Incongruous New York
That dislike of the obvious which is the chief characteristic of American humor is clearly exemplified in the names of most of New York’s streets.
The dwellers in a great European city would give their proudest avenue of great shops and rich clubs some dignified and significant title, like the Rue de la Paix or the Friedrichstrasse. The Asiatics would give it a name more definitely descriptive and laudatory, like “The Street of the Thousand and One Mirrors of Delight.” The New Yorkers, “laconic and Olympian,” designate it by a simple numeral. They call it Fifth Avenue.
It comes partly from the national reticence, this prosaic name of a poetic thoroughfare. It is a manifestation of that attitude of mind which makes us to call a venerated and beloved statesman merely “Old Abe,” when the English would call him “the Grand Old Man” and the Italians “the Star-crowned Patriarch.” Also it is a phase of our democracy. We will not seem to exalt one avenue over another by giving it a fairer name; Fifth Avenue sounds to the uninitiated no more wealthy and aristocratic than Fourth Avenue. Indeed, if there be any partiality in the awarding of names, it would seem to be exercised in favor of First Avenue or Avenue A.
It may be objected that the sponsors of Fifth Avenue did not foresee its destined splendor. But this fact does not alter the case; we continue to call it Fifth Avenue, whereas Europeans would alter its name to something more appropriate to its grandeur.
There was a pilgrim from the Five Towns who said that Fifth Avenue was architecturally the finest street in the world. This might pass for a guest’s flattery, were it not that Mr. Arnold Bennett is of a nation which does not count gracious insincerity among its vices. New York must blushingly admit the truth of his judgment.
It is not (he said) harmonious. Its beauty is made up of units of beauty related only by position. This, too, is characteristically American. Each building must have its distinctive excellence.
To give a street of wonders an austere name, to build palaces and fill them with offices and shops—these are the acts by which Americans are known. And especially does the New Yorker delight in the whimsical, the inconsistent, the unexpected. He is like a child who likes to dig in the sand with a silver spoon and to eat porridge with a toy shovel.
And this delicate perversity has its refreshing aspect. Fifth Avenue, surely, is a thing to admire in the new sense as well as the old. It sometimes suggests, perhaps, the ill-natured definition of a New Yorker as a man who, when he makes a set of chimes, puts it in a life insurance building. But it more often suggests a restatement of this definition; that is, that a New Yorker is a man who, when he makes a life insurance building, puts a set of chimes in it.
Now, certain masters of the mirthless science of psychology teach that humor depends on incongruity. Whether or not this is true, incongruity has much to do with making life worth while. For incongruity is the soul of romance.
Nobility, love, courage, beauty—the possession of these qualities does not give to a man or a woman romantic charm. A person is a hero or a heroine of romance because he or she lives in a contrasting place or age. For example, a cowboy riding a bucking bronco and whirling his lariat under a canvas roof in some sedate Eastern town is properly considered by the spectators to be a romantic figure. A cowboy engaged in the same interesting occupations on a Texas ranch would not be considered a romantic figure by his neighbors. It is incongruity of environment that romantically transforms him.
People and things of bygone ages are romantic to us because the years have gilded them. They were not romantic to their contemporaries. Says Edwin Arlington Robinson:
Minniver loved the Medici
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.
Exactly. Minniver Cheevy was a true romanticist. A plumed knight, armed cap-a-pie, is a romantic figure when we merely see him through the years from our modern surroundings by means of imagination’s powerful lens; he would be a figure even more romantic if we could actually see him shake his lance and lead his warriors against a drab-suited, machine-like company of present-day soldiers. Why, even horse cars, commonplace enough in their day, take on a certain sentimental luster when they lie abandoned in the outskirts of cities proud with electricity. And a subway train will one day be as romantic a spectacle as a stage coach.
Sometimes a building is deliberately given the romance of incongruity. This certainly is the case with the New York Stock Exchange. This splendid Grecian temple, with its lofty columns and noble façade, would, if it stood in ancient Athens, be, of course, beautiful, but in no respect romantic. It is romantic because it is in a place where it would not naturally be expected and because it is devoted to uses for which it does not seem to have been intended. If the god therein worshiped were not Mammon, but altisonant Jupiter, if white-robed priests found the future prefigured in the warm blood of the lambs therein sacrificed—then the building which now houses the clamoring merchants would be merely dignified and practical and not, as it is today, romantic.
The use of this Grecian temple as a counting house is a splendid example of the poetic tendency of a popular mind. The common business terms—“Bull” and “Bear,” for example—are incongruous, and therefore romantic. And a successful business man is not realistically called a successful business man; he is romantically called a “merchant prince” or a “captain of industry.”
But most of New York’s romantic places get their glory not by plan, but by the accident of design. You turn the corner from a sombre street lined by tall concrete and steel structures that obviously are of your own period and come suddenly upon a mellow bit of New Amsterdam. You would not be surprised to see old Peter Stuyvesant stump down Coenties Slip and drop in for his morning’s Hollands at “22½,” across the way. There are streets and squares and alleys in downtown New York that look now exactly as they did when Times Square was a cow pasture and the Bowery really bowery. But these places were not romantic to the citizens of that time; they would not be romantic to us if by some strange backward transmigration of souls we should inhabit a vanished century.
No, we are fortunate to live when Battery Place and Coenties Slip have acquired romance’s glamour. Incongruity is the soul of romance. And these quaint time-hallowed places have the loveliest sort of incongruity—the magical incongruity of archaisms.