MaaumMwaaum ¦ II NEW EW YORK VAN DYKE PEN NELL «'¦ ' "'¦ ill lilil itiwli illilHIHil ¦YJkLIE«¥MIVEI&S]nrY- BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE Ann S. Farnam Fund THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK ¦ BOSTON • CHICAGO ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY - CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO THE NEW NEW YORK A COMMENTARY ON THE PLACE AND THE PEOPLE BY JOHN C. YAN DYKE ILLUSTRATED BY JOSEPH PENNELL Nrfu fforft THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1909 All rights reserved Copyright, 1909, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1909. <]o<\y > ¦¦ NorfaooB ^rraa J. 8. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN" WHOSE EFFORTS IN MUNICIPAL ART HAVE IDENTIFIED HIM WITH THE NEW CITY THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY BOTH THE WRITER AND THE ILLUSTRATOR PREFACE The title of this book describes it with sufficient accuracy. The new city is pictured rather than the old; the present appearance is recited rather than the history of Dutch and English successions. This, of course, implies limitations, but not necessarily a meager field of survey. The difficulty has been, not the paucity, but the prodigality of the materials. Where one should begin has presented as much of a problem as where one should leave off. Besides, in a swift-expanding city like New York everything is more or less confused by move ment, by casual phenomena, by want of definition. Self- imposed barriers are necessary to keep one from being lost in the vastness of the swirl. The writer and the illustrator have not escaped the embarrassment of many points of view, but gradually the belief has come to them that, pictorially, the larger aspect of New York is the life and energy of its people projected upon the background of its commerce. It is this character of the place and its inhabitants that they have sought to set forth, convinced that character is interesting in itself, and that true municipal beauty must vii viii PREFACE be more or less beholden to it. Those who believe only in the planned and plotted city will, no doubt, shake their heads over this; but many times in civic story the characteristic has proved more attractive than the formal. It has been demonstrated in the present day, here in New York. Those who have erected the new city, as need has dictated, have builded better than they knew. They have given us, not the classic, but the picturesque — a later and perhaps a more interesting development. At least such is the chief contention of this book. With what reason or conviction it is pictured or argued is the privilege of the reader to decide. Therefore let us leave off explanations and begin. J. C. V. D. ^New York, May, 1909. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Introduction 1 II. The Approach prom the Sea 21 III. Seasonal Impressions 41 IV. The Streets in the Morning 59 V. Down Town 77 VI. Sky-scrapers 93 VII. The New City 113 VIII. Ancient Landmarks 131 IX. The Ebb Tide 149 X. Fifth Avenue at Four 169 XI. Shops and Shopping 187 XII. New York by Night 205 XIII. Homes and Houses 221 XIV. The Bowery 237 XV. The Tenement Dwellers 253 XVI. City Guardians 271 XVII. The Bridges 291 XVIII. The Water-ways 309 XIX. Docks and Ships 325 XX. Breathing Spaces 341 XXI. Municipal Art 357 XXII. For Mere Culture 371 XXIII. The Islands 387 XXIV. The Larger City 401 XXV. Traffic and Trade 417 ix PLATES IN COLOR The Old I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VH. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. xin. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIH. XIX. XX. XXI XXII XXIII. XXIV. XXV and the New Frontispiece FACING PAGE Madison Square 2 Battery Park near Bowling Green 22 Washington Square 42 The Plaza 60 Lower Broadway — Election Time 78 Building a Sky-scraper 94 New York Times Building 114 The City Hall and World Building 132 Hudson Park (Greenwich) 150 Fifth Avenue through the Washington Arch . . . 170 Broadway from Madison Square 188 Coney Island — on the Beach 206 Apartment Houses, Upper Broadway .... 222 Chinatown 238 Bleecker Street 254 Second Avenue 272 High Bridge, Harlem River 292 Near the Battery 310 Near the Shipping District 326 Morningside Park 342 Entrance Prospect Park, Brooklyn 358 University of New York 372 Governors Island 388 Elevated Road at One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street 402 Along Riverside Drive 418 PLATES IN BLACK AND WHITE FACING PAGE 1. Lower Bay 1 2. New York from Upper Bay 7 3. A Nearer View 10 4. Ferries and Sky-scrapers 16 5. Coney Island from Bay 24 6. Crossing Ferries 28 7. Docks and Slips .35 8. New York Custom House 37 9. The Flatiron (Fuller Building) 44 10. New York in Rain (Park Avenue) 46 11. Fort Lee in Haze 49 12. Lower City in Mist 51 13. Broadway — Down Town 62 14. Broad Street 64 15. Ann Street 71 16. Exchange Place 74 17. Park Row Building 85 18. City Investment aud Singer Buildings 87 19. Terminal Buildings from West Street 90 20. Little Flatiron — Maiden Lane 92 21. Sky-scrapers from Brooklyn Heights 99 22. Working at Night on Foundations 103 23. Among the Tall Buildings 106 24. Post Office and City Hall Park 110 25. Looking down Madison Avenue 117 26. Metropolitan Museum and Eighty-Second Street . . . 119 27. West Street Building 122 28. Singer Building — Early Evening 124 29. Trinity Churchyard . . . . , . . . . .135 xiii xiv PLATES IN BLACK AND WHITE FACING PAGE 30. St. Paul's and Park Row Building 138 31. St. Paul's — Interior 145 32. The Aquarium, Battery Park 147 33. Post Office from St. Paul's Porch 158 34. Mott Street 160 35. The New Tombs, Center Street 163 36. Grace Church, Broadway 165 37. Fifth Avenue at Thirty-Fourth Street 172 38. St. Patrick's Cathedral from Madison Avenue .... 174 39. Upper Fifth Avenue 177 40. Fifth Avenue from Metropolitan Museum 184 41. Broadway near Tenth Street 192 42. Twenty-Third Street 199 43. Altman's, Fifth Avenue 200 44. Tiffany's, Fifth Avenue 202 45. Sherman Statue — Evening 209 46. Upper Broadway — Night 215 47. Plaza by Moonlight 216 48. Sherry's (left) and Delmonico's (right) 218 49. Beginning of Madison Avenue 224 50. Madison Avenue Houses 231 51. Fifth Avenue Houses 232 52. The Ansonia 234 53. The Bowery 240 54. Elevated Road on the Bowery 247 55. Across the Bowery looking East 248 56. Jewish Cemetery (near Bowery) 250 57. Tenements near Brooklyn Bridge 261 58. East River Tenements 263 59. Elevated Road on Second Avenue ...... 266 60. Recreation Pier 268 61. Police Headquarters 275 62. Criminal Court Building 279 63. Bridge of Sighs . 282 PLATES IN BLACK AND WHITE xv FACING PAGE 64. Site of New Municipal Building 286 65. Brooklyn Bridge 295 66. Manhattan Bridge (in construction) 298 67. East River Bridge 305 68. Bridges on the Harlem 307 69. The Lower Hudson from Singer Tower 318 70. The East River 320 71. The Lower East River 323 72. The Harlem 325 73. Old Ships, South Street 332 74. The Mauretania 334 75. Tugs and Steamers 337 76. From Coenties Slip 341 77. Lake in the Central Park 348 78. St. Nicholas Avenue 352 79. Palisades and Hudson 355 80. Riverside Drive — Grant's Tomb 357 81. St. John the Divine (in construction) 364 82. Ward's Pilgrim, the Central Park 366 83. Fountain on Riverside Drive 369 84. Soldier's Monument, Riverside Drive 371 85. New York Botanical Museum, Bronx Park .... 376 86. Public Library, Fifth Avenue 382 87. CoUege of the City of New York 384 88. Hall of Fame, University of New York 386 89. Bedloes Island — Statue of Liberty 391 90. Island from the Battery 394 91. Staten Island Factories 396 92. East River Islands from Jefferson Park 400 93. Fort George by Night 405 94. Pennsylvania Railroad Station (in construction) . . . 407 95. East River from Williamsburgh Bridge 410 96. Brooklyn Bridge from Ferry Shed 412 97. West Street looking North 421 98. East River — Brooklyn Side 424 I*< PSHIS O Ah LNTKODIJCTION Pu I. — MADISON SQUARE CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Constantinople, seen in the early evening from the Marmora, is perhaps the most beautiful city in the world. It lifts from the water, takes form from out the opales cent distance, like some vision of The Thousand and One Nights Entertainment. The yellow walls and towers of old Byzantium, the red-tiled buildings that crowd along the seven hills of Stamboul, the silver-domed mosques of Achmet, of Mohammed, of Bajazet, the dark green cypresses in the Seraglio Gardens, the restless water at one's feet, the wonderful light that seems always overhead, and the rosy air that blends them all into harmony, make up a picture never to be forgotten. The glamour and the romance of the East become, for the moment, realities. The realm of enchantment lies just before you. As the ship draws nearer and swings around Seraglio Point into the Golden Horn, new vistas of even greater splendor open and deepen. The harbor with its forests of masts, the Galata Bridge — the whole eastern side of the city — lie in the shadow of the Stamboul hills; the domes of Sancta Sophia lift against the sunset west, 3 4 THE NEW NEW YORK a violet light gathers about the minarets of the mosque of Solymon, the rosy air turns into a golden mist, and through it the towers of Pera look supernaturally splendid. Haroun al Raschid, in fancy free, never built a city more beautiful ! It is a dream city. If you touch it, it will fade away and leave only a grouping of harsh facts. But touch it you must whether you will or will not. You are disembarked, sent ashore, and, at first, are de lighted with the way certain colors in shop fronts, flags, and costumes "cut out," with the quaintness of rambling buildings, with the ships and crowds and all the barbaric yawp of the streets. But presently you begin to lose the ensemble. The light and atmosphere no longer bind together. The forms of buildings become grotesque, the streets grow squalid, the people, the dogs, the horses, make up a mean and hideous entanglement of life; the noises are deafening, the odors unbearable, the filth untenable. Before the stars are out you have possibly concluded (and not without reason) that Constantinople may be beautiful at a distance, and picturesque in spots close at hand ; but that it certainly is not architectural, not structural, not a homogeneous civic unit like Paris. The larger elements of design and system are lacking. It is something that just "happened." Singularly enough there is in New York a superficial likeness to Constantinople. Even the height and location of the ground with the contours cut by the rivers are not INTRODUCTION 5 dissimilar. A glance at the map will show the Hudson corresponding to the Marmora, the East River to the Golden Horn, the Upper Bay to the Bosporus. Other. resemblances derive naturally from these. Manhattan be comes recognizable as Stamboul, the Battery as Seraglio Point, Brooklyn as the heights of Pera, Staten Island as Scutari. Even the Brooklyn Bridge can be tortured into a resemblance to the Galata Bridge, and the Williamsburgh Bridge is an exaggerated suggestion of the upper bridge on the Golden Horn. The likeness carries on (fancifully if you will) into the impression produced at first sight. Both cities are seen at their best from the water; both are beautiful from a distance and for a similar reason. Light and color gleaming from towers and spires and pinnacles, a fore ground of water, a background of blue sky, a rosy-blue envelope of air, make up the attractive quality of each. The white sky-scraper of New York, that thoughtless people jeer at, catches light as readily as a Moslem mina ret; the solid "blocks" standing shoulder to shoulder along the streets, the bunched group of high buildings in the lower city, make up walls more massive than those of Stamboul ; and if New York lacks the silvery domes of Constantinople, it is not without its tall towers flying flags against the blue, and such graceful traceries in the air as the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Seen from a point in the Upper Bay where the Brooklyn 6 THE NEW NEW YORK Bridge first comes into view and the sky-scrapers in the lower city crowd together like distant mountain peaks, New York is more striking, more impressive, than any other city on the globe. It looms through the blue mist, not with any Oriental romance about it, but with a feeling of tremendous bulk and power. The mass of it makes you realize the energy back of it, excites a wonder as to its fashioning, overawes you with its possibilities. There is no mystery here. New York is not a dream city. It is as real as the mountain walls of the Alps, as apparent as the white shaft of the Matterhorn, but picturesque in a similar way and for a similar reason. The Alpine lift of it, the clear light of it, the brilliant color, the serene sky, the enveloping air, are peculiarly beautiful. But as you come closer to the city, the measurable likeness to Constantinople returns to you. The illusion produced by distance begins to fade. Color once more ' ' cuts out" in sharp patches, the tall buildings lose their grouping and assume tower-like isolation ; the light becomes more fierce, the shadows more violent. The picture gets out of tone, out of value. The contrasts appear so sharp, the transitions so swift, that you are perhaps bewildered. The grotesque and the grandiose, the savage and the civilized, the luxurious and the poverty-stricken, touch on every side. Once in the streets all thought of a united and harmoni ous picture vanishes into thin air. Jostling details, Pl. 2. — New York from Upper Bay INTRODUCTION 7 harsh realities, are flung at you too violently to be merged into an ensemble. The picturesque still crops out in spots and patches at every turn, but it requires some men tal (and physical) firmness to stop and enjoy it. There is a great movement going on about you, a surge of struggling humanity ; and there is a great roar, the metallic-electric hum of power in action. If you are a stranger within the gates perhaps this means chaos to you, sheer mob mad ness ; and possibly before nightfall you will have concluded that Manhattan, like Constantinople, is lacking in homoge neity, wholly wanting in structural unity, in fact a mere agglomeration of buildings on a point of land. The check erboard "blocks," the recurrent regularity of streets, you admit, point to something planned ; but the buildings are eruptive and the whole city abnormal — something again that apparently just "happened." There is an explanation, if not an excuse, for this. The city belongs to a republic, a great democracy. It is very apparent in New York that every one stands firmly on his rights as an individual, and does about as he pleases. Architectural conformity to a general design is something not required, not planned, not even contemplated. Quite the reverse. If your neighbor does a thing one way, it is considered a proper assertion of your rights to do it the other way. If an office building soars twenty stories into the air, a bank building near it will more than likely stop at a story and a half. If one lifts upward in terra-cotta, the 8 THE NEW NEW YORK other will flatten out in white marble. After thirty years of brick and stone fronts in monotonous row, block upon block, a great change has come over the spirit of the dream and now, in the new buildings, the other extreme is sought. Nothing shall be like anything else, nothing shall conform except by the law of contrariety. In materials brick shall meet granite, and granite shall join to steel, and steel be fol lowed by marble or terra-cotta or concrete ; but two of a kind shall not stand side by side. And never by design or acquiescence shall adjoining buildings be of the same color. Even in brick there is forever the slight difference in coloring, caused by the different clay, the firing, or the pigmentation, that marks apart one's building from his neighbor's and thus asserts an individuality. The assertion of the individual is possibly the cause of the city's architectural incongruities. Everyone seems struggling as hard as he can to keep from losing himself in the body corporate. There are very few who wish to be simply citizens, to conform to civic laws, and to temper architectural aspirations to a sky line or a curb line. The average New York business man wants no self-effacement, no simple life. On the contrary, publicity, commercially and socially, is sought for; and being "in the public eye," as the phrase goes, seems to be the one thing needful. The buildings of the new city are more or less reflective of this obtrusive individuality. The love of prominence has produced homes and stores and sky-scrapers that are, if INTRODUCTION 9 convenient and useful, not the less blatant advertisements of their owners' families or businesses. What other object could induce an individual, or an aggregation of individuals, to build a silverware shop that suggests an overgrown Venetian palace, or apartment houses, French, Italian, Greek, Moorish, Turkish, in their ornamentation, or hotels after almost any and every plan on the footstool that is unique or striking? What is the meaning of the keen rivalry among the owners of the high buildings as to which shall be the highest, and the vaporizings in the newspapers about which has the greatest number of occu pants? Half of the "freak" buildings in New York are not well-meant architectural failures, but deliberate efforts to catch the eye and advertise someone or his wares. Even the creditable buildings — substantial structures that are not to be despised as art and cannot be regarded wholly as advertisements — reflect, in measure, the de sire for distinction, for aloofness, for novelty. How otherwise can we understand a Greek temple worked over and made to do service as a stock-exchange, or a Roman arch adapted to meet the requirements of a clearing-house, or a sixteenth-century Veronese council hall exaggerated into a printing-shop ? The desire for singularity is quite as pronounced in dwelling houses. French chateaux that are meaningless without their landscapes, Dutch houses that need water as a complement, Swiss chalets that belong in the Alps, and Palladian conglomerations that 10 THE NEW NEW YORK perhaps once belonged in Italy, measure up to a common curb and look down into the same asphalt street with the brown-stone front of yore. Evidently these people pro pose to have nothing monotonous or conventional, cost what it may; and though they imitate the dead and gone of England or Spain, they will not copy their next- door neighbors. This cry of the individual in brick and stone and steel, this strain for novelty or peculiarity or mere "loudness," produces variety enough in all conscience. And it also produces picturesqueness, but one can hardly claim for it unity. There is a want of coherence, of ensemble. No amount' of civic pride can find excuse for the inconsisten cies that crop out at every point, and it is impossible to be in sympathy with the stupidities and inanities per petrated by the semi-civilized that flock into New York and by mere numbers give a savage tang to the city. In fact, the savagery of New York is at first more marked than its civilization, its vices more pronounced than its virtues. Wherever one goes he finds these sharply con trasted. What else could be expected ! A million people with a million tastes and perfect freedom to express them as they please, a chorus where each member is allowed to sing his own tune in his own way, mean necessarily a want of harmony. New York is not a harmonious sym metrical city like Paris, and the fact is generally conceded by New Yorkers themselves. Pl. 3. — A Nearer View INTRODUCTION 11 Nor is it a restful city. Aside from the noise of it, 'the very sight of it keeps you ever on the alert. The long avenues of Paris dwindling away in linear perspective, the roof lines as unbroken as the curb lines, might put you to sleep with their undisturbed repose. The sameness of Madrid or the uniformity of new Rome, or the cast-iron dullness of Berlin are likewise conducive to somnolence. But when you drive through New York you have to look about you. Its variety is startling, disturbing, even shocking at times. It is a city quite by itself, a city of contrasts, with as little rest in its sky line as in the ragged mountains of Mexico, as little repose in its streets as in the lava stream of a volcano. Oh, to be sure, there are quiet spots in the parks and along the rivers, quaint nooks in the side streets, odd angles here and there where every thing is so still it is difficult to realize that you are in New York at all. Everyone knows these spots, with their door ways and garden walls and overhanging trees, for the magazine writer has written about them and the painter has illustrated them many times; but they are merely surface spots, — the exceptions, not the rule. The place is no quieter than its loudest note, no more restful than the inside of its stock-exchange, no more reposeful than the reach of its most aggressive sky-scraper. And hence, it is said, the city is an unlivable place; a great shop in which people barter and sell, get rich quick and die early, but cannot rationally live and have their 12 THE NEW NEW YORK being. Perhaps there is truth in that statement, as we shall see hereafter, and yet several millions of people who are now existent within the city, and unknown millions without who wish they could arrange to live within, would seem to confute it. They live somehow and have the appearance of enjoying life, though it may be they never arrive at the fullness of being vouchsafed to people in staid London or methodical Berlin. Perhaps a general statement that no city is quite as healthful and rational a place to live in as the country would be nearer the truth. The herding together of people in great centers, the incessant milling that goes on in the streets, the continual rubbing of minds and touching of hands, with one man's elbow in another man's ribs, and his toe forever galling his neighbor's kibe, are things that never yet led to the development of the virtues. They breed selfishness and all its allied train of evils, and they tend necessarily to the lawless assertion of the individual, which in turn produces that want of harmony which we have already noted. It might be better morally and physically for families to live farther apart and see each other less frequently. But evidently they do not think so. They answer the academic ques tion as to which is preferable, city or country, by moving into the cities — at least a great many do. And the flocking into New York is greater than into any other American metropolis. It draws like a load- INTRODUCTION 13 stone not only from our own interior states, but from foreign countries. Its increase from without when seen in statistics is something remarkable. And each year gives a higher figure. Why is this ? Why do they come ? Why do they not stay where they are or go to some other place ? Obviously because they find New York attractive, entertaining, amusing, perhaps improving. Does the city then respond to Matthew Arnold's test of a civilization: "Is it interesting?" Most assuredly. It is the most interesting place in the New World, and that is the chief reason, aside from business relations, why people keep trooping to it from all points of the com pass. There is "something to see there" is the way the response comes to you. Naturally it depends upon each individual what he sees and if it interests him. Some are content with seeing streets and shop windows; some seek the charm of the Central Park ; some are amused by monuments, museums, and theaters; some are delighted with the Stock Exchange, the Subway, the Bowery, or the Battery. Thousands are interested in fires, parades, slums, and police ; and thousands again are devoted only to art, music, literature, or the sciences. But the omnipresent interest of New York — to New Yorkers themselves as well as outsiders — is the passing throng, the great flux, the moving mass of people on the streets. It may be an outcrop of the social instinct or merely a vagabond curiosity, but almost everyone is 14 THE NEW NEW YORK ready to crane his neck to watch the mob as it passes. The interest is usually of a superficial nature. We may be looking only at heads and faces, at strides and strad dles, at fools and fashions; but still we look. Nor is this interest confined to any one class or quarter of the city. The man who watches the people hurrying along Fifth Avenue from his club window, or the woman who scans them through a lorgnette from the window of her brougham, are, in this respect at least, akin to the tene ment house family that watches the crowd from a fire- escape, or to the scullery maid who hangs half her person out of the back window to see the tops of people's hats. The human interest is always absorbing. What causes this never-ending ebb and flow of human currents up and down the avenues and through the cross streets? Whence comes this uneasy energy so manifest in New York life? What is the initial force that sends wave after wave of humanity hither and yon each morn ing and evening, and makes of New York a city of almost perpetual movement? Undoubtedly the motive power comes from commerce, trade, traffic, — what is commonly called "business." The energy is generated by wealth, its pursuit or its expenditure. And the wealth is here in New' York more than in any other American city. It has not all been created here by any means. In fact, it represents the industry of almost every state in the union. Generally speaking the source of power lies INTRODUCTION 15 without, in the surrounding country, in the productive Far West perhaps ; but the central dynamos are in New York. It is the power house by the sea where the energy is stored, and from which in turn energy is supplied. There will be those to rise up with indignant protest that there are other things in New York than trade and commerce. Quite true. The leaders in art, literature, music, and the drama, the great ones in law and medicine, the famous preachers, the celebrities in science, in en gineering, in philanthropy, in political life, have their headquarters if not always their residences here. In addition the city is stocked to overflowing with schools, colleges, universities, societies, clubs, charity organiza tions, hospitals, lecture halls, museums, art galleries — all the appurtenances and appliances of the higher and the intellectual life. But the sky-scraper of commerce looms above the university and the art gallery on the horizon line of the city; and the master builder of the sky-scraper, the so-called captain of industry, seems to fill the most conspicuous place in the interest and affec tions of the city's people. For all its facilities and its acquisitions of a purely intellectual or educational nature — and we shall recount them hereafter — the key-note of the city is taken from its commerce. The enormous buildings, the roar of traffic in the streets, the babel of tongues, the glare of lights, the strident screech of car wheels, speak the business character of the city as the 16 THE NEW NEW YORK hum of a top its spinning motion. If there is one feature of the city predominant above all others it is its life, its vitality, its tremendous energy kept forever in action by commerce. A material feature? Yes, but it calls for no apology. All the famed towns of Europe — Florence, Venice, Vienna, Paris, London — came to greatness through their wealth and commerce. Their streets and parks and plazas, their public buildings and cathedrals and campaniles which we to-day call "beautiful," were in their time merely the manifestation of energy as applied to material needs. And they were beautiful largely because they were well fitted to their time and people. Fitness to a designed end is always admirable, just as admirable in a modern battleship or sky-scraper as in a Venetian barca or a mediaeval bell-tower. For where- ever or whenever the work is perfectly adapted to use it takes upon itself character; and it is no new theory under the sun that beauty lies in character perhaps more often than in proportion, symmetry, or grace. Why not then beauty in the city of New York? Is not everything in it well fitted (or rapidly becoming so at least) to fulfill its functions as a great seaport, a commercial center, a nation's metropolis? Has it not already a distinct, a decisive character of its own? Of course it will never become beautiful in a Florentine or even a Parisian sense. Those ideals of fitness have Pl. 4. — Ferries and Sky-scrapers INTRODUCTION 17 passed, and the likeness will not be repeated in this western world. Why should we follow outworn prece dents? What would you have in twentieth-century New York, — city walls affording no protection to the city, lofty campanili with bell-ringing obsolescent, quaint bridges for a few hundred foot-passengers, instead of great structures to accommodate hundreds of thousands? This new civilization calls for a different expression in art from that. It calls for the things that reveal our western Ufe and its energy. If we build for our present- day needs with honesty and sincerity, we shall have no cause to blush. This, however, to the average man, in or out of New York, is a somewhat violent conclusion. He blushes unconsciously and offers apologies profusely for the sky-scrapers, the tunnels, the bridges, the subways. But there is no good reason for his doing so. They are necessities of the city's life, they work perfectly, fulfilling each its aim and purpose, each helping on the other like the wheels of a great machine in motion. And after their kind they are every one of them right, characteristic, and beautiful. Their fitness makes them so. But how very difficult it is to make the New Yorker believe that utility is the basis of beauty. He keeps harking back to Venetian buildings and bridges, think ing perhaps because they are now picturesque they never could have been useful. "Will New York ever become 18 THE NEW NEW YORK like that?" he asks. No; it certainly will not. But in its own way it is just as beautiful, just as picturesque at the present time, as London or Paris or any other European city. Unfortunately, though we have eyes, the majority of us see very little with them. Not one in a hundred of its citizens has ever seen New York. It is too near. There is no perspective, no proper focus. Even our painter people are a little bewildered by its "bigness." They do scraps of color, odd bits along the Harlem, a city square or street; but, with a few exceptions, they have not risen to the vast new city. That the "big" things, the high bridges, the colossal sky-scrapers, the huge factories, the enormous waterways, are pictorial in them selves needs no wordy argument. The illustrations in this volume are sufficient proof. In them Mr. Pennell has shown that the material is here and that it needs only the properly-adjusted eyes to see its beauty. That beauty, in the original as in the pictures, is not a harmony of streets, squares, and houses, nor a formal arrange ment of monuments, towers, and domes ; but rather a new sublimity that lies in majesty of mass, in aspiring lines against the upper sky, in the brilliancy of color, in the mystery of fields of shadow, in the splendor of fields of light, — above all in the suggested power and energy of New York life. This is all uniquely western, if you please, and those INTRODUCTION 19 who visit us from Europe rather smUe at it as men have done at all new things from time immemorial; but at least they come to see the new city and some day they may remain to praise it. One thing is certain, it cannot be ignored. It has too much character for that. THE APPEOACH FEOM THE SEA Pl. II. — BATTERY PARK NEAR BOWLING GREEN CHAPTER II THE APPROACH FROM THE SEA After the rain and fog of London, after six or seven days of knocking about on an ocean liner in wet Septem ber weather, how welcome to the homeward-bound traveUer is the glimpse of American sunlight that perhaps comes to him off Nantucket. It is not European sun light. It seems brighter, more sparkling, more luminous. The sky, too, is higher, arches into a loftier dome, shows a finer, paler quality of blue; while the clouds are dif ferent from any seen north of the Alps. In the late afternoon great heaps of cumulus lift in pink turrets and towers along the southern horizon, thin veils of stratus are drawn across their sunlit tops, and high above them, white as snow, gleam the feathery forms of the cirrus. It seems a fairy cloudland iUuminated by a sUver sun. The first exclamation of the stranger in America is over the sunlight and the sky. New York is a thousand mfles south, two thousand mUes west, of London, and its light has a clean clear quality about it that is im pressive. But no one exclaims over the first glimpse of American land. The ship's company looks at it list- 23 24 THE NEW NEW YORK lessly, for it is only a flat strip of dull yellow, lying low down upon the water to the north, with occasionally a dimly seen lighthouse rising from it. Almost any land in the world — England, France, Spain, Mexico, Peru — lifts out of the sea with a more commanding relief than America at the approach to New York Bay. The cliffs of Cornwall or the Pillars of Hercules one can grow enthusiastic over; but the sand spits of Long Island or New Jersey make no impression — except, of course, upon the returning native. Even the hiUs of Navesink and Sandy Hook, with its smartly painted buildings, are somehow passed by in silence. No one comments or grows emotional over them. But when Swinburne and Hoffman islands and the shores of Staten Island rise into prominence, there is a visible interest stirred throughout the ship. The pent-up steerage crowds against the rail and chatters excitedly; and even the complacent first-cabin ventures a few remarks on the green grass, the bright-colored houses, the warm sky. As the ship moves up into the Narrows, passing in the distance the white towers of Coney Island and close at hand the green and gray of Fort Tompkins and Fort Hamilton, the interest spreads. The rails above and below are manned with peering people. The houses, the gardens, the trees, the flowers of Staten Island are almost within stone-throwing distance ; and they all look Ph THE APPROACH FROM THE SEA 25 so preternaturally bright and beautiful that many adjectives are forthcoming. Even the not-too-observant foreigner begins to notice the sparkle of light on the water, the clearness of the air, the variety of the foliage, the gayety of the coloring. Presently the vibration of the vessel ceases, but the ship still moves with her own impetus slowly up into the quarantine grounds. Tugs and yachts and small boats gather about her, like fisher folk around a stranded whale ; but they do not try to board her. The tug coming out from the shore flying a yellow flag carries the health officer of the port; and he must make his inspection before any one is allowed to go on board. Once more the port raU is crowded with heads protruding to get a gUmpse of the great man coming up the ship's ladder. How very small he looks and what a long way down he is ! The monster proportions of the ship tend to dwarf everything about her — people and tugs, trees and houses, hiUs on the shore and distances on the water. From the thin air and the clear light one is led to believe that a conversation could be carried on with the people on the Staten Island shore; but they are something over half a mUe away. And from the name "The Narrows," given to the strait through which the ship has just come, one might gather the impression that it is really a narrow strip of water, whereas it is a mile wide. The medical inspection is soon through with, people 26 THE NEW NEW YORK from tugs and yachts and steamboats begin to climb up the vessel's side, sending and receiving shouts of recog nition from expectant friends. Perhaps an excursion steamer comes hurrying down the bay with a band of music, flying flags, and several hundred cheering throats to welcome home some congressman or senator whose greatness the ship's company had not suspected until now. Once more the ship gets under way and steams into the Upper Bay. Everybody is now on the alert. The shores are beginning to show many docks, factories, warehouses, elevators, all the queer buUdings to be found about the entrance of a great harbor; the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe's Island rises in huge proportions; and presently there is a hum that runs along the ship and all eyes are set and staring dead ahead, up the bay. Slowly, as the vessel turns on her course, the towering sky-scrapers of lower New York, and the spider-web tracery of the Brooklyn Bridge come into view. Faint and far the city lies, like a distant sierra. Nothing is distinct as yet. It is only a suggestion, but, like Mont Blanc seen from Geneva, what a sense of height it gives one ! It is not a city on a hUl gaining grandeur from its elevated position; on the contrary it rises almost sheer from the water's edge, — almost like Venice from her lagoon islands. No one who has come up to Venice by water in the evening light is likely to forget the loveliness of that city by the sea with its fairy palaces lifting out THE APPROACH FROM THE SEA 27 of the blue-green tide, its high silver domes of the Salute, its lofty campanUi, its wondrous color. It is one of the sights of the world. But New York is all dome, all campanile, all towering splendor as you see it from the Upper Bay; and it has an even greater wealth of color than Venice, a sharper light, a more luminous shadow. It wiU not stand close analysis so well as the City of the Doges; but at a distance it is superbly picturesque, grandly beautiful. With this far city in view and the mind groping at its proportions, trying to imagine its height and girth, the steamer, once more, begins to look small; the Statue of Liberty seems rather like an ordinary statue; even the Upper Bay after the open ocean, seems cramped, shut in. The stranger does not quite understand it. He has to be told over again that the statue on the island stands a hundred and fifty feet above its pedestal, being the largest (and about 'the worst) of its kind in the world; that the Upper Bay is five miles wide by five or six long, that the ship has been travelling a dozen mUes through land-locked waters, and that New York in the distance is still some miles away. Figures are frequently wearisome, if not something of a nuisance; but they are, nevertheless, quite convincing to the scepti cal, and absolutely indispensable to the exotic American. Gowanus Bay and the lower end of Brooklyn, Bayonne and the lower end of Jersey City, are passed quite un- 28 THE NEW NEW YORK noticed by the passengers. Things of a more immediate interest are claiming the attention. Outward-bound steamers are passing with flags flying and handker chiefs waving, huge full-rigged ships, riding high out of water, are being towed down and out to sea, barks and brigs and coasting schooners are following after, and lumbering in the rear come spiteful little tugs wrenching at long rows of garbage scows, or hustling along oil lighters, or snorting about dredgers or elevator boats. Everything whistles at you as it passes, by way of salu tation; and perhaps the white yacht that is along-side escorting the steamer up to her dock, gives a sharp shriek in return. Meantime the distant city grows in size, lifts higher, seems to peer through its blue atmosphere ; while over it, over the harbor and over the bay, the clear September sunlight is falling, dancing, flashing from dome and lofty window and wave facet, wringing color out of every ferry-boat, tug, building, greensward, and scrap of foliage within the great panorama. / When Governor's Island, with its round little fort, and the Battery, with its charming spot of green, are reached, some of the details of the tall buildings begin to reveal themselves. The outliers facing on Battery Park can be seen from foundation wall to roof line, and counted, in twenty or more stories, by the mounting windows. But these are only the foot-hills. Further back and lifting higher are the central peaks, the main sierras. Pl. 6. — Crossing Ferries THE APPROACH FROM THE SEA 29 The architectural wonders of the world seem insignifi cant when measured by their scale. The sky line of London, . for instance, is cut by church domes and steeples that look down on the low-lying town; but the highest church steeple here is that of Old Trinity, two hundred and eighty-four feet in height, which faUs to rise into sight. It is submerged by its surroundings, with the Singer Tower in the lead six hundred and thirty-five feet up in the air. Such structures are appro priately enough caUed "sky-scrapers." The tops of them reach into the blue, cut into it, seem to "scrape" against it. Almost everyone is impressed or startled or outraged by the first sight of them. Even the visiting foreigner finds his lively expectation outdone by the reality. Up into the North River the black muzzle of the steamer points, holding her way amid increasing num bers of tugs, ferry-boats, brick schooners, oU lighters and car barges. Gradually the bunched appearance of the tall buUdings begins to change. The group partially disintegrates, certain of the taller peaks draw off and stand alone, the lower city begins to show its profile. This is the view of the city that Mr. Henry James de scribes as like "some colossal hair comb turned upward, and so deprived of half its teeth that the others, at their uneven intervals, count doubly as sharp spikes." The simile has a modicum of truth about it. The want of 30 THE NEW NEW YORK teeth here and there shows that the growth is not com plete, that the city is stUl in a building stage; but that the present sky-line is unattractive can hardly be ad mitted. On the contrary, if seen late in the afternoon when the great foundation waUs are sunk in shadow, when the sun is setting over New Jersey and its yellow light flushes the tops of the high buildings and turns the window-panes to flaming fire, this profile view of the lower city is magnificently grand. There never was quite such a mountain barrier made by human hands and stretched along the eastern sky at sunset. Even in the full light of noonday, with dark shadows flung down the great walls and high lights leaping from cornice to gilded dome, or at dusk when each house of many thou sand electric lights has its windows illuminated, there is stUl a grandeur of mass, of light, of color, that is most imposing. That there is incongruity, want of proportion, want of Greek harmony about it, is quite true. But perhaps even so severe a critic as Mr. James wiU admit that the problem of New York to-day is quite different from the problem of Athens in Periclean times. Athens, or at least the beautiful part of it, was buUt to gratify the vanity of the Athenians; New York has been buUt to handle the commerce of the western world. I Commerce, travel, traffic, seem to proclaim themselves from every craft that floats in the harbor and from all the docks along the shores. The impulsive ferry-boats, THE APPROACH FROM THE SEA 31 carrying their thousands of commuters to or from New Jersey, keep darting back and forth from their slips, im pudently challenging our great liner with short, hoarse whistles that indicate they mean to cross our bows. They have to "make a train" and are not to be stopped. Long scows loaded with freight-cars are being shoved and pushed around the Battery and up to Mott Haven, where the cars are transferred to New England railway tracks ; pile-drivers in tow go staggering up the river to the new docks in process of building; great strings of canal boats, half a dozen long and three abreast, are traUing away toward Raritan Bay ; coal barges in squad rons keep filing past. Everything is moving in the interest of commerce. Much of this commercial show, in scale and value, falls far short of the imposing row of office buildings staked out from the Battery to the Plaza. Enough of it is petty or mean-looking, as, for instance, the rows and rows of pile-docks with long ramshackle pier-sheds upon them. True, they serve their purpose fairly well. With the necessities for many and quick landings the wooden dock that gives instead of breaking with the blow is better than the stone dock that might crush or bend the plates of a vessel; but not even a very "good American" will argue that they are better-looking and make a finer appearance than the stone ones. If the truth were told the wooden piers are a shabby, poverty-stricken, 32 THE NEW NEW YORK and patched border for so wealthy a city to be wearing on its outer garment. They contrast sharply with the huge steamers, the colossal bridges, and the high towers of the sky-scrapers — the first contrast perhaps to catch the eye of the visitor. To be sure, one soon forgets or fails to see these dis cordant items. There is such a bewildering rush at every one of the senses as the steamer moves up past the Court- landt Street ferry-slip, that the forlorn docks and the dirty scows are relegated to the background. Color asserts itself. It blares from the many-hued pier-sheds, from the white and gold excursion steamers, from the red and cream colored funnels of the ocean liners, from the magenta ferry-boats, from the terra-cotta, brick, and stone buildings. It is too near for any large unity or harmony. It comes in patches with some sharpness of impact, and is at first (perhaps by contrast with the dull blue and green of northern Europe) somewhat gay, but agreeably so. There is a stimulus, a tonic effect about it that gives intimation of the intensity of life that pre vails in the city and the harbor. It is not the deep half-tone, the broken hue, the dull morbid color indicative of decay ; on the contrary, it has clearness, even sharpness in it, and comes to you like the clarion call of a trumpet. And the noise ! The shrieks of passing steamers, the discordant notes of harbor craft, the puffing and wheez ing of tugs, the din of escaping steam, clanging bells, THE APPROACH FROM THE SEA 33 howling men are in the air. The deck rails of the steamer are manned, and aU the passengers above and below are in a buzz of excitement, a roar of noise. The end of the pier and the windows of the pier-shed are bulging with expectant friends, eagerly awaiting the docking of the big liner, and all making a noise again. Flags are flying, handkerchiefs are waving, everybody is talking, a large proportion is shouting. The warping-in process, slowly effected by the aid of tugs and windlasses, is accompanied by volleys of recognitions sent to the steamer from the dock, and returned in kind. And such a kind ! The manner in which the language is mangled, to say nothing of the idioms interpolated, gives one quite a shock. Such a beautiful bay and harbor, such wonderful sunlight and color, such a marvel of a city in its making ; but what abominable voices, and what atrocious grammar! You know that the ungrammatical and the slangy are always in evidence on such occasions, and that the well-bred majority is quiet and unobtrusive; but, nevertheless, it gives you a queer feeling. It is another one of the contrasts. And are those yellow-faced, unkempt, Ul-dressed stevedores who are sagging heavUy over the gang-planks the typical workmen of New York? Is that howling mass waving its arms and parasols in the background, representative of the city's upper classes ? Not neces- 34 THE NEW NEW YORK sarUy. A mob is a mob anywhere, and is usually gathered together for the purpose of doing those things in company that the individual would be ashamed to do alone. Not that there is anything reprehensible about the crowd that gathers to welcome an ocean- steamer, but, good American that you are, you wish it were not quite so demonstrative, not quite so "loud." You have misgivings that perhaps your foreign acquaint ance on the steamer will accept these people as typical of the soU, and you have a notion that the real American is somewhat more refined, more dignified than these; in fact, not very different from any other educated person. To be quite frank, you are somewhat taken aback to find so many of your countrymen not so high up socially or inteUectuaUy as the blue sky or even a down-town sky scraper. The gang-planks are in place and the rush to get ashore begins. There is no cause for hurry, because the baggage has to be taken off and examined before people can leave the pier; but that does not give anyone pause. To see the scrambling mass moving along the gang-planks one might think the ship afire, and everyone anxious to quit it in the shortest possible time. Off they surge, bonnets and bags and umbrellas, new clothes, top hats, and alpen stocks, dogs, maids, and stewards, each one pushing and hustling his neighbor, but good-natured about it, smUing, laughing, aU of them delighted to get ashore. Pl. 7. — Docks and Slips THE APPROACH FROM THE SEA 35 In half an hour the whole ship's company is within the pier-shed getting bags and boxes together for the customs examination. Everybody is moving, gesticulat ing, calling, perspiring. Passengers and their friends, with stewards, telegraph boys, customs officers, policemen, expressmen, are swirling about like so much flotsam. It looks like a mad mob, but there is a method in the mad ness. The moment one's boxes are together a special officer can be obtained to examine them. A landing card is presented at the desk of the chief and he immediately details a subordinate to accompany you. None of them takes off a cap. Your officer may nod a "Good morning ! " but it is very perfunctory. He wants to know at once where your baggage is, and if it is all together in one place. Then the trouble begins. That is, trouble may begin if one tries to dodge ques tions or hide anything, or even has a suspicious look. If one knows no guile he need fear no evil. For the average customs officer has no malice prepense. He is anxious to get through with the examination and get you and your bags off the premises ; but he has heard somewhat about the path of duty being the path of glory ; and, besides — a plain-clothes inspector may be watching him. At any rate, it will be necessary to open up those "few presents" and show the bottom of things. Perhaps when he has finished there is nothing but bottom left and most of your apparel is scattered about on the dock; and then again 36 THE NEW NEW YORK it is possible that you will be passed on as pleasantly, with withers unwrung, as though in England or in France. But the ordeal is through with and help is at hand. Ununiformed, unlicensed, unnumbered porters offer to aid in restoring the lost equilibrium. The belongings are put back, squeezed in, trampled into place, and the bags locked and strapped. Then the porter trundles them down toward the street entrance of the long dock and, incidentally, stops in the vicinity of carriage agents and cabmen. A bargain is struck for a conveyance. The price is of an exalted sky-scraping nature, but it is not the proper time to quarrel with cabmen. They know it, and charge according to their knowledge. Neither is it the place to get the best cab accommodations. The horses are street-car derelicts, the harness gives evi dence of disintegration, the carriage and the shabby unshaven driver are usually the worse for wear. One resolves not to be bothered by such small matters. The frayed lining of a coach is not to influence your opin ion about your native town. A look out of the carriage window (or over it, for there is no glass left in it) is pleas- anter and more philosophical. Alas ! the view without is quite as bad as the look within. West Street is crowded with trucks, drays, carts, cabs, cars, trolleys that tangle into knots and bunches and then somehow untangle ; the pavement is broken by car tracks and an occasional hole into which wheels drop with a thud and come out with a Pl. 8 — New York Custom House THE APPROACH FROM THE SEA 37 jerk; the dingy, battered-looking buildings that line the east side of the street, the cheap .and gaudy signs, the barrel skids across the sidewalks, the lampless lamp posts, the garbage cans, the stained awnings, are all somewhat disturbing. And the roar and rattle and clang that seem to accompany the movements of that mob of humanity ! Was there ever such a din known to men, since the walls of Jericho fell down ? Once out of the West Street maelstrom the carriage, perhaps, slips into a long, narrow side street, made up of many four-story buildings, all quite alike, and all appar ently inhabited by people who rub unclean hands on doors, waUs, and shutters, and do not bother about washing either the windows or themselves. Dull-looking women sit on the low stoops and survey the street in which dirty children are playing, often in connection with stand ing drays or ash barrels or coal heaps. As for the street itself, it is perhaps a series of Belgian block bumps, with an occasional break-away into asphalt. Wherever it crosses another street or avenue there are double car tracks with the clanging gongs of surface cars, and perhaps overhead the rattle and roar of a rusty-looking elevated railway. There is no cessation of clatter, and apparently no end to the mean buildings that line the way. Tenements, fac tories, shops, saloons, — whatever they are or are not, — at least just here they hold the record for uniform rectan- 38 THE NEW NEW YORK gular meanness. It is a little shocking the way all this is driven in upon one after some months in Paris or London. Perhaps you have ignored it, if not denied it, many a time in speaking of New York over there in Europe ; and, true enough, there is some improvement over earlier days ; but who could imagine it was still so bad ! Yet this is the West Side of the city; the East Side is perhaps worse. You begin to wonder about the narrow strip of comparative decency running up Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, and Broadway. Perhaps in your absence even that has become submerged beneath the high waves of immigration. Gradually the buildings grow larger and more important, the streets cleaner and more filled with people, the vehi cles more numerous, the noise more insistent. Apart ment houses begin to rise, shops and stores develop imposing show-windows, cars are coming and going, crowds are circulating in strings and knots. Presently the carriage rattles into Broadway and the shabby but unabashed driver begins edging his way across it, with one eye on the autocratic policeman who stands in the center of the street and regulates traffic. Through and across that net-work of cars and people the route lies down a clean asphalt street to Fifth Avenue, and in a few moments your dUapidated trap brings up with a flourish of whip, in front of perhaps the most ornate hotel in the world. THE APPROACH FROM THE SEA 39 Carriages in plush and velvet, ladies in silks and satins, flunkies and footmen in lacings and facings, pages in gloves and buttons, blend in a gorgeous confusion about the entrances. Within there are glimpses of marble and gilding, Oriental rugs and portieres, visitors in gay hats and marvelous costumes, smartly dressed men, hurrying porters, telegraph boys, call boys. An air of luxury and wealth, not to say riotous extravagance, seems to exude from every opening in the building. Around it are colossal structures in stone and marble, along the avenue is a great moving throng in carriages and on foot, close at hand gorgeous shop-windows catch the eye, in the distance towering Flatirons lose themselves in pale out lines, over all there is an unceasing roar and honk and whistle, and far above is the serene blue of the American sky. There is nothing strikingly new about this. The New Yorker has known it, known the squalor and known the magnificence, for a long time ; and yet each year as he re turns from Europe the sharp contrast is brought home to him more violently. In a few days he will accept it, without further thinking, as he has done many times before ; but he knows, nevertheless, that it is there. And how there, why there, in this chief city of the great repub lic ? Is democracy merely a name ? And is this newly established aristocracy of wealth more dominant, more arrogant, more despotic, than the old aristocracy of birth and rank? 40 THE NEW NEW YORK Fortunately, those questions do not have to be answered immediately. The stranger in New York is at first more given to the exclamation than the interrogation, and as for the returned native he is perhaps momentarily dazed by the splendor and the meanness of his own town. Besides, concise and final answers are not to be accepted regarding places and people in America. Many problems are still in process of solution. Not even the Americans themselves know precisely how they will come out. SEASONAL IMPEESSIONS 3HAUQ2 M0T0MIH2AW — .III .jS CHAPTER III SEASONAL IMPRESSIONS What is so gay as a day in New York, especially if it be in October ! The city is perhaps seen at its best dur ing that month. The inhabitants, returned from their summer vacations, have a brightness and an alertness about them, they step along the streets energetically as though in good health and spirits, and they pass the time of day with cordiality, even vivacity. Business enter prises of the winter have started (or at least one thinks they have though they are going on always) ; summer changes have perhaps been made; there is apparently a newness and a smartness about the streets and shops and moving wheels. Above all it is the season of light which may possibly account for some of the smart look of things. The skies are clear, the air is warm, and the sunlight falls perhaps for many days without clouds or rain. It is just ordinary Atlantic Coast sunshine, and dull enough compared with that of the table-lands of Wyoming or the deserts of Ari zona or the sierras of Old Mexico ; but by contrast with London light — London where the sun seen through smoke 43 44 THE NEW NEW YORK so often looks like a hot copper cent — it is really quite wonderful. New Yorkers have a way of boasting about it as though it were something of their own manufacture (which suggests the inclusive mind) ; but, nevertheless, it should be put down to their credit that they have tried to preserve it by prohibiting the use of soft coal within the city limits. Perhaps as a result of the soft-coal prohibition New York is a clean city. Not always clean underfoot. In a democratic city where the streets belong to everyone to use and to no one to keep clean, where men traffic and team a^eLare always in a hurry, it is impossible to prevent accumulations of litter. During the summer months it takes no herculean effort to keep the streets decently swept; but in winter, with much ice and snow, and a limited and unreliable labor supply, the difficulty is greatly increased. London or Paris perhaps does that sort of thing better than New York, because it has better facilities for doing it ; but, nevertheless, New York is, all told, the cleaner city. Paris is gray with dust and London grimy with soot, but the buildings of New York are as bright almost as the day they were erected. Look up at the clean walls, windows, and cornices ! How newly washed seem the chimneys, towers, and domes! The roofs, when you see them from the upper story of some sky-scraper, have a scrubbed look about them ; and even the trees in the larger parks, for all that pipes are harrying Pl. 9. — The Flatiron (Fuller Building) SEASONAL IMPRESSIONS 45 their roots and gases their branches, have a brightness quite unknown to the somber growths of Hyde Park or the Champs Elys6es. And how the color does crop out at every turn — is brought out perhaps with some extra sharpness because of the clear light ! Everything shows color. And seldom do you find the same tone repeated. The buildings along side of which run the elevated roads from the Battery to the Harlem River, are often alike in structure but seldom in hue. They differ each from the other by a tone or a shade. Stone, brick, cement, terra-cotta — no one could name or count the hundreds or even thousands of different tints or shades they show. To the unobservant the high mass of the Flatiron, the spires of St. Patrick's Cathedral, and Diana's Tower of the Madison Square Garden are alike in hues; but neither in local color nor in texture are they the same. When the straight shafts of sunset are striking them and the light upon them is reflected, the hues may be in one saffron, in another pink, in the third salmon-colored. Just so the morning sun falling upon the tall towers of the Brooklyn Bridge leaves a different stain from that upon the turrets of the Park Row Building or the great glass walls of the Singer Tower. Everywhere one goes, up or down the city, this prodi gality of color shows. Sometimes it appears in large patches like the red mass of the Produce Exchange, the 46 THE NEW NEW YORK gray mass of the sky-scrapers at Fifty-Fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, or the green mass of the Central Park; but more often the coloring is in spots here and there, and counts only as variation in the prevaUing note. For there is a prevailing note, a blend in this riot of hues. It requires distance, however, to see it. Close to view many of the colors in houses, signs, vehicles, costumes, fly at you rabidly, and are perhaps so intense that you turn away with dazed eyes only to see the complementary color in the very next object. Under the bright October sun every hue jumps to its highest pitch and apparently every shadow sinks to its lowest depth. The effect is violent. But October with its bright light and high color has also its lUac or purple haze that blends aU colors into one tone and makes of many pieces a pictorial unity. The haze does not belong exclusively to the woodlands, though in the Central Park it lurks along the driveways, rests upon the Mall, and floods in and out among the trees and rocks and flowers; while beyond Riverside Drive it hangs above the Hudson, shrouding and yet revealing the distant Palisades. It is also to be seen almost any day as one stands at the top of Murray HUl and looks down Fifth Avenue toward Madison Square. It fiUs the whole lower avenue, surrounds the towers and steeples and cornices, and draws its mauve-hued veiling across the sharp prow of the distant Flatiron, making of that Pl. 10. — New York in Rain (Park Avenue) SEASONAL IMPRESSIONS 47 much maligned structure a thing of beauty. It is not different in the streets of the lower city. Neither here nor there does the dust of traffic rising from the streets obliterate or obscure it. On the contrary, the more dust and automobUe smoke, the heavier is the atmosphere, and the more perfect the ensemble. New York is seldom free from a haze or mist of some sort. But it is a very thin veUing compared with that produced by the moisture and smoke of London. So it is that the Londoner within our gates is almost con tinuously out of focus. He complains of "loud" colors, wonders at the absence of aerial perspective, and thinks it all signifies and symbolizes our crude civilization; whereas, it may merely suggest that he himself has not yet acquired a comprehensive point of view. He is per haps looking at objects and colors in detail rather than in their relationship. Seen as one should look at a Monet landscape, for instance, the city is a marvel of color and light. That is its distinct and positive beauty. Of course, it is somewhat shocking to keep reiterating this, since we have all been reared in the belief that civic beauty lies in classic buildings, in roof lines, in squares, ovals, statuary, and the like; yet the hereti cal still insist that beauty may be in such intangible evanescent features as color, light, and air, with arches, columns, and towers little more than the catch points of perspective — the objects upon which light and color play. 48 THE NEW NEW YORK This lUac or purple haze of October may run through November and December, with day following day of sunshine, and the winter come late to the city. It is not an unusual experience. Yet as January comes in, the nights and days are decidedly colder and the autumn haze has perhaps shifted into a pale blue. The air seems thinner, sharper, more eager; and the tops of the tall buildings lift out of the dust of the street into clearer and brighter regions. All the roof and tower and cupola gew-gaws seem to sparkle in the sun, the drifts of steam from the hotels and high apartment houses are dazzling white, down in the street people in heavy coats hurry by, and cabbies and flunkies in bear-skins sit on their boxes looking preternaturaUy red in the face. At times it can be very cold in the city with its touch of the salt sea in the air — far colder than in the country, notwithstanding the popular belief to the contrary. The steel buildings, the blocks and blocks of stone, brick, and cement, the flagstone sidewalks, are receivers and retainers of cold rather than of heat. In the forest in winter a wood road will be warmer than the open, but in the city a steel-and-stone street, swept by the wind, may be colder than the wind itself. And how the wind can blow through the city streets! The tall buUdings seem to catch it on their upper walls and spUl it like a saU down into the thoroughfares, where it moves in violent twists and spirals. The foot-passengers in the Pl. 11. — Fort Lee in Haze SEASONAL IMPRESSIONS 49 neighborhood of the Flatiron sometimes have unpleasant experiences with it ; and farther up-town, though Society on the inside of a brougham goes through the Plaza to the Park with unruffled feathers, yet the man on the box has to "hold fast." It is the same story in the lower city. People worry along the streets with their heads down, holding their hats with a firm grip; the peddlers and newsboys creep into the great doorways and stamp their feet ; and the big truck horses go by with steaming breath and waving manes. In freezing weather there can be no water used on the streets, and the dust accompaniment to the high wind can be readUy imagined. It sometimes blows in small clouds to the infinite disgust of everyone. There is nothing to do about it except to get indoors and watch, through the windows, the pavement swept smooth in spots and heaped with eddies of dust in other places. Fortunately such days are few. They are not pleasant — • no, not even in New York — though there may be some consolation in thinking that they occur in other cities (Vienna and Rome, for instance) quite as often as here. It is even charged that Chicago, with its appeUation of "the Windy City," goes beyond New York in this respect — something which every New Yorker is too modest to deny. Inevitably comes the snow ; and that in a city is always regarded as something of a misfortune. Up in the 50 THE NEW NEW YORK Central Park and along Riverside Drive it looks very beautiful. The children, the skaters, and the coasters, with those who have horses and sleighs, enjoy it, and people who have offices up aloft in the sky-scrapers and see it flying past the windows in great gusts and clouds are sometimes elated by it ; but down in the street where it falls and lodges it is neither inspiring nor welcome. It mingles with the dust, is churned dirty by hoofs and wheels, and, if it melts, soon makes a slush underfoot. The surface . cars with their electric brooms push it into the gutters, the "white wings" of the street-cleaning department heap it into huge mounds for carriages and trucks to wallow through and break down again, and carts work at it for days and weeks trying to get it away to the docks and so into the rivers. A week after a heavy snow-fall a dozen or more of the principal streets may be clear, but the side streets have barricades of snow along their curb lines perhaps for a month or more. Nothing but a warm rain and a spring sun clears up the thoroughfares effectively. In the meantime, through January and February and into March, with the alterna tions of temperature, the snow melts and freezes, making the cross-walks and streets disagreeable and occasionally quite impossible. And rain ! It does not rain every day or every week by any means, but when the wind comes out of the east, the storm clouds are almost always following close upon i . I4U& MM ... MPflW' Pl. 12. — Lower City in Mist SEASONAL IMPRESSIONS 51 its heels. Then the signs and weather-vanes and windows of the city creak and rattle in the wind, and the pipes and gutters gurgle with the rain. If it follow cold weather perhaps the rain freezes as it falls, coating with ice the pavements and stoops of the houses, the high sides of the sky-scrapers, the tall masts of the shipping in the rivers. The huge suspension bridges turn into fairy creations of spun glass, the trees in the parks glitter like old-fashioned chandeliers ; while down in the streets horses slip and motors slide and the pedestrian has difficulty in keeping his feet. As the rain continues the ice gradu aUy melts, the trolley wheels buzz and sputter electricity, the elevated roads spit long sparks of blue light from the third raU, the carriages go by with a splash, and the rub ber-shod, rubber-coated cab horse slowly pounds out a hollow clop-clop, clop-clop, clop-clop. Perhaps a night and a day and a night the rain falls in waving sheets that slash against the high windows of the office buUdings, and break into water-dust against turret and tower. The streets are flooded, the tide water, driven in by the wind, is. up to its highest pitch, the cellars along West Street are drowned out, and every pipe is working overtime in getting rid of the flood. Gradually all the dirty snow of many weeks' accumula tion seems to slip from the turtle back of the island and slide toward one or the other of the rivers. The city is washed clean. Before morning the wind shifts into the 52 THE NEW NEW YORK south, the clouds break; and when the sun comes up perhaps New York awakes to find that spring has arrived overnight. Spring apparently comes earlier to the city than to the country. The small parks shut in by high build ings, and thus protected in measure from the winds, respond quickly to the first warm sun. Even in the Central Park the grass shows green in the little swales a week before it starts into life up in Westchester, and the stems of the maple put on a ruddy glow some days sooner than over in New Jersey. Around the southern slopes of the rocks the crocuses and dandelions push up, and in the lowlands pussy wUlows begin to burst with impa tience. Nature turns uneasily in her sleep in the early days of March for all that there may be some patches of snow stUl lying in the hoUows. The bluebirds and song sparrows come back by ones and twos and threes, and the blackbirds and robins in flocks, to add to the sense of stirring life. New York itself seems to emerge as from a bath with a cleaner and fresher aspect. The cold blue haze of winter is now seldom seen. In its place there is a warm, silver-gray atmosphere that is more apparent, more of an envelope, more of a har- monizer of local hues. It seems to come out of the moist ground, out of the rivers, out of the harbors, and is possibly the residuum of spring mists and dews. The days of March and April are not wanting in sunshine, SEASONAL IMPRESSIONS 53 yet they also bring gray clouds and falling rain. The rain is welcomed in the parks, along the driveways, and in the less cleanly portions of the city. And it is inter esting to watch as it falls into the streets, or is seen in bright diagonal lines against the tall buildings, or splashes into the rivers and makes a bubbling surface, or hangs like a fringed mantle over the Palisades, over Brooklyn Heights, over the hills of Staten Island. How very beautiful the high ridge of sky-scrapers looks shrouded in that sUver-gray mist, their tops half-disappearing in the upper blend of rain and clouds, and around their bases the docks and shipping half-emerging from the lower mists ! What wonderful patterns, what mysterious appearances, these high buildings take upon themselves with their masses of light and dark floating in the heavy atmosphere of rain ! When the sky clears, the blue seems more intense than ever, the white clouds are dazzling in light and perhaps heaped into enormous mounds of cumulus; and the sunlight falls clear and bright on the white walls of the Metropolitan Tower, and upon Diana of the Bended Bow above the Madison Square Garden. The long wet streets steam in the sun, the soaked trees in the parks steam, even the wet cab horses, as they jog by, steam too. Gradually the city dries out, returning to its normal condition; but the Flatiron, which acts as a barometer for the people passing on upper Fifth Avenue, indicates 54 THE NEW NEW YORK that there is stUl considerable humidity in the air. A gray mist surrounds it. The time has come for jonquils and tulips in Union Square, and spring in New York is not very different from spring elsewhere. Gradually, and quite imperceptibly, the season slips on. The cumulus clouds heap higher and higher along the southern horizon, the grass turns a summer green down at the Battery, the trees break into full leaf up in the parks. The flower shops along the avenues are over flowing upon the sidewalks with bursting beauty; the East Side fire-escapes in spots are green and white and yellow with plants growing in cans; and up toward the Bronx and Pelham Bay, over in the borough of Queens, down on the hUls of Staten Island, the wUd flowers grow in the fields and woods, just as theydid in the dayswhen Peter Minuit bought the island of Manhattan from the Indians for sixty guilders, payable in goods of Dutch manufacture. And so the summer comes in — is ushered in usually about the middle of June by three or four days of heat. If accompanied by moisture in the air, its results are somewhat disturbing. The newspapers print lists of the heat prostrations, and the reporters delight in picturing the horrors of the hot wave with that wealth of adjec tive and height of caption peculiar to modern journalism. But the dangers are somewhat exaggerated. Those who use ordinary precautions are in no perU. As for the quality of the heat, it is not different from that which SEASONAL IMPRESSIONS 55 occasionally visits Paris or Berlin or Vienna. Still, it is not to be denied that in New York men and horses do drop here and there when the mercury mounts very high ; and those who do not drop are not having the most enjoyable time of their lives. Hot weather in New York is not more defensible than elsewhere, and those who can do so generaUy leave the city behind them in the summer season. But if the city is not so pleasant in July as in November, it is often more beautiful. Heat brings out color in its richest tints. The blue and the gray hazes disappear, and now the distant Flatiron, seen down Fifth Avenue, seems to float in a rosy atmosphere. During the long summer afternoons the high sky above it shows a pallid blue suffused with pink. Warm colors are in the clouds, and are reflected from the white buildings, the tall towers, the harbor waters, even from the roadways and drive ways along the rivers. It is on such summer evenings as these, when the western sky is flushed with hot hues, that the spires of St. Patrick's Cathedral, seen from Sixth Avenue, take on pink and red and yellow tones; and the high tower of the Times. BuUding runs from a red glow at sunset through pink, mauve, and lilac, until, with twilight gone, it settles into a blue that belongs exclusively to the summer night. These are the evenings, too, for the sky scrapers of the lower town to light up with strange hues 56 THE NEW NEW YORK along their peaks, and reflect fiery lights from their countless windows. The sun is a wonderful alchemist, and it works as busUy and as potently on the face wall of a sky-scraper as on the canyon walls of the Colorado or the snow caps of Monte Rosa. Unfortunately, the hurrying New Yorker is not in a mood to enjoy these summer color-changes. He is dis turbed in his comfort, he fumes and frets ; and as a result, he exaggerates both the heat and his own condition. He is not "roasted" or "melted," as he writes the famUy. In reality he often has a cooler and pleasanter summer in town than the family sojourning in a box of a hotel in the mountains or by the sea-shore. His house is usually large and airy, his office is high up in the region of the winds, and he has a thick-walled club where he seeks refuge in the evenings. With the huddled and packed crowds on the East Side it is somewhat different. They never go away, never get a vacation of any kind, except for a day on a recreation pier or on an excursion steamer down the bay; they have neither cool houses nor breezy offices. During the hot weather they Uve in the street, sleep on the roofs, and endure the heat in silence. They suffer without doubt, and yet their miseries cannot be put down solely to the climate. Peo ple when "cabined, cribbed, confined," cannot be very happy or comfortable though the bending skies above be those of Olympus. SEASONAL IMPRESSIONS 57 Aside from the very rich and the very poor there are the many thousands of neither high nor low degree, who endure the dog-days in the city, in shop and factory and office, perspiring and grumbling perhaps, but neither fainting nor faltering. By day they move along the shady side of the street, and by night they haunt some roof-garden or open-air vaudeville ; or perhaps sit quietly on park benches watching the water play in the foun tains, or the gentle swaying of the tree branches in the warm air, or the dark purple shadows of the foliage cast on the pavements by the electric lights. The various conditions of humanity, each in its own way, manage to live through the seasons as they come and go. Of course New York has its many short comings and does not lack for the knowledge thereof. It is charged with this, and indicted for that, and con demned for the other thing. But its climate is neither a failure nor a crime. It is merely a series of contrasts, like so many other things that one meets with in and about the city. THE STEEETS IN THE MOENING Pl. IV.— THE PLAZA \ % V- M mw/ CHAPTER IV THE STBEETS IN THE MORNING If those who originally planned the streets of New York had possessed enough imagination to foresee the down-town habit of the present day, no doubt they would have arranged matters differently. They fancied that the city would be a great shipping center, a seaport; and that people would need many streets running to ward the water on either side. Moreover, the long backbone of Manhattan, being high ground from which there was a general slope away toward the rivers, must have suggested that the natural drainage and sewerage of the city would be along the many ribs or streets run ning east and west. No one thought then that in a com paratively few years half the population would, morning and evening, be moving along the ridge of the island, crowding, clutching, struggling with one another, like so many ants traveling along the narrow top of a fence rail. A glance at the map will show the peculiar disposition of the land. And it will also show hundreds of streets running east and west from river to river; but, at its 61 62 THE NEW NEW YORK widest part (Fourteenth Street), only seventeen avenues running north and south, and the majority of these not available for through traffic. The map, when taken in connection with the accepted idea of most New Yorkers that business must be transacted within a stone's throw of WaU Street and living must be carried on in the neighborhood of the Central Park, wUl explain, readUy enough, why there is so much friction during the "rush" hours. Hundreds of thousands of human ants want to pass along the fence raU at the same time. The wonder is, not that some of them get hustled and pushed, and that many lose the polish of their boots and the sheen of their hats; but that more are not injured or kUled outright. The transportation of a mUlion or more people a day from one point to another along the high ridge of crowded Manhattan is no easy task. They say in London or Paris or Berlin, with a little air of superior experience, that they do things differently over there. True enough, but the chances are they could not do this kind of thing at all. The movement of these large bodies of people along the ridge begins early in the morning. From seven untU ten o'clock one may notice the drift of people in the side streets toward the main thoroughfares. Men hurry along for a block or so and then disappear down a sub way entrance, or up the steps of an elevated station, or they turn down an avenue to wait for a surface car. 1 • i.1r Pl. 13. — Broadway, Down Town THE STREETS IN THE MORNING 63 The surface lines along Third, Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh Avenues are always crowded with passengers from Harlem down as far as Union Square; but they are not usually taken by people who are moving toward the lower part of the city. They are not fast enough and are subject to being held up at every street crossing. The crowd in them is "getting to business" in the up-town stores and offices, or else is coming down from the region of the park to shop or travel or keep some form of engagement. It is a good-natured, long-suffering crowd, and submits to being packed, like cattle in a box car, without a mur mur. Long after the seating and standing capacity of a car is exhausted, the conductor keeps stopping for "just a few more." No one complains. Everyone has been one of the stopped-for, and knows what it means to be left standing on a street corner, perhaps in the rain. Finally the car is filled to the bursting point, and when a quick stop or a sudden start is made, the mass within, holding on by straps, rolls and sways like a lump of jelly. As for the crowds that choke the platforms without, they roll too, but regain their equilibrium by force of sheer bulk and iron railings. The conductor wriggles in and out among the masses, collecting fares, disarranging toilets, and elbowing people right and left ; but no one says anything in remonstrance. It is not that people fail to realize the absurd and the disagreeable in all this, but because they recognize the 64 THE NEW NEW YORK unavoidable. What use to quarrel about what cannot be helped ? They have to be at their posts at a certain hour, and there is no other way to get there. The service is inadequate, to be sure, but how can it be bettered ? It changes completely every few years in the endeavor to accommodate itself to the increased demand ; but the crowd keeps growing faster than human wit can devise larger and better means of transportation. The foreign visitor who stands agape at this packing of cars has not the smallest idea of the problem presented. It is not the moving of a few thousand people at leisure, but the carrying each day of nearly two million passengers in the • borough of Manhattan alone, and the bulk of them during the "rush" hours at morning and evening. The squeezed and jammed and jellied public knows something about this, and, sensibly enough, agrees to accept the inevitable. The volume of this up-town crowd of buyers, travelers, clerks, managers, typewriters, and shop girls that fill the surface cars in the early morning is by no means insignificant. It is really enormous, almost as great as the crowd that gathers in the neighborhood of Wall Street. For it is an exaggeration to say that all busi ness is done down town. There are many large banks, insurance companies, printing-offices and wholesale houses, to say nothing of the retaU shops, in the upper city. Then too, most of the railroading, manufacturing, and shipping is carried on along the upper east and west sides. Pl. 14. — Broad Street THE STREETS IN THE MORNING 65 And though all the surface cars in the morning going down town are filled to overflowing, the returning cars are not entirely empty. There are stray currents of humanity that help restore the lost balance — people who for one reason or another move in an opposite direc tion to the main streams. Harlem and beyond are not deserted when the Stock Exchange opens. Some busi ness, some traffic is going on all over the city, at all times. However, the main currents in the early morning set toward WaU Street and they find the lines of most resistance but of least time by way of the elevated roads and the subways. The crush on these through lines is simUar to that on the surface cars. Train after train hums and rattles its way into the station to find a long waU of humanity lined up on the platform ready to board it. There is a clank of gates or the slam of an iron door, a few apologetic-looking people respond to the guard's call of "Passengers off first"; then there is an "All aboard," followed by a steady stream of people pouring in at each end of each car. The gates slam shut, the signal cord is jerked violently, the train with its electric power responds with another jerk, and is quickly under way. After half a dozen stops the train is filled, and if it is an express it runs through to The Bridge or Rector Street or South Ferry ; if it is a local, it continues adding passengers, until the aisles and platforms are crowded, and people are hanging by straps as in the surface cars. 66 THE NEW NEW YORK It is the same good-natured, tolerant crowd, whether met with on the surface and elevated roads, or in the subways. It stands jostling, pushing, elbowing with the utmost composure, each one knowing very well that he himself cannot get in or get out without doing the same thing. It even tries to be indifferent, looks out of the window or, more often, hides its face in the morning paper, if the crush is not too violent for the use of its hands. But the morning paper is not taken very seriously. The head-lines are read, and by the time Franklin Street and Park Place are reached many a journal has found its way to the floor, and is left there by its owner. The passengers now begin to file off. At Courtlandt and Rector half the occupants have disembarked to the refrain of "Step lively, please"; and when the Battery and South Ferry are called there are few to respond. The guards make a frantic effort to gather up the stray papers, the ventilators are reversed with a slam, and presently the train is going north at high speed for an other load of passengers. The disembarked hastens downstairs to the street or scrambles upstairs out of the subway, as the case may be, and there it meets and mingles with the larger moving throng of the lower city. Whence came this greater throng ? How did it arrive here ? What was its method of transit ? To answer such questions one has only to remember that the island of Manhattan does not begin THE STREETS IN THE MORNING 67 to furnish houses and homes for all the people that do business in the city. There is a great host living on the outskirts, in the suburbs, within a radius of thirty miles of the City Hall, that comes and goes each day with more regularity than the tides in the harbor. This does not mean merely the contingent living to the north of the city in Westchester, or along the sound in Connecticut, though the representation from there is vast enough in propor tions to fill the trains from Forty-Second Street down to the lower city. The streams of humanity flowing from that water-shed are very large and yet apparently they dwindle into insignificance compared with what pours in from Long Island. Up through Brooklyn and along the great bridges there is continuous travel by trolley, motor, and foot, from early in the morning. Before nine o'clock the tide is at its flood. Around the New York exit of the Brooklyn Bridge the currents from many directions meet and mingle to make a veritable whirlpool of humanity that circles and eddies, foams and dashes, gets mixed up in a roaring swirl, then collapses in froth, dissipates, and finally trickles away in small streams to various points of the compass. Of course there is a blocking of traffic, and occasionally an accident, due to the rush off or on the cars, that pro duces confusion, excitement, loud protest, or angry denunciation. But this, 'though a not unusual occur rence, always leaves the pushed and hustled crowd more 68 THE NEW NEW YORK or less indifferent. Everyone knows that the thorough fares are insufficient during "rush" hours; but they do not know how matters can be helped. There is less of a crowd at the WUliamsburgh Bridge because it is not the most direct route to the lower part of the city. It is one of the ways by which those who do business in the middle Broadway region travel, and it contributes its sum to the mass that each morning moves into the city ; but it lends not directly to the con gestion of the lower town. StUl, though it is not a direct way, it adds something, like the ferries beneath it that keep coming and going from shore to shore. Time was when the ferries at South and Wall and Fulton streets were the only means of getting into the lower town from Brooklyn, and they were then, in the morning hours, often loaded with people to the gunwales ; but since the buUding of the new bridges and the opening of the Battery tube, they have been used but little. Eventually their occupa tion will be gone completely. Thousands upon thousands swarm into the city from Long Island. Bridges creak and ferries strain and tunnels roar with the weight of them ; and the rasp and shuffle of their feet along the decks, along the bridge approaches, and along the flagged streets help make that deep under- 1 The crush at the Brooklyn Bridge has been greatly reduced since the opening of the Battery tube in 1908. This has, for the time, diverted much of the South Brooklyn travel. THE STREETS IN THE MORNING 69 tone of the city to which the electric cars add the high note. Yet Brooklyn and beyond is only one source of intake. The shores of the Upper Bay, Staten Island, Coney Island, send up their quota by steamer and ferry-boat ; while from the Hudson, reaching far into the state, steamboats and railways are bringing down and disembarking more thousands to swell the throng. But the body of com muters that comes in from New Jersey is, perhaps, the greatest of them all. Probably four hundred thousand people is a moderate estimate for those who daily travel into New York from across the Hudson. It is nearer, no doubt, to half a mUlion. The local trains on all the railways through New Jersey are crowded from seven to ten in the morn ing, and the double-decked ferries that push and snort and whistle their various ways from shore to shore look black with massed humanity. Again, as on the East River side, there are long tunnels under the Hudson, carrying passengers in swift electric cars; and these are lessening the crush on the ferries for the time being, but it will not be long before both tunnels and ferries are once more inadequate. The population in New Jersey that comes and goes daily to New York is increasing by thousands each year, and the greater the ease in getting to town, the better the traveling facilities, the more people there are willing enough to live in the country in preference to the crowded quarters of the upper city. 70 THE NEW NEW YORK The traffic over and under the Hudson is already enormous, and what it will become a few years hence no one can even imagine. One meets with the same throng crossing the Hudson River that he finds in the subways and the elevated trains. It is not over-polite. There are men who get up invariably to give their seats to women, and others who always apologize for crowding or jostling a neighbor; but there are many who do neither the one thing nor the other. It is not so much want of manners as thoughtless ness. They are not thinking about their neighbors. They have their minds fixed on the day's work and are quite unconscious of anything in their surroundings, except the time that is being made. They stand or herd to gether on decks and platforms, like bands of sheep in a corral, waiting silently until the boat or train is in, the gates are opened, and they can hustle up the runways and get into the street. Delay is about the only thing that frets them, and to miss a boat or a train is usually con sidered legitimate excuse for profanity. Danger and disaster frequently follow upon this high- pressure speed, this unending hurry; but the average commuter by boat or by tunnel will not allow himself to contemplate the .idea of anything happening to him. He dodges like a mackerel in a school attacked by blue-fish, and thinks it will not be his turn just yet. The train comes to a stop in the subway or on the elevated and instantly a Pl. 15. — Ann Street THE STREETS IN THE MORNING 71 hundred windows go up and a hundred heads are thrust out, each one anxious to know what the delay is about. The block system may run up danger signals by the score, but the impatient mob within wants to know "why he (the engineer) doesn't go ahead." It is just so on the rivers. Fogs shut down and shut out everything a boat's length away, the bells are ringing and the whistles blowing ; but the mob on the decks, straining its eyes into the gray pall ahead, occasionally casts a glance toward the pUot-house and wonders why the boat is running under a slow bell. Every few minutes, even in fair weather, there is some craft crossing your bows or whistling shrilly that it intends to cross, and for you to "slack up." When your pilot whistles back that he rejects the proposal, that he wUl not "slack up," and the other craft can stop or take the consequences, there are plenty of people on the decks to murmur approbation. That is the proper spirit. No stop for anything. A collision ? Well, — they would rather run that risk than get to the office late. Through the ferry-houses, up the side streets, the mov ing, wriggling throng from New Jersey is shunted. It does not now bother with surface cars, for it is easier to get up toward the Broadway ridge by foot. It follows the sidewalks, fills them full to the curbstones, and winds on over gratings, around upright showcases, along iron steps, intent upon arriving at a certain place at a certain 72 THE NEW NEW YORK hour, and not intent upon anything else. Obstructions, such as packing-cases being loaded on a truck, or a belated ash-man rolling a barrel across the sidewalk, divert the throng, but does not stop it. It turns out into the street, goes around, and then resumes its accustomed flow. Hawkers of knick-knacks, toy venders, fruit and flower peddlers, newsboys, yell and shout at it, but it does not swerve. It does not care for noise ; but let some stranger, meeting another stranger, stop on the sidewalk to shake hands and talk for a moment, and instantly everyone is angry. The stream is backed up by meeting with a snag, and the chances are favorable for the snag-makers being pushed into the gutter. At any rate, they are quickly made to realize with Mr. Brownell that, "Whoever is not in a hurry is in the way." It is the realization that the crowd itself is "in the way" that leads many of its units to drop out of it at side streets and make longer routes by less frequented thoroughfares. Often the longest way round proves the shortest way to the office ; and there are many desertions from the throng that winds up Courtlandt or Chambers Street. However, the main body goes on and finally pushes into Broadway. There it mingles and is lost in the greater procession, some of which is going north, some south, and some plunging in front of trucks and trolleys in the attempt to get on the other side of the street. It is a swift and compelling procession. You move with it and at its set pace, other- THE STREETS IN THE MORNING 73 wise someone will be treading on your heels. In fact, to do as the crowd does, is almost compulsory. The objective point of the crowd is undoubtedly at Broad and Wall streets, though there is no lack of activity along Broadway between Fulton Street and the Custom House, or for that matter along Park Row or on Broadway above the Post-Office. Still, there is an eddy in the region of the Stock Exchange where men drift about in circles as though they had reached their destination ; and tow ards this eddy people on the side streets seem alternately drawn in and sent out by dozens and scores and hundreds. Those who come and go in and about "the Street," are not necessarily heavy operators on the exchanges. They may be only clerks and messengers, office factotums. Some of them may have no business at all and are drawn there only by the movement of the throng. It is even believable that a part of the eddy is made up of driftwood — derelicts that have been stripped and deserted and are now floating idly about in the strom. The unfortunates that wander penniless in the Casino Gardens at Monte Carlo make up a considerable percentage of the so-called "gay throng" there, and Wall Street has its numerous shorn lambs called "capitalists" or "brokers" that still stand in the street and bleat. They are all men. The women do some trading in stocks, too, but usually it is over the 'phone from up town. Petticoats in the lower city during business hours 74 THE NEW NEW YORK are, of course, seen, but infrequently as compared with coats and trousers. And usually they belong to stenog raphers and typewriters who are employed in the various offices. The majority of women living in upper New York never go down town from year end to year end. The whole lower part of the city is given up to men and their business. They are nearly all what are caUed middlemen, and their business is betwixt and between. Few of them are, in any sense, original producers. They are doing something "on commission " ; trading in stocks or cotton or pig-iron or petroleum, buying and selling for a percentage of the account. Even if they are selling tickets on steamers and raUways, or writing life insurance policies, or practicing law up a sky-scraper, they are stUl men working for fees and salaries — middlemen who adjust and make possible, but do not produce. So it is that the down-town crowd, as it winds hither and yon along the thoroughfares, is a peculiar crowd. On the surface it has little of the stronger if rougher element in it, — no mechanics in their shirt-sleeves, no stevedores, no miners, no mill-hands, no laborers. The immense foreign population of New York is not here in evidence, the negro is seen only occasionally, and such native types as the Yankee, the Southerner, the Missour- ian, the Californian, are not recognizable. In fact, it is a select, gentlemanly-looking, somewhat whey-faced multi tude that one meets with in the Wall Street region. Its Pl. 16. — Exchange Place THE STREETS IN THE MORNING 75 hands are white, its body is fragile but active, its head is large and somewhat feverish. It works chiefly with its head. It thus wears out its nerves and is threatened continually with hysteria ; but its tenacity and endurance are remarkable. It holds on, worries through, and in the end gains its point. As these people pass you on the street, dressed fashion ably, moving alertly, saluting each other half flippantly, you wonder if they can be the business men of New York who pUe up such wonderful statistics in banking, trade, and commerce. Yes; some of them. Of course, the great majority of them hold subordinate positions. They are book-keepers, managing clerks, salesmen, little brokers, hangers-on. The heads of corporations and large institu tions — the so-called "captains of industry" — get to their offices by different ways than the sidewalks, and spend little time wandering along Broadway or elsewhere ; but their lieutenants and under-officers, those who wUl some day become captains, show in the crowd. It may occur to you that these rather effeminate- looking, city-bred folk can know not a great deal about the larger aspects of manufacturing, commerce, and agri culture; that they must be ignorant of the practical workings of railways, steel mills, and copper mines; and that their trading in securities, their sale of grain and cotton, their handling of cattle, iron, and oU is all more or less of a guess and a gamble. Yes; but it might be 76 THE NEW NEW YORK dangerous for you to presume upon that. The New York broker knows the financial side of America very well indeed ; he is an excellent promoter and the cleverest of all commission men. It sounds righteous, and it is just now politically proper, to call him "a gambler" ; but it is not an accurate term. Nor is it genetically true. There are gamblers in New York, and on the exchanges, beyond a doubt ; but there are also thousands of straight forward men of finance without whom we should fare badly. The country needs its Wall Street to handle its enterprises of great moment. Are these then the representative men of New York? Yes and no. They are one kind of New Yorker, — the kind that figures with undue prominence perhaps in the newspapers, — but there are many kinds of people in the city. You shall not be able to point out the type, but you shall see many types. Among them the man in Wall Street is certainly to be reckoned with. He plays a very important part in the commerce and trade of the city. All told, perhaps the bankers of New York are the most powerful group of men on the western continent, and they certainly lend an atmosphere to the down-town district, if not to the whole city. DOWN TOWN Pl. V.— LOWER BROADWAY- ELECTION TIME CHAPTER V DOWN TOWN It is difficult to convince the average person from without that everyone who transacts business in lower New York is not a banker, a money broker, or in some way directly connected with the Stock Exchange. The tradition has gone abroad that the only trading below the City Hall is trading in stocks, and that "down town" really means "Wall Street." Of course, it is not so. The people about the Stock Exchange, and the folk that press along the narrow width of Wall Street from Broad to Broadway, give one an exaggerated impression. There is trading going on in and about these streets without a doubt, a great volume of it; but there are also other transactions, taking place in other places near at hand, that have little or nothing to do with securities — transac tions carried on by people who never go near the Stock Exchange and never trade in stocks of any kind. There is another impression abroad among strangers to the effect that most of the business of Wall Street is transacted on the sidewalk. The phrase "in the Street" has been taken too literally, as meaning that operators in 79 80 THE NEW NEW YORK the stock market carry on business involving millions in an unconventional shirt-sleeve manner whUe leaning against a lamp post, or smoking a cigarette in a restaurant. True enough, there are brokers who deal in securities on the sidewalk, securities of all kinds; and sometimes the transactions of this curb market are of some volume. And, true again it is, that the final word in a great "deal" may at times be passed by the head of one house to the head of another house whUe meeting casually in the street, or in some midday lunching club. But, generally speaking, business is not transacted that way. It is a little more formal, even in a great democracy. The bulk of sales are made indoors, on the exchanges. The crowd in the street means little more in barter and sale at the corner of Wall and Broad than along the sidewalk of Park Row or about Bowling Green. There are so many people pushing along the sidewalks, or hurrying from curb to curb in the lower city, that the superficial observer quickly concludes that all the world is afoot and moving. That is another common mistake. The great throng of humanity that pours into Broadway and its side streets must go somewhere, else it would speedUy choke up and fill the thoroughfares. As a matter of fact it begins to melt away as soon as it arrives. It disappears in side entrances, in hallways, down basements, up elevator shafts. Swinging circular doors, compressed air doors, slam doors, receive it. Iron wickets, steel gates, DOWN TOWN 81 bronze grilles, open and close for it. There is a slide and a click of the door, something like a long breath from the elevator, and almost before one can count his fingers he has arrived at the twentieth story. The number of people in the streets is enormous, but there are ten times the number seated on stools and chairs in the countless offices of the tall buUdings. The great crowd is within rather than without. The committee on the Congestion of Population has estimated that if all the people in all the lower city left their offices for the street at one time, it would require six layers of sidewalks like the present ones to accommodate them. It is not the sky-scraper alone that absorbs the multi tude, though it does its share. The old-time granite and sandstone "blocks," the iron-clads of the seventies, even the ramshackle brick buildings slipping away toward the rivers, do service in the providing of office room. And it is remarkable how very little room is required to do a very extensive and prosperous business — that is, if one chooses to judge by advertisement and letter-head alone. Desk space is at a premium everywhere, and a spot large enough to hold two chairs is often vantage ground sufficient for a Napoleon of finance to dazzle the back country with his weekly bulletin of "points" on Wall Street. But aside from such pretension there is a great volume of busi ness done in very small space in lower New York. The demand for quarters creates an exaggerated price, and Pl. V.— LOWER BROADWAY -ELECTION TIME ^^n^wB^^KdllllllmUi^mBtmmmssSSi 82 THE NEW NEW YORK "office rent" is a large item in the yearly budget of every concern. Yet, large or small, the office is a desideratum. It is headquarters, and there transactions receive their last analysis and are paid for. There are zones or districts in this lower town that seem sacred to certain kinds of business, and where other kinds do not flourish, practicaUy do not exist at all. It seems that by some social instinct, or feeling of mutual protec tion, the birds of a feather are disposed to flock together. The stock and bond people flock around Wall Street, which, of course, means a district more than a street, the produce brokers form another group around Bowling Green, the shipping agents gather along lower Broadway, the insurance men between Wall and the City Hall, the coal and iron men on Courtlandt, and so on. The nucleus in each case is usually formed by an "exchange" where operators meet to get information, and to give and take orders. The interest of these exchanges, to the visitor, largely hinges upon the apparently excited movements of the operators. The Stock Exchange is the one usually visited by the country cousins in Gotham, who sometimes come away with the impression that they have seen a lunatic asylum temporarily freed from the restraint of the keepers. The method of bidding, with its suggestion of insanity in the actions, looks, and cries of the bidders, seems as necessary to the Stock Exchange as hammering and noise to a boUer shop. It is not, however, so hysterical DOWN TOWN 83 or frenzied as it looks. Most of the cry is physical and has for its aim the recognition of the crier as a bidder. To those in the thick of the bidding it is often as matter-of- fact as the loud announcement of the train ushers in the raUway stations, or the street cry of the newsboys or fruit hawkers. Moreover (to shatter another delusion), the operators down below on the floor are not the Wall Street capitalists whose names are so familiar, and whose stock manipula tions are read about in the newspapers. On the contrary, they are merely the executants of orders, called "floor- brokers." Among them are "board members" of large firms, who are looking to it that orders are properly filled ; sub-commission men, who work for other brokers and take a slice of the commission; and "room traders," who are sometimes used as stalking horses by large firms to cover up their transactions. They are all either bulls or bears, and are intent upon lifting up or beating down the market, as their interest may lie. They make a great noise and transact a large volume of business; but the people for whom they are doing the business do not appear on the floor, are not seen. The Produce Exchange on Beaver Street and Broad way does for all manner of produce substantially what the Stock Exchange does for stocks. That is to say, its mem bers buy and sell, in a "pit" or depressed ring in the floor, wheat, oats, barley, corn, feed, flour, tallow, oil, lard, tur- 84 THE NEW NEW YORK pentine, resin — all manner of general produce. There is also a great deal of misceUaneous and contingent business transacted within the building. Sales of cargoes, arrange ments for shipping, lighterage, insurance, may be speedUy made and concluded without leaving the exchange. Reports from aU sources are collected and buUetined, quotations here and abroad are given, prospects of grow ing crops with daily and weekly receipts in New York, and stock on hand in London and elsewhere are announced. The volume of business continues to grow each year at an astounding rate. The exchange itself profits by this. It started in small beginnings, under the blue sky, on the sidewalk. It was not formaUy known as the Produce Exchange untU 1868, and it did not move into its present massive building untU 1884. Since then its membership has increased to several thousands ; and its influence upon trade and transportation has become most potent. The Maritime Exchange is closely connected with the Produce Exchange. Its business is to promote the mari time interests of the city ; and those who do business on or with the sea — agents, shippers, commission merchants, warehousemen, importers, brokers, marine underwriters, wreckers, ship-chandlers — are eligible for member ship. The exchange keeps records of the arrivals and departures of ships, their movements about the world, and their sudden exits by fire and storm. It also keeps tables of the imports and exports, regulates and reports Pl. 17. — Park Row Building DOWN TOWN 85 upon navigation and lighthouses, and promotes favor able river and harbor legislation. The Customs House and the Post-Office, as well as the newspapers, get much of the news about the come and go of shipping from this source. Akin to these exchanges are others dealing with the special needs and wants of special industries. The Consolidated Stock and Petroleum Exchange, among other things, affords every facility and every information for the sale and shipping of petroleum. Each year the sales there run up to something over a billion barrels. The Cotton Exchange on Beaver Street deals in everything connected with the cotton industry and the marketing of the product. The Builders' Exchange has to do with the buying and selling of all kinds of building supplies such as cement, brick, stone, and the like; while the Metal Exchange on Pearl Street, the Wool Exchange on West Broadway, the Fruit Exchange on Park Place, the Brewers' Exchange on East Fifteenth Street, the SUk Association, the Shoe and Leather Exchange, all serve a purpose in promoting business in those commodities. Then there is that old-time gathering of jewelers on Maiden Lane about the Jewelers' Board of Trade, with the pre-Revolutionary Chamber of Commerce now on Liberty Street, and a Fire Insurance Exchange on Nassau Street. Besides these centers, which act as magnets in draw- 86 THE NEW NEW YORK ing together the people directly interested in the various industries, there are spots or areas settled by people who have aUied or identical interests. On Park Row and about Printing House Square are scores of buildings devoted to the publishing of newspapers; about Grand Street there are blocks given over to the wholesaling of dry-goods, down in the hollow of Canal Street are many freight and passenger raUway offices, not far away are regions dedicated to shoes and leather, or groceries, or artificial flowers, or feathers and milliners' supplies. These spots, that sometimes cover many blocks, are, of course, broken here and there by interlopers in other businesses; and there are literally thousands of firms in lower New York that belong to no group and are not affiliated with any of the exchanges. There is hardly an important manufacturing concern in the United States that has not some sort of headquarters in New York below the City Hall, and hardly a great shipping or commission firm in any of the large towns that has not an office in the lower city. The great majority of these offices are merely brokerage places where transactions are financed or arranged for, but not where the commodities themselves are actually delivered. The buying or selling is "for the account," and may result in a delivery at some future time in some other place; or it may be that no delivery at aU is effected — the settlement being made by paying the Pl. 18. — City Investment and Singer Buildings DOWN TOWN 87 balance, be it profit or loss. The sales, however, where actual delivery at some time and place is made, as in stocks, bonds, steel, sugar, cotton, wheat, oil, dry-goods, leather, are very heavy. If the estimate of them were given in dollars, it would have to be in bUlions, for mUlions would be inadequate to express it. What "actual delivery" means in produce and manu factures, aside from delivery for domestic uses, is sug gested by the volume of New York's foreign trade. It is five or six times as large as that of any other Ameri can city, and amounts to nearly one-half of the whole foreign trade of the United States. Each year over three thousand steamers and a thousand or more sailing vessels come up the bay from foreign ports. They bring the bulk of the things imported into the country, whether raw materials or finished products. Cotton, linen, wool, sUk, furs worked up into wearing apparel, rubber, coffee, sugar, tobacco brought in crude and after ward refined or manufactured in New York, are the leading items. The city's export trade is even greater than its import trade ; but by comparison with other American cities, and considering the total exports of the country, it is not preponderant. Several large cities contend in the foreign shipments of wheat, corn, and barley, and New York handles only about one-quarter of the whole foreign consignment. Of animal products it ships fully one-half, 88 THE NEW NEW YORK but of cotton, again, only about one-tenth. Still, aU this when considered in relation to the production and trade of the country is of huge volume. Once more, if it be estimated in dollars, it must be in mUlions ; and, if the domestic trade of the city with the interior country and the coastwise commerce of the port are included, the figures must be written in bUlions. And even yet the "business" of the city is not half stated. No one seems to think of New York as a manu facturing town. It is considered a shipping port, a city of commission merchants and brokers, a place where wealthy people live because there is no soft-coal smoke as in Pittsburg, Cincinnati, or Chicago. A sooty air, blackened buUdings, clanging trains of cars, and long lines of mUl-hands in blue-jeans are not in evidence; therefore it is assumed that only a genteel book-keeping and profit-taking business goes on here. But not so. Under the blue sky and clear light of New York a larger and more valuable series of manufactures is produced than in any other city on the continent. Manhattan taken by itself, ranks first, and Brooklyn standing alone, ranks fourth in the volume and value of these manu factures. Neither of them beats into salable shape steel raUs and iron beams like Pittsburg, nor puts up for the market canned and salted meats like Chicago; but they manufacture hundreds of small articles used in households here and elsewhere about the world. DOWN TOWN 89 The item of clothing alone is something staggering in its figures. The large foreign population of Manhattan furnishes the necessary labor for this kind of work — much of it being done by piece-work in the tenements. The manufacture of cigars and cigarettes, of lace and miUinery goods, of feathers, toys, and miscellaneous gimcrackery, is also carried on by the tenement-house people. Then there is no end to the establishments that turn out furniture, musical instruments, electrical apparatus, tools, chemicals. The publishing and print ing of books and papers is also a large industry ; and the brewing of beers, the refining of sugar and molasses, the preparing of spices and coffees are probably the largest enterprises of all. In Manhattan the majority of these manufactures are carried on in small buUdings ; or, if large, they are so far from the usually frequented avenues and streets that they are not remarked. The west side of the city, below Thirty-Fourth Street, is dotted with them; there are many scattered through the east side near the river; and there are others to the north along the Harlem. The Brooklyn water-front again is lined with factories, Long Island City has many of them, and Staten Island is almost girdled by them. Everywhere in the sparsely populated boroughs of Greater New York that have water-fronts, factories have sprung up. They are not welcomed by any except the persistent money-getters, 90 THE NEW NEW YORK and, in fact, they are fast making New York unfit for residence; but they must be counted in summing up the city's resources. And so, for practical purposes, the great manufacturing interests on Long Island, along the Hudson, and over in North Jersey in towns such as Newark and Paterson, must be reckoned with as part of the city's wealth and business. That reckoning, once more, must be made in billions, for the miUion-dollar mark is not sufficient to indicate it. And we have not yet so much as thought of the vast retail trade of the up-town districts. This is not merely the supplying of the immediate wants of one section of New York by the people in another section of New York. It is something more than selling or trading with one's self or one's towns-people. The retail trade of New York reaches to all quarters of the United States. What it comes to in figures would be difficult to determine with accuracy ; but we shall not be far from the truth if we con tinue with our designation of bUlions. The word seems to smack of pretension or extravagance, but it is neither the one thing nor the other ; it is the simple fact. New York numbers its inhabitants by the mUlions, and it must have something higher than that whereby to count its capital and its earnings. Whether it is necessary that all the vast business interests of the metropolis, and of the country at large, should have offices down town under the lee of Wall Pl. 19. — Terminal Buildings from West Street DOWN TOWN 91 Street, is a question that needs little discussion. No doubt many of them would not suffer extinction if they had offices up town in the region of Forty-Second Street. The New York Times and The Herald have proved, at least, that there is no absolute necessity for newspaper enter prises being located on Printing House Square; and as much might be proved regarding the offices of shipping agents, insurance men, lawyers, and many others who now crowd the lower city districts. There is, however, an argument for the other side. It is a part of a banker's capital that he hail from Wall Street and have an office there, just as it is a hall-mark of quality, an insignia of respectability, for a jeweler to send his circulars out into the country from Maiden Lane. Moving up town, to many of these houses, would spell ruin, — or at least they so regard it. It would be a losing of identity. Besides, there is business convenience in close quarters and short distances. A central hive saves time and energy. And so strong has the down-town in stinct become that one might remove the very hive itself and still the bees would swarm on the platform where it formerly stood. Of course the come and go of the throng each morning and evening, the push and surge and scramble along the fence rail, are caused by the endeavor to get in or out of the hive. Of course, again, the necessity for accommoda tions for the tenants of the hive has made the ground space 92 THE NEW NEW YORK of the lower city phenomenally valuable. So great be came the value of that land a few years ago, that a bet ter utilization of it in buUdings grew to be a necessity. Out of that necessity came the much used and much abused sky-scraper, the tall buUding that everyone scolds about and yet finds too useful to get on without — the one architectural success in which America is wholly original and beholden to none. But the sky-scraper is of so much importance in New York to-day that it requires a chapter of its own. Pl. 20. — Little Flatiron, Maiden Lane SKY-SCEAPEES Pl. VI. -BUILDING A SKY-SCRAPER smAfloa-Yaa a oniajiua-.iv .jh CHAPTER VI SKY-SCEAPEES The story is told of a Brahmin philosopher, sitting with a friend in his walled garden, and jesting over the smallness of the enclosure. It was not very long nor yet again very wide; but how deep down it was, and what wonderful height it had ! The depth beneath and the space overhead were unavailable possessions to him. He smiled at what he owned yet could not grasp or utilize. But land values have radically changed in modern days, especially in America. Any one who owns a small plot of ground in a large American city need not smile over its height and depth, for those are now very valuable dimen sions. They can both be turned to profit, turned into very tangible assets. The clever modern has found a way of not only digging in the earth, but of rising into the air on pinions of steel and sustaining his altitude almost indefinitely in time and in space. It is a very cramped and limited region of New York that lies below the City Hall. It has always lacked elbow-room ; it has always been crowded. The mere sur face dimensions of it were exhausted years ago. That, however, did not stop the influx of people seeking office 95 96 THE NEW NEW YORK room there. To accommodate the continued and increased inrush from year to year various expedients were put forth. At first the land-owners began burrowing in the ground, fitting up quarters below the curb line, — quarters where business was carried on only by artificial light at noonday. That proved, however, scarcely a temporary relief. It was wholly inadequate. Following this ex pedient, or perhaps contemporary with it, there was an adding of stories upon the old foundations — an increase from, say, four to six and eight floors. But there were limitations to that. People would not climb flights of stairs; and, again, brick could not be laid upon brick indefinitely. The first objection was, in a measure, done away with by the invention of the passenger elevator. From 1860 to 1880 steam and hydraulic elevators were used, but it was not untU about 1888 that electric ele vators came into vogue. With the coming of the elevator the eight-story buUd ings began to pay better in their top floors than in their middle or lower ones. "High livers," so called, preferred the light and air up aloft. Everything began to rise with the elevator — buUdings, prices, ambitions, expectations ; but stUl the right planning of the modern office building had not been reached. The eight-story or ten-story struc ture of marble or brick was too heavy, too bulky in the waUs. As the height increased the foundation walls had to be thickened proportionately. To spread out at SKY-SCRAPERS 97 the bottom in walls was to lose the advantage gained in offices at the top. Again, the additional number of elevators required by the increased number of occupants began to fill up space and lessen the available floor area. Iron came into the construction and was used for beams ; iron pUlars superseded stone pUlars ; the bulk in the lower walls was thus slightly cut down. Shortly thereafter an iron core to carry the floors was used on the inside of masonry walls, and a double construction was brought about. Both shell and core were self-sustaining. And yet this new plan added only a few more stories, and left the larger problem stUl unsolved. The walls that had to bear merely their own weight soon began to thicken again at the base as the building grew in height. Brick, granite, marble, and even iron, alone or in combination, were found wanting. After a certain weight was put upon them, a certain height was gained, there came a danger line. What stronger, more durable, less bulky material could be used to carry into the region of twenty stories? The answer came back in plans for a structure of steel — something following the general design of a bridge truss standing on end with the strain so adjusted by brace and girder, that the whole weight of the walls and floors would be finally conducted downward by post and beam until brought to bear upon the rock foundations. The result of the plans was the modern sky-scraper. '' It must not be forgotten that necessity was the mother 98 THE NEW NEW YORK that invented and brought forth the sky-scraper. It was a device at first to utUize small plots of valuable, heavUy taxed ground, to make these plots not only more valuable, but more remunerative in rents. The steel construction is now used on large plots of ground because it has been found a cheap and profitable mode of buUding; but that came about as a growth from the original idea. In its inception it was designed to meet a more positive need, to make ten rooms where only one was before, and thus to increase revenue and render tax assessments less appaUing. The story of the conception and the buUding of the first sky-scraper in New York will Ulustrate this. The Tower BuUding on lower Broadway was the initial steel skeleton buUding erected in the city, and its architect was Bradford Lee GUbert. It was put up in 1888-89 on a plot of ground twenty-one and a half feet in width. There was a frontage on Broadway of that width, leading back to a larger space on New Street. Using the Broad way frontage as a mere entrance to the larger premises at the back was an extravagance which the Tower BuUding was designed to do away with. Mr. GUbert's plans caUed for a structure of thirteen stories (about one hundred and sixty feet in height) to stand upon this space of twenty-one feet. The enclosing walls were to be twelve inches in width and to bear no weight.1 The weight of 1 The space saved by these walls alone, so much thinner than the previous stone construction, afterward amounted to $10,000 a year in rentals. Pl. 21. — Sky-scrapers from Brooklyn Heights SKY-SCRAPERS 99 the walls and the floors was to be transmitted to the steel columns, and thus passed on down to the cement foot ings of the foundation. Of course there was objection to the buUding at once. Architects declared it unsafe and impracticable, and the newspapers said the plan was "idiotic." "When the actual construction of the building began," says Mr. GUbert in a New York Times interview, "my troubles increased tenfold. The mere suggestion of a build ing 2L| feet wide, rising to the height of 160 feet above its footings, fiUed everybody who had no particular concern in the matter, with alarm. Finally an engineer with whom I had worked for many years came to me with a protest. When I paid no attention to him, he wrote to the owner. The owner came to me with the letter. He was afraid the buUding would blow over and that he would be subject to heavy damages. My personal position in the matter and that of the Building Department that had given me the permit, never seemed to strike him at all. Finally I drew out my strain sheets, showing the wind bracings from cellar to roof, and demonstrated by analysis that the harder the wind blew the safer the buUding would be ; as under one hundred tons, under hurricane pressure, while the wind was blowing seventy mUes an hour, the structure was cared for by its footings and was safest. . . . "This seemed to satisfy him and we went ahead. One Sunday morning, when the walls of the building were ready for the roof, I awoke to find the wind blowing a hurricane. That gale is a matter of record in the Weather Bureau. With a friend, who had implicit faith in my plans, I went down town to the sky-scraper. A crowd of persons who expected it to blow over stood at a respect- 100 THE NEW NEW YORK ful distance to watch the crash. Janitors and watchmen in adjoining buUdings and structures across the street moved out. They were afraid of being crushed to death, and said unpleasant things about my steel buUding. I secured a plumb-line and began to climb the ladders that the workmen had left in place when they quit work the previous evening. My friend went with me as far as the tenth story. The persons who looked at us from below called us fools. When I reached the thirteenth story, the gale was so fierce I could not stand upright. I crawled on my hands and knees along the scaffolding and dropped the plumb-line. There was not the slightest vibration. The buUding stood as steady as a rock in the sea. . . ." x Since 1889 many steel buUdings have towered into the air, and many improvements have been made upon the original design. r To-day the sky-scraper is still regarded as the best means of making heavily taxed land profitable, though that idea has become somewhat merged in the general value of the buUding principle. The New Trinity BuUding on Broadway, though not the largest nor the highest in the city, is a good modern instance of the finan- 1 This was in 1889, and ten years later, so universal was the acceptance of the steel-constructed building, that the original model, the Tower Building, had become ancient history. That it might not be wholly forgotten, the Society of Architectural Iron Manufacturers of New York placed a tablet upon the building to commemorate its erection, giving the names of both the architect and the construction company that built it. It is worthy of note in passing, because it is suggestive of the swift transitions taking place in this new world, that the marvelous sky-scraper of 1889 is already doomed to be torn down to make room for a greater building, a greater marvel. SKY-SCRAPERS 101 cial side of the sky-scraper, and may be used here in illus tration. The plot of ground upon which it stands is two hundred and sixty feet long, with forty feet of frontage on Broadway and forty-seven feet at the rear on Church Street. This land alone, before the erection of the new buUding, was valued at $2,000,000. What is more to the point, it was taxed at that valuation. Under our system of taxation, taxes are not levied upon the income of a property, but upon the assessed valuation whether there is any income attached or not. In London, for instance, it is quite the reverse of this. A man owning ground on Piccadilly could turn it into a cow-pasture if he would, and pay taxes on its income as a cow-pasture ; but if he held the same amount of property in lower New York, he would have to pay in taxes something like two per cent on several mUlions of dollars. This turn of the tax would bring him face to face with one of, say, three propositions. He would have to put the land to a more profitable use than pasturing cows, or sell it to someone who could so employ it, or pay a hundred thousand dollars or more a year for the privilege of defying the inevitable. Our foreign friends, who greatly wonder why we cannot be content with five- or six-story buildings in the lower city, as our grandfathers were, fail to understand our system of taxation, faU to understand that the tax bill keeps mounting higher with increased valuations, and 102 THE NEW NEW YORK that the income must increase to meet it. The tax on the ground alone of the Trinity property had become so enormous that the income of the old structure could not meet it. Hence the old came down and the new went up — went up three hundred feet, untU one could, from its upper stories, look down on the spire of Trinity Church, that for so many years had been the high point of the city's sky line. The necessity for more room, the neces sity for a better utUization of the ground space, the neces sity for more rent money to pay increased tax bUls, aU combined to bring the new structure into existence. Between two and three mUlions of dollars were spent in the construction of the New Trinity Building. This, with its land valued at two millions, raised the gross valuation to about five mUlions of dollars. To meet the taxes and the interest charges upon this sum there are now some twenty-one stories that pay, on an average, twenty- three thousand dollars annual rental for each story'. The ground floor alone rents for seventy-five thousand dollars a year. A pencU and the back of an envelope wUl enable anyone, in a few minutes, to figure out the business success of the enterprise. Everything sooner or later resolves itself into a matter of finance, especially in New York; and things must "pay," otherwise they wiU not last for long. The cost of these huge structures makes rapidity in con struction something of a necessity. Five mUlions of doUars Pl. 22. — Working at Night on Foundations SKY-SCRAPERS 103 drawing interest at five per cent means a quarter of a million dollars a year ; and the sooner the building begins earning rentals, the better for those who have the financial end of the enterprise to carry. Hence the speed with which the average sky-scraper is erected. A few months at the most is often sufficient to see it in place, fully equipped, and occupied. This speed in construction is greatly facUitated by the peculiar nature of the building. Once the foundations are laid the erection of the steel frame is merely a matter of bolting and riveting so many beams, girders, cantUevers, and brackets. This work can usually be carried on in many places at the same time, and large forces of men can be employed in day and night shifts. So it is that there is some truth in the common exaggeration that sky-scrapers are put up overnight. One can actually see the steel platforms grow from hour to hour as they lift higher and higher into the air. The frame of steel is the core of the building. It is the only thing that bears or carries any weight. Every thing that is put on afterwards is fastened to or hangs from this skeleton — with the possible exception of one or two stories at the bottom which, in their walls, may bear their own weight. The upper walls, whether of brick, terra-cotta, cement, or stone, depend from the steel structure to which they are attached by brackets. They may give the impression of being self-supporting, they may beguUe one into thinking that back of the walls 104 THE NEW NEW YORK is solid masonry; but they are only so much shield to keep out the weather. Just so with the floors, windows, balconies, cornices, raUings, roofs. They are not sup ported by the walls from below, but by steel brackets or trusses from within. With such a novel building principle it is possible to place the outer walls on the twentieth story before those of the first story are started, or to put up the roof before the window frames are in. The foundations are the vital spots of the building. Hence the necessity for their being sunk deep to bed-rock. Some of them go down nearly a hundred feet underground. This is compulsory because lower New York is underlaid with beds of sand and ooze from ten to eighty feet thick. The caisson method of working through them is employed. Air-tight, bottomless boxes are driven through the drift (the water being kept out by compressed air) to bed-rock and afterward filled up with cement. It is upon these cement piers that the columns of the sky-scraper rest. The foundations being difficult to buUd are often items of great expense, costing sometimes half a mUlion dollars for a single building. The weight they bear is enormous. The steel structure of bolted plates may look light and fraU at a distance, but some of the larger buUdings have upwards of twenty thousand tons of steel in them, which is by no means an insignificant figure. The waUs, cornices, and roof differ in weight according to the mate- SKY-SCRAPERS 105 rials used ; and, inasmuch as they have only to hold on, they are not a great problem to the buUder, though of importance to the architect. There are other figures, used in connection with these buildings and their detaUs, more amazing than those of cost or foundation or weight. The newspapers love to juggle with them, and to show by pictorial Ulustration how much higher are the steel structures than, say, an ocean- steamer placed on end ; or to figure out how many acres of ground their floor space would cover, or how many scrubwomen are required to keep the windows clean. The very high buildings are the ones that usually bristle with these statistics. The Singer Building, for instance, in addition to having its foundations ninety-two feet below the curb, rises above the curb in forty-two stories to a height of six hundred and twelve feet. Its outer walls are of terra-cotta, metal, and glass — great areas of glass. It is more of a tower than a building; yet, even so, it has over 400,000 square feet of floor space. In sheer altitude the tower of the Metropolitan Building on Madison Square goes beyond it. This is some seven hundred feet in height, rising in fifty stories, far above its own main buUding, — rising, indeed, like a beacon tower or light-house above all New York. There is no reason to think, however, that it will long retain its preeminence. A thousand feet are almost as easUy attained as seven hundred. It is not a question of 106 THE NEW NEW YORK engineering, but of finance, that is to be considered.1 If stUl higher buUdings wiU pay, they wUl probably be buUt. In office capacity the high towers are not so remark able as the buildings of more bulk and less altitude. The City Investing Company BuUding is only four hundred feet in height and has only thirty-six stories, but its floor area is 686,000 feet, and there were seven teen thousand tons of steel used in its construction. In sheer "bigness" the Terminal Buildings on Courtlandt and Church streets go beyond this. • The two buUdings stand linked together by a bridge like Siamese twins and are twenty-one stories in height. Their foundations are seventy-five feet below the curb, and in this deep ex cavation are placed the terminal stations of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, which operates the Hudson tunnels in connection with a subway on the west side of New York. The superstructure required twenty- six thousand tons of steel and provides eighteen acres of floor space, four thousand offices, thirty-nine passenger elevators (twenty-two of them express cars), five thousand windows, thirty thousand electric lights; and no one knows how many janitors, engineers, firemen, locksmiths, 1 There has been a proposal recently made by the Building Code Re vision Commission that a limitation of 300 feet for a sixty-foot street and 135 feet for a forty-five-foot street be imposed upon the high build ings; but this, if adopted, will not check the sky-scraper, except on the alleys and very narrow streets. '¦'¦ ., ... '¦ . Pl. 23. — Among the Tall Buildings SKY-SCRAPERS 107 glaziers, painters, plumbers, to keep it running properly. It called in all the trades to build it and needs a great many of them to continue its existence. It might be added in parenthesis that the services of a financier are also needed to look after the items of rents and repairs — especially the latter. The wear and tear upon a sky-scraper are quite as astonishing as the other things in connection with it. Almost all of these high buUdings are supplied with the conveniences of a city, and one can live in them indefi nitely without going out for food, clothing, or lodging. Besides offices, they contain stores, clubs, restaurants, bachelor apartments, barber shops, cigar and news stands, boot-cleaning establishments, baths, safe-deposit vaults, roof gardens — everything except vaudeville, and even that is a possibility of the near future. Moreover, each one of them contains the inhabitants of a city. In the larger ones there are from six to ten thousand tenants; and from 50,000 to 100,000 people pass in, or through, or up and down them in a single day.1 Of course, aU the tenants and their thousands of clients and customers require gas and electricity, private tele phones, hot and cold water, electric fans in summer, and steam heat in winter. The mechanical devices for supply ing these are ingenious to the last degree. For instance, in the matter of heat, where so many men have so many 1 The new Whitehall Building promises to surpass even these figures. 108 THE NEW NEW YORK opinions, there is a device in the newer office buildings whereby each room is supplied with a heat indicator, and aU one needs to do is to turn the pointer to the required number, 60, 70, or 80 degrees Fahrenheit, to have the heat at that temperature in a few minutes. As for such other features of life as meals, messenger boys, cabs, and service in general, one touches a button as in a hotel or a house. If there is one thing above another that makes the sky scraper possible, it is the elevator. Without it the in habitants of the top stories would have to climb the mountain each morning, and descend it each evening — something no man or superman could or would do. The elevator is the central pulsing artery of the whole steel structure; and it is a very rapid pulse in the bargain. For the first ten stories you move slowly if you get into the local elevator stopping at each floor ; but, if you are bound twenty-five stories up, you travel by the express elevator and the first stop is perhaps the eighteenth or twentieth floor. You enter the car and when it starts perhaps there is a feeling that your stomach is not accompanying you, so rapidly does the car get under way. When the car stops, it is again so suddenly that you feel as though the top of your head were continuing the journey without you. When you go down again, the top of your head threatens to part company once more; but you are landed at the street entrance as softly as SKY-SCRAPERS 109 though borne upon zephyrs and clouds — thanks, perhaps, to the air cushion. The elevator is indeed the genius of the sky-scraper as it is the incarnation of the get-there-quick idea. Rapid transit never had a more exemplary exponent. It works swiftly, silently, and to all appearances uncomplainingly and everlastingly. Each sky-scraper has from six to thirty of these shuttles that fly backward and forward, taking up and setting down passengers ; and in the course of the day carrying many thousands of people. Nothing is more amazing to the stranger in down-town New York than to see the cool and yet swift way that tenants of the high buildings load themselves into these steel cages. There is nothing said but "Up" or "Down" by the ele vator boy; and nothing said but "Tenth" or "Thirty- Second" or some other floor number, by the passenger; but everyone understands, steps lively, shrinks when the elevator is crowded, expands when it is empty, and makes as little of a nuisance of himself as possible. If it were not for this perfect understanding of sky-scraper machinery and the recognized ethics of the crowd, there would be instant confusion. Such high buildings as the Singer, the Park Row, the St. Paul, the Trust Company of America, use elevators as a necessity rather than a convenience; and there is required some concerted action on the part of the passengers to make them successful. /Not in lower New York alone do the tall buildings 110 THE NEW NEW YORK with their swift elevators crop out, though they are more concentrated there than elsewhere in the city. All over the borough of Manhattan they are to be seen. /They are not only expedients to utUize extra-valuable real estate, but are in themselves cheap and durable buUdings and ordinarUy profitable investments.1 The steel skeleton is to-day used in almost all the large hotels, apartment houses, clubhouses, printing shops, department stores, wholesale houses, and even factories./ From the Battery to Harlem and beyond these tower-like buUdings keep breaking above the whUom sky line like jonquUs above the grass of a spring lawn. The parks of the city are surrounded by them, Union and Madison squares, with the Plaza, are dominated by them, Broadway, dwindling away into the north, stUl has echoes of them ; and Fifth Avenue, with its twin pylons, the St. Regis and the Gotham, already in place, will soon become a canyon like Broad Street or lower Broadway. Everywhere they are safe, serviceable, absolutely necessary buUdings ; and it may be added that eventu ally people will find them not wanting in beauty. Just now many of them seem to stand like guideposts, showing where and how the city is to be buUt, and what the level of its new roofs. Naturally they look out of scale, and very much too high when compared with the older 1 The Baltimore fire and the San Francisco earthquake proved the steel building far safer and more lasting under storm and stress than either brick or stone. Pl. 24. — Post Office and City Hall Park SKY-SCRAPERS 111 buUdings; but when the empty spaces in between are filled, the Flatiron and the Times Building, with the Metropolitan Life and the Plaza Hotel, will not appear out of proportion. Tremendous in scale they are, certainly ; but then that is the New York that is to be. / THE NEW CITY Pl. VII. — NEW YORK TIMES BUILDING CHAPTER VII THE NEW CITY The steel structure has not gone on its way soaring into the empyrean without being challenged, criticised, and denounced. Every Frenchman that comes to us shrugs his shoulders over the "skee-scrapaire," and looks unthink able things, though he may say nothing; our English friends are usually frank enough to assure us that we are architecturally demented ; and even Madame Waddington and Mr. James, one-time Americans, return to us after many years to tell us that the high buUdings are "hideous." That is not the worst of it. Many New Yorkers entirely agree with them, and can find nothing good to say of the new city. They talk much of the sordid and commercial spirit (and there is much to be said against it), they speak of the destruction of the old things, — old streets, houses, churches, graveyards, — and they hark back a great deal to the old city and the good old times. They have always done so, in the past as in the present, quite ignoring the fact that time was never so old and never so good as just now. There has ever been an objec tion to both the innovator and the innovation. People 115 116 THE NEW NEW YORK become attached to things, to conditions, to environ ments, and they dislike any disturbance of the status quo. It is not that the things are necessarUy good or bad, but that they are, that they exist, and that we have become accustomed to them. Instinctively we love the broken path, and fall into ways of acting and methods of thinking from which we would not be jostled in the name of change or variety or progress. Mr. James, returning to New York after twenty years, misses what he left when he went away, and wonders that the city has changed. During his absence he has been accustomed, perhaps, to the streets of London, and he is somewhat surprised to find those of New York so unlike them. But what came he forth to see, a conventional city, a model of regularity, a place where people carry on the affair of living as becomes a luxurious upper class? Why was it to be supposed that history would repeat itself and produce on this continent, under entirely different conditions, another Vienna or Paris? Why is it that people seek here the Place de la Concorde, or the Ringstrasse, or Trafalgar Square? Nothing in our history or our social state or our commerce has called for such places; and yet, having seen them elsewhere, people think them necessary parts of every city and marvel that New York lacks them. It should be insisted upon again that New York is not primarily a place of residence, nor a center of govern ment ; but a city of commerce. In Paris people live over Pl. 25. — Looking down Madison Avenue THE NEW CITY 117 the shops in the busiest streets of the city ; and, at best, the exclusively residential portion along the Champs Ely- s6es, and in the region of the Arc de Triomphe, is neither very extensive nor very far removed from the Boulevard des Capucines and the Avenue de l'Op^ra. Again, the Strand and Piccadilly and Mayfair seem to be one, and even the Bank district of London is not wholly deserted of houses where people live. But not so New York. Its people, perhaps unconsciously, recognize that it is not a place to live in, and hundreds of thou sands doing business there live out of it, have homes on Long Island or in Westchester or over in New Jersey, and come to the city each morning and leave it again each evening. Even those who stay in town and have homes therein try to put as much distance as possible between their houses and their offices. Below Canal Street, and practically below Union Square on either side of Broad way running south, there are business buildings only. No one lives there except care-takers and their families, perched upon the roofs of the high buildings, or occupying quarters in the basement. The things that make for pleasure, for comfort of famUy or home, for restful scene and quiet stroll, are not wanted there ; they would, in fact, be in the way and more or less of a hindrance. The lower city is a shop or office, is fitted up solely with an eye to trade, and is given over wholly to business. The residential section of New York has been pushed 118 THE NEW NEW YORK farther north year by year untU now, with some excep tions, such as the Washington Square region and its adjoin ing side streets, the southern line is drawn at, say, Twenty- Third Street. There is a tendency to gather east and west about the Central Park or along the Riverside Drive. Of course, on the extreme sides of the lower city, both east and west, there are vast tenement-house districts thickly populated; but these are not, in any general sense of the phrase, "the residential portions" of a city. Moreover, those things that Mr. James feels the lack of in New York, he would not expect to find in the lower quar ters of London or Paris. The slums are not the places in any cities that are pointed out as restful or homelike or samples of civic beauty. Even in the best quarters along the east side of the Central Park our French and English friends wiU find nothing that reminds them of the square houses of Hyde Park, or the monotonous gray-stones of the Champs Elysees. Time was when the streets of upper New York wore a dull garment of chocolate-brown, and were as sedate and as uniform as the spirit of 1850 was prosaic. But all that has largely disappeared with the new era, and in its place there are infinitely varied houses of brick, stone, and marble. The great wealth of the city is throwing off an ornate efflorescence in its up-town houses, just as the com mercial wealth of Florence centuries ago reared splendid palaces along the Arno ; and just as that of Buda-Pesth k J j Pl. 26. — Metropolitan Museum and Eighty-Second Street THE NEW CITY 119 or Bucharest is doing to-day in its florid rendering of the art nouveau. It is picturesque and quite appropriate to the commercial center of the western continent ; but it is not at all like the picturesque of Whistler's London or Balzac's Paris. That, it seems, is the chief grievance of our critics. The city is not like other cities, therefore it must be very bad. "Hideous" is a word that seems to apply exclusively to things modern; and when the old things were new things, undoubtedly it was applied to them, too. A city or a nation in its art should represent itself, — its people, its industries, its life, — and should do so sincerely and sanely. There could be neither honesty nor common sense in erecting the towers of Westminster down town in New York, or the Madeleine or St. Peter's up town. We already have enough and to spare of these imitations. The Giralda tower of the Madison Square Garden, for instance, is an attempt to plant the old in the new ; and yet what purpose does it fulfill ? It has at its top neither bells nor clock nor muezzin to call to prayer, nor at its base any chapel, church, or sanctuary in which to pray. Unlike its Seville original it is only ornamental, and has not the saving grace of being useful. However, it is perhaps justifiable on the plea that it dominates a place of amusement and is what it was designed to be, "a drawing feature." But how or in what way does it represent New York or its people? And what does it 120 THE NEW NEW YORK express in art more than a certain eclectic cleverness in its designer? On the contrary, the vilified Flatiron, facing on the same open square, does represent the commercial spirit of New York, whether people like their commercialism flung in their faces in that way or not. It stands for com mon sense, and is a very proper utilization of a most valuable triangle of ground — one of the most valuable in the upper city. And it is not unjust in proportions, nor wanting in fine angle lines and sky lines ; whUe seen from upper Fifth Avenue through the mist of evening it is a wonder of color, light, and shade. Of course any dog can be given a bad name, and the Twenty-Third Street buUding was not improved in public esteem by being called a flatiron, nor again by being likened to an ocean steamer with all Broadway in tow. But the smile .and the laugh should not confuse our estimate. The Flatiron is a representative New York building; and, whUe making no great ornamental splurge, it fills its place admirably, and will be considered not the least successful unit in the colossal quadrangle that will some day hem in Madison Square. The Flatiron and the New York Times Building stand apart, each occupying a given space of ground and un related to other buildings by party walls. The street is their boundary on every side and they are complete in themselves. They do not yet look quite as they should, THE NEW CITY 121 because standing isolated; but, when the adjoining blocks and the streets around them are built up with sky-scrapers, the relationship will be apparent. Yet even in their present surroundings they are seen at a better advantage than the majority of the new buildings. Many of them rise to twenty stories with only the street wall in presentable shape. The other three faces remain, as a general thing, in a loose-end condition, waiting for the owners on either side to erect structures and thus shut out from view raw partitions and unfinished surfaces. It is in this condition that people see so many of the down town buUdings, and upon the impulse of the moment break out in superlatives about the "hideousness" of the new city. This judging of the picture by the half-finished sketch, and without sufficient imagination to see the work com pleted, results in many misconceptions. And then, again, in such swiftly constructed buildings, planned in a month and put up in less than six months, there must be necessarily much that is deficient, false, or hopelessly bad. It could not be otherwise. And still again, the architect has been confronted with new demands, which it has been necessary to meet in new ways. There have been arbitrary and exacting conditions imposed by the financial and architectural phases of the new building — conditions that have never arisen before in architecture or in building. 122 THE NEW NEW YORK A condition placed upon the sky-scraper at the start was that it should rise verticaUy, for practicaUy its whole height, without receding from or protruding over its street line. The buUding laws of the city would not permit of the latter, and the value of space would not aUow of the former. To recede from the line with stories or columns or windows, or to taper away at the top in any form, would be to lose the very space sought to be gained. Of course, the insistence upon the vertical line from street to cornice meant an enforced monotony in the waU space. How should the architect overcome that diffi culty ? Nothing in the architecture of the past seemed of any practical service in planning this new buUding. In fact, historic precedent was, and stUl is, something of a stumbling block in sky-scraper construction. The allur ing Greek temple with its waste of space in projecting portico and columns, the cathedral with tapering spires and towers, the pyramid with receding platforms, were not the proper models. Breaking the structure into three pieces on the principle of a column, with foundation, waU space, and cornice corresponding to base, shaft, and capital, again would not answer. Even the campanUe principle, though pointing the way, was just a Uttle beside the mark. The very nature of the structure with its space-saving requirements fought all of the old forms. Not but what they were tried, and some of them stiU i : " jfHj | Pl. 27. — West Street Building THE NEW CITY 123 in process of trying. Venetian palaces were elongated, Roman arches were drawn out of all recognition, Norman castles rose to phenomenal heights; but these contorted structures were far from satisfactory. The maj ority of the buildings, however, rather held by the three-part principle of Roman or Renaissance architecture, with the base, shaft, and capital of the column as controlling motives. In the average sky-scraper of this latter type one or more stories of the basement were heavily constructed or pushed out as a foot, a projecting cornice was used to emphasize the roof, and the intermediate space was broken with ornamental string-courses, bayed windows, high pilasters, or columns upholding ox-bowed windows covering several floors in height. This was little more than an adding-up or a pulling-out of the ordinary four-story building. It was, moreover, a strain at holding the buUding together ; and, by the use of the horizontal line emphasizing the separate stories, it was an attempt to minimize the height. In other words, the architect was apologetic about his buUding ; he was trying to make people believe it was not such a bridge truss on end, not such a sky-scraper, after all. This proved something of a mistake, and New York learned (or is in process of learning), of its mistake from Chicago. The credit of devising a better design belongs to the western architects. Instead of deprecating the height of the steel building, they emphasized it by using 124 THE NEW NEW YORK the vertical instead of the horizontal line. The foot of the building was made only a slight projection, the cornice was cut down or changed into a raUing or balcony that sometimes hid the roof, and the intermediate space was broken by climbing pUasters, corresponding in size to string-courses or half-round mouldings, that divided the windows up and down instead of across. The vertical line, instead of fighting the height of the buUding, accented it, gave it aspiration, dignity, and withal light ness and a semblance of honesty — the very things in which the first sky-scrapers were lacking. The West Street BuUding, designed by Mr. Cass GUbert, is a good example of the more modern structure using the vertical instead of the horizontal line. The effect of it is to carry the eye upward, to increase the height; and, finally, to allow definition to be lost in a mystery of ornamental window caps, cornices, and terra-cotta pin nacles. Perhaps there are too many of the latter in Mr. GUbert's building; but then, ornament has from the beginning been something of a snare to the sky-scraper architect. If applied just for diversion, it is usuaUy bad. There is ordinarily too much of it — too much variety as well as quantity — and it is perfectly apparent to the passer-by that it is put on merely to break the sameness of the facade. It is good only when it helps out the con struction or the architectural conception. If a series of columns, or jutting string-courses, or ribs of stone, or Pl. 28. — Singer Building — Early Evening THE NEW CITY 125 embayed windows can be used with architectural signifi cance, they may be very successful. So, again, there may be a proper ornamental filling of space in decorated cornices, or sculptured keystones or geometrical ara besques ; but there is always danger lurking in them — the danger of destroying solidity and simplicity by too much tracery and garnishment. There is the possibility of error, too, in the choice of stone or terra-cotta or brick or other weather-shield material used for the walls. The earlier attempts at producing an appearance of solid stone-walls, by deceitful veneers of granite or cement pilasters, were never good. Just now there is a disposition, or a desire, at least, upon the part of the architects, to exploit the airiness of the steel structure; but they are at some loss to know just how this shall be done. The Eiffel Tower gives the desired effect, but it would not make an office building ; it is not enclosed. The Singer Building is an enclosed tower, but the quantity of glass used to enclose it, perhaps, makes it look too fragile. Again, in the treatment of the wall space between foot and cap there comes to the architect the question of color. How can this be employed to break the vertical monotony? Can tiles, or terra-cotta, or different-hued bricks be used effectively in geometrical patterns? Is it desirable or practicable to have the walls painted ? Given several hundred feet of upright wall broken only by 126 THE NEW NEW YORK windows and pUasters, and what is to be done with it? How shall you make it look attractive and yet dignified ? All these questions are asked and answered in an individual way about every new steel buUding that is sent up. It has been generally assumed that the buUders of the sky-scrapers were money-makers pure and simple, — men after the dollar and caring nothing for appearances, — but such is not the case. They, with their architects and engineers, are very much concerned with the aesthetic side, and wish their buUdings to please the eye from without as well as to fill the pocket-book from within. Good form with color and ornamentation are things sought for. The attempt to produce them, which is apparent in almost every high buUding in the city, is sufficient evidence of the desire to have them. Admitting failure with them in many cases, and stUl success in perhaps as many more cases, shows that they are possibUities, and that eventu- aUy they wUl become established actualities. But the worry of the public, and the critics, and our returned compatriots, is perhaps centered less on the archi tecture (or its lack) in the new buUdings, than on their incongruity when seen with the old buUdings. They do not belong to the same school or style or epoch; they break in upon the present arrangement with a disagreeable jar. And yet, it is stUl within the memory of man that similar things were said about the tall towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. They, too, were once "hideous' ,» . THE NEW CITY 127 but gradually as the city has grown up to them they have become orderly, contiguous, related, affiliated. Eventu ally, perhaps, the new buildings wUl not be out of harmony with the old, because there will be little of the old left. Not that New York is to become an unbroken stretch of sky-scrapers. Many of the larger and older structures wUl undoubtedly remain. Not that all the tall buildings wUl be of a size, a style, or a color. There will be as great a variety in them as in the buildings they have superseded. And just as many inconsistencies along the line of contact. Why not? What strange theory of civic art taught us that uniformity in buildings made the city beautiful? It sometimes makes the dull city, as Madrid, for instance ; but it never made the wonder and surprise of Buda-Pesth, nor the unique charm of London. Variety does not mean necessarily antagonism. The Gothic does not clash with the Renaissance except in the theory of the partisan advocate. The Piazzeta at Venice is one of the most charming spots architecturally in all Europe, but what a variety of styles are grouped about it — the Byzantine S. Marco, the Gothic Doge's Palace, the classic Library of Sansovino, the mediaeval campanile, the composite Loggetta ! 'One by one as these structures went up, there were doubtless Venetians who groaned in spirit and declared the last addition to be the ruin of the city architecturally; but time has proved them wrong. There is no incongruity or want of harmony in the group. 128 THE NEW NEW YORK Nor wUl there be incongruity in the buUdings of the new New York, save as people for purposes of advertise ment or through absurdity, perpetrate the bizarre or the ridiculous. There is, to be sure, a sharp contrast between, say, the Metropolitan Life Building with its tall tower on Madison Square and the smaU green-and-yellow version of a Roman temple near by that is doing service as a Christian church. Both buildings are new and bad enough — the one in its want of proportion and its over- ornamentation, the other in its mixed imitation of the Roman Pantheon and the Kiinstler-Haus at Buda-Pesth. The larger one wUl possibly some day be blurred and blended by weathering until it fits in the square and meets the structures about it. Nor will the smaller one faU as a picturesque foU to its surroundings; but it will always be a terra-cotta protest against its marble neigh bor, a green frog raUing at a white giraffe. It was put forth to attract attention — and it does it. But, aside from advertising and fads of fashion, there is no reason why different styles of architecture should not harmonize with each other ; and this, too, without any preconceived plan to meet and match. The idea that a square or street or city needs to be exactly scaled and designed that its buUdings should not quarrel, is the latest theory of civic artists ; and, no doubt, if an agreement as to style and plan could be reached by all the land-owners of a given space, the result might be more uniform. Yet I / f THE NEW CITY 129 ( there is danger»in the exact plan. Such a uniformity with monotony is £till visible on some of the side streets of up-town New York where the old blocks of brown-stone fronts remain. Berlin is built somewhat in that style, and there are many miles of Paris that are deadly dull because wanting in variety. But the question is wholly academic. In a demo cratic city like New York people will build as suits their individual interests; and after all there is compensation in that. The great majority of squares and streets and towns — those that we admire to-day — were not planned. One thing after another was pushed in to fill a need, first a tower, then a church, then a town-hall, or a monument; untU finally a Piazza del Duomo, a Dresden Theater- Platz, or even an English Oxford, was the result. This grouping by necessity or for convenience has in the past proved quite as good, and even more interesting than the rectUinear laying out of a Louvre, or the formal grandeur of a Viennese Franzen-Ring. At least the result is not stUted, icily regular, splendidly null. It has the ap pearance of something constructed for use, not for looks, and it also suggests the story of progress.1 The future wUl no doubt see the same law of use, 1 That there are arguments for the formal city is not questioned. I my self have elsewhere used them. But why not admit that there may be arguments for the informal city also ? It is the old contention of the classic against the romantic, of form against color. But why not beauty in both? 130 THE NEW NEW YORK unconsciously perhaps, producing harmony in the open places and the long streets of New York.