NEW YORK WS FICTION ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, COPYRIGHT OFFICE. No registration of title of this book as a preliminary to copyright protec- tion has been found. JAN 2 1903 Forwarded to Order Division j^__— 2_-1902-~ ( 1 Hi 1 6 } *m ^~ C\ (Apr. 5, 1901— 5,000.) SS&eRffiaaBBBBBaHBBHHaHBB&SSB^ Safe ■<*mz CANNOT LEAVE THE LIBRARY. Chap Shelf Co COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. g| LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, g , NEW YORK IN FICTION NEW YORK IN FICTION By ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE 1LLUSTR A I E 1) NEW YORK • DO I) D, M E A I) A N I) CO M PA NY ■ M DCCCC J Copyright i8qq, /goo, by Dodo, Mead and Company Library of Congress Two Copies Received FEB 18 190? riRsr copy UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON AND SON ■ CAMBRIDGE, IT. S. A. To MY SISTER INTRODUCTORY AS the years pass it is becoming gen- erally understood that the greal American novel, of which we have heard so much and for which we have been waiting so Long, must be in every sense free from provincialism and local- ism. For instance, it cannot be distinct- ively a story of the Creoles of Louisiana, or of Greorgia plantation life, or of the Crackers of North Carolina, or of the ranch, the mining-camp, the chaparral, or of the people of Maine, or of the people of Western New York. There must be a broad canvas: it must deal with the great common principles of our national life; its characters must be Americans, not Yirginians or Texans or Kansans or Georgians. The many novels of recent i.\ IN TROD UCTOE Y years which have been hailed as the great American novel — King Noanett and Hugh Wynne and, of late, Richard Carre! and Jan ire Meredith and To Hart and to Hold — all have dealt with periods when American life was confined to a region that extended only a few hundred miles inland from the Atlantic coast. The vastness, the complexity of modern life, were absent. The Civil War is to all practical purposes a virgin literary field. The stories that we have had of it have been almost entirely tales of the battle- field, the camp, the bivouac, — all trumpet call and smoke and cannon glare ; the life behind we have not seen, nor the wide and tremendous moral and geographical sweep of that struggle, nor its influence on homely destinies, on obscure lives. For instance, to take up a tale that is old and yet ever new, the marvel of Vanity Fair is in the manner in which Thackeray bound up the life of an insignificant little English girl, living quietly by Blooms- in Tito i> re to it v bury Square, in the last fateful rush of the Imperial eagles. Indeed, an Ameri- can novelist mighl do worse than boldly to take a few ideas from the Waterloo chapters and paint for us the rout of senators, congressmen, lobbyists, adven- turesses — the pageanl of frills and furbe- lows and champagne hampers moving out gaily from Washington to the battle- field of Bull Run, which was to be a spectacle, a sort of opera bouffe — with just enough of carnage and bloodshed to stimulate properly the emotions; then, later, the horror, the grim humour of that frenzied flight. CONTENTS I \ ruoDuc roRY I'aki I. oi.i) am> Proletarian Niw York I. The Novelisl Topographically Considered . II. aIm.ui tli.' Battery, Bowling Green and Lower Broadway I I I. Park Row in Fiction IV. The Politician as Literary Material . . . V. The Great East Side ....... Part II. About Washington Square 1. 'I'll.' Historical Novel of the future .... 1 1 . Washington Square III. Bohemia IV. The New York of Davis and Fawcetl . ■ • V. Gramercy Park, Second Avenue and Colonel Carter's Haunts Part III The X i w City and Suburban New Vi IRK I. Neglected Phases of New York Life . • • II About Madison Square III. The Park and the Upper East and West Sides [V Harlem Heights and Westchester .... V. Greenpoint, Staten Island, and New Jersey I i 45 CI 89 94 10(J 120 129 153 l.;;. 177 [89 213 ILLUSTRATIONS Page "The walls of tin- church dimly glaring under the trees beyond." — Irving' & " Legend o) Sleepy Hollow" Frontispieci The Heart of the Old City 5 " The little red box of Vesey Street." — Bunner r> Jacob Dolph's House, No. 7 State Street. — Bunner .... 19 Home of the Lauderdales. — F. Marion Crawford's " Katherim Lauderdalt "and" Tin lialstons" 25 Printing-House Square and Park Row 33 TheCity Editor's Desk. — ./. I. Williams's" Tfn City Editor's ( 'onscit net " 37 Monkey Hill 41 " A little park, too small to be called a square, even if its shape had qoI been a triangle." — /'. L. Foul's " Th( Honourabh Peter Stirling" 55 Saloon <>t Dennis Moriart\ 58 The Niautic, Exchange Place. — Toionsend's "A Daughter of tin T( I" mi /'is " 59 Case's Tenement, Hester Street. — Richard Harding Davis . 62 " Big Barracks " Tenement, Eorsythe Street. — Jul inn Ralph's " Peoph W' Pass " 65 Pay-Day in the Sweatshop. — Cahan's " YeH" 71 The Greal Synagogue of tin- Ghetto, Norfolk Street — Cahan's " Tkt Imported Bridegroom " 7.'? Study rooms, the Great Synagogue, Norfolk Street. — Cahan's " I If Imported Bridegroom " 75 The Church where the White slaw-- died, Mutt and Park Street-. — Townsend's " II" Houst of Yellow /•' . 77 xv ILLUSTRATIONS Page " The House of Yellow Brick," Pell Street. — E. W. Townsend 80 " A narrow, worn pair of stone steps running up alongside an old three-story brick building." — Townsend's "A Daughter of the Tenements" 82 Newsboys' Lodging House, where Townsend found " Chimrnie Fadden " 84 The Sloper Residence. — //tiny James's " Washington Square " 9G The Monastery — Washington Square. — Robert Chambers's " Outsiders" and " The King in Yellow" 101 Captain Peters's Home — Washington Square — Bunner's " The Midgt " 104 Chrysalis College. — Theodore Winthrop's " Cecil Iheeme" . 107 The Garibaldi's Barred Window. — James L. Fold's " Bohemia Invaded" 110 The Casa Napoleon. — Janoier and Howells 115 In the Casa Napoleon. — Janvier and Howells 118 Where Van Bibber found the Runaway Couple. — R. I/. Davis's' 1 Van Bibber as Best Man" 123 Where Van Bibber found the Burglar. — R. H. Davis . . . 124 House before which Lena died. — E. W. Townsend's "By Whom the Offence Cometh" 125 No. G8 Clinton Place. — Janvier's "A Temporary Deadlock" . 128 The Crowdies' Home — Lafayette Place. — F. Marion Craw- ford's" The Ralstons" 133 Ernest Neuman's Home. — Henry Harland's "As It Was Written" 137 Larry Laughton's Home. — Brander Matthews's "The Last Meeting" 139 Mrs. Leroy's House — Gramercy Park. — /''. HopJcinson Smith's " Caleb West" 142 Royal Weldon's Home — Gramercy Park. — Edgar Saltus's " Tristrem Varick" 143 xvi ILL USTRA TIONS Page Colonel Carter's Gate Present Day. — /'. Hopkinson Smith's " ( 'olonel Carter of Carti rsritlt " 146 "The (ire is my friend," said i olonel Carter — Colonel Carter's Fireplace. — /'. Hopkinson Smith's "Colonel ' ' ■ oj ' 'a U ' Willi " 147 The Berkeley. — R. II. Davis To/ace 164 Kzra Piei-ce Home. — Bramler Matthews' s " His Father's Son " 167 "The Little Church around the Corner." — Daois and Mm thews 171 Manhattan Cluh.— P. L. Ford's " Tin Honourable Peter Stir- ling " 174 "Poverty Plat." — J. L. Ford 176 "The river, the penitentiary, and the s ke from the oil factories of Hunter's Point " 1 78 The Terrace.— H. Harland's " As It Was Written" . . . 180 Mrs. Peixada's Home. — //. Harland's "Mrs. Peixada" 181 Tiluski's Home. — H. Harland's " As It Was Written" . . 183 Scene of J. L. Williams's " Mrs. Harrison Wells's Shoes " |S4 " Van Bibber and the Swan-Boats." — /.'. // Davis . 185 John Lennox's House. — Westcott's " David Harum" . . 187 " 1'he long stretch by the reservoir." — P. I. Ford's " '/'/,. Honourabli Peter Stirling" I ss Squatter Territory. — Edgar Fawcett's " Thi Confessions <>f ( 'laud " 190 The Jumel House. — .1 Reputed Refuge of Harvey Birch 19.3 The Roger Morris IIoiiso — Washington's Headquarters. — /'. /.. Ford's "Janice Meredith" 197 "The road winding around little hills." — " Tin Sp;/" . . 199 Harvey Birch's Cave — Washington Rocks 201 Residence of " His Whiskers." — /■'. W. Townsend's " Chimmit Fadden " ^o:> w ii ILLUSTRATIONS Page "The most delightful of French inns." — F. Hopkinson Smith's " A Day at Lagverre's " 207 The Old Mill. — Geoffrey Crayon's " Chronicles" 210 " Flocks of white ducks paddling together." — F. Hopkinson Smith's ".1 Day at Laguerre's" 211 "The inky creek and flat marsh land." — Edgar Fawcett's " An Ambitious Woman " 214 " That broad expansion of the river denominated by the Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee " 215 Tom Grogan's House 218 The Andre Tree aud Monument. — living's " Legend of S/eej>y Hollow " 219 Tom Grogan's Barn 221 "The sea wall that Babcock was building for the Lighthouse Department." — F. Hopkinson Smith's " Tom Grogan" . 223 "Nassau Hall, then serving as barracks for the force centred there." — P. L. Ford's " Janice Meredith," ch. xxxii. . . 227 "Glimpses of the Raritan, over fields of stubble and corn- stacks, broken by patches of timber and orchard." — P. L. Ford's "Janice Meredith," ch. Hi 228 Greenwood, the Home of the Merediths. — P. L. Ford's " Janice Meredith " 229 part €>nc OLD AND PROLETARIAN NEW YORK New York in Fiction part rk, my dear? I do not know: were niv father here, Ami his, ;mkI in-, t he three and I Might between us make you some reply." His affection for the old town was very profound and sincere. He felt very keenly the significance of the phrase, " little old New York," — a phrase which, though applied to a city that is not so very old and is certainly not little, is none the less sincere and sympathetic. In his hooks he makes ns feel how much he would have liked to sec the old beaux with their bell-crown hats ogling the crinolined ladies on lower Broadway of a spring or a summer afternoon. How 13 NEW YORK IN FICTION he pored over the old chronicles in the hope of seeing the ghosts of old vanities and follies and wickednesses rise up out of their graves and dance, smirk, and gibber again ! II. THE BATTERY — BOWLING GREEN — WALL STREET — BUNNER'S NEW YORK Of the city of the poets and novelists of the first half of the century there is but little trace. The quaint homes of the people of Irving's Knickerbocker His- tory of New York belong to the irrev- ocable past; the Broadway of which Paulding, Halleck, Willis, Drake, and Clarke, the "mad poet," sung, is very different from the Broadway of the clos- ing years of the century. We can find the cottage at Fordham in which Poe lived, and follow Cooper's Harvey Birch through rapidly changing Westchester, but the New York of brick and stone belongs essentially to the work of the 14 " THE II I I I.I. RED BOX t' the Pas- saic It was only a few hundred yards away by the water front of Battery Park thai, half a century later, the Jacob Dolph who in ISO? was a little boy at- tending Mrs. Balmaster's private school on Ann Sired, fell to the ground with the apoplectic stroke that broughl about his death. Mi'. Howells writes of the Bat- tery in Their Wedding Journey and in .1 to tli'' \;ill>\ of Mm' Mohawk, embarking for their journey in a sloop ;it tin' fool of Whitehall Street. Among the Onondaga hidians of the Mohawk, the erstw hile continental officer was known as "The Greal Clear Skj " [ii a letter iinw before tin 1 present writer there are the words, "The great-granddaughter of the Colonel now sits opposite me, absorbed in tin- perusal of .1 New York House." 21 NEW YORK IN FICTION Hazard of New Fortunes; and Edmund Clarence Stedman is among the poets who have found in it poetical inspiration. Retracing our steps across the Park, we leave State Street, turn into White- hall Street, move northward past Bowl- ing Green, where, on the site of one of the steamship offices that until a year ago lined the southern side of the triangle, Martin Krieger's tavern stood, and where the bruised and mutilated iron palings stand mute witnesses of patriotic scorn for the crest and features of King George. One of the scenes of Edgar Fawcett's Horn a nee of Old New York — a prize story of a few years ago, but a story deserving more enduring fame than is accorded most prize stories — was laid in Bowling Green. Jacob Dolph, to revert to Bunner's story, had a naive belief in the city's future, and builded fine day-dreams of a New York that was to reach far beyond the City Hall, beyond Richmond Hill, 22 NEW YORK IN FICTION perhaps even as far as the Parade itself. He strenuously opposed the plan to have the north end of the new City Hall, which in L807 was in the course of erec- tion, constructed of cheap red stone, in the face of llic popular belief that only a few suburbans would ever look down on it from above Chambers Street. In the tirst decade of the century the phrase " from the Battery to Bull's Head " was a tine and effective hyperbole. Part of a Bull's Head Tavern, though not the first, still stands on the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. When the Commissioners made the afore- mentioned map, Wall Street was already typical. The Stock Exchange had been in existence almost ten years, and the street which in the earlier colonial times had marked the northern boundary of the Dutch New Amsterdam, became almost immediately, to a certain extent, the pulse of the nation's finance. Since that time there has been no thoroughfare so 23 NEW YORK IN FICTION widely used and so roundly abused by the makers of New York fiction — scarcely one of them but at some time has taken his stand on the Broadway sidewalk in front of old Trinity and shouted his dis- mal denunciation. The heroes and hero- ines of American fiction very often achieve fabulous wealth through specu- lation; apparently worthless securities bought for a mere song and laid away in deposit vaults, or, better still, in old attic trunks or musty cupboards or woollen stockings, and forgotten, soar skyward on the Pindaric wings of romance; but Wall Street in the guise of the Fairy Godmother somehow never gets its due. This is the significant distinction, that in fiction fortune comes to men and women through "lucky speculation," ruin through Wall Street. Leaving for a minute the men and women of Bunner's story, the vicinity conjures up the people of Charles Dudley Warner's Golden House; the Brights, 24 HOME OK I 111 I MM i:i>\i I - — F. MARION CRAWFORD'S " KATHERINB l W DERI) Ml." \s D " I 111. R ALSTONS." N /•: W YO E K I N F I CT1 ON Bemans, Lauderdales, Ralstons of Mar- ion Crawford's Qovels of New York life; the hero of Thomas Janvier's At the Casa Napoleon, who day after day took his stand at the southwest corner of Broad and Wall streets to study idly the great statue of Washington on the stone steps of the Sub-Treasury, and build line day- dreams of the three thousand dollar clerkship that never seem to come true. Joris Van Eeemskirk, of whom Mrs. Barr tells us in TJie Bow of Orange Rib- bon, was an important figure in the Wall Street of 1765. A two-storied house at the lower end of Pearl Street was the home of .Taeob Cohen and his grand- daughter Miriam. The Kalehook, or Kaleh I lock, where Captain Hyde and Neil Semple fought their duel, was a hill of considerable elevation, to the west of the present line of Broadway. Its south- ern boundary was about Warren Street, its northern boundary aboul ('anal. The district lying at its base was a fever- NEW YORK IN FICTION breeding marsh until drained by An- thony Rutgers. Afterward it was known as Lispenard Meadows, from Rutgers' s daughter, Mrs. Lispenard. The little lake or pond at its foot was called first Kalk-Hook, and afterward became known as the Collect Pond. The corner of Broadway and Franklin Street marks what was then the summit of the Kalchook Hill. The slope is still per- ceptible. In her recently published The Maid of Maiden Lane Mrs. Ban* treats practically of the same quarters of the city. The speculations that swept away all that was left of the once great Dolph family estate in the panic of 1873 were conducted in an office on William Street, near where the Cotton Exchange now stands. On Front Street was the whole- sale grocery firm, "Files and Nelson," of which Thomas Bailey Aldrich has written in My Const')) the Colonel. The ship-chandlering firm of Abram Van Riper and Son, whence Eustace Dolph 28 NEW YORK IN FICTION fled a forger, and where the delightful Mr. Daw, a very Dickensy creation, once tried a rolled-top desk and ;i revolving chair to his alarm and discomfiture, was on Water Street. Of Mrs. Kilmaster's private school on Ann Street, attended by Jacob Dolpli the second, or of the Van Riper mansion on Pine Street, op- posite the greal Burril House, of course no traces remain. Ray, the hero of Wil- liam Deau Howells's World of Chance, coining to seek his fortune in New York, noted first, from the deck of the North River ferryboat, "the mean, ugly fronts and roofs of the buildings beyond, and hulking high overhead in farther dis- tance in wist bulks and clumsy towers the masses of those ten-story edifices which are the necessity of commerce and the despair of art." The men who figure in the lirst pari of TJu Story of a New York ll<>ns< were in the habil of meeting to discuss trade and politics in the barber-shop of one 29 NEW YORK IN FICTION Huggins. This shop was on the north- east corner of Broadway and Wall Street, the site now occupied by the United Bank Building, a structure which has been in existence less than thirty years. In one of the old office buildings that formerly occupied the same site was Ugly Hall, the headquarters of the Ugly Club, a literary organization of which Halleck was a leading member. The entrance to Huggins' s barber-shop w r as about on the spot now marked by the first Broadway door of the bank building. Before the yellow-fever plague of 1822, the fashionable residence quarter of the city was about Bowling Green, Water, Pearl, Beaver, Broad, Whitehall streets and the lower end of Broadway. Mer- chants, shopkeepers, lawyers, as a rule, resided over their offices and stores. Mr. Charles H. Haswell, in his Reminiscences of an Octogenarian in the City of New York, speaks of the " Dutch-designed and Dutch-built houses," with sharply 30 NE \Y Y () R K I N FIC T I ON pitched roofs and gable ends to the street, thai were at thai day remaining in Broad Street. This street by night lias been very effectively described by Mr. Julius Chambers in On a Margin. The plague drove people to the open fields thai lay between the city proper and Greenwich village. One night dur- ing this period, when the sky was ml with the Light of the tar barrels thai were being burned in Ann Street, Mrs. Jacob Dolpli was buried in the churchyard of St. Paul's. In Chambers Street, oppo- site the north end of City Hall, was, in 1820, the office of the Chief of Police, where Allan Pale (Admiral Porter's Al- lan Dale (dkI Robert le Didble) made his firsi appearance on the stage of thai story. Farther up Broadway, in an office building near Worth Street, was the one- room law office of Peter — afterward the Honourable Peter — Stirling. At the Duane Street corner, adjoining the grounds of the New York Hospital, was ;;i NEW YORK IN FICTION the cigar-store of John Anderson, which Edgar Allan Poe's story of The Mystery of Marie Roget assured a permanent place among the scenes of New York fiction. III. PARK ROW IN FICTION Park Row in fiction has a twofold sig- nificance and interest. In the first place, the Row and the adjacent streets arc hallowed by the literary and histrionic memories of the past. Here, where the new Park Row Syndicate Building stands, was the old Park Theatre, the scene of the triumphs of Edmund Kean, Sinclair, Cooke, Young, Charles Kemble, Tyrone Power, Ellen Tree, Fanny Kem- ble, Emma Wheatley, Clara Fisher, Ju- nius Brutus Booth, J. W. Wallack, John and Charles Mason, Charlotte Cushman. These pavements were trod by Irving, Poe, Halleck, Cozzens, Du Chaillu, "Harry Franco," Brougham, Hoffman, Morris; and Clark passed many a night 32 NEW YORK IN FICTION on the benches in the Park opposite. Lain-, ii has belonged to Edmund Clarence Stedman, Greorge William Cur- tis, William ('nil is, William Dean How- ells, Richard Henry Stoddard and to the young and middle-aged poets and novel- ists of the present day. In the second place, as a background, as a part, a phase, of the Human Comedy of New York life, it is beginningto have a meaning. True, we have had nothing descriptive of the life comparable to Balzac's analytic and terrible arraignmeni of Paris journalism in Illusions Perchies, or even to the chap- ters dealing with the life of Fleet Street and the Fleet Prison in Pendennis. The stories of Park Row life have not gone very far below the surface, but two or three young newspaper men and at least one newspaper woman have written very cleverly and entertainingly of "heats" and "sticks" and " copy-readers " and " cub reporters" and "star" men. Then. too, there are the "lady novelists," to 35 NEW YORK IN FICTION whom the Row is as useful as it is vague, who find it a well of local colour, al- though it might not be polite to question them too closely as to the whereabouts of Ann or Beekman or Spruce or Frank- lin streets. The " journalist " — he is never a mere newspaper man — of this sort of fiction is forever stalking crim- inals, scenting out big news, talking in rather flabby epigram, or making violent love. He is usually dashing off edito- rials that make statesmen " sit up," and when he writes " stories," they are never less than a column in length and are in- evitably found the next morning under big black headlines at the beginning of the first page. He lives in Bohemia, a neighbourhood of which most city editors, who are supposed to know a good deal about everything pertaining to the city's streets and corners, will profess entire ignorance. In short, the journalist of this type is very beautiful and well groomed, but it must be confessed he is 36 NEW YORK IN FICTION considerably differenl from the practical newspaper man of real life. And it is with the latter that the present writer has t<> do. Till! CITY EDITOR'S l> I < K . — J. I.. WILLIAMS'S "THE CIIY EDITOR'S I ' »NSi I I \< K." 1 f. as yon go up t he Row, you will t urn in at the dark doorway of No. l!!). and mount three pairs of stairs, you will find the long, grimy one-room newspaper office which was the scene of Jesse Lynch NEW YORK IN FICTION Williams's story of "The City Editor's Conscience." In The Bookman for June, 1899, Maguire, who got the gold watch and chain, and of whom Henderson said in his speech that he was " about the sqnarest city editor in Park Row, even if he did flare up occasionally and get red in the face," was identified as "Jerry" Donnelly. It may be of in- terest to add that the real name of the telegraph editor mentioned in the open- ing sentence of the story is Clark ; that Brown, who was sent to the telephone to take from the Police Headquarters man, Wintringer (who in real life is Watson Sands), the story of a " bull that lias broken loose on its way to a slaughter- house uptown, and been terrorising people on Fifty-ninth Street, near the river," is Albert M. Chapman; that the cub reporter who was sent out on the ferry accident assignment is John E. Weier. The appearance of the office is changed but very little since the time of the story. 38 A E W V O I! K I A FIG T I ON Farther up the Row, the Sun building, at the corner of Nassau and Frankforl streets, is the scene of "The Stolen Story." Here worked Hamilton Knox, the cub reporter who found it easier to write his facts and then make tlieni; and Rufus Carrington, who heat all the older men from the other papers on the " Great Secretary of State Lnterview; " and Townsend's Philip Peyton and Ter- ence Lynn and T . Fitzgerald Lyon and that pathetic figure Tommy Nod: while just over the way is the office of the Earth, where Billy Woods was employed for a few eventful hours after being dis- charged by the Day. In the Park op- posite. Colonel Peter Stirling's regimenl was quartered during the riots described in Paul Leicester Ford's hook. It was there thai took place the bomb explosion which killed Podds. Over on the Park Row sidewalk Peter Stirling was found sleep- ing with his head pillowed on a roll of newspapers by Leonore and Watts D'Alloi. 39 NEW YORK IN FICTION After laying aside Jesse Lynch Wil- liams's stories of newspaper life, one very naturally turns to Miss Elizabeth Jordan's admirable Tales of the City Room. With one exception all the stories which make up Miss Jordan's books had the office of the New York World for background. The author was with that newspaper for ten years, doing editorial work in various departments. Many of the stories are entirely true. For in- stance, one of the strongest of all, " Miss Van Dyke's Best Story," which told of a shy, demure young newspaper woman who, inspired by the sheer horror and nov- elty of the thing, wrote a most wonderful and unfortunate description of the hideous- ness of an election night in the Tender- loin district, really happened just as was told, with the exception of the love inci- dent at the end. The heroine is a young lady now on the staff of the Jour mil " ' Chesterfield, Junior,' " says Miss Jor- dan, "is a live small boy who looked very 40 / A A' \V Y O R K IX FICTION like the description I gave <>f him, and whose manners were a delight to the entire staff. I If is slill at work, and is now wrestling with an ambition to be a managing editor s< ime day." A rather striking recent book that is closely linked with this part of New York is Mr. [rving Bachelor's Eben Holden, <>f which several very graphic chapters treat of the old Tribune office in the days of Horace Greeley. In finding for his hero a home in New York, Mr. Bachelor has preserved in fiction one of tin' quaintesl of all its quaint corners. The Monkey Hill of the period of the story was at a point which is now over- shadowed by one of the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. It has to-day a prac- tical existence, hut its identity has long been lost. Al the time of the outbreak of the War of Secession, there were some neat and cleanly looking houses on it of wood and brick and brownstone, in- habited by small tradesmen; a few shops. I:'. NEW YORK IN FICTION a big stable, and the chalet sitting on a broad, flat roof that covered a portion of the stable yard. The yard itself was the summit of Monkey Hill. It lay between two brick buildings and up the hill from the walk, one looking into the gloomy cavern of the stable ; and under the low roof, on one side, there were dump-carts and old coaches in varying stages of in- firmity. " There was an old iron shop, that stood flush with the sidewalk, flank- ing the stable yard. A lantern and a mammoth key were suspended above the door, and hanging upon the side of the shop was a wooden stair ascending to the chalet. The latter had a sheathing of weather-worn clapboards. It stood on the rear end of the brick building, com- municating with the front rooms above the shop. A little stair of five steps as- cended from the landing to its red door that overlooked an ample yard of roofing, adorned with potted plants. The main room of the chalet had the look of a 44 .V E W YO R K 1 N FIC T 1 ON ship's cabin. There were stationary scats along the wall covered with leath- ern cushions. There were port and star- hoard lanterns, and a big one of polished brass thai overhung the table. A ship's clock that had a noisy and cheerful tick was set in the wall. A narrow passage led to the room in front, and the latter had slanting sides. A hie,- window of little panes, in its further end, let in the Lighl of William Street. IV. THE POLITICIAN AS LITERARY MATERIAL Very recently a breezy Western states- man gave oul unsolicited the interesting information that he had decided to write a novel. When asked it' he had in mind any definite theme, he replied that he guessed that the book would treat of political life. Thereupon the newspaper paragrapher waxed exceedingly merry at his expense, and the daily reader snick- ered and mentally added the statesman 45 NEW YORK IN FICTION in question to the already long list of jokes which arise out of the political incongruities of the West, — the Boy Orators and the Sockless ones. We wish stoutly to maintain our possession of a sense of the humorous and our appreci- ation of the little ironies of life. We acknowledge that we are not building any high hopes in regard to this prom- ised literary effort, and will cheerfully leave to the press of Xenia, Ohio, Joliet, Illinois, and Mapleton, North Dakota, the task of heralding it as the Great American novel; but beyond this we must profess ourselves totally unable to appreciate the humour which is pro- voked by the mere suggestions of politics as a theme for literary treatment; also the whole incident is so very significant. The manner in which the machinery of politics has been ignored in the attempts of fiction to portray American life as it is, is certainly one of the most curious anomalies of our national literature. 4G N E W ) ' <> U K I X FIC T I ON To measure with any degree <>l' accu- racy tli<' reasons for this negled of a subject which, above all others, would seem to be vitally linked with the very fibres of American life, one can gel uoth- ing very convincing from merely looking a1 the conditions which prevail to-day; one musl u'o back and look into the Liter- ary tastes which prevailed during the tirst half of the century and the years which immediately preceded and imme- diately followed the War of Secession. [f we except a few of the great names — Poe, Hawthorne, [rving, Cooper, and their peers — one may say without being in the least unpatriotic that the genera] tendency of our literature was to he de- cried rather than applauded. The school of which X. P. Willis in his day was so striking a type was one which threat- ened seriously to retard the scheme of evolution which one may say now with considerable confidence will ultimately give us a greal national literature. The 47 NEW YORK IN FICTION fiction which was so popular a quarter of a century ago was utterly bad in that it preached false ideals and a certain false gentility. It was written in re- sponse to a demand ; on the other hand, it did a great deal toward fostering this demand and fettering alike the writer and the reader. Probably there is no book which better represents this type than Mrs. Augusta J. Evans Wilson's St. Elmo. Its hero was certainly the prize stock hero of his time, the real and indisputable ancestor of the Richard Harding Davis hero when that writer is at his worst. Taken apart, St. Elmo Murray was rather a flabby sort of poor creature, but when standing in full make-up under the glare of the lime-light, he was a positive triumph of sardonic in sou rid nee. What dreadful oaths he swore and how amazingly genteelly he swore them! What a tremendous amount of rag-bag information the fel- low had at his fingers' ends ! The most 48 A / m > I i:i.l s \ rill AXIS LB." I-'OKD's " THE HON- "l R 1111 I 11 ill: STIRLIXC." N E W YO R K I N F1C T I N ling made friends with the tenement- house children and took the first step toward the achievement of his career. The park lies directly to the cast of the Broadway building in which he had his office". "11 had no right to be there, for the land was wanted for business pur- poses, but the hollow on which it was built had been a swamp in the old days, and the soft land, and perhaps the un- healthiness, had prevented the erection of great warehouses and stores, which almost surrounded it. So it had been left to the storage of human souls, in- stead of merchandise, for valuable goods need careful housing, while any place serves to pack humanity." While there remains much to remind us of the con- ditions of twenty-live years ago, the com- paratively recent construction of the greater park, only a stone's throw dis- tant, has done a great deal toward the reclamation of the quarter. A few hundred yards to the west of this little 57 NEW YORK IN FICTION park we find on Centre Street the saloon of Dennis Moriarty, Peter's staunch friend and political henchman. SALOON OF DENNIS MORIARTY. When Edward W. Townsend was a reporter on the New York Sun, he was one day sent out on a " story " which took him to the offices of a fossilised company with a nine-worded name. 58 A' E W Y E K I A FIG T I ON Two or three antiquated clerks sal aboul on high stools, poring over musty ledgers, I Ml \l\NTh', EXCHANGE PLACE. — TOWNSENI) S " \ DAUGHTER OF THE fENEMENTS." iid tli<' business atmosphere was thai o1 lie sixth rather than the lasl decade «»t 59 NEW YORK IN FICTION the century. These offices were in No. 51 Exchange Place, between Broad and William streets, and that structure plays a conspicuous part in A Daughter of the Tenements under the name of the Niantic. It was there that Dan Lyon, the " Lord of Mulberry Court, 1 ' was janitor, that Mark Waters schemed, and that the Chinaman Chung stole the papers that he afterward concealed in the sole of his shoe. No. 51 is on the north side of the street, next to the Mills Building. It is five stories in height; it has an elevator — a startling concession to modernity in the buildings that line Exchange Place. At every story iron balconies jut out over the sidewalk and grooved gray columns run up along the front of the main office. There is a barber shop in the basement. In the book the Niantic was characterised as " one of the old-fashioned five-story granite office buildings, where com- mercial aristocracy transacts its business affairs in the same manner as when the 60 A E W YO R K I N F1C T I <> N tenants of the building Lived on Park Place or Barclay Street or thereabouts, <• 1 1 1 < I took drives to the homes of thai venturesome colony of other aristocrats who had Located oui of the country as far uptown as Washington Square." V. THE EAST SIDE -CASE'S AND THE BIG BAR RACKS TENEMENTS — 'CAT ALLEY " THE GHETTO — MULBERRY BEND AND CHINA TOWN On the south side of Hester Street, about fifty yards west of the Bowery, is Case's Tenement, where the disreputable Mr. Raegan Lay in aiding after his fatal fight with Pike McGronegal at the end of Wakeman's Dock on the Easl River front, and which is spoken of in many of Richard Harding Davis's earlier stories. It is a very dirty and dilapidated struc- ture, — broken panes of glass, t wisted rail- ings, glaring discolourations. There is a Chinese Laundry on the main floor. Nine 61 NEW YORK IN FICTION or ten years ago Mr. Davis, who was then a reporter on the Evening Sun, was one p case's tenement, HESTER STREET. DAVIS. 62 RICHARD HARDING NEW YORK IN FICTION day senl up to this place to " cover " the story of ;i greengoods game thai was sii|>- posed to be running there under the supervision of a man uamed Perceval. Mr. Perceval was found, hut refused to believe in the sincerity of his visitor as a "come-on," ami the interview ended by Mr. Davis beating a very hasty and un- dignified retreat. Later, the author of Van Bibber mel the messenger boy, who acted as trailer for the greengoods mam ami offered him ten dollars tor infor- mation as t<> the exact nature of his employer's business, the hoy proving in- corruptible. The incident was elaborated in the story of "The Trailer of Room No. 8." The Big Barracks Tenement, the scene of the majority of the stories in Julian Ralph's People We Pass, is a greal yellow brick structure <>n the west side of Por- sythe Street, near the northern end. The l)iii - Barracks was the home of \)v. Whitfield and his daughter, Mrs. Eric Go NEW YORK IN FICTION son, "Petey " and Nora Burke, and the scene of " The Lineman's Wedding," ar- ranged and reported by Mr. " Barny " Kelley of the Daily Camera. Allusion is also due to the stories of "Love in the Big Barracks," probably the truest and strongest tale of all in People We Pass, and " The Mother Song," with its touch- ing pathos and quaint humour. Speak- ing of these stories, Mr. Ralph, in a recent letter to the present writer, says: " In truth, like so many other things of the kind, my stories grew out of many pieces. First I adopted the name of the house because of the brutal and insulting name, ' The Big Flat,' I saw on a double- decker tenement in lower Mott or Baxter Street. Next I described the house with which I was familiar — or a type of tene- ment found elsewhere. Finally I chose Forsythe Street, because I knew more tenement folks there than elsewhere, knew them better, and thought that the mixture of races and worldly conditions 64 BIG BARRACKS TENEMENT, FORSYTHE STREET. — JUL.IAN UAf.PIl S " PI oi i.i. « i; PASS." N E W Y () R K 1 N F ICTION offered as much scope for stories as I could u'ct from any other quarter. In- numerable as were the kinds and points al which 1 touched these tenemenl people in my reporting experience, it was only here that I was received in their clubs or societies, at their dances and on their picnics, on a basis of complete friendli- ness and frankness. In other words, I looked on in other tenemenl districts, but in this one / took part. And here I found at least one lay employer of skilled labour living in old-world fraternity with his employes and their families, as well as an unusual number of well-to-do and more than ordinarily respectable tavern and shop keepers. It's all a thing <»t' the past. A very few years ago I went hack and tried to resurrect the old conditions, but they were buried and their spirit had moved uptown." The streets in this vicinity are also the streets of Abraham Cahan's stories of Grhetto life, which will be treated more 07 NEW YORK IN FICTION closely hereafter. In Ludlow Street was the home of Lena (Edward W. Town- send 1 s " By Whom the Offence Cometh "), before she went to live with Bat the pickpocket. One of the dim alleys that lead back from Rivington Street was used by Charles Dudley Warner in The Golden House; it Avas also in Rivington Street that Van Bibber thrashed the toughs with a scientific vehemence which showed that he might have risen to high distinction in the welter or light-weight division. Meeting on the northwest cor- ner of Rivington Street and the Bowery, John Suydam and the novelist De Ruyter start out together in " The Search for Local Colour" (Brander Matthews); near by Chimmie Fadden made an effec- tive political speech from the tail end of a cart, and the atmosphere and life of this quarter of the city were admirably portrayed in a short fugitive sketch called " Extermination," by J. L. Steffens, pub- lished in a New York newspaper about 68 A A' W YO E K I N FIC T ION two years ago. 1 The scene of " Extermi- nation' 3 was Ca1 Alley, opposite the Police Headquarters in Mulberry Street. " Looney Lenny " was " Silly Willie," or "Willie" Grallegher, a messenger for the headquarters newspaper men. " Ca1 Alley," which no longer exists, was admirably described by Jacob A. R-iis in an article on " The Passing of Ca1 Alley." printed in the Century about a year ago. Brander Matthews lias written of the old wooden houses of this neighbourhood "as pathetic survivals of the time when New York still remembered thai il had been New Amsterdam." Here he round the streak of local colour thai went to make "Before the Break of Day." While the telephone number was given, the saloon of the story was purely imagi- nary. The episode on which the tale was based actually took place in a house in Denver. Going back to the Grhetto, Abraham 1 Thi ' rcial Advertiser, Jul) 24, 1897. 69 NEW YORK IN FICTION Cahan's " Yekl," whom Zangwill recog- nised as the only Jew in American fic- tion, worked in a sweatshop in Pitt Street. Mr. Cahan said recently in con- versation that New York contained four different Ghettos. The great Ghetto is bounded by the East River, by Cherry Street, by the Bowery, and on the north formerly by Houston Street, but now it has crept up as far as East Tenth Street. This is the largest Ghetto in the world, greater even than the Warsaw Ghetto. Hester Street, the heart of this Ghetto, is known throughout Europe. Of the other three Ghettos, one lies between Ninety- eighth and One Hundred and Sixteenth Streets, east of Central Park; another, the Brownsville Ghetto, is in the Twenty- sixth Ward, Brooklyn; the last is the Williamsburg Ghetto. In writing " The Imported Bridegroom," a story which dealt with the New York of twenty years ago, Mr. Cahan had in view the old Ghetto about Bayard and Catherine 70 NEW YORK IS FICTION streets, which in the years following the close of the Civil War was settled l>v a THE ORBA1 SYNA n OF THE GHETTO, HORFOLK - I l.i I I I \\\ \s - 'nil. i MPOR I I D BKID1 GKOOAI 73 NE W YORK IN FICTION prosperous class of Russian Jews. At the time of the writing of the story con- siderable of this quarter remained. It is now almost entirely extinct. The school in Christie Street attended by Flora Stroon was only recently torn down. On the east side of the Bowery, a little below Canal Street, was the restaurant in which Shaya was found by Azrael Stroon. On Norfolk Street, near Broome, is the great synagogue " Beth- Hamidrash Hagodal " (the great house of study"). It was there in the vestry room that Shaya Golub studied the Tal- mud. On the third floor of a rickety old tenement in Essex Street was the sweatshop of the Lipmans, described in "A Sweatshop Romance." Boris and Tatyana Lurie of " Circumstances " lived in Madison Street, and it was to rooms on the second floor of a Cherry Street tenement-house that Nathan and Groldy repaired after " A Ghetto Wedding." In Henry Street was the first New 74 A E W Y RK IN F 1 C TION Y<>rk borne of the Everetts (Edgar EFaw- cett's -1 New York Fannin) after their STCDY ROOMS, THE GREAT SYNAGOGUE, NORFOLK STR1 1 I CAHAN'S "TH1 HI POR I I l< BRIDEGR< ">M." migration From Hoboken. The Everetl children attended school in Scannel Street. Thai was in the early half of the 75 NEW YORK IN FICTION century, when Broome, Prince, and Bond streets were fashionable thoroughfares, and the best shops were on Grand Street and the Bowery. With the passing of the Bend disappeared Mulberry Court, the strange, grim, and picturesque bit of proletarian New York that Edward W. Townsend has described in A Daughter of the Tenements. The entrance to the nar- row alley that led to the court was on the west side of Mulberry Street, about fifty paces below Bayard Street, and directly opposite the Italian banks and the Italian library- The site of Mulberry Court is marked by a tree that, surrounded by a circle of turf, stands in the northeast corner of the new park. On the east side of Baxter Street, south of Bayard, a tunnel leads back to the rear tenement where Carminella and Miss Eleanor Hazlehurst of North Washington Square visited the child stricken with fever. The tunnel was next door to a saloon. All this, of course, was swept away when 76 } I * N E W YO R K IX FIC T I ON the block was converted into a park. Mr. Townsend, as became the historian of this quarter, lias spoken of the colour and brightness of Mulberry Street, which is fairly alive with the scarlet and orange and green and bronze of the shops and push-carts. In direct contrast is the hideous blackness of Baxter Street, with its ghastly and inhuman stretches of second-hand clothes. Moving up the steep incline that begins at Mulberry and Park streets, we find at the corner of Mott Street the little Roman Catholic Church of the Transfiguration, where the white slaves of Chinatown died in Townsend's story of "The House of Fellow Brick." The House of Yellow Brick stands on the north side of Pell Street, about thirty yards from the Bowery. Only a few doors away a saloon at the corner of Dover and Pell streets marks the site of the Old Tree House in which Mrs. Susanna Rowson's " Charlotte Temple "died about lTT(i. The original of 79 NEW YORK IN FICTION " Charlotte Temple " was Charlotte Stan- ley, the mistress of Lieutenant-Colonel THE HOUSE OF YELLOW BRICK, PELL STREET. E. VV. TOWNSENL). 80 N E \Y Y (> It K I N /■'/(■ T I ON John Montresor, the Montraville of the novel. She is buried in Trinity church- yard. At N<>. KIMott Street, a quaint and striking brick building only a few doors from Chatham Square, was the opium den kept by the Chinaman Chung, who, as told in Mr. Townsend's .1 Daughter of the Tenements, stole the papers from Mark Waters's office in the Niantic building on Exchange Place. The Chinese Ash, flesh, and fowl shop described in the book has disappeared, bul the restaurant on the second floor and the .loss Temple, with windows opening on the iron balcony, remain. A flighl of well-worn stone steps run up from the sidewalk in front. Since the structure was made use of in Townsend's novel, another story has been added. This building is known as the City Hall of Chinatown. A little farther up Motf Street is the Chinese restauranl to which Lena (« By Whom the Offence Cometh") went, after Bal had been con- victed and sentenced for picking pockets 6 81 NEW YORK IN FICTION on Fifth Avenue. Near Mott Street lived Berthold Lindau, the fanatical social- ist of Mr. Howells in A Hazard of New A NARROW, WORN PAIR OF STONE STEPS RUNNING UP ALONG- SIDE AN OLD THREE-STORY BRICK BUILDING." — TOWNSEND'S "A DAUGHTER OF THE TENEMENTS." Fortunes. It was a mere chance that caused Mr. Howells to choose this part of the city for Lindau's home. The in- terior of the dwelling in the story was 82 N /•: W YO R K I N FICTION drawn from the interior of the home of a Socialist who lived in East Fourth Streel and whom the author visited many years ago. A few blocks away, on the Bowery above Bayard Street, is the Atlantic (Jar- den, thinly disguised under the name <>f the Arctic Grarden, where "Tom" Lyon and Carminella and her mother would come after the young heroine's dance was over for a real supper of beer and sand- wiches, and Philip Peyton would "send drinks to the performers and hear the fact alluded to in the next song." The " Tivoli " Theatre, where Carminella made her firsl appearance and scored her early successes, has of recent years been given over to Yiddish melodrama. Re- turning to Baxter Street, a dark passage running back from 1 he dirty green door of No. 14 leads to what remains of Murderer's Alley, one of t he most tragic and gruesome corners of the old Five Points region. Murderer's Alley was \\^^\ and elaborately staged by the late Augustin Daly in his 83 NEW YORK IN FICTION play called Pique. The heroine, who was enacted by Fanny Davenport, was mur- dered there. The Brace Memorial News- NEWSBOYS' LODGING HOUSE, WHERE TOWNSEND FOUND "CHIMMIE FADDEN." boys' Lodging House, where the idea of " Chimmie Fadden ' first came to Mr. Townsend, is on New Chambers Street, 84 NEW YOUK IX FICTI OX a block cast of Park How. Over on Cherry Hill were born Hefty Burke and the disreputable Mr. Raegan, two of Richard Harding Davis's earlier creations. Kast Broadway was the scene of the work <>f Conrad Dryfoos and of Margarel Vance described in Mr. Howells's Hazard of New Fortunes. In a sailor's pawnshop at the Lower end of Catherine Street was laid one of the scenes of Hie Shadows of a Great City, a very popular melodrama of some ten years ago. Roberl Barr, in an article published ahont two years ago, suggested Stephen Crane as the man most likely to write the greal American novel. Somehow the idea was not easily dismissed. As a story of New York life — his Maggie, a Girl of the Streets — even in the form in which it was publicly printed, was in a way a dominant hook. Pew writers have felt so intensely the throbbing life of the city. Stephen Crane saw in the flicker- ing street Lights, the wet pavements, the 85 NEW YORK IN FICTION looming factories and warehouses, count- less untold tragedies. Balzac somewhere said that the brief newspaper paragraph, " Yesterday at four o'clock in the after- noon a young person jumped from the Pont Neuf into the Seine," contained all the elements of the greatest novel. In Mr. Crane we found something of this passionate intensity. When Maggie ap- peared, many cried out against it on the ground that it contained no light, no hope. But Mi'. Crane saw no hope, no light. Maggie, above all his other books, is striking in its sincerity. He could not see in the lives of the people of Devil's Row and Rum Alley sunshine and sen- timent and humour, — these people to whom joy comes only in debauch. His proletaire is very convincing and power- ful, rising transcendent over his eccen- tricities of style and diction. But the lo- calities of the story are merely symbolic. Rum Alley and Devil's Row, we learn with regret, had no real foundation in fact. 8Q put Ctoo ABOUT WASHINGTON SQUARE part £tuo I. THE HISTORICAL NOVEL <>F THE FUTURE YEARS ago, in the days when — old New Yorkers tell us — the skies seemed to smile more brightly than they do now, when Lower Broad- way was still a fashionable promenade, when the native Greenwich villager clung proudly and somewhat arrogantly to his birthright, and frivolous-minded young bucks gathered nightly in the Apollo rooms on Broadway near Canal Street, — over in Paris fat ipiciers and their fat wives were blubbering nightly over a melodrama then popular at the playhouses of Belleville and the outer boulevards under the name of Tlie Streets of Paris. It was a play combining all the conventional elements of sen sat ion, — battle, murder and sudden death, arson 89 NEW YORK IN FICTION and charcoal fumes, and of course the ultimate triumph of virtue. Just before the fall of the curtain it was customary for the principal mummer to step for- ward to the edge of the footlights and in a few words point out that it was the theatre's mission to portray make-believe woes and passion — for the real tragedy of the streets of Paris, the audience must look outside, in the narrow alleys of Montmartre or about the abbatoirs of La Villette. After yielding substantial rev- enues to French managers, the play in the course of years crossed the Channel. It made its bow to the audiences of the Adelphi Theatre and straightway became The Streets of London. Again a few years passed and it was being played in a New York theatre, far uptown on the East Side, — the old Mount Morris, we think, joy of the benighted Harlemite of fifteen or twenty years ago, — as The Streets of New York. It was always and ever the same old play, only Martyrs' 90 NEW YORK IN FICTION Hill (Montmartre) became in turn Saf- fron Hill and Cherry Hill. It is many years now since The Streets of New York thrilled Manhattan audiences, bul — Well, tlif moral is quite obvious. ( > 1 1 1 - age and manner of life are, in a certain way, dull and disappointing. They lack the elemenl <>f intrigue. We look ahout us from day to day, from month to month: we see all the factors of history, — battles by land and sea, treaties made and treaties violated, riots, massacres, annexations, usurpations, and the rest; we take a certain hard-headed pride in the practical activity of our time, hut we feel that all is apparent, pain- fully apparent, traceable to well-known and established laws and causes. The romance, the colour, the mystery are not for us, hul for the readers of the histori- cal novel that is to he written two or three hundred years hence. It is not very difficull to imagine whal these novels will he like. One can very readily 91 NEW YORK IN FICTION think of the reader laying the delightful volume aside to curse the monotony and limitations of his own prosaic time, and to muse wistfully on those closing years of the nineteenth century when a man of spirit could carve out for himself fine adventures, and by his courage, dash, dex- terity, and genius for intrigue do some- thing toward moulding the history of the age in which he lived. There is not the slightest doubt that people who lived in Cceur de Lion's time or Quentin Dur- ward's time or D'Artagnan's time con- sidered their environments on the whole rather monotonous and lacking in ro- mance. The novels of the twenty-second century that deal with the age in which we are living will teem with cunningly laid snares, dark intrigues, sanguinary encounters. Swash-buckling heroes will stalk Broadway or the Bowery or Fifth Avenue by night, in search of strange adventures, and, of course, find them. Then history will stand forth raw, bare, 92 NEW YORK IN FICTION naked yet picturesque, — shorn of all its polite phrases and diplomatic attitudes. To give an instance, we in our blindness ridiculously believed the amicable settle- tneni of the Pashoda incident, lei us say, due to the good sense and skill <>!' Lord Salisbury and M. Dupuy (Ha! Ha!), just as the benighted Britons of 1660 or thereabouts believed the return of Charles the Second very commonplace and matter- of-fact. TJiey knew nothing of the nighl on t lie Newcastle marshes, a ml the French fishermen driven to the shore by storms, and the enterprise launched in the Rue des Lombards by Planchei el Cie. Nor do We see the 1'eal figure, the real hero. who, as the historical novel of the future will tell, at the time when the crisis was most acute, crossed to Paris on a Cook's ticket, shut the French Premier up in a folding bed, shipped \"'d, mattress, Minis- ter, and ;dl to a Manchester furnishing- house and — Bui this of course will he the version of the English romance: the NEW YORK IN FICTION French story will be quite different. It will be a French guet a pens, and the victim will in this case be " Le Lord Maire Comtede Sale Berri." Why should the romancer, wishing to tell of brave deeds, of sword strokes and pistol play, and to find for them a setting in our own age, be forced to invent imaginary king- doms, principalities, and republics'? Be- lieving as we do in our Ivanhoes and Durwards and D'Artagnans, we can ill afford to discredit the historical romance of the future. We feel the existence of these heroes; let them stand forth that we may do them honour. TT. WASHINGTON SQUARE Henry James, in his novel Washington Square, speaks of the locality having "a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a richer, riper look than any of the upper ramifica- * 94 N /•: W YO R K I A FIC TION tions of the greal longitudina] thorough- fare — the look of having had something of a social history." Probably in the last words we have the key to the hold which the Square has had on almost every novelist who has written of New York Life. An imaginary circle, with its centre in the white Memorial Arch and a radius of five or six hundred yards, would hold fully one-half of what is besl in the local colour of New York fiction. In the two short blocks from Macdougal Street to Washington Square East, along the north side of the quadrangle, are many of the structures that have served in the fiction of Brander Matthews, Henry .lames, V Hopkinson Smith, Edward W. Town- send, and Julian Ralph. On the south side lived Captain Peters and Philip Morrow. Only a few blocks away are the Casa Napoleon of Janvier, the struc- ture in which Colonel Carter lived; the Graribaldi of James L. Ford; the office of Every Other WeeJc exploited in .1 Hazard 95 NEW YORK IN FICTION of New Fort mux; the house where Van Bibber found his burglar; the home of the Lauderdales — the list is a very long THE SLOPER RESIDENCE. — HENRY JA.MEs's "WASHINGTON SQUARE." one. And it is curious to note that novelists, who elsewhere are at best superficial, here become sincere and con- 96 N E W Y () EK IN FI C TIO N vincing. Dr. Sloper' s house, described in Henry James's Washington Square, is <»n the north side <>!' the Square, between Fifth Avenue and Macdougal Street. In 1835, when Dr. Sloper firsl took posses- sion,moving uptown from the neighbour- hood of the City Hall, which had seen its besl days socially, the Square, then I In- ideal of quiet and genteel retirement, was enclosed by a wooden paling. The struc- ture in which the Slopers lived, and its neighbours were then supposed to em- body the last results of architectural science. It was then and is to-day a modern house, wide-fronted with a bal- cony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of white marble steps ascend- ing to a poi'tal also faced with white marble. In the twenties Mrs. Sloper was "one of the pretty girls of the small but promising capital which clustered about the Battery and overlooked the Bay, and of which the uppermost boundary was indicated by the grassy waysides of Canal 7 07 NEW YORK IN FICTION Street." A few doors away was the home of Mrs. Martin, known as "the Duchess of Washington Square," which Brander Matthews assured us, in The I .list Meeting, "has now regained the fashion it had lost for a score of years." Greorge William Curtis babbled charm- ingly of the old Square in Prue and I. Mr. Howells, in A Hazard of New For- tunes, writes of the "old-fashioned Amer- ican respectability which keeps the north side of the Square in vast mansions of red brick, and the international shabbi- ness which has invaded the southern border and broken it up into lodging- houses, shops, beer gardens, and studios." Basil and Isabel March came here when worn out by futile flat-hunting, and "strolled over the asphalt walks under the thinning shadows of the autumn- stricken sycamores." In one of the brick houses with white trimmings on Waverley Place, to the east of the Arch, lived Miss Grandish (in Julian Ralph's People We 98 A /•; II' )'() It K I N FTC 7 1 o N Puss). Petey Burke, from the sidewalk opposite, watched the comings and goings of Jenson, the husband of Agnes Whit- field, the angel of the \>\ts Barracks tene- ment on Forsythe Street. The striking social contrast presented by the north .•mil south sides of the Square was admi- rably caughl by Mr. Townsend in '".lust across the Square." F. ETopkinson Smith brings in the Square hi Caleb West, San- ford living in ;i five-room apartment at the top of a house with dormer windows on thf north side. His guests looking out could sec the ,l night life of the Park, miniature figures strolling about under the trees, flashing in brilliant light or swallowed up in dense shadow as they passed in the glare of llie many lamps scattered among the budding foliage." Another of these houses was tenanted by Mrs. Delaney, of Edgar Fawcett's Rutliev ford; and I lie Square was the scene of Mrs. 1 5n rt on Harrison's Street Bells out of Tune. Near the southeast corner of i cr NEW YORK IN FICTION the Square is the Benedick, a red-brick bachelor apartment building, used under the name of the Monastery by Robert W. Chambers in Outsiders, his recent story of New York life. Under its own name the Benedick plays a conspicuous part in the same writer's really line and tragic story, " The Repairer of Reputations," and in " The Yellow Sign" of The King in Yellow. An intimate friend of the late author- editor told the present writer that The Midge " was written by Bunner to get married on." The book was dashed off in the house on Seventh Street in which he was then living. It was one of the rare occasions on which Bunner was ever seen to work. This characteristic was always a mystery to his friends and busi- ness associates. He was seldom seen at his writing-table, and yet at the end of the year showed an extraordinary amount of work to his credit. The secret lay in the ease and speed with which he wrote. 100 I III. MONASTERY, \VASHINGTO> BQI IRK. ROBERT CHAMBERS ! "OUTSIDERS " AM> " I III KING IS FELLOW " A E \Y YO R K I N FIC T I ON There has probably never been a novel written thai is s<» drenched with the spirit of Washington Square as The Miiln the way to the Potter's Field to be." Captain Peters, or \)v. Peters as lie pre- ferred to be called, lived on the top floor of No. 50, a three-story brick structure on the "dark south side," between Thoinp- 103 NEW YORK IN FICTION son and Sullivan streets. The house, adjoining the Judson Memorial, stands back from the street, and is even darker captain peters s home, washington squark. — bunker's "the midge." and gloomier than those about it. A low iron railing, once green, separates the sidewalk from the poor little plot of sod and stunted grass. The door, a single step above the ground, is flanked by thin 104 A E II' YO U K I A FIC TION grooved columns. From the second story windows jut ou1 little balconies. It was through the dormer windows jut- ting from the root* that Peters looked ou1 upon the Square. In the story allusion is made to two vacant lots in the rear, stretching through to West Third Street. " These yards in summer were green and bright, and in the centre of one there was a tree." Years ago buildings were erected on this site, but even to-day, or at least until very recently, taking one's stand on the east sidewalk of Thompson Street and looking over the wooden fence in the rear of the Memorial Building, the top branches of this tree may be seen. On one of the benches of the Square Father Dube confessed to Dr. Peters the unhappiness of his mistaken avocation, and advised the latter to brighten his life by marrying the Midge. At the Univer- sity Place cornerof the Square Dr. Peters and Paul Eathaway, to whom the Midge was ultimately married, had their first Ki;, NEW YORK IN FICTION meeting. A few years ago, when the University of New York buildings were torn down, there disappeared the last traces of Chrysalis College, used by Theo- dore Winthrop in Cecil Dreeme. The same time marked the passing of the little church in which Katherme Lauder- dale and John Ralston were married. TTI. THE GARIBALDI — BRASSERIE PIGAULT — THE CASA NAPOLEON As one goes down Macdougal Street from the southwest corner of Washing- ton Square, where the French quarter of former days merged into the Greenwich Village of former days, the second house on the left-hand side, No. 146, is a three- story trellised-stoop structure that is rap- idly going the way of most of the houses of this vicinity. Behind a long, narrow table covered with dirty white oilcloth, that stands close to the basement win- 106 NEW YORK IN FICTION dows, directly under the balcony, an an- cient and toothless Italian vends soft drinks. The house is tenanted by three or four Italian families. People ac- quainted with this pari of New York will remember that a very few years ago this building was <>ccii]>ied by a rather pre- tentions Franco-Italian hotel. Anumber of years before it was frequented by Bun- ner, dames L. Ford, Brander Matthews, and other newspaper men and artists, and as such it was nsi^l by Mr. Ford in his humorous sketch "Bohemia Invaded" under the name of the ( Jaribaldi. The Garibaldi was a basement restaurant, and the yard in the rear beyond the window, guarded by thick iron bars, was littered with old casks. Here Tommy Steele and Charlie Play and Kitty Bainbridge of the Merry Idlers and all the gay Bohemians held high carnival until young Etchley, the artistic person, made his appearance and precipitated the onslaughl of the Philistines. The grated window in the 1(1!) NEW YORK IN FICTION rear, through which Charlie Play passed in his caustic comments on the restau- rant's commercial habitues, is still to be THE GARIBALDI'S HARKED WINDOW. — JAMES L. FORD'S "BOHEMIA INVADED." seen. What was then the dining-room has since been partitioned into a number of little living rooms, no N K W YORK IX FICTION kl3U0W3a 3JJIVAJA TJUAQH 1 H338 H3QAJ 23IOMAfla.23mW3Mn .2HU3U0U DMA With the above strange and pleasant conceit , Mr. Bunner introduced the read- ers of Tlie Midge to the Brasserie Pigault, that quainl and mysterious haunl of Dr. Peters, and Father Dube, and Parker Prout, the old artist, who had failed in his career because of too much talent, and M Martin and old Potain, who lost his mind after his wife's death, and Ovid Marie, the curly-haired music-teacher from Amity Street. It was as printed above that the patrons of the old wine-shop saw- and liked besl its sign. Thoughts of that sign and of the warmth 111 NEW YORK IN FICTION and comfort and cleanliness within, and of Madame Pigault, neat and comely, knitting — now knitting t' other side of Styx — and of the sawdust-covered floor, and of the little noises of a gentle sort inspired Mr. Buniier to that fine anti- prohibition sermon in which he showed with truth and keen humour the " esti- mable gentlemen who go about this broad land denouncing the Demon Drink," that there were wine-shops not wholly iniqui- tous and that bred not crime, but gentle- ness and good cheer. But not only is there no trace of the Brasserie Pigault; it is doubtful if it ever had any tangible existence. Brasserie Pigault, Mr. Ford, who knew Buniier in the early days, says, was any one of the quaint little French wine-shops of which there were so many in the quarter to the south of Washington Square in the later seventies and early eighties. No. 159 Greene Street, the site of the old French bakery mentioned in The 112 NEW YORK IN FICTION Midge, is to-day occupied by a l;ill office building. On Houston Street, near whal was then South Fifth Avenue, was the shop of Goubaud, the dealer in feathers, where died Lodviska Leezvinski, the mother of the Midge. Charlemagne's, where Peter and the Midge went often to dine, was probably the Restaurant n Bleecker Street. The Grand Vatel has also passed into history, its site being now occupied by an Italian restaurant and lodging-house. Pfaff's cellar, the resori of the literary wits during the sixties and early seventies, was on the corner of Bleecker Street and Broadway. Mr. Howells has written en tertainingly of Pfaff's in his literary reminiscences. "l)e Duchess," Chimmie Padden, his friend " de barkeep," and the hitter's " loidy fren," during one of their outings in the city strolled down South Fifth Avenue and lunched together at the res- taurant of the White Pup. The identity 8 113 NEW YORK IN FICTION of the White Pup is obvious enough. It has served several times as a background for fiction, and was only very recently used by Miss Ellen Glasgow for one of the New York scenes of The Descendant Recrossing Washington Square and mov- ing up Fifth Avenue, we find at 19 and 21 West Ninth Street the little Franco- Spanish South-American Hotel, which was the original of the Casa Napoleon, the modest and inviting hostelry where lived so many of Mr. Thomas Janvier's men and women, — Mrs. Myrtle Vane, who did the New York society news for Western papers; Mr. Dunbar and Miss Bream, Mr. Witherby and Mrs. Mor- timer, the web-spinning capitalist in a small way — the home of the genial Du- vant and the refuge of the family Effe- rati. " Janvier knows his New York," once said John Breslin, — high praise, for few have known the city as did the old fire chief. His comments on the New York of some of the other writers were more forceful and less polite. lit THI CASA NAPOLEON. — JANVIER \M' Ih'Wiiiv .V /•/ W Y () R K I X F I CT1 N The Casa Napoleon has another liter- ary interest. This was the Little restau- rant to which Mi'. Ilowells sent Hay (in The World of Chance) during the young writer's first weeks in New York, and it was here also that the Marches of .1 Hazard of New Fortunes came to dine dur- ing the long weeks spent in futile flat- hunting. Mr. Janvier, who at such limes as lie is in New York is a frequent visitor at the Casa Napoleon, dwelt at length on the establishment's " attractive look," and the balcony that ran along the line of the second-story windows, in which flowers were growing in great green wooden tubs. The Louis Napo- leon of Mr. Janvier's stories is Louis Napoleon < rriffou. The Dunbars, Breams, Witherbys, and the rest have taken their departure, but in their place there has sprung up another coterie of newspaper men, flippantly and facetiously known as " the Griffon push." In the odd little white frame building 117 NEW YORK IN FICTION that in bygone years was No. 58 J West Tenth Street, Frederick Olyphant, IN THE CASA NAPOLEON.— JANVIER AND HOWELLS. who figures in Brainier Matthews' s The Last Meeting, had his studio. The house was reached from West Tenth Street by 118 NEW YORK IX FICTION passing through a dim alley, "worn by the feel of three generations of artists." This structure, which holds a very im- portant place in the New York of fiction, will be described at length in the fol- lowing section. The artist life ahont Tenth Street was also the theme of the Van Dyke Brown stories. On Eleventh Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, is the building in which Fulkerson, Con- rad Dryfoos, and Basil March conducted Every Other Week. Mr. Howells had in mind one of the renovated old houses which line the street. It was on Union Square, in front of Brentano's, that Mar- garet Vance and Conrad Dryfoos met for the last time before the latter was killed in the great strike. In writing ahont this strike Mr. Howells drew upon his impressions of the railway strike of 1882 when an innocent spectator met his death in much the same manner as did I h'yfoos in the novel. 119 NEW YORK IN FICTION IV. RICHARD HARDING DAVIS — VAN BIBBER'S HAUNTS — GREENWICH VILLAGE — SCENES OF EDGAR FAWCETT'S NOVELS Richard Harding Davis strikes his highest, best, and most human note when telling of men and women lonely and homesick in other lands. The nostalgia has been strong upon him. It has been treasured in his memory, and at times the balm of spring air, some subtle odour of perfume or flower, a picture, a line in a book or a letter, brings over him with remarkable vividness the same sensations of strange, overwhelming loneliness that he has felt some time in the years gone by when he was knocking about some- where a few thousand miles away from the lights of Broadway and the tall tower of the Madison Square Garden. This note dominates all his work in which he finds his background in other lands. He has used it very effectively a number of times, and yet it does not seem to grow 120 NEW YORK IN FICTION .stale. It is a nostalgia that comes upon strong men, never maudlin, never weakly sentimental, but a great yearning home- sickness, that expresses itself feelingly, simply, colloquially. Near the end of The Exiles, Holcombe, the New York assistant district-attorney, leaving Tangiers, asks Meakin, the police commissioner who had been indicted for blackmailing gam- bling-houses, if he cannot do something for him at home. In the latter's reply we have what is probably the most power- ful and sincere bit of writing that Mr. Davis has ever done. It is here quoted entire : " 1 1 '11 tell you what you can do forme, Hol- combe. Some night I wish you would go down to Fourteenth Street, sonic nig'ht this spring, when the hoys arc sitting out on the steps in front of the Hall, and just take a drink for me at Ed Lally's ; just for luck. That's what I'd like to do. I don't know nothing better than Fourteenth Street of a summer evening, with all the people crowd- ing into Pastor's on one side of the Hall and the 121 NEW YORK IN FICTION Third Avenue L cars running by on the other. That 's a gay sight, ain't it now ? With all the girls coming in and out of Theiss's, and the side- walks crowded. One of them warm nights when they have to have the windows open, and you can hear the music in at Pastor's and the audience clapping their hands. That's great, isn't it?' Well, he laughed, and he shook his head. k I'll be back there some day, won't I ? ' lie said wistfully, 'and hear it for myself.' " Turning from Meakin to the versatile Van Bibber, we find at the corner of Ninth Street and University Place the French restaurant (Hotel Martin) from which he started out as " Best Man." The tables at which Van Bibber and the runaway couple were dining are in the one-story addition that runs along Ninth Street. On the steps running down from the hotel entrance to the sidewalk of University Place Van Bibber met the groom's elder brother, and promptly sent him off to Chicago. Later he wished it had been Jersey City. A block to the 122 NEW YORK IN FICTION west, at the northwest corner of Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, is the house in which Van Bibber came upon his peni- WHERE VAN BIBBER FOUND THE RUNAWAY COUPLE. — R. H. DA VIS'S "VAN BIBBER AS BEST MAN." tent burglar. At the northeast corner of Twelfth Street and Fifth Avenue is the Mission House before which Lena died (E. W. Townsend's "By whom the Offence Cometh"). 123 NEW YORK IN FICTION Bimner coined a striking phrase when he spoke of the " bourgeois conservatism WHERE VAN IHBIiKR FOUND THK BURGLAR. — R. H. DAVIS. of Greenwich Village. 1 ' But that was written many years ago, before the inva- sion of the old American ward by the 124 NEW YORK IN FICTION foreign element had really begun, and when a few minutes' walk from the tall HOI.'SE BEFORE WHICH LENA DIED. — E. W. TOWNSEND S ' BY WHOM THE OFFENCE COMETH." clock tower of Jefferson Market whisked one back to the atmosphere and condi- 125 NEW YORK IN FICTION tions of the early half of the century. The sight of that tall clock tower filled the soul of Chad {Colonel Carter of Cartersville) with unutterable bitterness. Brander Matthews, in one of his Man- hattan Vignettes, speaks of John Suydam noting the "high roof and lofty terrace above all the yawning baskets of vege- tables and the pendent turkeys." In "Aunt Eliza's Triumph" Mr. Townsend takes us to Greenwich Village, Aunt Eliza living in a house on Bank Street. Edgar Fawcett, in the story of A New York Family, pointed out the significant fact that all the great capitals of history, after many hesitant swerves and recoils, have taken a steadfast western course. This feature, however, is probably less true of our own than of any other metropolis of modern times. Chelsea and Greenwich Village were thriving populated communities when the eastern portion of the city of the same latitude was farm and swamp land. Mr. Faw- 126 NEW YORK IN FICTION cett's work is an excellent illustration of the element that is lacking in the local colour of the New York of fiction. He is strenuous, indomitably persistent, un- doubtedly sincere. His descriptions are apparently laboriously .and conscien- tiously wrought. But they are too often unconvincing. Much is to be said of his treatment of quaint corners of suburban New York, of Brooklyn, of Greenpoint, of Hoboken. These places, however, be- long to a later paper. One of the houses of the picturesque Colonnade Row in La- fayette Place was the home of Mrs. Rus- sell Leroy, described in A Hopeless Case. The old church at the southern end of Lafayette Place mentioned in the novel was St. Bartholomew's. The dwelling- houses on the east side of the street dis- appeared years ago. Moving westward again, passing Grace Church, which Mr. Fawcett describes as "looming up a tall and stately sentinel at the upper end of Broadway," and the St. Denis Hotel, 127 NEW YORK IN FICTION where Basil and Isabel March (A Hazard of New Fortunes) stayed during their NO. 68 CLINTON PLACE. JANVIER'S " A TEMPORARY DEADLOCK." invasions of New York, we find in West Tenth Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, the home of Spencer Dela- 128 NEW YORK IN FICTION plaine, the husband of Olivia Delaplaine in Mr. Fawcett's novel of that name. Two blocks away, at the Brevoort, lived Clinton Wainwright, Mr. Fawcett's " Grentleman of Leisure." One of Mr. Fawcett's most vigorous descriptions oc- curs where, in this book, he contrasts lower Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. Directly across the street from the Bre- voort, on the east side of the avenue, is No. 68 Clinton Place, interesting as being not only the scene, but the raison d'etre, of Thomas Janvier's ^i Temporary Deadlock. In one of the Fifth Avenue houses near here lived the Huntingdons of Edgar Fawcett's A Hopeless Case. V. CRAWFORD'S NEW YORK — OLD SECOND AVENUE — GRAMERCY PARK — COLONEL CAR- TER'S HOME F. Marion Crawford belongs to a race of novelists — a race whose influence is likely to dominate the lighter literature 9 129 NEW YORK IN FICTION of the early half of the twentieth cen- tury — who are untrammelled by circum- stance of mere creed or speech; who turn to their work with a recognition of the great fundamental principle that human nature is everywhere pretty much the same, — that love, hatred, avarice, jeal- ousy, make romance equally in Madagas- car and Maine. The story-tellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote of soils other than their own for the purpose of giving their extravagances the appearance of reality and verisimili- tude. They sat down to their writing- tables in much the same spirit as Tar- tarin started for Algiers. The Spain of Le Sage and Beaumarchais was as strange, as delightful, and as unreal as the country of the Liliputians or the Brobdignagians. Thackeray in all his more important stories took his men and women at some time in the narrative to Paris or Weimar or Rome, but it was to the British society of these places that 130 NEW YORK IN FICTION he introduced us, — a society which car- ried with it its usages, its prejudices, — its Lares and Penates. Among contem- porary writers Mr. Davis, invading the shores of the Mediterranean and imagi- nary South American republics for local colour, must take with him a few men and women out of Mr. Gibson's sketch book to establish himself soundly; and Mr. Anthony Hope needed an English- man to carry him through Ruritania. Even Mr. Kipling, so persistently hailed as the trumpeter of world-wide litera- ture, has confined himself almost entirely to English-speaking people. His tales of native life are exotic. Mr. Crawford is more typically the pioneer. So dis- tinctly is he a cosmopolitan, that his New York stories in no way compare with the splendid Saracinesca series; in the former he fails to make us feel the vastness, the complexity of the metro- politan life that is behind his men and women. In finding a home for the Lau- 131 NEW YORK IN FICTION derdales, Mr. Crawford obviously made use of the vine-covered residence of Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, to which he has been a frequent visitor, on the north side of Clinton Place, a few doors east of Fifth Avenue. He speaks of Clinton Place never having been a fashionable thoroughfare, although it once lay in a fashionable neighbourhood. Farther east on Clinton Place, in " an odd, old struc- ture tenanted by Bohemians," lived Paul Hathaway {The Midge). Again taking up Mr. Crawford's New York, the second house of Colonnade Row, opposite the Astor Library, was the home of Walter Crowdie and his wife Hester. A little garden, surrounded by an iron railing, separates the house from the street. These white houses, with their tall pillars and deep balconies, are among the most interesting and picturesque relics of the older New York. One of them was used by Mrs. Burton Harrison in The Anglo- maniacs. John Ralston and Katharine 132 THE CROWniES HOME, LAFAYETTE PLACE. — F. MARION CRAWFORD S " THE RALSTONS." NEW YORK IN FICTION Lauderdale, on their spring-day walk strolled up Stuyvesant Street and passed St. Mark's Church and on to Tompkins Square with its broad walks and hordes of screaming children — Julian Ralph has written of these in People W< Pass — and beyond across the lettered avenues t< > the timber-yard at the water's edge. On Avenue B was the canary-bird shop of Andreas Stoffel, of Mr. Janvier's An Idyll of the East Side. Claire Twining, in Edgar Fawcett's An Ambitious Woman, noted the "wide, jury expanse of the Square lighted with innumerable lamps," on her wild flight from Slocumb after the outbreak of fire in Niblo's Theatre. In this story Mr. Fawcett refers to the time when Tomp- kins Square was a " dark horror to all decent citizens living near it." By day set aside as a parade ground for the city militia, which paraded there scarcely twice a year, its lampless lapse of earth was by night at least four acres of brood- 135 NEW YORK IN FICTION ing gloom, and he who ventured to cross it stood the risk of thieving assault, if of nothing more harmful. The Grosveiiors lived in a big, dingy mansion on Second Avenue, near Stuy- vesant and Rutherford squares, which neighbourhood Mr. Fawcett has spoken of as " one of the few fragments that have been left uninvaded by the merci- less spirit of change. 11 Near by, in a little red brick house, dwelt Mrs. Montgomery, of Henry James's Washington Square; and Bunner has told us how at night the strong wind used to blow the music of St. George's bells half across the city to the Midge's ears. " It was as though Stuyvesant Square snugly locked up for the night sent a midnight message of re- proach to the broader and more demo- cratic ground, whose hard walks knew no rest from echoing footsteps in light or dark. 1 ' In one of the houses facing the north side of the Square lived the social- ist Dircks and his daughter Esther, the 136 NEW YORK IN FICTION heroine of Brander Matthews's A Confi- dent To-morrow. Farther down, near the ERNEST NEUMAN'S HOME. — HENRY HAKLANd's " AS IT WAS WRITTEN." avenue's southern extremity, we find on the northwest corner of Second Street the large red brick house where Ernest 137 NEW YORK IN FICTION Neuman went to live under an assumed name after his release from the Tombs Prison, where he had been on trial for the murder of his betrothed, as described in Henry Harland's As It Was Written. The Karons of the same writer's Mrs. Peixada lived between Sixth and Seventh streets, and across the way was the pawnshop of Bernard Peixada, " a brick house, although the bricks were concealed by a coat of dark grey stucco that blotches here and there had made almost black." The pawnbroking establishment was on the ground floor, and the broad windows in front were protected, like those of a jail, by heavy iron bars. In these windows were musical instruments, house- hold ornaments, kitchen utensils, firearms, tarnished uniforms, women's faded gewgaws and finery, and behind these, darkness, mystery, and gloom. The three upper stories were hermetically sealed and wore a sinister and ill-omened aspect. There is, however, no structure 138 NEW YORK IN FICTION in the neighbourhood even remotely sug- gestive of this shop. At the corner of Eighteenth Street and Fifth Avenue was the house of Uncle Larry Laughton (Brander Matthews' s The Last Meeting), where the Full Score Club met the evening that Frederick Oly- phant was " shanghaied " by the man with the Black Heart. The original of Laurence Laughton was Laurence Hut- ton, and the house in question was the home of Professor Matthews' s father. The scene of the dinner in The Last Meeting was the library, to which was transferred, for the purposes of the story, Laurence Hutton's famous collec- tion of death masks. Crossing from here to Gramercy Park, we find at No. 2 the home of Mr. Clifford Pinchot, used by F. Hopkinson Smith as the residence of Mrs. Leroy in Caleb West. It was here that Caleb's wife found a ref- uge after her flight with Lally. The house at the west corner of Lexington Avenue 141 NEW YORK IN FICTION and the Park was probably the home of Royal Weldon, who appears in Edgar Saltus's The Truth about Tristrem VaricJc. (-■ v -• . - ■Ha i MRS. LEROY S HOUSE, GRAMEECY PARK. — F. IIOPKINSON SMITH'S ' CALEB WEST." 142 NEW YORK IN FICTION It was in the drawing-room of this house that Tristrem Varick drove the needle- EOVAI, WELDON S HOME, GRAMERCY PARK. — EDGAR SALTUS'S " TRISTREM VARICK." like Roman knife home to his host's heart. The quarters occupied by Colonel Car- 143 NEW YORK IN FICTION ter of Cartersville during that period of his life when he was in New York trying to interest the agents of English syn- dicates in the railroad scheme, the con- summation of which would have given many of the very first Virginian families easy access to the Atlantic Coast, were described by F. Hopkinson Smith as be- ing in " an old-fashioned, partly fur- nished, two-story house, nearly a century old, which crouched down behind the larger and more modern dwelling front- ing on the street," designated in the book as Bedford Place. The spot was within a stone's throw of the tall clock tower of the Jefferson Market. The street en- trance to this curious abode was marked by a swinging wooden gate, opening into a narrow tunnel, which dodged under the front house. " It was an uncanny sort of passageway, mouldy and wet from a long neglected leak overhead, and lighted at night by a rusty lantern with dingy glass sides." Bedford Place was West Tenth 144 NEW YORK IN FICTION Street, and over the swinging wooden gate is the number — "58.1." Until a very few years ago this quaint bit of local colour existed in its entirety. Most of it, however, was destroyed when Mr. Ma it- land Armstrong, the owner of the front house, No. dS West Tenth Street, remod- elled his own residence. The entrance and the eastern half of the white frame structure in the rear, where the Colonel had his home, remain intact. The swinging wooden gate whence " Chad " swooped down upon the complacent shopkeepers of the quarter was for years a familiar landmark of the neighbour- hood. It opened into the tunnel directly under the stoop of No. 58 as it exists to- day. To the west of the gate the steps curved up to the door of the front house. Peering through the iron gate in front, one may see part of the dark, un- canny tunnel where the Colonel in- dulged in pistol practice preparatory to his expected meeting with the broker 10 145 N E W Y O R K IK FICTIO N Klutchem. The garden where Fitz and the Major took refuge while " Chad " colonel carter's gate, present day. — f. iiopkinson smith's "colonel carter of cartersvili.e." held the lighted candle as a mark for Carter's skill was then between the two 146 "the fire is my friend." said colonel carter. COLONEL CARTERS FIREPLACE. — F. HOPKINSON SMITHS "COLONEL carter oe CARTERSVILLE." NEW YORK IN FICTION houses. Few traces of it remain, for the extension built in the rear of No. 58 covers the greater part of the ground. Those who witnessed the stage presenta- tion of Colonel Carter of Cartersville at Palmer's Theatre will doubtless remem- ber that the scene of one act is laid in the Colonel's dining-room. When the play was in preparation, Mr. Smith piloted the scenic artist through the old building, with the result that the long room made familiar to theatre- goers as the scene of the Virginian Don Quixote's exploits was an exact reproduction of the original chamber. In the rear may be found the little door opening into the hall and the fourteen little white wooden steps by which Car- ter and his friends mounted to the upper story of the structure, where from one of the west windows " Chad," looking out into the night, saw the tall, illumi- nated tower of " de jail' looming up ominous and mysterious. A few hun- 149 NEW YORK IN FICTION dred yards away, on Sixth Avenue, was the cellar saloon patronised by Carter and his Virginian friends. Mr. Smith recognises three dominant types in American life. From Colonel Carter of CartersviEe, in which he attempted to portray the old Southern chivalry so rapidly passing away, he passed in Tom Grogan to the study of the ubiquitous Irish-American type. Caleb West com- pleted the trilogy with a picture of the sturdy life sprung from the New Eng- land soil. 150 p>art Cl)vcc THE NEW CITY AND SUBURBAN NEW YORK part €l)vcc I. NEGLECTED PHASES SEVERAL of the chapters of Olivia Delaplaine Edgar Fawcett devoted to a picture of Mrs. Ottarson's boarding-house, a red brick, high-stooped structure on Twenty-third Street, be- tween Seventh and Eighth avenues. It may be noted here that this house had no tangible original. Mr. Fawcett placed it for the purposes of the story in West Twenty-third Street, but always felt it to be one of the houses in Fourteenth Street, between Seventh and Eighth ave- nues, "that domain where the boarding- house is ubiquitous." These chapters have an interest far beyond their narra- tive importance. They call one's atten- tion to a field, a phase of New York life, wonderfully rich and typical, — a field in 153 NEW YORK IN FICTION which the novelist will not only have a small world of contrasts, characters, com- plications within four walls, but in which he will be absolutely untrammelled by the traditions or influences of European writers. There is no need of going for new types and material to the West or the Southwest. The boarding-house is, on the whole, rather more American than Red Gulch or Yuba Bill. The American writer may find an inspiration in the squabble of the Bayneses, the Bunches, and the MacWhirters in The Ad rent tins of Philip or the intrigues of the Maison Vauquer of Balzac's Le Pere Goriot. But the inspiration must be purely technical. Not but that we have had little touches of this life: it has been a rich field for the joke makers. Mr. John Kendrick Bangs has introduced us to its breakfast- table and pelted us with its harmless if superfluous epigrams. But none has treated it seriously in literature or done justice to its vulgarity and its tragic 154 NEW YORK IN FICTION gloom. In the boarding-house scenes of Olivia Delaplaine, passing over the very obvious fact that no woman ever talked as did Mrs. Ottarson, we feel that the Rev. Drowle, the Spillingtons, Bankses, and Sugbys are flagrant carica- tures, very degenerate descendants of the Americans of Martin Chuzzlewit. Mrs. Amelia Sugby, purveyor of the literature in which chambermaids and factory heroines delight, is a type that has been so persistently flaunted that it has ceased even to bore. Few writers touch even remotely on this subject without con- temptuous allusion to the floorwalker type. But where is the man who will lay bare for us this floorwalker's soul; this floorwalker's egotism, before the light of which the arrogance of the feu- dal baron must pale; the floorwalker distinction which poisons, vitiates, and makes ridiculous the social systems of the communities in the neighbourhood of great cities! 155 NEW YORK IN FICTION Boarding-house life, vulgar as it is, is too great and too vitally American to be treated merely in caricature. We have seen somewhat inadequately its laughable pretence, its amusing vanity, its sham elegance. But the man who treats its shabby gentility seriously, who can grasp its power, its intrigue, its passion, its pathos, will come very near to giving us the great American novel. By all odds the most puerile and un- reasonable complaint that one hears from literary workers is that the more obvious and inviting themes have all been worked threadbare, and that one in search of originality must go to the improbable and bizarre. This is far from being abso- lutely true of any literature; in this country the complaint is, on the face of it, absurd. One can suggest, almost off- hand, other phases of American life that not only have not been worn threadbare, but have in reality never been fully discovered. 156 NEW YORK IN FICTION For instance, we should have very little hesitation in predicting success to the young man of industry and real literary talent who will thoroughly study the life of the conventional American small town, — not especially the New England town or the Western or the Southern town, but the American town. Let him study all the factors of this really complex life and their relations toward each other. Let him keep well in hand his sense of hu- mour, study the social life, its distinc- tions, its complications, its scandals; let him know the local newspaper offices, the tax-receiver's office; above all, let him know every detail of the town's political life, the aspirations of prospective coun- cilmen, the men whose votes are for sale and the men who buy them ; and when he really knows all this he will have the ma- terial for not one but a dozen strong and vitally interesting novels. This sugges- tion may be offered to a young man, but hardly to a young woman. In the first 157 NEW YORK IN FICTION place, she will not see it, and then she would ignore it if she did. A young woman who writes and who aspires to treat realistically of this very life to which we allude recently blandly con- fessed that she had no idea of what a " primary " was, though she surmised that it had something to do with the Board of Education. She was quite satisfied and content. Politics were vulgar, and, be- sides, what had they to do with fiction! What she was after was the "love inter- est." Well, the " love interest " should, perhaps, not be ignored, but the fact re- mains that it is a fetichism which has spoiled many good novels and many good plays, and that absurd belief in the cant phrase is one of the greatest barriers in the way of true and good literature. Probably no profession but that of the clergyman has been treated in American fiction with any degree of adequacy. The physician's has not; the newspaperman's has not, despite the flattering partiality of 158 NEW YORK IN FICTION feminine purveyors of fiction for "brainy young journalists." The term " literary man" was once one of dignity and re spectability ; and yet so much has it been abused that it is doubtful if any sane, normal, intelligent man will hear it applied to himself with perfect equa- nimity. Any ill-balanced witness in a police court ease and without ostensible occupation may be relied on to inform the court that he is a " literary man." And this is the type that the public takes quite seriously, just as it greedily swallows the "journalist" of feminine fiction who writes manuscript and is " kind ' to mere reporters. But of all the professions, the richest in un worked literary material is probably that of the law. One could not easily overestimate the debt which the whole great scheme of the ComSdie Hwnaine owes to the brief period of his early life which Honore de Balzac spent in the 159 NEW YORK IN FICTION office of a notary. It was there that he got at the very heart of modern life. There he learned the meaning of money, not in its vulgar sense, but as a great moving and working factor and force in human society. That period was brief, but then and there was laid the founda- tion upon which the whole fabric of the ( '<>»te NEW YORK IN FICTION Peixada Mr. Harland gave us a long and graphic description of Beekman Place. He speaks of this unpretentious choco- THE TERRACE. H. HARLAND'S " AS IT WAS WRITTEN.' late-coloured thoroughfare, running north and south for two blocks from Forty- ninth to Fifty-first Street, as being in striking contrast to the rest of hot and 180 NE ]Y TO R K I N F ICT1 N dusty New York. In the book Mrs. Peixada's home is identified as No. 46; the apartment occupied by Arthur if if m 1 1 im MRS. PEIXADA S HOME. — II. HARLAND S "MltS. PEIXADA. 181 NEW YORK IN FICTION Ripley and Julian Hetzel being in the top floor of No. 43. In reality no such numbers exist. But No. 46 was spoken of as a corner house, and the links of circumstantial evidence scat- tered through the book are convincing enough to leave little doubt as to its identity. From the balcony of the house occupied by Mrs. Peixada the characters of this story looked down upon the busy river, where the tugs and Sound steamers kept up a continual puffing and whistling. Mr. Harland sees a beautiful mother-of- pearl tint in the water, and hears the band around the corner grinding out selections from Trovatore. Veronika and her uncle Tiluski lived in the topmost story of the white apartment house on Fifty-first Street, near Second Avenue. It was there that Neuman murdered his betrothed. A few blocks to the west and north, on Fifty-seventh Street, is the City Court which served Mr. Jesse Lynch Williams 182 NEW YOHK IN FICTION in his story of "Mrs. Harrison Wells's Shoes/' Farther up, at Sixty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, opposite the Park, we tiluski s home. — h. harland s "as it was written." 183 NEW YORK IN FICTION find the house of John Lennox {David Harwn). It was on the bridle-path that runs alongside the Reservoir that took scene of J. l. williams's " mrs. harrison wells's shoes.' place the runaway described by Mr. Ford in Tlie Honourable Peter Stirling. The swan-boats in the little lake at the lower end of the Park were the inspiration of 184 VAN BIBBER ANU THE SWAN-BOATS. — R. II. DAVIS. NEW YORK IN FICTION Mr. Davis's fragile and sympathetic story of Van Bibber and the little girls joiin lennox's house. — westcott's "i>avil> hakum." from the tenement districts of the down- town east side. Directly across the city, 1ST NEW YORK IN FICTION at Fifty-eighth Street and Eleventh Avenue, stood, many years ago, the cow- sheds described in TJie Honourable Peter ■ THE !X)N(i STRETCH BY THE RESERVOIR. P. L. FORD i "THE HONOURABLE PETER STIRLING." 188 N F W Y R K I N F I C Tl N Stirling. The " swill-milk cases " alluded to in this book actually took place in 1858; but fur the purposes of the story Mr. Ford used them while writing of the events of the year 1873. The scenes of squatter life treated by Mr. Fawcett in his Confessions of Claud were laid about Sixtieth and Sixty-first streets, near the North River. IV. HARLEM HEIGHTS — THE NEUTRAL GROUND — SCENES OE CHIMMIE FADDEN — LA- GUERRE'S — SLEEPY HOLLOW In one of the sketches of Made in France, which Was a collection of short tales from Guy de Maupassant told with a United States twist, the late Henry Cuyler Bunner described one of those quaint old frame houses with great gardens which, until ten or a dozen years ago, were to be found here and there throughout the upper West Side. It was in the garden that the hero of 189 NEW YORK IN FICTION the tale came upon the strange old couple pirouetting through their ghostly dance. ■SQUATTER TERRITORY. — EDGAR FAWCETT S " THE CONFESSIONS OF CLAUD." As to the actual situation of the house and garden there was very little said positively. It was somewhere west of 190 N E W Y O R K I N F I C T I N Central Park, rather far up ; and with this as guide the reader who knew this part of the city in those days, before the sweeping invasion of the real-estate agent, the architect, and the mason swept away the traces of the island's earlier history, may make such selection as suits his taste. Whatever the selec- tion may be, the reader will not have to journey far to find the scenes of Pro- fessor Brander Matthews' s Tom Pauld- ing, which were laid about what is now the Riverside Drive. The opening chapter of the book treated of West Ninety-third Street, and years after it was written the author took up his residence in this street, and there lives at the present day. Among the parts of New York which have been ignored in fiction Harlem is strikingly prominent. Perhaps this is in a measure due to the swiftness of its growth and the constant changes in its architectural aspect and social conditions 191 NEW YORK IN FICTION from year to year. The ubiquitous Mr. Fawcett has occasionally alluded to it, Mrs. Anna Katharine Green has used it as the background of one or two of her sensations, but it wholly lacks the charm of maturity which appeals to the literary temperament, and has, justly or unjustly, been regarded as dull and commonplace. Moving up the Heights, we come to the Jumel mansion, frequented by so many of the great personages of our national history, and one of the reputed places of concealment of Fenimore Cooper's Har- vey Birch. Beneath the Heights to the northwest stretches the broad expanse of the Hudson as the Spy and Captain Wharton saw it during their flights from the Virginian troopers. To the north the broken fragments of the Highlands, throwing up their lofty heads above masses of fog that hung over the water, and by which the " course of the river could be traced into the bosom of hills whose conical summits were grouping 192 THli JUMEL HOUSE. — A REPUTED REFUGE <>I HARVEY BIRCH. NEW YORK IN FICTION together, one behind another, in that dis- order which might be supposed to have succeeded their gigantic but fruitless ef- forts to stop the progress of the flood: and emerging from these confused piles, the river, as if rejoicing at its release from the struggle, expanded into a wide bay, which was ornamenting into a few- fertile and low points that jutted humbly into its broad basin." Near by are the scenes of Janice Meredith when Mr. Paul Leicester Ford, in the fifteenth chapter, carries his narrative from southern New Jersey to the northern end of Manhattan Island; whisking the characters of the book to Harlem Heights, and showing us Washington at a time when the colonial cause was beginning to look dark and hopeless. A group of horsemen on a slight eminence of ground were watch- ing the movements of the British men of war, and the discomfiture of the raw American recruits. Later the action shifts to the Roger Morris house, where 195 NEW YORK IN FICTION Washington had his headquarters and Mr. Meredith and his daughter are brought to answer to a charge of con- veying to the British vastly important information as to the lack of powder in the American army. The country at the northern end of Manhattan Island and beyond the Har- lem was in a measure the inspiration of Fenimore Cooper's The Spy. Every crag and valley was the scene of one of the skirmishes between partisans of the rival causes in the Revolutionary period ; every road knew the wanderings of Harvey Birch. The opening pages of the book find General Washington, under the name of Harper, pursuing his way through one of the numerous little valleys of West- chester, which became after the occupa- tion of New York by the British army common ground until the end of the war. The towns in the southern part of the country near the Harlem River were, for the most part, under English dominion, 196 N E W \ ' () R K I X F J C T ION while those of northern Westchester were in sympathy with the Revolution- ary cause. " The Locusts," the home of THE ROAD WINDING AROUND LITTLE HILLS. Courtesy of owners of Park Hill THE SPY, the Whartons, which was a meeting-place for the officers of King Gj-eorge's army, stood and still stands on the side of a hill 199 NEW YORK IN FICTION overlooking the distant waters of Long Island Sound, the scene of Water Witch. " The Locusts " at the present day is oc- cupied by descendants of the family that Cooper, when living at Closet Hall — the home of the Littlepage family in Satans- toe — was in the habit of visiting on his little journeys inland. The appearance of this house, which played so important a part in The Spy, has changed but little since the time when Cooper knew it. All the country to the north of the Harlem, stretching from the Hudson to the Sound, is rich with associations of Cooper's first great historical novel. Near by at " The Four Corners " is the site where stood the building from which Harvey Birch escaped disguised in Betty Flanagan's clothes. The village of Four Corners was a cluster of small and dilapidated houses at a spot where two roads inter- sected at right angles. The hilly country between Spuyten Duyvil and Yonkers was the scene of the flight and wander- 200 NEW YORK IN FICTION ings of the pedler and Captain Wharton, after the escape from the farmhouse in HARVEY BIRCH S CAVE. — WASHINGTON ROCKS Ceurtesy of owners of Park Hill. which the English officer was imprisoned awaiting execution, and from which lie was rescued by Harvey's strategy. The 201 NEW YORK IN FICTION cave in which they took refuge when pur- sued by the troop of American horse was in the Washington rocks at Park Hill. Turning from the fiction which finds its background in the last years of the eigh- teenth century to fiction which very dis- tinctively belongs to the closing years of the nineteenth century, we find a few miles from " The Locusts " the house which was the scene of the exploits, bel- ligerent and amorous, of Edward W. Townsend's Chimmie Fadden. The little Bowery boy, it will be remembered, after his reclamation by Miss Fannie was taken as footman to the country res- idence of " His Whiskers." It was there that he entered polite society, and wooed and won " De Duchess." The original of the country home of " His Whiskers " was the residence of Mr. Grillig, ex-Com- modore of the Larchmont Yacht Club, at Larchmont, overlooking the Sound. To this great house the author of Chimmie Fadden has been a frequent visitor. Fifty 202 KI.SIM.NCK or "HIS WHISKEKS. — E. \V. TOW NSKXl/s "chimmie faddi;n." NEW YORK IN FICTION or a hundred feet away from the northern end of the house is the stable to which " His Whiskers " was in the habit of tak- ing (Jhames whenever he deemed that the young man was in need of more vigorous redemption than Miss Fannie's instruc- tion could supply. On the banks of the Bronx, sung by the aforesaid Chimmie, was Laguerre's, so well beloved by Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, who characterized it as the "most delight- ful of French inns in the quaintest of French settlements." From the windows of the passing railway trains one may see the "tall trees trailing their branches in the still stream — hardly a dozen yards wide — the white ducks paddling together, and the queer punts drawn up on the shelving shore or tied to soggy, patched- up landing stairs." Alighting from the train at Williamsbridge, crossing the water, passing the tapestry factory, a short walk brings one to the former home of Henri Lemaire, the original of 205 NEW YORK IN FICTION Frangois Laguerre. Farther down the road there is a cafe very much like Laguerre' s, only more modern and pre- tentious, and consequently less pictur- esque. Like Laguerre in the story, Lemaire was a maker of passe-partouts. He is still living, and has a shop some- where on Sixth Avenue. It is only ten or fifteen years since Laguerre' s was unique in its mouldiness and charm. But now everything is much changed. The old house and the punts are going to decay, the stream is bit by bit losing its quaintness. No portion of New York or its envi- ronments has been more sympathetically and tenderly treated than in Washington Irving' s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Fol- lowing the post road to the north from Tarrytown, one may, from the countless associations of stone and wood, readily re-evoke the quaint figure of Ichabod Crane astride his horse Gunpowder in the wild flight from the Galloping Hes- 20G VHE hie most delightful <>l french inn's. — "a day at laguerre's. F. HOI'KINSoN SMITH S NEW YORK IN FICTION sian. The little valley among high hills and the small brook gliding through it remain much the same as in the days when Irving was living at Sunnyside. The old church where Ichabod instructed Katrina Van Tassel in psalmody is still to be seen surrounded by locust-trees and lofty elms from among which " its decent whitewashed walls shine modestly forth, like Christian purity beaming through the shades of retirement. A gentle slope descends from it to a silver sheet of water, bordered by high trees, between which peeps may be caught at the blue hills of the Hudson." " This church was built in the seventeenth cen- tury. From the surrounding churchyard the Headless Horseman was said to issue nightly. Ichabod' s fright began when passing the tree by which Major Andre was captured. His experience with the Headless Horseman began at the bridge, about two hundred yards farther on. It was not until the old church had been 14 209 NEW YORK IN FICTION reached that the Headless Horseman, rising in his stirrups, hurled the pump- kin which laid the fleeing schoolmaster low. The old Mott homestead, believed to have been the home of Katrina Van Tassel, was recently destroyed. The schoolhouse in which Ichabod Crane 210 "flocks of white ducks paddling together." — f. hof'kinson smith's "a day at laguerre's." NEW YORK IN FICTION taught and which was harassed by Brom Bones and liis wild cronies, has also passed away. Near by we find the ruins of the haunted mill of Geoffrey C rayon ' s Clironiclt « . V. GREENPOINT — SCENES OF "TOM GROGAN " In An Ambitions Woman Edgar Faw- cett gave us a description of an outlying portion of New York strikingly adequate in its scope and conviction. Of Green- point he says that its sovereign dreari- ness still remains. He dwells at length on its melancholy, its ugliness, its torpor, its neglect. To him it always had a certain "goblin hideousness keenly pic- turesque." When writing An Ambitions Woman he went time and time again to Greeiipoint to study its conditions and atmosphere, — to get all its tragi-comic suggestiveness well in memory. The background of the story — the black, loamy meadow, and the sodden bridge, ■2\'A NEW YORK IN FICTION and the little inky creek, and the iris- necked flock of pigeons, and the dull, "THE INKY CREEK AND FLAT MARSH LAND." EDGAR FAWCETT'S "AN AMBITIOUS WOMAN." dirty smoke from the factories — was all very real to him. 214 NEW YORK IN FICTION The Twinings lived in a three-story wooden house of a yellowish drab colour, with trellised piazza, Corinthian pillars, and high basement windows, in one of the retired side streets of Greenpomt. A few such houses are still to be found, but the book offers no evidence that the author had in mind any particular struc- ture. Claire Twining, before the en- counter with Josie which marked such a crisis in her life, was standing on a little hill which overlooked the lights of the city. This hill, from which Mr. Faw- cett described his heroine as " watching the wrinkled river, drab and tremulous, the boats, and beyond the church-spires of New York," was probably Pottery Hill, which was razed about ten years ago. Crossing two rivers and the city between, we find at Hoboken the little green park described in the same author's A Daughter of Si later. This book was a favourite novel of the late Colonel Ingersoll. In this park, which may be 217 NEW YORK IN FICTION seen from the river, Gaiy Arbuthnot and Brenda first speak. TOM GROGAN'S HOUSE. The opening pages of F. Hopkiiison Smith's Tom Gro'gan deal with the work about the Lighthouse Department and 218 \'\\i HIE ANDBE TREE AND MONUMENT. — IRVING's "LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW." N E W Y R K IN FT C TION the Government dock at St. George, Staten Island. Babcock, building the sea wall, conies upon Tom Grogan in the depot yard with its coal docks and machine shops. Over the hill in Staple- TOM UROIIAN S BARN. ton, thinly disguised in the story as Rockville, was Tom Grogan' s house and stables. The house, a plain, square frame dwelling, with front and rear verandas, protected by the arching branches of a 221 NEW YORK IN FICTION big sycamore-tree and surrounded by a small garden filled with flaming dahlias and chrysanthemums, is to-day occupied by the daughter and son-in-law of the original of the character, who herself lives in a house of recent erection only a stone's throw distant. Directly in the rear of this house may be found the stables, the stable yard, and the pump and horse trough, all of which play a conspicuous part in the tale. It was while in the larger of the two stables that Tom was struck down by the ham- mer in the hand of Dan McGaw, and through the window at the side came the light by which she saw his face before the blow fell. The long room in which Judge Bowker gave the decision which settled finally the question of the award of the contract, and allowed Tom Grogan the right to use her husband's signature in carrying on her business, was not, as might be supposed, in the Town Hall proper, but in a room directly over the 222 a fc ? as ^j&jg'frteir ,», NEW YORK IN FICTION Stapleton Post-Office. Across the square is a one-story frame structure, which was the original of O'Leary's saloon, where McGaw and Crimmins hatched their plots against Tom. The experiences which went to make this book were gathered during Mr. Smith's connection with the Government Lighthouse De- partment as contractor. It was then that he came in contact with Mrs. Bridget Mor- gan, stevedore, the original Tom Grrogan. Down the Atlantic Highlands are the scenes of Fenimore Cooper's WaterWitch, and out from Sandy Hook is the Scot- land Lightship, thoughts of which in- spired Mr. Richard Harding Davis when writing oue of his best and most charm- ing scenes of love-making, — that of Rob- ert Clay and Hope on the north-bound steamer off the coast of South America. A very few miles inland are the scenes of the greater part of Mr. Paul Leicester Ford's Janice Meredith, — many of them comparatively the same as in the days 15 225 NEW YORK IN FICTION when General Washington was in full night across the State on his way to Philadelphia and Valley Forge. The old church where Janice and her family wor- shipped was destroyed by the British soldiers during the Revolution, and the tavern frequented by Fownes and Joe Bagby long ago passed away from the eyes of men. And yet there is much to re-evoke the atmosphere of the novel. Nassau Hall still stands as solidly and majestically as at the time when it served as barracks for the soldiers of both causes. Here at New Brunswick is the same Rari- tan, and the same broad fields, and be- yond, in the distance, is the mountain range of the tale. After turning over the last page of JanU-v Meredith, the present writer took up The History of Union and Middlesex Counties, and reading through the chap- ters devoted to the city of New Bruns- wick and the surrounding country during the War of the Revolution, found it 226 NEW YORK IN FICTION difficult to determine just where, in the romance, fact ended and fiction began. So careful and accurate was Mr. Ford in the building of his story that the very names of the book have the same ring "NASSAU HALL, THEN SERVING AS BARRACKS FOR THE FORCE CENTRED THERE." — " JANICE MEREDITH," CH. XXXII. as the names to be found in the war and court records of Middlesex County. We read in the novel of the troubles Lambert Meredith had with his Whig neighbours, and then find in a printed fragment of a letter of a British officer that "one of 227 NEW YORK IN FICTION our friends had got several thousand in the back country brought over to our interests; but about a month ago a mob "glimpses of the raritan, over fields of stubble and cornstacks, broken by patches of timber and or- chard." — "janice meredith," ch. iii. of about one hundred dissolute fellows surrounded his house, with an intention to tar and feather him, upon which he came out armed, and while he was rea- 228 NEW YORK IN FICTION soiling the case with them at the door he was knocked down with the bntt end of a musket, then laid like a calf across a horse, and tied to a tree while yet insen- sible, and tarred and feathered." This sort of thing was going on all over the country; the Tories, on the other hand, retaliating whenever they had the opportunity. Greenwood, the home of the Merediths, by the river road, some four miles from the town of Brunswick, was purely an imaginary structure, and the accompany- ing picture of the house is as much the creation of the artist as of the author. In fact, there are a few little details, such as the relations of the house and the barn and the hedge, which fail to agree with the text. The interior of the Greenwood of the story was modelled after the old Ford home; the exterior after a house in Morris Plains. 231 FEB 18 1901