but few were needed; thus causing the north and south thoroughfares, which they have dubbed avenues, to be swamped with heterogeneous traffic, complicating the problem for later-day rapid transit, giving future generations another cause for criticism, and furnishing a set of cross streets the like of which cannot be found in any other city of the world.

The sights and smells of the water-front are here too.