The "water-front" means something different when you think of Riverside and its greenness, a few miles to the north, with Grant's tomb, white and glaring in the sun, and Columbia Library back on Cathedral Heights.
Down along the Battery sea-wall is the place to watch the ships go by.
Here the "lordly" Hudson is not yet obliged to become busy North River, and there is plenty of water between a white-sailed schooner yacht and a dirty tug slowly towing in silence—for there is no excuse here for whistling—a cargo of brick for a new country house up at Garrisons; while on the shore itself instead of wharves and warehouses and ferry-slips there are yacht and rowing club houses and an occasional bathing pavilion; and above the water edge, in place of the broken ridge of stone buildings with countless windows, there is the real bluff of good green earth with the well-kept drive on top and the sun glinting on harness-chains and automobiles.
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Now, between these two contrasts you will find—you may find, I mean, for most of you prefer to exhaust Europe and the Orient before you begin to look at New York—as many different sorts of interests and kinds of picturesqueness as there are miles, as there are blocks almost.
For instance, down there by the starting-point. If you go up toward the bridge from South Ferry a block or so and pull down your hat-brim far enough to hide the tower of the Produce Exchange, you have a bit of old New Amsterdam, just as it has been for years, so old and so Amsterdamish, with its long, sloping roofs, gable windows, and even wooden-shoe-like canal-boats, that you may easily feel that you are in Holland, if you like. As a matter of fact, it is more like Hamburg, I am told, but either will do if you get an added enjoyment out of things by noting their similarity to something else and appreciate mountains and sunsets more by quoting some other person's sensations about other sunsets and mountains.
Old New Amsterdam.
Just as it has been for years.
(Between South Ferry and the Bridge.)