Wonders of a great city : or, The sights, secrets, and sins of New York . a partially opened fan. Its averagebreadth is about a mile and a half, its greatest, four anda half; extreme length, sixteen miles. Its area is forty-one and a half square miles, or twenty-six thousand fivehundred acres. That portion of the city north of theHarlem river is known as the annexed district. Itcomprises what used to be known as the town of MottHaven, Tremont and Fordham. The Harlem isspanned by five bridges, the East River by one—theBrooklyn bridge, the eighth wonder of the world—andan attempt has been made t
Wonders of a great city : or, The sights, secrets, and sins of New York . a partially opened fan. Its averagebreadth is about a mile and a half, its greatest, four anda half; extreme length, sixteen miles. Its area is forty-one and a half square miles, or twenty-six thousand fivehundred acres. That portion of the city north of theHarlem river is known as the annexed district. Itcomprises what used to be known as the town of MottHaven, Tremont and Fordham. The Harlem isspanned by five bridges, the East River by one—theBrooklyn bridge, the eighth wonder of the world—andan attempt has been made to tunnel the North riverfrom Jersey City to New York. A prettier locationfor a city than Gotham, it would be difi[icult to im-agine. Sixteen miles only from the Atlantic ocean,which is kept back by Staten Island, and between twodeep rivers, which open up into the Bay, and find theocean thiough the Nairows, it seems as though Man-hattan Island was originally laid out for the site of agreat commercial metropolis. The lower section of the island is of sandy formation. The City of New York. 27 with what seems to be a good granite the Battery sea wall where the land is only a fewinches above the waters level, the land gradually risesuntil at the Northern limit it terminates in a range ofcliffs, which attain an elevation of one hundred andthirty feet above the sea. New York is well and com-pactly built, re]3resenting probably every kno^TO style ofarchitectm*e. Along the East River front there arefew vacant blocks. On the West Side front the cityhas not encroached upon the space lying between Six-tieth and One Hundred and Tenth streets, to any con-siderable extent. Below Canal street, the thorough-fares are narrow, squalid, crooked and crowded looking,with the exception of Broadway. Many of the downto^vn streets were formerly cow paths, and the earlyDutch and English settlers were apparently too indo-lent or busy to lay out streets, and so built along the lineof th
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Keywords: ., bookauthorwilliams, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1880, bookyear1887
