Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 140, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 June 1919 — Home Town Helps [ARTICLE]

Home Town Helps

JUDGE CITY BY ITS STREETS Importance of Well Laid Out and Properly Kept Thoroughfares Cannot Be Overestimated. Streets are the lines of expression on a city’s face. They are the ideographs of time, recording the thoughts, passions, impulses of the city-soul that dwells within. They are as surely the indices of a city’s character as the dines on a human face, a betrayal of whatever is ugly and sordid, an earnest of whatever is serene and gentle and strong. . “There are mean streets,” says Balzac, "and streets that are merely honest ; there are young streets about whose morality the public has not yet formed any opinion; there are murderous streets—streets older than the oldest hags; streets that We may esteem —clean streets, workaday streets and commercial streets. Some streets begin well and end badly.” In a city w’here the trees have been discarded to promote convenience and advantages of commercial thoroughfares there are just such streets w’hich distort and mar its beauty. It is a custom with us here in with the encroachment of business upon a residential district, tree-lined, shady and inviting, to Invade with vandalle hand and fell the trees. Flaunting signs may then be suspended over the pavement to* arrest the attention of the passerby; display windows may easier be viewed from either side of the thoroughfare. There is an irreverence in such practice; beauty and charm have been turned to the uses of barter and trade.