at broadway and twenty-third street, where later, on this and some other ground, the once famed flatiron building was placed, there stood at one time a smaller building, not more than six stories high, the northward looking blank wall of which was completely covered with a huge electric sign which read:

swept by ocean breezes

the great hotels

pain’s fireworks

sousa’s band

seidl’s great orchestra

the races

now—manhattan beach—now

each line was done in a different color of lights, light green for the ocean breezes, white for manhattan beach and the great hotels, red for pain’s fireworks and the races, blue and yellow for the orchestra and band. as one line was illuminated the others were made dark, until all had been flashed separately, when they would again be flashed simultaneously and held thus for a time. walking up or down broadway of a hot summer night, this sign was an inspiration and an invitation. it made one long to go to manhattan beach. i had heard as much or more about atlantic city and coney island, but this blazing sign lifted manhattan beach into rivalry with fairyland.

120 “where is manhattan beach?” i asked of my brother once on my first coming to new york. “is it very far from here?”

“not more than fifteen miles,” he replied. “that’s the place you ought to see. i’ll take you there on sunday if you will stay that long.”

since i had been in the city only a day or two, and sunday was close at hand, i agreed. when sunday came we made our way, via horse-cars first to the east thirty-fourth street ferry and then by ferry and train, eventually reaching the beach about noon.

never before, except possibly at the world’s fair in chicago, had i ever seen anything to equal this seaward-moving throng. the day was hot and bright, and all new york seemed anxious to get away. the crowded streets and ferries and trains! indeed, thirty-fourth street near the ferry was packed with people carrying bags and parasols and all but fighting each other to gain access to the dozen or more ticket windows. the boat on which we crossed was packed to suffocation, and all such ferries as led to manhattan beach of summer week-ends for years afterward, or until the automobile arrived, were similarly crowded. the clerk and his prettiest girl, the actress and her admirer, the actor and his playmate, brokers, small and exclusive tradesmen, men of obvious political or commercial position, their wives, daughters, relatives and friends, all were outbound toward this much above the average resort.

it was some such place, i found, as atlantic city and asbury park are to-day, yet considerably more restricted. there was but one way to get there, unless one could121 travel by yacht or sail-boat, and that was via train service across long island. as for carriage roads to this wonderful place there were none, the intervening distance being in part occupied by marsh grass and water. the long, hot, red trains leaving long island city threaded a devious way past many pretty long island villages, until at last, leaving possible home sites behind, the road took to the great meadows on trestles, and traversing miles of bending marsh grass astir in the wind, and crossing a half hundred winding and mucky lagoons where lay water as agate in green frames and where were white cranes, their long legs looking like reeds, standing in the water or the grass, and the occasional boat of a fisherman hugging some mucky bank, it arrived finally at the white sands of the sea and this great scene. white sails of small yachts, the property of those who used some of these lagoons as a safe harbor, might be seen over the distant grass, their sails full spread, as one sped outward on these trains. it was romance, poetry, fairyland.

and the beach, with its great hotels, held and contained all summer long all that was best and most leisurely and pleasure-loving in new york’s great middle class of that day. there were, as i knew all the time, other and more exclusive or worse beaches, such as those at newport and coney island, but this was one which served a world which was plainly between the two, a world of politicians and merchants, and dramatic and commercial life generally. i never saw so many prosperous-looking people in one place, more with better and smarter clothes, even though they were a little showy.122 the straw hat with its blue or striped ribbon, the flannel suit with its accompanying white shoes, light cane, the pearl-gray derby, the check suit, the diamond and pearl pin in necktie, the silk shirt. what a cool, summery, airy-fairy realm!

and the women! i was young and not very experienced at the time, hence the effect, in part. but as i stepped out of the train at the beach that day and walked along the boardwalks which paralleled the sea, looking now at the blue waters and their distant white sails, now at the great sward of green before the hotels with its formal beds of flowers and its fountains, and now at the enormous hotels themselves, the manhattan and the oriental, each with its wide veranda packed with a great company seated at tables or in rockers, eating, drinking, smoking and looking outward over gardens to the blue sea beyond, i could scarcely believe my eyes—the airy, colorful, summery costumes of the women who made it, the gay, ribbony, flowery hats, the brilliant parasols, the beach swings and chairs and shades and the floating diving platforms. and the costumes of the women bathing. i had never seen a seaside bathing scene before. it seemed to me that the fabled days of the greeks had returned. these were nymphs, nereids, sirens in truth. old triton might well have raised his head above the blue waves and sounded his spiral horn.

and now my brother explained to me that here in these two enormous hotels were crowded thousands who came here and lived the summer through. the wealth, as i saw it then, which permitted this! some few western123 senators and millionaires brought their yachts and private cars. senator platt, the state boss, along with one or more of the important politicians of the state, made the oriental, the larger and more exclusive of the two hotels, his home for the summer. along the verandas of these two hotels might be seen of a saturday afternoon or of a sunday almost the entire company of brooklyn and new york politicians and bosses, basking in the shade and enjoying the beautiful view and the breezes. it was no trouble for any one acquainted with the city to point out nearly all of those most famous on broadway and in the commercial and political worlds. they swarmed here. they lolled and greeted and chatted. the bows and the recognitions were innumerable. by dusk it seemed as though nearly all had nodded or spoken to each other.

and the interesting and to me different character of the amusements offered here! out over the sea, at one end of the huge manhattan hotel, had been built a circular pavilion of great size, in which by turns were housed seidl’s great symphony orchestra and sousa’s band. even now i can hear the music carried by the wind of the sea. as we strolled along the beach wall or sat upon one or the other of the great verandas we could hear the strains of either the orchestra or the band. beyond the hotels, in a great field surrounded by a board fence, began at dusk, at which time the distant lighthouses over the bay were beginning to blink, a brilliant display of fireworks, almost as visible to the public as to those who paid a dollar to enter the grounds. earlier in the afternoon i saw many whose only desire appeared124 to be to reach the race track in time for the afternoon races. there were hundreds and even thousands of others to whom the enclosed beach appeared to be all. the hundreds of dining-tables along the veranda of the manhattan facing the sea seemed to call to still other hundreds. and yet again the walks among the parked flowers, the wide walk along the sea, and the more exclusive verandas of the oriental, which provided no restaurant but plenty of rocking-chairs, seemed to draw still other hundreds, possibly thousands.

but the beauty of it all, the wonder, the airy, insubstantial, almost transparent quality of it all! never before had i seen the sea, and here it was before me, a great, blue, rocking floor, its distant horizon dotted with white sails and the smoke of but faintly visible steamers dissolving in the clear air above them. wide-winged gulls were flying by. hardy rowers in red and yellow and green canoes paddled an uncertain course beyond the breaker line. flowers most artfully arranged decorated the parapet of the porch, and about us rose a babel of laughing and joking voices, while from somewhere came the strains of a great orchestra, this time within one of the hotels, mingling betimes with the smash of the waves beyond the seawall. and as dusk came on, the lights of the lighthouses, and later the glimmer of the stars above the water, added an impressive and to me melancholy quality to it all. it was so insubstantial and yet so beautiful. i was so wrought up by it that i could scarcely eat. beauty, beauty, beauty—that was the message and the import of it all, beauty that changes and fades and will not stay. and125 the eternal search for beauty. by the hard processes of trade, profit and loss, and the driving forces of ambition and necessity and the love of and search for pleasure, this very wonderful thing had been accomplished. unimportant to me then, how hard some of these people looked, how selfish or vain or indifferent! by that which they sought and bought and paid for had this thing been achieved, and it was beautiful. how sweet the sea here, how beautiful the flowers and the music and these parading men and women. i saw women and girls for the favor of any one of whom, in the first flush of youthful ebullience and ignorance, i imagined i would have done anything. and at the very same time i was being seized with a tremendous depression and dissatisfaction with myself. who was i? what did i amount to? what must one do to be worthy of all this? how little of all this had i known or would ever know! how little of true beauty or fortune or love! it mattered not that life for me was only then beginning, that i was seeing much and might yet see much more; my heart was miserable. i could have invested and beleaguered the world with my unimportant desires and my capacity. how dare life, with its brutal non-perception of values, withhold so much from one so worthy as myself and give so much to others? why had not the dice of fortune been loaded in my favor instead of theirs? why, why, why? i made a very doleful companion for my very good brother, i am sure.

and yet, at that very time i was asking myself who was i that i should complain so, and why was i not126 content to wait? those about me, as i told myself, were better swimmers, that was all. there was nothing to be done about it. life cared no whit for anything save strength and beauty. let one complain as one would, only beauty or strength or both would save one. and all about, in sky and sea and sun, was that relentless force, illimitable oceans of it, which seemed not to know man, yet one tiny measure of which would make him of the elect of the earth. in the dark, over the whispering and muttering waters, and under the bright stars and in eyeshot of the lamps of the sea, i hung brooding, listening, thinking; only, after a time, to return to the hot city and the small room that was mine to meditate on what life could do for one if it would. the flowers it could strew in one’s path! the beauty it could offer one—without price, as i then imagined—the pleasures with which it could beset one’s path.

with what fever and fury it is that the heart seeks in youth. how intensely the little flame of life burns! and yet where is its true haven? what is it that will truly satisfy it? has any one ever found it? in subsequent years i came by some of the things which my soul at that time so eagerly craved, the possession of which i then imagined would satisfy me, but was mine or any other heart ever really satisfied? no. and again no.

each day the sun rises, and with it how few with whom a sense of contentment dwells! for each how many old dreams unfulfilled, old and new needs unsatisfied. onward, onward is the lure; what life may still do, not127 what it has done, is the all-important. and to ask of any one that he count his blessings is but an ungrateful bit of meddling at best. he will none of it. at twenty, at thirty, at sixty, at eighty, the lure is still there, however feeble. more and ever more. only the wearing of the body, the snapping of the string, the weakening of the inherent urge, ends the search. and with it comes the sad by-thought that what is not realized here may never again be anywhere. for if not here, where is that which could satisfy it as it is here? of all pathetic dreams that which pictures a spiritual salvation elsewhere for one who has failed in his dreams here is the thinnest and palest, a beggar’s dole indeed. but that youthful day by the sea!

* * * * *

twenty-five years later i chanced to visit a home on the very site of one of these hotels, a home which was a part of a new real-estate division. but of that old, sweet, fair, summery life not a trace. gone were the great hotels, the wall, the flowers, the parklike nature of the scene. in twenty-five years the beautiful circular pavilion had fallen into the sea and a part of the grounds of the great manhattan hotel had been eaten away by winter storms. the jersey coast, connecticut, atlantic city, aided by the automobile, had superseded and effaced all this. even the great oriental, hanging on for a few years and struggling to accommodate itself to new conditions, had at last been torn down. only the beach remained, and even that was changed to meet new conditions. the land about and beyond the hotels had been filled in, planted to trees, divided by streets and128 sold to those who craved the freshness of this seaside isle.

but of this older place not one of those with whom i visited knew aught. they had never seen it, had but dimly heard of it. so clouds gather in the sky, are perchance illuminated by the sun, dissolve, and are gone. and youth, viewing old realms of grandeur or terror, views the world as new, untainted, virgin, a realm to be newly and freshly exploited—as, in truth, it ever is.

but we who were——!