New York pays the penalty of her primal topographic curse, her old inconceivably bourgeois scheme of composition and distribution, the uncollected labor of minds with no imagination of the future and blind before the opportunity given them by their two magnificent water-fronts. This original sin of the longitudinal avenues perpetually, yet meanly intersected, and of the organized sacrifice of the indicated alternative, the great perspectives from East to West, might still have earned forgiveness by some occasional departure from its pettifogging consistency. But, thanks to this consistence, the city is, of all great cities, the least endowed with any blest item of stately square or goodly garden, with any happy accident of surprise, any fortunate nook or casual corner, any deviation, in fine, into the liberal or charming. That way, however, for the regenerate filial mind, madness may be said to liethe way of imagining what might have been and putting it all together in the light of what so helplessly is.