New York Sketches

by Jesse Lynch Williams

As it Looks on a Wet Night—The Circle, Fifty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue.

There is no such thing as a typical cross street to New Yorkers. Individually, each thoroughfare departs as widely from the type as the men who walk along them differ from the figure known in certain parts of this country as the typical New Yorker. In New York there is no typical New Yorker. These so-called similar streets, which look so much alike to a visitor driving up Fifth Avenue, end so very differently. Some of them, for instance, after beginning their decline toward the river and oblivion, are redeemed to respectability, not to say exclusiveness, again, like some of the streets in the small Twentieths running out into what was formerly the village of Chelsea; and those who know New York—even when standing where the Twentieth Streets are tainted with Sixth Avenue—are cognizant of this fact, just as they are of the peace and green campus and academic architecture of the Episcopal Theological Seminary away over there, and of the thirty-foot lawns of London Terrace, far down along West Twenty-third Street.

There are other residence streets which do not decline at all, but are solidly impressive and expensive all the way over to the river, like those from Central Park to Riverside Drive. And your old New Yorker does not feel depressed by their conventional similarity, their lack of individuality; he likes to think that these streets and houses no longer seem so unbearably new as they were only a short time ago, but in some cases are at last acquiring the atmosphere of home and getting rid of the odor of a real-estate project. Then, of course, so many cross streets would refuse to be classed as typical because they run through squares or parks, or into reservoirs or other streets, or jump over railroad tracks by means of viaducts, burrow under avenues by means of tunnels, or end abruptly at the top of a hill on a high embankment of interesting masonry, as at the eastern terminus of Forty-first Street—a spot which never feels like New York at all to me.

Hideous high buildings.

Looking east from Central Park at night.

Some notice should be taken also of those all-important up-town cross streets where business has eaten out residence in streaks, as moths devour clothes, such as broad Twenty-third Street with its famous shops, and narrow Twenty-eighth Street, with its numerous cheap table d'hôtes, each of which is the best in town; and 125th Street, which is a Harlem combination of both. These are the streets by which surface-car passengers are transferred all over the city. These are the streets upon which those who have grown up with New York, if they have paid attention to its growth as well as their own, delight to meditate. Even comparatively young old New Yorkers can say "I remember when" of memorable evenings in the old Academy of Music in Fourteenth Street off Union Square, and of the days when Delmonico's had got as far up-town as Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue.

Furthermore, it could easily be shown that, for those who love old New York, there is plenty of local historical association along these same straight, unromantic-looking cross streets—for those who know how to find it. For that matter one might go still further and hold that there would not be so much antiquarian delight in New York if these streets were not new and straight and non-committal looking. If, for instance, the old Union Road, which was the roundabout, wet-weather route to Greenwich village, had not been cut up and mangled by a merciless city plan there wouldn't be the fun of tracing it by projecting corners and odd angles of houses along West Twelfth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It would be merely an open, ordinary street, concealing nothing, and no more exciting to follow than Pearl Street down-town—and not half so crooked or historical as Pearl Street. There would not be that odd, pocket-like courtway called Mulligan "Place," with a dimly lighted entrance leading off Sixth Avenue between Tenth and Eleventh Streets. Nor would there be that still more interesting triangular remnant of an old Jewish burying-ground over the way, behind the old Grapevine Tavern. For either the whole cemetery would have been allowed to remain on Union Road (or Street), which is not likely, or else they would have removed all the graves and covered the entire site with buildings, as was the case with a dozen other burying-grounds here and there. If the commissioners had not had their way we could not have all those inner rows of houses to explore, like the "Weaver's Row," once near the Great Kiln Road, but now buried behind a Sixth Avenue store between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets, and entered, if entered at all, by way of a dark, ill-smelling alley. Nor would the negro quarter, a little farther up-town, have its inner rows which seem so appropriate for negro quarters, especially the whitewashed courts opening off Thirtieth Street, where may be found, in these secluded spots, trees and seats under them, with old, turbanned mammies smoking pipes and looking much more like Richmond darkies than those one expects to see two blocks from Daly's Theatre. Colonel Carter of Cartersville could not have found such an interesting New York residence if the commissioners had not had their way, nor could he have entered it by a tunnel-like passage under the house opposite the Tenth Street studios. Even Greenwich would not be quite so entertaining without those permanent marks of the conflict between village and city which resulted in separating West Eleventh Street so far from Tenth, and in twisting Fourth Street around farther and farther until it finally ends in despair in Thirteenth Street. If the commissioners had not had their way we should have had no "Down Love Lane" written by Mr. Janvier.

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