THE FUTURE IN AMERICA (Illustrated). H. G. Wells

Williamsburgh Bridge, the great promise of yet another monstrous bridge, overwhelmingly monstrous by any European example I know, and so past long miles of city to the left and to the right past the wide Brooklyn navy-yard (where three clean white war-ships lay moored), past the clustering castellated asylums, hospitals, almshouses and reformatories of Black-well’s long shore and Ward’s Island, and then through a long reluctant diminuendo on each receding bank, until, indeed, New York, though it seemed incredible, had done.

      And at one point a grave-voiced man in a peaked cap, with guide-books to sell, pleased me greatly by ending all idle talk suddenly with the stentorian announcement: “We are now in Hell Gate. We are now passing through Hell Gate!”

      But they’ve blown Hell Gate open with dynamite, and it wasn’t at all the Hell Gate that I read about in my boyhood in the delightful chronicle of Knickerbocker,

      So through an elbowing evening (to the tune of “Cavalleria Rusticana ” on an irrepressible string band) and a night of unmitigated fog-horn to Boston, which I had been given to understand was a cultured and uneventful city offering great opportunities for reflection and intellectual digestion. And, indeed, the large quiet of Beacon Street, in the early morning sunshine, seemed to more than justify that expectation….