AM ECONOMIST ABROAD-NEW YORK

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 116, 6 August 1927, Page 24

AM ECONOMIST ABROAD-NEW YORK

Transport of Citty’s Teeming Millions. . . Palace-Hotels Cater Well and Charge Accordinglyo. Romance Blooms in Drab Surroumdmgs.

(Written for THE SUN by

Dr. J. B. CONDLIFFE)

| of an infinite succession of yellow I taxi-cabs which flitted elusively past to pick up other passengers until after half an hour or so one of them was persuaded to deposit me two blocks round the corner at my hotel, to which I could easily have walked in five minutes had I but known. An express lift whisks one to the seventeenth floor of a thirty-two storey building, and one is left with a distinct feeling of having at last arrived in New York. The American hotel deserves an article to itself. Indeed a single column would be all too short to describe this efficient economic unit from its full-sized swimming pool in the basement, its barber’s shop, mercery, fur, drug, fancy goods, theatre, taxi, newspaper, telephone, telegraph, and many other stalls; its several restaurants, grills, coffee-rooms, cafeterias, and its hundreds of bedrooms between these and the roof-garden. The American bedroom and bath is a surprise and a pleasure to one whose travelling experience has been confined mainly to hotels in Australia and New Zealand and army huts in England. There are not only the ordinary conveniences extraordinarily well done—telephone, reading and writing lamps,

■■gH ROM Chicago to New \ Lyl York is a journey o£ a day and a night, but I MgLpJ took it in three stages, nE'jS! stopping off tor a few |a3>sii hours at Buffalo to see the Niagara Falls before they were entirely freed from ice, then at Syracuse to be exasperated and saddened by an “up and coming” university and its president. There, however, I met an old friend and branched off to his New England home along the valley of the Mohawk, passing by the Hudson gap, through whicn all roads northward and westward from New York must travel. My friend was a historian of distinction, who knew the intimate details of the Indian battles and of the revolutionary wars which were fought in this neighbourhood. I missed him the following day when I travelled alone down the valley of the Connecticut River to New York. • * * One’s first entry to a great city is always a thrilling event. As the train filled up with New Yorkers who had been spending their Sunday in the country, one began to realise both the diversity of racial types and the übiquity of the Hebrew in America's metropolis. The next impression is

ample closets and wardrobes; but the minor details show careful and pleasing forethought. Towels are saved by the provision of pads for one’s shoes and cloths on which razor blades may be wiped. Though the valet leaves his card within a few minutes of one’s arrival, the unhandy male is also provided with a small outfit of threaded needles, a button or two, and a safety pin! The only disagreeable thing about the hotel is the size of the bill at the end of one’s stay.

I have no intention of attempting to describe New York. Already it extends beyond Manhattan Island some fifty miles into the country. I spent a week-end very pleasantly in a country home set in very delightful wooded hill country on the banks of the Hudson, but still in New York. Technically the city is still less populous than London, but it will not be long before it outstrips its ancient rival in size if not in interest.

How can one describe a colossal city housing millions of people? The skyline of New York and its vigorous city architecture are the fa.vourite themes of writers and visitors. Both deserve to be. Some of the sky-scraping buildings, set back in cubical fashion by reason of the zoning law, achieve massive and impressive effects. They are the true embodiment and expression of the American spirit of thrusting achievement. Despite the zoning laws however and the beauty of architecture to which they give rise, the increasing development of the skyscraper troubles New York, if only because of the traffic problem to which it gives rise at certain hours of the day. Truth impels me to confess that only once did I get a real close-up view of the dosrn-town skyscrapers. Wall Street, in view of its reputation for lambing-down, might perhaps be described at any rate on such a dull day as when I saw it, as “a tunnel of green gloom.” From the top of the tall building whence the Rockefeller millions are distributed over the academic world, the view is bounded on one side by the Woolworth Tower and on the other by a slum area too valuable to build upon until a new skyscraper is needed. For the rest I spent a large part of my waking hours in taxis waiting for the traffic jams to break. In these taxis I went, as it were, from island to island through a sea of humanity. Like every other large town, New York contains within itself whatever you may wish to find. In various apartment houses or buildings like city offices, I found little islands of academic life, where economists and philosophers and historians had created about themselves “pools of silence” in order that they might study in peace. Another might have found musical or artistic islands or continents of big and little businesses, or oceans of pleasure; for in New York, as elsewhere, one can demonstrate the wisdom of the saying, “Seek and ye shall find.” I was, for example, taken to lunch to a British business men’s club. The luncheon rooms were at the top of a large building in Broadway, but the furniture and pictures might have been in London—or Leeds. Heavy leather chairs and couches, hunting prints, Spy’s political caricatures, cricket portraits and everywhere the accents of Yorkshire, Lancashire, London and, more rarely, Oxford. I had pea-soup, roast beef and plum pudding. It seemed the only suitable choice.

Two other impressions remain. The first is the cheapness and excellence of entertainment. In one evening at a movie theatre one saw in comfort two excellent films and two elaborate ballets, besides a silhouette dajice against a background of film; heard Levitzki play two soli and a concerto with a large symphony orchestra, heard also most of the better-known choruses ot Faust rendered by the orchestra and a well-trained choir—all for fifty cents. The other impression is of the art of O. Henry. One or two rides through Central Park on a warm evening when half New York’s population seems to be cooling itself off in the only open space available to it, will inevitably revive memories of his inimitable short stories and drive one back to his faith in the persistence of romance and adventure even in the drabbest surroundings.