NEW YORK
(_In a room on the ninth floor in the sky-scraper hotel New York_)
I
First Impressions
My first impressions of New York are enormously to enhance the effect
of this Progress, this material progress, that is to say, as something
inevitable and inhuman, as a blindly furious energy of growth that
must go on. Against the broad and level gray contours of Liverpool one
found the ocean liner portentously tall, but here one steams into the
middle of a town that dwarfs the ocean liner. The sky-scrapers that
are the New-Yorker's perpetual boast and pride rise up to greet one
as one comes through the Narrows into the Upper Bay, stand out, in a
clustering group of tall irregular crenellations, the strangest crown
that ever a city wore. They have an effect of immense incompleteness;
each one seems to await some needed terminal,--to be, by virtue of its
woolly jets of steam, still as it were in process of eruption. One
thinks of St. Peter's great blue dome, finished and done as one saw it
from a vine-shaded wine-booth above the Milvian Bridge, one thinks of
the sudden ascendency of St. Paul's dark grace, as it soars out over
any one who comes up by the Thames towards it. These are efforts that
have accomplished their ends, and even Paris illuminated under the tall
stem of the Eiffel Tower looked completed and defined. But New York's
achievement is a threatening promise, growth going on under a pressure
that increases, and amidst a hungry uproar of effort.
One gets a measure of the quality of this force of mechanical, of
inhuman, growth as one marks the great statue of Liberty on our
larboard, which is meant to dominate and fails absolutely to dominate
the scene. It gets to three hundred feet about, by standing on a
pedestal of a hundred and fifty; and the uplifted torch, seen against
the sky, suggests an arm straining upward, straining in hopeless
competition with the fierce commercial altitudes ahead. Poor liberating
Lady of the American ideal! One passes her and forgets.
Happy returning natives greet the great pillars of business by name,
the St. Paul Building, the World, the Manhattan tower; the English
new-comer notes the clear emphasis of the detail, the freedom from
smoke and atmospheric mystery that New York gains from burning
anthracite, the jetting white steam clouds that emphasize that freedom.
Across the broad harbor plies an unfamiliar traffic of grotesque broad
ferry-boats, black with people, glutted to the lips with vans and
carts, each hooting and yelping its own distinctive note, and there is
a wild hurrying up and down and to and fro of piping and bellowing tugs
and barges; and a great floating platform, bearing a railway train,
gets athwart our course as we ascend and evokes megatherial bellowings.
Everything is moving at a great speed, and whistling and howling, it
seems, and presently far ahead we make out our own pier, black with
expectant people, and set up our own distinctive whoop, and with the
help of half a dozen furiously noisy tugs are finally lugged and butted
into dock. The tugs converse by yells and whistles, it is an affair of
short-tempered mechanical monsters, amidst which one watches for one's
opportunity to get ashore.
Noise and human hurry and a vastness of means and collective result,
rather than any vastness of achievement, is the pervading quality of
New York. The great thing is the mechanical thing, the unintentional
thing which is speeding up all these people, driving them in headlong
hurry this way and that, exhorting them by the voice of every car
conductor to "step lively," aggregating them into shoving and elbowing
masses, making them stand clinging to straps, jerking them up elevator
shafts and pouring them on to the ferry-boats. But this accidental
great thing is at times a very great thing. Much more impressive than
the sky-scrapers to my mind is the large Brooklyn suspension-bridge.
I have never troubled to ask who built that; its greatness is not
in its design, but in the quality of necessity one perceives in its
inanimate immensity. It _tells_, as one goes under it up the East
River, but it is far more impressive to the stranger to come upon it
by glimpses, wandering down to it through the ill-paved van-infested
streets from Chatham Square. One sees parts of Cyclopean stone arches,
one gets suggestive glimpses through the jungle growth of business now
of the back, now of the flanks, of the monster; then, as one comes
out on the river, one discovers far up in one's sky the long sweep of
the bridge itself, foreshortened and with a maximum of perspective
effect; the streams of pedestrians and the long line of carts and
vans, quaintly microscopic against the blue, the creeping progress of
the little cars on the lower edge of the long chain of netting; all
these things dwindling indistinguishably before Brooklyn is reached.
Thence, if it is late afternoon, one may walk back to City Hall Park
and encounter and experience the convergent stream of clerks and
workers making for the bridge, mark it grow denser and denser, until
at last they come near choking even the broad approaches of the giant
duct, until the congested multitudes jostle and fight for a way.
They arrive marching afoot by every street in endless procession;
crammed trolley-cars disgorge them; the Subway pours them out.... The
individuals count for nothing, they are clerks and stenographers,
shop-men, shop-girls, workers of innumerable types, black-coated
men, hat-and-blouse girls, shabby and cheaply clad persons, such as one
sees in London, in Berlin, anywhere. Perhaps they hurry more, perhaps
they seem more eager. But the distinctive effect is the mass, the black
torrent, rippled with unmeaning faces, the great, the unprecedented
multitudinousness of the thing, the inhuman force of it all.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE]
I made no efforts to present any of my letters, or to find any one to
talk to on my first day in New York. I landed, got a casual lunch, and
wandered alone until New York's peculiar effect of inhuman noise and
pressure and growth became overwhelming, touched me with a sense of
solitude, and drove me into the hospitable companionship of the Century
Club. Oh, no doubt of New York's immensity! The sense of soulless
gigantic forces, that took no heed of men, became stronger and stronger
all that day. The pavements were often almost incredibly out of repair,
when I became footweary the street-cars would not wait for me, and I
had to learn their stopping-points as best I might. I wandered, just
at the right pitch of fatigue to get the full force of it into the
eastward region between Third and Fourth Avenue, came upon the Elevated
railway at its worst, the darkened streets of disordered paving below,
trolley-car-congested, the ugly clumsy lattice, sonorously busy
overhead, a clatter of vans and draught-horses, and great crowds of
cheap, base-looking people hurrying uncivilly by....
II
The Coming of White Marble
I corrected that first crowded impression of New York with a clearer,
brighter vision of expansiveness when next day I began to realize the
social quality of New York's central backbone, between Fourth Avenue
and Sixth. The effect remained still that of an immeasurably powerful
forward movement of rapid eager advance, a process of enlargement and
increment in every material sense, but it may be because I was no
longer fatigued, was now a little initiated, the human being seemed
less of a fly upon the wheels. I visited immense and magnificent
clubs--London has no such splendors as the Union, the University, the
new hall of the Harvard--I witnessed the great torrent of spending
and glittering prosperity in carriage and motor-car pour along Fifth
Avenue. I became aware of effects that were not only vast and opulent
but fine. It grew upon me that the Twentieth Century, which found New
York brown-stone of the color of desiccated chocolate, meant to leave
it a city of white and colored marble. I found myself agape, admiring
a sky-scraper--the prow of the Flat-iron Building, to be particular,
ploughing up through the traffic of Broadway and Fifth Avenue in the
afternoon light. The New York sundown and twilight seemed to me quite
glorious things. Down the western streets one gets the sky hung in
long cloud-barred strips, like Japanese paintings, celestial tranquil
yellows and greens and pink luminosity toning down to the reeking
blue-brown edge of the distant New Jersey atmosphere, and the clear,
black, hard activity of crowd and trolley-car and Elevated railroad.
Against this deepening color came the innumerable little lights of the
house cliffs and the street tier above tier. New York is lavish of
light, it is lavish of everything, it is full of the sense of spending
from an inexhaustible supply. For a time one is drawn irresistibly into
the universal belief in that inexhaustible supply.
At a bright table in Delmonico's to-day at lunch-time, my host told me
the first news of the destruction of the great part of San Francisco
by earthquake and fire. It had just come through to him, it wasn't
yet being shouted by the newsboys. He told me compactly of dislocated
water-mains, of the ill-luck of the unusual eastward wind that was
blowing the fire up-town, of a thousand reported dead, of the manifest
doom of the greater portion of the city, and presently the shouting
voices in the street outside arose to chorus him. He was a newspaper
man and a little preoccupied because his San Francisco offices were
burning, and that no further news was arriving after these first
intimations. Naturally the catastrophe was our topic. But this disaster
did not affect him, it does not seem to have affected any one with
a sense of final destruction, with any foreboding of irreparable
disaster. Every one is talking of it this afternoon, and no one is in
the least degree dismayed. I have talked and listened in two clubs,
watched people in cars and in the street, and one man is glad that
Chinatown will be cleared out for good; another's chief solicitude is
for Millet's "Man with the Hoe." "They'll cut it out of the frame,"
he says, a little anxiously. "Sure." But there is no doubt anywhere
that San Francisco can be rebuilt, larger, better, and soon. Just as
there would be none at all if all this New York that has so obsessed
me with its limitless bigness was itself a blazing ruin. I believe
these people would more than half like the situation. It would give
them scope, it would facilitate that conversion into white marble in
progress everywhere, it would settle the difficulties of the Elevated
railroad and clear out the tangles of lower New York. There is no sense
of accomplishment and finality in any of these things, the largest,
the finest, the tallest, are so obviously no more than symptoms and
promises of Material Progress, of inhuman material progress that is so
in the nature of things that no one would regret their passing. That, I
say again, is at the first encounter the peculiar American effect that
began directly I stepped aboard the liner, and that rises here to a
towering, shining, clamorous climax. The sense of inexhaustible supply,
of an ultra-human force behind it all, is, for a time, invincible.
One assumes, with Mr. Saltus, that all America is in this vein, and
that this is the way the future must inevitably go. One has a vision
of bright electrical subways, replacing the filth-diffusing railways of
to-day, of clean, clear pavements free altogether from the fly-prolific
filth of horses coming almost, as it were, of their own accord beneath
the feet of a population that no longer expectorates at all; of grimy
stone and peeling paint giving way everywhere to white marble and
spotless surfaces, and a shining order, of everything wider, taller,
cleaner, better....
So that, in the meanwhile, a certain amount of jostling and hurry and
untidiness, and even--to put it mildly--forcefulness may be forgiven.
III
Ellis Island
I visited Ellis Island yesterday. It chanced to be a good day for my
purpose. For the first time in its history this filter of immigrant
humanity has this week proved inadequate to the demand upon it. It was
choked, and half a score of gravid liners were lying uncomfortably up
the harbor, replete with twenty thousand or so of crude Americans from
Ireland and Poland and Italy and Syria and Finland and Albania; men,
women, children, dirt, and bags together.
Of immigration I shall have to write later; what concerns me now is
chiefly the wholesale and multitudinous quality of that place and its
work. I made my way with my introduction along white passages and
through traps and a maze of metal lattices that did for a while succeed
in catching and imprisoning me, to Commissioner Wachorn, in his quiet,
green-toned office. There, for a time, I sat judicially and heard him
deal methodically, swiftly, sympathetically, with case after case, a
string of appeals against the sentences of deportation pronounced in
the busy little courts below. First would come one dingy and strangely
garbed group of wild-eyed aliens, and then another: Roumanian gypsies,
South Italians, Ruthenians, Swedes, each under the intelligent guidance
of a uniformed interpreter, and a case would be started, a report made
to Washington, and they would drop out again, hopeful or sullen or
fearful as the evidence might trend....
Down-stairs we find the courts, and these seen, we traverse long
refectories, long aisles of tables, and close-packed dormitories with
banks of steel mattresses, tier above tier, and galleries and passages
innumerable, perplexing intricacy that slowly grows systematic with the
Commissioner's explanations.
Here is a huge, gray, untidy waiting-room, like a big railway-depot
room, full of a sinister crowd of miserable people, loafing about or
sitting dejectedly, whom America refuses, and here a second and a third
such chamber each with its tragic and evil-looking crowd that hates
us, and that even ventures to groan and hiss at us a little for our
glimpse of its large dirty spectacle of hopeless failure, and here,
squalid enough indeed, but still to some degree hopeful, are the
appeal cases as yet undecided. In one place, at a bank of ranges, works
an army of men cooks, in another spins the big machinery of the Ellis
Island laundry, washing blankets, drying blankets, day in and day out,
a big clean steamy space of hurry and rotation. Then, I recall a neat
apartment lined to the ceiling with little drawers, a card-index of the
names and nationalities and significant circumstances of upward of a
million and a half of people who have gone on and who are yet liable to
recall.
The central hall is the key of this impression. All day long, through
an intricate series of metal pens, the long procession files, step by
step, bearing bundles and trunks and boxes, past this examiner and
that, past the quick, alert medical officers, the tallymen and the
clerks. At every point immigrants are being picked out and set aside
for further medical examination, for further questions, for the busy
little courts; but the main procession satisfies conditions, passes
on. It is a daily procession that, with a yard of space to each,
would stretch over three miles, that any week in the year would more
than equal in numbers that daily procession of the unemployed that is
becoming a regular feature of the London winter, that in a year could
put a cordon round London or New York of close-marching people, could
populate a new Boston, that in a century--What in a century will it all
amount to?...
On they go, from this pen to that, pen by pen, towards a desk at a
little metal wicket--the gate of America. Through this metal wicket
drips the immigration stream--all day long, every two or three seconds
an immigrant, with a valise or a bundle, passes the little desk and
goes on past the well-managed money-changing place, past the carefully
organized separating ways that go to this railway or that, past the
guiding, protecting officials--into a new world. The great majority
are young men and young women, between seventeen and thirty, good,
youthful, hopeful, peasant stock. They stand in a long string, waiting
to go through that wicket, with bundles, with little tin boxes, with
cheap portmanteaus, with odd packages, in pairs, in families, alone,
women with children, men with strings of dependents, young couples. All
day that string of human beads waits there, jerks forward, waits again;
all day and every day, constantly replenished, constantly dropping the
end beads through the wicket, till the units mount to hundreds and the
hundreds to thousands....
Yes, Ellis Island is quietly immense. It gives one a visible image of
one aspect at least of this world-large process of filling and growing
and synthesis, which is America.
"Look there!" said the Commissioner, taking me by the arm and pointing,
and I saw a monster steamship far away, and already a big bulk
looming up the Narrows. "It's the _Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse_. She's
got--I forget the exact figures, but let us say--eight hundred and
fifty-three more for us. She'll have to keep them until Friday at the
earliest. And there's more behind her, and more strung out all across
the Atlantic."
In one record day this month 21,000 immigrants came into the port of
New York alone; in one week over 50,000. This year the total will be
1,200,000 souls, pouring in, finding work at once, producing no fall in
wages. They start digging and building and making. Just think of the
dimensions of it!
IV
To Fall River
One must get away from New York to see the place in its proper
relations. I visited Staten Island and Jersey City, motored up to
Sleepy Hollow (where once the Headless Horseman rode), saw suburbs
and intimations of suburbs without end, and finished with the long
and crowded spectacle of the East River as one sees it from the Fall
River boat. It was Friday night, and the Fall River boat was in a
state of fine congestion with Jews, Italians, and week-enders, and one
stood crowded and surveyed the crowded shore, the sky-scrapers and
tenement-houses, the huge grain elevators, big warehouses, the great
Brooklyn Bridge, the still greater Williamsburgh Bridge, the great
promise of yet another monstrous bridge, overwhelmingly monstrous by
any European example I know, and so past long miles of city to the
left and to the right past the wide Brooklyn navy-yard (where three
clean white war-ships lay moored), past the clustering castellated
asylums, hospitals, almshouses and reformatories of Blackwell's long
shore and Ward's Island, and then through a long reluctant diminuendo
on each receding bank, until, indeed, New York, though it seemed
incredible, had done.
And at one point a grave-voiced man in a peaked cap, with guide-books
to sell, pleased me greatly by ending all idle talk suddenly with the
stentorian announcement: "We are now in Hell Gate. We are now passing
through Hell Gate!"
But they've blown Hell Gate open with dynamite, and it wasn't at
all the Hell Gate that I read about in my boyhood in the delightful
chronicle of Knickerbocker.
So through an elbowing evening (to the tune of "Cavalleria Rusticana"
on an irrepressible string band) and a night of unmitigated fog-horn
to Boston, which I had been given to understand was a cultured and
uneventful city offering great opportunities for reflection and
intellectual digestion. And, indeed, the large quiet of Beacon Street,
in the early morning sunshine, seemed to more than justify that
expectation....