I
TIMES SQUARE
TIMES SQUARE is at the juncture of Broadway, Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street. It is the very heart of uptown Broadway. Not the downtown Broadway of finance and of towering buildings, but the Broadway of theatres, restaurants, gay crowds and bright lights. It is bustling, congested, whirling. It is in a constant state of being rebuilt and repaired. Its sidewalks are littered with timbers, pipes, derricks and showy women. One hears jazz music and Klaxtons. It is the playground of the pleasure seeker, the battleground of the taxis, the dream of the chorus girl on the road, and the nightmare of the traffic cop. It is white lights, green lights, red lights,—flashing, spinning and winking. It is noise, crowds, motion. Sun and storm, day and night it roars along, churning,—a whirlpool in a mighty river. Incongruous, incessant, enormous.
II
LOWER BROADWAY
THE changes in New York in the last hundred years have been almost fabulous and yet the greatest of all perhaps has been lower Broadway. The proud steeple of Trinity Church once dominated a scene of fashion. It is now surrounded, dwarfed, overshadowed. Once Beaux and Belles, in Brummel-like hats and directoire skirts, came grandly here to worship,—and meant it. To-day, one picnics in the church yard and eats luncheon bananas on the graves. The enormous buildings of commerce, finance and trade are filled to overflowing. Here is progress, wealth and unlimited resource. It is a tremendous hive full of golden honey. And it is doubtless very good. But it is also good that this small church of a bygone time, still stands undaunted,—respected among these colossal towers; and that it still brings from the past some of that calm strength that is of even more lasting stuff than the masonry of the church itself, and that through it, the spirit of Old New York still “carries on” in Lower Broadway.
