from Europe. We have taken the so-called "European plan" with all of its
disadvantages and none of its advantages. We have done away with the
stuffy over-eating "American plan" and have made a rule of
"pay-as-you-go" that is quite all right--and is not. For to the simple
"European plan" has recently been added many complications. In other
days the generosity of the portions in a New York hotel was famous. A
single portion of any important dish was ample for two. Your smiling
old-fashioned waiter told you that. The waiter in a New York restaurant
today does not smile. He merely tells you that the food is served "per
portion" which generally means that an unnecessary amount of food is
prepared in the kitchen and sent from the table, uneaten, as waste. And
a smart New York _restauranteur_ recently made a "cover charge" of
twenty-five cents for bread and butter and ice-water. Others followed.
It will not be long before a smarter _restauranteur_ will make the
"cover charge" fifty cents, and then folk will begin streaming into his
place. They don't complain. That's not the New York way.
They do not even complain of the hat-boys--bloodthirsty little brigands
who snatch your hat and other wraps before you enter a restaurant. The
brigands are skillfully chosen--lean, hungry little boys every time,
never fat, sleek, well-fed looking little boys. They are employed by a
trust, which rents the "hat-checking privilege" from the proprietor of
the hotel or restaurant. The owner of the trust pays well for these
privileges and the little boys must work hard to bring him back his
rental fees and a fair profit beside.
Leave that to them. Emerge from a restaurant, well-fed and at peace with
the world and deny that lean-looking, swarthy-faced, black-eyed boy a
quarter if you can--or dare. A dime is out of the question. He might
insult you, probably would. But a quarter buys your self-respect and the
head of the trust a share in his new motor car. The lean-looking boy
buys no motor cars. He works on a salary and there are no pockets in his
uniform. There is a stern-visaged cicerone in the background and to the
cicerone roll all the quarters, but the New Yorker does not
complain--save when he reaches Los Angeles or Atlanta or some other
fairly distant place and finds the same sort of highway brigandage in
effect there.
VI
After the dinner and the hat-boy--the theater. You suggest the theater
to Katherine. She is enthusiastic. You pick the theater. It is close at
hand and you quickly find your way to it. A gentleman, whose politeness
is of a variety, somewhat _frappé_, awaits you in the box-office. A line
of hopeful mortals is shuffling toward him, to disperse with hope left
behind. But this anticipates.
You inquire of the man in the box-office for two seats--two particularly
good seats. You remember going to the theater in Indianapolis once upon
a time, a stranger, and having been seated behind the fattest theater
pillar that you could have ever possibly imagined. But you need not
worry about the pillars in this New York playhouse. The box-office
gentleman, whose thoughts seem to be a thousand miles away, blandly
replies that the house is sold out.
"So good?" you brashly venture. You had not fancied this production so
successful. He does not even assume to hear your comment. You decide
that you will see this particular play at a later time. You suggest as
much to the indifferent creature behind the wicket. He replies by
telling you that he can only give you tickets for a Monday or Tuesday
three weeks hence--and then nothing ahead of the seventeenth row. Can he
not do better than that? He cannot. He is positive that he cannot. And
his positiveness is Gibraltarian in its immobility. A faint sign of
irritation covers his bland face. He wants you to see that you are
taking too much of his time.
Katherine saves the situation. She whispers to you that she noticed a
little shop nearby with a sign "Tickets for all Theaters" displayed upon
it.
"You know they abolished the speculators two years ago," she explains.
You move on to the little shop with the inviting sign. The gentleman
behind its counters has manners at least. He greets you with the smile
of the professional shopkeeper.
"Have you tickets for 'The Giddiest Girl'?" you inquire.
He smiles ingratiatingly. Of course he has, for any night and anywhere
you wish them.
"What is the price of them?"
You are not coldly commercial but, despite that smile, merely
apprehensive. And you are beginning to understand New York.
"Four dollars."
Not so bad at that--just the box-office price. You bring out four greasy
one-dollar bills. His eyes fixed upon them, he places a ticket down upon
the counter.
"There--there are two of us," you stammer.
He does not stammer.
"Do you think that they are four dollars a dozen?" he sallies.
You give him a ten dollar bill this time. You do not kick. Even though
the show is perfectly rotten and the usherette charges you ten cents for
a poorly printed program and scowls because you take the change from her
itching palm, do not complain. You would not complain even if you knew
that the man in the chair next to you paid only the regular prices,
because he happened to belong to the same lodge as the cousin of the
treasurer of the theater, while the man in the chair next to Katherine
paid nothing at all for his seat--having a relative who advertises in
the theater programs. You do not kick. Complaint has long since been
eliminated from the New York code and you have begun to realize that.
* * * * *
After the theater, another restaurant--this time for supper--more
hat-boys, more brigandage but it is the thing to do and you must do it.
And you must do it well. Splendor costs and you pay--your full
proportion. If up in your home town you know a nice little place where
you can drop in after the show at the local playhouse and have a glass
of beer and a rarebit--dismiss that as a prevailing idea in the
neighborhood of Long Acre square. The White Light district of Broadway
can buy no motor cars on the beer and rarebit trade. Louey's trade in
his modest little place up home is sufficient to keep him in moderate
living year in and year out, but Louey does not have to pay Broadway
ground rent, or Broadway prices for food-stuffs or Broadway salaries--to
say nothing of having a thirst for a bigger and faster automobile than
his neighbor. And as we have said, the opportunity for bankruptcy in the
so-called "lobster palaces" of Broadway runs high. As this is being
written, one of the most famous of them has collapsed.
Its proprietor--he was a smart caterer come east from Chicago where he
had made his place fashionable and himself fairly rich--for a dozen
years ran a prosperous restaurant within a stone-throw of the tall white
shaft of the _Times_ building. And even if the heels were the highest,
the gowns the lowest, the food was impeccable and if you knew New York
at all you knew who went there. It was gay and beautiful and
high-priced. It was immensely popular. Then the proprietor listened to
sirens. They commanded him to tear down the simple structure of his
restaurant and there build a towering hotel. He obeyed orders. With the
magic of New York builders the new building was ready within the
twelvemonth. It represented all that might be desired--or that upper
Broadway at least might desire--in modern hotel construction.
But it could not succeed. A salacious play which made a considerable
commercial success took its title from the new hotel and called itself
"The Girl from R----'s." That was the last straw. It might have been
good fun for the man from Baraboo or the man from Jefferson City to come
to New York and dine quietly and elegantly at R----'s, but to stop at
R----'s hotel, to have his mail sent there, to have the local paper
report that he was registered at that really splendid hostelry--ah, that
was a different matter, indeed. Your Baraboo citizen had some fairly
conservative connections--church and business--and he took no risks. The
new hotel went bankrupt.[A]
[A] Another hotel man has just taken the property. His first
step has been to change its name and, if possible, its
reputation. E. H.
Beer and rarebits, indeed. Sam Blythe tells of the little group of four
who went into a hotel grillroom not far from Forty-second street and
Broadway, who mildly asked for beer and rabbits.
"We have fine partridges," said the head-waiter, insinuatingly.
"We asked for beer and rabbits," insisted the host of the little group.
He really did not know his New York.
"We have fine partridges," reiterated the head-waiter, then yawned
slightly behind his hand. That yawn settled it. The head of the party
was bellicose. He lost his temper completely. In a few minutes an
ambulance and a patrol wagon came racing up Broadway. But the hotel had
won. It always does.
* * * * *
One thing more--the _cabaret_. We think that if you are really fond of
Katherine, and Katherine's reputation, you will avoid the restaurants
that make a specialty of the so-called _cabarets_. Really good
restaurants manage to get along without them. And the very best that can
be said of them is that they are invariably indifferently poor--a
_mélange_ contributed by broken-down actors or actresses, or boys or
girls stolen from the possibilities of a really decent way of earning a
living. As for the worst, it is enough to say that the familiarity that
begins by breeding contempt follows in the wake of the _cabaret_. It may
be very jolly for you, of a lonely summer evening in New York and
forgetting all the real pleasures of a lonely summer night in the big
town--wonderful orchestral concerts in Central Park, dining on open-air
terraces and cool quiet roofs, motoring off to wonderful shore dinners
in queer old taverns--to hunt out these great gay places in the heart of
the town. Easy _camaraderie_ is part and parcel of them. But you will
not want such comrades to meet any of the Katherines of your family. And
therein lies a more than subtle distinction.
VII
It has all quite dazed you. You turn toward Katherine as you ride home
with her in the taxicab--space forbids a description of the horrors and
the indignities of the taxicab trust.
"Is it like this--every night?" you feebly ask.
"Every night of the year," she replies. "And typical New Yorkers like
it."
That puts a brand-new thought into your mind.
"What is a typical New Yorker?" you demand.
"We are all typical New Yorkers," she laughs.
It is a foolish answer--of course. But the strange part of the whole
thing is that Katherine is right. Either there are no typical New
Yorkers--as many sane folk solemnly aver--or else every one who tarries
in the city through the passing of even a single night is a typical New
Yorker. How can it be else in a city who is still growing like a girl in
her teens, who adds to herself each year in permanent population 135,000
human beings, whose transient population is nightly estimated at over a
hundred thousand? They are all typical New Yorkers.
Here is Solomon Strunsky who has just arrived through Ellis Island,
scared and forlorn, with his scared and forlorn little family trailing
on behind, Solomon Strunsky all but penniless, and the merciless
home-sickness for the little faraway town in Polish hills tearing at his
heart. Is Solomon Strunsky less a typical New Yorker than the scion of
this fine old family which for sixty years lived and died in a red-brick
mansion close by Washington square? For in four years Solomon Strunsky
will be keeping his own little store in the East Side, in another year
he will be moving his brood up to a fine new house in Harlem, an even
dozen years from the entrance at Ellis Island and you may be reading the
proud patronymic of Strunsky spelled along a signboard upon one of the
great new commercial barracks, which, not content with remaining
downtown, began the despoliation of Fifth avenue and its adjacent retail
district. Can you keep Solomon Strunsky out of the family of typical New
Yorkers? We think not.
We think that you cannot exclude the man who through some stroke of
fortune has accumulated money in a smaller city, and who has come to New
York to live and to spend it. There are many thousands of him dwelling
upon the island of Manhattan; with his families they make a considerable
community by itself. They are good spenders, good New Yorkers in that
they never complain while the strings of their purses are never tightly
tied. They live in smart apartments uptown, at tremendously high
rentals, keep at least one car in service at all seasons of the year,
dine luxuriously in luxurious eating-places, attend the opera once a
week or a fortnight, see the new plays, keep abreast of the showy side
of New York. They are typical New Yorkers. In an apartment a little
further down the street--which rents at half the figure and comes
dangerously near being called a flat--is another family. This family
also attends the new plays, although it is far more apt to go a floor or
even two aloft, than to meet the speculator's prices for orchestra
seats. It also goes to the opera, and the young woman of the house is in
deadly earnest when she says that she does not mind standing through the
four or five long acts of a Wagnerian matinee, because the nice young
ushers let you sit on the floor in the intermissions. But this family
goes farther than the drama--spoken or sung. It is conversant with the
new books and the new pictures. That same young woman swings the Phi
Beta Kappa key of the most difficult institution of learning on this
continent. And she knows more about the trend of modern art than half of
the artists themselves. And yet she "goes to business"--is the capable
secretary of a very capable man downtown.
These are typical New Yorkers. So are a family over in the next
block--theirs is frankly a flat in every sense of that despised word.
They have not been in the theater in a dozen years, never in one of the
big modern restaurants or hotels. Yet the head of that family is a man
whose name is known and spoken reverently through little homes all the
way across America. He is a worker in the church, although not a
clergyman, a militant friend of education, although not an educator, and
he believes that New York is the most thoughtful and benevolent city in
the world. And if you attempt to argue with him, he will prove easily
and smilingly, that he is right and you--are just mistaken. He and his
know their New York--a New York of high Christian force and precept--and
they, too, are New Yorkers.
So, too, is Bliffkins and the little Bliffkins--although Bliffkins holds
property in a bustling Ohio city and votes within its precincts. To tell
the truth baldly, the Bliffkinses descend upon New York once each year
and never remain more than a fortnight. But they stop at a great hotel
and they are great spenders. Floor-walkers, head-waiters, head-ushers
know them. Annually, and for a few golden days they are part of New
York--typical New Yorkers, if you please. And when they are gone other
Bliffkinses, from almost every town across the land, big and little,
come to replace them. And all these are typical New Yorkers.
What is the typical New Yorker?
Are the sane folk right when they say that he does not exist? We do not
think so. We think that Katherine in all her flippancy was right. They
are all typical New Yorkers who sojourn, no matter for how little a
time, within her boundaries. We will go farther still. You might almost
say that all Americans are typical New Yorkers. For New York is, in no
small sense, America. Other towns and cities may publicly scoff her,
down in their hearts they slavishly imitate her, her store fronts, her
fashions, her hotel and her theater customs, her policemen, even her
white-winged street cleaners. They publicly laugh at her--down in their
hearts they secretly adore her.
3
ACROSS THE EAST RIVER
Physically only the East river separates Brooklyn from Manhattan island.
The island of Manhattan was and still is to many folk the city of New
York. Across that narrow wale of the East river--one of the busiest
water-highways in all the world--men have thrust several great bridges
and tunnels. Politically Brooklyn and Manhattan are one. They are the
most important boroughs of that which has for the past fifteen years
been known as Greater New York.
But in almost every other way Manhattan and Brooklyn are nearly a
thousand miles apart. In social customs, in many of the details of
living they are vastly different, and this despite the fact that the
greater part of the male population of Brooklyn daily travels to
Manhattan island to work in its offices and shops and you can all but
toss a stone from one community into the other. The very fact that
Brooklyn is a dwelling place for New York--professional funny-men long
ago called it a "bed-chamber"--has done much, as we shall see, toward
building up the peculiar characteristics of the town that stands just
across the East river from the tip of the busiest little island in the
world.
Consider for an instant the situation of Brooklyn. It fills almost the
entire west end of Long island--a slightly rolling tract of land between
a narrow and unspeakably filthy stream on the north known as Newtown
creek and the great cool ocean on the south. This entire tract has for
many years been known as Kings county--its name a slight proof of its
antiquity. Many years ago there were various villages in the old
county--among them Greenpoint, Bushwick, Williamsburgh, Canarsie,
Flatbush, Gravesend and Brooklyn. They were Dutch towns, and you can
still see some evidences of this in their old houses, although these are
disappearing quite rapidly nowadays. Brooklyn grew the most
rapidly--from almost the very day of the establishment of the republic.
Robert Fulton developed his steam-ferry and the East river ceased to be
the bugaboo it had always been to sailing vessels. Fulton ferry was
popular from the first. With the use of steam its importance waxed and
soon it was overcrowded. Another ferry came, another and another--many,
many others. They were all crowded, for Brooklyn was growing, a close
rim of houses and churches and shops all the way along the bank of the
East river from the Navy Yard at the sharp crook of the river that the
Dutch called the Wallabout, south to the marshy Gowanus bay. Upon the
river shore, north of the Wallabout, was Williamsburgh, which was also
growing and which had been incorporated into a city. But when the
horse-cars came and men were no longer forced to walk to and from the
ferries or to ride in miserable omnibuses, Brooklyn and Williamsburgh
became physically one. Williamsburgh then gave up its charter and its
identity and became lost in the growth of a greater Brooklyn. That was
repeated slowly but surely throughout all Kings county. Within
comparatively recent years there came the elevated railroad--at almost
the same time the great miracle of the Brooklyn bridge--and all the
previous growth of the town was as nothing. For two decades it grew as
rapidly as ever grew a "boom-town" in the West. The coming of electric
city transportation, the multiplying of bridges, the boring of the first
East river tunnel, all helped in this great growth. But the fairy web
of steel that John A. Roebling thrust across the busiest part of the
East river marked the transformation of Brooklyn--a transformation that
did not end when Brooklyn sold her political birthright and became part
and parcel of New York. That transformation is still in progress.
We have slipped into history because we have wanted you to understand
why Brooklyn today is just what she is. The submerging of these little
Dutch villages with their individual customs and traditions has done its
part in the making of the customs and traditions of the Brooklyn of
today. For Brooklyn today remains a congregation of separate
communities. You may slip from one to the other without realizing that
you have done more than pass down a compactly built block of houses or
crossed a crowded street.
And so it has come to pass that Brooklyn has no main street--in the
sense that about every other town in the United States, big or little,
has a main street. If you wish to call Fulton street, running from the
historic Fulton ferry right through the heart of the original city and
far out into the open country a main street, you will be forced to admit
that it is the ugliest main street of any town in the land: narrow,
inconsequential, robbed of its light and air by a low-hanging elevated
railroad almost its entire length. And yet right on Fulton street you
will find two department-stores unusually complete and unusually well
operated. New Yorkers come to them frequently to shop. The two stores
seem lost in the dreariness of Fulton street--a very contradiction to
that highway.
Yet Brooklyn is a community of contradictions. Here we have called
Fulton street a possible main street of Brooklyn, and yet there is a
street in the town, for the most part miles removed from it, that is
quite as brisk by day and the only street in the borough which has any
real activity at night. Like that great main-stem of Manhattan it is
called Broadway, and it is a wider and more pretentious street than
Fulton, although in its turn also encumbered with an elevated railroad.
But up and down Broadway there courses a constant traffic; on foot, in
automobiles, in trolley-cars. Broadway boasts its own department-stores,
some of them sizable, many hundreds of small shops, cheap theaters--and
some better--by the score. It is an entertaining thoroughfare and yet we
will venture to say that not one in ten thousand of the many transients
who come to New York at regular intervals and who know the Great White
Way as well as four corners up at home, have ever stepped foot within
it. We will go further. Of the two million humans who go to make the
population of Brooklyn; a large part, probably half, certainly a third,
have never seen its own Broadway.
This speaks volumes for the provincialism of the great community across
the East river from Manhattan. Remember all this while that it is a
community of communities, self-centered and rather more intent upon the
problem of getting back and forth between its homes and Manhattan than
on any other one thing in the world. As a rule, people live in Brooklyn
because it is less expensive than residence upon the island of
Manhattan, more accessible and far more comfortable than the Bronx or
the larger cities of New Jersey that range themselves close to the shore
of the Hudson river. It is in reality a larger and a better Jersey City
or a Hoboken or a Long Island City.
[Illustration: A quiet street on Brooklyn Heights]
And yet, like each of these three, it is something more than a mere
housing place for folk who work within congested Manhattan. It, too, is
a manufacturing center of no small importance. Despite the
transportation obstacles of being divided by one or two rivers from most
of the trunk-line railroads that terminate at the port of New York,
hundreds of factory chimneys, large and small, proclaim its industrial
importance. Its output of manufactures reaches high into the millions
each year. And the pay-roll of its factory operatives is annually an
impressive figure.
The fact remains, however, that it is a community of communities, each
pulling very largely for itself. A smart western town of twenty-five
thousand population can center more energy and secure for itself
precisely what it wishes more rapidly and more precisely than can this
great borough of nearly two million population. Brooklyn has not yet
learned the lesson of concentrated effort.
Now consider these communities of old Kings county once again. We have
touched upon their location and their growth; let us see the manner of
folk who made them grow. About the second decade of the last century a
virtual hegira of New England folk began to move toward New York City.
The New England states were the first portion of the land to show
anything like congestion, the wonderful city at the mouth of the Hudson
was beginning to come into its own--opportunity loomed large in the eyes
of the shrewd New Englanders. They began picking up and moving toward
New York. And they are still coming, although, of course, in no such
volume as in the first half of the nineteenth century.