There is no end to the apartment-houses for multitude, and there is no
street or avenue free from them. Of course, the better sort are to be
found on the fashionable avenues and the finer cross-streets, but others
follow the course of the horse-car lines on the eastern and western
avenues, and the elevated roads on the avenues which these have invaded.
In such places they are shops below and apartments above, and I cannot
see that the inmates seem at all sensible that they are unfitly housed in
them. People are born and married, and live and die in the midst of an
uproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it; and I
believe the physicians really attribute something of the growing
prevalence of neurotic disorders to the wear and tear of the nerves from
the rush of the trains passing almost momently, and the perpetual jarring
of the earth and air from their swift transit. I once spent an evening in
one of these apartments, which a friend had taken for a few weeks last
spring (you can get them out of season for any length of time), and as
the weather had begun to be warm, we had the windows open, and so we had
the full effect of the railroad operated under them. My friend had become
accustomed to it, but for me it was an affliction which I cannot give you
any notion of. The trains seemed to be in the room with us, and I sat as
if I had a locomotive in my lap. Their shrieks and groans burst every
sentence I began, and if I had not been master of that visible speech
which we use so much at home I never should have known what my friend was
saying. I cannot tell you how this brutal clamor insulted me, and made
the mere exchange of thought a part of the squalid struggle which is the
plutocratic conception of life; I came away after a few hours of it,
bewildered and bruised, as if I had been beaten upon with hammers.

Some of the apartments on the elevated lines are very good, as such
things go; they are certainly costly enough to be good; and they are