The greatest problem of this metropolis is not how best to be in this
place or that, but how fastest to go from one to the other, and the
New-Yorkers have made guesses at the riddle, bad and worse, on each of
the avenues, which, in their character of mere roadways, look as if the
different car-tracks had been in them first, and the buildings, high
and low, had chanced along their sides afterward. This is not the fact,
of course, and it is not so much the effect on Fifth Avenue and Madison
Avenue, and Lexington Avenue, which are streets of dwellings, solidly
built up, like the cross streets. But it is undoubtedly the effect on
all the other avenues, in great part of their extent. They vary but
little in appearance otherwise, from east to west, except so far as
the elevated railroads disfigure them, if thoroughfares so shabby and
repulsive as they mostly are, can be said to be disfigured, and not
beautified by whatever can be done to hide any part of their ugliness.
Where this is left to make its full impression upon the spectators,
there are lines of horse-cars perpetually jingling up and down, except
on Fifth Avenue, where they have stages, as the New-Yorkers call the
unwieldy and unsightly vehicles that ply there, and Lexington Avenue,
where they have the cable cars. But the horse-cars run even under the
elevated tracks, and no experience of noise can enable you to conceive
of the furious din that bursts upon the sense, when at some corner two
cars encounter on the parallel tracks below, while two trains roar
and shriek and hiss on the rails overhead, and a turmoil of rattling
express wagons, heavy drays and trucks, and carts, hacks, carriages,
and huge vans rolls itself between and beneath the prime agents of the
uproar. The noise is not only deafening, it is bewildering; you cannot
know which side the danger threatens most, and you literally take
your life in your hand when you cross in the midst of it. Broadway,
which traverses the district I am thinking of, in a diagonal line till
it loses its distinctive character beyond the Park, is the course of
the cable cars running with a silent speed that is more dangerous even
than the tumultuous rush on the avenues. Now and then the apparatus
for gripping the chain will not release it, and then the car rushes
wildly over the track, running amuck through everything in its way, and
spreading terror on every hand. When under control the long saloons
advance swiftly, from either direction, at intervals of half a minute,
with a monotonous alarum of their gongs, and the foot-passenger has to
look well to his way if he ventures across the track, lest in avoiding
one car another roll him under its wheels.
Apparently, the danger is guarded as well as it can be, and it has
simply to be taken into the account of life in New York, for it cannot
be abated, and no one is to be blamed for what is the fault of every
one. It is true that there ought not, perhaps, to be any track in such
a thoroughfare, but it would be hard to prove that people could get on
without it, as they did before the theft of the street for the original
horse-car track. Perhaps it was not a theft; but at all events, and
at the best, the street was given away by the city to an adventurer
who wished to lay the tracks in it for his private gain, and none of
the property owners along the line could help themselves. There is
nothing that Americans hold so dear, or count so sacred, as private
property; life and limb are cheap in comparison; but private enterprise
is allowed to violate the rights of private property, from time to time
here, in the most dramatic way.
The street-car company which took possession of Broadway never paid
the abutters anything, I believe; and the elevated railroad companies
are still resisting payment of damages on the four avenues which
they occupied for their way up and down the city without offering
compensation to the property owners along their route. If the
community had built these roads, it would have indemnified every one,
for the community is always just when it is the expression of the
common honesty; and if it is ever unjust, it is because the uncommon
dishonesty has contrived to corrupt it.
The elevated roads and the cable road had no right to be, on the terms
that the New-Yorkers have them, but they are by far the best means of
transit in the city, and I must say that, if they were not abuses, they
would offer great comfort and great facility to the public. This is
especially true of the elevated roads, which, when you can put their
moral offense out of your mind, are always delightful in their ease and
airy swiftness. You fly smoothly along between the second and third
story windows of the houses, which are shops below and dwellings above,
on the avenues. The stations, though they have the prevailing effect of
overuse, and look dirty and unkempt, are rather pretty in themselves;
and you reach them, at frequent intervals, by flights of not ungraceful
iron steps. The elevated roads are always picturesque, with here and
there a sweeping curve that might almost be called beautiful.
They darken the avenues, of course, and fill them with an abominable
uproar. Yet traffic goes on underneath, and life goes on alongside and
overhead, and the city has adjusted itself to them, as a man adjusts
himself to a chronic disease. I do not know whether they add to the
foulness of the streets they pass through or not; I hardly think they
do. The mud lies longer, after a rain, in the interminable tunnels
which they form over the horse-car tracks in the middle of the avenues,
and which you can look through for miles; but the mud does not blow
into your nose and mouth as the dust does, and that is, so far, a
positive advantage. A negative advantage, which I have hinted, is that
they hide so much of the street from sight, and keep you from seeing
all its shabbiness, pitilessly open to the eye in the avenues which
have only horse-car tracks in them. In fact, now that the elevated
railroads are built, and the wrong they have done to persons is mainly
past recall, perhaps the worst that can be said of them is that they
do not serve their purpose. Of course, in our conditions, where ten
men are always doing the work of one man in rivalry with each other,
the passage of people to and from business is enormous: the passage
of men to get money and the passage of women to spend it; and at the
hours of the morning and the afternoon when the volume of travel is the
greatest, the trains of the elevated roads offer a spectacle that is
really incredible.
Every seat in them is taken, and every foot of space in the aisles
between the seats is held by people standing, and swaying miserably to
and fro by the leather straps dangling from the roofs. Men and women
are indecently crushed together, without regard for that personal
dignity which we seem to know nothing of and care nothing for. The
multitude overflows from the car, at either end, and the passengers are
as tightly wedged on the platform without as they are within. The long
trains follow each other at intervals of two or three minutes, and at
each station they make a stop of but a few seconds, when those who wish
to alight fight their way through the struggling mass. Those who wish
to mount fight their way into the car or on to the platform, where the
guard slams an iron gate against the stomachs and in the faces of those
arriving too late. Sometimes horrible accidents happen; a man clinging
to the outside of the gate has the life crushed out of his body against
the posts of the station as the train pulls out. But in this land,
where people have such a dread of civic collectivism of any kind, lest
individuality should suffer, the individual is practically nothing in
the regard of the corporate collectivities which abound.