Down along the Battery sea-wall is the place to watch the ships go by.
Coastwise schooners, lumber-laden, which can get far up the river under
their own sail; big, full-rigged clipper ships that have to be towed
from the lower bay, their top masts down in order to scrape under the
Brooklyn Bridge; barques, brigs, brigantines—all sorts of sailing craft,
with cargoes from all seas, and flying the flags of all nations.
[Illustration: Down along the Battery sea-wall is the place to watch
the ships go by.—Page 385.]
White-painted river steamers that seem all the more flimsy and riverish
if they happen to churn out past the dark, compactly built ocean liners,
who come so deliberately and arrogantly, up past the Statue of Liberty,
to dock after the long, hard job of crossing, the home-comers on the
decks already waving handkerchiefs. Plucky little tugs (that whistle
on the slightest provocation), pushing queer, bulky floats, which bear
with ease whole trains of freight cars, dirty cars looking frightened
and out of place, which the choppy seas try to reach up and wash. And
still queerer, old sloop scows, with soiled, awkward canvas and no
shape to speak of, bound for no one seems to know where and carrying you
seldom see what. And always, everywhere, all day and night, whistling
and pushing in and out between everybody, the ubiquitous, faithful,
narrow-minded old ferry-boats, with their wonderful helmsman in the
pilot-house, turning the wheel and looking unexcitable....
[Illustration: The old town does not change so fast about its
edges.—Page 394.
(Along the upper East River front looking north toward Blackwell's
Island.)]
That is the way it is down around Pier A, where the Tammany Dock
Commission meets and the Police Patrol boat lies, and by Castle Garden,
where the river craft pass so close you can almost reach out and touch
them with your hand.
The "water-front" means something different when you think of Riverside
and its greenness, a few miles to the north, with Grant's tomb, white
and glaring in the sun, and Columbia Library back on Cathedral Heights.
Here the "lordly" Hudson is not yet obliged to become busy North
River, and there is plenty of water between a white-sailed schooner
yacht and a dirty tug slowly towing in silence—for there is no utter
excuse for whistling—a cargo of brick for a new country house up at
Garrisons; while on the shore itself instead of wharves and warehouses
and ferry-slips there are yacht and rowing club houses and an occasional
bathing pavilion; and above the water edge, in place of the broken ridge
of stone buildings with countless windows, there is the real bluff of
good green earth with the well-kept drive on top and the sun glinting
on harness and handle-bars.
* * * * *
Now, between these two contrasts you will find—you _may_ find, I mean,
for most of you prefer to exhaust Europe and the Orient before you begin
to look at New York—as many different sorts of interests and kinds of
picturesqueness as there are miles, as there are blocks almost.
[Illustration: Old New Amsterdam.
Just as it has been for years.—Page 388.
(Between South Ferry and the Bridge.)]
For instance, down there by the starting-point. If you go up toward
the bridge from South Ferry a block or so and pull down your hat-brim
far enough to hide the tower of the Produce Exchange, you have a bit
of old New Amsterdam, just as it has been for years, so old and so
Amsterdamish, with its long, sloping roofs, gable windows, and even
wooden-shoe-like canal-boats, that you may easily feel that you are in
Holland, if you like. As a matter of fact, it is more like Hamburg, I
am told, but either will do if you get an added enjoyment out of things
by noting their similarity to something else and appreciate mountains
and sunsets more by quoting some other person's sensations about other
sunsets and mountains.
[Illustration: New New York.
Not a stone's throw further up ... the towering white city of
1900.—Page 391.
(Between South Ferry and the Bridge.)]
[Illustration: From the point of view of the Jersey commuter ... some
uncommon, weird effects.—Page 394.
(Looking back at Manhattan from a North River ferry-boat.)]
[Illustration: Looking up the East River from the Foot of Fifty-ninth
Street.]
But if you believe that there is also an inherent, characteristic beauty
in the material manifestations of the spirit of our own new, vigorous,
fearless republic—and whether you do or not, if you care to look at one
of these sudden contrasts referred to—not a stone's throw farther up
the water-front there is a notable sight of newest New York. This, too,
is good to look at. Behind a foreground of tall masts with their square
rigging and mystery (symbols of the world's commerce, if you wish),
looms up a wondrous bit of the towering white city of 1900, a cluster
of modern high buildings which, notwithstanding the perspective of a
dozen blocks, are still high, enormously, alarmingly high—symbols of
modern capital, perhaps, and its far-reaching possibilities, or they may
remind you, in their massive grouping, of a cluster of mountains, with
their bright peaks glistening in the sun far above the dark shadows of
the valleys in which the streams of business flow, down to the wharves
and so out over the world.
[Illustration: Swooping silently, confidently across from one city to
the other.... Page 394.
(East River and Brooklyn Bridge.)]
Now, separately they may be impossible, these high buildings of
ours—these vulgar, impertinent "sky-scrapers;" but, as a group, and in
perspective, they are fine, with a strong, manly beauty all their own.
It is the same as with the young nation; we have grown up so fast and so
far that some of our traits, when considered alone, may not be pleasing,
but they appear in a different light when viewed as a whole and from
the right point of view.
[Illustration: For the little scenes ... quaint and lovable, one goes
down along the South Street water-front.—Page 397.
Smacks and oyster-floats near Fulton Market (At the foot of Beekman
Street, East River.)]
Or, on the other hand, for scenes not representatively commercial, nor
residential either in the sense that Riverside is, but more of the sort
that the word "picturesque" suggests, to most people: There are all
those odd nooks and corners, here and there up one river and down the
other, popping out upon you with unexpected vistas full of life and
color. Somehow the old town does not change so fast about its edges as
back from the water. It seems to take a longer time to slough off the
old landmarks.
The comfortable country houses along the shore, half-way up the island,
first become uncomfortable city houses; then tenements, warehouses,
sometimes hospitals, even police stations, before they are finally
hustled out of existence to make room for a foul-smelling gas-house
or another big brewery. Many of them are still standing, or tumbling
down; pathetic old things they are, with incongruous cupolas and dusty
fanlights and, on the river side, an occasional bit of old-fashioned
garden, with a bunker which was formerly a terrace, and the dirty
remains of a summer-house where children once had a good time—and still
do have, different-looking children, who love the nearby water just as
much and are drowned in it more numerously. It is not only by way of
the recreation piers that these children and their parents enjoy the
water. It is a deep-rooted instinct in human nature to walk out to the
end of a dock and sit down and gaze; and hundreds of them do so every
day in summer, up along here. Now and then, through these vistas you get
a good view of beautiful Blackwell's Island and its prison and hospital
and poorhouse buildings. Those who see it oftenest do not consider it
beautiful. They always speak of it as "The Island."
For those who do not care to prowl about for the scattered bits
of interest or who prefer what Baedeker would call "a magnificent
panorama," there are plenty of good points of vantage from which to
see whole sections at once, such as the Statue of Liberty or the tops
of high buildings, or, obviously, Brooklyn Bridge, which is so very
obvious that many Manhattanese would never make use of this opportunity
were it not for an occasional out-of-town visitor on their hands. No
one ought to be allowed to live in New York City—he ought to be made
to live in Brooklyn—who does not go out there and look back at his town
once a year. He could look at it every day and get new effects of light
and color. Even in sky-line he could find something new almost every
week or two. In a few years there will be a more or less even line—at
least a gentle undulation—instead of these raw, jagged breaks that
give a disquieting sense of incompletion, or else look as if a great
conflagration had eaten out the rest of the buildings.
The sky-line and its constant change can be watched to best advantage
from the point of view of the Jersey commuter on the ferry; he also has
some wonderful coloring to look at and some uncommon, weird effects,
such as that of a late autumn afternoon (when he has missed the 5.16
and has to go out on the 6.26) and it is already quite dark, but the
city is still at work and the towering office-buildings are lighted—are
brilliant indeed with many perfectly even rows of light dots. The dark
plays tricks with the distance, and the water is black and snaky and
smells of the night. All sorts of strange flares of light and puffs of
shadow come from somewhere, and altogether the commuter, if he were not
so accustomed to the scene, ought not to mind being late for dinner.
However, the commuter is used to this, too.
That scene is spectacular. There is another from the water that
is dramatic. Possibly the pilots on the Fall River steamers become
hardened, but to most of us there is an exciting delight in creeping
up under that great bridge of ours and dramatically slipping through
without having it fall down this time; and then looking rather
boastfully back at it, swooping silently, confidently across from one
city to the other, as graceful and lean and characteristically American
in its line as our cup defenders, and as overwhelmingly powerful and
fearless as Niagara Falls. However, much like the Thames embankment is
the bit of East Fifty-ninth Street in a yellow fog, and however skilful
you may be in making an occasional acre of the Bronx resemble the
upper Seine, this big bridge of ours cannot very well remind anyone of
anything abroad, because there aren't any others.
[Illustration: Even in sky-line he could find something new almost
every week or two.—Page 394.
The end of the day—looking back at Manhattan from the Brooklyn
Bridge.]
[Illustration: This is the tired city's playground.—Page 399.