This is the first sensation of life in New York--you feel that the
Americans have practically added a new dimension to space. They move
almost as much on the perpendicular as on the horizontal plane. When
they find themselves a little crowded, they simply tilt a street on end
and call it a sky scraper. This hotel, for example (the
Waldorf-Astoria), is nothing but a couple of populous streets soaring up
into the air instead of crawling along the ground. When I was here in
1877, I remember looking with wonder at the _Tribune_ building, hard by
the Post Office, which was then considered a marvel of architectural
daring. Now it is dwarfed into absolute insignificance by a dozen
Cyclopean structures on every hand. It looks as diminutive as the
Adelphi Terrace in contrast with the Hotel Cecil. I am credibly informed
that in some of the huge down-town buildings they run "express"
elevators, which do not stop before the fifteenth, eighteenth, twentieth
floor, as the case may be. Some such arrangement seems very necessary,
for the elevator _Bummelzugs_, which stop at every floor, take quite an
appreciable slice out of the average New York day. I wonder that
American ingenuity has not provided a system of pneumatic
passenger-tubes for lightning communication with these aerial suburbs,
these "mansions in the sky.
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