White Plains, New York

“ As in Chicago, they are conducive to crime, afford dark, narrow lanes for rape, assault, robbery and the pleasanter crimes of crap shooting and soliciting.
In some Negro sections where housing is at a premium, they live in shacks in the alleys. These are some of the slums already referred to—not many, but picturesque and odoriferous. One of the best-known is an alley oddly named Temperance Court. If white people lived there it would be fashionable at premium rents; it is similar to the aristocratic Washington Mews in New York’s Greenwich Village. ”

“ For New York considered in itself is primarily a place of unrest, and those who sincerely love it, as many do, love it for the romance of its restlessness. A man almost looks at a building as he passes to wonder whether it will be there when he comes back from his walk; and the doubt is part of an indescribable notion, as of a white nightmare of daylight, which is increased by the very numbering of the streets, with its tangle of numerals which at first makes an English head reel. ”

“ Winter in New York has its hardships and toil, and it has its joys as well, among rich and poor. Grim and relentless, it is beautiful at all times until man puts his befouling hand upon the landscape it paints in street and alley, where poetry is never at home in summer. The great city lying silent under its soft white blanket at night, with its myriad of lights twinkling and rivalling the stars, is beautiful beyond compare. Go watch the moonlight on forest and lake in the park, when the last straggler has gone and the tramp of the lonely policeman's horse has died away under the hill ”

“ The doings of every scapegrace in an American university, of every silly woman in Chicago, of every blackguard in New York, of every snob at Newport, of every desperado in the Rocky Mountains, of every club loafer anywhere, were served up as typical examples of American life. The municipal governments of our country, and especially that of New York, were an exhaustless quarry from which specimens of every kind of scoundrelism were drawn and used in building up an ideal structure of American life ”

“ When the nineteenth century began, western New York was almost entirely destitute of white inhabitants. Yet so rapid are the movements of population in the United States—in which, what sixty years ago was a mere hamlet clustering around the frontier Fort Dearborn, is now a mighty municipality with a population larger than had any of the historic capitals of Europe a century ago—that most Americans would consider all the region from the Niagara to the Hudson as a portion of the older settled sections of the country. ”

“ In front is an old dam and mill-pond, called "The Alley," recently improved, but still containing black bass; in the rear Little Neck Bay opens out to the Sound beyond, one of the sniping and ducking places of Greater New York. The old store, presumably the polling-place of that election district of the city, is where prominent personages of the neighborhood congregate and tell fishing and shooting stories, and gossip, and talk politics, seated on boxes and barrels around the white-bodied stove, for the sake of which they chew tobacco. ”

“ N the midst of wild mountain scenery, picturesque but not magnificent when compared with the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Adirondack and Catskill range in New York, or the Alleghanies in Western Pennsylvania and Virginia, is a bold promontory called West Point, rising more than one hundred and fifty feet above the waters of the Hudson, its top a perfectly level and fertile plateau, and every rood hallowed by associations of the deepest interest. ”

“ White never has any trouble with his tenants, though he gathers in the poorest; nor do his tenements have anything of the “institution character” that occasionally attaches to ventures of this sort, to their damage. They are like a big village of contented people, who live in peace with one another because they have elbow-room even under one big roof.
Enough has been said to show that model tenements can be built successfully and made to pay in New York, if the owner will be content with the five or six per cent. ”

“ The interior of New York state, as at Cooperstown, is agreeable in the nights, but the limestone soil retains a portion of its heat and the days are often sultry.
The White Mountains have the disadvantage of remoteness from any considerable centers of population and are not upon the main highways of travel. It takes a whole day to go to the mountains from Boston, and many of the resorts there are distant from the railroad, and must be reached by livery teams, which slowly climb to the altitudes, and affect the patience and also increase the cost of living. The days are often very cold. ”

“ Very little energy was expended by outside interests in southeastern New Mexico, except for the large cattle ranches owned by Texans migrating westward. Drawn by federal contracts to supply beef to soldiers at the various military posts along the Pecos and Tularosa rivers, and to Indians on the Mescalero Apache reservation, the ranchers had little time or money to invest in larger development schemes. This would change in the 1880s, when two New York brothers, Charles and John Eddy, came by stagecoach to the Pecos River valley to operate a cattle ranch. ”

“ If he hated New England as the breeding bed of radicalism, he loved New York passionately.
The first important duty imposed upon me as chairman of the committee on education was when there came up a bill for disposing of the proceeds of public lands appropriated by the government of the United States to institutions for scientific and technical education, under what was then known as the Morrill Act of 1862. Of these lands the share which had come to New York was close upon a million acres—a fair-sized European principality. ”

“ New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments—constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; ”

“ A dwelling upon these plains will then gratify the taste, and secure all those pleasures and enjoyments which render a rural life so attractive to the denizens of the city. A small freehold may now be purchased on this territory at a price which would scarcely secure a rocky knoll at the same distance from New York, on the banks of the Hudson. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The special pride of Brooklyn is Prospect Park, one of the finest in America, where art and the landscape gardener have assisted rather than thwarted nature in her efforts to produce beauty. It is situated on an elevated ridge on the southeastern borders of the city, and from certain localities commands broad views of Brooklyn, New York, the inner and outer harbor, and the Jersey shore. It contains five hundred and fifty acres, which embrace broad, green lawns, grassy slopes, groves, wooded hills, beautiful with ferns and wild flowers, lakes and rocky dells. ”

“ If from the crown of this impartial giant you look afar at Woodstock and then at the vast reservoir which spreads over the green, undulating valley; and then if you think of another little village, partly obliterated and partly pushed aside by that inland sea; why then, it is not hard to get the point of view of some poor little old man, who was turned out of house and home. For the old mountain seems to make everything plain. Serene, towering and apart from all the passions and enterprises and bickerings of men, it makes one see the great city of New York as a kind of invading bully. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As we passed along from the city, one varied, and verdant scene of all that is lovely in hill and dale, forest and field, orchard and farm-house, presented itself in quick succession after another—filling up the whole way with images as beautiful and varied as are brought to the eye by every turn of the kaleidoscope.
The country between Philadelphia and Harrisburg in its outlines and agricultural aspect strikingly reminded me of western New York. The impress of thrift and wealth are enstamped upon every vale and hill-side that meets your eye in this vast fertile landscape. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is plenty that is not at all city-like within the city walls—called limits—there is plenty of nature, but in most cases those wanting to commune with it are reminded that it is no longer within the domain of nature. The city has stretched out its hand, and the mark of the beast can usually be seen.
You can find not only rural seclusion and bucolic simplicity, but the rudeness and crudeness of the wilderness and primeval forest; indeed, even forest fires have been known in Greater New York. ”

“ These blocks of Rumanian and Hungarian tenement districts, their fire-escapes hung with feather beds and old carpets, and looking like great overflowing waste-baskets, are scattered in among little bluff ledges, scraggy with walnut brush, some great rocks still unblasted, and several patches of Indian corn in sloping hillside empty lots—small, strange heights of old New York country, still unsubmerged by the wide tide of Slav and Austrian immigration. ”

“ But the interesting thing about it is that here are seen not merely a few incongruous green patches that happen to be left between rapidly devouring suburban towns—like the fields near Woodside where the German women work—out here one rides through acre after acre of it, farm after farm, mile after mile, up hill, down hill, corn-fields, wheat-fields, stone fences, rail fences, no fences, and never a town in sight, much less anything to suggest the city, except the procession of market-wagons at certain hours, to or from College Point Ferry, and they aren't so conspicuously urban after all. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Savages must be subdued and land cleared and planted before the evolution of the dwelling could fairly begin. Primitive community life lingered long even on Manhattan Island. As late as 1649 the farmers petitioned for a free pasturage between their plantation of Schepmoes and the fence of the Great Bowerie Number One. ”

“ And he would be a wretched ghost indeed if doomed to haunt only upper New York. But it happens that he has a sanctuary, a haven after his own heart, where he can still draw a breath of relief, among buildings small but full of age and dignity and with the look of homes about them; on restful, crooked little streets where there remain trees and grass-plots; in the old-time purlieus of Washington Square and Greenwich Village!
The history of old New York reads like a romance. ”