Identifier: internationallib16lang (find matches)
Title: The International library of famous literature : selections from the world's great writers, ancient, mediaeval, and modern, with biographical and explanatory notes and with introductions
Year: 1898 (1890s)
Authors: Lang, Andrew, 1844-1912 Mitchell, Donald Grant, 1822-1908
Subjects: Literature
Publisher: New York Merrill and Baker
Contributing Library: Internet Archive
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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ation, itappears ; we care for size, but inartistically; we care nothingfor proportion, which is what makes size count. Everything ison the same scale : there is no play, no movement. An excep-tion should be made in favor of the big business building andthe apartment house which have arisen within a few years, andwhich have greatly accentuated the grotesqueness of the cityssky line as seen from either the New Jersey or the Long Islandshore. They are perhaps rather high than big ; many of themwere built before the authorities noticed them and followed un-equally in the steps of other civilized municipal governments,from that of ancient Rome down, in prohibiting the passing ofa fixed limit. But bigness has also evidently been one of theirarchitectonic motives, and it is to be remarked that they are sofar out of scale with the surrounding buildings as to avoid theusual commonplace only by creating a positively disagreeable 1 Copyright, 1893, by Charles Scribners Sons. Used by permission.
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- NEW YORK AFTER PARIS. 7689 effect. The aspect of Fifty-seventh Street, between Broad-way and Seventh Avenue, for example, is certainly thatof the world upside down : a Gothic church utterly concealed,not to say crushed, by contiguous flats, and confronted by theoverwhelming Osborne, which towers above anything in theneighborhood, and perhaps makes the most powerful impressionthat the returned traveler receives during his first week or twoof strange sensations. Yet the Osbornes dimensions arenot very different from those of the Arc de lEtoile. It is trueit does not face an avenue of majestic buildings a mile and ahalf long, and two hundred and thirty feet wide, but the asso-ciation of these two structures, one a private enterprise and theother a public monument, together with the obvious suggestionsof each, furnish a not misleading illustration of both the spec-tacular and the moral contrast between New York and Paris,as it appears unduly magnified no doubt to the sense surprisedto n

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