New York after Paris, 1906 Atlantic article

[elleng]

"New York is trying to create for itself a new mind as well as a new body."

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1906/10/new-york-after-paris/306234/

To the Parisian who sees New York for the first time, it must appear a wilderness of sprawling ugliness. He is shocked rather than dazzled by most of the things with which he is expected to be impressed; and his eyes, nose, and ears are constantly and cruelly assailed by sights, smells, and sounds to which New Yorkers through long familiarity are oblivious. "A big iron bazaar, and dirty beyond belief!" was the verdict of a Frenchman who fled from it in dismay and disgust at the end of twenty-four hours; and while not every Frenchman who arrives in New York takes to his heels in this inglorious fashion, the criticism is fairly typical of the way New York strikes the fastidious Gaul.

To the American returning to New York with a point of view gained by a long residence in Paris the New World metropolis must spell disillusion. The squalid, sagging, lurching wood-and-iron wharf line—the thing above all others he would most willingly have missed—confronts him on his arrival practically unaltered, except that it seems to him, in comparison with the trim and tidy banks of the Havre he has just left, more insufferable than his memory pictured it. Everything else has changed, and changed, it seems to him, for the worse.

Trinity spire and the Produce Exchange tower, which used to refresh his vision down town, are hidden by a score of nondescript sky-scrapers, and the beautiful lines of the Brooklyn Bridge are broken by these same intruders. The exquisite City Hall suffers likewise from their proximity, and will soon be perceived but dimly, like a jewel at the bottom of a well. The Bowery, which was erstwhile gay and piquant with glitter and gaud, has degenerated into sodden commonplaceness. Broadway (from City Hall to Fourteenth Street) has become completely Semitic, without having acquired thereby a scrap of Semitic charm.

[snagglepuss]

1. k and r

[frazzled]

2. The artists of the era did not feel that way

They had been to Europe, and were thrilled by the vibrant new forces at work in the burgeoning America to which they returned—the so-called Precisionists celebrated it as spiritual force. Others captured the dynamism of the city in a vibrant new style.

Here's John Marin writing about New York six years later, in 1912:

Shall we consider the life of a great city as confined simply to the people and animals on its streets and in its buildings? Are the buildings themselves dead? . . . I see great forces at work: great movements; the large buildings and the small buildings; the warring of the great and the small; influences of one mass on another greater or smaller mass. Feelings are aroused which give me the desire to express the reaction of these 'pull forces,' those influences which play with one another; great masses pulling smaller masses, each subject in some degree to the other's power. . . . While these powers are at work pushing, pulling, sideways, downwards, upwards, I can hear the sound of their strife and there is great music being played. And so I try to express graphically what a great city is doing.

And his watercolor of the Brooklyn Bridge from the same year:

[elleng]

3. Thanks!