Part 14

You will see more of the neglect and overuse in the avenues which penetrate the city’s mass from north to south, and more of the superficial and formal gentility in the streets that cross these avenues from east to west; but the arrogant untidiness you will find nearly everywhere, except in some of the newest quarters westward from the Park, and still farther uptown. These are really very clean; but they have a bare look, as if they were not yet inhabited, and, in fact, many of the houses are still empty. Lower down, the streets are often as shabby and as squalid as the avenues that run parallel with the river-sides; and at least two of the avenues are as decent as the decentest cross-streets.

Of late, a good many streets and several avenues have been asphalted, and the din of wheels on the rough pavement no longer torments the ear so cruelly; but there is still the sharp clatter of the horses’ shoes everywhere; and their pulverized manure, which forms so great a part of the city’s dust, and is constantly taken into people’s stomachs and lungs, seems to blow more freely about on the asphalt than on the old-fashioned pavements. A few years ago scraps of paper, straw, fruit-peel, and all manner of minor waste and rubbish, littered all the thoroughfares; under a reform administration this has been amended; but no one knows how long a reform will last in New York.

When I leave Central Park, where I like best to walk, I usually take one of the avenues southward, and then turn eastward or westward on one of the cross-streets whose perspective appeals to my curiosity, and stroll through it to one of the rivers. The avenues are fifteen or sixteen in number, and they stretch, some farther than others, up and down the island, but most of them end in the old town, where its irregularity begins, at the south, and several are interrupted by the different parks at the north. Together with the streets that intersect them between the old town and Central Park, they form one of the most characteristic parts of modern New York. Like the streets, they are numbered, rather than named, from a want of imagination, or from a preference of mere convenience to the poetry and associations that cluster about a name, and can never cling to a number, or from a business impatience to be quickly done with the matter. This must rather defeat itself, however, when a hurried man undertakes to tell you that he lives at three hundred and seventy-five on One Hundred and Fifty-seventh street. Toward the rivers the avenues grow shabbier and shabbier, though this statement must be qualified, like all general statements. Seventh Avenue, on the west, is pleasanter than Sixth Avenue; and Second Avenue, on the east, is more agreeable than Third Avenue. In fact, the other afternoon, as I strayed over to the East River, I found several blocks of Avenue A, which runs nearest it, very quiet, built up with comfortable dwellings, and even clean, as cleanliness is understood in New York.

But it is Fifth Avenue which divides the city lengthwise nearest the middle, and it is this avenue which affords the norm of style and comfort to the other avenues on either hand, and to all the streets that intersect it. Madison Avenue is its rival, and has suffered less from the invasion of shops and hotels, but a long stretch of Fifth Avenue is still the most aristocratic quarter of the city, and is upon the whole its finest thoroughfare. I do not think any New York street fine; but, generally, Fifth Avenue and the cross-streets in its better part have a certain regularity in their mansions of brownstone, which give something of the pleasure one gets from symmetry. They are at least not so chaotic as they might be; though they always suggest money more than taste, I cannot at certain moments, and under the favor of an evening sky, deny them a sort of unlovely and forbidding beauty. There are not many of these cross-streets which have remained intact from the business of the other avenues. They have always a drinking-saloon or a provision-store or an apothecary’s shop at the corners where they intersect; the modistes find lodgment in them almost before the residents are aware. Beyond Sixth Avenue, or Seventh at farthest, on the west, and Fourth Avenue or Lexington, on the east, they lose their genteel character; their dwellings degenerate into apartment-houses, and then into tenement-houses of lower and lower grade till the rude traffic and the offensive industries of the river shores are reached.

But once more I must hedge, for sometimes a street is respectable almost to the water on one side or the other; and there are whole neighborhoods of pleasant dwellings far down-town, which seem to have been forgotten by the enterprise of business, or neglected by its caprice, and to have escaped for a time at least the contagion of poverty. Business and poverty are everywhere slowly or swiftly eating their way into the haunts of respectability, and destroying its pleasant homes. They already have the whole of the old town to themselves. In large spaces of it no one dwells but the janitors with their families, who keep the sky-scraping edifices where business frets the time away; and by night in the streets where myriads throng by day, no one walks but the outcast and the watch.

Many of these business streets are the handsomest in the city, with a good sky line, and an architectural ideal too good for the uses of commerce. This is often realized in antipathetic iron, but often there is good honest work in stone, and an effect better than the best of Fifth Avenue. But this is stupid and wasteful; it is for the pleasure of no one’s taste or sense; the business men who traffic in these edifices have no time for their beauty, or no perception of it; the porters and truckmen and expressmen, who toil and moil in these thoroughfares, have no use for the grandeur that catches the eye of a chance passer.

Other spaces are abandoned to the poverty which festers in the squalid houses and swarms day and night in the squalid streets; but business presses closer and harder upon the refuges of its foster-child, not to say its offspring, and it is only a question of time before it shall wholly possess them. It is only a question of time before all the comfortable quarters of the city, northward from the old town to the Park, shall be invaded, and the people driven to the streets building up on the west and east of it for a little longer sojourn. Where their last stay shall be, Heaven knows; perhaps they will be forced into the country.

In this sort of invasion, however, it is poverty that seems mostly to come first, and it is business that follows and holds the conquest, though this is far from being always the case. Whether it is so or not, however, poverty is certain at some time to impart its taint; for it is perpetual here, from generation to generation, like death itself. In our conditions, poverty is incurable; the very hope of cure is laughed to scorn by those who cling the closest to these conditions; it may be better at one time, and worse at another; but it must always be, somehow, till time shall be no more. It is from everlasting to everlasting.

II.

When I come home from these walks of mine, I have a vision of the wretched quarters through which I have passed, as blotches of disease upon the civic body, as loathsome sores, destined to eat deeper and deeper into it; and I am haunted by this sense of them, until I plunge deep into the Park, and wash my consciousness clean of it all for a while. But when I am actually in these leprous spots, I become hardened, for the moment, to the deeply underlying fact of human discomfort. I feel their picturesqueness, with a callous indifference to that ruin, or that defect, which must so largely constitute the charm of the picturesque. A street of tenement-houses is always more picturesque than a street of brownstone residences, which the same thoroughfare usually is before it slopes to either river. The fronts of the edifices are decorated with the iron balconies and ladders of the fire-escapes, and have in the perspective a false air of gayety, which is travestied in their rear by the lines thickly woven from the windows to the tall poles set between the backs of the houses, and fluttering with drying clothes as with banners.

The sidewalks swarm with children, and the air rings with their clamor, as they fly back and forth at play; on the thresholds, the mothers sit nursing their babes, and the old women gossip together; young girls lean from the casements, alow and aloft, or flirt from the doorways with the hucksters who leave their carts in the street, while they come forward with some bargain in fruit or vegetables, and then resume their leisurely progress and their jarring cries. The place has all the attraction of close neighborhood, which the poor love, and which affords them for nothing the spectacle of the human drama, with themselves for actors. In a picture it would be most pleasingly effective, for then you could, he in it, and yet have the distance on it which it needs. But to be in it, and not have the distance, is to inhale the stenches of the neglected street, and to catch that yet fouler and dreadfuller poverty-smell which breathes from the open doorways. It is to see the children quarrelling in their games, and beating each other in the face, and rolling each other in the gutter, like the little savage outlaws they are. It is to see the work-worn look of the mothers, the squalor of the babes, the haggish ugliness of the old women, the slovenly frowziness of the young girls. All this makes you hasten your pace down to the river, where the tall buildings break and dwindle into stables and shanties of wood, and finally end in the piers, commanding the whole stretch of the mighty waterway with its shipping, and the wooded heights of its western bank.

I am supposing you to have walked down a street of tenement-houses to the North river, as the New-Yorkers call the Hudson; and I wish I could give some notion of the beauty and majesty of the stream, some sense of the mean and ignoble effect of the city’s invasion of the hither shore. The ugliness is, indeed, only worse in degree, but not in kind, than that of all city water-fronts. Instead of pleasant homes, with green lawns and orchards sloping to the brink, huge factories and foundries, lumber yards, breweries, slaughter-houses, and warehouses, abruptly interspersed with stables and hovels and drinking-saloons, disfigure the shore, and in the nearest avenue the freight trains come and go on lines of railroads, in all the middle portion of New York. South of it, in the business section, the poverty section, the river region is a mere chaos of industrial and commercial strife and pauper wretchedness. North of it there are gardened driveways following the shore; and even at many points between, when you finally reach the river, there is a kind of peace, or at least a truce to the frantic activities of business. To be sure, the heavy trucks grind up and down the long piers, but on either side the docks are full of leisurely canal-boats, and if you could come with me in the late afternoon, you would see the smoke curling upward from their cabin roofs, as from the chimneys of so many rustic cottages, and smell the evening meal cooking within, while the canal-wives lounged at the gangway hatches for a breath of the sunset air, and the boatmen smoked on the gunwales or indolently plied the long sweeps of their pumps. All the hurry and turmoil of the city is lost among these people, whose clumsy craft recall the grassy inland levels remote from the metropolis, and the slow movement of life in the quiet country ways. Some of the mothers from the tenement-houses stroll down on the piers with their babies in their arms, and watch their men-kind, of all ages, fishing along the sides of the dock, or casting their lines far out into the current at the end. They do not seem to catch many fish, and never large ones, but they silently enjoy the sport, which they probably find leisure for in the general want of work in these hard times; if they swear a little at their luck, now and then, it is, perhaps, no more than their luck deserves. Some do not even fish, but sit with their legs dangling over the water, and watch the swift tugs, or the lagging sloops that pass, with now and then a larger sail, or a towering passenger steamboat. Far down the stream they can see the forests of masts, fringing either shore, and following the point of the island round and up into the great channel called the East River. These vessels seem as multitudinous as the houses that spread everywhere from them over the shore farther than the eye can reach. They bring the commerce of the world to this mighty city, which, with all its riches, is the parent of such misery, and with all its traffic abounds in idle men who cannot find work. The ships look happy and free, in the stream, but they are of the overworked world, too, as well as the houses; and let them spread their wings ever so widely, they still bear with them the sorrows of the poor.

III.

The other evening I walked over to the East River through one of the tenement streets, and I reached the waterside just as the soft night was beginning to fall in all its autumnal beauty. The afterglow died from the river, while I hung upon a parapet over a gulf ravined out of the bank for a street, and experienced that artistic delight which cultivated people are often proud of feeling, in the aspect of the long prison island which breaks the expanse of the channel. I knew the buildings on it were prisons, and that the men and women in them, bad before, could only come out of them worse than before, and doomed to a life of outlawry and of crime. I was aware that they were each an image of that loveless and hopeless perdition which men once imagined that God had prepared for the souls of the damned, but I could not see the barred windows of those hells in the waning light. I could only see the trees along their walks; their dim lawns and gardens, and the castellated forms of the prisons; and the æsthetic sense, which is careful to keep itself pure from pity, was tickled with an agreeable impression of something old and fair. The dusk thickened, and the vast steamboats which ply between the city and the New England ports on Long Island Sound, and daily convey whole populations of passengers between New York and Boston, began to sweep by silently, swiftly, luminous masses on the black water. Their lights aloft at bow and stern, floated with them like lambent planets; the lights of lesser craft dipped by, and came and went in the distance; the lamps of the nearer and farther shores twinkled into sight, and a peace that ignored all the misery of it, fell upon the scene.

IV.

The greatest problem of this metropolis is not how best to be in this place or that, but how fastest to go from one to the other, and the New-Yorkers have made guesses at the riddle, bad and worse, on each of the avenues, which, in their character of mere roadways, look as if the different car-tracks had been in them first, and the buildings, high and low, had chanced along their sides afterward. This is not the fact, of course, and it is not so much the effect on Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, and Lexington Avenue, which are streets of dwellings, solidly built up, like the cross streets. But it is undoubtedly the effect on all the other avenues, in great part of their extent. They vary but little in appearance otherwise, from east to west, except so far as the elevated railroads disfigure them, if thoroughfares so shabby and repulsive as they mostly are, can be said to be disfigured, and not beautified by whatever can be done to hide any part of their ugliness. Where this is left to make its full impression upon the spectators, there are lines of horse-cars perpetually jingling up and down, except on Fifth Avenue, where they have stages, as the New-Yorkers call the unwieldy and unsightly vehicles that ply there, and Lexington Avenue, where they have the cable cars. But the horse-cars run even under the elevated tracks, and no experience of noise can enable you to conceive of the furious din that bursts upon the sense, when at some corner two cars encounter on the parallel tracks below, while two trains roar and shriek and hiss on the rails overhead, and a turmoil of rattling express wagons, heavy drays and trucks, and carts, hacks, carriages, and huge vans rolls itself between and beneath the prime agents of the uproar. The noise is not only deafening, it is bewildering; you cannot know which side the danger threatens most, and you literally take your life in your hand when you cross in the midst of it. Broadway, which traverses the district I am thinking of, in a diagonal line till it loses its distinctive character beyond the Park, is the course of the cable cars running with a silent speed that is more dangerous even than the tumultuous rush on the avenues. Now and then the apparatus for gripping the chain will not release it, and then the car rushes wildly over the track, running amuck through everything in its way, and spreading terror on every hand. When under control the long saloons advance swiftly, from either direction, at intervals of half a minute, with a monotonous alarum of their gongs, and the foot-passenger has to look well to his way if he ventures across the track, lest in avoiding one car another roll him under its wheels.

Apparently, the danger is guarded as well as it can be, and it has simply to be taken into the account of life in New York, for it cannot be abated, and no one is to be blamed for what is the fault of every one. It is true that there ought not, perhaps, to be any track in such a thoroughfare, but it would be hard to prove that people could get on without it, as they did before the theft of the street for the original horse-car track. Perhaps it was not a theft; but at all events, and at the best, the street was given away by the city to an adventurer who wished to lay the tracks in it for his private gain, and none of the property owners along the line could help themselves. There is nothing that Americans hold so dear, or count so sacred, as private property; life and limb are cheap in comparison; but private enterprise is allowed to violate the rights of private property, from time to time here, in the most dramatic way.

The street-car company which took possession of Broadway never paid the abutters anything, I believe; and the elevated railroad companies are still resisting payment of damages on the four avenues which they occupied for their way up and down the city without offering compensation to the property owners along their route. If the community had built these roads, it would have indemnified every one, for the community is always just when it is the expression of the common honesty; and if it is ever unjust, it is because the uncommon dishonesty has contrived to corrupt it.

The elevated roads and the cable road had no right to be, on the terms that the New-Yorkers have them, but they are by far the best means of transit in the city, and I must say that, if they were not abuses, they would offer great comfort and great facility to the public. This is especially true of the elevated roads, which, when you can put their moral offense out of your mind, are always delightful in their ease and airy swiftness. You fly smoothly along between the second and third story windows of the houses, which are shops below and dwellings above, on the avenues. The stations, though they have the prevailing effect of overuse, and look dirty and unkempt, are rather pretty in themselves; and you reach them, at frequent intervals, by flights of not ungraceful iron steps. The elevated roads are always picturesque, with here and there a sweeping curve that might almost be called beautiful.

They darken the avenues, of course, and fill them with an abominable uproar. Yet traffic goes on underneath, and life goes on alongside and overhead, and the city has adjusted itself to them, as a man adjusts himself to a chronic disease. I do not know whether they add to the foulness of the streets they pass through or not; I hardly think they do. The mud lies longer, after a rain, in the interminable tunnels which they form over the horse-car tracks in the middle of the avenues, and which you can look through for miles; but the mud does not blow into your nose and mouth as the dust does, and that is, so far, a positive advantage. A negative advantage, which I have hinted, is that they hide so much of the street from sight, and keep you from seeing all its shabbiness, pitilessly open to the eye in the avenues which have only horse-car tracks in them. In fact, now that the elevated railroads are built, and the wrong they have done to persons is mainly past recall, perhaps the worst that can be said of them is that they do not serve their purpose. Of course, in our conditions, where ten men are always doing the work of one man in rivalry with each other, the passage of people to and from business is enormous: the passage of men to get money and the passage of women to spend it; and at the hours of the morning and the afternoon when the volume of travel is the greatest, the trains of the elevated roads offer a spectacle that is really incredible.

Every seat in them is taken, and every foot of space in the aisles between the seats is held by people standing, and swaying miserably to and fro by the leather straps dangling from the roofs. Men and women are indecently crushed together, without regard for that personal dignity which we seem to know nothing of and care nothing for. The multitude overflows from the car, at either end, and the passengers are as tightly wedged on the platform without as they are within. The long trains follow each other at intervals of two or three minutes, and at each station they make a stop of but a few seconds, when those who wish to alight fight their way through the struggling mass. Those who wish to mount fight their way into the car or on to the platform, where the guard slams an iron gate against the stomachs and in the faces of those arriving too late. Sometimes horrible accidents happen; a man clinging to the outside of the gate has the life crushed out of his body against the posts of the station as the train pulls out. But in this land, where people have such a dread of civic collectivism of any kind, lest individuality should suffer, the individual is practically nothing in the regard of the corporate collectivities which abound.

V.