At last Grace Church, with its clean light stone, is reached; and the
green grass and shrubbery in front of the interesting-looking Gothic
rectory. It is a glad relief. And now--in fact, a little before this
point--about where stood that melancholy building bearing the plaintive
sign "Old London Street"--which was used now for church services and now
prize-fights and had never been much of a success at anything--about
here, the up-town walkers notice (unless lured off to the left by the
thick tree-tops of Washington Square to look at the goodliest row of
houses in all the island) that the character of Broadway has changed
even more than the direction of the street changes. A short distance
below the bend all the stores were wholesale, now they are becoming
solidly retail. Instead of buyers the people along the street are
mostly shoppers. Down there were very few women; up here are very few
men. This is especially noticeable when Union Square is reached, with
cable-cars clanging around Dead Man's Curve in front of Lafayette's
statue. Here, down Fourteenth Street, may be seen shops and shoppers of
the most virulent type; windows which draw women's heads around whether
they want to look or not, causing them to run you down and making them
deaf to your apologies for it. Big dry-goods stores and small millinery
shops; general stores and department stores, and the places where
the sidewalks are crowded with what is known to the trade as "Louis
Fourteenth Street furniture." All this accounts for there being more
restaurants now and different smells and another feeling in the air.
[Illustration: ... Diana on top glistening in the sun.]
From the upper corner of Union Square, with its glittering
jewellery-shops and music-stores and publishers' buildings, and its
somewhat pathetic-looking hotels, once fashionable but now fast becoming
out-of-date and landmarky (though they seem good enough to those who
sit and wait on park benches all day), the open spaciousness of Madison
Square comes into view, the next green oasis for the up-town traveller.
This will help him up the intervening blocks if he is not interested in
the stretch of stores, though these are a different sort of shop, and
they seem to say, with their large, impressive windows, their footmen,
their buttons at the door, "We are very superior and fashionable."
[Illustration: Seeing the Avenue from a stage-top.]
The shoppers, too, are not so rapacious along here, because they have
more time; and the clatter is not so great, because there are more
rubber-tired carriages in the street. Nor are all these people shoppers
by any means, for along this bit of Broadway mingle types of all
the different sorts of men and women who use Broadway at all: nuns,
actors, pickpockets, detectives, sandwich-men, little girls going to
Huyler's, artists on the way to the Players'--the best people and the
worst people, the most mixed crowd in town may be seen here of a bright
afternoon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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