Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  They darken the avenues, of course, and till 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 eyes 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 one another, 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 one another 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

  It is not only the corporations which outrage personal rights; where there is a question of interest, there seems to he 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. 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, often 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 mean time he pays a low tax on his land compared with the tax which the improved property pays, and gets some meagre 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. 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 most spoils the sky-line, 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 instance, at the street facing the southern limit of the Park, you will get some notion of what I mean, and I hope you will he willing to suffer by a little study of it. At the western end you will see a vacant lot, with its high hoard fence covered with painted signs; then a tall mass of apartment-houses; then a stretch of ordinary New York dwellings of the old, commonplace brown-stone 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 two-story 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 our silly American weakness for something foreign, this square is called the Plaza; I believe it is not at all like a Spanish plaza, but the name is its least offence. An irregular space in the centre 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 costly new apartment-house of a modified Gothic style, 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 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 Fair City at Chicago would now render perceptible even to the dullest sense.

  VI

  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 said already that it is stil
l, upon the whole, the best of the avenues, in the sense of being the abode of the best — that is, the richest — people; we Americans habitually use best in this sense. Madison Avenue stretches northwest farther than the eye can reach, an interminable perspective of brown-stone 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 our system the same business, the same enterprise, a thousand times.

  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 productive labor and solely devoted to marketing the things made by people who are overworked in making them.

  Yet I prefer the smaller shops, where I can enter into some human relation with the merchant, if it is only for the moment. I have already tried to give some notion of the multitude of these; and I must say now that they add much in their infinite number and variety to such effect of gayety as the city has. They are especially attractive at night, when their brilliant lamps, with the shadows they cast, unite to an effect of gayety which the day will not allow.

  The great stores contribute nothing to this, for they all close at six o’clock in the evening. On the other hand, they do not mar such poor beauty as the place has with the superfluity of signs that the minor traffic renders itself so offensive with. One sign, rather simple and unostentatious, suffices for a large store; a little store will want half a dozen, and will have them painted and hung all over its façade, and stood about in front of it as obtrusively as the police will permit. The effect is bizarre and grotesque beyond expression. If one thing in the business streets makes New York more hideous than another it is the signs, with their discordant colors, their infinite variety of tasteless shapes. If by chance there is any architectural beauty in a business edifice, it is spoiled, insulted, outraged by these huckstering appeals; while the prevailing unsightliness is emphasized and heightened by them. A vast, hulking, bare brick wall, rising six or seven stories above the neighboring buildings, one would think bad enough in all conscience: how, then, shall I give any notion of the horror it becomes when its unlovely space is blocked out in a ground of white with a sign painted on it in black letters ten feet high?

  The signs that deface the chief of our cities seem trying to shout and shriek each other down, wherever one turns; they deface the fronts and sides and tops of the edifices; in all the approaches to the metropolis they stretch on long extents of fencing in the vacant suburban lands and cover the roofs and sides of the barns. The darkness does not shield you from them, and by night the very sky is starred with the electric bulbs that spell out, on the roofs of the lofty buildings, the frantic announcement of this or that business enterprise.

  The strangest part of all this is, no one finds it offensive, or at least no one says that it is offensive. It is, indeed, a necessary phase of the economic warfare in which our people live, for the most as unconsciously as people lived in feudal cities, while the nobles fought out their private quarrels in the midst of them. No one dares relax his vigilance or his activity in the commercial strife, and in the absence of any public opinion, or any public sentiment concerning them, it seems as if the signs might eventually hide the city. That would not be so bad if something could then be done to hide the signs.

  VII

  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 cosey, 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-house, 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. 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 he 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 the saloon 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 cas
t-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.