"It's a shame that we could not have started at Washington square," she apologizes. "When you sweep around and north through the great arch it almost seems as if you were passing through the portals of New York. It is one of the few parts of the town that are not changing rapidly."
For Fifth avenue—only a few blocks north of that stately arch—has begun to disintegrate and decay. Not in the ordinary sense of those terms. But to those who remember the stately street of fifteen or twenty years ago—lined with the simple and dignified homes of the town—its change into a business thoroughfare brings keen regrets. Katherine remembers that she read in a book that there are today more factory workers employed in Fifth avenue or close to it, than in such great mill cities as Lowell or Lawrence or Fall River, and when you ask her the reason why she will tell you how these great buildings went soaring up as office-buildings, without office tenants to fill them. They represent speculation, and speculation is New Yorkish. But speculation in wholesale cannot afford to lose, and that is why the garment manufacturers and many others of their sort came flocking to the great retail shopping district between Fourth and Seventh avenues and Fourteenth and Thirty-fourth streets, and sent the shops soaring further to the north. It has been expensive business throughout, doubly expensive, because absolutely unnecessary. Some of the great retail houses of New York built modern and elaborate structures south of Thirty-fourth street within the past twenty years in the firm belief that the retail shopping section had been fixed for the next half century. But the new stores had hardly been opened before the deluge of manufacturing came upon them. Shoppers simply would not mix with factory hands upon lower Fifth avenue and the side streets leading from it. And so the shop-keepers have had to move north and build anew. And just what a tax such moving has been upon the consumer no one has ever had the audacity to estimate.
"They should have known that nothing ever stays fixed in New York," says Katherine. "We are a restless folk, who make a restless city. Stay fixed? Did you notice the station at which you entered today?"
Of course you did. The new Grand Central, with its marvelous blue ceiling capping a waiting-room so large that the New York City Hall, cupola, wings and all could be set within it, can hardly escape the attention of any traveler who passes within its portals.
"It is the greatest railroad station in the world," she continues, "and yet I have read in the newspapers that Commodore Vanderbilt built on that very plat of ground in 1871 the largest station in the world for the accommodation of his railroads. He thought that it would last for all time. In forty years the wreckers were pulling it down. It was outgrown, utterly outgrown and they were carting it off piece by piece to the rubbish heaps."
She turns suddenly upon you.
"That is typical of our restless, lovely city," she tells you. And you, yourself, have heard that only two years ago they tore down a nineteen story building at Wall and Nassau streets so that they might replace it by another of the towers—this one thirty stories in height.
*****
The conductor of the green omnibus thrusts his green fare-box under your nose. You find two dimes and drop it into the contrivance.
"You can get more value for less money and less value for much money in New York than in any other large city in the world," says Katherine.