The Personality of American CitiesHungerford, Edward
History
The Personality of American Cities
Hungerford, Edward
Cities and towns -- United States; United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
The overloading of the Brooklyn bridge is repeated in the subway--that
hidden giant of New York, which is the real backbone of the island of
Manhattan. Built to carry four hundred thousand humans a day, that busy
railroad has begun to carry more than a million each working day. How it
is done, no one, not even the engineers of the company that operates it,
really knows. The riders in the great tube who have to use it during the
busiest of the rush hours are willing to hazard a guess, however. It is
probable that in no other railroad of the sort would jamming and
crowding of this sort be tolerated for more than a week. Yet the patrons
of the subway not only tolerate but, after a fashion, they like it.
You can ask a New Yorker about it half an hour after his trip down town,
sardine-fashion, and he will only say:
"The subway? It's the greatest ever. I can come down from Seventy-second
street to Wall street in sixteen minutes, and in the old days it used to
take me twenty-six or twenty-seven minutes by the elevated."
There is your real New Yorker. He would be perfectly willing to be bound
and gagged and shot through a pneumatic tube like a packet of letters,
if he thought that he could save twenty minutes between the Battery and
the Harlem river. No wonder then that he scorns a relatively greater
degree of comfort in elevated trains and surface cars and hurries to the
overcrowded subway.
But New York astir in the morning is more even than Manhattan, the Bronx
and the populous boroughs over on Long island. Upon its westerly edge
runs the Hudson river--New Yorkers will always persist in calling it the
North river--one of the masterly water highways of the land. The busy
East river had been spanned by man twice before any man was bold enough
to suggest a continuous railroad across the Hudson. Now there are
several--the wonderful double tubes of the Pennsylvania railroad leading
from its new terminal in the uptown heart of Manhattan--and two double
sets of tunnels of a rapid-transit railroad leading from New Jersey both
uptown and downtown in Manhattan. This rapid transit railroad--the
Hudson & Manhattan, to use its legal name, although most New Yorkers
speak of it as the McAdoo Tubes, because of the man who had the courage
to build it--links workaday New York with a group of great railroad
terminals that line the eastern rim of New Jersey all the way from
Communipaw through Jersey City to Hoboken. And the railroads reach with
more than twenty busy arms off across the Jersey marshes to rolling
hills and incipient mountains. Upon those hills and mountains live
nearly a hundred thousand New Yorkers--men whose business interests are
closely bound up in the metropolis of the New World but whose social and
home ties are laid in a neighboring state. These--together with their
fellows from Westchester county, the southwestern corner of Connecticut
and from the Long island suburban towns--measure a railroad journey of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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