This plant was built to give New York's water an air bath before its entrance into the big aqueduct. It consists of a concrete pool as long as a city block and half as wide, covered with water pipes laid in squares four by five feet. At intervals of five and six feet are nozzles through which the water is driven from forty to sixty feet into the air in the form of fine spray. It descends perfectly oxygenated. A fountain three acres in area surrounded by deciduous and evergreen trees is a delightful sight and forms a rare introduction to this Gotham-made Como (see text, page 31). only line of communication between the west bank of North River and the east bank. Now, however, there are six tubes under the Hudson, two belonging to the Pennsylvania Railroad and four to the Hudson and Manhattan Subway System. Owing to the growth of the motor-car industry, thousands of trucks and passenger cars are demanding direct communication between Manhattan and New Jersey. To meet this need it is proposed that a vehicular traffic tunnel be constructed under the river, and unless New York breaks all analogies of her history, such a tunnel will be in operation within two decades. THE WORLD'S LARGEST CANTILEVER BRIDGE When the Pennsylvania Railroad was halted at Jersey City by North River, its one great ambition was to get into New York. Finally the McAdoo tunnels showed the railroad how, and it not only entered the city, but through it and under East River to Long Island. Then it conceived a new ambition-to get out of New York and into New England railroad territory. It attained that end by utilizing its Hudson tunnels into New York, its East River tunnels into Long Island, and a new bridge out of Long Island and into the New York-New England mainland. A great cantilever bridge, the largest in the world, swings its graceful way across East River from Long Island to the Bronx mainland, where the long coveted connection with New England railroads is achieved. Passengers from the South and West to New England thus dive under the Hudson, under the city, under East River, and come up on Long Island. Then they face about and speed over the river under which they passed only a few minutes before. This Hell Gate structure is one of the most beautiful bridges in the world. Sweeping in a broad, graceful quartercircle from the Long Island shore, across Ward's and Randall's islands to the mainland, it has a splendid arch that matches its curve and combines with the latter to make the structure one of unusual symmetry. The bridge and its approaches cost $27,000,000. Its arch, the longest in existence, carries a concrete deck on which is laid a four-track railroad. HOW NEW YORK HANDLES ITS FREIGHT A congestion of population that at places reaches 3,000 to the acre and at others concentrates as many people as live in the whole State of Nevada within the limits of a single square mile, means not only overtaxed passenger transportation facilities, but overburdened freight movement as well. Ride from Danbury, Connecticut, to Plymouth, Massachusetts, from New Bedford, Massachusetts, to Bangor, Maine, thence to Burlington, Vermont, and down to Boston. You will naturally conclude that New England is preëminently a manufacturing region. Yet the value of New York's manufactured products is nearly as great as that of the output of all New England's factories. Well might the freight-handling facilities of any city stagger under such a load, especially a city whose main borough is only a narrow tongue of land with a broad river on each side, a sea at one end, and a small river at the other. WHAT NEW YORK EATS It takes a tremendous amount of foodstuffs to supply nearly six million people. Every week the city eats 200 trainloads of food. It must have 2,160 carloads of cereals and flour, 2,000 carloads of milk, 1,636 carloads of vegetables, and 1,168 carloads of meat, dressed and on the hoof. Picture a food train 76 miles long, drawn by 200 engines. That is New York's weekly food supply. The handling of manufactured goods and foodstuffs is only the beginning of the city's freight-moving problem. Her harbor is the gateway between New England and a major portion of the remainder of the country. Into the "down East" manufacturing district pour raw materials and coal through New York, and out of that district come the finished products. Billions of dollars worth of stuff must be lightered back and forth through Gotham waters. But these are merely the problems which the movement of domestic freight present to New York. As pointed out in the in PENNSYLVANIA STATION NEW YORK CITY With its Doric façades designed to suggest Roman temples and baths, and with its grand stairway and its general waiting-room constructed of travertine from Tivoli, Italy, and modeled after the Baths of Caracalla, this station is indeed at once a monument to trai sportation and to Roman architectural genius. The highest track that runs into the station is nine feet below sealevel. Millions of people pass its portals every month. troduction, the value of the exports from this port is greater than the value of the exports of Asia, Africa, and Australia combined. Think of the thousands of cargoes which leave these continents. And then add the vast international trade between the countries of Asia, as Japan with Russia and China. Yet all this intercontinental and international trade combined does not amount to as much as the outgoing trade of the port of New York. The incoming trade, also, is vast in volume-South America, Africa, and Australia combined are far behind New York in the comparison of import values. With such an unmatched combination of freight-moving demands, what wonder is it that even the supercity falters? Many remedies have been proposed. Ward's Island, planted in the throat of East River, together with Hell Gate, stands as an obstruction to through East River traffic. It has been proposed that great ship terminals be built on the shores of the Bronx above Hell Gate, thus providing entirely new docking territory. Already work in this direction has been started and some extraordinary difficulties have been encountered on the marshy shores, where the mud is so fluid that it has to be moved by hydraulic dredges and deposited behind retaining walls. Congress has just enacted a law providing for the deepening of Hell Gate channel to 40 feet. This will give the Bronx a splendid water-front of its own. NEW YORK'S GREAT WATERFRONT New York has 578 miles of waterfront, of which 450 miles are available for pier construction. The harbor is far superior to that of London or of Liverpool. The Thames is a brook beside the Hudson, and requires constant dredging. Liverpool has a tide of 30 feet range, with enormous watergate construction quired to overcome it, while New York Harbor is practically tide free. re In so far as docking space is concerned, New York can expand her harbor to a capacity equaling the combined dockage space of any five of the main ports of Europe. On the Manhattan shore of North River, between 36th and 39th streets, the city has begun the construction of a series of gigantic piers for modern leviathans. These piers are 1,050 feet long, with slips 350 feet wide and having a depth of 44 feet at mean low water. Construction preliminaries for these piers reminded the onlooker of the raising of the Maine in Havana Harbor. A huge cofferdam, the largest ever made, was constructed by driving steel sheet piling around the space to be excavated. Then the water was pumped out of the area enclosed by the cofferdam and work was begun on the building of the piers. The relief of the congestion beyond the piers is one of the main problems of the port. A series of elevated freight stations, situated behind these piers and accessible to all railroads, just as are the Bush terminals in Brooklyn, has been proposed. THE POLICE AND FIRE DEPARTMENTS One hesitates, in an article of magazine length, even to refer to the police and fire departments of the metropolis, for each is a story in itself and defies successful summary in a few paragraphs. One who stands at a busy corner like Fifth avenue and Thirty-fourth street, when Upper Manhattan and the Bronx are making their morning migration to the downtown district, and watches a traffic policeman handle the inevitable congestion, appreciates two facts-first, that the New York police force faces tremendous problems, and, second, that it solves these problems in a way that is admirable. The city spends as much for the maintenance of law and order alone as the republic of Colombia spends for all national purposes. If all the people-men, women, and children-in Nevada's largest city were suddenly to turn policemen, they would make a force just about equal to that of New York. We read often of the failures of the New York police force, but those who realize the vastness of the population, the unusual proportion of criminals which a supercity attracts from the outside world, and the opportunities men have for losing themselves in a community so big and so busy that no one bothers about the affairs of his neighbors, understand quite This owl's-eye view of Manhattan south of Madison Square antedates the air-defense order of the month of June and was not taken on any of |