the upper West Side. That has moments of being even beautiful. But there
is a point beyond which sublimity cannot go; and that is about the
fifteenth story. When you get a group of those sky-scrapers, all soaring
beyond this point, you have, in an inverted phase, the unimpressiveness
which Taine noted as the real effect of a prospect from the summit of a
very lofty mountain. The other day I found myself arrested before a
shop-window by a large photograph labelled 'The Heart of New York.' It
was a map of that region of sky-scrapers which you seem to think not
justly beyond the scope of attributive sublimity. It was a horror; it
set my teeth on edge; it made me think of scrap-iron--heaps, heights,
pinnacles of scrap-iron. Don't ask me why scrap-iron! Go and look at
that photograph and you will understand. Below those monstrous cliffs
the lower roofs were like broken foot-hills; the streets were chasms,
gulches, gashes. It looked as if there had been a conflagration, and the
houses had been burned into the cellars; and the eye sought the
nerve-racking tangle of pipe and wire which remains among the ruins
after a great fire. Perhaps this was what made me think of
scrap-iron--heaps, heights, pinnacles of it. No, there was no sublimity
there. Some astronomers have latterly assigned bounds to immensity, but
the sky-scrapers go beyond these bounds; they are primordial, abnormal."
"You strain for a phrase," we said, "as if you felt the essential
unreality of your censure. Aren't you aware that mediaeval Florence,
mediaeval Siena, must have looked, with their innumerable towers, like
our sky-scrapered New York? They must have looked quite like it."
"And very ugly. It was only when those towers, which were devoted to
party warfare as ours are devoted to business warfare, were levelled,
that Florence became fair and Siena superb. I should not object to a New
York of demolished sky-scrapers. They would make fine ruins; I would
like to see them as ruins. In fact, now I think of it, 'The Heart of New
York' reminded me of the Roman Forum. I wonder I didn't think of that
before. But if you want sublimity, the distinguishing quality of New
York, as I feel it more and more, while I talk of it, you must take that
stretch of Fifth Avenue from a motor-bus top."
"But that stretch of Fifth Avenue abounds in sky-scrapers!" we lamented
the man's inconsistency.
"Sky-scrapers in subordination, yes. There is one to every other block.
There is that supreme sky-scraper, the Flatiron. But just as the
Flatiron, since the newspapers have ceased to celebrate its pranks with
men's umbrellas, and the feathers and flounces and 'tempestuous
petticoats' of the women, has sunk back into a measurable inconspicuity,
so all the other tall buildings have somehow harmonized themselves with
the prospect and no longer form the barbarous architectural chaos of
lower New York. I don't object to their being mainly business houses and
hotels; I think that it is much more respectable than being palaces or
war-like eminences, Guelf or Ghibelline; and as I ride up-town in my
motor-bus, I thrill with their grandeur and glow with their
condescension. Yes, they condescend; and although their tall white
flanks climb in the distance, they seem to sink on nearer approach, and
amiably decline to disfigure the line of progress, or to dwarf the
adjacent edifices. Down-town, in the heart of New York, poor old Trinity
looks driven into the ground by the surrounding heights and bulks; but
along my sublime upper Fifth Avenue there is spire after spire that does
not unduly dwindle, but looks as if tenderly, reverently, protected by
the neighboring giants. They are very good and kind giants, apparently.
But the acme of the sublimity, the quality in which I find my fancy
insisting more and more, is in those two stately hostelries, the Gog and
Magog of that giant company, which guard the approach to the Park like
mighty pillars, the posts of vast city gates folded back from them."
"Come!" we said. "This is beginning to be something like."
"In November," our friend said, taking breath for a fresh spurt of
praise, "there were a good many sympathetic afternoons which lent
themselves to motor-bus progress up that magnificent avenue, and if you
mounted to your place on top, about three o'clock, you looked up or down
the long vista of blue air till it turned mirk at either vanishing-point
under a sky of measureless cloudlessness. That dimness, almost smokiness
at the closes of the prospect, was something unspeakably rich. It made
me think, quite out of relation or relevance, of these nobly mystical
lines of Keats:
'His soul shall know the sadness of her night,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.'"
We closed our eyes in the attempt to grope after him. "Explain, O
Howadji!"
"I would rather not, as you say when you can't," he replied. "But I will
come down a little nearer earth, if you prefer. Short of those visionary
distances there are features of the prospect either way in which I
differently rejoice. One thing is the shining black roofs of the cabs,
moving and pausing like processions of huge turtles up and down the
street; obeying the gesture of the mid-stream policemen where they stand
at the successive crossings to stay them, and floating with the coming
and going tides as he drops his inhibitory hand and speeds them in the
continuous current. That is, of course, something you get in greater
quantity, though not such intense quality, in a London 'block,' but
there is something more fluent, more mercurially impatient, in a New
York street jam, which our nerves more vividly partake. Don't ask me to
explain! I would rather not!" he said, and we submitted.
He went on to what seemed an unjustifiable remove from the point.
"Nothing has struck me so much, after a half-year's absence, in this
novel revelation of sublimity in New York, as the evident increase on
the street crowds. The city seems to have grown a whole new population,
and the means of traffic and transportation have been duplicated in
response to the demand of the multiplying freights and feet." Our friend
laughed in self-derision, as he went on. "I remember when we first
began to have the electric trolleys--"
"Trams, we believe you call them," we insinuated.
"Not when I'm on this side," he retorted, and he resumed: "I used to be
afraid to cross the avenues where they ran. At certain junctions I
particularly took my life in my hand, and my 'courage in both hands.'
Where Sixth Avenue flows into Fifty-ninth Street, and at Sixth Avenue
and Thirty-fourth Street, and at Dead Man's Curve (he has long been
resuscitated) on Fourteenth Street, I held my breath till I got over
alive, and I blessed Heaven for my safe passage at Forty-second and
Twenty-third streets, and at divers places on Third Avenue. Now I regard
these interlacing iron currents with no more anxiety than I would so
many purling brooks, with stepping-stones in them to keep my feet from
the wet: they are like gentle eddies--soft, clear, slow tides--where one
may pause in the midst at will, compared with the deadly expanses of
Fifth Avenue, with their rush of all manner of vehicles over the smooth
asphalt surface. There I stand long at the brink; I look for a policeman
to guide and guard my steps; I crane my neck forward from my coign of
vantage and count the cabs, the taxicabs, the carriages, the private
automobiles, the motor-buses, the express-wagons, and calculate my
chances. Then I shrink back. If it is a corner where there is no
policeman to bank the tides up on either hand and lead me over, I wait
for some bold, big team to make the transit of the avenue from the
cross-street, and then in its lee I find my way to the other side. As
for the trolleys, I now mock myself of them, as Thackeray's Frenchmen
were said to say in their peculiar English. (I wonder if they really
did?) It is the taxicabs that now turn my heart to water. It is
astonishing how they have multiplied--they have multiplied even beyond
the ratio of our self-reduplicating population. There are so many
already that this morning I read in my paper of a trolley-car striking a
horse-cab! The reporter had written quite unconsciously, just as he used
to write horseless carriage. Yes, the motor-cab is now the type, the
norm, and the horse-cab is the--the--the----"
He hesitated for the antithesis, and we proposed "Abnorm?"
"_Say_ abnorm! It is hideous, but I don't know that it is wrong. Where
was I?"
"You had got quite away from the sublimity of New York, which upon the
whole you seemed to attribute to the tall buildings along Fifth Avenue.
We should like you to explain again why, if 'The Heart of New York,'
with its sky-scrapers, made you think of scrap-iron, the Flatiron
soothed your lacerated sensibilities?"
[Illustration: FIFTH AVENUE FROM THE TOP OF A MOTOR-BUS]
"The Flatiron is an incident, an accent merely, in the mighty music of
the Avenue, a happy discord that makes for harmony. It is no longer
nefarious, or even mischievous, now the reporters have got done
attributing a malign meteorological influence to it. I wish I could say
as much for the white marble rocket presently soaring up from the east
side of Madison Square, and sinking the beautiful reproduction of the
Giralda tower in the Garden half-way into the ground. As I look at this
pale yellowish brown imitation of the Seville original, it has a pathos
which I might not make you feel. But I would rather not look away from
Fifth Avenue at all. It is astonishing how that street has assumed and
resumed all the larger and denser life of the other streets. Certain of
the avenues, like Third and Sixth, remain immutably and
characteristically noisy and ignoble; and Fifth Avenue has not
reduced them to insignificance as it has Broadway. That is now a
provincial High Street beside its lordlier compeer; but I remember when
Broadway stormed and swarmed with busy life. Why, I remember the
party-colored 'buses which used to thunder up and down; and I can fancy
some Rip Van Winkle of the interior returning to the remembered terrors
and splendors of that mighty thoroughfare, and expecting to be killed at
every crossing--I can fancy such a visitor looking round in wonder at
the difference and asking the last decaying survivor of the famous
Broadway Squad what they had done with Broadway from the Battery to
Madison Square. Beyond that, to be sure, there is a mighty flare of
electrics blazoning the virtues of the popular beers, whiskeys, and
actresses, which might well mislead my elderly revisitor with the belief
that Broadway was only taken in by day, and was set out again after dark
in its pristine--I think pristine is the word; it used to be--glory. But
even by night that special length of Broadway lacks the sublimity of
Fifth Avenue, as I see it or imagine it from my motor-bus top. _I_ knew
Fifth Avenue in the Lincolnian period of brick and brownstone, when it
had a quiet, exclusive beauty, the beauty of the unbroken sky-line and
the regularity of facade which it has not yet got back, and may never
get. You will get some notion of it still in Madison Avenue, say from
Twenty-eighth to Forty-second streets, and perhaps you will think it was
dull as well as proud. It is proud now, but it is certainly not dull.
There is something of columnar majesty in the lofty flanks of these tall
shops and hotels as you approach them, which makes you think of some
capital decked for a national holiday. But in Fifth Avenue it is always
holiday--"
"Enough of streets!" we cried, impatiently. "Now, what of men? What of
that heterogeneity for which New York is famous, or infamous? You
noticed the contrasting Celtic and Pelasgic tribes in Boston. What of
them here, with all the tribes of Israel, lost and found, and the
'sledded Polack,' the Czech, the Hun, the German, the Gaul, the Gothic
and Iberian Spaniard, and the swart stranger from our sister continent
to the southward, and the islands of the seven seas, who so sorely
outnumber us?"
Our friend smiled thoughtfully. "Why, that is very curious! Do you know
that in Fifth Avenue the American type seems to have got back its old
supremacy? It is as if no other would so well suit with that sublimity!
I have not heard that race-suicide has been pronounced by the courts
amenable to our wise State law against _felo de se_, but in the modern
Fifth Avenue it is as if our stirp had suddenly reclaimed its old-time
sovereignty. I don't say that there are not other faces, other tongues
than ours to be seen, heard, there; far from it! But I do say it is a
sense of the American face, the American tongue, which prevails. Once
more, after long exile in the streets of our own metropolis, you find
yourself in an American city. Your native features, your native accents,
have returned in such force from abroad, or have thronged here in such
multitude from the prospering Pittsburgs, Cincinnatis, Chicagos, St.
Louises, and San Franciscos of the West, that you feel as much at home
in Fifth Avenue as you would in Piccadilly, or in the Champs Elysees, or
on the Pincian Hill. Yes, it is very curious."
"Perhaps," we suggested, after a moment's reflection, "it isn't true."
X
CHEAPNESS OF THE COSTLIEST CITY ON EARTH
"One of my surprises on Getting Back," the more or less imaginary
interlocutor who had got back from Europe said in his latest visit to
the Easy Chair, "is the cheapness of the means of living in New York."
At this the Easy Chair certainly sat up. "Stay not a moment, Howadji,"
we exclaimed, "in removing our deep-seated prepossession that New York
is the most expensive place on the planet."
But instead of instantly complying our friend fell into a smiling muse,
from which he broke at last to say: "I have long been touched by the
pathos of a fact which I believe is not yet generally known. Do you know
yourself, with the searching knowledge which is called feeling it in
your bones, that a good many Southerners and Southerly Westerners make
this town their summer resort?" We intimated that want of penetrating
statistics which we perceived would gratify him, and he went on. "They
put up at our hotels which in the 'anguish of the solstice' they find
invitingly vacant. As soon as they have registered the clerk recognizes
them as Colonel, or Major, or Judge, but gives them the rooms which no
amount of family or social prestige could command in the season, and
there they stay, waking each day from unmosquitoed nights to iced-melon
mornings, until a greater anguish is telegraphed forward by the
Associated Press. Then they turn their keys in their doors, and flit to
the neighboring Atlantic or the adjacent Catskills, till the solstice
recovers a little, and then they return to their hotel and resume their
life in the city, which they have almost to themselves, with its parks
and drives and roof-gardens and vaudevilles, unelbowed by the three or
four millions of natives whom we leave behind us when we go to Europe,
or Newport, or Bar Harbor, or the Adirondacks. Sometimes they take
furnished flats along the Park, and settle into a greater permanency
than their hotel sojourn implies. They get the flats at about half the
rent paid by the lessees who sublet them, but I call it pathetic that
they should count it joy to come where we should think it misery to
stay. Still, everything is comparative, and I suppose they are as
reasonably happy in New York as I am in my London lodgings in the London
season, where I sometimes stifle in a heat not so pure and clear as that
I have fled from."
"Very well," we said, dryly, "you have established the fact that the
Southerners come here for the summer and live in great luxury; but what
has that to do with the cheapness of living in New York, which you began
by boasting?"
"Ah, I was coming back to that," the Howadji said, with a glow of
inspiration. "I have been imagining, in the relation which you do not
see, that New York can be made the inexpensive exile of its own children
as it has been made the summer home of those sympathetic Southerners. If
I can establish the fact of its potential cheapness, as I think I can, I
shall deprive them of some reasons for going abroad, though I'm not sure
they will thank me, when the reasons for Europe are growing fewer and
fewer. Culture can now be acquired almost as advantageously here as
there. Except for the 'monuments,' in which we include all ancient and
modern masterpieces in the several arts, we have no excuse for going to
Europe, and even in these masterpieces Europe is coming to us so
increasingly in every manner of reproduction that we allege the
monuments almost in vain. The very ruins of the past are now so
accurately copied in various sorts of portable plasticity that we may
know them here with nearly the same emotion as on their own ground. The
education of their daughters which once availed with mothers willing to
sacrifice themselves and their husbands to the common good, no longer
avails. The daughters know the far better time they will have at home,
and refuse to go, as far as daughters may, and in our civilization this,
you know, is very far. But it was always held a prime reason and
convincing argument that Dresden, Berlin, Paris, Rome, and even London,
were so much cheaper than New York that it was a waste of money to stay
at home."
"Well, wasn't it?" we impatiently demanded.
"I will not say, for I needn't, as yet. There were always at the same
time philosophers who contended that if we lived in those capitals as we
lived at home, they would be dearer than New York. But what is really
relevant is the question whether New York isn't cheaper now."
"We thought it had got past a question with you. We thought you began by
saying that New York _is_ cheaper."
"I can't believe I was so crude," the Howadji returned, with a fine
annoyance. "That is the conclusion you have characteristically jumped to
without looking before you leap. I was going to approach the fact much
more delicately, and I don't know but what by your haste you have
shattered my ideal of the conditions. But I'll own that the great
stumbling-block to my belief that the means of living in New York are
cheaper than in the European capitals is that the house rents here are
so incomparably higher than they are there. But I must distinguish and
say that I mean flat-rents, for, oddly enough, flats are much dearer
than houses. You can get a very pretty little house, in a fair quarter,
with plenty of light and a good deal of sun, for two-thirds and
sometimes one-half what you must pay for a flat with the same number of
rooms, mostly dark or dim, and almost never sunny. Of course, a house is
more expensive and more difficult to 'run,' but even with the cost of
the greater service and of the furnace heat the rent does not reach that
of a far less wholesome and commodious flat. There is one thing to be
said in favor of a flat, however, and that is the women are in favor of
it. The feminine instinct is averse to stairs; the sex likes to be
safely housed against burglars, and when it must be left alone, it
desires the security of neighbors, however strange the neighbors may be;
it likes the authority of a janitor, the society of an elevator-boy. It
hates a lower door, an area, an ash-barrel, and a back yard. But if it
were willing to confront all these inconveniences, it is intimately, it
is osseously, convinced that a house is not cheaper than a flat. As a
matter of fact, neither a house nor a flat is cheap enough in New York
to bear me out in my theory that New York is no more expensive than
those Old World cities. To aid efficiently in my support I must invoke
the prices of provisions, which I find, by inquiry at several markets on
the better avenues, have reverted to the genial level of the earlier
nineteen-hundreds, before the cattle combined with the trusts to send
them up. I won't prosily rehearse the quotations of beef, mutton, pork,
poultry, and fish; they can be had at any dealer's on demand; and they
will be found less, on the whole, than in London, less than in Paris,
less even than in Rome. They are greater no doubt than the prices in our
large Western cities, but they are twenty per cent. less than the prices
in Boston, and in the New England towns which hang upon Boston's favor
for their marketing. I do not know how or why it is that while we wicked
New-Yorkers pay twenty-five cents for our beefsteak, these righteous
Bostonians should have to pay thirty, for the same cut and quality. Here
I give twenty-eight a pound for my Java coffee; in the summer I live
near an otherwise delightful New Hampshire town where I must give
thirty-eight. It is strange that the siftings of three kingdoms, as the
Rev. Mr. Higginson called his fellow-Puritans, should have come in their
great-grandchildren to a harder fate in this than the bran and shorts
and middlings of such harvestings as the fields of Ireland and Italy, of
Holland and Hungary, of Poland and Transylvania and Muscovy afford.
Perhaps it is because those siftings have run to such a low percentage
of the whole New England population that they must suffer, along with
the refuse of the mills--the Mills of the Gods--abounding in our city
and its dependencies.
"I don't know how much our housekeepers note the fall of the prices in
their monthly bills, but in browsing about for my meals, as I rather
like to do, I distinctly see it in the restaurant rates. I don't mean
the restaurants to which the rich or reckless resort, but those modester
places which consult the means of the careful middle class to which I
belong. As you know, I live ostensibly at the Hotel Universe. I have a
room there, and that is my address----"
"We know," we derisively murmured. "So few of our visitors can afford
it."
"I can't afford it myself," our friend said. "But I save a little by
breakfasting there, and lunching and dining elsewhere. Or, I did till
the eggs got so bad that I had to go out for my breakfast, too. Now I
get perfect eggs, of the day before, for half the price that the
extortionate hens laying for the Universe exact for their last week's
product. At a very good Broadway hotel, which simple strangers from
Europe think first class, I get a 'combination' breakfast of fresh eggs,
fresh butter, and fresh rolls, with a pot of blameless Souchong or
Ceylon tea, for thirty cents; if I plunge to the extent of a baked
apple, I pay thirty-five. Do you remember what you last paid in Paris or
Rome for coffee, rolls, and butter?"
"A franc fifty," we remembered.
"And in London for the same with eggs you paid one and six, didn't you?"
"Very likely," we assented.
"Well, then, you begin to see. There are several good restaurants quite
near that good hotel where I get the same combination breakfast for the
same price; and if I go to one of those shining halls which you find in
a score of places, up and down Broadway and the side streets, I get it
for twenty-five cents. But though those shining halls glare at you with
roofs and walls of stainless tile and glass, and tables of polished
marble, their bill of fare is so inflexibly adjusted to the general
demand that I cannot get Souchong or Ceylon tea for any money; I can
only get Oolong; otherwise I must take a cup of their excellent coffee.
If I wander from my wonted breakfast, I can get almost anything in the
old American range of dishes for five or ten cents a portion, and the
quality and quantity are both all I can ask. As I have learned upon
inquiry, the great basal virtues of these places are good eggs and good
butter: I like to cut from the thick slice of butter under the perfect
cube of ice, better than to have my butter pawed into balls or cut into
shavings, as they serve your butter in Europe. But I prefer having a
small table to myself, with my hat and overcoat vis-a-vis on the chair
opposite, as I have it at that good hotel. In those shining halls I am
elbowed by three others at my polished marble table; but if there were
more room I should never object to the company. It is the good, kind,
cleanly, comely American average, which is the best company in the
world, with a more than occasional fine head, and faces delicately
sculptured by thought and study. I address myself fearlessly to the old
and young of my own sex, without ever a snub such as I might get from
the self-respectful maids or matrons who resort to the shining halls,
severally or collectively, if I ventured upon the same freedom with
them. I must say that my commensals lunch or dine as wisely as I do for
the most part, but sometimes I have had to make my tacit criticisms; and
I am glad that I forbore one night with a friendly young man at my
elbow, who had just got his order of butter-cakes--"
"Butter-cakes?" we queried.
"That is what they call a rich, round, tumid product of the griddle,
which they serve very hot, and open to close again upon a large lump of
butter. For two of those cakes and his coffee my unknown friend paid
fifteen cents, and made a supper, after which I should not have needed
to break my fast the next morning. But he fearlessly consumed it, and
while he ate he confided that he was of a minor clerical employ in one
of the great hotels near by, and when I praised our shining hall and its
guests he laughed and said he came regularly, and he always saw people
there who were registered at his hotel: they found it good and they
found it cheap. I suppose you know that New York abounds in tables
d'hote of a cheapness unapproached in the European capitals?"
We said we had heard so; at the same time we tried to look as if we
always dined somewhere in society, but Heaven knows whether we
succeeded.