Excerpt from Charcoals of New and Old New York: Pictures and Text All along the Spine and flanks of this Reptile of Gneiss tormenting men dig and bore and blast: driving tunnels through its Vitals; scoop ing holes for sub-cellars five floors under ground; running water pipes and gas mains; puncturing its skin with hypodermics of steam; weight ing it with skyscrapers, the dismal streets below dark as sunless ravines; plastering its sides with grass bordered by asphalt into which scraggly shrubs are stuck - and as a crowning indignity criss-crossing its backbone with centipedes of steel, highways for endless puffing trains belching heat and gas. This has been going on in constantly increasing malevolence since the Dutch landed, and will continue to go on until three or four, or per haps six, brand-new cities, each one exactly above the other, are piled on top of the poor beast. What will happen then, especially if it loses all patience and some fine morning gives an angry shiver, as would an old horse shaking, off flies, a lucky survivor near the Golden Gate may know, but no one questions that it would be unpleasant for the flies. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.