Here is Church Street, for instance; it is not very long, and you turn into it from Fulton or from Canal. So turned the Easy Chair, and there was the long, narrow vista walled by lofty buildings, the spacious houses of trade, built yesterday, piled with dry goods, bold with prosperous newness, but instantly suggesting the street of palaces in Genoa. And a few rods off some old Knickerbocker is gravely stalking down Broadway who has not turned aside into Church Street for many a year, and who supposes Church Street is still a place not to be named, an unspeakable Gehenna. So it was a dozen years ago. Once, also, it was the Black Broadway. It was a kind of voluntary Ghetto of the colored people. Then, again, it was an offshoot of the Five Points. There were low ranges of dingy buildings. Dirty men and women slouched along on the walks and lounged out of the windows, and their idle, ribald laughter echoed along the street that few carriages travelled. Dens of every kind were just around every corner. Slatternly women emptied slops upon the pavement, and the stench was perpetual. Dirty little children screamed and played, and sickly babies squalled unheeded. It was a street fallen out of Hogarth; the street of worst repute in the city. And now it is a double range of stately buildings--symmetrical, massive. Horse-cars struggle on it with light carts of dry-goods dealers, with the slow, enormous teams that shake the ground. At every corner there is an inextricable snarl of wagons, and porters are heaving boxes, and young clerks are directing, and huge windows are filled with huge pattern cards, so that the narrow way is tapes-tried. "Look out, there!" cries a porter-compelling clerk to the Easy Chair, which smiles to think that only yesterday it was in Exchange Place, and Pearl Street, and elsewhere that the peremptory youth was ordering him to mind his eye. And if the employer who now sits in the spacious office opposite had known that his clerk was familiar with Church Street, he would have warned him of the gates of destruction, and have admonished him that Church Street, though a narrow street, was a broad way.