Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 14.djvu/587

NEW YORK. apartment houses. Riverside Drive is one of the most beautitul avenues in the world. Uptown along the West Side there are miles of small, artistic private houses until the neighborhood of 110th Street is reached, where over large areas apartment houses are again the rule. The upper part of the island along the East Side is solidly built up with tenement houses. A rocky ridge, rising steeply from the Hudson, with an equally abrupt descent toward the east, extends through the upper part of Manhattan Island, rising finally into hills of nearly 250 feet elevation. These eminences, in part known as Washington Heights, offer charming sites for dwellings, and are in some places compactly built up, while extensive tracts are still covered with woods, presenting exquisite bits of scenery along the Hudson and Harlem rivers.



Blackwell's, Ward's, and Randall's islands, picturesquely situated in the East River, are used for city institutions for the care of the poor, sick, and disorderly. Contagious disease hospitals are maintained by the city on the small islands off Port Morris, in the Borough of the Bronx.

Viewed from the bay, the business part of the Borough of Manhattan presents a most extraordinary conglomeration of towering office buildings, varying from ten to twenty-five stories in height, huddled together in apparent confusion upon a strip of land less than a mile wide. Beginning at the Battery, the first building of importance is the Produce Exchange, a modern Renaissance structure of brick and terra cotta, with a tine tower 225 feet high. Opposite the Exchange, on Bowling Green, is the new Custom House, upon the site of the official residence built by the city for General Washington. From Bowling Green to Wall Street, Broadway is lined with immense business structures, each of them costing millions of dollars, occupied by the Standard Oil Company, the Manhattan Life Insurance Company, the Commercial Cable Company, the Union Trust Company, and other large corporations. The Consolidated Stock and Petroleum Exchange is at Broadway and Exchange Place. From Trinity Church, running east to the river, is Wall Street, a narrow thoroughfare so completely lined on both sides with buildings from twelve to twenty stories high, used by banks and financial institutions, as to resemble more

a cañon than a street. Chief among the buildings here are the great banks, and the Sub-Treasury, a Doric building of granite, upon the site of the old City Hall, from the balcony of which Washington was inaugurated as first President of the United States. In Broad Street, which runs south from the Sub-Treasury, is the new Stock Exchange, costing $2,000,000. Opposite the Stock Exchange is the Mills Building, erected twenty years ago at a cost of $4,000,000. It was the first of the luxurious office buildings in the financial district. On the other side of Exchange Place is the Broad-Exchange, a twenty-story granite pile. Trinity Church, the most interesting of New York's churches, stands upon land granted by the English Government in 1697. The original plot embraced a tract of many acres running down to the Hudson River. The first church was completed in 1697, the present one in 1846. It is a Gothic structure of brown stone. In the churchyard are many monuments in memory of well-known persons. On Broadway, from Trinity Church to the City Hall, are some of the most imposing of the insurance buildings. That of the Equitable Life Assurance Society occupies a whole block. Here also is the building of the American Surety Company, with a cornice 307 feet above the pavement and a foundation extending 72 feet below the street. On the opposite side of Broadway is the main office of the Western Union Telegraph Company. In Cedar Street, a few doors from Broadway, is the Clearing House, maintained by the associated banks of New York. It is a beautiful structure of white marble. In Liberty Street is the palatial home of the Chamber of Commerce. At the junction of Broadway and Park Row stands the Post Office, a large and imposing composite structure, of Doric and Renaissance, upon a triangular plot. Opposite the Post Office is Saint Paul's Chapel, where Washington's pew is shown. Across the way is the old Astor House, a granite hotel which fifty years ago was considered the most luxurious establishment of its kind in the country. Above the Post Office is the City Hall, in City Hall Park. Near by are the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, the great buildings of the World, Tribune, and Times on the east, and the lofty structures of the Postal Telegraph Building and Home Insurance Company on the west. To the south is the Park Row Building, one of the tallest in the country, twenty-five stories high, not counting the towers. The City Hall is the most beautiful of New York's earlier buildings. It was begun in 1803 and finished in 1812 at a cost of $500,000. White marble was used for the front and sides, but brown stone for the back, as it was supposed that the city would not extend beyond it. Back of the City Hall is the