“Been here before?” Twain’s reedy drawl.
“No,” I said, which was almost true. I’d attended a conference once, gotten a few first impressions.
“This island held the noblest fascination for me when I arrived sixteen years ago, a printer boy with ten dollars sewn in my coat. Stayed the whole summer of ’fifty-three. Saw the World’s Fair at the Crystal Palace. A spectacle! Did you know six thousand attended every day? Double my hometown’s population.” He knocked his pipe against the railing. “Fell in love with Manhattan like she was a woman. Now it’s different. Traffic’s an abomination. Prices are higher’n perdition—lodging alone’s triple what I paid then. By the way, where’re you staying?”
I pulled a slip of paper from my wallet. “Earle’s Hotel, Canal Street.”
“Why, that’s right near the St. Nicholas. How’d it be if we took in a few sights together? I’m a mite weary of folks I generally see.”
“You’re on,” I said, delighted.
“Buy a money belt,” he said. “The cash you’re carrying in that fancy billfold won’t be with you six blocks in a Seventh Avenue car or downtown Red Bird bus.”
“Muggers?”
“Them too, but I meant pickpockets.”
We walked down the ferry ramp. The dock was noisy with workers on freight platforms, baggage wagons rumbling over planks, horsecars gliding on rails. Twain hailed one of the lined-up hacks.
We slanted onto Canal Street and clattered beneath a flimsy-looking iron trackway running along Greenwich. It stood fifteen feet above the street. “What’s that?” I asked, reminded of erector-set constructions Grandpa and I had made.
“The new Ninth Avenue Elevated,” Twain said. “Runs from Battery Place clear up to Thirtieth and Ninth. Experimental, cars pulled by cable.” He explained that steam trains weren’t permitted below Forty-second: noise and smoke terrorized horses; cinders posed a fire hazard.
I craned my neck as we crossed Broadway. Paved sidewalks were overhung with broad awnings. The streetlamps were globes topped by brass balls. Pedestrians swarmed among bicycles—I’d learned they were fairly new and known as velocipedes—and round-topped public minicoaches and swifter carnages and carts and horsecars. There were no traffic signals. One cursing cop tried to keep it all moving. Traffic wasn’t bad this early, Twain remarked. To me it looked awful.
I peered around the driver, trying to see everything. A maze of telegraph wires stretched overhead. Buildings were encrusted with ironwork, and the tallest stood only five or six stories. In the distance a steeple soared above its surroundings. It was Trinity Church, Manhattan’s tallest structure at well over two hundred feet. But it would soon be surpassed, Twain said. The walls of the new St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue would stretch some three hundred and thirty feet heavenward.
A horrendous clanging sounded. Pedestrians and vehicles gave way to form a corridor in which an ambulance emerged, its grim-faced driver wielding a whip on a single straining horse. The cab’s shades were raised; I glimpsed an attendant struggling with his patient, a bald man thrashing spasmodically. I stared in morbid fascination. Violence and death were close to the surface back here; it lent existence a certain tenuous vitality.
The lobby of Earle’s Hotel held worn horsehair furniture, tarnished spittoons, and an oppressive portrait of the Duke of Wellington, whose painted eyes followed us. Twain rumbled disapprovingly and suggested I stay with him at the St. Nicholas. I said it was presently out of my price range. He reflected on that, nodded, and said he’d return later.
My room was drab but reasonably clean. I examined my wound. It was still stiff and tender, but had virtually healed. The gash was unchanged. Weary and a bit hung over, I tried the bed and was soon making up for lost sleep.
Manhattan’s built-up portions extended to 130th Street, near the Harlem River, and held over a million people. Twain seemed determined for me to see most of them. He started by escorting me along Broadway, tipping his hat to people staring at him, beaming and responding when they called, “Hi, Mark!”
He showed me the famous gray-stoned Astor House at the corner of Barclay. Built thirty years earlier, it had been considered too far uptown, Twain said. Now it was too far down, its glory stolen by the Metropolitan and St. Nicholas, whose homey comforts Twain preferred, and which in turn were being supplanted by mammoth new establishments farther uptown. At Madison Square we strolled into one—the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It covered a square block and held six floors. Twain showed me its steam-powered elevator (he called it a “perpendicular railway”); so many used it for fun that the management had installed in it a gas chandelier, plush carpeting, and a divan. Every room contained the latest comforts: central heating, private baths, speaking tubes for room service.
We hired a hack and toured the white-fronted palaces of consumerism along the fashionable “Ladies’ Mile.” There, lavishly outfitted women left liveried coachmen to wait while they shopped in Lord & Taylor’s emporium at Twentieth or Arnold Constable’s at Nineteenth, both having recently opened their pale marble facades to the public.
I told Twain I wanted to visit a state-of-the-art department store. He chose A. T. Stewart’s cast-iron palace at Ninth, just east off Broadway. Its exterior white metal, ornately sculpted, was designed to look like marble. Blue awnings shaded the window displays. Inside, the scale was grandiose. Eight floors spanned two and a half acres. Two thousand employees dispensed stock to meet life’s physical requisites, from baby clothes to funereal “black goods.” A central rotunda framed an enormous domed skylight. A double staircase linked all floors. An organ played solemnly—appropriate, I thought, for a marketplace shrine.
We looked in on the vast sewing room, an entire floor, where rows of women—more than nine hundred—hand-stitched every bit of clothing sold in the store. Noticing that they didn’t work from patterns, I questioned the floor manager, a silk-hatted martinet who gave me a fishy look and informed me that not only did no such
