The Personality of American Cities Part 3

"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 mult.i.tude has been fed. Miss Stenographer has had her salad and eclair, 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.

IV

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 a _vis-a-vis_ awaiting 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.ses 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 Na.s.sau streets so that they might replace it by another of the towers--this one thirty stories in height.

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 you are 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 this _via 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 broad _facade_ closely 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 a.s.sumption 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 in black 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--a sprinkling 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 rapid _tempo_ of 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 the _finesse_ of their work the traffic moves like mola.s.ses.

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 rehea.r.s.ed for whole weeks.

New York is wonderful, the traffic of its chief show street--for Fifth avenue can now be fairly said to have 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't they--"

"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 gra.s.s 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 know that 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 surpa.s.s the Avenue as a street of fine residences.

The side streets were preeminently 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 a.n.a.lysis 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, j.a.panese 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 gla.s.s-enclosed garden, filled with giant palms and tiny tables, tremendous waiters and infinitesimal chairs. A large bland-faced employe--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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Washington Square and its lovely Arch--New York]