ca. 1893
from The Cliff Dwellers
This country is a treeless country — if we overlook the “forest of chimneys” comprised in a bird’s-eye view of any great city, and if we are unable to detect any botanical analogies in the lofty articulated iron funnels whose rammifying cables reach out wherever they can to fasten where they may.
It is a shrubless country — if we give no heed to the gnarled carpentry of the awkward frameworks which carry the telegraph, and which are set askew on such dizzy corners as the course of the wires may compel.
It is an arid country — if we overlook the numberless tanks that squat on the high angles of alley walls, or if we fail to see the little pools of tar and gravel that ooze and shimmer in the summer sun on the roofs of old-fashioned buildings of the humbler sort.
It is an airless country — if by air we mean the mere combination of oxygen and nitrogen which is commonly indicated by that name. For here the medium of sight, sound, light, and life becomes largely carbonaceous, and the remoter peaks of this mighty yet unprepossessing landscape loom up grandly, but vaguely, through swathing mists of coal-smoke.
The tribe inhabiting the Clifton is large and rather heterogeneous. All told, it numbers about four thousand souls. It includes bankers, capitalists, lawyers, “promoters”; brokers in bonds, stocks, pork, oil, mortgages; real-estate people and railroad people and insurance people — life, fire, marine, accident; a host of principals, agents, middlemen, clerks, cashiers, stenographers, and errand boys; and the necessary force of engineers, janitors, scrub-women, and elevator-hands.
All these thousands gather daily around their own great campfire. This fire heats the four big boilers under the pavement of the court which lies just behind, and it sends aloft a vast plume of smoke to mingle with those of other like communities that are settled round about. These same thousands may also gather — in installments — at their tribal feast, for the Clifton has its own lunch counter just off one corner of the grand court, as well as a restaurants several floors higher up.
