city. People who lived in
Society saw Madison and Fifth Avenues, where their homes were, with the
churches and hotels scattered along them; and the shopping district
just below, and the theatre district at one side, and the park to the
north. Unless one went automobiling, that was all of the city one need
ever see. When visitors asked about the Aquarium, and the Stock
Exchange, and the Museum of Art, and Tammany Hall, and Ellis Island,
where the immigrants came, the old New Yorkers would look perplexed,
and say: "Dear me, do you really want to see those tilings? Why, I have
been here all my life, and have never seen them!"

For the hordes of sightseers there had been provided a special
contrivance, a huge automobile omnibus which seated thirty or forty
people, and went from the Battery to Harlem with a young man shouting
through a megaphone a description of the sights. The irreverent had
nicknamed this the "yap-wagon"; and declared that the company
maintained a fake "opium-joint" in Chinatown, and a fake "dive" in the
Bowery, and hired tough-looking individuals to sit and be stared at by
credulous excursionists from Oklahoma and Kalamazoo. Of course it would
never have done for people who had just been passed into Society to
climb upon a "yap-wagon"; but they were permitted to get into the
subway, and were whirled with a deafening clatter through a long tunnel
of steel and stone. And then they got out and climbed a steep hill like
any common mortals, and stood and gazed at Grant's tomb: a huge white
marble edifice upon a point overlooking the Hudson. Architecturally it
was not a beautiful structure--but one was consoled by reflecting that
the hero himself would not have cared about that. It might have been
described as a soap-box with a cheese-box on top of it; and these
homely and familiar articles were perhaps not altogether out of keeping
with the character of the humblest great man who ever lived.

The view up the river was magnificent, quite the finest which the city
had to offer; but it was ruined by a hideous gas-tank, placed squarely
in the middle of it. And this, again, was not inappropriate--it was
typical of all the ways of the city. It was a city which had grown up
by accident, with nobody to care about it or to help it; it was huge
and ungainly, crude, uncomfortable, and grotesque. There was nowhere in
it a beautiful sight upon which a man could rest his eyes, without
having them tortured by something ugly