If the reader will look at a plan of New York, he will see that Central
Park is really in the centre of the place, if a thing which has length
only, or is so nearly without breadth or thickness, can be said to
have a centre. South of the Park, the whole island is dense with life
and business; it is pretty solidly built up on either side; but to the
northward the blocks of houses are no longer of a compact succession;
they struggle up, at irregular intervals, from open fields, and sink
again, on the streets pushed beyond them into the simple country, where
even a suburban character is lost. It can only be a few years, at
most, before all the empty spaces will be occupied, and the town, such
as it is, and such as it seems to have been ever since the colonial
period, will have anchored itself fast in the rock that underlies the
larger half of it, and imparted its peculiar effect to every street--an
effect of arrogant untidiness, of superficial and formal gentility, of
immediate neglect and overuse.