WHAT NEW YORK HAS BUT HAS NOT.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 4207, 14 September 1874, Page 3

WHAT NEW YORK HAS BUT HAS NOT.

(From the New York Herald, June 29.) New York is a metropolis remarkable for what it has not even in what it has. It has long enjoyed the commercial supremacy of this Continent, and yet throughout the whole period it has been without wharves and piers. Its growth has been unexampled, and yet after efforts continued through many years it is without rapid transit; business men living at the upper part of the island have no speedy means of getting from their homes to their business or from their business to their homes. The street cars are dirty and disagreeable as well as slow, and most of them are so old that they nearly toss the passenger off his scat in trying to shake themselves to pieces. Scarcely a single street is paved throughout with the same material. Breaks in the wooden pavements are frequently repaired with stone. Then New York has splendid public and private buildings, but many of them are so badly built that they are a constant menace to passers by ; sometimes a foundation gives way, and now and then a house topples over. We have plenty of high priced dwellings, but no pleasant cottages. A “ whole house” is a luxury which people in ordinary circumstances cannot afford. The “ French .flat” system is too much after the tenement house model, and the tenement houses are frightfully overcrowded, and yet in no city in the world is there so much waste of dwelling space. Business in New York wiE not tolerate domestic life in its chosen haunts. In consequence fully one-half of the fine buildings below the Canal street are practically useless above the third story. Our markets are inaccessible ; our street cars are overcrowded; . the leading thoroughfares are impeded with booths andstands of every kind ; Broadway is yet to be “ relieved,” because there is no outlet for downtown traffic from the lower part of Church Street into West Broadway and South Fifth avenue ; and, worst of aU, there are heavy taxes to pay and no adequate returns either in comfort or convenience. Law is exceedingly expensive, but it is not a luxury, and politics is a profession to some, but a burden upon all. Wo have nearly everything a great city ought to have, but all that wo possess is held under conditions that make the possession irksome.