Here is where the town ends, and the country begins.—Page [399].
(High Bridge as seen Looking South from Washington Bridge.)
By the time you get up to Gansevoort Market, with its broad expanse of cobblestones, the steamship lines begin to thin out and the ferries are now sprinkled more sparsely. Where the avenues grow out into their teens, there are coal-yards and lumber-yards. On the warehouses and factories are great twenty-foot letters advertising soap and cereals, all of which are the best.... Farther up is the region of slaughter-houses and smells, gas-houses and their smells.... And so on up to Riverside, and beyond that the unknown wildness of Manhattan's farthest north, and Fort Washington with its breastworks, which it is pleasing to see, are being visited and picnicked upon more often than formerly.
But over on the east edge of the town there is more to look at and more of a variety. All the way from the Bridge and the big white battle-ships squatting in the Navy Yard across the river; up past Kip's Bay with its dapper steam-yachts waiting to take their owners home from business; past Bellevue Hospital and its Morgue, and the antediluvian-looking United States Frigate New Hampshire moored nearby, (now used by the Naval Reserve), past Thirty-fourth Street ferry with its streams of funerals and fishing-parties; Blackwell's Island with its green grass and the young doctors and officials upon it, playing tennis obliviously; Hell Gate with its boiling tide, where so many are drowned every year; East River Park with its bit of green turf (it is too bad there are not more of these parks on our water-fronts); past Ward's Island with its public institutions; Randall's Island with more public institutions—and so up into the Harlem where soon around the bend the occasional tall mast looks very incongruous as seen across a stretch of real estate.
And now you have a totally different feel in the air and a totally different sort of "scenery." It is as different as the use it is put to. Below McComb's Dam Bridge, clear to the Battery, it was nearly all work; up here it is nearly all play.
On the banks of the river, rowing clubs, yacht clubs, bathing pavilions—they bump into each other they are so thick; on the water itself their members and their contents bump into each other on holidays—launches, barges, racing-shells and all sorts of small pleasure craft.
Near the Manhattan end of McComb's Dam Bridge are the famous fields of famous football victories, baseball championships, track games, open-air horse shows; across the bridge go the bicyclers, hordes of them, brazen braided bicyclists who use chewing gum and lean far over, and all the other varieties.
Up the river are college and school ovals and athletic fields; on the ridges upon either side are walks and paths for lovers. For the lonely pedestrian and antiquarians, two old revolutionary forts and some good colonial architecture. Whirly go-rounds and big wheels for children, groves and beer-gardens for picnickers; while down on one bank of the stream upon the broad speedway go the full-blooded trotters with their red-faced masters behind in light-colored driving coats, eyes goggled, arms extended.
On the opposite banks are the two railroads taking people to Ardsley Casino, St. Andrew's Golf Club, and the other country clubs and the pretty links at Van Cortlandt Park, and taking picnickers and family parties to Mosholu Park, and regiments and squadrons to drill and play battle in the inspection grounds nearby, and botanists and naturalists and sportsmen for their fun farther up in the good green country.
No wonder there is a different feeling in the air up along this best known end of the city's water-front. The small, unimportant looking winding river, long distance views, wooded hills, green terraces, and even the great solid masonry of High Bridge, and the asphalt and stone resting-places on Washington Bridge somehow help to make you feel the spirit of freedom and outdoors and relaxation. This is the tired city's playground.