The new New York : a commentary on the place and the people

Front matter

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Preface

The title of this book describes it with sufficient accuracy. The new city is pictured rather than the old ; the present appearance is recited rather than the history of Dutch and English successions. This, of course, implies limitations, but not necessarily a meager field of survey. The difficulty has been, not the paucity, but the prodigality of the materials. Where one should begin has presented as much of a problem as where one should leave off. Besides, in a swift-expanding city like New York everything is more or less confused by movement, by casual phenomena, by want of definition. Selfimposed barriers are necessary to keep one from being lost in the vastness of the swirl.

The writer and the illustrator have not escaped the embarrassment of many points of view, but gradually the belief has come to them that, pictorially, the larger aspect of New York is the life and energy of its people projected upon the background of its commerce. It is this character of the place and its inhabitants that they have sought to set forth, convinced that character is interesting in itself, and that true municipal beauty must viii PREFACE

be more or less beholden to it. Those who believe only

in the planned and plotted city will, no doubt, shake their

heads over this; but many times in civic story the

characteristic has proved more attractive than the formal.

It has been demonstrated in the present day, here in New

York. Those who have erected the new city, as need has

dictated, have builded better than they knew. They

have given us, not the classic, but the picturesque — a

later and perhaps a more interesting development.

At least such is the chief contention of this book. With

what reason or conviction it is pictured or argued is the

privilege of the reader to decide. Therefore let us leave

off explanations and begin.

J. C. V. D.

New York, May, 1909.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Introduction 1

II. The Approach from the Sea 21

Introduction

Constantinople, seen in the early evening from the Marmora, is perhaps the most beautiful city in the world. It lifts from the water, takes form from out the opalescent distance, like some vision of The Thousand and One Nights Entertainment. The yellow walls and towers of old Byzantium, the red-tiled buildings that crowd along the seven hills of Stamboul, the silver-domed mosques of Achmet, of Mohammed, of Bajazet, the dark green cypresses in the Seraglio Gardens, the restless water at one's feet, the wonderful light that seems always overhead, and the rosy air that blends them all into harmony, make up a picture never to be forgotten. The glamour and the romance of the East become, for the moment, realities. The realm of enchantment lies just before you.

As the ship draws nearer and swings around Seraglio Point into the Golden Horn, new vistas of even greater splendor open and deepen. The harbor with its forests of masts, the Galata Bridge — the whole eastern side of the city — lie in the shadow of the Stamboul hills; the domes of Sancta Sophia lift against the sunset west, a violet light gathers about the minarets of the mosque of Solymon, the rosy air turns into a golden mist, and through it the towers of Pera look supernaturally splendid. Haroun al Raschid, in fancy free, never built a city more beautiful ! It is a dream city. If you touch it, it will fade away and leave only a grouping of harsh facts.

But touch it you must whether you will or will not. You are disembarked, sent ashore, and, at first, are delighted with the way certain colors in shop fronts, flags, and costumes ''cut out," with the quaintness of rambling buildings, with the ships and crowds and all the barbaric yawp of the streets. But presently you begin to lose the ensemble. The light and atmosphere no longer bind together. The forms of buildings become grotesque, the streets grow squalid, the people, the dogs, the horses, make up a mean and hideous entanglement of life; the noises are deafening, the odors unbearable, the filth untellable. Before the stars are out you have possibly concluded (and not without reason) that Constantinople may be beautiful at a distance, and picturesque in spots close at hand ; but that it certainly is not architectural, not structural, not a homogeneous civic unit like Paris. The larger elements of design and system are lacking. It is something that just ''happened."

Singularly enough there is in New York a superficial likeness to Constantinople. Even the height and location of the ground with the contours cut by the rivers are not dissimilar. A glance at the map will show the Hudson corresponding to the Marmora, the East River to the Golden Horn, the Upper Bay to the Bosporus. Other resemblances derive naturally from these. Manhattan becomes recognizable as Stamboul, the Battery as Seraglio Point, Brooklyn as the heights of Pera, Staten Island as Scutari. Even the Brooklyn Bridge can be tortured into a resemblance to the Galata Bridge, and the Williamsburgh Bridge is an exaggerated suggestion of the upper bridge on the Golden Horn.

The likeness carries on (fancifully if you will) into the impression produced at first sight. Both cities are seen at their best from the water; both are beautiful from a distance and for a similar reason. Light and color gleaming from towers and spires and pinnacles, a foreground of water, a background of blue sky, a rosy-blue envelope of air, make up the attractive quality of each. The white sky-scraper of New York, that thoughtless people jeer at, catches light as readily as a Moslem minaret; the solid ''blocks" standing shoulder to shoulder along the streets, the bunched group of high buildings in the lower city, make up walls more massive than those of Stamboul ; and if New York lacks the silvery domes of Constantinople, it is not without its tall towers flying flags against the blue, and such graceful traceries in the air as the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges.

Seen from a point in the Upper Bay where the Brooklyn

Bridge first comes into view and the sky-scrapers in the lower city crowd together like distant mountain peaks, New York is more striking, more impressive, than any other city on the globe. It looms through the blue mist, not with any Oriental romance about it, but with a feeling of tremendous bulk and power. The mass of it makes you reaHze the energy back of it, excites a wonder as to its fashioning, overawes you with its possibilities. There is no mystery here. New York is not a dream city. It is as real as the mountain walls of the Alps, as apparent as the white shaft of the Matterhorn, but picturesque in a similar way and for a similar reason. The Alpine lift of it, the clear light of it, the brilliant color, the serene sky, the enveloping air, are peculiarly beautiful.

But as you come closer to the city, the measurable likeness to Constantinople returns to you. The illusion produced by distance begins to fade. Color once more ' ' cuts out" in sharp patches, the tall buildings lose their grouping and assume tower-like isolation ; the light becomes more fierce, the shadows more violent. The picture gets out of tone, out of value. The contrasts appear so sharp, the transitions so swift, that you are perhaps bewildered. The grotesque and the grandiose, the savage and the civilized, the luxurious and the poverty-stricken, touch on every side.

Once in the streets all thought of a united and harmonious picture vanishes into thin air. Jostling details.

harsh reaHties, are flung at you too violently to be merged into an ensemble. The picturesque still crops out in spots and patches at every turn, but it requires some mental (and physical) firmness to stop and enjoy it. There is a great movement going on about you, a surge of struggling humanity; and there is a great roar, the metallic-electric hum of power in action. If you are a stranger within the gates perhaps this means chaos to you, sheer mob madness ; and possibly before nightfall you will have concluded that Manhattan, like Constantinople, is lacking in homogeneity, wholly wanting in structural unity, in fact a mere agglomeration of buildings on a point of land. The checkerboard '^ blocks," the recurrent regularity of streets, you admit, point to something planned ; but the buildings are eruptive and the whole city abnormal — something again that apparently just '' happened."

There is an explanation, if not an excuse, for this. The city belongs to a republic, a great democracy. It is very apparent in New York that every one stands firmly on his rights as an individual, and does about as he pleases. Architectural conformity to a general design is something not required, not planned, not even contemplated. Quite the reverse. If your neighbor does a thing one way, it is considered a proper assertion of your rights to do it the other way. If an office building soars twenty stories into the air, a bank building near it will more than likely stop at a story and a half. If one lifts upward in terra-cotta, the other will flatten out in white marble. After thirty years of brick and stone fronts in monotonous row, block upon block, a great change has come over the spirit of the dream and now, in the new buildings, the other extreme is sought. Nothing shall be like anything else, nothing shall conform except by the law of contrariety. In materials brick shall meet granite, and granite shall join to steel, and steel be followed by marble or terra-cotta or concrete ; but two of a kind shall not stand side by side. And never by design or acquiescence shall adjoining buildings be of the same color. Even in brick there is forever the slight difference in coloring, caused by the different clay, the firing, or the pigmentation, that marks apart one's building from his neighbor's and thus asserts an individuality.

The assertion of the individual is possibly the cause of the city's architectural incongruities. Everyone seems struggling as hard as he can to keep from losing himself in the body corporate. There are very few who wish to be simply citizens, to conform to civic laws, and to temper architectural aspirations to a sky line or a curb line. The average New York business man wants no self-effacement, no simple life. On the contrary, publicity, commercially and socially, is sought for; and being ^'in the pubHc eye," as the phrase goes, seems to be the one thing needful. The buildings of the new city are more or less reflective of this obtrusive individuality. The love of prominence has produced homes and stores and sky-scrapers that are, if convenient and useful, not the less blatant advertisements of their owners' families or businesses. What other object could induce an individual, or an aggregation of individuals, to build a silverware shop that suggests an overgrown Venetian palace, or apartment houses, French, Italian, Greek, Moorish, Turkish, in their ornamentation, or hotels after almost any and every plan on the footstool that is unique or striking? What is the meaning of the keen rivalry among the owners of the high buildings as to which shall be the highest, and the vaporizings in the newspapers about which has the greatest number of occupants? Half of the ''freak" buildings in New York are not well-meant architectural failures, but deliberate efforts to catch the eye and advertise someone or his wares. Even the creditable buildings — substantial structures that are not to be despised as art and cannot be regarded wholly as advertisements — reflect, in measure, the desire for distinction, for aloofness, for novelty. How otherwise can we understand a Greek temple worked over and made to do service as a stock-exchange, or a Roman arch adapted to meet the requirements of a clearing-house, or a sixteenth-century Veronese council hall exaggerated into a printing-shop? The desire for singularity is quite as pronounced in dwelling houses. French chateaux that are meaningless without their landscapes, Dutch houses that need water as a complement, Swiss chalets that belong in the Alps, and Palladian conglomerations that perhaps once belonged in Italy, measure up to a common curb and look down into the same asphalt street with the brown-stone front of yore. Evidently these people propose to have nothing monotonous or conventional, cost what it may; and though they imitate the dead and gone of England or Spain, they will not copy their next-door neighbors.

This cry of the individual in brick and stone and steel, this strain for novelty or peculiarity or mere ''loudness," produces variety enough in all conscience. And it also produces picturesqueness, but one can hardly claim for it unity. There is a want of coherence, of ensemble. No amount of civic pride can find excuse for the inconsistencies that crop out at every point, and it is impossible to be in sympathy with the stupidities and inanities perpetrated by the semi-civilized that flock into New York and by mere numbers give a savage tang to the city. In fact, the savagery of New York is at first more marked than its civilization, its vices more pronounced than its virtues. Wherever one goes he finds these sharply contrasted. What else could be expected ! A million people with a million tastes and perfect freedom to express them as they please, a chorus where each member is allowed to sing his own tune in his own way, mean necessarily a want of harmony. New York is not a harmonious symmetrical city like Paris, and the fact is generally conceded by New Yorkers themselves.

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Nor is it a restful city. Aside from the noise of it, the very sight of it keeps you ever on the alert. The long avenues of Paris dwindling away in linear perspective, the roof lines as unbroken as the curb lines, might put you to sleep with their undisturbed repose. The sameness of Madrid or the uniformity of new Rome, or the cast-iron dullness of Berlin are likewise conducive to somnolence. But when you drive through New York you have to look about you. Its variety is startling, disturbing, even shocking at times. It is a city quite by itself, a city of contrasts, with as little rest in its sky line as in the ragged mountains of Mexico, as little repose in its streets as in the lava stream of a volcano. Oh, to be sure, there are quiet spots in the parks and along the rivers, quaint nooks in the side streets, odd angles here and there where everything is so still it is difficult to realize that you are in New York at all. Everyone knows these spots, with their doorways and garden walls and overhanging trees, for the magazine writer has written about them and the painter has illustrated them many times; but they are merely surface spots, — the exceptions, not the rule. The place is no quieter than its loudest note, no more restful than the inside of its stock-exchange, no more reposeful than the reach of its most aggressive sky-scraper.

And hence, it is said, the city is an unlivable place; a great shop in which people barter and sell, get rich quick and die early, but cannot rationally live and have their being. Perhaps there is truth in that statement, as we shall see hereafter, and yet several millions of people who are now existent within the city, and unknown millions without who wish they could arrange to live within, would seem to confute it. They live somehow and have the appearance of enjoying life, though it may be they never arrive at the fullness of being vouchsafed to people in staid London or methodical Berlin.

Perhaps a general statement that no city is quite as healthful and rational a place to live in as the country would be nearer the truth. The herding together of people in great centers, the incessant milling that goes on in the streets, the continual rubbing of minds and touching of hands, with one man's elbow in another man's ribs, and his toe forever galling his neighbor's kibe, are things that never yet led to the development of the virtues. They breed selfishness and all its allied train of evils, and they tend necessarily to the lawless assertion of the individual, which in turn produces that want of harmony which we have already noted. It might be better morally and physically for families to live farther apart and see each other less frequently. But evidently they do not think so. They answer the academic question as to which is preferable, city or country, by moving into the cities — at least a great many do.

And the flocking into New York is greater than into any other American metropolis. It draws like a loadstone not only from our own interior states, but from foreign countries. Its increase from witliout when seen in statistics is something remarkable. And each year gives a higher figure. Why is this ? Why do they come ? Why do they not stay where they are or go to some other place ? Obviously because they find New York attractive, entertaining, amusing, perhaps improving.

Does the city then respond to Matthew Arnold's test of a civilization: ''Is it interesting?" Most assuredly. It is the most interesting place in the New World, and that is the chief reason, aside from business relations, why people keep trooping to it from all points of the compass. There is ''something to see there" is the way the response comes to you. Naturally it depends upon each individual what he sees and if it interests him. Some are content with seeing streets and shop windows; some seek the charm of the Central Park ; some are amused by monuments, museums, and theaters; some are delighted with the Stock Exchange, the Subway, the Bowery, or the Battery. Thousands are interested in fires, parades, slums, and police ; and thousands again are devoted only to art, music, literature, or the sciences.

But the omnipresent interest of New York — to New Yorkers themselves as well as outsiders — is the passing throng, the great flux, the moving mass of people on the streets. It may be an outcrop of the social instinct or merely a vagabond curiosity, but almost everyone is ready to crane his neck to watch the mob as it passes. The interest is usually of a superficial nature. We may be looking only at heads and faces, at strides and straddles, at fools and fashions; but still we look. Nor is this interest confined to any one class or quarter of the city. The man who watches the people hurrying along Fifth Avenue from his club window, or the woman who scans them through a lorgnette from the window of her brougham, are, in this respect at least, akin to the tenement house family that watches the crowd from a fireescape, or to the scullery maid who hangs half her person out of the back window to see the tops of people's hats. The human interest is always absorbing.

What causes this never-ending ebb and flow of human currents up and down the avenues and through the cross streets? Whence comes this uneasy energy so manifest in New York life? What is the initial force that sends wave after wave of humanity hither and yon each morning and evening, and makes of New York a city of almost perpetual movement? Undoubtedly the motive power comes from commerce, trade, traffic, — what is commonly called ''business." The energy is generated by wealth, its pursuit or its expenditure. And the wealth is here in New York more than in any other American city. It has not all been created here by any means. In fact, it represents the industry of almost every state in the union. Generally speaking the source of power lies without, in the surrounding country, in the productive Far West perhaps ; but the central dynamos are in New York. It is the power house by the sea where the energy is stored, and from which in turn energy is suppHed.

There will be those to rise up with indignant protest that there are other things in New York than trade and commerce. Quite true. The leaders in art, literature, music, and the drama, the great ones in law and medicine, the famous preachers, the celebrities in science, in engineering, in philanthropy, in political life, have their headquarters if not always their residences here. In addition the city is stocked to overflowing with schools, colleges, universities, societies, clubs, charity organizations, hospitals, lecture halls, museums, art galleries — all the appurtenances and appliances of the higher and the intellectual life. But the sky-scraper of commerce looms above the university and the art gallery on the horizon line of the city; and the master builder of the sky-scraper, the so-called captain of industry, seems to fill the most conspicuous place in the interest and affections of the city's people. For all its facilities and its acquisitions of a purely intellectual or educational nature — and we shall recount them hereafter — the key-note of the city is taken from its commerce. The enormous buildings, the roar of traffic in the streets, the babel of tongues, the glare of lights, the strident screech of car wheels, speak the business character of the city as the hum of a top its spinning motion. If there is one feature of the city predominant above all others it is its life, its vitality, its tremendous energy kept forever in action by commerce.

A material feature? Yes, but it calls for no apology. All the famed towns of Europe — Florence, Venice, Vienna, Paris, London — came to greatness through their wealth and commerce. Their streets and parks and plazas, their public buildings and cathedrals and campaniles which we to-day call ''beautiful," were in their time merely the manifestation of energy as applied to material needs. And they were beautiful largely because they were well fitted to their time and people. Fitness to a designed end is always admirable, just as admirable in a modern battleship or sky-scraper as in a Venetian barca or a mediaeval bell-tower. For whereever or whenever the work is perfectly adapted to use it takes upon itself character; and it is no new theory under the sun that beauty lies in character perhaps more often than in proportion, symmetry, or grace.

Why not then beauty in the city of New York? Is not everything in it well fitted (or rapidly becoming so at least) to fulfill its functions as a great seaport, a commercial center, a nation's metropolis? Has it not already a distinct, a decisive character of its own? Of course it will never become beautiful in a Florentine or even a Parisian sense. Those ideals of fitness have

Pl. 4. — Fekriks and Sky-scrapers passed, and the likeness will not be repeated in this western world. Why should we follow outworn precedents? What would you have in twentieth-century New York, — city walls affording no protection to the city, lofty campanili with bell-ringing obsolescent, quaint bridges for a few hundred foot-passengers, instead of great structures to accommodate hundreds of thousands? This new civilization calls for a different expression in art from that. It calls for the things that reveal our western life and its energy. If we build for our present-day needs with honesty and sincerity, we shall have no cause to blush.

This, however, to the average man, in or out of New York, is a somewhat violent conclusion. He blushes unconsciously and offers apologies profusely for the sky-scrapers, the tunnels, the bridges, the subways. But there is no good reason for his doing so. They are necessities of the city's life, they work perfectly, fulfilling each its aim and purpose, each helping on the other like the wheels of a great machine in motion. And after their kind they are every one of them right, characteristic, and beautiful. Their fitness makes them so.

But how very difficult it is to make the New Yorker believe that utility is the basis of beauty. He keeps harking back to Venetian buildings and bridges, thinking perhaps because they are now picturesque they never could have been useful. ''Will New York ever become like that?" he asks. No; it certainly will not. But in its own way it is just as beautiful, just as picturesque at the present time, as London or Paris or any other European city.

Unfortunately, though we have eyes, the majority of us see very little with them. Not one in a hundred of its citizens has ever seen New York. It is too near. There is no perspective, no proper focus. Even our painter people are a little bewUdered by its ''bigness." They do scraps of color, odd bits along the Harlem, a city square or street; but, with a few exceptions, they have not risen to the vast new city. That the ''big" things, the high bridges, the colossal sky-scrapers, the huge factories, the enormous waterways, are pictorial in themselves needs no wordy argument. The illustrations in this volume are sufficient proof. In them Mr. Pennell has shown that the material is here and that it needs only the properly-adjusted eyes to see its beauty. That beauty, in the original as in the pictures, is not a harmony of streets, squares, and houses, nor a formal arrangement of monuments, towers, and domes ; but rather a new sublimity that lies in majesty of mass, in aspiring lines against the upper sky, in the brilliancy of color, in the mystery of fields of shadow, in the splendor of fields of light, — above all in the suggested power and energy of New York life.

This is all uniquely western, if you please, and those who visit us from Europe rather smile at it as men have done at all new things from time immemorial; but at least they come to see the new city and some day they may remain to praise it. One thing is certain, it cannot be ignored. It has too much character for that.

Pl. II. — battery park near bowling green

Chapter II

After the rain and fog of London, after six or seven days of knocking about on an ocean liner in wet September weather, how welcome to the homeward-bound traveller is the glimpse of American sunlight that perhaps comes to him off Nantucket. It is not European sunlight. It seems brighter, more sparkling, more luminous. The sky, too, is higher, arches into a loftier dome, shows a finer, paler quality of blue; while the clouds are different from any seen north of the Alps. In the late afternoon great heaps of cumulus lift in pink turrets and towers along the southern horizon, thin veils of stratus are drawn across their sunlit tops, and high above them, white as snow, gleam the feathery forms of the cirrus. It seems a fairy cloudland illuminated by a silver sun.

The first exclamation of the stranger in America is over the sunlight and the sky. New York is a thousand miles south, two thousand miles west, of London, and its light has a clean clear quality about it that is impressive. But no one exclaims over the first glimpse of American land. The ship's company looks at it listlessly, for it is only a flat strip of dull yellow, lying low down upon the water to the north, with occasionally a dimly seen lighthouse rising from it. Almost any land in the world — England, France, Spain, Mexico, Peru — lifts out of the sea with a more commanding relief than America at the approach to New York Bay. The cliffs of Cornwall or the Pillars of Hercules one can grow enthusiastic over; but the sand spits of Long Island or New Jersey make no impression — except, of course, upon the returning native.

Even the hills of Navesink and Sandy Hook, with its smartly painted buildings, are somehow passed by in silence. No one comments or grows emotional over them. But when Swinburne and Hoffman islands and the shores of Staten Island rise into prominence, there is a visible interest stirred throughout the ship. The pent-up steerage crowds against the rail and chatters excitedly; and even the complacent first-cabin ventures a few remarks on the green grass, the bright-colored houses, the warm sky.

As the ship moves up into the Narrows, passing in the distance the white towers of Coney Island and close at hand the green and gray of Fort Tompkins and Fort Hamilton, the interest spreads. The rails above and below are manned with peering people. The houses, the gardens, the trees, the flowers of Staten Island are almost within stone-throwing distance ; and they all look so preternaturally bright and beautiful that many adjectives are forthcoming. Even the not-too-observant foreigner begins to notice the sparkle of light on the water, the clearness of the air, the variety of the foliage, the gayety of the coloring.

Presently the vibration of the vessel ceases, but the ship still moves with her own impetus slowly up into the quarantine grounds. Tugs and yachts and small boats . gather about her, like fisher folk around a stranded whale ; but they do not try to board her. The tug coming out from the shore flying a yellow flag carries the health officer of the port ; and he must make his inspection before any one is allowed to go on board. Once more the port rail is crowded with heads protruding to get a glimpse of the great man coming up the ship's ladder. How very small he looks and what a long way down he is ! The monster proportions of the ship tend to dwarf everything about her — people and tugs, trees and houses, hills on the shore and distances on the water. From the thin air and the clear light one is led to believe that a conversation could be carried on with the people on the Staten Island shore; but they are something over half a mile away. And from the name ''The Narrows," given to the strait through which the ship has just come, one might gather the impression that it is really a narrow strip of water, whereas it is a mile wide.