America To-day, Observations and Reflections. Archer William
as you slice off the top of an egg, and plant them down in Europe, they would of themselves make a biggish hotel according to our standards. This first elevator voyage is the prelude to how many others! For the past week I seem to have spent the best part of my time in elevators. I must have travelled miles on miles at right angles to the earth's surface. If all my ascensions could be put together, they would out-top Olympus and make Ossa a wart.
This is the first sensation of life in New York—you feel that the Americans have practically added a new dimension to space. They move almost as much on the perpendicular as on the horizontal plane. When they find themselves a little crowded, they simply tilt a street on end and call it a sky scraper. This hotel, for example (the Waldorf-Astoria), is nothing but a couple of populous streets soaring up into the air instead of crawling along the ground. When I was here in 1877, I remember looking with wonder at the Tribune building, hard by the Post Office, which was then considered a marvel of architectural daring. Now it is dwarfed into absolute insignificance by a dozen Cyclopean structures on every hand. It looks as diminutive as the Adelphi Terrace in contrast with the Hotel Cecil. I am credibly informed that in some of the huge down-town buildings they run "express" elevators, which do not stop before the fifteenth, eighteenth, twentieth floor, as the case may be. Some such arrangement seems very necessary, for the elevator Bummelzugs, which stop at every floor, take quite an appreciable slice out of the average New York day. I wonder that American ingenuity has not provided a system of pneumatic passenger-tubes for lightning communication with these aërial suburbs, these "mansions in the sky."
FOOTNOTES:
A similar story is told of the Confederate President. Challenged by a sentinel, he said, "Look at me and you will see that I am President Davis." "Well," said the soldier, "you do look like a used postage-stamp. Pass, President Davis!"
LETTER III
New York a much-maligned City—Its Charm—Mr. Steevens' Antitheses—New York compared with Other Cities—Its Slums—Advertisements—Architecture in New York and Philadelphia.
NEW YORK.
Many superlatives have been applied to New York by her own children, by the stranger within her gates, and by the stranger without her gates, at a safe distance. I, a newcomer, venture to apply what I believe to be a new superlative, and to call her the most maligned city in the world. Even sympathetic observers have exaggerated all that is uncouth, unbeautiful, unhealthy in her life, and overlooked, as it seems to me, her all-pervading charm. One must be a pessimist indeed to feel no exhilaration on coming in contact with such intensity of upward-striving life as meets one on every hand in this league-long island city, stretching oceanward between her eastern Sound and her western estuary, and roofed by a radiant dome of smokeless sky. "Upward-striving life," I say, for everywhere and in every branch of artistic effort the desire for beauty is apparent, while at many points the achievement is remarkable and inspiriting. I speak, of course, mainly of material beauty; but it is hard to believe that so marked an impulse toward the good as one notes in architecture, painting, sculpture, and literature, can be unaccompanied by a cognate impulse toward moral beauty, even in relation to civic life. The New Yorker's pride in New York is much more alert and active than the Londoner's pride in London; and this feeling must ere long make itself effective and dominant. For the great advantage, it seems to me, that America possesses over the Old World is its material and moral plasticity. Even among the giant structures of this city, one feels that there is nothing rigid, nothing oppressive, nothing inaccessible to the influence of changing conditions. If the buildings are Cyclopean, so is the race that reared them. The material world seems as clay on the potter's wheel, visibly taking on the impress of the human spirit; and the human spirit, as embodied in this superbly vital people, seems to be visibly thrilling to all the forces of civilisation.
One of the latest, and certainly one of the most keen-sighted, of English travellers in America is Mr. G.W. Steevens, a master journalist if ever there was one. I turn to his Land of the Dollar and I find New York writ down "uncouth, formless, piebald, chaotic." "Never have I seen," says Mr. Steevens, "a city more hideous. … Nothing is given to beauty; everything centres in hard utility." Mr. Steevens must forgive me for saying that this is simply libellous. It is true, I do not quote him fairly: I omit his laudatory antitheses. The truncated phrase in the above passage reads in the original "more hideous or more splendid," and after averring that "nothing is given to beauty," Mr. Steevens immediately proceeds to celebrate the beauty of many New York buildings. Are we to understand, then, that the architects thought of nothing but "hard utility," and that it was some æsthetic divinity that shaped their blocks, rough-hew them how they might? For my part, I cannot see how truth is to result from the clash of contradictory falsehoods. There are a few cities more splendid than New York; many more hideous. In point of concentrated architectural magnificence, there is nothing in New York to compare with the Vienna Ringstrasse, from the Opera House to the Votive Church.
In the splendour which proceeds from ordered uniformity and spaciousness, Paris is, of course, incomparable; while a Scotchman may perhaps be excused for holding that, as regards splendour of situation, Edinburgh is hard to beat. Nor is there any single prospect in New York so impressive as the panorama of London from Waterloo Bridge, when it happens to be visible—that imperial sweep of river frontage from the Houses of Parliament to the Tower. Except in the new region, far up the Hudson, New York shares with Dublin the disadvantage of turning her meaner aspects to her river fronts, though the majesty of the rivers themselves, and the grandiose outlines of the Brooklyn Bridge, largely compensate for this defect. In the main, then, the splendour of New York is as yet sporadic. It is emerging on every hand from comparative meanness and commonplace. At no point can one as yet say, "This prospect is finer than anything Europe can show." But everywhere there are purple patches of architectural splendour; and one can easily foresee the time when Fifth Avenue, the whole circuit of Central Park, and the up-town riverside region will be magnificent beyond compare.
As for the superlative hideousness attributed by Mr. Steevens to New York, I can only inquire, in the local idiom: "What is the matter with Glasgow?" Or, indeed, with Hull? or Newcastle? or the north-east regions of London? No doubt New York contains some of the very worst slums in the world. That melancholy distinction must be conceded her. But simply to the outward eye the slums of New York have not the monotonous hideousness of our English "warrens of the poor." In spite of her hard winter, New York cannot quite forget that her latitude is that of Madrid and Naples, not of London, or even of Paris. Her slums have a Southern air about them, a variety of contour and colour—in some aspects one might almost say a gaiety—unknown to Whitechapel or Bethnal Green. For one thing, the ubiquitous balconies and fire escapes serve of themselves to break the monotony of line, and lend, as it were, a peculiar texture to the scene; to say nothing of the oportunities they afford for the display of multifarious shreds and patches of colour. Then the houses themselves are often brightly, not to say loudly, painted; so that in the clear, sparkling atmosphere characteristic of New York, the most squalid slum puts on a many-coloured Southern aspect, which suggests Naples or Marseilles rather than the back streets of any English city. Add to this that the inhabitants are largely of Southern origin, and are apt, whenever the temperature will permit, to carry on the main part of their daily lives out of doors; and you can understand that, appalling as poverty may be in New York, the average slum is not so dank, dismal, and suicidally monotonous as a street of a similar status in London.
"The whole city," says Mr. Steevens, "is plastered, and papered, and painted with advertisements;" and he instances the huge "H-O" (whatever that may mean) which confronts one as one sails up the harbour, and the omnipresent "Castoria" placards. Here Mr. Steevens shows symptoms of the note-taker's hyperæsthesia. The facts he states are undeniable, but the implication that advertisement is carried to greater excess in New York than in London and other European cities seems to me utterly groundless. The "H-O" advertisement is not one whit more monstrous than, for instance, the huge announcements of cheap clothing-shops,