Metropolitan see

“ Too often the American that himself makes his fortune, builds him a great metropolitan house, in the most metropolitan street of the most metropolitan town. Whereas a European of the same sort would thereupon migrate into the country. ”

“ One might climb to the top of one of the great “sky-scrapers,” and gaze down upon a wilderness of houses, with roofs as innumerable as tree-tops, and people looking like tiny insects below. Or one might go out into the harbour late upon a winter afternoon, and see it as a city of a million lights, rising like an incantation from the sea. Round about it was an unbroken ring of docks, with ferry-boats and tugs darting everywhere, and vessels which had come from every port in the world, emptying their cargoes into the huge maw of the Metropolis. ”

“ Think of it, ye metropolitan dwellers in your two-hundred-year-old cities, who after a day down-town sink into your cushioned-seats for an hour's ride to the suburbs with a sigh of contentment that your lot is cast in the midst of civilization,—think how close upon your heels come some of these Western cities which have not yet seen their second decade! ”

“ A shameless new quarter suddenly obtruded itself with an ugly emphasis; unclassifiables, male and female, began to assert and disport themselves more daringly than dreamt of heretofore; and many good citizens who would crowd the town forward to a population of a million and to a status undeniably metropolitan came to stroll these tawdry, noisy new streets with a curiosity of mind at once disturbed, titillated, and somehow gratified. ”

“ Once already our city, to which have come the duties and responsibilities of metropolitan greatness before it was able to fairly measure its task, has felt the swell of its resistless flood. If it rise once more, no human power may avail to check it. ”

“ The workman No. 11811, the man who lived in a prison-like house, under the underground railway of Metropolis, who knew no other way than that from the hole in which he slept to the machine and from the machine back to the hole—this man saw, for the first time in his life, the wonder of the world, which was Metropolis: the city, by night shining under millions and millions of lights. ”

“ It is thus used now for the capital of a country, which contains the various official buildings of the administrative departments, the Houses of Parliament, &c. In the case of London, the term “metropolitan” is sometimes applied to the whole area including the “City of London,” e.g. ”

“ This fact alone must attract to our metropolis the best of our population, the bone and sinew which have no longer any use for themselves where they have been expended in rearing colossal fortunes, and now demand a metropolitan repose. ”

“ This area has the advantage of some other great business centres in having broad streets at right angles, but with all this openness for movement, the throng of passengers and traffic, the intersecting street and cable railways, the loads of freight and the crush of carriages, the life and hurry and excitement are sufficient to satisfy the most eager lover of metropolitan pandemonium. ”

“ The man who was the great brain in the brain-pan of Metropolis had ceased to press his fingers on the blue metal plate.
In ten hours he would let the machine brute roar anew. And in another ten hours, again. And always the same, and always the same, without ever loosening the ten-hour clamp.
Metropolis did not know what Sunday was. Metropolis knew neither high days nor holidays. Metropolis had the most saintly cathedral in the world, richly adorned with Gothic decoration. ”

“ And you, father, you press your fingers upon the little blue metal plate near your right hand, and your great glorious, dreadful city of Metropolis roars out, proclaiming that she is hungry for fresh human marrow and human brain and then the living food rolls on, like a stream, into the machine-rooms, which are like temples, and that, just used, is thrown up.... ”

“ The heart of the machine-city of Metropolis dwelt in a white, cathedral-like building. The heart of the machine-city of Metropolis was, until this day and this hour, guarded by one single man. The heart of the machine-city of Metropolis was a machine and a universe to itself. Above the deep mysteries of its delicate joints, like the sun's disc—like the halo of a divine being—stood the silver-spinning wheel, the spokes of which appeared in the whirl of revolution, as a single, gleaming, disc. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Another matter that has engaged public attention is the apparent difference of opinion between the Metropolitan and the Metropolitan District Companies, as to the control of the Inner Circle. Nature has designed them to be one, and but for vested and promoters’ interests, they probably would have been one from the first. ”

“ In the terminal stations of the city you first begin to divine the real character of the city. You see it, a great crucible into which the people of all nations and all the corners of one of the greatest of the nations are being poured. Pressing her nose against the glass of a window that looks down into surpassingly busy streets, overshadowed by the ungainly bulk of an elevated railroad, is the bent figure of a hatless peasant woman from the south of Europe—seeing her America for the first time and almost shrinking from the glass in a mixture of fear and of amazement. ”

“ In a vast and flourishing metropolis the individual in liberty and security passes among the countless waves of this ocean of men.
A metropolis thus rising from its contracted infancy, extending in growth, and diversified by new classes of society, presented many novelties in its crowded scenes; mutable manners, humorous personages, all the affectations or the homeliness of its citizens. Many writers, among whom were some of admirable genius, devoted their pens to fugitive objects and evanescent scenes, sure of finding an immediate reception from the sympathy of their readers. ”

“ That great City is, like some of the capitals of Europe, built on a broad river, with the mass of the metropolis on the one bank, but a wide-spreading suburb on the other. As the Trastevere is to Rome, as Southwark to London, so is earth to heaven, the bit of the city on the other side the bridge. ”

“ Only twelve miles from the metropolis, and in reality one of its many suburbs, it nestles among the hills, and looks off upon a broad expanse of field and meadow and forest, as though there were no such place as London in existence. ”

“ Metropolis, moreover, means a place where burn the beacon-lights of intelligence and culture; where the latest word 116 of science is spoken; where every day a superstition dies; where seekers after truth come nearest to their goal. A metropolis is the essence of our New Century civilization,—the creation of an irresistible modern impulse, an entity that challenges our admiration and inspires us with awe.
THE METROPOLIS OF THE MOORS
APPROACHING FEZ
But there is in this world a great city, the metropolis of a nation, which is not like the cities that we know. ”

“ If then, there are twenty such avenues to the metropolis, it appears that the total of the regular ingress and egress will be 16,000 persons, of whom perhaps 8,000 walk, 2,000 arrive in public conveyances, and 6,000 ride on horseback, or in open or close carriages. Such a phenomenon is presented no-where else in the world; and it never can exist except in a city which unites the same combined features of population, wealth, commerce, and the varied employments which belong to our own vast metropolis. ”

“ Now metropolitan casts are composed chiefly of well known people. You have seen these people often, you know what they can do, you select them with an eye to round pegs and square holes, and you write to them or their representatives. ”

“ It should be remembered that one great use of a metropolis, if not the greatest, is to test everything for the benefit of the whole of the rest of the country. The country may, according to circumstances, be more or less ready to avail itself of the benefit ”

“ But we must not therefore assume that the metropolitan populations consume the metropolitan matches. Taking the population at upward of two millions, and the inhabited houses at about three hundred thousand, let us endeavor to estimate the distribution of these little articles of domestic comfort. ”

“ There are certain descriptions of people who, oddly enough, appear to appertain exclusively to the metropolis. You meet them, every day, in the streets of London, but no one ever encounters them elsewhere ”

“ At the Metropolitan in New York they sit in a glare, and wear their showiest harness; they hum airs, they squeak fans, they titter, and they gabble all the time. In some of the boxes the conversation and laughter are so loud as to divide the attention of the house with the stage. In large measure the Metropolitan is a show-case for rich fashionables who are not trained in Wagnerian music and have no reverence for it, but who like to promote art and show their clothes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This city is our metropolis, with which we are connected by small steamers crossing to and fro with the tide, and where all our shopping is done, our own ville being too thoroughly limited and roturier in taste to merit many of our shekels. ”

“ So let no one imagine for this, the world's metropolis, a great over-crowded city different from Boston or New York,—a vast labyrinth of narrow and crooked streets, in which are evidences of bad conditions, the results of life in a dark age,—for nothing of the kind is true. In some portions, e. g. not far from Covent Garden Market, there are streets where very poor people reside, and are crowded, but not in very old and peculiar buildings. In no way are the conditions worse than in sections of New York and Boston. London is a very large and very fine city, modern in general appearance. ”

“ Metropolis is a classic of science-fiction which created an impact on the literary world which reverberates to this day. Its dramatic presentation of the city-world of the next century stirred the minds of readers with an unforgettable vision of a metropolis grown to Gargantuan proportions, of humanity fighting to keep its soul against the monster world of machinery, robots, and complexity that had been spawned in our own century. The book inspired a movie which is possibly the best science-fiction film ever made. ”

“ All in all the Atlantic metropolis is the first city in the world to me,—first in force, unrivaled in individuality, richer and freer in its spirit than London or Paris, though so often more gauche, more tawdry, more shamblingly inexperienced. ”

“ It is not these things, superadded characteristics, negligible details, which cause one to cry or to laugh—which mark the difference between town and town. It does not matter how one sees a town—but how one feels it, the soul, the meaning, the reason of it.
And one can feel New York as one can feel no other town—not even London. ”

“ It seems to be a portal to the empty sky, a door through which the traveler might pass into the infinity of space. It is, in fact, the gate of an almost deserted metropolis, a city that was built for a population of one hundred thousand and contains to-day less than six thousand souls. ”

“ Day, who gives us a very full and exhaustive account of all the social surroundings of the ‘Empire City,’ with its huge Babel-like hotels, its swarm of restaurants and eating-houses, necessary to a people who live out of their own homes, and its varied modes of locomotion, likens this huge hive to ‘a combination of London, Berlin, and Paris.’ The city is laid out in parallelograms, and the streets are numerically named. The practice—widely prevalent—of hanging out clothes to dry on the house-tops must be sadly detrimental to the appearance of respectable neighbourhoods. ”

“ It was a very pleasant moment in the growth of the metropolis which had become, in a quiet, provincial way, a town in the special sense in which that word connotes a group of people numerous enough to constitute a society, fond of the same pleasures, interested in local incidents and amusements, sufficiently intimate to have formed a code of social standards and manners. ”

“ These water ways of the metropolis extend for several hundred miles through and about the City and its suburbs, and connect and bring into communication other great cities of the country. They are traversed continually by barges, which besides much merchandise contain a large floating population. ”

“ The contrast between these pure white shafts, and the dark green of the sward and foliage, is both striking and beautiful, while, in the far distance, the gazer, turning from this scene of silence and death, lovely as it is, may behold the bright waters of the Bay or Sound, covered with the life and activity of the commerce of this great country, and the Metropolis itself lies almost at his feet. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The great cities all have faces. If all the people who live in each city could be photographed exactly one over the other, the result would be the general expression of that city's face. New York would be discontented and eager; London would be stolidly glum and healthy, with a little surliness; Berlin would be supercilious, overbearing; Rome would be gravely resentful; and so on; but Paris would be gay, incredulous, frivolous, pretty and impudent. ”