Одноэтажная Америка / Little Golden America

One can be enthusiastic about them, one can be amazed by them, love them or detest them – at any rate, they evoke some definite feeling – but almost all other American cities resemble each other like the Canadian quintuplets, whom even their tender mother mistakes for each other. This colourless and depersonalized gathering of brick, asphalt, automobiles, and bill-boards evokes in the traveller only a sense of annoyance and disappointment.

And if the traveller drives into the first small town with a feeling of excited expectation, then in the next town this feeling cools considerably, in the third it is exceeded by astonishment, in the fourth by an ironic smile, in the fifth, seventeenth, eighty-sixth, and hundred and fiftieth it is transformed into indifference – as if the speeding automobile were being met not by the new and unknown cities of an unexplored country, but rather by ordinary railroad sidings with the inevitable bell, hot-water boiler, and the watchman in the red cap.

The city’s principal street passes right through the city.

It is called Main Street (which means the principal street) or State Street (the street of the state) or Broadway.

Every small town wants to be like New York. There are New Yorks of two thousand population, there are New Yorks of eighteen hundred. We even found one New York consisting of nine hundred inhabitants, and it was a real city. Its inhabitants walked on their Broadway, their noses high in the air. They weren’t quite sure which Broadway was generally regarded as the more important, theirs or New York’s.

The architecture of the buildings in the principal street cannot present the eye with artistic delights. It consists of brick, the frankest kind of brick, laid in two-story cubes. Here people make money, so there is no room for abstract embellishments.

The lower part of the city (downtown) is called the business centre. Here are the trading establishments, business offices, the motion-picture theatres. There are no people on the sidewalks, but the streets are full of automobiles.

They occupy all the free places at the side. They are forbidden to stop only before fire hydrants or driveways, which is indicated by the sign “No Parking”.

It becomes at times a task of torment to find a place where you may leave your machine or, as the Russians in America say, where you can “park” it. One evening we were in San Diego, a city on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.