Running east from Broadway, just below Wall Street, is Exchange Place. It is a narrow street and a short, but it is not a little street. Huge buildings are its walls, which seem almost to meet overhead. Straight up they tower, face to face, staring at each other with countless eyes. Daily into these few buildings come thousands and thousands of people: old and young, gay and sad, financiers and office boys,--to work. It is a good-sized town in one street. It is a veritable cañon of the city.
One of the “Views of New York” most often pictured and most often snapped by amateur photographers is that of lower Manhattan as seen from a distance. And yet from a painting, photograph or drawing, who can feel what it is? As with pictures of the Grand Cañon, it seems impossible to realize the scale or to give the sense of its enormous size. To know what it is, one must have seen it. A picture, in this case, can only serve to refresh the memory of the man who knows.
Nothing better exemplifies the growth of New York than does the City Hall, standing as it does almost in the shadow of the Municipal Building. In the old days when it was the principal structure on City Hall Park, its three stories afforded ample room in which to carry on the city’s affairs. It now houses only four offices, including that of the Mayor and that of the Art Commission. The other city offices, and their number is astounding, are elsewhere. But although the city has grown beyond recognition, the City Hall has proudly kept its place, and is honored as is a venerable old man, a bit less active than he was perhaps, but still the dignified head of a noble house.
Here is the force of the sea and the romance of a fairy tale. Here immense fortunes are won in a day and lost in less, and the hopes and savings of years vanish in an hour. Here are bank messengers who become millionnaires overnight and capitalists who awake penniless. It is the market of the whole country and of others. Here are corn and wheat heaped in huge confusion, millions of bales of cotton and barrels of oil, high-piled above the sky-scrapers. Railroads, steamers, banks and bullion; raw gold and ore, coal, silver and copper, mounting to the clouds in glimmering pinnacles and smoking hills. And through it all and around it all, pulses the restless swing and change, the tireless tide of “the street.”