It Is Formed By The Sound Or East River, Which
Divides The Continent From Long Island By The Hudson River,
Which
runs into the Sound, or rather joins it at the city foot, and by a
small stream called the
Harlem River, which runs out of the Hudson
and meanders away into the Sound at the north of the city, thus
cutting the city off from the main-land. The breadth of the island
does not much exceed two miles, and therefore the city is long, and
not capable of extension in point of breadth. In its old days it
clustered itself round about the Point, and stretched itself up
from there along the quays of the two waters. The streets down in
this part of the town are devious enough, twisting themselves about
with delightful irregularity; but as the city grew there came the
taste for parallelograms, and the upper streets are rectangular and
numbered. Broadway, the street of New York with which the world is
generally best acquainted, begins at the southern point of the town
and goes northward through it. For some two miles and a half it
walks away in a straight line, and then it turns to the left toward
the Hudson. From that time Broadway never again takes a straight
course, but crosses the various avenues in an oblique direction
till it becomes the Bloomingdale Road, and under that name takes
itself out of town. There are eleven so-called avenues, which
descend in absolutely straight lines from the northern, and at
present unsettled, extremity of the new town, making their way
southward till they lose themselves among the old streets. These
are called First Avenue, Second Avenue, and so on. The town had
already progressed two miles up northward from the Battery before
it had caught the parallelogramic fever from Philadelphia, for at
about that distance we find "First Street". First Street runs
across the avenues from water to water, and then Second Street. I
will not name them all, seeing that they go up to 154th Street!
They do so at least on the map and I believe on the lamp-posts.
But the houses are not yet built in order beyond 50th or 60th
Street. The other hundred streets, each of two miles long, with
the avenues, which are mostly unoccupied for four or five miles, is
the ground over which the young New Yorkers are to spread
themselves. I do not in the least doubt that they will occupy it
all, and that 154th Street will find itself too narrow a boundary
for the population.
I have said that there was some good architectural effect in New
York, and I alluded chiefly to that of the Fifth Avenue. The Fifth
Avenue is the Belgrave Square, the Park Lane, and the Pall Mall of
New York. It is certainly a very fine street. The houses in it
are magnificent - not having that aristocratic look which some of
our detached London residences enjoy, or the palatial appearance of
an old-fashioned hotel in Paris, but an air of comfortable luxury
and commercial wealth which is not excelled by the best houses of
any other town that I know.
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