Free From Time to Time by Jack Finney Page B

past Union Square . . . west on Fourteenth . . . then onto Broadway. Not the quickest route on a weekday morning, hut I needed this time to myself. We jiggled along further downtown, and Broadway became more and more crowded in the morning rush until finally, down near Trinity Church, it got too much.

    This is where we were, the traffic even worse today because of a little snow and because the new horse-drawn streetcars-now added to the Broadway omnibuses-stood in several motionless little strings of three or four cars, their horses standing dumbly, tails switching, the drivers clanging their bells at the stalled traffic blocking them. This happened a lot now, because the ears, confined to their tracks, couldn't turn out like the little buses. The old street was too narrow now: I'd seen buses simply turn off Broadway and go around a block to circumnavigate some snarl, reentering Broadway beyond it. Leaning out at the side of my cab, I could see that up ahead a dray loaded with empty barrels had tried to pull around a string of blocked streetcars, and met with a light delivery wagon trying the same thing from the opposite direction. The two drivers, standing before their seats, were doing the usual yelling and waving their whips at each other. It's not easy to back a wagon or dray, and neither one wanted to. A big mess, made a lot worse by the snow and stalled cars. I'd liked them at first; now I thought that on Broadway they were a nuisance.
    I couldn't just sit here waiting: I was due at work in eight minutes, and I pushed up the doors from over my lap and climbed down. I knew the fare from Gramercy Park to Leslie's, and handed up the full amount plus a ten-cent tip, which was a proper one. But he didn't thank me, and I understood; he was stuck here now without a fare, nobody would hail him till he got himself clear. So I got out my change, found another ten-cent piece for him, and this time got thanked. I had a couple of blocks to walk, and I set out.
    Walking along through the morning crowd, I recognized again what I had slowly and reluctantly realized over the past year or so: that Broadway down here was just plain ugly. I couldn't see that, when I first came to this place and time. Everything then, every sight and person I saw, every sound I heard, thrilled me. And I walked Lower Broadway, as everywhere else, in an ecstatic trance at simply being here. Pretty soon-this is what happened to me first-the buildings lining the street no longer looked old to my eyes. From my own time I could remember one or two of them, I'm certain, still existing on twentieth-century Lower Broadway, truly old to my eye and mind then, out of place in time. But here I'd watched some of these being built, watched the Irish hod carriers climbing their ladders in the mornings as I passed, seen the new bricks rising, finally, to five or six stories of new construction smelling of wet plaster. Many others of these were no more than five or ten years old. And now to my eves they looked right, looked modern and were. And looked ugly, I also saw now, crammed together wall against wall, too high for their widths on the old narrow lots bought and built on one at a time, their uncoordinated rooflines jagged as broken teeth. And the street itself too narrow and now narrowed still more by the inflexible new car tracks. One morning last spring I'd walked by an impossible snarl of stalled traffic, the intersection a tangled struggling chaos, and seen an infuriated driver suddenly stand up before his seat and with his whip lash out and slash open the cheek of another driver, sending him to his knees at his wagon seat. The street was badly cobbled, City Hall graft, you heard. It was potholed. And the endless, endless banging ring of the iron-tired wheels against those uneven stones could drive you crazy. And always, always, Broadway was dusty or muddy or both. And always with plenty of horse manure, which dried and turned to gritty dust so that on a breezy day