Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  I do not speak, now, of the railroad companies, which have gridironed the country, in its whole length and breadth, and which are empowered by their franchises to destroy the homes of the living and desecrate the graves of the dead, in running their lines from point to point. These companies do pay something, as little as they may, or as much as they must; but the street-car company which took possession of Broadway never paid the abuttors 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 everyone, for the community is always just when it is the expression of the common honesty here; and if it is ever unjust, it is because the uncommon dishonesty has contrived to corrupt it.

  Yet the Americans trust themselves so little in their civic embodiment that the movement for the public ownership of the railroads makes head slowly against an inconceivable prejudice. Last winter, when the problem of rapid transit pressed sorely upon the New Yorkers, the commission in charge could find no way to solve it but by offering an extension of franchise to the corporation which has already the monopoly of it. There was no question of the city’s building the roads, and working them at cost; and if there had been, there would have been no question of submitting the project to those whose interests are involved. They have no such thing here as the referendum, and the Americans who are supposed to make their own law’s, merely elect their representatives, and have no voice themselves in approving or condemning legislation.

  The elevated roads and the cable read 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. The tracks are lifted upon iron piers, from twenty to fifty feet above the street, according to the inequality of the surface, and 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 over-use, 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 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 foulness and 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 plutocratic 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: 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 aisle 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 prize, but which the Americans 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 platforms 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 onto 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.

  It is not only the corporations which outrage personal rights, in America; where there is a question of interest, there seems to be no question of rights between individuals. They prey upon one another and seize advantages by force and by fraud in too many ways for me to hope to make the whole situation evident to you, but I may at least give you some notion of the wrong they do. The avenues to the eastward and westward have not grown up solidly and continuously in obedience to any law of order, or in pursuance of any meditated design. They have been pushed along given lines, in fragments, as builders saw their interest in offering buyers a house or a row of houses, or as they could glut or trick the greed of land-owners clinging to their land, and counting upon some need of it, in the hope of extorting an unearned profit from it. In one place you will see a vast and lofty edifice, of brick or stone, and on each side of it or in front of it, a structure one-fourth as high, or a row of scurvy hovels, left there till a purchaser comes, not to pay the honest worth of the land for it, but to yield the price the owner wants. In other places you see long stretches of high board fence, shutting in vacant lots, usually the best lots on the street, which the landlord holds for the rise destined to accrue to him from the building all round and beyond his property. In the meantime he pays a low tax on his land compared with the tax which the improved property pays, and gets some meager return for the use of his fence by the Italian fruiterers who build their stalls into it, and by the bill-posters who cover it with a medley of theatrical announcements, picturing the scenes of the different plays and the persons of the players. To the Altrurian public the selfishness of a man willing idly to benefit by the industry and energy of others in giving value to his possessions would be unimaginable. Yet this is so common here that it is accepted and honored as a proof of business sagacity; and the man who knows how to hold onto his land, until the very moment when it can enrich him most, though he has neither plowed nor sown it, or laid the foundation of a human dwelling upon it, is honored as a longheaded and solid citizen, who deserves well of his neighbors. There are many things which unite to render the avenues unseemly and unsightly, such as the apparently desperate tastelessness and the apparently instinctive uncleanliness of the New Yorkers. But as I stand at some point commanding a long stretch of one of their tiresome perspectives, which is architecturally like nothing so much as a horse’s jawbone, with the teeth broken or dislodged at intervals, I can blame nothing so much for the hideous effect as the rapacity of the land-owner holding on for a rise, as it is called. It is he who breaks the skyline, and keeps the street, mean and poor at the best in design, a defeated purpose, and a chaos come again.

  Even when the owners begin to build, to improve their real estate, as the phrase is, it is without regard to the rights of their neighbors, or the feelings or tastes of the public, so far as the public may be supposed to have any. This is not true of the shabbier avenues alone, but of the finest, and of all the streets. If you will look, for inst
ance, at the enclosed photograph of the street facing the southern limit of the Park, you will get some notion of what I mean, and I hope you will be willing to suffer by a little study of it. At the western end you will see a vacant lot, with its high board fence covered with painted signs, then a tall mass of apartment houses; then a stretch of ordinary New York dwellings of the old commonplace brownstone sort; then a stable, and a wooden liquor saloon at the corner. Across the next avenue there rises far aloof the compact bulk of a series of apartment houses, which in color and design are the pleasantest in the city, and are so far worthy of their site. Beyond them to the eastward the buildings decline and fall, till they sink into another wooden drinking-shop on the corner of another avenue, where you will see the terminus of one of the elevated roads. Beyond this avenue is the fence of a large vacant lot, covered, as usual, with theatrical posters, and then there surges skyward another series of apartment houses. The highest of these is nearly fifty feet higher than its nearest neighbors, which sink again, till you suddenly drop from their nondescript monotony to the gothic façade of a house of a wholly different color, in its pale sandstone, from the red of their brick fronts.

  A vacant lot yawns here again, with a flare of theatrical posters on its fence, and beyond this, on the corner, is a huge hotel, the most agreeable of the three that tower above the fine square at the gate of the Park. With that silly American weakness for something foreign, this square is called the Plaza; I believe that it is not at all like a Spanish plaza, but the name is its least offense. An irregular space in the center is planted with trees, in whose shade the broken-kneed hacks of the public carriages droop their unhappy heads, without the spirit to bite the flies that trouble their dreams; and below this you get a glimpse of the conventional cross-street terminating the Plaza. At the eastern corner of the avenue is a vacant lot, with pictorial advertisements painted on its fence, and then you come to the second of the great hotels which give the Plaza such character as it has. It is of a light-colored stone, and it towers far above the first, which is of brick. It is thirteen stories high, and it stops abruptly in a flat roof. On the next corner north is another hotel, which rises six or seven stories higher yet, and terminates in a sort of mansard, topping a romanesque cliff of yellow brick and red sandstone. I seek a term for the architectural order, but it may not be the right one. There is no term for the civic disorder of what succeeds. From the summit of this enormous acclivity there is a precipitous fall of twelve stories to the roof of the next edifice, which is a grocery; and then to the florist’s and photographer’s next is another descent of three stories; on the corner is a drinking-saloon, one story in height, with a brick front and a wooden side. I will not ask you to go farther with me; the avenue continues northward and southward in a delirium of lines and colors, a savage anarchy of shapes, which I should think the general experience of the beauty of the Fair City at Chicago would now render perceptible even to the dull American sense. What exists is the necessary and inexorable effect of that uncivic individuality which the Americans prize, and which can manifest itself only in harm and wrong; but if you criticised it you would surprise and alarm them almost as much as if you attacked the atrocious economic inequality it springs from.

  There are other points on Fifth avenue nearly as bad as this, but not quite, and there are long stretches of it, which, if dull, have at least a handsome uniformity. I have told you already that it is still upon the whole, the best of the avenues, in the sense of being the abode of the best, that is the richest people; the Americans habitually use best in this sense. Madison avenue stretches northwest farther than the eye can reach, an interminable perspective of brownstone dwellings, as yet little invaded by business. Lexington avenue is of the same character, but of a humbler sort. On Second avenue, down town, there are large old mansions of the time when Fifth avenue was still the home of the parvenus; and at different points on such other avenues as are spared by the elevated roads, there are blocks of decent and comfortable dwellings; but for the most part they are wholly given up to shops. Of course, these reiterate with the insane wastefulness of the competitive system the same business, the same enterprise, a thousand times. The Americans have no conception of our distribution; and though nearly everything they now use is made in large establishments, their wares are dispersed and sold in an infinitude of small stores.

  One hears a good deal about the vast emporiums which are gathering the retail trade into themselves, and devastating the minor commerce, but there are perhaps a score of these at most, in New York; and on the shabbier avenues and cross-streets there are at least a hundred miles of little shops, where an immense population of little dealers levy tribute on the public through the profit they live by. Until you actually see this, you can hardly conceive of such a multitude of people taken away from the labor due to all from all, and solely devoted to marketing the things made by people who are overworked in making them. But bad as this is, and immoral as it is in Altrurian eyes, it is really harmless beside a traffic which is the most conspicuous on these avenues; I mean the traffic in intoxicating liquors, sold and drunk on the premises. I need not tell you that I still hold our national principles concerning the use of alcohol, but I have learned here to be lenient to its use, in a measure which you would not perhaps excuse. I perceive that as long as there is poverty there must be drunkenness, until the State interferes and sells a man only so much as he can safely drink. Yet, knowing as I do from the daily witness of the press and the courts, that drink is the source of most of the crimes and vices which curse this people, I find the private traffic in alcohol infinitely shocking, and the spectacle of it incredible. 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 one day 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 whisky 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 clubhouses 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 overwork, 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. We at home, have so long passed the sad necessity to which such places minister, that we sometimes forget it, but you know how in our old competitive days, this traffic was one of the first to be taken out of private hands, and assumed by the State, which continued to manage it without a profit so long as the twin crazes of competition and drunkenness endured among us. 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 their constitution, and a chief defense against the advance of Altrurian ideas.

  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 you some notion of; but in fact it deforms life here 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. I do not say beautifully, for their dress is of the fashion which you have seen in our Regionic museum, where we used to laugh over it together when we fancied people in it, and is a modification of the fashions that prevail everywhere in plutocratic Christendom. The rich copy the fashion 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 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 an American, as I am an Altrurian, I would uncover my head to them, and ask their forgiveness for the system that condemns some one always to such humiliation as theirs.