Here was the sum of six million humans beings’ optimistic hopes for a better world. Here, mankind’s technology could defeat those ancient demons which enslaved its forefathers for uncountable generations. Here were fortunes greater than all previous fortunes, ambitions higher than any earlier ambitions, possibilities which until now had never been conceived. It was no longer any surprise that provincial minds, rural minds, the minds of small people, might draw back from this and brand it evil because it was so dramatically unfamiliar. Many Americans refused even to stand on the far side of a New York bridge to look upon this wonder from a distance. To them not only was she the new Babylon, she was Sodom and Gomorrah, Rome and Jerusalem all rolled in together. I was not to know that my mockery of their fears would one day prove foolish, that they understood something I, in those days, did not. New York was a mighty machine. Like any machine she had no morality. Her goodness or her evil depended entirely on the motives of who controlled her.
She was a sensitive and highly complex machine. All she lacked was the capacity to move from place to place and one day, I thought, she might even have that. The astonishing geometry of fire escapes, water towers, elevated railroads, streetcar wires, baroque ironwork, telephone lines, power cables, bridges, lamp posts, illuminated signs and arches in combination with the buildings themselves formed a profoundly complex grammar of its own; the infinite variety of curves and angles made up the characters of a mysterious and scarcely decipherable alphabet. As many-levelled as the human brain itself, New York appeared to possess the same limitless potential for creativity and intricacy. Her traffic was unceasing, flowing like blood through a maze of veins and arteries, most of it motor-driven, though there were still a good many horses. Constantly moving, these trams, cabs, buses, cars and wagons possessed the boisterous momentum of logs in a torrent. The great avenues and cross streets, conduits of this vast machine, steamed and hissed from a thousand vents and grills; yet no one could claim her citizens were grey-faced automata, designed only to serve her, as Lang claimed in his film Metropolis. New York was then firmly under the control of her citizens, who were still primarily true born Americans or English-speaking settlers. They had made her, now they used her. For their own convenience. This was evident in the postures they struck in the streets, their easy familiarity with modern innovation. I had never seen fresh ideas treated with such amiably casual interest as in New York and I never would again. All the inventions pouring from the factories of Edison, Ford, Tesla and America’s other twentieth-century wizard-heroes, all the gadgets and marvels of our machine age, were taken by New Yorkers as available to them by right. Here every family appeared to own a motor car, a phonograph, a vacuum cleaner, an electric iron, a power wringer, while telephones, refrigerators and automatic washing machines were the property of quite ordinary people. Only the degenerate immigrants, the uneducated, jealous, desperately greedy sons and daughters of European gutters, of Asiatic opium addicts and African savages did not have these things (in such quantities at least) and this of course was largely because they had neither the intelligence nor the background to understand them: indeed, many developed deep superstitious terror of, for instance, washing machines, and would not allow them into their dens, even when they were offered.
The city dazzled me with brilliant signs picked out in thousands of tiny coloured bulbs. Everywhere I heard the slamming of metal upon metal, the humming of motors, the clicking of cogs, the whirring of dials and indicators, while from the network of railroads, big and small, overground and underground, came a squealing of wheels on tracks, of warning horns, escaping steam and efficient airbrakes. To me this was a symphony whose themes emerged gradually, as in Wagner, forming a unity when sometimes one least expected resolution. Back and forth in the streets ran ragamuffins. They sold newspapers, soft drinks, ice creams, candy. They yelled impossibly garbled phrases; words I could not even begin to interpret. Moreover, this unceasing vitality flourished in a climate of pressing, almost tangible heat, making me sweat so badly I was soaked from top to bottom before I had walked a few hundred yards from the hotel.
On my first morning I went nowhere in particular. I merely strolled from block to block, taking stock of my surroundings as I always did. I enjoyed the bustle and the anonymity. Somewhere around East 19th Street I stepped into a little café and ordered a cup of coffee. New Yorkers, generally thought ill-mannered by other Americans, seemed elaborately polite compared, say, to Parisians. When I had finished my coffee, I made enquiries and was directed to a large pawnbroking house only a block or two away. Here I was able to change a gold ring, inscribed and given to me by M. de Grion as a Christmas present, into a moderately good-sized sum. Next I walked on a little further until I reached Sixth Avenue and soon discovered a reasonably decent gentleman’s outfitters who provided me, within two hours, with a white linen suit, white spats and gloves, a Panama. I was now better equipped for the weather, if not for the dust and dirt. I had the feeling, on the question of style, however, that it would not have mattered much what I wore. Aside from Constantinople, I had never seen such a huge variety of racial types and national costumes. Some were strange, such as the Hassids or pigtailed Chinese, but others displayed their cultural origins more subtly, in Bavarian hats, Russian boots, Turin-cut trousers. What was most cheering for me was that I had been led to believe I should see swarthy aliens crowding every sidewalk but this was far from the case. There were no more of these in the ordinary parts of New York than in any cosmopolitan city. New York was in this respect little different from Odessa.
That afternoon I walked down Seventh Avenue to the secluded tree lined squares and eighteenth-century houses of Greenwich Village. These relatively low apartment blocks and ordinary shops reminded me in their general respectability of my boyhood Kiev, though at that time, because the area was pleasant and cheap, increasing numbers of artists were moving in, giving the neighbourhood something of the quality of the Left Bank. Here and there it was possible for me to imagine myself suddenly transported to the country. The abundance of flowers and foliage pleased my senses as, sitting for a while in Washington Square, I watched children playing familiar games. These quasi-rural areas are required in any real city, I think. The tranquillity one finds in them is somehow more positive than anything discovered in the country itself. Here I used to visit the roof garden of Derry and Tom’s Department Store. I would go there two or three times a week in the summer, for this same sense of peace. The traffic could be heard, but it was in another world, so distant. On a fine day, listening to the fountains and seeing pink flamingoes wade from pool to pool, one could experience few greater pleasures. But presently of course Derry’s is sold to a Russian Jewess who refuses the consolation of her roof garden to lonely old men and women and makes it the exclusive territory of the fashionable and wealthy. Who cares if I have nowhere to sit now; no birds to feed; nowhere to throw a penny and make a wish?