Читать книгу The Color of a Great City онлайн

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For, to begin with, the city, as I see it, was more varied and arresting and, after its fashion, poetic and even idealistic then than it is now. It offered, if I may venture the opinion, greater social and financial contrasts than it does now: the splendor of the purely social Fifth Avenue of the last decade of the last century and the first decade of this, for instance, as opposed to the purely commercial area that now bears that name; the sparklingly personality-dotted Wall Street of 1890–1910 as contrasted with the commonplace and almost bread and butter world that it is to-day. (There were argonauts then.) The astounding areas of poverty and of beggary even,—I refer to the east side and the Bowery of that period—unrelieved as they were by civic betterment and social service ventures of all kinds, as contrasted with the beschooled and beserviced east side of to-day. Who recalls Steve Brodies, McGurks, Doyers Street and “Chuck” Connors?

The city is larger. It has, if you will, more amazing architectural features. But has it as vivid and moving social contrasts,—as hectic and poignant and disturbing mental and social aspirations as it had then? I cannot see that it has. Rather, as it seems to me, it is duller because less differentiated. There are millions and millions but what do they do? Tramp aimlessly, for the most part, here and there in shoals, to see a ball game, a football game, a parade, a prize-fight, a civic betterment or automobile exhibition or to dance or dine in a hall that holds a thousand. But of that old zest that seemed to find something secret and thrilling in a thousand nooks and corners of the old city, its Bowery, its waterfront, its rialto, its outlying resorts, not a trace. One cannot even persuade the younger generation, that never even knew the old city, to admit that they feel a tang of living equivalent to what they imagined once was. The truth is that it is not here. It has vanished—along with the generation that felt it.