VI.
There are other points on Fifth Avenue nearly as bad as this, but not quite, and there are long stretches of it, which, if dull, have at least a handsome uniformity. I have said already that it is still, upon the whole, the best of the avenues, in the sense of being the abode of the best—that is the richest—people; we Americans habitually use best in this sense. Madison Avenue stretches northwest farther than the eye can reach, an interminable perspective of brownstone dwellings, as yet little invaded by business. Lexington Avenue is of the same character, but of a humbler sort. On Second Avenue, down town, there are large old mansions of the time when Fifth Avenue was still the home of the parvenus; and at different points on such other avenues as are spared by the elevated roads there are blocks of decent and comfortable dwellings; but for the most part they are wholly given up to shops. Of course, these reiterate with the insane wastefulness of our system the same business, the same enterprise, a thousand times.
One hears a good deal about the vast emporiums which are gathering the retail trade into themselves, and devastating the minor commerce, but there are perhaps a score of these at most, in New York; and on the shabbier avenues and cross-streets there are at least a hundred miles of little shops, where an immense population of little dealers levy tribute on the public through the profit they live by. Until you actually see this, you can hardly conceive of such a multitude of people taken away from productive labor and solely devoted to marketing the things made by people who are overworked in making them.
Yet I prefer the smaller shops, where I can enter into some human relation with the merchant, if it is only for the moment. I have already tried to give some notion of the multitude of these; and I must say now that they add much in their infinite number and variety to such effect of gayety as the city has. They are especially attractive at night, when their brilliant lamps, with the shadows they cast, unite to an effect of gayety which the day will not allow.
The great stores contribute nothing to this, for they all close at six o’clock in the evening. On the other hand, they do not mar such poor beauty as the place has with the superfluity of signs that the minor traffic renders itself so offensive with. One sign, rather simple and unostentatious, suffices for a large store; a little store will want half a dozen, and will have them painted and hung all over its façade, and stood about in front of it as obtrusively as the police will permit. The effect is bizarre and grotesque beyond expression. If one thing in the business streets makes New York more hideous than another it is the signs, with their discordant colors, their infinite variety of tasteless shapes. If by chance there is any architectural beauty in a business edifice, it is spoiled, insulted, outraged by these huckstering appeals; while the prevailing unsightliness is emphasized and heightened by them. A vast, hulking, bare brick wall, rising six or seven stories above the neighboring buildings, one would think bad enough in all conscience: how, then, shall I give any notion of the horror it becomes when its unlovely space is blocked out in a ground of white with a sign painted on it in black letters ten feet high?
The signs that deface the chief of our cities seem trying to shout and shriek each other down, wherever one turns; they deface the fronts and sides and tops of the edifices; in all the approaches to the metropolis they stretch on long extents of fencing in the vacant suburban lands, and cover the roofs and sides of the barns. The darkness does not shield you from them, and by night the very sky is starred with the electric bulbs that spell out, on the roofs of the lofty buildings the frantic announcement of this or that business enterprise.
The strangest part of all this is, no one finds it offensive, or at least no one says that it is offensive. It is, indeed, a necessary phase of the economic warfare in which our people live, for the most as unconsciously as people lived in feudal cities, while the nobles fought out their private quarrels in the midst of them. No one dares relax his vigilance or his activity in the commercial strife, and in the absence of any public opinion, or any public sentiment concerning them, it seems as if the signs might eventually hide the city. That would not be so bad if something could then be done to hide the signs.