Not only the women of Manhattan itself revel in this daily scene; but their neighbors from Brooklyn, Staten Island, Jersey City and Newark pour in by the hundreds, from the underground tubes and the ferries that connect these places with New York. The whole raison d’être of countless women and girls who live within an hour’s distance of the city is this everyday excursion to their Mecca: the leisurely stroll up Fifth Avenue from Twenty-third Street, down from Fifty-ninth; the cup of tea at one of the rococo hotels along the way. It is a routine of which they never seem to tire—a monotony always new to them. And the pathetic part of it is that while they all—the indigent “roomers,” the anxious suburbanites, and the floating fraction of tourists from the West and South—fondly imagine they are beholding the Four Hundred of New York society, they are simply staring at each other!
And accepting each other naïvely at their clothes value. The woman of the hall bedroom receives the same appreciative glance as the woman with a bank account of five figures; provided that outwardly she has achieved the same result. The prime mania of New York is results—or what appear to be results. Every sky-scraper in itself is an exclamation-point of accomplishment. And the matter is not how one accomplishes, but how much; so that the more sluggish European can feel the minutes being snatched and squeezed by these determined people round him and made to yield their very utmost before being allowed to pass into telling hours and days.
With this goes an air of almost offensive competency—an air that is part of the garments of the true New Yorker; as though he and he alone can compass the affair towards which he is forever hurrying. There is about him, always, the piquant insinuation that he is keeping someone waiting; that he can. I have been guilty of suspecting that this attitude, together with his painstakingly correct clothes, constitute the chief elements in the New Yorker’s game of “bluff.” Let him wear what the ready-made tailor describes as “snappy” clothes, and he is at once respected as successful. A man may be living on one meal a day, but if he can contrive a prosperous appearance, together with the preoccupied air of having more business than he can attend to, he is in the way of being begged to accept a position, at any moment.
No one is so ready to be “bluffed” as the American who spends his life “bluffing.” In him are united the extremes of ingenuousness and shrewdness; so that often through pretending to be something he is not, he does actually come to be it. A Frenchman or a German or an Englishman is born a barber; he remains a barber and dies a barber, like his father and grandfather before him. His one idea is to be the best barber he can be; to excell every other barber in his street. The American scorns such lack of “push.” If his father is a barber, he himself learns barbering only just well enough to make a living while he looks for a “bigger job.” His mind is not on pleasing his clients, but on himself—five, ten, twenty years hence.
He sees himself a confidential clerk, then manager’s assistant, then manager of an independent business—soap, perhaps; he sees himself taken into partnership, his wife giving dinners, his children sent to college. And so vivid are these possibilities to him, reading and hearing of like histories every day in the newspapers and on the street, that unconsciously he begins to affect the manners and habits of the class he intends to make his own. In an astonishingly short time they are his own; which means that he has taken the main step towards the realization of his dream. It is the outward and visible signs of belonging which eventually bring about that one does belong; and no one is quicker to grasp this than the obscure American. He has the instincts of the born climber. He never stops imitating until he dies; and by that time his son is probably governor of the State, and his daughter married to a title. What a people! As a Frenchman has put it, “il n’y a que des phenomènes!”
One cannot conclude an introductory sketch of some of their phenomena without a glance at their amazing architecture. The first complacent question of the newspaper interviewer to every foreigner is: “What do you think of our sky-scrapers?” And one is certainly compelled to do a prodigious deal of thinking about them, whether he will or no. For they are being torn down and hammered up higher, all over New York, till conversation to be carried on in the street must needs become a dialogue in monosyllabic shouts; while walking, in conjunction with the upheavals of new Subway tunnelling, has all the excitements of traversing an earthquake district.
Underwood & Underwood
A PATCH OF THE CRAZY-QUILT BROADWAY, FROM 42d STREET
This perpetual transition finds its motive in the enormous business concentrated on the small island of Manhattan, and the constant increase in office space demanded thereby. The commerce of the city persistently moves north, and the residents flee before it; leaving their fine old Knickerbocker homes to be converted into great department stores, publishing houses, but above all into the omnivorous office-building. The mass of these are hideous—dizzy, squeezed-together abortions of brick and steel—but here and there among the horrors are to be found examples of true if fantastic beauty. The Flatiron Building is one, the Woolworth Building (especially in its marvellous illumination by night) another, the new colonnaded offices of the Grand Central Station a third. Yet the general impression of New York architecture upon the average foreigner is of illimitable confusion and ugliness.