*****
The conductor of the green omnibus thrusts his green fare-box under your nose. You find two dimes and drop it into the contrivance.
"You can get more value for less money and less value for much money in New York than in any other large city in the world," says Katherine.
She is right—and you know that she is right. You can have a glorious ride up the street, that even in its days of social decadence is still the finest highway in the land—a ride that continues across the town and up its parked rim for long miles—for a mere ten cents of Uncle Sam's currency and as for the reverse—well youare going to dinner in a smart hotel with Katherine in a little while.
You swing across Broadway and up the west edge of Madison square, catch a single, wondering close-at-hand glimpse of the white campanile of the Metropolitan tower which dominates that open place and so all but replaces Diana on her perch above Madison Square Garden—a landmark of the New York of a quarter of a century ago and which is apt to come into the hands of the wreckers almost any day now. Now you are at the south edge of the new shopping district, although some of the ultra places below Thirty-fourth street have begun to move into that portion of the avenue just south of Central Park. In a little while they may be stealing up the loveliest portion of the avenue—from Fifty-ninth street north.
The great shops dominate the avenue. And if you look with sharp eyes as the green bus bears you up thisvia sacre, you may see that one of the greatest ones—a huge department store encased in architecturally superb white marble—bears no sign or token of its ownership or trade. An oversight, you think. Not a bit of it. Four blocks farther up the avenue is another great store in white marble—a jewelry shop of international reputation. You will have to scan its broadfaçadeclosely indeed before you find the name of the firm in tiny letters upon the face of its clock. Oversight? Not a bit of it. It is the ultra of shop-keeping in New York—the assumption that the shop is so well known that it need not be placarded to the vulgar world. And if strangers from other points fail to identify it—well that is because of their lack of knowledge and the shopkeeper may secretly rejoice.
But, after all, it is the little shops that mark the character of Fifth avenue—not its great emporiums. It is the little millinery shops where an engaging creature inblack and white simpers toward you and calls you, if you are of the eternal feminine, "my dear;" the jewelry shops where the lapidary rises from his lathe and offers a bit of craftsmanship; the rare galleries that run from old masters to modern etchers; specialty shops, filled top to bottom with toys or Persian rugs, or women's sweaters, or foreign magazines and books, that render to Fifth avenue its tremendous cosmopolitanism. These little shops make for personality. There is something in the personal contact between the proprietor and the customer that makes mere barter possess a real fascination. And if you do pay two or three times the real value in the little shop you have just so much more fun out of the shopping. And there are times when real treasures may come out of their stores.
"Look at the cornices," interrupts Katherine. "Mr. Arnold Bennett says that they are the most wonderful things in all New York."
Katherine may strain her neck, looking at cornices if she so wills. As for you, the folk who promenade the broad sidewalks are more worth your while. There are more of them upon the west walk than upon the east—for some strange reason that has long since brought about a similar phenomenon upon Broadway and sent west side rents high above those upon the east. Fifth avenue thrusts its cosmopolitanism upon you, not alone in her shops, with their wonderfully varied offerings, but in the very humans who tread her pavements. The New York girl may not always be beautiful but she is rarely anything but impeccable. And if in the one instance she is extreme in her styles, in the next she is apt to be severe in her simplicity of dress. And it is difficult to tell to which ordinary preference should go. These girls—girls in a broad sense all the way from trim children in charge of maid or governess to girls whose pinkness of skin defies the graying of their locks—asprinkling of men, not always so faultless in dress or manner as their sisters—and you have the Fifth avenue crowd. Then between these two quick moving files of pedestrians—set at all times in the rapidtempoof New York—a quadruple file of carriages; the greater part of them motor driven.
Traffic in Fifth avenue, like traffic almost everywhere else in New York is a problem increasing in perplexity. A little while ago the situation was met and for a time improved by slicing off the fronts of the buildings—perhaps the most expensive shave that the town has ever known—and setting back the sidewalks six or eight feet. But the benefits then gained have already been over-reached and the traffic policeman at the street corners all the way up the avenue must possess rare wit and diplomacy—while their fellows at such corners as Thirty-fourth and Forty-second are hardly less than field generals. And with all thefinesseof their work the traffic moves like molasses. Long double and triple files of touring cars and limousines, the combined cost of which would render statistics such as would gladden the heart of a Sunday editor, make their way up and down the great street tediously. If a man is in a hurry he has no business even to essay the Avenue. And occasionally the whole tangle is double-tangled. The shriek of a fire-engine up a side street or the clang of an ambulance demanding a clear right-of-way makes the traffic question no easier. Yet the policemen at the street corners are not caught unawares. With the shrill commands of their own whistles they maneuver trucks and automobiles and even some old-fashioned hansom cabs, pedestrians, all the rest—as coolly and as evenly as if it had been rehearsed for whole weeks.
*****
New York is wonderful, the traffic of its chief show street—for Fifth avenue can now be fairly said tohave usurped Broadway as the main highway of the upper city—tremendous. You begin to compute what must be the rental values upon this proud section of Fifth avenue, as it climbs Murray Hill from Thirty-fourth street to Forty-second street, when Katherine interrupts you once again. She knows her New York thoroughly indeed.
"Do you notice that house?" she demands.
You follow her glance to a very simple brick house, upon the corner of an inconsequential side street. Beside it on Fifth avenue is an open lot—of perhaps fifty feet frontage, giving to the avenue but a plain brown wooden fence.
"A corking building lot," you venture, "Why don'tthey—"
"I expected you to say that," she laughs. "They have wanted to build upon that lot—time and time again. But when they approach the owner he laughs at them and declines to consider any offer. 'My daughter has a little dog,' he says politely, 'It must have a place for exercise.' We New Yorkers are an odd lot," she laughs. "You know that the Goelets kept a cow in the lawn of their big house at Broadway and Nineteenth street until almost twenty years ago—until there was not a square foot of grass outside of a park within five miles. And in New York the man who can do the odd thing successfully is apt to be applauded. You could not imagine such a thing in Boston or Baltimore or Philadelphia, could you?"
You admit that your imagination would fall short of such heights and ask Katherine if you are going up to the far end of the 'bus run—to that great group of buildings—university, cathedral, hospital, divinity school—that have been gathered just beyond the northwestern corner of Central Park.
"No, I think not," she quickly decides, "You knowthat Columbia is not to New York as Harvard is to Boston. Harvard dominates Boston, Columbia is but a peg in the educational system of New York. The best families here do not bow to its fetich. They are quite as apt to send their boys to Yale or Princeton—even Harvard."
"Then there's the cathedral and the Drive," you venture.
"We have a cathedral right here on Fifth avenue that is finished and, in its way, quite as beautiful. And as for the Drive—it is merely a rim of top-heavy and expensive apartment houses. The West Side is no longer extremely smart. The truth of the matter is that we must pause for afternoon tea."
You ignore that horrifying truth for an instant.
"What has happened to the poor West Side?" you demand.
Katherine all but lowers her voice to a whisper.
"Twenty years ago and it had every promise of success. It looked as if Riverside Drive would surpass the Avenue as a street of fine residences. The side streets were preëminently nice. Then came the subway—and with it the apartment houses. After that the very nice folk began moving to the side streets in the upper Fifties, the Sixties and the Seventies between Park and Fifth avenues."
"Suppose that the apartment houses should begin to drift in there—in any numbers?" you demand.
"Lord knows," says Katherine, and with due reverence adds: "There is the last stand of the prosperous New Yorker with an old-fashioned notion that he and his would like to live in a detached house. The Park binds him in on the West, the tenement district and Lexington avenue on the East—to the North Harlem and the equally impossible Bronx. The old guard is standing together."
"There is Brooklyn?" you venture.
"No New Yorker," says Katherine, with withering scorn, "ever goes publicly to Brooklyn unless he is being buried in Greenwood cemetery."
*****
Tea for you is being served in a large mausoleum of a white hotel—excessively white from a profuse use of porcelain tiles which can be washed occasionally—of most extraordinary architecture. Some day some one is going to attempt an analysis of hotel architecture in New York and elsewhere in the U.S.A. but this is not the time and place. Suffice it to say here and now that you finally found a door entering the white porcelain mausoleum. What a feast awaited your eyes—as well as your stomach—within. Rooms of rose pink and rooms of silver gray, Persian rooms, Japanese rooms, French rooms in the several varieties of Louis, Greek rooms—Europe, the ancients and the Orient, have been ransacked for the furnishing of this tavern. And in the center of them all is a great glass-enclosed garden, filled with giant palms and tiny tables, tremendous waiters and infinitesimal chairs. A large bland-faced employé—who is a sort of sublimated edition of the narrow lean hat-boys who we shall find in the eating places of the Broadway theater districts—divests you of your outer wraps. You elbow past a band and arrive at the winter garden. A head waiter in an instant glance of steel-blue eyes decides that you are fit and finds the tiniest of the tiny tables for you. It is so far in the shade of the sheltering palm that you have to bend almost double to drink your tea—and the orchestra is rather uncomfortably near.
Washington Square and its lovely Arch—New YorkWashington Square and its lovely Arch—New York
Katherine might have taken you to other tea dispensaries—an unusual place in a converted stable in Thirty-fourth street, another stable loft in West Twenty-eighth—dozens of little shops, generally feminine to anintensified degree, which combine the serving of tea with the vending of their wares. But she preferred the big white hotel.
"Tea at the Plaza is so satisfactory and so restful," she says, as you dodge to permit two ladies—one in gray silk and the other in a cut of blue cloth that gives her the contour of a magnified frog—to slip past you without knocking your tea out of your untrained fingers. "We might have gone to the Manhattan—but it's so filled with young girls and the chappies from the schools—the Ritz is proper but dull, so is Sherry's—all the rest more or less impossible."
She rattles on—the matter of restaurants is always dear to the New York heart. You ignore the details.
"But why?" you demand.
"Why what?" she returns.
"Why tea?"
You explain that afternoon tea in its real lair—London—in a sort of climatic necessity. The prevalence of fog, of raw damp days, makes a cup of hot tea a real bracer—a stimulant that carries the human through another two or three hours of hard existence until the late London dinner. The bracing atmosphere of New York—with more clear days than any other metropolitan city in the world—does not need tea. You say so frankly.
"I suppose you are right," Katherine concedes, "but we have ceased in this big city to rail at the English. We bow the knee to them. The most fashionable of our newest hotels and shops run—absurdly many times—to English ways. And afternoon tea has long since ceased to be a novelty in our lives. Why, they are beginning to serve it at the offices downtown—just as they do in dear old London."
You swallow hard—some one has recommended thatto you as a method of suppressing emotion—for polite society is never emotional.
Dinner is New York's real function of the day. And dinner in New York means five million hungry stomachs demanding to be filled. The New York dinner is as cosmopolitan as the folk who dwell on the narrow island of Manhattan and the two other islands that press closely to it. The restaurant and hotel dinners are as cosmopolitan as the others. Of course, for the sake of brevity, if for no other reason, you must eliminate the home dinners—and read "home" as quickly into the cold and heavy great houses of the avenue as into the little clusters of rooms in crowded East Side tenements where poverty is never far away and next week's meals a real problem. And remember, that to dine even in a reasonably complete list of New York's famous eating places—a new one every night—would take you more than a year. At the best your vision of them must be desultory.
Six o'clock sees the New York business army well on its way toward home—the seething crowds at the Brooklyn bridge terminal in Park Row, the overloaded subway straining to move its fearful burden, the ferry and the railroad terminals focal points of great attractiveness. To make a single instance: take that division of the army that dwells in Brooklyn. It begins its march dinnerward a little after four o'clock, becomes a pushing, jostling mob a little later and shows no sign of abatement until long after six. Within that time the railroad folk at the Park Row terminal of the old bridge have received, classified and despatched Brooklynward, more than one hundred and fifty thousand persons—the population of a city almost the size of Syracuse.And the famous old bridge is but one of four direct paths from Manhattan to Brooklyn.
Six o'clock sees restaurants and cafés alight and ready for the two or three hours of their really brisk traffic of the day. There are even dinner restaurants downtown, remarkably good places withal and making especial appeal to those overworked souls who are forced to stay at the office at night. There are bright lights in Chinatown where innumerable "Tuxedos" and "Port Arthurs" are beginning to prepare the chop-suey in immaculate Mongolian kitchens. But the real restaurant district for the diner-out hardly begins south of Madison square. There are still a very few old hotels in Broadway south of that point—a lessening company each year—one or two in close proximity to Washington square. Two of these last make a specialty of French cooking—theirtable d'hôtesare really famous—and perhaps you may fairly say when you are done at them that you have eaten at the best restaurants in all New York. From them Fifth avenue runs a straight course to the newer hotels far to the north—a silent brilliantly lighted street as night comes "with the double row of steel-blue electric lamps resembling torch-bearing monks" one brilliant New York writer has put it. But before the newest of the new an intermediate era of hotels, the Holland, the nearby Imperial and the Waldorf-Astoria chief among these. The Waldorf has been from the day it first opened its doors—more than twenty years ago—New York's really representative hotel. Newer hostelries have tried to wrest that honor from it—but in vain. It has clung jealously to its reputation. The great dinners of the town are held in its wonderful banqueting halls, the well-known men of New York are constantly in its corridors. It is club and more than club—it is a clearing-house for all of the bestclubs. It is the focal center for the hotel life of the town.
There is an important group of hotels in the rather spectacular neighborhood of Times square—the Astor, with its distinctly German flavor, and the Knickerbocker which whimsically likes to call itself "the country club on Forty-second street" distinctive among them. And ranging upon upper Fifth avenue, or close to it, are other important houses, the Belmont, the aristocratic Manhattan, the ultra-British Ritz-Carlton, the St. Regis, the Savoy, the Netherland, the Plaza, and the Gotham. In between these are those two impeccable restaurants—so distinctive of New York and so long wrapped up in its history—Sherry's and Delmonico's.
Over in the theatrical brilliancy of Broadway up and down from Times square are other restaurants—Shanley's, Churchill's, Murray's—the list is constantly changing. A fashionable restaurant in New York is either tremendously successful—or else, as we shall later see, they are telephoning for the sheriff. And the last outcome is apt more to follow than the first. For it is a tremendous undertaking to launch a restaurant in these days. The decorations of the great dining-rooms must rival those of a Versailles palace while the so-called minor appointments—silver, linen, china and the rest must be as faultless as in any great house upon Fifth avenue. The first cost is staggering, the upkeep a steady drain. There is but one opportunity for the proprietor—and that opportunity is in his charges. And when you come to dine in one of these showy uptown places you will find that he has not missed his opportunity.
All New York that dines out does not make for these great places or their fellows. There are little restaurants that cast a glamour over their poor food by thrusting out hints of a magic folk named Bohemians who dine night after night at their dirty tables. There are otherswho with a Persian name seek to allure the ill-informed, some stout German places giving the substantial cheer of the Fatherland, beyond them restaurants phrasing themselves in the national dishes and the cooking of every land in the world, save our own. For a real American restaurant is hard to find in New York—real American dishes treats of increasing rarity. A great hotel recently banished steaks from its bills-of-fare, another has placed the ban on pie; and as for strawberry short-cake—just ask for strawberry short-cake. The concoction that the waiter will set before you will leave you hesitating between tears and laughter—ridicule for the pitiful attempts of a French cook and tears for your thoughts of the tragedy that has overwhelmed an American institution. Some day some one is going to build a hotel with the American idea standing back of it right in the heart of New York. He is going to have the bravery or the patriotism to call it the American House or the United States Hotel or Congress Hall or some other title that means something quite removed from the aristocratic nomenclature that our modern generation of tavern-keepers have borrowed from Europe without the slightest sense of fitness; and to that man shall be given more than mere riches—the satisfaction that will come to him from having accomplished a real work.
The truth of the matter is that we have borrowed more than nomenclature from Europe. We have taken the so-called "European plan" with all of its disadvantages and none of its advantages. We have done away with the stuffy over-eating "American plan" and have made a rule of "pay-as-you-go" that is quite all right—and is not. For to the simple "European plan" has recently been added many complications. In other days the generosity of the portions in a New York hotel was famous. A single portion of any important dish was ample fortwo. Your smiling old-fashioned waiter told you that. The waiter in a New York restaurant today does not smile. He merely tells you that the food is served "per portion" which generally means that an unnecessary amount of food is prepared in the kitchen and sent from the table, uneaten, as waste. And a smart New Yorkrestauranteurrecently made a "cover charge" of twenty-five cents for bread and butter and ice-water. Others followed. It will not be long before a smarterrestauranteurwill make the "cover charge" fifty cents, and then folk will begin streaming into his place. They don't complain. That's not the New York way.
They do not even complain of the hat-boys—bloodthirsty little brigands who snatch your hat and other wraps before you enter a restaurant. The brigands are skillfully chosen—lean, hungry little boys every time, never fat, sleek, well-fed looking little boys. They are employed by a trust, which rents the "hat-checking privilege" from the proprietor of the hotel or restaurant. The owner of the trust pays well for these privileges and the little boys must work hard to bring him back his rental fees and a fair profit beside.
Leave that to them. Emerge from a restaurant, well-fed and at peace with the world and deny that lean-looking, swarthy-faced, black-eyed boy a quarter if you can—or dare. A dime is out of the question. He might insult you, probably would. But a quarter buys your self-respect and the head of the trust a share in his new motor car. The lean-looking boy buys no motor cars. He works on a salary and there are no pockets in his uniform. There is a stern-visaged cicerone in the background and to the cicerone roll all the quarters, but the New Yorker does not complain—save when he reaches Los Angeles or Atlanta or some other fairly distant place and finds the same sort of highway brigandage in effect there.
After the dinner and the hat-boy—the theater. You suggest the theater to Katherine. She is enthusiastic. You pick the theater. It is close at hand and you quickly find your way to it. A gentleman, whose politeness is of a variety, somewhatfrappé, awaits you in the box-office. A line of hopeful mortals is shuffling toward him, to disperse with hope left behind. But this anticipates.
You inquire of the man in the box-office for two seats—two particularly good seats. You remember going to the theater in Indianapolis once upon a time, a stranger, and having been seated behind the fattest theater pillar that you could have ever possibly imagined. But you need not worry about the pillars in this New York playhouse. The box-office gentleman, whose thoughts seem to be a thousand miles away, blandly replies that the house is sold out.
"So good?" you brashly venture. You had not fancied this production so successful. He does not even assume to hear your comment. You decide that you will see this particular play at a later time. You suggest as much to the indifferent creature behind the wicket. He replies by telling you that he can only give you tickets for a Monday or Tuesday three weeks hence—and then nothing ahead of the seventeenth row. Can he not do better than that? He cannot. He is positive that he cannot. And his positiveness is Gibraltarian in its immobility. A faint sign of irritation covers his bland face. He wants you to see that you are taking too much of his time.
Katherine saves the situation. She whispers to you that she noticed a little shop nearby with a sign "Tickets for all Theaters" displayed upon it.
"You know they abolished the speculators two years ago," she explains.
You move on to the little shop with the inviting sign. The gentleman behind its counters has manners at least. He greets you with the smile of the professional shopkeeper.
"Have you tickets for 'The Giddiest Girl'?" you inquire.
He smiles ingratiatingly. Of course he has, for any night and anywhere you wish them.
"What is the price of them?"
You are not coldly commercial but, despite that smile, merely apprehensive. And you are beginning to understand New York.
"Four dollars."
Not so bad at that—just the box-office price. You bring out four greasy one-dollar bills. His eyes fixed upon them, he places a ticket down upon the counter.
"There—there are two of us," you stammer.
He does not stammer.
"Do you think that they are four dollars a dozen?" he sallies.
You give him a ten dollar bill this time. You do not kick. Even though the show is perfectly rotten and the usherette charges you ten cents for a poorly printed program and scowls because you take the change from her itching palm, do not complain. You would not complain even if you knew that the man in the chair next to you paid only the regular prices, because he happened to belong to the same lodge as the cousin of the treasurer of the theater, while the man in the chair next to Katherine paid nothing at all for his seat—having a relative who advertises in the theater programs. You do not kick. Complaint has long since been eliminated from the New York code and you have begun to realize that.
*****
After the theater, another restaurant—this time forsupper—more hat-boys, more brigandage but it is the thing to do and you must do it. And you must do it well. Splendor costs and you pay—your full proportion. If up in your home town you know a nice little place where you can drop in after the show at the local playhouse and have a glass of beer and a rarebit—dismiss that as a prevailing idea in the neighborhood of Long Acre square. The White Light district of Broadway can buy no motor cars on the beer and rarebit trade. Louey's trade in his modest little place up home is sufficient to keep him in moderate living year in and year out, but Louey does not have to pay Broadway ground rent, or Broadway prices for food-stuffs or Broadway salaries—to say nothing of having a thirst for a bigger and faster automobile than his neighbor. And as we have said, the opportunity for bankruptcy in the so-called "lobster palaces" of Broadway runs high. As this is being written, one of the most famous of them has collapsed.
Its proprietor—he was a smart caterer come east from Chicago where he had made his place fashionable and himself fairly rich—for a dozen years ran a prosperous restaurant within a stone-throw of the tall white shaft of theTimesbuilding. And even if the heels were the highest, the gowns the lowest, the food was impeccable and if you knew New York at all you knew who went there. It was gay and beautiful and high-priced. It was immensely popular. Then the proprietor listened to sirens. They commanded him to tear down the simple structure of his restaurant and there build a towering hotel. He obeyed orders. With the magic of New York builders the new building was ready within the twelvemonth. It represented all that might be desired—or that upper Broadway at least might desire—in modern hotel construction.
But it could not succeed. A salacious play whichmade a considerable commercial success took its title from the new hotel and called itself "The Girl from R——'s." That was the last straw. It might have been good fun for the man from Baraboo or the man from Jefferson City to come to New York and dine quietly and elegantly at R——'s, but to stop at R——'s hotel, to have his mail sent there, to have the local paper report that he was registered at that really splendid hostelry—ah, that was a different matter, indeed. Your Baraboo citizen had some fairly conservative connections—church and business—and he took no risks. The new hotel went bankrupt.A
AAnother hotel man has just taken the property. His first step has been to change its name and, if possible, its reputation. E. H.
AAnother hotel man has just taken the property. His first step has been to change its name and, if possible, its reputation. E. H.
Beer and rarebits, indeed. Sam Blythe tells of the little group of four who went into a hotel grillroom not far from Forty-second street and Broadway, who mildly asked for beer and rabbits.
"We have fine partridges," said the head-waiter, insinuatingly.
"We asked for beer and rabbits," insisted the host of the little group. He really did not know his New York.
"We have fine partridges," reiterated the head-waiter, then yawned slightly behind his hand. That yawn settled it. The head of the party was bellicose. He lost his temper completely. In a few minutes an ambulance and a patrol wagon came racing up Broadway. But the hotel had won. It always does.
*****
One thing more—thecabaret. We think that if you are really fond of Katherine, and Katherine's reputation, you will avoid the restaurants that make a specialty of the so-calledcabarets. Really good restaurants manage to get along without them. And the very best that can be said of them is that they are invariably indifferently poor—amélangecontributed by broken-down actors oractresses, or boys or girls stolen from the possibilities of a really decent way of earning a living. As for the worst, it is enough to say that the familiarity that begins by breeding contempt follows in the wake of thecabaret. It may be very jolly for you, of a lonely summer evening in New York and forgetting all the real pleasures of a lonely summer night in the big town—wonderful orchestral concerts in Central Park, dining on open-air terraces and cool quiet roofs, motoring off to wonderful shore dinners in queer old taverns—to hunt out these great gay places in the heart of the town. Easycamaraderieis part and parcel of them. But you will not want such comrades to meet any of the Katherines of your family. And therein lies a more than subtle distinction.
It has all quite dazed you. You turn toward Katherine as you ride home with her in the taxicab—space forbids a description of the horrors and the indignities of the taxicab trust.
"Is it like this—every night?" you feebly ask.
"Every night of the year," she replies. "And typical New Yorkers like it."
That puts a brand-new thought into your mind.
"What is a typical New Yorker?" you demand.
"We are all typical New Yorkers," she laughs.
It is a foolish answer—of course. But the strange part of the whole thing is that Katherine is right. Either there are no typical New Yorkers—as many sane folk solemnly aver—or else every one who tarries in the city through the passing of even a single night is a typical New Yorker. How can it be else in a city who is still growing like a girl in her teens, who adds to herself each year in permanent population 135,000 human beings, whose transient population is nightly estimated at over a hundred thousand? They are all typical New Yorkers.
Here is Solomon Strunsky who has just arrived through Ellis Island, scared and forlorn, with his scared and forlorn little family trailing on behind, Solomon Strunsky all but penniless, and the merciless home-sickness for the little faraway town in Polish hills tearing at his heart. Is Solomon Strunsky less a typical New Yorker than the scion of this fine old family which for sixty years lived and died in a red-brick mansion close by Washington square? For in four years Solomon Strunsky will be keeping his own little store in the East Side, in another year he will be moving his brood up to a fine new house in Harlem, an even dozen years from the entrance at Ellis Island and you may be reading the proud patronymic of Strunsky spelled along a signboard upon one of the great new commercial barracks, which, not content with remaining downtown, began the despoliation of Fifth avenue and its adjacent retail district. Can you keep Solomon Strunsky out of the family of typical New Yorkers? We think not.
We think that you cannot exclude the man who through some stroke of fortune has accumulated money in a smaller city, and who has come to New York to live and to spend it. There are many thousands of him dwelling upon the island of Manhattan; with his families they make a considerable community by itself. They are good spenders, good New Yorkers in that they never complain while the strings of their purses are never tightly tied. They live in smart apartments uptown, at tremendously high rentals, keep at least one car in service at all seasons of the year, dine luxuriously in luxurious eating-places, attend the opera once a week or a fortnight, see the new plays, keep abreast of the showy side of New York. They are typical New Yorkers. In an apartment a little further down the street—which rents at half the figure and comes dangerously near being called a flat—is another family. Thisfamily also attends the new plays, although it is far more apt to go a floor or even two aloft, than to meet the speculator's prices for orchestra seats. It also goes to the opera, and the young woman of the house is in deadly earnest when she says that she does not mind standing through the four or five long acts of a Wagnerian matinee, because the nice young ushers let you sit on the floor in the intermissions. But this family goes farther than the drama—spoken or sung. It is conversant with the new books and the new pictures. That same young woman swings the Phi Beta Kappa key of the most difficult institution of learning on this continent. And she knows more about the trend of modern art than half of the artists themselves. And yet she "goes to business"—is the capable secretary of a very capable man downtown.
These are typical New Yorkers. So are a family over in the next block—theirs is frankly a flat in every sense of that despised word. They have not been in the theater in a dozen years, never in one of the big modern restaurants or hotels. Yet the head of that family is a man whose name is known and spoken reverently through little homes all the way across America. He is a worker in the church, although not a clergyman, a militant friend of education, although not an educator, and he believes that New York is the most thoughtful and benevolent city in the world. And if you attempt to argue with him, he will prove easily and smilingly, that he is right and you—are just mistaken. He and his know their New York—a New York of high Christian force and precept—and they, too, are New Yorkers.
So, too, is Bliffkins and the little Bliffkins—although Bliffkins holds property in a bustling Ohio city and votes within its precincts. To tell the truth baldly, the Bliffkinses descend upon New York once each year and never remain more than a fortnight. But they stop ata great hotel and they are great spenders. Floor-walkers, head-waiters, head-ushers know them. Annually, and for a few golden days they are part of New York—typical New Yorkers, if you please. And when they are gone other Bliffkinses, from almost every town across the land, big and little, come to replace them. And all these are typical New Yorkers.
What is the typical New Yorker?
Are the sane folk right when they say that he does not exist? We do not think so. We think that Katherine in all her flippancy was right. They are all typical New Yorkers who sojourn, no matter for how little a time, within her boundaries. We will go farther still. You might almost say that all Americans are typical New Yorkers. For New York is, in no small sense, America. Other towns and cities may publicly scoff her, down in their hearts they slavishly imitate her, her store fronts, her fashions, her hotel and her theater customs, her policemen, even her white-winged street cleaners. They publicly laugh at her—down in their hearts they secretly adore her.
Physically only the East river separates Brooklyn from Manhattan island. The island of Manhattan was and still is to many folk the city of New York. Across that narrow wale of the East river—one of the busiest water-highways in all the world—men have thrust several great bridges and tunnels. Politically Brooklyn and Manhattan are one. They are the most important boroughs of that which has for the past fifteen years been known as Greater New York.
But in almost every other way Manhattan and Brooklyn are nearly a thousand miles apart. In social customs, in many of the details of living they are vastly different, and this despite the fact that the greater part of the male population of Brooklyn daily travels to Manhattan island to work in its offices and shops and you can all but toss a stone from one community into the other. The very fact that Brooklyn is a dwelling place for New York—professional funny-men long ago called it a "bed-chamber"—has done much, as we shall see, toward building up the peculiar characteristics of the town that stands just across the East river from the tip of the busiest little island in the world.
Consider for an instant the situation of Brooklyn. It fills almost the entire west end of Long island—a slightly rolling tract of land between a narrow and unspeakably filthy stream on the north known as Newtown creek and the great cool ocean on the south. This entire tract has for many years been known as Kingscounty—its name a slight proof of its antiquity. Many years ago there were various villages in the old county—among them Greenpoint, Bushwick, Williamsburgh, Canarsie, Flatbush, Gravesend and Brooklyn. They were Dutch towns, and you can still see some evidences of this in their old houses, although these are disappearing quite rapidly nowadays. Brooklyn grew the most rapidly—from almost the very day of the establishment of the republic. Robert Fulton developed his steam-ferry and the East river ceased to be the bugaboo it had always been to sailing vessels. Fulton ferry was popular from the first. With the use of steam its importance waxed and soon it was overcrowded. Another ferry came, another and another—many, many others. They were all crowded, for Brooklyn was growing, a close rim of houses and churches and shops all the way along the bank of the East river from the Navy Yard at the sharp crook of the river that the Dutch called the Wallabout, south to the marshy Gowanus bay. Upon the river shore, north of the Wallabout, was Williamsburgh, which was also growing and which had been incorporated into a city. But when the horse-cars came and men were no longer forced to walk to and from the ferries or to ride in miserable omnibuses, Brooklyn and Williamsburgh became physically one. Williamsburgh then gave up its charter and its identity and became lost in the growth of a greater Brooklyn. That was repeated slowly but surely throughout all Kings county. Within comparatively recent years there came the elevated railroad—at almost the same time the great miracle of the Brooklyn bridge—and all the previous growth of the town was as nothing. For two decades it grew as rapidly as ever grew a "boom-town" in the West. The coming of electric city transportation, the multiplying of bridges, the boring of the first East river tunnel, all helped in this great growth. But the fairyweb of steel that John A. Roebling thrust across the busiest part of the East river marked the transformation of Brooklyn—a transformation that did not end when Brooklyn sold her political birthright and became part and parcel of New York. That transformation is still in progress.
We have slipped into history because we have wanted you to understand why Brooklyn today is just what she is. The submerging of these little Dutch villages with their individual customs and traditions has done its part in the making of the customs and traditions of the Brooklyn of today. For Brooklyn today remains a congregation of separate communities. You may slip from one to the other without realizing that you have done more than pass down a compactly built block of houses or crossed a crowded street.
And so it has come to pass that Brooklyn has no main street—in the sense that about every other town in the United States, big or little, has a main street. If you wish to call Fulton street, running from the historic Fulton ferry right through the heart of the original city and far out into the open country a main street, you will be forced to admit that it is the ugliest main street of any town in the land: narrow, inconsequential, robbed of its light and air by a low-hanging elevated railroad almost its entire length. And yet right on Fulton street you will find two department-stores unusually complete and unusually well operated. New Yorkers come to them frequently to shop. The two stores seem lost in the dreariness of Fulton street—a very contradiction to that highway.
Yet Brooklyn is a community of contradictions. Here we have called Fulton street a possible main street of Brooklyn, and yet there is a street in the town, for the most part miles removed from it, that is quite as brisk by day and the only street in the borough which has anyreal activity at night. Like that great main-stem of Manhattan it is called Broadway, and it is a wider and more pretentious street than Fulton, although in its turn also encumbered with an elevated railroad. But up and down Broadway there courses a constant traffic; on foot, in automobiles, in trolley-cars. Broadway boasts its own department-stores, some of them sizable, many hundreds of small shops, cheap theaters—and some better—by the score. It is an entertaining thoroughfare and yet we will venture to say that not one in ten thousand of the many transients who come to New York at regular intervals and who know the Great White Way as well as four corners up at home, have ever stepped foot within it. We will go further. Of the two million humans who go to make the population of Brooklyn; a large part, probably half, certainly a third, have never seen its own Broadway.
This speaks volumes for the provincialism of the great community across the East river from Manhattan. Remember all this while that it is a community of communities, self-centered and rather more intent upon the problem of getting back and forth between its homes and Manhattan than on any other one thing in the world. As a rule, people live in Brooklyn because it is less expensive than residence upon the island of Manhattan, more accessible and far more comfortable than the Bronx or the larger cities of New Jersey that range themselves close to the shore of the Hudson river. It is in reality a larger and a better Jersey City or a Hoboken or a Long Island City.
A quiet street on Brooklyn HeightsA quiet street on Brooklyn Heights
And yet, like each of these three, it is something more than a mere housing place for folk who work within congested Manhattan. It, too, is a manufacturing center of no small importance. Despite the transportation obstacles of being divided by one or two rivers from most of the trunk-line railroads that terminate at the port ofNew York, hundreds of factory chimneys, large and small, proclaim its industrial importance. Its output of manufactures reaches high into the millions each year. And the pay-roll of its factory operatives is annually an impressive figure.
The fact remains, however, that it is a community of communities, each pulling very largely for itself. A smart western town of twenty-five thousand population can center more energy and secure for itself precisely what it wishes more rapidly and more precisely than can this great borough of nearly two million population. Brooklyn has not yet learned the lesson of concentrated effort.
Now consider these communities of old Kings county once again. We have touched upon their location and their growth; let us see the manner of folk who made them grow. About the second decade of the last century a virtual hegira of New England folk began to move toward New York City. The New England states were the first portion of the land to show anything like congestion, the wonderful city at the mouth of the Hudson was beginning to come into its own—opportunity loomed large in the eyes of the shrewd New Englanders. They began picking up and moving toward New York. And they are still coming, although, of course, in no such volume as in the first half of the nineteenth century.
These New England folk found New York already aping metropolitanism—with its unshaded streets and its tightly built rows of houses. Over on Long island across busy Fulton ferry it was different. There must have been something in the early Brooklyn, with its gentle shade-trees down the streets and its genial air of quiet comfort that made the New Englanders think of the pretty Massachusetts and Connecticut towns that they had left. For into Brooklyn they came—a steady stream which did not lessen in volume until the daysof the Civil War. They gave the place a blood infusion that it needed. They crowded the old Dutch families to one side and laid the social foundations of the Brooklyn of today.
It was New England who founded the excellent private schools and small colleges of Brooklyn, who early gave to her a public-school system of wide reputation. It was New England who sprinkled the Congregational churches over the older Brooklyn, who gave to their pulpits a Talmage and a Storrs, who brought Henry Ward Beecher out from the wilds of the Mid-west and made him the most famous preacher that America has ever known. It was New England who for forty years made Brooklyn Heights—with its exquisite situation on a plateau overlooking the upper harbor of New York—the finest residential locality in the land. It was New England for almost all that time who filled the great churches of the Heights to their capacity Sabbath morning after Sabbath morning—New England who stood for high thought, decent living and real progress in Brooklyn. It was New England that made Brooklyn eat her pork and beans religiously each Sabbath eve.
The great churches and the fine houses still stand on Brooklyn Heights, but alas, there are few struggles at the church-doors any more on Sabbath morning. The old houses, the fine, gentle old houses—many of them—have said good-by to their masters, their gayeties and their glories. Some of them have been pulled down to make room for gingerbread apartment structures and some of those that have remained have suffered degradation as lodging- and as boarding-houses. It has been hard to hold the younger generation of fashionable Brooklyn in Brooklyn. Manhattan is too near, too alluring with all of its cosmopolitan airs, and these days there is another steady hegira across the East river—the first families of Brooklyn seeking residence among the smart streets of upper Manhattan.
There is another reason for this. We have told how Brooklyn sold her birthright when she threw off her political individuality and made herself a borough of an enlarged New York. Perhaps it would be more true to say that she mortgaged that birthright the very hour when the Brooklyn bridge, then new, took up the fullness of its mighty work. In the weaving of that bridge is wrapped one of the little-known tragedies of Brooklyn—the immensely human story of Roebling, its designer and its builder, who suffered fatal injuries upon it and who died a lingering death before it was completed. Roebling's apartments were upon a high crest of Brooklyn Heights and the windows of his sick-room looked down upon the workmen who were weaving the steel web of the bridge. In the last hours of his life he could see the creation of his mind, the structure that was about to be known as one of the eight modern wonders of the world, being made ready for its task of the long years.
The coming of that first bridge began the transformation of Brooklyn; although for a long time Brooklyn did not realize it. The New England element within her population did not even realize it when she gave up her political identity as a city. Then something else happened. Two miles to the north of the first bridge another was built—this with its one arm touching the East Side of Manhattan—the most crowded residence district in the new world—while its other hand reached that portion of Brooklyn, formerly known as Williamsburgh. We have already spoken of Williamsburgh—in its day a city of some promise but for sixty years now part of Brooklyn. In the greater part of these sixty years it hung tenaciously to its personality. Back of it was a great area of regular streets and small housesknown as the Eastern District. The folk who lived there called themselves Brooklyn folk. Williamsburgh was different. Its folk were glad to give themselves the name of the old town, although the pattern of its streets ran closely into the pattern of the streets of the community which had engulfed it. They held themselves a bit by themselves. They had their own shops, their own theater, their own clubs, their own churches, their own schools. They also had the opportunity of seeing the social and the business changes that the development of the first bridge had wrought in old Brooklyn; how Fulton street from the old City Hall down to the ferry-house had lost its gayety and was entering upon decadence.
The Williamsburgh bridge repeated the story of the Brooklyn bridge—only in sharper measure. It was like a tube lancing the overcrowded mass of the East Side of Manhattan. It had hardly been completed before it had its own hegira. The Jews of the crowded tenements of Rivington and Allen and Essex and all the other congested narrow streets east of the Bowery began moving over the new bridge and out to a distant section of Brooklyn, known as Brownsville. They had preëmpted Brownsville for their own. For a time that was all right. Then the wiser men of that wise old race began asking themselves "why go to Brownsville, eight or nine miles distant, when at the other end of the bridge is a fair land for settlement?"
So began changed conditions for Williamsburgh. For a little while it sought to oppose the change, but an ox might as well pull against the mighty power of a locomotive, as a community try to defy the working of economic law. For a decade now Williamsburgh has been "moving out," her houses, her churches, many of her pet institutions—going the most part farther out upon Long island and there rebuilding under many protective restrictions. The old Williamsburgh is nearly gone. Strange tongues and strange creeds are heard within her churches. And some of them have been pulled down, along with whole blocks of the gentle red-brick houses, to give way to cheap apartments, wrought wondrously and fearfully and echoing with the babbling of unfamiliar words. Nor has the transformation stopped at Williamsburgh. The invasion has crept, is still creeping into the Eastern District just beyond, transforming quiet house-lined streets into noisy ways lined with crowded apartments.
It is only within a comparatively little time that the older Brooklyn has realized the change that is coming upon her. She has known for years of the presence of many thousands of Irish and German within her boundaries. They have been useful citizens in her development and have done much for her in both a generous and an intelligent fashion. She holds today great colonies of Norse and of the Swedish—down close to the waterfront in the neighborhood of the Narrows, and her Italian citizens, taken by themselves, would make the greatest Italian city in the world. She has the largest single colony of Syrians in the New World and more than half a million Jews. According to reliable estimates, three-quarters of her adult population today are foreign-born.
Thus can we record the transformation of a community. It is a transformation which has created many problems, far too many to be recounted here. We have only room to show the nature of the change to a town where grandfathers used to be all in all and which has sleepily awakened to find itself cosmopolitan, its institutions changing, its future uncertain. There have not been a dozen important Protestant churches builded in Brooklyn within the past twelve years—and some of these merely new edifices for old congregations whichhave been forced to pick up and move. And there have been old churches of old faiths that finally have had to give up and close their doors for the final time. Even the old custom of singing Christmas songs in the public schools has been forbidden. The New England strain of Americanism in Brooklyn is dying.