THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



47 



well that a police force must be highly 

 efficient to render such an accounting of 

 its stewardship as the New York force is 

 able to give. 



The fire department, dealing with a 

 congestion of population such as is to be 

 found nowhere else in the world, protect- 

 ing the loftiest buildings in the world, 

 guarding some of the most inflammable 

 industries in existence, has a wonderful 

 work to do. Some of the big buildings 

 house as many people during their work- 

 ing hours as reside in North Dakota's 

 largest city; and some of these buildings 

 go down as many stories into the ground 

 as "skyscrapers" rise into the air in many 

 cities. 



With the world's busiest waterfront to 

 protect, with industry's most inflamma- 

 ble products to guard from harm, with 

 high buildings and congested tenements 

 to defend against fire disaster, it is little 

 wonder that New York has endeavored 

 to make her fire department the last word 

 in efficiency, with the most modern ap- 

 paratus, the most thorough discipline, the 

 most unceasing and intensive training for 

 its personnel. 



ITS SHOPS AND HOTELS 



New York is indeed a many-sided city. 

 It has more facets than a diamond, each 

 fascinatingly interesting, each superlative 

 in its own way. Its amusements, upon 

 which it spends $60,000,000 a year, are 

 a story by themselves. A single theater 

 has had box-office receipts in one season 

 amounting to $1,500,000. The opera has 

 brought in some $10,000,000 in one sea- 

 son, and concerts have added as much 

 more. 



Then there are the hotels ! Nearly 

 300,000 people go in and out of the city 

 every day, and a third of them find abid- 

 ing places in the hotel district. Every 

 night the hotel and restaurant food and 

 drink bill is a million and a quarter dol- 

 lars. A single hostelry handles more 

 telephone calls a year than the entire 

 kingdom of Bulgaria. The city drinks 

 fourteen million glasses of beer and 

 twelve million glasses of soda water every 

 twenty-four hours and pays $1,300,000 

 for them. It spends $100,000 a day for 

 ice-cream. 



No picture of New York would be 

 even passably complete that did not turn 



aside from the big problems of a super- 

 city and the story of their solution long 

 enough to tell something about its shop- 

 ping districts. Perhaps no other me- 

 tropolis in the world has so many people 

 who are "the glass of fashion and the 

 mould of form," and Gotham has a store 

 for every pocketbook and every taste, 

 from the open-air shops of the East Side, 

 where the hobo can outfit himself in 

 second-hand rags for a song, to the ex- 

 clusive specialty stores on Fifth avenue, 

 where only those with big bank accounts 

 and expensive tastes are catered to. 



Once New York went downtown to 

 shop, but now shops have come uptown 

 to meet New York. One by one, nearly 

 all of the big stores below Thirtieth have 

 gone uptown or out of business, so that 

 of the establishments of merchant princes 

 which formerly graced the region of 

 Fourteenth and Twenty-third streets, 

 only Wanamaker's remains, and even 

 such a name with which to conjure barely 

 suffices to hold the crowd that long has 

 filled that big emporium. 



More and more New York is drifting 

 away from the department store and to 

 the specialty shop. Fifth avenue from 

 Thirtieth street to Fifty-ninth is the spe- 

 cialty shopping district. An ideal district 

 it is, too, for here lumbering trucks and 

 evil-smelling meat wagons may not come, 

 and elite New York and the out-of-town 

 shopper can shop and have afternoon tea 

 undisturbed by such traffic. 



Rents are high, and so are prices along 

 Fifth avenue, but for all that every store 

 seems to do a prosperous business. One 

 store has nought to offer but lingerie and 

 laces ; another specializes in perfumes, 

 and no odor that commerce affords is 

 wanting ; still another sells only mourning 

 goods, and yet another toys. Here is a 

 corset shop where only French is spoken, 

 for only the elite are welcome ; there a 

 Parisian jewelry store, and a little further 

 on one that handles only leather goods. 



Nor must one forget the little specialty 

 places that tuck themselves away on all 

 the blocks touching Fifth avenue on the 

 cross streets, where one may shop at 

 leisure, or the dainty places the initiated 

 find in all sorts of unexpected quarters, 

 even in big office buildings. Some enter- 

 prising girl, who has saved a few thou- 

 sand dollars, unable to pay the big prices 



