New York Sketches

by Jesse Lynch Williams

[THE CROSS STREETS]

Down near the eastern end of the street.

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.