White-painted river steamers that seem all the more flimsy and riverish if they happen to churn out past the dark, compactly built ocean liners, who come so deliberately and arrogantly, up past the Statue of Liberty, to dock after the long, hard job of crossing, the home-comers on the decks already waving handkerchiefs. Plucky little tugs (that whistle on the slightest provocation), pushing queer, bulky floats, which bear with ease whole trains of freight cars, dirty cars looking frightened and out of place, which the choppy seas try to reach up and wash. And still queerer, old sloop scows, with soiled, awkward canvas and no shape to speak of, bound for no one seems to know where and carrying you seldom see what. And always, everywhere, all day and night, whistling and pushing in and out between everybody, the ubiquitous, faithful, narrow-minded old ferry-boats, with their wonderful helmsman in the pilot-house, turning the wheel and looking unexcitable....
The old town does not change so fast about its edges.—Page [394].
(Along the upper East River front looking north toward Blackwell's Island.)
That is the way it is down around Pier A, where the Tammany Dock Commission meets and the Police Patrol boat lies, and by Castle Garden, where the river craft pass so close you can almost reach out and touch them with your hand.
The "water-front" means something different when you think of Riverside and its greenness, a few miles to the north, with Grant's tomb, white and glaring in the sun, and Columbia Library back on Cathedral Heights.
Here the "lordly" Hudson is not yet obliged to become busy North River, and there is plenty of water between a white-sailed schooner yacht and a dirty tug slowly towing in silence—for there is no utter excuse for whistling—a cargo of brick for a new country house up at Garrisons; while on the shore itself instead of wharves and warehouses and ferry-slips there are yacht and rowing club houses and an occasional bathing pavilion; and above the water edge, in place of the broken ridge of stone buildings with countless windows, there is the real bluff of good green earth with the well-kept drive on top and the sun glinting on harness and handle-bars.
Now, between these two contrasts you will find—you may find, I mean, for most of you prefer to exhaust Europe and the Orient before you begin to look at New York—as many different sorts of interests and kinds of picturesqueness as there are miles, as there are blocks almost.