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Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! Stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!

Walt Whitman

Shortly after returning home from the football game, I had one or two more opportunities of looking at New York, and each time I took a stroll, usually on foot and once in a taxi.

After the first dazzle of the skyscrapers had slightly worn off and I had grown a little accustomed to the beautiful and absurd things, there was more leisure to stare at sights that were less impressive but none the less strange. The Elevated Railroad, for example, is a weird contraption which lacks every jot of the two qualities America yearns for. It has neither the swift, silent efficiency of Modernity, nor the quiet dignity of Age. It is the sort of railroad which I would have built if I had been mechanically-minded and half-witted, and it makes the sort of noise which would drown a fair-sized artillery bombardment and which would make the national anthem of a tribe of Congolese Africans, played fortissimo with old saws upon sheets of rusty tin, sound like the love-song of a Tyrolean maiden on a spring morning. Here, as in the Subway, you can buy the entire system for a nickel, which struck me as a very moderate sum considering that it includes a fleeting glimpse, at a range of approximately 12 feet, into about ten thousand domestic interiors as you whiz past. It is a barbarous form of transport. The passenger might well expect to find Voodoo being practised by the station officials, and a stall on each platform where a sacred white cock might be purchased and a sacrificial knife obtained from a slot-machine. There are those who consider the Street Car more hideous than the Elevated as it clanks its dreary way along, but it is a controversy which admits of a wide and unprofitable discussion. But both sides are agreed that where you have a Street Car under an Elevated, the savage scream and the dismal clank together, there you have an abnegation of all the cultural dreams that Man has striven to realize throughout the ages. Third Avenue is a living proof that all Progress, except Progress backwards, and very occasionally sideways, is a vain chimæra.

Let us leave this painful subject. The New Yorker’s best transport is his own legs. Next come the private automobile and the taxi, and after that the Fifth Avenue veterans. Bracketed last, a long way down the course, come the fearful triplets of dinginess and noise, the Subway, the Elevated, and the Street Car.

There is something either strange or comical to be seen on every block. At one moment it may be the offices of the Bartenders College Incorporated, at another the shop of a gentleman who advertises a nice line in Pants and Gabardines. A Rolls-Royce, sprinkled liberally with footmen and chaffeurs in livery, will find itself held up by the cart of an itinerant seller of gaily-coloured mattresses, crying his wares in a Mediterranean accent and striking three Swiss sheep-bells all the time with the handle of a baseball bat.

Down by West Twenty-third the cheerful calls of the urchins one to another, and the refined conversation of the dwellers in London Terrace (the largest apartment-house in the world, where the hall porters are dressed in a sort of parody of the uniform of the London police), are punctuated by the melancholy clanging of the bells on the locomotives as the Pennsylvania trains go creeping out. They sound like a bell-buoy warning steamers against hidden death. Up on West Fifty-second the rows of dingy little houses, windows shuttered and grimy, doors splintered, iron railings all bent and rusty, are survivals of that epoch when the youth of a nation learnt to soak bad whisky and worse gin in speakeasies, and when an Anglo-Saxon race handed power and wealth on a platter to the scum of Naples and Sicily.

Down in West Third there is a colony of dingy shops each one of which is occupied by a manufacturer of hat-linings, and on the ornate bronze ceilings of the elevators of the Municipal Building you will find the Royal Arms of England. (Perhaps they are placed there ironically, for these elevators are the creakiest and jerkiest that I ever was in.)

On Park Avenue there is a shop called Barkis, Willing & Co., and the boxes for the mailing of parcels are not fastened down in any way, but just stand about loose and haphazard on the pavements, inviting an enterprising bandit to hoist the whole thing into a lorry and drive off with it. The walls of the post offices are lined with the bulletins of the Department of Justice of wanted fugitives, with photographs, finger-prints, criminal record, etc., so that, if you feel so inclined, you can write out your letter and study the faces of the most hideous thugs at the same time.

And if you are tired of walking, put your foot on a shoeblack’s stool in Broadway and lean back against the wall, and watch the folks go hurrying up and down this strangest of all streets. You never know what you are going to see next. It is as fatal to generalize about Broadway as about the United States. Peanuts, shoeblacks, and cinemas are the commonest sights. A skyscraper stands side by side with a theatre built in the Classic style with columns, capitals, and pediment, and advertised by a gigantic green jackboot, and next door may be a one-story wooden candy store, four feet by six. If New York is a miniature world, Broadway is a miniature New York. All the rushing haste is there, and yet you may see a saunterer; all the genius of the New World goes racing by, and yet you may see a Tibetan lama in meditation; all the architects of the Twentieth Century may build a skyscraper, but you may see a log cabin beside it. Gaudy theatres and dismal poverty, sables and rags, glittering neon lights and dirty alleys, Broadway is like a New England hooked-rug, made up of any scrap that comes to hand.

But after all it is only a miniature. There are other things to see in New York than giant green jackboots on Hellenic architecture.

A whole world separates the peanut-seller of Broadway from the maritime folks of South Street, that small beginning amid the coves of the island from which has evolved the greatest port in the world. It is only a hundred and fifty years ago that Catherine Slip and Coenties Slip were little creeks in the sand. But Broadway up by Seventieth and Eightieth Streets neither knows nor cares who built the foundations of the port, any more than the Londoner of Kensington knows or cares two pins about the Port of London.

In order to avoid the reproach of writing about places that I had never seen, I made several attempts to get off Manhattan Island into some of the other boroughs. The statement that “You can’t understand New York by looking only at Fifth Avenue” is only second in popularity at cocktail parties to its elder brother, “You can’t understand America by looking only at New York”.

I tried, or almost tried, them all. It was a dismal business. The Bronx came first and succeeded in impressing its personality no better than by leaving behind a memory of dingy little houses, badly-paved streets, garish advertisements, factories, heaps of rubble, tumbledown warehouses, railway cuttings, alley-ways, and a general atmosphere of seedy dilapidation.

Queens, contrariwise, is full of open spaces, stretching in splendid procession, with almost contiguous boundaries, for miles. Wide and clear under the sky, they put to shame the tenemental squalor of the Bronx, and serve as ventilators through which the citizens of Queens can breathe the air of Ocean. They march eastwards in healthy stateliness, these open spaces: Calvary Cemetery, New Calvary Cemetery, Mount Zion Cemetery, Mount Olivet, the two Lutherans, Linden Hill Cemetery, Mount Carmel, Mount Neboh and again Mount Carmel, and Union Field Cemetery, to the Cemetery of the Evergreens, the Cypress Hills Cemetery, the Salem Field Cemetery, and the borders of Brooklyn. Further north there are two more of the open spaces of Queens, side by side in somewhat sinister proximity, the St. Michael’s Cemetery and the Grand Central Air Port.

I never achieved Jersey City, except in rapid transit, as rapid as possible, to further fields. Many a time I gazed at it across the Hudson and resolved to cross over and explore the amenities of its innumerable railway stations, but always my heart failed me at the sight of that grimy silhouette. Once I got as far as to board a ferry-boat, but it was no good. Just as the local Charon was about to cast off, I fled down the gangway with a hoarse scream, back to the sheltering bosom of old Mother Manhattan. It was a narrow escape, and I could appreciate at that moment the slightly melodramatic gesture of all those heroes of history who have knelt down and kissed the sand of one beach or another in their time.

But although Jersey City was thus shirked, perhaps as a sop to conscience because Jersey City was thus shirked, I took a great deal of trouble over Brooklyn.

Now Brooklyn has one distinction that raises it high above the dingy Bronx, above even the cemeterial Queens, and for all I know, and I should certainly think it probable, over Jersey City. It has all the noise, all the squalor, all the shabbiness of the others, and more than its share of the criminal sub-European element, but here and there the wanderer will come unexpectedly upon little blocks of eighteenth-century houses, unspoilt and as lovely as the day on which they were built. They are scattered about in side streets and byways, and there are even one or two seventeenth-century farmhouses still standing, I am told, presumably with a good deal of perplexity, in the heart of the borough. Columbia Heights, an eighteenth-century row that looks across the East River to the Manhattan skyline and over Governor’s Island down the Hudson, must surely have the most stupendous views from its windows of any residential houses in the world. Life in Columbia Heights must be just a series of dashes from window to window. Now the Berengaria is coming slowly up to the Cunard dock; now a destroyer pulls out of the Navy yard and heads for the Atlantic; sometimes a ship will berth just below the house so that her foremast is almost in the dining-room, and sometimes the sunlight explodes in a blaze upon the top of the Empire State Building. Columbia Heights is no place for a writer or an artist unless he has a large private income from money invested in safe Government Bonds.

These beautiful old houses make the rest of Brooklyn seem very queer. For instance, Fulton Street, the main shopping street, is as queer a street as I ever saw in my life. As a general rule, a go-ahead, enterprising, commercial community will try to make its shopping centre as attractive as possible to those ladies and gentlemen who have money to spend and are showing a tentative disposition to spend some of it. The attraction may take the form of comfort, ease, and luxury, as in the premises of a Bond Street picture-dealer, or of ready accessibility, as in the Champs Élysées, or of tasteful and yet opulent window-display as in the establishments of Messrs Cartier, or of a wild picturesqueness as in the bazaars of Fez and Ferghana and Ispahan. Whatever the method, the theory is the same. The rich, already dallying, are to be allured into dallying one second too long so that in that last second they may yield to the enticement of the wares for sale.

Fulton Street, the chief bazaar of Brooklyn, is a long narrow street, flanked, as in Paris or Ispahan or anywhere else, with the wares of the merchant. The department stores are as grand as anything on Manhattan and as brilliantly lit-up in the evening. But down the centre of the street runs the ubiquitous street car, painted just the same dingy fawn colour (though perhaps fawn is hardly the word to apply to this system of traction), and economizing just as rigidly upon lubricating oil, as anything on Manhattan, and above the street car roars and jangles the Elevated. Between the rails of the street cars and the pavements there is just room to squeeze a motor-car, and to the lamp-posts and traffic-signal-posts are affixed severe notices: “No parking here” and “No cruising for taxis”. These two notices, when considered separately from the other amenities of the street, might be taken as an ingenious device to entrap the rich. It is easy to drive to Fulton Street, but, your car having been shoo-ed away and the cruising taxi being forbidden, it is almost impossible to get out again, and you might therefore spend more money than you intended, to the profit of the shopkeeper and to the satisfaction of those political economists who would cure all our evils by a freer circulation of currency. This would be a plausible, almost convincing, theory if it were not for the street cars and the Elevated. No human being with the slightest endowment of artistic sensibility would remain in Fulton Street an instant longer than was absolutely necessary on his first visit, would run away screaming (and nobody would hear him), on foot, rather than wait a moment for his Duesenberg, and would never re-visit the accursed place. Ah! you say, but the rich have no endowment of artistic sensibility. But the rich, I reply shrewdly, have as good an endowment of ears as their neighbour. And anyway, I add, think of Andrew Carnegie. To which you very reasonably answer that you have no desire to think of Andrew Carnegie, and there the matter comes to an end. Nevertheless, I still maintain that, as a shopping street, Fulton is the worst I ever saw.

And even now I have not come to the end of the Fulton monstrosities. To the east the street broadens out into a spacious circle, just as Fifth Avenue blossoms into Washington Square, and Piccadilly and the Élysées into the Circus and the Étoile. Here also the Brooklyners run true to form. For this circle is the meeting-place, not only of innumerable street-car tracks, but of no fewer than four Elevated railways criss-crossing each other in a weird and hideous welter of shape and sound. Let us leave this grim subject.

Brooklyn is a city of small houses. There are streets and streets with nothing higher than two or three stories, and stately avenues are often lined with the most quaint little buildings. But the thing which at once stamps and explains Brooklyn is this: it is a city of more than two million inhabitants, and yet it only has four big hotels, and they are all jammed together in the once-fashionable neighbourhood of the Heights. The fact is, of course, that nobody goes to Brooklyn for pleasure, and those who go for work are not the sort who live in big hotels. On the other hand, almost as many people seem to go there to die as to Queens, for there are lots of splendid hospitals and quantities of cemeteries.

I walked slowly back in the evening, past the Walt Whitman house and across Brooklyn Bridge. The mist was a deep violet over the Chrysler Building, blessedly almost hiding it altogether, and the shadows of the swarming craft upon the East River were lengthening. A clatter of steam-hammers came faintly from the Brooklyn Navy Yard where a warship was lying, grey against the jumble of slums which seem to welcome the returning sailor all over the world, and a vast advertisement on the wall of a building announced “Largest Jewish Daily in the World”, and just below me, on the next track of the bridge, rattled a street car labelled “King’s Highway”. What a city! For more than a hundred and fifty years its citizens have been piously celebrating its True Republican Principles, and its emancipation from the decadent, degrading, dismal influence of Royalty. And yet it sees nothing funny or peculiar in a street car labelled “King’s Highway”! Again I say, What a city! What else can one say?

My last stroll in New York City, before setting out to conquer the interior of the country, was done by taxi. It began with a curious, probably unique, little scene. While being driven in a taxi home to my hotel at 3 o’clock in the morning, I fell into conversation with the driver, an intelligent young Jew named, as his identification card inside the cab informed me, Isidore Grunbaum. (It is a great deal easier to talk to, and to be overheard by, a taxi-driver in New York than in London. The British cabman is cut off from his fare by glass, which makes the fare safe from eaves-dropping and also makes him stand in the rain while giving his instructions and again when paying his dues.) On arriving at my hotel in Madison Avenue, I asked Mr Grunbaum if he would drive me round the city for four hours on the following afternoon for the sum of ten dollars. “Too much,” replied Mr Grunbaum. “I will do it for seven.” “Nonsense,” I said, “I’ll give you ten.” “I’ll only take seven”, he replied stubbornly. A compromise was, of course, reached. But surely it is the first case on record of a Scotsman offering too much to a Jew and the Jew refusing to take it.

Punctual to the minute Isidore arrived that afternoon with his handsome black-and-scarlet cab and we started off. We went to some queer places and I saw some queer things. I saw the Bowery, famous to all Europeans as the legendary home of street-gangs and Boys, and now sunk into an irredeemable poverty. A shave costs three cents in the Bowery and a meal can be got for ten. Fifteen cents will buy a night’s lodging in a common dormitory and another five secures you the privacy of a board a few feet high cutting off the rest of the dormitory. The shops are full of old junk, obviously the fragments of furniture of the evicted and the distrained, and every street looks like a street of sellers without any buyers. Thence we went from Bowery into Chinatown, home of the laundry, and across into Centre Street where the Bridge of Sighs, high above a side street, links, fatally, the Central Police Headquarters to the famous Tombs prison, a grim, pseudo-mediaeval fortress of dirty, dark-grey stone. Centre Street and the Tombs were in a fine frenzy at the time of my visit, for only the day before, a criminal had been brought from the Tombs across the Bridge of Sighs to be examined in the “Line-Up”. He was the last of a row of prisoners, and he was handcuffed to the prisoner next to him. Misliking the whole procedure, and fain to be elsewhere, he had waited until attention was focused on some other scoundrel, and then had eased the handcuff off his wrist and strolled out through two doors that are invariably kept locked and were found locked after his departure. He had not been seen since.

From the Tombs we rambled to the City Hall and thence to Orchard Street with its rows of street traders on each side, where, in Isidore’s words, “You can buy anything from a battleship to a button”. The bargaining in Orchard Street seemed to be pretty intensive. Oriental eyes were flashing, and Levantine shoulders were being shrugged with a rapidity that would have put to shame a skilled player of the concertina. Voices were raised in expostulation and dark hands were gesticulating with a superb vehemence. “You ask the price of a pair of spectacles,” explained Isidore, “and he says fifty cents. You offer him three cents, and after twenty minutes you compromise on a nickel.”

In Greenwich Village we dived down a flight of steps into a small bar that was half full of the ordinary type of bar-frequenter, and half full of an “arty” crew, talking a little too loudly and looking aggressively unself-conscious. It reminded me of the “Cadogan Arms” and the “Six Bells”, both in the King’s Road, Chelsea, in the days when third-rate painters and first-rate models used to sit on high stools, and drink beer, and smoke cigarettes through enormous green cigarette-holders, and protest with slightly raised voices that they were waiting, by appointment, for Augustus John.

Isidore and I leaned on the counter in a corner and he told me about himself and about New York. He was born in London, in the Whitechapel Road, but his father had emigrated three years later. Isidore had been trained to be a Rabbi, “And now I am a hackman”, he said. From training for the Rabbinate he drifted into cab-driving, and from cab-driving into business, and when his business failed in the great Slump, “I went back to my cab”. Isidore owned his own cab and wrote a weekly article for a newspaper that was devoted to the affairs and interests of taximen.

Isidore’s prose style, like Mr Dizzy Dean’s, runs to the vigorous and the picturesque. He carries a punch in both hands and is not afraid to use it. This is an extract from Isidore’s column:

As a Brooklyn Hackie sees New York

When will these cheap muzzlers and chiselers learn to hack like men, instead of blocking up traffic as they do around the various entrances of the Waldorf? ... Notice that the new traffic regulations prohibiting parking in the theatrical zone is again prohibited between 7.45 and 9 p.m. ... Orchids to the cop who last Tuesday night at Broadway and 50th Street, gave justice to the hackie who was being shoved around on a closed line, by four would-be hackmen.... Willie, the dispatcher of the Alliance Cab, is now ill and his friends in the industry wish him a speedy recovery. ... What is there to the rumour that the Alliance Garage will not be getting any new Paramounts? ... Hackstands around the Grand Central are nicely located. We would like more of them....

And here is another:

Town Taxi Doings

Winey Ganzi, formerly president of the Town Taxi, found hacking so good that he has gone into the glove business. And Kid Skinzi got a forty-five-cent call; fare had no money and gave him 25 (twenty-five, count ’em) bottles of beer instead of the dough. They all had a party and Skinzi could of had a date if he wanted it.

It makes a professional author a little wistful to see a hackman, even if he is trained for the Rabbinate, muscle in on the literary racket with such pep and vim.

The New York “hackman”, said Isidore, has a pretty poor time in a good many ways, and the independent owner has to face the cut-throat competition of the big fleets, the Yellow and the Radio, as well. Hacking is lousy, said Isidore. A hackie can put in as much as twelve to sixteen hours a day and still make less than he would if he was on Relief. Isidore as an independent owner, and an acutely intelligent man, was keenly interested in the competition of the Fleets, and after a good deal of beer in the Greenwich Village bar, we repaired to a Special Meeting of the Independent Owners, Isidore as a delegate, myself posing as something pretty hot in London’s hack world. The meeting took place in a Downtown office and consisted of fifteen Jews, an Italian, an Anglo-Saxon, and myself. The proceedings lasted three hours and consisted almost entirely of dialogue that ran on the following spirited sort of lines:

Mr Zuschelheim. Mr Chairman, the only thing I ask of the company is that we should concentrate upon our common welfare and refrain completely from personalities, but I feel it my duty to say that Mr Apfelaum over there is nothing but a lousy crook. (Uproar.)

Mr Jacob (Chairman). Order, order. I will not allow——

Mr Apfelaum (striking a table and pushing his nose into Mr Z.’s face). And who was it swindled his firm out of the insurance premiums? (Uproar.)

Chairman. Gentlemen, we are here to co-operate——

Mr Z. I will co-operate with anyone in the world, but not with Mr Apfelaum, who is the lousiest crook in New York. (Uproar.)

Mr Wernick. No, sir, the lousiest crook in New York is Mr Eisenpreis sitting right there besides you. (Uproar.)

Mr Eisenpreis (shaking his fist at Mr Wernick). And what jail were you in when I was fighting the Independents’ battle last year? (Uproar.)

Chairman. Gentlemen, we are here to co-operate——

Mr Zeltinger. Mr Chairman, I move that we resolve to co-operate to the utmost in defending ourselves to the utmost against unfair competition, but before I move it I want to know, Mr Chairman, what rake-off you are getting out of this and who you are getting it from. (Pandemonium. Frantic waving of cheap cigars, this being, apparently, the Jewish Independent Taxi-Owners’ favourite form of gesture. Only Isidore remains quiet. He whispers to me that he will bet me a dollar to a nickel that the only resolution that will be passed will be a resolution to do nothing.)

After three hours of slander and counter-slander, invective and counter-invective, accusation and counter-accusation, the meeting agreed upon a resolution, moved from the Chair and passed unanimously, “that a further meeting be called in a month’s time, and that in the meantime nothing be done”.

After that we went and drank some more beer and Isidore talked about rackets and gambles. He told me about the Clip-Joint Racket which depends for its existence mainly upon the inexhaustible supply of rich business men who arrive on the spree from Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, and St. Louis, and elsewhere, at the Pennsylvania and Grand Central stations and tell the taxi-driver to drive them to some place where they can enjoy themselves. If the driver is a respectable man, he will not risk his licence and will drop his fare at the Plaza or the Waldorf-Astoria. But if he is disreputable, he will drive his man to the Clip-Joint and return next day for his rake-off. Isidore told me about the big Slot Racket, and the Number Racket on the horse races, and the Italian Racket of the Game of the Ten Cities, and the Harlem Game which is so neatly organized that each street has its bet-collector who calls at every house every morning for the dimes.

“This city”, said Isidore, “is built upon gambling. Each section has its own national game, beginning with Wall Street and working down through Poles, Italians, Czechos, till you get down to the nigger dimes.

“This city”, said Isidore, “is plumb-full of rackets. I picked up a fare last April, that’s eight months ago, and I drove him from East 9th to Radio City. When he gets out he says I drove so badly that he’s strained his back over a bump. There weren’t any bumps, but wot-the-hell. You don’t need real bumps to go to Court. You need a crook doctor and a crook lawyer. The next thing I knew was a claim for a thousand dollars. A month after that my insurance company went bankrupt. But wot-the-hell. The Courts are so full up of cases that it won’t come up for another two years, and by that time I’ll be bankrupt.”

“Oh I hope not, Mr Grunbaum”, I said politely.

Isidore looked at me blankly. “How do you mean you hope not? If that case ever comes into Court I’ll turn my cab over to my brother and go broke. I’m not going to pay a thousand dollars to that racket. Say, listen, do you know how dopers inject themselves if they haven’t got enough money to buy a hypodermic. They take the biggest safety-pin they can find, and they jab it into their arm and leave it there until it makes a big enough hole to stay open....”

I saw many things that day. I saw a Funeral Parlour in the window of which the sole exhibit was an advertisement of a Grand Card Reception and Dance at the Pennsylvania Hotel. I saw a large and handsome building which called itself Educational Building. There was a show-case at the entrance to it, and in the show-case there were three books called Murder in Bermuda, Death in the Theatre, and Death of an Honest Broker. We hastened on. I had no desire to investigate the curriculum, nor interview any of the professors who lectured on such startling subjects. I saw a sudden wave of beauty, carrying more pretty girls on each yard of its crest than six blocks of Fifth or Park Avenues ever carry in the day-time, which showed us that the staff of Macy’s Department Store had just been dismissed from its work, and in Union Square we paused for a moment to listen to an orator addressing a crowd under the shadow of Lafayette’s elegant statue (though it is surely a poor compliment to the swordsmanship of that great man to make him grasp the blade of his sword so firmly), and at the end we rounded the Washington Arch, with its rows of lovely old red-brick houses on each side, and there in front of us was the long stretch of Fifth Avenue rising slowly towards the sky and then falling away over the hill into the dove-blue shadows of the evening.

While I was wandering through Manhattan’s semi-practical, semi-romantic street system, now gazing with admiration at the front of the Players’ Club, now shocked by the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, at one moment enchanted by the old houses in Grove Street or Macdougal Alley, at the next running with loud screams away from the brown horror of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, I missed one whole class of place-names. I could not find a Bunker’s Hill Avenue, nor a Yorktown Park, nor a Saratoga Railroad Station, nor a Concord Bridge, nor any other record of the defeats of the British arms. There is no flaunting in New York of the miserable scuttlings and surrenderings of the Royal Armies, as London flaunts its Waterloo and Trafalgar, and Paris the hundred great victories of France. And it would appear that the spirit which prefers the everyday work of peace to the advertisement of ancient slaughters is still dominant, because I could not find an Argonne Avenue or a St. Mihiel Boulevard, or anything more bellicose than a few memorials to famous soldiers, a bridge and a square for Washington, a square for Pershing, a tomb for Grant, and for Sherman an equestrian statue, advancing cautiously to battle in the Plaza behind the petticoats of a well-developed lady.