Inner city

“ And the voice—I remember the voice—whose voice is it? I remember the voice—whose voice is it?"
He looked round him again, at the pictures, as if to find among them the face he sought. The pictures showed all the life of the Past; the ball-room with the dancers; the sports of the field; the drive in the afternoon, the ride in the morning; the bevy of girls; the soldiers and the sailors; the streets crowded with people; the vile slums and the picturesque blackguardism of the City—but not the face he wanted. ”

“ The neighborhood is a social unit which, by its clear definition of outline, its inner organic completeness, its hair-trigger reactions, may be fairly considered as functioning like a social mind. ... The local boss, however autocratic he may be in the larger sphere of the city with the power he gets from the neighborhood, must always be in and of the people; and he is very careful not to try to deceive the local people so far as their local interests are concerned. It is hard to fool a neighborhood about its own affairs. ”

“ The attraction of the metropolis is due in part, however, to the fact that in the long run every individual finds somewhere among the varied manifestations of city life the sort of environment in which he expands and feels at ease; finds, in short, the moral climate in which his peculiar nature obtains the stimulations that bring his innate qualities to full and free expression. ”

“ Do you live out of town, and quite removed from the attractions of a metropolis? Ah! your home, then, is under clearer skies, which the city artists can only imitate; you live amidst the decorations which highest Nature imparts but to country landscapes. Without the especial occupations of city life, you escape its rush and tumult. You are being taught by slower, yet as attractive, methods, the grand lessons of life. ”

“ For my own part I see the city I am going to build in the eye of the mind—or of the heart—so vividly and consistently that I never need to make notes of it on paper. I know when what I am building is not in accord with the vision, and then I pull it down. ”

“ Imagination rears thy towers and Fancy populates thy streets, yet art thou a city that hath foundations; a dwelling eternal though unseen. Ever building, changing, never falling, thy walls are open-gated day and night. ”

“ A few steps, and below us in the hollow we see the city, all its commonplaceness charmed away, the vulgar noises of the streets blended in a soft murmur. Not one human life moves in those streets, commonplace and vulgar though it may seem, but has its own charm and beauty, if we could find the right view-point, or if our sight went deep enough. ”

“ The spires shoot up into the sky—the domes tranquilly rest there—all the roofs glitter as with diamonds, all the white walls are lustrous, save where, here and there, some loftier range of buildings hangs its steadfast shadow o'er square or street, magnifying the city, by means of separate multitudes of structures, each town-like in itself, and the whole gathered together by the outward eye, and the inward imagination, worthy indeed of the name of Metropolis. ”

“ To this ideal unity of healthy town, with its practical and scientific schools of all kinds, with its meditative cloister of ethical and social idealism, of unified science and philosophy, of imagination and drama, all culminating in the polity, culture, and art which make a city proper, we have here the corresponding defects in detail. ”

“ And through it all, the light reflected from a hundred windows flashed and blazed in wondrous glory, until the city seemed a dream of unearthly splendor and fairy loveliness, in which the people moved in wonder and in awe. ”

“ A city whose mighty buildings were each a truncated pyramid in shape, towering into the air for thousands upon thousands of feet, a city whose every building and street and square glowed with the same faint white light as the ground upon which they stood, a metropolis out of nightmare, the darkness of which was dispelled only by the light of its own great glowing structures and streets. ”

“ All else—the distant glamour of the city, of a life new and incomprehensible to her, full in the centre of the bustling world and no longer at its very confines—enticed her but the more in its shimmering remoteness with the mystery of a great light that shines from afar. ”

“ The magic of the city—whence comes it? Every people, every age has felt it, this mysterious sense of personality, this deep, alluring spell which age after age, nation after nation, has woven round the city of its dreams. ”

“ As they watched the city rising from the sunlit waves, tier above tier, with its gleaming walls, domes, gardens, fountains, many stairs and broad streets, while behind and above swam those hazy mountains, all filmy and blue in that balmy atmosphere, only to breathe which was an intoxication, they seemed to be looking into heaven—a heaven of perfect beauty, rest and peace. ”

“ The fact is, however, that the city is rooted in the habits and customs of the people who inhabit it. The consequence is that the city possesses a moral as well as a physical organization, and these two mutually interact in characteristic ways to mold and modify one another. It is the structure of the city which impresses us by its visible vastness and complexity, but this structure has its basis, nevertheless, in human nature, of which it is an expression. ”

“ From the ornamental and show gardens of the rich, to the orchards of the citizen, anxious about his necessities—from thence to the factories, bleaching-grounds, and similar establishments, even to the burying-grounds—for a little world lay within the limits of the city—we passed a varied, strange, spectacle, which changed at every step, and with the enjoyment of which our childish curiosity was never satisfied. ”

“ I went in by a gate and saw its houses and streets, and a great disappointment came upon me. For there is an air about a city, and it has a way with it, whereby a man may recognized one from another at once. There are cities full of happiness and cities full of pleasure, and cities full of gloom. There are cities with their faces to heaven, and some with their faces to earth; some have a way of looking at the past and others look at the future ”

“ It has been built and burrowed from time immemorial far down underneath some great, beautiful, sunny, human metropolis, called The World Above, but of this light-crowned city those who inhabit the subterranean retreats of The Darker Realm know but little, of its happy days and doings they can but dream. ”

“ To a young girl brought up in the seclusion of a very retired country life, who can catch but a faint echo from the great world to which she is an entire stranger, the metropolis, seen at a distance, [Pg 291] through the dazzling medium of the imagination, is believed to be a wonderful place; a city full of enchantments, where beauty and wealth meet you at every turn, and cares and sorrows are forgotten in an endless round of dissipation and pleasure. ”

“ The dwellers in this crowded house, with their vision of space and sunlight; the village with its vision of a city; the city with its vision of a country; the country with its vision of a republic of the world—all these universal struggles were condensed now into the little space of a man's consciousness. ”

“ Out of unconscious slumber into the brilliant morning and the thick activity we come. But, by-and-by, the heaving mass breaks into units, and one by one dissolves into the shadow of the night. Two cities grow up side by side—the city in which men appear, the city into which they vanish; the city whose houses and goods they possess for a little while [33] and then leave behind them, and the city whose white monuments just show us the pinnacles of their estates in the eternal world. ”

“ Beings are crowding there like the lights of a populous city suddenly revealed to us from the brow of some neighbouring hill, or like the splendours of a theatre or ballroom as they appear before the eyes of one who has been walking in darkness and solitude. ”

“ The lure of great cities is perhaps a consequence of stimulations which act directly upon the reflexes. As a type of human behavior it may be explained, like the attraction of the flame for the moth, as a sort of tropism. ”

“ The narrow, silent, doleful streets of the old city, with its overhanging roofs and yawning arches, leave a sad memory on the brain as we turn thoughtfully away from its crumbling walls and picturesque, antique Moorish gates. ”

“ Over such, a poet might fancy their peaceful spirits would linger, and look beyond to where the vast city gradually grows in length and breadth from year to year, until, as is not improbable, it may at last extend its foot to the edge of the open ocean. ”

“ But when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home ”

“ This city has men in it—and these men have souls in them—or at least have the passages to souls. Though they are millions of years behind time, they have yet reached the stage of evolution that knows ears and eyes. ”

“ There are streets, of course, but by their very multiplicity and complexity they lose their individual impressiveness and are merged in that great whole, the City. One recoils from them and takes refuge in the sense of one's own home. ”

“ The sky scraper stands in the heart of the great city. From its top one can see the city, one can hear the city, one can smell the city—the city where men live and work. One can see the crowded streets full of tiny men and tiny automobiles, the riverside with its baby warehouses and its baby docks, the river with its toy bridges and toy giant steamers and tug boats and barges and ferries. The city noise,—the distant, rumbling, grumbling noise,—sounds like the purring of a far-away giant beast. ”

“ To-day the city is the same city no longer, nor is the man who writes this the market boy who toiled up the long hill in the blossoming spring, with the seeds of the future quickening in brain and heart. ”

“ In those dreadful days of the previous fall she had wished every hour that she was living in a city, because in the city a thousand resolute intrusions compel distraction, make the moments seem to fly, whether the heart is heavy or light. ”

“ Day after day thither are borne new corpses, a whole, immense, living, noisy city has been already borne thither one by one, and lo! the new city which has grown in its place is awaiting its turn—and the little corners remain ever the same, small, still, ravenous. ”

“ Thus flippantly do some of the younger sons of men blaspheme this metropolis of the mid-West—a city the creation of which is, by many persons of discrimination, held to be the chief romance and abiding miracle of the nineteenth century. ”

“ THE CITY’S HEART
“Bosh!” said my friend, jabbing impatiently with his stick at a gaunt cat in the gutter, “all bosh! A city has no heart. It’s incorporated selfishness; has to be. Slopping over is not business. City is all business. A poet’s dream, my good fellow; pretty but moonshine!”
We turned the corner of the tenement street as he spoke. ”

“ Any lover of the city could live as far out as this. I have no quarrel with the city as a place to work in. Cities are as necessary as wheat-fields and as lovely, too—from twenty miles away, or from Westminster Bridge at daybreak. The city is as a head to the body, the nervous centre where the multitudinous sensations are organized and directed, where the multitudinous and interrelated interests of the round world are directed. The city is necessary; city work is necessary; but less and less is city living necessary. ”

“ In solitudeor in society? In the green stillness of the country, where he can hear the heart of nature beat, or in the dark, gray city, where he can hear and feel the throbbing heart of man? I will make answer for him, and say, in the dark, gray city. ”

“ That this city, like all great cities, is pursuing after pleasure, as the paramount object to be attained, is because their souls are hungering and thirsting after that food necessary to build them up into the stature of perfect men and women. ”

“ And a few comprehensive lessons from that "Wisdom which uttereth her voice in the streets," may prove a fitting introduction, from which we can pass to consider more specific conditions of humanity in the city.
Taking up the subject in this light, I observe that the first lesson of the street is in the illustration which it affords us of the diversities of human conditions. The most superficial eye recognizes this. A city is, in one respect, like a high mountain ”

“ The city which once had crushed her imagination in the first despair of her arrival, the city which she felt in all its moods, grumbling, defiant, waiting cruelly, submissive or ominous, now rolled before her in a brilliant succession of pleasures, her world and her destiny—theater and restaurant, opera and cabaret; and everywhere, in the burst of lights, or languidly sunk in the seduction of music, in the lure of shop-windows was the zest of precious temptations—dangers that it was an ecstasy to be able to reject. ”

“ The narrow and irregular streets and well-built houses, some of which still retain the quaint, picturesque gables so reminiscent of earlier times, envelop the city with that delightful, indefinable air of mediævalism—a something which, tempered with old associations and traditions, no modern city with all its improvements can supply. ”

“ Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. ”