Your United States | Page 9

of cast iron; but
only for a moment! What, after all, do I care what a cornice is made of,
so long as it juts proudly out from the façade and helps the street to a
splendid and formidable sky-line? I had neither read nor heard a word
of the cornices of New York, and yet for me New York was first and
last the city of effective cornices! (Which merely shows how eyes
differ!) The cornice must remind you of Italy, and through Italy of the
Renaissance. And is it not the boast of the United States to be a
renaissance? I always felt that there was something obscurely symbolic
in the New York cornice--symbolic of the necessary qualities of a
renaissance, half cruel and half humane.
The critical European excusably expects a very great deal from Fifth
Avenue, as being the principal shopping street of the richest
community in the world. (I speak not of the residential blocks north of
Fifty-ninth Street, whose beauty and interest fall perhaps far short of
their pretensions.) And the critical European will not be disappointed,
unless his foible is to be disappointed--as, in fact, occasionally happens.
Except for the miserly splitting, here and there in the older edifices, of
an inadequate ground floor into a mezzanine and a shallow box (a
device employed more frankly and usefully with an outer flight of steps

on the East Side), there is nothing mean in the whole street from the
Plaza to Washington Square. A lot of utterly mediocre architecture
there is, of course--the same applies inevitably to every long street in
every capital--but the general effect is homogeneous and fine, and,
above, all, grandly generous. And the alternation of high and low
buildings produces not infrequently the most agreeable architectural
accidents: for example, seen from about Thirtieth Street, the
pale-pillared, squat structure of the Knickerbocker Trust against a
background of the lofty red of the Æolian Building.... And then, that
great white store on the opposite pavement! The single shops, as well
as the general stores and hotels on Fifth Avenue, are impressive in the
lavish spaciousness of their disposition. Neither stores nor shops could
have been conceived, or could be kept, by merchants without genuine
imagination and faith.
And the glory of the thoroughfare inspires even those who only walk
up and down it. It inspires particularly the mounted policeman as he
reigns over a turbulent crossing. It inspires the women, and particularly
the young women, as they pass in front of the windows, owning their
contents in thought. I sat once with an old, white-haired, and serious
gentleman, gazing through glass at Fifth Avenue, and I ventured to say
to him, "There are fine women on Fifth Avenue." "By Jove!" he
exclaimed, with deep conviction, and his eyes suddenly fired, "there
are!" On the whole, I think that, in their carriages or on their feet, they
know a little better how to do justice to a fine thoroughfare than the
women of any other capital in my acquaintance. I have driven rapidly
in a fast car, clinging to my hat and my hair against the New York wind,
from one end of Fifth Avenue to the other, and what with the sunshine,
and the flags wildly waving in the sunshine, and the blue sky and the
cornices jutting into it and the roofs scraping it, and the large whiteness
of the stores, and the invitation of the signs, and the display of the
windows, and the swift sinuousness of the other cars, and the proud
opposing processions of American subjects--what with all this and with
the supreme imperialism of the mounted policeman, I have been
positively intoxicated!
And yet possibly the greatest moment in the life of Fifth Avenue is at

dusk, when dusk falls at tea-time. The street lamps flicker into a steady,
steely blue, and the windows of the hotels and restaurants throw a
yellow radiance; all the shops--especially the jewelers' shops--become
enchanted treasure-houses, whose interiors recede away behind their
façades into infinity; and the endless files of innumerable vehicles,
interlacing and swerving, put forth each a pair of glittering eyes. Come
suddenly upon it all, from the leafy fastnesses of Central Park, round
the corner from the Plaza Hotel, and wait your turn until the arm of the
policeman, whose blue coat is now whitened with dust, permits your
restive chauffeur to plunge down into the main currents of the city....
You will have then the most grandiose impression that New York is, in
fact, inhabited; and that even though the spectacular luxury of New
York be nearly as much founded upon social injustice and poverty as
any imperfect human civilization in Europe, it is a boon to be alive
therein!... In half an hour, in three-quarters of an hour, the