VANISHING NEW YORK

By ROBERT and ELIZABETH SHACKLETON

Robert Shackleton (1860—) and his wife, Elizabeth Shackleton, have written much in collaboration. Among such works are:The Quest of the Colonial; Adventures in Home Making; The Charm of the Antique.Mr. Shackleton was at one time associate editor ofThe Saturday Evening Post.He is the author of many books, among which areTouring Great Britain; History of Harper's Magazine,andThe Book of New York.

Washington Irving'sSketch Booktells of Irving's delighted wanderings around old London, and of his interest in streets and buildings that awoke memories of the past.Vanishing New Yorkis an essay that corresponds closely with the essays written by Irving so many years ago. In this modern essay Robert and Elizabeth Shackleton tell of their wanderings about old New York, of odd streets, curious buildings, and romantic and historic associations. The essay gives to New York an interest that makes it, in the eyes of the reader, as fascinating as Irving's old London.The writers do more than tell the story of a walk about New York, and much more than merely name and describe the places they saw. By a skilful use of adjectives, and by an interested suggestiveness, they throw over the places they mention an atmosphere of charm. We feel that we are with them, enjoying and loving the curious old places that seem so destined to vanish forever.What is left of old New York that is quaint and charming? The New York of the eighties and earlier, of Henry James,[65]of Gramercy Park, Washington and Stuyvesant squares, quaint old houses on curious by-streets? The period of perhaps a more beautiful and certainly a more leisurely existence? All places of consequence and interest that remain to-day are herewith described.

The writers do more than tell the story of a walk about New York, and much more than merely name and describe the places they saw. By a skilful use of adjectives, and by an interested suggestiveness, they throw over the places they mention an atmosphere of charm. We feel that we are with them, enjoying and loving the curious old places that seem so destined to vanish forever.

What is left of old New York that is quaint and charming? The New York of the eighties and earlier, of Henry James,[65]of Gramercy Park, Washington and Stuyvesant squares, quaint old houses on curious by-streets? The period of perhaps a more beautiful and certainly a more leisurely existence? All places of consequence and interest that remain to-day are herewith described.

To one, vanishing New York means a little box garden up in the Bronx, glimpsed just as the train goes into the subway. To another, it is a fan-light on Horatio Street; an old cannon, planted muzzle downward at a curb-edge; a long-watched, ancient mile-stone; a well; a water-tank boundup in a bank charter; a Bowling Green sycamore; an ailantus beside the twin French houses of crooked Commerce Street. And what a pang to find an old landmark gone! To another it is the sad little iron arch of the gate of old St. John's at the end of the once-while quaint St. John's Place, all that is now left of the beautiful pillared and paneled old church and its English-made wrought-iron fence. To many it is the loss of the New York sky-line, one of the wonders of the world—lost, for it has vanished from sight. Now the sky-line is to be seen only from the water, and the city is no longer approached by water except by a few; but is entered under the rivers on each side, by tunnels down into which the human currents are plunged. A positive thrill, a morning-and-evening thrill that was almost a worship of the noble and the beautiful, used to sweep over the packed thousands on the ferry-boats as they gazed at the sky-line.

It is extraordinary how swiftly New York destroys and rebuilds. There is the story of a distinguished visitor who, driven uptown on the forenoon of his arrival, was, on his departure in the late afternoon of the same day, driven downtown over the same route in order that he might see what changes had meanwhile taken place. The very first vessel built in New York—it was three hundred years ago—was named in the very spirit of prophecy, for it was called theOnrust(Restless).

Yet it is astonishing how much of interest remains in this iconoclastic city, although almost everything remains under constant threat of destruction. Far over toward the North River is one of the threatened survivals. It is shabby, ancient; indeed, it has been called the oldest building in New York, though nothing certain is known beyond 1767. But it is very old, and may easily date much further back. It is called the Clam Broth House, and is on Weehawken Street, which, closely paralleling West Street, holds its single block of length north from Christopher. It is a lost and forgotten street, primitively cobblestoned with the worst pavement in New York, and it holds several lost and forlorn old houses—low-built houses, with great broad, sweeping roofsreaching almost to the ground, houses tremulous with age. Of these the one now called the Clam Broth House, low, squat, broad-roofed, is the oldest. In a sense the fronts are on West Street, but all original characteristics have there been bedizenedly lost, and the ancient aspect is on Weehawken Street.

These were fishermen's houses in ancient days, waterside houses; for West Street is filled-in ground, and the broad expanse of shipping space out beyond the street is made land. When these houses were built, the North River reached their doors, and, so tradition has it, fishermen actually rowed their boats and drew their shad-seines beneath this Clam Broth House.

Of a far different order of interest is a demure little church, neat and trim, on Hudson street. It is built of brick, bright red, with long red wings stretching oddly away from the rear, with a low, squat tower of red, and in the midst of gray old houses that hover around in fading respectability. It is St. Luke's, is a century old, and with it is connected the most charming custom of New York.

In 1792 a certain John Leake died, leaving a sum to Trinity Church for the giving forever, to “such poor as shall appear most deserving,” as many “six-penny wheaten loaves” as the income would buy, and this sweet and simple dole has ever since been regularly administered, and it will go on through the centuries, like the ancient English charity at Winchester, where for eight hundred years bread and ale have been given.

But there is one strictly New York feature about this already old Leake dole that differentiates it from the dole of Winchester, for it is still at the original wicket that the Winchester dole is given. There the custom was instituted, and there it has continued through all these centuries. But in New York the dole began at Trinity, but after something more than half a century, as population left the neighborhood of Trinity, the dole was transferred to St. John's, on Varick Street, once known as “St. John's in the Fields,” and now, after more than another half-century, there has come stillanother removal, and the dole is given at quaint old St. Luke's. Thus it has already had three homes, and one wonders how many it will have as the decades and the centuries move on. One pictures it peripatetically proceeding hither and thither as further changes come upon the city, the dole for the poor that never vanish.

A short distance south from St. Luke's, on the opposite side of Hudson Street, is an open space that is a public playground and a public garden. It was a graveyard, but a few years ago the city decreed that it should vanish, with the exception of a monument put up to commemorate the devotion of firemen who gave their lives for duty in a fire of the long ago. It was not the graveyard of St. Luke's, although near, but of farther away St. John's; and it is pleasant to remember that it was in walking to and fro among the now vanished graves and tombs that Edgar Allan Poe[66]composed his “Raven.”

Cheerful in its atmosphere—but perhaps this is largely from its name—is short little Gay Street, leading from Waverley Place, just around the corner from Sixth Avenue. Immediately beyond this point—for much of the unexpected still remains in good old Greenwich Village—Waverley becomes, by branching, a street with four sidewalks; for both branches hold the name of Waverley. It is hard for people of to-day to understand the power of literature in the early half of the last century, when Washington Irving[67]was among the most prominent citizens, and James Fenimore Cooper[68]was publicly honored, and admirers of the Waverley Novels made successful demand on the aldermen to change the name of Sixth Street, where it left Broadway, to Waverley Place, and to continue it beyond Sixth Avenue, discarding another name on the way, and at this forking-point to do away with both Catharine and Elizabeth streets in order to give Waverley its four sidewalks. Could this be done in these later days with the names, say of Howells[69]or of Hopkinson Smith![70]Does any one ever propose to have an “O” put before Henry Street![71]

At the forking-point is a triangular building, archaic in aspect, and very quiet. It is a dispensary, and an ancient jest of the neighborhood is, when some stranger asks if it has patients, to reply, “It doesn't need 'em; it's got money.”

Gay Street is miniature; its length isn't long and its width isn't wide. It is a street full of the very spirit of old Greenwich, or, rather, of the old Ninth Ward; for thus the old inhabitants love to designate the neighborhood, some through not knowing that it was originally Greenwich Village, and a greater number because they are not interested in the modern development, poetic, artistic, theatric, empiric, romantic, sociologic, but are proud of the honored record of the district as the most American ward of New York City.

In an apartment overlooking a Gay Street corner there died last year a man who had rented there for thirty-four years. There loomed practical difficulties for the final exit, the solution involving window and fire-escape. But the landlord, himself born there, said, “No; he has always gone in and out like a gentleman, and he shall still go out, for the last time, as a gentleman,” thereupon he called in carpenter and mason to cut the wall.

Then some old resident will tell you, pointing out house by house and name by name, where business men, small manufacturers, politicians, and office-holders dwelt. And, further reminiscent, he will tell of how, when a boy, at dawn on each Fourth of July, he used to get out his toy cannon andfire it from a cellar entrance (pointing to the entrance), and how one Fourth the street was suddenly one shattering crash, two young students from the old university across Washington Square having experimentally tossed to the pavement from their garret window a stick of what was then “a new explosive, dynamite.” No sane and safe Fourths then!

ilop185(page 185)“It has been called the oldest building in New York.”

(page 185)

“It has been called the oldest building in New York.”

Back to Index Next