Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries From Dutch Days to the Present (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries From Dutch Days to the Present

It goes without saying that some of these narratives mirror more faithfully than others the spirit and details of the urban scene. Some obviously were written on all too brief acquaintance with the city. Few writers were as intellectually humble as Lin Yutang who after ten years of residence in the United States contended that he did not know enough to write a book about Eighty-fourth Street, let alone all the dark, fathomless, mysterious city of New York. At times, language difficulties led to confusion for commentators who had to cope with a foreign tongue as well as a foreign scene. Not many were as frank in admitting this inadequacy as the Spanish Visitor who entitled his book New York: Impressions of a Nineteenth Century Spaniard Who Does Not Know English.

Bias inevitably affects the accuracy of some of the writing of this kind. The comments of Visitors from Boston and Philadelphia now and again betray the rivalry with New York that prevailed among her urban competitors along the Atlantic coast; and observers of European origin were palpably not unaffected by the relations exist ing at the moment between their homelands and the United States. The resident commentator can be biased, too; yet local pride or nostalgia sometimes serves the historian when it prompts a reflective New Yorker to compare the existing city with the one he knew in bygone days. The resident's observations benefit from his closer ac quaintance with the local scene; but his familiarity with it often results in the omission of details which the best of the foreign chroui clers do not overlook.

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