Produced by Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. [Illustration: On the Harlem River—University Heights from Fort George. _See_ "_The Water Front of New York_." _Drawn by Jules Guérin._] SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE VOL. XXVI OCTOBER, 1899 NO. 4 Copyright, 1899, by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved. [Illustration: Grant's Tomb and Riverside Drive (from the New Jersey Shore).] THE WATER-FRONT OF NEW YORK By Jesse Lynch Williams 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 top masts 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. [Illustration: Down along the Battery sea-wall is the place to watch the ships go by.—Page 385.] 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 helmsman in the pilot-house, turning the wheel and looking unexcitable.... [Illustration: The old town does not change so fast about its edges.—Page 394. (Along the upper East River front looking north toward Blackwell's Island.)] That is the way it is down around Pier A, where the Tammany 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.