If a single downtown building like the Blue Cross Blue Shield headquarters separates the city from its river, a modest stretch of boardwalk knits them back together.
The site is now occupied by a Staples store, and it sits on a modest stretch of Market Street that includes drugstores, cellphone shops and a two-acre street parking lot that was once promoted as a site for the Disney amusement park.
On a modest stretch of Linda Vista Avenue near the La Cañada Flintridge-Pasadena border lies a nondescript piece of land whose dry shrubs and trees hide a rich biodiversity of life.
For all the hope invested in it, the toll is a relatively modest stretch of the UK's 2,211-mile motorway network: a 27-mile route that runs from the National Exhibition Centre in the south-east of Birmingham to Cannock in Staffordshire.
At the dawn of the last century The Times left Printing House Square, near City Hall, for a new tower in a modest uptown stretch that soon came to be known as Times Square.
Chasing retired entertainers, rather than negotiating to buy expensive documents held by knowledgeable collectors, made a modest acquisitions budget stretch so much further.
Yet though the area has a big-box furniture store, a destination supermarket, a number of waterfront parks and a modest but tenacious stretch of restaurants and boutiques, it retains some of the off-the-grid ambience that Mr. Galeano, a Brooklyn real estate agent, recalls as part of his youth.
In towns like Ontario, a city of 145,000 people in San Bernardino County, east of Los Angeles, the large populations of working-class families that include many Hispanic and Asian immigrants find that even a modest savings can help stretch the budget considerably.
A modest space, the full stretch of his walls are decked with paintings and preparatory sketches devoted to his final thesis exhibition.
Other times, the much-needed heart is attempted but not reached, such as Melissa van der Schyff's passionate delivery of "Dirty Dishes," a song by a servant badgered by the police and the media which stretches a modest image to the breaking point.
Plundering Robert Altman, Howard Hawks and daytime television alike, Russell conducts this suburban symphony with agitated adoration for all involved; not a modest film-maker by any stretch, he remains a thrillingly sociable one.
