But Montague and Alice did not attend this service—they had promised
themselves the very plebeian diversion of a ride in the subway; for so
far they had not seen this feature of the city. People who lived in
Society saw Madison and Fifth Avenues, where their homes were, with the
churches and hotels scattered along them; and the shopping district
just below, and the theatre district at one side, and the park to the
north. Unless one went automobiling, that was all of the city one need
ever see. When visitors asked about the Aquarium, and the Stock
Exchange, and the Museum of Art, and Tammany Hall, and Ellis Island,
where the immigrants came, the old New Yorkers would look perplexed,
and say: “Dear me, do you really want to see those things? Why, I have
been here all my life, and have never seen them!”
For the hordes of sightseers there had been provided a special
contrivance, a huge automobile omnibus which seated thirty or forty
people, and went from the Battery to Harlem with a young man shouting
through a megaphone a description of the sights. The irreverent had
nicknamed this the “yap-wagon”; and declared that the company
maintained a fake “opium-joint” in Chinatown, and a fake “dive” in the
Bowery, and hired tough-looking individuals to sit and be stared at by
credulous excursionists from Oklahoma and Kalamazoo. Of course it would
never have done for people who had just been passed into Society to
climb upon a “yap-wagon”; but they were permitted to get into the
subway, and were whirled with a deafening clatter through a long tunnel
of steel and stone. And then they got out and climbed a steep hill like
any common mortals, and stood and gazed at Grant’s tomb: a huge white
marble edifice upon a point overlooking the Hudson. Architecturally it
was not a beautiful structure—but one was consoled by reflecting that
the hero himself would not have cared about that. It might have been
described as a soap-box with a cheese-box on top of it; and these
homely and familiar articles were perhaps not altogether out of keeping
with the character of the humblest great man who ever lived.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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