By the time Sixth Avenue is crossed brick frequently come into use in place of brownstone, and there are not only doctors' signs now, but "Robes et Manteaux" are announced, or sometimes, as on that ugly iron balcony, merely Madame somebody. By this time also there have already appeared on some of the newel-posts by the door-bell, "Boarders," or "Furnished Rooms"—modestly written on a mere slip of paper, as though it had been deemed unnecessary to shout the words out for the neighborhood to hear. In there, back of these lace-curtains, yellow, though not with age, is the parlor—the boarding-house parlor—with tidies which always come off and small gilt chairs which generally break, and wax wreaths under glass, like cheeses under fly-screens in country groceries. In the place of honor hangs the crayon portrait of the dear deceased, in an ornate frame. But most of the boarders never go there, except to pay their bills; down in the basement dining-room is where they congregate, you can see them now through the grated window, at the tables. Here, on the corner, is the little tailor-shop or laundry, which is usually found in the low building back of that facing the avenue, which latter is always a saloon unless it is a drug-store; on the opposite corner is still another saloon—rivals very likely in the Tammany district as well as in business, with a policy-shop or a pool-room on the floor above, as all the neighbors know, though the local good government club cannot stop it. Here is the "family entrance" which no family ever enters.
Chinatown.
Then come more apartments and more private residences, not invariably passé, more boarding-houses, many, many boarding-houses, theatrical boarding-houses, students' boarding-houses, foreign boarding-houses; more small business places, and so on across various mongrel avenues until here is the region of warehouses and piano factories and finally even railway tracks with large astonishing trains of cars. Cross these tracks and you are beyond the city, in the suburbs, as much as the lateral edges of this city can have suburbs; yet this is only the distance of a long golf-hole from residences and urbanity. Here are stock-yards with squealing pigs, awful smells, deep, black mire, and then a long dock reaching far out into the Hudson, with lazy river barges flopping along-side it, and dock-rats fishing off the end—a hot, hateful walk if ever your business or pleasure calls you out there of a summer afternoon. There the typical up-town cross street ends its dreary existence.
II
Down-town it is so different.
Down-town—"'way down-town," in the vernacular—in latitude far south of homes and peace and contemplation, where everything is business and dollars and hardness, and the streets might well be economically straight, and rigorously business-like, they are incongruously crooked, running hither and thither in a dreamy, unpractical manner, beginning where they please and ending where it suits them best, in a narrow, Old-World way, despite their astonishing, New-World architecture. Numbers would do well enough for names down here, but instead of concise and business-like street-signs, the lamp-posts show quaint, incongruous names, sentimental names, poetic names sometimes, because these streets were born and not made.
It still remains whimsically individual and village-like.
They were born of the needs or whims of the early population, including cows, long before the little western city became self-conscious about its incipient greatness, and ordered a ready-made plan for its future growth. It was too late for the painstaking commissioners down here. One little settlement of houses had gradually reached out toward another, each with its own line of streets or paths, until finally they all grew together solidly into a city, not caring whether they dovetailed or not, and one or the other or both of the old road names stuck fast. The Beaver's Path, leading from the Parade (which afterward became the Bowling Green) over to the swampy inlet which by drainage became the sheep pasture and later was named Broad Street, is still called Beaver Street to this day. The Maiden Lane, where New York girls used to stroll (and in still more primitive times used to do the washing) along-side the stream which gave the street its present winding shape and low grading, is still called Maiden Lane, though probably the only strollers in the modern jostling crowd along this street, now the heart of the diamond district, are the special detectives who have a personal acquaintance with every distinguished jewellery crook in the country, and guard "the Lane," as they call it, so carefully that not in fifteen years has a member of the profession crossed the "dead-line" successfully. There is Bridge Street, which no longer has any stream to bridge; Dock Street, where there is no dock; Water Street, once upon the river-front but now separated from the water by several blocks and much enormously valuable real estate; and Wall Street, which now seems to lack the wooden wall by which Governor Stuyvesant sought to keep New Englanders out of town. His efforts were of no permanent value.