Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 January 1917 — How Our Cities Have Grown. [ARTICLE]

How Our Cities Have Grown.

A metropolis grows up in two ways. At first it expands legitimately, adding furlong to furlong of growth. Then *lt leaps forward and seizes a large area overnight by act of legislature or parliament, sweeping into its net a score of villages and settlements. Then It proceeds to consolidate its position, as General Joffre might say, by filling up the intervening spaces. In European cities they have an inner ring, which is the old city, and an outer ring, which may be anything. New York, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, have their inner rings, which are the legitimate city, and the outer ring, which came by the get-big-qulck method. New York succumbed to the promoter’s fever in 1898. In that year the city absorbed large areas of virgin soil, and a cbgjn of independent villages, sortie of them nearly as old as Manhattan itself. From the Sound to the Atlantic they stretch across the backbone of Long island and the lower harbor of Staten islandr-where the local tradition, in spite of municipal ferries and promised tunnels, has remained at Its strongest. '

Such frenzied expansion Is tfierea-' son why the traveler in the nearer suburbs of a great city will often come across a city line which is no longer the city line. As you near the old city line from the heart of population, the .solid blocks of apartments and flats thin out. There follow stretches of waste land, market gardens, cemeteries. It Is across this zone between the old and the new city lines that the transit railways throw their surface lines and elevated “extensions,” and close behind them are the builders, criss crossing the. raw acres with their long lines of “frame” and brick.—Harper's Magazine. « f ’ •