Here is New York

New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience—if they did they would live elsewhere.

Schwab’s house facing the Hudson on Riverside is gone. Gould’s house on Fifth Avenue is an antique shop. Morgan’s house on Madison Avenue is a church administration office. What was once the Fahnestock house is now Random House. Rich men nowadays don’t live in houses; they live in the attics of big apartment buildings and plant trees on the setbacks, hundreds of feet above the street.

New York provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.

I’ve been remembering what it felt like as a young man to live in the same town with giants.

Hell Gate Bridge

furnaces of the Bowery

Belvedere Tower in the Park,

the settlers give it passion

Many of its settlers are probably here merely to escape, not face, reality.

The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.