only one way for a city to attain the beauty and the haunting charm
of age, and that is to wait patiently until time has finished his slow
work. It is hard to wait, and a new city is a crude and painful thing.
One can easily imagine the older cities looking scornfully or pityingly
down upon it, themselves secure in the grim or the delicate beauty of
their age. Only once in many generations does a city rise which
achieves a character, an individuality, without waiting for the
lingering years to bestow it. It happens so seldom as to come almost
into the realm of the miraculous. Yet to him who for the first time
sees New York at night, or as the declining sun sets ten thousand roofs
for the moment aflame--a miracle seems not more wonderful than this.

There are miles on miles of roofs in many a town, stretching away
beyond the reach of sight; there is, especially in the great cities of
the old world, an immensity of movement which is at once alien and akin
to the great movements of earth and sea; there are cities which seem
great because of the multiplicity of things--men and ships and creeds
and costumes which jostle one another in every market place. New York
has all these things--yet they do not explain New York--they are almost
inconsiderable elements in the greater thing that is the city itself.
Wherein the essence lies--whether it is the purely superficial aspect
of it, the imaginative daring of its architecture, or some deeper and
more subtle thing--no man can surely say.

There are strewn about in a thousand niches of the city little groups
of buildings which seem to have assembled themselves, by some lonesome
impulse, into communities. Primarily, of course, these groupings are
ethnological, these cities within a city being originally created
largely by the timidity of strangers in a strange land. There are
little Italys, and Chinatowns, and diminutive Bohemias, all swung
together by the action of this great centripetal force of loneliness.
The buildings in these communities, inflexible enough in all conscience
as regards design, contrive none the less to take on in some way a
character and appearance peculiar to their inhabitants; this may be a
matter only of red Turkey turbans flapping in the breeze, or perhaps of
the haunting aroma of some national staple of food--but certainly it is
there. Scattered through Manhattan, from the Battery to the Bronx,
these five centers are witnesses as they stand to the e