*****
The owl still comes on cloudy, troubled nights and sits in a high tree-limb above the quiet graves in the graveyard of King's Chapel. When he comes he sees the tardiest of the Boston men, carrying the green bags, that their daddies and their granddaddies before them carried, as they go slipping down the School street hill. He is a very old owl and he loves the old town—loves each of its austere meeting-houses with their belfried towers, loves the meeting places behind the rows of chimney-pots, the open reaches of the Common and the adjoining Public Gardens, where children paddle in the swan-boats all summer long. He loves the tang and mist of the nearby sea, but best of all he likes the tree-limb in the old graveyard, the part of Boston that stands changeless through the years—that thrusts itself into the very face of modernity with the grimy stone church at its corner and seems to say:
"I am the Past. To the Past, Reverence."
And in Boston Modernity halts many times to make obeisance to the Past.
Before the dawn, metropolitan New York is astir. As a matter of far more accurate fact she never sleeps. You may call her the City of the Sleepless Eye and hit right upon the mark. For at any time of the lonely hours of the night she is still a busy place. Elevated and subway trains and surface cars, although shortened and reduced in number, are upon their ways and are remarkably well filled. Regiments of men are engaged in getting out the morning papers—in a dozen different languages of the sons of men—and another regiment is coming on duty to lay the foundations of the earliest editions of the evening papers. There are workers here and there and everywhere in the City of the Sleepless Eye.
But before the dawn, New York becomes actively astir. Lights flash into dull radiance in the rows of side-street tenement and apartment houses all the way from Brooklyn bridge to Bronx Park. New York is beginning to dress. Other lights flash into short brilliancy before the coming of the dawn. New York is beginning to eat its breakfast. And right afterwards the stations of the elevated and the subway, the corners where the speeding surface cars will sometimes hesitate, become the objects of attack of an army that is marching upon the town. Workaday New York is stretching its arms and settling down to business.
Nor is the awakening city to be confined to the narrowstrip of island between the North and East rivers. Over on Long island are Brooklyn, Long Island City, Flushing, Jamaica and a score of other important places now within the limits of Greater New York. Some folk find it more economical to live in these places than in the cramped confines of Manhattan, and so it is hardly dawn before the great bridges and the tubes over and under the East river are doing the work for which they were built—and doing it masterfully.
The Brooklyn bridge is the oldest of these and yet it has been bending to its superhuman task for barely thirty years. In these thirty years it has been constantly reconstructed—but the best devices of the engineers, doubling and tripling the facilities of the original structure, can hardly keep pace with the growth of the communities and the traffic it has to serve. So within these thirty years other bridges and two sets of tunnels have come to span the East river. But the work of the first of all man's highways to conquer the mighty water highway has hardly lessened. The oldest of the bridges, and the most beautiful despite the ugliness of its approaches, still pours Brooklynites into Park Row, fifty, sixty, seventy thousand to the hour.
The Brooklyn Bridge is the finest of transportation structuresThe Brooklyn Bridge is the finest of transportation structures
The overloading of the Brooklyn bridge is repeated in the subway—that hidden giant of New York, which is the real backbone of the island of Manhattan. Built to carry four hundred thousand humans a day, that busy railroad has begun to carry more than a million each working day. How it is done, no one, not even the engineers of the company that operates it, really knows. The riders in the great tube who have to use it during the busiest of the rush hours are willing to hazard a guess, however. It is probable that in no other railroad of the sort would jamming and crowding of this sort be tolerated for more than a week. Yet the patrons of the subway not only tolerate but, after a fashion, they likeit. You can ask a New Yorker about it half an hour after his trip down town, sardine-fashion, and he will only say:
"The subway? It's the greatest ever. I can come down from Seventy-second street to Wall street in sixteen minutes, and in the old days it used to take me twenty-six or twenty-seven minutes by the elevated."
There is your real New Yorker. He would be perfectly willing to be bound and gagged and shot through a pneumatic tube like a packet of letters, if he thought that he could save twenty minutes between the Battery and the Harlem river. No wonder then that he scorns a relatively greater degree of comfort in elevated trains and surface cars and hurries to the overcrowded subway.
But New York astir in the morning is more even than Manhattan, the Bronx and the populous boroughs over on Long island. Upon its westerly edge runs the Hudson river—New Yorkers will always persist in calling it the North river—one of the masterly water highways of the land. The busy East river had been spanned by man twice before any man was bold enough to suggest a continuous railroad across the Hudson. Now there are several—the wonderful double tubes of the Pennsylvania railroad leading from its new terminal in the uptown heart of Manhattan—and two double sets of tunnels of a rapid-transit railroad leading from New Jersey both uptown and downtown in Manhattan. This rapid transit railroad—the Hudson & Manhattan, to use its legal name, although most New Yorkers speak of it as the McAdoo Tubes, because of the man who had the courage to build it—links workaday New York with a group of great railroad terminals that line the eastern rim of New Jersey all the way from Communipaw through Jersey City to Hoboken. And the railroads reach with more than twenty busy arms offacross the Jersey marshes to rolling hills and incipient mountains. Upon those hills and mountains live nearly a hundred thousand New Yorkers—men whose business interests are closely bound up in the metropolis of the New World but whose social and home ties are laid in a neighboring state. These—together with their fellows from Westchester county, the southwestern corner of Connecticut and from the Long island suburban towns—measure a railroad journey of from ten to thirty miles in the morning, the same journey home at night, as but an incident in their day's work. They form the great brigade of commuters, as a rule the last of the working army of New York to come to business.
The commuter has his own troubles—sometimes. By reason of his self-chosen isolation he may suffer certain deprivations. The servant question is not the least of these. And the extremes of a winter in New York come hard upon him. There are days when the Eight-twenty-two suddenly loses all that reputation for steadiness and sobriety that it has taken half a year to achieve, days when sleepy schooners laden with brick and claiming the holy right-of-way of the navigator get caught in the draw-bridges, days when the sharp unexpectedness of a miniature blizzard freezes terminal switches and signals and tangles traffic inexplicably—days, and nights as well, when the streets of his suburban village are well-nigh impassable. But these days are in a tremendous minority. And even upon the worst of them he can put the rush and turmoil of the city behind him—in the peace and silence of his country place he can forget the sorrows of Harlem yesteryear—with the noisy twins on the floor below and the mechanical piano right overhead.
*****
For nearly four hours the steady rush toward work continues. You can gauge it by a variety of conditions—even by the newspapers that are being spread wide open the length of the cars. In the early morning the popular penny papers—theAmericanand theWorldpredominating, with a sprinkling of thePressin between. Two hours later and while these popular penny papers are still being read—they seem to have a particular vogue with the little stenographers and the shopgirls—the more staid journals show themselves. Men who like the solid reading of theTimes, with its law calendars and its market reports; men of the town who frankly confess to an affection for the flippancy of theSun, or who have not lost the small-town spirit of their youth enough to carry them beyond the immensely personal tone of theHerald. And in between these, men who sniff at the mere mention of the name of Roosevelt, and who read theTribunebecause their daddies and their grand-daddies in their turn read it before them, or frankly business souls who are opening the day with a conscientious study of theJournal of Commerceor the Wall street sheets.
New York goes to work reading its newspaper. And before you have finished a Day of Days in the biggest city of the land you might also see that it goes to lunch with a newspaper in its hand, returns home tired with the fearful thoughts of business to delve comfortably into the gossip of the day in the favorite evening paper.
Just as you stand at the portals of the business part of the town and measure the incoming throng by its favorite papers so can you sieve out the classes of the workers almost by the hours at which they report for duty. In the early morning, in the winter still by artificial light, come those patient souls who exist literally and almost bitterly by the labor of their hands and the sweat of their brows. With them are the cleaners and the elevator crews of the great office-buildings—those tremendous commercial towers that NewYork has been sending skyward for the past quarter of a century. On the heels of these the first of the workers in the office-buildings, office-boys, young clerks, girl stenographers whose wonderful attire is a reflection of the glories that we shall see upon Fifth avenue later in this day. It is pinching business, literally—the dressing of these young girls. But if their faces are suspiciously pinky or suspiciously chalky, if their pumps and thin silk stockings, their short skirts and their open-necked waists atrocious upon a chill and nasty morning, we shall know that they are but the reflection of their more comfortable sisters uptown. Not all of this rapidly increasing army of women workers in business New York is artificial. Not a bit of it. There are girls in downtown offices whose refinement of dress and deportment, whose exquisite poise, whose well-schooled voices might have come from the finest old New York houses. And these are the girls who revel in their Saturday afternoons uptown—all in the smartness of best bib and tucker—at the matinee or fussing with tea at Sherry's or the Plaza.
An army of office workers pours itself into the business buildings that line Broadway and its important parallel streets all the way from Forty-second street to the Battery—that cluster with increasing discomfort in the narrow tip of Manhattan south of the City Hall. Clerks, stenographers, more clerks, more stenographers, now department heads and junior partners—finally the big fellows themselves, coming down democratically in the short-haul trains of the Sixth avenue elevated that start from Fifty-eighth street or even enduring the discomforts of the subway, for it takes a leisurely sort of a millionaire indeed who can afford to come in his motor car all the way downtown through the press and strain of Broadway traffic. After all these, the Wall street men. For the exchange opens at the stroke of ten ofTrinity's clock and five brief and bitter hours of trading have begun.
For four hours this flood of humans pouring out of the ferry-house and the railroad terminals, up from the subway kiosks and out from the narrow stairways of the elevated railroads. The narrow downtown streets congest, again and again. The sidewalks overflow and traffic takes to the middle of the streets. But the great office buildings absorb the major portion of the crowds. Their vertical railroads—eight or ten or twenty or thirty cars—are working to capacity and workaday New York is sifting itself to its task. By ten o'clock the office buildings are aglow with industry—the great machine of business starting below the level of the street and reaching high within the great commercial towers.
New York is the City of the Towers.
Sometimes a well-traveled soul will arise in the majesty of contemplation and say that in the American metropolis he sees the shadowy ghost of some foreign one. Along Madison square, where the cabbies still stand in a long, gently-curving, expectant line he will draw his breath through his teeth, point with his walking stick through the tracery of spring-blossoming foliage at Diana on her tower-perch and whisper reverently:
"It is Paris—Paris once again."
And there is a lower corner of Central Park that makes him think of Berlin; a long row of red brick houses with white trimmings along the north shore of Washington square that is a resemblance to blocks of a similar sort in London.
But he is quite mistaken. New York does not aim to be a replica of any foreign metropolis. She has her own personality, her own aggressive individualism; sheis the City of the Towers as well as the City of the Sleepless Eye—and no mean city at that. Take some clever European traveler, a man who can find his way around any of the foreign capitals with his eyes shut, and let him come to New York for the first time; approach our own imperial city through her most impressive gateway—that narrow passage from the sea between the ramparts of the guarding fortresses. This man, this traveler, has heard of the towers of the great New World city—they have been baldly pictured to him as giant, top-heavy barracks, meaningless compositions of ugly blank walls, punctuated with an infinity of tiny windows. That is the typical libel that has gone forth about New York.
He sees naught of such. He sees a great city, the height of its buildings simply conveying the impression from afar that it is builded upon a steep ridge. Here and there a building of still loftier height gives accent to the whole, emphasis to what might otherwise be a colorless mass; gives that mysterious tone and contrast which the artist is pleased to call "composition." Four of these towers already rise distinct from the giant skyscrapers of Manhattan. Each for this moment proclaims a victory of the American architect and the American builder over the most difficult problem ever placed before architect or builder.
The European traveler will give praise to the sky-line of New York as he sees it from the steamer's deck.
"It is the City of the Towers," he will say.
*****
In this, your Day of Days in New York, come with us and see the making of a skyscraper. This skyscraper is the new Municipal Building. It is just behind the tree-filled park in which stands New York's oldest bit of successful architecture—its venerable City Hall. A long time before New York dreamed that she mightbecome the City of the Towers they builded this old City Hall—upon what was then the northerly edge of the town. So sure were those old fellows that New York would never grow north of their fine town hall that they grew suddenly economical—the spirit of their Dutch forbears still dominated them—and builded the north wall of Virginia freestone instead of the white marble that was used for the facings of the other walls.
"No one will ever see that side of the building," they argued. "We might as well use cheap stone for that wall."
Today more than ninety-nine per cent. of the population of the immensely populated island of Manhattan lives north of the City Hall. That cheap north wall, hidden under countless coats of white paint, is the one acute reminder of the days that were when the Hall was new—when the gentle square in which it stood was surrounded by the suburban residences of prosperous New Yorkers and when the waters of the Collect Pond—where the New York boys use to skate in the bitterness of old-fashioned winters—lapped its northerly edge. There was no ugly Court House or even uglier Post Office to block the view from the Mayor's office up and down Broadway. New Yorkers were proud of their City Hall then—and good cause had they for their pride. It is one of the best bits of architecture in all America. And an even century of hard usage and countless "restorations" has only brought to it the charm of serene old age.
But the City Hall long since was outgrown. The municipal government of New York is a vast and somewhat unwieldy machine that can hardly be housed within a dozen giant structures. To provide offices for the greater part of the city's official machinery, this towering Municipal Building has just been erected. And because it is so typical of the best form of the so-calledskyscraper architecture, let us stop and take a look at it, listen to the story of its construction. In appearance the new Municipal Building is a gray-stone tower twenty-five stories in height and surmounted by a tower cupola an additional fifteen stories in height. In plan the structure is a sort of semi-octagon—a very shallow letter "U," if you please. But its most unusual feature comes from the fact that it squarely spans one of the busiest crosstown highways in the lower part of the city—Chambers street. The absorption of that busy thoroughfare is recognized by a great depressed bay upon the west front—the mainfaçadeof the building. And incidentally that depressed bay makes interior courts within the structure absolutely unnecessary. So much for the architectural features, severe in its detail, save for some ornate and not entirely pleasing sculptures. You are interested in knowing how one of these giants—so typical of the new New York—are fabricated.
This young man—hardly a dozen years out of a big technical school—can tell you. He has supervised the job. Sometimes he has slept on it—in a narrow cot in the temporary draughting-house. He knows its every detail, as he knows the fingers of his hands.
"Just remember that we began by planning a railroad station in the basement with eight platform tracks for loading and unloading passengers."
"A railroad station?" you interrupt.
"Certainly," is his decisive reply. "Downstairs we will soon have the most important terminal of a brand new subway system crossing the Manhattan and the Williamsburgh bridges and reaching over Brooklyn like a giant gridiron."
He goes on to the next matter—this one settled.
"There was something more than that. We had to plant on that cellar a building towering forty storiesin the air; its steel frame alone weighing twenty-six thousand tons—more than half the weight of the heaviest steel cantilever bridge in America—had to be firmly set."
The young engineer explains—in some detail. To find a foothold for this building was no sinecure. Tests with the diamond drill had shown that solid rock rested at a depth of 145 feet below street level at the south end of the plat. At the north end, the rock sloped away rapidly and so that part of the building rests upon compact sand. The rock topography of Manhattan island is uncertain. There are broad areas where solid gneiss crops close to the street level, others where it falls a hundred feet or more below water level. There is a hidden valley at Broadway and Reade street, a deep bowl farther up Broadway. Similarly, the north extremity of the Municipal Building rests upon the edge of still another granite bowl—the sub-surface of that same Collect Pond upon which the New York boys used to skate a century or more ago.
"That bothered some folks at first," laughs the engineer, "but we met it by sinking the caissons. We've more than a hundred piers down under this structure hanging on to Mother Earth. You don't realize the holding force of those piers," he continues. He turns quickly and points to a fourteen story building off over the trees of City Hall park. Out in one of the good-sized towns of the Middle West people would gasp a little at sight of it—in New York it is no longer even a tower.
"Turn that fellow right upside down into the hole we dug for this building," says the engineer, "and the rim of his uppermost cornice would about reach the feet of our own little forest of buried concrete piers."
That was one detail of the construction of the building. Here is another; the first six stories of the new structure involved elaborate masonry, giant stones, muchcarved. From the seventh story the plain walls of the exterior developing into an elaborate cornice were of simple construction. If the setting of these upper floors had waited until the first six stories of elaborate stonework had been made ready there would have been a delay of months in the construction work. So the contractor began building the walls—which in the modern steel skyscraper as you know form no part of the real structure but act rather as a stone envelope to keep out hard weather—from the seventh story upward. Eventually the masons working on the first six stories, working upwards all the time, reached and joined the lower edge of the masonry that had been set some weeks before. Time had been saved and you know that timedoescount in New York. Remember the Wall street man who preferred to have his ribs crushed and his hat smashed down over his nose in the subway rather than lose ten minutes each day in the elevated.
Now you stand with the young engineer at the topmost outlook of the tower in the Municipal Building and look down on the busy town. Before you is that mighty thoroughfare, Broadway—but so lined with towering buildings that you cannot see it, save for a brief space as it passes the greenery of the City Hall Park; behind you is that still mightier highway—the East river. Over that river you see the four bridges—the oldest of them landing at your very feet—and crawling things upon them, which a second glance shows to be trains and trolley-cars and automobiles and wagons in an unending succession. Beyond the East river and its bridges—the last of these far to the north and barely discernible—is Brooklyn, and beyond Brooklyn—this time to the south—is a shimmering slender horizon of silver that the man beside you tells you is the ocean.
You let your gaze come back to the wonderful viewwhich the building squarely faces. You look down upon the towers of New York—big towers and little towers—and you lift your eyes over the dingy mansard of the old Post Office and see the greatest of all the towers—the creamy white structure that a man has builded from his profits in the business of selling small articles at five and ten cents apiece. It is fifty-five stories in height—exquisitely beautiful in detail—and the owner will possess for a little time at least, the highest building in the world. You can see the towers in every vista, puffing little clouds of white smoke into the purest blue air that God ever gave a city in which to spin her fabrications. To the north, the south, the west, they show themselves in every infinite variety and here and there between them emerge up-shouldering rivals, steel-naked in their gaunt frames. If your ears are keen and the wind be favorable perhaps you can hear the clatter of the riveters and you can see over there the housesmiths riding aloft on the swinging girders with an utter and immensely professional indifference, threading the slender, dizzy floor-girders as easily as a cat might tread the narrow edge of a backyard fence.
Off with your gaze again. Look uptown, catch the faint patch of dark green that is Central Park, the spires of the cathedral, the wonderful campanile at Madison square. Let your glance swing across the gentle Hudson, over into a New Jersey that is bounded by the ridges of the Orange mountains, then slowly south and even the great towers that thrust themselves into almost every buildable foot of Broadway below the City Hall cannot entirely block your view of the wonderful upper harbor of New York—of the great ships that bring to an imperial city the tribute that is rightfully hers.
Now let your vision drop into the near foreground—into the tracery of trees about the jewel-box of a City Hall. Let it pause for a moment in the broad-pavedstreet at your feet with the queer little openings through which humans are sweeping like a black stream into a funnel; others from which the human streams come crawling upward like black molasses and you are again reminded that some of the greatest highways of New York are those that are subterranean and unseen. The sidewalks grow a little blacker than before.
"It's lunch-time," laughs the young engineer.
Bless you, it is. The morning that you gave to one of the most typical of the towers has not been ill-spent.
Thirty minutes before the big bell of Trinity spire booms out noon-tide New York's busiest grub-time begins. A few early-breakfasting clerks and office-boys begin to find their way toward the shrines of the coffee-urns and the heaped-up piles of sandwiches.
The view of New York from the lunch club in the skyscraperThe view of New York from the lunch club in the skyscraper
Of course, in New York breakfast is an almost endless affair—generally a fearfully hurried one. But lunch is far more serious. Lunch is almost an institution. Fifteen minutes after it is fairly begun it is gaining rapid headway. Thin trails of stenographers and clerks are finding their ways, lunch-bound, through the canyon-like streets of lower Manhattan, streams that momentarily increase in volume. By the time that Trinity finally booms its twelve stout strokes down into Broadway there is congestion upon the sidewalks—the favorite stools at the counters, the better tables in the higher-priced places are being rapidly filled. At twelve-thirty it begins to be luck to get any sort of accommodations at the really popular places; before one o'clock the intensity of grubbing verges on panic and pandemonium. And at a little before three cashiers are totaling their receipts, cooks, donning their hats and coats to go uptown, and waiters and 'buses are upturning chairs and scrubbing floors with scant regard for belated lunchers whohave to be content with the crumbs that are left after the ravishing and hungry army has been fed. Order after pandemonium—readiness for the two hours of gorge upon the morrow. The restaurants and lunch-rooms are as quiet as Trinity church-yard and something like three quarters of a million hungry souls have lunched in the business section of Manhattan south of Twenty-third street—at a total cost, according to the estimate of a shrewd restauranteur of a quarter of a million dollars.
*****
You may pay your money and take your choice. The shrewd little newsboys and office-boys who find their way to the short block of Ann street between Park Row and Nassau—the real Grub street of New York—are proving themselves financiers of tomorrow by dickering forsandwiches—"two cents apiece; three for a nickel." They always buy them in lots of three. That is business and business is not to be scorned for a single instant. Or you can pay as high prices in the swagger restaurants downtown as you do in the swagger restaurants uptown—and that is saying much. When lunch-time comes you can suit the inclinations of your taste—and your pocket-book. But the average New Yorker seems to run quite strongly to the peculiar form of lunch-room in which you help yourself to what you want, compute from the markers the cost of your midday meal, announce that total to the cashier, who is perfectly content to take your word for it, pay the amount and walk out. It seems absurd—to any one who does not understand New Yorkers. The lunch-room owners do understand them. New York business men and business boys are honest, as a general thing—particularly honest in little matters of this sort.
"It is all very simple," says the manager of one of these big lunch-rooms, who stands beside you for amoment at the entrance of one of his places—it boasts that it serves more than two thousand lunches each business day between eleven and three. "I've been through the whole mill. I've been check boy and oyster man, cashier—now I'm looking out for this particular beanery. Honor among New York business men? There's a lot of it."
"And you don't run many risks?" you venture.
"Not many here," he promptly replies. "But there was a man in here yesterday, who runs a cafeteria out in Chicago. I was telling him some of the rules of the game here—how when a customer comes in and throws his hat down in a chair before he goes over to the sandwich and coffee counters that chair is his, until he gets good and ready to go. My Chicago friend laughed at that. 'If we were to do that out in my neck-o'-the-woods,' says he, 'the customer would lose his hat.' And the uptown department stores don't take any chances, either. At one of the biggest of them they make the women decide what they will eat, but before they can start they must buy a check—pay in advance, you understand. They've tried the downtown way—and now they take no chances."
The floor manager laughs nervously.
"It's different with the girls downtown. We've started one quick buffet lunch on the honor plan, same dishes and prices and service as the men's places, but this one is for business girls. They said at first that we wouldn't make good with them—but we're ready to start another within the month. The business girls don't cheat—no matter what their uptown sisters may try to do."
*****
As a matter of fact downtown business girls in New York eat very sensibly. Sweets are popular but not invariable. They prefer candy, with fruit as a secondchoice, to be eaten some time during the afternoon. In big offices, where many girls are employed, "candy pools" are often made, each girl contributing five cents and getting her pro rata, one member of the staff being delegated to make the purchases. Eaten in this way the candy acts as a stimulant during the late afternoon hours, in much the same way as the invariable tea of the business man in London.
The business girl in New York takes her full hour for luncheon. It is seldom a minute more or a minute less. She is willing as a rule to stay overtime at night but she feels that she must have her sixty minutes in the middle of the day. A part of the lunch hour is always a stroll—unless there be a downpour. Certain downtown streets from twelve to one o'clock each day suggest the proximity of a nearby high school or seminary. There is much pairing off and quiet flirtation. This noon-day promenade of girls—for the most part astonishingly well-dressed girls and invariably in twos and threes—is one of the sights of downtown New York. Some of the girls gather in the old churchyards of Trinity and St. Paul's—in lower Broadway—on pleasant days. They sit down among the tombstones with their little packages of food and eat and chat and then stroll. No one molests them and the church authorities, although a little flustered when this first began, have seen that there is no harm in it and let the girls have their own way. There is always great decorousness and these big open-air spaces in the midst of the crowded street canyons are enjoyed by the women who appreciate the grass and winding paths after the hard pavements.
All the business girls downtown are not content with sitting after lunch among the tombstones of St. Paul's churchyard or of Trinity. He was indeed a canny lunch-man who took note of all the girls strolling in the narrow streets of downtown Manhattan, who remembered that all New York, rich or poor, loves to dance and who then fitted up an unrentable third floor loft over his eating place as a dancing hall. Two violins and a piano—a gray-bearded sandwich man to patrol the streets with "DANCING" placarded fore and aft upon his boards—the trick was done. Mamie told Sadie and Sadie told Elinor and Elinor told Flossie and the lunch-man began to grow famous. He made further study of the psychology of his patrons. There were the young fellows—shipping and file clerks and even ambitious young office-boys to be considered. There were the after-lunch smokes of these young captains of industry to come into the reckoning. The lunch-man placed a row of chairs along one edge of his dancing-hall and over them "Smoking Permitted at This End of the Room." After that Mamie and Sadie and Elinor and Flossie had partners and the lunch-man was on the highway to a six-cylinder motor car. He has his imitators. If you were in business in lower New York and your stenographer began to hum the "Blue Danube" along about half an hour before noon you would very well know she was gathering steam for the blissful twenty minutes of dancing that was going to help her digest her lunch.
*****
You, yourself, are going to lunch in still another sort of restaurant. It is characteristic of a type that has sprung up on the tip of Manhattan island within the past dozen years. You reach this grubbing-place by skirting the front doors of unspeakably dirty eating-houses in a mean street of the Syrian quarter. Finally you turn the corner of a dingy brick building, which was once the great house of one of the contemporaries of the first of the Vanderbilts and which has managed to escape destruction for three quarters of a century and face—the only skyscraper in congested New York which stands in a grass-platted yard—the whim of its wealthy owner. A fast elevator whisks you thirty stories to the top of the building and you step into the lobby of what looks, at first glance, to be the entrance hall of some fine restaurant in uptown's Fifth avenue. But this is a lunching-club—one of the newest in the town as well as one of the most elaborate.
Elaborate did we say? This is the elaboration of perfect taste—unobtrusive rugs, hangings, lighting fixtures and furniture—great, broad rooms and from their windows there comes to you another of the spectacular views that lay below the man-made peaks of Manhattan. To the south—the smooth, blue surface of the upper bay—in the foreground a nine hundred foot ship coming to the new land, her funnels lazily breathing smoke at the first lull in her four-day race across the Atlantic; to the east, a mighty river and its bridges, Brooklyn again and on very clear days, visions of Long island; to the north the most wonderful building construction that man has ever attempted, Babylonic in its immensity; to the west the brisk waterway of the North river and beyond it, Jersey City, sandwiched in between the smoky spread of railroad yards. This is the sort of thing that Mr. Downtown Luncher may have—if he is willing to pay the price. On torrid summer days he may ascend to the roof-garden, may glance lazily below him at the activities of the busiest city in the world and sip up the cool breezes from the sea, while folk down in the bottom of the Broadway chasm are sweltering from heat and humidity. And in winter he will find a complete gymnasium in operation on another floor of the club, with a competent instructor in charge. The "doctor," as they call him, will lay out a course of work. And that course of work, calling for a half-hour of exercise each day just before lunch will make dyspeptic and paunchy old money-grubbers alike, keen as farmhands coming into dinner.
And yet this club, typical of so many others in the downtown business heart of Manhattan, is but a cog in the mighty machine of the lunching of the workaday multitudes of downtown. Its doors are closed and lights are out at six o'clock in the evening, save on extraordinary occasions; while most of its hundred or more well-trained waiters go uptown to assist in the dinner and the late supper rushes of the fashionable restaurants in the theater and hotel district. Like most of its compeers, it is an outgrowth of the wonderfully comfortable old Lawyers' Club, which was completely destroyed in the great fire that burned the Equitable Building in January, 1912. From that organization, famed for its noon-day hospitality and for the quality of the folk you might meet between its walls, have sprung many other downtown lunch clubs—the Whitehall, the Hardware, the Manufacturers, the Downtown Association, the new Lawyers—many, many others; almost invariably occupying the upper floors of some skyscraper that has been planned especially for them. These clubs are not cheap. It costs from sixty to a hundred dollars to enter one of them and about as much more yearly in the form of dues. Their restaurant charges are far from low-priced. They are never very exclusive organizations and yet they give to the strain of the workaday New Yorker his last lingering trace of hospitality—the hospitality that has lingered around Bowling Green and Trinity and St. Paul's church-yards since colonial days and the coffee houses.
*****
Even the hospitality of the genial host seems to end—with the ending of the lunch-hour. As he takes his last sip ofcafé noirhe is tugging at his watch.
"Bless me," he says, "It is going on three o'clock. I've got that railroad crowd due in my office in fifteen minutes."
That is your dismissal. For ninety minutes he has given you his hospitality—his rare and unselfish self. He has put the perplexing details of his business out of his mind and given himself to whatever flow of talk might suit your fancy. Now the hour and a half of grace is over—and you are dismissed, courteously—but none the less dismissed. With your host you descend to the crowded noisome street. He sees you to the subway—gives you a fine warm grasp of his strong hand—and plunges back into the great and grinding machine of business.
Lunch in your Day of Days within the City of the Towers is over. Three o'clock. Before the last echoes of Trinity's bell go ringing down through Wall street to halt the busy Exchange—the multitude has been fed. Miss Stenographer has had her salad and éclair, two waltzes and perhaps a "turkey trot" into the bargain, and is back at the keys of her typewriter. Mr. President has entertained that Certain Party at the club and has made him promise to sign that mighty important contract. And the certain Party and Mr. President rode for half an hour on the mechanical horses in the gymnasium. What fun, too, for those old boys?
Three o'clock! The cashiers are totaling their receipts, the waiters and the 'buses are upturning chairs and tables to make way for the scrub-women, some are already beginning to don their overcoats to go uptown; but the three-quarters of a million of hungry mouths have been fed. New York has caught its breath in mid-day relaxation and once more is hard at work—putting in the last of its hours of the business day with renewed and feverish energy.
You had planned at first to walk up Broadway. You wanted to see once again the church-yards around Trinity and St. Paul's, perhaps make a side excursion down toward Fraunces' Tavern—just now come back into its own again. Some of the old landmarks that are still hidden around downtown New York seemed to appeal to you. But your host at luncheon laughed at you.
"If you want to spend your time that way, all right," he said, "but the only really old things you will find in New York are the faces of the young men. You can find those anywhere in the town."
And there was another reckoning to be figured. Three o'clock means the day well advanced and there is avis-à-visawaiting you uptown. Of course, there is a Her to enjoy your Day of Days with you. And just for convenience alone we will call her Katherine. It is a pretty name for a woman, and it will do here and now quite as well as any other.
Katherine is waiting for you in the Fourteenth street station of the subway. She is prompt—after the fashion of most New York girls. And it is a relief to come out of the overcrowded tube and find her there at the entrance that leads up to sunshine and fresh air. She knows her New York thoroughly and as a prelude to the trip uptown she leads you over to Fifth avenue—to the upper deck of one of those big green peregrinating omnibuses.
"It's a shame that we could not have started at Washington square," she apologizes. "When you sweep around and north through the great arch it almost seems as if you were passing through the portals of New York. It is one of the few parts of the town that are not changing rapidly."
For Fifth avenue—only a few blocks north of that stately arch—has begun to disintegrate and decay. Not in the ordinary sense of those terms. But to those who remember the stately street of fifteen or twenty years ago—lined with the simple and dignified homes of the town—its change into a business thoroughfare brings keen regrets. Katherine remembers that she read in a book that there are today more factory workers employed in Fifth avenue or close to it, than in such great mill cities as Lowell or Lawrence or Fall River, and when you ask her the reason why she will tell you how these great buildings went soaring up as office-buildings, without office tenants to fill them. They represent speculation, and speculation is New Yorkish. But speculation in wholesale cannot afford to lose, and that is why the garment manufacturers and many others of their sort came flocking to the great retail shopping district between Fourth and Seventh avenues and Fourteenth and Thirty-fourth streets, and sent the shops soaring further to the north. It has been expensive business throughout, doubly expensive, because absolutely unnecessary. Some of the great retail houses of New York built modern and elaborate structures south of Thirty-fourth street within the past twenty years in the firm belief that the retail shopping section had been fixed for the next half century. But the new stores had hardly been opened before the deluge of manufacturing came upon them. Shoppers simply would not mix with factory hands upon lower Fifth avenue and the side streets leading from it. And so the shop-keepers have had to move north and build anew. And just what a tax such moving has been upon the consumer no one has ever had the audacity to estimate.
"They should have known that nothing ever stays fixed in New York," says Katherine. "We are a restless folk, who make a restless city. Stay fixed? Did you notice the station at which you entered today?"
Of course you did. The new Grand Central, with its marvelous blue ceiling capping a waiting-room so large that the New York City Hall, cupola, wings and all could be set within it, can hardly escape the attention of any traveler who passes within its portals.
"It is the greatest railroad station in the world," she continues, "and yet I have read in the newspapers that Commodore Vanderbilt built on that very plat of ground in 1871 the largest station in the world for the accommodation of his railroads. He thought that it would last for all time. In forty years the wreckers were pulling it down. It was outgrown, utterly outgrown and they were carting it off piece by piece to the rubbish heaps."
She turns suddenly upon you.
"That is typical of our restless, lovely city," she tells you. And you, yourself, have heard that only two years ago they tore down a nineteen story building at Wall and Nassau streets so that they might replace it by another of the towers—this one thirty stories in height.