People who live in Brooklyn take pride in
keeping up old friendships and in dressing without ostentation. There
are old gentlemen who use only the ferries in coming to New York,
because they regard the bridges as a novelty open to the suspicion of
being unsafe.
And yet, as I have said, Brooklyn is rather a condition than a concrete
fact. I believe every great Babylon has its neighbouring Brooklyn.
London has it; Boston has it; Paris has it; even Chicago has it. And the
line of demarcation between what is Brooklyn and what is not Brooklyn is
not always a sharp one. There are many people in Manhattan who at heart
are residents of Brooklyn. Such people, though they live in Harlem,
avoid the express trains in the Subway on account of the crush. They
visit the Museum of Natural History on Sunday and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art on legal holidays and extraordinary occasions. They cross
the Hudson and walk on the Palisades. They bring librettos to the opera
and read them in the dark, thus missing a great deal of what passes on
the stage. On the other hand, you will find people in Brooklyn whose
spirit is totally alien to the place.
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