Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 168, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 July 1915 — STREETS THAT ARE CANYONS [ARTICLE]

STREETS THAT ARE CANYONS

Some Thoroughfares of Manhattan Are the Most Highly Congested in the World. Many of the highly congested streets of lower Manhattan meanwhile have a beauty, or at least an impressiveness, peculiarly their own. It is only when one of these canyons is isolated from its surroundings by a photograph that the effect of mass may be fully appreciated. An effect of startling novelty may be had by standing in the middle of one of these streets and looking directly upward. The perspective from this point of view still further exaggerates their height or rather depth. In the Middle Ages it was common to build houses with each floor projecting out beyond the line of the floor below until the cornices of the roofs on either side of the street all but touched. The effect of looking skyward from the middle of a modern New York street is much the same. The sun never penetrates to the pavement at the foot of some of these canyons, which are, therefore in perpetual half shadow, like the bottom of a deep well. The population housed in these buildings is doubtless greater in proportion to the street width than in any other city in the world. It has been estimated that if all the occupants of these office buildings were to leave at the same time they/ would have to stand ten deep in ths street in places. ///v: