CHAPTER XVIII.
_Stretches of the Avenue_ Stretches of the Avenue--The Days of Squatter Kings--Seneca Village--"Millionaire's Row"-- The Avenue Gates--The Soul of Central Park--Some Palaces of the Stretch--The Obelisk and the Metropolitan Museum--Northward Through Harlem.
Here and there in the Island, far to the north, may be found an unblasted rock on the top of which is perched an unpainted shanty with a crude chimney spout from which smoke issues voluminously.

A quarter of a century ago there were thousands of such shanties along the upper West Side.

From the lofty iron height of the El.

Road one could survey them stretching all the way from the Sixties to One Hundred and Sixteenth.

On the summits the Lords of the Manors smoked their clay pipes in bland disregard of the world and its rent-collectors, and the family goats gambolled; in the valleys the truck gardens waxed green and smiled luxuriously as if conscious of the enormous square-foot value of the land that they were pre-empting.