href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@42501@[email protected]#i_image123" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">123

Cemetery Ridge, Near Richmond, Staten Island 126 A Peaceful Scene in New York 127 In the distance is St. Andrew's Church, Borough of Richmond, Staten Island. A Relic of the Early Nineteenth Century, Borough of Richmond 128 An Old-fashioned, Stone-arched Bridge. (Richmond, Staten Island) 129 An Old House in Flatbush 131

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THE WATER-FRONT

THE WATER-FRONT

DOWN along the Battery sea-wall is the place to watch the ships go by.

Coastwise schooners, lumber-laden, which can get far up the river under their own sail; big, full-rigged clipper ships that have to be towed from the lower bay, their topmasts down in order to scrape under the Brooklyn Bridge; barques, brigs, brigantines—all sorts of sailing craft, with cargoes from all seas, and flying the flags of all nations.

White-painted river steamers that seem all the more flimsy and riverish if they happen to churn out past the dark, compactly built ocean liners, who come so deliberately and arrogantly up past the Statue of Liberty, to dock after the long, hard job of crossing, the home-comers on the decks already waving handkerchiefs. Plucky little tugs (that whistle on the slightest provocation), pushing queer, bulky floats, which bear with ease whole trains of freight-cars, dirty cars looking frightened and out of place, which the choppy seas try to reach up and wash. And still queerer old sloop scows, with soiled, awkward canvas and no shape to speak of, bound for no one seems to know where and carrying you seldom see what. And always, everywhere, all day and night, whistling and pushing in and out between everybody, the ubiquitous, faithful, narrow-minded old ferry-boats, with their wonderful helmsmen in the pilot-house, turning the wheel and looking unexcitable....

That is the way it is down around Pier A, where the New York Dock Commission meets and the Police Patrol boat lies, and by Castle Garden, where the river craft pass so close you can almost reach out and touch them with your hand.

The "water-front" means something different when you think of Riverside and its greenness, a few miles to the north, with Grant's tomb, white and glaring in the sun, and Columbia Library back on Cathedral Heights.

Here the "lordly" Hudson is not yet obliged to become busy North River, and there is plenty of water between a white-sailed schooner yacht and a dirty tug slowly towing in silence—for there is no excuse here for whistling—a cargo of brick for a new country house up at Garrisons; while on the shore itself instead of wharves and warehouses and ferry-slips there are yacht and rowing club houses and an occasional bathing pavilion; and above the water edge, in place of the broken ridge of stone buildings with countless windows, there is the real bluff of good green earth with the well-kept drive on top and the sun glinting on harness-chains and automobiles.

Now, between these two contrasts you will find—you may find, I mean, for most of you prefer to exhaust Europe and the Orient before you begin to look at New York—as many different sorts of interests and kinds of picturesqueness as there are miles, as there are blocks almost.

For instance, down there by the starting-point. If you go up toward the bridge from South Ferry a block or so and pull down your hat-brim far enough to hide the tower of the Produce Exchange, you have a bit of old New Amsterdam, just as it has been for years, so old and so Amsterdamish, with its long, sloping roofs, gable windows, and even wooden-shoe-like canal-boats, that you may easily feel that you are in Holland, if you like. As a matter of fact, it is more like Hamburg, I am told, but either will do if you get an added enjoyment out of things by noting their similarity to something else and appreciate mountains and sunsets more by quoting some other person's sensations about other sunsets and mountains.

But if you believe that there is also an inherent, characteristic beauty in the material manifestations of the spirit of our own new, vigorous, fearless republic—and whether you do or not, if you care to look at one of these sudden contrasts referred to—not a stone's throw farther up the water-front there is a notable sight of newest New York. This, too, is good to look at. Behind a foreground of tall masts with their square rigging and mystery (symbols of the world's commerce, if you wish), looms up a wondrous bit of the towering white city of the new century, a cluster of modern high buildings which, notwithstanding the perspective of a dozen blocks, are still high, enormously, alarmingly high—symbols of modern capital, perhaps, and its far-reaching possibilities, or they may remind you, in their massive grouping, of a cluster of mountains, with their bright peaks glistening in the sun far above the dark shadows of the valleys in which the streams of business flow, down to the wharves and so out over the world.

Now, separately they may be impossible, these high buildings of ours—these vulgar, impertinent "sky-scrapers;" but, as a group, and in perspective, they are fine, with a strong, manly beauty all their own. It is the same as with the young nation; we have grown up so fast and so far that some of our traits, when considered alone, may seem displeasing, but they appear less so when we are viewed as a whole and from the right point of view.