Western New York

“ These are the men who constitute, to a great extent, the people of Western New York. But the school-house, I know, is among them. Education is among them. They read, and write, and think. Here, too, are women, educated, refined, and intelligent; and here are men who know the history of their country, and the laws of their country, and the institutions of their country; and men, lovers of liberty always, and yet lovers of liberty under the Constitution of the country, and who mean to maintain that Constitution with all their strength. ”

“ Although of New York, I am still a citizen of the Northwest. The Northwest extends eastward to the base of the Alleghany Mountains, and does not all of western New York lie westward of the Alleghany Mountains? Whence comes all the inspiration of free soil which spreads itself with such cheerful voices over all these plains? ”

“ New York is one of the most wonderful products of our wonderful western civilization. It is itself a world in epitome. Thoroughly cosmopolitan in its character, almost every nationality is represented within its boundaries, and almost every tongue spoken. It is the great monetary, scientific, artistic and intellectual centre of the western world. Containing much that is evil, it also abounds with more that is good. ”

“ An enumeration of its inhabitants, in 1790, showed a population of 1100. What a contrast with Western New-York at the present day. The Counties handed over to me for the purpose of the present publication, are Alleghany, Cattaraugus, Cayuga, Chautauque, Chemung, Erie, Genesee, Livingston, Monroe, Niagara, Orleans, Ontario, Seneca, Steuben, Tompkins, Wayne, and Yates. These counties, or most of them at all events, belong to what may, perhaps, with propriety, be denominated Western New-York—but some of them are without the pale of what may be fairly termed the "Genesee Country." ”

“ The raw products of the disappearing forests of western New York— lumber, staves, pot and pearl ashes, etc., and the growing surplus of agricultural products, began to flow in increasing volume down this greater Hudson River to New York City. The farther west was also turning its streams of commerce into this channel. The tolls of the canal system were over half a million dollars immediately upon its completion ”

“ Down the western streets one gets the sky hung in long cloud-barred strips, [Pg 41] like Japanese paintings, celestial tranquil yellows and greens and pink luminosity toning down to the reeking blue-brown edge of the distant New Jersey atmosphere, and the clear, black, hard activity of crowd and trolley-car and Elevated railroad. Against this deepening color came the innumerable little lights of the house cliffs and the street tier above tier. New York is lavish of light, it is lavish of everything, it is full of the sense of spending from an inexhaustible supply. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Beginning with New York, as that is the point we started from, New York was built, is building, will ever be building in huge blocks of steel and stone, and the ambitious of every city and country in the world will keep pouring into it and crowding its floor space and shoving it up higher and higher into towering cubes. New York dominates the whole of the Western Hemisphere and weights securely the Eastern coast of the map, and because of all this weight and importance, New Yorkers fancy they are the Americans of America, but New York is not half as typically American as Chicago ”

“ Originally, it was denominated the "Genesee County" but now wears the distinctive appellation of "Western New-York," and embraces, if I am correctly informed, that portion of the State lying west of a line running north and south through Seneca Lake. Its settlement may probably be said to have commenced about the year 1787. ”

“ It will be remembered that this was in the year 175-, or long before even speculation had brought any portion of western New York within the bounds of civilization. At that distant day there were two great channels of military communication between the inhabited portion of the colony of New York and the frontiers which lay adjacent to the Canadas,—that by Lakes Champlain and George, and that by means of the Mohawk, Wood Creek, the Oneida, and the rivers we have been describing. ”

“ Even the richest and most cultivated tracts of America, that I have seen, except the Western part of New York, which is unquestionably the ugliest, and dullest, and most unpoetical region on earth, have a young untamed freshness about them, which you do not find in England. ”

“ They said we western men had to bring our produce, and whatever we had to sell, down to the New York market, in order to dispose of it. I made up my mind, if New York was the head and mouth of Uncle Sam, that his body and heart were in the great central West, his hands upon the treasury at Washington and his feet were of California, like unto polished gold, washed by the surf of the Pacific Ocean. ”

“ We know what New York is thinking before New York herself knows it, because we visit the metropolis to find out. Sleeping-cars have no terrors for us, and a man who has never been west of Philadelphia seems to us a singularly benighted being. Those of our Western school-teachers who don’t see Europe for three hundred dollars every summer get at least as far East as Concord, to be photographed “by the rude bridge that arched the flood.”
That fine austerity which the voluble Westerner finds so smothering on the Boston and New York express is lost utterly at Pittsburg. ”

“ Surveying in retrospect the story of Manhattan, we see that New York City has been in succession the Indian’s home, the Dutchman’s camp, village, and municipality, the English and the American city, and the modern metropolis of the Western world. Its population has been Indian, Dutch, and always, since the white man came, cosmopolitan. ”

“ No one nurtured in New England, amid the veneration of fine trees, can traverse the more recently settled regions of New York, and especially the far Western States, without bemoaning the recklessness with which the ancient glory of the forest is sacrificed. ”

“ Like the Western Army and Army of the Potomac during the war, the City of New York possesses its troop of bummers—men who hate the discipline of life, detest marching in the ranks of workers, and hold industry in abomination. ”

“ London thinks New York puts on airs, New York complains of Chicago’s want of modesty, Chicago can see that Kansas City and Omaha are aggressively boastful, and these cities acknowledge the expansive self-appreciation of Denver and Helena.
Does going West work a radical difference in a man’s character? Hardly. We are all cut out of the same piece of cloth. The Western man is the Eastern or the Southern man let loose, with his leading-strings cut. But the change of situation creates immense diversity in interests and in spirit. ”

“ That the influence of New York with or in the western states has been increasing, while that of Virginia has not been growing, may, I think, be taken for granted. What has brought about this state of things, is one of those questions which, while you are working up to the position of useful citizens, and striving to become influential men in the state, should not, and of course will not, escape your attention. ”

“ Washington Heights is a crowning wilderness looking down upon the city from Fort George, while the Sound and a glimpse of the village beyond seen through the faint blue haze of distance lend a touch of fairylike enchantment. The Jersey shore and the Palisades are one long drawn out joy, so that, turn where you will, you find New York beautiful. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Look uptown, catch the faint patch of dark green that is Central Park, the spires of the cathedral, the wonderful campanile at Madison square. Let your glance swing across the gentle Hudson, over into a New Jersey that is bounded by the ridges of the Orange mountains, then slowly south and even the great towers that thrust themselves into almost every buildable foot of Broadway below the City Hall cannot entirely block your view of the wonderful upper harbor of New York—of the great ships that bring to an imperial city the tribute that is rightfully hers. ”

“ It was the centre of the most varied life in New York. To the north lay fashion and wealth, to the east and west, respectability and moderate means; to the south, poverty and squalor, vice and crime. All could be seen and heard from the windows of his sitting room. In the evenings toward spring he looked out upon a panorama of the human race such as is presented by no other city in the world and by no other part of that city. ”

“ In the face of these facts, how can intelligent men continue to hold the opinion that New York is to continue long to be, as now, the focal point of North American commerce and influence? Yet well informed men do continue to express the opinion that New York will ever hold the position of the chief city of the continent. Every one at all familiar with the location and movement of our population, knows that the central point of its numbers is moving in a constant and almost unvarying direction west by north. ”

“ The road leads up over a sort of plateau; a wide expanse of country can be viewed in all directions, but there are only more fields to see, more farm-houses and squatty barns, perhaps a village church steeple in the distance, a village that has its oldest inhabitant and a church with a church-yard. Away off to the north, across a gleaming strip of water, which the map shows to be Long Island Sound, lie the blue hills of the Bronx. They, too, are well within Greater New York. So is all that country to the southwest, far beyond the range of the eye, Jamaica, and Jamaica Bay and Coney Island. ”

“ The drift from town to country homes is a sign of the times and an augury of great good to the coming generation, physical and patriotic. After all, bricks and mortar are not the making of a city. New York is at its best beyond the borders. Its rich citizens overflow into these northern suburbs and lordly estates, and across the East River into Brooklyn and Long Island’s garden villages, and across the Hudson into New Jersey’s charming towns, and down the bay to Staten Island. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ It is the fashion in the East to speak of New York as poor of environment, unpossessed of the agreeable, accessible countryside that crowns the convenience not only of London and of Paris, but even, with more humiliating promptitude, that of Boston, of Philadelphia, of Baltimore. ”

“ A whirling maelstrom of human activity and dynamic energy—the city which above all others is characteristic of the genius and virility of the American people—New York, with its congested polyglot population and teeming millions, is assuredly one of the busiest, as it is one of the most strenuous and most noisy places on earth. ”

“ Fifty years ago, New York was little more than a village; now, it is a fine city with three hundred thousand inhabitants. I have never seen any city so admirably adapted for commerce. It is built upon a narrow island, between Long Island Sound and the Hudson River, Broadway running up it like the vertebrae of some huge animal, and the other streets diverging from it at right angles, like the ribs; each street running to the river, and presenting to the view a forest of masts. ”