LIKE many a landed estate, like many a quiet village, like many a battle-ground, like many a winding and historic road, like so many other places of interest of which the island of Manhattan has been the scene in days agone—Minniesland is not easy to locate. Relentlessly and remorselessly the great masses of brick and mortar have forged ahead in their furtherance of the city's growth, seeking a level as they spread, dominating the island, levelling the hills, and stretching over valleys until the surface of the land is altered beyond all knowing. Minniesland is one of the almost buried districts of the great city. Its last surviving relic, a squareornamental structure, is the one token that it ever existed. Now that the town has surrounded this building, and streets have cut through and mutilated the first plan of the district, this house may be found standing where One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street slopes down to the Hudson River. Enter it; pass through its ancient halls, and, standing on its porch, blot from the mind the spot as it is and reconstruct it as it was half a century ago.
Fifty years ago the city was far away there to the south, and this house, miles and miles away up-country, was at the edge of a forest stretching down the hillside to the river. There were other farmhouses around it. To the north was the mansion where Colonel Morris had lived before the Revolution; where Madame Jumel in later days had married Aaron Burr. To the south was the squareframe building, close by a clump of thirteen trees, where Alexander Hamilton had lived and where his widow stayed on after his death.
Forgetting for a moment these old-time surroundings of the house by the forest edge, turn to the building itself, and imagine at the window a man sitting. He has long hair and clear blue eyes. He is painting at a small easel and working in quite a wonderful manner, for he is ambidextrous. He stops in his work and looks over the trees towards the Hudson. If that ever-moving river recalls to him his past life, John James Audubon, ornithologist, is reviewing a strange and adventurous career in many countries, full of losses, of suffering, of changes, of perils. He thinks of himself as a boy wandering through the dense, hot wilds of San Domingo; as a youth hard at his art studies in Paris under the master David; as aman at his father's country place on the Schuylkill, failing utterly and absolutely when he goes into business, and letting his father's fortune slip away from his nerveless grasp. He remembers, too, his marriage, and how his wife followed his restless career with unchanging love and remained always a balance-wheel to his impetuosity. He recalls how, through all the changes of that early and unsettled life, the naturalist-love born in him when he roamed the tropical home of his youth was always strongest in his nature, and was constantly cropping out in his mania for collecting beautiful things that were quite worthless from a commercial point of view, just as it was shown in his personal appearance; for his manner of dressing, always with his hair falling over his shoulders, marked him as a man regardless of conventionality, a man so bound within the circle of his ownthoughts that he had little time or inclination to peek out and see which way the world was moving.
Audubon's Home, 156th St. and N. River
Audubon had passed through the hardest struggles of his life, had travelled in England, in France, in Scotland, arranging for the publication of his bird pictures, that remarkable work which set his memory apart; he had succeeded in his life's object, and at the close of 1840 had come here to this forest hillside by theHudson, built the house on the estate Minniesland, named in honor of his wife, made it a luxurious abode, and there gathered his friends about him.
With this home of Audubon there is associated a memory of the early days of the telegraph. When Samuel F.B. Morse built the first telegraph line to Philadelphia, he had it strung across the river from Fort Lee to the basement of Audubon's house, and there he received the first telegraphic message ever sent to the island of Manhattan. Here Audubon lived, wrote, and painted until even his rugged strength was worn out. He worked until those clever ambidextrous hands lost the cunning to work out the forms his active brain could still conceive. The day came, in 1851, when he died, fortunately before any great change had come over the beauties of Minniesland. Thepeacefulness of Trinity Cemetery, which takes in part of the Audubon farm, is still faintly reminiscent of the scene of the ornithologist's later life, and there, close by the old house, is the grave of Audubon, and upon his tomb are sculptured the birds he loved so well, now keeping watch over him.
Clement C. Moore's House, Chelsea
While Audubon worked in his out-of-town retreat, another scholar and writer lived farther down the island towards the city. Clement C. Moore lived in a little district of his own called Chelsea Village, now merged into the city by so deft a laying out of streets that there is little irregularity at the point where town and village met. A bit of the old village remains exactly as it was in the General Theological Seminary, and the block on which it stands, Twentieth to Twenty-first streets, Ninth and Tenth avenues, is still called Chelsea Square. Clement C. Moore inheritedfrom his father, Bishop Benjamin Moore, a large tract of land along the river near the present Chelsea Square, and gave the land on which the seminary was built to that institution. He himself lived in a house which his father had occupied before him and which stood on the line of the present Twenty-third Street on the block between Ninth and Tenth avenues. It was a very old building, renowned for the fact that General Washington had stopped there one afternoon when he had his headquarters in the city. Clement C. Moore was a professor in the General Theological Seminary, and while there compiled the first Greek and Hebrew lexicons ever published in this country. But it is not by reason of his learned books or his philanthropy that his name isbest recalled, but by a poem which he wrote for his children and of which the world at large might never have known but that it was sent without his knowledge and published in an up-State paper. This poem, the Christmas classic ofThe Visit of St. Nicholas, begins with "'T was the night before Christmas," and its simple yet merry jingle and delightful word-pictures have endeared it to all children since his time and will endure to please many more to come.
All that there was of literary New York half a century ago centred about Anne C. Lynch. She established a circle, a gathering which increased or fell off in numbers as men and women of brains came and went. This was the first near approach to asalonin this country. In the early days of her coming to the city, Miss Lynch lived in a neat-appearing brick house in Waverly Place, just off WashingtonSquare. She moved elsewhere from time to time, the literary coterie moving about as she moved. At the height of her success, in 1855, she married the Italian educator, Vincenzo Botta, then in his second year in New York and occupying a professorship of Italian literature in the University of New York. The receptions of Mrs. Botta flourished and were as popular as had been those of Miss Lynch. Her writings, too, went on, and her most widely known work, the material for which she gathered during her intimate personal association with many authors, theHandbook of Universal Literature, was written when she lived in Thirty-seventh Street, a few doors west of Fifth Avenue.
In the early years of Anne C. Lynch's receptions, one of her intimates was Caroline M. Kirkland, the friend of Bayard Taylor. Mrs. Kirkland, who had just returned after a residence in Michigan, sought her advice before she publishedForest Life, which was the second of her descriptions of the sparsely settled region where she had spent three years of her life. The intimacy between these two continued for years, indeed until Mrs. Kirkland died, in 1864, stricken with paralysis while under the strain of managing a great sanitary fair during the Civil War.
Through Mrs. Kirkland, Lydia M. Child was introduced at the Lynch receptions, when she was associated with her husband in conducting theNational Anti-Slavery Standard. She had been a writer since her youth, having published her first book,Hobomok, in 1821. Her works had been much read, but lost much of their popularity after she published the first anti-slavery book in America, in 1833, under the titleAnAppeal for that Class of Americans Called Africans. She ever remained prominent as an abolitionist, but because of her opinions lost caste as a writer of novels. But Miss Lynch cared little what opinions any one held so long as they really had opinions and would stand by them, and Mrs. Child was welcomed to her home until she left the city, in 1844, to spend the rest of her life in Wayland, Massachusetts.
Very often Edgar Allan Poe attended the Lynch receptions, taking with him his delicate wife, who seemed to get better for the moment when she saw her husband the centre of a notable gathering. For even here Poe had quite a following of his own. It was on one of these evenings that he gave it as his opinion thatThe Sinless Childwas one of the strongest long poems ever produced in America. This poem wasjust then making a great stir and on this special evening had been the subject of much discussion. The author was present, as she usually was where writers congregated, for the beautiful and witty Elizabeth Oakes Smith carried enthusiasm and inspiration wherever she went. She found time to form part of many a circle, even though her days were well filled, for she assisted her husband, "Major Jack Downing," in his editorial work. For many a year before she finally retired to Hollywood, South Carolina, she held her place as the first and only woman lecturer in America.
writers
1. W.D. HOWELLS.2. J.G. HOLLAND.3. RICHARD GRANT WHITE.4. BRANDER MATTHEWS.5. WILLIAM WINTER.
From an engraving of the picture by J.H. Marble; courtesy of Mr. W.E. Benjamin.
Another dear friend of Poe's might usually be found at these receptions. "Estella" Lewis, the poet, lived in Brooklyn and held there quite a court of clever people. The time came when she was, indeed, a friend in need to Poe in his time of dire necessity at Fordham. It was at herBrooklyn home that he readThe Ravenbefore it was published, and Estella Lewis was the last friend he visited before he left New York on the journey south which ended in his death.
On the "Poe nights," too, Ann S. Stephens was usually to be found at Miss Lynch's. She became a much-read novelist, writingFashion and FamineandMary Derwent. On these nights, too, might be seen Margaret Fuller, the transcendentalist. She had left her Massachusetts home to take her place with Horace Greeley as literary editor of theTribune, and between whiles devoted herself to charitable work in an effort to better the social condition of the poor of the metropolis. During most of her stay she lived in a locality much changed since her time, near where Forty-ninth Street touches the East River. A picturesque spot itwas, overlooking the green stretches of Blackwell's Island, in the midst of suburban life. Her stay in New York was short. After a year or so she went to Europe and in Italy married the Marquis Ossoli. She was on her way back to America, in 1850, a passenger in the merchantmanElizabeth, when the ship was wrecked off Fire Island and she perished with it.
To this group of writers also belongs Frances Sargent Osgood. While, somewhere about the year 1846, the country was ringing with her praise, she was living the secluded life of an invalid, with her husband, in what was then becoming a fashionable neighborhood, 18 East Fourteenth Street. Once, in 1845, she had met Poe, had been instantly attracted by him, and became thereafter his staunch admirer, expressing her opinion persistently whenever opportunityoffered. He, on his part, appreciated her poetic genius, and more than once referred to the scrupulous taste, faultless style, and magical grace of her verse. And several of his poems are addressed directly to her.
There was a young man named Richard Henry Stoddard who frequented the Lynch receptions. He had worked for six years in a foundry learning the trade of iron moulder, and writing poetry as he worked. By the year 1848 he was beginning to make a name for himself, and his first volume of poems,Footnotes, had just been published. At Miss Lynch's house he met Miss Elizabeth Barstow, herself a poet, and some time later visited her at her home in Mattapoisett. This led to their marriage. Early in the year of his meeting with Miss Barstow, Stoddard made the acquaintance of Bayard Taylor.Taylor had already travelled on foot over Europe, had crystallized the results of these travels inViews Afoot, and was then working under Greeley on theTribune, as one of the several editors. Side by side with him worked that pure-hearted and thoughtful man who had been the instigator and supporter of the Brook Farm experiment, George Ripley, who wrote theTribune'sbook criticisms.
Views Afootwas the most popular book of the day when Stoddard walked into theTribuneoffice and introduced himself to the author, finding him very hard at work in a little pen of a room. This was the start of a friendship which lasted for thirty years, and was only broken in upon by death.
A few days after, Stoddard called upon Taylor, who then lived in Murray Street, a few steps from Broadway.Charles Fenno Hoffman, who occupied rooms in the same building, was then beginning to show signs of the mental breakdown which was to cloud the last thirty-four years of his life. But Hoffman was prosperous and occupied luxurious quarters on the ground floor, while Taylor, despite the popularity of his book, led a life of hard work and struggle. He was ill paid for his services on theTribune, as Greeley did not believe in high salaries, and he lived up four flights of stairs in a sort of two-roomed attic. There Stoddard went almost every Saturday after his labors at the iron foundry, and there the friendship strengthened week by week; there Taylor taught Stoddard to smoke; there they discussed books and writers, and there wrote poetry together. There Taylor wroteKublehandAriel in the Cloven Pine, and, too, the song that won for hima prize when Barnum invited the entire country to a competition in writing a song for Jenny Lind. Taylor was visited by a great many friends, and with them the youthful Stoddard became acquainted. Sometimes to the house in Murray Street came Rufus W. Griswold, author ofPoets and Poetry of America,Prose Writers of America, and kindred works. He had been one of Taylor's early advisers. The diplomatist and playwright, George H. Boker, often made one of the party at this time, when his tragedy,Calaynos, was being acted with great success at Sadlers's Wells Theatre in England. Another visitor was Richard Kimball, the lawyer-author, then enthusiastically putting the finishing touches toSt. Leger.
These days of changing fortunes were the most romantic of Taylor's career. Many other places in thecity are associated with him, one a house near Washington Square, where he lived for some years and wrote among other things thePoems of the Orient. His last city home was at 142 East Eighteenth Street. There he wroteDeukalion, and from there he started out, after being dined and fêted, on his mission as United States Minister to Germany. In England he met Carlyle. In Paris he had a "queer midnight supper" with Victor Hugo. In Germany, though he was then quite an ill man, he threw himself into official business with an energy that his constitution, worn by years of persistent hard work, would not warrant. Before the end of the year, the friends in America who had wished him farewell in April, congratulating him that he had attained an honor that he prized, knew that he lay dead in Berlin.
LOOKING backward to the days before the Civil War is to bring into review a host of men who then walked through the city in which time has wrought so many changes, and to bring to the mind's eye familiar streets, but so altered that they seem like unknown highways.
There was the Battery, with its old-time appearance, when the green grass of summer was not cast into deep and continual shade by an overhanging device of modern travel, and when its broad walk was a promenade, the like and popularity of which was not to be found elsewhere. There stood squat Castle Garden, half in the water and half on theland, of nondescript style of architecture, suggesting a means of defence against an invading force and giving cause for wonder as to how it ever came by the flowery half of its name.
Wandering swiftly through the lower end of the town, memory recalls old houses whose begrimed fronts bore the markings of a good hundred years. There, by the Bowling Green, was where Washington and Putnam had their headquarters. Farther up-town a hotel arose where Franconi's Hippodrome had been. Still farther along was Murray Hill, where there was just enough elevation of land to account in a measure for its name. Still farther on were country places beyond the town—beyond the town then, but now come to be the very heart's core of the metropolis.
But of all the points of interestnone comes fresher to the mind than Broadway. And though they have all changed, some swept away, some freshened up, others reconstructed into modern ways and made to keep pace with the progress of the passing days, no change or series of changes have brought about such complete renewal, if the reminiscent eye of the mind is to be believed, as has come to Broadway. Blotting out for the moment the city's chief canyon of travel as it is to-day, with its brobdingnagian structures, and its sights and sounds of business and pleasure and enterprise, let the highway of old take its place. As far back as fifty years ago, residences were gradually metamorphosed into business hives, but they managed to retain much of their conservative appearance for a long time, as though a battle were being waged as to whether Broadway should be a place of homesor a business thoroughfare. Trees by the curb line waved their branches in angry protest against commercial encroachments and in opposition to great glaring signs that blurted out business announcements in a bold-faced manner, that argued they had come to stay. While the Broadway of to-day gives the impression of narrowness because of the height of the sky-scrapers that border it, it then looked exceedingly wide. It was never a quiet street, for a continual procession of omnibuses and other vehicles on business and pleasure bent streamed along it. Among the popular resorts at which they often stopped was Charles Pfaff's, where beer was sold. There of an evening met the literary Bohemians of the city, in the days when Bohemia really existed and before the word had well-nigh lost significance and respect. They were gifted men with greatpower of intellect, who spoke without fear and without favor and whose every word expressed a thought. They were real men and they made the world a real place, a place without affectation, without pretence, without show, without need of applause, and without undue cringing to mere conventional forms. These were the characteristics of the Bohemians, and Bohemia was wherever two or three of them were gathered together. Bohemia was the atmosphere they carried with them, and whether upon the streets or in Pfaff's cellar they were at home. Pfaff's happening to be a convenient gathering-place, and beer happening to be the popular brew with most of them, they gathered there.
It is a tradition that the place came into favor through the personal efforts of the energetic Henry Clapp. He was attracted to it, so the traditionruns, soon after he started theSaturday Pressin 1858, that lively publication, so brilliant while it lasted, so soon to die, and at its death having pasted on its outer door an announcement which read: "This paper is discontinued for want of funds, which by a coincidence is precisely the reason for which it was started." Whether it is true or not that Clapp was the first to call attention to the resort that came to be the meeting-place of the Bohemians, matters little. It grew to be such a meeting-place, and it is quite true that the members of the staff of theSaturday Pressdid more than any one else to give it a name that has lived through the years.
It is hard to locate Pfaff's place now. Go to look for it on the east side of Broadway, above Bleecker Street three or four doors, and you will be disappointed, for there is nothing to locate—just a conventional business house. Take an idle hour and picture it in memory; that will be better. Thinking of it now it is quite natural to contrast it with modern eating- and drinking-houses, famous for their mirror-lined walls, richly carved appointments, carpeted floors, and flashing electric lights. Pfaff's was a hole beneath the surface of the street, ill-lighted, ill-ventilated, ill-kept. But it is far better to read George Arnold's poem embodying the spirit of the cellar, and recording how the company was "very merry at Pfaff's." This poet was one of the merry company in the days when he wrote regularly for the columns ofVanity Fair. He has himself said that some of the poems were written in the late hours after an evening spent in the underground Broadway resort with Fitz-Hugh Ludlow, with Mortimer Thomson, the famous "Q.K. Philander Doesticks," and a score of like writers. It was Arnold, too, who caused an hour of sadness when he took there the story of the death of Henry W. Herbert, who was well known to all the habitués. They all knew his life's story; they had heard him tell of his father, the Dean of Manchester and cousin to the Earl of Carnarvon; they had heard him tell how he had come to New York from London, how he had taught in the school in Beaver Street near Whitehall, and how in that little school he had partly written his historical romanceCromwell, and how he had mapped out some of the others that followed it. They knew, too, how he had, under the name of "Frank Forester," produced such books asAmerican Game in its Season,The Horse and Horsemanship in North America, and become famous by novel-writing. He was the firstto introduce sports of the field into fiction in America. Some of his comrades knew the unhappiness that had crept into his life, but even his dearest friends were not prepared for the news which Arnold brought one day, that "Frank Forester" had died by his own hand in a room on the second floor of the Stevens House, there in Broadway by the Bowling Green, not more than the throw of a stone from the place where, in his early days in New York, he had taught school.
Another friend of George Arnold's, who sometimes spent hours with him at Pfaff's, was George Farrar Browne, but few will remember him by this name, while many will recall that which he made famous, Artemus Ward. He had passed his apprenticeship as a printer and reporter, had made the country ring with the name of the lively but illiterate showman,and was in New York trying to carryVanity Fairto success—a task which he could not accomplish.
Another of the Pfaff company was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. This was at a time when he had editorial charge of theSaturday Pressafter he had come from Portsmouth and served three years at his desk in the commission house of his rich uncle. Working over the books of the firm, his mind was often busy with themes outside of the commission house, all tending towards a literary career.
Another lounger at Pfaff's whose name has become famous in the world of letters was William Winter, who was sometimes a visitor. Howells went there on his first visit to New York and dined with Walt Whitman, and there were others—Bayard Taylor and Stedman among them.
The University Building
It was only a few minutes' walk from Pfaff's to Washington Square,and there could be found the substantial-appearing University building, where Theodore Winthrop had his office and where he wroteCecil DreemeandJohn Brent. From that gloomy building he was called to the war, and to his home there friends brought the details of his death—shot through the heart while rallying his men in an attack which he had helped to plan at the action of Big Bethel in June, 1861. At the timeof his death he was scarcely known as a writer, and it was not until the publication ofCecil Dreemethat the world realized that it had lost an entertaining story-teller as well as a brave soldier when Winthrop fell.
Among others who served in the Seventh Regiment of New York, of which Theodore Winthrop was a member, was Fitz-James O'Brien, the erratic and brilliant journalist, whose tale ofThe Diamond Lenswas his best contribution to the literature of the day. The only literary man of the Seventh to return to New York was O'Brien's friend, Charles Graham Halpine, who resigned, and lived to make his name famous by his humorous sketches of army life supposed to have been penned by "Private Miles O'Reilly."
The name of Winthrop naturally suggests the name of Dr. John W. Draper, who was associated with theUniversity of New York for more than thirty years. His technical writings made his name known over the world, and he spent many years of his life in the dingy old University building working on aHistory of Intellectual Development in Europe.
The Studio Building in West 70th St.
Fitz-James O'Brien has told of how he was once sent by a newspaper to see Henry T. Tuckerman, in a big brown building in Tenth Street. This studio building, just east of Sixth Avenue, is there yet, and the room on the second floor whereO'Brien had his talk with the scholarly essayist and critic may be seen. At that time Tuckerman was writingThe Criterion; or, The Test of Talk about Familiar Things. In this large room overlooking the street it was his custom on Sunday evenings to entertain his literary friends.
Another home where there were Sunday-evening gatherings for many years was that of Alice and Phœbe Cary. This house, one of the few residences remaining in a neighborhood otherwise given up to business structures to-day, is numbered 53 on East Twentieth Street. Here the Carys lived when they made their home in this city, coming from their Ohio birthplace to a wider field of activity. You can walk now into the little parlor where the gatherings were held. You can go into the room above, where Phœbe worked—when she found time; for in the jointhousekeeping of the sisters Phœbe often said that she had to be the housekeeper before she could be the poet. In that room she wrote, after coming from church one Sunday, the hymn which has made her name famous and well-beloved,Nearer My Home.
53 EAST 20th St.
There on the same floor was the favorite work-corner of Alice, and sitting close by the window, where she could look out into the street, she wrote many of her poems of memory and of domestic affection. In this room, too, she died.
To recite the names of those Sunday-evening callers would be to recall all the writers in the city at thattime, and to mention all those prominent in the world of letters who came from out of town. James Parton was often one of the company, in the days when he was arranging the material for hisLife of Horace Greeley, material gathered from those who had known the great editor during his early days in New Hampshire and Vermont. Greeley himself dropped in occasionally, and also another member of theTribunestaff, Richard Hildreth, the writer from Massachusetts, who had been associate editor of the BostonAtlasand who in after years was United States Consul at Trieste.
Herman Melville was invited to the Twentieth Street house at the time when he was at work on hisBattle Pieces, and could look back on years of adventure by land and by sea, and on the hardships that had supplied him with the materialfrom which to write so much that was odd and interesting. At one of these Sunday-night receptions, at which Alice Cary introduced him first, Melville told the company, and told it far better than he had ever written anything (at least so one of his hearers has recorded), the story of that life of trial and adventure. He began at the beginning, telling of his boyhood in New York, of his shipping as a common sailor, and of his youthful wanderings in London and Liverpool. In true sailor fashion, and with picturesque detail, he spun the tale of his eighteen months' cruise to the sperm fisheries in the Pacific, and held his hearers' close attention while he related the coarse brutality of his captain, who had forced him to desert at the Marquesas Islands. Then he traced his wanderings with his one companion through the trackless forest on theisland of Nukahiva and of his capture by the Typee cannibals. He related how there was little hope in his heart that he could ever escape, but that he still held tight to life and his courage did not desert him; how with the thought of death before him by night and by day he yet hourly studied the strange life about him and garnered those facts and fancies which he afterwards used to such advantage in his successfulTypee. It was a thrilling tale to listen to, in strange contrast to his humdrum later life when he was an employee of the New York Custom House. When you go to see the home of the Cary sisters, walk on a few blocks to East Twenty-sixth Street, and there see the house numbered 104. On this site stood Melville's house, where he lived for many years and where, when he had come to be an old man, he died.
Mary L. Booth was another visitor to the home of the Cary sisters, and with them she talked over a great many details of herHistory of the City of New York, which she was at that time energetically engaged upon. And there this future editor ofHarper's Bazarmet Martha J. Lamb when Mrs. Lamb came to the city from Chicago. A talk between the two had much to do with directing Mrs. Lamb's thought into historical lines, and led to her publishing, some seventeen years later, herHistory of New York, and to her assuming, in 1883, the editorship of theMagazine of American History. Mary L. Booth used to tell very amusingly how she had once met Samuel G. Goodrich, then famous as "Peter Parley," at the little house in Twentieth Street, and how disappointed she had been in listening to his talk and not finding it as impressive as itshould have been as coming from the author and editor of more than one hundred and fifty volumes. This incident occurred within a year or two of "Peter Parley's" death.
That popular writer of juvenile tales, Alice Haven, was also a visitor of the Cary sisters. Her early life had been spent in Philadelphia, where she had been married to J.C. Neal, but after his death she had removed to New York and made her home there. She was very much interested in the work of St. Luke's Hospital, which was not a great distance away, and often came to talk with Phœbe Cary about that institution. Miss Cary herself was interested in it because of her regard for its founder, Dr. William Augustus Muhlenberg, who had written a hymn that was a great favorite of hers,I Would Not Live Alway. Dr. Muhlenberg was the rector of the Church ofthe Holy Communion, and in 1846 on St. Luke's Day after his sermon he suggested to his congregation that of the collection that was about to be taken half should be put aside as the commencement of a fund which should be used to found an institution for the care of the sick poor. The fund started that day with thirty dollars, and that was the beginning of St. Luke's Hospital. It was not a great while before the actual hospital work was begun in a building at 330 Sixth Avenue, near Twentieth Street, and there had a home until the completion of that at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, where it remained until those quarters were outgrown, and in 1896 it removed to the new buildings on Cathedral Heights.
THERE is little of old-time picturesqueness in the city of New York to-day, where buildings are too towering, too massive, too thickly clustered to offer artistic and unique effects. But a stroll about the homes of the writers of the city invests their rather commonplace surroundings with more than passing interest.
In the older part of the town, the section that was all of New York a hundred years ago and is now the far down-town, there are many reminders of those friends whose books are on the most easily reached library shelf.
To No. 10 West Street, that stands on the river front, Robert LouisStevenson was taken by a fellow-voyager in 1879; here he stopped the first night he spent in America, and of this house he wrote in theAmateur Emigrant. From the waterside just at dusk, catching a dim outline of the varying housetops is to glimpse some old castle of feudal times. The lowest building in all this block is No. 10—a meagre, dingy, two-story structure that has come to be very old. The doors and windows seem to have been made for some other building, and to be trying to get back to where they belong, bulging out in the struggle and making rents in the house-front.
No. 10 West St.
Crossing Battery Park to State Street, at No. 17 is the tall Chesebrough building that has sprung up on the spot where William Irving, brother of Washington, lived, and where the Salmagundi witsgathered sometimes in the evening. Two or three doors farther along is a survival of old New York which delights the eye, with its porticoes and oval windows, odd appearing and many-sided; a mansion when wealth and affluence clustered around the Battery. This is the scene of the first few chapters of Bunner'sStory of a New York House. Around the corner and through the wide doors of the Produce Exchange, at the back of that building and literally hidden in the middle of the block, is an old street that seems to have lost its usefulness, a quaint and curious way full half a century and more behind the times, now bearing the name of MarketfieldStreet, but once called Petticoat Lane. It is no longer a thoroughfare, for in its length of half a block it has neither beginning nor end. Here is all that is left of the house in which Julia Ward Howe was born.
Passing along Broad Street, where Edmund C. Stedman, the poet and financier, has an office close to Wall Street, you come in a few minutes to the Custom House. To enter that building is to get lost in a moment. Pass through the door into a veritable trackless wilderness of narrow black halls, with rooms that open in the most unexpected corners, and come after a while to the Debenture Room of old, and to the window near which Richard Henry Stoddard had his desk for close upon twenty years.
Freed from the intricacies of the old building, continue the stroll up-town, and in Park Row, at No. 29,on the third floor, is found the old home of theCommercial Advertiser, where Jesse Lynch Williams worked, and wroteA City Editor's Conscience, and other stories. A little way farther on is theTribunebuilding, where William Winter has his den, and under the same roof the room where Irving Bacheller conducted a newspaper syndicate beforeEben Holdenwas thought of. Then on again a few steps to theSunbuilding and into the room, little changed from the time when Charles A. Dana sat there so many years, and, close by, the reporters' room where Edward W. Townsend worked, and wrote aboutChimmie Fadden. There is a winding staircase, that the uninitiated could never find, leading into the rooms of theEvening Sun, where Richard Harding Davis "reported," and where he conceived some of the Van Bibber stories. Directly acrossthe street is theWorldoffice, and looking from the windows, so high up that the city looks like a Lilliputian village, you have the view that Elizabeth Jordan looked upon during the ten years she was getting inspiration for theTales of a City Room. Down narrow Frankfort Street is Franklin Square, the home ofHarper's Magazine, where George W. Curtis established his Easy Chair in which he was enthroned so long, and which is now occupied by William Dean Howells.
Cherry Street leads out of Franklin Square direct to Corlear's Hook Park. Half a hundred feet before that green spot is reached, in a squalid neighborhood of dirty house-fronts, ragged children, begrimed men, and slovenly women, there is a house numbered 426, above the door of which are the words: "I was sick and ye visited Me." Dwellers in theneighborhood know that this is a hospital for those suffering from incurable disease, but, beyond this, seem to know very little about it. It is the home of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who has given up her entire life to brighten many another. In the same block, but nearer to Scammel Street, which is next towards the south, Brent's foundry used to be in the days when Richard Henry Stoddard was an iron-worker and the friend of Bayard Taylor, whom he visited in Murray Street.
Where "How The Other Half Lives" was written
From this far East Side to Washington Square is quite a distance, but stop half-way at Police Headquarters and the nearby reporters' offices. Any one there will be glad to point out the room where Jacob A. Riis worked so many years and wrote most ofHow the Other Half Lives, andfrom which he carried out his ideas for benefiting the city poor—carried them out so well that President Roosevelt called him New York's most useful citizen.
In Washington Square the wanderer has much to think of in the literary associations recalled by this green garden that has blossomed from a pauper graveyard, and which has been written of by Howells, Brander Matthews, Bayard Taylor, Bunner, Henry James, F. Hopkinson Smith, and almost every writer who has brought New York into fiction.
146 Macdougal St.
From the square, stroll in any direction for definite reminders. Towards the south and around into Macdougal Street, at No. 146, there is a dingy brick house with a trellised portico, where Brander Matthews and his friends used to dine, and which James L. Ford made the Garibaldi of hisBohemia Invaded. Walk towards the east, past the site of the University building, and stand at the Greene Street corner, at No. 21 Washington Place, where Henry James was born. Towards the west a few steps into Waverly Place, at No. 108, is a squat red brick house where Richard Harding Davis wrote his newspaper tales. Across, at the corner, lived George Parsons Lathrop when he wroteBehind Time, and there his wife, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, wroteAlong the Shore. An historic site this house stands on, for it is where Stoddard and Taylor once lived together. A block to the north is old-time Clinton Place, which now,for modern convenience, recking not of memory or of sentiment, has become Eighth Street. There, to the left of Fifth Avenue, at No. 18, is where Paul du Chaillu wroteIvar the Viking, and to the right the house opposite, covered from basement to eaves with green clustering vines, is the home of Richard Watson Gilder.
108 Waverly Place
It is only a question now of crossing half a dozen city blocks towards the east to wander into what was called the Bouwerie Village. Modern streets and modern improvements have so overridden the village of old that traces of it are few and difficult to find. Here in thisdistrict many a writer of New York has lived. At Fourth Avenue and Tenth Street still stands the house, known to all who lived there as "The Deanery," in which Miss Annie Swift kept boarders, and where the family of Richard Henry Stoddard lived during the last four years that Mr. Stoddard held his post in the Custom House. Here Stedman, and Bayard Taylor, and Howells were visitors, with scores of other writers; here Mrs. Stoddard wroteThe Morgensons, and here Stoddard himself wroteThe King's Bell,Melodies and Madrigals, and other poems. Not more than a block away, in the house numbered 118, Richard Grant White had his home when he wroteThe New Gospel of Peace, According to St. Benjamin.
Richard Grant White's Home
Around the corner in Third Avenue, at Thirteenth Street, is a tablet telling of the pear tree that Peter Stuyvesant brought from Holland, that grew and flourished on the edge of the Stuyvesant orchard for more than two hundred years. Within a stone's throw of the tree in the sixties, and while it yet bloomed, Stoddard lived with his friend Bayard Taylor, and here theLife of Humboldtcame from Stoddard's pen. Around another corner into Fourteenth Street and down a block to No. 224, Paul du Chaillu had apartments when hewroteThe Land of the Midnight Sun; but the tree-filled yard and the vine-covered cottage next to it, on which the writer's window looked, are buried beneath a dwelling in the full flush of newness.
In Fifteenth Street, just past Stuyvesant Park, is a really picturesque row of tiny houses that must have been there when Stuyvesant Park was very new indeed. They have balconies enclosed by iron fretwork, and the first in the row is especially dainty and attractive, and quite overshadowed by the lofty building that has grown up beside it. In this out-of-the-way corner the Stoddards lived for something more than a quarter of a century, and here they died, the brilliant son first, then Mrs. Stoddard, and finally Richard Henry Stoddard, in 1903.
Where Richard Henry Stoddard Died
Along the parkside and around the corner to Seventeenth Street, No. 330 was another interesting landmarkuntil, quite lately, it was swept away. Brander Matthews lived there, and could look across the square to the gray towers of St. George's while he wrote theFrench Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century. H.C. Bunner had quarters there when he wroteA Woman of Honorand other stories of that period, and Richard Grant White was a long dweller there.
Northward a few streets, on the south side of Gramercy Park, is the house of John Bigelow, writer of half a dozen important books, who fifty years and more ago assisted William Cullen Bryant in the editorial conduct of theEveningPost. Only a few steps away, in historic Irving Place, the ivy-covered house is where Mrs. Burton Harrison wroteSweet Bells out of Tune, and on another block farther to the south the Lotus Club long had its home, the building now given over to commercial uses.
Where the Author's Club was organized
In the short stretch of Fifteenth Street that leads from Irving Place to Union Square are two points closely associated with the literature of the city. One is midway the distance, the prosaic office of a brewer now, but once the home of the Century Club when Bancroft the historian was its president. The other is nearer to the square, with a tall ironfence, and a gateway not at all in keeping with the modern appearance of the street. Behind the tall fence is a bit of greensward, and beyond that a house quaintly unusual in appearance, seeming to shrink from sight in the shadows cast about it. This is where Richard Watson Gilder at one time lived, where Charles De Kay organized the Authors' Club, and where the Society of American Artists was formed.
Beyond Union Square there is in Eighteenth Street the house numbered 121 where Brander Matthews lived for fourteen or more years, where he wrote many of his books, and where was held the first meeting to organize the American CopyrightLeague. It was Professor Matthews who gave the dinner at which the unique society known as the Kinsmen came into being, at the Florence on the same street at number 105,—an apartment house in which Ellen Glasgow, Elizabeth Bisland, and Edgar Saltus have made their homes, and in which the widow of Herman Melville is now living.
Horace Greeley's Home
In nearby Nineteenth Street is still standing No. 35, a house where Horace Greeley lived, with William Allen Butler, the author ofNothing to Wear, for a next-door neighbor. Three blocks farther on is the big office building where Dr. Josiah Strong wrote most ofOur Country, and where Hamilton W. Mabie has a study in the editorial rooms ofThe Outlook. A few steps farther in Twenty-second Street, at No. 33, Stephen Crane wrote part ofThe Red Badge of Courageand workedon the daily newspapers. Close by in Fifth Avenue is the publishing house where the critic and essayist, William Crary Brownell, author ofFrench Traits, and other works, spends his business hours. Around the corner in Twenty-third Street, on the top floor of another publishing house is the den of the energetic author, editor, and critic, Jeannette L. Gilder. Across Madison Square, at the Twenty-fifth Street corner, Edgar Saltus had apartments for some time, and just off Broadway in Twenty-seventh Street, at No. 26, Edgar Fawcett wroteA Mild Barbarian.
On up Madison Avenue past Twenty-eighth Street is a brownstone dwelling with a luxuriantly blooming window garden, where James Lane Allen lives when he is in town and revises his writings. A few steps into the next thoroughfarethe Little Church Around the Corner nestles in a populous district, and in the next block, just beyond the Woman's Hotel, Mrs. Burton Harrison has written many of her books. Two blocks away, in theLifebuilding, John A. Mitchell, founder of the paper, spends several working hours of each day.
Going farther up-town in Park Avenue just beyond Thirty-sixth Street is a substantial building where Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland wrote and where he died. In nearby Thirty-seventh Street hover memories of Parke Godwin, who married the daughter of William Cullen Bryant, and whose business and literary interests were closely entwined with those of his father-in-law. A few steps westward is the solemnly quiet Brick Presbyterian Church, where Dr. Henry van Dyke preached before he was called to Princeton.Turning into Forty-sixth Street, note a house distinguished from its neighbors by a doorway of wrought-iron, where John A. Mitchell did much of the writing ofAmos Judd.
The Beekman Mansion near 52nd St. [Transcriber's Note: 51st St.] East River
Across town, where Fifty-first Street touches the East River, is a street so short and so out-of-the-way that few New Yorkers have ever heard of it. It is called Beekman Place, and in it survives the memory of the old Beekman house which stood near by, and which in the days of the Revolution was used as a British headquarters. It was in theBeekman house that Nathan Hale rested his last night on earth. Here in this quiet spot Henry Harland lived in the eighties, when he was employed in the Register's Office and got up at two o'clock many and many a morning to write (under the name of Sidney Luska) some of his earlier books. The windows of his home looked out upon a beautiful and unusual city scene. Any one going now to where Fifty-first Street ends at an embankment high above the river may see it just as he saw it then—see the waves splashing on a rocky shore, with neither docks nor wharves nor factories to interfere; see a broad river; see a green island with stone turreted towers, and in the distance, forming a background, the irregular sky-line of the Brooklyn borough shore.
Farther up-town to Central Park, and there on the south side is themammoth apartment house close to Sixth Avenue, where William Dean Howells did much of his work; and on beyond the avenue, at No. 150, Kate Douglas Wiggin evolvedPenelope's Experiences. Still on up-town, following the easterly side of the park, in Sixty-fourth Street, at No. 16, Carl Schurz lived, and in Seventy-seventh Street is the square house of stone where Paul Leicester Ford met such a fearful death.
Crossing Central Park to the far west side, the journeyer comes to wide, tree-lined West End Avenue, and there at Ninety-third Street, almost upon the shores of the Hudson River, in a locality of beautiful homes, Brander Matthews, author ofVignettes of ManhattanandA Confident To-morrow, lives and works. Returning down-town on the westerly side of the city, stop just beyond Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-sixthStreet before a house, colonial as to its doors and windows at least, the home of that distinguished naval officer and writer, Captain A.T. Mahan. On the nearest corner is the church where funeral services were held over Paul du Chaillu when his body was brought back from Russia. Down a few streets, John Denison Champlin, author and encyclopædist, has his home, in a yellow apartment house, and half a block along Seventy-eighth Street stands the terra cotta building occupied by Stedman before he moved to Bronxville. Down to Sixty-fifth Street now, a dozen steps or more west of Central Park, EdgarFawcett conceivedA Romance of Old New York, before going to Europe for an indefinite stay.
Lawrence Hutton's House
In Thirty-fourth Street, midway between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, visit the solid little brick house, with green shutters and an air of dignity that proclaims it of another time. This has stood for three quarters of a century and at one time had no neighbors. There, until 1898, when he went to Princeton, Lawrence Hutton gathered his collection of objects artistic from all parts of the world; there he kept his assortment of death masks; there he wrote and entertained his friends, authors, actors, men of different callings.
Let the last step be to that reminder of old Chelsea Village, in Twenty-third Street beyond Ninth Avenue, called London Terrace. The Terrace was built when Chelsea was really a village, and exists to-daylong after the village has ceased to have an identity. One house in the row, No. 413, is particularly interesting, picturesquely and historically, carrying as its literary association the name of Charles De Kay, critic and author—a name of to-day and of the past as well, for he is the grandson of the poet, Joseph Rodman Drake.
De Kay's House—London Terrace