NEW YORK'S COMMERCIAL TEMPLES

Evening Star, Issue 17312, 27 March 1920, Page 8

NEW YORK'S COMMERCIAL TEMPLES

LONDONER IN WALL STREET CANYON. PIGMY CHURCHES AT FOOT OF WOOIAYOItTH BUILDING. Writing of the tumultuous life of New York, Mr 11. G. Gardiner, former editor of tho ' Daily News,' London, gives a vigorous impression of his envisagement of the huge New York temples of finance and commerce, commencing with " the great cathedral that you saw from afar towering over these battlements liko the Matterhorn. The nearer view does not disappoint you. Slender and beautifully proportioned, it rises in great leaps to "a pinnacle nearly twice as high as the cross of at. Paul's Cathedral. It is the church of St. Woohvorth. Lito this masterpiece he poured the wealth acquired in his sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the most significant building in America and the first turret to catch the noose of light that dawn flings daily over the Atlantic from the east. "You enter its marble halls and tako an express train to the 49th floor, flashing in your journey past visions of crowded offices, tier after tier of offices, banks, and publishers, and merchants, and jewellers, liko a great street, Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been miraculously turned skywards by some violent geological ' fault.' And at the- 49th floor you get°out and take another ' local' train 'to the top, and from thence you look giddily down, far down even upon the great precipices of the Great Canyon, down to the streets, where tlio moving throng you left a few minutes ago looks like a colony of ants or black beetles wandering uncertainly over the pavement. TOY BUILDINGS-TINY SPIRES. "And in tho midst of the great fortresses _of commerce two toy buildings, with tiny spires. You have been in themj perhaps, and know them to be lar<?o churches, St. Paul's and Trinity, curiously own City churches. Once New \ ork nestled under their shadows; now they are swallowed up and lost in the vastness of the terrific structures that inom above them. In one of them— Irinity— you will have seen the pew of George Washington still decorated with too flag of the 13 rtars of the original union. fc _ "Perhaps you will bo tempted to see m this inverted world an inverted civilisation. _ There will flash on your mind's eye the vision of the great dome that to lioat m the heavens over the secular activities of another city, still boldin* aioit, to however negligent and indifferent a generation, a symbol of the supremacy of spiritual t] rings. VISTA OF TIiANIC POWER. ''A n , d . y° u %vili wonder whether in this astonishing spectacle below vou in which the temples of the ancient worship crouc'i at tu» porch of those Leviathan' temples oi commerce, there is the unconse-ioivj e sof another philosophy of life i„ which St. TVoolworth and not St Pan! points the way to the stars. "You turn and look over tho enormous catv tflat. caught m fcj lf> ann 60 - jtg t noble rivers, extends ova- 20 milcj fcnf-re >ou, with its overflow of Brooklyn on the tar side cf one et-ream and its" overflow o Jersev City on the far hank of th« wtner. in the brilliant sunshine and the ciear the eve travels tarover this incredible vista of human activity. " -;bid- beyond the vision of tho eye thn mmd tames the thought onward to the great lakec am} the "seething cities bv their shores, and oven the illimitable plains westward to sunny lands more remote than Europe, biit still obedient to the Stars and Stripes, and southward oy the great'rivers to the tropic sea."