CITIES
As there are books on beehives, on colonies of birds’ nests, or on the constitution of coral islands, why should we not study thus the cities of humanity?
Paris, the capital of the Kingdom, uniform and concentric in its development, expands, as it grows, into a larger likeness of the island to which it was once confined. London is a juxtaposition of stores, warehouses, and factories. New York is a railway terminal, built of houses between tracks. It is a pier for landing, a great jetty flanked by wharves and warehouses. Like the tongue, which receives and divides its food, like the uvula at the back of the throat placed between two channels, New York, between her two rivers, the North and the East, has set her docks and her storehouses on one side, Long Island; on the other, by Jersey City and the dozen railway lines which range their depots on the embankment of the Hudson, she receives and sends out the merchandise of all the Western continent. The active part of the city, composed entirely of banks, exchanges, and offices, is on thetip of this tongue, which—not to push this figure too far—moves incessantly from one end to the other.
Boston is composed of two parts: the new city, pedantic and miserly, like a man who, displaying his riches and his virtue, yet guards them for himself,—where the streets, open on all sides to avenues, seem to become more silent and longer in the cold, and to listen with more spite to the step of the passer-by who follows them, grinding his teeth in the blast; and the hill where the old city, like a snail-shell, contains all the windings of traffic, debauchery, and hypocrisy.
The streets of Chinese cities are made for a people accustomed to walking in single file; each individual takes his place in an interminable, endless line. Between the houses resembling boxes with one side knocked out, where the inhabitants sleep pell-mell among the merchandise, these narrow fissures are insinuated.
Are there not special points for study? The geometry of streets, the measurement of turnings, the calculus of crowded thoroughfares, the disposition of avenues? Is not all movement parallel to these, and all rest or pleasure perpendicular?
A book indeed!