Vidal Gore — Eighteen Seventy [381]

SLOWLY I WALKED the several blocks from the hotel to Gramercy Park, which turns out to be a homely little square on the order of London’s Hanover Square but smaller, less impressive, with a tiny bleak garden at the center surrounded by a perfunctory ironwork fence and the usual narrow houses sprayed with chocolate. Apparently, no one of any pretension to respectability will live behind walls of any other shade; so unlike the vivid red-brick houses and tenements of the poor or those occasional wooden shanty houses one sees in the side streets, all smeared with bile-yellow or poison-green paint. — Vidal Gore, Eighteen Seventy, 381

Note

The vivid imagery used to describe Gramercy Park creates a distinct sense of place, contrasting its modest charm with the grandeur of London, which highlights the protagonist’s feelings of alienation in his surroundings.