Impressions and experiences

by William Dean Howells

I.

You will see more of the neglect and overuse in the avenues which penetrate the city’s mass from north to south, and more of the superficial and formal gentility in the streets that cross these avenues from east to west; but the arrogant untidiness you will find nearly everywhere, except in some of the newest quarters westward from the Park, and still farther uptown. These are really very clean; but they have a bare look, as if they were not yet inhabited, and, in fact, many of the houses are still empty. Lower down, the streets are often as shabby and as squalid as the avenues that run parallel with the river-sides; and at least two of the avenues are as decent as the decentest cross-streets.

Of late, a good many streets and several avenues have been asphalted, and the din of wheels on the rough pavement no longer torments the ear so cruelly; but there is still the sharp clatter of the horses’ shoes everywhere; and their pulverized manure, which forms so great a part of the city’s dust, and is constantly taken into people’s stomachs and lungs, seems to blow more freely about on the asphalt than on the old-fashioned pavements. A few years ago scraps of paper, straw, fruit-peel, and all manner of minor waste and rubbish, littered all the thoroughfares; under a reform administration this has been amended; but no one knows how long a reform will last in New York.

When I leave Central Park, where I like best to walk, I usually take one of the avenues southward, and then turn eastward or westward on one of the cross-streets whose perspective appeals to my curiosity, and stroll through it to one of the rivers. The avenues are fifteen or sixteen in number, and they stretch, some farther than others, up and down the island, but most of them end in the old town, where its irregularity begins, at the south, and several are interrupted by the different parks at the north. Together with the streets that intersect them between the old town and Central Park, they form one of the most characteristic parts of modern New York. Like the streets, they are numbered, rather than named, from a want of imagination, or from a preference of mere convenience to the poetry and associations that cluster about a name, and can never cling to a number, or from a business impatience to be quickly done with the matter. This must rather defeat itself, however, when a hurried man undertakes to tell you that he lives at three hundred and seventy-five on One Hundred and Fifty-seventh street. Toward the rivers the avenues grow shabbier and shabbier, though this statement must be qualified, like all general statements. Seventh Avenue, on the west, is pleasanter than Sixth Avenue; and Second Avenue, on the east, is more agreeable than Third Avenue. In fact, the other afternoon, as I strayed over to the East River, I found several blocks of Avenue A, which runs nearest it, very quiet, built up with comfortable dwellings, and even clean, as cleanliness is understood in New York.

But it is Fifth Avenue which divides the city lengthwise nearest the middle, and it is this avenue which affords the norm of style and comfort to the other avenues on either hand, and to all the streets that intersect it. Madison Avenue is its rival, and has suffered less from the invasion of shops and hotels, but a long stretch of Fifth Avenue is still the most aristocratic quarter of the city, and is upon the whole its finest thoroughfare. I do not think any New York street fine; but, generally, Fifth Avenue and the cross-streets in its better part have a certain regularity in their mansions of brownstone, which give something of the pleasure one gets from symmetry. They are at least not so chaotic as they might be; though they always suggest money more than taste, I cannot at certain moments, and under the favor of an evening sky, deny them a sort of unlovely and forbidding beauty. There are not many of these cross-streets which have remained intact from the business of the other avenues. They have always a drinking-saloon or a provision-store or an apothecary’s shop at the corners where they intersect; the modistes find lodgment in them almost before the residents are aware. Beyond Sixth Avenue, or Seventh at farthest, on the west, and Fourth Avenue or Lexington, on the east, they lose their genteel character; their dwellings degenerate into apartment-houses, and then into tenement-houses of lower and lower grade till the rude traffic and the offensive industries of the river shores are reached.

But once more I must hedge, for sometimes a street is respectable almost to the water on one side or the other; and there are whole neighborhoods of pleasant dwellings far down-town, which seem to have been forgotten by the enterprise of business, or neglected by its caprice, and to have escaped for a time at least the contagion of poverty. Business and poverty are everywhere slowly or swiftly eating their way into the haunts of respectability, and destroying its pleasant homes. They already have the whole of the old town to themselves. In large spaces of it no one dwells but the janitors with their families, who keep the sky-scraping edifices where business frets the time away; and by night in the streets where myriads throng by day, no one walks but the outcast and the watch.

Many of these business streets are the handsomest in the city, with a good sky line, and an architectural ideal too good for the uses of commerce. This is often realized in antipathetic iron, but often there is good honest work in stone, and an effect better than the best of Fifth Avenue. But this is stupid and wasteful; it is for the pleasure of no one’s taste or sense; the business men who traffic in these edifices have no time for their beauty, or no perception of it; the porters and truckmen and expressmen, who toil and moil in these thoroughfares, have no use for the grandeur that catches the eye of a chance passer.

Other spaces are abandoned to the poverty which festers in the squalid houses and swarms day and night in the squalid streets; but business presses closer and harder upon the refuges of its foster-child, not to say its offspring, and it is only a question of time before it shall wholly possess them. It is only a question of time before all the comfortable quarters of the city, northward from the old town to the Park, shall be invaded, and the people driven to the streets building up on the west and east of it for a little longer sojourn. Where their last stay shall be, Heaven knows; perhaps they will be forced into the country.

In this sort of invasion, however, it is poverty that seems mostly to come first, and it is business that follows and holds the conquest, though this is far from being always the case. Whether it is so or not, however, poverty is certain at some time to impart its taint; for it is perpetual here, from generation to generation, like death itself. In our conditions, poverty is incurable; the very hope of cure is laughed to scorn by those who cling the closest to these conditions; it may be better at one time, and worse at another; but it must always be, somehow, till time shall be no more. It is from everlasting to everlasting.