Except in the city proper, where they have particular names, the streets are all numbered: 1st Street, 2nd Street, 125th Street, and so on. The great arteries take the name of Avenues, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, up to 11th, besides Broadway which crosses the city diagonally.
It will readily be seen that nothing is easier than to find a house situated in such and such a street, at such and such a number. So many streets, so many blocks, and you are at your destination without trouble. The thing which puzzled my wits was to remember the addresses of my acquaintances: No. 103, East 15th Street; 144, West 26th Street; 134, West 33rd Street; 177, East 48th Street; 154, West 72nd Street; 400, Fifth Avenue. You can readily imagine the perplexity of the unfortunate foreigner who finds himself, at the end of a few days, confronted with this difficulty and with a score of calls to pay.
As I looked at the New Yorkers walking along the streets with that preoccupied look of theirs, I said to myself: "Those good people must be trying to keep their address in mind, and are repeating it over to themselves all the time."
It is of no use looking in New York for monuments in the sense which we attach to the word in Europe. There are massive buildings, and a few handsome churches, but nothing which arrests your gaze. The houses in the best parts of the town are built of brown stone, in the English style. In the populous quarters many are of red brick, with green shutters on the outside.
The streets are horribly ill paved. From my windows, which looked on Madison Square, the carriages appeared to rise and fall as if on a troubled sea. Drunkards have had to drop their habits: they could not reach home from the beer saloons.
Three fine squares alone break the monotony of all these parallelograms of streets: Washington Square, Union Square, and Madison Square.
On the north, Central Park, with its fine avenues, its hillocks, its valleys, its lakes, and its magnificent terrace over the Hudson, is a very lovely pleasure ground. It is the only place where one can see trees, turf, and flowers. New York does not possess a single garden, public or private, if one excepts the three squares I named just now.
That which strikes the visitor to New York is not the city itself, but the feverish activity that reigns there.
Overhead is a network of telegraph and telephone wires; on the ground a network of rails. It is estimated that there are more than 12,000 miles of telegraph wires suspended over the heads of the passers by: about enough to go half round the world.
The whistles of the boats that ply between New York and Brooklyn on the East River, and between New York and Jersey City on the Hudson, keep up, day and night until one in the morning, a noise which is like the roar of wild beasts. It is the cry of Matter under the yoke of Man. It is like living in a menagerie.