The Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries and Crimes of New York City — John Shaqi
The Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries and Crimes of New York CityMcCabe, James Dabney
History
The Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries and Crimes of New York City
McCabe, James Dabney
New York (N.Y.) -- Description and travel; New York (N.Y.) -- History
Below Twenty-third street, and especially below Union Square, Broadway
is built up magnificently. Marble, brown stone, and iron warehouses,
extend in long rows on each side of the street. There are some old
shanties still standing on the great thoroughfare, but they are rapidly
disappearing, and in a few years will be entirely gone. The view from
any point below Fourteenth street, ranges from Union Square to the
Bowling Green, and is grand and exhilarating beyond description. The
windows of the stores are filled with the gayest and most showy goods.
Jewels, silks, satins, laces, ribbons, household goods, silver ware,
toys, paintings; in short, rare, costly, and beautiful objects, greet
the gazer on every hand.
There are no railroad tracks on Broadway below Fourteenth street; the
public travel is done by means of omnibusses, or stages, as they are
called. Several hundred of these traverse the street from the lower
ferries as far up as Twenty-third street, turning off at various points
into the side streets and avenues. At night the many colored lamps of
these vehicles add a striking and picturesque feature to the scene.
They are filled with all sorts of people.
The Broadway side walks are always crowded, and this throng of passers-
by is, to our mind, the most attractive feature of the busy scene.
Every class and shade of nationality and character is represented here.
America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and even Oceanica, has each its
representatives here. High and low, rich and poor, pass along these
side-walks, at a speed peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering
to a stranger. No one seems to think of any person but himself, and
each one jostles his neighbor or brushes by him with an indifference
amusing to behold. Fine gentlemen in broad cloth, ladies in silks and
jewels, and beggars in squalidness and rags, are mingled here in true
Republican confusion. The bustle and uproar are very great, generally
making it impossible to converse in an ordinary tone. From early
morning till near midnight this scene goes on.
A gentleman from the remote interior, once put up at the St. Nicholas
Hotel. He came to the City on urgent business, and told a friend who
was with him, that he intended to start out early the next morning.
This friend saw him, about noon the next day, waiting at the door of
the St. Nicholas Hotel, surveying the passing crowd with an air of
impatience.
"Have you finished your business?" he asked.
"No," said the gentleman, "I have not yet started out. I've been
waiting here for three hours for this crowd to pass by, and I see no
signs of it doing so."
The friend, pitying him, put him in a stage, and started him off,
telling him that crowd usually took twenty-four hours to pass that
point.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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