The next morning he told me he was going; and as I sauntered down to take the train for a brief flight to New York, I saw him on the platform in citizen’s dress and smoking a cigarette. He was laughing and joking with some of the waiters who still lingered, and bidding them take care of themselves, and promising a like vigilance of his own welfare.
After that there was the short interval of a single meal when I was served by a detached waiter, before I was handed over to the kindly helper who next had charge of me. I clung to him anxiously, for I did not know what day or hour I should lose him; I did not know how soon he might lose me!
In the passing of the head porter there was something deeply dramatic, almost tragic for me. We had become acquaintances, friends, even, I hope, and I had become sensible of the gradual disappearance of his subordinates until they were reduced to what I may call the tail porter in contradistinction to the head porter. Then the head porter said that he had a great mind to be going himself; but when I asked him why, he could not well say, and he agreed with me that it might be better for him to stay. We counted up the remaining families together, and found them twenty, and I convinced him that by the most modest computation here were twenty dollars in fees before him. I thought that I had secured his allegiance to the end, but the very morning before the pensive record of these events I went to look for him in his accustomed place to get my shoes “shined,” and he was not there. The barber was there, looking in a vague disoccupation across the marshes to the northward of the hotel, and I asked him where the porter was. He closed his eyes that he might open his lips more impressively, and breathed the word, “Andato.”
“Gone?” I echoed.
The barber was a beautifully smiling, richly languaged Sicilian, and he responded in an elegant sympathy with my dismay: “Sì; andato. Me ne vado anch’io, fra pochi giorni. M’impazzo quì. Guardi!” (Yes; gone. I am going, I myself, in a few days. I madden here. Look!) With the last word he touched my arm lightly to make me turn, and pointed to the long plank footway, stilted upon the marshes from one to the other side of the railroad curve, and leading to the boat-house on the bay beyond their wide levels. Midway of this I saw a solitary figure, whose lank length and forward droop I could not mistake. The departing porter looked like the last citizen abandoning the ruins of Persepolis, and I—I felt like Persepolis!
VIII.
I strive, perhaps in vain, to impart a sense of the slowly creeping desolation, the gradual paresis, that was seizing upon the late full and happy life of our hotel; and I have not strictly observed the order of the successive events. I have not spoken of the swift evanescence of the bell-boys, the first of whom began so jubilantly with me when I came, covenanting to deliver a pitcher of ice-water at my door every morning at ten, and every evening at eight. He was faithful to his trust, and embarrassed me with a superfluity of ice-water, which ten men could hardly have drunk, and lived; but when the economic frame of our hotel began to be shaken, he was early in warning me that he might go at any moment. He was No. 18, but he promised me that No. 10 would see that I was daily and nightly deluged with ice-water, and No. 10 was exemplarily true to me for a day. Then he vanished too, with a grateful sense, I hope, of my folly in bestowing a preliminary half-dollar upon him. But he had made interest for me, I found, with No. 4, and No. 4 deluded me by his fleeting permanency for a week. One morning he told me he was going, and he took a last half-dollar from me with a true compassion for my forlorn case. He was so visibly the last of the bell-boys that he could not assign me to a lower number. For one night the head porter brought my ice-water. Now the night porter brings it, and if he should leave before I do— But I will not anticipate, as the older romancers used to say. I will not look forward, even in the case of the chambermaids, of whom there have been already three changes, with the prospect next week of having in some of the laundry girls to do up the work.
IX.
The laundry itself was attacked ten days ago by the general paralysis of the hotel’s functions, so far as the guests’ linen was concerned, which has since had to be sent far inland by the enterprise of one of the bathing-pavilion men, and precariously returned on a variable date. I forget whether the laundry succumbed before or after the closing of the refreshment-room. The hotel sold no strong drinks, and the magnificent facilities of the bar were inadequately employed by a soda fountain, a variety of mineral waters in bottles, a supply of ginger ale, and lemons for lemonade. On an opposite counter were Huyler’s candies, and a choice of chewing-gum; the salubrious pepsin, or the merely innocent peppermint. When the moment for dismantling this festive place arrived, with the unexpectedness of all the other moments of our slow dehabilitation, I was present, and saw the presiding genius packing up his stock of lemons. It gave me a peculiar pang. I had never bought any of them, or wanted any, but I had personally acquainted myself with almost every example of the fruit; I knew those lemons apart, and from often study of them on their shelf, as I stood hardily sipping my ginger ale before the counter, I was almost as intimate with them as with the stock of the news-dealer.
I must say that as to the books his stock was terribly dull. He owned himself that it was dull, and when I asked him where in the world he got together such a lot of stupid books, he could only say that they were such as were appointed to be sold in summer hotels by the news company. The newspapers were rather better: if they were not livelier, they were lighter, or at least more ephemeral. I bought freely of them; the dailies in the mornings, and the weeklies in the afternoons, with their longer leisure. I bought the magazines, which are now often as cheap as the papers, and, unlike the books, are seldom dull all through. Then I formed the intimacy of many illustrated papers which I did not buy, but studied on the strings where they hung stretched high over the counter. In one was the picture of a young lady habited in the mingled colors of Yale and Princeton, with a Cupid throwing a football at her heart. She was a great resource, and could not be stared out of countenance.
Besides, there was on a wire frame over the showcase a platter, of native decoration, representing the whole of Long Island in a railroad map. It was a strangely ugly object, like some sort of sad, dissected fish, but fascinating. The news-dealer and I had often discussed its price, and I had invariably refused it at $1.25, though it was originally put upon the market at $2.50.
After he had packed up his stock, I could hold out no longer. I looked about for him, and found him playing checkers with the ex-keeper of the refreshment-room. I asked him if that hideous platter had now got down to a dollar, and he went and hunted it out of his stock. Upon inspection he seemed to discover that it was still $1.25. In a desperation I paid the money; and almost at the same moment the news-dealer’s place knew him no more, and I remained with my platter for a memorial of one of the weirdest experiences of a life which has not been barren of weirdness.
X.
“You ought to have seen an old-time closing of this hotel,” said the clerk one evening toward the last. He had by this time resumed in his own person almost as many functions as the ancient mariner of the Bab Ballad who had eaten the former survivors of the Nancy brig, and claimed to represent them all by virtue of his superior appetite and digestion. Our clerk was now cashier, postmaster, room-clerk, night-clerk, and day-clerk, with moments of bell-boy; he spoke with authority, and we listened with the respect due to his manifold quality.
“The guests,” he continued, “would run down toward the end of August to about two hundred. Then notice would be put up in the office, ‘The hotel will close to-morrow after breakfast.’ The band would be still here, and the bell-boys all on duty; and the night before, all the guests would gather in the office. The band would play, and the talking and laughing would go on all through the evening, like the height of the season, and perhaps there would be a little dancing. Everybody would say good-night, the same as ever, and as soon as breakfast was over in the morning you would see them streaming away to the train, till there wasn’t a soul left in the house but clerks and the help. Then this stair carpet would come down with a run.” He pointed to the wide stairway. “The rugs would come up all through the halls; the dining-room would be cleared before you could look, and all the chairs would be on the tables with their legs in the air. The help would come to the desk in a steady file, and get their money and go. Before noon the cleaners would have the whole house to themselves.”
We owned that it must have been fine, that it was spectacular and impressive, even dramatic, but in our hearts we felt that there was a finer poetic quality in our closing, which was like one of the slow processes of nature, and emulated the pensive close of summer, when the leaves do not all fall in a night, or the flowers wither or the grass droop in a single day, but the trees slowly drop their crowns through many weeks, and the successive frosts lay a chill touch on a blossom here, and a petal there, and the summer passes in a euthanasy which suffers you to say at no given moment, “The summer is dead,” till it has long been dead.
Several aspects of the elementally simple landscape about us seemed peculiarly to sympathize with the quiet passing of the life of the great hotel. There could be no change in the long, irregular, gray sand dunes before it, which dropped themselves in lumpish masses, like the stretched and twisted shape of some vast bisected serpent. The stiff grasses and arid weeds that clothed them thinly, like a growth of dreadful green hair, kept their rigidity and their color with a sort of terrestrial immortality, or rather of an imperishable lifelessness; but over them fluttered a multitude of butterflies, thick as the leaves of autumn, and of much the same ultimate color, like spirits already released to their palingenesis. Flights of others, of a gay white and yellow, like the innocent souls of little ones, haunted the leaf-plant beds before the hotel, or tried to make friends with the harsh little evergreens surviving the plantations of a more courageous period of the enterprise, and stolidly presenting a wood at the borders of the plank walks. To the landward the mighty marshes stretched their innumerable acres to the sunrise and the sunset and the northern lights, one wash of pale yellow-green. Before we left, this began to be splashed as with flame or blood by the reddening of that certain small weed which loves the salt of tide-flooded meadows. The hollyhocklike bells of the marsh-roses drooped and fell, but other and gayer flowers, like ox-eye daisies of taller stem, came to replace them; and still, with the rising tide, the larger and the lesser craft that plied upon the many channels of the meadows blew softly back and forth, and seemed to sail upon their undulant grasses.
In all, the large leisure, the serene lapse of nature toward decay, seemed to express a consciousness of the hotel’s unhurried dissolution, to wait gently upon it, and to stay in a faithful summer loveliness till the last light should be quenched, of all those that had made it flame like a jewel in the forehead of the sea, and that had faded from veranda and balcony to the glitter of the clustered lamps in the office and dining-room.
XI.
There came, indeed, about the middle of September, a sudden rude shock of cold, which seemed to express an impatience with the dying hotel, hitherto unknown to the gently varying moods of nature. The wind blew for a day from the northwest, and stiffened its wasted and flaccid frame until one fancied its teeth chattering, as it were; but even then the sea did not share the harsh sentiment of the inland weather. It lay smiling as serenely as ever, and the fleet of fishing sloops and schooners that began to flock before our beach about the end of August rocked and tilted, like things in a dream, as they had for the last fortnight. It was said that one of them dragged her anchor and came ashore in the night, but this happened in the dark, and we knew of it only by hearsay, after she had got off and sailed away. A day later they were all there again, and some flew in close to the beach, and skimmed back and forth, as fearless of its ever-shifting sands as the fish-hawks that sailed the deeps of blue air above them.
The water remained as warm as ever; warmer, they said, who tried it in a bath. I did not. The next to the last time I bathed I had for sole companion a literary clergyman, with whom I walked down to the beach discussing the amusing aspects of the Ninth Crusade, which the Venetians so cannily turned aside from the conquest of the Holy Land to the conquest of Constantinople. The New York Dump was unpleasantly evident in the sea that day; and the last time the Dump had the sea all to itself. It is not agreeable to bathe among old brooms, bottles, decayed fruit, trunk lids, vegetable cans, broken boxes, and the other refuse of the ash-barrel, and I came out almost before the life-guard could get ready to throw me a life-preserver.
He was not the gaudy giant of bronze who posed between the life-lines at the height of the bathing-season, when twoscore spectators on the benches provided for them watched a half-dozen men and women weltering in the surf, or popping up and down after the manner of ladies taking a sea-bath. But I dare say he was quite as efficient, and as I had the good fortune to make his acquaintance, I liked him better. I specially liked his pelting about the bathing-pavilion before he went on duty with me, in his bare legs and feet, and wearing over his bathing-tights a cut-away coat, with a derby hat, to complete his ceremonial costume.
He was not so much in keeping with the inlander’s ideal of bathing-beaches, where summer girls float in the waves or loll upon the sands in the flirtatious poses familiar to the observer of them in the illustrated papers. To guard these daring maids from the dangers of the deep the gaudy bronze giant, with his yachting cap, his black jerseys, his white shoes, and his brown arms folded upon his breast, where they half revealed, half hid his label of Life-Guard, was a far fitter figure. But for the real bathers, I think the guard in the cut-away, derby, and bare feet was much more to be trusted; he was simple, substantial, and unpretentious; and surf-bathing, let me whisper in the innumerable ear of the inland myriads who have never seen it, is not often the gay frolic they have fancied: rather, it is sober, serious, sloppy.
XII.
At first the mental frame of us lingerers in the closing hotel was one of heroic self-applause. We wore a brave and smiling front; we said it was so much nicer than when the house was full, than when there were a thousand or even a hundred in it; and we all declared that we were going to stay as long as the landlord would let us. But from time to time there were defections; one table after another was dismantled; face after face vanished; first a white face, then a black face. I do not think we were so smiling after four of the beach trains were taken off; secretly, I think each of us wondered, What if we should stay till the last train was taken off, and we could not get away! What should we do then?
We have become rather more serious; we do not talk trivially when we talk, and we scarcely talk at all; we have traversed each other’s conversable territory so often that there is no longer the hope of discovery in it. We have not only become serious; I have reached the point where I have asked in thought if we are not a little absurd. Why should we stay? What is keeping us? The waves of autumn will soon reach the kitchen fires; and then?
Last night, our waiter said he was going on Monday. This morning the newsboy passed through the office on his way to serve the cottagers with the papers. Asked if he were not going to serve the hotel guests, he went on without answering. It may be because he is an officer of a railroad, whose officers reluctantly answer questions; but perhaps he has come to feel a ghostly quality in us, and regards us as so many simulacra incapable of interest in the affairs of real men.
The gas was not lighted in the ballroom after dinner yesterday; the halls gloomed like illimitable caverns late in the gathered dusk.
Shall I be able to stay till Friday? We shall see.
XIII.
A most resplendent Sunday is passing. The cold wind of last night has blown the whole world clean of clouds. One has a sense of the globe swinging in depths of translucent ether, stainless through all the reaches of space.
The sea is blue as the sky. It quivers where the sun slants upon it, and reflects the rays from myriad facets of steel. You cannot look at it long there, but now you begin to understand what Tennyson meant when he called it
“The million-spangled sapphire marriage-ring of the land.”
All day yesterday, which was the great day for the arriving European steamers, they came hurrying in. We counted ten or twelve, each blocking the length of an express train out of the rim of the horizon. To-day there are none: only a few far-off full-sailed ships, and nearer shore the fleet of fishing sloops and schooners, tilting and swaying, and now and then flying in so close to the beach that we can see the men on board, and trailing their small boats through a drift of foamy sea.
There are twenty-three guests in the house now—the house that holds a thousand! Two hunters came down with their guns Friday night, and re-enforced us. After breakfast a gay group gathered on the great midmost stairway of the veranda, and one of the men told the ladies stories and made them laugh. Every one is acquainted now, and speaks freely to every one else. It is rather weird. Should we be so civil if we were normally conditioned?
We have a very good two-o’clock dinner: the cook still remembers it is Sunday. After dinner two of us go down to the bathing-beach, and from the spectators’ benches watch a soft-shell crab which has been bathing, and is now lying in the warm sand where the rising tide has flung him. We wait to see it reach him again, and draw him back, but it does not. It seems to me that he is unhappy in the sun, and I take a stick and tilt him into the sea. I do not know whether he likes that either; but he cannot help himself. He could not help himself in the sun.
XIV.
It is Monday morning now, and the world is wrapped in cold gray clouds, which seem to have meant something unpleasant to the fishing craft, for they have all vanished but two of the bolder sail. It rains a little and then stops. A wind, heavy with the salt breath of the sea, rises steadily, and bemoans itself in all the angles and projections of the house. The lanterns of the veranda, which have not been lighted for a week, rattle dolefully in the blast. Under them, the long line of rocking-chairs in which a quarter of a mile of ladies used to sit and gossip together stretches emptily away. The wind pushes against the tall backs of the chairs, and they rock softly to and fro, as if the ghosts of the gossipers invisibly filled them, and still inaudibly babbled on. Where some of the chairs are grouped facing one another, the effect is very creepy. Will they keep up their spectral colloquies all winter?
I escape from this eery sight to my own room, and in the corridor, three uptown blocks away, I behold a small chambermaid balancing herself against a large bucket as she wavers slowly down. It is tragic.
The wind rises, and by mid-afternoon blows half a gale. The sea froths and roars and tumbles on the beach, and far out the serried breakers toss their white-caps against the sky-line, like so many cooks abandoning the hotel kitchen.
About three o’clock, the life-guard of the bathing-beach, having cast his derby and cut-away, appears with three other men in tights, and pulls in the life-lines and the buoys. Now the Dump will have the ocean for its own.
A stranded boat which lies on the beach to the northward came ashore in the gale last night from some of the fishermen. It is in good condition, and if the trains should stop running before noon to-morrow we can be taken off in it. Eighteen of our number went away this morning; and there are now but four of us left. We could easily get away in that boat.
XV.
The wind rose till nightfall, and then its passion broke in tears. A tempestuous night threatened; but the weather changed its mind as swiftly as a woman, and the day dawned as sweetly and softly this morning as a day of young June. The sea is again a shining level, veiled in a tender mist. Out of this the fishing sail come stealing silently one after another till again a fleet of them is tilting and swaying in front of the hotel. One large, goblin sail, which remained throughout the threats of the weather, looks like the picture of the goblin in the Bab Ballad which tries to frighten the image before the tobacconist’s shop.
The gang of Italians who have toiled for three months to hide the infamies of the Dump, burying them in the sand as fast as the sea cast them ashore, are taking up the plank walks to the bathing-beach. The season is over. The barrel, which formed the outermost buoy, swings monumentally (if monuments can swing) at anchor among the breakers.
At the station the railroad people have become unnaturally amiable. They call me by name; they take a personal interest in getting off my telegrams and express packages. In one of my visits to them, I meet the life-guard in full citizen’s dress, with even shoes on. He salutes me, but I have to look twice before I know him.
XVI.
A generous contention has arisen between ourselves and the other remaining family as to which shall be last to leave the hotel. They go on the 10.25, and we have outstayed them! We are the last guests in the house. The landlord’s Italian greyhound seems instinctively to feel our pathetic distinction. He rushes upon me from far down the veranda, and fawns upon me.
The cook and a last helper of some unknown function carry our trunks to the station. But it has now suddenly become a question whether we shall go on the 12.20 or wait for the 5.20. It depends finally upon our getting a last lunch at the restaurant of the bathing-beach. We ask, limiting our demands to a clam chowder. We are answered that there are still clams, but the man who knows how to make chowder is gone. The restaurant family are going to lunch upon a ham bone, which is now being scraped for them. We refuse to share it with many thanks, and decide to go on the 12.20.
I have paid my last bill.
On the 10th of August a pomp of liveried menials met me as I alighted from the train, and contended for the honor and profit of carrying my umbrella into the hotel.
On the 17th of September I myself carry a heavy satchel in each hand out through the echoing corridors down the wide veranda stairs to the train, unattended by a single fee-taker.
The hotel is closed.
GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK.
This morning, as I sat on a bench in one of the most frequented walks of Central Park, I could almost have touched the sparrows on the sprays about me; a squirrel, foraging for nuts, climbed on my knees, as if to explore my pockets. Of course, there is a policeman at every turn to see that no wrong is done these pretty creatures, and that no sort of trespass is committed by any in the domain of all; but I like to think that the security and immunity of the Park is proof of something besides the vigilance of its guardians; that it is a hint of a growing sense in Americans that what is common is the personal charge of every one in the community.
As I turn from my page and look out upon it, I see the domes and spires of its foliage beginning to feel the autumn and taking on the wonderful sunset tints of the year in its decline; when I stray through its pleasant paths, I feel the pathos of the tender October air; but, better than these sensuous delights, in everything of it and in it, I imagine a prophecy of the truer state which I believe America is destined yet to see established. It cannot be that the countless thousands who continually visit it, and share equally in its beauty, can all come away insensible of the meaning of it; here and there some one must ask himself, and then ask others, why the whole of life should not be as generous and as just as this part of it; why he should not have a country as palpably his own as the Central Park is, where his ownership excludes the ownership of no other. Some workman out of work, as he trudges aimlessly through its paths must wonder why the city cannot minister to his need as well as his pleasure, and not hold aloof from him till he is thrown a pauper on its fitful charities. If it can give him this magnificent garden for his forced leisure, why cannot it give him a shop where he can go in extremity, to earn his bread?
I.
I may be mistaken. His thoughts may never take this turn at all. The poor are slaves of habit, they bear what they have borne, they suffer on from generation to generation, and seem to look for nothing different. But this is what I think for poor people in the Park, not alone for the workman recently out of work, but for the workman so long out of it that he has rotted into one of the sodden tramps whom I meet now and then, looking like some forlorn wild beast, in the light of the autumnal leaves. That is the great trouble in New York; you cannot anywhere get away from the misery of life. You would think that the rich for their own sakes would wish to see conditions bettered, so that they might not be confronted at every turn by the mere loathliness of poverty. But they likewise are the slaves of habit, and go the way the rich have gone since the beginning of time. Sometimes I think that as Shakespeare says of the living and the dead, the rich and the poor are “but as pictures” to one another, without vital reality.
Sometimes I am glad to lose the sense of their reality, and this is why I would rather walk in the pathways of the Park than in the streets of the city, for the contrasts there are not so frequent, if they are glaring still. I do get away from them now and then, for a moment or two, and give myself wholly up to the delight of the place. It has been treated with the artistic sense which always finds its best expression in the service of the community, but I do not think we generally understand this, the civic spirit is so weak in us yet; and I doubt if the artists themselves are conscious of it, they are so rarely given the chance to serve the community. When this chance offers, however, it finds the right man to profit by it, as in the system of parks at Chicago, the gardened spaces at Washington, and the Central Park in New York. Some of the decorative features here are bad, the sculpture is often foolish or worse, and the architecture is the outgrowth of a mood, where it is not merely puerile. The footways have been asphalted, and this is out of keeping with the rustic character of the place, but the whole design, and much of the detail in the treatment of the landscape, bears the stamp of a kindly and poetic genius. The Park is in no wise taken away from nature, but is rendered back to her, when all has been done to beautify it, an American woodland, breaking into meadows, here and there, and brightened with pools and ponds lurking among rude masses of rock, and gleaming between leafy knolls and grassy levels. It stretches and widens away, mile after mile, in the heart of the city, a memory of the land as it was before the havoc of the city began, and giving to the city-prisoned poor an image of what the free country still is, everywhere. It is all penetrated by well-kept drives and paths; and it is in these paths that I find my pleasure. They are very simple woodland paths, but for the asphalt; though here and there an effect of art is studied with charming felicity; and I like to mount some steps graded in the rock at one place and come upon a plinth supporting the bust of a poet, as I might in an old Italian garden. But there is otherwise very little effect of gardening except near the large fountain by the principal lake where there is some flare of flowers on the sloping lawns. There is an excess in the viaduct, with its sweeping stairways, and carven freestone massiveness; but it is charming in a way, too, and the basin of the fountain is full of lotuses and papyrus reeds, so that you do not much notice the bronze angel atop, who seems to be holding her skirt to one side and picking her steps, and to be rather afraid of falling into the water. There is, in fact, only one thoroughly good piece of sculpture in the Park, which I am glad to find in sympathy with the primeval suggestiveness of the landscape gardening: an American Indian hunting with his dog, as the Indians must have hunted through the wilds here before the white men came.
II.
This group is always a great pleasure to me, from whatever point I come upon it, or catch a glimpse of it; and I like to go and find the dog’s prototype in the wolves at the menagerie which the city offers free to the wonder of the crowds constantly thronging its grounds and houses. The captive brutes seem to be of that solidarity of good-fellowship which unites all the frequenters of the Park; the tigers and the stupidly majestic lions have an air different to me from tigers and lions shown for profit. Among the milder sorts, I do not care so much for the wallowing hippopotamuses, and the lumbering elephants, and the supercilious camels which one sees in menageries everywhere, as for those types which represent a period as extinct as that of the American pioneers; I have rather a preference for going and musing upon the ragged bison pair as they stand with their livid mouths open at the pale of their paddock, expecting the children’s peanuts, and unconscious of their importance as survivors of the untold millions of their kind which a quarter of a century ago blackened the Western plains for miles and miles. There are now only some forty or fifty left; for of all the forces of our plutocratic conditions, so few are conservative that the American buffalo is as rare as the old-fashioned American mechanic, proud of his independence, and glorying in his citizenship.
In some other enclosures are pairs of beautiful deer, which I wish might be enlarged to the whole extent of the Park. But I can only imagine them on the great sweeps of grass, which recall the savannahs and prairies, though there is a very satisfactory flock of sheep which nibbles the herbage there, when these spaces are not thrown open to the ball-players who are allowed on certain days of the week. I like to watch them, and so do great numbers of other frequenters of the Park, apparently; and when I have walked far up beyond the reservoirs of city-water, which serve the purpose of natural lakes in the landscape, I like to come upon that expanse in the heart of the woods where the tennis-players have stretched their nets over a score of courts, and the art students have set up their easels on the edges of the lawns, for what effect of the autumnal foliage they have the luck or the skill to get. It is all very sweet and friendly, and in keeping with the purpose of the Park, and its frank and simple treatment throughout.
III.
I think this treatment is best for the greatest number of those who visit the place, and for whom the aspect of simple nature is the thing to be desired. Their pleasure in it, as far as the children are concerned, is visible and audible enough, but I like, as I stroll along, to note the quiet comfort which the elder people take in this domain of theirs, as they sit on the benches in the woodland ways, or under the arching trees of the Mall, unmolested by the company of some of the worst of all the bad statues in the world. They are mostly foreigners, I believe, but I find every now and then an American among them, who has released himself, or has been forced by want of work, to share their leisure for the time; I fancy he has always a bad conscience, if he is taking the time off, from the continual pressure of our duty to add dollar to dollar, and provide for the future as well as the present need. The foreigner, who has been bred up without the American’s hope of advancement, has not his anxiety, and is a happier man, so far as that goes; but the Park imparts something of its peace to every one, even to some of the people who drive, and form a spectacle for those who walk.
For me they all unite to form a spectacle I never cease to marvel at, with a perpetual hunger of conjecture as to what they really think of one another. Apparently, they are all, whether they walk or whether they drive, willing collectively, if not individually, to go on forever in the economy which perpetuates their inequality, and makes a mock of the polity which assures them their liberty. The difference which money creates among men is always preposterous, and whenever I take my eyes from it the thing ceases to be credible; yet this difference is what the vast majority of Americans have agreed to accept forever as right and justice. If I were to go and sit beside some poor man in the Park, and ask him why a man no better than he was driving before him in a luxurious carriage, he would say that the other man had the money to do it; and he would really think he had given me a reason; the man in the carriage himself could not regard the answer as more full and final than the man on the bench. They have both been reared in the belief that it is a sufficient answer, and they would both regard me with the same misgiving if I ventured to say that it was not a reason; for if their positions were to be at once reversed, they would both acquiesce in the moral outlawry of their inequality. The man on foot would think it had simply come his turn to drive in a carriage, and the man whom he ousted would think it was rather hard luck, but he would realize that it was what, at the bottom of his heart, he had always expected.
Only once have I happened to find any one who questioned the situation from a standpoint outside of it, and that was a shabbily dressed man whom I overheard talking to a poor woman in one of those pleasant arbors which crown certain points of rising ground in the Park. She had a paper bundle on the seat beside her, and she looked like some working-woman out of place, with that hapless, wistful air which such people often have. Her poor little hands, which lay in her lap, were stiffened and hardened with work, but they were clean, except for the black of the nails, and she was very decently clad in garments beginning to fray into rags; she had a good, kind, faithful face, and she listened without rancor to the man as he unfolded the truth to her concerning the conditions in which they lived. It was the wisdom of the poor, hopeless, joyless, as it now and then makes itself heard in the process of the years and ages, and then sinks again into silence. He showed her how she had no permanent place in the economy, not because she had momentarily lost work, but because in the nature of things as we have them, it could only be a question of time when she must be thrown out of any place she found. He blamed no one; he only blamed the conditions. I doubt whether his wisdom made the friendless woman happier, but I could not have gainsaid it, when he saw me listening, if he had asked, “Isn’t that the truth?” I left him talking sadly on, and I never saw him again. He was threadbare, but he too was cleanly and decent in his dress, and not at all of that type of agitators of whom we have made an effigy like nothing I have seen, as if merely for the childish pleasure of reviling it.
IV.
The whole incident was infinitely pathetic to me; and yet we must not romance the poor, or imagine that they are morally better than the rich; we must not fancy that a poor man, when he ceases to be a poor man, would be kinder for having been poor. He would perhaps oftener, and certainly more logically, be unkinder, for there would be mixed with his vanity of possession a quality of cruel fear, an apprehension of loss, which the man who had always been rich would not feel. The self-made man when he has made himself of money, seems to have been deformed by his original destitution, and I think that if I were in need I would rather take my chance of pity from the man who had never been poor. Of course, this is generalization, and there are instances to the contrary, which at once occur to me. But what is absolutely true is that our prosperity, the selfish joy of having, at the necessary cost of those who cannot have, is blighted by the feeling of insecurity which every man has in his secret soul, and which the man who has known want must have in greater measure than the man who has never known want.
There is, indeed, no security for wealth, which we think the chief good of life, in the system that warrants it. When a man has gathered his millions, he cannot be reduced to want, probably; but while he is amassing them, while he is in the midst of the fight, or the game, as most men are, there are ninety-five chances out of a hundred that he will be beaten. Perhaps it is best so, and I should be glad it was so if I could be sure that the common danger bred a common kindness between the rich and the poor, but it seems not to do so. As far as I can see, the rule of chance, which they all live under, does nothing more than reduce them to a community of anxieties.
To the eye of the observer they have the monotony of the sea, where some tenth wave runs a little higher than the rest, but sinks at last, or breaks upon the rocks or sands, as inevitably as the other nine. Our inequality is without picturesqueness and without distinction. The people in the carriages are better dressed than those on foot, especially the women; but otherwise they do not greatly differ from the most of these. The spectacle of the driving in the Park has none of that dignity which characterizes such spectacles in European capitals. This may be because many people of the finest social quality are seldom seen there, or it may be because the differences growing out of money can never have the effect of those growing out of birth; that a plutocracy can never have the last wicked grace of an aristocracy. It would be impossible for instance, to weave any romance about the figures you see in our carriages; they do not even suggest the poetry of ages of prescriptive wrong; they are of to-day, and there is no guessing whether they will be of to-morrow or not.
In Europe, this sort of tragi-comedy is at least well played; but in America, you always have the feeling that the performance is that of second-rate amateurs, who, if they would really live out the life implied by America, would be the superiors of the whole world. I am moved to laughter by some of the things I see among them, when perhaps I ought to be awed, as, for instance, by the sight of a little, lavishly dressed lady, lolling in the corner of a ponderous landau, with the effect of holding fast lest she should be shaken out of it, while two powerful horses, in jingling, silver-plated harness, with due equipment of coachman and footman, seated on their bright-buttoned overcoats on the box together, get her majestically over the ground at a slow trot. This is what I sometimes see, with not so much reverence as I feel for the simple mother pushing her baby-carriage on the asphalt beside me and doubtless envying the wonderful creature in the landau. Sometimes it is a fat old man in the landau; or a husband and wife, not speaking; or a pair of grim old ladies, who look as if they had lived so long aloof from their unluckier sisters that they could not be too severe with the mere sight of them. Generally speaking, the people in the carriages do not seem any happier for being there, though I have sometimes seen a jolly party of strangers in a public carriage, drawn by those broken-kneed horses which seem peculiarly devoted to this service.
The best place to see the driving is at a point where the different driveways converge, not far from the Egyptian obelisk which the Khedive gave us some years ago, and which we have set up here in one of the finest eminences of the Park. He had of course no moral right to rob his miserable land of any one of its characteristic monuments, but I do not know that it is not as well in New York as in Alexandria. If its heart of aged stone could feel the continuity of conditions, it must be aware of the essential unity of the civilizations beside the Nile and beside the Hudson; and if Cleopatra’s needle had really an eye to see, it must perceive that there is nothing truly civic in either. As the tide of dissatisfied and weary wealth rolls by its base here, in the fantastic variety of its equipages, does the needle discern so much difference between their occupants and the occupants of the chariots that swept beneath it in the capital of the Ptolemies two thousand years ago? I can imagine it at times winking such an eye and cocking in derision the gilded cap with which the New-Yorkers have lately crowned it. They pass it in all kinds of vehicles, and there are all kinds of people in them, though there are sometimes no people at all, as when the servants have been sent out to exercise the horses, for nobody’s good or pleasure, and in the spirit of that atrocious waste which runs through our whole life. I have now and then seen a gentleman driving a four-in-hand, with everything to minister to his vanity in the exact imitation of a nobleman driving a four-in-hand over English roads, and with no one to be drawn by his crop-tailed bays or blacks except himself and the solemn groom on his perch; I have wondered how much more nearly equal they were in their aspirations and instincts than either of them imagined. A gentleman driving a pair, abreast or tandem, with a groom on the rumble, for no purpose except to express his quality, is a common sight enough; and sometimes you see a lady illustrating her consequence in like manner. A lady driving, while a gentleman occupies the seat behind her, is a sight which always affects me like the sight of a man taking a woman’s arm, in walking, as the man of an underbred sort is apt to do.
Horsey-looking women, who are, to ladies at least, what horsey-looking men are to gentlemen, drive together; often they are really ladies, and sometimes they are nice young girls, out for an innocent dash and chat. They are all very much and very unimpressively dressed, whether they sit in state behind the regulation coachman and footman, or handle the reins themselves. Now and then you see a lady with a dog on the seat beside her, for an airing, but not often a child; once or twice I have seen one with a large spaniel seated comfortably in front of her, and I have asked myself what would happen if, instead of the dog, she had taken into her carriage some pale woman or weary old man, such as I sometimes see gazing patiently after her. But the thing would be altogether impossible. I should be the first to feel the want of keeping in it; for, however recent wealth may be here, it has equipped itself with all the apparatus of long-inherited riches, which it is as strongly bound to maintain intact as if it were really old and hereditary—perhaps more strongly. I must say that, mostly, its owners look very tired of it, or of something, in public, and that our American plutocrats, if they have not the distinction of an aristocracy, have at least the ennui.
V.
But these stylish turnouts form only a part of the spectacle in the Park driveways, though they form, perhaps, the larger part. Bicyclers weave their dangerous and devious way everywhere through the roads, and seem to be forbidden the bridle-paths, where from point to point you catch a glimpse of the riders. There are boys and girls in village carts, the happiest of all the people you see; and there are cheap-looking buggies, like those you meet in the country, with each a young man and young girl in them, as if they had come in from some remote suburb; turnouts shabbier yet, with poor old horses, poke about with some elderly pair, like a farmer and his wife. There are family carryalls, with friendly-looking families, old and young, getting the good of the Park together in a long, leisurely jog; and open buggies with yellow wheels and raffish men in them behind their widespread trotters; or with some sharp-faced young fellow getting all the speed out of a lively span that the mounted policemen, stationed at intervals along the driveways, will allow. The finer vehicles are of all types, patterned like everything else that is fine in America, upon something fine in Europe; but just now a very high-backed phaeton appears to be most in favor; and in fact I get a great deal of pleasure out of these myself, as I do not have to sit stiffly up in them. They make me think somehow of those eighteenth-century English novels, of the times when young ladies like Evelina drove out in phaetons, and were the passionate pursuit of Lord Orvilles and Sir Clement Willoughbys.
How far do the New Yorkers publicly carry their travesty of the European aristocratic life? I should say, from what I have seen of the driving in the Park, it does not err on the side of excess. The equipages, when they are fine, are rather simple; and the liveries are such as express a proprietary grandeur in coat-buttons, silver or gilt, and in a darker or lighter drab of the cloth the servants wear; they are often in brown or dark green. Now and then you see the tightly cased legs and top-boots and cockaded hat of a groom, but this is oftenest on a four-in-hand coach, or the rumble of a tandem cart; the soul of the free-born republican is rarely bowed before it on the box of a family carriage. I have seen nothing like an attempt at family colors in the trappings of the coachman and horses.
I should say that the imitation was quite within the bounds of good taste. The bad taste is in the wish to imitate Europe at all; but with the abundance of money, the imitation is simply inevitable. There is no American life for wealth; there is no native formula for the expression of social superiority; because America means equality if it means anything, in the last analysis. But in all this show on the Park driveways, you get no effect so vivid as the effect of sterility in that liberty without equality which seems to satisfy us Americans. A man may come into the Park with any sort of vehicle, so that it is not for the carriage of merchandise, and he is free to spoil what might be a fine effect with the intrusion of whatever squalor of turnout he will. He has as much right there as any one, but the right to be shabby in the presence of people who are fine is not one that I should envy him. I do not think that he can be comfortable in it, for the superiority around him puts him to shame, as it puts the poor man to shame at every turn in life, though some people, with an impudence that is pitiable, will tell you that it does not put him to shame; that he feels himself as good as any one. We are always talking about human nature and what it is, and what it is not; but we try in our blind worship of inequality to refuse the first and simplest knowledge of human nature, which testifies of itself in every throb of our own hearts, as we try even to refuse a knowledge of the Divine nature, and attribute to the Father of all a design in the injustice we have ourselves created.
To me the lesson of Central Park is that where it is used in the spirit of fraternity and equality, the pleasure in it is pure and fine, and that its frequenters have for the moment a hint of the beauty which might be perpetually in their lives; but where it is invaded by the motives of the strife that raves all round it in the city outside, its joys are fouled with contempt and envy, the worst passions that tear the human heart. Ninety-nine Americans out of a hundred, have never seen a man in livery; they have never dreamed of such a display as this in the Park. Yet with our conditions, I fear that at sight of it ninety-nine Americans out of every hundred would lust for their turn of the wheel, their throw of the dice, so that they might succeed to a place in it, and flaunt their luxury in the face of poverty, and abash humility with their pride.
NEW YORK STREETS.
If the reader will look at a plan of New York, he will see that Central Park is really in the centre of the place, if a thing which has length only, or is so nearly without breadth or thickness, can be said to have a centre. South of the Park, the whole island is dense with life and business; it is pretty solidly built up on either side; but to the northward the blocks of houses are no longer of a compact succession; they struggle up, at irregular intervals, from open fields, and sink again, on the streets pushed beyond them into the simple country, where even a suburban character is lost. It can only be a few years, at most, before all the empty spaces will be occupied, and the town, such as it is, and such as it seems to have been ever since the colonial period, will have anchored itself fast in the rock that underlies the larger half of it, and imparted its peculiar effect to every street—an effect of arrogant untidiness, of superficial and formal gentility, of immediate neglect and overuse.
I.
You will see more of the neglect and overuse in the avenues which penetrate the city’s mass from north to south, and more of the superficial and formal gentility in the streets that cross these avenues from east to west; but the arrogant untidiness you will find nearly everywhere, except in some of the newest quarters westward from the Park, and still farther uptown. These are really very clean; but they have a bare look, as if they were not yet inhabited, and, in fact, many of the houses are still empty. Lower down, the streets are often as shabby and as squalid as the avenues that run parallel with the river-sides; and at least two of the avenues are as decent as the decentest cross-streets.
Of late, a good many streets and several avenues have been asphalted, and the din of wheels on the rough pavement no longer torments the ear so cruelly; but there is still the sharp clatter of the horses’ shoes everywhere; and their pulverized manure, which forms so great a part of the city’s dust, and is constantly taken into people’s stomachs and lungs, seems to blow more freely about on the asphalt than on the old-fashioned pavements. A few years ago scraps of paper, straw, fruit-peel, and all manner of minor waste and rubbish, littered all the thoroughfares; under a reform administration this has been amended; but no one knows how long a reform will last in New York.
When I leave Central Park, where I like best to walk, I usually take one of the avenues southward, and then turn eastward or westward on one of the cross-streets whose perspective appeals to my curiosity, and stroll through it to one of the rivers. The avenues are fifteen or sixteen in number, and they stretch, some farther than others, up and down the island, but most of them end in the old town, where its irregularity begins, at the south, and several are interrupted by the different parks at the north. Together with the streets that intersect them between the old town and Central Park, they form one of the most characteristic parts of modern New York. Like the streets, they are numbered, rather than named, from a want of imagination, or from a preference of mere convenience to the poetry and associations that cluster about a name, and can never cling to a number, or from a business impatience to be quickly done with the matter. This must rather defeat itself, however, when a hurried man undertakes to tell you that he lives at three hundred and seventy-five on One Hundred and Fifty-seventh street. Toward the rivers the avenues grow shabbier and shabbier, though this statement must be qualified, like all general statements. Seventh Avenue, on the west, is pleasanter than Sixth Avenue; and Second Avenue, on the east, is more agreeable than Third Avenue. In fact, the other afternoon, as I strayed over to the East River, I found several blocks of Avenue A, which runs nearest it, very quiet, built up with comfortable dwellings, and even clean, as cleanliness is understood in New York.
But it is Fifth Avenue which divides the city lengthwise nearest the middle, and it is this avenue which affords the norm of style and comfort to the other avenues on either hand, and to all the streets that intersect it. Madison Avenue is its rival, and has suffered less from the invasion of shops and hotels, but a long stretch of Fifth Avenue is still the most aristocratic quarter of the city, and is upon the whole its finest thoroughfare. I do not think any New York street fine; but, generally, Fifth Avenue and the cross-streets in its better part have a certain regularity in their mansions of brownstone, which give something of the pleasure one gets from symmetry. They are at least not so chaotic as they might be; though they always suggest money more than taste, I cannot at certain moments, and under the favor of an evening sky, deny them a sort of unlovely and forbidding beauty. There are not many of these cross-streets which have remained intact from the business of the other avenues. They have always a drinking-saloon or a provision-store or an apothecary’s shop at the corners where they intersect; the modistes find lodgment in them almost before the residents are aware. Beyond Sixth Avenue, or Seventh at farthest, on the west, and Fourth Avenue or Lexington, on the east, they lose their genteel character; their dwellings degenerate into apartment-houses, and then into tenement-houses of lower and lower grade till the rude traffic and the offensive industries of the river shores are reached.
But once more I must hedge, for sometimes a street is respectable almost to the water on one side or the other; and there are whole neighborhoods of pleasant dwellings far down-town, which seem to have been forgotten by the enterprise of business, or neglected by its caprice, and to have escaped for a time at least the contagion of poverty. Business and poverty are everywhere slowly or swiftly eating their way into the haunts of respectability, and destroying its pleasant homes. They already have the whole of the old town to themselves. In large spaces of it no one dwells but the janitors with their families, who keep the sky-scraping edifices where business frets the time away; and by night in the streets where myriads throng by day, no one walks but the outcast and the watch.
Many of these business streets are the handsomest in the city, with a good sky line, and an architectural ideal too good for the uses of commerce. This is often realized in antipathetic iron, but often there is good honest work in stone, and an effect better than the best of Fifth Avenue. But this is stupid and wasteful; it is for the pleasure of no one’s taste or sense; the business men who traffic in these edifices have no time for their beauty, or no perception of it; the porters and truckmen and expressmen, who toil and moil in these thoroughfares, have no use for the grandeur that catches the eye of a chance passer.
Other spaces are abandoned to the poverty which festers in the squalid houses and swarms day and night in the squalid streets; but business presses closer and harder upon the refuges of its foster-child, not to say its offspring, and it is only a question of time before it shall wholly possess them. It is only a question of time before all the comfortable quarters of the city, northward from the old town to the Park, shall be invaded, and the people driven to the streets building up on the west and east of it for a little longer sojourn. Where their last stay shall be, Heaven knows; perhaps they will be forced into the country.
In this sort of invasion, however, it is poverty that seems mostly to come first, and it is business that follows and holds the conquest, though this is far from being always the case. Whether it is so or not, however, poverty is certain at some time to impart its taint; for it is perpetual here, from generation to generation, like death itself. In our conditions, poverty is incurable; the very hope of cure is laughed to scorn by those who cling the closest to these conditions; it may be better at one time, and worse at another; but it must always be, somehow, till time shall be no more. It is from everlasting to everlasting.
II.
When I come home from these walks of mine, I have a vision of the wretched quarters through which I have passed, as blotches of disease upon the civic body, as loathsome sores, destined to eat deeper and deeper into it; and I am haunted by this sense of them, until I plunge deep into the Park, and wash my consciousness clean of it all for a while. But when I am actually in these leprous spots, I become hardened, for the moment, to the deeply underlying fact of human discomfort. I feel their picturesqueness, with a callous indifference to that ruin, or that defect, which must so largely constitute the charm of the picturesque. A street of tenement-houses is always more picturesque than a street of brownstone residences, which the same thoroughfare usually is before it slopes to either river. The fronts of the edifices are decorated with the iron balconies and ladders of the fire-escapes, and have in the perspective a false air of gayety, which is travestied in their rear by the lines thickly woven from the windows to the tall poles set between the backs of the houses, and fluttering with drying clothes as with banners.
The sidewalks swarm with children, and the air rings with their clamor, as they fly back and forth at play; on the thresholds, the mothers sit nursing their babes, and the old women gossip together; young girls lean from the casements, alow and aloft, or flirt from the doorways with the hucksters who leave their carts in the street, while they come forward with some bargain in fruit or vegetables, and then resume their leisurely progress and their jarring cries. The place has all the attraction of close neighborhood, which the poor love, and which affords them for nothing the spectacle of the human drama, with themselves for actors. In a picture it would be most pleasingly effective, for then you could, he in it, and yet have the distance on it which it needs. But to be in it, and not have the distance, is to inhale the stenches of the neglected street, and to catch that yet fouler and dreadfuller poverty-smell which breathes from the open doorways. It is to see the children quarrelling in their games, and beating each other in the face, and rolling each other in the gutter, like the little savage outlaws they are. It is to see the work-worn look of the mothers, the squalor of the babes, the haggish ugliness of the old women, the slovenly frowziness of the young girls. All this makes you hasten your pace down to the river, where the tall buildings break and dwindle into stables and shanties of wood, and finally end in the piers, commanding the whole stretch of the mighty waterway with its shipping, and the wooded heights of its western bank.
I am supposing you to have walked down a street of tenement-houses to the North river, as the New-Yorkers call the Hudson; and I wish I could give some notion of the beauty and majesty of the stream, some sense of the mean and ignoble effect of the city’s invasion of the hither shore. The ugliness is, indeed, only worse in degree, but not in kind, than that of all city water-fronts. Instead of pleasant homes, with green lawns and orchards sloping to the brink, huge factories and foundries, lumber yards, breweries, slaughter-houses, and warehouses, abruptly interspersed with stables and hovels and drinking-saloons, disfigure the shore, and in the nearest avenue the freight trains come and go on lines of railroads, in all the middle portion of New York. South of it, in the business section, the poverty section, the river region is a mere chaos of industrial and commercial strife and pauper wretchedness. North of it there are gardened driveways following the shore; and even at many points between, when you finally reach the river, there is a kind of peace, or at least a truce to the frantic activities of business. To be sure, the heavy trucks grind up and down the long piers, but on either side the docks are full of leisurely canal-boats, and if you could come with me in the late afternoon, you would see the smoke curling upward from their cabin roofs, as from the chimneys of so many rustic cottages, and smell the evening meal cooking within, while the canal-wives lounged at the gangway hatches for a breath of the sunset air, and the boatmen smoked on the gunwales or indolently plied the long sweeps of their pumps. All the hurry and turmoil of the city is lost among these people, whose clumsy craft recall the grassy inland levels remote from the metropolis, and the slow movement of life in the quiet country ways. Some of the mothers from the tenement-houses stroll down on the piers with their babies in their arms, and watch their men-kind, of all ages, fishing along the sides of the dock, or casting their lines far out into the current at the end. They do not seem to catch many fish, and never large ones, but they silently enjoy the sport, which they probably find leisure for in the general want of work in these hard times; if they swear a little at their luck, now and then, it is, perhaps, no more than their luck deserves. Some do not even fish, but sit with their legs dangling over the water, and watch the swift tugs, or the lagging sloops that pass, with now and then a larger sail, or a towering passenger steamboat. Far down the stream they can see the forests of masts, fringing either shore, and following the point of the island round and up into the great channel called the East River. These vessels seem as multitudinous as the houses that spread everywhere from them over the shore farther than the eye can reach. They bring the commerce of the world to this mighty city, which, with all its riches, is the parent of such misery, and with all its traffic abounds in idle men who cannot find work. The ships look happy and free, in the stream, but they are of the overworked world, too, as well as the houses; and let them spread their wings ever so widely, they still bear with them the sorrows of the poor.
III.
The other evening I walked over to the East River through one of the tenement streets, and I reached the waterside just as the soft night was beginning to fall in all its autumnal beauty. The afterglow died from the river, while I hung upon a parapet over a gulf ravined out of the bank for a street, and experienced that artistic delight which cultivated people are often proud of feeling, in the aspect of the long prison island which breaks the expanse of the channel. I knew the buildings on it were prisons, and that the men and women in them, bad before, could only come out of them worse than before, and doomed to a life of outlawry and of crime. I was aware that they were each an image of that loveless and hopeless perdition which men once imagined that God had prepared for the souls of the damned, but I could not see the barred windows of those hells in the waning light. I could only see the trees along their walks; their dim lawns and gardens, and the castellated forms of the prisons; and the æsthetic sense, which is careful to keep itself pure from pity, was tickled with an agreeable impression of something old and fair. The dusk thickened, and the vast steamboats which ply between the city and the New England ports on Long Island Sound, and daily convey whole populations of passengers between New York and Boston, began to sweep by silently, swiftly, luminous masses on the black water. Their lights aloft at bow and stern, floated with them like lambent planets; the lights of lesser craft dipped by, and came and went in the distance; the lamps of the nearer and farther shores twinkled into sight, and a peace that ignored all the misery of it, fell upon the scene.
IV.
The greatest problem of this metropolis is not how best to be in this place or that, but how fastest to go from one to the other, and the New-Yorkers have made guesses at the riddle, bad and worse, on each of the avenues, which, in their character of mere roadways, look as if the different car-tracks had been in them first, and the buildings, high and low, had chanced along their sides afterward. This is not the fact, of course, and it is not so much the effect on Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, and Lexington Avenue, which are streets of dwellings, solidly built up, like the cross streets. But it is undoubtedly the effect on all the other avenues, in great part of their extent. They vary but little in appearance otherwise, from east to west, except so far as the elevated railroads disfigure them, if thoroughfares so shabby and repulsive as they mostly are, can be said to be disfigured, and not beautified by whatever can be done to hide any part of their ugliness. Where this is left to make its full impression upon the spectators, there are lines of horse-cars perpetually jingling up and down, except on Fifth Avenue, where they have stages, as the New-Yorkers call the unwieldy and unsightly vehicles that ply there, and Lexington Avenue, where they have the cable cars. But the horse-cars run even under the elevated tracks, and no experience of noise can enable you to conceive of the furious din that bursts upon the sense, when at some corner two cars encounter on the parallel tracks below, while two trains roar and shriek and hiss on the rails overhead, and a turmoil of rattling express wagons, heavy drays and trucks, and carts, hacks, carriages, and huge vans rolls itself between and beneath the prime agents of the uproar. The noise is not only deafening, it is bewildering; you cannot know which side the danger threatens most, and you literally take your life in your hand when you cross in the midst of it. Broadway, which traverses the district I am thinking of, in a diagonal line till it loses its distinctive character beyond the Park, is the course of the cable cars running with a silent speed that is more dangerous even than the tumultuous rush on the avenues. Now and then the apparatus for gripping the chain will not release it, and then the car rushes wildly over the track, running amuck through everything in its way, and spreading terror on every hand. When under control the long saloons advance swiftly, from either direction, at intervals of half a minute, with a monotonous alarum of their gongs, and the foot-passenger has to look well to his way if he ventures across the track, lest in avoiding one car another roll him under its wheels.
Apparently, the danger is guarded as well as it can be, and it has simply to be taken into the account of life in New York, for it cannot be abated, and no one is to be blamed for what is the fault of every one. It is true that there ought not, perhaps, to be any track in such a thoroughfare, but it would be hard to prove that people could get on without it, as they did before the theft of the street for the original horse-car track. Perhaps it was not a theft; but at all events, and at the best, the street was given away by the city to an adventurer who wished to lay the tracks in it for his private gain, and none of the property owners along the line could help themselves. There is nothing that Americans hold so dear, or count so sacred, as private property; life and limb are cheap in comparison; but private enterprise is allowed to violate the rights of private property, from time to time here, in the most dramatic way.
The street-car company which took possession of Broadway never paid the abutters anything, I believe; and the elevated railroad companies are still resisting payment of damages on the four avenues which they occupied for their way up and down the city without offering compensation to the property owners along their route. If the community had built these roads, it would have indemnified every one, for the community is always just when it is the expression of the common honesty; and if it is ever unjust, it is because the uncommon dishonesty has contrived to corrupt it.
The elevated roads and the cable road had no right to be, on the terms that the New-Yorkers have them, but they are by far the best means of transit in the city, and I must say that, if they were not abuses, they would offer great comfort and great facility to the public. This is especially true of the elevated roads, which, when you can put their moral offense out of your mind, are always delightful in their ease and airy swiftness. You fly smoothly along between the second and third story windows of the houses, which are shops below and dwellings above, on the avenues. The stations, though they have the prevailing effect of overuse, and look dirty and unkempt, are rather pretty in themselves; and you reach them, at frequent intervals, by flights of not ungraceful iron steps. The elevated roads are always picturesque, with here and there a sweeping curve that might almost be called beautiful.