The comfortable country houses along the shore, half-way up the island, first become uncomfortable city houses; then tenements, warehouses, sometimes hospitals, even police stations, before they are finally hustled out of existence to make room for a foul-smelling gas-house or another big brewery. Many of them are still standing, or tumbling down; pathetic old things they are, with incongruous cupolas and dusty fanlights and, on the river side, an occasional bit of old-fashioned garden, with a bunker which was formerly a terrace, and the dirty remains of a summer-house where children once had a good time—and still do have, different-looking children, who love the nearby water just as much and are drowned in it more numerously. It is not only by way of the recreation piers that these children and their parents enjoy the water. It is a deep-rooted instinct in human nature to walk out to the end of a dock and sit down and gaze; and hundreds of them do so every day in summer, up along here. Now and then, through these vistas you get a good view of beautiful Blackwell's Island and its prison and hospital and poorhouse buildings. Those who see it oftenest do not consider it beautiful. They always speak of it as "The Island." For those who do not care to prowl about for the scattered bits of interest or who prefer what Baedeker would call "a magnificent panorama," there are plenty of good points of vantage from which to see whole sections at once, such as the Statue of Liberty or the tops of high buildings, or, obviously, Brooklyn Bridge, which is so very obvious that many Manhattanese would never make use of this opportunity were it not for an occasional out-of-town visitor on their hands. No one ought to be allowed to live in New York City—he ought to be made to live in Brooklyn—who does not go out there and look back at his town once a year. He could look at it every day and get new effects of light and color. Even in sky-line he could find something new almost every week or two. In a few years there will be a more or less even line—at least a gentle undulation—instead of these raw, jagged breaks that give a disquieting sense of incompletion, or else look as if a great conflagration had eaten out the rest of the buildings.