Roy jumped up and ran over to the fence. Sure enough, each post showed plainly that its top had been broken off. Roy was amazed.
“To think that this fence was standing at the time of the Revolution,” he thought. “Why, Washington must have been here often and he probably looked at these broken posts just as I have.”
Doubtless Washington did see the posts. Certainly he must have been in the Bowling Green many a time. Only a short distance from the Bowling Green, in Fraunces Tavern, at Broad and Pearl Streets, Washington said farewell to forty-four of his officers at the close of the Revolution, a fact that Roy soon discovered from his guide-book. Immediately he hurried away to take a look at this beautiful old building of colonial design, made of yellow Dutch bricks. Roy admired it very much. A bronze tablet on the corner of the building stated that it was now the property of the Sons of the Revolution.
“Good!” thought Roy. “Now I know of two things in New York that haven’t been torn down. And I don’t believe they ever will be.”
When Roy looked further in his book he found there were many, many old things remaining, so many that he could not hope to see them in one day, and particularly not on this day, for it was already supper time. But there was one place that Roy was eager to see. The guide-book said that a tablet on the building at 41 Broadway marked the site of the first houses or huts erected on Manhattan Island by white men. They were built about 1613.
“I’ll just walk up Broadway,” thought Roy, “and see that tablet. Then I’ll go on up Broadway, get something to eat, and go back to the Lycoming after supper. I suppose I could get a meal aboard the Lycoming, but likely I’d have to eat with Captain Lansford.”
Roy walked slowly up the longest street in the world; for Broadway, extending far beyond the limits of New York City, and passing through one community after another, is still Broadway half a hundred miles from Bowling Green. He could hardly have gone otherwise than slowly if he had tried, for it was the evening rush hour. From every doorway people were pouring out into the street. The sidewalks were jammed. The roadway was so crowded with busses and trucks and drays and trolley-cars and automobiles that it was next to impossible to cross it. Bells were clanging, automobile horns honking, whistles blowing. Iron-shod hoofs rang on the pavements. Leather shoes scraped and shuffled on the stone sidewalks. And all these noises combined in one ceaseless roar that beat on the ear incessantly. But what most impressed Roy was the unceasing rush of people. Apparently there was no end to them. Doorways of high buildings fairly vomited human beings. But no matter how many persons issued forth, more remained to come out. Time and time again Roy had seen this evening rush for home, and always he was impressed by it. It seemed impossible that there could be so many workers in the city. But when he remembered that some of the tall buildings about him held as many as ten thousand persons,—almost as many people as there were in the whole town of Central City—the rush did not seem so incomprehensible. Every time Roy looked at the crowd he thought of the ceaseless flow of a rushing stream.
Roy paused when he reached 41 Broadway and read the tablet on the wall. But he passed on quickly, for the crowded sidewalk was a poor place to loiter, and the tumult of traffic drove from his head all thoughts of those sleepy old days when New York was New Amsterdam.
Roy was now in the very heart of that deep canyon formed by the huge buildings in lower Broadway. He knew that nowhere else in the world could one find structures like them. There they towered, ten, twenty, thirty, forty stories high, until it made one almost dizzy to look up at them. Like the traffic in the street, Roy had seen them often; but now, as always when he saw them near at hand, he marveled at these huge structures man had reared two and even three times as high as Niagara, while the gigantic Woolworth Building, more than four and a half times the height of Niagara, towered a full seven hundred and fifty feet above the sidewalk. As Roy looked up Broadway at it now he could not help feeling awed.
“Just think,” he muttered, “it’s two hundred feet longer than the Lycoming.”