NEW YORK.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14109, 10 July 1909, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEW YORK.

SOME VAGRANT IMPRESSIONS.

BY. FRANK FOX.

[ALL BIGHTS BESBIIVISD.] "I tell . you, living anywhere else on earth than New York' is just camping .out!" : ■ :,:'■ . So most emphatically, the chef! of a Canadian Pacific railway dining-car. He was a good chef, too; broiled a chicken deliciously, made coffee which was coffee, and not a dark and bitter mystery. So I was compelled to some respect for his opinion of New York, and looked forward to reaching it with eagerness. Perhaps"" the problem, "How to be Happy Though Out of Australia." is capable of solution somewhere, though I doubt it, feeling that the Australian, who is I Australian in sentiment, can never quite reconcile himself to absence from a land where the common happiness is the general ideal. It certainly is not to be solved by life in New York. New York is magnificent, but it is war! On that little island of Manhattan seethes a vast population, reaching up, leyer on layer, to the sky, and struggling, smuggling always for the summit when there is hope of security from submersion. Rich and poor dwell side by side, for it is the tradition of New York that you must live in New York itself. Live half a mile across the river in New Jersey, aad you are a foreigner. Live at Hoboken and you are an object of derision. To be in the social swim you must have a New York mansion. To have the best chancu for a casual job you must be one of a herd packed in a New York tenement house. To hold up your head in the "middle class"—by which is meant keeping up still a pretence that you are going to be a millionaire some day—you must again have a New York address. this vast city is intensely provincial; knows, will know nothing but New York. ' The close packing together of the vastly rich and the abysmally poor within so narrow a space gives an impression of savage cruelty. Take from the centre of the city an "elevated" up-town to Harlem, and as yon pass look into the windows of the poor tenement houses. You will see wolfish hungry men, dismal battered women, pinched bloodless children a miserable crowded poverty hanging out from every window and the railing of every fire-escape its banners of rag.;. Coming back, walk along the Riverside Drive for three miles, or Central Park Avenue ; for two miles. Here are the houses of the i rich, tier upon tier, sheltering millionaire ! after millionaire, marching along in pompI ous magnificence of wealth. There are ! apartment houses where a "flat" costs £1500 (pounds, not dollars) a year; little mansions in marble, or bigger ones in brown stone, the rent of which represents the -owner's interest on £500,000 (again pounds). The contrast to anyone accustomed to the fairly even standard of happiness in Australia is intolerably cruel. It is hideous to be poor in New York. .It must be more hideous to be rich, with that packed poverty two streets away. Though cruel, New York is hospitable to strangers. Finding Canada coldly suspicious ■-. of strangers, sniffly resentful of letters of introduction, I expected the United: States to be even a little colder, a little more suspicious, and was aghast to find at the railway station that had left all my letters of introduction—even that to the club affiliated with mine—behind. For a moment I hesitated, then took the bold course, and a taxi-cab, was driven to the Lotos Club. The secretary] took my explanation quite amiably, and I was soon installed in a sage-green furnished room of quiet luxury (temperature 92 degrees; but I soon altered that by opening a window and shutting off tha steam heat) in a club-house the magnificence and artistic wealth of which eclipsed-even the palace hotels of this continent. Certainly New York was riot, at first impression, cold or ' suspicious. ■ > Carefully refraining from stealing any of the many hundreds of valuable pictures, or any of the wonderful hanmieredbrass electric lamps (and so justifying in a measure the secretary's trust), I sallied out next morning, feeling still; only under reprieve, and ventured timidly into a newspaper office. There people came along and insisted that they knew mo; that they had read my last book; that, if they hadn't, anyhow, they had read notices of it in the New York and Boston papers. " You must come to lunch." No, the New Yorker is not cold or suspicious to strangers. I fancy, indeed, he does a little violence" to his conscience" by going beyond the strict truth in professing to know you. Still, among the citizens there is no hope for the vanquished, and New York gives the ultimate impression of cruelty. The contrasts of wealth are so terrible. ' . Terrible, too, are some of the results ol these contrasts. Whilst I was in New York a judge solemnly ruled that it was not wise for parents to allow children or young women to go out into the streets alone, even in the day. Social desperation has found one expression: in the organisation of kidnapping societies. These carry on a regular trade in stealing the children of the rich, and holding them for ransom. The Black Hand" is another manifestation of the morbid state of society; though it is confined almost exclusively to the low-class foreign population. The Black Hand lives by levying blackmail. If you come under its ' notice and you don't pay up neither your life nor your property is safe. You will be mutilated, murdered, or burned out. Six people were burned to death in a Black Hand incendiary fire the week I was in New York, and there was no hope among the police of bringing the criminals to book. Investigation was blocked everywhere by the fact that anyone who gave a elm might expect to be the next victim of the Black Hand. , ~ ■" ~', A minor manifestation of the bitterness of the class struggle in New York is the - almost invariable rudeness of the workers, i especially" the public servants. in Australia the working man is usually just as , much a gentleman as the professional man, . or the merchant; and the public servant , is almost invariably civil. That is a reflection of a sound social spirit of equality. ' In America the social spirit seems to be ', one of bitterness, and people are rude just [ to prove that they are independent. Rail- ■ way porters and clerks, policemen, park ' rangers, lift attendants—all these in New York seem to me, with few exceptions, '. grosslesslv and needlessly rude. They roar , out prohibitions, delight in the tyrannical exercise of petty authority, " make it \ even" with the rich, or those they fancy i to be rich, by adopting towards them a consistently insulting attitude. The Ame- ; rican puts up with this calmly. He [ thinks it is a necessary adjunct to "demo- . cracy." >■ ~• : .„ , . -, The architecture of .New fork is > sublime. It is nonsense to talk of the sky- - scraper as monstrous or ugly. •'/■ Here it is right "in the picture." I can imagine nothing more impressive than New York from the waterfront. And there are other buildings than sky-scrapers, many hundreds of churches, public institutions, i banks, private mansions, which for quiet, elegant beauty could not be surpassed. ' The New York Public Library— last ' great work of Stanford White, who fell ; : a pitiful victim to his own viciousaess and 1 the viciousness of a pair of scamps who 5 had not his redeeming genius—is worthy 1 of ancient r Athens; a bank en Fifth 1 Avenue by the same architect might have '' been erected in the, best days of : Venice. The principal streets of New York are ' now paved with asphalt or wood ; the old I cobblestone atrocities survive only downJ town. The surface of Fifth Avenue, all ways kept beautifully smooth, hag the apj pearance of a finely-polished black marble from the constant friction of motor-tires " and the constant lubrication with motor * oil. There are 70,000 motors registered in , the State of New York* and you may see 1 any day on Fifth Avenue about £1,000,000 "■■ worth of automobiles. Horse carriages are s becoming rare up-town in the city.