Catherine Sloper Lower Broadway / City Hall (the old downtown)
Ch. III · 7% through the novel
He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820.
The world the Slopers left. When trade turned the old brick houses near the City Hall into "offices, warehouses, and shipping agencies", the doctor followed fashion north to Washington Square. James uses the shift downtown-to-uptown as social chronology: an address is a date.
inferred Dr Sloper's first house is fiction, but James fixes it precisely: a red-brick edifice with granite copings and a fanlight, "within five minutes' walk of the City Hall", in the downtown quarter that was fashionable about 1820 before trade drove the doctors out. The pin marks City Hall, the real landmark James measures the house against.
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Catherine Sloper Dr Sloper's house, Washington Square North
Ch. III · 7% through the novel
The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble.
The novel's fixed address: the doctor's marble-stepped house on the north side of the Square, the setting for nearly every interior scene. James pins his fiction to the real Row of houses he knew, "the ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement", and half the drama is about who is allowed through that white-marble door.
inferred The Sloper house is invented, but James sites it exactly on "the Row", the terrace of Greek Revival houses built along Washington Square North in 1829-33, which he calls "very solid and honourable dwellings" that "remain to this day". Nos. 1-13 still stand, east of Fifth Avenue. The pin marks the Row.
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Morris Townsend Fifth Avenue, at its origin on the Square
Ch. III · 7% through the novel
and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies.
Fifth Avenue begins at the north-west corner of Washington Square and runs uptown into the money. Its "spacious and confident air" is the marriage-market world Morris Townsend wants into: charming, penniless, and calculating what Catherine will inherit. James makes the avenue's ambition and the suitor's the same thing.
explicit Named directly in the text.
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