Utica, New York

“ I never conceived or realized, until on my way to Utica under keepers, on what a slender thread hangs the liberty of the people of the State of New York. Only the day before, I was feeling that the spell that had lain upon me for more than a month, was broken; all things began to appear more natural; my appetite became strong, though I was weak in body ”

“ As one county after another instructed its delegates for Tilden, professional politicians exhibited much astonishment. To the Canal ring the trend of public sentiment toward a man of his record and independence was especially ominous. Suddenly, such violent opposition appeared that the New York Herald, studying the Democratic papers in the State, declared that outside of New York City only the Utica Observer, which was influenced by Kernan, favoured his nomination. ”

“ Hamilton Fish was the favourite candidate for governor in the Utica convention. His sympathies leaned toward the conservatives of his party; but the moderation of his speech and his conciliatory manners secured the good wishes of both factions, and he received seventy-six votes on the first ballot. Fish was admittedly one of the most popular young men in New York City. He had never sought or desired office. In 1842, the friends of reform sent him to Congress from a strong Democratic district, and in 1846, after repeatedly and peremptorily declining, the Whig convention, to save theii. ”

“ We frequently ran along the line of cuttings for the railroad now in progress between Utica and Schnectady. The rocky nature of the ridge whose line they pursue, offers formidable impediments; but the work was proceeding with great rapidity notwithstanding. This railway, when complete, together with the canal by whose side it runs, will afford a facility of communication between New York and Utica, which, for speed and convenience, can have no rival. ”

“ Forty-two thousand settlers are said to have come into Indiana in 1816, and to have raised the population to 112,000.
Letters from New York describe the condition of that state west of Utica as one of astonishing prosperity. Log cabins were disappearing, and frame and brick houses taking their place. The pike from Utica to Buffalo was almost a continuous village, and the country for twenty miles on either side was filling up with an industrious population. ”

“ A month later, having examined "the land and the water with scrutinising eye, superintending our operations and exploring all our facilities and embarrassments" from the great drop at Lockport to the waters of the Mohawk at Utica, he again refers to the future Queen City of the Lakes with prophetic power. "Buffalo is to be the point of beginning, and in fifty years it will be next to New York in wealth and population." [186]
It is doubtful if any statesman endowed with less geniusi. 244 than Clinton could have kept the project alive during this period of indifference and discouragement. ”

“ And, as tinted photographs had gone out of fashion even in Utica, and as the advent of moving pictures was beginning to kill vaudeville everywhere except in New York, the ever-provincial, thither the Quest family drifted. And there, through the next few years, they sifted downward through stratum after stratum of the metropolitan purlieus, always toward some darker substratum—always a little lower.
The childishly attractive mother, in blue velvet and white cat's fur, still did fancy skating at rink and Hippodrome. ”

“ They look so much at home and you come so near them that you can hardly believe you shall be in ten minutes in the depth of the forest again.”
At Utica he found a host of friends, was received [62] with Western hospitality, and had twenty or thirty invitations to dinners and parties. A Utica belle whom he had known in New Haven made up a picnic in his behoof to Trenton Falls, the scenery of which he described so admirably in “Edith Linsey.” It was his hap to visit Trenton on the very day when a Miss Suydam, a young lady from New York, fell over the falls and was killed. ”

“ Notwithstanding our altruistic intention to accept cheerfully whatever accommodations offered, our delighted surprise may be imagined when we entered the beautiful, wide, white marble lobby of the brand-new Hotel Utica! Our rooms were big and charmingly furnished. One had light blue damask hangings, and cane furniture; another mahogany and English chintz; each of them had its own bathroom with best sort of plumbing.
The food is very good and reasonable as to price. One dinner for instance was a dollar and thirty cents for each of us, including crêpes Suzette, which were delicious! ”

“ A long walk through Utica made us acquainted with a regular and handsomely built city, which rises from the south bank of the Mohawk River to an elevation of 150 feet. Among the stately buildings are six large hotels, the handsome city hall, the postoffice and the bank edifice. There is also a State Lunatic Asylum. Utica, being in the center of a great dairy region, has become the most important cheese market in the United States. ”

“ The city was so big, the throngs of people on the street so intent on their own business without apparently being able to bestow a thought upon others, and the noise so wearying and bewildering, that it would be very pleasant to stand once more by the side of the long, dusty road which stretched away in the distance, like a yellow ribbon between the green and nodding trees. ”

“ Aunt Eunice was very much struck with the changes. Her surprise really delighted the little girl. They took her over in Hammersley Street. Old Mr. Bounett seemed quite feeble, and though he was not in his court attire, he had a ruffled shirt-front and small-clothes. Aunt Eunice thought him delightful. It seemed queer to think of a French quarter in New York in the old part of the last century where people met and read from the French poets and dramatists, and almost believed when civilization set in earnestly, French must be the polite language of the day. ”

“ 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. ”

“ An octopus of a city, New York, might be taken as the symbol of this extraordinary nation; it displays the vertigo, the audacity, and all the lack of proportion that characterise American life. Near the poverty of the Ghetto and the disturbing spectacle of Chinatown you may admire the wealth of Fifth Avenue and the marble palaces which plagiarise the architecture of the Tuscan cities. ”

“ At that period there were a good many people removing from the place where I lived, and the vicinity, to seek a settlement at Utica. That place is now a large city, but at the time I speak of, about five and thirty years ago, it was a small settlement, and surrounded with forests. The soil in that quarter was, however, reputed to be very rich, and crowds of people were flocking to the land of promise.
Among others who had made up their minds to follow the fashion of that day, was a family by the name of Stebbins, consisting of seven persons. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He was happier now than he had been on the Monday morning previous; for, although charmed to a certain degree with the city, he preferred to live in the country, and was decidedly impatient to be at Berry’s Corner again, where there would be no danger of another arrest.
Life in New York no longer had any charms for him. He had seen Bob and Tom at work, and felt certain that next summer when called upon to weed the long rows of carrots, the task would [Pg 229] seem less laborious as compared with theirs, and decidedly more pleasant. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whether the thrush sang or not, it mattered little to us, for somewhere, falling from gray rocks, hidden away among deep shadows of pine and maple, its voice hushed to a soothing murmur as of wind among the pines, Trenton falls was singing its age- old songs. Then, too, we felt the wordless melody of our own joyous hearts filled with morning's enthusiasm.
The country around Utica is very beautiful. Toward the north a short distance beyond the Mohawk river lay the picturesque Deerfield hills, beginning of the scenic highlands which stretch away toward the Adirondack mountains and the St. ”

“ Housing conditions among the Italians are as bad as can be imagined and the most crowded quarters in our cities are those inhabited by them. Four hundred and ninety-two families in one block is the record, and it is held by New York, on Prince Street, between Mott and Elizabeth Streets; while Philadelphia can boast of having the most unwholesome tenements, where air is a luxury and daylight unknown. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The reproduction is made easier in New York because he finds the material ready to hand in the worst of the slum tenements; but even where it is not he soon reduces what he does find to his own level, if allowed to follow his natural bent. [1] The Italian comes in at the bottom, and in the generation that came over the sea he stays there. In the slums he is welcomed as a tenant who "makes less trouble" than the contentious Irishman or the order-loving German, that is to say: is content to live in a pig-sty and submits to robbery at the hands of the rent-collector without murmur. ”

“ Octavia said at once that was the kind she wanted to see in Chicago. Of what use to meet more charming and refined people like in New York or Philadelphia. She wanted to sample the "rough-hewn." And we both felt, Mamma, one must have a nice streak in one to go on being kind to a person who has a continual cold in her head. ”

“ As a family accumulates a little money, plans are made to move out of these sections in lower New York and to settle in different surroundings in the upper part of the city, on Lexington Avenue or in the Bronx. ”

“ Here we parted in the most courteous manner, and I continued along the left bank for two or three miles farther, when I reached the ruins of Utica, situated at the foot of the hills, at a height of about 30 feet above the level of the bottom of the valley, and about a mile distant from the left bank of the river, and 5 miles from the sea-shore, with nothing but a dreary flat marsh intervening. Utica was originally seated on the sea-shore, and was a port of considerable importance; the marshes that now exist have been gradually formed during the lapse of centuries ”

“ Fields is gone, and his old friend and neighbor Whipple, who was one of the earliest of the noted lyceum lecturers. The old corner in the old corner book-store is gone, and with it have vanished many of the happy company that gathered there, not only of orators, but of famous authors. The lyceum of the last generation is gone, but it is not surprising that those who recall with the Utica Herald its golden prime should cherish a kindly and regretful feeling for an institution which was so peculiarly American, and which served so well the true American spirit and American life. ”

“ O you who have been a schoolboy and lived for months and months in a pent-up Utica, where the glimpse of a girl is as welcome and as rare as a sunbeam in a cellar, you can imagine how the two hours and forty-five minutes were improved—and Chicago eighty miles away. It is true we all turned for a moment to catch a last glimpse of the University dome, towering over the treetops ”

“ That first breathless impression of New York! How she had feared it, that first dusky evening, when, shrinking in a doorway before the onrush of driven multitudes, she had felt the very air dragged from her nostrils, obliterating her individuality, routing her courage, stunning her senses. She had stood a long time, clinging to her meager sheltering, disheartened at the fury at her feet, awed by the flaming ladders to the impending stars—no inanimate stones, but living rocks, endlessly climbing, which must end by toppling over on her in an obliterating crash. ”

“ 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. ”