New York City (1947)

[Music] below us stretching majestically a wilderness of brick and steel is one of the best-known most populous habitations of man on the face of the earth New York a great city in this land of ours whose shadow falls across the entire nation whose name is read in its mighty skyline its famous streets its bridges America's melting Park of humanity whose people are the peoples of all the earth on whose tongue are the languages of all countries in this world of ours a city of superlatives in terms of the biggest and the best the greatest and a most no traveler to this world metropolis is ever prepared for what he sees here the experiences he has here he feels in the swift rhythm and tempo of daily existence he arrived on one of the hundreds of trains that arrived every day one every 50 seconds day and night around the clock or perhaps he arrives on one of the hundreds of planes domestic and foreign which make New York one of the world's busiest air traffic centres and then he is plunged at once into a swirl of humanity and traffic shocking and breathtaking to the first visitor but taken as a matter of course by those whose home this is where most of the other great cities of the world spread their being wide and far out from the business hub like the spokes of a wheel the choice of this mighty metropolis was to go up higher than man had ventured before or since to poke holes into the sky with scrapers swarming with human tenants making them more like mighty hives of toiling be here in this human melting pot there are more people than live in Norway and and Sweden combined here live more Irish than there are in Dublin more Jews than there are in Palestine more Italians than there are in Naples and almost as many as there are in Rome with thousands and thousands in each case enough to make a good-sized city of Negros check poles Greeks Germans Puerto Ricans and almost any nationality on the map here are city employees numbering enough to run a nation with an army of more than 19,000 policemen 11,000 firemen and 120,000 other municipal employees from the mayor down to the street cleaner and the garbage collecting here we see a landmark in a city crowded to overflowing with notable landmarks the Empire State Building the world's tallest rising 1,250 feet above the sidewalk amid the clatter of delivery trucks the hoarse cries of buyers and sellers the pungent smells of produce of the sea stands the famous Fulton fish market on the east side of town a tumultuous raucous place renowned wherever fish is eaten and enjoy for the variety the quantity and quality of the hundreds of tons of fish and other seafood that pass over its counters every day and not far off is a part of town known the world over as the Lower East Side a teeming sector of the city that was once almost entirely given over to slums but made livable by modern improvements in housing and marketing but this city is not all sound and fury here in the very center of the city is a beautiful park a peaceful retreat from the turmoil of Street traffic a calm lake for boating a restful green of grass and trees here is a remnant from a bygone era this still catted cabbie whose Carrington team are available to anyone wishing a ride around the park even a well-stocked zoo for the city's children and the young in spirit [Music] in another part of the city is Greenwich Village once the center of unconventional bohemian living in the United States today more sedate but still with an informal manner of life for the electoral and the artistic the actor the writer the dancer the poet or as in this case the painter Parimal from greenwich village in space and in spirit is Wall Street the Money Mart of the nation and in many respects of the world the stock exchange is here and in the immediately surrounding area the United States subtreasury the buildings and offices of many of America's great banking houses industrial and shipping firms and then a place of historic significance and final rests dating back from colonial cities Trinity Church whose history is the history of our country with its cemetery where sleep men and women who live denied before we became a nation here is the gravestone of a great revolutionary figure Alexander Hamilton there are other churches in this great city hundreds of them for every creed and faith old and new in the Gramercy Park District the Church of the Transfiguration famed as the wedding place of the theater people and familiarly known as the little church around the corner and here on Fifth Avenue facing the world-renowned Rockefeller city is st. Patrick's Cathedral a magnificent example of Gothic architecture of the Middle Ages libraries colleges and universities statues museums theaters fashionable shops world-famous avenues all these and more are part of this fabulous city too many in number to be contained in a brief survey a hurried glimpse then of only a few more of its countless points of interest the Statue of Liberty lighting the way for the oppressed and dispossessed to our American Way of life Grant's Tomb overlooking the Hudson River on the west side of town Radio City with enough people in it to fill a modern city of significant size [Music] the Washington Square arch at the eastern limit of Greenwich Village the Brooklyn Bridge connecting the two boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn the Bowery a street of lost hope [Music] Park Avenue a canyon of apartment houses called home by the rich of the city Columbia University George Washington Bridge whose other end is in New Jersey across the Hudson Harlem a negro city within this city [Music] this then is our City Oh Henry's Baghdad on the Hudson Park braked aliens and loved it at the same time this Colossus of the Atlantic seaboard a city famed in song in story the key to our national economy the fulcrum of our development is a great power in the council's of the world the center of our cultural and historical traditions offering everything to everybody all things to all men whose names say with pride and awe New York the big town in this land of ours you