In the meantime the newest New York has come into its being. The construction of the two modern railroad terminals--the one in Thirty-third Street and the other in Forty-second--has created in the district that lies between them what today would seem to be the permanent retail shopping center of the city. The one station brings nearly 60,000 folk--transients and commuters--the other almost 100,000, into New York each business day. They anchor and anchor firmly, its new business heart. Its sidewalks are daily thronged. As was Twenty-third Street two decades ago, so has Thirty-fourth become today. Not only the railroad stations but four great subways running north and south, four elevated railways, too, a dozen surface-car lines, and innumerable taxis and private motor-cars pour their passengers into it. It is a thoroughfare of surpassing importance. [Illustration: THE MACY'S OF TODAY By 1903 the new Macy's in Herald Square was finished and the business going forward in great strides] Fifty years ago, as Rowland H. Macy walked home one evening with his daughter--as was his frequent wont--from the simple little old red-brick store in Fourteenth Street to their new house in Forty-ninth, he paused for a moment with her in front of the old Broadway Tabernacle. "I want you to notice this corner, very carefully, Florence," said he. "A half-century hence and the business of New York is to be centered between Thirty-fourth Street and Forty-second. Here is to be the future business heart of this wonderful city." It is upon the vision of men quite as much as upon their prudence that the success of their enterprises depends. _Today_ I. A Day in a Great Store The subtle hour which in summer comes just before the break of day is the only hour in which New York ever sleeps; if indeed the modern Bagdad ever sleeps at all. There is an hour, however--from three of the morning until four--when the city is all but stilled; when its heart-beats are at the lowest ebb of the twenty-four. In that hour even Broadway is nearly deserted and Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street equally emptied. The swinging lights of a white-fronted lunch-room or two; the echoing racket of an extremely occasional surface-car or elevated train; the rush of a "night-hawk" taxi; the clatter of the milk-wagon; the measured walk of a policeman and the hurried one of some much belated suburbanite hurrying toward the great railroad station over in Seventh Avenue; these sounds, occasional and unrelated seemingly, are not New York; not at least the New York that you and I are accustomed to knowing. Yet, after all, they are New York; even, if you please, the New York of that throbbing heart, Herald Square.