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Road in the City of Brooklyn, having completed our report of estimate and assessment in said matter, hereby give notice, that our said report (now being engrossed) will be filed in the office of the Clerk of the County of Kings, for the inspection of all persons interested therein, on Monday the 13th day of July instant. Notice is further hereby given, that we will meet on Friday, the 24th day of July inst. at ten o'clock in the forenoon at the Common Council Room, in Hall's building to review our said report at which time and place, all persons interested therein will be heard in relations thereto.
(signed) - commissioners
Brooklyn July 9th 1835
9.30.69
[Text of typed card pasted into book]
Impressions and experiences by William Dean Howelles
Harper Brothers 1896 p 261
New York Streets
...The elevated roads, which, when you can put their moral offense out of your mind, are always delightful in their ease and airy swiftness. You fly smoothly along between the second and third story windows of the houses, which are shops below and dwellings above, on the avenues. The stations, though they have the prevailing effect of overuse and look dirty and unkempt, are rather pretty in themselves; and you reach them, at frequent intervals, by flights of not ungraceful iron steps. The elevated roads are always picturesque, with here and there a sweeping curve that might almost be called beautiful. They darken the avenues, of course, and fill them with an abominable uproar. Yet traffic goes on underneath, and life goes on alongside and overhead, and the city has adjusted itself to them, as a man adjusts himself to a chronic disease.
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[Text of typed card pasted into book]
page 246
Of late, a good many streets and several avenues have been asphalted, and the din of wheels on the rough pavement no longer torments the ear so cruelly; but there is still the sharp clatter of the horses' shoes everywhere; and their pulverized manure, which forms so great a part of the city's dust, and is constantly taken in people's stomachs and lungs, seems to blow more freely about on the asphalt than on the old-fashioned pavements. A few years ago scraps of paper, straw, fruit-peel, and all manner of minor waste and rubbish, littered all the thoroughfares; under a reform administration this has been amended; but no one knows how long a reform will last in New York.
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page 258-59
But the horse-cars run even under the elevated tracks, and no experience of noise can enable you to conceive of the furious din that bursts upon the sense, when at some corner two cars encounter on the parallel below, while two trains roar and shriek and hiss on the rails overhead, and a turmoil of rattling express wagons, heavy drays and trucks, and carts, hacks carriages, and huge vans rolls itself between and beneath the prime agents of the uproar. The noise is not only deafening, it is bewildering; you cannot know which side the danger threatens most, and you literally take your life in your hands when you cross in the midst of it.
page 258
... The elevated railroads disfigure them, if thoroughfares so shabby and repulsive as they mostly are, can be said to be disfigured, and not beautiful by whatever can be done to hide any part of their ugliness
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gedney/#copy

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