Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

I’d spent my share of Navy time in Newport down on Thames Street (also known as Bloody Alley), which had ever been the waterfront thoroughfare, although things had slipped and no longer was it the main business street. But in the seventeenth century only a madman or seer might have predicted that upstart New York City would have an avenue more important than the Alley. Thames Street—a narrow, dark trench of a lane under hip roofs and gables and old doorways with fanlights—had seen the likes of Captain Kidd, Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Lafayette, Rochambeau, Kosciuszko, Baron Steuben, Count von Fersen (a lover of Marie Antoinette), Nathanael Greene, Gilbert Stuart, Stephen Decatur, Oliver Perry (Battle of Lake Erie), Matthew Perry (opening of Japan), Herman Melville, most of the Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers, and Kennedys, and a thousand-thousand fishermen and sailors. Not bad for a street that began as a swamp. Citizens of Newport hanged pirates at the north end of the Alley, buccaneers and merchantmen refitted ships at the Thames Street wharfs, and Englishmen impressed American seamen they found wandering “the Strand,” as it was once called. The first cobblestones were bought with receipts levied on each slave imported from Africa (later, any Negro who owned a pig and sty could vote in a mock election for a black governor at the corner of Thames and Farewell streets). In one house nearby, a boy in his father’s arms, upon seeing George Washing...