Abstract

Monster of a City

New York City is a sprawling, voracious monster of a city. It covers 315 square miles; it is crammed with some 8 million people. At least a million, a full eighth of its total population, live in packed squalor, six arid ten to a room, in slum tenements whose mere existence is a nauseous stench on the air. Merely to recite such figures is to indicate the magnitude of New York's problems and the essence of the city itself. For in New York everything is judged by magnitude. Such figures graphically illustrate the tremendous pressures that are generated in the crucible that is New York. The consequence is inevitable. Today, wherever one goes in New York, wherever one hears protest against injustice or fancied injustice, one listens to a baffled public denouncing a great impersonal "they."