FullReads

Twilight in the Park, indeed, converts more than one building into a thing of beauty, and the Plaza into a thing of beauty from more than one view. For instance, as you pass into the Park, seeking the spot we have described, turn back before you have advanced far, and see the great cliff wall going up beyond the slender tracery of young trees, with the street lights, just turned on, making a level strip of golden shimmer at its base, curiously suggestive of crowds and gaiety. There is at all hours a certain charm to be found in the long line of high hotels and apartment houses which line the Park to the west, when you view them over treetops, rock ledges, and running brooks, or over white fields of snow. It is as if the city had crested in a great wave along the green shore of the country, ready to curl and fall and dash onward, but had been suddenly arrested by some more potent King Canute. Loveliness, however, is hardly a word you would apply till twilight steals across the scene. Down side streets into the west the golden sunset glows for a time, and the shadows on the snow are amethyst. Then the glow fades. The arc lamps come on with a splutter, and they, too, at first are amethyst. But in the gathering dark they change to blue. The sky changes to the deep blue of approaching night. The dim bulks of the buildings change to blue. The shadows about you are but a deeper blue. Even the snow at your feet is blue. In the great apartments and hotels the golden window squares appear, and the looming procession of blue shadow bulks might be a fleet of giant liners going by you in the night.

There is always a mystery and poignant charm about our parks in New York, if you let them have their way with your imagination, which you do not find in other parks intrinsically, perhaps, more beautiful. No doubt this comes from violent contrast between our city and the hush and peace of trees. Our streets are all treeless, and our great heave of masonry comes up to the very edge of our green oases. Even the smaller parks which fill but a block or two, when twilight enfolds them, blurring the harsher outlines and conjuring out the shadows, can captivate the senses. If you chance to wander in Brooklyn–which no self-respecting inhabitant of Manhattan permits himself to do except under compulsing!–you may come upon Fort Greene Park when the evening shadows are stealing down the streets to meet you, and the Martyrs’ Monument strangely converted into a pagan altar, silhouetted against the sky amid its guardian druid grove wherein the lamps glow and twinkle and dark figures move mysteriously.

But it is not even necessary to enter the parks of New York to find the picturesque and lovely. Such open areas as Washington and Madison Squares hold varying aspects of beauty and imaginative suggestion, from sunrise to moonset. Large enough to admit the play of light and to blur a bit the building lines at their further side, these squares reward the seeing eye with many an unguessed delight.

For ten years my rooms were six stories up on the east side of Washington Square, and for ten years, at all seasons and all hours, I walked daily up-town through Madison Square to the Rialto, and back again. I have often regretted that I kept no note-book of the changing aspects of these two oases, as one keeps a note-book of the seasons in the country. Spring comes in Washington and Madison Squares with signs no less unmistable than the hepaticas by the woodland road. The western wall of the Flatiron Building has its autumnal colorings; and though the first snow fall may be black mud by noon, at sun-up those brick-bounded areas laugh in white and the aged trees arch their fantastic tracery.