Her air, when it is typical, is light, dry, cool. It is pale, it is faintly tinctured with pearl and opal. Heaven is unbelievably remote; the city itself daring so high, heaven lifts in a cautious remove. Light and shadow are fantastically banded, striped, and patchworked among her cavern streets; a cool, deep gloom is cut across with fierce jags and blinks of brightness. She smiles upon man who takes his ease in her colossal companionship. Her clean soaring perpendiculars call the eye upward. One wanders as a botanist in a tropical forest. That great smooth groinery of the Pennsylvania Station train shed: is it not the arching fronds of iron palm trees? Oh, to be a botanist of this vivid jungle, spread all about one, anatomist of the ribs and veins that run from the great backbone of Broadway!
To love her, one thinks, is to love one"s fellows; each of them having some unknown share in her loveliness. Any one of her streets would be the study and delight of a lifetime. To speak at random, we think of that little world of brightness and sound bourgeois cheer that spreads around the homely Verdi statue at Seventy-third Street. We have a faithful affection for that neighbourhood, for reasons of our own.
Within a radius, thereabouts, of a quarter-mile each way, we could live a year and learn new matters every day. They call us a hustling folk.
Observe the tranquil afternoon light in those brownstone byways. Pa.s.s along leisurely Amsterdam Avenue, the region of small and genial shops, Amsterdam Avenue of the many laundries. See the children trooping upstairs to their own room at the St. Agnes branch of the Public Library. See the taxi drivers, sitting in their cars alongside the Verdi gra.s.s plot (a rural breath of new-mown turf sweetening the warm, crisp air) and smoking pipes. Every one of them is to us as fascinating as a detective story. What a hand they have had in ten thousand romances. At this very moment, what quaint and many-stranded destinies may hail them and drive off? But there they sit, placid enough, with a pipe and the afternoon paper. The light, fluttering dresses of enigmatic fair ones pa.s.s gayly on the pavement. Traffic flows, divides, and flows on, a sparkling river. Here is that mystery, a human being, buying a cigar.
Here is another mystery asking for a gla.s.s of frosted chocolate. Why is it that we cannot accost that tempting riddle and ask him to give us an accurate precis of his life to date? And that red-haired burly sage, he who used to bake the bran m.u.f.fins in the little lunchroom near by, and who lent us his Robby Burns one night--what has become of him?
So she teases us, so she allures. Sometimes, on the L, as one pa.s.ses along that winding channel where the walls and windows come so close, there is a felicitous sense of being immersed, surrounded, drowned in a great, generous ocean of humanity. It is a fine feeling. All life presses around one, the throb and the problem are close, are close. Who could be weary, who could be at odds with life, in such an embrace of destiny? The great tall sides of buildings fly open, the human hive is there, beautiful and arduous beyond belief. Here is our worship and here our lasting joy, here is our immortality of encouragement. Yes, perhaps O. Henry did say the secret after all: "He saw no longer a rabble, but his brothers seeking the ideal."
VESEY STREET
[Ill.u.s.tration]
The first duty of the conscientious explorer is to study his own neighbourhood, so we set off to familiarize ourself with Vesey Street.
This amiable byway (perhaps on account of the proximity of Washington Market) bases its culture on a solid appreciation of the virtue of good food, an admirable trait in any street. Upon this firm foundation it erects a seemly interest in letters. The wanderer who pa.s.ses up the short channel of our street, from the docks to St. Paul"s churchyard, must not be misled by the character of the books the bibliothecaries display in their windows. Outwardly they lure the public by Bob Ingersoll"s lectures, Napoleon"s Dream Book, efficiency encyclopaedias and those odd and highly coloured small brochures of smoking-car tales of the Slow Train Through Arkansaw type. But once you penetrate, you may find quarry of a more stimulating kind. For fifteen cents we eloped with a first edition of Bunner"s "Love in Old Cloathes," which we were glad to have in memory of the "old red box on Vesey Street" which Banner immortalized in rhyme, and which still stands (is it the same box?) by the railing of St. Paul"s. Also, even n.o.bler treasure to our way of thinking, did we not just now find (for fifteen cents) Hilaire Belloc"s "Hills and the Sea," that enchanting little volume of essays, which we are almost afraid to read again. Belloc, the rogue--the devil is in him.
Such a l.u.s.ty beguilery moves in his nimble prose that after reading him it is hard not to fall into a clumsy imitation of his lively and frolic manner. There is at least one essayist in this city who fell subject to the hilarious Hilaire years ago. It is an old j.a.pe but not such a bad one: our friend Murray Hill will never return to the status quo ante Belloc.
But we were speaking of Vesey Street. It looks down to the water, and the soft music of steamship whistles comes tuning on a cold, gusty air.
Thoroughly mundane little street, yet not unmindful of matters spiritual, bounded as it is by divine Providence at one end (St. Paul"s) and by Providence, R. I. (the Providence Line pier) at the other.
Perhaps it is the presence of the graveyard that has startled Vesey Street into a curious reversal of custom. On most other streets, we think, the numbers of the houses run even on the south side, odd on the north. But just the opposite on Vesey. You will find all even numbers on the north, odd on the south. Still, Wall Street errs in the same way.
If marooned or quarantined on Vesey Street a man might lead a life of gayety and sound nourishment for a considerable while, without having recourse to more exalted thoroughfares. There are lodging houses in that row of old buildings down toward the docks; from the garret windows he could see masts moving on the river. For food he would live high indeed.
Where will one see such huge glossy blue-black grapes; such enormous Indian River grapefruit; such n.o.ble display of fish--scallops, herrings, smelts, and the larger kind with their dead and desolate eyes?
There are pathetic rows of rabbits, frozen stiff in the bitter cold wind; huge white hares hanging in rows; a tray of pigeons with their iridescent throat feathers catching gleams of the pale sunlight. There are great sacks of nuts, barrels of cranberries, kegs of olive oil, thick slabs of yellow cheese. On such a cold day it was pleasant to see a sign "Peanut Roasters and Warmers."
Pa.s.sing the gloomy vista of Greenwich Street--under the "L" is one of those mysterious little vents in the floor of the street from which issues a continual spout of steam--our Vesey grows more intellectual.
The first thing one sees, going easterly, is a sign: THE TRUTH SEEKER, _One flight Up_. The temptation is almost irresistible, but then Truth is always one flight higher up, so one reflects, what"s the use? In this block, while there is still much doing in the way of food--and even food in the live state, a window full of entertaining chicks and ducklings cl.u.s.tered round a colony brooder--another of Vesey Street"s interests begins to show itself. Tools. Every kind of tool that gladdens the heart of man is displayed in various shops. One realizes more and more that this is a man"s street, and indeed (except at the meat market) few of the gayer s.e.x are to be seen along its pavements. One of the tool shops has open-air boxes with all manner of miscellaneous oddments, from mouse traps to oil cans, and you may see delighted enthusiasts poring over the a.s.sortment with the same professional delight that ladies show at a notion counter. One of the tool merchants, however, seems to have weakened in his love of city existence, for he has put up a placard:
WANTED TO RENT _Small Farm Must Have Fruit and Spring Water_
How many years of repressed yearning may speak behind that modest ambition!
Our own taste for amus.e.m.e.nt leads us (once luncheon dispatched; you should taste Vesey Street"s lentil soup) to the second-hand bookshops.
Our imagined castaway, condemned to live on Vesey Street for a term of months, would never need to languish for mental stimulation. Were he devout, there is always St. Paul"s, as we have said; and were he atheist, what a collection of Bob Ingersoll"s essays greets the faring eye! There is the customary number of copies of "The Pentecost of Calamity"; it seems to the frequenter of second-hand bazaars as though almost everybody who bought that lively booklet in the early days of the war must have sold it again since the armistice. Much rarer, we saw a copy of "Hopkins"s Pond," that little volume of agreeable sketches written so long ago by Dr. Robert T. Morris, the well-known surgeon, and if we had not already a copy which the doctor inscribed for us we would certainly have rescued it from this strange exile.
There are only two of the really necessary delights of life that the Vesey Street maroon would miss. There is no movie, there are no doughnuts. We are wondering whether in any part of this city there has sprung up the great doughnut craze that has ravaged Philadelphia in the past months. As soon as prohibition became a certainty, certain astute merchants of the Quaker City devoted themselves to inoculating the public with a taste for these humble fritters, and now they bubble gayly in the windows of Philadelphia"s most aristocratic thoroughfare. It is really a startling sight to see Philadelphia lining up for its noonday quota of doughnuts, and the merchants over there have devised an ingenious method of tempting the crowd. A funnel, erected over the frying sinkers, carries the fragrant fumes out through a transom and gushes it into the open air, so that the sniff of doughnuts is perceptible all down the block. There is a fortune waiting on Vesey Street for the man who will establish a doughnut foundry, and we solemnly pledge our own appet.i.te and that of all our friends toward his success.[2]
At its upper end, perhaps in memory of the vanished Astor House, Vesey Street stirs itself into a certain magnificence, devoting its window s.p.a.ce to jewellery and silver-mounted books of prayer. At this window one may regulate his watch at a clock warranted by Charles Frodsham of 84, Strand, to whose solid British accuracy we hereby pay decent tribute. Over all this varied scene lifts the shining javelin-head of the Woolworth Building, seen now and then in an almost disbelieved glimpse of sublimity; and the golden Lightning of the Telephone and Telegraph pinnacle, waving his zigzag brands in the sun.
[2] Since this was written, the lack has been supplied--on Park Row, just above the top of Vesey Street; probably the most luxurious doughnut shop ever conceived.
BROOKLYN BRIDGE
[Ill.u.s.tration]
A windy day, one would have said in the dark channels of downtown ways.
In the chop house on John Street, lunch-time patrons came bl.u.s.tering in, wrapped in overcoats and m.u.f.flers, with something of that air of ostentatious hardiness that men always a.s.sume on coming into a warm room from a cold street. Thick chops were hissing on the rosy grill at the foot of the stairs. In one of the little crowded stalls a man sat with a gla.s.s of milk. It was the first time we had been in that chop house for several years ... it doesn"t seem the same. As Mr. Wordsworth said, it is not now as it hath been of yore. But still,
The homely Nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her Inn-mate Man, Forget the glories he hath known.
It"s a queer thing that all these imitation beers taste to us exactly as real beer did the first time we tasted it (we were seven years old) and shuddered. "Two gla.s.ses of cider," we said to the comely serving maid.
Alas
That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive.
There is a nice point of etiquette involved in lunching in a crowded chop house. Does the fact of having bought and eaten a moderate meal ent.i.tle one to sit with one"s companion for a placid talk and smoke afterward? Or is one compelled to relinquish the table as soon as one is finished, to make place for later comers? These last are standing menacingly near by, gazing bitterly upon us as we look over the card and debate the desirability of having some tapioca pudding. But our presiding Juno has already settled the matter, and made courtesy a matter of necessity. "These gentlemen will be through in a moment," she says to the new candidates. Our companion, the amiable G---- W----, was just then telling us of a brand of synthetic whiskey now being distilled by a famous tavern of the underworld. The superlative charm of this beverage seems to be the extreme rigidity it imparts to the persevering communicant. "What does it taste like?" we asked. "Rather like gnawing furniture," said G---- W----. "It"s like a long, healthy draught of sh.e.l.lac. It seems to me that it would be less trouble if you offered the barkeep fifty cents to hit you over the head with a hammer.
The general effect would be about the same, and you wouldn"t feel nearly so bad in the morning."
A windy day, and perishing chill, we thought as we strolled through the gloomy caverns and crypts underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Those twisted vistas seen through the archways give an impression of wrecked Louvain.
A great bonfire was burning in the middle of the street. Under the Pearl Street elevated the sunlight drifted through the girders in a lively chequer, patterning piles of gray-black snow with a criss-cross of brightness. We had wanted to show our visitor Franklin Square, which he, as a man of letters, had always thought of as a trimly gardened plot surrounded by quiet little old-fashioned houses with bra.s.s knockers, and famous authors tripping in and out. As we stood examining the facade of Harper and Brothers, our friend grew nervous. He was carrying under his arm the dummy of an "export catalogue" for a big bra.s.s foundry, that being his line of work. "They"ll think we"re free verse poets trying to get up courage enough to go in and submit a ma.n.u.script," he said, and dragged us away.
A windy day, we had said in the grimy recesses of Cliff and Dover streets. (Approaching this sentiment for the third time, perhaps we may be permitted to accomplish our thought and say what we had in mind.) But up on the airy decking of the Brooklyn Bridge, where we repaired with G---- W---- for a brief stroll, the afternoon seemed mild and tranquil.
It is a mistake to a.s.sume that the open s.p.a.ces are the windier. The subway is New York"s home of aeolus, and most of the gusts that buffet us on the streets are merely hastening round a corner in search of the nearest subway entrance so that they can get down there where they feel they belong. Up on the bridge it was plain to perceive that the March sunshine had elements of strength. The air was crisp but genial. A few pedestrians were walking resolutely toward the transpontine borough; the cop on duty stood outside his little cabin with the air of one ungrieved by care. Behind us stood the high profiles of the lower city, sharpened against the splendidly clear blue sky which is New York"s special blessing. On the water moved a large tug, towing barges. Smoke trailed behind it in the same easy and comfortable way that tobacco reek gushes over a man"s shoulder when he walks across a room puffing his pipe.
The bridge is a curiously delightful place to watch the city from.
Walking toward the central towers seems like entering a vast spider"s web. The footway between the criss-cross cables draws one inward with a queer fascination, the perspective diminishing the network to the eye so that it seems to tighten round you as you advance. Even when there is but little traffic the bridge is never still. It is alive, trembling, vibrant, the foot moves with a springy recoil. One feels the lift and strain of gigantic forces, and looks in amazement on the huge sagging hawsers that carry the load. The bars and rods quiver, the whole lively fabric is full of a tremor, but one that conveys no sense of insecureness. It trembles as a tree whispers in a light air.
And of the view from the bridge, it is too sweeping to carry wholly in mind. Best, one thinks, it is seen in a winter dusk, when the panes of Manhattan"s mountains are still blazing against a crystal blue-green sky, and the last flush of an orange sunset lingers in the west. Such we saw it once, coming over from Brooklyn, very hungry after walking in most of the way from Jamaica, and pledged in our own resolve not to break fast until reaching a certain inn on Pearl Street where they used to serve banana omelets. Dusk simplifies the prospect, washes away the lesser units, fills in the foreground with obliterating shadow, leaves only the monstrous sierras of Broadway jagged against the vault. It deepens this incredible panorama into broad sweeps of gold and black and peac.o.c.k blue which one may file away in memory, tangled eyries of shining windows swimming in empty air. As seen in the full brilliance of noonday the bristle of detail is too bewildering to carry in one clutch of the senses. The eye is distracted by the abysses between buildings, by the uneven elevation of the summits, by the jumbled compression of the streets. In the vastness of the scene one looks in vain for some guiding principle of arrangement by which vision can focus itself. It is better not to study this strange and disturbing outlook too minutely, lest one lose what knowledge of it one has. Let one do as the veteran prowlers of the bridge: stroll pensively to and fro in the sun, taking man"s miracles for granted, exhilarated and content.
THREE HOURS FOR LUNCH
Hudson Street has a pleasant savour of food. It resounds with the dull rumble of cruising drays, which bear the names of well-known brands of groceries; it is faintly salted by an aroma of the docks. One sees great signs announcing cocoanut and whalebone or such unusual wares; there is a fine tang of coffee in the air round about the corner of Beach Street.
Here is that vast, ma.s.sy brick edifice, the New York Central freight station, built 1868, which gives an impression of being about to be torn down. From a dilapidated upper window hangs a faded banner of the Irish Republic. At noontime this region shows a mood of repose. Truckmen loll in sunny corners, puffing pipes, with their curved freight hooks hung round their necks. In a dark smithy half a dozen sit comfortably round a huge wheel which rests on an anvil, using it as a lunch table. Near Ca.n.a.l Street two men are loading ice into a yellow refrigerator car, and their practiced motions are pleasant to watch. One stands in the wagon and swings the big blocks upward with his tongs. The other, on the wagon roof, seizes the piece deftly and drops it through a trap on top of the car. The blocks of ice flash and shimmer as they pa.s.s through the sunshine. In Jim O"Dea"s blacksmith shop, near Broome Street, fat white horses are waiting patiently to be shod, while a pink glow wavers outward from the forge.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
At the corner of Hudson and Broome streets we fell in with our friend Endymion, it being our purpose to point out to him the house, one of that block of old red dwellings between Hudson and Varick, which Robert C. Holliday has described in "Broome Street Straws," a book which we hope is known to all lovers of New York local colour. Books which have a strong sense of place, and are born out of particular streets--and especially streets of an odd, rich, and well-worn flavour--are not any too frequent. Mr. Holliday"s Gissingesque appreciation of the humours of landladies and all the queer fish that shoal through the backwaters of New York lodging houses makes this Broome Street neighbourhood exceedingly pleasant for the pilgrim to examine. It was in Mr.
Holliday"s honour that we sallied into a Hudson Street haberdashery, just opposite the channel of Broome Street, and adorned ourself with a new soft collar, also having the pleasure of seeing Endymion regretfully wave away some gorgeous mauve and pink neckwear that the agreeable dealer laid before him with words of encouragement. We also stood tranced by a marvellous lithograph advertising a roach powder in a neighbouring window, and wondered whether Mr. Holliday himself could have drawn the original in the days when he and Walter Jack Duncan lived in garrets on Broome Street and were art students together. Certainly this picture had the vigorous and spirited touch that one would expect from the draughting wrist of Mr. Holliday. It showed a very terrible scene, apparently a civil war among the roaches, for one army of these agile insects was treasonously squirting a house with the commended specific, and the horrified and stricken inmates were streaming forth and being carried away in roach ambulances, attended by roach nurses, to a neighbouring roach cemetery. All done on a large and telling scale, with every circ.u.mstance of dismay and reproach on the faces of the dying blattidae. Not even our candour, which is immense, permits us to reprint the slogan the manufacturer has adopted for his poster: those who go prowling on Hudson Street may see it for themselves.
In the old oyster and chop house just below Ca.n.a.l Street we enjoyed a very agreeable lunch. To this place the Broome Street garreteers (so Mr.
Holliday has told us) used to come on days of high prosperity when some cheque arrived from a publisher. At that time the tavern kept an open fireplace, with a bright nest of coals in the chilly season; and there was a fine mahogany bar. But we are no laudator of acted time; the fireplace has been bricked up, it is true; but the sweet cider is admirable, and as for the cheesecake, we would back it against all the Times Square variety that Ben De Ca.s.seres rattles about. It is delightful and surprising to find on Hudson Street an ordinary so droll and d.i.c.kensish in atmosphere, and next door is a window bearing the sign WALTER PETER. We feel sure that Mr. Holliday, were he still living in those parts, would have cajoled the owner into changing that E to an A.
Our stroll led us north as far as Charlton Street, which the geographers of Greenwich Village claim as the lower outpost of their domain.
Certainly it is a pleasing byway, running quietly through the afternoon, and one lays an envious eye upon the demure brick houses, with their old-fashioned doorways, pale blue shutters, and the studio windows on the southern side. At the corner of Varick Street is a large house showing the sign, "Christopher Columbus University of America."
Macdougal Street gives one a distant blink of the thin greenery of Washington Square.
An unexpected impulse led us eastward on Grand Street, to revisit Max Maisel"s interesting bookshop.--We had never forgotten the thrill of finding this place by chance one night when prowling toward Seward Park.
In bookshops of a liberal sort we always find it advisable to ask first of all for a copy of Frank Harris"s "The Man Shakespeare." It is hardly ever to be found (unfortunately), so the inquiry is comparatively safe for one in a frugal mood; and it is a tactful question, for the mention of this book shows the bookseller that you are an intelligent and understanding kind of person, and puts intercourse on good terms at once. However, we did find one book that we felt we simply had to have, as it is our favourite book for giving away to right-minded people--"The Invisible Playmate," by William Canton. We fear that there are still lovers of children who do not know this book; but if so, it is not our fault.