OLIVER H. G. LEIGH.
New York, Washington, Chicago.
The reflective voyager, on his first sight of New York, is baffled when he attempts to catalogue his sensations. All is so completely in contrast with the capitals of Europe. The gloriously bright sky, air that drinks like champagne, the resultant springiness of life and movement, that overdoes itself in excitement and premature exhaustion, and the obtrusively visible defects of this surface enthusiasm, monotonous streets, unfinished or unbegun city improvements, and the conspicuous lack of play-spaces for children—this is the rough portrait sketch New York draws of itself for the newcomer. It does not disguise the fact that money-making was for many years the dominant consideration. The city was laid out for business, and public comfort had to look out for itself. The workers, the poor, and the helpless were apparently overlooked.
But there are at least three New Yorks to explore. Old New York stretches from the bay up to once aristocratic Madison Square, and this is the section that first leaves its mark on the aforesaid visitor. Then comes new New York, the splendid modern metropolis that spreads from Central Park along the Hudson to the northern heights where the stately mausoleum of Grant, the transplanted Columbia University, and the great Cathedral-to-be add majestic dignity to the grandly picturesque panorama by the river. The antiquated brownstone wilderness of fashionable houses blossoms into white and gray and red clusters of mansions, richly varied in form and treatment, with the welcome grassy settings so pitifully missing in the older quarter. From a neglected span of prairie ground, pimpled with bare rocks and goat-sheltering shanties also shared by dago families, this section has in a few years qualified itself to rival the famous features of old-world cities. A nobler prospect than Riverside Drive alongside the mighty Hudson cannot be desired nor found. At last the city has discovered and worthily utilized its splendid opportunities. Then, thirdly, there is Greater New York. For the simplification of local government it is doubtless excellent policy for London and New York to lasso their humbler neighbor towns that the big cities may pose as suddenly greater than ever. The thing is done with a stroke of the pen and does not wound the pride of the newly scooped-in citizens, because the individuality of the suburban districts remains unchanged, but in our infantile capacity as mere sightseers the side-shows do not affect the glories of the ring proper. If this fashion of acquiring greatness continues, being inclusion rather than expansion, there need be no limit to the ciphers periodically tacked on to the population of the world’s swarming hives. Now that New York is growing, it might drop its insignificant borrowed name and assume its rightful one of dignity and historic import, Manhattan. It fills the twenty-two square miles between Harlem river, the Hudson, the East River, and the bay, which area is Manhattan Island. North of the Harlem it includes the district of the Bronx, a little stream which for half a mile or so affords as exquisite a picture of nature’s beauty as can be found anywhere. The drift from town to country homes is a sign of the times and an augury of great good to the coming generation, physical and patriotic. After all, bricks and mortar are not the making of a city. New York is at its best beyond the borders. Its rich citizens overflow into these northern suburbs and lordly estates, and across the East River into Brooklyn and Long Island’s garden villages, and across the Hudson into New Jersey’s charming towns, and down the bay to Staten Island. In no great metropolis this side of Constantinople is it so easy and inexpensive to slip quickly from the office or home and enjoy the bracing delights of a sail down the salt water (the upper bay has fourteen square miles and the lower over eighty) or up a stately river with all the charms of the Hudson. Everything is on the grand scale, once the city’s square blocks of barracky houses are left behind.
Old-world quietists are surprised to discover one cosy quarter, perhaps two, in the grimy section of New York. Stuyvesant Square and its immediate belongings around St. George’s Church still survive as an oasis of sweetness and light in a wilderness of dismal commonplace. Washington Square carries somewhat of the old aristocratic flavor to the borders of Bohemia, and the Theological College in Chelsea used to give a solemnizing leaven to that changing district. The social transformation is still in progress. It may, perhaps, be a token of the rise to metropolitanism that the distinctively American hotels of the old-fashioned type have virtually disappeared. European models have the preference for the time being in the in- and outdoor life of New Yorkers. English sports have apparently taken firm root, as seen in the popularity of golf, football, horse-racing, rowing, and some less desirable practices incident to one or two of these erstwhile sports that have developed into business undertakings, to the regret of true sportsmen. In this connection it is worth while to notice the striking disparity in the sizes of the audiences and outdoor crowds of New York and London. If fifteen thousand people pay to see the Harvard-Yale football game, or other such sport, it is considered worthy of special headlines in the papers. Madison Square Garden holds that number, seated, but the occasions when it has been filled at meetings have been few. Football crowds in England range from thirty up to seventy thousand, by turnstile record. The Crystal Palace accommodates over one hundred thousand holiday-makers without being crowded, in its central nave, sixteen hundred feet by eighty, besides transepts, and its famous grounds. The late Rev. C. H. Spurgeon had congregations of six thousand, seated, twice each Sunday for twenty-eight years. Mr. Gladstone and others have addressed twenty-five thousand in the Agricultural Hall, which covers over three acres, and St. Paul’s Cathedral has occasional congregations of over twenty thousand. These facts are the more curious as applying to a small country.
One explanation of this contrast lies in the fact that New York is not a homogeneous community. In a more marked degree than other capitals it is a congeries of towns and colonies, largely alien in sympathies. You can wander in turn through Judea, China, Italy, Ireland, France, Russia, Poland, Germany, Holland, and colored colonies. Local color is strong in each. The English speech is not used, not known, by many of these people. The picturesqueness of tenement life and its Babel sounds does not atone for the want of the deep-rooted Americanism which must sooner or later be the test of welcome immigration.
Broadway is one of the great streets of the world though really a Narrow-way for so important a thoroughfare. Running north and south and having no rival for its most used section it has more than its natural share of traffic. From the historic Bowling Green and Trinity Church—two fine monuments of pre-Revolution days—up to Fourteenth Street, Broadway is mainly a wholesale market. Then it changes to a retail bazaar, and its trading features disappear as it nears the park. There used to be a well-defined sky-line in the lower city, but this has been sadly damaged by the towering office Babels that make the older quarter of the city a cave of the winds. If some day an earthquake were to shake the lower end of Manhattan Island, mighty would be the fall of these presumptuous files and woe betide their inhabitants. Fifth Avenue up to Thirty-fourth Street has given up its fashionable prestige in exchange for the profits of business. The Stock and Produce Exchanges are far down-town, among the multitude of banks that crowd around the spot made sacred ground to future generations of patriots as the scene of Washington’s inauguration as President. The city and its environs are rich in historic sites and monuments of the Revolutionary struggle. These, happily for the country’s future, are every year being sought and studied by the young, also by bands of teachers from states near and far, and by visitors from abroad. The devotion of one or more societies of private individuals has of late years conferred a boon upon the public which can hardly be too highly appreciated, in causing durable memorial tablets to be placed on buildings of historic interest. In this and kindred ways New York is fast removing all justification for the stale reproach that it cared not for shrines and took small interest in its own history.
A mere suggestion, yet a very helpful one, toward realizing somewhat of the enormous shipping business done for the country by New York can be got by a tour of the main wharves. There is a water-front of twenty-five miles around the island, without reckoning the shores of Brooklyn and Hoboken. The bird’s-eye view from the wonderful and graceful Suspension Bridge enlarges one’s conception of what such a metropolis is and can do. Alpine grain elevators circle the city on the opposite shore of the rivers and upper bay. Two thousand ships sail out each year laden with the grain that feeds the nations on the other hemisphere. Three thousand steamships enter these wharves yearly with human and commercial freight from foreign ports. Nearly ten thousand steerage immigrants land each week the year round, besides an immense passenger contingent. These are the sights that fascinate the thoughtful: the comings and goings of the peoples of the earth and its products. Old Castle Garden and the Battery have greatly changed in recent years, but their memories linger. If it had been possible to keep the triangle south of Fourteenth Street as the select residential quarter, what an unrivalled site it would now be! A water panorama worth crossing the Atlantic to see, for its immensity, its picturesque bordering, and the magnificent view of the foreground of an embowered city by the sea.
Human needs shaped these water avenues to other destinies. They draw from the great ocean beyond the Narrows the sources of all that has gone to the building of national greatness. In turn they have borne to other lands the seeds of a larger liberty, patterned after and stimulated by the unparalleled success that has so splendidly rewarded self-achieved freedom to grow, to think, to speak out, and to speed the commerce of the world.