Great Cities Through Travelers' Eyes Read online

  Again across Broadway, and…into another long main street, the Bowery.… The stores are poorer here; the passengers less gay. Clothes ready-made, and meat ready-cooked, are to be bought in these parts; and the lively whirl of carriages is exchanged for the deep rumble of carts and wagons. These signs which are so plentiful, in shape like river buoys, or small balloons, hoisted by cords to poles, and dangling there, announce, as you may see by looking up, ‘Oysters in every Style’. They tempt the hungry most at night, for then dull candies glimmering inside, illuminate these dainty words, and make the mouths of idlers water, as they read and linger.…

  But how quiet the streets are! Are there no itinerant bands; no wind or stringed instruments? No, not one. By day, are there no Punches, Fantoccini, Dancing-dogs, Jugglers, Conjurors, Orchestrinas, or even Barrel-organs? No, not one. Yes, I remember one. One barrel organ and a dancing monkey – sportive by nature, but fast fading into a dull, lumpish monkey, of the Utilitarian school. Beyond that, nothing lively; no, not so much as a white mouse in a twirling cage.

  Are there no amusements? Yes. There is a lecture room across the way, from which that glare of light proceeds, and there may be evening service for the ladies thrice a week, or oftener. For the young gentlemen, there is the counting house, the store, the bar-room; the latter, as you may see through these windows, pretty full. Hark! to the clinking-sound of hammers breaking lumps of ice, and to the cool gurgling of the pounded bits, as, in the process of mixing, they are poured from glass to glass. No amusements? What are these suckers of cigars and swallowers of strong drinks, whose hats and legs we see in every possible variety of twist, doing, but amusing themselves? What are the fifty newspapers, which those precocious urchins are bawling down the street, and which are kept filed within, what are they but amusements? Not vapid waterish amusements, but good strong stuff; dealing in round abuse and blackguard names; pulling off the roofs of private houses, as the Halting Devil did in Spain; pimping and pandering for all degrees of vicious taste, and gorging with coined lies the most voracious maw; imputing to every man in public life the coarsest and the vilest motives; scaring away from the stabbed and prostrate body-politic, every Samaritan of clear conscience and good deeds; and setting on, with yell and whistle and the clapping of foul hands, the vilest vermin and worst birds of prey. No amusements!

  1866 JOHN WALTER

  The New York John Walter (see page 80) saw and recorded included many features familiar today, but not the skyline.

  We have been busy enough, as you may suppose, since we arrived here, and have seen most of the lions of the place. Our first visit was to the tower of Trinity Church, at the bottom of Broadway, in order to get a bird’s-eye view of the city.… The view extends all over the bay and its surrounding shores on one side, and a long way up the Hudson and the Sound on the other; but chiefly reveals the fact that the roofs of the houses in New York are nearly flat.

  The city is singularly destitute of fine public buildings, or other striking architectural features. It is the vast size of the ‘stores’ and hotels, and the beauty of the streets in the more fashionable quarters, that constitute its chief merits. The city is built on an island, called Manhattan, about seven or eight miles long, by two or three wide. It is laid out in ‘avenues’ and streets, which intersect each other at right angles, the avenues forming the longer, and the streets the shorter axis. Of these, Fifth Avenue is by far the finest; it extends from the centre of the city to the ‘Central Park’, and is the most aristocratic quarter in New York. It contains the principal clubs and the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the latest of those enormous caravansaries of which Astor House, in Broadway, was the first, and destined to be succeeded by others still vaster and more imposing. The private houses, as in all the best streets in New York, have a half-sunk basement, with a flight of ten or twelve steps up to the front door. This causes them, of course, to be well set back from the pavement, a great improvement upon our ordinary low-level system in London. They are built either of bright, red brick, relieved with green shutters, or of brown sandstone or white marble. The general appearance of the streets is remarkably bright and cheerful, and there is no smoke. To this agreeable picture, however, there are some drawbacks. The streets, as a general rule, are execrably paved, and there are no cabs. The bad paving is laid at the door of the Corporation, which enjoys the worst possible reputation, and is charged with every species of jobbery and rascality. The want of cabs is a great nuisance, though the inconvenience is less felt here than it would be in London, where the streets are too narrow and the traffic too great to admit of tramways and street cars. These latter monopolize the passenger traffic of most of the streets, but Fifth Avenue and Broadway are at present exempt from them. The ‘Central Park’, which may some day deserve that name, though at present quite at the extremity of the city, somewhat resembles the Bois de Boulogne, but is even more beautifully laid out. It is a wild, rocky district, of about 900 acres, and contains a beautiful lake and many miles of walks and carriage drives.…

  The Americans are early risers, and our breakfast table is pretty well filled by eight o’clock. The bill of fare is truly sumptuous, and receives ample justice at the hands of the guests. Oysters, fried or stewed; beefsteaks and mutton chops; kidneys and hashes of various kinds; omelettes; eggs, boiled, poached, or ‘jobbled’; tomatoes, in various forms; hominy, boiled or fried; breadstuffs, and ‘corn’ cakes of all sorts form the staple of this important meal.

  1947 SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

  French intellectual and feminist Simone de Beauvoir (see page 122) visited America in 1947, fascinated by the dissociation between her mental pictures of a city so well known from popular culture, and the actual city she encountered.

  25 January I’m flying to New York.… Despite all the books I’ve read, the films, the photographs, the stories, New York is a legendary city in my past; there is no path from the reality to the legend. Across from old Europe, on the threshold of a continent populated by 160 million people, New York belongs to the future. How could I jump wholeheartedly over my own life? I try to reason with myself – New York is real and present – but this feeling persists.… I don’t know if it will be through anger or hope, but something is going to be revealed – a world so full, so rich and so unexpected that I’ll have the extraordinary adventure of becoming a different me.…

  D. P. has come to meet me; I don’t know her. But off I go, borne away beside a young woman I’ve never seen, through a city my eyes don’t yet know how to see. The car drives so fluidly, the road beneath the wheels is so smooth, that the earth seems as evanescent as air. We follow a river, we cross a metal bridge, and my neighbor says suddenly, ‘That’s Broadway.’ Then, all at once, I see. I see broad, brightly lit streets where hundreds and hundreds of cars are driving, stopping, and starting again with such discipline you would think they were guided from above by some magnetic providence. The regular grid of the streets, the immovable stop signs at the perpendicular intersections, the mathematical sequence of red and green traffic lights all create such an impression of order and peace that the city seems silent. The fact is, you don’t hear a single honk or exhaust backfiring, and now I understand why our American visitors are surprised by the awful screeching of brakes at our street corners. Here the cars glide by on a blanketed roadway punctuated by rising geysers of steam. It’s like a silent film. The shiny cars look like they’ve just left the showroom, and the pavement seems as clean as the tiles of a Dutch kitchen. Light has washed away all the stains; it’s a supernatural light that transfigures the asphalt, that wraps a halo around the flowers, silk dresses, candies, nylon stockings, gloves, bags, shoes, furs and ribbons offered in the shop windows. I look avidly.… Tomorrow New York will be a city. But this evening is magical.…

  26 January It’s nine o’clock in the morning. It’s Sunday. The streets are deserted. A few neon signs are still lit. Not a pedestrian, not a car; nothing disturbs the rectilinear grid of Eighth Avenue. Cubes, prisms, parallelograms; the hou
ses are abstract solids and surfaces; the intersection, an abstract of two volumes – its materials have no density or structure; the space itself seems to have been set in molds. I do not move; I look. I’m here, and New York will be mine.… I go down Broadway; it’s really me. I’m walking in streets not yet traveled by me, streets where my life has not yet been carved, streets without any scent of the past.…

  Slogans run through my head: ‘City of contrasts’. These alleys smelling of spices and packing paper at the foot of facades with thousands of windows: that is one contrast. I encounter another contrast with each step, and they are all different. ‘A vertical city’, ‘passionate geometries’, ‘thrilling geometries’: such phrases are perfect descriptions of these skyscrapers, these facades, these avenues: I see that. And I’ve often read, ‘New York with its cathedrals.’ I could have invented the phrase – all these old clichés seem so hollow. Yet in the freshness of discovery, the words ‘contrasts’ and ‘cathedrals’ also come to my lips, and I’m surprised they seem so faded when the reality they capture is unchanged. People have told me something more precise: ‘On the Bowery on Sundays, the drunks sleep on the sidewalks.’ Here is the Bowery; the drunks are sleeping on the sidewalks. This is just what the words meant, and their precision disconcerts me. How could they have seemed so empty when they are so true? It isn’t with words that I will grasp New York. I no longer think of grasping it: I will be transformed by it.…

  27 January If I want to decode New York, I must meet New Yorkers. There are names in my address book but no faces to match. I’ll have to talk on the telephone, in English, to people whom I don’t know and who don’t know me. Going down into the hotel lobby, I’m more intimidated than if I were going to take an oral exam. This lobby stuns me with its exoticism, an unnatural exoticism. I’m the Zulu frightened by a bicycle, the peasant lost in the Paris Metro. There’s a newspaper and a cigar stand, a Western Union office, a hairdresser, a writing room where stenographers and typists take dictation from clients – it’s at once a club, an office, a waiting room and a large department store. I perceive around me all the conveniences of everyday life, but I don’t know what to do.… I’m confused by the coins.… For ten minutes I try in vain to get a telephone line; all the machines reject the nickel I stubbornly keep sliding into the slot meant for quarters. I remain sitting in one of the booths, worn out. I want to give up: I hate this malicious instrument. But in the end I can’t just stay wrapped in my solitude. I ask the Western Union employee for help. This time someone answers.… They weren’t expecting me, and I have nothing to offer. I simply say, ‘I’m here.’ I have no face either; I’m just a name bandied about by mutual friends.… But the voices are almost friendly, natural. This naturalness already comforts me, as a kind of friendship. After three calls, though, I close my address book, flushed.

  PARIS

  Paris began as the Roman town of Lutetia. By the late 13th century it was the largest city in western Europe, a centre of learning based on the Sorbonne. Its architecture included the Gothic Basilica of St Denis, the mausoleum for the kings of France; Notre-Dame Cathedral; and the Sainte-Chapelle, built by Louis IX (r. 1226–70 — known as St Louis) as the home for expensive relics brought back from Crusade. The monarchs made the Louvre (originally a castle) and the Tuileries Palace their home.

  In the early 16th century, Francis I introduced Renaissance art and architecture to Paris, but the city suffered in the religious wars later in the same century. In the 17th century the reign of Louis XIV saw a monumental building programme of churches, palaces and grand avenues (despite his moving the capital to Versailles); it became a high point on any Grand Tour. Louis XV (r. 1715–74) created the large Place Louis XV (now the Place de la Concorde) on the west side of the city, where his grandson Louis XVI would be guillotined in 1793.

  The Revolution brought chaos to the city, but Napoleon I did much to reglorify Paris, building the Arc de Triomphe at the end of the Champs-Elysées; after further urban uprisings in 1830 and 1848, Paris was radically transformed in the 1850s and 1860s by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann, who together built 40,000 houses in a unified style along wide, straight boulevards.

  Early 20th-century Paris was acknowledged as the cultural heart of Europe, but was materially run down following the First World War. Artists, writers and thinkers were attracted from across the world to shiver in Rive Gauche garrets, drink in bars, make love and produce masterworks. Paris was occupied by Nazi Germany in June 1940 following the Blitzkrieg conquest of France. After liberation in 1944, it was gradually rebuilt and stylishly modernized.

  1287 RABBAN BAR SAUMA

  Rabban Bar Sauma (c. 1220–1294) was a Nestorian Christian monk, born near Beijing of a Mongol background. While on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he was appointed ambassador of the Mongol Il-Khan Abaqa and his son Arghun, who sought an alliance with the Christian West to drive the Egyptian Mamluks from the Holy Land. Although he met the Cardinals in Rome, Philip IV (the Fair) of France in Paris and Edward I of England (in Gascony), nothing concrete came of his embassy. He died in Baghdad.

  Afterwards they went to the country of Paris. And King Philip sent out a large company of men to meet them, who brought them into the city with great ceremony. The King assigned to Rabban Sauma a place to dwell, and three days later summoned him to his presence. And the King asked him, ‘Why have you come? Who sent you?’ Rabban Sauma replied, ‘King Arghun and the Catholicus of the East have sent me concerning Jerusalem.’ And he gave the King the letters and gifts he had brought. And the King answered, ‘If it is true that the Mongols, though they are not Christians, will fight against the Arabs for the capture of Jerusalem, we should fight with them.’

  Rabban Sauma said to him, ‘Now we have seen the glory of your kingdom, we ask you to show us the churches and the shrines, and the relics of the saints, and everything else which is found here and not in any other country, so that when we return we may make known what we have seen.’ Then the King commanded his Amirs, ‘Show them all the wonderful things which we have here, and afterwards I myself will show them what I have.’

  And Rabban Sauma and his companions remained for a month of days in this great city of Paris, and they saw everything. There were 30,000 scholars engaged in the study of ecclesiastical books of instruction, commentaries and exegesis of the Holy Scriptures, and also of profane learning; and they studied wisdom, philosophy and rhetoric, and the arts of healing, geometry, arithmetic, and the science of the planets and the stars; they engaged constantly in writing theses, and all of them received money for subsistence from the King.

  They also saw a great church in which were the tombs of dead kings, with statues in gold and silver upon their tombs. 500 monks performed commemoration services here, and they too ate and drank at the expense of the king. And the crowns of those kings, as well as their armour and apparel, were laid upon their tombs. In short they saw everything that was splendid and renowned.

  After this the King summoned them, and they went to him in the church. And he asked Rabban Sauma, ‘Have you seen what we have?’ Then they went into an upper chamber of gold, which the King opened, and he brought out a coffer of beryl in which was laid the Crown of Thorns that the Jews placed upon the head of our Lord when they crucified Him. The Crown was visible through the transparent beryl. And there was with it a piece of the wood of the Cross. The King said, ‘When our fathers took Constantinople, and sacked Jerusalem, they brought these blessed objects from it.’ And we blessed the King and besought him to permit us to return.

  1612 THOMAS CORYAT

  The English gentleman Thomas Coryat (c. 1577–1617) from Somerset travelled across northern Europe and Italy in 1608–11, much of the time on foot and mainly for reasons of curiosity. Coryat’s Crudities, the record of his journey, was highly popular, and introduced many Englishmen to Continental manners. The partially built bridge he describes is the Pont Neuf, built by Henry IV.

  A little on this side of Paris, there is the fairest gallows
that ever I saw, built upon a little hillock called Mount Falcon, which consists of fourteen fair pillars of freestone: this gallows was made in the time of the Guisian massacre, to hang the admiral of France, Chatillion, who was a Protestant, in AD 1572.…

  This city is exceeding great, no less then ten miles in circuit, very populous and full of very goodly buildings, both public and private…. It is environed with very ancient stone walls that were built by Julius Caesar when he made his residence here in the midst of his French conquests, from whom some have not doubted in former times to call it the city of Julius.… As for her name of Paris, she hath it (as some write) from Paris, the 18th king of Gallia Celtica, whom some write to have been descended from Japhet, one of the three sons of Noah, and to have founded this city: but the name of Lutetia it doth well brook, being so called from the Latin word Lutum, which signifies dirt, because many of the streets are the dirtiest, and so consequently the most stinking, of all that ever I saw in any city in my life.

  It is divided into three parts, the university, the city and the town, by the noble river the Seine…. The university, whereof I can speak very little (for to my great grief I omitted to observe those particulars in the same that it behoved an observative traveller, having seen but one of their principal colleges, which was their famous Sorbonne, that fruitful nursery of school-divines) was instituted in the year 796, by the good Emperor Charles the Great….