Many superlatives have been applied to New York by her own children, by
the stranger within her gates, and by the stranger without her gates, at
a safe distance. I, a newcomer, venture to apply what I believe to be a
new superlative, and to call her the most maligned city in the world.
Even sympathetic observers have exaggerated all that is uncouth,
unbeautiful, unhealthy in her life, and overlooked, as it seems to me,
her all-pervading charm. One must be a pessimist indeed to feel no
exhilaration on coming in contact with such intensity of upward-striving
life as meets one on every hand in this league-long island city,
stretching oceanward between her eastern Sound and her western estuary,
and roofed by a radiant dome of smokeless sky. "Upward-striving life," I
say, for everywhere and in every branch of artistic effort the desire
for beauty is apparent, while at many points the achievement is
remarkable and inspiriting. I speak, of course, mainly of material
beauty; but it is hard to believe that so marked an impulse toward the
good as one notes in architecture, painting, sculpture, and literature,
can be unaccompanied by a cognate impulse toward moral beauty, even in
relation to civic life. The New Yorker's pride in New York is much more
alert and active than the Londoner's pride in London; and this feeling
must ere long make itself effective and dominant. For the great
advantage, it seems to me, that America possesses over the Old World is
its material and moral plasticity. Even among the giant structures of
this city, one feels that there is nothing rigid, nothing oppressive,
nothing inaccessible to the influence of changing conditions. If the
buildings are Cyclopean, so is the race that reared them. The material
world seems as clay on the potter's wheel, visibly taking on the impress
of the human spirit; and the human spirit, as embodied in this superbly
vital people, seems to be visibly thrilling to all the forces of
civilisation.
One of the latest, and certainly one of the most keen-sighted, of
English travellers in America is Mr. G.W. Steevens, a master journalist
if ever there was one. I turn to his _Land of the Dollar_ and I find New
York writ down "uncouth, formless, piebald, chaotic." "Never have I
seen," says Mr. Steevens, "a city more hideous.... Nothing is given to
beauty; everything centres in hard utility." Mr. Steevens must forgive
me for saying that this is simply libellous. It is true, I do not quote
him fairly: I omit his laudatory antitheses. The truncated phrase in the
above passage reads in the original "more hideous or more splendid," and
after averring that "nothing is given to beauty," Mr. Steevens
immediately proceeds to celebrate the beauty of many New York buildings.
Are we to understand, then, that the architects thought of nothing but
"hard utility," and that it was some æsthetic divinity that shaped their
blocks, rough-hew them how they might? For my part, I cannot see how
truth is to result from the clash of contradictory falsehoods. There are
a few cities more splendid than New York; many more hideous. In point of
concentrated architectural magnificence, there is nothing in New York to
compare with the Vienna Ringstrasse, from the Opera House to the Votive
Church.
In the splendour which proceeds from ordered uniformity and
spaciousness, Paris is, of course, incomparable; while a Scotchman may
perhaps be excused for holding that, as regards splendour of situation,
Edinburgh is hard to beat. Nor is there any single prospect in New York
so impressive as the panorama of London from Waterloo Bridge, when it
happens to be visible--that imperial sweep of river frontage from the
Houses of Parliament to the Tower. Except in the new region, far up the
Hudson, New York shares with Dublin the disadvantage of turning her
meaner aspects to her river fronts, though the majesty of the rivers
themselves, and the grandiose outlines of the Brooklyn Bridge, largely
compensate for this defect. In the main, then, the splendour of New York
is as yet sporadic. It is emerging on every hand from comparative
meanness and commonplace. At no point can one as yet say, "This prospect
is finer than anything Europe can show." But everywhere there are purple
patches of architectural splendour; and one can easily foresee the time
when Fifth Avenue, the whole circuit of Central Park, and the up-town
riverside region will be magnificent beyond compare.
As for the superlative hideousness attributed by Mr. Steevens to New
York, I can only inquire, in the local idiom: "What is the matter with
Glasgow?" Or, indeed, with Hull? or Newcastle? or the north-east regions
of London? No doubt New York contains some of the very worst slums in
the world. That melancholy distinction must be conceded her. But simply
to the outward eye the slums of New York have not the monotonous
hideousness of our English "warrens of the poor." In spite of her hard
winter, New York cannot quite forget that her latitude is that of Madrid
and Naples, not of London, or even of Paris. Her slums have a Southern
air about them, a variety of contour and colour--in some aspects one
might almost say a gaiety--unknown to Whitechapel or Bethnal Green. For
one thing, the ubiquitous balconies and fire escapes serve of themselves
to break the monotony of line, and lend, as it were, a peculiar texture
to the scene; to say nothing of the oportunities they afford for the
display of multifarious shreds and patches of colour. Then the houses
themselves are often brightly, not to say loudly, painted; so that in
the clear, sparkling atmosphere characteristic of New York, the most
squalid slum puts on a many-coloured Southern aspect, which suggests
Naples or Marseilles rather than the back streets of any English city.
Add to this that the inhabitants are largely of Southern origin, and are
apt, whenever the temperature will permit, to carry on the main part of
their daily lives out of doors; and you can understand that, appalling
as poverty may be in New York, the average slum is not so dank, dismal,
and suicidally monotonous as a street of a similar status in London.
"The whole city," says Mr. Steevens, "is plastered, and papered, and
painted with advertisements;" and he instances the huge "H-O" (whatever
that may mean) which confronts one as one sails up the harbour, and the
omnipresent "Castoria" placards. Here Mr. Steevens shows symptoms of the
note-taker's hyperæsthesia. The facts he states are undeniable, but the
implication that advertisement is carried to greater excess in New York
than in London and other European cities seems to me utterly groundless.
The "H-O" advertisement is not one whit more monstrous than, for
instance, the huge announcements of cheap clothing-shops, &c., painted
all over the ends of houses, that deface the railway approaches to
Paris; nor is it so flagrant and aggressive as the illuminated
advertisements of whisky and California wines that vulgarise the august
spectacle of the Thames by night. It is true that the proprietors of
"Castoria" have occupied nearly every blank wall that is visible from
Brooklyn Bridge; but their advertisements are so far from garish that I
should scarcely have noticed them had not Mr. Steevens called my
attention to them. Sky-signs, as Mr. Steevens admits, are unknown in New
York; so are the flashing out-and-in electric advertisements which make
night hideous in London. One or two large steady-burning advertisements
irradiate Madison Square of an evening; but being steady they are
comparatively inoffensive. Twenty years ago, when I crossed the
continent from San Francisco, I noticed with disgust the advertisements
stencilled on every second rock in the canyons of Nevada, and defacing
every coign of vantage around Niagara. Whether this abuse continues I
know not; but I know that the pill placards and sauce puffs which
blossom in our English meadows along every main line of railway are
quite as offensive. Far be it from me to deny that advertising is
carried to deplorable excesses in America; but in picking this out as a
differentia, Mr. Steevens shows that his intentness of observation in
New York has for the moment dimmed his mental vision of London. It is a
case, I fancy, in which the expectation was father to the thought.
Similarly, Mr. Steevens notes, "No chiropodist worthy of the name but
keeps at his door a modelled human foot the size of a cab-horse; and
other trades go and do likewise." The "cab-horse" is a monumental
exaggeration; but it is true that some chiropodists use as a sign a foot
of colossal proportions--the size of a small sheep, let us say, if we
must adopt a zoological standard. So far good; but the implication that
the streets of New York swarm, like a scene in a harlequinade, with
similarly Brobdingnagian signs is quite unfounded. Thus it is, I think,
that travellers are apt to seize on isolated eccentricities or
extravagances (have we no monstrous signs in England?) and treat them as
typical. Mr. Steevens came to America prepared to find everything
gigantic, and the chiropodist's foot so agreeably fulfilled his
expectation that he thought it unnecessary to look any further--"ex pede
Herculem."[C]
The architecture of New York, according to Mr. Steevens, is "the
outward expression of the freest, fiercest individualism.... Seeing it,
you can well understand the admiration of an American for something
ordered and proportioned--for the Rue de Rivoli or Regent Street." I
heard this admiration emphatically expressed the other day by one of the
foremost and most justly famous of American authors; but, unlike Mr.
Steevens, I could not understand it. "What!" I said, "you would
Haussmannise New York! You would reduce the glorious variety of Fifth
Avenue to the deadly uniformity of the Avenue de l'Opéra, where each
block of buildings reproduces its neighbour, as though they had all been
stamped by one gigantic die!" Such an architectural ideal is
inconceivable to me. It is all very well for a few short streets, for a
square or two, for a quadrant like that of Regent Street, or a crescent
or circus like those of Bath or Edinburgh. But to apply it throughout a
whole quarter of a city, or even throughout the endless vistas of a
great American street, would be simply maddening. Better the most
heaven-storming or sky-scraping audacity of individualism than any
attempt to transform New York into a Fourierist phalanstery or a model
prison. I do not doubt that there will one day be some legal restriction
on Towers of Babel, and that the hygienic disadvantages of the
microbe-breeding "well" or air-shaft will be more fully recognised than
they are at present. A time may come, too, when the ideal of an unforced
harmony in architectural groupings may replace the now dominant instinct
of aggressive diversity. But whatever developments the future may have
in store, I must own my gratitude to the "fierce individualism" of the
present for a new realisation of the possibilities of architectural
beauty in modern life. At almost every turn in New York, one comes
across some building that gives one a little shock of pleasure.
Sometimes, indeed, it is the pleasure of recognising an old friend in a
new place--a patch of Venice or a chunk of Florence transported bodily
to the New World. The exquisite tower of the Madison Square Garden, for
instance, is modelled on that of the Giralda, at Seville; while the new
University Club, on Fifth Avenue, is simply a Florentine fortress-palace
of somewhat disproportionate height. But along with a good deal of sheer
reproduction of European models, one finds a great deal of ingenious
and inventive adaptation, to say nothing of a very delicate taste in the
treatment of detail. New York abounds, it is true, with monuments of
more than one bygone and detestable period of architectural fashion; but
they are as distinctly survivals from a dead past as is the wooden
shanty which occupies one of the best sites on Fifth Avenue, in the very
shadow of the new Delmonico's. I wish tasteless, conventional, and
machine-made architecture were as much of a "back-number" in England as
it is here. A practised observer could confidently date any prominent
building in New York, to within a year or two, by its architectural
merit; and the greater the merit the later the year.
In short, architecture is here a living art. Go where you will in these
up-town regions, you can see imagination and cultured intelligence in
the act, as it were, of impressing beauty of proportion and detail upon
brick and terra-cotta, granite and marble. And domestic or middle-class
architecture is not neglected. The American "master builders" do not
confine themselves to towers and palaces, but give infinite thought and
loving care to "homes for human beings." The average old-fashioned New
York house, so far as I have seen it, is externally unattractive (the
characteristic material, a sort of coffee-coloured stone, being truly
hideous), and internally dark, cramped, and stuffy. But modern houses,
even of no special pretensions, are generally delightful, with their
polished wood floors and fittings, and their airy suites of rooms. The
American architect has a great advantage over his English colleague in
the fact that in furnace-heated houses only the bedrooms require to be
shut off with doors. The halls and public rooms can be grouped so that,
when the curtains hung in their wide doorways are drawn back, two,
three, or four rooms are open to the eye at once, and charming effects
of space and light-and-shade can be obtained. Of this advantage the
modern house-planner makes excellent use, and I have seen more than one
quite modest family house which, without any sacrifice of comfort, gives
one a sense of almost palatial spaciousness. An architectural exhibition
which I saw the other day proved that equal or even greater care and
attention is being bestowed upon the country house, in which a
characteristically American style is being developed, mainly founded, I
take it, upon the suave and graceful classicism of Colonial
architecture. The wide "piazza" is its most noteworthy feature, and the
opportunity it offers for beautiful cloister-work is being utilised to
the full. Furthermore, the large attendance at the exhibition showed
what a keen interest the public takes in the art--a symptom of high
vitality.
In Philadelphia, too, where I spent some time last week, there is a good
deal of exquisite architecture to be seen. The old Philadelphia dwelling
house, "simplex munditiis," with its plain red-brick front and white
marble steps, has a peculiar charm for me; but it, of course, is not a
product of the present movement. I do not know the date of some lovely
white marble palazzetti scattered about the Rittenhouse Square region;
but the Art Club on Broad Street, and the Houston Club for Students of
the University of Pennsylvania, are both quite recent buildings, and
both very beautiful. I could mention several other buildings that are,
as they say here, "pretty good" (a phrase of high commendation); but I
had better get safely out of New York before I enlarge on the merits of
Philadelphia. There is only one city the New Yorker despises more than
Philadelphia, and that is Brooklyn. The New York schoolboy speaks of
Philadelphia as "the place the chestnuts go to when they die;" and to
the most popular wit in New York at this moment (an Americanised
Englishman, by the way) is attributed the saying, "Mr. So-and-so has
three daughters--two alive, and one in Philadelphia." Six different
people have related this gibe to me; it is only less admired than the
same gentleman's observation as he alighted from an electric car at the
further end of the Suspension Bridge, when he heaved a deep sigh, and
remarked, "In the midst of life we are in Brooklyn." Another favourite
anecdote in New York is that of the Philadelphian who went to a doctor
and complained of insomnia. The doctor gave him a great deal of sage
advice as to diet, exercise, and so forth, concluding, "If after that
you haven't better nights, let me see you again." "But you mistake,
doctor," the patient replied; "I sleep all right at night--it's in the
daytime I can't sleep!"