Title: New York - The Nation's Metropolis
Author: Marcus, Peter
Language: English
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                               NEW YORK
                        THE NATION’S METROPOLIS

                            [Illustration]



                               NEW YORK

                        THE NATION’S METROPOLIS

                                  BY

                             PETER MARCUS


                       _WITH AN APPRECIATION BY_

                           J. MONROE HEWLETT

                 PRESIDENT OF THE ARCHITECTURAL LEAGUE
                              OF NEW YORK

                       [Illustration: colophon]

                               NEW YORK
                              BRENTANO’S
                              PUBLISHERS

                          COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
                              BRENTANO’S

                         _All rights reserved_


                          THE PLIMPTON PRESS
                          NORWOOD·MASS·U·S·A



CONTENTS


    I. _Times Square._
   II. _Lower Broadway._
  III. _Exchange Place._
   IV. _Looking West on Brooklyn Bridge._
    V. _The City Hall._
   VI. _Wall Street._
  VII. _The Old Bridge._
 VIII. _The Tombs Prison._
   IX. _Looking West Along Peck Slip._
    X. _The East Pier, Brooklyn Bridge._
   XI. _The Municipal Building._
  XII. _New York from Fulton Ferry._
 XIII. _The Metropolitan Tower._
  XIV. _The Cathedral on the Avenue._
   XV. _Queensboro Bridge._
  XVI. _Fifth Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street._
 XVII. _Hell Gate Bridge._
XVIII. _Soldiers and Sailors Monument._
  XIX. _The Cathedral on the Heights._
   XX. _The Viaduct._
  XXI. _Grant’s Tomb._
 XXII. _The Battleship “Oklahoma” on the Hudson._
XXIII. _High Bridge._
 XXIV. _Washington Bridge._
  XXV. _Grand Central Station._



NEW YORK

THE CITY OF VIOLENT CONTRASTS


New York is preëminently the City of Violent Contrasts. Towering shafts
of brick and stone and steel, soaring traceries of cables, derricks,
girders and electric signs, smooth stretches of gray asphalt, subway and
sewer excavations, broad harbors and stately ships, oily canals and
garbage dumps, classic columns, gilded domes, palaces and shanties,
parks and fountains, factory chimneys and gas tanks; these are a few of
the items that occur in this as in other cities, but nowhere else are
these and other manifestations of beauty and ugliness, prosperity and
squalor brought into such vivid and striking relief, and of no other
city can we say with equal truth that it defies the effort to summarize
briefly its typical characteristics. Fragments and details suggestive of
widely differing phases of its life persistently force themselves into a
single picture without regard to orderly classification or proper
dramatic sequence.

Appreciation of the beauty of nature as undisturbed by man seems
inherent in our race, but man in his material progress is constantly
defacing nature, constantly destroying, constantly substituting forms
and arrangements dictated by utility, not by beauty, and shocking to
our finer instincts. Then imagination steps in and gradually invests
these new forms with new meanings derived from history, logic, romance,
symbolism and pure poetic fancy. Some are condemned and discarded as
unnecessary or useless, while others at first glance equally ugly
acquire a significance and a soul. Of him who would interpret such a
theme as New York our first demand must therefore be prophetic vision.

To the artist who seeks to penetrate the outer surfaces of his subject
and to suggest and interpret an activity, a creative power, a vastness
of scale and a variety of functions beyond human power to portray,
charcoal is a most, perhaps the most, inspiring medium. It is surely the
medium that most readily lends itself to the simultaneous expression of
form, mass, line and tone.

Hopkinson Smith once said that Venice is nothing but air and water.
There all else has been so softened and moulded and enveloped as to
become part and parcel of sea and cloud. The portrayal of this is
preëminently a painter’s job. But New York, in addition to being a lot
of other things, is a Venice in the making, and all the ugly
paraphernalia by means of which this making is slowly going forward, all
the unlovely processes, physical and chemical, structural and
commercial, must be recognized and expressed and by the light of poetic
vision be made a part of its beauty and romance.

A painter might perhaps strive to envelope and obscure whatever seemed
objectionable in a glory of color. An architect might lay undue stress
upon the many examples of distinction in the work of his craft, which
are often all but details in a vast scheme. The pictorial expression of
New York requires a blending of the view points of the painter and the
architect in which both contribute to an image of something not yet
realized, perhaps never to be fully realized, and help in dramatizing
the struggle towards that thing.

Peter Marcus is a painter not an architect, but he is also a designer
experienced in the goldsmith’s craft and there is evident in these
charcoal studies a pleasure in the delineation of the tracery of bridge
cables and trusses, derricks, scaffolding and electric signs, that in
contrast with his broad and greatly simplified expressions of
architectural form and detail, adds vastly to the eloquence of his work.
Furthermore, he is a native of New York as his parents were before him,
and the slow development by which New York has climbed upward has been
part and parcel of his life. These are the days of a premature
development or forcing of the artistic personality, usually expressed at
some sacrifice of the prevailing characters and sentiment of his
subject.

To my mind the most distinctive quality of these drawings is found in
the complete subjection of the artist to the spirit of the thing
represented.

Lower Manhattan from the harbor, from Brooklyn, from across the Hudson
and from the air has been exploited to such an extent as to destroy for
the native New Yorker much of the impressiveness of this majestic
panorama, but lower Manhattan as seen from within by the man in the
street has a different kind of impressiveness and pictorially has
hitherto been somewhat neglected. Five drawings are devoted to this
theme--“Lower Broadway,” “Wall Street,” “The City Hall,” “The Tombs,”
and “Exchange Place.” These five drawings as a group seem to me to
represent the culmination of the artist’s achievement. They show a
simplicity and ease of method, a definite conception and an admirable
sureness of values and textures. In imaginative power and sinister
suggestion, “Exchange Place” brings to mind Bochlin’s “Isle of the Dead”
and it is not like that, a creation of the imagination but a truthful
characterization of locality. A second group of five are “The
Metropolitan Tower,” “Times Square,” “Grand Central Station,” “The
Municipal Building,” and “The Cathedral on the Avenue.”

As these take us further up town into wider streets and more extended
surfaces of sky, distance and silhouette become increasingly important
in their composition, and what we lose in concentration we gain in tonal
interest.

“The Old Bridge,” “Washington Bridge,” “Queensboro Bridge,” and “The
Viaduct,” fall naturally into a third group. Here we have a different
manifestation of energy, the architecture of the engineer, crisp and
nervous in rendering, beautifully expressive of structure unadorned.

If in the drawings thus far mentioned certain qualities of Piranesi,
Méryon and Brangwyn are brought to mind; in “High Bridge,” “The
Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument,” “Hell Gate Bridge,” “Grant’s Tomb,”
and “The Cathedral on the Heights,” there is equally a suggestion of
Whistler. Less vigorous than the others in draughtsmanship, they are
full of the suggestion of subdued color. By reason of the more subtle
quality of their rendering, they lend themselves less readily to
reproduction but even the reproductions convey beautiful impressions of
shadowy foliage and quiet waters, bare, wind-swept branches and lonely
spaces.

It is safe to predict that if he continues his interest in charcoal as a
medium, Peter Marcus will gradually and naturally acquire a more
characteristic personal manner, but it will come from ease of mastery
not from assumed eccentricity, and whatever he may achieve in future
this series of drawings will stand as the most comprehensive and broadly
discerning study of New York in its entirety that has yet been made.

                           J. Monroe Hewlett
                           _President of the
                        Architectural League of
                               New York_



NEW YORK

THE NATION’S METROPOLIS



I

TIMES SQUARE


Times Square is at the juncture of Broadway, Seventh Avenue and
Forty-second Street. It is the very heart of uptown Broadway. Not the
downtown Broadway of finance and of towering buildings, but the Broadway
of theatres, restaurants, gay crowds and bright lights. It is bustling,
congested, whirling. It is in a constant state of being rebuilt and
repaired. Its sidewalks are littered with timbers, pipes, derricks and
showy women. One hears jazz music and Klaxtons. It is the playground of
the pleasure seeker, the battleground of the taxis, the dream of the
chorus girl on the road, and the nightmare of the traffic cop. It is
white lights, green lights, red lights,--flashing, spinning and winking.
It is noise, crowds, motion. Sun and storm, day and night it roars
along, churning,--a whirlpool in a mighty river. Incongruous, incessant,
enormous.

[Illustration]



II

LOWER BROADWAY


The changes in New York in the last hundred years have been almost
fabulous and yet the greatest of all perhaps has been lower Broadway.
The proud steeple of Trinity Church once dominated a scene of fashion.
It is now surrounded, dwarfed, overshadowed. Once Beaux and Belles, in
Brummel-like hats and directoire skirts, came grandly here to
worship,--and meant it. To-day, one picnics in the church yard and eats
luncheon bananas on the graves. The enormous buildings of commerce,
finance and trade are filled to overflowing. Here is progress, wealth
and unlimited resource. It is a tremendous hive full of golden honey.
And it is doubtless very good. But it is also good that this small
church of a bygone time, still stands undaunted,--respected among these
colossal towers; and that it still brings from the past some of that
calm strength that is of even more lasting stuff than the masonry of the
church itself, and that through it, the spirit of Old New York still
“carries on” in Lower Broadway.

[Illustration]



III

EXCHANGE PLACE


Running east from Broadway, just below Wall Street, is Exchange Place.
It is a narrow street and a short, but it is not a little street. Huge
buildings are its walls, which seem almost to meet overhead. Straight up
they tower, face to face, staring at each other with countless eyes.
Daily into these few buildings come thousands and thousands of people:
old and young, gay and sad, financiers and office boys,--to work. It is
a good-sized town in one street. It is a veritable cañon of the city.

[Illustration]



IV

LOOKING WEST ON BROOKLYN BRIDGE


One of the “Views of New York” most often pictured and most often
snapped by amateur photographers is that of lower Manhattan as seen from
a distance. And yet from a painting, photograph or drawing, who can feel
what it is? As with pictures of the Grand Cañon, it seems impossible to
realize the scale or to give the sense of its enormous size. To know
what it is, one must have seen it. A picture, in this case, can only
serve to refresh the memory of the man who knows.

[Illustration]



V

THE CITY HALL


Nothing better exemplifies the growth of New York than does the City
Hall, standing as it does almost in the shadow of the Municipal
Building. In the old days when it was the principal structure on City
Hall Park, its three stories afforded ample room in which to carry on
the city’s affairs. It now houses only four offices, including that of
the Mayor and that of the Art Commission. The other city offices, and
their number is astounding, are elsewhere. But although the city has
grown beyond recognition, the City Hall has proudly kept its place, and
is honored as is a venerable old man, a bit less active than he was
perhaps, but still the dignified head of a noble house.

[Illustration]



VI

WALL STREET


Here is the force of the sea and the romance of a fairy tale. Here
immense fortunes are won in a day and lost in less, and the hopes and
savings of years vanish in an hour. Here are bank messengers who become
millionnaires overnight and capitalists who awake penniless. It is the
market of the whole country and of others. Here are corn and wheat
heaped in huge confusion, millions of bales of cotton and barrels of
oil, high-piled above the sky-scrapers. Railroads, steamers, banks and
bullion; raw gold and ore, coal, silver and copper, mounting to the
clouds in glimmering pinnacles and smoking hills. And through it all and
around it all, pulses the restless swing and change, the tireless tide
of “the street.”

And the traders! Giants and pygmies. Tumbling over each other, swarming,
pushing, struggling. Here holding up a million head of cattle to the
highest bidder, there beating down the price of a small nation. Here is
a man beaten by a crowd for buying oil and there is another lying dead
because he sold it. And away over there runs a little man who has
succeeded in stealing a pig and is now scurrying off with it to safety.

This mountainous market of hopes and of nations, of success and failure,
of tragedy and comedy, of ships, steam, mines, and the lives of men,
towering phantom-like and vast,--is Wall Street.

[Illustration]



VII

THE OLD BRIDGE


Brooklyn Bridge the first bridge between Manhattan and Long Island. The
day of its opening was one of great public enthusiasm. Parties were
given for walking or driving across the bridge, and that night half New
York and Brooklyn were on the house-tops to watch it illuminated by
fire-works. In those days it was called “_The_ Bridge.” But now since
the Manhattan, the Williamsburg and the Queensboro bridges have been
added to the East River giants, it has become “The _Old_ Bridge,” a name
meaning many things to those who have known it from its beginning. Its
erection was a long step towards close relationship between New York and
the whole of Long Island.

[Illustration]



VIII

THE TOMBS PRISON


Who can look at a prison without being glad that he is not in it? At the
corner of Lafayette and Franklin streets is the great gray pile that is
the Tombs. Its turrets, towers and narrow windows suggest dungeon keeps
and feudal castles; its heavy gateways,--medieval strongholds. Its high
exterior wall and “Bridge of Sighs” make one remember the lugubrious
histories of the Doge’s Palace and of the Tour de Nesle. Those inside
bear the double burden of being imprisoned and of knowing that close
about them is all the life of the great city: its lights, its
restaurants, its countless activities and its friends. Yes, looking at
the Tombs, grim as it is, makes one feel strangely fortunate.

[Illustration]



IX

LOOKING WEST ALONG PECK SLIP


If Father Knickerbocker should come over to New York on the Fulton
Ferry, as in times gone by he used to do, when he had been visiting his
respected neighbors on Brooklyn Heights; and if he should stand on South
Street and look up Peck Slip and see it as it is to-day--how he would
stare through his horn-rimmed spectacles and how his dear old heart
would thump under his brass-buttoned coat! How he would pinch himself
and wonder what it all could mean! What was that enormous shaft all
white and glowing in the afternoon, rising eight hundred feet or eight
thousand to the very sky? What were those towers, spires and turrets,
soaring above the clouds, the brilliant sunlight gilding their countless
feathers of steam and decking their phantom minarets with myriad
candles? What _could_ it mean? Had he landed on Manhattan or was this
some island built by fairies or by elves? Nay, this place was far too
fair for that, and must be then the work of witchcraft and the devil. Or
was it, after all, the same old place that he had known, but grown and
glorified beyond belief? And when he finally realized this to be the
case, Father Knickerbocker without doubt would be wondrous proud of his
great-grandsons and of the New York of to-day.

[Illustration]



X

THE PIER


Like twin Colossi, silent amid the hum of cities and the whistling of a
thousand boats, the grim piers of Brooklyn Bridge stand sentry at the
river’s gate.

[Illustration]



XI

THE MUNICIPAL BUILDING


Astride of Chamber Street at Park Row stands the Municipal Building.
Under its roof are half a hundred commissions, departments, boards and
bureaux that regulate such petty affairs as the highways, parks, water
supply, bridges, taxes and fire-fighting for upwards of six millions of
people. A gigantic task, and accomplished in a building well worthy of
its responsibility.

[Illustration]



XII

NEW YORK FROM FULTON FERRY


Watching Manhattan as the boat comes near its shore, one seems to come
under the spell of its incalculable weight, its stupendous mass of iron,
brick and stone. It is oppressive, ominous. One feels the past, the
present and the future; and the tremendous forces which must have worked
together to produce this titanic offspring, to have spawned this
mountain of precipices. One feels the hidden activity, the pitiless
struggle going on beneath; yet a few puffs of smoke are all that betray
the smouldering of the mighty fires. One lets one’s mind sink into the
vast depths between, to see little humanity running here and there like
ants amid the tangle of wires, tunnels and pipes. Little humanity that
built it all.

In the past, church spires rose majestic above the surrounding city. Now
they are lost. The buildings of commerce, creeping high and higher, have
struggled upward, climbing upon one another’s backs, and mounting each
on the shoulder of each, in their ceaseless effort to be the tallest
among their fellows. And just as it is among men and the rulers of men,
as surely as one has gained the supremacy, has come another to surpass
him, swinging upward yet another fifty, one hundred, or two hundred
feet, and from their thousand brazen throats has boomed again the cry,
“Long live the king!”

Eight hundred feet towers the monarch of to-day. He is called
“Woolworth,” and twelve thousand men live daily in his strength. His
head is of gold but his feet are of clay, and who will be king
to-morrow?

And wondering, one looks up and up, above the mightiest of these kings,
and yet above the very summit of his crown, and there one sees--the
sunset.

[Illustration]



XIII

THE METROPOLITAN TOWER


The Home Office of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. is in the
“Metropolitan Life Building.” It covers the whole block between Madison
and Fourth Avenues and from Twenty-third to Twenty-fourth streets: some
twenty-five acres. Its forty-odd-story tower dominates the whole of
Madison Square and dwarfs its neighbors of a meagre twenty stories.
Above the level of their roofs the face of a giant clock covers three
stories of its front and stares unwinking at the thousands in the park.
To old women and to newsboys, to strong men and to wasters, to honest
and to sick, to those who read the columns under “Help Wanted--Male,”
and to those who have gone far beyond doing so, to the restless and the
lonely among the crowds, waiting for that thing to “turn up” that never,
never does; to all these this ponderous clock points the passing of the
minutes, hours, days,--of life itself: this clock, relentless as the
sun, upon the _Life_ Insurance tower.

[Illustration]



XIV

THE CATHEDRAL ON THE AVENUE


Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue is the largest and finest
Catholic church in the city. It is a magnificent structure, taking up
the whole block between Fiftieth and Fifty-first streets and Madison
Avenue. It fronts, of course, on Fifth Avenue, from where perhaps it can
best be seen. One longs to see it standing in a more open space and to
see its beauties as a whole from further off as one now sees its spires,
which are remarkable from nearby but glorious from a greater distance.

[Illustration]



XV

QUEENSBORO BRIDGE


Queensboro Bridge is the most northerly of Manhattan’s four East River
bridges. Its mile and a half of mighty steel structure reaches from
Second Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street well into Queens County, Long
Island. Far below it in the middle of the river is Blackwells Island, on
the south end of which is one of the city hospitals. The rest of this
island is the cheerless home of an ever-changing group of those
unfortunates, who through some unkind trick of fate have slipped, or
have seemed to slip, into that uncharted realm vaguely called “Without
the Law.”

[Illustration]



XVI

FIFTH AVENUE AT FIFTY-NINTH STREET


Whether under the régime of private or of business houses the region of
Fifth Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street has been for a long time the
luxury-centre of New York. On this enchanted soil is the well-known
Vanderbilt home, one of the few dwellings that still resist the tide of
business uptown to this point. Southward for miles “The Avenue” used to
be the smartest residential street in the city. It is now the home of
Rembrandts, pearls, sables, Rolls Royces beyond number, first editions,
tear bottles, jades, and silken ankles. It is more dangerous to cross
than the Continental Divide. It separates East from West in the city.

[Illustration]



XVII

HELL GATE BRIDGE


Hell Gate Bridge derives its name from the treacherous section of the
East River which it crosses. It is a most important part in a wonderful
piece of railroad engineering. At New Rochelle tracks lead from the old
New York, New Haven and Hartford lines to Port Morris, from here over
Hell Gate Bridge, through the Borough of Queens and Long Island City,
under the East River and half of Manhattan, to come to the surface at
the Pennsylvania Station. Hell Gate Bridge runs from above Port Morris
over Bronx Kills and Randall’s Island, across Little Hell Gate and
Ward’s Island, and last, with its huge span, over Hell Gate to Astoria
in Queens. It is six miles long. If laid over Manhattan it would reach
from Wanamaker’s store at Eighth Street, to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth
Street. It is a remarkable link in the great chain between the two
railroads. It obviates breaking bulk at New York, and connects Southern
New England with “all points west.”

[Illustration]



XVIII

THE SOLDIERS AND SAILORS MONUMENT


It is not what some one may say, but what the Nation feels, that tells
the story of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument.

[Illustration]



XIX

THE CATHEDRAL ON THE HEIGHTS


The Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine is the chief church of
the diocese of New York. It stands on Morningside Heights, a magnificent
site, from which it dominates all the surrounding city. Its enormous
dome suggests that of Saint Peter’s and on the very pinnacle of the apse
the angel Gabriel faces east, sounding the trumpet in an endless note of
triumph.

Viewing this structure, although as yet unfinished, one tries, almost in
vain, to realize that it is to be still larger and more wonderful when
fully completed, and when time has mellowed its stately stones and has
hung about its walls the indescribable dignity of age.

[Illustration]



XX

THE VIADUCT


The Hudson and the Palisades combine in making “Riverside” one of the
most naturally beautiful driveways in the world. Yet it owes much also
to the workers of magic in steel. Northward from Grant’s Tomb and
Claremont for half a mile or more it is upheld by giant arches of their
making. Across a whole valley, this broad roadbed all glistening in the
sun and streaked by the gay lines of endless pleasure traffic, rolls
grandly on, supported by the silent strength of that great land bridge,
the Viaduct.

[Illustration]



XXI

GRANT’S TOMB


The tomb of Ulysses S. Grant at One Hundred and Twenty-second Street and
Riverside Drive is one of New York’s best known landmarks. A structure
of impressive grandeur and large historic interest, it encourages the
thousands of New Yorkers that pass it daily to look forward to the time
when their city will be ennobled by a fitting memorial of the heroic
officers and men of the great world war.

[Illustration]



XXII

THE BATTLESHIP “OKLAHOMA” ON THE HUDSON


It often seems more difficult to recognize beauty in things with which
we are familiar than in those which are more foreign to us. The Hudson
is, beyond question, as splendid a river as any of which European cities
can boast, yet visitors to New York often seem to appreciate it more
than do the New Yorkers themselves. Whether twinkling under myriad
lights on a summer night, or storm lashed in January, the Hudson sweeps
the whole west shore of Manhattan in lasting yet ever changing grandeur.
Imagine yourself in an unknown, distant city, and watch the sun go
gorgeously down behind the Palisades, while on the water its long
reflection is ploughed to pieces by the river craft.

[Illustration]



XXIII

HIGH BRIDGE


Boldly across the Harlem River at One Hundred and Seventy-fourth Street
stands High Bridge. It differs remarkably from other New York bridges in
that it is built entirely of masonry. No steel construction, no
suspension cable, no huge rolling lift or counter-poise relate it to the
present dynasty of bridges. One hundred and thirty-five feet of solid
stone it rises gray and enduring amid the surrounding green. Surely it
belongs to the Old World and to another time, and looking through its
arches one half expects to see the towers and battlements of some old
chateau, clear cut against the sky. One may even fancy,--but here a
blunt-nosed tug rams puffing up against the tide, smoke belching from
its stumpy funnel, the water churned to froth; and one has lost the
wonders of the past in wonders of to-day.

[Illustration]



XXIV

WASHINGTON BRIDGE


Washington Bridge is one of the many arteries that join the Borough of
the Bronx with Manhattan, and in thus connecting its enormous area and
population with the rest of the metropolis, is a material factor in
making New York the foremost city of the country.

[Illustration]



XXV

THE GRAND CENTRAL STATION


The Grand Central is one of the finest railroad stations in the country.
Fronting on Forty-second it extends to Forty-fifth Street and from
Vanderbilt Avenue to Lexington. The group of figures forming the clock
cartouche above its main façade is a piece of masterly sculpture. Its
main hall is gigantic. The system with which its hundreds of trains
arrive and depart is little less than magical. Yet greater far than
these is the story of the crowds that come to New York on these trains,
and the mass of hopes and aspirations that they bring to the city
through this great gate. And of all who come buoyant, confident and
convinced that they will wrest success from this thronging mart of
millions,--how few achieve! And yet, though comparatively few, these
victors form so vast an army that they many times outnumber the
successful sons of the city, and are a mighty force in the making of New
York, the Metropolis of the Nation.

[Illustration]



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