Remarkable, unspeakable New York!(Brief Article)

New York City's image in literature reveals that, more than any other American city, it embodies the American dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The city is both fact and symbol, and writers have variously viewed its significance with suspicion, hostility, celebration, and wonder.

In 1785 the city, then mainly just the island of Manhattan, became the nation's temporary capital, and in 1789 Washington was sworn in as president of the United States on the steps of Federal Hall. When, in October 1790, the capital was moved back to Philadelphia, Washington left New York, never to return.

The New York Academy of the Fine Arts opened in 1802, and the New-York Historical Society was founded in 1804. By 1815 New York City had a hundred thousand inhabitants, supplanting Philadelphia as the nation's largest city. With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which linked the Atlantic to the Great Lakes, the city's commercial eminence was assured. By 1860 the city managed two-thirds of all American imports and one-third of its exports, more than matching its internal trade along the canal.

Many witnesses wrote about the state of the city on the eve of the Civil War, portraying it as a chaotic, squalid boomtown. Then as now the city was an unreal mixture of crushing poverty and fabulous wealth. As E. B. White observed in Here Is New York (1949): "New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant."

Before the Civil War new arrivals had moved into lower Manhattan, squeezing the middle class northward and contributing to the construction of streetcar lines that already in 1858 carried thirty-five million passengers a year. About a dozen railroads relied on the commerce generated in New York, and after 1853 Cornelius Vanderbilt began to consolidate many of them in the Grand Central Rail System.

As grass and trees gave ...