"Brownstone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two hundred feet long, but looks proportionate, from the Art-Gallery with its fine pictures and pipe-organ at one end, to its rich leather-finished dining-room at the other. It is of brownstone—the real Fifth Avenue stuff. Fond du Lac stone is cheaper and perhaps just as good, but it has the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... time to remove his office farther south on Third Street and occupy a building of his own. He knew where an option was to be had on a twenty-five-foot building, which, though old, could be given a new brownstone front and made very significant. He saw in his mind's eye a handsome building, fitted with an immense plate-glass window; inside his hardwood fixtures visible; and over the door, or to one side of it, set in bronze letters, Cowperwood & Co. ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... he had but to walk down Fifty-second Street half a block, pass a stodgy family of brownstone houses—and then in a jiffy he was under the high ceilings of his great front room. This was entirely satisfactory. Here, after all, life began. Here he slept, breakfasted, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... never before seen it at night, and for the first time I really appreciated its gloomy situation. In its day it had been part of a fashionable residential district, of which it was now the only survival. It was of brownstone, with a flight of steps mounting steeply to the door, and stood back from the street at the bottom of a canon formed by the towering walls of the adjacent office buildings. Why any woman who could afford to live ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... between Central Park and the Hudson River. It was a tall house, standing two stories higher than any other structure in the block. Like most of its neighbors it had evidently seen better days. In places the brownstone front was cracked and great chips had flaked off. The broken stones in the long flight of steps that led up to the first floor were patched with colored cement that had faded so the patches stood out baldly. The brass ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... with prodigal lavishness. On his Fifth avenue mansion alone, Cornelius expended $5,000,000. To get the space for three beds of blossoms and a few square yards of turf, a brownstone house adjoining his mansion was torn down, and the garden created at an expense of $400,000. George, a brother of Cornelius and of William K. Vanderbilt, and a man of retiring disposition, spent $6,000,000 in building a palatial home in the heart of the ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... fer me, boss. If I'd been taller, I'd have stood fer being a cop, an' bin buyin' a brownstone house on Fifth Avenue by dis. It's de cops makes de big money in little old Manhattan, dat's ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... Madison Avenue past the Hotel Essex. There was not a soul to be seen. Even the silver-laced porter had retired from the freezing vestibule. A few moments later Miss Erith paused before a shop on the ground floor of an old-fashioned brownstone residence which had ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... of sandstone, made of little grains of sand. It will crumble more easily than granite. What does "crumble" mean? Brownstone, used in building, is ...
— Home Geography For Primary Grades • C. C. Long
... street, close to the house which should have been Dorothy's, he discovered that the numbering on the doors had been wretchedly mismanaged. One or the other of two brownstone fronts must be her residence; he could not determine which. The nearest was lighted from top to bottom. In the other a single pair of windows only, on the second floor, showed the ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... situated on Forty ——th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, a neighborhood at one time much in vogue, but now given up almost entirely to boarding-houses of the cheaper kind. Old-fashioned brownstone residences, with high ceilings, cracked walls, dirty, paper-patched windows, and narrow little gardens choked up with weeds, they were as unattractive-looking from without as they were gloomy and destitute of comfort ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... risen with his bettered circumstances from a two-story brick in Degraw street, Brooklyn, by the usual stages to a brownstone "mansion" above the reservoir in New York. When he came to be vice-president of the Bank of Manhadoes, Hilbrough had in a measure reached the goal of his ambition. He felt that he could slacken the strenuousness of his exertions and let his fortune expand ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... his convincing speech with the smile of a successful artist. Meeks's admiration was too great for words. Together they went to No. 12 Avenue C. It was an old-fashioned brownstone house in a prosperous and ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... which he and Bubbles had taken off into a suit-case marked "A.P." (Amelia Popple), and led the way downstairs. A little later a taxicab drew up at the curb, and the two disguised secret-service agents sauntered down the high steps of Mrs. Popple's brownstone house, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... secure from business, after you passed Clinton Place; commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kind dwelt unmolested in the brownstone stretches of Fifth Avenue. I tried hard to imagine them from the acquaintance Mr. Butler's poem had given me, and from the knowledge the gentle satire of The 'Potiphar Papers' had spread broadcast through a community shocked by ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... nothing prospered with him. He met with loss after loss, until, in a time of financial panic he failed. He saved but a little from the wreck of his fortune, That little started him in a modest business, yielding him, perhaps, one-tenth his former income. The brownstone house was sold. He moved into a shabby house in an obscure street, where Mrs. Stanton spends her time mostly in bewailing the ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... him enthusiastically. "Pretty? I'll bet Bernhardt's got nothing on her for looks. She'll have a brownstone hut on Fifth Avenue and an air-tight limousine one of these days, ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... tail of his eye Kennedy watched Harris. Instead of turning into the Montmartre and his office, he went past to a high-stooped brownstone house, two doors away, climbed the steps ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... brownstone house, in a dirty neighborhood just west of Seventh Avenue, and of where now stands the York Hotel. Three weeks ago I revisited it and found it unchanged. At the time of my first visit, on the jamb of ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... of bay mingled with the red of running gear that stretched itself out for four blocks. Then a water-hydrant played its part in the cosmogony, the buggy became matchwood as foreordained, and the driver rested very quietly where he had been flung on the asphalt in front of a certain brownstone mansion. ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... ago Andrew was a business man, but his health failed and, like so many people in the story books, he fled to the country, or, as he called it, to the bosom of Nature. He and I were the only ones left in an unsuccessful family. I was slowly perishing as a conscientious governess in the brownstone region of New York. He rescued me from that and we bought a farm with our combined savings. We became real farmers, up with the sun and to bed with the same. Andrew wore overalls and a soft shirt and grew brown and tough. My hands got red and blue with soapsuds and frost; I never saw a Redfern ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... have crowded so disrespectfully about it the whole place still has a sort of "world-with-out-end-amen" air—perhaps because of the impressive squareness of its structure, great blocks of brownstone joined solidly; perhaps because of the enormous gnarled wistaria vines that stretch above its massive cornices—but one does feel as Felicia Day herself did when some one asked her how long she thought it had been there. She said she thought it must have been there "Much, much more than Always—it ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... and garbage chute, were already in place. It left an ambitious housekeeper small margin for original arrangement, but of course it did save money and time. The building was of pretty cream brick, clean and fresh, the street wide, and lined with dignified old brownstone houses, and the location perfect. She smothered a dream of wide old-fashioned rooms, quaintly furnished in chintzes and white paint. They had found no such enchanting places, except at exorbitant rents. Seventy-five dollars, or one hundred dollars, were asked ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... the road. A newspaper man, vacation-free from Broadway first nights and operas sung by Melba, Sembrich, and the Brothers de Reszke, was showing his city-bred children his native hills and introducing them to the beauties of a world alien to asphalt pavements and brownstone fronts. ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... by the window in his pajamas, just before going to bed, he thought about Myra, and he thought about himself. But when he thought about himself he slammed the door on what he saw. Florian's rooms were in Lexington Avenue in the old brownstone district that used to be the home of white-headed millionaires with gold-headed canes, who, on dying, left their millions to an Alger newsboy who had once helped them across the street. Millionaires, gold-headed canes, and newsboys had long vanished, and ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... there," retorted Diogenes. "What you don't know would fill a circulating library. Well—I lived in a tub. Now, if I believed in envy, I suppose you think I'd be envious of people who live in brownstone fronts with back ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... farming," says he, "lots of it, but the Negro farmer has been systematically robbed by the white man since the close of the Civil War. If the Negro farmers were to be returned all the interest in excess of 8 per cent charged them for money advanced them they would to-day be living in brownstone mansions, just as the rich white ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... more doubted this than she doubted God Himself. It was His law. He had ordained it so. She had grown so used to the throngs below her window and so loved the little park with its splashing fountain that she had refused to follow her landlady uptown when the brownstone boarding-house facing the Square had been ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... Club of Albany, the Country Club, the German Hall Association and the Adelphi Club are the chief social organizations. The principal church buildings are the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception (Roman Catholic), a fine specimen of Gothic architecture, built of brownstone, with spires 210 ft. high; the cathedral of All Saints (Protestant Episcopal), an English Gothic structure of pink sandstone designed by R. W. Gibson and begun in 1883; St Peter's Episcopal Church (French Gothic), of Hudson River bluestone; Emmanuel Baptist Church, of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... crime or even disturbance. A shut door, a clean stoop, heavily curtained windows (some of which were further shielded by closely drawn shades) were eloquent of inner quiet and domestic respectability, while its calm front of brick, with brownstone trimmings, offered a pleasing contrast to the adjoining buildings jutting out on either side, alive with ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... get through with this, if I ain't handed in my checks before," he said dreamily, "it's mine for a brownstone on the Avenue, and one of them life-size landscapes with a shack on it for the season down to Pa'm Beach that they call country cottages. I'll dress the ginks that scrub the horses down in solid gold braid, and put the corpse of chamber ladies in Irish lace—I bust into society, marry a duke's ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... subtle as to be quite lost on Orde, demanded a card. Orde scribbled a line in his note-book, tore it out, folded it, and left it. In it he stated his regret, his short residence in the city, and desired an early opportunity to call. Then he departed down the brownstone steps, totally unconscious of the contempt he had inspired in the heart of the liveried ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White |
