STUDY IN CONTRASTS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 632, 8 April 1929, Page 14

STUDY IN CONTRASTS

MODERN NEW YORK CHANGES IN FACE AND FIGURE New York's complexion, material and human, has darkened perceptibly during the last ten years, observes a writer in “The Times.” Increasing clouds of smoke from prosperous factories blow from the mainland across the splendid fronts of Manhattan’s cliff dwellings a rising tide of negro duskiness pours from the South into the civic canons. The employment of generous quantities of electricity in the buildings, and of lavish amounts of cosmetics upon the faces of the deep-toned damsels, struggles against this sunburning. Nevertheless New York becomes with time more, as the Mexicans say, tostada. The tremendous extension of production, of selling and buying, conjures new gigantic industrial fortresses into the air every day, while the entry of the cheerful, prolific negro into Northern industry and business ofiices follows logically upon the heels of restriction in the numbers of that other willing horse, the immigrant from the Old Country. Looking, for after-the-war changes in New York, one perceives a sharpening of contrasts. The artificial canons, the gorges, the cloud-capped towers, have always had a magnificence of their own. increased with the recent erection of immense new hotels, huge office buildings, and noble railway stations. upon which the fortunate architect has been able to expend a genius unfettered by limitations of costly materials, or airscope; by little, in fact, except groundspace. He has created a new skyline, with a beauty of its own. Yet New York still has her feet in the mud. and if the days are past when houses in the Bowery u-ere to be seen festooned with streamers of dirt, too many avenues, aside from the handsome Fifth or gracious Madison and Park, and too many cross-streets, aside from the fashionable shopping regions, show without shame vast holes in street and sidewalk, and garbage cans whose open mouths disgorge rubbish to every gust. The famous, much-abused “L” looks to-day as if it had not had a scrubbing-brush on its staircases or a lick of paint on its precarious platforms for the last decade; the Subway is, more than ever, an outrage to eye and ear. Private houses, automobiles, and persons display more luxury, more exclusive qualities; pub. lie transport is more crowded, shabbier. New York, it appears, has become more sumptuous and more ! squalid. “Soft” Saloons Is it a result of prohibition that Manhattan displays such a lot of new shops? Scores, full of jewellery; hundreds, full of women’s clothes; thousands more for delightful eats and innocuous drinks. The third rate in each class are below, and the first rate far above, London in price. Not only do such favoured regions as Central Broadway and the crossstreets just above and below Fortvfifth shine with lobster and chicken palaces, cafeterias, and restaurants specialising in foreign foods, but on such avenues as Sixth and Seventh, where formerly four saloons stood on most cross-roads —one to each corner of each block—are new crops of little stores showing everything, from neardrugs to near-diamonds, but, above all, in incalculable numbers, multiplied like the sands of the sea, are the little bright, ornate open-fronted places selling “soft” drinks. Several kinds of semi-medicinals such as coca-kola and sarsaparijla may be sold here, but the majority specialise in fruit-juice, and particularly orange, drinks; these illuminated booths, open day' and night, seem never to take a wink of sleep, and their profits must be almost equal to those of the “blind tigers” whose patrons may be seen reeling drowsily along dim pavements late at night. The fruit-drink legion is run close in popularity by the ever-ready, dazzlingly equipped drugstores, selling 24 hours in the day, good coffee, miserable tea, thick sweet chocolate, as well as an enormous range of icecreams and iced beverages, and quantities of hot cakes and pies. All New York seems to be perpetually sipping or chewing some sugared confection with a flavouring of root or fruit or leaf. Can it be that the cliff-dweller of Manhattan is reverting, in food as well as in housing habits, to the types of the aboriginal south-west? Or is this hut another of New York’s contrasts, with fruitarians at one end of the scale and consumers of gigantic chops and insecticide alcohol at the other? More Restless Than Ever

Changes have taken place, too, in the shopping and residential sections. Fashionable windows have moved farther uptown, to Fifty-seventh Street and its neighbourhood, while the most eagerly sought living quarters have shifted from Riverside Drive down to Park Avenue, and still farther to rehabilitated Washington Square. Hereabouts was formerly No Man’s Land of New York, with the congeries of named streets below, culminating at the edge of the island in the financial section and chief sea-gateway, and containing large groups of what New York calls “foreigners”—an odd distinction in a city where everything is foreign, except perhaps the bedrock. New York is never fi t lied; something is always to be puLed down and built up. Were it to be finished it would no longer be interesting. But to-day, with all its accession of wealth, accession of population, and accession of cement and steel. New York is more restless and incomplete than ever.