The Essence of New York City sity of Michigan had described the ever-changing character of New York in terms that are as apt in 1959 as they were a century before. "The city has not only advanced in magnitude, it has also been rebuilt," he said, in addressing the New York Geographical Society in 1855. "The palaces of the last generation were forsaken and turned into boarding-houses, then pulled down and replaced by warehouses. He who erects his magnificent palace on Fifth Avenue today, has only fitted out a future boarding-house, and probably occupied the site of a future warehouse. ... The New York of today [and he was writing in 1855] is not the New York of fifty years ago, and fifty years hence where will [be] the New York of today... ?"48 The Chancellor's predictions were borne out with such repetitive exactness in the ensuing years as to suggest that rapid physical transformation is a law of life as well as an attribute of urban personality on Manhattan Island. The self-transforming character of New York City has been both cause and consequence of the frenzied tempo of activity which has characterized the New York scene from the later eighteenth century to the present day. Hardly had the defeated British left the war-torn and army-occupied city, at the close of the American Revolution, than visitors were commenting upon the activity which everywhere prevailed. "On all sides houses are rising, and streets extending: I see nothing but busy workmen building and repairing."44 This was 1788. Fifty years later, in the 18 3 os, a visitor asserted, "Whoever visits New York feels as he does in a watch-maker's shop; everybody goes there for the true time, and feels on leaving it as if he had been wound up or regulated anew.... He hears a clicking as it were on all sides of him, and finds everything he looks at in movement, and not a nook or corner but what is brim-ful of business."40 The New 48 Henry P. Tappan, The Growth of Cities: a Discourse delivered before the New York Geographical Society, on the evening of March i$th, 1855 (New York: 1855), 3'-3*- **J. P. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, Performed in 1788 (2 vols.; London: 1792), I, 161. 48 Theodore Dwight, Things As They Are; or, Notes of a Traveller through Some of the Middle and Northern States (New York: 1834), 31. 418