The Personality of American Cities Part 2

He sees naught of such. He sees a great city, the height of its buildings simply conveying the impression from afar that it is builded upon a steep ridge. Here and there a building of still loftier height gives accent to the whole, emphasis to what might otherwise be a colorless ma.s.s; gives that mysterious tone and contrast which the artist is pleased to call "composition." Four of these towers already rise distinct from the giant skysc.r.a.pers of Manhattan. Each for this moment proclaims a victory of the American architect and the American builder over the most difficult problem ever placed before architect or builder.

The European traveler will give praise to the sky-line of New York as he sees it from the steamer's deck.

"It is the City of the Towers," he will say.

In this, your Day of Days in New York, come with us and see the making of a skysc.r.a.per. This skysc.r.a.per is the new Munic.i.p.al Building. It is just behind the tree-filled park in which stands New York's oldest bit of successful architecture--its venerable City Hall. A long time before New York dreamed that she might become the City of the Towers they builded this old City Hall--upon what was then the northerly edge of the town. So sure were those old fellows that New York would never grow north of their fine town hall that they grew suddenly economical--the spirit of their Dutch forbears still dominated them--and builded the north wall of Virginia freestone instead of the white marble that was used for the facings of the other walls.

"No one will ever see that side of the building," they argued. "We might as well use cheap stone for that wall."

Today more than ninety-nine per cent. of the population of the immensely populated island of Manhattan lives north of the City Hall. That cheap north wall, hidden under countless coats of white paint, is the one acute reminder of the days that were when the Hall was new--when the gentle square in which it stood was surrounded by the suburban residences of prosperous New Yorkers and when the waters of the Collect Pond--where the New York boys use to skate in the bitterness of old-fas.h.i.+oned winters--lapped its northerly edge. There was no ugly Court House or even uglier Post Office to block the view from the Mayor's office up and down Broadway. New Yorkers were proud of their City Hall then--and good cause had they for their pride. It is one of the best bits of architecture in all America. And an even century of hard usage and countless "restorations" has only brought to it the charm of serene old age.

But the City Hall long since was outgrown. The munic.i.p.al government of New York is a vast and somewhat unwieldy machine that can hardly be housed within a dozen giant structures. To provide offices for the greater part of the city's official machinery, this towering Munic.i.p.al Building has just been erected. And because it is so typical of the best form of the so-called skysc.r.a.per architecture, let us stop and take a look at it, listen to the story of its construction. In appearance the new Munic.i.p.al Building is a gray-stone tower twenty-five stories in height and surmounted by a tower cupola an additional fifteen stories in height. In plan the structure is a sort of semi-octagon--a very shallow letter "U," if you please. But its most unusual feature comes from the fact that it squarely spans one of the busiest crosstown highways in the lower part of the city--Chambers street. The absorption of that busy thoroughfare is recognized by a great depressed bay upon the west front--the main _facade_ of the building. And incidentally that depressed bay makes interior courts within the structure absolutely unnecessary. So much for the architectural features, severe in its detail, save for some ornate and not entirely pleasing sculptures. You are interested in knowing how one of these giants--so typical of the new New York--are fabricated.

This young man--hardly a dozen years out of a big technical school--can tell you. He has supervised the job. Sometimes he has slept on it--in a narrow cot in the temporary draughting-house. He knows its every detail, as he knows the fingers of his hands.

"Just remember that we began by planning a railroad station in the bas.e.m.e.nt with eight platform tracks for loading and unloading pa.s.sengers."

"A railroad station?" you interrupt.

"Certainly," is his decisive reply. "Downstairs we will soon have the most important terminal of a brand new subway system crossing the Manhattan and the Williamsburgh bridges and reaching over Brooklyn like a giant gridiron."

He goes on to the next matter--this one settled.

"There was something more than that. We had to plant on that cellar a building towering forty stories in the air; its steel frame alone weighing twenty-six thousand tons--more than half the weight of the heaviest steel cantilever bridge in America--had to be firmly set."

The young engineer explains--in some detail. To find a foothold for this building was no sinecure. Tests with the diamond drill had shown that solid rock rested at a depth of 145 feet below street level at the south end of the plat. At the north end, the rock sloped away rapidly and so that part of the building rests upon compact sand. The rock topography of Manhattan island is uncertain. There are broad areas where solid gneiss crops close to the street level, others where it falls a hundred feet or more below water level. There is a hidden valley at Broadway and Reade street, a deep bowl farther up Broadway. Similarly, the north extremity of the Munic.i.p.al Building rests upon the edge of still another granite bowl--the sub-surface of that same Collect Pond upon which the New York boys used to skate a century or more ago.

"That bothered some folks at first," laughs the engineer, "but we met it by sinking the caissons. We've more than a hundred piers down under this structure hanging on to Mother Earth. You don't realize the holding force of those piers," he continues. He turns quickly and points to a fourteen story building off over the trees of City Hall park. Out in one of the good-sized towns of the Middle West people would gasp a little at sight of it--in New York it is no longer even a tower.

"Turn that fellow right upside down into the hole we dug for this building," says the engineer, "and the rim of his uppermost cornice would about reach the feet of our own little forest of buried concrete piers."

That was one detail of the construction of the building. Here is another; the first six stories of the new structure involved elaborate masonry, giant stones, much carved. From the seventh story the plain walls of the exterior developing into an elaborate cornice were of simple construction. If the setting of these upper floors had waited until the first six stories of elaborate stonework had been made ready there would have been a delay of months in the construction work. So the contractor began building the walls--which in the modern steel skysc.r.a.per as you know form no part of the real structure but act rather as a stone envelope to keep out hard weather--from the seventh story upward. Eventually the masons working on the first six stories, working upwards all the time, reached and joined the lower edge of the masonry that had been set some weeks before. Time had been saved and you know that time _does_ count in New York. Remember the Wall street man who preferred to have his ribs crushed and his hat smashed down over his nose in the subway rather than lose ten minutes each day in the elevated.

Now you stand with the young engineer at the topmost outlook of the tower in the Munic.i.p.al Building and look down on the busy town. Before you is that mighty thoroughfare, Broadway--but so lined with towering buildings that you cannot see it, save for a brief s.p.a.ce as it pa.s.ses the greenery of the City Hall Park; behind you is that still mightier highway--the East river. Over that river you see the four bridges--the oldest of them landing at your very feet--and crawling things upon them, which a second glance shows to be trains and trolley-cars and automobiles and wagons in an unending succession. Beyond the East river and its bridges--the last of these far to the north and barely discernible--is Brooklyn, and beyond Brooklyn--this time to the south--is a s.h.i.+mmering slender horizon of silver that the man beside you tells you is the ocean.

You let your gaze come back to the wonderful view which the building squarely faces. You look down upon the towers of New York--big towers and little towers--and you lift your eyes over the dingy mansard of the old Post Office and see the greatest of all the towers--the creamy white structure that a man has builded from his profits in the business of selling small articles at five and ten cents apiece. It is fifty-five stories in height--exquisitely beautiful in detail--and the owner will possess for a little time at least, the highest building in the world.

You can see the towers in every vista, puffing little clouds of white smoke into the purest blue air that G.o.d ever gave a city in which to spin her fabrications. To the north, the south, the west, they show themselves in every infinite variety and here and there between them emerge up-shouldering rivals, steel-naked in their gaunt frames. If your ears are keen and the wind be favorable perhaps you can hear the clatter of the riveters and you can see over there the housesmiths riding aloft on the swinging girders with an utter and immensely professional indifference, threading the slender, dizzy floor-girders as easily as a cat might tread the narrow edge of a backyard fence.

Off with your gaze again. Look uptown, catch the faint patch of dark green that is Central Park, the spires of the cathedral, the wonderful campanile at Madison square. Let your glance swing across the gentle Hudson, over into a New Jersey that is bounded by the ridges of the Orange mountains, then slowly south and even the great towers that thrust themselves into almost every buildable foot of Broadway below the City Hall cannot entirely block your view of the wonderful upper harbor of New York--of the great s.h.i.+ps that bring to an imperial city the tribute that is rightfully hers.

Now let your vision drop into the near foreground--into the tracery of trees about the jewel-box of a City Hall. Let it pause for a moment in the broad-paved street at your feet with the queer little openings through which humans are sweeping like a black stream into a funnel; others from which the human streams come crawling upward like black mola.s.ses and you are again reminded that some of the greatest highways of New York are those that are subterranean and unseen. The sidewalks grow a little blacker than before.

"It's lunch-time," laughs the young engineer.

Bless you, it is. The morning that you gave to one of the most typical of the towers has not been ill-spent.

III

Thirty minutes before the big bell of Trinity spire booms out noon-tide New York's busiest grub-time begins. A few early-breakfasting clerks and office-boys begin to find their way toward the shrines of the coffee-urns and the heaped-up piles of sandwiches.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The view of New York from the lunch club in the skysc.r.a.per]

Of course, in New York breakfast is an almost endless affair--generally a fearfully hurried one. But lunch is far more serious. Lunch is almost an inst.i.tution. Fifteen minutes after it is fairly begun it is gaining rapid headway. Thin trails of stenographers and clerks are finding their ways, lunch-bound, through the canyon-like streets of lower Manhattan, streams that momentarily increase in volume. By the time that Trinity finally booms its twelve stout strokes down into Broadway there is congestion upon the sidewalks--the favorite stools at the counters, the better tables in the higher-priced places are being rapidly filled. At twelve-thirty it begins to be luck to get any sort of accommodations at the really popular places; before one o'clock the intensity of grubbing verges on panic and pandemonium. And at a little before three cas.h.i.+ers are totaling their receipts, cooks, donning their hats and coats to go uptown, and waiters and 'buses are upturning chairs and scrubbing floors with scant regard for belated lunchers who have to be content with the crumbs that are left after the ravis.h.i.+ng and hungry army has been fed. Order after pandemonium--readiness for the two hours of gorge upon the morrow. The restaurants and lunch-rooms are as quiet as Trinity church-yard and something like three quarters of a million hungry souls have lunched in the business section of Manhattan south of Twenty-third street--at a total cost, according to the estimate of a shrewd restauranteur of a quarter of a million dollars.

You may pay your money and take your choice. The shrewd little newsboys and office-boys who find their way to the short block of Ann street between Park Row and Na.s.sau--the real Grub street of New York--are proving themselves financiers of tomorrow by d.i.c.kering for sandwiches--"two cents apiece; three for a nickel." They always buy them in lots of three. That is business and business is not to be scorned for a single instant. Or you can pay as high prices in the swagger restaurants downtown as you do in the swagger restaurants uptown--and that is saying much. When lunch-time comes you can suit the inclinations of your taste--and your pocket-book. But the average New Yorker seems to run quite strongly to the peculiar form of lunch-room in which you help yourself to what you want, compute from the markers the cost of your midday meal, announce that total to the cas.h.i.+er, who is perfectly content to take your word for it, pay the amount and walk out. It seems absurd--to any one who does not understand New Yorkers. The lunch-room owners do understand them. New York business men and business boys are honest, as a general thing--particularly honest in little matters of this sort.

"It is all very simple," says the manager of one of these big lunch-rooms, who stands beside you for a moment at the entrance of one of his places--it boasts that it serves more than two thousand lunches each business day between eleven and three. "I've been through the whole mill. I've been check boy and oyster man, cas.h.i.+er--now I'm looking out for this particular beanery. Honor among New York business men? There's a lot of it."

"And you don't run many risks?" you venture.

"Not many here," he promptly replies. "But there was a man in here yesterday, who runs a cafeteria out in Chicago. I was telling him some of the rules of the game here--how when a customer comes in and throws his hat down in a chair before he goes over to the sandwich and coffee counters that chair is his, until he gets good and ready to go. My Chicago friend laughed at that. 'If we were to do that out in my neck-o'-the-woods,' says he, 'the customer would lose his hat.' And the uptown department stores don't take any chances, either. At one of the biggest of them they make the women decide what they will eat, but before they can start they must buy a check--pay in advance, you understand. They've tried the downtown way--and now they take no chances."

The floor manager laughs nervously.

"It's different with the girls downtown. We've started one quick buffet lunch on the honor plan, same dishes and prices and service as the men's places, but this one is for business girls. They said at first that we wouldn't make good with them--but we're ready to start another within the month. The business girls don't cheat--no matter what their uptown sisters may try to do."

As a matter of fact downtown business girls in New York eat very sensibly. Sweets are popular but not invariable. They prefer candy, with fruit as a second choice, to be eaten some time during the afternoon.

In big offices, where many girls are employed, "candy pools" are often made, each girl contributing five cents and getting her pro rata, one member of the staff being delegated to make the purchases. Eaten in this way the candy acts as a stimulant during the late afternoon hours, in much the same way as the invariable tea of the business man in London.

The business girl in New York takes her full hour for luncheon. It is seldom a minute more or a minute less. She is willing as a rule to stay overtime at night but she feels that she must have her sixty minutes in the middle of the day. A part of the lunch hour is always a stroll--unless there be a downpour. Certain downtown streets from twelve to one o'clock each day suggest the proximity of a nearby high school or seminary. There is much pairing off and quiet flirtation. This noon-day promenade of girls--for the most part astonis.h.i.+ngly well-dressed girls and invariably in twos and threes--is one of the sights of downtown New York. Some of the girls gather in the old churchyards of Trinity and St.

Paul's--in lower Broadway--on pleasant days. They sit down among the tombstones with their little packages of food and eat and chat and then stroll. No one molests them and the church authorities, although a little fl.u.s.tered when this first began, have seen that there is no harm in it and let the girls have their own way. There is always great decorousness and these big open-air s.p.a.ces in the midst of the crowded street canyons are enjoyed by the women who appreciate the gra.s.s and winding paths after the hard pavements.

All the business girls downtown are not content with sitting after lunch among the tombstones of St. Paul's churchyard or of Trinity. He was indeed a canny lunch-man who took note of all the girls strolling in the narrow streets of downtown Manhattan, who remembered that all New York, rich or poor, loves to dance and who then fitted up an unrentable third floor loft over his eating place as a dancing hall. Two violins and a piano--a gray-bearded sandwich man to patrol the streets with "DANCING"

placarded fore and aft upon his boards--the trick was done. Mamie told Sadie and Sadie told Elinor and Elinor told Flossie and the lunch-man began to grow famous. He made further study of the psychology of his patrons. There were the young fellows--s.h.i.+pping and file clerks and even ambitious young office-boys to be considered. There were the after-lunch smokes of these young captains of industry to come into the reckoning.

The lunch-man placed a row of chairs along one edge of his dancing-hall and over them "Smoking Permitted at This End of the Room." After that Mamie and Sadie and Elinor and Flossie had partners and the lunch-man was on the highway to a six-cylinder motor car. He has his imitators. If you were in business in lower New York and your stenographer began to hum the "Blue Danube" along about half an hour before noon you would very well know she was gathering steam for the blissful twenty minutes of dancing that was going to help her digest her lunch.

You, yourself, are going to lunch in still another sort of restaurant.

It is characteristic of a type that has sprung up on the tip of Manhattan island within the past dozen years. You reach this grubbing-place by skirting the front doors of unspeakably dirty eating-houses in a mean street of the Syrian quarter. Finally you turn the corner of a dingy brick building, which was once the great house of one of the contemporaries of the first of the Vanderbilts and which has managed to escape destruction for three quarters of a century and face--the only skysc.r.a.per in congested New York which stands in a gra.s.s-platted yard--the whim of its wealthy owner. A fast elevator whisks you thirty stories to the top of the building and you step into the lobby of what looks, at first glance, to be the entrance hall of some fine restaurant in uptown's Fifth avenue. But this is a lunching-club--one of the newest in the town as well as one of the most elaborate.

Elaborate did we say? This is the elaboration of perfect taste--un.o.btrusive rugs, hangings, lighting fixtures and furniture--great, broad rooms and from their windows there comes to you another of the spectacular views that lay below the man-made peaks of Manhattan. To the south--the smooth, blue surface of the upper bay--in the foreground a nine hundred foot s.h.i.+p coming to the new land, her funnels lazily breathing smoke at the first lull in her four-day race across the Atlantic; to the east, a mighty river and its bridges, Brooklyn again and on very clear days, visions of Long island; to the north the most wonderful building construction that man has ever attempted, Babylonic in its immensity; to the west the brisk waterway of the North river and beyond it, Jersey City, sandwiched in between the smoky spread of railroad yards. This is the sort of thing that Mr.

Downtown Luncher may have--if he is willing to pay the price. On torrid summer days he may ascend to the roof-garden, may glance lazily below him at the activities of the busiest city in the world and sip up the cool breezes from the sea, while folk down in the bottom of the Broadway chasm are sweltering from heat and humidity. And in winter he will find a complete gymnasium in operation on another floor of the club, with a competent instructor in charge. The "doctor," as they call him, will lay out a course of work. And that course of work, calling for a half-hour of exercise each day just before lunch will make dyspeptic and paunchy old money-grubbers alike, keen as farmhands coming into dinner.

And yet this club, typical of so many others in the downtown business heart of Manhattan, is but a cog in the mighty machine of the lunching of the workaday mult.i.tudes of downtown. Its doors are closed and lights are out at six o'clock in the evening, save on extraordinary occasions; while most of its hundred or more well-trained waiters go uptown to a.s.sist in the dinner and the late supper rushes of the fas.h.i.+onable restaurants in the theater and hotel district. Like most of its compeers, it is an outgrowth of the wonderfully comfortable old Lawyers'

Club, which was completely destroyed in the great fire that burned the Equitable Building in January, 1912. From that organization, famed for its noon-day hospitality and for the quality of the folk you might meet between its walls, have sprung many other downtown lunch clubs--the Whitehall, the Hardware, the Manufacturers, the Downtown a.s.sociation, the new Lawyers--many, many others; almost invariably occupying the upper floors of some skysc.r.a.per that has been planned especially for them. These clubs are not cheap. It costs from sixty to a hundred dollars to enter one of them and about as much more yearly in the form of dues. Their restaurant charges are far from low-priced. They are never very exclusive organizations and yet they give to the strain of the workaday New Yorker his last lingering trace of hospitality--the hospitality that has lingered around Bowling Green and Trinity and St.

Paul's church-yards since colonial days and the coffee houses.

Even the hospitality of the genial host seems to end--with the ending of the lunch-hour. As he takes his last sip of _cafe noir_ he is tugging at his watch.