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
Here is Solomon Strunsky who has just arrived through Ellis Island,
scared and forlorn, with his scared and forlorn little family trailing
on behind, Solomon Strunsky all but penniless, and the merciless
home-sickness for the little faraway town in Polish hills tearing at his
heart. Is Solomon Strunsky less a typical New Yorker than the scion of
this fine old family which for sixty years lived and died in a red-brick
mansion close by Washington square? For in four years Solomon Strunsky
will be keeping his own little store in the East Side, in another year
he will be moving his brood up to a fine new house in Harlem, an even
dozen years from the entrance at Ellis Island and you may be reading the
proud patronymic of Strunsky spelled along a signboard upon one of the
great new commercial barracks, which, not content with remaining
downtown, began the despoliation of Fifth avenue and its adjacent retail
district. Can you keep Solomon Strunsky out of the family of typical New
Yorkers? We think not.
We think that you cannot exclude the man who through some stroke of
fortune has accumulated money in a smaller city, and who has come to New
York to live and to spend it. There are many thousands of him dwelling
upon the island of Manhattan; with his families they make a considerable
community by itself. They are good spenders, good New Yorkers in that
they never complain while the strings of their purses are never tightly
tied. They live in smart apartments uptown, at tremendously high
rentals, keep at least one car in service at all seasons of the year,
dine luxuriously in luxurious eating-places, attend the opera once a
week or a fortnight, see the new plays, keep abreast of the showy side
of New York. They are typical New Yorkers. In an apartment a little
further down the street--which rents at half the figure and comes
dangerously near being called a flat--is another family. This family
also attends the new plays, although it is far more apt to go a floor or
even two aloft, than to meet the speculator's prices for orchestra
seats. It also goes to the opera, and the young woman of the house is in
deadly earnest when she says that she does not mind standing through the
four or five long acts of a Wagnerian matinee, because the nice young
ushers let you sit on the floor in the intermissions. But this family
goes farther than the drama--spoken or sung. It is conversant with the
new books and the new pictures. That same young woman swings the Phi
Beta Kappa key of the most difficult institution of learning on this
continent. And she knows more about the trend of modern art than half of
the artists themselves. And yet she "goes to business"--is the capable
secretary of a very capable man downtown.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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