The Walls of Jericho by Rudolph Fisher

Court Avenue is a straight, thin spinster of a street which even in July is cold. There is about it an air of arched eyebrows, of skirts drawn aside and comments made with a sniff. It is adorned in sparse, lean, scrawny maples, all suffering from malnutrition, and these tend to stress rather than relieve the hardness of dry, level pavements.

The dwellings are all the same pale gray and are all essentially alike, four stories tall, thin to gauntness, droop-eyed with drawn shapes, standing shoulder to shoulder in long, inhospitable rows. Stone stoops, well withdrawn from the sidewalk, lend an air of inaccessibility, and the tiny front yards that might dispel this illusion by only a bit of grass or a flower are instead uniformly laid away beneath slabs of expressionless concrete.