A CITY should be laid out like a golf links; except for an occasional compromise in the interest of art or expediency it should be allowed to follow the natural topography of the country.

But this is not the way the matter was regarded by the commission appointed in 1807 to lay out the rural regions beyond New York, which by that time had grown up to the street now called Houston, and then called North Street, probably because it seemed so far north—though, to be sure, there were scattered hamlets and villages, with remembered and forgotten names, here and there, all the way up to the historic town of Haarlem. The commissioners saw fit to mark off straight street after shameless straight street with the uncompromising regularity of a huge foot-ball field, and gave them numbers like the white five-yard lines, instead of names. They paid little heed to the original arrangements of nature, which had done very well by the island, and still less to man's previous provisions, spontaneously made along the lines of least resistance—except, notably, in the case of Greenwich, which still remains whimsically individual and village-like despite the attempt to swallow it whole by the "new" city system.

This plan, calling for endless grading and levelling, remains to this day the official city chart as now lived down to in the perpendicular gorges cut through the hills of solid rock seen on approaching Manhattan Field; but the commissioners' marks have not invariably been followed, or New York would have still fewer of its restful green spots to gladden the eye, nor even Central Park, indeed, for that space also is checkered in their chart with streets and avenues as thickly as in the crowded regions above and below it.

However, anyone can criticise creative work, whether it be the plan of a play or a city, but it is difficult to create. Not many of us to-day who complacently patronize the honorable commissioners would have made a better job of it if we had lived at that time—and had been consulted. For at that time, we must bear in mind, even more important foreign luxuries than golf were not highly regarded in America, and America had quite recently thrown off a foreign power. That in itself explains the matter. Our country was at the extreme of its reaction from monarchical ideals, and democratic simplicity was running into the ground. In our straining to be rid of all artificiality we were ousting art and beauty too. It was so in most parts of our awkward young nation; but especially did the materialistic tendency of this dreary disagreeable period manifest itself here in commercial New York, where Knickerbocker families were lopping the "Vans" off their names—to the amusement of contemporaneous aristocracy in older, more conservative sections of the country, and in some cases to the sincere regret of their present-day descendants.

Now, the present-day descendants have, in some instances, restored the original spelling on their visiting cards; in other cases they have consoled themselves with hyphens, and most of them, it is safe to say, are bravely recovering from the tendency to over-simplicity. But the present-day city corporation of Greater New York could not, if it so desired, put a Richmond Hill back where it formerly stood, southwest of Washington Square and skirted by Minetta River—any more than it can bring to life Aaron Burr and the other historical personages who at various times occupied the hospitable villa which stood on the top of it and which is also gone to dust. They cannot restore the Collect Pond, which was filled up at such great expense, and covered by the Tombs prison and which, it is held by those who ought to know, would have made an admirable centre of a fine park much needed in that section, as the city has since learned. They cannot re-establish Love Lane, which used to lead from the popular Bloomingdale road (Broadway), nearly through the site of the building where this book is published, and so westward to Chelsea village.

They wanted to be very practical, those commissioners of 1807. They prided themselves upon it. Naturally they did not fancy eccentricities of landscape and could not tolerate sentimental names. "Love Lane? What nonsense," said these extremely dignified and quite humorless officials; "this is to be Twenty-first Street." They wanted to be very practical, and so it seems the greater pity that with several years of dignified deliberation they were so unpractical as to make that notorious mistake of providing posterity with such a paucity of thoroughfares in the directions in which most of the traffic was bound to flow—that is, up and down, as practical men might have foreseen, and of running thick ranks of straight streets, as numerously as possible, across the narrow island from river to river, where but few were needed; thus causing the north and south thoroughfares, which they have dubbed avenues, to be swamped with heterogeneous traffic, complicating the problem for later-day rapid transit, giving future generations another cause for criticism, and furnishing a set of cross streets the like of which cannot be found in any other city of the world.

These are the streets which visitors to New York always remark; the characteristic cross streets of the typical up-town region of long regular rows of rectangular residences that look so much alike, with steep similar steps leading up to sombre similar doors and a doctor's sign in every other window. Bleak, barren, echoing streets where during the long, monotonous mornings "rags-an-bot'l" are called for, and bananas and strawberries are sold from wagons by aid of resonant voices, and nothing else is heard except at long intervals the welcome postman's whistle or the occasional slamming of a carriage door. Meantime the sun gets around to the north side of the street, and the airing of babies and fox-terriers goes on, while down at the corner one elevated train after another approaches, roars, and rumbles away in the distance all day long until at last the men begin coming home from business. These are the ordinary unromantic streets on which live so few New Yorkers in fiction (it is so easy to put them on the Avenue or Gramercy Park or Washington Square), but on which most of them seem to live in real life. A slice of all New York with all its layers of society and all its mixed interests may be seen in a walk along one of these typical streets which stretch across the island as straight and stiff as iron grooves and waste not an inch in their progress from one river, out into which they have gradually encroached, to the other river into which also they extend. It is a short walk, the island is so narrow.

Away over on the ragged eastern edge of the city it starts, out of a ferry-house or else upon the abrupt water-front with river waves slapping against the solid bulwark. Here are open, free sky, wide horizon, the smell of the water, or else of the neighboring gas-house, brisk breezes and sea-gulls flapping lazily. The street's progress begins between an open lot where rival gangs of East Side boys meet to fight, on one side, and, on the other, a great roomy lumber-yard, with a very small brick building for an office. A dingy saloon, of course, stands on the corner of the first so-called avenue. Away over here the avenues have letters instead of numbers for names. Across the way—and it is easily crossed, for on some of these remote thoroughfares the traffic is so scarce that occasional blades of grass come up between the cobble-stones—is a weather-boarded and weather-beaten old house of sad mien, whose curtainless gable windows stare and stare out toward the river, thinking of other days.... Some warehouses and a factory or two are usually along here, with buzz-saws snarling; then another lettered avenue or two and the first of the elevated railroads roars overhead. This is now several blocks nearer the splendor of Fifth Avenue, but the neighborhood does not look it, for here is the thick of the tenement district, with dingy fire-escapes above, and below in the street, bumping against everyone, thousands of city children, each of them with at least one lung. The traffic is more crowded now, the street darker, the air not so good. Above are numerous windows showing the subdivisions where many families live—very comfortably and happily in numerous cases; you could not induce them to move into the sunshine and open of the country. Here, on the ground floor of the flat, is a grocery with sickening fruit out in front; on one side of it a doctor's sign, on the other an undertaker's. The window shows a three-foot coffin lined with soiled white satin, much admired by the wise-eyed little girls.

As each of these succeeding avenues is crossed, with its rush and roar of up-town and down-town traffic, the neighborhood is said to be more "respectable," meaning more expensive; more of the women on the sidewalks wear hats and paint, and there are fewer children without shoes; private houses are becoming more frequent; babies less frequent; there is more pretence and less spontaneity. The flats are now apartments; they have ornate, hideous entrances, which add only to the rent.... So on until here is Madison Avenue and a whole block of private houses, varied only by an occasional stable, pleasant, clean-looking little stables, preferable architecturally to the houses in some cases. And here at last is Fifth Avenue; and it seems miles away from the tenements, sparkling, gay, happy or pretending to be, with streams of carefully dressed people flowing in both directions; New York's wonderful women, New York's well-built, tight-collared young men; shining carriages with good-looking horses and well-kept harness, mixed with big, dirty trucks whose drivers seem unconscious of the incongruity, but quite well aware of their own superior bumping ability. Dodging in and out miraculously are a few bicycles.... And now when the other side of the avenue is reached the rest is an anti-climax. Here is the trades-people's entrance to the great impressive house on the corner, so near that other entrance on the avenue, but so far that it will never be reached by that white-aproned butcher-boy's family—in this generation, at least. Beyond the conservatory is a bit of backyard, a pathetic little New York yard, but very green and cheerful, bounded at the rear by a high peremptory wall which seems to keep the ambitious brownstone next door from elbowing its way up toward the avenue.

These next houses, however, are quite fine and impressive, too, and they are not so alike as they seem at first; in fact, it is quite remarkable how much individuality architects have learned of late years to put into the eighteen or twenty feet they have to deal with. The monotony is varied occasionally with an English basement house or a tall wrought-iron gateway and a hood over the entrance. Here is a white Colonial doorway with side-lights. The son of the house studied art, perhaps, and persuaded his father to make this kind of improvement, though the old gentleman was inclined to copy the rococo style of the railroad president opposite.... Half-way down the block, unless a wedding or a tea is taking place, the street is as quiet as Wall Street on a Sunday. Behind us can be seen the streams of people flowing up and down Fifth Avenue.

By the time Sixth Avenue is crossed brick frequently come into use in place of brownstone, and there are not only doctors' signs now, but "Robes et Manteaux" are announced, or sometimes, as on that ugly iron balcony, merely Madame somebody. By this time also there have already appeared on some of the newel-posts by the door-bell, "Boarders," or "Furnished Rooms"—modestly written on a mere slip of paper, as though it had been deemed unnecessary to shout the words out for the neighborhood to hear. In there, back of these lace-curtains, yellow, though not with age, is the parlor—the boarding-house parlor—with tidies which always come off and small gilt chairs which generally break, and wax wreaths under glass, like cheeses under fly-screens in country groceries. In the place of honor hangs the crayon portrait of the dear deceased, in an ornate frame. But most of the boarders never go there, except to pay their bills; down in the basement dining-room is where they congregate, you can see them now through the grated window, at the tables. Here, on the corner, is the little tailor-shop or laundry, which is usually found in the low building back of that facing the avenue, which latter is always a saloon unless it is a drug-store; on the opposite corner is still another saloon—rivals very likely in the Tammany district as well as in business, with a policy-shop or a pool-room on the floor above, as all the neighbors know, though the local good government club cannot stop it. Here is the "family entrance" which no family ever enters.

Then come more apartments and more private residences, not invariably passÉ, more boarding-houses, many, many boarding-houses, theatrical boarding-houses, students' boarding-houses, foreign boarding-houses; more small business places, and so on across various mongrel avenues until here is the region of warehouses and piano factories and finally even railway tracks with large astonishing trains of cars. Cross these tracks and you are beyond the city, in the suburbs, as much as the lateral edges of this city can have suburbs; yet this is only the distance of a long golf-hole from residences and urbanity. Here are stock-yards with squealing pigs, awful smells, deep, black mire, and then a long dock reaching far out into the Hudson, with lazy river barges flopping along-side it, and dock-rats fishing off the end—a hot, hateful walk if ever your business or pleasure calls you out there of a summer afternoon. There the typical up-town cross street ends its dreary existence.

II

Down-town it is so different.

Down-town—"'way down-town," in the vernacular—in latitude far south of homes and peace and contemplation, where everything is business and dollars and hardness, and the streets might well be economically straight, and rigorously business-like, they are incongruously crooked, running hither and thither in a dreamy, unpractical manner, beginning where they please and ending where it suits them best, in a narrow, Old-World way, despite their astonishing, New-World architecture. Numbers would do well enough for names down here, but instead of concise and business-like street-signs, the lamp-posts show quaint, incongruous names, sentimental names, poetic names sometimes, because these streets were born and not made.

They were born of the needs or whims of the early population, including cows, long before the little western city became self-conscious about its incipient greatness, and ordered a ready-made plan for its future growth. It was too late for the painstaking commissioners down here. One little settlement of houses had gradually reached out toward another, each with its own line of streets or paths, until finally they all grew together solidly into a city, not caring whether they dovetailed or not, and one or the other or both of the old road names stuck fast. The Beaver's Path, leading from the Parade (which afterward became the Bowling Green) over to the swampy inlet which by drainage became the sheep pasture and later was named Broad Street, is still called Beaver Street to this day. The Maiden Lane, where New York girls used to stroll (and in still more primitive times used to do the washing) along-side the stream which gave the street its present winding shape and low grading, is still called Maiden Lane, though probably the only strollers in the modern jostling crowd along this street, now the heart of the diamond district, are the special detectives who have a personal acquaintance with every distinguished jewellery crook in the country, and guard "the Lane," as they call it, so carefully that not in fifteen years has a member of the profession crossed the "dead-line" successfully. There is Bridge Street, which no longer has any stream to bridge; Dock Street, where there is no dock; Water Street, once upon the river-front but now separated from the water by several blocks and much enormously valuable real estate; and Wall Street, which now seems to lack the wooden wall by which Governor Stuyvesant sought to keep New Englanders out of town. His efforts were of no permanent value.

Nowadays they seem such narrow, crowded little runways, these down-town cross streets; so crowded that men and horses share the middle of them together; so narrow that from the windy tops of the irregular white cliffs which line them you must lean far over in order to see the busy little men at the dry asphalt bottom, far below, rapidly crawling hither and thither like excitable ants whose hill has been disturbed. And in modern times they seem dark and gloomy, near the bottom, even in the clear, smokeless air of Manhattan, so that lights are turned on sometimes at mid-day, for at best the sun gets into these valleys for only a few minutes, so high have the tall buildings grown. But they were not narrow in those old days of the Dutch; seemed quite the right width, no doubt, to gossip across, from one Dutch stoop to another, at close of day, with the after-supper pipe when the chickens and children had gone to sleep and there was nothing to interrupt the peaceful, puffing conversation except the lazy clattering bell of an occasional cow coming home late for milking. Nor were they gloomy in those days, for the sun found its way unobstructed for hours at a time, when they were lined with small low-storied houses which the family occupied upstairs, with business below. Everyone went home for luncheon in those days—a pleasant, simple system adhered to in this city, it is said, until comparatively recent times by more than one family whose present representatives require for their happiness two or three homes in various other parts of the world in addition to their town house. This latter does not contain a shop on the ground floor. It is situated far up the island, at some point beyond the marsh where their forebears went duck-shooting (now Washington Square), or in some cases even beyond the site of the second kissing bridge, over which the Boston Post road crossed the small stream where Seventy-seventh Street now runs.

Now, being such a narrow island, none of its cross streets can be very long, as was pointed out, even at the city's greatest breadth. The highest cross-street number I ever found was 742 East Twelfth. But these down-town cross streets are much shorter, even those that succeed in getting all the way across without stopping; they are so abruptly short that each little street has to change in the greatest possible hurry from block to block, like vaudeville performers, in order to show all the features of a self-respecting cross street in the business section. Hence the sudden contrasts. For instance, down at one end of a certain well-known business street may be seen some low houses of sturdy red brick, beginning to look antique now with their solid walls and visible roofs. They line an open, sunny spot, with the smell of spices and coffee in the air. A market was situated here over a hundred years ago, and this broad, open space still has the atmosphere of a marketplace. The sights and smells of the water-front are here, too, ships and stevedores unloading them, sailors lounging before dingy drinking-places, and across the cobble-stones is a ferry-house, with "truck" wagons on the way back to Long Island waiting for the gates to open, the unmistakable country mud, so different from city mire, still sticking in cakes to the spokes, notwithstanding the night spent in town. Nothing worth remarking, perhaps, in all this, but that the name of the street is Wall Street, and all this seems so different from the Wall Street of a stone's-throw inland, with crowded walks, dapper business men, creased trousers, tall, steel buildings, express elevators, messengers dashing in and out, tickers busy, and all the hum and suppressed excitement of the Wall Street the world knows, as different and as suddenly different as the change that is felt in the very air upon stepping across through the noise and shabby rush of lower Sixth Avenue into the enchanted peace of Greenwich village, with sparrows chirping in the wistaria vines that cover old-fashioned balconies on streets slanting at unexpected angles.

The typical part of these down-town cross streets is, of course, that latter part, the section more or less near Broadway, and crowded to suffocation with great businesses in great buildings, commonly known as hideous American sky-scrapers. This is the real down-town to most of the men who are down there, and who are too busy thinking about what these streets mean to each of them to-day to bother much with what the streets were in the past, or even to notice how the modern tangle of spars and rigging looks as seen down at the end of the street from the office window.

Of course, all these men in the tall buildings, whether possessed of creative genius or of intelligence enough only to run one of the elevators, are alike Philistines to those persons who find nothing romantic or interesting in our modern, much-maligned sky-scrapers, which have also been called "monuments of modern materialism," and even worse names, no doubt, because they are unprecedented and unacademic, probably, as much as because ugly and unrestrained. To many of us, however, shameless as it may be to confess it, these down-town streets are fascinating enough for what they are to-day, even if they had no past to make them all the more charming; and these erect, jubilant young buildings, whether beautiful or not, seem quite interesting—from their bright tops, where, far above the turmoil and confusion, Mrs. Janitor sits sewing in the sun while the children play hide-and-seek behind water-butts and air-shafts (there is no danger of falling off, it is a relief to know, because the roof is walled in like a garden), down to the dark bottom where are the safe-deposit vaults, and the trusty old watchmen, and the oblong boxes with great fortunes in them, along-side of wills that may cause family fights a few years later, and add to the affluence of certain lawyers in the offices overhead. Deep down, thirty or forty feet under the crowded sidewalk, the stokers shovel coal under big boilers all day, and electricians do interesting tricks with switchboards, somewhat as in the hold of a modern battle-ship. In the many tiers of floors overhead are the men with the minds that make these high buildings necessary and make down-town what it is, with their dreams and schemes, their courage and imagination, their trust and distrust in the knowledge and ignorance of other human beings which are the means by which they bring about great successes and great failures, and have all the fun of playing a game, with the peace of conscience and self-satisfaction which come from hard work and manly sweat.

Here during daylight, or part of it, they are moving about, far up on high or down near the teeming surface, in and out of the numerous subdivisions termed offices, until finally they call the game off for the day, go down in the express elevator, out upon the narrow little streets, and turn north toward the upper part of the island. And each, like a homing pigeon, finds his own division or subdivision in a long, solid block of divisions called homes, in the part of town where run the many rows of even, similar streets.

III

These two views across two parts of New York, the two most typical parts, deal chiefly with what a stranger might see and feel, who came and looked and departed. Very little has been said to show what the cross-streets mean to those who are in the town and of it, who know the town and like it—either because their "father's father's father" did, or else because their work or fate has cast them upon this island and kept them there until it no longer seems a desert island. The latter class, indeed, when once they have learned to love the town of their adoption, frequently become its warmest enthusiasts, even though they may have held at one time that city contentedness could not be had without the symmetry, softness, and repose of older civilizations, or even that true happiness was impossible when walled in by stone and steel from the sight and smell of green fields and running brooks.

He who loves New York loves its streets for what they have been and are to him, not for what they may seem to those who do not use them. They who know the town best become as homesick when away from it for the straightness of the well-kept streets up-town as for the crookedness and quaintness of the noisy thoroughfares below. The straightness, they point out complacently, is very convenient for getting about, just as the numbering system makes it easy for strangers. On the walk up-town they enjoy looking down upon the expected unexpectedness of the odd little cross streets, which twist and turn or end suddenly in blank walls, or are crossed by passageways in mid-air, like the Bridge of Sighs, down Franklin Street, from the Criminal Court-house to the Tombs. But farther along in their walk they are just as fond of looking down the perspective of the straight side streets from the central spine of Fifth Avenue past block after block of New York homes, away down beyond the almost-converging rows of even lamp-posts to the Hudson and the purple Palisades of Jersey, with the glorious gleam and glow of the sunset; while the energetic "L" trains scurry past, one after another, trailing beautiful swirls of steam and carrying other New Yorkers to other homes. None of this could be enjoyed if the cross streets tied knots in themselves like those in London and some American cities. Even outsiders appreciate these characteristic New York vistas; and nearly every poet who comes to town discovers its symbolic incongruity afresh and sings it to those who have enjoyed it before he was born, just as most young writers of prose feel called upon to turn their attention the other way and unearth the great East Side of New York.

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.

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.

Looked at from the point of view of use and knowledge, every street, like every person, gains a distinct personality, some being merely more strongly distinguished than others. And just as every human being, whatever his name or his looks may be, continues to win more or less sympathy the more you know of him and his history and his ambitions, so with these streets, and their checkered careers, their sudden changes from decade to decade—or in still less time, in our American cities, their transformation from farm land to suburban road, and then to fashionable city street, and then to small business and then to great business. Such, after all, is the stuff of which abiding city charm is made, not of plans and architecture.