In almost every street tramcars pass every few minutes. It is an incessant procession. In Broadway alone there are more than three hundred. The cars, as they are always called in America, are magical, like everything American. Built to carry twenty-four persons inside (there are no seats on the top), they are made to hold sixty and more. In fact, no matter how full they are, there is always room for one more. The conductor never refuses to let you get on board. You hang on to the rail beside the driver or conductor, if it is not possible to squeeze yourself inside and hold on to the leather straps provided for the purpose; you gasp for breath, it is all you can do to get at your pocket to extract the five cents which you owe the car company; but the conductor cries in his imperturbable nasal drawl: "Move forward, make room." If you do not like it, you have the alternative of walking. These cars are drawn by two horses. At night, when the theatres are emptying and the loads are heaviest, is just the time when the stoppages are most frequent—someone gets on or alights at every block; the strain on the horses must be tremendous.
Cabs are few. This is not wonderful, seeing that the lowest fare is a dollar or a dollar and half.
In Third Avenue and Sixth Avenue, you find the overhead railway called "the Elevated." It is supported on iron pillars, and the trains run along on a level with the upper windows of the houses. This company carries every day the fabulous number of 500,000 passengers.
All the existing means of transit are acknowledged to be insufficient, and an underground railway is talked of. There will soon be travellers under ground, on the ground, and in the air. Poor Hercules, where are you with your ne plus ultra? You had reckoned without your Yankee.
The streets, ill-paved and dirty, are dangerous in winter. Coachmen do not check their horses for the foot passengers, but neither do they try to run over them. They strike the middle course between the London coachman, who avoids them, and the Parisian one, who aims at them.
At the corner of each block there is a letter-box. If you have any newspapers or extra large letters to post, you lay them on the box and trust to the honesty of the passers-by. If rain comes on, so much the worse. If you want stamps, you go to the chemist and buy a lotion or potion, taking occasion at the same time to buy your stamps. Post-offices are few and far between.
The populous quarters, such as the Chinese quarter, the Italian quarter, the Jewish quarter, with their tenement-houses—those barracks of the poor, which I visited one day in company with a sanitary engineer—remind one of Dante's descriptions: it is a descent, or rather an ascent, into hell. I spare the reader the impressions which that day left upon me. Horrible! A populace composed of the offscourings of all nations—the dirtiest, roughest, one can imagine.
Hard by this frightful squalor, Fifth Avenue, with its palaces full of the riches of the earth. It is the eternal history of large cities.
As in London, hundreds of churches and taverns (called beer saloons): it is the same ignoble Anglo-Saxon mixture of bible and beer, of the spiritual and the spirituous.