Impressions and experiences

by William Dean Howells

Nothing seems so characteristic of this city, after its architectural shapelessness, as the eating and drinking constantly going on in the restaurants and hotels, of every quality, and the innumerable saloons. There may not be really more of these in New York, in proportion to the population, than in other great cities, but apparently there are more; for in this, as in all her other characteristics, New York is very open; her virtues and her vices, her luxury and her misery, are in plain sight; and a famishing man must suffer peculiarly here from the spectacle of people everywhere at sumptuous tables. Many of the finest hotels, if not most of them, have their dining-rooms on the level of the street, and the windows, whether curtained or uncurtained, reveal the continual riot within. I confess that the effect upon some hungry passer is always present to my imagination; but the New-Yorkers are so used to the perpetual encounter of famine and of surfeit that they do not seem to mind it.

There is scarcely a block on any of the poorer avenues which has not its liquor store, and generally there are two; wherever a street crosses them there is a saloon on at least one of the corners; sometimes on two, sometimes on three, sometimes even on all four. I had the curiosity to count the saloons on Sixth Avenue, between the Park, and the point down town where the avenue properly ends. In a stretch of some two miles I counted ninety of them, besides the eating houses where you can buy drink with your meat; and this avenue is probably far less infested with the traffic than some others.

You may therefore safely suppose that out of the hundred miles of shops, there are ten, or fifteen, or twenty miles of saloons. They have the best places on the avenues, and on the whole they make the handsomest show. They all have a cheerful and inviting look, and if you step within, you find them cosy, quiet, and, for New York, clean. There are commonly tables set about in them, where their frequenters can take their beer or whiskey at their ease, and eat the free lunch which is often given in them; in a rear room you see a billiard-table. In fact, they form the poor man’s club-houses, and if he might resort to them with his family, and be in the control of the State as to the amount he should spend and drink there, I could not think them without their rightful place in an economy which saps the vital forces of the laborer with over-work, or keeps him in a fever of hope or a fever of despair as to the chances of getting or not getting work when he has lost it. If you suggested this to the average American, however, he would be horror-struck. He would tell you that what you proposed was little better than anarchy; that in a free country you must always leave private persons free to debauch men’s souls and bodies with drink, and make money out of their ruin; that anything else was contrary to human nature, and an invasion of the sacred rights of the individual. Here in New York, this valuable principle is so scrupulously respected that the saloon controls the municipality, and the New-Yorkers think this is much better than for the municipality to control the saloon. It is from the saloon that their political bosses rise to power; it is in the saloon that all the election frauds are planned and fostered; and it would be infinitely comic, if it were not so pathetic, to read the solemn homilies on these abuses in the journals which hold by the good old American doctrine of private trade in drink as one of the bulwarks of the constitution.

VIII.

Without it, there would be far less poverty than there is, but poverty is a good old American institution, too; there would inevitably be less inequality, but inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself. In New York the inequality has that effect upon the architecture which I have tried to give some notion of; but in fact it deforms life at every turn, and in nothing more than in the dress of the people, high and low. New York is, on the whole, without doubt, the best-dressed community in America, or at least there is a certain number of people here, more expensively and scrupulously attired than you will find anywhere else in the country. The rich copy the fashions set for them in Paris or in London, and then the less rich, and the still less rich, down to the poor, follow them as they can, until you arrive at the very poorest, who wear the cast-off and tattered fashions of former years, and masquerade in a burlesque of the fortunate that never fails to shock and grieve me. They must all somehow be clothed; the climate and the custom require it; but sometimes I think their nakedness would be less offensive; and when I meet a wretched man, with his coat out at the elbows, or split up the back, in broken shoes, battered hat, and frayed trousers, or some old woman or young girl in a worn-out, second-hand gown and bonnet, tattered and threadbare and foul, I think that if I were a believer in it, I would uncover my head to them, and ask their forgiveness for the system that condemns some one always to such humiliation as theirs.

We say such people are not humiliated, that they do not mind it, that they are used to it; but if we ever look these people in the eye, and see the shrinking, averted glance of their shame and tortured pride, we must know that what we say is a cruel lie. At any rate, the presence of these outcasts must spoil the beauty of any dress near them, and there is always so much more penury than affluence that the sight of the crowd in the New York streets must give more pain than pleasure. The other day on Fifth Avenue it did not console me to meet a young and lovely girl, exquisitely dressed in the last effect of Paris, after I had just parted from a young fellow who had begged me to give him a little money to get something to eat, for he had been looking for work a week and had got nothing. I suppose I ought to have doubted his word, he was so decently clad, but I had a present vision of him in rags, and I gave to the frowzy tramp he must soon become.

Of course, this social contrast was extreme, like some of those architectural contrasts I have been noting, but it was by no means exceptional, as those were not. In fact, I do not know but I may say that it was characteristic of the place, though you might say that the prevalent American slovenliness was also characteristic of the New York street crowds; I mean the slovenliness of the men—the women, of whatever order they are, are always as much dandies as they can be. But most American men are too busy to look much after their dress, and when they are very well to do they care very little for it. You see few men dressed in New York with, the distinction of the better class of Londoners, and when you do meet them, they have the air of playing a part, as in fact they are: they are playing the part of men of leisure in a nation of men whose reality is constant work, whether they work for bread or whether they work for money, and who, when they are at work, outdo the world, but sink, when they are at leisure, into something third rate and fourth rate. The commonness of effect in the street crowds is not absent from Fifth Avenue or from Madison Avenue any more than it is from First Avenue or Tenth Avenue; and the tide of wealth and fashion, that rolls up and down the better avenues in the splendid carriages, makes the shabbiness of the foot-passenger, when he is shabby, as he often is, the more apparent. On the far east side, and on the far west side, the horse-cars, which form the only means of transit, have got the dirt and grime of the streets and the dwellings on them and in them, and there is one tone of foulness in the passengers and the vehicles. I do not wish to speak other than tenderly of the poor, but it is useless to pretend that they are other than offensive in aspect, and I have to take my sympathy in both hands when I try to bestow it upon them. Neither they nor the quarter they live in has any palliating quaintness; and the soul, starved of beauty, will seek in vain to feed itself with the husks of picturesqueness in their aspect.

IX.

As I have said before, the shabby avenues have a picturesqueness of their own, but it is a repulsive picturesqueness, as I have already suggested, except at a distance. There are some differences of level, on the avenues near the rivers, that give them an advantage of the more central avenues, and there is now and then a break of their line by the water, which is always good. I have noticed this particularly on the eastern side of the city, which is also the older part, and which has been less subject to the changes perpetually going on elsewhere, so that First Avenue has really a finer sky-line, in many parts, than most parts of Fifth Avenue. There are certain bits, as the artists say, in the old quarters of the town once forming Greenwich village, which, when I think of them, make me almost wish to take back what I have said of the absence even of quaintness in New York. If I recall the aspect of Mulberry Bend and Elizabeth street, on a mild afternoon, when their Italian denizens are all either on the pavement or have their heads poked out of the windows, I am still more in doubt of my own words. But I am sure, at least, that there is no kindliness in the quaintness, such as you are said to find in European cities. It has undergone the same sort of malign change here that has transformed the Italians from the friendly folk they are at home to the surly race they mostly show themselves here: shrewd for their advancement in the material things, which seem the only good things to the Americanized aliens of all races, and fierce for their full share of the political pottage. The Italians have a whole region of the city to themselves, and they might feel at home in it if the filthiness of their native environment could repatriate them.