THIS CLIPPING FROM
NEW YORK
HERALD-TRIBUNE

NOV 28 1926

Nobody Knows New York!

Lower Broadway—Where the Most Silent Workaday Crowd in the
World Marches Slowly By

By Will Irwin

TO MOST of the pavements which bottom lower Broadway and its subsidiary canyons the sunlight cannot penetrate. Yet in bright weather the depths at the foot of the gigantic buildings never seem dim or murky. The sunbeams, leaping back and forth from a thousand windows far above, give to the shadows of the street level a faint luminosity. In that light the human figures flowing ceaselessly north and south in a double stream seem to stand forth more clearly outlined than in full sunlight; it is almost as though the air were faintly charged with phosphorus, which spreads about them the very wraith of an aura. It is a strange thing to say of that district, which more than any other in this world stands a symbol for things material, but some times in that light these crowds seem unreal. They might be the Outward Bound—dead and unaware.

Another anomaly—mid-morning or mid-afternoon, the crowds of lower

Broadway do not, as all Europeans and outlanders believe, walk at a brisk rush. The tempo, it seems to me, is even slower than that of the commercial streets in London or Paris, far slower than that of the shopping district in upper Fifth Avenue. Not that they loiter. The step is as firm and determined as that of infantry on the march.

Final peculiarity: This is the most silent workday crowd in the world. When I first noticed this—as a man will notice suddenly a phenomenon he has been witnessing for years—I wondered if it were not a trick of acoustics; perhaps these depths absorbed sound. Then a pair of truckmen unloading a safe laughed, and the noise came out as clearly as the crying of a child in church. The cause may be that half-light; it takes full light, whether of sun or fire, to draw conversation out of people; or it may be the absorption of brainworkers. This is only the overflow of nearly a million people who for

seven hours a day cram the caves in the great cliffs up there, and 99 per cent of them work furiously with their minds.

Nearly a million. Nowhere on the surface of the globe do so many people congregate as on these lower acres of Manhattan. It has become a city of itself, lacking nothing which man demands of life, except only lodging and formal amusements. One could dress like a princess or a Beau Brummel from the smart specialty shops which flash invitations at you in the little subway basements or the ground floors. These exist mostly to tempt the commuters, but all Broadway and Wall Street purchase from them in emergency. Along the street level flourish hundreds and perhaps thousands of restaurants. And these are not always of the quick-lunch variety. I know one tucked into a by-way of lower Broadway which serves French fare with all the ceremony and leisure of Paris. Only wine, which gives the keynote to all French cook-

ery, is lacking. May I not say, alas!

Along the streets at the back doors of the skySCRAPERS there are Mexican, pure Spanish and Italian establishments. A half block further and one may lunch on the strange pastes and sirupy coffee of the middle class in this City of Big Business, as the white-tiled cafeterias are the inns of the proletariat.

The upper class generally lunches elsewhere. Scarcely one of the great buildings but houses on one or more of its top floors a club bearing the name of some trade or profession, with a membership of all trades and professions. Real clubs they are, too, even though most of them close at 6 o'clock. They have their lounge rooms and reading rooms, their costly paintings and interior decorations, their private apartments for special functions, their broad dining rooms served by French chefs. One, atop a high skyscraper, opens out on to a roof terrace whose view looks down like that of an aero-

plane upon the ribbons that are the sidewalks, the dizzy chasms that are the streets, the misty, busy sweep of water and shore which is the eastern harbor.

Once I attended in a private room of this club an intimate luncheon to an Englishman who is important in many branches of human endeavor. The company—mostly eminent—was of both sexes. With the soup they plunged into a tourney of conversation so brilliant and so well sustained that when the waiters showed signs of patience we adjourned to the terrace. There all the rest of a warm autumn afternoon we looked down at the world as from the heavens and speculated on its future when we were gone. More and more do these private dining rooms of the down-town clubs entertain such companies as these; it is growing to be a fashion in the higher intellectual circles of the metropolis.

Finally, the very highest circle of all—the big bankers, the captains of industry—have of late years begun to establish auxiliary living quarters in their proud office suites. The very rich are giving up New York as a main seat of residence, shifting to the country. No more do they maintain town mansions, but only apartments. Nothing is more convenient than a suite attached to the office, where in the "country season" one may dress for dinner or, under pressure, pass the night. Some go further than this. They have added private dining rooms of their very own.

One of the most important American financiers has many interests outside of business. The list of his boards and committees—artistic, philanthropic and political—would fill a page of "Who's Who." He manages it all by insisting that the committees must meet with him at luncheon in the private dining room annexed to his office. He enters sharp on the hour of 1 and a butler begins immediate service of a simple luncheon. I do not know whether this meal is the work of his own chef or comes from the club on the adjoining floor. At any rate, it is a creation. Sharp at 2:15 the host rises, makes his excuses, and the committee remains to finish off the tag end of the business. This is one device by which men of his importance manage three or four careers at once.

Since I began rightly to understand this cliff city I look upon every casual visit to an unknown office as an adventure. There they stand, window after window up a thrust of thirty stories, just alike. The elevator doors, opening to discharge passengers, reveal only white corridors and uniform doors—mahogany or oak or green-painted steel. As Gertrude Stein, futurist poet, says in her masterpiece on the Bon March, "One, one, there are many of them. Each is like the other."

Within, you feel, must be the same neat, sanitary uniformity—steel or near-mahogany desks and chairs of the latest fashion in office furniture; rows of scrubbed clerks and well powdered stenographers, all cut off from the same pattern. Sometimes that is exactly what you find, and sometimes— I had occasion only this autumn to interview the very important president of a most important corporation. When I stepped through his impersonal mahogany door I did not look at him, though he was waiting for me at his desk, but at his surroundings. In the spaces between windows stood glass cabinets holding ship models, which were, to any others I ever have seen, like Venetian glass to Delft china. For these were all made of bone and ivory; every plank, every smallest spar, a distinct piece. The blocks of the rigging, which looked perfect to the naked eye, were no bigger than sections from a grain of rice. The president, before settling down to business, showed me over the collection, lingering with special fondness over an eighteen-inch ship-of-the-line, made by a French

prisoner in the Napoleonic Wars. I have heard since that this is the finest specimen of its kind in the world.

"I hope you don't think it's an affectionation, my having them here," said the president. "I like them about me, and I spend more of my waking hours here than anywhere else, and they rest me!"

Again, I stepped into a broker's office. There stood the board with the busy marker at work, facing the regular crowd of intent amateur speculators, and they sat in antique, nine-slat Windsor chairs; for this office houses an extraordinary private collection of early American pine and maple furniture—tavern tables, butterfly and crane-bracket tables, Carver chairs, dower chest, very early prints.

I hear on the authority of a great art critic that there stands, carefully guarded, in a private Broadway office one of the five or six greatest of all Greek torsos. The world of art knows it not; it has passed since its discovery

on some Greek island from hand to hand of collectors with a mania for secret and exclusive possession. Some day it will land in a museum; that is the eventual destiny of all artistic treasures which survive the accidents of time; and when that happens it will be as though some antiquary had dug up another Bathing Venus from the soil of Cyrene.

Wall Street proper as it breaks out of Broadway reminds me of a conservative small-town banker in a rusty frock coat among the smart suitings of a Rotary Club luncheon. He knows and they know that he could buy the whole lot; what is the necessity for dressing the part? Narrow, insignificant, the buildings of only moderate height and mostly of nondescript transition period architecture, only its magic name on the lamp-post attracts the attention of the tourist.

The Sub-Treasury alone, an unique marble building in the best American classic manner, gives it distinction. Every New York child must go to see that historic spot at least once in his schooling, and learn what happened there—the punishments of the pillar and whipping post, the acquittal of Zenger, which won so great a battle for liberty of the press; the meeting of the first Continental Congress after the Revolution and the inauguration of Washington. Ward's heroic-sized figure of Washington has more life than most of the statuary of the stiff period in which he wrought. The bronze tablet of Washington at prayer is perhaps the most atrocious violation of taste in all New York. And spattered over the pillars and the front steps are the scars of the latest and most tragic episode of its history. There, several years ago, a cart loaded with dynamite exploded. If it were a militant anarchist job—as seems most likely—the blast was probably intended for the modest little building of the J. Pierpont Morgan Company across the street. It turned the morning Wall Street crowd into a shambles; it blew men from their desks a half a block away. And to render villainy complete it failed to make a dent on that tablet!

Where Wall Street breaks out of Broadway stands Trinity Church. It is in every figurative sense the soul of the down-town district. The beating humanity of its strange parish lies elsewhere, suppressed under walls of granite and concrete or of custom. But Trinity wears its heart on the outside of its nut-brown vesture, and it deserves an installment by itself.