Bellport, New York

“ And he would be a wretched ghost indeed if doomed to haunt only upper New York. But it happens that he has a sanctuary, a haven after his own heart, where he can still draw a breath of relief, among buildings small but full of age and dignity and with the look of homes about them; on restful, crooked little streets where there remain trees and grass-plots; in the old-time purlieus of Washington Square and Greenwich Village!
The history of old New York reads like a romance. ”

“ THE JUMEL MANSION
Alone in its brittle modern neighborhood, this lovely anachronism stands on the highest point of Manhattan, untroubled, unruffled, and undisturbed except by Sunday idlers to whom its orchards are just another breathing spot. Though it was Heath’s headquarters, then housed Washington, later was captured by Howe, and was one of the smartest suburban estates of Colonial New York, it will never be forgotten as the home of a person of no military or aristocratic consequence, yet of caprice, beauty, ambition, impropriety, common sense and eccentricity—yes, a woman. ”

“ Coming as I do from Europe to America, I am amazed at the apparent buoyancy and abundance of New York. The place seems to possess an inexhaustible vitality. But this towering, thundering, congested city, with such a torrent of traffic and such a concourse of people as I have never seen before, is, after all, the European door of America; it draws this superabundant and astounding life from trade, from a trade whose roots are dying.
When one looks at New York its assurance is amazing; when one reflects we realize its tremendous peril. ”

“ You will have then the most grandiose impression that New York is, in fact, inhabited; and that even though the spectacular luxury of New York be nearly as much founded upon social injustice and poverty as any imperfect human civilization in Europe, it is a boon to be alive therein!... In half an hour, in three-quarters of an hour, the vitality is clean gone out of the street. The shops have let down their rich gathered curtains, the pavements are deserted, and the roadway is no longer perilous. And nothing save a fire will arouse Fifth Avenue till the next morning. ”

“ Where is lime-white Paris, with its green and disciplined foliage, its hard unflinching tastefulness, its smartly organized viciousness, and the myriads of workers, noisily shod, streaming over the bridges in the gray cold light of dawn. Where is New York, the high city of clangor and infuriated energy, wind swept and competition swept, its huge buildings jostling one another and straining ever upward for a place in the sky, the fallen pitilessly overshadowed. ”

“ The New York World, of November 20th, 1892, publishes an article in connection with New York society, that, having received a place in that great Democratic journal, because of its undoubted truth, is worthy of a place in this volume. In speaking of the death of Mrs. Belmont, the World makes use of the occasion to express some remarkably forcible facts with regard to New York society. It says:—
“In the social history of New York it will be a lasting distinction to Mrs. ”

“ With your eyes peppered with dust, with your ears full of the clatter of the Elevated Road, and with the prairie breezes playfully buffeting you and waltzing with you by turns, as they eddy through the ravines of Madison, Monroe, or Adams-street, you take your life in your hand when you attempt the crossing of State-street, with its endless stream of rattling waggons and clanging trolley-cars. New York does not for a moment compare with Chicago in the roar and bustle and bewilderment, of its street life. ”

“ There was a pilgrim from the Five Towns who said that Fifth Avenue was architecturally the finest street in the world. This might pass for a guest's flattery, were it not that Mr. Arnold Bennett is of a nation which does not count gracious insincerity among its vices. New York must blushingly admit the truth of his judgment.
It is not (he said) harmonious. Its beauty is made up of units of beauty related only by position. This, too, is characteristically American. Each building must have its distinctive excellence. ”

“ It makes a pleasant break in the day trip from the capital of New England to the capital of the United States, to spend an hour tramping up and down a broad ship’s deck, or dining in a roomy, sun-filled cabin, while New York itself is as completely ignored as any small way-station along the run. New Yorkers themselves have long since become too accustomed to seeing the long train ferried upon the water-way that separates the two greatest boroughs of the city, to give it more than passing thought. ”

“ The restless, deeply sunk eyes, the excited, wearied features,—to what a life they bore witness? Better lie and sleep on Ocean Hill than live thus on Broadway! These figures resembled a few of those which I had seen at the Astor House; but I had already seen on Broadway both human beings and horses which I wished not to have seen on the soil of the New World, and which testify to dark passages of life even there. And yet,—how should it be otherwise, especially at New York? which is rather a large hotel, a caravanserai for the whole world, than a regular American city. ”

“ But philosophers are uncommon.
To Helen Maitland, leaving Fifth Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street and straying northwestward into the early autumn splendor of the Park, it seemed as though for the first time she could understand the viewpoint of those unidentified myriads to whom New York is a fetich; and as she walked on beneath the trees soon to lay aside their valedictory robes, she appreciated most fully those to whom Central Park is a fetich within a fetich, a guarded flame within the inmost chamber of the shrine. ”

“ Today more than ninety-nine per cent. of the population of the immensely populated island of Manhattan lives north of the City Hall. That cheap north wall, hidden under countless coats of white paint, is the one acute reminder of the days that were when the Hall was new—when the gentle square in which it stood was surrounded by the suburban residences of prosperous New Yorkers and when the waters of the Collect Pond—where the New York boys use to skate in the bitterness of old-fashioned winters—lapped its northerly edge. ”

“ Belmont that she was a conspicuous figure in good society before good society had been vulgarized. I have no quarrel with the society of to-day, which has merely followed the law of its evolution. I merely insist that the New York society of thirty years ago had all the good features of to-day, and was conspicuously free from certain faults which are now conspicuously prominent. ”

“ And everywhere to north, south, and east, the endless waste of city, stark, clean-cut, naked alike of tree and of art, unsoftened even by the haze of its own exudations—everywhere the window-riddled blocks of oblongs and cubes gridironed with steel rails—New York in all the painted squalor of its Pueblo splendour. ”

“ Brooklyn is as quiet as New York is bewildering and noisy: it is built upon the heights of Long Island; has glorious views over the wide harbour, and quiet broad streets, planted on each side with acanthus trees, a kind of Chinese tree, and I believe of the acacia family, which has a leaf like our ash, only much broader, and which bears long pods. There is also another kind of tree, with a taller stem, which gives shade and a peaceful and rural character to the streets. It is said that the merchants of New York go over to Brooklyn, where they have their house and home, to sleep. ”

“ And there was no doubt that if you were on top, a personality, New York was the most enchanting place in the world to live in, just as it must be the most unsatisfactory for the poor and insignificant. To have conquered New York meant more—several thousand times more—than conquering all the rest of the United States put together, with New York left out. Moreover, it was the only place where you could have any real fun, if you wanted your fun with the sort of men who drifted to New York from all parts of the nation as naturally as pilgrims went to Mecca. ”

“ Within half an hour you will be apologizing for New York. In their quiet, serene, contented way those happy Philadelphians will be making you a little shame-faced of the bustling madness of our heaven-touching Babel. Of course, your secret adoration of Manhattan, the greatest wild poem ever begotten by the heart of man, is not readily transmissible. You will stammer something of what it means to climb upward from the subway on a spring morning and see that golden figure over Fulton Street spreading its shining wings above the new day. ”

“ The Twilight Veil New York! How few of us call it home! We have been sucked into it, as into a whirlpool, and as we spin round and round on its mighty unrest our hearts and fancies find repose in memory—the memory of an old New England village, or a corn field and a split-rail fence and then the level prairie, or cotton fields and the red handkerchiefs of the negroes, or the vineyard slopes of Sicily, or the great white surf beating up the cliffs of Connemara. ”

“ You have the garden spot of the West, if not of the civilized world, and your people display a charm that must be, I dare say, typically American. Altogether, I am enchanted with the wonders I have beheld since landing at your New York, particularly with the habit your best people have of roughing it in camps like that of Mr. C. Belknap-Jackson among the mountains of New York, where I was most pleasantly entertained by himself and his delightful wife. ”

“ The next great event in the fashionable world was a Newport ball. A lady who had married a man of cultivation and taste, a member of one of New York’s oldest families, who had inherited from her father an enormous fortune, was at once seized with the ambition to take and hold a brilliant social position, to gratify which she built one of the handsomest houses in this city, importing interiors from Europe for it, and such old Spanish tapestries as had never before been introduced into New York ”

“ It will be in their trade, their resources, their activity, and their influence on the rest of the world, as well as in their population, that the towns of Manhattan will be first entitled to rank with the larger capitals of Europe. So obvious, rapid, and natural has been the advance of all the places, that it is not easy for the mind to regard anything belonging to them as extraordinary, or out of rule. There is not a port in the whole country that is less indebted to art and the fostering hand of Government than this. ”

“ If the Manhattan towns, or Manhattan, as we shall not scruple to term the several places that compose the prosperous sisterhood at the mouth of the Hudson—a name that is more ancient and better adapted to the history, associations, and convenience of the place than any other—continue to prosper as they have done, ere the close of the present century they will take their station among the capitals of the first rank. ”

“ Every boy and girl living on a farm in New York State twenty-five years or more ago, has in memory a picture like this: a stubbly hill-side field beset with russet shocks of corn and constellations of orange pumpkins, whence might be seen wide valleys filled with purple haze, and far hills bedecked with autumn tapestries woven about emerald patches of new wheat. ”

“ And even as this old guide-book boasts of the, to us, insignificant Liverpool of fifty years ago, the New York guidebooks are now vaunting of the magnitude of a town, whose future inhabitants, multitudinous as the pebbles on the beach, and girdled in with high walls and towers, flanking endless avenues of opulence and taste, will regard all our Broadways and Bowerys as but the paltry nucleus to their Nineveh. From far up the Hudson, beyond Harlem River, where the young saplings are now growing, that will overarch their lordly mansions with broad boughs, centuries old ”

“ You know already from description that Philadelphia is remarkable for its regularity and order. It has in this respect the character of the Quakers, and is a quiet city in comparison with New York, has no palaces or remarkable buildings, but is everywhere well built, has beautiful broad streets planted with trees, and behind these, broad causeways and many magnificent private houses, with marble steps and doorways, and particularly so in the fashionable streets. In each of the great quarters there is a large, green market, planted with trees like a park, where it is delightful to walk or sit. ”

“ The spinning lines of towering buildings on Broadway passed as mists in a dream.
As the velvet feet of the car touched the great bridge she lazily opened her eyes for a moment and gazed through the lace-work of steel at the broad sweep of the magnificent harbor. The dark blue hills of Staten Island framed the picture.
He was right. She had never seen New York before. Never before had its immense panorama been swept within two hours. Never before had she realized its dimensions. She had always felt stunned and crushed in the effort to conceive it. Today she had wings. ”

“ Across to Sixth Avenue and north, cuts the heart of New York. It is early; but already the great beast is stirring its limbs. Trucks rumble past. Trolley cars shoot south and north, clanking shrieking. Trumpeting automobiles whirr by with gleaming brasses. ”

“ Astor House is situated in Broadway, the great high-street and thoroughfare of New York, where people and carriages pour along in one incessant stream, and in true republican intermixture. Long lines of white and gilded omnibuses wind their way at an uninterrupted, rapid rate, as far as one can see, amid thousands of other vehicles, great and small. The broad side-paths are thronged with people of all classes; there are beautiful houses, and houses under erection ”