The New York World

“ To New York city alone belongs the insane custom, that could only have been derived from the King of Dahomey, of parading the household appurtenancies and goods of mankind through the streets upon a set day, and inviting all the world to look upon his poverty or his wealth. ”

“ New York is, I firmly believe, the most charitable city in the world. Nowhere is there so eager a readiness to help, when it is known that help is worthily wanted; nowhere are such armies of devoted workers, nowhere such abundance of means ready to the hand of those who know the need and how rightly to supply it. Its poverty, its slums, and its suffering are the result of unprecedented growth with the consequent disorder and crowding, and the common penalty of metropolitan greatness. ”

“ New York, then, as the window and front door of the United States, with an unchallenged financial, commercial, shipping and literary ascendency, has the pull over all her rivals. To nine-tenths of mankind New York is America. All the rest of the country is but the pedestal upon which New York stands. ”

“ But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world; saints and martyrs, dreamers and scoundrels, the traditions of a thousand races and a thousand religions, went to her making and throbbed and jostled in her streets. And over all that torrential confusion of men and purposes fluttered that strange flag, the stars and stripes, that meant at once the noblest thing in life, and the least noble, that is to say, Liberty on the one hand, and on the other the base jealousy the individual self-seeker feels towards the common purpose of the State. ”

“ That spirit—that determination to carry on—is part of what makes New York one of the great cities in the world. And that’s the spirit all of us can draw upon, as Americans, as we meet this challenge together. ”

“ Van Meter shrank back in his pew as a ripple of applause ran round the galleries.
“If men ask a sign to-day whether the Church of the living God exists in New York, what is our answer?
“Look about you. New York is the centre of the commerce, society, art, literature and politics of the Western World. Her port, in which fly the flags of every nation, is the gateway of two worlds. The feet of four millions daily press her pavements. Her walls frame the furnace in which are being tried by fire the faiths, hopes and dreams of the centuries past and to come. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Lamenting over his broken fortunes, and mourning for his poor Italy, he sauntered, upon a certain day, into the Garden of Plants, upon the further side of the Seine. It is a place where the neighboring world go to breathe the air of woods, and to relieve the stifling atmosphere of the city, with the openness and freedom of Nature. (In parenthesis, let us ask, when shall New York civilization reach such a kind provision for life?) ”

“ You are trying to sleep in the heart of Central New York, in the midst of all the thunder and the rush and the roar of her million-crowded streets, along which surges as a restless tide the turbid and foaming flood of city life. ”

“ New York may be harsh and blusterous and violent, but there is a breeze from the sea and a breeze of fraternity in the streets, and the Americans of all peoples in the world are a nation of still unbroken men. ”

“ NEW YORK THE increase of the towns of Manhattan, as, for the sake of convenience, we shall term New York and her adjuncts, in all that contributes to the importance of a great commercial mart, renders them one of the most remarkable places of the present age. Within the distinct recollections of living men, they have grown from a city of the fifth or sixth class to be near the head of all the purely trading places of the known world. ”

“ New York is a little place, full of the small thinkings of little places. It has great pride and wonderful industry—just like little places—but of the doings of the great world, it knows everything too late. Long before the big wars the Bohemia of New York city knows what is to be, and prepares; one day New York city wake up and scream the stale news. So wit’ everyt’ing. ”

“ I must also make myself somewhat better acquainted with the five points in the refined life of New York; for I know that there, as in all great cities, is also to be found in the life of the higher class the five ugly and dangerous points. ”

“ My thought is that there should be somewhere—and why not in New York?—a Place of Exchange for the New Ideas that the world evolves each year, a central spot where all that is new in science, philosophy, practical political machinery, and all else of the world's mind-products shall be placed on exhibition where those interested may see. ”

“ The cynic may sneer that the analogy between the City of the Great Assassin and the City of the Boss extends further than the sea-gate to the city. But to the millions whose eyes have rested hungrily upon the nearing land such reflections are unknown. To them the New World, of which New York holds the keys, has ever been arrayed in the rainbow garment of Hope. New York, merely as the portal of the continent, had long been to them as a kind of New Jerusalem, let down from Heaven in mercy to hard-driven, hopeless men. ”

“ We are surrounded by Internationals—our city is at the mercy of men who are restrained by no law, by no religion, by no morality, by no sentiment of humanity, from using any means or methods they judge likely to serve their ends, and New York is hardly less wealthy and more combustible than Paris. ”

“ But it must be remembered that New York, as a great emporium of commerce, and as a place of general resort, not only from all parts of the States, but from most parts of the world, has always a large pauper population to provide for ”

“ CHAPTER XVI. Position of New York—Externals of the city—Conveyances— Maladministration—The stores—The hotels—Curiosities of the hospital— Ragged schools—The bad book—Monster schools—Amusements and oyster saloons—Monstrosities—A restaurant—Dwelling-houses—Equipages—Palaces —Dress—Figures—Manners—Education—Domestic habits—The ladies—The gentlemen—Society—Receptions—Anti-English feeling—Autographs—The "Buckram Englishman."
New York, from its position, population, influence, and commerce, is worthy to be considered the metropolis of the New World. The situation of it is very advantageous. ”

“ The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there’s nowhere else. It’s the top of the world. ”

“ There is something rather fine in the desperate self-confidence of every American in the ultimate rise of his particular star. Out of it, I believe, grows much of that feverish activity which the visitor to New York invariably records among his first impressions. One has barely arrived, and been whirled from the dock into the roar and rush of Twenty-third Street and Broadway, when he begins to realize the relentless energy of the place. ”

“ When I came to New York as a boy, forty years ago, there were two ladies who were skillful leaders and whose ability and social power the fashionable world acknowledged. They gave the handsomest balls and dinners given in this city, and had at them all the brilliant people of that period. ”

“ Father Knickerbocker, coming to smoke his pipe here, will be in good company, you perceive!
The recollections of many living persons who recall the old Square and other parts of early New York, bring forcibly to us the realisation of the speed with which this country of ours has evolved itself. In one man's lifetime, New York has grown from a small town just out of its [Pg 28] Colonial swaddling clothes to the greatest city in the world. ”

“ If the world at large judges the American Commonwealth by New York, then New York owes a double duty both to the American Commonwealth and to the world at large. Hence the extreme interest which the latest evolution in the civic development of New York naturally arouses. ”

“ There are in New York city a number of merchants, [284] bankers, brokers, and other persons eminent in the business world, and respectable in all social relations, who never make an important business move in any direction, until after consultation with one or another of the Witches of New York. ”

“ If in addition to these great qualifications he were to realise the possibilities of his vocation, and to become inspired by a supreme enthusiasm—say to redeem New York, and make the second city in the world in size the first city of the world as a place of human habitation—there is no knowing what incalculable good might lie within his grasp. Certainly no man in all New York has such a chance of combining all the elements that make for righteousness and progress in the city as the young Californian millionaire-editor who founded the Journal. ”

“ And I have heard my friends, the S.'s, of New York, speak of a young landscape painter of that city, a man of estimable character, and possessed of unmistakeable talent, who not long since, consulting with his young wife as to the best mode of managing for themselves and their two little ones, came to the agreement that the best mode of all would be for them—to die! ”

“ In this we consider ourselves highly honored and introduced to the best society of New York. The toilets and the diamonds were resplendent, and one figure of the “German” (cotillon) , in which the ladies formed two groups in the centre, facing inward with their bright trains spread out behind them, was a splendid piece of color and costume. ”

“ It is not the tale of a New York which is intrinsically decent, hospitable, clean and square, and which tries to do its best, somehow, though it is pinched between the geographical limitations of Hudson and East River, the political limitations of enthusiastic, youthful Democracy and old-world British party government, the ethnological limitations of Sicilian and Syrian and Russian Jew—not to mention native-born immigrants from the, of course, chivalrous South and the, of course, big-bulking, manly, Stetson-hatted West, the climatic limitations of a biting winter and a scorching summer. ”

“ But for all this, Americans seem to find wondrous charms in this city, and prolong their stay for one month to two, then to six, and not unfrequently rush back to New York, settle up their affairs, and return to live here permanently, despising the French more and more every year, of course! ”

“ Naturally desiring to represent in the most favourable colours the world from which I came, I touched but slightly, though indulgently, on the antiquated and decaying institutions of Europe, in order to expatiate on the present grandeur and prospective pre-eminence of that glorious American Republic, in which Europe enviously seeks its model and tremblingly foresees its doom. Selecting for an example of the social life of the United States that city in which progress advances at the fastest rate, I indulged in an animated description of the moral habits of New York. ”

“ This tendency townwards, which is one of the most striking characteristics of the English-speaking race all round the world, is nowhere more conspicuous than in the United States; and New York, of all American cities, is that where this centripetal law is just now seen to be operating most powerfully. In the amalgamation by which the Greater New York has come into being we have the latest manifestation of the craving on the part of all modern men to come together in ever-increasing agglomerations of humanity. The fissiparous tendency so perceptible in politics is not visible in cities. ”

“ If New York is to be raised to the position of being the ideal city of the New World it will not have to be by mere newspaper talk, but by the man behind the newspaper who can make his newspaper the organising, vivifying, rallying centre for all the best forces and influences of the city. If Mr. Hearst has soul enough and heart enough he may do it. ”

“ You'd think New York people was all wise; but no. They don't get a chance to learn. Everything's too compressed. Even the hayseeds are baled hayseeds. But what else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other? ”

“ The following day an excursion was proposed to one of the islands in the neighbourhood of the city, where right-minded men have established a large institution for the reception and assistance of emigrants, who, in sickness or destitution, arrive in New York from Europe. ”

“ The Five Points is one of the oldest portions of New York, and received its name from five streets which open here into a large square. These streets, and especially the square, are the haunts of the extremest misery of that great city. Lower than to the Five Points it is not possible for fallen human nature to sink. ”

“ These three men are to him America. Everything else in the national institutions in which Americans pride themselves he only sees through a glass darkly, if he sees it at all.
These dwellers in tenement-houses in New York, to whom the police—of whom there were then 4,000—are judge, executive, and legislature, constitution and town meeting, comprise two-thirds of the population of the city. ”

“ To-morrow, my friends, the Harts, return to Philadelphia. My companion to New York is a lawyer, an elderly gentleman, very estimable and good-hearted, I believe, but who has the fault of having too good a memory for——verses, and a fancy for repeating, long and often, very prosaic pieces from the German, French, and English authors, which are less amusing to prosaic listeners. ”