It is still remembered that some little houses at the farther end of Gay Street, on Christopher, were occupied by a little colony of hand-loom weavers from Scotland, who there looked out from these “windows in Thrums.”[72]
It is still remembered that some little houses at the farther end of Gay Street, on Christopher, were occupied by a little colony of hand-loom weavers from Scotland, who there looked out from these “windows in Thrums.”[72]
Around two corners from this spot is a curiously picturesque little bit caused by the street changes of a century ago. It is Patchin Place, opening from Tenth Street opposite Jefferson Market. The place is a cul-de-sac, with a double row of little three-story houses, each looking just like the other, of yellow-painted brick. Each house has a little area space, each front door is up two steps from its narrow sidewalk. Each door is of a futuristic green. Each has its ailantus-tree, making the little nooked place a delightful bower.
Immediately around the corner is the still more curious Milligan Place, a spot more like a bit of old London than any other in New York. It is a little nestled space, entered by a barely gate-wide opening from the busy Sixth Avenue sidewalk. Inside it expands a trifle, just sufficiently to permit the existence of four little houses, built close against one another. So narrowly does an edge of brick building come down beside the entrance that it is literally only the width of the end of the bricks.
In an instant, going through the entrance that you might pass a thousand times without noticing, you are miles away, you are decades away, in a fragment of an old lost lane.
Near by, where Sixth Avenue begins, there is still projective from an old-time building the sign of the Golden Swan, a lone survival of long ago. And this is remindful of thecigar-store Indians. Only yesterday they were legion, now a vanished race. And the sidewalk clocks that added such interest to the streets, they, too, have gone, banished by city ordinance.
The conjunction of Seventh Avenue and Greenwich Avenue and Eleventh Street makes a triangle, at the sharp point of which is a small, low, and ancient building, fittingly given over to that ancient and almost vanished trade, horseshoeing. A little brick building with outside wooden stair stands against and above it as the triangle widens, and then comes an ancient building a little taller still. And this odd conglomerate building was all, so you will be told, built in the good old days for animal houses for one of the earliest menageries! Next came a period of stage-coaches, with horses housed here. And, as often in New York, a great shabbiness accompanies the old. Within the triangle, inside of a tall wooden fence, are several ancient ailantus trees, remindful that long ago New York knew this locality as—name full of pleasant implications—“Ailanthus Gardens.” And every spring Ailanthus Gardens, oblivious to forgetfulness and shabbiness, still bourgeons green and gay.
An old man, a ghost-of-the-past old man, approached, and, seeing that we were interested, said abruptly, unexpectedly, “That's Bank Street over there, where the banks and the bankers came,” thus taking the mind far back to the time of a yellow-fever flight from what was then the distant city to what was in reality Greenwich.
Only a block from here, on Seventh Avenue, is a highly picturesque survival, a long block of three-story dwellings all so uniformly balconied, from first floor to roof-line, across the entire fronts, that you see nothing but balconies, with their three stories fronted with eyelet-pattern balustrades. In front of all the houses is an open grassy space, and up the face of the balconies run old wistaria-vines. Each house, through the crisscrossing of upright and lateral lines, is fronted with nine open square spaces, like Brobdingnagian pigeon-holes.
On West Eleventh Street is a row almost identical in appearance. If you follow Eleventh Street eastward, and find that it does not cut across Broadway, you will remember that this comes from the efforts of Brevoort, an early landowner, to save a grand old tree that stood there. And then Grace Church gained possession, and the street remained uncut.
A most striking vanishing hereabouts has been of the hotels. What an interesting group they were in this part of Broadway! Even the old Astor, far down town, has gone, only a wrecked and empty remnant remaining.
But a neighbor of the Astor House is an old-time building whose loss, frequently threatened, every one who loves noble and beautiful architecture would deplore—the more than century-old city hall, which still dominates its surroundings, as it has always dominated, even though now the buildings round about are of towering height.
Time-mellowed, its history has also mellowed, with myriad associations and happenings and tales. That a man who was to become Mayor of New York (it was Fernando Wood) made his first entry into the city as the hind leg of an elephant of a traveling show, and in that capacity passed for the first time the city hall, is a story that out-Whittingtons Whittington.[73]
And noblest and finest of all the associations with the city hall is one which has to do with a time before the city hall arose; for here, on the very spot where it stands, George Washington paraded his little army on a July day in 1776, and with grave solemnity, while they listened in a solemnity as grave, a document was read to them that had just been received from Philadelphia and which was forever to be known as the Declaration of Independence.
It used to be, three quarters of a century ago, that people could go northward from the city hall on the New York and Harlem Railway, which built its tracks far down in this direction. It used the Park Avenue tunnel, which had been built in 1837 for the first horse-car line in the world. After the railway made Forty-second Street its terminal, horse-cars again went soberly through the tunnel. What a pleasure to remember the tinkle, tinkle as they came jerkily jogging through, from somewhere up Harlemward, and, with quirky variety as to course, to an end somewhere near University Place! A most oddly usable line.
A few minutes' walk from University Place is one of the most fascinating spots in New York—“St. Mark's in the Bouwerie,” although it is actually on Second Avenue and Stuyvesant Street.
The church was built in 1799, but it stands on property that the mighty Petrus Stuyvesant[74]owned, and on the site of a chapel that he built, and his tomb is beneath the pavement of the church, and the tombstone is set in the foundation-wall on the eastern side. There is an excellent bronze close by, fittingly made in Holland, of this whimsical, irascible, kind-hearted, clear-headed captain-general and governor who ruled this New Amsterdam. Nothing else in the city so gives the smack of age, the relish of the saltness of time, as this old church built on Stuyvesant's land and holding his bones. For Stuyvesant was born when Elizabeth reigned in England and when Henry of Navarre, with his white plume, was King of France. The great New-Yorker was born in the very year that “Hamlet” was written.[75]
He loved his city, and lived here after the English came and conquered him and seized the colony.
This highly pictorial old church, broad-fronted, pleasant-porticoed, stands within a great open graveyard space, green with grass and sweetly shaded, and its aloofness and beauty are markedly enhanced by its being set high above the level of the streets.
On Lafayette Street, once Lafayette Place, a quarter of a mile from St. Mark's, still stands the deserted Astor Library, just bought by the Y. M. H. A. as a home for immigrants, built three quarters of a century ago for permanence, but now empty and bare and grim, shorn of its Rialto-like[76]steps, with closed front, as if harboring secrets behind its saddening inaccessibility. Once-while stately gate-posts and gateway, now ruinous, beside the library building, marked the driveway entrance of a long-vanished Astor home.
All is dreary, dismal, desolate, and the color of the Venetian-like building has become a sad combination of chocolate brown and dull red.
The tens of thousands of books from here, the literature and art of the Lenox collection, and the fine foundation of Tilden are united at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. From what differing sources did these three mighty foundations spring! One from the tireless industry of a great lawyer;[77]one from a far-flung fur trade that over a century ago reached through trackless wilderness to the Pacific;[78]one from a fortune wrung by exactions from American soldiers of the Revolution, prisoners of war, who paid all they had in the hope of alleviating their suffering—a fortune inherited by a man who studied to put it out for the benefit of mankind in broad charity and helpfulness, in hospitals and colleges, and in his library, left for public use.[79]
With the old Astor Library so stripped and deserted, one wonders if a similar fate awaits the stately and palatial building to which it has gone. Will the new building someday vanish? And similarly the superb and mighty structures that have in recent years come in connection with the city's northern sweep?
A curious fate has attended the Lenox Library property. Given to the city, land and building and contents, the land and building were sold into private ownership when the consolidation of libraries was decided upon. The granite stronghold, built to endure forever, was razed, and where it had stood arose the most beautiful home in New York, which, gardened in boxwood, its owner filled with priceless treasures. And now he is dead, and again the land, a building, and costly contents are willed to the city.
Across from the old Astor Library stood Colonnade Row, a long and superb line of pillar-fronted grandeur; but only a small part now remains, with only a few of the fluted Corinthian pillars. All is shabby and forlorn, but noble even in shabbiness. And the remnant, one thinks, must shortly fall a victim to the destructive threat that hangs over everything in our city.
Colonnade Row was built in the eighteen twenties. Washington Irving lived there. One gathers the impression that Irving, named after Washington, lived in as many houses as those in which Washington slept. In the row occurred the wedding of President Tyler,[80]an event not characterized by modest shrinking from publicity, for after the ceremony the President and his bride were driven down Broadway in an open carriage, drawn by four horses, to the Battery, whence a boat rowed them out to begin their married life on—of all places!—a ship of war!
It is interesting to find two Virginia-born Presidents of the United States coming to Lafayette Street; for here dwelt Monroe,[81]he of the “Doctrine,” during the latter part of his life, at what is now the northwest corner of Lafayette Street and Prince; and he died there. Long since the house fell into sheer dinginess and wreck, and a few months agowas sold to be demolished; but New York may feel pride in her connection with the American who, following Washington's example, declared against “entangling ourselves in the broils of Europe, or suffering the powers of the old world to interfere with the affairs of the new.”
Near this house Monroe was buried, in the Marble Cemetery on Second Street, beyond Second Avenue, a spot with high open iron fence in front and high brick wall behind, with an atmosphere of sedateness and repose, although a tenement district has come round about. Monroe's body lay here for a quarter of a century, and then Virginia belatedly carried it to Virginian soil.
Close by, entered through a narrow tunnel-like entrance at 41-1/2 Second Avenue, is another Marble Cemetery (the Monroe burying-place is the New York City Marble Cemetery, and this other is the New York Marble Cemetery), and this second one is quite hidden away in inconspicuousness, as befits a place which, according to a now barely decipherable inscription, was established as “a place of interment for gentlemen,” surely the last word in exclusiveness!
Across the street from the entrance to this cemetery for gentlemen is a church for the common people, one of the pleasant surprises of a kind which one frequently comes upon in New York—a building really distinguished in appearance, yet not noticed or known. A broad flight of steps stretches across the broad church front. There are tall pillars and pilasters, excellent iron fencing and gateway. The interior is all of the color of pale ivory, with much of classic detail and with a “Walls-of-Troy” pattern along the gallery. There were a score of such classic churches in New York early in the last century.
Always in finding the unexpected there is charm, as when, the other day, we came by the merest chance upon “Extra Place”! What a name! It is a little court nooked out of First Street,—how many New Yorkers know that there is a First Street in fact and not merely in theory?—between Second and Third avenues. Extra Place is a stone's throw in length, a forgotten bit of forlornness, but at its end, beyondsheds and tall board fencing, are suggestions of pleasant homes of a distant past, great fireplace chimneys and queer windows, and an old shade tree, and under the tree a brick-paved walk, formal in its rectangle, where happy people walked in the long ago, and where once a garden smiled, but where now no kind of flower grows wild.
The tree of the New York tenements is the ailantus, palm-like in its youth, brought originally from China for the gardens of the rich. It grows in discouraging surroundings, is defiant of smoke, does not even ask to be planted; for, Topsy-like, it “jest grows.” Cut it down, and it comes up again. It is said to have no insect enemies. An odd point in its appearance is that every branch points up.
The former extraordinary picturesqueness of the waterfront has gone; but still there is much there that is strange, and a general odor of oakum and tar remains. And, leading back from the East-Side waterfront, narrow, ancient lanes have been preserved, and by these one may enter the old-time warehouse portion of the city, where still the permeative smell of drugs or leather or spice differentiates district from district.
Vanished is many a delightful old name. Pie Woman's Lane became Nassau Street. Oyster Pasty Alley became Exchange Alley. Clearly, early New Yorkers were a gustatory folk.
A notable vanishing has within a few months come to Wall Street itself—the vanishing of the last outward and visible sign of the feud of Alexander Hamilton[18] and Aaron Burr.[82]Hamilton was the leading spirit in establishing one bank in the city, and Burr, through a clause in a water-company charter, established another, and through all these decades the banks have been rivals. Now they have united their financial fortunes and become one bank.
An interesting rector of Trinity Church, which looks in such extraordinary fashion into the narrow gorge of Wall
Street, became over a century ago Bishop of New York, Benjamin Moore, and he is chiefly interesting, after all, through his early connection with the then distant region still known as Chelsea, in the neighborhood of Twenty-third Street and the North River, where he acquired great land-holdings that had been owned by the English naval captain who had made his home here and given the locality its name.
Chelsea still holds its own as an interesting neighborhood, mainly because of its possession of the General Theological Seminary, which has attracted and held desirable people and given an atmosphere of quiet seclusion.
The seminary buildings occupy the entire block between Ninth and Tenth avenues and Twentieth and Twenty-first streets. They are largely of English style, and there are long stretches of ten-foot garden wall. Now and then a mortar-boarded student strides hurriedly across an open space, and now and then a professor paces portentously. The buildings are mostly of brick, but the oldest is an odd-looking structure of silver-gray stone. The varied structures unite in effective conjunction. It may be mentioned that, owing to a Vanderbilt who looked about for something which in his opinion would set the seminary in the front rank, its library possesses more ancient Latin Bibles, so it is believed, than does even the Bodleian.[83]
The chapel stands in the middle of the square, and above it rises a square Magdalen-like tower,[84]softened by ivy; and, following a beautiful old custom as it has been followed since the tower was built, capped and gowned students gather at sunrise on Easter morning on the top of this tall tower and sing ancient chorals to the music of trombone and horn.
Chelsea ought to be the most home-like region in New York on account of its connection with Christmas; for ason of Bishop Moore, Clement C. Moore,[85]who gave this land to the seminary, and made his own home in Chelsea, wrote the childhood classic, “'Twas the night before Christmas.”
In this old-time neighborhood stand not only houses, but long-established little shops. One for drugs, for example, is marked as dating back to 1839. But, after all, that is not so old as a great Fifth Avenue shop which was established in 1826. However, there is this difference: the Chelsea shops are likely to be on the very spots where they were first opened, whereas the great shop of Fifth Avenue has reached its location by move after move, from its beginning on Grand Street, when that was the fashionable shopping street of the city.
In Chelsea are still to be found the old pineapple-topped newel-posts of wrought iron, like openwork urns; there are old houses hidden erratically behind those on the street-front. One in particular remains in mind, a large old-fashioned dwelling, now reached only by a narrow and built-over passage, a house that looks like a haunted house, from its desolate disrepair, its lost loneliness of location.
Chelsea is a region of yellow cats and green shutters, shabby green on the uncared for and fresh green for the well kept. Old New York used typically to temper the dog-days behind green slat shutters, or under shop awnings stretched to the curb, and with brick sidewalks, sprinkled in the early afternoon from a sprinkling-can in the 'prentice hand.
One of the admirable old houses of Chelsea is that where dwelt that unquiet spirit, Edwin Forrest,[86]the actor. It is at 436 West Twenty-second Street, a substantial-looking, square-fronted house, with a door of a great single panel. And the interior is notable for the beautiful spiral stair that figured in court in his marital troubles.
There are in Chelsea two more than usually delightfulresidential survivals, with the positively delightful old names of Chelsea Cottages and London Terrace. The cottages are on Twenty-fourth Street, and the Terrace is on Twenty-third, and each is between Ninth and Tenth avenues, and both were built three quarters of a century ago.
The cottages are alternating three-story and two-story houses, built tightly shoulder to shoulder, astonishingly narrow-fronted, each with a grassy space in front. Taken together, they make one of the last stands on Manhattan of simple and modest and concerted picturesque living.
The Terrace is a highly distinguished row of high-pilastered houses, set behind grassy, deep dooryards. There are precisely eighty-eight three-and-a-half-story pilasters on the front of this stately row. The houses have a general composite effect of yellowish gray. They are built on the London plan of the drawing-room on the second floor, so that those that live there “go down to dinner.” The drawing-rooms are of pleasant three-windowed spaciousness, extending across each house-front.
The terrace is notable in high-stooped New York in having the entrance-doors on virtually the sidewalk level. That the familiar and almost omnipresent high-stooped houses of the nineteenth century ought all to have been constructed without the long flight of outside stone steps characteristic of the city is shown by a most interesting development on East Nineteenth Street, between Third Avenue and Irving Place. There the houses have been excellently and artistically remodeled, with highly successful and highly satisfactory results. With comparatively slight cost, there has been alteration of commonplaceness into beauty.
The high front steps have been removed, and the front doors put down to where they ought to be. Most of the house-fronts have been given a stucco coat, showing what could be done with myriad commonplace houses of the city.
The houses are colorfully painted tawny red or cream or gray or pale pink or an excellent shade of brown. You think of it as the happiest-looking street in New York. Solid shutters add their effect, some the green of bronze patina. Thereare corbeled gables. Some of the roofs are red-tiled. Two little two-story stables have been transformed by little Gothic doors. There are vines. There are box-bushes. There are flowers in terra-cotta boxes on low area walls. Here and there is a delightful little iron balcony, here and there a gargoyle. On one roof two or three storks are gravely standing! There are charming area-ways, and plane-trees have been planted for the entire block. And here the vanishing is of the undesirable.
On Stuyvesant Square, near by, are the Quaker buildings, standing in an atmosphere of peace which they themselves have largely made—buildings of red brick with white trimmings, and with a fine air of gentleness and repose; a little group that, so one hopes, is very far indeed from the vanishing point.
And there is fine old Gramercy Park, whose dignified homes in the past were owned by men of the greatest prominence. Many of the great homes still remain, and the central space, tall, iron-fenced, is still exclusively locked from all but the privileged, the dwellers in the houses on the park. And there, amid the grass and the trees, sedate little children, with little white or black dogs, play sedately for hours.
We went for luncheon, with two recent woman's college graduates, all familiar with New York, into the club house that was the home of Samuel J. Tilden. Our companions were unusually excellent examples of the best that the colleges produce; they were of American ancestry. But any New-Yorker will feel that much of the spirit of the city has vanished, that much of the honored and intimate tradition has gone, when we say that, it being mentioned that this had been the Tilden home, it developed that neither of them had ever heard of Samuel J. Tilden.
1. Things That Have Vanished11. A Trip About Town2. My Own Town Years Ago12. Some Curious Buildings3. Old Buildings13. The Highway4. The People of a Former Day14. The Founding of My Town5. Legacies15. Early Settlers6. Street Names16. My Ancestors7. The Story of a Street17. Family Relics8. The Story of an Old House18. A Walk in the Country9. The Farm19. The Making of a City10. Eternal Change20. Main Street
1. Things That Have Vanished11. A Trip About Town2. My Own Town Years Ago12. Some Curious Buildings3. Old Buildings13. The Highway4. The People of a Former Day14. The Founding of My Town5. Legacies15. Early Settlers6. Street Names16. My Ancestors7. The Story of a Street17. Family Relics8. The Story of an Old House18. A Walk in the Country9. The Farm19. The Making of a City10. Eternal Change20. Main Street
Your object is not to tell what you do on any walk that you choose to take, nor is it to tell what you see. You are not to try to inform people concerning facts. You are to give them pleasing impressions that come to you as you meditate on something that has changed.
In order to do this you must, first of all, have a real experience, both in visiting a place and in feeling emotion. Then you must make a plan for your writing, so that you will take your reader just as easily and just as naturally as possible over the ground that you wish him to visit in imagination.
Make many allusions to people, to books, to events, and to anythingelse that will bring back the past vividly. Make that past appear in all its charm. You can do this best if your emotion is real, and if you pay considerable attention to your style of writing. Use many adjectives and adjective expressions. Above all, try to find words that will be highly suggestive.