Impressions of New York.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXIX, Issue 18, 2 November 1907, Page 27

Impressions of New York.

(By

T. P. O’CONNOR.

One of the curious fancies, waking or dreaming, of one who has never crossed the ocean, is speculation as to what will be the look of the solid land of which he will first catch sight after his days of wandering on the trackless ocean. I remember to this day how I made a complete image to myself, more than quarter of a century ago, of the kind of thing which would first catch my eye. It had become so real to me that I dreamed of it again and again. It was a long, small is'and—just the kind of island you would see in a tiny inland lake in Ireland—with tall reeds up about its side; and in the midst of it a long, low building—something between the outhouse of a farm and the bungalow of a man of isolated habits and moderate fortune.

I recall this curious and haunting fancy because what I remember best of my experiences of arrival in America— I have been in America now three times —is tb.e first sight that met my view—and the first thing in that sight; for it is the symptom and the epitome of all my impressions then and afterward. It was not the small, long, narrow island of my imagination. The island, if island it were, was so intermingled with the mainland as not to look an island at all, and it was huge and not small. And the dwelling—which is the main feature of the landscape in my wake—was not in the least like that long, narrow, lowroofed dwelling of which 1 had dreamed; it was a gigantic hotel. Whenever I think of my approach to New York, it is that gigantic hotel that always staiFds out in my memory. Buildings of these enormous proportions are a strange sight to European eyes. We have nothing like them in any part of Europe. Somehow or other, I associate this gigantic hotel with the appearance of ait elephant. I am not sure that it is not intentionally fashioned after an elephant’s shape. At all events, it remains in my memory as hearing to the building* with wl.ich I had been associated in E;.r.v e t’ c relation M

the elephant does to the horse. And my first impression, then, of New York is of immensity—and especially immensity of building. THE CITY OF THE GIGANTIC. In all your streets I saw something of the same kind; and I speak not merely of the phenomenal sky-scrapers, with which everybody is familiar, but with the general building and architectural idea of the whole city. It is all on a scale gigantic, daring, almost appalling. It is the first and most striking indication of that powerful, daring, gigantesquc temperament which is the temperament of America. The land into which we are born is of all environments the most potent of our character; and America, with its States that are king ';>..is and its single nation that yet is as great as ancient continents divided into dozens of nations—America has impressed its own gigantic proportions on the mind of America, all of whose conceptions run to the gigantic. Aly second impression of America is also derived from its buildings. I will never forget my first walk up Fifth Avenue, though it is so many years since it was taken. The houses of the Vanderbilts, the Stewarts, and those other names great in the finance and wealth of America, appeared to me like some une.isy dream of glory, wealth, and luxury, unbridled, visionary, and arrogant. i Lose houses, with their vast fronts, their gilded or sculptured walls, seemed to bo a curious mixture—may 1 put it that way? —of palaces on the canals of Venice, cathedrals of ancient German towns, and the pasteboard towers of a melodrama. I speak of melodrama because there was a curious sense of unreality and of the theatrical in this abounding luxury and display. I seemed to be living in a city where wealth, imperial power, unexampled conquests, desired display and reveal themselves with the ostentation and pride we associate with cities like the Constantinople of the later Roman Empire and of the Baby lon of an earlier period. I have lived for nearly forty years in a great city—in some respects the greatest city in the world—but in its dingy and comparatively modest mansions I see a contrast with the daring opulence of New York houses as great almost as there is between London and an English provincial town. HIE NEW FIFTH AVENUE. The Fifth Avenue of the early eighties, when I first saw it, is, of course, quite unlike in many respects the Fifth Avenue of last year when I passed through it again. It is no longer the somewhat quiet and sombre place, with its long and uninterrupted rows of brown-stone private mansions, which it then for the most part was. The tranquility has given place to an immense tumult and activity. But still there are things that seem to remain the same; and one of tnese is that same intense love of the gigantic, the splendid, and the artistic. In a small German village 1 have often been struck with the curious poetry that the people are able to put into what with us in England is the most prosaic of enterprises and institutions. The London butcher’s shop is not an attractive spectacle; but in Germany I have often seen the butcher’s shop so covered with garlands—a thing ol such a pleasant commingling of white marble and green leaves as almost to make you forget the viler side of the trade. In the same way—but on an altogether larger scale—l was immensely struck in New York with the extraordinary things which the potent life-spirit of the city can put into so commonplace a thing as mere shops, or stores, as you wo<ild call them. Bond Street is an historic thoroughfare in London — has been the resort of our dandies and our coqi ettes for more than one century — ami its stores are neat, clean, well ordered. SHOPS THAT ARE PALACES. But what a poor, insignificant thing even the finest jeweller’s store of Bond Street or of Regent in London is in comparison with such a place as that in which Tiffany now stores his wares. Or take Altman’s—l believe a big dry goods store. Compare it with, say. Whiteley’s or John Barker’s or any other of our great caravanseries of London It is true that Whiteley’s or John Barker’s might cover a great deal more •pace off ground; hut, after all, what is there in these great stores to mark them

out from the buildings around? They are. larger, and there are more of them; but they have the same height of elevation, they ht'f/e the same kind of roof, their fronts consist entirely of the same deadly monotony of big glass windows and plain window-sash. When 1 passed Tiffany’s or Altman’s I felt as though I were passing, not a store given up to the somewhat prosaic work of selling jewels or underclothing, but by a palace artistic, dreamful, a reverie of beauty which some poet mind had fashioned as a lordly ami beautiful pleasure - house. These shops were palaces for the magnifico who ruled an Italian city and state in medieval times rather than a mere shop where the ordinary citizen or his wife could go and haggle about their wares.

If I dwell on the gigantic and the beautiful which you see in New York, it is because these seem to me to be the outward manifestation of what is the real temperament of New York. Behind these gigantic and beautiful fabrics there is the inspiring mind of the country, and that mind appears to me to be essentially grandiose. Ido not speak of the American spirit as haunted by that perilous delusion whic is called megalomania, when the man of i’dbalanced mind is found to be spending all his substance in the illusion that he is the owner of millions. If there were some word which left in the “megalo” and left out the “mania,” it is the word which I would apply to the American temperament. Tin' life-spirit of New York is-perhaps mure virile, violent, and concentrated than in other parts of the country, but the spirit is common to all America, though in the metropolis you see its most remarkable and striking outcome. It is the spirit of a nation at once larger, newer, richer in material, and still more in possibilities, than any other nation that ever existed. THE EBULLIENCE OF LIFE. Take the history of the country and of its settlement in one broad sweeping generalisation. and you find that it may be summed up as the application to a soil, at once virgin and gigantic, of all the experience and all the courage and daring of all the other lands and all the antecedent ages. To America, with its vastness still unpeopled, came the young, the strong, the daring of all the world, with their accumulated knowledge and experience of the ages and the different nations behind them on the one hand, and, on the other, with their spirits fresh, impatient, filled with that intoxication which comes to those who escape to freedom and allimitable possibilities from the servitude and the cramped conditions of ancient countries and settled social castes. These two things in combination were bound to produce an ebullition of life: and this ebullience of life is what really lies behind the gigantic sky-scrapers and the palatial stores of New York. It is the life-spirit of New York, in fact, which is more interesting even than its manifestations in edifice—or, to put the same idea in other words, the most interesting thing in New York is its men and women, it is in them that you see this strange, resistless, inexhaustible, exuberant life-spirit revealing itself—often with something like frenzied activity. Put all the thousands of streams, big and little, from near and afar, into a small narrow and run them down a steep and abrupt descent, and you have Niagara Falls; and in the same way, put all the fevered energy of Europe, just escaped, and all the boundless energies of all the other cities, villages, and illimitable plains of America into a narrow tongue of land—and you have New York. Thus it is that the European visitor becomes conscious at the very moment of his landing of a surging—a tumult, a deafening thunderousness of life—if I may coin such a phrase—which to him is bewildering, affrighting, and discomforting. AH around him he sees the work of construction and reconstruction going on simultaneously. Beside the great skyscraper is another greater and huger skv-srraper; the whole town seems to be in a constant process of creation and recreation.

And the desire for movement seems to be something like a mania rather than a mere expression of ordinary city needs. The citizen to get down from up-town to the business region, at once has his elevated railroad. It may kiii people. It mny destroy all the pleasure of life in every house it passes by. It may induce premature birth, neurotic character, weedy frames. No matter! Right on

the railroad must go, like some modem Juggernaut, obeying an impulse which is inborn, irresistible, and merciless. It has not time nor care to mark the victims as they fall under its wheels as it marches on, triumphant, devastating, merciless.

Or an underground railroad is necessary. The delving begins; goes on for years; meets every kind of difficulty—rock, water, impermeable mud; it goes right on all the same; and when it is finished there is a service which for rapidity and completeness is utterly beyond anything of which Europe even yet has begun to dream. To move rapidly, ceaselessly, even through destruction and death—to move —that seems to be the dominating impulse of New York. There is no room or time to pause. The New Yorker—indeed, the American generally—mider the impulse of this spirit of restless and constant movement, undertakes a journey of two, three, six days as we undertake a jorney from London to Edinburgh—a journey of one night. And often it strikes you that it is movement for mere movement's sake; the extorted obedience to a resistless inner fever. And thus you get a sense of energy in New York by the side of which the energy of even London seems little better than lethargy. A CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT. And this restlessness does not end with the day. All through the night the street-cars and the railroads run—almost at the same breakneck pace. Their loud shouts and bell-ringings beset the air through the long watches of the darkness. There does not seem to be such a thing in all the twenty-four hours of the New York day as one halfhour of silence, of quiet, of pause. To the foreigner the city, for that reason, is for some time one of the most uncomfortable in the world. I never knew in the two or three weeks I spent in New York lately one night during which I had a decent and uninterrupted spell of sleep. I might as well have tried to sleep in the midst of a battle-field as during a New York night. And when New York amuses itself, it gives one the same impression of looking to the feverishness rather than the intrinsic pleasurableness of what it does. Those vast restaurants where nightly men and women dine strike me as noisy, tumultuous, with rush and fever as their inspiring emotions. It is not merely that Americans in such resorts seem to me to speak more, and more loudly, than they do in our London restaurants, but that they seem also to me to be as hurried in tneir pursuit of pleasure as in their pursuit of business. THE TRIUMPH OF MONEY. And this brings me to the second great dominating impression which the foreigner gets of New York—mat is, its expensiveness. To me it seems as if a shilling in London went quite as far as a dollar—four times the amount—goes in New York. To a Londoner, money seems to have no value for anybody in New York. You pay heavily for almost —Graphic—lmpressions New York—3 — everything—for your rooms in a hotel, for your meals, for a carriage, for a drink—and the tip system —which was said once not to be American at all—-has reached to such a point that it is a tax on any purse but the most opulent. The triumph of money was not so borne in upon me in New York as the absolute necessity for it, and for a large amount of it. I did not see how any man of the middle classes eould get any comfort out of the city if he passed the ordinary life of people I saw around me. We have, especially since the advent of the South African millionaire, immensely increased the cost of life in London; and our big hotels can now bear comparison in their prices with those of almost any city in the world. But every hotel seemed to me to be dear in New York. Everything, in fact, seemed dear. As I have said, your dollar went just the same length as our shilling in London.

I came, from this fact, to view New York in a curious spirit. Analysing my emotions, I should describe them as a mixture of an immense admiration, an immense love, and an immense pity. The admiration was extorted by the sense of wondrous vitality, courage, and possibilities of the city. It represented in reality and truth a new world —even a new birth of humanity. Those people—never satisfied with their achievement—never tired, never at rest —straining in the case of even a millionaire with the

same enthusiasm and ferocity of effort as in the days of poverty—all moved by the same great gust of passionate activity—what was all this but a new- world and a new birth of humanity ? AN ATMOSPHERE OF OPTIMISM. And these factors in the New York character account for the second feeling —the immense love which it inspires, especially in one of the same blood as that of so many of New York’s citizens. For the whole and dominant atmosphere of the place is optimism; and optimism is the parent of some of the best of human qualities. All around you are people who hope to become rich beyond the dreams of avarice—who have their great dreams, and who are compelled by the very nature of their environments to live as if the dreams had already been realised. Go to the Waldorf-Astoria, and you begin to realise what is the country which lies behind New York and what tremendous and as yet but slightly garnered possibilities supply the capital with its wealth, its driving force, the fury of its life. In that huge caravansary you find them assembled from all parts of the vast continent—those men, usually with the chin whiskers, with the billycock hat, with . the great round oaths, with those restless eyes that seem to be always searching a distant horizon of immense hopes and, at the same time, just penetrate to the depths of your soul when they are turned on to you — the men of the great mining world. It is that group of men which suggested to me the thought that there is something in the eye of almost every American that shows the penetration of the born and instinctive psychologist. In that vast life of restless ambition, of warring natures, of every man having to make his way and devil take the hindmost —in that nation every one can instinctively “place” you by a mere glance. The bell-boy who attends your room, the boy who draws up the elevator —he can tell whether the visitor who sends up his car;! is the reputable person who has a right to an interview, or the dead-teat who has come to try and victimise you. FAIRY-TALES OF FORTUNE. In the Waldorf-Astoria there assemble, as I have said, every afternoon the mining-men of the United States; and there yon ean hear the storiesi—more like pages from the "Arabian Nights” than anything real or possible—of immense fortunes made in few years; of blacksmiths or hodmen or navvies who have grown to *be multi-millionaires. These men have come to get their money or spend their money in New York, and to supply their share of its extravagance, its feverish hunt for money and for pleasure. They swell its Niagara of expenditure and crowded life. And with this optimism comes a great spirit of good-nature, of to'eration, of helpfulness; and in no eity in the world is there such a desire to entertain and to honour the foreigner. Our hospitality is generous, but it is niggardly as compared with that of New York. They can't do enough for you. It is one of the surprising and one of the most delightful characteristics of the city that amid all that feverish and merciless struggle for existence which I have described, there is found time by the New Yorker for so many little acts of kindness and hospitality. Yon get not merely invitations to dinners; but the dinner has all kinds of little surprises which are meant to show you honour. Your rooms are tilled with flowers that friends have taken the trouble to send to you; and those flowers, again, are an example of that perfect wastefulness and lavishness which are characteristic of New York. You sometimes find one person sending you flowers that must have cost ten pounds—a sum which most of us would hesitate to spend in London even on the bouquet of a rich young bride. FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY. And. finally, you feel an immense pity lor New York. Wliat becomes of the weak, the unsuccessful, the poor in that tremendous rush of gigantic ambitions and of lavish cost? Side by side with the reckless good-humour, the extravagant optimism of many classes in New York, I thought I saw a sombreness and unrest among the poor, a dull sense of a burden of life too heavy to bear. They seemed to me for the most sad, reticent, grim. And there is another class which 1 did not meet, but which must be even •adder and more pathetic, and that in

the middle classes, who have to get along with moderate means in this carnival of luxury and extravagance and costliness. -

You must have money, and plenty of it, to find life tolerable—that is what, finally, I felt about New York; and so I had it in my heart to forgive the ferocious combatant who seeks for it; the fallen combatant who has failed to attain it; and even the beautiful young woman who weds the elderly millionaire. And so New York represents to me the three virtues —it gives me faith, it gives me hope, it gives me charity.— “Munsey’s Magazine.”