NEW YORK is preëminently the City of Violent Contrasts. Towering shafts of brick and stone and steel, soaring traceries of cables, derricks, girders and electric signs, smooth stretches of gray asphalt, subway and sewer excavations, broad harbors and stately ships, oily canals and garbage dumps, classic columns, gilded domes, palaces and shanties, parks and fountains, factory chimneys and gas tanks; these are a few of the items that occur in this as in other cities, but nowhere else are these and other manifestations of beauty and ugliness, prosperity and squalor brought into such vivid and striking relief, and of no other city can we say with equal truth that it defies the effort to summarize briefly its typical characteristics. Fragments and details suggestive of widely differing phases of its life persistently force themselves into a single picture without regard to orderly classification or proper dramatic sequence.

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