House and Garden 
into the chasm that 
before had been all 
white, hot, and daz¬ 
zling. An old man, a 
sheik, sits at his door. 
And behold the con¬ 
ception of the street 
has enlarged. It may 
be something more 
than a passage, some¬ 
thing more than a 
means of getting from 
one point to another 
at whatever discom¬ 
fort, for an old man 
finds pleasure in idly 
sitting there ! 
The new idea gains 
rapidly and takes 
strong hold. The 
towns had been 
crowded, the streets 
the narrowest of slits 
and the houses hud¬ 
dled close together, 
in order that the pro¬ 
tecting wall which was to enclose them all 
should be no longer than necessary. But 
within that wall, the street is all the out¬ 
doors the public has. If it could be 
made more habitable, pleasanter, by crude 
surface-draining and incidental shading, with¬ 
out loss of the town’s compactness, then 
surely this is desirable. And the more the 
street is used, the more frequently there is 
a passing on it and the more there is of 
sitting before the doors, the more interesting 
it becomes. Sociability has developed on the 
way, and there have appeared the beginnings 
of that conception of the street which is to 
find such elaborate satisfaction, our traveler 
reflects, in the Spanish alamedas and the 
French boulevards. 
But there was a long course of evolution 
before these were reached. The social func¬ 
tion of the way increased until it far out¬ 
stripped the conception that is suggested by 
boulevard and alameda. In the Egyptian 
villages up the Nile today rude bedsteads 
come out of the hovels by the middle of 
February and the population sleeps in the 
streets three-quarters of the year. Thus, 
the brightly lighted boulevard, with its many 
chairs and little tables, 
is a conventionalized, 
restricted and self- 
conscious use of the 
street — adapted to 
modern cities — as 
compared to the use 
of it which developed 
when once the idea of 
the street as some¬ 
thing more than a 
passage, a way of 
going, had appeared. 
To stroll leisurely up 
and down the street, 
merely for the sake of 
its company; to sip 
one’s coffee and ab¬ 
sinth there, that the 
gayety of the scene 
may be enjoyed — 
these are as tame a 
daytime use of the 
street, compared to 
the extreme of so¬ 
ciability which first 
appears when the new conception of the 
way has taken hold, as is its relative deser¬ 
tion late at night compared to the sleeping 
family groups on which the stars that over¬ 
hang primitive towns look down. There is, 
however, this to be considered : in these 
little towns, where we seek in the protracted 
childhood of a people the beginnings of 
the street, the traffic makes very slight de¬ 
mands. These are pressing enough to neces¬ 
sitate the provision of streets, but once the 
way is provided, it is not kept constantly in 
use; and however narrow, there are only 
rare emergencies, speaking generally, when 
the whole of its width is required by the 
travel. So there is little restraint put by 
traffic on the social use of the way, and with 
much to tempt to this and nothing to re¬ 
strain, we see its encouragement to sociability 
swiftly gaining a strong hold. 
This will express itself in several ways. 
As the interest in the thoroughfare increases 
through the injection of this new element, 
a new life comes into the abutting architec¬ 
ture. The street is recognized by some¬ 
thing more than an inconspicuous slit in a 
blank wall for egress and entrance. On the 
AN EASTERN STREET MADE DIGNIFIED 
219 
