NEW YORK'S COMMERCIAL TEMPLES.

Colonist, Volume LXII, Issue 15345, 8 April 1920, Page 3

NEW YORK'S COMMERCIAL TEMPLES.

LONDONER IN WALL STREET

CAETON.

PIGMY CHURCHES AT FOOT OF WOOIAVORTH BUILDING. ■

Writing of the tumultuous life of New York, Mi 7 A. G. Gardiner, former editor of the "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 like 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 St. Paul's Cathedral. It is the church of St. Woolworth. Into 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 catcii the 7ioose of light that dawn llings daily over the Atlantic from the east.

"You enter its marble halls and take an express train to the 49th floor, flashing- in your . journey past visions of crowded offices, tier after tier of offices, banks, .'md publishers and merchants, and jewellers, like a great street. Piccadilly' or the Strand, that has beeja 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 the moving throng you left a few minutes ago look like a.colony of ants or black beetles wandering uncertainly over the pavement. . . TOY BUILDINGS—TINY' SPIRES. "And in the midst of the great fortrpsses of commerce two toy buildings, v.-ith tiny spires. Yoix have been in them perhaps, ami know them to be large churches, St. Paul's and Trinity, curiously like our own City churches. Once New York nestled under their shadows; now they are swallowed up and lost in the vastness of the terrific structures that loom above them. In one of them—Trinity—you will have seen the pew pf George Washington still decorated with the flag of the 13 stars of the original union. i "Perhaps you will be tempted to see lin this inverted world an inverted civili-j sation. There will flash on your mind's | eye the vision of the great" dome that' ; seems, to .-float in the heavens over the] I secular. activities of , another city, still ( I holding aloft, to However negligent and j indifferent a generation, a symbol of the; supremacy of spiritual things.

VISTA OF TITANIC POWER

"And you will wonder whether in this astonishing spectacle below you in. which the temples of the ancient worship crouch at the porch of these Leviathan temples of commerce,' there is the unconscious expression of another pholosophy of life in which St. Woolworth and not St., Paul points the way io the stars. , "You turn ancl look over the enormous city that* caught in the arms of its two noble 'rivers, extends over 20 miles before you, with its overflow ot Brooklyn on the far side of one stream ana its overflow of .Jersey City on the far bank of the other. In the brilliant sunshine and the clear smokeless atmosphere the eye travels far over this incredible vista of human activity. - "And beyond the vision of the eye the mind carries the thought onward to the prcat lakes and the seething cities ; by their shores,-and over, the illimitable plains westward to sunny lands more remote than Europe but still obedient to the Stars and Stripes, and southward by the great rivers to the tropic sea."