The Argosy, Vol. 82, No. 3 — page 198: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

bearing on stories or their authors. It is a matter on which I should very much like to hear from my readers, scattered as they are all over this vast country. Is it true that there is planted in the breast of every American, be his or her lot cast on the plains of Kansas, among the mountains of the West, or in the glades of Florida, a deep-seated, insatiable longing to go to New York City? I am told there is. The preponderating number of non-natives in the population of my own home-town—for I was actually born in Manhattan—would seem to bear out the report. THE LURE OF NEW YORK But why, I am asking you? Why, for instance, should a young fellow I know have sold an expensive musical instrument he owned merely to get the money to pay his fare from Sacramento clear across the continent to New York, where he had no opening and few friends? “Tf it was the excitement of a big city you wanted, ” I asked him, “ why didn’t you pick out Chicago, which was a good deal nearer?” 4 But that wouldn’t be New York,” he answered, “the biggest town in the country.” I admit there is a reason why all red-blooded folk should be anxious to get at the heart of things; I grant you that in this big Empire City theré are opportunities not only for pleasure but for culture that do not exist elsewhere, but what I want to find out from you is to what extent the desire to be in touch with Broadway should make people even on the Pacific coast willing to undergo all sorts of privations for the chance to win out in a city where naturally the handicap is greater than would be the case elsewhere with less competition. There is no place on earth where one can be so. lonely as in New York. The desolateness of being friendless in a crowd is appalling. “Ts it as hard to meet people in London as it is in New York?” a young fellow said to me just before the war, when it looked as though he might be sent by his firm to England. No matter what my answer to him was. The point is that he had found New York a lonesome place. Do all you people elsewhere take this fact into account when you raise heaven and earth to make it possible for you to come to our big town? Of course I’m proud of being a New Yorker, complimented to think that ap- parently everybody else wants to come here, but—well, I'd like to hear from you folks elsewhere at first hand on the matter. The draw of New York on the rest of the country is far greater in proportion to inhabitants than is that of London or Paris, in normal times, on the rest of England and France. New York has within the past year passed London in population, and now ranks as the biggest city in the world, with 5,253,885 inhabitants, according to the latest computation, against London’s 4,522,964. Paris comes third, Chicago fourth, 372 [*: month I promised that I would open for discussion a topic that has no direct Gomichbooks (E@)