Islands of New York City
If New York has little repute as a city of culture, it has perhaps still less as a city of brotherly love. Its head may be thought shrewd enough in business matters, but whoever accused the city of having a heart or a soul?
Who, for instance, thinks of it as wasting any effort or energy on the unfortunate, the unsuccessful, the incompetent? The prevalent belief is that those who cannot swim go down in the big maelstrom, and no one in the city puts out a hand to save them. But, once more, the prevalent belief is wrong.
The islands where these institutions are located are in summer the coolest and the greenest spots in the city, and at any season they are beautiful in their settings. All of which puts the notion into one's head that the city has given up to its crippled and aged, its thugs and thieves, its paupers and prisoners, the most livable and lovable portions of the town, keeping for itself only some flat and rather hot districts on the upper avenues. This looks like a great deal of self-denial in favor of the outcast; but, unfortunately, the motive will not bear critical analysis. It is to be feared that the New Yorkers put the prisoners andthe paupers on the islands because no one else wanted those spots. They were waste places that could be spared very readily; and besides, over there "the slovenly unhandsome corse" could not come betwixt the wind and the nobility. People do not want their public institutions too close to them.
As for islands near a city, they have never been popular resorts, except for picnic parties. Humanity of the hermit variety occasionally exists upon them; but the true citydweller is a person of gregarious tastes and loves to flock along a dusty street rather than a water front. Moreover, the islands are inaccessible, hard to come and go from, and, also, they are "dreadfully lonely." But they are good healthful places for the indigent and the aged, and admirable spots in which to bring sinners to repentance. Hence their appropriateness for prisons and hospitals. Let the blind and the halt have them. So long as the free citizen can smell gasolene and see asphalt on Fifth Avenue, he will not miss the sea breezes and green grass of the islands.
The New York people have always been leaving the best places behind them in their rush for the spot that is for the moment the most frequented or fashionable. In the ancient days they abandoned the Battery, one of the finest residential sites in the city, to crowd around City Hall Park and Warren Street. Then they retreated, step by step, along the shopways and avenues, from Bleecker Street through Union and Madison squares and Bryant Park to the Central Park, where for the moment they are pausing to catch breath. As for the Riverside Drive, it has been recently discovered, and declared beautiful; but many people think it "quite impossible" as a place of residence because one's friends will not come out there to call! Morningside Park, again, is pretty, good enough for a group of college buildings to face upon, or for a Harlem promenade, but much too far from the Plaza.
Such fancies have bothered New Yorkers in the past, and are doing so to-day. Under the circumstances it is not to be wondered at that no one wants the islands, and that they have been given over to various undesirable citizens who are kept in more or less restraint by a water front and a stone wall. Instead of being parked and used by the public, like the beautiful Margarethen-Insel at Buda-Pesth, they have been utilized and rendered forbidding by the city or national government. Up the river following the prisons and asylums there is a decent little island doing service as a potter's field, and not far from it, on another island, the city is building a veritable mountain out of street refuse.
Staten Island would be an ideal spot for suburban residences, for little towns, perhaps for a great city. In its extreme length it is thirteen miles and in its greatest width eight miles, there being, all told, some sixty square miles of it. It is greatly diversified by hills, some of them four hundred feet high; and from their ridges and summits wonderful views are obtained. To the east is the Narrows with the Upper and Lower bays, and all that that implies in passing ships and sails. Here the transatlantic steamers, the coasters, the schooners, the round-the-Horn ships come and go all day long. Far out, beyond Sandy Hook and the light-ship, the black smoking funnels and the gray sails can be seen rising from the sea as they come or sinking below the verge as they go. Over the Narrows, over Coney Island, over Long Island, the view extends; but ever the eyes keep returning to the distant sea, the trail of smoke, the glint of sails along the rim. To the south are the hills of Navesink and the low shores of New Jersey, to the west the marshes, and to the northeast the distant New York.
The interior of Staten Island is one of the most positive contrasts one can meet with in the greater city. It is difficult to realize that the woods and ponds, the farms and gardens and country places, that one sees over there, are really a part of New York. It is like a country district in the Mohawk Valley, with plowed fields, meadows, cattle, and timbered hilltops. The woods and fields are not trimmed or swept or bridle-pathed or terraced or laid out for tennis and golf. It is not a park; it is what is left of primeval nature. Daisies are growing in the lowlands, violets are blooming along the wood roads, and wild roses are nodding and bending along the fences. The brooks find their own way to the sea, the squirrels hunt their own provender, and the song birds build their nests quite un- observed.
For not a great many people penetrate into the interior of Staten Island. It is the borough of Richmond and has something more than seventy thousand inhabitants; but New Yorkers hardly yet regard it as part of the city, because it is five miles from the Battery and has to be reached by a ferryboat, time twenty-two minutes. Occasionally the man in the motor goes chasing through it at breakneck speed, seeing nothing except the signboards of the automobile club; but those who come over to the island for a quiet stroll along the wood roads and through the fields are very few. The city dweller likes to think about such things when reading his evening paper by the fire, and to hear him talk on occasion one might imagine that in the city he was in durance vile; but at heart he does not care too much for nature. He likes people better than stumps, and, consequently, takes the suburbs and the islands in homœopathic doses.
Staten Island from a steamer's deck coming up the bay looks almost like fairyland. Everything about it is bright and sparkling, the greenswards of Forts Tompkins and Wadsworth -- about as gun proof as so many golf bunkers -- are graceful, and the quarantine station seems a haven of refuge cut out of a picture book. Moreover, that part of the island is comparatively free of factories and the air is passing clear. Even the barren little quarantine islands lying down in the Lower Bay have a romantic or picturesque look seen through that air, and under that brilliant sunlight. Yet, strange to relate, there has always been a fight on hand to keep these islands and waters of the harbor entrance from being polluted or infected or destroyed. At one time scows dumped refuse there; now sewage, factory drainage, and smallpox patients lay claim to them. And still they survive as things of beauty to gladden the eye of the returning traveler and make him proud of his native land.
The islands in the Upper Bay are better known, but not much more frequented than those in the East River. Bedloe's Island catches its daily tale of tourists who go there to see the Statue of Liberty by Bartholdi; but few natives of the city have ever set foot upon it. It used to be a place of execution -- a suggestion of how the forefathers of the present citizen regarded the beauty spots in the harbor. Now it is only famous for its statue, which would have looked so much better almost anywhere else. It should have been planted squarely at the extreme end of the Battery, where the ships coming up the harbor could have passed almost under it. Then its colossal proportions would have been like those of an Osiride figure in front of an Egyptian temple -- an effective feature in introducing the massive architecture back of it.
Placed where it is there is only a mild wonder about its size, because it is two miles off from the Battery, and a mile or more from the steamer channel. Governor's Island is a picturesque spot, seen from Brooklyn Heights or the Battery, and yet another place that the citizen leaves undisturbed. The United States government occupies it for military purposes, and admission to it is to be had only by a written pass. It is covered with trees, officers' quarters, parade grounds, and guns. There are some harbor defenses located there, and on the western side is old Castle William, a cheese-box fort made of sandstone, which is now used as a prison, presumably because it is good for nothing else. The island is not a martial-looking camp. To-day it is quite as peaceful as its neighbor, the gunless Battery of bellicose birth.
The best known and most frequented of all the islands has not now the slightest characteristic of an island. It is the fag-end of a sand spit pushed out into the Lower Bay, and is called Coney Island possibly because in the memory of man no conies were ever known there or elsewhere in the eastern United States. Originally there was quite a strip of this sand spit extending along the south shore of Long Island and cut here and there by inlets. Now it is divided into different localities with names like Manhattan Beach, Rockaway, and Brighton Beach. The western extremity of it only is known as Coney Island. Years ago it was resorted to as a bathing beach, but in more recent times it has passed into a show place where all sorts of freaks and fads are seen and queer spectacular entertainments are given. It is the home of Mardi Gras; it is the Pike, the Midway, and the Great White Way all combined. It nods by day but wakes up at twilight with thousands of electric lights in dazzling forms, and scores of variety shows to please the multitude. Its easy access by railway from New York, and its cool nights in summer, make it a favorite stamping ground for the gilded youth of the city, who go to it in crowds and mobs -- sometimes over a hundred thousand a day. But there is nothing very unique about it. Every city of any size has some such place where young heads are for a time made less conscious of their emptiness.
Over in Jamaica Bay to the east of Coney Island there are plenty of genuine islands, belonging to the greater city, that are not doing service of any kind. Eventually these little sand-and-mud areas in the bay may be turned into dock foundations, and a new port for New York built around them; but just now the natives dig clams on them, and hunters in long boots sometimes gun over them for snipes and ducks. They are still in a state of nature, though within the city's limits and not twelve miles from the high ridge of sky-scrapers on Lower Broadway. Always contrasts, contrasts, contrasts. In New York they never seem to cease and determine.

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