Palmyra, New York

“ In fifty years they have crept up from the Fourth Ward slums and the Five Points the whole length of the island, and have polluted the Annexed District to the Westchester line. Crowding all the lower wards, wherever business leaves a foot of ground unclaimed; strung along both rivers, like ball and chain tied to the foot of every street, and filling up Harlem with their restless, pent-up multitudes, they hold within their clutch the wealth and business of New York, hold them at their mercy in the day of mob-rule and wrath. ”

“ When from the window of a luxurious office thirty stories above the pavement I looked down upon the human current of Broadway, and over the roof-tops of the tongue of Manhattan, and across the bridges to other roof-tops, and upon the traffic of bay and river, I thought of that little room, first door to the left upstairs, in the town hall of Souilly, where more men than all of service age in all the city of New York had been commanded in two of the greatest battles of history. ”

“ Partners they might be to him in name, and, since they were all well-tried and trusted men, they no doubt were of assistance to him; but as far as executive power was concerned, they might as well have been junior clerks in some other firm, for Palmer went on his way automatically, self-balanced on the topmost crest of the huge wave of prosperity that was flooding America, quicker than the whole of the rest of the New York Market to scent coming trouble or prosperity in the world of money, prompter than any to take advantage of it. ”

“ The surface emotion stays always on the surface and lives actively in the front of one's senses and musings.
The feel of New York is a mixture of ice-water, a corrosive acid and human breath sweeping someway warmish against one's flesh.
It is immensely ungentle, New York: immensely human: immensely intriguing to all one's selves. It is too big to have prejudices and traditions of locality: so it leaves its dwellers free, by ones and multitudes, to be human beings. ”

“ The old home of the Maitlands overlooking Rittenhouse Square had been the scene of her début. In all the refined and decorous gayeties of Philadelphia's ultra-fastidious society she had participated. She had even looked upon money standardized New York in its delirium of extravagance, at least in so far as a sedate and well-born Philadelphia family could countenance such golden madness. During the year she had ranged like a conqueror—pardon the masculine appellation—between Palm Beach in the South and Bar Harbor in the North. ”

“ XXIX A MEETING ON THE AVENUE TRAIL Light sang in the veins and thoughts of a city. Light cleansed the streets of vapors. Light, the light of the sunshine of late May, made a far different New York from the New York under a blanket of March mist of the day of Jack's arrival. The lantern of the Metropolitan tower was all blazing gold; Diana's scarf trailed behind her in the shimmering abandon of her honi soit qui mal y pense chases on Olympus; Admiral Farragut grew urbane, sailing on a smooth sea with victory won ”

“ This whole idea of moving New York was folly. It is not the climate he needs, it is the greater quiet. My own advice was that he should go to Venice; it was his idea that the Mediterranean was what he needed. There are no noisy streets in Venice——"
I did not wait to hear more. The next morning when John D. Markright awoke—if his feverish tossings on his bed could be called sleep—it was a new city that met his gaze. In such a cause I do not spare myself. I did not begrudge John D. Markright the labor of that night. ”

“ On the southern shore of Long Island, who has not seen the sumptuous ultramarine, with a surf as snowy as apple-blossom? After shrill and meager New York, the color of that Atlantic is drenching.
The dancing harbor of New York is a beauty that never fades, but I hate the New York skyline except at night. In the day-time those punctured walls seem imbecile to me. They look out on the river with such a lidless, such an inhuman, stare. Nothing of man clings to them. They are barren as the rocks, empty as the deserted vaults of cliff-dwellers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All of it is because New York is one Large Condition made of human breaths and the worn scrapings of tired Youth rather than one large town made of [310] individuals and stone houses.
And in that is an odd enchantment for me who am born and grown in the places of Half-fear with an old isolated whole fear always on me.
In New York I am a partaker of that smooth manna of humanness as I am of the air and the sunshine and the little black specks of coal-soot: partly from choice, partly willy-nilly, partly in the sweeping unanalyzable pell-mell-ness of massed human nature. ”

“ You can't run away with New York as you propose unless you own it. I will not be a party to any plan for stealing New York. I am an honest man, Mr. Markright, and I would not steal a pin. To you the theft of a bit of land like the Island of Manhattan may be but a little thing, but while my parents are but poor, they are honest, and it shall never be said that I brought their gray hairs to the grave by helping to run away with even a part of the State of New York. ”

“ The sea of a mighty population, held in galling fetters, heaves uneasily in the tenements. Once already our city, to which have come the duties and responsibilities of metropolitan greatness before it was able to fairly measure its task, has felt the swell of its resistless flood. If it rise once more, no human power may avail to check it. The gap between the classes in which it surges, unseen, unsuspected by the thoughtless, is widening day by day. ”

“ If New York were in danger of falling to an enemy, the splendid length of Fifth Avenue and the majesty of the skyscrapers of lower Broadway and the bay and the rivers would become vivid to you in a way they never had before; or Washington, or San Francisco, or Boston—or your own town. The thing that is a commonplace, when you are about to lose it takes on a cherished value.
To-morrow the German guns might be thundering in front of the fortifications. The communiqués from Joffre became less frequent and more laconic. ”

“ Never had New York seemed to contain so many people; never had the overflow so congested avenue and street, circle and square, and the wretchedly inadequate and dirty street-car and subway service.
And into the heart of it all went Palla, engulfed in the great tides of Fifth Avenue, drifting into quieter back-waters to east and west, and sometimes caught and tossed about in the glittering maelstrom of Broadway when she ventured into the theatre district.
Opera, comedy, musical show and cinema interested her ”

“ Tralára! Tralára! Now forward to die;
For the banner, hurrah! and for sweethearts, good-by!
"Four hundred wild lads!" Maybe so. I'll be bound
'Twill be easy to count us, face up, on the ground.
If we hold the road open, though Death take the toll,
We'll be missed on parade when the States call the roll—
When the flags meet in peace and the guns are at rest,
And fair Freedom is singing Sweet Home in the West.
John Williamson Palmer.
On September 15, 1776, the British took possession of New York, and the American lines were withdrawn to the line of the Harlem River. ”

“ Its lower ranks are recruited from the scum of Palermo, who, combining extraordinary physical courage with the lowest type of viciousness, generally live by the same means that supports the East Side "cadet" in New York City, and who end either in prison or on the dissecting-table, or gradually develop into real Mafiusi and perhaps gain some influence. ”

“ I have in mind a house in Pell Street that has been raided no end of times by the police, and its population emptied upon Blackwell’s Island, or into the reformatories, yet is to-day honeycombed with scores of the conventional households of the Chinese quarter: the men worshippers of Joss; the women, all white, girls hardly yet grown to womanhood, worshipping nothing save the pipe that has enslaved them body and soul. Easily tempted from homes that have no claim upon the name, they rarely or never return. Mott Street gives up its victims only to the Charity Hospital or the Potter’s Field. ”

“ For one thing, the ubiquitous balconies and fire escapes serve of themselves to break the monotony of line, and lend, as it were, a peculiar texture to the scene; to say nothing of the oportunities they afford for the display of multifarious shreds and patches of colour. Then the houses themselves are often brightly, not to say loudly, painted; so that in the clear, sparkling atmosphere characteristic of New York, the most squalid slum puts on a many-coloured Southern aspect, which suggests Naples or Marseilles rather than the back streets of any English city. ”

“ Crowded out of the tenements to shift for himself, and quite ready to do it, he meets there the host of adventurous runaways from every State in the Union and from across the sea, whom New York attracts with a queer fascination, as it attracts the older emigrants from all parts of the world. A census of the population in the Newsboys’ Lodging-house on any night will show such an odd mixture of small humanity as could hardly be got together in any other spot. It is a mistake to think that they are helpless little creatures, to be pitied and cried over because they are alone in the world. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Queen, now Pearl, was the principal business street; fashion was to be found in the vicinity of the Battery, and Broad and Dock streets; the Vauxhall Gardens were at the foot of Reade; and to pass out of town, one would have to turn off Broadway into Chatham street, which extended through Park Row, and keep on to the Bowery. [Pg 38]
John Adams has left us a brief description of New York, as he saw it when passing through to the first Congress at Philadelphia in 1774, in company with Cushing, Paine, and Samuel Adams. ”

“ Paul and all the tight-built inland towns they murder you with narrowness and harshness and rancorous ill-will: they are scowlingly annoyed with you for making them murder you.
In New York they murder you with a large soft wave of indifferent insolence—no annoyance, no friction. New York eats you as it eats its dinner, rather liking you. ”

“ This kind of life was maintained until he was nearly nineteen years of age when he entered a store at Durham, New York, as a clerk. Here he allowed nothing to escape his attention and, by industry, coupled with frugality, he was enabled to enter a business on his own account when twenty-one. Mr. Palmer, like all other young men who have risen from poverty to affluence, was constantly alive to the problems of the day; especially did the subject of this narrative watch the indications of progress in his native country. ”

“ Of course, Campaspe replied. Tell her I shall be delighted.
On the way to the Ritz she recalled that she had agreed to join Hubert Miles and his young wife at Voisin's, but she did not regret this lapse of memory which, perhaps, had not been altogether unconscious. Driving up Park Avenue she peered ahead at the terraced apartment houses rising on either side. Soon, she mused, New York will resemble ancient Babylon. It will become a city of terraced palaces, with balconies and aerial gardens. How much New Yorkers like to move! There is the endless search for a new environment. ”

“ It is nothing fulfilling, nothing satisfying. It is merely human. It is half-lyric.
It reassures me as a person: it makes me feel human in all my surfaces.
Which are harder to humanize, in everybody, than any deepest deeps.
And it is therefore with all my surfaces, smoothly and restfully, I love New York. ”

“ Italian immigrant who claims so large a share of public attention, partly because he keeps coming at such a tremendous rate, but chiefly because he elects to stay in New York, or near enough for it to serve as his base of operations, and here promptly reproduces conditions of destitution and disorder which, set in the frame-work of Mediterranean exuberance, are the delight of the artist, but in a matter-of-fact American community become its danger and reproach. ”

“ The exterior of the houses, as well as the side pavement, are kept remarkably clean; and there is no intermixture of commerce, as there is at New York, the bustle of business being confined to the Quays, and one or two streets adjoining the river side.
The first idea which strikes you when you arrive at Philadelphia, is that it is Sunday: every thing is so quiet, and there are so few people stirring ”