Manhattan's Malady

The Very Latest Thing in Perils

GEORGE S. CHAPPELL

NEW YORK is ill, very ill. Yes, Reader, your old and respected friend, Geo. W. Gotham, is a prey to inward disorders of a most malignant nature. He is suffering from that rare disease, Cirrhosis of the Suburbs! The alarming thing about it is that his heirs and assignees are apparently oblivious to the fact that the old man may pop off any minute without even time to sign along the dotted line.

"New York ill?" you say. "Pooh, you are spoofing."

Not so. Let me seem to digress for a moment to point opt certain other internal troubles which have been so narrowly averted as to leave me, for one, aghast and trembling. Turn back mentally to the not distant past when lurid people with Jimhamlewis minds had a peck of possible troubles to gloat over. Item one was always the great war which was to be waged between the East and the West. Our fair land was to be ripped vertically up the Mississippi midriff. It was to be the lanky ranger against the Harvard full-back, the wild-and-wooly versus the effete and effeminate.

Other minds, more scholastic and studious, saw the future struggle as one of principles rather than boundaries. Labor was to rise against Capital.

In the ears of Professor Bulwinkle of the University of Cohoes sounded already "the whetting of sledge hammers against horny hands, as the sleeping giant stealthily prepares to turn the Rockfeller estate into a second Runnymede." The Professor's metaphor was a bit mixed, but he was there with the big idea.

Still other analysts read evil in the militant attitude of modern woman. Man's social citadels were to be stormed by an army of Amazons, with odds on the distaff-side. But, why go on?

IN the light of the great world conflict, lighted so nonchalantly by a scrap of paper, how pale seem these will-o-the-wisps; mere farthing-dips to go to bed by,—now that East and West, Labor and Capital, man and woman, are gloriously welded into solid midvale wherewith to pulverize the base-metal of Pottsdam, Krupp and Co.

But,—and this brings me back to my point of departure and Geo. W. Gotham, —let us not be hasty and, like the recently restored victim of influenza, rush from the hospital crying "I am cured" only to fall into a relapse and perish. There are still localized focii in the body politic—to quote Dr. Bulwinkle—which are far from well, and one of these is that plaguey cirrhosis of the suburbs of which I have spoken.

I refer, specifically, to the deep enmity which exists between the two great masses of our population who inhabit the districts known roughly as Jersey and Westchester. "Purely local," you say. Yes, but likewise typical of any other great city, and therefore important.

For the benefit of those of my readers whose dilatory domiciles are beyond the limits of the Metropolitan mailing list, let me briefly explain the curious organism of New York City which lies, as it were, supine on a double-bed of rivers with two great floating kidneys stretching far out into the landscape on either side. These kidneys are respectively Jersey and Westchester. I purposely leave out Long Island which is a mere appendix, oddly vermiform, in fact, possessing only a transitory Summer importance when compared with the two vital organs referred to. Can you imagine two well-conducted kidneys warring upon each other? Yet that is just what they do. Instead of joining hands and getting together, they work along perfectly distinct lines, one distilling gall, the other wormwood, for each other's consumption.

Go with any Jersey man to the wild woods and mirror lakes of his northern counties, roll in a banker's Rolls-Royce over the rolling hills of Bernardsville, climb the Orange mountains until you stand on the tip of the tallest orange,—nay, go into the humble homes of Hohokus, and then, amid their native rocks and rills, say mildly to these Jerseymen that it reminds you of some parts of Westchester. Ye Gods! what a chorus of anathema will shake the skies.

"Westchester! Westchester?" they will say. "Man, you're crazy. "Why, the place is a roadhouse, that's all,—a redlight stop-over for joy-riding silk merchants. Rye? Greenwich? Larchmont?—broiling in summer, impossible in winter,—and the train service! Look at New York Central stock to-day, and look, oh, look at New Haven! Do you think I want to risk my life on the New Haven every day, and then, if I reach the Grand Central safely, be suffocated in the subway on my way downtown? Not on your life! Where, in Westchester, I ask you will you see a rolling hill (or an orange or a hoho) like that?"

Do not argue, Reader. It is worse than futile. Spend your week-end quietly, write a nice bread-and-butter letter the following Saturday, run up to your friends in Mt. Kisco, motor with them through the blue-spangled lake country, play golf at Apawamis, perch on the rail of a jaunty 30-footer as she rounds the outer-mark off Larchmont, roam through the wild park of Mr. Tilford (of Park & Tilford) at Purchase, and then with muted palate, murmur that it is very like certain parts of Jersey.

Saints preserve us! A crash of cussing will bound off that section of the map that will make a Big Bertha like a Little Mary.

"Jersey! Jersey!" they will scream, entirely losing what Mr. Choate nimbly termed their Westchesterfieldian suburbanity, "Quick, Watson, the needle . . . I'll hold him till the wagon comes. Why, man, they eatered clay in Jersey. Brick Church, Rahway, Peapack? Whassat? . . . Bernardsville? You have to start the day before to get there the day after,—and the train service ! If you don't die of Hudson tuberculosis, you just waste away on the Erie. Oh, moider: The Erie!"

The Erie is always the crowning jest. After that, there is nothing more to be said.

I DON'T think I exaggerate this thing a bit. It is a very serious matter. Two of Father Knickerbocker's most important vitals are not showing any team-play and something must be done. We must not laugh it off or say with Mercutio, "A plague on both your houses!" and pack off to neutral Little Neck, or self-satisfied Southampton. No, no, we must act, or better still, we must let the experts act. If a major operation is necessary, call in Major Goethals; if an anaesthetic is needed, convene the Senate. Do something, anything, bridge the Hudson, pave over the Harlem—so that when our victorious lads come marching home,—they will find that we, too, have done our full duty, and that while they have saved the country for us, we have saved the city for them!