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.
I
These are the streets which visitors to New York always remark; the characteristic cross streets of the typical up-town region of long regular rows of rectangular residences that look so much alike, with steep similar steps leading up to sombre similar doors and a doctor's sign in every other window. Bleak, barren, echoing streets where during the long, monotonous mornings "rags-an-bot'l" are called for, and bananas and strawberries are sold from wagons by aid of resonant voices, and nothing else is heard except at long intervals the welcome postman's whistle or the occasional slamming of a carriage door. Meantime the sun gets around to the north side of the street, and the airing of babies and fox-terriers goes on, while down at the corner one elevated train after another approaches, roars, and rumbles away in the distance all day long until at last the men begin coming home from business. These are the ordinary unromantic streets on which live so few New Yorkers in fiction (it is so easy to put them on the Avenue or Gramercy Park or Washington Square), but on which most of them seem to live in real life. A slice of all New York with all its layers of society and all its mixed interests may be seen in a walk along one of these typical streets which stretch across the island as straight and stiff as iron grooves and waste not an inch in their progress from one river, out into which they have gradually encroached, to the other river into which also they extend. It is a short walk, the island is so narrow.
