oriously blocked and confused, and
occasions more loss of time and temper and life and limb than would
amply repay, once in five years, the widening of it to double its
present breadth.

It is a great misfortune, that our commercial metropolis, the
predestined home of five millions of people, should not have a single
street worthy of the population, the wealth, the architectural ambition
ready to fill and adorn it. Wholesale trade, bankers, brokers, and
lawyers seek narrow streets. There must be swift communication between
the opposite sides, and easy recognition of faces across the way. But
retail trade requires no such conditions. The passers up and down on
opposite sides of Broadway are as if in different streets, and neither
expect to recognize each other nor to pass from one to the other without
set effort. It took a good while to make Broad and Canal Streets
attractive business-streets, and to get the importers and jobbers out
of Pearl Street; but the work is now done. The Bowery affords the only
remaining chance of building a magnificent metropolitan thoroughfare in
New York; and we anticipate the day--when Broadway will surrender its
pretensions to that now modest Cheapside. Already, about the confluence
of the Third and Fourth Avenues at Eighth Street are congregated some
of the chief institutions of the city,--the Bible House, the Cooper
Institute, the Astor Library, the Mercantile Library. Farther down,
the continuation of Canal Street affords the most commanding sites for
future public edifices; while the neighborhoods of Franklin and Chatham
Squares ought to be seized upon to embellish the city at imperial points
with its finest architectural piles. The capacities of New York, below
Union Square, for metropolitan splendor are entirely undeveloped; the
best points are still occupied by comparatively worthless buildings, and
the future will produce a now unlooked-for change in the whole character
of that great district.

The huddling together of our American cities is due to the recentness
of the time when space was our greatest enemy and sparseness our chief
discouragement. Our founders hated room as much as a backwoods farmer
hates trees. The protecting walls, which narrowed the ways and cramped
the houses of the Old-World cities, did not put a severer compress
upon them, than the disgust of solitude and the craving for "the sweet
security of streets" threw about our city-builders. In the Western towns
no