"New York City has more trees (2,400,000) than houses, and it makes 18,200,000 telephone calls a day of which about 125,000 are wrong numbers. Its rate of divorces is the lowest of any big American city, less than a tenth of that of Baltimore for instance, and even less than that in the surrounding countryside. One of its hotels, built largely over railway tracks, has an assessed valuation of $22,500,000 (there are 124 buildings valued at more than a million dollars in Manhattan alone), and it is probably the only city in the world that still maintains sheriff's juries and has five district attorneys. New York City has such admirable institutions as New School for Social Research, the Council on Foreign Relations, Cooper Union, the Museum of Modern Art, and a black market in illegitimate babies. It has 492 playgrounds, more than 11,000 restaurants, 2,800 churches, and the largest store in the world, Macy's, which wrote 40,328,836 sales checks in 1944, and serves more than 150,000 customers a day. It has the Great White Way, bad manners, 33,000 schoolteachers (average pay $3,803) and 500 boy gangs."
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John Gunther
John Gunther (August 30, 1901 – May 29, 1970) was an American journalist and author.
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