Apart
from a few tourist-haunted monuments, which the resident passes with
scarcely a glance, the general run of buildings and streets, if not
palpably modern, can at most lay claim to a respectable, or
disreputable, middle-age. Now, an eminently respectable middle-age is
precisely the characteristic of the central regions of Philadelphia and
Baltimore; while in New York both reputable and disreputable middle-age
are amply represented. One may almost say that these Eastern cities are
fundamentally old-fashioned, and that all their modern mechanism of
electric cars, telephone wires, and what not, is but a thin and
transparent outer network, through which the older order of things is
everywhere peering. And from this very contrast between the old and the
new, this sense of visible time-strata in the structure of a city, there
results a very real effect of age.
Here, in Washington, one instinctively craves for something of that
uniformity which one instinctively deprecates as an ideal for New York.
The buildings on the main streets are too haphazard, like the books on
an ill-arranged shelf: folios, quartos, and duodecimos huddled pell-mell
together. But when some approach to a definite style is achieved, how
noble will be the radiating vistas of this spacious city! The plan of
the avenues and streets, as has been aptly said, suggests a cartwheel
superimposed upon a gridiron--an arrangement, by the way, which may be
studied on a small scale in Carlsruhe.
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