To the OP. You may find an enlarging meter extremely handy when printing your street photography work, mainly for making work prints, or proofs.
But if you wish to take one of your pictures farther, and into the realm of exhibition prints, you have to work hard. For that there are no shortcuts.
Your picture of the big stone with skyscrapers in the background, you may wish to preflash your paper to overcome its inertia, so that the paper will easier pick up details in those blocked up highlights.
Like Ralph suggests, aiming to control film processing is your best bet, and you may wish to make it standard procedure to always overexpose your film and then adjust either agitation or time, or both, to get negatives that print easier. A whole lot can be done with reduced agitation and dilute developers in situations where extreme contrast was recorded.
Your paper only has so much range, and some things can be done to salvage negatives with contrast range that exceeds the capability of your paper and paper developer combination.
You may also wish to print by aiming at getting the highlights to a point where you like them, and then adjusting to get the full tonal scale. Sometimes split grade printing is beneficial in accomplishing this. Use a very low contrast filter and expose test strips until you see highlights you like. Then add a higher contrast filter and expose another test strip on top of a full sheet of what you got with the low contrast filter, until you have a good combination of light and dark tones.
Now you can start to tweak it by dodging and burning pieces of your picture at two different contrast levels. This has some REAL printing power, and a lot can be accomplished by using this technique.
All in all, you can print negatives with contrast levels that exceeds your paper and paper developer combination's range, but it really starts with your negatives. If you often find yourself in a situation where you have to burn in the highlights to get visible tone, you may just be over-developing.
Shorten development time, and you maintain much of the film's original characteristics, but you compress the whole tonal scale.
If you extend the time between agitations, say every three or five minutes, you will somewhat change the film characteristics, by lifting the shadow details (because when you agitate less you also have to compensate by developing longer), and getting a more pronounced shoulder for more compressed highlights, all while your midtones remain pretty much the same.
Anyway, I hope this helps, and that I didn't assume too much of what you've done so far already.
- Thomas
