By the time you get up to Gansevoort Market, with its broad expanse of cobble-stones, the steamship lines begin to thin out and the ferries are now sprinkled more sparsely. Where the avenues grow out into their teens, there are coal-yards and lumber-yards. On the warehouses and factories are great twenty-foot letters advertising soap and cereals, all of which are the best.... Farther up is the region of slaughter-houses and their smells, gas-houses and their smells.... And so on up to Riverside, and across the new bridge to the unknown wildness of Manhattan's farthest north, and Fort Washington with its breastworks, which, it is pleasing to see, are being visited and picnicked upon more often than formerly.
This is the tired city's playground.
Washington Bridge and the Speedway—Harlem River looking south.
But over on the east edge of the town there is more to look at and more of a variety. All the way from the Bridge and the big white battle-ships squatting in the Navy Yard across the river; up past Kip's Bay with its dapper steam-yachts waiting to take their owners home from business; past Bellevue Hospital and its Morgue, past Thirty-fourth Street ferry with its streams of funerals and fishing-parties; Blackwell's Island with its green grass and the young doctors playing tennis, oblivious to their surroundings; Hell Gate with its boiling tide, where so many are drowned every year; East River Park with its bit of green turf (it is too bad there are not more of these parks on our water-fronts); past Ward's Island with its public institutions; Randall's Island with more public institutions—and so, up into the Harlem, where soon, around the bend, the occasional tall mast looks very incongruous when seen across a stretch of real estate.
And now you have a totally different feel in the air and a totally different sort of "scenery." It is as different as the use it is put to. Below McComb's Dam Bridge, clear to the Battery, it was nearly all work; up here it is nearly all play.
On the banks of the river, rowing clubs, yacht clubs, bathing pavilions—they bump into each other, they are so thick; on the water itself their members and their contents bump into each other on holidays—launches, barges, racing-shells and all sorts of small pleasure craft.
Here is where the town ends, and the country begins.
(High Bridge as seen looking south from Washington Bridge.)