If you desire a curious experience, go into a New York club like the Yale or Harvard or Players' club, and collect a dozen men at random, asking each for a little word-sketch of his childhood home. Seldom enough will the scene of that sketch be in New York City, and you will probably be surprised to find how infrequently it will be in any city. A kind of urban consciousness gets complete possession of us after we have lived long on Manhattan Island, and we are prone to forget what a geographically tiny spot it is. We forget the country. It comes as a surprise when we discover how many of our fellows were, like us, country bred. We are still a nation, at bottom, of little white dwelling houses, if not any longer of little white school houses. (I know the phrase is little red school houses, only they never were red, but white!) This is probably one reason why our æsthetic sense is not adjusted to find more beauties than we do in the physical aspects of New York City. Deep in our consciousness, if not rather our subconsciousness, lies the ache for green vistas and gardens, for low sky lines and quiet streets. When we speak of the picturesque in New York, we most often refer (aside from the obviously striking aspect of the lower city from the harbor) to the old brick houses on Washington Square or the quaint streets of Greenwich Village. Yet we do both the city and ourselves an injustice by this more or less unconscious attitude. Let us consider picturesque to mean what is shaped by chance and the play of light into a beautiful picture, and, if we but walk the town with eyes upraised and open, we shall see the picturesque on every side.
There is the Plaza Hotel, for example. Every New Yorker and every visitor to New York knows it,—a great, white, naked sky-scraper, with a green hip-roof, rising close to the Park and St. Gaudens' golden bronze of General Sherman. But how many know that it is probably the one sky-scraper in the world which can gaze at its own reflection in still water, and that to the spectator looking at it over this water-mirror it becomes a gigantic but ethereal Japanese design, even to the pine limb flung across the upper corner?
They say there is an hour at twilight when all men appear noble, and all women beautiful. Certainly there is such a twilight hour when New York City is veiled, oftimes, in loveliness; and most lovely at this hour is the Plaza mirrored in the pool. The view is not easy to find, unless you are one of those who know your Central Park. But a little searching will uncover it. You will see in the southeast corner of the Park a lake, and just beyond this lake you will find a path turning west. That path leads to a stone bridge over a northward-stretching inlet of the pond. Cross the bridge a few paces and turn your face to the south. At your feet the bank goes down sharply to the still, dark water. Across the pond the bank rises steep and rocky, covered with thick shrubbery and trees. Shooting up apparently out of these trees is the white wall of the Plaza, three hundred feet into the air, and down into the water sinks its still reflection, to an equal depth. It rises alone, open sky to left and right, and there is just room in the lake for its replica. The picture is impressive by day, but as twilight begins to steal over the scene, as the sky takes on a pearly softness, and the shadows creep through the trees in the Park, and the lights in half the windows up that white cliff wall begin to gleam in golden squares, the great building becomes curiously ethereal, the pine limb flung into the foreground of the design catches the eye, the reflection in the water is as real as the reality. The Plaza, monstrous tons of steel and stone, floats between two elements. Then darkness gathers, the reflected lights in the blackening water grow more golden, and suddenly, perhaps, a duck swims across a tenth story window and sets it dancing in golden ripples. You may fare far among the ancient and “picturesque” cities of the earth without finding a rival for this strange bit of beauty in New York, an ethereal sky-scraper in white and gold gazing at its own reflection in the forest pool!
Twilight in the Park, indeed, converts more than one building into a thing of beauty, and the Plaza into a thing of beauty from more than one view. For instance, as you pass into the Park, seeking the spot we have described, turn back before you have advanced far, and see the great cliff wall going up beyond the slender tracery of young trees, with the street lights, just turned on, making a level strip of golden shimmer at its base, curiously suggestive of crowds and gaiety. There is at all hours a certain charm to be found in the long line of high hotels and apartment houses which line the Park to the west, when you view them over treetops, rock ledges, and running brooks, or over white fields of snow. It is as if the city had crested in a great wave along the green shore of the country, ready to curl and fall and dash onward, but had been suddenly arrested by some more potent King Canute. Loveliness, however, is hardly a word you would apply till twilight steals across the scene. Down side streets into the west the golden sunset glows for a time, and the shadows on the snow are amethyst. Then the glow fades. The arc lamps come on with a splutter, and they, too, at first are amethyst. But in the gathering dark they change to blue. The sky changes to the deep blue of approaching night. The dim bulks of the buildings change to blue. The shadows about you are but a deeper blue. Even the snow at your feet is blue. In the great apartments and hotels the golden window squares appear, and the looming procession of blue shadow bulks might be a fleet of giant liners going by you in the night.
There is always a mystery and poignant charm about our parks in New York, if you let them have their way with your imagination, which you do not find in other parks intrinsically, perhaps, more beautiful. No doubt this comes from violent contrast between our city and the hush and peace of trees. Our streets are all treeless, and our great heave of masonry comes up to the very edge of our green oases. Even the smaller parks which fill but a block or two, when twilight enfolds them, blurring the harsher outlines and conjuring out the shadows, can captivate the senses. If you chance to wander in Brooklyn—which no self-respecting inhabitant of Manhattan permits himself to do except under compulsing!—you may come upon Fort Greene Park when the evening shadows are stealing down the streets to meet you, and the Martyrs' Monument strangely converted into a pagan altar, silhouetted against the sky amid its guardian druid grove wherein the lamps glow and twinkle and dark figures move mysteriously.
But it is not even necessary to enter the parks of New York to find the picturesque and lovely. Such open areas as Washington and Madison Squares hold varying aspects of beauty and imaginative suggestion, from sunrise to moonset. Large enough to admit the play of light and to blur a bit the building lines at their further side, these squares reward the seeing eye with many an unguessed delight.
For ten years my rooms were six stories up on the east side of Washington Square, and for ten years, at all seasons and all hours, I walked daily up-town through Madison Square to the Rialto, and back again. I have often regretted that I kept no note-book of the changing aspects of these two oases, as one keeps a note-book of the seasons in the country. Spring comes in Washington and Madison Squares with signs no less unmistable than the hepaticas by the woodland road. The western wall of the Flatiron Building has its autumnal colorings; and though the first snow fall may be black mud by noon, at sun-up those brick-bounded areas laugh in white and the aged trees arch their fantastic tracery.
Spring in the Square! The central fountain is playing again its rainbow jet of spray, the tulips are a jaunty ring about it, the benches have put forth a strange, sad foliage of humanity (you must not think too much of the benches nor look at them too long!), the shrill children are everywhere, the green 'busses are gay with sight-seers atop, and as you stand by the fountain and look northward through the Washington Arch, you see that an amazing thing has come to pass. The great arch spans the vista of the Avenue, lined here with red brick dwellings and the sunny white bulk of the old Brevoort House. Far off, the sky-scrapers begin to loom, whipping out flags and steam plumes. It is a treeless vista, yet it is hazed with spring! Imagination, you scoff—and dust. Yet you look again, and it is not imagination, and it is not dust. It is the veil of spring, cast with delicate hand over the city. These laughing sight-seers atop the green 'bus now going under the arch feel it, too. These children screaming round your feet, as they dash through the wind-borne fountain spray, are aware of it. There is an answering benignity in the calm, red brick dwellings up the vista of the Avenue. Wait for a few hours, let the sun sink behind the heights of Hoboken, and then wander once more into the Square. Twilight, a warm, balmy twilight, is upon your spirit. Look through the arch southward now. There is still plenty of light left in the sky, but the great, springing, Roman masonry is dusky. It frames the sweeping curve of the asphalt around the fountain, and beyond that the Judson Memorial tower, graceful, Italian, bearing its electric cross against the failing day like a cluster of timid evening stars. It is a tower from the plains of Lombardy, or from an island in the Tiber, seen through an arch of ancient Rome. Do you object to that in an American city? I cannot argue the point. I only know that when I see them so, the one framing the other, in the spring twilight, or in the early dusk of a winter day, my heart is very glad, and my spirit feels a touch of that peace and calm the poet felt among the Roman ruins,
“Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles
Miles on miles....”
How often in New York it is a tower which gathers the picture together! Ours is a city of towers. We hide Trinity spire in a well, and Henry Arthur Jones, the playwright, once complained that the windows of his hotel room on the Avenue looked down upon the pinnacle of a church steeple. Yet our towers rise just the same, new ones leaping up as far above the new three-hundred-foot sky-line as Trinity steeple once lifted above lower Broadway. We aspire still. Nor is the old Judson tower on Washington Square yet dwarfed. How many red sunsets have I seen glow through its belfry windows, while the tower itself was a black silhouette against the sky, and down in the shadowy Square the night lamps began to come out, or the asphalt, drenched by a shower, shone as if molten copper had been rained upon it! In how many deep, starlit nights have I thrown open my window for a fresher breath and a moment of meditation, to see the deserted Square below me, its white arch faintly gleaming in the radiation of the arc lamps, the long stretch of city roofs beyond, the twinkling lamps on the far heights of Hoboken, and there in the centre of the picture the dark, silent tower, keeping quiet watch and bearing its steady cross like a star-cluster in the night! Many a time I have gone to bed with its beautiful image behind my eyelids.