Читать книгу The Color of a Great City онлайн

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Still later, after the opening of the World War, and because I was noting how swiftly and steadily the city was changing and old landmarks and conditions were being done away with, I thought it worth while to bring together, not only all the scenes I had previously published or sketched, but to add some others which from time to time I had begun but never finished. Among these at that time were The Fire, Hell’s Kitchen, A Wayplace of the Fallen, The Man on the Bench. And then, several years ago, having in the meanwhile once more laid aside the material to the advantage of other matters, I decided that it was still worth while. And getting them all out and casting aside those I no longer cared for, and rewriting others of which I approved, together with new pictures of old things I had seen, i.e., Bums, The Michael J. Powers Association, A Vanished Summer Resort, The Push-cart Man, The Sandwich Man, Characters, The Men in the Snow, The City Awakes—I finally evolved the present volume. But throughout all these latest additions I sought only to recapture the flavor and the color of that older day—nothing more. If they are anything, they are mere representations of the moods that governed me at the time that I had observed this material at first hand—not as I know the city to be now.