New Yorkers

“ Almost any other kind of young man suddenly uplifted by strange fortune they might have known some parallel for, but a newsboy of New York! All the New Yorkers they had met or heard of had been so rich and grand as to make them feel themselves, by contrast, mere country paupers, quite shivering with poverty and huddling for protection in their barely clean rags, so what was there to go on? ”

“ Neither the sons of the men who once lived in these houses, nor the Germans whose names are now upon the doors, nor, for the matter of that, we English, who claim New York as the second of our towns, are the to-day‘s New Yorkers. ”

“ Pilkings had displayed ill-feeling over the passing of the amiable elastic-sided Congress shoe. But that was practically forgotten, and Father began to feel fairly certain of his job.
There are three sorts of native New-Yorkers: East Side Jews and Italians, who will own the city; the sons of families that are so rich that they swear off taxes; and the people, descendants of shopkeepers and clerks, who often look like New-Englanders, and always listen with timid admiration when New-Yorkers from Ohio or Minnesota or California give them information about the city. ”

“ If I spoke with Altrurian breadth of the way New-Yorkers live, my dear Cyril, I should begin by saying that the New-Yorkers did not live at all. But outside of our happy country one learns to distinguish, and to allow that there are several degrees of living, all indeed hateful to us, if we knew them, and yet none without some saving grace in it. You would say that in conditions where men were embattled against one another by the greed and the envy and the ambition which these conditions perpetually appeal to here, there could be no grace in life ”

“ And then some one asked him what he considered the most striking and prominent trait of New Yorkers.
“The most visible and peculiar trait of New York folks,” answered Bud, “is New York. Most of ’em has New York on the brain. They have heard of other places, such as Waco, and Paris, and Hot Springs, and London; but they don’t believe in ’em. They think that town is all Merino. Now to show you how much they care for their village I’ll tell you about one of ’em that strayed out as far as the Triangle B while I was working there.
“This New Yorker come out there looking for a job on the ranch. ”

“ I can imagine it at times winking such an eye and cocking in derision the gilded cap with which the New-Yorkers have lately crowned it. They pass it in all kinds of vehicles, and there are all kinds of people in them, though there are sometimes no people at all, as when the servants have been sent out to exercise the horses, for nobody’s good or pleasure, and in the spirit of that atrocious waste which runs through our whole life. ”

“ Do New-Yorkers control the capital, rule the politics, build the palaces, direct the newspapers, furnish the entertainment, manufacture the literature, set the pace in society? Even the socialists and mobocrats are not native. Successive invaders, as in Rome, overrun and occupy the town. ”

“ Upon those hills and mountains live nearly a hundred thousand New Yorkers—men whose business interests are closely bound up in the metropolis of the New World but whose social and home ties are laid in a neighboring state. ”

“ This indeed merits a closer study than can be given here, for it is the life led by vast numbers of prosperous New Yorkers who love both the excitement of the city and the repose of the country, and who aspire to unite the enjoyment of both in their daily existence. ”

“ When these last were not literally all Bostonians they were New Yorkers who might have been mistaken for such—never indeed by Bostonians themselves, but only by other New Yorkers, the rich and guileless; so the effect as of a vague tribute to culture the most authentic (if I speak not too portentously) was left over for the aftertaste of simple and subtle alike. ”

“ Within view were Americans of all kinds, French and Germans, Italians and Austrians, Spaniards and Moors, Scandinavians and negroes, born New Yorkers and born citizens of most of the capitals of civilisation and semi-barbarism. There were actresses, dancers, shop girls, cocottes; touts, thieves, confidence-men, mission workers; artists and students from the musty University building, tramps and drunkards from the “barrel-houses” and “stale-beer shops;” and, across the square to the north, representatives of New York’s oldest and most noted families. ”

“ I am supposing you to have walked down a street of tenement-houses to the North river, as the New-Yorkers call the Hudson; and I wish I could give some notion of the beauty and majesty of the stream, some sense of the mean and ignoble effect of the city’s invasion of the hither shore. The ugliness is, indeed, only worse in degree, but not in kind, than that of all city water-fronts. ”

“ In such parts of the city, except when No Trespassing signs prevent, on any day of the open season scores of men and youths may be seen whose work and homes are generally in the densest parts of the city, respectable citizens from the extreme east and west sides of Manhattan, artisans and clerks, salesmen and small shopkeepers, who, quite unexpectedly in some cases, share the ancient fret and longing of the primitive man in common with those other New Yorkers who can go farther out on Long Island or farther up into New York State to satisfy it. ”

“ There are many things which unite to render the avenues unseemly and unsightly, such as the apparently desperate tastelessness and the [Pg 265] apparently instinctive uncleanliness of the New-Yorkers. But as I stand at some point commanding a long stretch of one of their tiresome perspectives, which is architecturally like nothing so much as a horse’s jawbone, with the teeth broken or dislodged at intervals, I can blame nothing so much for the hideous effect as the rapacity of the land-owner holding on for a rise, as it is called. ”

“ But there is one point in which the New-Yorkers have an immeasurable advantage over the Philadelphians,—an advantage which proves their city as much superior to Philadelphia as Paris is to a country town of France, or London to a rotten borough; viz. the New York oyster-cellars remain open until three or four in the morning, whereas the Philadelphians close theirs very soon after one: a custom which is vulgar and provincial in the extreme; and prevents many a gentleman, who has made but an indifferent supper at a party, from procuring himself the gratification of the nightmare. ”

“ He knows who will come, who will not come, but will send regrets. In case of a pinch, he can fill up the list with young men, picked up about town, in black swallow-tailed coats, white vests, and white cravats, who, in consideration of a fine supper and a dance, will allow themselves to be passed off as the sons of distinguished New Yorkers. ”

“ New-Yorkers do not doubt, and indeed have no reason to doubt, that their city, now numbering little more than one-third of the population of London, will, within the next fifty years, be greater than the metropolis of the British empire. ”

“ The greatest problem of this metropolis is not how best to be in this place or that, but how fastest to go from one to the other, and the New-Yorkers have made guesses at the riddle, bad and worse, on each of the avenues, which, in their character of mere roadways, look as if the different car-tracks had been in them first, and the buildings, high and low, had chanced along their sides afterward. ”

“ It will come with more leisure, more Englishmen, and the inevitable imitation of ourselves in that and in other things. They hate us, but the tail of their eye is always on England’s big finger writing on the wall. The Eastern men copy our accent, our clothes, our customs. The New Yorkers are already good sportsmen, and they owe it to us that they are. ”

“ She hated her big showy place on Long Island, she was tired of the spring trip to London and Paris, where one met at every turn the faces one had grown sick of seeing all winter, and she declared that in the early summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers... ”

“ If we had a big house in New York, such as I would build, it would be an introduction in itself. After all, these Chicagoans aren’t even a snapper on the real society whip. It’s the Easterners who set the pace, and the New-Yorkers most of all. ”

“ Secure in our material prosperity, we New-Yorkers do not always recall those incidents in the history of the city which deserve to be forever memorable. We are not often accused of modesty—but we are over-modest, are we not?—when we allow our children to be taught that the first bloodshed of the Revolution was in the Boston Massacre, forgetting that the Liberty Pole fight took place in New York six weeks earlier. ”

“ It isn’t that they’d jeer at me, though they would, of course—because most of them haven’t any ambition and just spend their money on their backs, or on the races, or anyhow. No, I haven’t the confidence these New-Yorkers have. Why, I whisper to the car conductors to let me off at the corner, and I do it as quietly as I can, for I don’t want them all looking at me. But a man who was brought up in the city, he just glances up from his paper and says “Twenty-third!” And probably nobody takes any notice of him, except the conductor. I wonder if I’ll ever be so at home here as they are. ”

“ The New-Yorkers are generous, hospitable, and friendly, and are glad to offer all the pleasantest forms of amusement and hospitality to an agreeable girl who looks neat and attractive and is amiable and vivacious. ”

“ Apart from nationality, there is danger to free government both in the growth of New York City, and in the gigantic fortunes of New Yorkers. The income, they tell me, of one of my merchant friends is larger than the combined salaries of the president, the governors, and the whole of the members of the legislatures of all the forty-five States and territories. ”

“ There are thousands of otherwise well-informed New-Yorkers to whom its very name is unknown. And yet it is an important political centre, the capital of the Yiddish country, and the recipient of many special favors at the hands of a paternal municipality. ”

“ Indignant if they are pointed at as “no Americans,” they seem to separate themselves from everything that is American: they spend summers in England, winters in Algeria, springs in Rome, and Coloradans say with a sneer, “Good New Yorkers go to Paris when they die.” ”

“ Her hair is sort of sandy, and I don’t know what color eyes she has. I never knew you to take such an interest in folks before.
You ask me how I like the people here—I suppose you mean the New-Yorkers generally. Well, I guess I shall get to like them in time. They ain’t as stuck up as you’d think. That sassy way of theirs don’t mean anything half the time. They just mind their own business and they haven’t got time for anything else. They don’t worry their heads about anybody. ”

“ A trip abroad has become a purely social function to a large number of wealthy Americans, including “presentation” in London and a winter in Rome or Cairo. And just as a “smart” Englishman is sure to tell you that he has never visited the “Tower,” it has become good form to ignore the sight-seeing side of Europe; hundreds of New Yorkers never seeing anything of Paris beyond the Rue de la Paix and the Bois. They would as soon think of going to Cluny or St. Denis as of visiting the museum in our park! ”

“ Well-fed New-Yorkers will therefore be able to see with their own eyes how starving people eat—people who have no money to buy food with. Before each ticket-holder takes the seat to which he is entitled he, or more probably she, will receive ten thousand dollars in cash, by simply using brains. Let us see if New-Yorkers are as clever as they are charitable. Also, I shall marry Grace Goodchild in June.
[Signed] H. R.
A great many people announce an epoch-making idea and expect the world to remember it ever thereafter. ”

“ Then we’ll go away in the parlor-car to be New-Yorkers for the rest of our lives and to leave the Natives way behind us.
I don’t know but it’s thinking of that little girl with the dark-brown eyes that makes me lonelier sometimes. Here’s my love to her.
Your own
JACK.
IV NEW YORK, Oct. 7, 1894.
DEAR MIRIAM,—You mustn’t think that I’m lonely every day. I haven’t time to be lonely generally. It’s only now and then nights that I feel as if I’d like to have somebody to talk to about old times. But I don’t understand what you mean about this Miss Stanwood. ”

“ In studying the history of the province, I am impressed with the debt New Yorkers of Dutch descent owe, not to their forefathers, but to their foremothers; the conspicuous decorum of life of these women and their great purity of morals were equalled by their good sense and their wonderful capacity in both domestic and public affairs. They were as good patriots as they were good business women ”

“ They never walk in the streets but in the most showy and extreme toilet, and I have known twenty, forty, and sixty dollars paid for a bonnet to wear in a morning saunter up Broadway.
[2] These are the titles of three omnibuses which run up and down Broadway all the day long.
[3] The New Yorkers have begun to see the evil of their ways, as far as regards their carriage-road in Broadway,—which is now partly Macadamised. It is devoutly to be hoped, that the worthy authorities will soon have as much compassion on the feet of their fellow-citizens, as they have begun to have for their brutes. ”

“ Is it fair to judge a man by his post-office address? Why, I’ve seen Kentuckians who hated whiskey, Virginians who weren’t descended from Pocahontas, Indianians who hadn’t written a novel, Mexicans who didn’t wear velvet trousers with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen, spendthrift Yankees, cold-blooded Southerners, narrow-minded Westerners, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on the street to watch a one-armed grocer’s clerk do up cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man and don’t handicap him with the label of any section. ”