Rich, hemm'd thick all around with sail-ships and steamships, an island sixteen miles long, solid founded."

It impressed me then much as Whitman's poem to the big city impresses me to-day. But, boy-like, fresh from my better-ordered Boston, I was not a little disdainful of it all-displeased by a sense of the universal clutter, the dirt, the shabbiness, the staggery ranks of telegraph poles along Broadway and all other main thoroughfares, the cheap ostentation of the business streets, the depressing uniformity of the "brown-stone district," the miles of flimsylookings built of soft brick painted in harsh reds picked out in white along the mortar line, the few good edifices. only emphasizing the universal rubbishy aspect of things. The stately possibilities of the magnificent avenues and of the ample crosstown streets that recurred at regular intervals the only redeeming qualities of the abominable gridiron plan imposed upon the island were then hardly manifest. But Central Park atoned for it all; in exploring the Ramble-my first keen delight in a naturalistic landscape wrought by a great artist-I was lost in admiration for Mr. Olmsted's masterly creation.

Ever since then it has been my fortune to be able to watch New York grow. Often in it, but never of it-intervals of a month or two, a year or two; never so familiar with the face of things as to lose the sense of changing aspects, with every return I have been impressed with the mighty development of the huge organism: transformation upon transformation forced upon it by the necessities of

growth, the process by degrees more confidently guided by an awakening civic consciousness that informed it with intelligent volition.

We are rightly inclined to dwell with dissatisfaction upon the evils of great cities that almost everywhere we find all too sadly in evidence. New York undoubtedly has its full share of these. But if we consider the changes that have come over the face of things-and yet more significantly within the heart of thingsin the course of a generation or so, we find ample assurance that New York is steadily "making good" in the literal sense of the term. New ills, like noxious weeds, may still keep cropping out, but at least they are combated with more intelligent vigilance; we can plainly perceive the steadily increasing preponderance of the good.

First and most fundamental comes the organic advance: the amelioration of

the cramping city plan with new boulevards, parkways, parks, urban squares, and playgrounds that make for the recreation and better health of all classes; vast advances in public movement, better pavements, cleaner streets, improved conveyances; colossal betterments in transit, with elevated lines-provisional makeshifts these, that another generation should know only as things of the past-subways, great bridges and tunnels, and, last of all, the revolutionary reformations of the great steam-line terminals, with their almost fabulous outlays in architectural and engineering magnificence-tunnels under the town and below the two rivers, edifices superbly monumental-works that are carrying the metropolitan waves to yet remoter population margins; that of the Pennsylvania Railroad destined very materially to rectify the now excessive longitudinal tendencies in growth with more

normal transverse expansions, both westward and eastward.

With the sense of physical expansion has come the growing consciousness of metropolitan solidarity. This has found expression politically; with the popular adoption of the term "Greater New York," the vast composite city of five boroughs has come into being, while in the west, across the Hudson, a sub-metropolitan section awaits the inevitable coalescence of its various municipal units into the secondary great city that a situation in another State conditions.

The limitations of this article make the "new New York" mainly synonymous with Manhattan; it should be borne in mind that the foregoing characterizations apply largely to the metropolis as a whole. Perhaps the average New Yorker realizes this as little as the average stranger does. There are many thousands whose knowledge of the metropolis is limited to their own wards; even many of those familiar with lower Broadway see nothing of the city above Twenty-third Street from one year's end to another. Like limitations hold true of "uptowners." But travels at home may prove as instructive as travels abroad, with the advantage of costing less in both money and time. I make it a point to visit at frequent intervals the various sections of my own historic city. Thereby I learn as much in the way of interesting new architecture, landscape charm, and a sense of human progress in general as I might from seeing a deal of novelty in foreign parts. Of all forms of provincialism the Cockney brand is the densest. If more residents of Manhattan made it a rule to acquaint themselves occasionally with conditions over on the Jersey side or beyond the East River-the noble drive along the Hudson, for instance, or the romantic picturesqueness of the Palisades-they might even learn to appreciate that yet other parts of the world have something worth taking into

account.

Perhaps ninety-nine persons out of a hundred, if asked to mention the one distinctive thing that pre-eminently characterizes New York, would specify the "sky-scraper." And they would be right.

To be sure, it was Chicago that originated the sky-scraper. It has long since become an American institution. Atlanta has prodigious ones-samples of New York built on a Boston base. Perhaps even Oshkosh has grown them! Boston is the only great city that forbids them, or at least strictly limits their unbounded aspirations. The National capital should by all means do the same, and most peremptorily. But New York has made the sky-scraper especially its own, has developed its possibilities to the utmost, and thereby has transformed its collective aspect most amazingly. Hated, feared, almost despised at first, while ridiculed not a little, the sky-scraper has gone its conquering way. Despite the direst predictions as to what might happen, it has come to stay, although perhaps some of the most ambitious examples, from rusting out in their marrows, so to speak, may have to come down inside of twentyfive years.

To watch the progress of this tremendous upbuilding-" upheaval " may seem a better term; it quite literally expresses the process-has been fascinating. Year after year, noted from the water on the East River, the North River, and from the Bay approach, the growth of the new sky-line has seemed like that of a new geological formation. The beginnings were gradual; halting and tentative in effect. Gaining momentum, the movement at last became violent, fairly cataclysmal, if the term may be stretched to cover a constructive activity. Even in memory it now seems a bit absurd to think that we once regarded the "Tribune" building, with its "tall tower," as a veritable sky-scraper. At that time it appeared, indeed, a marvel of lofty construction, and was a pioneer in the tendency to build high in air promoted by the invention of the "vertical railway." Then a few years later the "World" building arose to hump itself above the town in gilt-topped ostentation. Its ambition to overtop all New York was but briefly satisfied. The much earlier Equitable building and the other great life insurance edifices-in their day unrivaled examples of secular architecture monumentally developedtogether with the aforementioned great