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MY GOTHAM

It used to be a saying in this city twenty years ago . . . “Little old New York is good enough for me.” I daresay that is still a saying here. I have not lately heard it. . . . But in those days it was a good saying; it would not be so any longer now that the note of New York is that of a certain careless largeness—and a certain agelessness.

In 1906 New York had a quality of littleness and a quality of age. Then there were boarding houses where men in shirt sleeves and lady guests in white shirtwaists sat on the steps of houses in Madison Avenue right down to Twenty-fourth Street; then all along the main thoroughfares peanut barrows made harmony with their whistles—and, above all, every second or third passerby on Broadway was apt to stop and ask you—an obvious foreigner!—“Wal . . . and what are your impressions of New York?” . . . I assure you that they used to do that, and I assure you that they used to say “wal” instead of “well.”

In these days no one asks you that; I suppose partly because New York is now a great city and partly because I, foreign though I be, am quite as much entitled to ask the question of the passerby as he is to ask it of me. I mean that whatever the city contains it contains no born New Yorkers. That is one of the phenomena that has here most struck me. I never meet born New Yorkers in the city of their birth. In Paris, yes!—in London, too, and in the remoter parts of New Jersey and Connecticut states . . . and none of the New York families that I used to know are here any longer. That I find sad, for they were such nice people. . . . Stay: I have met one born New Yorker who used to be here in 1906 . . . but that one—such a nice person too, was only on a visit here and has gone back home—to somewhere in Missouri.

These are merely personal impressions gathered in the course of conversation, and these are all that I have to offer. I am no statistician, nor would I be one if I could. . . . When I first came here I had a certain shyness about asking people where they came from, but later I observed that when two Americans meet for the first time they invariably ask, the one of the other: “Where are you from?” So I gradually contracted the habit. In England it is not done—I suppose because it is a matter of good form to pretend that every one you know belongs to a county family—and you have to pretend to know all about the county families of England. In Paris you can tell where people come from by their accents. As a rule it is Michigan; sometimes it is Nebraska, or else it is Sussex, England; less frequently Marseilles or Perpignan, France. There—in Paris—in the Quartier Montparnasse where I live, these accents are differentiable enough. I doubt if they would be here, where a sort of normal, not very noticeable accent seems to be developing.

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious—but above all it is a crucible—because it is large enough to be incurious. It is that that distinguishes the large from the not really large city. You become a Londoner in next to no time. You can even become a Parisian very quickly. I imagine you could grow into a New Yorker in a day or two. You could do that, indeed, in the old days. I remember twenty years or so ago being taken over a public school in New York by an inspector. In one corner of an asphalted stretch of playground stood a small boy sobbing. Says the inspector to him: “Why are you crying, my little man?” Says the little boy: “Me brother hit me.” The inspector: “But you mustn’t cry because your brother hit you!” And the little boy—with ferocity: “I ain’t going to let a blame Dago hit me. I’m a New Yorker, I am!” His brother had been born in Warsaw, he himself on Ellis Island. Perhaps to-day it doesn’t go so easily as that!

But above all, for me—and I am talking about my New York—the note of this city is its casualness, its easiness, its sheer ordinariness. In the old days one would not have been much astonished if Redskins had raided Central Park; to-day one is astonished if anything out of the ordinary happens.

The most singular proof of this came to me the other day. Some one had made an engagement with me—a “date”—to meet him at a certain business house at a certain hour, on East Twenty-seventh Street. The business house, as is not unusual, had moved to other premises. There was nothing for it but to parade the street in front of that vacated nest—for half an hour or more. For myself, I always arrive a quarter of an hour before my date; no New Yorker known to me was ever less than an hour late for an appointment. Well, I began to do sentry duty in front of that store—stepping up and down and about—turning, as the drill book has it, in a smart and soldierly manner. But gradually I began to think and gradually I began to loaf. I was thinking out, as a matter of fact, what I am writing now . . . so that at the last, it was from miles and miles above the clouds that my arriving friend had to haul me down. . . . A comfortable, warm feeling that was. I might have been in Kensington Gardens, London, England, or Rue Notre Dame des Champs, Paris, France . . . just anywhere, in any great city.

And— No: my pocket was not picked. And— No: no trolley car mounted the sidewalk to crush me, and no one jostled me, nor did I once have to step aside. I just mooned happily.

The New Yorker thinks that he rushes. He doesn’t, and with the slowing down of the traffic added to the always leisurely pace on the sidewalks, he can’t. Neither does the New York business man hustle. In London or Paris when I go to see my lawyer or my banker or my publisher I dash into his inner room, feeling frightened at my temerity. I tell my business in a few seconds and I rush out—sure that I have taken up too much time: reading it in the stern, bored faces of my interlocutors. Here, bless you, in palatially appointed rooms, the business man appears rather as orator and anecdotalist. Before each announcement of what he is going to do for you he makes a preamble as to his moral and social motives—a long preamble! As you try to tear yourself away—appalled at the amount of his time you have taken up—he grasps your extended right hand gently but firmly and holding on to it, he tells you six anecdotes about his family, two about his last game of golf and several more about how they hustle in this city. Then he suggests taking you out to lunch somewhere—with a short round—twelve holes or so—afterward . . . It is the paradise of business men. They say money is here easy to make. It must be!

And it is good enough for me. . . . As I have already said, in one of his books W. H. Hudson asserts that wherever grass grows and there are birds he has felt himself at home. For myself, I have something of the same feeling wherever men and women are to be found. In France I feel myself a Frenchman, in Italy I feel more than half Italian; I am almost entirely Provençal in Provence. I daresay if I ever go to America I shall feel myself American enough. But I have never been to America: only I feel at home in New York.

Americans, in fact, terrify me a little. But I am fond of New York and fond of several of the inhabitants of this city. I don’t know that I am fond of any one else in the world—outside of my family, of course. The French don’t offer themselves much for fondness: the English don’t much understand what to do with it. But New York and New Yorkers like being liked . . . they let you know it and that is agreeable.

New York, then, is a place where I can moon about and feel pleasant—much as I can in Provence. What it is—this city—I don’t presume to dictate, but I do presume to say that it differs very little from any other great city, psychologically.

I see my English friends walk about here, agape for differences. They are astounded that bus conductors push something like an automatic pistol at them instead of handing them a pink strip of paper; they find it queer that the subway is not as deep down as the Tube in London, and unnatural that houses should scrape the skies. But the nature of man is not changed by having to stick a coin into a little slot or even by working in an office on top of forty-three other offices. . . . New York differs from London in having a keener intellectual life; it differs from Paris in that intellectual circles are smaller. Perhaps the products of the intellect are less valued here by the bulk of the people than is the case in other cities—but New York is becoming more and more of an intellectual center as the days go on—and that adds enormously to the world. It adds enormously, not merely to the pleasure, but to the safety of the world. If I—or you—can sit—as I found myself thinking the other day—perfectly tranquilly at table with eleven other people, all foreigners to me, and if I can feel perfectly at home and can find myself talking quite unself-consciously about just such things as I usually talk about at home, it is a sign that a great step has been taken toward that union of peoples that the world so dreadfully needs.

One day—may it come soon—there will not be any America, there will not be any Europe; there will be just the World about which we shall all move at ease, where we shall all loaf and think and, please God, find money easy to make. Well, one hears eternally that New York is not America. It is obviously not Europe—the Atlantic lies between. Is it, then, the outer fringe of America—or the end of Europe? Perhaps, the one overlapping the other, here we have the beginning of the world.

I like, at any rate, to think of it like that and it is possible that it is true enough. For New York is Babel without confusion of tongues. A place of refuge for all races of the world from the flood of ancient sorrows; the forlorn hope of humanity that, having lived too long, seeks rebirth. And indeed, the note of New York—its gayety, its tolerance, its carelessness is just that of a storming-party hurrying towards an unknown goal. It is the city of the Good Time—and the Good Time is there so sacred that you may be excused anything you do in searching for it. That is an ideal so practicable!

Happiness, the quest for islands of the Blest, the pursuit of saintliness, of sanity or of tranquil continuity—all these graspings after a Fata Morgana have from the beginnings of eternity, in the Old World, given weariness to the lives of mankind. They are so difficult and no New Yorker contemplates difficult things. But the Good Time—like the Catholic religion—is human and attainable. How it may be with America I do not know; perhaps there the sterner virtues and pursuits for which stand the pilgrim fathers—who were not Americans—still obtain. But not in New York. It is the only place outside Provence where everybody is rich and gay. But yes . . . outside, the sterner virtues still obtain. I was just now airing my amiable views of New York to a lady from Boston. She said: “Yes, but to be rich and gay is not the supreme end of life.” . . . For me, alas, it is!

I do not mean for myself personally . . . but for nations and races. Races that are not harassed are seldom menaces to their neighbors; races that have leisure have leisure also for Thought and the Arts. And it is pleasant—it is the pleasantest thing in the world, to think of great numbers of people—great, great numbers of people—all enjoying themselves innocently. You know that when you think kindly of Henri IV, who wished that every peasant of his realms might have a fowl in the pot on Sundays. It is assuredly not from New York that any menace will come to the world: it is from places where the sterner virtues obtain.

By day the soaring cliffs that rise joyously over behind the Battery are symbols not merely of hope but of attainment; after dark, and more particularly in the dusk, they are sheer fairyland. There is something particularly romantic in a Germanic sort of way about mountains illuminated from within. I remember watching the mountains behind Caerphilly in South Wales from Cardiff; their purple black against the night was pierced by illuminated and flickering mine-mouths and the suggestion that gnomes and Nibelungen of sorts were there at work on the veined treasure of the earth was irresistible. But it was a relatively heavyish glamor: the millionwise illumination of New York is a lighter, gayer affair—as it were Oberon and Titania against the Germanic gnomes. The mind on seeing it connotes not subterranean picks and sweat, but lighter, more tenuous occupations—the pursuits of delicate, wayward beings. And indeed, the mind connotes correctly enough, for though statistically New York may for all I know be a great manufacturing city, nothing could be further from my Gotham, except for the work of the stevedores in the Port, than those other desperate and mournful labors, in the dark and underneath the earth. For New York stands for air and light. Preëminently for air and light.

But, for me, the most vivid recollection of New York—and I have it even when I sit here at work in one of the darkest, oldest and most Bloomsbury-like houses of the downtown of this city—is the view, long ago, from the roof of one of the tall houses that look down on City Hall, of the brand-new, marvelously white and beautiful Flatiron. In those days the Flatiron was one of the seven wonders of the world and the air was more clear than it is possible for air to be, beneath the crystalline bowl of the sky. The shadows were all naturally blue, too, and every detail of every cornice of that building was visible from where we stood, pinkish white outlined by delicate blue. And indeed, every detail of every other building within sight was equally visible, distance being indicated only by the diminution of objects, not by their growing dimmer to the sight. And each building had its panache—its ostrich-plume of steam streaming away in the keen wind. I have never known greater exhilaration; I have never seen anything more gayly beautiful.

All that is very much changed now. There is, I suppose, a good deal of soft coal still being used, and what has been used during past times of stress seems indelibly to have left a film over the white buildings and even to have taken the edge off the very clearness of the air. The buildings round the Woolworth Tower, seen even from the distance towards Sandy Hook, have no longer their pristine whiteness; they have rather the gray of bones that have been long exposed to the air, though they still tower proudly aloft, man’s protest and assertion in the face of Nature.

New York, I think, has lost a little in impressiveness, if not in beauty. Painters—and particularly foreign painters—still rave about her canyons and ravines. But there are too many. They give the painters greater choice of “bits,” but to ordinary humanity they are apt to produce at last an effect of drafty gloom—as if one were at the bottom of shafts rather than on the face of the friendly earth. And the contrasts of the old days are lost.

It used to be a cumulative affair; you used to come down on the Fifth Avenue horse-stage between personable but not too lofty houses; then you plunged into splendid abysses. And the sentinel before these splendid abysses was the Flatiron that, seen down either Fifth Avenue or Broadway from afar, was as white and as radiantly proportioned as any Greek conception for celebrating a victory. That used to be a journey; a romance.

To-day the Flatiron is gray and the skyline along Fifth Avenue where it goes along Central Park is too uniform in height with the rest of the city to let you have any feeling either of entrance or of plunging down . . . Heaven knows where, on the North, you would have a sense of entering New York. She straggles out into sparse suburbs and wilted rusticities as is the case with London towards Twickenham, or Paris, Montmorency way. So that the compact, comfortable feeling that one used to have, of being bounded on the two sides by the rivers and of entering a city that was still low at Fifty-seventh Street, is gone for ever. New York will never be little and old again; she has assumed the ageless aspect of the great metropolis.

It was, no doubt, merely an illusion, but the feeling that one then had that, when looking downtown from Central Park, one was outside the city walls and was looking into it, was so strong as to be nearly irresistible. There were obviously hundreds of thousands of people dwelling behind one’s back; one knew even individuals who lived just next door to the great baseball ground—at 118th Street, I think. But the New York that mattered to one was before one’s face. The fluxes and refluxes of residential New York are so continuous as to be absolutely unfollowable; but I am inclined to think that the people that one knew when the Flatiron was still a prodigy and Madison Square the fashionable shopping center, and Sixth Avenue below Twenty-third Street housed great stores, and poor Fourteenth Street itself between Sixth and Third Avenues was old-fashioned and “residential”—the people that one then knew lived between the southern boundaries of Central Park and the south side of Washington Square. I remember having letters of introduction to or calling on one or two families on that Square, several in Gramercy Park, one in West Fourteenth Street itself, others in Twenty-sixth and Thirty-sixth Streets, and so on upwards to the Park. On the other hand, the offices of my publisher were in Twenty-third Street between Broadway and Lexington, and he himself lived somewhere up in the hundreds, and I had several friends away in Bronx Park. I stayed, I remember, at first in the Waldorf-Astoria, then in a hotel on West Twenty-seventh Street, just off Fifth, which was more than indifferent. Its anteroom always smelt of fish frying in indifferent fat.

I remember this particularly because of a gentleman who, somebody told me, was a Western Senator—but I daresay he was not. He boarded a trolley on which I was progressing from Wall Street to Twenty-seventh—at about Eighth Street. The coat-tails of his frock-coat flew out behind him as he made a flying leap onto the vehicle; he wore an immense black sombrero, a scarlet tie and black leggings. At least, I like to think of him as wearing leggings; perhaps he did not really, but I confuse his memory with that of Buffalo Bill. He seated himself beside me, drew from his tail-pockets an immense dark-scarlet apple, which he first polished on his sleeve and then held under my nose.

“Ain’t that a peach?” he exclaimed. I regarded it with attention and then remarked that it appeared to me to be an apple. He remarked that if it was not the peachiest peach he ever seen he never seen another. And he added:

“Take it, mister.” I refused to take it; I said that if I put it in my pocket it would spoil the set of my coat, whereas if I carried it in my hand it would make me conspicuous. But that fellow pursued me all the way to West Twenty-seventh Street, got off the car and followed me into the ante-room of my hotel, holding out the brilliant apple and vociferating: “If she ain’t a peach I never seen. . . .” And over the deep humiliation that I felt at being seen in such flamboyantly attired company was superadded the nauseous consciousness of that ancient fish-and-burnt-fat smell. It has never left me.

And next day one of the papers came out with a column headed in gigantic type: “English Peer Cannot Understand How Apple Can Be Peach.” It was accompanied by a caricature of myself entitled: The Animated Match. In those days I weighed only nine stone two—123 pounds. Alas, alas!

I used to think for long that that caption gave the measure of the little oldness of my Gotham of those days when English visitors for pleasure were so rare that every one of them had to be dignified at least with the title of peer. Indeed, when I told the emigration officer on the steamer that I was visiting the United States for my pleasure and in no hope of gain, he simply refused to believe me. He said he had never heard of anybody doing that. . . . I remember him vividly to this day. A fat, dead-white complexioned man, with silver-rimmed spectacles, an unbuttoned waistcoat over an indecently enormous abdomen and wearing a singularly shabby straw hat, he lolled sideways at a table before which we stood, smoked a cigar and cleaned his fingernails whilst he spat out questions from behind his cigar. As the first United States official to give an impression to the first visitor coming for pleasure he was a bit of a misfortune. But, as they used to say—for I have not heard the expression in many years: This is a free country.

And yet I do not know—as regards that heading. It seemed to me the note of a small old town that the papers should give columns to an incident so trifling. Yet I was the other day in Chicago, which is neither little nor old, and which can never be either. Certainly it can never be both—for when it was merely Fort Dearborn it was little and after the fire it was young. But nowadays it grows vaster and vaster—and younger and younger and younger till it begins to have that pathos of extreme youth that. . . . However, I am not writing about Chicago now; I am writing about its hawk. For when I was in Chicago lately the whole city, all the newspapers, all the streets were convulsed or rendered impassable by a hawk.

This bird of prey had been driven in by the severe weather in the surrounding Middle West, and making a home on the crags of the Tribune or the Wrigley buildings, it was striking down at leisure the city’s innumerable pigeons and eating them here or there in full view of the populace. And that was “Front Page News” in excelsis. No war tidings could so have caused the larger sort of type to spring into use across the tops of pages of journals. The streets were rendered impassable by reason of the crowds gazing into the skies and dangerous because lovers of pigeons fired charges of gun-shot into the air at imaginary hawks, whilst lovers of hawks thrust their arms up or down whilst they were in the act of firing. That lasted for days.

I don’t, by the bye, write of this with reprehension or scorn or anything. It seems to me very proper and right. Life in the great towns is so mechanical, so aloof from vitality, so much a matter of machines that any incursion of the natural—of the wild, the predatory and the free—is a very proper derivative. It will cool blood heated by overindulgence in refrigerated food and brains overtaxed by tickers and typewritten statements. European nations support their royal families and aristocracies for this purpose; why should not Chicago have its hawk and its gunmen—though indeed the hawk excited more attention than ever did the raid on the Drake Hotel?

Still, excitement over accipitrine or foreign visitors for pleasure may be taken as the characteristic of a small old town, as a rule. You cannot imagine New York or Paris or London raising an eyelid because of the visit of a hawk to the City Hall or the Mansion House or the Hotel de Ville—though I do remember that years ago London was stirred by the first visit of great flocks of seagulls to the Thames Embankment. But that excitement was soon over; to-day the gulls are so familiar a part of the riverine landscape of London that hardly a soul is found feeding them. Occasionally some one will take them a bundle of scraps, and now and then a city clerk at lunch time will toss into the beak of a gull a scrap of the sandwich he is eating as he strolls.

But then, whatever be the case with Paris, New York seems to have no city-consciousness at all. London, indeed, has herself precious little. The Parisian is always the Parisian, but the Londoner, except that he will exhibit symptoms of mild disgust if you suggest that he could be anything else but a Londoner, is singularly unaware of the existence of his city. And the New Yorker—so battered at, apostrophized and continually rebuked is he by all the rest of the inhabitants of God’s Country—the New Yorker outside New York only very coyly admits the place of his residence. He prefers to say that he is from Vermont. Or Nebraska.

And—for it is pleasant to contemplate the inter-actions and reactions of great cities one upon another—what of city-consciousness London has has always seemed to me to come to her, at any rate in part, by way of New York. By way of the gray squirrel! For it was when the gray squirrel was first set free in quantities in Regents Park that, in order to secure immunity for them from the acts of chase of the London small boy that the London County Council issued orders that the board school teachers were to inculcate lessons as to civic pride upon their pupils. The teachers were to tell their pupils that gray squirrels were things to be proud of because other fellows’ cities had no gray squirrels. And so with other beasts and birds. So that to-day the fauna of the London parks is profuse and astonishing and you never see—as used to be the case in my boyhood—the London male young using catapults against living things except other small boys—and perhaps cats. So here again the New World redressed the balance of the Old.

And more than redressed it. For one thing has always caused a note of sadness to me in New York—the fact that I seldom see a bird here. And for me a city without birds is like a house without a piano—something a little deadened. I seldom—practically never—see even the humble, troublesome sparrow in New York. Even years ago that fact used to impress me. One went along the streets and never saw a bird. There were, however, other beautiful flying things. One day I went into the office—in Twenty-third Street—of my publisher, and he said—it was Mr. S. S. McClure of prodigious memory:

“What in h—ll have you got on your derby?” So I removed my billycock, and there, right in the front, in the place usually occupied by a regimental or a fireman’s badge, was a great, beautiful moth. A great moth with a wing-spread larger than that of a sparrow. And, after that I used to take pleasure in observing those fine things floating with the boldest and most beautiful flight in the world—smoother than that of the finches and more floating than the swallows—over the buses on Fifth Avenue or round and round the trees of Madison Square in an autumn season. I have not seen them lately—but that, I am aware, is no proof that they are no longer there. For sitting the other day with a lady in the window of the National Arts Club looking down over Gramercy Park—which in London would be called a square—I remarked to her that New York had for me always a certain note of sadness because there are no birds here—not even sparrows. She remarked drily:

“If you will give yourself the trouble to look down you will see at least seventeen.” And there they were—at least seventeen sparrows flying across the gray winter grass of the square. There was even a pyramidal box pierced in tiers with small holes and supported on a pole—a miniature sparrow-cote.

But although, for that moment I was caught out, I do not believe that that little company of seventeen sparrows in Gramercy Park need convince me that New York ever is or ever could be a thickly bird-populated city. Yet somehow the companionship of birds is a necessity to my complete pleasure. I do not mean that I have—or that to be a proper man any one need have—the passion for birds that was our dear Huddie’s—W. H. Hudson’s. I should never have the patience to watch for hours and days and weeks a titlark’s nest in which a cuckoo had laid an egg. But in the garden of my studio in Paris there was a colony of white blackbirds, and in a thorn tree in the backyard of my flat in London a thrush nested. And it was a pleasure to me to glance up from my work and see the wings flitting intimately past the windows or to see on the leads the mother thrush with her yellow, black-speckled waistcoat, dropping smashed snails into the enormously distended beaks of her clamorous nestlings. It gave a touch of lightness to the day.

But if here I look up amid the shadows and out into the backyard I see nothing—a cement floor, an incredibly begrimed glass roof of an open shed. And it is just a well; except for soot, clean but eternally Cimmerian. A well—for, although the house I have chosen to live in is old and relatively low, on the other three sides that surround my yard there tower up the skyscrapers, and I live either in funereal shadows or in artificial light.

Do not mistake me. I am lamenting neither my lot nor my lodgings. I have had the offer of a perfectly brand-new apartment on Park Avenue. But I should die in a perfectly brand-new apartment on Park Avenue. Here I have a number of largish, tall rooms, dark but with sculptured marble mantelpieces and roughish Early American furniture—honest early nineteenth century journeyman’s work such as might have been produced in Kent or Sussex in the England of that period. It is a fact that I have been in this rambling, ramshackle old place four months and only yesterday discovered that I was the proprietor of a kitchen. I wanted to give a tea-party and asked the housekeeper to lend me a spirit lamp to boil the water, whereupon she said:

“Why don’t you use your kitchen?” And there it was.

This will seem incredible and I have not time to explain it; it is nevertheless a true anecdote. For what I am talking about is the tall buildings—the skyscrapers of New York. By way of birds.

Where a sparrow can lodge a sparrow will lodge—but on the faces of these immense cliffs there is not lodgment even for a sparrow—except maybe, skywards. You see, I have been gradually raising my eyes towards the tops of these cliffs by way of the backyards and the shadows. I will confess that it was the hawk at Chicago that first made me fully recognize the vastness of these affairs. For when upon the railway platform of Rockford, Ill., I read in the local journal that Chicago, toward which I was proceeding, was convulsed by the visits of a hawk, my first and natural reaction was to think:

“Why don’t they kill it? Or at least take it alive?”

I read that every shotgun and rifle in the city had been mobilized; that the Chief of Police had issued ukases alike against the shooters and the hawk; that the commissioner for something had declared at all costs that the hawk must be protected because the overpopulation of the city by pigeons had long been a menace to the health of the human inhabitants; that the deputy commissioner for something else and somebody else had spent the day spreading clap-nets on the roof of the City Hall and baiting them with live pigeons; that the local agriculturists had passed resolutions declaring that the hawk must be protected because pigeons eat the grain from sown fields; that the mobilization of the city fire brigade had been advocated in order to spread bird-lime on lofty roofs, but whether to catch the hawk or the pigeons I do not know . . . when on that windy platform I read all this there rose in my mind’s eye at once the image of a London suburb, far-flung, with its two or, at most, three-storied villas. No London commuter would notice the hawk; if he did he could not tell a hawk from a hernshaw—or from a pigeon for the matter of that. Or if they did see it on a roof and want to kill it, it could be done with a boy’s catapult. Almost with a pea-shooter.

But till then I had never seen Chicago. I had heard that her suburbs, too, covered an immensity of ground, but I had reckoned without the Wrigley or the Tribune or the other tall buildings that have above the mournful plains of the Middle West the aspect of being a great assembling of super-lighthouses, the one whispering in the ear of the other. Or of an immense basalt, fluted and pyramidal crag aspiring to the peak of heaven!

When I did see them I realized that to kill a lone hawk that had those altitudes at its disposal would be about as easy as to kill one hawk on Seawfell . . . a one and only hawk. And then I had a better image of New York herself. For the lower levels of New York are familiar enough to one and so indeed are the higher office-chambers. One walks the streets or visits the offices gaining those associations that in the end are what make a city seem alive to us. But I wonder how many of us ever raise our eyes to the heavens or think of the skyline in inner New York. Few, I imagine. At any rate, it was not until I lately saw Chicago that I had a vision of the immense plateau that the New York roofs must make. For till from a distance one sees the Illinois metropolis one has little idea of what the isolated skyscraper is like—and until one has fully taken in an isolated skyscraper one has little idea of an assemblage of them so serried that their roofs form a plateau. And the idea of that level of the air is singularly stimulating.

One has, naturally, long ago heard the legends. It is several years since I met a man who told me that his father made a living—and a good living, too!—as custodian of the roofs of unfinished or as yet not fully occupied buildings, living thereon in a temporary shack. Later one began to hear of millionaire owners of vast edifices who had bungalows on their roofs, poplar groves, garages, I daresay, golf courses . . . who knows what? That sort of imagination is very easy to have and to cap. There is no reason why you should not have a lake with sailing boats. Indeed, the swimming pool of the Illinois Women’s Athletic Club is on the roof of a Chicago skyscraper.

That sort of conception and the putting of it into execution are easy enough if you have enough money and a sufficiently large slave population. Even Babylon had its roof-gardens—far away and long ago. And it is a mere commonplace that where space is very valuable the rooftops will be utilized be they four stories high or a hundred and fifty. So will the earth beneath ground and the very rivers. For I am certain that, in the end, the East River will be covered in, since, sooner or later, New York must either succumb or find more breathing space.

New York is what she is because she is in part an unofficially administrative, in part a pure pleasure city. The days are no doubt past when all the business men of the United States had to go on their knees to Wall Street to obtain capital which Wall Street would grant or not according to its own sole will and caprice. To a certain extent the local Federal Reserve banks from Alabama to the State of Washington suffice for necessary loans, and Wall Street alone can scarcely create or quell financial panics for its own pleasure. Nevertheless, immensely the larger part of the financial and commercial transactions of the Continent are transacted either in or through New York and she is still the financial center of the New World, as London is of the Old. Indeed, a curious parallel might be drawn between the situations of the two great banking cities. New York is not, of course, officially the metropolis of the United States: she houses neither the Federal Legislature nor the Federal Judiciary—but that she is the “capital” of the United States in the colloquial sense in which that word is generally used no one not a much more than a hundred per cent American would deny. And probably by her combined social and financial pull she controls the Legislature at Washington far more than is acknowledged.

That, however, is not my topic of the moment—nor is it ever likely to be. What I was about saying is that it seems fairly obvious that New York cannot continue—whatever her position of control may at present be—in that position of control unless she does attain in one way or the other to more elbow room. I said lately that the New Yorker never keeps an engagement to within half an hour—but that is not to accuse the New Yorker of having an unpunctual mind or of lacking the desire to be of a royal politeness. It is merely to point out that, hurry as he may, and with the best will in the world, he simply cannot do it. There is no gauging the time of your arrival at any given point on the ground level of the city. Having an engagement for half-past four in Sixty-fifth Street, I took a taxicab one afternoon at four in Madison Square and arrived at five minutes past five, having traveled at the rate of practically a minute and a half to a block. The same evening I had a date for eight o’clock in the same street. I took a taxi at the corner of Sixteenth Street and Sixth Avenue at seven o’clock and arrived at Sixty-fifth Street at seven-twenty—having to cool my feet for forty minutes outside the house where I was dining and having covered the ground at the rate of practically fifty blocks in twenty minutes.

Those were merely social engagements, so that it was only my own time that was lost. Supposing, however, that they had been business dates! I should not only have lost my own time but I should have kept the man who was expecting me waiting in addition for thirty-five minutes.

And this goes on millionwise: there must at present be thousands of millions of business hours lost in the city of New York every year, on the surface of the ground alone. It is all very well to say that you can always take the Subway and the Elevated—and I believe that this course recommends itself to the democratic spirit of the American. At any rate, when I said to a lively young lady from Seattle that I never moved about New York except by taxi or by surface bus, she retorted on me as if I had been more than several sorts of a snob. But to do it, if one’s work makes any call on the individual, is not to be any sort of a snob at all. If your work is individualistic in nature—and I presume that the work of big business heads and the like is that—you must have privacy of a sort for as long periods of the day as are attainable. You are an engrossed person. I can do twice as much work as most of my confrères in New York—or in London and in Paris, for that matter—just because I do protect my thinking machine by such devices as taking taxis whenever I have to move about the streets of such cities as New York. . . . This, however, seems to call for a new chapter.