S BY THOMAS R. DAWLEY, JR. CATTERED over a diversified surface of three hundred and twentythree square miles, New York presents an area nearly three times that of London and ten times that of Paris. Paris, with its thirty square miles, by the side of it is a compact little city to the center of which all roads may be said to lead. And so with London, though four times New York's size, to the business center there are no great rivers to be spanned, no bay to be crossed, or very great distances traversed. In or about the centers of both these European cities people dwell, and there is constant life and movement, the attraction of theaters, public places, and gayety at all times. Not so with New York, where the business center is located on the lower end of Manhattan, which forms a narrow peninsula geographically isolated from the mainland. There no one pretends to live, if we may except the localized colonies of foreigners, such as the Syrians of Washington Street, the Italians of Mulberry Street, and the Chinese of Mott and Pell Streets, or the Jews on the East Side. With these localities excepted, the business center of the city outside of business hours is as silent as the tombs of Thebes. As morning dawns, the reigning silence begins to be broken by the great rush of people from all directions to take their places in the empty workshops, factories, and buildings, till they are filled to the streets and wharfs with seething, hurrying humanity, all bent upon their personal gain and occupation. As the day wanes they begin to hurry away again as they came, leaving that part of the city, with its tall buildings, factories, and shops, and even its shipping, as silent and deserted as it was before. This aspect of the American metropolis began with the natural desire of the independent, home-loving American to live apart from his business, combined with the limited area of the city proper to give him such a home as he required. It began on the very lowest end of the peninsula, pressing its way upwards, and as the city became more and more congested with business, it drove the homes out, either to the suburbs or further up town. Thus the fashionable quarters of Bleecker Street and Washington Square were transferred to Fifth Avenue, while the districts thus abandoned by the wealthy, like "the palace of a king in the day of its decline, which commonly ends in being the nestling-place of the beggar," became in the majority of cases the resort of the lowly. Thus early it became a marked feature of our growing metropolis that only the very rich or the very poor lived in what was then New York, to-day Manhattan. Across the East River was the little city of Brooklyn, which furnished an aristocratic residential section on the heights opposite Wall Street even back in the days of the Dutch burghers, when they rowed their own boats across to the city, where, after transacting their business, they sat in front of the stores along the water-front, and smoked their pipes as they gossiped away an idle hour, looking out upon the green slope of the Brooklyn to be. Williamsburg, further up, was a little settlement which grew and became popu lated with the great influx of Germans from across the sea, who added rapidly to its increase. Brooklyn gradually spread over the green fields, its characteristic homes of the Hill district back of the Heights, the residential section of the fairly well-to-do who could afford dwell ings with ample room on shaded streets, becoming its prominent feature. Back of the Hill oceanward spread the farms of the old Dutch settlers of Peter Stuyvesant days, with their little village of Flatbush centered around the old Dutch church which still exists. South Brooklyn formed a community by itself; then there was East New York, far inland-a suburban growth, from its name and beer gardens a seeming travesty on Bowery New York. Bushwick, with its dairy farms and fruit orchards, filled in the triangular space between East New York and Williamsburg. Williamsburg was soon swallowed up by fast-growing Brooklyn, and the other places, all growing and spreading, became merged with Brooklyn too, their seams between healing over till it would be hard to tell just where any of the former villages began or left off. Then came the Consolidation Act which made New York and Brooklyn, with the outlying Boroughs of Bronx, Richmond, and Queens, one city, and thus we have the largest city in the world with a much smaller number of inhabitants per square mile than either Paris or London, the two next largest cities in point of population. And for this very reason, surrounded, traversed, and separated by its rivers, estuaries, and bays, it is the most inconvenient for its inhabitants in which to find a suitable place to live, with proper regard to getting to and fro from that point where it becomes necessary to go, not only in order to earn one's daily bread, but to enjoy such amusements and educational advantages as are offered by a great city. If the home be selected in the upper part of Manhattan, the most available locality in regard to transit, perhaps, unless it be the extremely wealthy who can afford a mansion, it means one of the two extremes either a dismal flat with its prison-like cells for bedrooms, or a fashionable apartment-house, very well for a small family of grown people, but no fit place for children, any more than the cheaper flat. And even the uptown flat is not cheap, for rents are high and the cost of provisions proportionately higher. Bronx means a much longer, tedious ride, in crowded cars both night and morning, in which, unless one is fortunate enough or scrambles hard enough to secure a seat, he must hang on by a strap to his jour ney's end. We have New Jersey, which is nearer, and furnishes homes cheap enough to be sure, but there is a prejudice on the part of some people against living in a State apart from that in which their business interests are centered, especially as the laws of the State in which they do not reside treat them as foreigners. For residential purposes in New York we have left Richmond across the Bay, already crowding Brooklyn and Queens. The great problem which has confronted the people of New York is the bringing of this great city, with all its boroughs, together; in other words, unifying it by adequate means of transit, so that its people may obtain suitable homes within its bounds, without having to devote a quarter of their time at least in getting to and from their places of work or business. To do this, great engineering feats have to be planned and accomplished, and millions of money supplied for the purpose. It has been this latter, appalling amounts for each new enterprise, which has hitherto prevented the carrying out of the schemes proposed for the closer unification of the great city. It never seemed possible that the investment of such vast capital as was required in any one of the schemes would pay. When the present Brooklyn Bridge was proposed, it was cried down as impossible, impracticable, and entirely unnecessary, and even after the work was commenced it dragged along for years, and at one time stopped completely for the lack of an appropriation. At last the Bridge was finished, and now, as one looks at the great mass of people on an afternoon, struggling to get into the cars which are to convey them home-throngs in steady streams down Center Street, along Park Row and Nassau Street, across the City Hall Park from up and down Broadway and intersecting streets, all converging towards the iron-throated Bridge entrance, where it yawns with its various side entrances, swallowing them all, one wonders how THE PROPOSED BRIDGE primary study of the Bridge engineers, New York ever got along without the Bridge No. 4 is a cantilever bridge over Blackwell's Island from Long Island City, terminating at Second Avenue, between Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth Streets, Manhattan. Work has also begun on this OVER THE NORTH RIVER five years provided the necessary appro- It is estimated that it will take two and one-half years to complete the bridge at the foot of Broadway, Brooklyn, and Delancey Street, Manhattan, the towers of which are up and temporary foot-path across. Each of these bridges will have capacity for four trolley tracks, two L tracks and two roadways eighteen feet wide, with the somewhat novel feature of a tenfoot sidewalk for foot passengers on the extreme outsides of each bridge, thus affording ample room for the future bridgejumper, without the necessity of his having to jump from cars or trucks to accomplish his perilous feat. The naming of the bridges is an interesting topic recently taken up by the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, which has awarded a silver and a bronze medal respectively for the best and the next-best list of proposed names. Although the trustees did not consider any of the 121 lists submitted ideal, the prizes were awarded to Miss Mary I. Smithson, of East Orange, N. J., and Franklin T. Nevin, of Pittsburg, Pa. With only praise for all the Society has done in its particular field, I think that its Secretary, Mr. Hall, will agree with me in that the bridges are bound to name themselves. The present bridge, now known and named by the people as the "Brooklyn Bridge," in view of the near completion of No. 2 Bridge, is already beginning to be called the "Old Bridge," and I find around the bridge office Bridge No. 3 being termed the "Pike Street Bridge," though Pike Street has nothing more to do with it than have the many other streets which the bridge will cross when completed, and the name is considered by many, who have expressed the hope to me that it will not become fastened upon it by popular usage, as very commonplace and inappropriate. Bridge No. 4 is already being termed "Blackwell's Island Bridge," though "Queen's Bridge" is fully as appropriate, and, owing to its brevity, stands as good a chance of becoming its permanent name. I doubt if No. 2 bridge will ever be known by any other name than that of the "Williamsburg Bridge," though at present it is called the "New Bridge." The new bridges are to be free bridges; that is, they will be open to all car lines which desire to use them, irrespectively. The city makes no plans for running cars, but merely provides the capacity for their use. If the companies for any reason should fail to extend their lines across the bridges when they have been thrown open for traffic, there are no provisions made for compelling them to do so. |