day well advanced and there is a _vis-à-vis_ awaiting you uptown. Of
course, there is a Her to enjoy your Day of Days with you. And just for
convenience alone we will call her Katherine. It is a pretty name for a
woman, and it will do here and now quite as well as any other.
Katherine is waiting for you in the Fourteenth street station of the
subway. She is prompt--after the fashion of most New York girls. And it
is a relief to come out of the overcrowded tube and find her there at
the entrance that leads up to sunshine and fresh air. She knows her New
York thoroughly and as a prelude to the trip uptown she leads you over
to Fifth avenue--to the upper deck of one of those big green
peregrinating omnibuses.
"It's a shame that we could not have started at Washington square," she
apologizes. "When you sweep around and north through the great arch it
almost seems as if you were passing through the portals of New York. It
is one of the few parts of the town that are not changing rapidly."
For Fifth avenue--only a few blocks north of that stately arch--has
begun to disintegrate and decay. Not in the ordinary sense of those
terms. But to those who remember the stately street of fifteen or twenty
years ago--lined with the simple and dignified homes of the town--its
change into a business thoroughfare brings keen regrets. Katherine
remembers that she read in a book that there are today more factory
workers employed in Fifth avenue or close to it, than in such great mill
cities as Lowell or Lawrence or Fall River, and when you ask her the
reason why she will tell you how these great buildings went soaring up
as office-buildings, without office tenants to fill them. They represent
speculation, and speculation is New Yorkish. But speculation in
wholesale cannot afford to lose, and that is why the garment
manufacturers and many others of their sort came flocking to the great
retail shopping district between Fourth and Seventh avenues and
Fourteenth and Thirty-fourth streets, and sent the shops soaring further
to the north. It has been expensive business throughout, doubly
expensive, because absolutely unnecessary. Some of the great retail
houses of New York built modern and elaborate structures south of
Thirty-fourth street within the past twenty years in the firm belief
that the retail shopping section had been fixed for the next half
century. But the new stores had hardly been opened before the deluge of
manufacturing came upon them. Shoppers simply would not mix with factory
hands upon lower Fifth avenue and the side streets leading from it. And
so the shop-keepers have had to move north and build anew. And just what
a tax such moving has been upon the consumer no one has ever had the
audacity to estimate.
"They should have known that nothing ever stays fixed in New York," says
Katherine. "We are a restless folk, who make a restless city. Stay
fixed? Did you notice the station at which you entered today?"
Of course you did. The new Grand Central, with its marvelous blue
ceiling capping a waiting-room so large that the New York City Hall,
cupola, wings and all could be set within it, can hardly escape the
attention of any traveler who passes within its portals.
"It is the greatest railroad station in the world," she continues, "and
yet I have read in the newspapers that Commodore Vanderbilt built on
that very plat of ground in 1871 the largest station in the world for
the accommodation of his railroads. He thought that it would last for
all time. In forty years the wreckers were pulling it down. It was
outgrown, utterly outgrown and they were carting it off piece by piece
to the rubbish heaps."
She turns suddenly upon you.
"That is typical of our restless, lovely city," she tells you. And you,
yourself, have heard that only two years ago they tore down a nineteen
story building at Wall and Nassau streets so that they might replace it
by another of the towers--this one thirty stories in height.
* * * * *
The conductor of the green omnibus thrusts his green fare-box under your
nose. You find two dimes and drop it into the contrivance.
"You can get more value for less money and less value for much money in
New York than in any other large city in the world," says Katherine.
She is right--and you know that she is right. You can have a glorious
ride up the street, that even in its days of social decadence is still
the finest highway in the land--a ride that continues across the town
and up its parked rim for long miles--for a mere ten cents of Uncle
Sam's currency and as for the reverse--well you are going to dinner in
a smart hotel with Katherine in a little while.
You swing across Broadway and up the west edge of Madison square, catch
a single, wondering close-at-hand glimpse of the white campanile of the
Metropolitan tower which dominates that open place and so all but
replaces Diana on her perch above Madison Square Garden--a landmark of
the New York of a quarter of a century ago and which is apt to come into
the hands of the wreckers almost any day now. Now you are at the south
edge of the new shopping district, although some of the ultra places
below Thirty-fourth street have begun to move into that portion of the
avenue just south of Central Park. In a little while they may be
stealing up the loveliest portion of the avenue--from Fifty-ninth street
north.
The great shops dominate the avenue. And if you look with sharp eyes as
the green bus bears you up this _via sacre_, you may see that one of the
greatest ones--a huge department store encased in architecturally superb
white marble--bears no sign or token of its ownership or trade. An
oversight, you think. Not a bit of it. Four blocks farther up the avenue
is another great store in white marble--a jewelry shop of international
reputation. You will have to scan its broad _façade_ closely indeed
before you find the name of the firm in tiny letters upon the face of
its clock. Oversight? Not a bit of it. It is the ultra of shop-keeping
in New York--the assumption that the shop is so well known that it need
not be placarded to the vulgar world. And if strangers from other points
fail to identify it--well that is because of their lack of knowledge and
the shopkeeper may secretly rejoice.
But, after all, it is the little shops that mark the character of Fifth
avenue--not its great emporiums. It is the little millinery shops where
an engaging creature in black and white simpers toward you and calls
you, if you are of the eternal feminine, "my dear;" the jewelry shops
where the lapidary rises from his lathe and offers a bit of
craftsmanship; the rare galleries that run from old masters to modern
etchers; specialty shops, filled top to bottom with toys or Persian
rugs, or women's sweaters, or foreign magazines and books, that render
to Fifth avenue its tremendous cosmopolitanism. These little shops make
for personality. There is something in the personal contact between the
proprietor and the customer that makes mere barter possess a real
fascination. And if you do pay two or three times the real value in the
little shop you have just so much more fun out of the shopping. And
there are times when real treasures may come out of their stores.
"Look at the cornices," interrupts Katherine. "Mr. Arnold Bennett says
that they are the most wonderful things in all New York."
Katherine may strain her neck, looking at cornices if she so wills. As
for you, the folk who promenade the broad sidewalks are more worth your
while. There are more of them upon the west walk than upon the east--for
some strange reason that has long since brought about a similar
phenomenon upon Broadway and sent west side rents high above those upon
the east. Fifth avenue thrusts its cosmopolitanism upon you, not alone
in her shops, with their wonderfully varied offerings, but in the very
humans who tread her pavements. The New York girl may not always be
beautiful but she is rarely anything but impeccable. And if in the one
instance she is extreme in her styles, in the next she is apt to be
severe in her simplicity of dress. And it is difficult to tell to which
ordinary preference should go. These girls--girls in a broad sense all
the way from trim children in charge of maid or governess to girls whose
pinkness of skin defies the graying of their locks--a sprinkling of
men, not always so faultless in dress or manner as their sisters--and
you have the Fifth avenue crowd. Then between these two quick moving
files of pedestrians--set at all times in the rapid _tempo_ of New
York--a quadruple file of carriages; the greater part of them motor
driven.
Traffic in Fifth avenue, like traffic almost everywhere else in New York
is a problem increasing in perplexity. A little while ago the situation
was met and for a time improved by slicing off the fronts of the
buildings--perhaps the most expensive shave that the town has ever
known--and setting back the sidewalks six or eight feet. But the
benefits then gained have already been over-reached and the traffic
policeman at the street corners all the way up the avenue must possess
rare wit and diplomacy--while their fellows at such corners as
Thirty-fourth and Forty-second are hardly less than field generals. And
with all the _finesse_ of their work the traffic moves like molasses.
Long double and triple files of touring cars and limousines, the
combined cost of which would render statistics such as would gladden the
heart of a Sunday editor, make their way up and down the great street
tediously. If a man is in a hurry he has no business even to essay the
Avenue. And occasionally the whole tangle is double-tangled. The shriek
of a fire-engine up a side street or the clang of an ambulance demanding
a clear right-of-way makes the traffic question no easier. Yet the
policemen at the street corners are not caught unawares. With the shrill
commands of their own whistles they maneuver trucks and automobiles and
even some old-fashioned hansom cabs, pedestrians, all the rest--as
coolly and as evenly as if it had been rehearsed for whole weeks.
* * * * *
New York is wonderful, the traffic of its chief show street--for Fifth
avenue can now be fairly said to have usurped Broadway as the main
highway of the upper city--tremendous. You begin to compute what must be
the rental values upon this proud section of Fifth avenue, as it climbs
Murray Hill from Thirty-fourth street to Forty-second street, when
Katherine interrupts you once again. She knows her New York thoroughly
indeed.
"Do you notice that house?" she demands.
You follow her glance to a very simple brick house, upon the corner of
an inconsequential side street. Beside it on Fifth avenue is an open
lot--of perhaps fifty feet frontage, giving to the avenue but a plain
brown wooden fence.
"A corking building lot," you venture, "Why don't they--"
"I expected you to say that," she laughs. "They have wanted to build
upon that lot--time and time again. But when they approach the owner he
laughs at them and declines to consider any offer. 'My daughter has a
little dog,' he says politely, 'It must have a place for exercise.' We
New Yorkers are an odd lot," she laughs. "You know that the Goelets kept
a cow in the lawn of their big house at Broadway and Nineteenth street
until almost twenty years ago--until there was not a square foot of
grass outside of a park within five miles. And in New York the man who
can do the odd thing successfully is apt to be applauded. You could not
imagine such a thing in Boston or Baltimore or Philadelphia, could you?"
You admit that your imagination would fall short of such heights and ask
Katherine if you are going up to the far end of the 'bus run--to that
great group of buildings--university, cathedral, hospital, divinity
school--that have been gathered just beyond the northwestern corner of
Central Park.
"No, I think not," she quickly decides, "You know that Columbia is not
to New York as Harvard is to Boston. Harvard dominates Boston, Columbia
is but a peg in the educational system of New York. The best families
here do not bow to its fetich. They are quite as apt to send their boys
to Yale or Princeton--even Harvard."
"Then there's the cathedral and the Drive," you venture.
"We have a cathedral right here on Fifth avenue that is finished and, in
its way, quite as beautiful. And as for the Drive--it is merely a rim of
top-heavy and expensive apartment houses. The West Side is no longer
extremely smart. The truth of the matter is that we must pause for
afternoon tea."
You ignore that horrifying truth for an instant.
"What has happened to the poor West Side?" you demand.
Katherine all but lowers her voice to a whisper.
"Twenty years ago and it had every promise of success. It looked as if
Riverside Drive would surpass the Avenue as a street of fine residences.
The side streets were preëminently nice. Then came the subway--and with
it the apartment houses. After that the very nice folk began moving to
the side streets in the upper Fifties, the Sixties and the Seventies
between Park and Fifth avenues."
"Suppose that the apartment houses should begin to drift in there--in
any numbers?" you demand.
"Lord knows," says Katherine, and with due reverence adds: "There is the
last stand of the prosperous New Yorker with an old-fashioned notion
that he and his would like to live in a detached house. The Park binds
him in on the West, the tenement district and Lexington avenue on the
East--to the North Harlem and the equally impossible Bronx. The old
guard is standing together."
"There is Brooklyn?" you venture.
"No New Yorker," says Katherine, with withering scorn, "ever goes
publicly to Brooklyn unless he is being buried in Greenwood cemetery."
* * * * *
Tea for you is being served in a large mausoleum of a white
hotel--excessively white from a profuse use of porcelain tiles which can
be washed occasionally--of most extraordinary architecture. Some day
some one is going to attempt an analysis of hotel architecture in New
York and elsewhere in the U.S.A. but this is not the time and place.
Suffice it to say here and now that you finally found a door entering
the white porcelain mausoleum. What a feast awaited your eyes--as well
as your stomach--within. Rooms of rose pink and rooms of silver gray,
Persian rooms, Japanese rooms, French rooms in the several varieties of
Louis, Greek rooms--Europe, the ancients and the Orient, have been
ransacked for the furnishing of this tavern. And in the center of them
all is a great glass-enclosed garden, filled with giant palms and tiny
tables, tremendous waiters and infinitesimal chairs. A large bland-faced
employé--who is a sort of sublimated edition of the narrow lean hat-boys
who we shall find in the eating places of the Broadway theater
districts--divests you of your outer wraps. You elbow past a band and
arrive at the winter garden. A head waiter in an instant glance of
steel-blue eyes decides that you are fit and finds the tiniest of the
tiny tables for you. It is so far in the shade of the sheltering palm
that you have to bend almost double to drink your tea--and the orchestra
is rather uncomfortably near.
[Illustration: Washington Square and its lovely Arch--New York]
Katherine might have taken you to other tea dispensaries--an unusual
place in a converted stable in Thirty-fourth street, another stable loft
in West Twenty-eighth--dozens of little shops, generally feminine to
an intensified degree, which combine the serving of tea with the
vending of their wares. But she preferred the big white hotel.
"Tea at the Plaza is so satisfactory and so restful," she says, as you
dodge to permit two ladies--one in gray silk and the other in a cut of
blue cloth that gives her the contour of a magnified frog--to slip past
you without knocking your tea out of your untrained fingers. "We might
have gone to the Manhattan--but it's so filled with young girls and the
chappies from the schools--the Ritz is proper but dull, so is
Sherry's--all the rest more or less impossible."
She rattles on--the matter of restaurants is always dear to the New York
heart. You ignore the details.
"But why?" you demand.
"Why what?" she returns.
"Why tea?"
You explain that afternoon tea in its real lair--London--in a sort of
climatic necessity. The prevalence of fog, of raw damp days, makes a cup
of hot tea a real bracer--a stimulant that carries the human through
another two or three hours of hard existence until the late London
dinner. The bracing atmosphere of New York--with more clear days than
any other metropolitan city in the world--does not need tea. You say so
frankly.
"I suppose you are right," Katherine concedes, "but we have ceased in
this big city to rail at the English. We bow the knee to them. The most
fashionable of our newest hotels and shops run--absurdly many times--to
English ways. And afternoon tea has long since ceased to be a novelty in
our lives. Why, they are beginning to serve it at the offices
downtown--just as they do in dear old London."
You swallow hard--some one has recommended that to you as a method of
suppressing emotion--for polite society is never emotional.
V
Dinner is New York's real function of the day. And dinner in New York
means five million hungry stomachs demanding to be filled. The New York
dinner is as cosmopolitan as the folk who dwell on the narrow island of
Manhattan and the two other islands that press closely to it. The
restaurant and hotel dinners are as cosmopolitan as the others. Of
course, for the sake of brevity, if for no other reason, you must
eliminate the home dinners--and read "home" as quickly into the cold and
heavy great houses of the avenue as into the little clusters of rooms in
crowded East Side tenements where poverty is never far away and next
week's meals a real problem. And remember, that to dine even in a
reasonably complete list of New York's famous eating places--a new one
every night--would take you more than a year. At the best your vision of
them must be desultory.
Six o'clock sees the New York business army well on its way toward
home--the seething crowds at the Brooklyn bridge terminal in Park Row,
the overloaded subway straining to move its fearful burden, the ferry
and the railroad terminals focal points of great attractiveness. To make
a single instance: take that division of the army that dwells in
Brooklyn. It begins its march dinnerward a little after four o'clock,
becomes a pushing, jostling mob a little later and shows no sign of
abatement until long after six. Within that time the railroad folk at
the Park Row terminal of the old bridge have received, classified and
despatched Brooklynward, more than one hundred and fifty thousand
persons--the population of a city almost the size of Syracuse. And the
famous old bridge is but one of four direct paths from Manhattan to
Brooklyn.
Six o'clock sees restaurants and cafés alight and ready for the two or
three hours of their really brisk traffic of the day. There are even
dinner restaurants downtown, remarkably good places withal and making
especial appeal to those overworked souls who are forced to stay at the
office at night. There are bright lights in Chinatown where innumerable
"Tuxedos" and "Port Arthurs" are beginning to prepare the chop-suey in
immaculate Mongolian kitchens. But the real restaurant district for the
diner-out hardly begins south of Madison square. There are still a very
few old hotels in Broadway south of that point--a lessening company each
year--one or two in close proximity to Washington square. Two of these
last make a specialty of French cooking--their _table d'hôtes_ are
really famous--and perhaps you may fairly say when you are done at them
that you have eaten at the best restaurants in all New York. From them
Fifth avenue runs a straight course to the newer hotels far to the
north--a silent brilliantly lighted street as night comes "with the
double row of steel-blue electric lamps resembling torch-bearing monks"
one brilliant New York writer has put it. But before the newest of the
new an intermediate era of hotels, the Holland, the nearby Imperial and
the Waldorf-Astoria chief among these. The Waldorf has been from the day
it first opened its doors--more than twenty years ago--New York's really
representative hotel. Newer hostelries have tried to wrest that honor
from it--but in vain. It has clung jealously to its reputation. The
great dinners of the town are held in its wonderful banqueting halls,
the well-known men of New York are constantly in its corridors. It is
club and more than club--it is a clearing-house for all of the best
clubs. It is the focal center for the hotel life of the town.
There is an important group of hotels in the rather spectacular
neighborhood of Times square--the Astor, with its distinctly German
flavor, and the Knickerbocker which whimsically likes to call itself
"the country club on Forty-second street" distinctive among them. And
ranging upon upper Fifth avenue, or close to it, are other important
houses, the Belmont, the aristocratic Manhattan, the ultra-British
Ritz-Carlton, the St. Regis, the Savoy, the Netherland, the Plaza, and
the Gotham. In between these are those two impeccable restaurants--so
distinctive of New York and so long wrapped up in its history--Sherry's
and Delmonico's.
Over in the theatrical brilliancy of Broadway up and down from Times
square are other restaurants--Shanley's, Churchill's, Murray's--the list
is constantly changing. A fashionable restaurant in New York is either
tremendously successful--or else, as we shall later see, they are
telephoning for the sheriff. And the last outcome is apt more to follow
than the first. For it is a tremendous undertaking to launch a
restaurant in these days. The decorations of the great dining-rooms must
rival those of a Versailles palace while the so-called minor
appointments--silver, linen, china and the rest must be as faultless as
in any great house upon Fifth avenue. The first cost is staggering, the
upkeep a steady drain. There is but one opportunity for the
proprietor--and that opportunity is in his charges. And when you come to
dine in one of these showy uptown places you will find that he has not
missed his opportunity.
All New York that dines out does not make for these great places or
their fellows. There are little restaurants that cast a glamour over
their poor food by thrusting out hints of a magic folk named Bohemians
who dine night after night at their dirty tables. There are others who
with a Persian name seek to allure the ill-informed, some stout German
places giving the substantial cheer of the Fatherland, beyond them
restaurants phrasing themselves in the national dishes and the cooking
of every land in the world, save our own. For a real American restaurant
is hard to find in New York--real American dishes treats of increasing
rarity. A great hotel recently banished steaks from its bills-of-fare,
another has placed the ban on pie; and as for strawberry
short-cake--just ask for strawberry short-cake. The concoction that the
waiter will set before you will leave you hesitating between tears and
laughter--ridicule for the pitiful attempts of a French cook and tears
for your thoughts of the tragedy that has overwhelmed an American
institution. Some day some one is going to build a hotel with the
American idea standing back of it right in the heart of New York. He is
going to have the bravery or the patriotism to call it the American
House or the United States Hotel or Congress Hall or some other title
that means something quite removed from the aristocratic nomenclature
that our modern generation of tavern-keepers have borrowed from Europe
without the slightest sense of fitness; and to that man shall be given
more than mere riches--the satisfaction that will come to him from
having accomplished a real work.