Before the dawn, metropolitan New York is astir. As a matter of far more accurate fact she never sleeps. You may call her the City of the Sleepless Eye and hit right upon the mark. For at any time of the lonely hours of the night she is still a busy place. Elevated and subway trains and surface cars, although shortened and reduced in number, are upon their ways and are remarkably well filled. Regiments of men are engaged in getting out the morning papers—in a dozen different languages of the sons of men—and another regiment is coming on duty to lay the foundations of the earliest editions of the evening papers. There are workers here and there and everywhere in the City of the Sleepless Eye.

But before the dawn, New York becomes actively astir. Lights flash into dull radiance in the rows of side-street tenement and apartment houses all the way from Brooklyn bridge to Bronx Park. New York is beginning to dress. Other lights flash into short brilliancy before the coming of the dawn. New York is beginning to eat its breakfast. And right afterwards the stations of the elevated and the subway, the corners where the speeding surface cars will sometimes hesitate, become the objects of attack of an army that is marching upon the town. Workaday New York is stretching its arms and settling down to business.

Nor is the awakening city to be confined to the narrow strip of island between the North and East rivers. Over on Long island are Brooklyn, Long Island City, Flushing, Jamaica and a score of other important places now within the limits of Greater New York. Some folk find it more economical to live in these places than in the cramped confines of Manhattan, and so it is hardly dawn before the great bridges and the tubes over and under the East river are doing the work for which they were built—and doing it masterfully.

The Brooklyn bridge is the oldest of these and yet it has been bending to its superhuman task for barely thirty years. In these thirty years it has been constantly reconstructed—but the best devices of the engineers, doubling and tripling the facilities of the original structure, can hardly keep pace with the growth of the communities and the traffic it has to serve. So within these thirty years other bridges and two sets of tunnels have come to span the East river. But the work of the first of all man's highways to conquer the mighty water highway has hardly lessened. The oldest of the bridges, and the most beautiful despite the ugliness of its approaches, still pours Brooklynites into Park Row, fifty, sixty, seventy thousand to the hour.

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 from ten to thirty miles in the morning, the same journey home at night, as but an incident in their day's work. They form the great brigade of commuters, as a rule the last of the working army of New York to come to business.

The commuter has his own troubles—sometimes. By reason of his self-chosen isolation he may suffer certain deprivations. The servant question is not the least of these. And the extremes of a winter in New York come hard upon him. There are days when the Eight-twenty-two suddenly loses all that reputation for steadiness and sobriety that it has taken half a year to achieve, days when sleepy schooners laden with brick and claiming the holy right-of-way of the navigator get caught in the draw-bridges, days when the sharp unexpectedness of a miniature blizzard freezes terminal switches and signals and tangles traffic inexplicably—days, and nights as well, when the streets of his suburban village are well-nigh impassable. But these days are in a tremendous minority. And even upon the worst of them he can put the rush and turmoil of the city behind him—in the peace and silence of his country place he can forget the sorrows of Harlem yesteryear—with the noisy twins on the floor below and the mechanical piano right overhead.

For nearly four hours the steady rush toward work continues. You can gauge it by a variety of conditions—even by the newspapers that are being spread wide open the length of the cars. In the early morning the popular penny papers—the American and the World predominating, with a sprinkling of the Press in between. Two hours later and while these popular penny papers are still being read—they seem to have a particular vogue with the little stenographers and the shopgirls—the more staid journals show themselves. Men who like the solid reading of the Times, with its law calendars and its market reports; men of the town who frankly confess to an affection for the flippancy of the Sun, or who have not lost the small-town spirit of their youth enough to carry them beyond the immensely personal tone of the Herald. And in between these, men who sniff at the mere mention of the name of Roosevelt, and who read the Tribune because their daddies and their grand-daddies in their turn read it before them, or frankly business souls who are opening the day with a conscientious study of the Journal of Commerce or the Wall street sheets.

New York goes to work reading its newspaper. And before you have finished a Day of Days in the biggest city of the land you might also see that it goes to lunch with a newspaper in its hand, returns home tired with the fearful thoughts of business to delve comfortably into the gossip of the day in the favorite evening paper.

Just as you stand at the portals of the business part of the town and measure the incoming throng by its favorite papers so can you sieve out the classes of the workers almost by the hours at which they report for duty. In the early morning, in the winter still by artificial light, come those patient souls who exist literally and almost bitterly by the labor of their hands and the sweat of their brows. With them are the cleaners and the elevator crews of the great office-buildings—those tremendous commercial towers that New York has been sending skyward for the past quarter of a century. On the heels of these the first of the workers in the office-buildings, office-boys, young clerks, girl stenographers whose wonderful attire is a reflection of the glories that we shall see upon Fifth avenue later in this day. It is pinching business, literally—the dressing of these young girls. But if their faces are suspiciously pinky or suspiciously chalky, if their pumps and thin silk stockings, their short skirts and their open-necked waists atrocious upon a chill and nasty morning, we shall know that they are but the reflection of their more comfortable sisters uptown. Not all of this rapidly increasing army of women workers in business New York is artificial. Not a bit of it. There are girls in downtown offices whose refinement of dress and deportment, whose exquisite poise, whose well-schooled voices might have come from the finest old New York houses. And these are the girls who revel in their Saturday afternoons uptown—all in the smartness of best bib and tucker—at the matinee or fussing with tea at Sherry's or the Plaza.

An army of office workers pours itself into the business buildings that line Broadway and its important parallel streets all the way from Forty-second street to the Battery—that cluster with increasing discomfort in the narrow tip of Manhattan south of the City Hall. Clerks, stenographers, more clerks, more stenographers, now department heads and junior partners—finally the big fellows themselves, coming down democratically in the short-haul trains of the Sixth avenue elevated that start from Fifty-eighth street or even enduring the discomforts of the subway, for it takes a leisurely sort of a millionaire indeed who can afford to come in his motor car all the way downtown through the press and strain of Broadway traffic. After all these, the Wall street men. For the exchange opens at the stroke of ten of Trinity's clock and five brief and bitter hours of trading have begun.

For four hours this flood of humans pouring out of the ferry-house and the railroad terminals, up from the subway kiosks and out from the narrow stairways of the elevated railroads. The narrow downtown streets congest, again and again. The sidewalks overflow and traffic takes to the middle of the streets. But the great office buildings absorb the major portion of the crowds. Their vertical railroads—eight or ten or twenty or thirty cars—are working to capacity and workaday New York is sifting itself to its task. By ten o'clock the office buildings are aglow with industry—the great machine of business starting below the level of the street and reaching high within the great commercial towers.

II

New York is the City of the Towers.

Sometimes a well-traveled soul will arise in the majesty of contemplation and say that in the American metropolis he sees the shadowy ghost of some foreign one. Along Madison square, where the cabbies still stand in a long, gently-curving, expectant line he will draw his breath through his teeth, point with his walking stick through the tracery of spring-blossoming foliage at Diana on her tower-perch and whisper reverently:

"It is Paris—Paris once again."

And there is a lower corner of Central Park that makes him think of Berlin; a long row of red brick houses with white trimmings along the north shore of Washington square that is a resemblance to blocks of a similar sort in London.

But he is quite mistaken. New York does not aim to be a replica of any foreign metropolis. She has her own personality, her own aggressive individualism; she is the City of the Towers as well as the City of the Sleepless Eye—and no mean city at that. Take some clever European traveler, a man who can find his way around any of the foreign capitals with his eyes shut, and let him come to New York for the first time; approach our own imperial city through her most impressive gateway—that narrow passage from the sea between the ramparts of the guarding fortresses. This man, this traveler, has heard of the towers of the great New World city—they have been baldly pictured to him as giant, top-heavy barracks, meaningless compositions of ugly blank walls, punctuated with an infinity of tiny windows. That is the typical libel that has gone forth about New York.

He sees naught of such. He sees a great city, the height of its buildings simply conveying the impression from afar that it is builded upon a steep ridge. Here and there a building of still loftier height gives accent to the whole, emphasis to what might otherwise be a colorless mass; gives that mysterious tone and contrast which the artist is pleased to call "composition." Four of these towers already rise distinct from the giant skyscrapers of Manhattan. Each for this moment proclaims a victory of the American architect and the American builder over the most difficult problem ever placed before architect or builder.

The European traveler will give praise to the sky-line of New York as he sees it from the steamer's deck.

"It is the City of the Towers," he will say.

In this, your Day of Days in New York, come with us and see the making of a skyscraper. This skyscraper is the new Municipal Building. It is just behind the tree-filled park in which stands New York's oldest bit of successful architecture—its venerable City Hall. A long time before New York dreamed that she might become the City of the Towers they builded this old City Hall—upon what was then the northerly edge of the town. So sure were those old fellows that New York would never grow north of their fine town hall that they grew suddenly economical—the spirit of their Dutch forbears still dominated them—and builded the north wall of Virginia freestone instead of the white marble that was used for the facings of the other walls.

"No one will ever see that side of the building," they argued. "We might as well use cheap stone for that wall."

Today more than ninety-nine per cent. of the population of the immensely populated island of Manhattan lives north of the City Hall. That cheap north wall, hidden under countless coats of white paint, is the one acute reminder of the days that were when the Hall was new—when the gentle square in which it stood was surrounded by the suburban residences of prosperous New Yorkers and when the waters of the Collect Pond—where the New York boys use to skate in the bitterness of old-fashioned winters—lapped its northerly edge. There was no ugly Court House or even uglier Post Office to block the view from the Mayor's office up and down Broadway. New Yorkers were proud of their City Hall then—and good cause had they for their pride. It is one of the best bits of architecture in all America. And an even century of hard usage and countless "restorations" has only brought to it the charm of serene old age.

But the City Hall long since was outgrown. The municipal government of New York is a vast and somewhat unwieldy machine that can hardly be housed within a dozen giant structures. To provide offices for the greater part of the city's official machinery, this towering Municipal Building has just been erected. And because it is so typical of the best form of the so-called skyscraper architecture, let us stop and take a look at it, listen to the story of its construction. In appearance the new Municipal Building is a gray-stone tower twenty-five stories in height and surmounted by a tower cupola an additional fifteen stories in height. In plan the structure is a sort of semi-octagon—a very shallow letter "U," if you please. But its most unusual feature comes from the fact that it squarely spans one of the busiest crosstown highways in the lower part of the city—Chambers street. The absorption of that busy thoroughfare is recognized by a great depressed bay upon the west front—the main faÇade of the building. And incidentally that depressed bay makes interior courts within the structure absolutely unnecessary. So much for the architectural features, severe in its detail, save for some ornate and not entirely pleasing sculptures. You are interested in knowing how one of these giants—so typical of the new New York—are fabricated.

This young man—hardly a dozen years out of a big technical school—can tell you. He has supervised the job. Sometimes he has slept on it—in a narrow cot in the temporary draughting-house. He knows its every detail, as he knows the fingers of his hands.

"Just remember that we began by planning a railroad station in the basement with eight platform tracks for loading and unloading passengers."

"A railroad station?" you interrupt.

"Certainly," is his decisive reply. "Downstairs we will soon have the most important terminal of a brand new subway system crossing the Manhattan and the Williamsburgh bridges and reaching over Brooklyn like a giant gridiron."

He goes on to the next matter—this one settled.

"There was something more than that. We had to plant on that cellar a building towering forty stories in the air; its steel frame alone weighing twenty-six thousand tons—more than half the weight of the heaviest steel cantilever bridge in America—had to be firmly set."

The young engineer explains—in some detail. To find a foothold for this building was no sinecure. Tests with the diamond drill had shown that solid rock rested at a depth of 145 feet below street level at the south end of the plat. At the north end, the rock sloped away rapidly and so that part of the building rests upon compact sand. The rock topography of Manhattan island is uncertain. There are broad areas where solid gneiss crops close to the street level, others where it falls a hundred feet or more below water level. There is a hidden valley at Broadway and Reade street, a deep bowl farther up Broadway. Similarly, the north extremity of the Municipal Building rests upon the edge of still another granite bowl—the sub-surface of that same Collect Pond upon which the New York boys used to skate a century or more ago.

"That bothered some folks at first," laughs the engineer, "but we met it by sinking the caissons. We've more than a hundred piers down under this structure hanging on to Mother Earth. You don't realize the holding force of those piers," he continues. He turns quickly and points to a fourteen story building off over the trees of City Hall park. Out in one of the good-sized towns of the Middle West people would gasp a little at sight of it—in New York it is no longer even a tower.

"Turn that fellow right upside down into the hole we dug for this building," says the engineer, "and the rim of his uppermost cornice would about reach the feet of our own little forest of buried concrete piers."

That was one detail of the construction of the building. Here is another; the first six stories of the new structure involved elaborate masonry, giant stones, much carved. From the seventh story the plain walls of the exterior developing into an elaborate cornice were of simple construction. If the setting of these upper floors had waited until the first six stories of elaborate stonework had been made ready there would have been a delay of months in the construction work. So the contractor began building the walls—which in the modern steel skyscraper as you know form no part of the real structure but act rather as a stone envelope to keep out hard weather—from the seventh story upward. Eventually the masons working on the first six stories, working upwards all the time, reached and joined the lower edge of the masonry that had been set some weeks before. Time had been saved and you know that time does count in New York. Remember the Wall street man who preferred to have his ribs crushed and his hat smashed down over his nose in the subway rather than lose ten minutes each day in the elevated.

Now you stand with the young engineer at the topmost outlook of the tower in the Municipal Building and look down on the busy town. Before you is that mighty thoroughfare, Broadway—but so lined with towering buildings that you cannot see it, save for a brief space as it passes the greenery of the City Hall Park; behind you is that still mightier highway—the East river. Over that river you see the four bridges—the oldest of them landing at your very feet—and crawling things upon them, which a second glance shows to be trains and trolley-cars and automobiles and wagons in an unending succession. Beyond the East river and its bridges—the last of these far to the north and barely discernible—is Brooklyn, and beyond Brooklyn—this time to the south—is a shimmering slender horizon of silver that the man beside you tells you is the ocean.

You let your gaze come back to the wonderful view which the building squarely faces. You look down upon the towers of New York—big towers and little towers—and you lift your eyes over the dingy mansard of the old Post Office and see the greatest of all the towers—the creamy white structure that a man has builded from his profits in the business of selling small articles at five and ten cents apiece. It is fifty-five stories in height—exquisitely beautiful in detail—and the owner will possess for a little time at least, the highest building in the world. You can see the towers in every vista, puffing little clouds of white smoke into the purest blue air that God ever gave a city in which to spin her fabrications. To the north, the south, the west, they show themselves in every infinite variety and here and there between them emerge up-shouldering rivals, steel-naked in their gaunt frames. If your ears are keen and the wind be favorable perhaps you can hear the clatter of the riveters and you can see over there the housesmiths riding aloft on the swinging girders with an utter and immensely professional indifference, threading the slender, dizzy floor-girders as easily as a cat might tread the narrow edge of a backyard fence.

Off with your gaze again. Look uptown, catch the faint patch of dark green that is Central Park, the spires of the cathedral, the wonderful campanile at Madison square. Let your glance swing across the gentle Hudson, over into a New Jersey that is bounded by the ridges of the Orange mountains, then slowly south and even the great towers that thrust themselves into almost every buildable foot of Broadway below the City Hall cannot entirely block your view of the wonderful upper harbor of New York—of the great ships that bring to an imperial city the tribute that is rightfully hers.

Now let your vision drop into the near foreground—into the tracery of trees about the jewel-box of a City Hall. Let it pause for a moment in the broad-paved street at your feet with the queer little openings through which humans are sweeping like a black stream into a funnel; others from which the human streams come crawling upward like black molasses and you are again reminded that some of the greatest highways of New York are those that are subterranean and unseen. The sidewalks grow a little blacker than before.

"It's lunch-time," laughs the young engineer.

Bless you, it is. The morning that you gave to one of the most typical of the towers has not been ill-spent.

III

Thirty minutes before the big bell of Trinity spire booms out noon-tide New York's busiest grub-time begins. A few early-breakfasting clerks and office-boys begin to find their way toward the shrines of the coffee-urns and the heaped-up piles of sandwiches.

Of course, in New York breakfast is an almost endless affair—generally a fearfully hurried one. But lunch is far more serious. Lunch is almost an institution. Fifteen minutes after it is fairly begun it is gaining rapid headway. Thin trails of stenographers and clerks are finding their ways, lunch-bound, through the canyon-like streets of lower Manhattan, streams that momentarily increase in volume. By the time that Trinity finally booms its twelve stout strokes down into Broadway there is congestion upon the sidewalks—the favorite stools at the counters, the better tables in the higher-priced places are being rapidly filled. At twelve-thirty it begins to be luck to get any sort of accommodations at the really popular places; before one o'clock the intensity of grubbing verges on panic and pandemonium. And at a little before three cashiers are totaling their receipts, cooks, donning their hats and coats to go uptown, and waiters and 'buses are upturning chairs and scrubbing floors with scant regard for belated lunchers who have to be content with the crumbs that are left after the ravishing and hungry army has been fed. Order after pandemonium—readiness for the two hours of gorge upon the morrow. The restaurants and lunch-rooms are as quiet as Trinity church-yard and something like three quarters of a million hungry souls have lunched in the business section of Manhattan south of Twenty-third street—at a total cost, according to the estimate of a shrewd restauranteur of a quarter of a million dollars.

You may pay your money and take your choice. The shrewd little newsboys and office-boys who find their way to the short block of Ann street between Park Row and Nassau—the real Grub street of New York—are proving themselves financiers of tomorrow by dickering for sandwiches—"two cents apiece; three for a nickel." They always buy them in lots of three. That is business and business is not to be scorned for a single instant. Or you can pay as high prices in the swagger restaurants downtown as you do in the swagger restaurants uptown—and that is saying much. When lunch-time comes you can suit the inclinations of your taste—and your pocket-book. But the average New Yorker seems to run quite strongly to the peculiar form of lunch-room in which you help yourself to what you want, compute from the markers the cost of your midday meal, announce that total to the cashier, who is perfectly content to take your word for it, pay the amount and walk out. It seems absurd—to any one who does not understand New Yorkers. The lunch-room owners do understand them. New York business men and business boys are honest, as a general thing—particularly honest in little matters of this sort.

"It is all very simple," says the manager of one of these big lunch-rooms, who stands beside you for a moment at the entrance of one of his places—it boasts that it serves more than two thousand lunches each business day between eleven and three. "I've been through the whole mill. I've been check boy and oyster man, cashier—now I'm looking out for this particular beanery. Honor among New York business men? There's a lot of it."

"And you don't run many risks?" you venture.

"Not many here," he promptly replies. "But there was a man in here yesterday, who runs a cafeteria out in Chicago. I was telling him some of the rules of the game here—how when a customer comes in and throws his hat down in a chair before he goes over to the sandwich and coffee counters that chair is his, until he gets good and ready to go. My Chicago friend laughed at that. 'If we were to do that out in my neck-o'-the-woods,' says he, 'the customer would lose his hat.' And the uptown department stores don't take any chances, either. At one of the biggest of them they make the women decide what they will eat, but before they can start they must buy a check—pay in advance, you understand. They've tried the downtown way—and now they take no chances."

The floor manager laughs nervously.

"It's different with the girls downtown. We've started one quick buffet lunch on the honor plan, same dishes and prices and service as the men's places, but this one is for business girls. They said at first that we wouldn't make good with them—but we're ready to start another within the month. The business girls don't cheat—no matter what their uptown sisters may try to do."

As a matter of fact downtown business girls in New York eat very sensibly. Sweets are popular but not invariable. They prefer candy, with fruit as a second choice, to be eaten some time during the afternoon. In big offices, where many girls are employed, "candy pools" are often made, each girl contributing five cents and getting her pro rata, one member of the staff being delegated to make the purchases. Eaten in this way the candy acts as a stimulant during the late afternoon hours, in much the same way as the invariable tea of the business man in London.

The business girl in New York takes her full hour for luncheon. It is seldom a minute more or a minute less. She is willing as a rule to stay overtime at night but she feels that she must have her sixty minutes in the middle of the day. A part of the lunch hour is always a stroll—unless there be a downpour. Certain downtown streets from twelve to one o'clock each day suggest the proximity of a nearby high school or seminary. There is much pairing off and quiet flirtation. This noon-day promenade of girls—for the most part astonishingly well-dressed girls and invariably in twos and threes—is one of the sights of downtown New York. Some of the girls gather in the old churchyards of Trinity and St. Paul's—in lower Broadway—on pleasant days. They sit down among the tombstones with their little packages of food and eat and chat and then stroll. No one molests them and the church authorities, although a little flustered when this first began, have seen that there is no harm in it and let the girls have their own way. There is always great decorousness and these big open-air spaces in the midst of the crowded street canyons are enjoyed by the women who appreciate the grass and winding paths after the hard pavements.

All the business girls downtown are not content with sitting after lunch among the tombstones of St. Paul's churchyard or of Trinity. He was indeed a canny lunch-man who took note of all the girls strolling in the narrow streets of downtown Manhattan, who remembered that all New York, rich or poor, loves to dance and who then fitted up an unrentable third floor loft over his eating place as a dancing hall. Two violins and a piano—a gray-bearded sandwich man to patrol the streets with "DANCING" placarded fore and aft upon his boards—the trick was done. Mamie told Sadie and Sadie told Elinor and Elinor told Flossie and the lunch-man began to grow famous. He made further study of the psychology of his patrons. There were the young fellows—shipping and file clerks and even ambitious young office-boys to be considered. There were the after-lunch smokes of these young captains of industry to come into the reckoning. The lunch-man placed a row of chairs along one edge of his dancing-hall and over them "Smoking Permitted at This End of the Room." After that Mamie and Sadie and Elinor and Flossie had partners and the lunch-man was on the highway to a six-cylinder motor car. He has his imitators. If you were in business in lower New York and your stenographer began to hum the "Blue Danube" along about half an hour before noon you would very well know she was gathering steam for the blissful twenty minutes of dancing that was going to help her digest her lunch.

You, yourself, are going to lunch in still another sort of restaurant. It is characteristic of a type that has sprung up on the tip of Manhattan island within the past dozen years. You reach this grubbing-place by skirting the front doors of unspeakably dirty eating-houses in a mean street of the Syrian quarter. Finally you turn the corner of a dingy brick building, which was once the great house of one of the contemporaries of the first of the Vanderbilts and which has managed to escape destruction for three quarters of a century and face—the only skyscraper in congested New York which stands in a grass-platted yard—the whim of its wealthy owner. A fast elevator whisks you thirty stories to the top of the building and you step into the lobby of what looks, at first glance, to be the entrance hall of some fine restaurant in uptown's Fifth avenue. But this is a lunching-club—one of the newest in the town as well as one of the most elaborate.

Elaborate did we say? This is the elaboration of perfect taste—unobtrusive rugs, hangings, lighting fixtures and furniture—great, broad rooms and from their windows there comes to you another of the spectacular views that lay below the man-made peaks of Manhattan. To the south—the smooth, blue surface of the upper bay—in the foreground a nine hundred foot ship coming to the new land, her funnels lazily breathing smoke at the first lull in her four-day race across the Atlantic; to the east, a mighty river and its bridges, Brooklyn again and on very clear days, visions of Long island; to the north the most wonderful building construction that man has ever attempted, Babylonic in its immensity; to the west the brisk waterway of the North river and beyond it, Jersey City, sandwiched in between the smoky spread of railroad yards. This is the sort of thing that Mr. Downtown Luncher may have—if he is willing to pay the price. On torrid summer days he may ascend to the roof-garden, may glance lazily below him at the activities of the busiest city in the world and sip up the cool breezes from the sea, while folk down in the bottom of the Broadway chasm are sweltering from heat and humidity. And in winter he will find a complete gymnasium in operation on another floor of the club, with a competent instructor in charge. The "doctor," as they call him, will lay out a course of work. And that course of work, calling for a half-hour of exercise each day just before lunch will make dyspeptic and paunchy old money-grubbers alike, keen as farmhands coming into dinner.

And yet this club, typical of so many others in the downtown business heart of Manhattan, is but a cog in the mighty machine of the lunching of the workaday multitudes of downtown. Its doors are closed and lights are out at six o'clock in the evening, save on extraordinary occasions; while most of its hundred or more well-trained waiters go uptown to assist in the dinner and the late supper rushes of the fashionable restaurants in the theater and hotel district. Like most of its compeers, it is an outgrowth of the wonderfully comfortable old Lawyers' Club, which was completely destroyed in the great fire that burned the Equitable Building in January, 1912. From that organization, famed for its noon-day hospitality and for the quality of the folk you might meet between its walls, have sprung many other downtown lunch clubs—the Whitehall, the Hardware, the Manufacturers, the Downtown Association, the new Lawyers—many, many others; almost invariably occupying the upper floors of some skyscraper that has been planned especially for them. These clubs are not cheap. It costs from sixty to a hundred dollars to enter one of them and about as much more yearly in the form of dues. Their restaurant charges are far from low-priced. They are never very exclusive organizations and yet they give to the strain of the workaday New Yorker his last lingering trace of hospitality—the hospitality that has lingered around Bowling Green and Trinity and St. Paul's church-yards since colonial days and the coffee houses.

Even the hospitality of the genial host seems to end—with the ending of the lunch-hour. As he takes his last sip of cafÉ noir he is tugging at his watch. "Bless me," he says, "It is going on three o'clock. I've got that railroad crowd due in my office in fifteen minutes."

That is your dismissal. For ninety minutes he has given you his hospitality—his rare and unselfish self. He has put the perplexing details of his business out of his mind and given himself to whatever flow of talk might suit your fancy. Now the hour and a half of grace is over—and you are dismissed, courteously—but none the less dismissed. With your host you descend to the crowded noisome street. He sees you to the subway—gives you a fine warm grasp of his strong hand—and plunges back into the great and grinding machine of business.

Lunch in your Day of Days within the City of the Towers is over. Three o'clock. Before the last echoes of Trinity's bell go ringing down through Wall street to halt the busy Exchange—the multitude has been fed. Miss Stenographer has had her salad and Éclair, two waltzes and perhaps a "turkey trot" into the bargain, and is back at the keys of her typewriter. Mr. President has entertained that Certain Party at the club and has made him promise to sign that mighty important contract. And the certain Party and Mr. President rode for half an hour on the mechanical horses in the gymnasium. What fun, too, for those old boys?

Three o'clock! The cashiers are totaling their receipts, the waiters and the 'buses are upturning chairs and tables to make way for the scrub-women, some are already beginning to don their overcoats to go uptown; but the three-quarters of a million of hungry mouths have been fed. New York has caught its breath in mid-day relaxation and once more is hard at work—putting in the last of its hours of the business day with renewed and feverish energy.

IV

You had planned at first to walk up Broadway. You wanted to see once again the church-yards around Trinity and St. Paul's, perhaps make a side excursion down toward Fraunces' Tavern—just now come back into its own again. Some of the old landmarks that are still hidden around downtown New York seemed to appeal to you. But your host at luncheon laughed at you.

"If you want to spend your time that way, all right," he said, "but the only really old things you will find in New York are the faces of the young men. You can find those anywhere in the town."

And there was another reckoning to be figured. Three o'clock means the day well advanced and there is a vis-À-vis awaiting you uptown. Of course, there is a Her to enjoy your Day of Days with you. And just for convenience alone we will call her Katherine. It is a pretty name for a woman, and it will do here and now quite as well as any other.

Katherine is waiting for you in the Fourteenth street station of the subway. She is prompt—after the fashion of most New York girls. And it is a relief to come out of the overcrowded tube and find her there at the entrance that leads up to sunshine and fresh air. She knows her New York thoroughly and as a prelude to the trip uptown she leads you over to Fifth avenue—to the upper deck of one of those big green peregrinating omnibuses.

"It's a shame that we could not have started at Washington square," she apologizes. "When you sweep around and north through the great arch it almost seems as if you were passing through the portals of New York. It is one of the few parts of the town that are not changing rapidly." For Fifth avenue—only a few blocks north of that stately arch—has begun to disintegrate and decay. Not in the ordinary sense of those terms. But to those who remember the stately street of fifteen or twenty years ago—lined with the simple and dignified homes of the town—its change into a business thoroughfare brings keen regrets. Katherine remembers that she read in a book that there are today more factory workers employed in Fifth avenue or close to it, than in such great mill cities as Lowell or Lawrence or Fall River, and when you ask her the reason why she will tell you how these great buildings went soaring up as office-buildings, without office tenants to fill them. They represent speculation, and speculation is New Yorkish. But speculation in wholesale cannot afford to lose, and that is why the garment manufacturers and many others of their sort came flocking to the great retail shopping district between Fourth and Seventh avenues and Fourteenth and Thirty-fourth streets, and sent the shops soaring further to the north. It has been expensive business throughout, doubly expensive, because absolutely unnecessary. Some of the great retail houses of New York built modern and elaborate structures south of Thirty-fourth street within the past twenty years in the firm belief that the retail shopping section had been fixed for the next half century. But the new stores had hardly been opened before the deluge of manufacturing came upon them. Shoppers simply would not mix with factory hands upon lower Fifth avenue and the side streets leading from it. And so the shop-keepers have had to move north and build anew. And just what a tax such moving has been upon the consumer no one has ever had the audacity to estimate.

"They should have known that nothing ever stays fixed in New York," says Katherine. "We are a restless folk, who make a restless city. Stay fixed? Did you notice the station at which you entered today?"

Of course you did. The new Grand Central, with its marvelous blue ceiling capping a waiting-room so large that the New York City Hall, cupola, wings and all could be set within it, can hardly escape the attention of any traveler who passes within its portals.

"It is the greatest railroad station in the world," she continues, "and yet I have read in the newspapers that Commodore Vanderbilt built on that very plat of ground in 1871 the largest station in the world for the accommodation of his railroads. He thought that it would last for all time. In forty years the wreckers were pulling it down. It was outgrown, utterly outgrown and they were carting it off piece by piece to the rubbish heaps."

She turns suddenly upon you.

"That is typical of our restless, lovely city," she tells you. And you, yourself, have heard that only two years ago they tore down a nineteen story building at Wall and Nassau streets so that they might replace it by another of the towers—this one thirty stories in height.

The conductor of the green omnibus thrusts his green fare-box under your nose. You find two dimes and drop it into the contrivance.

"You can get more value for less money and less value for much money in New York than in any other large city in the world," says Katherine.

She is right—and you know that she is right. You can have a glorious ride up the street, that even in its days of social decadence is still the finest highway in the land—a ride that continues across the town and up its parked rim for long miles—for a mere ten cents of Uncle Sam's currency and as for the reverse—well you are going to dinner in a smart hotel with Katherine in a little while.

You swing across Broadway and up the west edge of Madison square, catch a single, wondering close-at-hand glimpse of the white campanile of the Metropolitan tower which dominates that open place and so all but replaces Diana on her perch above Madison Square Garden—a landmark of the New York of a quarter of a century ago and which is apt to come into the hands of the wreckers almost any day now. Now you are at the south edge of the new shopping district, although some of the ultra places below Thirty-fourth street have begun to move into that portion of the avenue just south of Central Park. In a little while they may be stealing up the loveliest portion of the avenue—from Fifty-ninth street north.

The great shops dominate the avenue. And if you look with sharp eyes as the green bus bears you up this via sacre, you may see that one of the greatest ones—a huge department store encased in architecturally superb white marble—bears no sign or token of its ownership or trade. An oversight, you think. Not a bit of it. Four blocks farther up the avenue is another great store in white marble—a jewelry shop of international reputation. You will have to scan its broad faÇade closely indeed before you find the name of the firm in tiny letters upon the face of its clock. Oversight? Not a bit of it. It is the ultra of shop-keeping in New York—the assumption that the shop is so well known that it need not be placarded to the vulgar world. And if strangers from other points fail to identify it—well that is because of their lack of knowledge and the shopkeeper may secretly rejoice.

But, after all, it is the little shops that mark the character of Fifth avenue—not its great emporiums. It is the little millinery shops where an engaging creature in black and white simpers toward you and calls you, if you are of the eternal feminine, "my dear;" the jewelry shops where the lapidary rises from his lathe and offers a bit of craftsmanship; the rare galleries that run from old masters to modern etchers; specialty shops, filled top to bottom with toys or Persian rugs, or women's sweaters, or foreign magazines and books, that render to Fifth avenue its tremendous cosmopolitanism. These little shops make for personality. There is something in the personal contact between the proprietor and the customer that makes mere barter possess a real fascination. And if you do pay two or three times the real value in the little shop you have just so much more fun out of the shopping. And there are times when real treasures may come out of their stores.

"Look at the cornices," interrupts Katherine. "Mr. Arnold Bennett says that they are the most wonderful things in all New York."

Katherine may strain her neck, looking at cornices if she so wills. As for you, the folk who promenade the broad sidewalks are more worth your while. There are more of them upon the west walk than upon the east—for some strange reason that has long since brought about a similar phenomenon upon Broadway and sent west side rents high above those upon the east. Fifth avenue thrusts its cosmopolitanism upon you, not alone in her shops, with their wonderfully varied offerings, but in the very humans who tread her pavements. The New York girl may not always be beautiful but she is rarely anything but impeccable. And if in the one instance she is extreme in her styles, in the next she is apt to be severe in her simplicity of dress. And it is difficult to tell to which ordinary preference should go. These girls—girls in a broad sense all the way from trim children in charge of maid or governess to girls whose pinkness of skin defies the graying of their locks—a sprinkling of men, not always so faultless in dress or manner as their sisters—and you have the Fifth avenue crowd. Then between these two quick moving files of pedestrians—set at all times in the rapid tempo of New York—a quadruple file of carriages; the greater part of them motor driven.

Traffic in Fifth avenue, like traffic almost everywhere else in New York is a problem increasing in perplexity. A little while ago the situation was met and for a time improved by slicing off the fronts of the buildings—perhaps the most expensive shave that the town has ever known—and setting back the sidewalks six or eight feet. But the benefits then gained have already been over-reached and the traffic policeman at the street corners all the way up the avenue must possess rare wit and diplomacy—while their fellows at such corners as Thirty-fourth and Forty-second are hardly less than field generals. And with all the finesse of their work the traffic moves like molasses. Long double and triple files of touring cars and limousines, the combined cost of which would render statistics such as would gladden the heart of a Sunday editor, make their way up and down the great street tediously. If a man is in a hurry he has no business even to essay the Avenue. And occasionally the whole tangle is double-tangled. The shriek of a fire-engine up a side street or the clang of an ambulance demanding a clear right-of-way makes the traffic question no easier. Yet the policemen at the street corners are not caught unawares. With the shrill commands of their own whistles they maneuver trucks and automobiles and even some old-fashioned hansom cabs, pedestrians, all the rest—as coolly and as evenly as if it had been rehearsed for whole weeks.

New York is wonderful, the traffic of its chief show street—for Fifth avenue can now be fairly said to have usurped Broadway as the main highway of the upper city—tremendous. You begin to compute what must be the rental values upon this proud section of Fifth avenue, as it climbs Murray Hill from Thirty-fourth street to Forty-second street, when Katherine interrupts you once again. She knows her New York thoroughly indeed.

"Do you notice that house?" she demands.

You follow her glance to a very simple brick house, upon the corner of an inconsequential side street. Beside it on Fifth avenue is an open lot—of perhaps fifty feet frontage, giving to the avenue but a plain brown wooden fence.

"A corking building lot," you venture, "Why don't they—"

"I expected you to say that," she laughs. "They have wanted to build upon that lot—time and time again. But when they approach the owner he laughs at them and declines to consider any offer. 'My daughter has a little dog,' he says politely, 'It must have a place for exercise.' We New Yorkers are an odd lot," she laughs. "You know that the Goelets kept a cow in the lawn of their big house at Broadway and Nineteenth street until almost twenty years ago—until there was not a square foot of grass outside of a park within five miles. And in New York the man who can do the odd thing successfully is apt to be applauded. You could not imagine such a thing in Boston or Baltimore or Philadelphia, could you?"

You admit that your imagination would fall short of such heights and ask Katherine if you are going up to the far end of the 'bus run—to that great group of buildings—university, cathedral, hospital, divinity school—that have been gathered just beyond the northwestern corner of Central Park.

"No, I think not," she quickly decides, "You know that Columbia is not to New York as Harvard is to Boston. Harvard dominates Boston, Columbia is but a peg in the educational system of New York. The best families here do not bow to its fetich. They are quite as apt to send their boys to Yale or Princeton—even Harvard."

"Then there's the cathedral and the Drive," you venture.

"We have a cathedral right here on Fifth avenue that is finished and, in its way, quite as beautiful. And as for the Drive—it is merely a rim of top-heavy and expensive apartment houses. The West Side is no longer extremely smart. The truth of the matter is that we must pause for afternoon tea."

You ignore that horrifying truth for an instant.

"What has happened to the poor West Side?" you demand.

Katherine all but lowers her voice to a whisper.

"Twenty years ago and it had every promise of success. It looked as if Riverside Drive would surpass the Avenue as a street of fine residences. The side streets were preËminently nice. Then came the subway—and with it the apartment houses. After that the very nice folk began moving to the side streets in the upper Fifties, the Sixties and the Seventies between Park and Fifth avenues."

"Suppose that the apartment houses should begin to drift in there—in any numbers?" you demand.

"Lord knows," says Katherine, and with due reverence adds: "There is the last stand of the prosperous New Yorker with an old-fashioned notion that he and his would like to live in a detached house. The Park binds him in on the West, the tenement district and Lexington avenue on the East—to the North Harlem and the equally impossible Bronx. The old guard is standing together." "There is Brooklyn?" you venture.

"No New Yorker," says Katherine, with withering scorn, "ever goes publicly to Brooklyn unless he is being buried in Greenwood cemetery."

Tea for you is being served in a large mausoleum of a white hotel—excessively white from a profuse use of porcelain tiles which can be washed occasionally—of most extraordinary architecture. Some day some one is going to attempt an analysis of hotel architecture in New York and elsewhere in the U.S.A. but this is not the time and place. Suffice it to say here and now that you finally found a door entering the white porcelain mausoleum. What a feast awaited your eyes—as well as your stomach—within. Rooms of rose pink and rooms of silver gray, Persian rooms, Japanese rooms, French rooms in the several varieties of Louis, Greek rooms—Europe, the ancients and the Orient, have been ransacked for the furnishing of this tavern. And in the center of them all is a great glass-enclosed garden, filled with giant palms and tiny tables, tremendous waiters and infinitesimal chairs. A large bland-faced employÉ—who is a sort of sublimated edition of the narrow lean hat-boys who we shall find in the eating places of the Broadway theater districts—divests you of your outer wraps. You elbow past a band and arrive at the winter garden. A head waiter in an instant glance of steel-blue eyes decides that you are fit and finds the tiniest of the tiny tables for you. It is so far in the shade of the sheltering palm that you have to bend almost double to drink your tea—and the orchestra is rather uncomfortably near.

Katherine might have taken you to other tea dispensaries—an unusual place in a converted stable in Thirty-fourth street, another stable loft in West Twenty-eighth—dozens of little shops, generally feminine to an intensified degree, which combine the serving of tea with the vending of their wares. But she preferred the big white hotel.

"Tea at the Plaza is so satisfactory and so restful," she says, as you dodge to permit two ladies—one in gray silk and the other in a cut of blue cloth that gives her the contour of a magnified frog—to slip past you without knocking your tea out of your untrained fingers. "We might have gone to the Manhattan—but it's so filled with young girls and the chappies from the schools—the Ritz is proper but dull, so is Sherry's—all the rest more or less impossible."

She rattles on—the matter of restaurants is always dear to the New York heart. You ignore the details.

"But why?" you demand.

"Why what?" she returns.

"Why tea?"

You explain that afternoon tea in its real lair—London—in a sort of climatic necessity. The prevalence of fog, of raw damp days, makes a cup of hot tea a real bracer—a stimulant that carries the human through another two or three hours of hard existence until the late London dinner. The bracing atmosphere of New York—with more clear days than any other metropolitan city in the world—does not need tea. You say so frankly.

"I suppose you are right," Katherine concedes, "but we have ceased in this big city to rail at the English. We bow the knee to them. The most fashionable of our newest hotels and shops run—absurdly many times—to English ways. And afternoon tea has long since ceased to be a novelty in our lives. Why, they are beginning to serve it at the offices downtown—just as they do in dear old London."

You swallow hard—some one has recommended that to you as a method of suppressing emotion—for polite society is never emotional.

V

Dinner is New York's real function of the day. And dinner in New York means five million hungry stomachs demanding to be filled. The New York dinner is as cosmopolitan as the folk who dwell on the narrow island of Manhattan and the two other islands that press closely to it. The restaurant and hotel dinners are as cosmopolitan as the others. Of course, for the sake of brevity, if for no other reason, you must eliminate the home dinners—and read "home" as quickly into the cold and heavy great houses of the avenue as into the little clusters of rooms in crowded East Side tenements where poverty is never far away and next week's meals a real problem. And remember, that to dine even in a reasonably complete list of New York's famous eating places—a new one every night—would take you more than a year. At the best your vision of them must be desultory.

Six o'clock sees the New York business army well on its way toward home—the seething crowds at the Brooklyn bridge terminal in Park Row, the overloaded subway straining to move its fearful burden, the ferry and the railroad terminals focal points of great attractiveness. To make a single instance: take that division of the army that dwells in Brooklyn. It begins its march dinnerward a little after four o'clock, becomes a pushing, jostling mob a little later and shows no sign of abatement until long after six. Within that time the railroad folk at the Park Row terminal of the old bridge have received, classified and despatched Brooklynward, more than one hundred and fifty thousand persons—the population of a city almost the size of Syracuse. And the famous old bridge is but one of four direct paths from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

Six o'clock sees restaurants and cafÉs alight and ready for the two or three hours of their really brisk traffic of the day. There are even dinner restaurants downtown, remarkably good places withal and making especial appeal to those overworked souls who are forced to stay at the office at night. There are bright lights in Chinatown where innumerable "Tuxedos" and "Port Arthurs" are beginning to prepare the chop-suey in immaculate Mongolian kitchens. But the real restaurant district for the diner-out hardly begins south of Madison square. There are still a very few old hotels in Broadway south of that point—a lessening company each year—one or two in close proximity to Washington square. Two of these last make a specialty of French cooking—their table d'hÔtes are really famous—and perhaps you may fairly say when you are done at them that you have eaten at the best restaurants in all New York. From them Fifth avenue runs a straight course to the newer hotels far to the north—a silent brilliantly lighted street as night comes "with the double row of steel-blue electric lamps resembling torch-bearing monks" one brilliant New York writer has put it. But before the newest of the new an intermediate era of hotels, the Holland, the nearby Imperial and the Waldorf-Astoria chief among these. The Waldorf has been from the day it first opened its doors—more than twenty years ago—New York's really representative hotel. Newer hostelries have tried to wrest that honor from it—but in vain. It has clung jealously to its reputation. The great dinners of the town are held in its wonderful banqueting halls, the well-known men of New York are constantly in its corridors. It is club and more than club—it is a clearing-house for all of the best clubs. It is the focal center for the hotel life of the town.

There is an important group of hotels in the rather spectacular neighborhood of Times square—the Astor, with its distinctly German flavor, and the Knickerbocker which whimsically likes to call itself "the country club on Forty-second street" distinctive among them. And ranging upon upper Fifth avenue, or close to it, are other important houses, the Belmont, the aristocratic Manhattan, the ultra-British Ritz-Carlton, the St. Regis, the Savoy, the Netherland, the Plaza, and the Gotham. In between these are those two impeccable restaurants—so distinctive of New York and so long wrapped up in its history—Sherry's and Delmonico's.

Over in the theatrical brilliancy of Broadway up and down from Times square are other restaurants—Shanley's, Churchill's, Murray's—the list is constantly changing. A fashionable restaurant in New York is either tremendously successful—or else, as we shall later see, they are telephoning for the sheriff. And the last outcome is apt more to follow than the first. For it is a tremendous undertaking to launch a restaurant in these days. The decorations of the great dining-rooms must rival those of a Versailles palace while the so-called minor appointments—silver, linen, china and the rest must be as faultless as in any great house upon Fifth avenue. The first cost is staggering, the upkeep a steady drain. There is but one opportunity for the proprietor—and that opportunity is in his charges. And when you come to dine in one of these showy uptown places you will find that he has not missed his opportunity.

All New York that dines out does not make for these great places or their fellows. There are little restaurants that cast a glamour over their poor food by thrusting out hints of a magic folk named Bohemians who dine night after night at their dirty tables. There are others who with a Persian name seek to allure the ill-informed, some stout German places giving the substantial cheer of the Fatherland, beyond them restaurants phrasing themselves in the national dishes and the cooking of every land in the world, save our own. For a real American restaurant is hard to find in New York—real American dishes treats of increasing rarity. A great hotel recently banished steaks from its bills-of-fare, another has placed the ban on pie; and as for strawberry short-cake—just ask for strawberry short-cake. The concoction that the waiter will set before you will leave you hesitating between tears and laughter—ridicule for the pitiful attempts of a French cook and tears for your thoughts of the tragedy that has overwhelmed an American institution. Some day some one is going to build a hotel with the American idea standing back of it right in the heart of New York. He is going to have the bravery or the patriotism to call it the American House or the United States Hotel or Congress Hall or some other title that means something quite removed from the aristocratic nomenclature that our modern generation of tavern-keepers have borrowed from Europe without the slightest sense of fitness; and to that man shall be given more than mere riches—the satisfaction that will come to him from having accomplished a real work.

The truth of the matter is that we have borrowed more than nomenclature from Europe. We have taken the so-called "European plan" with all of its disadvantages and none of its advantages. We have done away with the stuffy over-eating "American plan" and have made a rule of "pay-as-you-go" that is quite all right—and is not. For to the simple "European plan" has recently been added many complications. In other days the generosity of the portions in a New York hotel was famous. A single portion of any important dish was ample for two. Your smiling old-fashioned waiter told you that. The waiter in a New York restaurant today does not smile. He merely tells you that the food is served "per portion" which generally means that an unnecessary amount of food is prepared in the kitchen and sent from the table, uneaten, as waste. And a smart New York restauranteur recently made a "cover charge" of twenty-five cents for bread and butter and ice-water. Others followed. It will not be long before a smarter restauranteur will make the "cover charge" fifty cents, and then folk will begin streaming into his place. They don't complain. That's not the New York way.

They do not even complain of the hat-boys—bloodthirsty little brigands who snatch your hat and other wraps before you enter a restaurant. The brigands are skillfully chosen—lean, hungry little boys every time, never fat, sleek, well-fed looking little boys. They are employed by a trust, which rents the "hat-checking privilege" from the proprietor of the hotel or restaurant. The owner of the trust pays well for these privileges and the little boys must work hard to bring him back his rental fees and a fair profit beside.

Leave that to them. Emerge from a restaurant, well-fed and at peace with the world and deny that lean-looking, swarthy-faced, black-eyed boy a quarter if you can—or dare. A dime is out of the question. He might insult you, probably would. But a quarter buys your self-respect and the head of the trust a share in his new motor car. The lean-looking boy buys no motor cars. He works on a salary and there are no pockets in his uniform. There is a stern-visaged cicerone in the background and to the cicerone roll all the quarters, but the New Yorker does not complain—save when he reaches Los Angeles or Atlanta or some other fairly distant place and finds the same sort of highway brigandage in effect there.

VI

After the dinner and the hat-boy—the theater. You suggest the theater to Katherine. She is enthusiastic. You pick the theater. It is close at hand and you quickly find your way to it. A gentleman, whose politeness is of a variety, somewhat frappÉ, awaits you in the box-office. A line of hopeful mortals is shuffling toward him, to disperse with hope left behind. But this anticipates.

You inquire of the man in the box-office for two seats—two particularly good seats. You remember going to the theater in Indianapolis once upon a time, a stranger, and having been seated behind the fattest theater pillar that you could have ever possibly imagined. But you need not worry about the pillars in this New York playhouse. The box-office gentleman, whose thoughts seem to be a thousand miles away, blandly replies that the house is sold out.

"So good?" you brashly venture. You had not fancied this production so successful. He does not even assume to hear your comment. You decide that you will see this particular play at a later time. You suggest as much to the indifferent creature behind the wicket. He replies by telling you that he can only give you tickets for a Monday or Tuesday three weeks hence—and then nothing ahead of the seventeenth row. Can he not do better than that? He cannot. He is positive that he cannot. And his positiveness is Gibraltarian in its immobility. A faint sign of irritation covers his bland face. He wants you to see that you are taking too much of his time.

Katherine saves the situation. She whispers to you that she noticed a little shop nearby with a sign "Tickets for all Theaters" displayed upon it.

"You know they abolished the speculators two years ago," she explains. You move on to the little shop with the inviting sign. The gentleman behind its counters has manners at least. He greets you with the smile of the professional shopkeeper.

"Have you tickets for 'The Giddiest Girl'?" you inquire.

He smiles ingratiatingly. Of course he has, for any night and anywhere you wish them.

"What is the price of them?"

You are not coldly commercial but, despite that smile, merely apprehensive. And you are beginning to understand New York.

"Four dollars."

Not so bad at that—just the box-office price. You bring out four greasy one-dollar bills. His eyes fixed upon them, he places a ticket down upon the counter.

"There—there are two of us," you stammer.

He does not stammer.

"Do you think that they are four dollars a dozen?" he sallies.

You give him a ten dollar bill this time. You do not kick. Even though the show is perfectly rotten and the usherette charges you ten cents for a poorly printed program and scowls because you take the change from her itching palm, do not complain. You would not complain even if you knew that the man in the chair next to you paid only the regular prices, because he happened to belong to the same lodge as the cousin of the treasurer of the theater, while the man in the chair next to Katherine paid nothing at all for his seat—having a relative who advertises in the theater programs. You do not kick. Complaint has long since been eliminated from the New York code and you have begun to realize that.

After the theater, another restaurant—this time for supper—more hat-boys, more brigandage but it is the thing to do and you must do it. And you must do it well. Splendor costs and you pay—your full proportion. If up in your home town you know a nice little place where you can drop in after the show at the local playhouse and have a glass of beer and a rarebit—dismiss that as a prevailing idea in the neighborhood of Long Acre square. The White Light district of Broadway can buy no motor cars on the beer and rarebit trade. Louey's trade in his modest little place up home is sufficient to keep him in moderate living year in and year out, but Louey does not have to pay Broadway ground rent, or Broadway prices for food-stuffs or Broadway salaries—to say nothing of having a thirst for a bigger and faster automobile than his neighbor. And as we have said, the opportunity for bankruptcy in the so-called "lobster palaces" of Broadway runs high. As this is being written, one of the most famous of them has collapsed.

Its proprietor—he was a smart caterer come east from Chicago where he had made his place fashionable and himself fairly rich—for a dozen years ran a prosperous restaurant within a stone-throw of the tall white shaft of the Times building. And even if the heels were the highest, the gowns the lowest, the food was impeccable and if you knew New York at all you knew who went there. It was gay and beautiful and high-priced. It was immensely popular. Then the proprietor listened to sirens. They commanded him to tear down the simple structure of his restaurant and there build a towering hotel. He obeyed orders. With the magic of New York builders the new building was ready within the twelvemonth. It represented all that might be desired—or that upper Broadway at least might desire—in modern hotel construction.

But it could not succeed. A salacious play which made a considerable commercial success took its title from the new hotel and called itself "The Girl from R——'s." That was the last straw. It might have been good fun for the man from Baraboo or the man from Jefferson City to come to New York and dine quietly and elegantly at R——'s, but to stop at R——'s hotel, to have his mail sent there, to have the local paper report that he was registered at that really splendid hostelry—ah, that was a different matter, indeed. Your Baraboo citizen had some fairly conservative connections—church and business—and he took no risks. The new hotel went bankrupt.A

Beer and rarebits, indeed. Sam Blythe tells of the little group of four who went into a hotel grillroom not far from Forty-second street and Broadway, who mildly asked for beer and rabbits.

"We have fine partridges," said the head-waiter, insinuatingly.

"We asked for beer and rabbits," insisted the host of the little group. He really did not know his New York.

"We have fine partridges," reiterated the head-waiter, then yawned slightly behind his hand. That yawn settled it. The head of the party was bellicose. He lost his temper completely. In a few minutes an ambulance and a patrol wagon came racing up Broadway. But the hotel had won. It always does.

One thing more—the cabaret. We think that if you are really fond of Katherine, and Katherine's reputation, you will avoid the restaurants that make a specialty of the so-called cabarets. Really good restaurants manage to get along without them. And the very best that can be said of them is that they are invariably indifferently poor—a mÉlange contributed by broken-down actors or actresses, or boys or girls stolen from the possibilities of a really decent way of earning a living. As for the worst, it is enough to say that the familiarity that begins by breeding contempt follows in the wake of the cabaret. It may be very jolly for you, of a lonely summer evening in New York and forgetting all the real pleasures of a lonely summer night in the big town—wonderful orchestral concerts in Central Park, dining on open-air terraces and cool quiet roofs, motoring off to wonderful shore dinners in queer old taverns—to hunt out these great gay places in the heart of the town. Easy camaraderie is part and parcel of them. But you will not want such comrades to meet any of the Katherines of your family. And therein lies a more than subtle distinction.

VII

It has all quite dazed you. You turn toward Katherine as you ride home with her in the taxicab—space forbids a description of the horrors and the indignities of the taxicab trust.

"Is it like this—every night?" you feebly ask.

"Every night of the year," she replies. "And typical New Yorkers like it."

That puts a brand-new thought into your mind.

"What is a typical New Yorker?" you demand.

"We are all typical New Yorkers," she laughs.

It is a foolish answer—of course. But the strange part of the whole thing is that Katherine is right. Either there are no typical New Yorkers—as many sane folk solemnly aver—or else every one who tarries in the city through the passing of even a single night is a typical New Yorker. How can it be else in a city who is still growing like a girl in her teens, who adds to herself each year in permanent population 135,000 human beings, whose transient population is nightly estimated at over a hundred thousand? They are all typical New Yorkers. 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.

These are typical New Yorkers. So are a family over in the next block—theirs is frankly a flat in every sense of that despised word. They have not been in the theater in a dozen years, never in one of the big modern restaurants or hotels. Yet the head of that family is a man whose name is known and spoken reverently through little homes all the way across America. He is a worker in the church, although not a clergyman, a militant friend of education, although not an educator, and he believes that New York is the most thoughtful and benevolent city in the world. And if you attempt to argue with him, he will prove easily and smilingly, that he is right and you—are just mistaken. He and his know their New York—a New York of high Christian force and precept—and they, too, are New Yorkers.

So, too, is Bliffkins and the little Bliffkins—although Bliffkins holds property in a bustling Ohio city and votes within its precincts. To tell the truth baldly, the Bliffkinses descend upon New York once each year and never remain more than a fortnight. But they stop at a great hotel and they are great spenders. Floor-walkers, head-waiters, head-ushers know them. Annually, and for a few golden days they are part of New York—typical New Yorkers, if you please. And when they are gone other Bliffkinses, from almost every town across the land, big and little, come to replace them. And all these are typical New Yorkers.

What is the typical New Yorker?

Are the sane folk right when they say that he does not exist? We do not think so. We think that Katherine in all her flippancy was right. They are all typical New Yorkers who sojourn, no matter for how little a time, within her boundaries. We will go farther still. You might almost say that all Americans are typical New Yorkers. For New York is, in no small sense, America. Other towns and cities may publicly scoff her, down in their hearts they slavishly imitate her, her store fronts, her fashions, her hotel and her theater customs, her policemen, even her white-winged street cleaners. They publicly laugh at her—down in their hearts they secretly adore her.