Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
utmost, and its passengers average over a million a week. The view
from its raised footway is one of the most superb sights of New York,
disclosing both cities, and the extensive wharves and commerce of
East River, the Navy Yard just above, and for miles over the
surrounding region and down through the harbor to the distant blue
hills of Staten Island.
THE CITY OF CHURCHES.
The Borough of Brooklyn, which has grown from the overflow of New
York, whose people are said to go over there "chiefly to sleep or be
buried," is popularly known as the "City of Churches." A large portion
of the working population of the metropolis, as well as the merchants
and business men, make it their home and dormitory, while there are
beautiful cemeteries in the suburbs peopled largely by dead New
Yorkers. Greenwood, overlooking New York harbor from Gowanus Heights
in South Brooklyn, is regarded as one of the finest American
cemeteries. In no other city can be found such an aggregation of
churches, developed in a past generation, and under the ministry of a
regiment of distinguished clergymen, then led by Beecher and Storrs,
so that the popular title was well bestowed. Brooklyn is entirely the
growth of the nineteenth century, a growth due to the inability of New
York to spread, excepting far northward. It stretches several miles
along East River and three or four miles inland, and grows rapidly.
When the century began, however, it was hard work to find three
thousand people there, and, strangely enough, they had to cross over
to New York to go to church. Just about the time old Peter Minuit was
buying Manhattan from the Indians, a band of Walloons first settled in
Brooklyn. Their descendants drove cows across East River to Governor's
Island to graze, the Buttermilk Channel between them being then
shallow enough for fording, though it is now scoured out deep enough
to float the largest vessels, the docks located where the cows then
crossed now accommodating an enormous commerce. At first a little
ferry from Fulton Street to Peck Slip, New York, accommodated the
straggling village, and it has grown into more than a dozen steam
ferries of the largest capacity, which (besides the bridge) will carry
daily a half-million people across at one cent apiece, this fleet of
packet-boats being the greatest transporters of humanity in the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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