The capacities of New York, below
Union Square, for metropolitan splendor are entirely undeveloped; the
best points are still occupied by comparatively worthless buildings, and
the future will produce a now unlooked-for change in the whole character
of that great district.
The huddling together of our American cities is due to the recentness
of the time when space was our greatest enemy and sparseness our chief
discouragement. Our founders hated room as much as a backwoods farmer
hates trees. The protecting walls, which narrowed the ways and cramped
the houses of the Old-World cities, did not put a severer compress
upon them, than the disgust of solitude and the craving for "the sweet
security of streets" threw about our city-builders. In the Western towns
now, they carefully give a city air to their villages by crowding the
few stores and houses of which they are composed into the likeliest
appearance of an absolute scarcity of space.
They labor unconsciously to look crowded, and would sooner go into a
cellar to eat their oysters than have them in the finest saloon above
ground.
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