House and Garden 
LES ALI.EES HAUTES AT BEZIERS 
upon it the decorativeness and ornament 
that haci made splendid the space before the 
gate ? Add the Avenue de la Marine at Tunis 
to the picture of the Porta Felice at Palermo, 
and you will see what this effect may be. 
And you should consider how the treatment 
will facilitate and encourage the sociability 
of the way—that more lately conceived but 
hardly secondary function of the street—as 
well as increase the convenience of its travel. 
In front of the church on the Avenue de 
la Marine in Tunis, there is a space of hid¬ 
eous planning—of which the least said the 
better. But from that point there stretch 
four rows of trees in parallel lines in the 
center of the avenue, throwing the carriage 
and tramway travel upon either side in un¬ 
checked streams of opposite direction. It 
is a convenient arrangement from various 
points of view and it has the esthetic merit 
of giving unity and repose to the composi¬ 
tion. The long, tapering lines of perspec¬ 
tive are beautiful and appropriate in them¬ 
selves, and even if—as will happen only occa¬ 
sionally, as in Les Allies Iiautes at Beziers— 
there be little gracefulness to the trees, their 
- value is evident as a screen to indifferent 
architecture, as a lovely background to 
sculpture, or as an approach to monumental 
construction, and, finally, as a unifying and 
harmonizing element of the way. They 
render the promenade shady and inviting, 
and by placing seats beneath the trees the 
sociability of the street may be vastly 
heightened. Indeed, how far we have pro¬ 
gressed from that primitive street, the narrow 
slit between bare walls, where the first sug¬ 
gestion of sociability appeared in a stone 
for a seat before a door! 
On Les Allees Hautes at Beziers the mid¬ 
dle strip is still a promenade. But it is 
broad and, with narrower and little used 
promenades on either side, it obviously 
might have been a carriage way. There had 
been little or no loss in esthetic effectiveness 
in making it this—see the familiar Champs 
Ely sees in Paris, or the Prado at Marseilles, 
and when the street is to merge into a 
crowded business street on entering the 
commercial section of the town, there will 
be a considerable gain by the opportunity 
this treatment gives for preserving continu¬ 
ity of aspect. That trees are not in the 
way on a broad business street, and with 
care may be made to grow there, is shown 
by the tree-planted streets of Paris. 
265 
