---
title: Improvement Era
description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930.
authors:
  - Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations
collections:
  - periodicals
tags:
  - magazine
  - improvement-era
periodical: Improvement Era
volume: 1
number: 2
published: 1897-12
publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations
publisher_place: Salt Lake City
language: en
type: magazine
reference: 'Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations, "Wonders of Greater New York," *Improvement Era* 1, no. 2 (December 1897): 121.'
source:
  url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera12unse
  transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers.
  identifier: improvementera12unse
start_page: 121
end_page: 121
rights:
  status: public-domain
  basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1897-12)
  source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera12unse
  publication_year: 1897
  note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1897, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright.
---

# Wonders of Greater New York

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WONDERS OF GREATER NEW YORK.

Greater New York includes quite a score of cities, towns and villages, ranging in population from a few hundreds to 2,000,000 each. Its population will be 3,300,000 or more, giving an area of 360 square miles. It will be second in size only to greater London among the world's cities. This brings Paris into the third place. And it must be remembered that London was a city nearly two thousand years before the first white man set foot on Manhattan Island. New York would furnish space for 132 such cities, and yet there are in it as many people as were in all the thirteen colonics when they declared their independence. Mr. Waldron begins to astonish us by the statement that the population of Greater New York, lined up shoulder to shoulder, would extend from New York to St. Louis, a thousand miles across the country, and if they were marched by, two abreast, day and night, it would take three weeks before the last pair had passed the observer. The railroad lines within the borders of the city would reach from New York to Omaha, and the elevated lines alone would make a double-track connection with New Haven, Conn. The street lines have a capital of $95,000,000, and their 5,000 cars make a yearly aggregate run of 85,000,000 miles, which would about bridge the distance from the earth to the sun. They carry 480,000,000 passengers a year and an average of 1,300,000 a day. The steam roads entering the national center send out 1,000 passenger trains every twenty-four hours, and about 500,000 passengers on the average enter or leave the city on these roads every day. The clearing-house shows checks and drafts to the amount of $69,000,000 a day, about half larger than the combined bank clearings of all the other cities in the nation. Mr. Waldron says: