Omaha daily bee. (Omaha [Neb.]) 187?-1922, 1916-11-27
An Engllshman's Dissertations
ON NeW York

| never really feel myself in America until
New York is left behind and | am rid OF its at
| mosphere OF concentrated self-suficiency. | know
| when land on Manhattan Island that have left
Europe But am not conscious OF having reached
| the United States. The city is little world OF
| itself, planted round a backwater, away from the
| man streams of both American and European ex-
Istence but in many ways more closely allied
with London and Paris than with Denver and
| Kansas City. know of no metropolis so intensely
| absorbed in its own affairs, so, coolly disdainfu
| OF everything in America that is not New York
| What is its place in American lifea 1t sets the
fashions. it is the home of the leisure class it is
| an accepted rendezvous OF the "magnates." it is
the seat of the money power" it struggles hard
to be the arbiter on all points Of social usage, it
can stamp with more effective seal OF approval
or disapproval than any other American city can
command an opera book, play. But COM
merclaly, financially and politically its influence
decreases as that of the west increases New
York, | should say, reached its greatest height
OF power in 1896 Since then its importance has
steadily waned, and fifty years hence it will be
like firm whose branches have outgrown the
main Office.
Everything in and around New York has
changed since first visited it twenty years ago,
but not New York itself As look over it at this
moment, from the fifteenth floor OF my hotel
get the same impression that | received in 1896
Of city as violently antithetical to London as
anything could be-
The differences everywhere--n the crys-
tallinc brightness of the atmosphere. brightness
heightened rather than broken by the gay white
whlfts OF steam from apartment house, skyscraper
and factory; in the gmmering panorama Of
speckless. towering cdilces; in the sabbing sharp
ness OF the noises from the street: in vision OF
city built, one would say, by the Titans planned
by Euclid, and furnished by Edsona chcssboard
affair OF right angles and squares and paraelo-
grams; in the prodigaty of electric light that at
E,y nd oh
building pa ace in fairyland; in the ascending
sense, as one looks down hundred and fifty feet
to the asphalt below, OF movement joyous |
ness all exhilaration quicker and sharper edged !
than anything we in London ever knew.
London has grown; only just begin |
ming to make it, or rather to make it over. But
in New York one feels one's self in metropolis |
that has somehow been hit off at stroke and |
dumped down upon Manhattan Island by con-
tract.
The waywardness the surprises, the haphaz-
ard hooks and irregularities, the cacsural pauses
the deep quiet half-forgotten pools of silence and
ISOLATION the enormous sense of background
and a past, the sheer, delightful tumble OF it all
everything, in short that makes one love Lon
don and hate it with equal fervor finds here no
counterpart at all.
New York seems almost at times to be less
city than system, an amazing and triumphant
essay in the art OF saving time and space. Every
|
be sacrificed, to the necessity of enabling ten peo-
pie TO live, and above all to move, in an area
where three would be crowd
Method mechanics, the draftsman's ruler the
daring and ingenuity have never
achieved anything more wonderful than in max
ing metropolis on Manhattan Island possible.
They have solved the problem with steel and mar
Bile; with offices, stores. apartment houses and
hotels that dwarf the highest church steepe; with
curveless streets slashed by electric car lines,
overarched by elevated railroads and tunneled by
a four-traek subway--in a word by every device
that can annihilate distance and delay
But in so solving it, in thus scaling everything
down to the dull prose of business and dispatch,
in treating New York as primarily puzzle in
transportation and communications, a gigantic
counter to facilitate buying and selling they have
made it city of all the material conveniences and
ew or none of the emotional satisfactions
Behind the whirr and radiance and stimulus
of the whole vast machine there Is little to make
my permanent appeal. New York has had his
ory but it is overaid and obliterated by the rau
'ous and lnsistent present. Except for small
angle of streets down town" there is hardly any,
hing to recall the past. Dutch New York, Eng
ish New York, are as though they had never been
One might as well write sonnets to steam
adiator as attempt to grow historically or aes-
hetically sentimental over New York. The first ;
md last note of the city is that of hard brilliant
elentless mechanism. | feel as though were
living in power house or had been transformed q
INTO mere bundle of freight caught up in the i
"Trip OF universal express company. And vet I
With all the symmetry of its design its enforced
md rigid adhesion to plan, one gets curious /
ense OF impermanence, as though the city were !
IN IN the experimental, campng-out stage, as
hough even now it were rather a large cara. #
'anserai than settled community. t