The Project Gutenberg eBook of New York Sketches, by Jesse Lynch Williams.

Coastwise schooners, lumber-laden, which can get far up the river under their own sail; big, full-rigged clipper ships that have to be towed from the lower bay, their topmasts down in order to scrape under the Brooklyn Bridge; barques, brigs, brigantines—all sorts of sailing craft, with cargoes from all seas, and flying the flags of all nations.

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 after4 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 helmsmen in the pilot-house, turning the wheel and looking unexcitable....

That is the way it is down around Pier A, where the New York 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 excuse here for whistling—a cargo of brick for a new country house up at Garrisons; while on6 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-chains and automobiles.

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.

For instance, down there by the starting-point. If you go up toward the bridge from South Ferry a block or so and pull down your hat-brim far enough to hide the tower of the Produce Exchange, you have a bit of old New Amsterdam, just as it has been for years, so old and so Amsterdamish, with its long, sloping roofs, gable windows, and even wooden-shoe-like canal-boats, that you may easily feel that you are in Holland, if you like. As a matter of fact, it is more like Hamburg, I am told, but either will do if you get an added enjoyment out of things by noting their similarity to something else and appreciate mountains and sunsets more by quoting some other person's sensations about other sunsets and mountains.

Old New Amsterdam.

Just as it has been for years.
(Between South Ferry and the Bridge.)

But if you believe that there is also an inherent, characteristic8 beauty in the material manifestations of the spirit of our own new, vigorous, fearless republic—and whether you do or not, if you care to look at one of these sudden contrasts referred to—not a stone's throw farther up the water-front there is a notable sight of newest New York. This, too, is good to look at. Behind a foreground of tall masts with their square rigging and mystery (symbols of the world's commerce, if you wish), looms up a wondrous bit of the towering white city of the new century, a cluster of modern high buildings which, notwithstanding the perspective of a dozen blocks, are still high, enormously, alarmingly high—symbols of modern capital, perhaps, and its far-reaching possibilities, or they may remind you, in their massive grouping, of a cluster of mountains, with their bright peaks glistening in the sun far above the dark shadows of the valleys in which the streams of business flow, down to the wharves and so out over the world.

Now, separately they may be impossible, these high buildings of ours—these vulgar, impertinent "sky-scrapers;" but, as a group, and in perspective, they are fine, with a strong, manly beauty all their own. It is the same as with the young nation; we have grown up so fast and so far that some of our traits, when considered alone, may seem displeasing, but they appear less so when we are viewed as a whole and from the right point of view.

New New York.

Not a stone's throw farther up ... the towering white city of the new century.
(Between South Ferry and the Bridge.)

Or, on the other hand, for scenes not representatively commercial, nor residential either in the sense that Riverside10 is, but more of the sort that the word "picturesque" suggests to most people: There are all those odd nooks and corners, here and there up one river and down the other, popping out upon you with unexpected vistas full of life and color. Somehow the old town does not change so fast about its edges as back from the water. It seems to take a longer time to slough off the old landmarks.

From the point of view of the Jersey commuter ... some uncommon, weird effects.

(Looking back at Manhattan from a North River ferry-boat.)

The comfortable country houses along the shore, half-way up the island, first become uncomfortable city houses; then tenements, warehouses, sometimes hospitals, even police stations, before they are finally hustled out of existence to make room for a foul-smelling gas-house or another big brewery. Many of them are still standing, or tumbling down; pathetic old things they are, with incongruous cupolas and dusty fanlights and, on the river side, an occasional bit of old-fashioned garden, with a bunker which was formerly a terrace, and the dirty remains of a summer-house where children once had a good time—and still do have, different-looking children, who love the nearby water just as much and are drowned in it more numerously. It is not only by way of the recreation piers that these children and their parents enjoy the water. It is a deep-rooted instinct in human nature to walk out to the end of a dock and sit down and gaze; and hundreds of them do so every day in summer, up along here. Now and then through these vistas you get a good view of beautiful Blackwell's Island with its prison and hospital and poorhouse buildings. Those12 who see it oftenest do not consider it beautiful. They always speak of it as "The Island."

For those who do not care to prowl about for the scattered bits of interest or who prefer what Baedeker would call "a magnificent panorama," there are plenty of good points of vantage from which to see whole sections at once, such as the Statue of Liberty or the tops of high buildings, or, obviously, Brooklyn Bridge, which is so very obvious that many Manhattanese would never make use of this opportunity were it not for an occasional out-of-town visitor on their hands. No one ought to be allowed to live in New York City—he ought to be made to live in Brooklyn—who does not go out there and look back at his town once a year. He could look at it every day and get new effects of light and color. Even in sky-line he could find something new almost every week or two. In a few years there will be a more or less even line—at least a gentle undulation—instead of these raw, jagged breaks that give a disquieting sense of incompletion, or else look as if a great conflagration had eaten out the rest of the buildings.

Swooping silently, confidently across from one city to the other....

(East River and Brooklyn Bridge.

The sky-line and its constant change can be watched to best advantage from the point of view of the Jersey commuter on the ferry; he also has some wonderful coloring to look at and some uncommon, weird effects, such as that of a late autumn afternoon (when he has missed the 5.15 and has to go out on the 6.26) and it is already quite dark, but the city is still at work and the towering office-buildings are13 lighted—are brilliant indeed with many perfectly even rows of light dots. The dark plays tricks with the distance, and the water is black and snaky and smells of the night. All14 sorts of strange flares of light and puffs of shadow come from somewhere, and altogether the commuter, if he were not so accustomed to the scene, ought not to mind being late for dinner. However, the commuter is used to this, too.

That scene is spectacular. There is another from the water that is dramatic. Possibly the pilots on the Fall River steamers become hardened, but to most of us there is an exciting delight in creeping up under that great bridge of ours and daringly slipping through without having it fall down this time; and then looking rather boastfully back at it, swooping silently, confidently across from one city to the other, as graceful and lean and characteristically American in its line as our cup defenders, and as overwhelmingly powerful and fearless as Niagara Falls. However much like the Thames Embankment is the bit of East Fifty-ninth Street in a yellow fog, and however skilful you may be in making an occasional acre of the Bronx resemble the Seine, our big bridges cannot very well remind anyone of anything abroad, because there aren't any others.

For the little scenes that are not inspiring or awful, but simply quaint and lovable, one goes down along the South Street water-front. Fulton Market with its memorable smells and the marketeers and 'longshoremen; and behind it the slip where clean-cut American-model smacks put in, and sway excitedly to the wash from the Brooklyn ferry-boats, which is not noticed by the sturdy New Haven Line steamers16 nearby. On the edge of the street and the water are the oyster floats, half house and half boat, which look like solid shops, with front doors, from the street side until, the seas hitting them, they, too, begin to sway awkwardly and startle the unaccustomed passer-by.

It is down around here that you find slouching idly in front of ship-stores, loafing on cables and anchors, the jolly jack tar of modern days. From all parts of the world he comes, any number of him, if you can tell him when you see him, for he is seldom tarry and less often jolly, unless drunk on the very poor grog he gets in the various evil-looking dives thickly strewn along the water-fronts. Some of these are modern plate-glass saloons, but here and there is a cosey old-time tavern (with a step-down at the entrance instead of a step-up), low ceiling, dark interior, and in the window a thickly painted ship's model with flies on the rigging.

Farther down, near Wall Street ferry, where the smells of the world are gathered, you may see the stevedores unloading liqueurs and spices from tropical ports, and coffees and teas; nearby are the places where certain men make their livings tasting these teas all day long, while the horse-cars jangle by.

Even in sky-line he could find something new almost every week or two.

The end of the day—looking back at Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge.

Old Slip and other odd-named streets are along here, where once the water came before the city outgrew its clothes; before Water Street, now two or three blocks back, had lost all right to its name. Here the big slanting bowsprits hunch away in over South Street as if trying to be18 quits with the land for its encroachment, and the plain old brick buildings huddled together across the way have no cornices for fear of their being poked off. Queer old buildings they are, sail lofts with their peculiar roofs, and sailors' lodging-houses, and the shops where the seaman can buy everything he needs from suspenders to anchor cables, so that after a ten-thousand mile cruise he can spend all his several months' pay within two blocks of where he first puts foot on shore and within one night from when he does so. Very often he has not energy to go farther or money to buy anything, thanks to the slavery system which conducts the sailors' lodging-houses across the way. There is nothing very picturesque about our modern merchant marine and its ill-used and over-worked sailors; it is only pathetic.

Those are some of the reasons, I think, why East River is more interesting to most of us than North River. Another reason, perhaps, is that East River is not a river at all, but an arm of the ocean which makes Long Island, and true to its nature in spite of man's error it holds the charm of the sea. The North River side of the town in the old days had less to do with the business of those who go down to the sea in ships, was more rural and residential; and now its water-front is so jammed with railway ferry-houses and ocean-steamship docks that there is little room for anything else.

For the little scenes ... quaint and lovable, one goes down along the South Street water-front.

Smacks and oyster-floats near Fulton Market. (At the foot of Beekman Street, East River.)

However, these long, roofed docks of famous Cunarders and American and White Star Liners, and of the French20 steamers (which have a round-roof dock of a sort all their own) are interesting in their way, too, and the names of the foreign ports at the open entrance cause a strange fret to be up and going; especially on certain days of the week when thick smoke begins to pour from the great funnels which stick out so enormously above the top story of the now noisy piers. Cabs and carriages with coachmen almost hidden by trunks and steamer-rugs crowd in through the dock-gates, while, within, the hold baggage-derricks are rattling and there is an excited chatter of good-by talk....

By the time you get up to Gansevoort Market, with its broad expanse of cobble-stones, 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 their smells, gas-houses and their smells.... And so on up to Riverside, and across the new bridge to 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.

This is the tired city's playground.

Washington Bridge and the Speedway—Harlem River looking south.

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-yachts22 waiting to take their owners home from business; past Bellevue Hospital and its Morgue, past Thirty-fourth Street ferry with its streams of funerals and fishing-parties; Blackwell's Island with its green grass and the young doctors playing tennis, oblivious to their surroundings; 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 when 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.

Here is where the town ends, and the country begins.

(High Bridge as seen looking south from Washington Bridge.)

Near the Manhattan end of McComb's Dam Bridge are the two fields famous for football victories, baseball championships, track games, open-air horse shows; across the bridge go the bicyclers and automobilists, hordes of them, brazen-braided bicyclists who use chewing-gum and lean far24 over, leather coated chauffeurs with their eyes unnecessarily protected.

The Old and the New, from Lower New York Across the Bridge to Brooklyn.

From the top of the high building at Broadway and Pine Street.

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 thoroughbred 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 public links at Van Cortlandt25 Park, and taking picnickers and family parties to Mosholu Park, and regiments and squadrons to drill and play battle in the inspection ground nearby, and botanists and naturalists and sportsmen for their fun farther up in the good green country.

The old town does not change so fast about its edges.

(Along the upper East River front looking north toward Blackwell's Island.)

No wonder there is a different feeling in the air up26 along the 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. Here is where the town ends, and the country begins.

THE WALK UP-TOWN

THE walk up-town reaches from the bottom of the buzzing region where money is made to the bright zone where it is spent and displayed; and the walk is a delight all the way. It is full of variety, color, charm, exhilaration—almost intoxication, on its best days.

Indeed, there are connoisseurs in cities who say that of all walks of this sort in the world New York's is the best. The walk in London from the city to the West End by way of Fleet Street, the Strand, and Piccadilly, is teeming with30 interest to the tourist—Temple Bar, St. Clement's, Trafalgar Square and all—but, for a walk up-town, a walk home to be taken daily, it is apt to be oppressive and saddening, even without the fog; so say many of those who know it best. Paris, with her boulevards, undoubtedly has unapproachable opportunities for the flaneur, but like Rome and Vienna and most of the other European capitals, she has no one main artery for a homeward stream of working humanity at close of day; and that is what "the walk up-town" means.

And yet so few, comparatively, of those whose physique and office hours permit, take this appetizing, worry-dispelling walk of ours; this is made obvious every afternoon, from three o'clock on, by the surface and elevated cars, into which the bulk of scowling New York seems to prefer to push itself, after a day spent mostly indoors;31 here to get bumped and ill-tempered, snatching an occasional glimpse of the afternoon paper held in the hand which does not clutch the strap overhead. It seems a great pity. The walk is just the right length to take before dressing for dinner. A line drawn eastward from the park plaza at Fifty-eighth Street will almost strike an old mile-stone still standing in Third Avenue, which says, "4 miles from City Hall, New York." The City Hall was in Wall Street when those old-fashioned letters were cut, and Third Avenue was the Post Road.

Many good New Yorkers (chiefly, however, of that small per cent. born in New York, who generally know rather little about their town except that they love it) have not been so remotely far down the island as Battery Park for a decade, unless to engage passage at the steamship offices which until recently were to be found in the sturdy houses32 of the good old Row (though once called "Mushroom Row") opposite the oval of the ancient Bowling Green, where now the oddly placed statue of Abram de Peyster sits and stares all day. (Now that these old gable windows and broad chimneys are gone I wonder how he will like the new Custom-house.)

Now, the grandmothers of these same New Yorkers, long ago, before there were any steamships, when Castle Garden was a separate island and Battery Park was a fashionable esplanade from which to watch the shipping in the bay and the sunsets over the Jersey hills—their grandmothers, dressed in tight pelisses and carrying reticules, were wont to take a brisk walk, in their very low-cut shoes, along the sea-wall before breakfast and breathe the early morning air. They did not have so far to go in those days, and it was a fashionable thing to do. To-day you can see almost every variety of humanity on the cement paths from Pier A to Castle Garden, except that known as fashionable. But the sunsets are just as good and the lights on the gentle hills of Staten Island quite as soft and there are more33 varieties of water-craft to gaze at in the bristling bay. I should think more people would come to look at it all.

I mean of those even who do not like to mingle with other species than their own and yet want fresh air and exercise. On a Sunday in winter if they were to come down here for their afternoon stroll they would find (after a pleasant trip on nearly empty elevated cars) less "objectionable" people and fewer of them than on the crowded up-town walks.

What there are of strollers down here—in winter—are representatives of the various sets of eminently respectable janitors' families (of which there are almost as many grades as there are heights of the roofs from which they have descended), and modest young jackies, with flapping trousers, and open-mouthed emigrants, though more of the latter are to be seen on those flimsy, one-horsed express wagons coming from the Barge Office, seated on piles of dirty baggage—with steerage tags still fresh—whole families of them, bright-colored head-gear and squalling children, bound for the foreign-named emigrant hotels and homes which are as interesting as the immigrants. Some of these latter are right opposite there on State Street, including one with "pillared34 balcony rising from the second floor to the roof," which is said to be the earlier home of Jacob Dolph in Bunner's novel—a better fate surely than that of the other New York house for which the book was named.

Across the park and up and around West Street are more of these immigrant places, some with foreign lettering and some plain Raines's law hotels with mirrored bars. One of them, perhaps the smallest and lowest-ceiled of all, is where Stevenson slept, or tried to, in his amateur emigranting.

These are among the few older houses in New York used for the same purposes as from the beginning. They seem to have been left stranded down around this earliest part of the town by an eddy in the commercial current which sweeps nearly everything else to the northward from its original moorings.... But this is not what is commonly meant by "down-town," though it is the farthest down you can go, nor is it where the walk up-town properly begins.

The Walk Up-town begins where the real Broadway begins, somewhat above the bend, past the foreign consulates, away from the old houses and the early nineteenth century35 atmosphere. Crowded sidewalks, a continuous roar, intent passers-by, jammed streets, clanging cable-cars with down-towners dodging them automatically; the region of the modern high business building.

Above are stories uncountable (unless you are willing to be bumped into); beside you, hurried-looking people gazing straight ahead or dashing in and out of these large doors which are kept swinging back and forth all day; very heavy doors to push, especially in winter, when there are sometimes three sets of them. Within is the vestibule bulletin-board with hundreds of men's names and office-numbers on it; near by stands a judicial-looking person in uniform who knows them all, and starts the various elevators by exclaiming "Up!" in a resonant voice. While outside the crowd still hums and hurries on; it never gets tired; it seems to pay no attention to anything. It is a matter of wonder how a living is made by all the newsstands on the corners; all the dealers in pencils and pipe-cleaners and shoe-strings and rubber faces who are thick between the corners, to whom as little heed is given as to the clatter of trucks or the wrangling of the now-blocked cable-cars, or the cursing36 truck-drivers, or the echoing hammering of the iron-workers on the huge girders of that new office building across the way.

But that is simply because the crowd is accustomed to all these common phenomena of the city street. As a matter of fact, half of them are not so terrifically busy and important as they consider themselves. They seem to be in a great hurry, but they do not move very fast, as all know who try to take the walk up-town at a brisk pace, and most of them wear that intent, troubled expression of countenance simply from imitation or a habit generated by the spirit of the place. But it gives a quaking sensation to the poor young man from the country who has been walking the streets for weeks looking for a job; and it makes the visiting foreigner take out his note-book and write a stereotyped phrase or two about Americans—next to his note about our "Quick Lunch" signs which never fail to astonish him, and behind which may be seen lunchers lingering for the space of two cigars.

An ambulance, with its nervous, arrogant bell, comes scudding down the street. A very important young interne is on the rear keeping his balance with arrogant ease. His youthful, spectacled face is set in stony indifference to all possible human suffering. The police clear the way for him. And now see your rushing "busy throng" forget itself and stop rushing. It blocks the sidewalk in five seconds, and still stays there, growing larger, after those walking up-town have passed on.

37 The beautiful spire of Trinity, with its soft, brown stone and the green trees and quaintly lettered historic tombs beneath and the damp monument to Revolutionary martyrs over in one corner—no longer looks down benignly on all about it, because, for the most part, it has to look up. On all sides men have reared their marts of commerce higher than the house of God.

It seems perfectly proper that they should, for they must build in some direction and see what valuable real estate they have given up to those dead people who cannot even appreciate it. Here among the quiet graves the thoughtful stranger is accustomed to moralize tritely on how thoughtless of death and eternity is "the hurrying throng" just outside the iron fence, who, by the way, have to pass that church every day, in many cases three or four times, and so can't very well keep on being impressed by the nearness of death, etc., about which, perhaps, it is just as well not to worry during the hours God meant for work. Even though one cannot get much of a view from the steeple,38 except down Wall Street, which looks harmless and disappointingly narrow and quiet at first sight, Trinity is still one of the show-places of New York, and it makes a pleasing and restful landmark in the walk up Broadway. It deserves to be starred in Baedeker.

Now comes the most rushing section of all down-town: from Trinity to St. Paul's, clattering, crowded, typical Down-Town. So much in a hurry is it that at Cedar Street it skips in twenty or thirty feet a whole section of numbers from 119 to 135. The east side of the street is not so capricious; it skips merely from No. 120 to 128.

The people that cover the sidewalks up and down this section, occasionally overflowing into the streets, would probably be pronounced a typical New York crowd, although half of them never spend an entire day in New York City from one end of the month to the other, and half of that half sleep and eat two of their meals in another State of the Union. The proportion might seem even greater than that, perhaps it is, if at the usual hour the up-town walker should be obliged to struggle up Cortlandt Street or any of the ferry streets down which the torrents of commuters pour.

Up near St. Paul's the sky-scrapers again become thick, so that the occasional old-fashioned five or six story buildings of solid walls with steep steps leading up to the door, seem like playthings beside which the modern building39 shoots up—on up, as if just beginning where the old ones left off. More like towers are many of these new edifices, or magnified obelisks, as seen from the ferries, the windows and lettering for hieroglyphics. Others are shaped like plain goods-boxes on end, or suggest, the ornate ones, pieces of carefully cut cake standing alone and ready to fall over at any moment and damage the icing.

Good old St. Paul's, which is really old and, to some of us, more lovable than ornate, Anglican Trinity, has also been made to look insignificant in size by its overpowering commercial neighbors, especially as seen from the Sixth Avenue Elevated cars against the new, ridiculous high building on Park Row. But St. Paul's turns its plain, broad, Colonial back upon busy Broadway and does not seem to care so much as Trinity. The church-yard is not so old nor so large as Trinity's, but somehow it always seems to me more rural and church-yardish and feels as sunny and sequestered as though miles instead of a few feet from Broadway and business.

Now, off to the right oblique from St. Paul's, marches Park Row with its very mixed crowd, which overflows the sidewalks, not only now at going-home time, but at all hours of the day and most of the night; and on up, under the bridge conduit, black just now with home-hurrying Brooklynites and Long Islanders, we know we could soon come to the Bowery and all that the Bowery means, and that, of course, is a walk worth taking. But The Walk Up-town, as such, lies straight up Broadway, between the substantial old Astor House, the last large hotel remaining down-town, and the huge, obtrusive post-office building, as hideous as a badly tied bundle, but which leads us on because we know—or, if strangers, because we do not know—that when once we get beyond it we shall see the calm, unstrenuous beauty of the City Hall with its grateful lack of height, in its restful bit of park. Here, under the first trees, is the unconventional statue of Nathan Hale, and there, under those other trees—up near the court-house, I suppose—is where certain memorable boy stories used to begin, with a poor, pathetic newsboy who did noble deeds and in the last chapter always married the daughter of his former employer, now his partner.

41 By this time some of the regular walkers up-town have settled down to a steady pace; others are just falling in at this point—just falling in here where once (not so very many years ago) the city fathers thought that few would pass but farmers on the way to market, and so put cheap red sandstone in the back of the City Hall.

Over there, on the west side of the street, still stands a complete row of early buildings—one of the very few remaining along Broadway—with gable windows and wide chimneys. Lawyers' offices and insurance signs are very prominent for a time. Then comes a block or two chiefly of sporting-goods stores with windows crowded full of hammerless guns, smokeless cartridges, portable canoes, and other delights which from morning to night draw sighs out of little boys who press their faces against the glass awhile and then run on. Next is a thin stratum composed chiefly of ticket-scalpers, then suddenly you find yourself in the heart of the wholesale district, with millions of brazen signs, one over another, with names "like a list of Rhine wines;" block after block of it, a long, unbroken stretch.

This comes nearer to being monotonous than any part of the walk. But even here, to lure the walker on, far ahead, almost exactly in the centre of the cañon of commercial Broadway, can be seen the pure white spire of Grace Church, planted there at the bend of the thoroughfare, as if purposely to stand out like a beacon and signal to those below that Broadway changes at last and that up there are some Christians.

But there are always plenty of people to look at, nor are they all black-mustached, black-cigared merchants talking dollars; at six o'clock women and girls pour down the stairs and elevators, and out upon the street with a look of relief; stenographers, cloak inspectors, forewomen, and little girls of all ages. Then you hear "Good-night, Mame." "Good-night, Rachel." "What's your hurry? Got a date?" And off they go, mostly to the eastward, looking exceedingly happy and not invariably overworked.

Others are emissaries from the sweat-shops, men with long beards and large bundles and very sober eyes, patriarchal-looking sometimes when the beard is white, who go upstairs with their loads and come down again and trudge off down the side-street once more to go on where they left off, by gas-light now.

And all this was once the great Broadway where not many years ago the promenaders strutted up and down in the afternoon, women in low neck and India shawls; dandies, as they were then called, in tremendous trousers with huge checks. Occasionally even now you see a few strollers here by mistake, elderly people from a distance revisiting New York after many years and bringing their families with them. "Now, children, you are on Broadway!" the fatherly smile seems to say. "Look at everything." They probably stop at the Astor House.

As the wholesale dry-goods district is left behind and the realm of the jobbers in "notions" is reached, and the44 handlers of artificial flowers and patent buttons and all sorts of specialties, Grace Church spire becomes nearer and clearer, so that the base of it can be seen. Here, as below, and farther below and above and everywhere along Broadway, are the stoop and sidewalk sellers of candies, dogs, combs, chewing-gum, pipes, looking-glasses, and horrible burning smells. They seem especially to love the neighborhood of what all walkers up-town detest, a new building in the course of erection—with sidewalks blocked, and a set of steep steps to mount—only, your true walker up-town always prefers to go around by way of the street, where he is almost run down by a cab, perhaps, which he forgets entirely a moment later when he suddenly hears a stirring bell, an approaching roar, and a shrieking whistle growing louder:

Across Broadway flashes a fire-engine, with the horses at a gallop, the earth trembling, the hatless driver leaning forward with arms out straight, and a trail of sparks and smoke behind. Another whizz, and the long ladder-wagon shoots across with firemen slinging on their flapping coats, while behind in its wake are borne many small crazed boys, who could no more keep from running than the alarm-bell45 at the engine-house could keep from ringing when the policeman turned on the circuit. And young boys are not the only ones. No more to be thrilled by this delight—it will mean to be old.

III

At last Grace Church, with its clean light stone, is reached; and the green grass and shrubbery in front of the interesting-looking Gothic rectory. It is a glad relief. And now—in fact, a little before this point—about where stood that melancholy building bearing the plaintive sign "Old London Street"—which was used now for church services and now prize-fights and had never been much of a success at anything—about here, the up-town walkers notice (unless lured off to the left by the thick tree-tops of Washington Square to look at the goodliest row of houses in all the island) that the character of Broadway has changed even more than the direction of the street changes. A short distance below the bend all the stores were wholesale, now they are becoming solidly retail. Instead of buyers the people along the street are mostly shoppers. Down there were very few women; up here are very few men. This46 is especially noticeable when Union Square is reached, with cable-cars clanging around Dead Man's Curve in front of Lafayette's statue. Here, down Fourteenth Street, may be seen shops and shoppers of the most virulent type; windows which draw women's heads around whether they want to look or not, causing them to run you down and making them deaf to your apologies for it. Big dry-goods stores and small millinery shops; general stores and department stores, and the places where the sidewalks are crowded with what is known to the trade as "Louis Fourteenth Street furniture." All this accounts for there being more restaurants now and different smells and another feeling in the air.

From the upper corner of Union Square, with its glittering jewellery-shops and music-stores and publishers' buildings, and its somewhat pathetic-looking hotels, once fashionable but now fast becoming out-of-date and landmarky (though they seem good enough to those who sit and wait on park benches all day), the open spaciousness of Madison Square comes into view, the next green oasis for the up-town47 traveller. This will help him up the intervening blocks if he is not interested in the stretch of stores, though these are a different sort of shop, and they seem to say, with their large, impressive windows, their footmen, their buttons at the door, "We are very superior and fashionable."

The shoppers, too, are not so rapacious along here, because they have more time; and the clatter is not so great, because there are more rubber-tired carriages in the street. Nor are all these people shoppers by any means, for along this bit of Broadway mingle types of all the different sorts of men and women who use Broadway at all: nuns, actors, pickpockets, detectives, sandwich-men, little girls going to Huyler's, artists on the way to the Players'—the best people and the worst people, the most mixed crowd in town may be seen here of a bright afternoon.

When they get up to Madison Square the crowd divides and, as some would have us think, all the "nice" people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue, while all the rest go the left, up the Broadway Rialto and the typical part of the Tenderloin.

48 But when Madison Square is reached you have come to one of the Places of New York. It is the picture so many confirmed New Yorkers see when homesick, Madison Square with the sparkle of a clear, bracing October morning, the creamy Garden Tower over the trees, standing out clear-cut against the sky, Diana on top glistening in the sun; a soft, purple light under the branches in the park, a long, decorative row of cabs waiting for "fares," over toward the statue of Farragut, and lithe New York women, wearing clothes as they alone know how to wear them, crossing Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street while a tall Tammany policeman holds the carriages back with a wave of his little finger.

It is all so typically New York. Over on the north side by the Worth monument I have heard people exclaim, "Oh, Paris!" because, I suppose, there is a broad open expanse of asphalt and the street-lights are in a cluster, but it seems to me to be as New Yorkish as New York can be. It has an atmosphere distinctively its own—so distinctly its own that many people, as I tried to say on an earlier page,49 miss it entirely, simply because they are looking for and failing to find the atmosphere of some other place.

Now this last lap of the walk—from green Madison Square and the new Martin's up the sparkling avenue to the broad, bright Plaza at the Park entrance, where the brightly polished hotels look down at the driving, with their awnings flapping and flags out straight—makes the most popular part of all the walk.

This is the land of liveried servants and jangling harness, far away, or pretending to be, from work and worry; this is where enjoyment is sought and vanity let loose—and that, with the accompanying glitter and glamour, is always more interesting to the great bulk of humanity.

It is also better walking up here. The pavements are cleaner now and there is more room upon them. A man could stand still in the middle of the broad, smooth walk and look up in the air without collecting a crowd instantaneously. You can talk to your companion and hear the reply since the welcome relief of asphalt.

50 Here can be seen hundreds of those who walk for the sake of walking, not only at this hour but all day long. In the morning, large, prosperous-looking New Yorkers with side-whiskers and well-fed bodies—and, unintentionally, such amusing expressions, sometimes—walking part way, at least, down to business, with partly read newspapers under their arms; while in the opposite direction go young girls, slender, erect, with hair in a braid and school-books under their arms and well-prepared lessons.

Then come those that walk at the convenience of dogs, attractive or kickable, and a little later the close-ranked boarding-school squads and the cohorts of nurse-maids with baby-carriages four abreast, charging everyone off the sidewalk. Next come the mothers of the babies and their aunts, setting out for shopping, unless they have gone to ride in the Park, and for Guild Meetings and Reading Clubs and Political Economy Classes and Heaven knows what other important morning engagements, ending, perhaps, with a visit to the nerve-specialist.

And so on throughout the morning and afternoon and evening hours, each with its characteristic phase, until the51 last late theatre-party has gone home, laughing and talking, from supper at Sherry's or the Waldorf-Astoria; the last late bachelor has left the now quiet club; the rapping of his cane along the silent avenue dies away down an echoing side-street; and a lonely policeman nods in the shadow of the church gate-post. Suddenly the earliest milk-wagon comes jangling up from the ferry; then dawn comes up over the gas-houses along East River and it all begins over again.

But the most popular and populous time of all is the regular walking-home hour, not only for those who have spent the day down toward the end of the island at work, but for those who have no more serious business to look after than wandering from club to club drinking cocktails, or from house to house drinking tea.

All who take the walk regularly meet many of the same ones every day, not only acquaintances, but others whom we somehow never see in any other place, but learn to know quite well, and we wonder who they are—and they wonder who we are, I suppose. Pairs of pink-faced old gentlemen, walking arm-in-arm and talking vigorously. Contented52 young couples who look at the old furniture in the antique-shop windows and who are evidently married, and other younger couples who evidently soon will be, and see nothing, not even their friends. Intent-browed young business men with newspapers under their arms; governesses out with their charges; bevies of fluffy girls with woodcock eyes, especially on matinée day with programmes in their hands, talking gushingly.

It is a sort of a club, this walking-up-the-avenue crowd; and each member grows to expect certain other members at particular points in the walk, and is rather disappointed when, for instance, the old gentleman with the large nose is not with his daughter this evening. "What can be the matter?" the rest of us ask each other, seeing her alone.

There is one man, the disagreeable member of the club, a bull-frog-looking man of middle age with a Germanic face and beard, a long stride, and a tightly buttoned walking-coat (I'm sure he's proud of his chest), who comes down when we are on the way up and gets very indignant every time we happen to be late. His scowl says, as plainly as this type, "What are you doing way down here by the53 Reform Club? You know you ought to be passing the Cathedral by this time!" And the worst of it is, we always do feel ashamed, and I'm afraid he sees it.

This mile and a half from where Flora McFlimsey lived to the beginning of the driving in the Park is not the staid, sombre, provincial old Fifth Avenue which Flora McFlimsey knew. Up Fifth Avenue to the Park New York is a world-city.

Not merely have so many of the brownstone dwellings, with their high stoops and unattractive impressiveness, been turned over to business or pulled down altogether to make room for huge, hyphenated hotels, but the old spirit of the place itself has been turned out; the atmosphere is different.

The imported smartness of the shops, breeches makers to His Royal Highness So-and-So, and millinery establishments with the same Madame Luciles and Mademoiselle Lusettes and high prices, that have previously risen to fame in Paris and London, together with the numerous clubs and picture-galleries, all furnish local color; but it is the people themselves that you see along the streets, the various languages they speak, their expression of countenance, the way54 they hold themselves, the manner of their servants—in a word, it is the atmosphere of the spot that makes you feel that it is not a mere metropolis, but along this one strip at least our New York is a cosmopolis.

And the Walk-Up-town hour is the best time to observe it, when all the world is driving or walking home from various duties and pleasures.

There, on that four-in-hand down from Westchester County comes a group of those New Yorkers who, unwillingly or otherwise, get their names so often in the papers. The lackey stands up and blows the horn and they manage very well to endure the staring of those on the sidewalks.

Here, in the victoria behind them, is a woman who worships them. She would give many of her husband's new dollars to be up there too, though pretending not to see the drag. See how she leans back in the cushions and tries to prop her eyebrows up, after the manner of the Duchess she once saw in the Row. She succeeds fairly well, too, if only her husband wouldn't spoil it by crossing his legs and exposing his socks.

Here are other women with sweet, artless faces who do55 not seem to be strenuous or spoiled (as yet) by the world they move in, and these are the most beautiful women in all the world; some in broughams (as one popular story-writer invariably puts his heroines), or else walking independently with an interesting gait.

Here, in that landau, comes the latest foreign-titled visitor, urbane and thoughtfully attentive to all that his friends are saying and pointing out to him. And here is a bit of color, some world-examining, tired-eyed Maharajah, with silk clothes—or was it only one of the foreign consuls who drive along here every day.

There goes a fashionable city doctor, who has a high gig, and correspondingly high prices, hurrying home for his office hours. Surely, it would be more comfortable to get in and out of a low phaëton; this vehicle is as high as that loud, conspicuous, advertising florist's wagon—can it be for the same reason?

Here in that grinding automobile come a man and two women on their way to an East Side table d'hôte, to see Bohemia, as they think; see how reckless and devilish they look by anticipation! Up there on that 'bus are some people from the country, real people from the real country, and56 their mouths are open and they don't care. They are having much more pleasure out of their trip than the self-conscious family group entering that big gilded hotel, whose windows are constructed for seeing in as well as out (and that is another way of advertising).

Here comes a prominent citizen outlining his speech on his way home to dress for the great banquet to-night, for he is a well-known after-dinner orator, and during certain months of the year never has a chance to dine at home with his family. Suppose, after all, he fails of being nominated!

Here come a man and his wife walking down to a well-known restaurant—early, so that he will have plenty of time to smoke at the table and she to get comfortably settled at the theatre with the programme folded before the curtain rises; such a sensible way. He is not prominent at all, but they have a great deal of quiet happiness out of living, these two.

And there goes the very English comedian these two are to see in Pinero's new piece after dinner, though they did not observe him, to his disappointment. It is rather late for an actor to be walking down to his club to dine, but he is57 the star and doesn't come on until the end of the first act, and his costume is merely that same broad-shouldered English-cut frock coat he now has on. We, however, must hurry on.

Because it keeps the eyes so busy, seeing all the people that pass, one block of buildings seems very much like another the first few times the new-comer takes this walk, except, of course, for conspicuous landmarks like that of the new library on the site of the late reservoir or the Arcade on the site of the old Windsor Hotel, with its ghastly memories; but after awhile all the blocks begin to seem very different; not only the one where you saw a boy on a bicycle run down and killed, or where certain well-known people live, but the blocks formerly considered monotonous. There are volumes of stories along the way. Down Twenty-ninth Street can be seen, so near the avenue and yet so sequestered, the Church of the Transfiguration, as quaint and low and toy-like as a stage-setting, ever blessed by stage-people for the act which made the Little Church Around the Corner known to everyone, and by which certain pharisees were taught the lesson they should have learned from the parable in their New Testament.

58 Farther up is a church of another sort, where Europeans of more or less noble blood marry American daughters of acknowledged solvency, while the crowd covers the sidewalks and neighboring house-steps. Here, consequently, other people's children come to be married, though neither, perhaps, attended this church before the rehearsal, and get quite a good deal about it in the society column too, though, to tell the truth, they had hoped that the solemn union of these two souls would appropriately call forth more publicity. Shed a tear for them in passing. There are many similar disappointments in life along this thoroughfare.

Farther back we passed what a famous old rich man intended for the finest house in New York, and it has thus far served chiefly as a marble moral. Its brilliance is dingy now, its impressiveness is gone, and its grandeur is something like that of a Swiss chalet at the base of a mountain since the erection across the street of an overpowering, glittering hotel.

This is the region of clubs; they are more numerous than drug-stores, as thick as florists' shops. But it seems only yesterday that a certain club, in moving up beyond Fortieth Street, was said to be going ruinously far up-town. Now nearly all the well-known clubs are creeping farther and farther along, even the old Union Club, which for long pretended to enjoy its cheerless exclusiveness down at the corner of Twenty-first Street, stranded among piano-makers59 and publishers, and then with a leap and a bound went up to Fiftieth Street to build its bright new home.

Soon the new, beautiful University Club at Fifty-fourth Street, with the various college coats of arms on its walls, which never fail to draw attention from the out-of-town visitors on 'bus-tops, will not seem to be very far up-town, and by and by even the great, white Metropolitan will not be so much like a lonely iceberg opposite the Park entrance. I wonder if anyone knows the names of them all; there always seem to be others to learn about. Also one learns in time that two or three houses which for a long time were thought to be clubs are really the homes of former mayors, receiving from the city, according to the old Dutch custom, the two lighted lamps for their doorways. This section of the avenue where, in former years, were well-known rural road-houses along the drive, is once60 more becoming, since the residence régime is over, the region of famous hostelries of another sort.

There is just one of the old variety left, and it, strangely enough, is within a few feet of two of the most famous restaurants in America—the somewhat quaint and quite dirty old Willow Tree Cottage; named presumably for the tough old willow-tree which still persistently stands out in front, not seeming to mind the glare and stare of the tall electric lights any more than the complacent old tumble-down frame tavern itself resents the proximity of Delmonico's and Sherry's, with whom it seems to fancy itself to be in bitter but successful rivalry—for do not all the coachmen and footmen flock there during the long, wet waits of winter nights, while the dances are going on across at Sherry's and Delmonico's? Business is better than it has been for years.

In time, even the inconspicuous houses that formerly seemed so much alike become differentiated and, like the separate blocks, gain individualities of their own, though you may never know who are the owners. They mean something to you, just as do so many of the regular up-town61 walkers whose names you do not know; fine old comfortable places many of them are, even though the architects of their day did try hard to make them uncomfortable with high, steep steps and other absurdities. When a "For Sale" sign comes to one of these you feel sorry, and finally when one day in your walk up-town you see it irrevocably going the way of all brick, with a contractor's sign out in front, blatantly boasting of his wickedness, you resent it as a personal loss.

It seems all wrong to be pulling down those thick walls; exposing the privacy of the inside of the house, its arrangement of rooms and fireplaces, and the occupant's taste in color and wall decorations. Two young women who take the walk up-town always look the other way when they pass this sad display; they say it's unfair to take advantage of the house. Soon there will be a deep pit there with puffing derricks, the sidewalk closed, and show-bills boldly screaming. And by the time we have returned from the next sojourn out of town there will be an office-building of ever-so-many stories or another great hotel. Already the sign there will tell about it.

62 You quicken your pace as you draw near the Park; some of the up-town walkers who live along here have already reached the end of their journey and are running up the steps taking out door-keys. The little boy in knickerbockers who seems responsible for lighting Fifth Avenue has already begun his zigzag trip along the street; soon the long double rows of lights will seem to meet in perspective. A few belated children are being hurried home by their maids from dancing-school; their white frocks sticking out beneath their coats gleam in the half light. Cabs and carriages with diners in them go spinning by, the coachmen whip up to pass ahead of you at the street-crossing; you catch a gleam of men's shirt-bosoms within and the light fluffiness of women, with the perfume of gloves. Fewer people are left on the sidewalks now—those that are look at their watches. The sun is well set by the time you reach the Plaza, but down Fifty-ninth Street you can see long bars of after-glow across the Hudson.

In the half-dark, under the Park trees, comes a group of Italian laborers; their hob-nailed shoes clatter on the cement-walk, their blue blouses and red neckerchiefs stand out against the almost black of the trees; they, too, are walking home for the night. The Walk Up-town is finished and the show is over for to-day.

THE CROSS STREETS

A CITY should be laid out like a golf links; except for an occasional compromise in the interest of art or expediency it should be allowed to follow the natural topography of the country.

But this is not the way the matter was regarded by the commission appointed in 1807 to lay out the rural regions beyond New York, which by that time had grown up to the street now called Houston, and then called North Street, probably because it seemed so far north—though, to be sure, there were scattered hamlets and villages, with remembered and forgotten names, here and there, all the way up to the66 historic town of Haarlem. The commissioners saw fit to mark off straight street after shameless straight street with the uncompromising regularity of a huge foot-ball field, and gave them numbers like the white five-yard lines, instead of names. They paid little heed to the original arrangements of nature, which had done very well by the island, and still less to man's previous provisions, spontaneously made along the lines of least resistance—except, notably, in the case of Greenwich, which still remains whimsically individual and village-like despite the attempt to swallow it whole by the "new" city system.

This plan, calling for endless grading and levelling, remains to this day the official city chart as now lived down to in the perpendicular gorges cut through the hills of solid rock seen on approaching Manhattan Field; but the commissioners' marks have not invariably been followed, or New York would have still fewer of its restful green spots to gladden the eye, nor even Central Park, indeed, for that space also is checkered in their chart with streets and avenues as thickly as in the crowded regions above and below it.

However, anyone can criticise creative work, whether it be the plan of a play or a city, but it is difficult to create. Not many of us to-day who complacently patronize the honorable commissioners would have made a better job of it if we had lived at that time—and had been consulted. For at that time, we must bear in mind, even more important foreign luxuries than golf were not highly regarded in America,68 and America had quite recently thrown off a foreign power. That in itself explains the matter. Our country was at the extreme of its reaction from monarchical ideals, and democratic simplicity was running into the ground. In our straining to be rid of all artificiality we were ousting art and beauty too. It was so in most parts of our awkward young nation; but especially did the materialistic tendency of this dreary disagreeable period manifest itself here in commercial New York, where Knickerbocker families were lopping the "Vans" off their names—to the amusement of contemporaneous aristocracy in older, more conservative sections of the country, and in some cases to the sincere regret of their present-day descendants.

Now, the present-day descendants have, in some instances, restored the original spelling on their visiting cards; in other cases they have consoled themselves with hyphens, and most of them, it is safe to say, are bravely recovering from the tendency to over-simplicity. But the present-day city corporation of Greater New York could not, if it so desired, put a Richmond Hill back where it formerly stood, southwest of Washington Square and skirted by Minetta River—any more than it can bring to life Aaron Burr and the other historical personages who at various times occupied the hospitable villa which stood on the top of it and which is also gone to dust. They cannot restore the Collect Pond, which was filled up at such great expense, and covered by the Tombs prison and which, it is held by those who70 ought to know, would have made an admirable centre of a fine park much needed in that section, as the city has since learned. They cannot re-establish Love Lane, which used to lead from the popular Bloomingdale road (Broadway), nearly through the site of the building where this book is published, and so westward to Chelsea village.

They wanted to be very practical, those commissioners of 1807. They prided themselves upon it. Naturally they did not fancy eccentricities of landscape and could not tolerate sentimental names. "Love Lane? What nonsense," said these extremely dignified and quite humorless officials; "this is to be Twenty-first Street." They wanted to be very practical, and so it seems the greater pity that with several years of dignified deliberation they were so unpractical as to make that notorious mistake of providing posterity with such a paucity of thoroughfares in the directions in which most of the traffic was bound to flow—that is, up and down, as practical men might have foreseen, and of running thick ranks of straight streets, as numerously as possible, across the narrow island from river to river, where but few were needed; thus causing the north and south thoroughfares, which they have dubbed avenues, to be swamped with heterogeneous traffic, complicating the problem for later-day rapid transit, giving future generations another cause for criticism, and furnishing a set of cross streets the like of which cannot be found in any other city of the world.

These are the streets which visitors to New York always remark; the characteristic cross streets of the typical up-town region of long regular rows of rectangular residences that look so much alike, with steep similar steps leading up to sombre similar doors and a doctor's sign in every other window. Bleak, barren, echoing streets where during the long, monotonous mornings "rags-an-bot'l" are called for, and bananas and strawberries are sold from wagons by aid of resonant voices, and nothing else is heard72 except at long intervals the welcome postman's whistle or the occasional slamming of a carriage door. Meantime the sun gets around to the north side of the street, and the airing of babies and fox-terriers goes on, while down at the corner one elevated train after another approaches, roars, and rumbles away in the distance all day long until at last the men begin coming home from business. These are the ordinary unromantic streets on which live so few New Yorkers in fiction (it is so easy to put them on the Avenue or Gramercy Park or Washington Square), but on which most of them seem to live in real life. A slice of all New York with all its layers of society and all its mixed interests may be seen in a walk along one of these typical streets which stretch across the island as straight and stiff as iron grooves and waste not an inch in their progress from one river, out into which they have gradually encroached, to the other river into which also they extend. It is a short walk, the island is so narrow.

Away over on the ragged eastern edge of the city it starts, out of a ferry-house or else upon the abrupt water-front with river waves slapping against the solid bulwark. Here are open, free sky, wide horizon, the smell of the water, or else of the neighboring gas-house, brisk breezes and sea-gulls flapping lazily. The street's progress begins between an open lot where rival gangs of East Side boys meet to fight, on one side, and, on the other, a great roomy lumber-yard, with a very small brick building for74 an office. A dingy saloon, of course, stands on the corner of the first so-called avenue. Away over here the avenues have letters instead of numbers for names. Across the way—and it is easily crossed, for on some of these remote thoroughfares the traffic is so scarce that occasional blades of grass come up between the cobble-stones—is a weather-boarded and weather-beaten old house of sad mien, whose curtainless gable windows stare and stare out toward the river, thinking of other days.... Some warehouses and a factory or two are usually along here, with buzz-saws snarling; then another lettered avenue or two and the first of the elevated railroads roars overhead. This is now several blocks nearer the splendor of Fifth Avenue, but the neighborhood does not look it, for here is the thick of the tenement district, with dingy fire-escapes above, and below in the street, bumping against everyone, thousands of city children, each of them with at least one lung. The traffic is more crowded now, the street darker, the air not so good. Above are numerous windows showing the subdivisions where many families live—very comfortably and happily in numerous cases; you could not induce them to move into the sunshine and open of the country. Here, on the ground floor of the flat, is a grocery with sickening fruit out in front; on one side of it a doctor's sign, on the other an undertaker's. The window shows a three-foot coffin lined with soiled white satin, much admired by the wise-eyed little girls.

Up Beekman Street. Each ... has to change in the greatest possible hurry from block to block.

As each of these succeeding avenues is crossed, with its rush and roar of up-town and down-town traffic, the neighborhood is said to be more "respectable," meaning more expensive; more of the women on the sidewalks wear hats and paint, and there are fewer children without shoes; private houses are becoming more frequent; babies less frequent;76 there is more pretence and less spontaneity. The flats are now apartments; they have ornate, hideous entrances, which add only to the rent.... So on until here is Madison Avenue and a whole block of private houses, varied only by an occasional stable, pleasant, clean-looking little stables, preferable architecturally to the houses in some cases. And here at last is Fifth Avenue; and it seems miles away from the tenements, sparkling, gay, happy or pretending to be, with streams of carefully dressed people flowing in both directions; New York's wonderful women, New York's well-built, tight-collared young men; shining carriages with good-looking horses and well-kept harness, mixed with big, dirty trucks whose drivers seem unconscious of the incongruity, but quite well aware of their own superior bumping ability. Dodging in and out miraculously are a few bicycles.... And now when the other side of the avenue is reached the rest is an anti-climax. Here is the trades-people's entrance to the great impressive house on the corner, so near that other entrance on the avenue, but so far that it will never be reached by that white-aproned butcher-boy's family—in this generation, at least. Beyond the conservatory is a bit of backyard, a pathetic little New York yard, but very green and cheerful, bounded at the rear by a high peremptory wall which seems to keep the ambitious brownstone next door from elbowing its way up toward the avenue.

These next houses, however, are quite fine and impressive,77 too, and they are not so alike as they seem at first; in fact, it is quite remarkable how much individuality architects have learned of late years to put into the eighteen or twenty feet they have to deal with. The monotony is varied occasionally with an English basement house or a tall wrought-iron gateway and a hood over the entrance. Here is a78 white Colonial doorway with side-lights. The son of the house studied art, perhaps, and persuaded his father to make this kind of improvement, though the old gentleman was inclined to copy the rococo style of the railroad president opposite.... Half-way down the block, unless a wedding or a tea is taking place, the street is as quiet as Wall Street on a Sunday. Behind us can be seen the streams of people flowing up and down Fifth Avenue.

By the time Sixth Avenue is crossed brick frequently come into use in place of brownstone, and there are not only doctors' signs now, but "Robes et Manteaux" are announced, or sometimes, as on that ugly iron balcony, merely Madame somebody. By this time also there have already appeared on some of the newel-posts by the door-bell, "Boarders," or "Furnished Rooms"—modestly written on a mere slip of paper, as though it had been deemed unnecessary to shout the words out for the neighborhood to hear. In there, back of these lace-curtains, yellow, though not with age, is the parlor—the boarding-house parlor—with tidies which always come off and small gilt chairs which generally break, and wax wreaths under glass, like cheeses under fly-screens in country groceries. In the place of honor hangs the crayon portrait of the dear deceased, in an ornate frame. But most of the boarders never go there, except to pay their bills; down in the basement dining-room is where they congregate, you can see them now through the grated window, at the tables. Here, on the corner, is the little79 tailor-shop or laundry, which is usually found in the low building back of that facing the avenue, which latter is always a saloon unless it is a drug-store; on the opposite corner is still another saloon—rivals very likely in the Tammany district as well as in business, with a policy-shop or a pool-room on the floor above, as all the neighbors know, though the local good government club cannot stop it. Here is the "family entrance" which no family ever enters.

Then come more apartments and more private residences, not invariably passé, more boarding-houses, many, many boarding-houses, theatrical boarding-houses, students' boarding-houses, foreign boarding-houses; more small business80 places, and so on across various mongrel avenues until here is the region of warehouses and piano factories and finally even railway tracks with large astonishing trains of cars. Cross these tracks and you are beyond the city, in the suburbs, as much as the lateral edges of this city can have suburbs; yet this is only the distance of a long golf-hole from residences and urbanity. Here are stock-yards with squealing pigs, awful smells, deep, black mire, and then a long dock reaching far out into the Hudson, with lazy river barges flopping along-side it, and dock-rats fishing off the end—a hot, hateful walk if ever your business or pleasure calls you out there of a summer afternoon. There the typical up-town cross street ends its dreary existence.

Down-town—"'way down-town," in the vernacular—in latitude far south of homes and peace and contemplation, where everything is business and dollars and hardness, and the streets might well be economically straight, and rigorously business-like, they are incongruously crooked, running hither and thither in a dreamy, unpractical manner, beginning where they please and ending where it suits them best, in a narrow, Old-World way, despite their astonishing, New-World architecture. Numbers would do well enough for names down here, but instead of concise and business-like81 street-signs, the lamp-posts show quaint, incongruous names, sentimental names, poetic names sometimes, because these streets were born and not made.

They were born of the needs or whims of the early population, including cows, long before the little western city became self-conscious about its incipient greatness, and ordered a ready-made plan for its future growth. It was too late for the painstaking commissioners down here. One little settlement of houses had gradually reached out toward another, each with its own line of streets or paths, until finally they all grew together solidly into a city, not caring whether they dovetailed or not, and one or the other or both of the old road names stuck fast. The Beaver's Path, leading from the Parade (which afterward became the82 Bowling Green) over to the swampy inlet which by drainage became the sheep pasture and later was named Broad Street, is still called Beaver Street to this day. The Maiden Lane, where New York girls used to stroll (and in still more primitive times used to do the washing) along-side the stream which gave the street its present winding shape and low grading, is still called Maiden Lane, though probably the only strollers in the modern jostling crowd along this street, now the heart of the diamond district, are the special detectives who have a personal acquaintance with every distinguished jewellery crook in the country, and guard "the Lane," as they call it, so carefully that not in fifteen years has a member of the profession crossed the "dead-line" successfully. There is Bridge Street, which no longer has any stream to bridge; Dock Street, where there is no dock; Water Street, once upon the river-front but now separated from the water by several blocks and much enormously valuable real estate; and Wall Street, which now seems to lack the wooden wall by which Governor Stuyvesant sought to keep New Englanders out of town. His efforts were of no permanent value.

Nowadays they seem such narrow, crowded little runways, these down-town cross streets; so crowded that men and horses share the middle of them together; so narrow that from the windy tops of the irregular white cliffs which line them you must lean far over in order to see the busy little men at the dry asphalt bottom, far below, rapidly83 crawling hither and thither like excitable ants whose hill has been disturbed. And in modern times they seem dark and gloomy, near the bottom, even in the clear, smokeless air of Manhattan, so that lights are turned on sometimes at mid-day, for at best the sun gets into these valleys for only a few minutes, so high have the tall buildings grown. But they were not narrow in those old days of the Dutch; seemed quite the right width, no doubt, to gossip across, from one Dutch stoop to another, at close of day, with the after-supper pipe when the chickens and children had gone to sleep and there84 was nothing to interrupt the peaceful, puffing conversation except the lazy clattering bell of an occasional cow coming home late for milking. Nor were they gloomy in those days, for the sun found its way unobstructed for hours at a time, when they were lined with small low-storied houses which the family occupied upstairs, with business below. Everyone went home for luncheon in those days—a pleasant, simple system adhered to in this city, it is said, until comparatively recent times by more than one family whose present representatives require for their happiness two or three homes in various other parts of the world in addition to their town house. This latter does not contain a shop on the ground floor. It is situated far up the island, at some point beyond the marsh where their forebears went duck-shooting (now Washington Square), or in some cases even beyond the site of the second kissing bridge, over which the Boston Post road crossed the small stream where Seventy-seventh Street now runs.

Now, being such a narrow island, none of its cross streets can be very long, as was pointed out, even at the city's greatest breadth. The highest cross-street number I ever found was 742 East Twelfth. But these down-town cross streets are much shorter, even those that succeed in getting all the way across without stopping; they are so abruptly short that each little street has to change in the greatest possible hurry from block to block, like vaudeville performers, in order to show all the features of a self-respecting86 cross street in the business section. Hence the sudden contrasts. For instance, down at one end of a certain well-known business street may be seen some low houses of sturdy red brick, beginning to look antique now with their solid walls and visible roofs. They line an open, sunny spot, with the smell of spices and coffee in the air. A market was situated here over a hundred years ago, and this broad, open space still has the atmosphere of a marketplace. The sights and smells of the water-front are here, too, ships and stevedores unloading them, sailors lounging before dingy drinking-places, and across the cobble-stones is a ferry-house, with "truck" wagons on the way back to Long Island waiting for the gates to open, the unmistakable country mud, so different from city mire, still sticking in cakes to the spokes, notwithstanding the night spent in town. Nothing worth remarking, perhaps, in all this, but that the name of the street is Wall Street, and all this seems so different from the Wall Street of a stone's-throw inland, with crowded walks, dapper business men, creased trousers, tall, steel buildings, express elevators, messengers dashing in and out, tickers busy, and all the hum and suppressed excitement of the Wall Street the world knows, as different and as suddenly different as the change that is felt in the very air upon stepping across through the noise and shabby rush of lower Sixth Avenue into the enchanted peace of Greenwich village, with sparrows chirping in the wistaria vines that cover old-fashioned balconies on streets slanting at unexpected angles.

The typical part of these down-town cross streets is, of course, that latter part, the section more or less near Broadway, and crowded to suffocation with great businesses in great buildings, commonly known as hideous American sky-scrapers. This is the real down-town to most of the men who are down there, and who are too busy thinking about what these streets mean to each of them to-day to bother much with what the streets were in the past, or even to notice how the modern tangle of spars and rigging looks as seen down at the end of the street from the office window.

Of course, all these men in the tall buildings, whether possessed of creative genius or of intelligence enough only to run one of the elevators, are alike Philistines to those persons who find nothing romantic or interesting in our modern, much-maligned sky-scrapers, which have also been called "monuments of modern materialism," and even worse89 names, no doubt, because they are unprecedented and unacademic, probably, as much as because ugly and unrestrained. To many of us, however, shameless as it may be to confess it, these down-town streets are fascinating enough for what they are to-day, even if they had no past to make them all the more charming; and these erect, jubilant young buildings, whether beautiful or not, seem quite interesting—from their bright tops, where, far above the turmoil and confusion, Mrs. Janitor sits sewing in the sun while the children play hide-and-seek behind water-butts and air-shafts (there is no danger of falling off, it is a relief to know, because the roof is walled in like a garden), down to the dark bottom where are the safe-deposit vaults, and the trusty old watchmen, and the oblong boxes with great fortunes in them, along-side of wills that may cause family fights a few years later, and add to the affluence of certain lawyers in the offices overhead. Deep down, thirty or forty feet under the crowded sidewalk, the stokers shovel coal under big boilers all day, and electricians do interesting tricks with switchboards, somewhat as in the hold of a modern battle-ship. In the many tiers of floors overhead are the men with the minds that make these high buildings necessary and make down-town what it is, with their dreams and schemes, their courage and imagination, their trust and distrust in the knowledge and ignorance of other human beings which are the means by which they bring about great successes and great failures, and have all the fun of playing a game, with90 the peace of conscience and self-satisfaction which come from hard work and manly sweat.

Here during daylight, or part of it, they are moving about, far up on high or down near the teeming surface, in and out of the numerous subdivisions termed offices, until finally they call the game off for the day, go down in the express elevator, out upon the narrow little streets, and turn north toward the upper part of the island. And each, like a homing pigeon, finds his own division or subdivision in a long, solid block of divisions called homes, in the part of town where run the many rows of even, similar streets.

III

These two views across two parts of New York, the two most typical parts, deal chiefly with what a stranger might see and feel, who came and looked and departed. Very little has been said to show what the cross-streets mean to those who are in the town and of it, who know the town and like it—either because their "father's father's father" did, or else because their work or fate has cast them upon this island and kept them there until it no longer seems a desert island. The latter class, indeed, when once they have learned to love the town of their adoption, frequently become its warmest enthusiasts, even though they may have held at one time that city contentedness could not be had without the symmetry, softness, and repose of older civilizations,92 or even that true happiness was impossible when walled in by stone and steel from the sight and smell of green fields and running brooks.

He who loves New York loves its streets for what they have been and are to him, not for what they may seem to those who do not use them. They who know the town best become as homesick when away from it for the straightness of the well-kept streets up-town as for the crookedness and quaintness of the noisy thoroughfares below. The straightness, they point out complacently, is very convenient for getting about, just as the numbering system makes it easy for strangers. On the walk up-town they enjoy looking down upon the expected unexpectedness of the odd little cross streets, which twist and turn or end suddenly in blank walls, or are crossed by passageways in mid-air, like the Bridge of Sighs, down Franklin Street, from the Criminal Court-house to the Tombs. But farther along in their walk they are just as fond of looking down the perspective of the straight side streets from the central spine of Fifth Avenue past block after block of New York homes, away down beyond the almost-converging rows of even lamp-posts to the Hudson and the purple Palisades of Jersey, with the glorious gleam and glow of the sunset; while the energetic "L" trains scurry past, one after another, trailing beautiful swirls of steam and carrying other New Yorkers to other homes. None of this could be enjoyed if the cross streets tied knots in themselves like those in London and some American93 cities. Even outsiders appreciate these characteristic New York vistas; and nearly every poet who comes to town discovers its symbolic incongruity afresh and sings it to those who have enjoyed it before he was born, just as most young writers of prose feel called upon to turn their attention the other way and unearth the great East Side of New York.

There is no such thing as a typical cross street to New94 Yorkers. Individually, each thoroughfare departs as widely from the type as the men who walk along them differ from the figure known in certain parts of this country as the typical New Yorker. In New York there is no typical New Yorker. These so-called similar streets, which look so much alike to a visitor driving up Fifth Avenue, end so very differently. Some of them, for instance, after beginning their decline toward the river and oblivion, are redeemed to respectability, not to say exclusiveness, again, like some of the streets in the small Twentieths running out into what was formerly the village of Chelsea; and those who know New York—even when standing where the Twentieth Streets are tainted with Sixth Avenue—are cognizant of this fact, just as they are of the peace and green campus and academic architecture of the Episcopal Theological Seminary away over there, and of the thirty-foot lawns of London Terrace, far down along West Twenty-third Street.

There are other residence streets which do not decline at all, but are solidly impressive and expensive all the way over to the river, like those from Central Park to Riverside Drive. And your old New Yorker does not feel depressed by their conventional similarity, their lack of individuality; he likes to think that these streets and houses no longer seem so unbearably new as they were only a short time ago, but in some cases are at last acquiring the atmosphere of home and getting rid of the odor of a real-estate project. Then, of course, so many cross streets would refuse to be95 classed as typical because they run through squares or parks, or into reservoirs or other streets, or jump over railroad tracks by means of viaducts, burrow under avenues by means of tunnels, or end abruptly at the top of a hill on a high embankment of interesting masonry, as at the eastern terminus of Forty-first Street—a spot which never feels like New York at all to me.

Some notice should be taken also of those all-important96 up-town cross streets where business has eaten out residence in streaks, as moths devour clothes, such as broad Twenty-third Street with its famous shops, and narrow Twenty-eighth Street, with its numerous cheap table d'hôtes, each of which is the best in town; and 125th Street, which is a Harlem combination of both. These are the streets by which surface-car passengers are transferred all over the city. These are the streets upon which those who have grown up with New York, if they have paid attention to its growth as well as their own, delight to meditate. Even comparatively young old New Yorkers can say "I remember when" of memorable evenings in the old Academy of Music in Fourteenth Street off Union Square, and of the days when Delmonico's had got as far up-town as Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue.

Furthermore, it could easily be shown that, for those who love old New York, there is plenty of local historical association along these same straight, unromantic-looking cross streets—for those who know how to find it. For that matter one might go still further and hold that there would not be so much antiquarian delight in New York if these streets were not new and straight and non-committal looking. If, for instance, the old Union Road, which was the roundabout, wet-weather route to Greenwich village, had not been cut up and mangled by a merciless city plan there wouldn't be the fun of tracing it by projecting corners and odd angles of houses along West Twelfth Street between97 Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It would be merely an open, ordinary street, concealing nothing, and no more exciting to follow than Pearl Street down-town—and not half so crooked or historical as Pearl Street. There would not be that odd, pocket-like courtway called Mulligan "Place," with a dimly lighted entrance leading off Sixth Avenue between Tenth and Eleventh Streets. Nor would there be that still more interesting triangular remnant of an old Jewish burying-ground over the way, behind the old Grapevine Tavern. For either the whole cemetery would have been allowed to remain on Union Road (or Street), which is not likely, or else they would have removed all the graves and covered the entire site with buildings, as was the case with a dozen other burying-grounds here and there. If the commissioners had not had their way we could not have all those inner rows of houses to explore, like the "Weaver's Row," once near the Great Kiln Road, but now buried behind a Sixth Avenue store between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets, and entered, if entered at all, by way of a dark, ill-smelling alley. Nor would the negro quarter, a little farther up-town, have its inner rows which seem so appropriate for negro quarters, especially the whitewashed courts opening off Thirtieth Street, where may be found, in these secluded spots, trees and seats under them, with old, turbanned mammies smoking pipes and looking much more like Richmond darkies than those one expects to see two blocks from Daly's Theatre. Colonel Carter of Cartersville could not have98 found such an interesting New York residence if the commissioners had not had their way, nor could he have entered it by a tunnel-like passage under the house opposite the Tenth Street studios. Even Greenwich would not be quite so entertaining without those permanent marks of the conflict between village and city which resulted in separating West Eleventh Street so far from Tenth, and in twisting Fourth Street around farther and farther until it finally ends in despair in Thirteenth Street. If the commissioners had not had their way we should have had no "Down Love Lane" written by Mr. Janvier.

Looked at from the point of view of use and knowledge, every street, like every person, gains a distinct personality, some being merely more strongly distinguished than others. And just as every human being, whatever his name or his looks may be, continues to win more or less sympathy the more you know of him and his history and his ambitions, so with these streets, and their checkered careers, their sudden changes from decade to decade—or in still less time, in our American cities, their transformation from farm land to suburban road, and then to fashionable city street, and then to small business and then to great business. Such, after all, is the stuff of which abiding city charm is made, not of plans and architecture.

RURAL NEW YORK CITY

THERE is pretty good snipe shooting within the city limits of New York, and I have heard that an occasional trout still rises to the fly in one or two spots along a certain stream—which need not be made better known than it is already, though it can hardly be worth whipping much longer at any rate.

A great many ducks, however, are still shot every season in the city, by those who know where to go for them; and as for inferior sport, like rabbits—if you include them as game—on certain days of the year probably more gunners and dogs are out after rabbits within the limits of Greater New York than in any region of equal extent in the world, though to be sure the bags brought in hardly compare with those of certain parts of Australia or some of our Western States. Down toward Far Rockaway, a little this side of the salt marshes of Jamaica Bay, in the hedges and cabbage-patches of the "truck" farms, there is plenty of good cover102 for rabbits, as well as in the brush-piles and pastures of the rolling Borough of Richmond on Staten Island, and the forests and stone fences of the hilly Bronx, up around Pelham Bay Park for instance. But the gunners must keep out of the parks, of course, though many ubiquitous little boys with snares do not.

In such parts of the city, except when No Trespassing signs prevent, on any day of the open season scores of men and youths may be seen whose work and homes are generally in the densest parts of the city, respectable citizens from the extreme east and west sides of Manhattan, artisans and clerks, salesmen and small shopkeepers, who, quite unexpectedly in some cases, share the ancient fret and longing of the primitive man in common with those other New Yorkers who can go farther out on Long Island or farther up into New York State to satisfy it. To be sure, the former do not get as many shots as the latter, but they get the outdoors and the exercise and the return to nature, which is the main thing. And the advantage of going shooting in Greater New York is that you can tramp until too dark to see, and yet get back in time to dine at home, thus satisfying an appetite acquired in the open with a dinner cooked in the city.

Once a certain young family went off to a far corner of Greater New York to attack the perennial summer problem. By walking through a hideously suburban village with a beautifully rural name they found, just over the brow of a104 hill, quite as a friend had told them they would, tucked away all alone in a green glade beside an ancient forest, a charming little diamond-paned, lattice-windowed cottage, covered thick with vines outside, and yet supplied with modern plumbing within. It seemed too good to be true. There was no distinctly front yard or back yard, not even a public road in sight, and no neighbors to bother them except the landlord, who lived in the one house near by and was very agreeable. All through the close season they enjoyed the whistling of quail at their breakfast; in their afternoon walks, squirrels and rabbits and uncommon song-birds were too common to be remarked; and once, within forty yards of the house, great consternation was caused by a black snake, though it was not black snakes but mosquitoes that made them look elsewhere next year, and taught them a life-lesson in regard to English lattice-windows and American mosquito-screens.

But until the mosquitoes became so persistent it seemed—this country-place within a city, or rus in urbe, as they probably enjoyed calling it—an almost perfect solution of the problem for a small family whose head had to be within commuting distance of down-town. For though so remote, it was not inaccessible; two railroads and a trolley line were just over the dip of the hill that hid them, so that there was time for the young man of the house to linger with his family at breakfast, which was served out-of-doors, with no more objectionable witnesses than the thrushes in the hedges.105 And then, too, there was time to get exercise in the afternoon before dinner. "It seemed an ideal spot," to quote their account of it, "except that on our walks, just as we thought that we had found some sequestered dell where nobody had come since the Indians left, we would be pretty sure to hear a slight rustle behind us, and there—not an Indian but a Tammany policeman would break through the thicket, with startling white gloves and gleaming brass buttons, looking exactly like the policemen in the Park. Of course he would continue on his beat and disappear in a moment, but by that time we had forgotten to listen to the birds and things, and the distant hum of the trolley would break in and remind us of all things we have wanted to forget."

A Bit of Farm Land in the Heart of Greater New York.

"Acre after acre, farm after farm, and never a sign of city in sight."

In a way, that is rather typical of most of the rurality found within the boundaries of these modern aggregations or trusts of large and small towns, and intervening country, held together (more or less) by one name, under one municipal government, and called a "city" by legislature. There is plenty that is not at all city-like within the city walls—called limits—there is plenty of nature, but in most cases those wanting to commune with it are reminded that it is no longer within the domain of nature. The city has stretched out its hand, and the mark of the beast can usually be seen.

You can find not only rural seclusion and bucolic simplicity, but the rudeness and crudeness of the wilderness and primeval forest; indeed, even forest fires have been known in Greater New York. But the trouble is that so often the bucolic simplicity has cleverly advertised lots staked out across it; the rural seclusion shows a couple of factory chimneys on the near horizon. The forest fire was put out by the fire department.

There are numerous peaceful duck-ponds in the Borough of Queens, for instance, as muddy and peaceful as ever you saw, but so many of them are lighted by gas every evening. Besides the fisheries, there is profitable oyster-dredging in several sections of this city; and in at least one place it can be seen by electric light. There are many potato-patches patrolled by the police.

One of the Farmhouses that Have Come to Town.

The old Duryea House, Flushing, once used as a head-quarters for Hessian officers.

Not far from the geographical centre of the city there are fields where, as all who have ever commuted to and from the north shore of Long Island must remember, German women may be seen every day in the tilling season, working away as industriously as the peasants of Europe, blue skirts, red handkerchiefs about their heads, and all: while not far108 away, at frequent intervals, passes a whining, thumping trolley-car, marked Brooklyn Bridge.

In another quarter, on a dreary, desolate waste, neither farm land, nor city, nor village, there stands an old weather-beaten hut, long, low, patched up and tumbled down, with an old soap-box for a front doorstep—all beautifully toned by time, the kind amateurs like to sketch, when found far away from home in their travels. The thing that recalls the city in this case, rather startlingly, is a rudely lettered sign, with the S's turned the wrong way, offering lots for sale in Greater New York.

It is not necessary to go far away from the beaten paths109 of travel in Greater New York to witness any of these scenes of the comedy, sometimes tragedy, brought about by the contending forces of city and country. Most of what has been cited can be observed from car-windows. For that matter, somewhat similar incongruity can be found in all of our modern, legally enlarged cities, London, with the hedges and gardens of Hampstead Heath, and certain parts of the Surrey Side, or Chicago, with its broad stretches of prairie and farms—the subject of so many American newspaper jokes a few years ago.

The Old Country Cross-roads Store, Established 1828.

In the background is the old water-power mill.

But New York—and this is another respect in which it is different from other cities—our great Greater New110 York, which is better known as having the most densely populated tenement districts in the world, can show places that are more truly rural than any other city of modern times, places where the town does not succeed in obtruding itself at all. From Hampstead Heath, green and delightful as it is, every now and then the gilded cross of St. Paul's may be seen gleaming far below through the trees. And in Chicago, bucolic as certain sections of it may be, one can spy the towers of the city for miles away, across the prairie; even when down in certain wild, murderous-looking ravines there is ever on high the appalling cloud of soft-coal smoke. But out in the broad, rolling farm lands of Long Island you111 can walk on for hours and not find any sign of the city you are in, except the enormous tax-rate, which, by the way, has the effect of discouraging the farmers (many of whom did not want to become city people at all) from spending money for paint and improvements, and this only results in making112 the country look more primitive, and less like what is absurdly called a city.

But the best of these rural parts of town cannot be spied from car-windows, or the beaten paths of travel.

Make a journey out through the open country to the southeast of Flushing, past113 the Oakland Golf Club, and over toward the Creedmoor Rifle Range, after a while turn north and follow a twisting road that leads down into the ravine at the head of Little Neck Bay, where a few of the many Little Neck clams come from. All of these places are well within the eastern boundary of the city, and this little journey will furnish a very good example of a certain kind of rural New York, but only one kind, for it is only one small corner of a very big place.

Working as industrially as the peasants of Europe, blue skirts, red handkerchiefs about their heads....

As soon as you have ridden, or walked—it is better to walk if there is plenty of time—beyond the fine elms of the ancient Flushing streets, you will be in as peaceful looking114 farming country as can be found anywhere. But the interesting thing about it is that here are seen not merely a few incongruous green patches that happen to be left between rapidly devouring suburban towns—like the fields near Woodside where the German women work—out here one rides through acre after acre of it, farm after farm, mile after mile, up hill, down hill, corn-fields, wheat-fields, stone fences, rail fences, no fences, and never a town in sight, much less anything to suggest the city, except the procession of market-wagons at certain hours, to or from College Point Ferry, and they aren't so conspicuously urban after all.

Even the huge advertising sign-boards which usually shout to passers-by along the approaches to cities are rather scarce in this country, for it is about midway between two branches of the only railroad on Long Island, and there is no need for a trolley. There is nothing but country roads, with more or less comfortable farm-houses and large, squatty barns; not only old farm-houses, but what is much more striking, farm-houses that are new. Now, it does seem odd to build a new farm-house in a city.

Out in the fields the men are ploughing. A rooster crows in the barn-yard. A woman comes out to take in the clothes. Children climb the fence to gaze when people pass by. And one can ride for a matter of miles and see no other kind of life, except the birds in the hedge and an occasional country dog, not suburban dogs, but distinctly farm dogs, the kind that have deep, ominous barks, as heard at night from a distance. By and by, down the dusty, sunny, lane-like road plods a fat old family Dobbin, pulling an old-fashioned phaëton in which are seated a couple of prim old maiden ladies, dressed in black, who try to make him move faster in the presence of strangers, and so push and jerk animatedly on the reins, which he enjoys catching116 with his tail, and holds serenely until beyond the bend in the road.

Of course, this is part of the city. The road map proves it. But there are very few places along this route where you can find it out in any other way. The road leads up over a sort of plateau; a wide expanse of country can be viewed in all directions, but there are only more fields to see, more farm-houses and squatty barns, perhaps a village church steeple in the distance, a village that has its oldest inhabitant and a church with a church-yard. Away off to the north, across a gleaming strip of water, which the map shows to be Long Island Sound, lie the blue hills of the Bronx. They, too, are well within Greater New York. So is all that country to the southwest, far beyond the range of the eye, Jamaica, and Jamaica Bay and Coney Island. And over117 there, more to the west, is dreary East New York and endless Brooklyn, and dirty Long Island City, and, still farther, crowded Manhattan Island itself. Then one realizes something of the extent of this strange manner of city. It is very ridiculous.

When at last the head of Little Neck Bay is reached, here is another variety of primitive country scene. The upland road skirting the hill, beyond which the rifles of Creedmoor are crashing, takes a sudden turn down a steep grade, a guileless-looking grade, but very dangerous for bicyclists, especially in the fall when the ruts and rocks are covered thick with leaves for days at a time. Then, after passing a nearer view (through a vista of big trees) of the blue Sound,118 with the darker blue of the hills beyond, the road drops down into a peaceful old valley, tucked away as serene and unmolested as it was early in the nineteenth century, when the country cross-roads store down there was first built, along-side of the water-power mill, which is somewhat older. In front is an old dam and mill-pond, called "The Alley," recently improved, but still containing black bass; in the rear Little Neck Bay opens out to the Sound beyond, one of the sniping and ducking places of Greater New York. The old store, presumably the polling-place of that election district of the city, is where prominent personages of the neighborhood congregate and tell fishing and shooting stories, and gossip, and talk politics, seated on boxes and barrels around the white-bodied stove, for the sake of which they chew tobacco.

It is one of those stores that contain everything—from anchor-chains to chewing-gum. There are bicycle sundries in the show-case and boneless bacon suspended from the old rafters, but the best thing in the place is a stream of running water. This is led down by a pipe from the side of the hill, acts as a refrigerator for a sort of bar in one corner of the store—for this establishment sells a greater variety of commodities than most department stores—and passes out into Long Island Sound in the rear.

The fact that they are in Greater New York does not seem to bother them much down in this happy valley, at least it hasn't changed their mode of life apparently. The last time we were there a well-tanned Long Islander was119 buying some duck loads; he said he was merely going out after a few snipe, but he ordered No. 5's.

"Oh, I generally catch a glimpse of him once a month or so," said the gunner. "But then, you see, these here city policemen have to be pretty careful, they're likely to get lost."

"Down near Bay Ridge," a man on the cracker-barrel put in as he stroked the store-cat, "one night a policeman got off his beat and floundered into the swamp, and if it hadn't been that some folks of the neighborhood rescued him, he'd have perished—of mosquitoes."

120 "We don't have any mosquitoes here on the north shore," put in the other, addressing us without blinking. He is probably the humorist of the neighborhood.

This is only one of the many pilgrimages that may be made in Greater New York, and shows only one sort of rurality. It is the great variety of unurban scenes that is the most impressive thing about this city. Here is another sort, seen along certain parts of Jamaica Bay:

Long, level sweeps of flat land, covered with tall, wild grass that the sea-breezes like to race across. The plain is intersected here and there with streams of tide-water. At rare intervals there are lonely little clumps of scrub-oaks, huddled close together for comfort. Away off in the distance the yellow sand-dunes loom up as big as mountains, and beyond is the deep, thrilling blue of the open sea, with sharp-cut horizon.

The sun comes up, the wonderful color tricks of the early morning are exhibited, and the morning flight of birds begins. The tide comes hurrying in, soon hiding the mud flats where the snipe were feeding. The breeze freshens up, and whitecaps, like specks, can be seen on the distant blue band of the ocean.... The sun gets hot. The tide turns. The estuaries begin to show their mud-banks again. The sun sinks lower; and distant inlets reflect it brilliantly. The birds come back, the breeze dies down, and the sun sets splendidly across the long, flat plain; another day has passed over this part of a so-called city and no man has been121 within a mile of the spot. The nearest sign of habitation is the lonely life-saving station away over there on the dunes, and, perhaps, a fisherman's shanty. Far out on the sky-line is the smoke of a home-coming steamer, whose approach has already been announced from Fire Island, forty miles down the coast.

Then, here is another sort: A rambling, stony road, occasionally passing comfortable old houses—historic houses in some cases—with trees and lawns in front, leading down to stone walls that abut the road. The double-porticoed house where Aaron Burr died is not far from here. An old-fashioned, stone-arched bridge, a church steeple around the bend, a cluster of trees, and under them, a blacksmith shop.122 Trudging up the hill is a little boy, who stares and sniffles, carrying a slate and geography in one hand, and leading a little sister by the other, who also sniffles and stares. This, too, is Greater New York, Borough of Richmond, better known as Staten Island. This borough has nearly all kinds of wild and tame rurality and suburbanity. Its farms need not be described.

III

Pointing out mere farms in the city becomes rather monotonous; they are too common. But there is one kind of farm in New York that is not at all common, that has never existed in any other city, so far as I know, in ancient or modern times. It is situated, oddly enough, in about the centre of the 317 square miles of New York—so well as the centre of a boot-shaped area can be located.

Cross Thirty-fourth Street Ferry to Long Island City, which really does not smell so bad as certain of our poets would have us believe; take the car marked "Steinway," and ride for fifteen or twenty minutes out through dreary city edge, past small, unpainted manufactories, squalid tenements, dirty backyards, and sad vacant lots that serve as the last resting-place for decayed trucks and overworked wagons. Soon after passing a tumble-down windmill, which looks like an historic old relic, on a hill-top, but which was built in 1867 and tumbled down only recently, the Steinway Silk Mills will be reached (they can be distinguished by the long,124 low wings of the building covered with windows like a hothouse). Leave the car here and strike off to the left, down the lane which will soon be an alley, and then a hundred yards or so from the highway will be seen the first of the odd, paper-covered houses of a colony of Chinese farmers who earn their living by tilling the soil of Greater New York.

At short distances are the other huts crouching at the foot of big trees, with queer gourds hanging out in front to dry, and large unusual crocks lying about, and huge baskets, and mattings—all clearly from China; they are as different from what could be bought on the neighboring avenue as the farm and farmers themselves are different from most Long Island farms and farmers. Out in the fields, which are tilled in the Oriental way, utilizing every inch of ground clean up to the fence, and laid out with even divisions at regular intervals, like rice-fields, the farmers themselves may be seen, working with Chinese implements, their pigtails tucked up under their straw hats, while the western world wags on in its own way all around them. This is less than five miles from the glass-covered parade-ground of the Waldorf-Astoria.

They have only three houses among them, that is, there are only three of these groups of rooms, made of old boards and boxes and covered with tar paper; but no one in the neighborhood seems to know just how many Chinamen live there. The same sleeping space would hold a score or more over in Pell Street.

125 Being Chinamen, they grow only Chinese produce, a peculiar kind of bean and some sort of salad, and those large, artistic shaped melons, seen only in China or Chinatown, which they call something that sounds like "moncha," and which, one of them told me, bring two cents a pound from the Chinese merchants and restaurateurs of Manhattan. For my part, I was very glad to learn of these farms, for I had always been perplexed to account for the fresh salads and green vegetables, of unmistakably Chinese origin, that can be found in season in New York's Chinatown. Under an old shed near by they have their market-wagon, in which, looking inscrutable, they drive their stuff to market through Long Island City, and by way of James Slip Ferry over to Chinatown; then back to the farm again, looking inscrutable. And on Sundays, for all we know, they leave the wagon behind and go to gamble their earnings away in Mott Street, or perhaps away over in some of the well-known places of Jersey City. Then back across the two ferries to farming on dreary Monday mornings.

Even up in Manhattan there are still places astonishingly unlike what is expected of the crowded little island on which stands New York proper. There is Fort Washington with tall trees growing out of the Revolutionary breastworks, land, under their branches, a fine view up the Hudson126 to the mountains—a quiet, sequestered bit of public park which the public hasn't yet learned to treat as a park, though within sight of the crowds crossing the viaduct from the Grant Monument on Riverside. There are wild flowers up there every spring, and until quite recently so few people visited this spot for days at a time that there were sometimes woodcock and perhaps other game in the thickly wooded ravine by the railroad. Soon, however, the grass on the breastworks will be worn off entirely, and the aged deaf man who tends the river light on Jeffreys Hook will become sophisticated, if he is still alive.

It will take longer, however, for the regions to the north, beyond Washington Heights, down through Inwood and past Tubby Hook, to look like part of a city. And across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek from Manhattan Island, up through the winding roads of Riverdale to Mount St. Vincent,127 and so across the line to Yonkers, it is still wooded, comparatively secluded and country-like, even though so many of the fine country places thereabouts are being deserted. Over to the eastward, across Broadway, a peaceful road which does not look like a part of the same thoroughfare as the one with actors and sky-scrapers upon it, there are the still wilder stretches of Mosholu and Van Cortlandt Park, where, a year or two ago, large, well-painted signs on the trees used to say "Beware of the Buffaloes."

A Peaceful Scene in New York.

In the distance is St. Andrew's Church, Borough of Richmond, Staten Island.

The open country sport of golf has had a good deal to do with making this rural park more generally appreciated. Golf has done for Van Cortlandt what the bicycle had done for the Bronx and Pelham Bay Parks. There are still natural, wild enough looking bits, off from the beaten paths, in all these parks, scenes that look delightfully dark and sylvan in the yearly thousands of amateur photographs—the camera128 does not show the German family approaching from the rear, or the egg-shells and broken beer-bottles behind the bushes—but beware of the police if you break a twig, or pick a blossom.

Those who enjoy the study of all the forms of nature except the highest can find plenty to sigh over in the way the city thrusts itself upon the country. But to those who think that the haunts and habits of the Man are not less worthy of observation than those of the Beaver and the Skunk, it is all rather interesting, and some of it not so deeply deplorable.

There are certain old country taverns, here and there, up toward Westchester, and down beyond Brooklyn and over on Staten Island—not only those which everybody knows, like129 the Hermitage in the Bronx and Garrisons over by the fort at Willets Point, but remote ones which have not yet been exploited in plays or books, and which still have a fine old flavor, with faded prints of Dexter and Maud S. and much earlier favorites in the bar-room. In some cases, to be sure, though still situated at a country cross-roads, with green fields all about, they are now used for Tammany head-quarters with pictures of the new candidate for sheriff in the old-fashioned windows—but most of them would have gone out of existence entirely after the death of the stage-coach, if it had not been for the approach of the city, and the side-whiskered New Yorkers of a previous generation who drove fast horses. If the ghosts of these men ever drive back to lament the good old days together, they must be somewhat surprised, possibly disappointed, to find these rural road-houses doing a better business than even in their day. The130 bicycle revived the road-house, and though the bicycle has since been abandoned by those who prefer fashion to exercise, the places that the wheel disclosed are not forgotten. They are visited now in automobiles.

There are all those historic country-houses within the city limits, well known, and in some cases restored, chiefly by reason of being within the city, like the Van Cortlandt house, now a part of the park, and the Jumel mansion standing over Manhattan Field, a house which gets into most historical novels of New York. Similarly Claremont Park has adopted the impressive Zabriskie mansion; and the old Lorillard house in the Bronx might have been torn down by this time but that it has been made into a park house and restaurant. Nearly all these are tableted by the "patriotic" societies, and made to feel their importance. The Bowne place in Flushing, a very old type of Long Island farm-house, was turned into a museum by the Bowne family itself—an excellent idea. The Quaker Meeting-house in Flushing, though not so old by twenty-five years as it is painted in the sign which says "Built in 1695," will probably be preserved as a museum too.

Another relic in that locality well worth keeping is the Duryea place, a striking old stone farm-house with a wide window on the second floor, now shut in with a wooden cover supported by a long brace-pole reaching to the ground. Out of this window, it is said, a cannon used to point. This was while the house was head-quarters for Hessian131 officers, during the long monotonous months when "the main army of the British army lay at Flushing from Whitestone to Jamaica;" and upon Flushing Heights there stood one of the tar-barrel beacons that reached from New York to Norwich Hill, near Oyster Bay. The British officers used to kill time by playing at Fives against the blank wall of the Quaker Meeting-house, or by riding over to Hempstead Plains to the fox-hunts—where the Meadowbrook Hunt Club rides to the hounds to-day. The common soldiers meanwhile stayed in Flushing and amused themselves, according to the same historian, by rolling cannon-balls about a course of nine holes. That was probably the nearest approach132 to the great game at that time in America, and it may have been played on the site of the present Flushing Golf Club.

These same soldiers also amused themselves in less innocent ways, so that the Quakers and other non-combatants in and about this notorious Tory centre used to hide their live stock indoors over night, to keep it from being made into meals by the British. That may account for the habit of the family occupying the Duryea place referred to; they keep their cow in a room at one end of the house. At any rate it is not necessary for New Yorkers to go to Ireland to see sights of that sort.

Those are a few of the historic country places that have come to town. There is a surprisingly large number of them, and even when they are not adopted and tableted by the D. A. R. or D. R., or S. R. or S. A. R., they are at least known to local fame, and are pointed out and made much of.

But the many abandoned country houses which are not especially historic or significant—except to certain old persons to whom they once meant home—goodly old places, no longer even near the country, but caught by the tide well within the city, that is the kind to be sorry for. Nobody pays much attention to them. A forlorn For Sale sign hangs out in front, weather-beaten and discouraged. The tall Colonial columns still try to stand up straight and to appear unconscious of the faded paint and broken windows,133 hoping that no one notices the tangle of weeds in the old-fashioned garden, where old-fashioned children used to play hide-and-seek among the box-paths, now overgrown or buried under tin cans.... Across the way, perhaps, there has already squatted an unabashed row of cheap, vulgar houses, impudent, staring little city homes, vividly painted, and all exactly alike, with highly ornamented wooden stoops below and zinc cornices above, like false-hair fronts. They look at times as though they were putting their heads together to gossip and smile about their odd, old neighbor that has such out-of-date fan-lights, that has no electric bell, no folding-beds, and not a bit of zinc cornicing.

Meanwhile the old house turns its gaze the other way, thinking of days gone by, patiently waiting the end—which will come soon enough.

Transcriber's Notes:

Simple typographical errors were corrected.

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

Page 8, first line: "manifestations of the spirit" could be "or".

	PAGE
The Water-Front	1
The Walk Up-Town	27
The Cross Streets	63
Rural New York City	99

NEW YORK SKETCHES

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE WATER-FRONT

THE WATER-FRONT

THE WALK UP-TOWN

THE WALK UP-TOWN

I

II

III

IV

THE CROSS STREETS

THE CROSS STREETS

I

II

III

RURAL NEW YORK CITY

RURAL NEW YORK CITY

I

II

III

IV

V

Transcriber's Notes:

On the Harlem River—University Heights from Fort George	Frontispiece
	PAGE
Grant's Tomb and Riverside Drive (from the New Jersey Shore)	3
Down along the Battery sea-wall is the place to watch the ships go by	5
Old New Amsterdam	7
Just as it has been for years. (Between South Ferry and the Bridge.)
New New York	9
Not a stone's throw farther up ... the towering white city of the new century. (Between South Ferry and the Bridge.)
From the point of view of the Jersey commuter ... some uncommon, weird effects	11
(Looking back at Manhattan from a North River ferry-boat.)
Swooping silently, confidently across from one city to the other	13
(East River and Brooklyn Bridge.)
Looking up the East River from the Foot of Fifty-ninth Street	15
Even in sky-line he could find something new almost every week or two	17
The end of the day—looking back at Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge.
For the little scenes ... quaint and lovable, one goes down along the South Street water-front	19
Smacks and oyster-floats near Fulton Market. (At the foot of Beekman Street, East River.)
This is the tired city's playground	21
Washington Bridge and the Speedway—Harlem River looking south.
Here is where the town ends, and the country begins	23
(High Bridge as seen looking south from Washington Bridge.)
The Old and the New, from Lower New York across the Bridge to Brooklyn	24x
From the top of the high building at Broadway and Pine Street.
The old town does not change so fast about its edges	25
(Along the upper East River front looking north toward Blackwell's Island.)
... opposite the oval of the ancient Bowling Green	29
... immigrant hotels and homes	30
No. 1 Broadway	30
Lower Broadway during a parade	30
The beautiful spire of Trinity	31
... clattering, crowded, typical Broadway	32
City Hall with its grateful lack of height	33
What's the matter?	34
In the wake of a fire-engine	35
No longer to be thrilled ... will mean to be old	37
Grace Church spire becomes nearer	39
Through Union Square	40
... windows which draw women's heads around	41
Instead of buyers ... mostly shoppers	42
... crossing Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street	43
Madison Square with the sparkle of a clear ... October morning	44
In front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel	45
Diana on top glistening in the sun	46
Seeing the Avenue from a stage-top	47
... people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue	48
A seller of pencils	49
It is also better walking up here	50
... those who walk for the sake of walking	51
At the lower corner of the Waldorf-Astoria	52
... with baby-carriages	53
This is the region of Clubs	54xi
(The Union League.)
... close-ranked boarding-school squads	55
... the coachmen and footmen flock there	56
The Church of the Heavenly Rest	57
Approaching St. Thomas's	59
The University Club ... with college coats-of-arms	60
Olympia Jackies on shore leave	61
Down near the eastern end of the street	65
Across Trinity Church-yard, from the West	67
An Evening View of St. Paul's Church	69
The sights and smells of the water-front are here too	71
An Old Landmark on the Lower West Side	73
(Junction of Canal and Laight Streets.)
Up Beekman Street	75
Each ... has to change in the greatest possible hurry from block to block.
Under the Approach to Brooklyn Bridge	77
Chinatown	79
It still remains whimsically individual and village-like	81
A Fourteenth Street Tree	83
Such as broad Twenty-third Street with its famous shops	85
A Cross Street at Madison Square	87
Across Twenty-fourth Street—Madison Square when the Dewey Arch was there	88
Herald Square	91
As it Looks on a Wet Night—The Circle, Fifty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue	93
Hideous high buildings	95
Looking east from Central Park at night.
Flushing Volunteer Fire Department Responding to a Fire Alarm	103
A Bit of Farm Land in the Heart of Greater New York	105xii
Acre after acre, farm after farm, and never a sign of city in sight.
One of the Farmhouses that have Come to Town	107
The old Duryea House, Flushing, once used as a head-quarters for Hessian officers.
East End of Duryea House, where the Cow is Stabled	108
The Old Water-power Mill from the Rear of the Old Country Cross-roads Store	109
The Old Country Cross-roads Store, Established 1828	110
In the background is the old water-power mill.
Interior of the Old Country Cross-roads Store	111
The Colony of Chinese Farmers, Near the Geographical Centre of New York City	112
Working as industrially as the peasants of Europe, blue skirts, red handkerchiefs about their heads	113
Remains of a Windmill in New York City, Between Astoria and Steinway	114
The Dreary Edge of Long Island City	115
The Procession of Market-wagons at College Point Ferry	116
Past dirty backyards and sad vacant lots	117
New York City Up in the Beginnings of the Bronx Regions—Skating at Bronxdale	119
Another Kind of City Life—Along the Marshes of Jamaica Bay	121
There is profitable oyster-dredging in several sections of the city	123
Cemetery Ridge, Near Richmond, Staten Island	126
A Peaceful Scene in New York	127
In the distance is St. Andrew's Church, Borough of Richmond, Staten Island.
A Relic of the Early Nineteenth Century, Borough of Richmond	128
An Old-fashioned, Stone-arched Bridge. (Richmond, Staten Island)	129
An Old House in Flatbush	131