New York is built upon an island, which is I believe about ten miles long, counting from the southern point at the Battery up to Carmansville, to which place the city is presumed to extend northward. This island is called Manhattan, a name which I have always thought would have been more graceful for the city than that of New York. It is formed by the Sound or East River, which divides the continent from Long Island by the Hudson River, which runs into the Sound, or rather joins it at the city foot, and by a small stream called the Harlem River, which runs out of the Hudson and meanders away into the Sound at the north of the city, thus cutting the city off from the main-land. The breadth of the island does not much exceed two miles, and therefore the city is long, and not capable of extension in point of breadth. In its old days it clustered itself round about the Point, and stretched itself up from there along the quays of the two waters. The streets down in this part of the town are devious enough, twisting themselves about with delightful irregularity; but as the city grew there came the taste for parallelograms, and the upper streets are rectangular and numbered. Broadway, the street of New York with which the world is generally best acquainted, begins at the southern point of the town and goes northward through it. For some two miles and a half it walks away in a straight line, and then it turns to the left toward the Hudson. From that time Broadway never again takes a straight course, but crosses the various avenues in an oblique direction till it becomes the Bloomingdale Road, and under that name takes itself out of town. There are eleven so-called avenues, which descend in absolutely straight lines from the northern, and at present unsettled, extremity of the new town, ****** their way southward till they lose themselves among the old streets. These are called First Avenue, Second Avenue, and so on. The town had already progressed two miles up northward from the Battery before it had caught the parallelogramic fever from Philadelphia, for at about that distance we find "First Street". First Street runs across the avenues from water to water, and then Second Street. Iwill not name them all, seeing that they go up to 154th Street!
They do so at least on the map and I believe on the lamp-posts.
But the houses are not yet built in order beyond 50th or 60th Street. The other hundred streets, each of two miles long, with the avenues, which are mostly unoccupied for four or five miles, is the ground over which the young New Yorkers are to spread themselves. I do not in the least doubt that they will occupy it all, and that 154th Street will find itself too narrow a boundary for the population.
I have said that there was some good architectural effect in New York, and I alluded chiefly to that of the Fifth Avenue. The Fifth Avenue is the Belgrave Square, the Park Lane, and the Pall Mall of New York. It is certainly a very fine street. The houses in it are magnificent--not having that aristocratic look which some of our detached London residences enjoy, or the palatial appearance of an old-fashioned hotel in Paris, but an air of comfortable luxury and commercial wealth which is not excelled by the best houses of any other town that I know. They are houses, not hotels or palaces; but they are very roomy houses, with every luxury that complete finish can give them. Many of them cover large spaces of the ground, and their rent will sometimes go up as high as 800pounds and 1000 pounds a year. Generally the best of these houses are owned by those who live in them, and rent is not, therefore, paid. But this is not always the case, and the sums named above may be taken as expressing their value. In England a man should have a very large income indeed who could afford to pay 1000 pounds a year for his house in London. Such a one would as a matter of course have an establishment in the country, and be an earl, or a duke, or a millionaire. But it is different in New York. The resident there shows his wealth chiefly by his house; and though he may probably have a villa at Newport or a box somewhere up the Hudson, he has no second establishment. Such a house, therefore, will not represent a total expenditure of above 4000 pounds a year.
There are churches on each side of Fifth Avenue--perhaps five or six within sight at one time--which add much to the beauty of the street. They are well built, and in fairly good taste. These, added to the general well-being and splendid comfort of the place, give it an effect better than the architecture of the individual houses would seem to warrant. I own that I have enjoyed the vista as I have walked up and down Fifth Avenue, and have felt that the city had a right to be proud of its wealth. But the greatness and beauty and glory of wealth have on such occasions been all in all with me. I know no great man, no celebrated statesman, no philanthropist of peculiar note who has lived in Fifth Avenue.
That gentleman on the right made a million of dollars by inventing a shirt collar; this one on the left electrified the world by a lotion; as to the gentleman at the corner there, there are rumors about him and the Cuban slave trade but my informant by no means knows that they are true. Such are the aristocracy of Fifth Avenue, I can only say that, if I could make a million dollars by a lotion, I should certainly be right to live in such a house as one of those.