McKim, Mead, and White. Some of the new
residential streets of places as recent as Chicago or St. Paul more
than hold their own, as it seems to me, with any contemporaneous
thoroughfares of their own class in Europe. To my own opinion let me
add the valuable testimony of Mr. E.A. Freeman, in his "Impressions of
the United States" (pp. 246, 247):

I found the modern churches, of various denominations, certainly
better, as works of architecture, than I had expected. They may
quite stand beside the average of modern churches in England,
setting aside a few of the very best.... But I thought the
churches, whose style is most commonly Gothic of one kind or
another, decidedly less successful than some of the civil
buildings. In some of these, I hardly know how far by choice, how
far by happy accident, a style has been hit upon which seemed to
me far more at home than any of the reproductions of Gothic. Much
of the street architecture of several cities has very
successfully caught the leading idea of the true Italian style.

New York, the gateway to America for, perhaps, nine out of ten
visitors, is described by Mr. Richard Grant White, the American
writer, as "the dashing, dirty, demi-rep of cities." Mr. Joaquin
Miller, the poet of the Sierras, calls it "an iron-fronted,
iron-footed, and iron-hearted town." Miss Florence Marryat asserts
that New York is "_without any exception_ the most charming city she
has ever been in." Miss Emily Faithful admits that at first it seems
rough and new, but says that when one returns to it from the West, one
recognises that it has everything essential in common with his
European experiences. In my own note-book I find that New York
impressed me as being "like a lady in ball costume, with diamonds in
her ears, and her toes out at her boots."

Here, then, is evidence that New York makes a pretty strong impression
on her guests, and that this impression is not by any means the same
in every case. New York is evidently a person of character, and of a
character with many facets. To most European visitors it must, on the
_whole_, be somewhat of a disappointment; and it is not really an
advantageous or even a characteristic portal to the American
continent. For one thing, it is too overwhelmingly cosmopolitan in the
composition of its population to strike the distinctive American note.
It is not alone that New York society imitates that of F