It is not only the corporations which outrage personal rights; where there is a question of interest, there seems to be no question of rights between individuals. They prey upon one another and seize advantages by force and by fraud in too many ways for me to hope to make the whole situation evident. The avenues to the eastward and westward have not grown up solidly and continuously in obedience to any law of order, or in pursuance of any meditated design. They have been pushed along given lines, in fragments, as builders saw their interest in offering buyers a house or a row of houses, or as they could glut or trick the greed of land-owners clinging to their land, and counting upon some need of it, in the hope of extorting an unearned profit from it. In one place you will see a vast and lofty edifice, of brick or stone, and on each side of it or in front of it a structure one fourth as high, or a row of scurvy hovels, left there till a purchaser comes, not to pay the honest worth of the land for it, but to yield the price the owner wants. In other places you see long stretches of high board fence, shutting in vacant lots, often the best lots on the street, which the landlord holds for the rise destined to accrue to him from the building all round and beyond his property. In the meantime he pays a low tax on his land compared with the tax which the improved property pays, and gets some meager return for the use of his fence by the Italian fruiterers who build their stalls into it, and by the bill-posters who cover it with a medley of theatrical announcements, picturing the scenes of the different plays and the persons of the players. There are many things which unite to render the avenues unseemly and unsightly, such as the apparently desperate tastelessness and the apparently instinctive uncleanliness of the New-Yorkers. But as I stand at some point commanding a long stretch of one of their tiresome perspectives, which is architecturally like nothing so much as a horse’s jawbone, with the teeth broken or dislodged at intervals, I can blame nothing so much for the hideous effect as the rapacity of the land-owner holding on for a rise, as it is called. It is he who most spoils the sky-line, and keeps the street, mean and poor at the best in design, a defeated purpose, and a chaos come again.