As I muse, the remembrance of a great city comes back to me,--a
city walled up to the sky and roaring like the sea. The memory of
that roar returns first; then the vision defines: a chasm, which
is a street, between mountains, which are houses. I am tired,
because I have walked many miles between those precipices of
masonry, and have trodden no earth,--only slabs of rock,--and
have heard nothing but thunder of tumult. Deep below those huge
pavements I know there is a cavernous world tremendous: systems
underlying systems of ways contrived for water and steam and
fire. On either hand tower facades pierced by scores of tiers of
windows,--cliffs of architecture shutting out the sun. Above, the
pale blue streak of sky is cut by a maze of spidery lines,--an
infinite cobweb of electric wires. In that block on the right
there dwell nine thousand souls; the tenants of the edifice
facing it pay the annual rent of a million dollars. Seven
millions scarcely covered the cost of those bulks overshadowing
the square beyond,--and there are miles of such. Stairways of
steel and cement, of brass and stone, with costliest balustrades,
ascend through the decades and double-decades of stories; but no
foot treads them. By water-power, by steam, by electricity, men
go up and down; the heights are too dizzy, the distances too
great, for the use of the limbs. My friend who pays rent of five
thousand dollars for his rooms in the fourteenth story of a
monstrosity not far off has never trodden his stairway. I am
walking for curiosity alone; with a serious purpose I should not
walk: the spaces are too broad, the time is too precious, for
such slow exertion,--men travel from district to district, from
house to office, by steam. Heights are too great for the voice to
traverse; orders are given and obeyed by machinery. By
electricity far-away doors are opened; with one touch a hundred
rooms are lighted or heated.
And all this enormity is hard, grim, dumb; it is the enormity of
mathematical power applied to utilitarian ends of solidity and
durability. These leagues of palaces, of warehouses, of business
structures, of buildings describable and indescribable, are not
beautiful, but sinister. One feels depressed by the mere
sensation of the enormous life which created them, life without
sympathy; of their prodigious manifestation of power, power
without pity. They are the architectural utterance of the new
industrial age. And there is no halt in the thunder of wheels, in
the storming of hoofs and of human feet. To ask a question, one
must shout into the ear of the questioned; to see, to understand,
to move in that high-pressure medium, needs experience. The
unaccustomed feels the sensation of being in a panic, in a
tempest, in a cyclone. Yet all this is order.
The monster streets leap rivers, span sea-ways, with bridges of
stone, bridges of steel. Far as the eye can reach, a bewilderment
of masts, a web-work of rigging, conceals the shores, which are
cliffs of masonry. Trees in a forest stand less thickly, branches
in a forest mingle less closely, than the masts and spars of that
immeasurable maze. Yet all is order.