"Manhattan Island" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had been familiar all his life. It was chiseled in the wall of the church near the pew held for a hundred years by his own family; it was a name of dignity, associated with the best traditions of Manhattan Island; and this, presumably, was the Governor's name. Graybill was unfamiliar, and this puzzled him, for he knew and could place half a dozen Van Dorens, probably relatives in some degree of the Governor, but he recalled no woman of the family who had married ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... handkerchief full of it home, getting myself well pricked by the spines, but to my botanical enthusiasm this was nothing in view of the discovery. Only here and there patches of arable land maintained small farmhouses, but the greater part of the surface of Manhattan Island was composed of a poor grazing land, interspersed with rolling ledges of bare granite, on which were visible what were then known as "diluvial scratches," which my brother Charles, who was an ardent naturalist, explained to me as the grooves made by the irruption of the deluge, which ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... CITY (3,437), but including Brooklyn, Jersey City, and other suburban places, nearly three millions, the premier city of the American continent, and third wealthiest in the world; occupies Manhattan Island (131/2 m. long) and several smaller islands at the terminal confluence of the Hudson with East River, which opens into Long Island Sound; 18 m. S. of the city is Sandy Hook, where two ship channels ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... The situation on Manhattan Island was this. To the south was General Knox, in command of a fort known as Bunker Hill on an eminence of what is now Grand Street. Near-by was General Israel Putnam—probably less known to posterity (above all, to youthful posterity) for his qualities as a commander ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... than he expected. All of the lower end of Manhattan Island was covered by it. The Crystal Palace—some distance out—stood at Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue—the present site of Bryant Park. All the world's newest wonders were to be seen there—a dazzling exhibition. A fragment of the letter which Sam ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... fifteen months in London, and the present record will consist of my later and more matured impressions. An American who has never seen this metropolis can have but a faint idea of it. A fair distribution of the houses would cover Manhattan Island. Two of its parks contain some square miles of pleasure-ground, and the smallest of five would clear New-York of buildings from the City Hall to the Battery. It is indeed a mammoth city. The ancient suburbs ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Knickerbocker, that venerated historian from whom all good citizens of New York obtain the first impressions of their ancestry, felt that he had no right to chronicle the vicissitudes of Manhattan Island until he had first accounted for the universe of which it is a part. Equally with the important bit of land named, the strawberry belongs to the existing cosmos, and might be traced back to "old chaos." I hasten to re-assure the ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... more than two centuries been a vague and variable term. In 1620-21 it was a line of forest which bounded the infant colony at Plymouth, a few scattered settlements on the James River, in Virginia, and the stockade on Manhattan Island, where Holland had established a trading-post destined to become one day the great commercial city of ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... of his native city. Indeed, the few qualified to snub him cared nothing about the matter, and it was not likely that anybody else would take the initiative in being disagreeable to a young man, the fortunes and misfortunes of whose race were part of the history of Manhattan Island. Siwards, good or bad, were a matter of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... Haerlem," a settlement established in 1658 by Gov. Peter Stuyvesant in the northeastern part of Manhattan Island. It existed for 200 years but is now lost under modern Harlem, which centers about 125th St. In this neighborhood to the west occurred the battle of Harlem Heights—a lively skirmish fought Sept. 16, 1776, opposite the west front of the ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... and more ago the founder of the Devon line had come to America, and invested his savings in land on Manhattan Island. Other people had toiled and built a city there, and generation after generation of the Devons had sat by and collected the rents, until now their fortune amounted to four or five hundred millions of dollars. ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... Half Moon with bows and arrows, killing one of the crew. The sailors built a barricade above the bulwarks to protect the men from further encounters, and Hudson proceeded up the harbor. He landed at the lower point of Manhattan Island and made a ceremonial visit to the Indians, who were doubtless of a different tribe from those that attacked him, for in that day there were many nations in the vicinity of Manhattan, some fierce and warlike and others peace-loving ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... outstanding editors of America. Born on Manhattan Island and for many years active in newspaper work in New York City. His experience also includes editorial direction of newspapers in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Boston. He knows the pulse of humanity and what pleases and interests the greatest number ...
— What's in the New York Evening Journal - America's Greatest Evening Newspaper • New York Evening Journal
... hours of happiness in return for his service, and as partial recompense for the lifetime of lonely misery that must be his when the woman he loved had passed out of his life forever? Billy thought not, and so he tarried on upon "Manhattan Island," as Barbara had christened it, and he lived in the second finest residence in town upon the opposite side of "Riverside Drive" from the palatial home of ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a voucher against such a measure," responded Putnam. "But if thirty thousand well-armed and well-fed British troops, having possession of all the land and water around Manhattan Island, can't capture this small and undisciplined army, they don't deserve the ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... unreality in the whole conversation. Cal let the talk flow on, knowing it was a reaction to shock. What if a modern ocean liner pulled into the harbor of New York—to find an untouched Manhattan Island in its virgin state? ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... held possession of Manhattan Island and the territory now known as New York, were not enjoying the peace and tranquillity promised the just. Because some swine had been stolen from the plantation of De Vries on Staten Island, the Dutch governor sent an armed force to chastise the innocent Raritans ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... monopolies as railways, telegraph and telephone service, gas and electric lighting, are controlled by, and largely in the interests of, a small owning class. The Astors have become enormously rich because one of their progenitors bought for an inconsiderable sum farm land on Manhattan Island which is now worth so many dollars a square foot. Others have made gigantic fortunes out of the country's forests, its coal deposits, its copper, its waterpower, its oil. A certain upper stratum of society is freed from the necessity ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... real-estate agent would deceive anybody—more particularly a stranger from the East. So it must be true. And Los Angeles' main business district is like a transverse slice chopped out of the middle of Manhattan Island. It isn't Western. It is typically New Yorky—as alive as New York and as handsomely done. You can almost imagine you are at the corner ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... could make money from trading for furs with the Indians. They sent many expeditions to Hudson's River, and made a great deal of money. Some of their captains explored the coast northward and southward as far as Boston harbor and Delaware Bay. Their principal trading-posts were on Manhattan Island, and near the site of Albany. In 1614 some of the leading traders obtained from the Dutch government the sole right to trade between New France and Virginia. They called this ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... necessary for the life of the group. The final result is so obvious and familiar that we take it for granted, accepting it as self-sufficient without realizing how it has come about and how modern is the present state of affairs. Let us compare the life of an Indian savage living on Manhattan Island four centuries ago with that of a New Yorker to-day, as regards so simple a matter as the procuring of fish food. The Indian emerged from his tepee, built by himself, and walking to the shore, stepped into a canoe which also he had made ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... the business man flying to his office in the city from his country estate—unless some landing-field is built on the lower end of Manhattan Island as has been proposed. The Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York has taken up the matter of legislation to make landing-fields possible, and it must go through. The business man ought, in the near future, to be able to use ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... do you expect them to come from if not the City? Central Park is bounded on three sides by Manhattan Island and on the fourth by the Eighth Avenue Subway. And Brooklyn and Bronx boys have got pretty sharp scenters. And what's it get you insulting the woiking and non-woiking people of the woild's greatest metropolis? Be grateful for any audience you ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... later, after Burr had seen hard service at Quebec and on Manhattan Island, his name was associated with that of a very beautiful girl named Margaret Moncrieffe. She was the daughter of a British major, but in some way she had been captured while within the American lines. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... Cooper Rivers, which meet at Charleston's beautiful Battery precisely as the Hudson River and the East River meet at the Battery in New York. The shape of Charleston, indeed, greatly resembles that of Manhattan Island, and though her harbor and her rivers are neither so large nor so deep as those of the port of New York, they are altogether adequate to a ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... good thing this man ever did in his life, Was day before yesterday: He died.... But he didn't even do that of his own volition.... He was the meanest man in business on Manhattan Island, The most treacherous friend, the crudest and stingiest husband, And a father so hard that his children left home as soon as they were old enough.... Of course he had divinity: everything human has: But he kept ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... of his promise, because the sun was high in the heavens when the sloop began to pass the high, wooded hills that lie at the upper end of Manhattan Island, and they drew in to their anchorage near the Battery. They did not see the stone government buildings that had marked Quebec, nor the numerous signs of a fortress city, but they beheld more ships and more indications of a great ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a car-gong of a different timbre and the unmistakable hiss of a trolley wheel on its wire. There are no overhead wires on Manhattan Island except at the several points where the off-island railways terminate. "Union railway," Evan said to himself. "We've reached the Harlem river." Sure enough, they passed over a draw-bridge; the double clank-clank of the draw could not be ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... was a "good mixer" when business required that particular form of diplomacy, and the familiarities of Jake Spaulding left his nerves unscathed, but in bone and brain cells he was of the intensely respectable aristocracy of Manhattan Island and he never forgot it. He had surrendered to a girl of no position without a struggle, and made her his wife, but it is doubtful if he would even have fallen in love with her if she had been underbred ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... great and amazing city. It almost frightened him. It covered the entire lower end of Manhattan Island; visionary citizens boasted that one day it would cover it all. The World's Fair building, the Crystal Palace, stood a good way out. It was where Bryant Park is now, on Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue. Young Clemens classed it as one of the wonders of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... by at an earlier date Hendrick Christianson, agent of a Dutch fur trading company, built four small houses and a redoubt, the foundation of America's metropolis. In 1626 Peter Minuit, first governor of the New Netherlands, bought for twenty-six dollars all Manhattan Island." ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... the Evening Post—how eagerly seized—assures us that nothing very particular has happened since our last. It is amusing to notice how universal is the habit of reading a morning paper. Hundreds of vehicles and vessels convey the business men of New York to that extremity of Manhattan Island-which may be regarded as the counting-house of the Western Continent. It is not uncommon for every individual in a cabin two hundred feet long to be sitting absorbed in his paper, like boys conning their lessons on their way to school. Still more striking is it to observe the torrent of workingmen ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... frame with a lean-to for a kitchen, and an adjoining stable-shed, overshadowed all by two great chestnuts of the days when there were country lanes where now are paved streets, and on Manhattan Island there was farm by farm. A light gleamed in the window looking toward the street. As 'Liza's hoofs were heard on the drive, a young girl with a shawl over her head ran out from some shelter where she had been watching, and ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... woman who cleaned up her room for three dollars a month, and Jane Anderson, were the only friends she had among the six million people whose lives centered on Manhattan Island. ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... line from New York to Philadelphia, being obliged to sell the shares for one-half their face value. Incorporation was secured from the Maryland Legislature, under the first American charter, for the telegraph business. The line was completed in 1845 to the Hudson opposite the upper end of Manhattan Island, and an effort made to insulate the wire and connect with the city along the bottom of the river. This failed, and for some time messages had to be taken over in boats. In 1846 the wire was carried on to Baltimore. In ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... from imposition without a special landing place from which they could wholly exclude the rascal crew who cheated them. It took eight years to obtain this from the New York Legislature, but at last, in 1855, it was granted, and the old fort at the foot of Manhattan Island, called Castle Garden, was leased for this purpose. This is now the Emigrants' Landing, the gate of the New World for those who, pressing westward, throng into it from the Old. Night and day it is open, and through this passage the ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant
... so adroit in intrigue, as fond of fighting, but with less of the gift of the woods, and much more the faculty for government. There was little interchange of friendliness and trade between the rival colonists; and Frenchmen were as rare on Manhattan Island as Englishmen on the heights of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Manhattan Island, Kings and Westchester counties had long since accepted his doctrines, and they stood behind him in unbroken ranks; but the northern counties and cities of New York, including Albany, were still under the autocratic sway of Clinton. Hamilton's colleagues, ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... Washington's headquarters were on Manhattan Island, at the home of the Quaker merchant, Robert Murray; and here, in the first week of September, 1776, he had asked his officers ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... York, the passengers had to look out for their luggage, and either engage hacks or hand-cartmen, who for twenty- five cents would carry a trunk to any part of the city. The city then, be it remembered, did not reach up Manhattan Island above the vicinity of Broome or Spring Streets, although there were beyond that the villages of Greenwich, Bloomingdale, Yorkville, and Harlem. The City Hotel, on Broadway, just above Trinity Churchyard, Bunker's Hotel, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... taken a steerage passage, so as to save money; and, being dressed in shabby clothes, in keeping with his third-class ticket, the loafers about the Battery, at the end of Manhattan Island, on which the town of New York is built, thought he was merely an ignorant German peasant whom they might easily impose on. They, however, soon found that he had not been campaigning six months for nothing, and so their ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... very quietly bought a house on Manhattan Island. It was a small, narrow, three-storied house of brick, rather shabby on the outside, and situated on a modest block between Lexington and Park avenues, where the newly married of the younger set were arriving in increasing numbers, prepared to pay the penalty ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... sailed up the river called by his name, led certain Amsterdam and Hoorn merchants to plan a settlement near this river; and they secured a charter giving them exclusive rights from Chesapeake bay to Newfoundland. The result was the founding of the colony of New Netherland, with New Amsterdam on Manhattan island as its capital. This settlement was at first small and insignificant, but, being placed midway between the English colonies on that same coast, it added one more to the many questions of dispute between the ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson |
