PRESIDENT OF THE ARCHITECTURAL LEAGUE OF NEW YORK
I. _Times Square._ II. _Lower Broadway._ III. _Exchange Place._ IV. _Looking West on Brooklyn Bridge._ V. _The City Hall._ VI. _Wall Street._ VII. _The Old Bridge._ VIII. _The Tombs Prison._ IX. _Looking West Along Peck Slip._ X. _The East Pier, Brooklyn Bridge._ XI. _The Municipal Building._ XII. _New York from Fulton Ferry._ XIII. _The Metropolitan Tower._ XIV. _The Cathedral on the Avenue._ XV. _Queensboro Bridge._ XVI. _Fifth Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street._ XVII. _Hell Gate Bridge._ XVIII. _Soldiers and Sailors Monument._ XIX. _The Cathedral on the Heights._ XX. _The Viaduct._ XXI. _Grant’s Tomb._ XXII. _The Battleship “Oklahoma” on the Hudson._ XXIII. _High Bridge._ XXIV. _Washington Bridge._ XXV. _Grand Central Station._
New York is preëminently the City of Violent Contrasts. Towering shafts of brick and stone and steel, soaring traceries of cables, derricks, girders and electric signs, smooth stretches of gray asphalt, subway and sewer excavations, broad harbors and stately ships, oily canals and garbage dumps, classic columns, gilded domes, palaces and shanties, parks and fountains, factory chimneys and gas tanks; these are a few of the items that occur in this as in other cities, but nowhere else are these and other manifestations of beauty and ugliness, prosperity and squalor brought into such vivid and striking relief, and of no other city can we say with equal truth that it defies the effort to summarize briefly its typical characteristics. Fragments and details suggestive of widely differing phases of its life persistently force themselves into a single picture without regard to orderly classification or proper dramatic sequence.
Appreciation of the beauty of nature as undisturbed by man seems inherent in our race, but man in his material progress is constantly defacing nature, constantly destroying, constantly substituting forms and arrangements dictated by utility, not by beauty, and shocking to our finer instincts. Then imagination steps in and gradually invests these new forms with new meanings derived from history, logic, romance, symbolism and pure poetic fancy. Some are condemned and discarded as unnecessary or useless, while others at first glance equally ugly acquire a significance and a soul. Of him who would interpret such a theme as New York our first demand must therefore be prophetic vision.