The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Let us turn to consider how New York has provided for the people as well
as the goods that enter her precincts by all the ways we have rehearsed.
She draws them up Broadway in twenty thousand horse-vehicles per day, on
an average, and from that magnificent avenue, crowded for nearly five
miles with elegant commercial structures, over two hundred miles more of
paved street, in all directions. She lights them at night with eight
hundred miles of gas-pipe; she washes them and slakes their thirst from
two hundred and ninety-one miles of Croton main; she has constructed for
their drainage one hundred and seventy-six miles of sewer. She
victimizes them with nearly two thousand licensed hackmen; she licenses
twenty-two hundred car- and omnibus-drivers to carry them over
twenty-nine different stage-routes and ten horse-railroads, in six
hundred and seventy-one omnibuses and nearly as many cars, connecting
intimately with every part of the city, and averaging ten up-and-down
trips per day. She connects them with the adjoining cities of the
main-land and with Staten and Long Island by twenty ferries, running, on
the average, one boat each way every ten minutes during the twenty-four
hours. She offers for her guests' luxurious accommodation at least a
score of hotels, where good living is made as much the subject of high
art as in the Hotel du Louvre, besides minor houses of rest and
entertainment, to the number of more than five thousand. She attends to
their religion in about four hundred places of public worship. She
gives them breathing-room in a dozen civic parks, the largest of which
both Nature and Art destine to be the noblest popular pleasure-ground of
the civilized world, as it is the amplest of all save the Bois de
Boulogne. Central Park covers an area of 843 acres, and, though only in
the fifth year of its existence, already contains twelve miles of
beautifully planned and scientifically constructed carriage-road, seven
miles of similar bridle-path, four sub-ways for the passage of
trade-vehicles across the Park, with an aggregate length of two miles,
and twenty-one miles of walk. As an item of city property, Central Park
is at present valued at six million dollars; but this, of course, is
quite a nominal and unstable valuation. The worth of the Park to New
York property in general is altogether beyond calculation.
New York feeds her people with about two million slaughter-animals per
annum. How these are classified, and what periodical changes their
supply undergoes, may be conveniently seen by the following tabular view
of the New York butchers' receiving-yards during the twelve months of
the year 1863. I am indebted for it to the experience and courtesy of
Mr. Solon Robinson, agricultural editor of the "New York Tribune."
_Receipts of Butchers' Animals in New York during 1863._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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