ABSTRACT
London has never taken kindly to attempts at delimitation whether by people who wanted to govern it, or by those who just wanted to fix it statistically; every time this was done, London promptly outgrew its administration or its figures. It seems strange that the American mind, usually so quick to appreciate the pecuniary value of any movement, has not seen the civic advantage of Municipal Art. There is a competition of cities just as there is a competition of individuals, and this competition has remained unrealized by the citizens of Greater New York. In a city nothing is quite what it appears, and so the writer who would understand the nature of mankind must constantly revise his own definitions. The excitement of a city is its sense of infinite possibility, of its ceaselessly becoming something else.
