Class r ^ , _^ Book ii5! . CQBmiGm DEFQSm THE GOVERNOR S ROOM IN THE CITY HALL THE BOOK OF NEW YORK By ROBERT SHACKLETON ^u//z«r ./"The BOOK OF BOSTON." .'UNVISITED PLACES OF OLD EUROPE." ETC. Illustrated with Photographs ,ndM Drawings hyR.h.^OYE^ THF PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY PHILADELPHIA 1917 (i COPYRIGHT 19 17 BY THE PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY The Book of New York DEC22!9I7 f^:)pi A -I tt I fi7i; CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I A City Young and Old 1 II The Geeat Indifferent City .... 14 III Down at the Battery ^4 IV The Church and the Street .... 44 V Around City Hall Park 57 VI "Million-footed Manhattan" .... 70 VII Up the Bowery ^-'- VIII Some Contrasts of the City .... 97 IX Among the Tenements 107 X Tammany ^^^ XI The City of Foreigners 1^5 XII Two Notable Squares 14'7 XIII Gramercy and Stuyvesant and Old Chelsea ^^^ XIV Up Fifth to Forty-Second 1^^ XV Above Forty-Second 1^''' XVI On Murray Hill 20o XVII Midst Pleasures and Palaces .... 213 XVIII Superstitions of the City 228 XIX Streets and Ways 241 XX The Region of Riverside . . . • • -258 CONTENTS CHAPTEK PAGE XXI To JuMEL AND Van Cortlandt .... 268 XXII Hamilton and Burr 280 XXIII Where IMany Thousands Dwell . . .290 XXIV Up the Hudson 302 XXV West Point 317 XXVI Down the Bat 328 XXVII In Greenwich Village 343 XXVIII Washington Square ....... 357 ILLUSTEATIONS The Governor's Koom in the City Hall . . Frontispiece Madison Square Garden . . . Title Page Decoration PAGE The Brooklyn Bridge (heading) 1 The Statue of Liberty (initial) 1 The Bowling Green (tailpiece) 13 The Hall of Fame (initial) 14 Staircase and Rotunda of the Old City Hall (facing) 16 Poe's Cottage (tailpiece) 33 The Old House on the Battery .... (initial) 34 The Battery (facing) 36 Lower Manhattan (tailpiece) 43 The Stock Exchange . . . . . . (initial) 44 Old Trinity, far overtopped by Office Buildings (facing) 46 Fraunces Tavern (tailpiece) 56 St. Paul's on Broadway (initial) 57 The Old City Hall and its Setting . . . (facing) 66 Statue of Nathan Hale (tailpiece) 69 The Equitable Building (initial) 70 IMinetta Street (tailpiece) 80 Statue of Peter Cooper (initial) 81 The Sherman Statue ...... (facing) 84 Old St. Mark's (tailpiece) 96 The Ancient Church in Eastchester . . (initial) 97 The End of 106th Street (tailpiece) 106 The Cathedral of St. John the Divine . . (initial) 107 Among the Tenements: Rivington Street (facing) 108 ILLUSTEATIONS PAGE 123 124 Manhattan Bridge (tailpiece) ^^^11 Street (i^^^ial) The City Hall (,,i,pi,,^) ,3, The Shopping Stretch of Fifth Avenue . (initial) 135 The Heart of Chinatown (tailpiece) 146 The Appellate Court (initial) 147 The Towers of Madison Square . . . (facino-) 150 The Farragut Monument (tailpiece) 157 Statue of Petrus Stuyvesant .... (initial) 158 Studio Buildings in East 19th Street . . (facing) 160 Gramercy Park and the Pla^^ers Club . . (facing) 164 168 The Oldest House in New York . . . (tailpiece) The Old Eleventh Street Corner . . . (initial) ' 1^^^ ^^^^^^ Cluirch Around the Corner " . (facing ) 174 186 187 190 204 205 210 The New York Public Library .... (tailpiece) St. Patrick's Cathedral (initial) Forty-Second Street near Fifth Avenue . (facing) The Metropolitan Museum (tailpiece) The Grand Central Terminal .... (initial) The Obelisk in Central Park .... (facing) On the Park Side of Fifth Avenue . . . (tailpiece) 212 .. ' ^ ~ - 213 Madison Square Garden (initial) Classic Pillars of the Pennsylvania Station (facing) 216 227 228 234 240 The Hispanic Museum (tailpiece) A Hester Street Corner (initial) The Lights of Broadway (facino') The Custom House .* (tailpiece) _„ The Corner of Broadway and Fifth Avenue (initial ) 241 The College of the City of New York . . (tailpiece) 257 Grant's Tomb (initial) 258 The Beginning of Riverside Drive . . . (facing) 260 Columbia University (facing) 264 The Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument . . (tailpiece) 267 The Van Cortlandt Mansion .... (initial) 268 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE The Jmnel Mansion (tailpiece) 279 The Statue of Hamilton in Central Park . (initial) 280 New York from the Bay (tailpiece) 289 Entrance to Prospect Park (initial) 290 The Brooklyn Museum (tailpiece) 301 Staircase in the Philipse ]Manor Hall . . (initial) 302 The Hudson near Fort Washington . . (facing) 304 Irving's Home, Sunnyside (tailpiece) 316 The Medieval Effect of West Point . . (initial) 317 West Point and the Highlands . . . (facing) 322 The West Point Chapel ...... (tailpiece) 327 The Old Moravian Church (initial) 328 Billopp House (tailpiece) 342 Old Wrought-Iron Newel Posts . . . (initial) 343 A Bit of Greenwich Village: Milligan Place (facing) 346 Corner in Old Greenwich (tailpiece) 356 The Benches of Washington Square . . (initial) 357 Washington Arch : the Gateway of Fifth Avenue (facing) 360 Washington's Words in Stone . . . • (tailpiece) 369 ^ •^!.? I lilrfe^ THE BOOK OF NEW YORK CHAPTER I A CITY YOUNG AKD OLD |INE old Frenchman that he was, when he came back over the ocean to us a half century after his youthful advent, Lafayette appreciated to the full the finely delightful qualities which he rec- ognized in the character of our principal city. ''I shall love New York," he said; "Mon- sieur, I shall love New York so well that I may never be able to get away from it!" And this expresses the ke^mote of New York, its magnetic quality, the way in which it draws, attracts, allures. He who writes of New York should take the city seriously, yet not too seriously. The city is so great, so mighty, so tremendous, in population, in wealth, THE BOOK OF NEW YORK in power, in achievements, that any tendency to over- estimate should be checked, that every claim to impor- tance should be carefully weighed, that the subtle danger of over-admiration should be avoided. That excellent New York poet of long ago, Fitz-Greene Halleck, felt and expressed all this when he wrote : "And on our City Hall a Justice stands: A neater form was never made of board ; Holding majestically in her hands A pair of steelyards and a wooden sword, And looking down with complaisant civility — Emblem of dignity and durability." But when, mth every tendency to yield over-ad- miration or over-importance fully in hand, one looks at New York seriously, soberly, with intent to see only what is fairly to be seen, it is seen as a city of immense and wide interest. Far more than any other city, whether of the past or of the present, New York is one that is both young and old. Insistently young, vociferously young, ob- viously young, it at the same time displays all the qualities of maturity. It is a city of today, yet also a city of three centuries. This marks it, among cities, more than does any other of its myriad characteristics. There are the vivid, vital evidences of 3'outh, the fire of youth, the strength and vigor and crudity and ruthlessness and inconstancy of youth ; it is a city as new and as crude as the newest of mining to'wais and of as gay an irre- sponsibility : yet it is also a city with the sadness, the earnestness, the gravity, the solidity, the balance, the 2 A CITY YOUNG AND OLD impressiveness, of age. Eiglitly seen, its chasmed streets are but wrinkles cut by the years. Looking at the tens of thousands of new buildings, the miles and miles of new-made thoroughfares, it is the very newest of all cities: yet it is also one that possesses the salt and the savor of time. One needs but remember that in old St. Mark's Church there lies buried a man who, of powerful influence on the life and development of this, his beloved towTi, was ruler here while the long-ago Thirty Years' War was rag- ing, was born when Elizabeth was Queen of England and while Shakespeare was splendidly in mid-career. In everything. New York is the city that is differ- ent. When considering Boston, Philadelphia, Chi- cago, San Francisco, it is customary to speak of what their people think or are or do, but no one ever speaks thus of the people of New York, but only of the city itself. For the city is so much greater than its peo- ple! With New York, the city makes the people; elsewhere, the people make the city. Always it has been a restless city; and Adrian Block, who built the first handful of houses here, over three hundred years ago, and here built and launched the first vessel built in America, named that vessel of Manhattan the Unrest, as if with a touch of in- spired insight. And Verazzano, who was here long before Block ; coming, indeed, in the reign and in the service of him of 'Hhe longest nose in history," as the New Yorker, Henry James, described that pic- turesque king, Francis the First ; also saw Manhattan with the eye of prophecy, for he set down in his re- 3 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK port that the island seemed to be a place of wealth! It seemed to him a place of gold, of jewels, of furs — and it is still a place of gold and of jewels and of furs. Never was there any other city that so rapidly and ruthlessly tears down and throws away. It would seem as if the motto of New York were ' ' Never save for tomorrow what can be destroyed today!" It builds swiftly, makes immense advances swiftly, but as swiftly destroys what it has built : dwelling houses and business buildings that have gone up like magic disappear like magic, in single gaps, in rows, in streets, in four-square blocks. Nothing, however new and costly, is permitted to stand for a moment in the path of public or private improvement. For new thoroughfares, for burrowing subways, for bridge approaches, massed houses vanish; and other buildings, in number innumerable, vanish that there may arise triumphant business structures or apart- ment houses such as elsewhere the world has never seen. The story, cheerfully typical, is told, of a vis- itor of note, that he was driven uptown, in the morn- ing, to be toasted and greeted and to meet some of the city's best, and that in the afternoon he was taken back over the same route that he might see what changes had meanwhile taken place ! When New York is referred to, whether by New Yorkers themselves or by others, Manhattan Island, or the Borough of Manhattan as it is now ofiicially known, is usually meant, although there are also the Boroughs of Brooklyn, of Queens, of Eichmond, of 4 A CITY YOUNG AND OLD the Bronx, within the limits of the Greater City. In all, it is estimated that now the population is more than that of London; that Greater New York leads the world! Manhattan is an Indian word, Americanized. As, at one end of the State, the softly lilting ''Neeaw- gawrah, ' ' with its accent on syllables first and third, was harshly changed to "Nyaggaruh," so, at this end of the State, the ' * Manattan ' ' of the Indians, without an **h," and prettily pronounced, as it was, with its accent on syllable one, was harshly transformed in accent and given a "hat"! — with about the same effect indeed, as that of putting an American hat on an Indian in his native dress. There are still a few Indians in the region of the James River, in Virginia, where John Smith and Pocahontas and Powhatan played their drama of life and death, and I have heard them speak of their great chief of the past, with the easy ripple, accenting syllable one, of *'Powattan," quite discarding the "hat," as Manhattan Indians would similarly do with their own name, were there any Manhattan Indians existent. Never in history has there been such a magnificent city. It draws the great and the little; the masters of finance, of railroads and manufacturing, the lead- ers in law and surgery and authorship and art, and millions of little folk as well; while the rest of the country looks on jealously, feels jealous, is jealous — but New York, when she thinks of them at all, knows that the very men who talk depreciatingly of her are getting ready to come to her by the next train. 5 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK More and more of the wealth of the world centers here. In spite of misconceptions which come from extravagant statements, whether made seriously or as witticisms, New York is a safe city, a city to which capital gladly comes and where the average individ- ual lives a protected and happy life. Naturally and inevitably, there is temptation where there is such vastness of wealth ; naturally, there is crime ; but on the whole, for those who wish safety, safety comes as a matter of course. It is a city which is more criticised, by its own peo- ple and by others, than any other city in the world was ever criticised. At the same time it is essen- tially so great a city that not only is every New Yorker proud of being a New Yorker, but every other American, away from his own home town, no matter what that town may be or how dearly he may honor it, is pridefully titillated if taken for a New Yorker, for the very name carries with it the implication of alert- ness, of power, of ability. ''Whatever is, is wrong," is what people love to say of New York, yet all, no matter how reluctantly, or with what misgivings, ad- mire its might. That it should develop skyward is held against the city as one of the most common reproaches ; yet this development was but meeting an exigence with sagacity. Narrowed closely between rivers and bay, and thus barred from the usual development of the usual city, sidewise and outward, this unusual city found its natural development to be up toward the sky; whereupon, toward the sky it went, with thou- 6 A CITY YOUNG AND OLD sands of people in the offices of single structures, and with banks of elevators of from five to thirty or so ; and with much of positive beauty, and not only costli- ness, in many of these wonderful office buildings. The streets between these dizzy heights are like roads through narrow defiles between mountains. I have seen, in the Alps, the white summits, far above me, aglow with the splendor of sunset, while the road it- self was darkened by the gloom of evening, and I have often thought of this when, looking up from some canyon street of New York, where the shadows have already gathered, I have seen, far above, white towers still glowing with the sunset glory of purple and gold. Fired by the greatness of New York, Fernando Wood, its mayor, in 1861 proposed in a message to the Common Council that it should secede from the Union and become independent. He looked upon the secession of the South as certain, and was anxious that New York emulate and outdo the glories of the long-ago free cities of Germany. New York, im- perially alone, was to be the wonder of the world ! — alone, except for Staten Island and Brooklyn, which it was to annex and then to take the name of Tri- Insula! But with the firing on Fort Sumter the proposal of Mayor Wood was instantly thrust aside and forgotten. New York is a kaleidoscopic city, an active city, a city with the touch and tang of leadership, a city that has always welcomed. Some other cities receive even the most worthwhile newcomer with hesitation and 7 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK doubt. But make yourself a New Yorker, declare yourself a New Yorker, and New York accepts you, and is glad to have you, and is the more glad the more you are worth the having. New York welcomes and appraises, whereas in some of the other Eastern cities you will never really be accepted, no matter how wonderful, how able, how brilliant, you may be ! If you would advance in art, in letters, in business, New York treats you as one of her children; if you would be a social climber, it is not necessary to have a family tree to climb by, as it is in Boston and Phila- delphia. From the first. New York has been cosmopolitanly planned. From the first it has stood for broad toler- ance, and has welcomed all nationalities and all be- liefs. As early as 1643, so it has been stated, there were people of eighteen nationalities here. The Dutch set a broad example in a day of narrow- ness by declaring that all religious sects should be treated alike. The city, then a tiny place, gave shel- ter both to Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson when they fled from New England persecution. Jesuit Fathers, fleeing from the Indians, were wel- comed and given free transportation to Europe. Hebrews, with wonderful tolerance for that early day, were admitted to citizenship in 1657 — and that it was really so wonderful is not without a humorous suggestion in view of the vast number of Hebrews who at the present day take New York citizenship as a matter of course. Intended victims marked for death by the witchcraft delusion fled here for safety, 8 A CITY YOUNG AND OLD and found it ; for the New York clergj^, while those of New England were flaming with the terrible zeal of religious persecution, gravely resolved that ''a good name obtained by a good life should not be lost by spectral accusation." A city of amenities, this great city of New York! And it is typical of the influence of the place that when a letter from "Washington to his wife is inter- cepted by the British and sent to General Howe, he courteously, from his headquarters in New York, sends it back to Washington, expressing himself as happy to return it without the least attempt having been made to discover its contents. And some time after this, we find Washington sending his compli- ments to General Howe in New York and doing him- self the pleasure to return a dog, picked up by some American troops and having the name of General Howe on the collar. And that Washington himself, who began his Presidential career in New York, owned dogs of such names as Juno, and Mopsey and Truelove, would alone point out that he himself was a man of amenities, a very human and a very likable man, indeed. The very air of New York exhilarates. This is no fancy, but a very literal fact. There is something extraordinarily brisk, active, inspiring about it. And it is not only New Yorkers who notice this, but vis- itors as well. **I have," wrote Thackeray, '*an ir- repressible longing to be in motion. There is some electric influence in the air and the sun here which we don't experience on our side of the globe. People 9 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK can't sit still; they must keep moving. I want to dash into the street now. ' ' And the mention of Thackeray is remindful that New York is a city which always presents the possi- bilities of adventure of one kind or another ; for that great novelist had, in New York, an actual adven- ture, such as his great rival Dickens fancied in imagi- nation as happening to Pickwick! For Thackeray wrote home that, after a dinner at Delmonico's, he went to his hotel and began undressing, only to be paralyzed by a woman's voice in the alcove — for he had gone into a second-floor room instead of his own on the third! **I tremble when I think of it," he writes. Always one comes back to the idea of change, as a characteristic of New York ; and the very seal of the city is curiously typical of this. On it there still stands an Indian with his bow — ^no wonder English- men come to New York to hunt Indians on Broadway ! (Before passing this off as entirely a joke it is well to remember that one so recent as Ellen Terry, the actress, has set down in her memoirs that when first she sailed for New York, from England, it was with the expectation of finding the men wearing red flan- nel shirts and bowie knives !) And still there stands, on the other side of the shield, an old-time sailor, in knee-breeches, with a lead-line in his hand and at his shoulder a double cross-staff such as was long ago used in taking observations, and such as, indeed, was used by Hudson himself as he entered the harbor of what was to become known as New York. 10 A CITY YOUNG AND OLD Between the Indian and the knee-breeched sailor is a windmill. A few windmills far out on Long Island have continued to represent, into this twentieth cen- tury, this picturesque feature of the past, but it is difficult to realize that windmills were ever a feature of city life, here on Manhattan! But it was neces- sary to have some kind of power for mills, and there was no stream on the island with current sufficient, and so it was that windmills naturally came. Tradi- tion still hazily tells of the first one as standing just west of Broadway, and of the amazement of the In- dians — something like, one may presume, the amaze- ment of sophisticated New Yorkers who, wandering so far afield as toward the eastern end of Long Is- land, gaze in amazement at these lingering relics of the past. There was a time when windmills stood on Maiden Lane, and on Cortlandt Street and Park Row, and at other places, and they show prominently in early prints of the city. The barrels on the seal are not rum barrels, but in- nocent flour barrels, for an important industry of early New York was the milling of flour. And the two beavers ! It is long since beavers were on Man- hattan Island, even in the shape of finished skins. In early days, however, the island was thronged with beavers and a little beaver stream gave name to Beaver Street; even as early as 1626 one ship car- ried from Manhattan Island to Amsterdam over seven thousand beaver skins, besides the skins of otter, mink and other animals ; and by 1671 the prov- 11 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK ince was furnishing over eighty thousand beaver skins annually. Immediately above the shield is an eagle ; and it is certainly long since an eagle fluttered down Broad- way! In fact, one sees that nothing on the shield is typical of the present day ; that these things, so typi- cal of the past, have gone. Mrs. Trollope, mother of the famous Anthony, came over to America, almost a century ago, and wrote a book of the most narrow and imfair animad- versions, but in one respect she was enthusiastic about America; she immensely admired New York. ''My imagination is incapable of conceiving any- thing of the kind more beautiful than the harbor of New York," she wrote. ''I think New York one of the finest cities I ever saw. Situated on an island, which I think it will one day cover, it rises, like Venice, from the sea, and like that fairest of cities in the days of her glory receives into its lap tribute of all the riches of the earth. ' ' Lord Bacon, whose scientific mind loved to revel in details, enumerated among the things that ought to be seen by a traveler, the courts of princes, the courts of justice in session, churches, walls, fortifications and harbors, antiquities and ruins, libraries, colleges, gardens, warehouses, horsemanship and fencing, the training of soldiers, plays, treasuries of jewels and robes, and in conclusion, ''whatsoever is memorable" : and it seems as if one who would write of New York should place himself, so far as possible, in the position 12 A CITY YOUNG AND OLD of Bacon's traveler, and try to see the city from the traveler's standpoint. And one likes to remember the words of Washmg- ton Irving when, in 1832, he returned from Europe and was proudly welcomed by his city: '^s this not," he said, ''a city by which one may be proud to be received as a son!" s^.^ «?: 13 CHAPTER II THE GKE^VT INDIFFERENT CITY IKOM early years the greatness and fu- ture growth of New York were recog- nized; and over a century ago the streets of the city were mapped out, in detail, for al- most the entire extent of Man- hattan Island. Xever was there a more amus- ing misconception than the often-repeated one that the north side of the City Hall was made of cheaper ma- terial than the front because no one was ever ex- pected to live north of it and that therefore it would never be seen, for before the City Hall was built the growth of the city northward was recogTiized. Commissioners, appointed to map out the streets for the population of the future, worked on the task from 1807 to ISll, and produced the most amazing prophecy in the annals of any city. For, after all, Xew York was then but small. It was lusty and vigorous and confident, but in wellnigh two centuries of existence had not extended thickly for much more than a mile from the Battery. And here came com- 14 ' THE GREAT LVDIFFEEENT CITY missioners who, with the eye of faith, saw the coming development and planned out streets for miles and miles to the northward, over land that was then but sparsely dotted with tiny villages and scattered farm- houses, with here and there a mansion. They ac- tually mapped out the plan of the city to 155th Street, inspired by the basic l>elief of the time; they were pjrophets inspired by the sense of popular confidence. But they were not poetical prophets; they dis- cerned the future, but they met the situation prosai- cally. They did not attempt charm in their plan; there was, with the streets, to be naught of circles and crescents such as those of Edinburgh or Bath, naught of great and ordered vistas or of avenues radiating from a central point,, as one sees in Paris or as had even then been begun in "Washington. They saw, in the great slim water-girdled city of the future, a problem to be met, not prettily but prosaically; there was frankly to be a triumph of utilitarianism. They themselves realized this. They discussed circles and stars and ovals and radiants, but then set down, stolidly, that **The commissioners could not but bear in mind that a city is to be composed prin- cipally of the habitations of men, and that straight- sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to btuld and the most convenient to live in." And all the artists and art commissions of Xew York have never been able to get over the result of their work. Pick up the map which they made, back before the War of 1812, and you wiU think that you are looking at a map of today, unless you notice the date, and 15* THE BOOK OF NEW YORK unless you notice no Central Park, and that Madison Square was to be much larger than it was linally made, for their plan contemplated the extent of Madi- son as from 23rd to 34th Streets and from Third Avenue to Seventh, to give ample space for a reser- voir of water and for the gathering and training of troops. They felt dubious about developing above 155th Street, where the lower stretch of the Harlem, with its marshy flats, was reached. In time, they thought, a still farther district might be built up, but that, as they said, might not be for centuries. But so far as 155th Street it seemed to them a very practical prop- osition; and this at a time when the city had not seriously extended beyond City Hall Park and when little Greenwich Village was a distant and separate place ! They worried somewhat about how their plan, con- cretely expressing the city's vague dream, would be taken; some, they said, would expect them to chart streets even beyond 155th; to others, "It may be a source of merriment that the commissioners have provided space for a greater population than is col- lected at any spot on this side of China"; but they bravely set forth their ideas, gridironing the coming city with streets all at right-angles. Practical men though they prided themselves on be- ing, tliej^ made a most unpractical blunder : a mistake which has proved to be both awkward and costly. For they ought to have known that the proper way to develop New York for the street traffic of the 16 STAIRCASE AND ROTUNDA OF THE OLD CITY HALL THE GREAT INDIFFEEEXT CITY future was the exact contrary of their plan : that in- stead of having a few avenues running lengthwise and most of the streets running crosswise, it should have been seen, from the shape of the island, that the future traffic would need more highways and nearer together, lengthwise, north and south, and not so many near together, leading east and west. The gridiron should have been turned sidewise. If there had been more north and south highways, the natural direction of the city's main traffic, the congestion problem would have been avoided, and New York would not have had to meet and face, as it is still meeting and facing, an immense expense in the open- ing of more north and south thoroughfares. When the city came to the matter of lajdng out Central Park, a half century later — for thus rapidly had the city grown, as if to justify the early confi- dence ! — men of an unutilitarian tj^pe were chosen for the work, and they succeeded beautifully. They were a small board, consisting of the Mayor, two other city officials, and three citizens; and what a three those citizens were ! — for they were William CuUen Bryant the poet, and George Bancroft the historian, and Washington Irving! And the plans that they made and set in motion, or which they in their noble spirit inspired landscape artists to dream of, were of a kind so superb as to give New York one of the finest parks of any city in the world, with wealth of water and rocks, and diversified heights and levels, and greenery. New York has quite forgotten that it ever pos- 17 TIIK r^OOK OF \FAV YORK jjossod Bancroft; it has t'oviiotton that it possessed Bryant, although he lived for some time at -4 AVest loth Street, and for a loiii^or period at nearby Koslyn, ou Long Island. And tltat it has not forgotten Irving is an exception to its usual indilYerent way. New York's way of ignoring even her greatest folk, and her readiness to be thoroughly critical when she does notice them, has had a marked etTect in lessening the ^'aluo of her historical and literary associations in the public mind. Alexander Hamilton and Washing- ton Irving have been the two that have come nearest to receiving her whole-souled and continued admira- tion, but even these have not been given adulation approacliing the adulation customary in such a city as Boston. In Boston, a man of ability has always ex- pected 10 be taken very seriously, and has always taken himself very seriously. Boston, from the tirst, not content with its really great men and really great events, that it nobly honors, has also exploited even the tiniest happenings in its history, and has pin- nacled even second-rate and third-rate men. especially politicians and authors. Xew I'ork. going to the other extreme, has taken its even notable events and people very lightly. Always, its tendency is to think of the future rather than of the past. Before the K evolutionary clash began, Xew York had expressed de:fiance of England — but after the war was over forgot to talk abotit it ! In Januaiy of 1770, long before the conflict at Lexington, even two months before the so-called Boston Massacre, men of Xew York skirmished with the British on Golden Hill, in IS THE GBEAT DsDjL- l i^-EST CITY tibe Yimaty of J Li= refused to take itself serionsly ; althon^ on the oth^r hand it may be said that Irving was in great degree only reflecting, in this, the spirit of his native t 'j-si- For Irving wrote a history of X ew York : it was a famnoroTis book, a Knickerbocker historv. as he called it, thns coining that deli^itfiil word, which was promjrtly adopted as meaning old families of Dutch ancestry, and then also as meaTifng short trousers, after Cmikshaiik delightfully illustrated the volume with short-breeched Dutchmen. The historv pleas- antly made light of dignitaries of the i>ast, and its success did much to intensify the general tendency of the city toward a sort of chaSng attitude, although Irving wrote only of the earlv Dutch regime. His humorous viewpoint, hLs refusal to take digni- taries seriously, was adopted in the general viewpoint 19 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK toward any sort of dignity or distinction. Dutchmen seemed fmmy to Irving, and he expatiated on that feature, emphasizing the size and quantity of their breeches, and the length of their pipes, and their gen- eral deliberateness of conduct. He might, had he wished, have written seriously enough of even the Dutch; of their frightful slaughter, for the mere lust of killing, of a hundred or so friendly Indians who had sought shelter on Manhattan from war parties of Mohawks; he might have written with much gravity of the war that followed, and of the hiring of a cer- tain New Englander, one Underhill, who had dis- played such cold cruelty toward New England In- dians that the Dutch eagerly paid him to come here to manage a massacre, near what is now Bedford, with the shooting or burning of some five hundred men, women and children, without the loss of a single life among those who did the killing. But Irving frankly laid stress on the light and humorous features of the Dutch and their times, and the humor was really there in plenty, and he made himself and New York famous with it, even abroad ; Sir Walter Scott read his Knickerbocker book and from it prophesied Irving's coming greatness, and greeted him as a friend and literary brother when he went to Abbotsf ord. With that book, early in his career, Irving sounded the natural New York keynote of frivolousness to- ward the past, and helped to intensify it. It was easy to encourage indifference in the great growing indifferent city which, though at times ready to flare 20 THE GREAT INDIFFERENT CITY into enthusiasm, quickly forgets. And perhaps New York could not be the greatest exponent of the future if she permitted herself to think of the past. Irving was quite capable, when he chose, of handling historical subjects with sober dignity, as in his life of Washington ; and that he and Washington once met, and how they met, is among the prettiest of all the incidents of New York history. Irving was born in the year which marked the close of the Revolution, 1783, and therefore his first name of Washington came naturally; and in 1789, Wash- ington, then living in New York as President of the United States, was one day spoken to, in a shop, by a Scotch maid, who modestly called his attention to a little boy beside her, of whom she was in charge ; for, recognizing Washington, the maid wished him to know that the lad had been given the name of Wash- ington in his honor; whereupon the tall grave man put his hand on little Irving 's head and said a few simple words of good wishes ; and one knows that this chance meeting must deeply have influenced Wash- ington Irving throughout his entire life, and that, no matter how excellent a man he would in any case have been, it must have aided in keeping him to standards of sweetness and honesty and kindliness: and never was there a sweeter and kindlier career than that of Irving. He is directly connected with New York City. He lived for a time in that immensely distinguished line of buildings, with great long front of huge Corin- thian pillars, on Lafayette Street (once Lafayette 21 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK Place), known as Colonnade Row, w^hicli had been named, at first, likewise in honor of Lafayette, La Grange Row. The Row has dwindled in recent years; it has become shorter and shorter by demoli- tion and soon it must all vanish. Long ago it lost all atmosphere of fine living, yet here wealthy New Yorkers dwelt, and in one of the houses President Tyler married Julia Gardiner of Gardiner's Island, the bit of land just off shore out toward the end of Long Island which, granted two and a half centuries ago as Gardiner's Manor, has remained the only un- broken manor in the country, for its extent has been neither altered nor diminished since the original grant; and, an even stranger fact, it is still in pos- session of a lineal descendant of the first Gardiner. There was no modest shrinking from publicity at the Tyler-Gardiner wedding! It was, indeed, an exam- ple to the contrary ; for after the ceremony the bride and groom were driven down Broadway behind four white horses to a waiting w^arship. Still more closely associated with Irving than Colonnade Row is the house, still looking much as when he lived there, on Irving Place, at the corner of 17th Street. The surroundings, however, have greatly changed, for in Irving 's day there was a great open space stretching off toward the East River. It is a smallish building of gray brick, three stories and a basement in height. Fronting on Irv- ing Place are pleasant mndows, with an iron balcony running the width of the house, and a slightly pro- jective bay, of w^hite wood supported on slender iron 22 THE GEEAT INDIFFERENT CITY rods ; the entrance to the house being by iron balus- tered steps of bro\vn stone on the 17th Street side. In this house, and even more in his charming home of Sunny side, up the Hudson, Irving delightfully met the finest folk of his day. Literary fancies change ; but much of what Irving wrote is still as fascinating to modern taste as when he wrote it. His "New York," however, makes, in large part, hard reading, and one wonders that it so delighted his period. It pleased giants as well as little folk. Not only was the general public de- lighted with it, and Scott delighted with it, but Dickens has recorded that, coming down from New Haven to New York by boat, he cut short a nap, so as not to miss seeing Hell Gate and the Hog's Back and other localities made famous by the Knickerbocker volume. Dickens also admired the other work of Irving, that which is still so fresh and so altogether charm- ing, and when, later, he came down the Hudson to- ward New York, he looked eagerly for all the locali- ties of that delightful region, made famous by the writer whom every one loved. It is interesting to know that there was for a time a pleasant association between Irving and John Howard Payne, and that the two collaborated in the writing of a play called ' ' Charles the Second, ' ' which has usually been ascribed to Payne alone, and which, after being acted in London, was presented in New York, in 1824, in the long ago vanished Park Theater, the fashionable theater of early New York, which 23 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK seated twelve hundred, and was the resort of the best people of the time whenever an excellent play was given. That the author of ''Home, Sweet Home" was a New Yorker, born here in 1791, is another of the facts that New York has never greatly heeded. Joseph Rodman Drake, who died in 1820 at the age of twenty-five, v/as a New Yorker who, like Irving, recognized in the Hudson River a pictorial subject. He wrote the liltmg rhjTues of the "Culprit Fay," which, although it made no fixed impression in litera- ture, was notable as an early American work. And he did write one memorable and remembered thing, his "Ode to the American Flag," with its ring- ing lines : ''When Freedom from her mountain height Unfurl 'd her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night, And set the stars of glory there!" Drake also discovered and wrote about the beauties of the Bronx, long afterwards to be rediscovered by F. Hopkinson Smith; and it is fitting that the early poet should be buried in that region that he loved, in a little graveyard now included within a park that has been called by his name. There was a Damon and Pythias friendship be- tween Drake and another New Yorker, Fitz-Greene Halleck, both of whom were born in the same year and both of whom struggled together for literary fame; and the death of Drake gave the sorrowing 24 THE GREAT INDIFFERENT CITY Halleck the opportunity that he would only too gladly have missed, for he wrote, in memory of his friend, some never-to-be forgotten lines, simple and touching in their measured beauty: ' ' Green be the turf above thee, Friend of my better days ; None knew thee but to love thee, Nor named thee but to praise. ' ' Halleck also made other contributions to fame, among others the fiery lines beginning, "At midnight, in his guarded tent." Recently, picking up by mere chance a book of selections of poetry, published in New York in 1840, with its credit of this or that poem to Shelley or Shakespeare or Scott or whatever Brit- ish writer it might be, I noticed, in casually turning the pages, that "Marco Bozzaris" was there — but with the author's name quite omitted! He was American ; he was a New Yorker ; why should he be remembered or named ! Not only New York City, but the country in gen- eral, ought to give far more honor to our early au- thors than it is customary, except in the case of a very few, to give. Leaving an author's name off altogether, in a formal collection, is not usual, but it is very usual indeed to depreciate the entire early American literary school. Even such writers as did not do work that is to live forever, did at least aid in giving that atmosphere of literature and art without which no country can well produce artistic or literary masters. 25 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK There are New Yorkers who will not even glance at a place associated with Irving or Poe or Howells or Mark Twain or other American authors, who go obediently about, following guide or guidebook, pick- ing out the home and the grave of this and that New England or Old England writer, even of such as can only fairly be credited with what may be called good literary intentions. Edgar Allan Poe was long a New Yorker, but he was an unhappy New Yorker indeed. He could not, either as author or editor, sufficiently impress him- self to secure practical returns. An unbelievably few dollars, was, as a general thing, the extent of his literary remuneration; a possible five or ten dollars always loomed large. For his "Raven," written when he was a New Yorker, he seems to have been paid the pitiful sum of ten dollars. He lived in grinding poverty in various shadowily remembered New York localities, and toward the end far up in the Fordham district, and he was so often without money to pay the stage fare down into the city that he frequently walked the entire distance in lonely discouragement. Such walks as, at other times, he took for the sake of walking, were usually at night ; and one evening, crossing alone on the foot- path over the lofty aqueduct over the Harlem River — a bridge which, seen from below and from a dis- tance, is positively beautiful, with its row of tall and symmetrical arches— he noticed a brilliant star di- rectly in front of him, whereupon there came to him the inspiration for the lines, with their haunting 26 THE GREAT INDIFFERENT CITY rhythm and swing, about the star-dials hinting of morn, their liquescent and nebulous luster, their be- diamonded crescent. After all, one remembers that Poe's first and most definite standard of poetry was that it be musical. The poor little Fordham cottage has been pre- served, although not quite at the original spot; the city, so indifferent to Poe himself, has at least kept his cottage. His wife, poor thing, died there, hungry and cold; she used to try to keep warm in bed by cuddling her yellow cat against her bosom, but at last even a cat was not enough to sustain life. And Poe himself soon wandered away from this great in- different city and at Baltimore somberly closed his sorrowful career. It is a curious thing, in regard to New York's lit- erary history, that a majority of its early notable leaders were poets. In such an eminently practical city as this, one would certainly have expected prose. Irving, indeed, wrote prose, but he was exceptional; and even his prose, until he was well on in his career, was of gay insouciance. Poets have continued to arise, novelists have here distinguished themselves, short-story writers have here done splendid work — but historians and philosophers have not greatly flourished in Manhattan soil. It may be added, too, that New York long ago seized the literary scepter of the country and took to itself the most prominent publications and most of the publishing houses. In the great and even vast number of authors who 27 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK in course of time have come to call New York their home, it is hard to pick and choose. A man may, like Howells, write with skill and smoothness and publish book after book, only to find himself not pre- cisely deemed among the few to be marked for per- manent fame. It is curious, and one may if he wishes deem it unfair, but so it is, that a score of thick novels may be thrust aside when there suddenly appears, let us say, a thin-volumed *' Colonel Carter." And, too, Howells has always seemed to consider himself more of a Bostonian than a New Yorker ; a New Yorker by stress of circumstance, but still a Bostonian by choice. Henry James, too — ^well, he did admirable early work, but so promptly made and kept a resolve to live as much as possible on the other side of the Atlantic, even long before he formally became a Brit- ish subject, that perhaps he, too, need not be looked upon as a New Yorker. One is tempted to think that the most interesting of his associations with his na- tive city is the fact that, as a small boy, he saw Thack- eray, when the great Englishman was a dinner guest at his first New York dinner, at the home of little Henry's father. And perhaps the best, or at least the cleverest, commentary on the works of Henry James, intricate and involved as he allowed his style to become, with interminable length of sentences, was that of the witty New Yorker who announced that a new serial by Henry James was about to begin, and that the opening sentence was to be continued through six numbers. 28 THE GREAT INDIFFERENT CITY At the time I write, Richard Harding Davis and F. Hopkinson Smith, both of them now dead, loom the most prominent as New York writers, or at least as the most prominent among those who have not only done distinguished work in broad fields but who also have best presented the character and the life of the city itself. But this, probably enough, will not be permanent. Not so long ago, Crawford was deemed the most notable of this class. Before that, and especially as exponents of New York, came Bunner and Sidney Luska — but Sidney Luska is quite forgotten now, and Bunner, with all his bubbling cleverness, is with difficulty kept in mind. Still further back there was Winthrop ; now and then you mil still hear some old- fashioned New Yorker speak of him; but Winthrop died in the Civil War, and somehow his work seemed to die then too; not entirely without reason, either, if one may judge from his inept description of de- lightful Washington Square, as "a dreary place, drearily surrounded by red brick houses with marble steps monstrous white, and blinds monstrous green." F. Hopkinson Smith should be remembered, among other reasons, for so breezily pointing out that, in a New York apartment-house room without a chimney, it is quite possible to put both a fireplace and a chim- ney, and to have friends gather there in conf abulative happiness in front of a blazing fire, the ideal of ' ' four feet on a fender." And he loved to point out that even in the heart of New York there may be the gleam of old mahogany, there may be the shining 29 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK glow of lights from old brass andirons, there may be a glorious sideboard, there may be the lovely blue of old china, there may be the silver sheen of ancient stately candlesticks. To the very end of his long life he kept all the en- thusiasm of youth. How every one loves his Colonel Carter ! I remember his telling me that in essentials he was picturing in this character his own father; and it touched him to know that he had made Jiis father so loved. He was describing a real house, in that story, on West 10th Street, at what was 58y2, behind 58, near Sixth Avenue, but only a trace of it now remains. And it is sorrowful to think that in this great indifferent city there may before long be only a trace of the fame of Hopkinson Smith him- self. That New York so rapidly forgets and so fre- quently ignores is quite typical of a deep-based trait: that is, that New York is a city entirely with- out self -consciousness ; it is so sufficient unto itself as not to be sensitive in the least about its dignity or its reputation, or to care what people think or say or write about it. As a world center, it must needs be that New York is greater than any of its people ; and it carries this feature to an extreme undreamed of in other world centers. The individual, no matter how towering, no matter for a time how dominant, finds his importance to be little compared with that of the city itself. It is a city which treats individuals as the ocean treats drops of water. New York does not, like other cities, 30 THE GREAT INDIFFERENT CITY claim great men ; she expects great men to claim New York! And over and over again one notices how carelessly she forgets. Already New York has practically forgotten that President Grant, up at 3 East 66th Street, wrote the greater part of his Memoirs, under immense financial and physical stress, with the shadow of death creep- ing over him. The city has quite forgotten that President Arthur died at 123 Lexington Avenue. Still more amazing is it that New York long ago quite forgot the birthplace of Roosevelt, although the unusual personality of the man and his having been President for two terms would, one should suppose, have kept the house an object of constant interest. As I write, it has just been destroyed; it was at 28 East 20th Street; and for a long time before its de- struction it stood drearily unoccupied, though a res- taurant had for a time been there, and it bore in its window an invitation, so unintentionally humorous as almost to be pathetic, to ' ' Come in and eat where Roosevelt was born." New York has quite forgotten that he of the famous Monroe Doctrine, President Monroe, came to New York toward the close of his life and died here in 1831: fittingly, too, on the Fourth of July, as with two other Presidents, Jefferson and John Adams. His home here was an old house, still standing, at 63 Prince Street at the corner of Lafayette. It is a house of brick, once red but now weatherbeaten to dreary dinginess, a house with charming fanlights and high stoop and pleasant dormers and capacious 31 THE BOOK OP NEW YORK gables, with high ceilings, Avith well-designed door- frames and eight-paneled doors; but it is now a wreck, with the great blue sign of a ragman upon its center and signs of ''For Sale" on either side. It seems incredible, that the fact could be forgot- ten by any city, that the author of the declaration which for a century influenced the world, the declara- tion as to ''entangling ourselves in the broils of Europe, or suffering the powers of the old world to interfere with the affairs of the new, ' ' once made the city his home. Forgotten, too, is the fact that his body remained in the Marble Cemetery, far over on East Second Street beyond Second Avenue, until 1858, when it was taken to Richmond at the request of the State of Virginia. The old cemetery, high iron-fenced in front and high brick walled behind, is still sedate, composed, with an air of quiet breeding, and, situated though it now is in the midst of tenement surroundings, has succeeded by its silent influence in maintaining a gen- eral air of quiet and neatness and cleanliness in the adjacent buildings, even though the ones whose rear windows open upon its old-fashioned space are a-flutter with vari-colored washing. Not to be confounded, this graveyard, with another "Marble Cemetery," so called, near by, entered through a tunnel-like entrance at 41^ Second Ave- nue; in this other Marble Cemetery, little and now hidden away, there having been buried some 1500 in all, many of them from the most prominent families, as would be expected from a most curious and now 32 THE GREAT INDIFFERENT CITY almost undecipherable inscription, that it was in- tended as ''a place of interment for gentlemen." Mohammed planned a heaven for men ; but left it for New York to plan a gentlemen's cemetery! ^*^r"^"TW^^ 3i:»*|im=20r1iCifTii:?in 33 CHAPTER III DOWJSr AT THE BATTEEY "HEN New York a few years ago wished to celebrate the completion and opening of its first subway, and wished to do it in a style commensurate with the city's greatness, the mayor suggested that ev- ery bell and whistle should sound in unison for one hour ; a great and prolonged din being supposedly representative of New York City and most fitting for the celebration of a tre- mendous achievement! And New York is indeed a city of noise — but the noise is the rattle and thunder and turmoil of traffic; it is not noise from choice but from necessity. And there are still several places in Manhattan where there is almost quiet, one of these being down at the lower point of the island, the Battery, where still there is a peaceful area of park, almost undis- turbed by din. George Washington, when as President he lived in this city, found his favorite walk to be, as he has re- 34 DOWN AT THE BATTERY corded in his diary, along the sea-wall of the Battery. And Aaron Burr, after the loss of Theodosia, the daughter whom he worshipped, used to pace back and forth, back and forth, along this sea-wall, looking hungrily toward the Narrows in the never to be ful- filled hope that a ship should appear bearing the one who had so mysteriously vanished at sea. The sea-wall is still one of the finest walks in the city. The land projects a little further into the Bay than it used to do, and the walk has therefore been advanced a little, but it is still almost identically the same as of old ; it is a walk of buoyancy for those who can feel buoyant, with its tang of the sea and its tingling breezes, and for the unhappy, like Burr, there are days of breezeless gloom, when the water seeps and sighs along the edge. To walk there is to walk in a place of memories. A beautiful approach to the Battery is from the Bay, on a day of sunlight, when there is a glowing blue of water and of sky, and the ceaseless movement of numberless boats. On either side there is the gen- tly sloping shore of Long Island or of New Jersey ; in front, on the left, is the great green Goddess of Lib- erty; on the right are the mighty curves of the bridges ; in the center, set in the midst of blue water, beneath the blue dome of the sky, there rises a clus- tering mass of buildings to incredible and irregular heights, in whites and grays and dark browns, with splashes of red and green. And in front of this clus- tered mass is the park of the Battery. There is dignity in the view, there is strength, there 35 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK is superb impressiveness, there is the unexpected gen- tleness of greener5^ In the early hours of a winter's evening, when the myriad boats show lights of green and white and red, and Liberty stands in a soft and whitish glow, and the interminable lines of cars move over the arching bridges like fireflies on fairy threads, and the tower- ing buildings are alight, in thousands of windows, giving an effect as of a wonderful hill city with lighted houses rising tier on tier, higher and higher, it is one of the striking sights of the world. Washington, when in the long ago he walked the Battery walk, would have been keenly interested could he have known that, a quarter of a century after his own death, his beloved friend and associate Lafayette was to be received here at the Battery by enthusiastic New Yorkers. It was in 1824 that the Frenchman came back to re- visit America. Most of the men of the Revolution were then dead, and he did not know he had won a profound love in the hearts of all Americans. But he wanted to see once more the country for which he had given his best efforts and where the most inter- esting years of his interesting life had been spent. The changes in France had left him far from rich, and he was disturbed about what would be the ex- penses here. On the way over he talked candidly with a Boston merchant, a fellow passenger, about the cost of hotels and travel; and he accepted the Bostonian's invitation to dinner when he should reach that city. 36 DOWN AT THE BATTERY He expected, on the whole, to drift inconspicuously through the country. And when his ship reached New York and he found the Bay filled with ships a-flutter with flags and with their yards manned with lines of sailors, all in his honor ; when he saw flags in every direction, on the water and on the shores, and when he heard the roar of cannon and the ringing of bells ; he wept with the pathetic surprise of it all. He landed at the Battery— and collectors prize the old blue plates that picture his ship, the Cadmus, and Castle Garden, as it came afterwards to be called, which was then a fort separated from the mainland by a narrow strip of water ; a fort of that old cheese- box order of architecture which for so long a time appealed to army engineers. Here Lafayette was welcomed, and thence was driven to the City Hall, cheered by uncounted thousands on the streets and on the very roofs. And after that, throughout America, he found himself, wherever he went, the honored guest of nation or state or city or town — and there was no need to think of hotel expenses! And it is pleasant to know that when he reached Boston he took time from the rush of grand receptions to look up the Bostonian and dine with him as he had promised to do. Years after this, the city welcomed Admiral Dewey, here at the Battery, when he came sailing home from Manila, bearing his honors thick upon him ; though it is amusing to remember what panic he put into the hearts of the committee of reception by arriving one day sooner than was planned. However, like the 37 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK genial gentleman that he was, he postponed his land- ing until everything should be prepared. I saw him, close by, as he stepped ashore, and never was there a more simple, more attractive, more unpretentious, more capable-looking American. He was given a more than royal welcome, and a parade in his honor was resplendent in glitter of banners and arms, and was of immensity of length. At the very edge of the sea-wall, over at one side of Battery Park, still stands old Castle Garden, as it was for many years known. It was long the receiv- ing station for immigrants, before that it was used as a hall for amusements, celebrations and public recep- tions, originally it was a fort (not the first fort here at the Battery, but built just before 1812), and now it is the city's Aquarium. Perhaps it was never of attractive shape ; certainly it has with the passage of years been altered out of any degree of attractiveness that it may have had in the past, although some of the old casemates are still preserved. It is a squatty, sprawling, many-sky- lighted building, with huge cupolas, a building neither round nor square nor octagon, but somehow suggest- ing each of these shapes. Jenny Lind's first American concert was given here, and stories have come down about the marvelous in- terest and enthusiasm that she aroused. That first concert gave for her share twelve thousand dollars which entire sum she promptly turned over to charity. For that first concert Barnum offered a prize of two hundred dollars for the best song for her and there 38 DOWN AT THE BATTERY were seven hundred competitors, and Bayard Taylor won the prize. On the night of the first concert, peo- ple who had been unable to buy seats stood in throngs on the water-front or filled the host of boats that were rowed as near as possible to the outside of the building. It is one of the amusing memories of the Battery, that at the time when Barnum was exhibiting the once well known Cardiff Giant, at Castle Garden, he was apparently so fearful lest some one might get at it, that every night, after the performance was over, he had the supposedly petrified man, a heavy load, borne across this Battery space to the old Eastern Hotel (a house built before 1790 and only recently destroyed, at the corner of "Whitehall and South Streets), where he kept a room for the ostensible safeguarding of his stone man. Near the Aquarium is a spirited bronze bust of Verazzano, and it shows him as the possessor of a nose as long as that of his royal master Francis. Here at the beginning of Broadway is a monument to an Italian explorer in the service of France, and sev- eral miles to the northward, at what was until lately deemed the other end of Broadway, is a monument to that still more famous Italian who made his explora- tions in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella. At the opposite side of the open space from the Aquarium, just where the park curves into State Street, is a house, Number 7, which has figured in one of Bunner's stories, ''A New York House," and which instantly attracts attention from its unusual and dis- 39 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK tinguished appearance. It was built shortly before the year 1800 by a New York merchant whose wife was connected with a governor of Connecticut and with President Dwight of Yale ; which facts were very important in early days when the Battery houses were social centres. Those people never supposed that the house would ever become a home for immigrant girls. It is fronted by two sets of pillars, one set being round and the other square; and there is a recessed balcony on the level of the second floor. When the occupant of 1804 moved away — a certain Colonel Van Vredenburgh, who had served in the Rev- olution — he loaded his furniture into a boat at his front door, and then, he and his family stepping in after the furniture, they started on their journey far up the Hudson, to a new home in the Mohawk Val- ley : where, it somehow seems interesting to know, this man of the Battery became known among the Indians as ''The Great Clear Sky." Immediately to the northward of Battery Park, where it opens into the Bowling Green, is the begin- ning of Broadway. At the right, as you face toward this beginning, is the great gray Custom House, roofed in dull red, and at the left is a higher building of red brick with a roof in black and green. Between these two buildings, beyond the Bowling Green, begins a mighty chasm, incredibly narrow, incredibly deep and high, a chasm in grays and browns and whites with slashes of greens and reds. It is a great long gash among buildings, it is a canyon profound in its depth, it is a long valley with vertical stone walls rising to 40 DOWN AT THE BATTERY great and irregular heights and peaks and ledges. It is a valley deeper and more precipitous than the gorge of the Trossachs, and it only waits a Walter Scott of business to picture there some tragic or dramatic scene. The pleasant oval of the Bowling Green — which was really once a bowling green and has for generations preserved this oval shape — surrounded by its iron fence, is remindful of one of the romantic episodes of New York history; an episode which has already become almost a myth. And to tell of this it is neces- sary to drop back a little into the past. Following the repeal of the Stamp Act, the New York Assembly voted, in its enthusiasm, to set up a statue of King George the Third and a statue of Wil- liam Pitt, whereupon the statue of William Pitt was set up in Wall Street and that of the King in the cen- ter of the Bowling Green. This kingly statue was equestrian and was set up on a date which shows how ingrained was the intense feeling for royalty even up to the verge of the Revo- lution. For it was August 21, 1770 — and although in a short five years there were to be Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, the people were still so in- fatuated with royalty as to honor this birthday date of that Prince of Wales, who, dying before his father, and thus missing the throne, left only the memory that he was the son of King George the Second and the father of King George the Third, and that he was de- scribed in the lines, surreptitiously quoted and laughed about in England : 41 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK "Here lies Fred, "Who was alive and is dead. Had it been his father, I had much rather. Had it been his brother, Still better than another. Had it been his sister, No one would have missed her. Had it been the whole generation, Still better for the nation. But since 'tis only Fred, Who was alive and is dead. No more need be said." The statue of Pitt was destroyed by angry British soldiers in the course of their occupancy of New York, but a fragment has been preserved and is in the rooms of the city 's Historical Society ; but before that on a July night in 1776 the Americans themselves had de- stroyed the statue of the King. It was in place when the sun went down, and when the morning came it had vanished. Few knew until long afterwards what became of it. It was taken to Litchfield in Connecticut, far up in the delightful hill country, and there, as it was of lead, it was made into bullets. And a record left by- Oliver Wolcott, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and afterwards a general and a gov- ernor, tells who made the bullets and how many were made. A shed was built in the Wolcott orchard, and the statue, first chopped and melted in the kitchen, was made into bullets by women and girls of the best 42 DOWN AT THE BATTEEY blood and social position. Laura Wolcott made 8378 cartridges; Mary Ann Wolcott made still more, for her total was 10,790 ; a neighbor, Mrs. Marvin, made 6058 ; Frederick Wolcott, a lad permitted to work with the women at the interesting task, made 936 ; a Mrs. Beach made 2002; others made amounts various; and the total was 42,088 cartridges made. How and by whom the cartridges were used has not been recorded, except as to some minor items, such as the giving of 300 to the regiment of a Colonel Wig- glesworth — delightful name! — and the giving of sev- eral hundred to a Colonel Howe, and of fifty to the Litchfield militia on the occasion of an alarm. The ancient house still stands, full of years and dig- nity. The kitchen in which the lead was melted has been torn down, but the rest of the building stands just as it stood in the long ago ; the ancient orchard is still an orchard ; and the present owner, a Wolcott in direct descent, pointed out to me the spot where the bullets were made. ^., k.^.:Ji 43 CHAPTER IV THE CHUKCH AND THE STREET ITTTIXGLY, the richest church in the worki looks do^^1l the richest street in the world; or at least, the street held to be the most rep- resentative of wealth. But ^'^all Street" is more than that short and narrow thor- onghfare; for the name is under- stood to iuchido. also, quite a sec- tion immediately adjacent. It ex- tends, indeed, down Broadway as far as to a quiet- looking building, of gray stone and with an ungraceful square tower, known throughout the world as '^ Number 26"; this being the head- quarters of the Standard Oil Company. "What ex- traordinary stories are represented by this ordinary looking building! What fiction, and what facts stranger than fiction, are called to mind by the thought of the centralized power that the building represents ! What a romance it all has been, in the rising up. from nothing, to an overshadowing of the world ! Wliat business splendidly done, what griev- ous busmess battles, what control of legislators, of 44 THE CHURCH AND THE STREET mayors, of town councilmen and of individuals! How sphinx-like the l-juilding faces Broadway, hiding its secrets from the world ! The first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States lived for a time in a house which stood at * ' Number 26 " ; and he was buried in the graveyard of Trinity Church, the precursor of the Trinity of to- day which, of sandstone so brown as almost to be black, stands looking down, from its position on Broadway, into the narrow defile of Wall Street. In its location, and with its great open stretch of old graveyard on either hand, the church is of wonder- ful impressiveness. The first Trinity, built in the reign of William of Orange, was burned in the great fire of 1776. It was rebuilt in 1790, and when this, too, was burned, the present structure was erected. It was completed in 1846 and its architect was Eichard Upjohn, who did invaluable service to New York City by giving to it a number of fine and dignified churches, at a time when what is kno^vn as the Victorian influence was destroy- ing good taste upjon both sides of the Atlantic : he was a worshiper of the Gothic, and made his mid-century churches look delightfully old! The notable bronze doors were designed by St. Gaudens, and were surely inspired by the doors of the Baptistery in Florence. The interior of the church is dignified, with much of impressiveness, and there is an effect of fine spa- ciousness, which well matches the spaciousness of the burying-ground outside. The brilliant white of the elaborate altar and the glow of myriad colored panes 45 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK in a great window behind it make # contrast that will become finer and finer as age gently softens the hues of the glass. It used to be that the spire of Trinity was the loftiest landmark of New York, and it seemed miracu- lous when skyscrapers began to mount above it. Henry James, less than forty years ago, writing his *' International Episode," put his Englishman up to the amazing height of seven stories in an office build- ing and from that immense height the roar of the street "sounded infinitely far below," and the man was startled by seeing himself on a level with a steeple top ! Now, Trinity spire is far below the cor- nices and towers of the giant buildings that cluster thick about that part of Broadway. Back in the time of Queen Anne, Trinity was given a royal grant of a great tract on lower Manhattan Island, and although the church has given away por- tions to this or that institution, she still holds the greater part of the tract, and is the greatest tenement house proprietor in New York, with an annual income of over half a million dollars, from which she assists in the upkeep of several churchly offshoots, officially her chapels, and such good works as seem fitting, and of course attends to her own ministry. When Doctor Berrian was rector of Trinity a preacher from a poor country parish went to him and asked for his influ- ence in finding a church with a larger salary, where- upon the good rector exclaimed, with naive earnest- ness, that he could not understand why clergymen so often wished a change: "Why," he concluded, "I 46 OLD TRINITY, FAR OVERTOPPED BY OFFICE BUILDINGS THE CHURCH AND THE STREET have been with Trinity Church for forty years, and have never thought of leaving ! ' ' When the Prince of Wales, afterwards King Ed- ward the Seventh, visited New York, he was taken to a service at Trinity, and close to him sat General Winfield Scott, that picturesque figure of our War of 1812 with England, and in the crowded aisle beside the pew stood George Bancroft, historian of the Revo- lution! — which delicate attentions must have amused the eminently clear-sighted young man, as doubtless later he was even more amused when, visiting Wash- ington, nothing would do but that he must go down to Mt. Vernon and stand before the tomb of the man whose leadership had taken a nation from England's rule. In New York, besides attending Trinity, the Prince of Wales was made to feel that he was indeed a guest that the city delighted to honor, for he was taken to Central Park, and Cooper Union, and Barnum's Museum, and the Free Academy, and a Deaf and Dumb Institution! In fact, he was treated as New Yorkers always used to treat country cousins, but in his case there was fortunately, also, a splendid ball in his honor at the old Academy of Music, at Irving Place and 14th Street ; a building now given over to moving pictures, after a long career as opera house and theater, and at the time of the great ball only six years old. Probably the most beautiful service of Trinity is that of Ascension Day, when it is customary to have a special choir of some fifty voices, and an orchestra 47 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK of some two-score pieces, so as to give superb music superbly. On this day the church is literally packed, and with many unable to enter, and the splendid serv- ice is the more effective from the knowledge that, while it is in progress, the rush and turmoil of busi- ness, of Broadway and Wall Street, are at the very doors. The noblest memory of old Trmity ought to be that, at a time when the World War was raging, but before America had plunged in, a noon-day meeting was regularly held here, to pray ''for the restoration of the world's peace, and for divine guidance for all men.*' The printed form, given to each who en- tered, expressed the hope "that a way may be found for the speedy restoration of just and honorable peace amongst all nations." No other graveyard in New York possesses varied interest to equal that of Trinity, where the stones and monuments are thick-clustered, and where the very place seems filled with thick-clustering memories. Not only does the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, lie here, but also that Gallatin of the three "A's," Abraham Albert Alphonse, the Swiss who, coming to America in 1780, and at once taking part in our war, held afterwards a succession of high offices, including that of Secretary of the Treasury. Both he and Hamilton are in the southern half of the graveyard, and on this side, too, but so far back as to be at the extreme verge, is the grave of that picturesque Eevolutionary general, highly trusted by Washington, who is always referred to as 48 THE CHURCH AND THE STREET Lord Stirling, although his efforts in the British courts to secure the Stirling earldom, with its title and estates, were unsuccessful: the ''self-made peer," Major Andre gibingiy termed him. Near the tomb of Stirling is that of General Kearney, of the Civil War — for our old churches, like the cathedrals of England, began, even before our entry into the world struggle, to put up memorials to veterans and victims of war after war. Here in Trinity churchyard is buried that Sir Dan- vers Osborne who, upon landing from England, assumed office, and after ruling as governor of New York for half a week, incontinently hanged himself. Here is the supposed grave of Charlotte Temple, over whose sad story, whether it was true or false, our forefathers and mothers loved to weep. Almost at the entrance of the church is the tomb of Captain James Lawrence, he of the Chesapeake and ''Don't give up the ship!" And the victorious English honored Lawrence when, with display and solemn cannonading, they sailed with his body, wrapped in the American flag, into Halifax. And it is one of the most curious similarities of literature that, as Oliver Wendell Holmes saved Old Ironsides from destruction with his vigorous and timely verses, in the same way Tennyson, with vigorous and timely verse, saved from destruction the Shannon, the con- queror of the Chesapeake. In the upper corner of the churchyard, just off the Broadway sidewalk, is a towering and admirable monument to the men of the Revolution who died in 49 THE BOOK OP NEW YOEK the English prisons of New York. There is no word of hate ; there is no reminder of the needless suffering which was inflicted upon those men. It is as if, under the shadow of this old church, all enmity should be forgotten. And yet, being human, one likes to remember that, so it seems (although, unfortunately, it is not an abso- lute certainty), the terrible provost Cunningham, who was responsible for most of the cruelty, and who loved to boast that he had killed more Americans than both Burgoyne and Cornwallis combined, was after- wards hanged, in London, for forgery. He had a nephew who as a lad assisted him and was especially active in extorting money for food and for any miti- gation of cruelty, and this nephew lived on, in New York, for half a century after the Eevolution, in busi- ness as a real estate agent. For a great many years, burials have not been per- mitted in this old Trinity burymg ground, except in the rare case of some member of an old family that possesses a Trinity family tomb. I saw, not many years ago, such a funeral and burial here, it being the funeral of a descendant of one of the earliest Dutch families, and it made a very impressive scene, here in the heart of the busiest portion of the busiest city of the world, in the very shadow of the Elevated trains that went thundering by. It is one of the prettiest sights in this great city, to see, at noontime, on pleasant sunny days, pretty young stenographers sprinkled about this ancient graveyard, sewing in the sun — not precisely Shake- 50 THE CHURCH AND THE STREET peare's charming '* spinsters and knitters in the sun"; but Shakespeare himself would doubtless have changed the word to sewing if he could have seen this old graveyard of Trinity on a pleasant day. Wall Street represents the financial supremacy of America, the financial supremacy of the world. It is no exaggeration to say that Wall Street has become the money capital of the nations. Here it is that the mighty financial affairs of Europe and Asia, of Africa and Australia, of our own America, are directly or indirectly controlled. The vast commercial interests of our land, the trade and the manufactures, all yield homage to this clump of office buildings centering about the narrow thoroughfare into whose gorge-like chasm Old Trinity so staidly looks. Wall Street, crowded as it is with men of money, lined as it is by office buildings occupied by financial firms whose names are known throughout the world, is more famous for an old building at the corner of Nassau Street than for the offices of even the most famous men of millions. The building is of gray stone, dulled to a deeper gray by time, and across the entire front are high steps, which lead up to a terrace and to a row of pillars of much dignity, and thus to the entrance. This fine old building stands where stood the former City Hall, wln'ch was used as a meet- ing place by the Continental Congress and thus gained the name of Federal Hall, and in front of which Washington took the oath of office as the first President of the United States. The great slab of brown stone on which he stood 51 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK when taking the oath is preserved in a bronze frame inside the present building ; and in front is a gravely noble statue of Washington, by J. Q. A. Ward. That there is also a tablet representing Washington kneel- ing under a two-branched tree, with gloved hands raised in prayer, merely shows how both history and religion may be belittled. To suggest some of the differences between those days in 1789 and today, it may be mentioned, remind- fully, that there was no telephone then, no electricity, no moving pictures, no motor-cars, no telegraph; there was not a bathroom or a furnace or a gas jet or a match or a steel pen in all New York. And if I add that on inauguration day Washington wore a coat of black velvet, a white waistcoat, knee breeches, silver buckled shoes, yellow gloves, and a long dress-sword, it is only as a reminder that he was a careful dresser and considered that a man of posi- tion should pay great attention to his personal looks. The ''President's March" began its course of pop- ularity by being played at one of the receptions to Washington on his way here from Mount Vernon for the inauguration: after that, it was played in New York, on every possible Presidential appearance, and was always enthusiastically received by the public; and no wonder, for it was played with the tune to which were afterward given the words of ''Hail, Columbia ! ' ' Knowing how Wall Street is abused, by many, as a place of metaphorical financial pirates, it is curious to know that it was the shelter of a very real pirate, 52 THE CHURCH AND THE STREET the famous Captain Kidd himself ! For Kidd did not spend all his life on the sea or in burying treasure! He lived at one time on Pearl Street, here in New York, and, marrying a widow who lived on Wall Street, he became, through the marriage, the owner of the house at what was number 56 ; so that he was a veritable Wall Street man. It is curious about Kidd that, pirate though he was, and indicted for piracy, the crime for which he was hanged was the too hasty killing of one of his own piratical sailors by a blow with a bucket. It is odd that a more terrible and much more vicious pirate, of old-time days, was named Morgan; but in this case with no connection whatever with Wall Street. No one would ever have thought of Morgan the pirate in connection with any Wall Street name, had not the most prominent of Wall Street men of some years ago been moved by a sense of saturnine humor to give his yacht the piratical name of the Corsair and to have it painted black. In the early days of New York, real pirates, or free- booters who were looked upon as probable pirates, were not an uncommon sight in the streets, swashing about in their great hats, their flaming waist-sashes, and with great pistols openly showing. Some of the early New York fortunes were based on buying loot from the pirates and selling it at a great profit. Pirates were hanged, at New York, as recently as toward the middle of the nineteenth century. Broad Street, which is really an unusually broad street, is a very important part of the Wall Street 53 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK district: during banking hours its pavement, just around the corner from Wall Street, is excitedly alive with the brokers of the picturesque "curb market," and here on Broad Street, facing this curb market, is the Stock Exchange itself. The Stock Exchange is a beautiful building, in some respects a superb building. It has an admirable row of little balconies, low set, along its front, above the entrance ways, and above the balconies is a row of low windows, and above them is a mighty frontage of glass, broad and high, against which stand six great grooved columns ; above these columns is a pediment, bearing a group of sculptured figures, emblematic of commerce and finance. Inside the building, the great floor offers an excit- ing sight, for it is thronged with brokers buying and selling, and the air is filled with frantic cries. It was a New York humorist who remarked, with truth, that *'a seat on the Stock Exchange, " costing seventy- five thousand dollars or so, meant the privilege of standing in a continuous cane-rush from ten to three ! One of the memories of Broad Street is that the great Hamilton, addressing here an excited crowd on the subject of the Jay Treaty with England, was roughly dragged down and hustled through the street. Broad Street came naturally by its great width, for in early days a canal led down its middle, and quaint Dutch houses lined each side of the placid water, which generations ago vanished. The houses were mostly of wood, except for their gable ends, which faced the 54 THE CHUECH AND THE STREET canal and were of small yellow bricks with black headers: the doors were large, the windows were small, every doorstep was immaculately clean, every- body clattered about in wooden shoes — it is like a dream to think of that picturesque Broad Street of so long ago. There still stands, at the corner of Broad and Pearl Street, an old house of noble memories : not so old as those picturesque houses of the early Dutch, but one of the oldest existing buildings in New York; it is Fraunces Tavern, and was built in 1719. The building has suffered from fire and from radi- cal alterations, but it has been elaborately restored by the Sons of the Revolution to an appearance con- siderably like that of its early years, and is a digni- fied, dormered building of brick. A restaurant is still maintained on the lower floor. On the second floor is the famous ''Long Room," of the same shape and dimensions that it was when it won its fame, and not without much of its original appearance, in spite of the somewhat too free restoration. Fittingly, the building has been made the depository of a great num- ber of Revolutionary relics; for its association with the Revolution was profoundly dramatic. For it was here, in this dignified ''Long Room," that Washington took farewell of his most prominent and trusted officers at the close of the Revolution. It was on December 4, 1783, and among the forty-four officers were Knox and Wayne, Greene and Steuben, Moultrie, Lincoln and Hamilton. It was a solemn and affecting scene. They ate together in almost 55 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK breathless silence. Then Washington filled his glass with wine, and said : "With a heart full of love and gratitude I must now take my leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable." All drank their wine; and then, one by one, they made their farewells ; a scene profoundly solemn and sorrowful. 56 CHAPTER V AEOUND CITY HALL PAEK ET in the very center of the front wall of old St. Paul's, on Broadway, and in the shadow of its pillared portico, is a tablet setting forth that in this church is the tomb of the gallant General Richard Mont- gomery. But this Broadway front, when the church was built, was the rear, and the real face of the church still looks out in the direction of the North River, between which and the church there was originally nothing but trees and a low bank and the beach. And, in strictness, St. Paul's is not a church, but bears only the name of Chapel, being an off- shoot and dependent of Trinity. With the exception of the spire, St-. Paul's was com- pleted in 1766, and its stones are almost black with age and dust and smoke. It is a building of a dig- nity in which a certain primness is mingled v/ith a very real sense of charm. The spire, rising in pleas- ing pilastered gradations, was put up in 1794. Looking at the Montgomery tablet, there comes the 57 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK picture of a gallant young British officer, who, having recently resigned his commission, after winning honors under the command of Wolfe, had become a citizen of the Colony of New York and had fallen in love with the pretty daughter of one of the powerful Livingstons. "I have ventured to request, sir," he writes, with old-fashioned formality to the young woman's father, Judge Robert R. Livingston, 'Hhat you will consent to a union which to me has the most promising appearance of happiness, from the lady's uncommon merit and amiable worth." He does not, you see, promise happiness to the young woman, or speak of his own advantages, but the very naivete of the letter shows him as a likable young man, and both father and daughter were alike in so believing. And so they were married ; and in two years the Revolu- tion broke out, and at once Montgomery was ordered, with General Benedict Arnold, to attempt the capture of Quebec. And, as the story of it all comes back, one forgets this quiet portico and the ceaseless rush of Broadway, and thinks of the heroic attack, the narrow path along the cliff, the fierce wind and the drifting snow and the slippery ice, and of the whirl of grape- shot which marked Montgomery's death. The English conquerors carried his body with honor into Quebec, for chivalry had not then passed from war, and there it lay until 1818, when the State of New York asked that it might be yielded to the land of his adoption. With sorrowful jDomp the body was brought back, and the last stage of the journey was by boat dovm 58 AROUND CITY HALL PARK the Hudson. At Rhinebeck, which for their brief married life had been their home, Montgomery's widow was still living, and as the fmieral barge ap- proached she begged to be left alone, to see it from the window of the room which had been most dear to them, forty-three years before; and cannon thun- dered from the boat, and the guard stood at salute beside the catafalque; and when the boat moved slowly on into the distance, and friends went gently in to the hero's lonely widow, they found her fallen unconscious, overpowered by the rush of memories. St. Paul's, in its burials, seems to have been de- sirous to point out, even in early days, the cosmopoli- tan character of the city, for here lie such men as the Hessian Baron Nordeck, and that Sieur de Roche Fontaine who was aide to Rochambeau. Within, the church is pleasantly impressive; and, indeed, the interior was definitely modeled after fa- mous old St. Martin 's-in-the-Fields, of London. And there is still preserved, and held in reverence, but not with such reverence but that the visitor to the building may sit in it if he so desires, the pew which General Washington occupied when he lived in New York; Trinity, the parent church, being then but a ruin, hav- ing been burned during British occupancy of the city. St. Paul's occupies the block between Fulton and Vesey Streets, and at Vesey, while Broadway con- tinues straight on, Park Row leads off diagonally to the right; to the point thus formed. City Hall Park used to extend, and there was an admirable gateway here, and an admirable view of the present City Hall 59 THE BOOK OF NEW YOKK itself: but this fetching view was lost when a post- ofl5ce structure of unusual unattractiveness was built here, in 1875. Opposite the upper end of the post-office stands the loftiest of all skyscrapers, the Woolworth building, which splendidly rises in its fifty-one stories, to the seemingly impossible height of 750 feet. It is a noble building, in its dignity and in its fine simplicity, and points out, if the fact needs any pointing out, that a skyscraper may be not only a thing of necessity, in a city developing as New York develops, but a thing of beauty as well. With a fine air of distinction, the City Hall looks out over its little park. It is a building of cream color, mellowed and darkened by time, a building of perfection of outline, of peculiar attractiveness. It is so different from w^hat one expects to see in New York that it is no wonder that the newly arrived Irishman remarked, on first catching sight of it, that it was certainly not made in this country ! It is but two stories high, unless one counts the half story of a basement and the slight square attic up- lifted in the center, and it is surmounted by a smallish and admirable clock-tower ; but although it stands in the midst of towering new buildings, among which are not only the Woolworth but the immense and lofty new Municipal Building, this little old City Hall, so graceful, so self-possessed, with so fine an air of re- pose, of distinction, does not seem small. Indeed, it seems to dominate! It is a little Napoleon among giant marshals. 60 ABOUND CITY HALL PAEK The center of the building is recessed, with two pro- jecting wings. Throughout, it is the knowledge and use of proper proportions that give the building its fineness of look. There is more than the usual num- ber of w^indows along the front, thus adding to the aspect of airy lightness. In front of the broad stone steps that lead up to the low-pillared entrance, the sidewalk bends broadly outward in a generous bow, and, slightly terraced, adds to the general effective- ness. Inside, the admirable stone stairway, a double stair, sweeping upward within the rotunda, is a marvelous achievement of grace and beauty. The encircling pil- lars at the head of the stairs are of much dignity. The Governor's Eoom — so called from the intention that this should always be a headquarters ready for the Governor of the State, whenever he should visit the metropolis— is really a suite of three connecting rooms which keep up the old-time atmosphere of fine stateliness. Maintained as a memento of the past, the Governor's Eoom is beautiful in its paneling and cornices and ceilings, its fireplaces, the portraits of distinguished men that line its walls, and its fine old furniture. The room has a soft beauty of coloring, from the white of the woodwork, the varied colors of the paintings, the mahogany furniture, the oak floor ; and of all of the coloring, the buff and blue of Trum- bull's Washington is most delightful. This portrait of Washington was painted in 1790, at the special request of the city authorities, who for- mally asked Washington to ''permit Mr. Trumbull to 61 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK take his portrait to be placed in the City Hall as a monument to the respect which the inhabitants of this city have toward him"; the City Hall of that time being the building on Wall Street. This began a very pleasant custom on the part of the city to obtain for its City Hall the portraits of leading men, and especially men of this State, and the custom was kept up for some seventy-five years. (Ancient Florence began a similar custom, and in- stead of wearying with seventy-five years kept it up for centuries!) Washington is represented as standing beside his gray horse, with one hand on the pommel of the saddle. It is a quiet but spirited portrait, and Washington looks every inch a leader, in his coat of blue, his breeches and waistcoat of buff, his high black boots. The background represents the view and the walk which he personally loved, for it is New York Bay and the hills of Staten Island, as seen from the walk along the Battery. Among the other portraits is that of Seward as governor, twenty years before the Civil War, a slen- der, youngish, dapper, tight-buttoned man, painted by Inman ; and also an Inman is that of the distinguished New Yorker, Van Buren, with red hair and red side- whiskers and his hand on a tablecloth of dull crimson ; not at all the Van Buren of the imagination ! For this is a retiring sort of man, lacking altogether in the ex- pected aggressiveness of the chosen protege of the fiery Jackson. Here is Alexander Hamilton, painted by Trumbull ; 62 AROUND CITY HALL PARK a good-looking man, a little thin-lipped, with pow- dered hair and white stock. It takes away from the value of this portrait that it was not painted from life, but one year after Hamilton's death; but it no doubt correctly represents his long nose, his thin lips, his fingers a little too slender. Here is DeWitt Clin- ton who, the son of a distinguished father, won dis- tinction even greater than that of his father. He is a stoutish man with an alert and distinctly modern face. The portrait was painted by that Catlin who was one of the earliest travelers among the Indians of the West and a painter of Indian scenes. Among the others is a Hudson that need not seri- ously be considered, and also a Stuyvesant about which very little is known; but there is a really ex- cellent bust of Henry Clay, made by Pruden, in 1849. And there is a portrait of Oliver Hazard Perry — com- monly referred to as ''Commodore," but to whom a grateful government never gave a higher title than Captain, and even that not until after the Battle of Lake Erie. This painting was made at the request of the city, in 1816, very shortly after his victory; it is by Jarvis, and it shows the gallant young Perry in an open boat, bareheaded, in blue coat and white waistcoat and trousers, with sailors beside him in striped woolen sweaters and beaver hats of the shape of the silk hats of today ; this scene representing him in the act of changing from his sinking flagship to another ship, to continue the fight. It is one of the pleasant things about New York that it has always loved to do honor to naval heroes. 63 THE BOOK OF NEW YOKK Kecently it was Dewey; long ago Hull and Decatur were honored here, and were formally received at the City Hall ; and Oliver Hazard Perry was also one of the naval men to whom New York gave a special pub- lic welcome, in addition to securing his portrait. The old-time furniture here is fascinating. There is a beautiful great desk, a Sheraton of unusual length and design, flat-topped, with drawers at either end as well as at each side, the desk which Washing- ton, as President, personally used here in New York City. There are also desks that were personally used by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton; and there are chairs and tables and settees, made for the first furnishing of the former Federal Hall. John McComb, a Scotchman, was the reputed archi- tect of the City Hall, but there is some reason for thinking that the perfection of the design was largely owing to an assistant; a Frenchman. It should be remembered, however, that the best architectural work of the then recent years had been by Scotchmen, the family of Adam, that they had published their designs, and that this building shows marked Adam characteristics. McComb himself furnished the stone and did the stone work, and under him, for the woodwork, was a man named Weeks, who had a brother who was charged with having murdered a girl to whom he was engaged. Hamilton and Burr, who at that time had not become enemies, were united in the defense of Weeks, and the Judge, Lansing, practically ordered the jury to acquit. 64 AEOUND CITY HALL PAEK The girl's aunt, shaking with passionate grief, cried openly in the court room that there would be no jus- tice in Heaven if those who had set free the slayer of her niece should die unpunished. And old New York- ers used to point out, with awe, that Hamilton was shot ; that Burr, a disgraced wanderer, crept disgraced to death; that Lansing, rising to be chief justice, stepped out of his ofiSce in New York, one day in 1829, and quite vanished out of existence, in absolute and mysterious disappearance. In front of the City Hall stands one of the most dis- tinguished works of art in New York, a bronze statue, by MacMcnnies, of Nathan Hale, the schoolmaster cap- tain who volmiteered to act as a spy to obtain informa- tion of which Washington was vitally in need. The statue, with a brave pathos in its pose, bears upon the base Hale's noble last words that his only regret was that he had but one life to give for his country. By an incomprehensible blunder, the statement is also inscribed on the base that Hale was "a captain in the regular army of the United States," although the United States did not even exist until years after his death. He was hurriedly hanged, after the fare- well messages which he had written to his mother and to the girl he was to have married were burned before his eyes. The face, of gentle manliness, is but an ideal, as there was no portrait to follow: nor was Hale executed where his statue stands, but at some spot, vaguely identified as being on the Beekman property, beside the East River. Within scarcely more than a stone's throw, how- 65 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK ever, from this statue there was long ago a hanging in New York City which, like that of Hale, was en- tirely without dishonor to the man upon whom sen- tence was inflicted. Following the overturning of the English govern- ment by William and Mary, a committee of safety met, in New York, to appoint a governor to take the place of the governor who had been appointed under the Stuart regime, whereupon a merchant named Jacob Leisler was chosen, and he acted as governor from 1689 to 1691, holding the office with dignity, and ready at any time to turn over his powers to a duly accredited successor. It was Leisler who, as acting governor, summoned the first Congress of the Colonies to meet ! He called the meeting together at the old State House in Coen- ties Slip, in 1690, and representatives were there from New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Plymouth, which was then under a separate government, and Maryland. New Jersey sent its ''sympathies" in- stead of representatives; and the Quakers of Penn- sylvania sent word that it was ''ag't their princ's to fight." This Congress voted to raise an army of eight hundred and fifty men to invade Canada and wipe out the French, but it is not recorded that the French were wiped out at that time. Leisler 's career was tragically ended. A man with the suggestive name of Sloughter came over, appointed as governor, and although Leisler made no opposition whatever when the proper credentials were shown him, he was put under arrest, treated 66 AROUND CITY HALL PARK with the greatest harshness, and sentenced to death, in spite of his pitiful amazement that he was to be slain by William for holding the Colony against Stnart sympathizers! He and his son-in-law were hanged, under accompanying circumstances of great cruelty, in a drenching rain, in the Leisler garden, close to the edge of what is now City Hall Park. The stigma of disloyalty was afterwards formally removed, and Frankfort and Jacob Streets bear in mind the unfortunate man, for Jacob was his first name and Frankfort was the city of his birth. There is a street up near Mulberry Bend with the sweet old- fashioned name of Hester, but that district is now so far from being either sweet or old-fashioned that one does not think of even the name as a delightful one: but it was named for Hester, the daughter of Governor Leisler. The City Hall was completed in 1812; and, in the open space where it now stands, the Declaration of Independence was read to the gathered American troops, on July 9, 1776, in the presence of General Washington. Washington's first New York home, after he be- came President, was but a few minutes' walk from this spot, on Cherry Hill, at the corner of Cherry Street and the incredibly curving Pearl Street, on what is now known as Franklin Square. Cherry Hill, in early days, was a charming region, with cherry trees and greenery leading down to the sparkling river. But the Cherry Hill of to-day is one of the disreputable-looking tenement districts of 67 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK the city, with houses of different heights standing at irregular angles with the sidewalks, and threatening dark passageways leading to dingier and darker tene- ments in the rear. From the huge bridge, the orig- inal Brooklyn Bridge, far overhead, comes the dis- tant rumble of traffic. At the upper end of the slope stands a huge abutment, darkly massive, and on that very spot stood the Presidential mansion. The progress of New York since early days is splendidly marked by its bridges. To say that they are the greatest bridges in the world is but a small statement, for nowhere else in the world are there bridges even to be compared with them. The original Brooklyn Bridge, over a mile in length, is still fondly known by that distinctive name, and its beautifully sweeping curve still gives it the supremacy in looks. Close above is the Manhattan Bridge ; then comes the Williamsburg Bridge, with its length of over a thousand feet more than the first of these bridges, and of 7,200 feet in all. Next up the East River is the huge Queensboro, fourteen hundred feet longer than the Williamsburg, and with a mighty length of 8601 feet in all. And last of all is the tremendous Hell Gate Bridge, leading from East 141st Street to Astoria. Different from the other bridges is this Hell Gate Bridge. For the others are for trolley cars and foot passengers, for wagons and automobiles, but the Hell Gate is a railroad bridge, making, with its huge bulk, the connecting link which for the first time permits, in connection with the tunnels, through trains to run 68 AROUND CITY HALL PAEK without ferriage from the South, through New York City, on to New England. Stupendous, marvelous — no words can be too strong for these achievements : and by far the great- est praise and the greatest credit belong to the mem- ory of the engineer, Roebling, who first saw how to span this great width of water, and who made the plans for Brooklyn Bridge and got the work in suc- cessful motion — and then died before the bridge could be completed. Work was begun in 1870: the bridge was opened for traffic in 1883: and I like to believe the story, which bears the marks of poetical truth, that Roebling, dying, and unable to leave his room, had himself, day by day, placed at the window, whence he could see, in the distance, the lofty towers, and the great bridge curving toward completion. CHAPTER VI * * MILLION-FOOTED MANHATTAN ' ' "ALT WHITMAN never wearied of coming phras- es to express his admira- tion of New York, such as: ''Superb-faced Man- hattan"; ''City of the World! City of tall fa- gades of marble and iron!" "Mettlesome, mad, extravagant city ! ' ' "When million-footed Manhattan unpent descends to her pavement ' ' ; and, naturally, ' ' My city ! ' ' The thrill, the life, the movement, the strength, of the city — how they stand for the most representative Americanism! And foreign visitors are much im- pressed by these aspects of Americanism : as, for ex- ample, Thackeray, who writes: "Broadway has a rush of life such as I have never seen : the rush and restlessness please me. ' ' Rudyard Kipling, however, was frankly jarred by this kind of Americanism, at least on his first visit. Busy streets, and huge busi- ness structures, frankly wearied him, and, as he has never been in the habit of mincing his words, he pub- 70 '^ MILLION-FOOTED MANHATTAN" lished his irritable belief that Americans were "bar- barians" and "heathens." However, the barbarians and heathens forgave him, and all America watched and waited with eager sympathy when he lay in New York, at the threshold of death, in the late '90 's. Kip- ling came to know New York very well: and I have wondered whether, with his love for the picaresque and unusual, he ever knew, in regard to a hotel that was one of his favorites, that the brother of the pro- prietor was said to be a professional thief and swin- dler whose frequent address was the penitentiary, and that the hotel itself, highly respectable and prosper- ous, had been built, so it was said, with the ill-earned money from the brother who, for cogent reasons, was unable, himself, to spend much time there ! A human tide comes flowing into the business por- tion of New York every morning; it fills the canyon gorge of Broadway, it goes rushing in currents into the side streets and offshoots, it is sucked into the great stores and the office buildings. Then, in the aft- ernoon, the tide turns. The human stream comes pouring out of the buildings, rushing from street after street, swirling into the subways, moving in swift cur- rents toward ferries and elevated trains, rushing to- ward the great bridges. And no feature of this gen- eral scene is more impressive than the black-coated, black-skirted streams moving in unbroken currents, across the squares and across the avenues, eastward into the tenement districts. In general character, the lower part of the city on the West Side is different from that on the East : the 71 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK streets are broader, the houses are lower, there are far more individual homes remaining, with concomi- tantly fewer tenements, there is many a charming old doorway, many an oval window, there are wrought- iron newels with pineapples or classic urns ; and here the population is still largely American or Irish- American. Far down on the lower West Side, on Varick Street, at St. John's Park, is St. John's Chapel, which was considered so far uptown when it was built that it was wondered who could possibly be expected to attend it, but which is now so far downtown that church-goers never get to it. Trinity Church, owning a great deal of land in this vicinity, and wishing in consequence to draw wealthy homes here, built for this reason, St. John's, completed in 1807. At the time it was built, it faced out over a space free of houses towards the Hudson, and was known as St. John's-in-the-Field. Within the park which was laid out within a few years after the building of the church grew fine big trees, and this park space was enclosed, as Gramercy Park still is, within an iron fence with a locked gate, whose keys were given to owners of the new houses facing the park, as they were built. They were fine houses that gradually arose there, but most of them were torn down and replaced by business structures many and many a year ago. But, before the coming of business, the entire centre of the park, which was to have remained a delightful open space forever, was acquired by the New York Central Railway, which covered every portion of the 72 ''MILLION-FOOTED MANHATTAN'^ park area, over half a century ago, with a huge un- sightly freight station, thus not only ruining the neighborhood for homes, but blotting the park itself entirely out of existence: for always there are men who can carry out ruthless plans. I remember meet- ing an old gentleman, an old-time resident of the park, who told what a poignant tragedy to him and to others was the felling of the trees. Old St. John's, now black with age, is of stately porticoed design, with great pillars, and its fine tower dimmishingly rises in pilastered squares and columned circles. Its interior is stately and dignified, with fine columns, and tall square pilastered corners at the front of the chancel, and a curving stairway to the pulpit. I say that all this ''is," but even as I write the stately old building may be destroyed. In front of it a new subway has undermined the very portico, and on either side are wreckage and desolation. Even before the recent additional changes of the vicinity began to be made. Trinity was on the point of giving up this chapel, and by the time this is published the buildmg may, not improbably, be demolished. It won so many friends by its dignified beauty, that it has been permitted to remain long after its practical use- fulness disappeared. The last time that I was there, one day as the after- noon shadows were gently stretching across the shad- o^vy interior, it was not a time for service, but the organist was softly practising, and I was the only one m the church. Sweet and pleasant was the effect, de- 73 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK liglitful was the fiiie dignity of it all and the softly echoing music— and then, at the very door, came a succession of crashing detonations from the blasting work. It is a pleasant thing to remember in connection with this old church that here there is still given out, on Saturday mornings, a free weekly dole of sixty- seven loaves of wheaten bread in compliance with the will of a certain John Leake, w^ho died in 1792, leav- ing money whose income should always be thus de- voted to feeding the poor. Delightfully remindful, this, that New York is really an old city ; for nothing is pleasanter than ancient pleasant customs, graceful charities which are to go on forever, like the dole of bread and ale that has been given out for centuries at charming old Winchester, in England. And, as to the continued permanence of the dole of old St. John's, a man in charge of the building said to me, with fretful resignation, as of submission, but with frank unwil- lingness, to the inevitable : ' ' We can 't stop givin ' it : it's lor: the lor won't let us"! St. John's Park has a curious connection with the tragedy of the Blennerhassetts, who lived so romanti- cally on the Ohio, and who were ruined through their connection with Aaron Burr: for their son, helpless and an object of charity, lingered on till 1854, and shortly before his death was visited by James Parton, the historian, bearing a contribution from a number of sympathizers, and Parton tells of finding him in a miserable room near St. John's Park, an elderly man, shabbily dressed, with a pallid, expressionless face. 74 ''MILLION-FOOTED MANHATTAN" The graveyard of St. John's was at some blocks to the northward, on Hudson Street, and it was a roman- tic looking place, which a few years ago was turned into a children's plaj^ground and a sunken Italian garden and named Hudson Park. One of the old mon- uments is still preserved there; a firemen's monument ornamented with stone helmets and firemen's trump- ets. A row of old-time houses, admirably preserved, looks into the park ; "St. Luke 's Place, ' ' this used to be called, and long ago these were homes of prosper- ous sea-captains. St. John's Graveyard well deserves to be remem- bered, for, so the tradition has come down, it was through walking back and forth among its stones that the idea of the ''Raven" came to Edgar Allan Poe. A few minutes ' walk from here, just away from the lower end of Sixth Avenue, is a little section centered in Minetta Street and Minetta Lane, Vv^hich is the wretchedest part of the city in outward appearance : it is a center for poor-looking negroes, and some poorer whites, and the tiny area is a nest of narrowest streets, scarcely more than alleys, with unexpected crooks and twists. The houses are tumbledown and old, and originally were picturesque, with dormered roofs, with hips and gables, with their front steps of stone leading up sidewise to pillared doorways, and with many of the houses set, with no apparent reason, at delightfully odd and differing angles. Italians are thick-crowding up to this region, and near by, on Bleecker Street, is an Italian Church, that of Madonna di Pompei, with pillared front and Italian 75 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK campanile. The church looks unexpectedly old, con- sidering that the Italians have come here within but a few years— and you find that the dignified pillared front is really old, and that it is the recent successful addition of the slim campanile which gives the Itahan aspect to the entire structure ! Broadway is not far away: wherever you are, in Manhattan, Broadway seems readily reachable: and not far from straight across from here, and about as far east of Broadway as this is west, is an interesting church of another type. It is old St. Patrick's, a dull- gray plastered building, built over a hundred years ago, and for years it was the Eoman Catholic Cathe- dral of the city. It was surrounded at first by an American population, then by the Irish, and now by the Italians who pack solidly the tenements round about ; so solidly, that there are seven thousand chil- dren of school-age within the radius of a quarter of a mile. It faces on Mott Street and runs back to Mul- berry, with its side towards Prince. Within the church is buried thaf Boss" Kelly who 'long ruled Tammany with an iron and honest hand. Here, too, lies that Delmonico, founder of the line, who achieved world-wide fame through catering in things gastronomic and costly. And then comes a sudden thrill ; for, walking through the high-walled graveyard beside the church, one is suddenly back in the Revolu- tion, suddenly one hears, in fancy, the thunder of can- non, and sees Paul Jones, off Flamborough Head, dashing splendidly on the British in the ''Bon Homme Richard," one sees, in swift fancy, the Frenchman, 76 ''MILLION-FOOTED MANHATTAN" Pierre Landais, in his own much larger battleship, not helping Paul Jones, but holding off and, whether by accident or design, actually broadsiding the Ameri- can's boat. For here is the grave of poor Landais; and, according to the old inscrijDtion, he was ' ' ancien Contre-Amiral au service des Etats Unis, qui dispar- uit June, 1818, age 87 ans." And there comes not only the memory of that day of glory for Paul Jones and of disgrace for Landais, but the thought of the lonely suffering of the long years that followed, here in New York, for the French- man. He was tried by a naval committee, none of whom understood French, he himself at the time un- derstanding scarcely a word of English, and was dis- missed from the American service in disgrace. Again and again he sought in vain for a rehearing, and for forty weary years walked the streets of New York in proud and solitary poverty, now and then donning his old Continental uniform on some great national occa- sion, but always looked at by the people askance ; and at length it was here, in old St. Patrick's churchyard, that the saddened and friendless man found rest. The churches of New York add greatly, not only to the interest of the city, but to its looks : and none have a more striking situation than the beautiful structure at Broadway and Tenth Street. It is Grace Church, and it can be seen from far down Broadway, for it stands where the great thoroughfare makes a sweep- ing bend, and it is a beautifully spired, and inspired, mass of white stone, with the effect, from a distance, of rising in the very middle of the street. 77 THE BOOK OF NEW YOKK It is a fine structure, with a sweetly gracious air; it is not a perched church, but sits close to the ground, with its gardens and greenery and shrubs nestled around it, and with its door opening in welcome from the sidewalk. It is amazing to see this broad open greenery on either side of the church and fronting the recessed rectory and tributary church buildings, in this busy part of Broadway. And on the grass is a huge dolium, a curiosity-awakenmg jar, brought here from across the ocean as if to prove the truth of tne "Arabian-Nights" and its tale of Ali Baba and the forty thieves who hid in jars ! On the southern wall of the church, and a curious thing to find in America, is an outside pulpit of stone, remindful of the outside pulpit behind the delightful cathedral of Tours. This pulpit looks over an open sjoace toward where, for years, night after night, there gathered the drearily pathetic and world-famous bread line, which disappeared with the passing of the kind-hearted Austrian's bakery and coffee-house from that corner. The front view of Grace Church, the iron fence, the hedge, the greenery, make a scene which became, on the stage, the best known piece of scene painting in America ; for this was made the setting for one of the acts in the ' ' Old Homestead, ' ' a play which was played for so many years, and which became over and over again familiar in every part of the country. The chimes, too, which were always rung when this scene was presented on the stage, were remindful of the chimes of this church, which, sounding so often and so 78 '^MILLION-FOOTED MANHATTAN" sweetly over the throngs of Broadway, seem among the sweetest chimes in the world. The interior of the church well carries out the in- terest of the exterior, with its stone pillars, the quiet coloring of the glass behind the altar, the admirable smaller rose-window, and the general air of repose. There never will be anything more dramatic than a certain funeral procession, in New York, and what led up to it; and I speak of it here because I saw the funeral when it was passing Grace Church. The setting of the dramatic story was in the romantic period of the world — which is only to say that any period possesses romance, and that it only needs to be recognized when it comes. Henry George, the Single Taxer, one of the striking figures in Amierican life, was running for the office of mayor of New York in a fiercely contested campaign, the first mayoralty campaign of the Greater City, in 1897. Almost on the eve of election he died, and there was widespread grief. His body lay in state and a hundred thousand people solemnly passed by. At the funeral services there were addresses by a Eoman Catholic priest, a Congregational minister, a Hebrew Rabbi, and others ; to such varied minds had his teach- ing and personality appealed. As evening came on, the funeral procession moved. Down Broadway it came, on its way to Brooklyn and Greenwood, and profoundly impressive was the sight as the cortege swung around the bend of Broadway at Grace Church. Although but early evening, it was dark. Lights and shadows seemed mysteriously 79 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK blended. The heaviest bell of the church was slowly tolling and the tolling was sad and drear and of tre- mendous solemnity. The body of the dead man was borne high on a lofty open catafalque, which was all black, and the coffin shook and rocked as the wheels jolted over the roughness of the pavement. Alone, in front, with head and shoulders drooping, rode a man on horseback, the chief mourner and closest friend, Tom Johnson, himself a figure of national importance, but now likewise gone. Behind, came lifers playing the saddening notes of "Flee as a bird to the moun- tain"; and behind these, marching solemnly between the black and deserted fronts of the business houses and past this church, there followed thousands upon thousands of men on foot. It made a picture of tre- mendous intensity. iiw 80 CHAPTER VII UP THE BOWERY EW YORK is one of the cities that have popular songs writ- ten about them; and perhaps none of its songs won such widespread popularity as the one that goes so swingingly with its: "The Bowery, the Bowery, They do such things, and they say such things. On the Bowery, the Bowery — I '11 never go there any more ! ' ' But of course what it meant was, that everybody would want to hurry right back there; whereupon it behooved the Bowery to do such things and to say such things as would give it the air of living up to its swaggering and swashbuckling reputation, with even more than a touch of the desperately dissipated and criminal. But, as a show, on the basis of such anticipations, the Bowery does not look the part! It is an ex- tremely broad street, with a line of elevated tracks along either side and an unusual number of trolley 81 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK tracks down the middle. It has quite a proportion of saloons, it is markedly a street of big cheap lodg- ing houses for men, there are restaurants and pawn- shops, and there are many stores, mostly smallish ones; it looks like a busy respectable street, and that it even has banks, gives it, surely, the final re- spectable touch. Even the men and women who throng its sidewalks are disappointingly respectable in looks! The wicked glories of the Bowery of the past, partly real and partly imaginary as they were, have gone, and the wickedness of to-day, when you come to look into it, is not glamorous. Wickedness, to be attractive, seems to need the haze of distant time. It is hard to feel pleasantly thrilled over "Suicide Hall," and ''Nigger Mike's," and ''The Bucket of Blood," even though their claims to fame have been eagerly pushed. It is hard to feel keen interest in Sloppy Mag Unsky or Tinky-Tin Cushman, or even in the man who set the example of bridge-jumping, and on the strength of this set up a prosperous saloon. However, people and places are here, and some friendly policeman or guide, or perhaps the megaphone man of a sightseeing car, will point them out. The fame of the Bowery of the past — romanti- cally evil, as it was in the past — came largely from the evil neighborhood and haunts of the Five Points and Mulberry Bend: but a great public park has there taken the place of the tenements inhabited by the lowest criminals, and busy Italians have since UP THE BOWERY thronged into possession of the present bordering tenements, and the Chinese quietly hold their own circumscribed district, a patient and on the whole a law-abiding folk. But one relic of the past does still remain there, and it is a joy! The ''pullers-in" of Baxter Street are still there! — the second-hand clothing spiders who seize the passing man of un- wariness and, dragging him indoors, outfit him in raiment of which it can be justly said that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. And it is proper to refer to Solomon, for the men of these dark little clothing shops are of his race. But this extremely successful race are more in evi- dence in New York than merely on little Baxter Street! To say that there are more Hebrews in New York than in Jerusalem would be to put it mildly. There are more here than there are in any other city of the world. They occupy great sections in the Man- hattan tenement district, they have a mighty Ghetto far over in that part of Brooklyn known as Browns- ville. On Broadway, one sees few business signs ex- cept those with Hebrew names. Not only are there synagogues for the poor, but there are also those for the wealthy, as notably the one opposite lower Central Park, on Fifth Avenue. Not only in business but in real estate have they won prominence, for it is stated, by real estate men, that Hebrews own sixty- five per cent, of the land of Manhattan. And, as a race, they independently aim to take care of their own charities, and a much smaller proportion than those of 83 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK other races get their names into the records of the criminal courts. On Center Street, not far from Mulberry Bend, is the great pile of buildings of the Criminal Courts and the Tombs. The famous original Tombs Prison, however, with its Egyptian-like front, has been re- placed by a modern structure on the same spot, but still the Venetian-like Bridge of Sighs connects the courts and the prison, and over it the prisoners pass to be tried, and return across it if convicted. The grim trials known to evil fame and eagerly dis- cussed throughout the entire country, have been many : vastly more have been those unnoticed ones which meant, in their outcome, just as much to the individual as if millions of people were every morning looking at their newspapers to see how the case was going. Frequently, a jury is ready to report at night ; and when this is expected, and the judge is in a good humor, he will wait patiently as the hours creep slowly by — slowly for the prisoner, at least, but not always so for the others interested, for I have seen the judge and the lawyers on both sides, with news- paper men and perhaps some interested witnesses, ad- journ to one of the near places of refreshment, and gaily talk and banter, while, if they cared to think of it, and if any good could be done by thinking of it, they would realize that the prisoner was frantically waiting. At length a bailiff would come in with a whispering word. All would straggle back to the dimly lighted courtroom, where shadows were hiding in all the cor- 84 UP THE BOWEEY ners and there would be a hnrrying "Hear ye, hear ye ! " and the jury would file soberly in, and the pris- oner would stand to face them. The "Bowery" is an odd misnomer. For it is a Dutch word, pronounced but not spelled this way, and it means a pleasant suburban home mth a garden. Governor Petrus Stuyvesant had his Bowery, some two and a half miles north of the Battery, and to the road which, for the northern half of the distance, led to it, was given its name — the Bowery. The gallant General Knox rode down the Bowery at the head of the first detachment of the American army on November 25, 1783, on his way to the Battery, to take possession of the city after the evacuation by the British: he having been chosen for the proud honor by Washington, who followed him a little later, and met him, on his return, here on the Bowery, at what was to be its junction with Canal Street. At the upper end of the Bowery is the Bible House, with its output of over seven millions of Bibles a year, and at the southern end is dark little Chatham Square, covered with elevated tracks and station — and I re- member a modern little sign there, eminently suggest- ive, at the foot of a black little stair, reading "Black Eyes Painted." Just off the lower side of Chatham Square, on a little, old and very dismal street which has incongru- ously been given the name of the New Bowery, is the earliest Jewish graveyard in the city, dating far back to 1656. It is one of the loneliest, one of the gloomi- est places imaginable, and I never see it without 85 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK thinking of the sad little London burying-ground where ended the tragedy of the mistress of Bleak House. This ancient Jewish cemetery is tiny in size, it stands a little above the present level of the side- walk, and fronts gloomily out beneath the Elevated tracks which fill the narrow gloomy street. Those first Jews in Xew York were Spanish and Portuguese, and their records and tombstones were inscribed in Spanish, and their rabbis had romantic names such as Pinto, Seixas and Peixotto. Cats now prowl dismally among the time-blackened stones, and the windows of dilapidated tenements look down upon them; and from one of these windows, a third-floor one at 26 James Street; nearly a century ago — the quarter being then somewhat better than at present — little Joe Jefferson, afterwards to be Rip Van Winkle, used to look down into this strange, lonely God's Acre. Most marked of any of the outward changes in the appearance of the Bowery is that which has come with the tearing down of buildings to make the plaza and approach, at Canal Street, for the great Manhattan Bridge. The result is superbly beautiful: great space has been taken for it, and the work has been done with strength of conception and architect- ural impressiveness. The old Bowery Theatre, full of interesting theat- rical memories, and known for some years past as the Thalia, looks across the Bowery at this sweeping change: and the old theatre itself is doomed shortly to disappear, to be replaced by a modern business 86 UP THE BOWERY structure of a kind befitting tlie changed looks of the neighborhood. It is well worth while to take a trolley car and cross Manhattan Bridge in the early evening, even if only to come back from its farther end, for it rises over the very roofs of block after block of tenements, and you look far down into streets that look like narrow slits, and down at lighted windows and busy streets and moving throngs. And the impression comes of endless cars, in long twinkling lines, flitting over endlessly on the Wil- liamsburg Bridge above and the old Brooklyn Bridge a little farther do^m; and it is all w^onderfuUy im- pressive and tells vividly of the great surging life of the great city. Walk slowly up the Bowery, and you are pleased mth the gregarious life and happiness of it all. Peo- ple are bustling, crowding, thronging, but all are quiet and orderly. Seldom is any one boisterous or drunk. The policemen, so quiet and capable, are just quietly looking on, ready to help or to answer questions. An old man with two heavy valises gets dazedly off a car, looks dazedly about, is lost. Instantly a policeman is beside him, genially and capably helping him, put- ting confidence into him, directing him. Not always the wicked Bowery of tradition, one realizes. At the end of the Bowery, at a cobweb centre of streets, rises the shapeless bulk of Cooper Union. It was founded long ago by Peter Cooper and has done great good through its many and varied classes, its generous aid to those who are struggling and ambi- 87 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK tious. For use in coiinoetion with the work of the School of Design, a notable collection has been gath- ered of the line old furniture of early days, and there are also admirable details of early woodwork and metal work. The great reading room of Cooper Union, with its myriad of newspapers from myriad cities, is one of tlie sights of Xew York, crowded as it is with the homeless and the homesick, and with strangers eager to read the news from their home-towns. The meeting hall on the lower floor has long been a place for men of advanced ideas, or at least of ideas different from those currently received — the two things not being at all necessarily the same! The listeners are likely to be of the class often referred to as the *' half-baked " : blind gropers after a knowledge that has been denied them; and, looking in at some meeting there, you will notice the tense eager look, the look of mental hunger, on the faces of those who crowd the front rows. It is a hall that is also associated with important movements. Although itself without dignity of as- pect, there have been famous meetings here, most not- able being the one addressed by Abraham Lincoln shortly before his nomination for the Presidency, when he was an unkno^^Ti figTire looming like a nightmare to the well-tailored East. One who heard him has told me of the solemn and immense effect of his great speech; of how he began haltingly, even awkwardly, but of how he gathered strength and ease, and went magnificently on. 88 UP THE EOTVERY Bnt when the meeting was over Lincoln was still bnt a nightmare. He was not yet a prophet. He wa5 not yet a leader, here in the East, away from his own region. All felt the impulse to draw away from this tall, gaunt, ill-dressed, earnest man— for earnest- ness always jars unless you are earnest yourself, and it always jars the smug, the satisfied, the complacent. One man, so the story runs, led Lincoln to a street car and put him aboard, saying that a youth, also boarding the car at that moment, would show him the way to his hotel; but within a few blocks the young man himself, ashamed of the tall companion who had been given him, slipped away, after murmuring that the car would go to the side entrance of the Astor House. And so, after a speech that was to arouse, in the reading of it, admiration and amazement, and which is memorable even to this day, the great Lincoln, de- serted and alone, was jolted slowly on, in a gloomy horse-car, to the side entrance of his hotel ! Two or three minutes ' walk from the northern end of the Bowery, is St. Mark's Church: '^St. Marks-in- the-Bowery," as it is still often called by old Xew Yorkers. ''They say," and it used really to be believed by many and perhaps is even yet believed by some, that the ghost of old Petrus Stuyvesant still imperatively walks the aisles of this ancient church. Not that the church, old as it is— it was built in 1799— goes back so far as Stuyvesant 's own time, for he died over a cen- tury earlier than that, but that it stands on property 89 TUK r^OOK OK NKW YOKK that ho owiuni, and on iho ;sito ol' a ohapol that ho built, and that his tomb, with an insoriptiou ph\iuly to bo road from tho outsido of tho ohuroh. on ono of tlio fomidation stono;?. i$ bonoath tho tloor. oloso to tho oastorn sido. Tho original chapol \vas of oourso Dutch, and it was spociiioally givon by Stuyvosant's widow to tho Dutch Collogiato Church, which. howo\ or. doclinod to accept tho property, not fooling tho nood for it. and in 1793 a groat-grandson of tho groat Potrus otYorod it to Trinity Corporation, and the property thus became Episcopalian, and the present church was built. It is a broad-fronted church, all in browns, situated in the midst of a green space at the junction of Second Avonuo and Stuyvesant Street. It stands sedately above the level of the sidewalk, with a broad open graveyard space on either side, and all about it are green grass and groat trees and shrubs, with singing birds and a general airy pleasantness, and Japanese ivy growing lush upon its walls. It is comfortable, it is pleasing and, in spite of being rather squat, it is highly pictorial. In fact, it is an exceedingly pictorial reminder of long-past time. The stone lions sitting inside of the portico of this extremely old-fashioned church seem oddly incongruous, but. after all. they achieve interest the moment one thinks of them as "Lions of St. Mark's." Tho church is now quite away from the homos of its natural congregation, but now and then it is filled to overflowing on some special occasion. But I re- member dropping in one week-day and linding the rec- 90 UP THE BOWERY tor going throtigh the fnll service with only one man in the large interior to make responses, and the or- ganist to play. Besides the one man there was, in- deed, a poor crif^jle, bnt he had only hmnbly crept in and sat very silent and very stiU and was obviously desirons to efface himself. At another time, when the church wa« also empty and when no service at aU was in progress, I noticed a lady there whom I knew to be the great-granddaughter of an old-time New York governor, a very great man in his day, whom they honored by burning near the stnrdy Stuyvesant ; she had slipped in with gentle inconspicuonsness, and somehow it seemed to give a sweet and charming con- nection between the vanished past and the present day, to see her kneeling where for generations her forebears had knelt. It is odd that Stuyi'esant shonld be so often called Peter. Assuredly, he did not call himself Peter, and I do not see why any one else should use the name. His name was Petrus, and it was often enough signed to Xew York decrees and ordinances to fix it perma- nently in the mind of the city. But there has been an odd, although quite unintentional revenge; for the Dutch, in the use of the name of Hudson, who was an Englishman of the plain English name of Henry, long ago gave him the Dutch form of Hendryck, and many English and Americans took this form from the Dntch, and in books and records, and even yet, and fre- quently, in conversation among Xew Yorkers, the name of Hendrjck Hudson is still absurdly re- ferred to. 91 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK The interior of the church is notably broad, with a vaulted roof, with windows rich in new colored glass, with seven-branched candlesticks, with the Stations of the Cross upon the walls. The whimsical, irascible, tyrannical and highly hon- orable wooden-legged Petrus stumped through early New York so dominantly that he is still vaguely thought of as a sort of legendary good spirit of the city. He had fought in the European wars, and the wooden leg which came from one of the old battles, and which was often described as silver because it was silver-banded, and which threatened to put an end to his picturesque career, merely had the effect of send- ing him to win greater fame in America than ever would have been his in the long-forgotten campaigns of Germany and the Netherlands. That he was captain-general — good old name! — and governor-in-chief, and that, he died in 1682, at the age of eighty : this may be read on the outside face of the ancient tomb, there in the foundation of the present church. He was governor from 1647 to 1664, in which latter year there descended upon the colony an overwhelming English force. For a time, Stuyvesant would not consider surren- der. *'As touching your threats," he wrote to the English commander, 'Sve have nothing to answer, only that we fear nothing but what God, who is as just as He is merciful, may lay upon us. ' ' But surrender at length was needful, and, bitterly disappointed and chagrined, Stuyvesant retired to his *'bouwerie" here. 92 UP THE BOWERY His property extended from the East River as far as what is now known as Fourth Avenue, and an old pear tree that he set out at the corner of what is now Third Avenue and loth Street bore fruit for over two centuries, growing more and more ancient looking and gnarled and giving promise of another century or so of life, even though it stood in a circle within the side- walk area. But not very many years ago a careless driver ran a heavy truck against it and knocked it down, and that was the end of the ancient tree. The place where it stood is still marked, and policemen will tell you that visitors, and even New Yorkers, walking from curiosity over in this interesting sec- tion, will still ask to be shown the Stuyvesant pear tree, in the belief that it is still growing there. After the surrender of 1664, the disappointed Stuy- vesant went to Holland to explain in person the cir- cumstances of his unavoidable surrender of New Am- sterdam. It had intensely humiliated him; he felt that if he had been properly supported from Holland the surrender need not have been made ; and after his explanation he returned to his **bouwerie" in his be- loved New York, for the city was still warm in his affections in spite of the change in government and in name ; and it was on this trip that he brought with him the pear tree, then but a tiny little thing, the merest of saplings, and he planted it as a memorial by which, he said, he hoped to be remembered: grimly cynical, he thought that this tiny sapling would better preserve his fame than the seventeen years of gover- norship that had ended only in disaster. 93 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK And all this sets the mind into the backward and abysm of time, for the career of Stuyvesant, who is so close to the New York of to-day that even the stories of his imperative ghost still linger, makes the city itself seem so old ! For he was a boy of seven years when Manhattan Island was seen by Hudson in 1609 : he was a lad of eleven when a few huts were put up here by Adrian Block in 1613 ; he was just entering on his twenties when the place was given what may be termed casual settlement, in 1624, by several families out of a shipload of Dutch who were really intended for the older settlement of Albany : and he had reached the age of twenty-four when, little suspecting that he himself was to go to Manhattan and be an important figure there, the place was formally settled by families intentionally taking their household goods to the spot. He was born when Henry of Navarre was King of France, when Elizabeth was Queen of England, in the year in which ''Hamlet" was written: he was made governor here by the Dutch, when England was un- der Cromwell: he died in the reign of Charles the Second. And yet it is customary to think of New York as a new city in a new country ! There is an admirable recent monument to Stuy- vesant, set close beside the porch of this church of St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery; a monument of broad-curving gray stone, surmounted by the bust of the irascible Petrus in bronze; but his body does not lie beneath this monument, but is within and below the inscribed foundation wall, over which ivy long ago began to clamber. 94 UP THE BOWERY Not only is Governor Stuyvesant buried here, but here too, and by the strangest of chances in the very same vault, is Governor Sloughter, the man who, as if changing *'o" to "a," unjustly had poor Governor Leisler killed, with the formalities of justice. Also here, but not in the same vault with those two early rulers who are so strangely set cheek by jowl, is that famous Governor Tompkms, who was long known as the war governor, because of his being the chief ex- ecutive of the State during the War of 1812, and who was also Vice-President of the United States. Old St. Mark's makes so harmonious a whole that it seems odd that, although the main building was erected from 1795 to 1799, the portico — which makes the church look like St. Martin 's-in-the-Fields, on Trafalgar Square — was actually not constructed until the uninspired time of 1858, and that the steeple of this so homogeneous structure was set up intermedi- ately, in 1829; and the calm preciseness of St. Mark's is vastly accentuated by the calm preciseness of this steeple, running up, as it does, in lessening squares, to a square-cornered and sharply pyramidal shaft, topped with a round gilt ball and a weather-vane. The home of Petrus, that he so loved, and to which he came back to live even though he must live under an alien government, stood near this old church, and here he ended his life in patriarchal dignity. Each year, on the anniversary of the day on which, as captain-general, he had fought and overcome the Swedes — how curious to know that there was ever such a conflict on American soil! — there was always 95 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK a gala celebration on his place ; and as it was on April the First, Stuyvesant always saw to it that there were simple April First jests upon his ancient servants, negroes whom he had kept about him for years. Whenever Stuyvesant sat down, it was with his back to New York City, for its loss had caused him much bitterness: — but if his ghost should now sit down (and Scrooge thought that Marley's couldn't!) it would find it difficult to turn its back on New York ! When Stuyvesant died, it seemed as if every one in the colony, Dutch and English alike, came to the Bou- werie to follow his body in its short journey to the grave : and notable among the mourners in their piti- ful grief, were the gray-haired servants, his old negroes. ■«» *- ^ /' }' • J .T^^■'^ v% ^■iBilBM^- 96 CHAPTER VIII SOME CONTEASTS OF THE CITY HEN one thinks of the con- trasts of New York it seems as if it is peculiarly a city of contrasts, almost a city that is all contrast: what- ever you see, you may also see its opposite. No city shows quite such contrasts as that of the very richest men in the world and men of absolute poverty : the greatest philanthropists, the greatest givers of money in all the world, and the greatest criminals : no other city can show such a total of motor-cars and motor trucks as New York : yet there are countless numbers among the throngs on the sidewalks who have never ridden in a motor — there are no jitneys in New York — and within recent years a sight has become com- mon, in the best business sections, that used to be rare except in the tenement streets ; that of little carts piled high with merchandise and pushed by men. No other city in the world has so many and so varied types of humanity, and in such vast numbers. 97 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK No other city shows such miles and miles of crowded life, and totals of massed humanity, yet in no other city is there so much of loneliness. The extent to which loneliness is prevalent is amazing. The number of rich and well-to-do and poor, not the homeless but those with homes, who know nobody, who have no callers and who never call, whose only social diver- sions are found in the theatres, the restaurants, the parks, the streets, is utterly amazing. The great stores of New York are the greatest in the world, as to cost of buildings, number of em- ployees, value of stock and volume of business, yet at the same time there are thousands of little, mussy, poorly equipped local shops, and many an attractive little shop as well. No part of the world is more busy, and at the same time more thronged, than the district of lower Broad- way and Wall Street and the wholesale district, dur- ing the day; and nowhere in the world is there a business district so deserted, so silent, so without life except for the solitary and infrequent policeman, as the mile after mile of this district at night. No- where in the world are there such lofty business structures and apartment houses, yet these are bor- dered and interspersed with buildings of ordinary height: there are two-story buildings that have held their own while business has mounted to the sky be- side them, and there are even vacant lots. There are the most expensive specialists, in medicine and sur- gery, and there are hospitals with the most expensive 98 SOME CONTRASTS OF THE CITY and modern equipment where surgical and medical aid is given free. There is the greatest and most reckless spending in the world, and there is the most pinching economy. You may stand beside some wealthy woman who negligently orders furs or gowns costing thousands, and in a few minutes may be in a shop where you will hear a poor child, who is buying a loaf of stale bread and a penny 's worth of cheese, say to the clerk, "Mother wants you to cut it with the ham knife to give it a hammy taste. ' ' While reckless spenders outdo one another in ex- pensiveness — and it was estimated just before the war that a million and a quarter of dollars was spent every evening in New York for dinners at the great hotels and restaurants — the careful savers have been daily increasing the immense totals in the savings banks. While the spending idlers, children of the wealthy, increasingly rival in number the wealthy young idlers that marked the life of London before the great war, the number is also increasing of those who toil and snip and baste and press and patch and sponge in sweat-shops wet and depressive with steam. While the number increases of those who with diffi- culty find ways to spend their money, the number also increases of those with no money to spend: I have seen the policemen, after midnight, moving stol- idly from park bench to park bench, effectually rous- ing the homeless sleepers by blows upon their feet: I have seen the derelicts disappear doubtfully into 99 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK the darkness : one cold morning at City Hall Park, I saw two poor fellows, pathetically anxious to keep up their appearance, wash themselves at the fountain, wipe themselves with grimy handkerchiefs, and then step into the post-office to dry the handkerchiefs on a radiator in the corridor. And I have heard rich New Yorkers boast offensively of their riches. In some degree, such contrasts are to be observed in other cities; but in none so strikingly as in New York. And often the contrasts are vivid. I have seen an archbishop of New York, at his silver jubilee, the central figure of a magnificent service in the Ca- thedral, with hundreds of the priesthood and of churchly dignitaries, of this and other cities, in his train, with pomp of silk and purple and cloth of gold, with the sounding of great bells, and the triumphant pealing of the organ and the sound of singing voices and the music of the horns and cymbals and strings of a great orchestra, and with a mighty congregation packing every inch of the edifice ; and I have seen the same archbishop conducting a service in the chapel on Blackwell's Island, looking with tears in his eyes at the massed array of paupers and prisoners and crippled and blind, but dressed in his splendid robes, in cope and surplice and stole of cloth of gold, and with a mighty golden mitre upon his head, and in his hand a golden crozier, to show that high mass on Blackwell's was the same as on Fifth Avenue. In- stead of great reverberant bells, a little bell in a little green-slatted cupola rang forth its summons: in- stead of splendid organ and orchestra and choir, there 100 SOME CONTRASTS OP THE CITY were a crippled player at an old melodeon, and a choir of four blind and crippled derelicts: and I noticed that the tin vessels, just inside of the entrance, for the holy water, were soon dipped empty, and it was pitiful to see the late comers groping eagerly in the dry vessels for the water which they could not find. As New York has always been ready with con- trasts, I shall dip back into the past for one, and speak of that wonderful day of June 25, 1775, when Washington, on his way to assume command of the Revolutionary army, crossed from the Jersey shore to Manhattan and received an ovation; he was re- ceived by cheering people, he was driven through the city in an open carriage, drawn by white horses ; and the royal governor, Tryon, fearfully witnessed Wash- ington's crossing of the river from a ship anchored in midstream, but did not dare land until nightfall, and then went, neglected by the people, to his home — and this, though it was more than a year before the signing of the Declaration, and although Tryon was a man who had won a reputation for ruthless hangings in the course of his governorship of North Carolina. New York, representative as it is in the highest degree of the eminently practical, has at the same time always possessed emotional possibilities, and a favorite form of expression has been that of riots. As far back as 1788 there were savage riots, still known as Doctors' Riots, in the course of which a 101 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK number were killed and wounded, the cause being ru- mors that bodies were stolen and dissected. So in- tensely wrought up were the people that when the great Baron Steuben and John Jay went out to calm them, these distinguished men were incontinently driven away with volleys of stones. In 1834 there were serious Anti-Slavery riots; and in that same year, as if to give variety, there was the odd happen- ing of a stone-cutters' riot, which came about be- cause of the refusal, for some strange reason, of the workmen to use marble as a building material. One of the worst riots was that of 1849, in Astor Place, the basis of this being the jealousy between the friends of two actors, Forrest, an American, and Mac- ready, an Englishman. Forrest, so it was believed, when in England, had been slighted through Mac- ready's efforts, and so Macready was regarded with ill-will when he next came to this country. On the same evening each of these actors was to play Mac- beth — oddly enough, not even a play in which a man was the leading character was chosen! — and there came a riotous demioustration against Macready; a fight developed, and the militia were called out, and twenty-two people were killed and a great number injured. The Draft Riots of 1863, vdth their horrible burnings and tortures and outrages and hnichings, with over a thousand people killed and numerous buildings destroyed, made one of the worst outbreaks that ever disgraced any city. Far back in 1837 there was a bread riot, caused by 102 SOME CONTRASTS OF THE CITY the high price of flour, and some shops were broken into and flour was thrown out into the streets and destroyed. Just eighty years after this, in 1917, there were demonstrations almost serious enough to call riots, caused by a great rise in the prices of foods of all kinds ; and disorderly throngs gathered and had to be dispersed. I saw one evening a most dramatic sight on Fifth Avenue. The poor, aroused by the leaping upwards of food cost to well-nigh impossible prices, had for several days been gathering in their own quarters and had even gone so far as to beseech help of the mayor. Immigrants, most of them, from autocratic Russia or the Slavic lands, they had been brought up to believe their immediate ruler to be the wielder of power and the dispenser of aid; but they had not found the help they needed, and it was whispered among them that a greater man than the mayor, the Governor — and they liked the word ''Governor"! — was to be one evening at a great Fifth Avenue hotel ; and so as evening came on I saw them gathering, al- most all women, and almost all with children in their arms, gathering silent and sad, and kept moving by the police, but every few rods halting in groups of perhaps a score or so, listening to some one of the group, until the police roughly bade them again to go on. There were hundreds and hundreds, perhaps there were thousands, a doleful and woebegone sight. ''Bread!" was their cry, and the wailing infants 103 THE BOOK OP NEW YORK seemed to echo it. The women did not see the Gov- ernor; they were hustled and pushed and rudely or- dered about; after a while they crept off to their homes like animals to their lairs; and I thought, it was sights like this which, in Paris, preceded the French Revolution, although the gay and the rich ate brioche and paid no heed, and thought the complain- ing poor only uninteresting and tiresome. This highly practical city is always delightfully ready with romance. A gloomy old mansion, which only within recent years was destroyed, stood on Broadway, south of Madison Square, with a broad yard beside it within which was a walled garden ; and with the effort of a little neck-stretching, or from the vantage point of a carriage, one could see why it was that the place was kept up. For it was not, pri- marily, for the sake of maintaining a home on Broad- way ; it was more for the care of a peacock and a cow ! It was a Goelet mansion; so no wonder it was a Goelet who married the Duke of Roxburghe and thus acquired, as a home, the castle of Floors, with its park filled with deer, and with its estate enclosed by the longest private stone wall in Great Britain: re- minder of the wall for the live-stock of Broad- way! On Fifth Avenue, a little south of 42nd Street, is a vacant lot beside a private house ; and the lot was kept open, beside this house, to be a play-space for a much-loved dog, although the otherwise unused bit of land represented the investment of immense potential 104 SOME CONTRASTS OF THE CITY capital. Well, the dog is dead now, and the owner is dead, and so the lot may at any time be built up. The old Van Beuren house on West 14th Street, particularly gloomy and black as it was, stood there before retail trade came sweeping northward with its immense tide of prosperity and its numberless build- ings ; and it still stands there, the only private house in that region, and about it are still the great green grounds, facing now the ebbing of that wonderful business tide as years ago it faced the flow ; and at the back of the huge old garden, with its moribund trees and shrubs, is an old carriage house with arched doors, and over these arches is a series of small open- ings through which, a strange sight for that dis- trict, pigeons still constantly pass in and out : doubt- less, pigeons of a long line of inherited Knicker- bocker blood! Of the human romance in this city which is mis- takenly supposed to think of nothing but the making of money or the spending of it, that too is likely to be typically away from the usual. It would be hard to find anything much more romantic than the way in which a short-story writer of New York carried on his courtship, for, happening to be in London and becoming engaged by mail to the girl he loved, who at the time happened to be in Chicago, he sent a mes- senger boy bearing the engagement ring from Eng- land to America, as naturally as if it were just around the corner. If, afterwards, divorce soon came— well, perhaps even that is not entirely untypical of present- 105 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK day conditions, at least am6ng such of the New York- ers as live swiftly and feverishly : and if to this it be added that the writer died in the full flush of life, barely on the threshold of middle age, that also may be deemed typical of New York. 106 CHAPTER IX AMONG THE TENEMENTS ROADLY speaking, the tene- ments of New York are on the East Side of the city: there is enough of truth in ^^SMV^^f*-—-^ the idea to justify the com- •' '^' r'^i'l^t^ Toaon interchangeableness of ^^I'lib-^^gfe ' ' East Side " and * ' Tenement district" in ordinary talk. But there is no truth at all in the equally prevalent idea that the tenement region represents little besides poverty or ignorance or crime or all three, with a practical absence of the broadening or intelligently pleasurable features of life. An author died, on the East Side, in 1916 — an au- thor not known to the city in general, but whose works, in Yiddish, were familiar to a myriad of read- ers. An immense throng packed the streets through which his funeral procession moved, the people stand- ing reverently, in a weird silence. And as to what kind of a man this was, this Sholem ben Menachem Rabinowitz, or Sholem Aleichem as he was known, who had such a devoted following while living and 107 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK such masses of mourners when dead, his will may be deemed illuminative, for it began : "Wherever I die I want to be placed not among aristocrats or among the powerful, but among plain Jewish laborers, among the very people itself, so that the simple graves about me should adorn my grave- stone even as the plain good people during my life- time illumined their f olkes-schreiber. " After all, it should be remembered that there are a million Jews in Greater New York : many times the total population, including all races, of Jerusalem, and three times as many Jews as has Warsaw, the city next to New York in Jewish population. And to know that such a man as Sholem Aleichem was an idol of the tenement dwellers is to revise for- ever the commonly held beliefs as to the standards of the tenements. But it is not necessary to go from one extreme of belief to the other : it is not needful to deem the tene- ment districts all admirable, merely because it is a mistake to deem them all the reverse of admirable. Yet it is well to know that a great part of the East Side holds itself pridefully, and that it is not without claim to consider itself intellectual. It would immensely surprise most New Yorkers, except the tenement dwellers, to know that, at the lower end of Second Avenue, is a big new theater where moving pictures are never given, and where the full desire is to give only intellectual plays. The plays are presented in German- Yiddish, and the au- thors are themselves Yiddish, either of this country 108 AMONG THE TENEMENTS or of Europe, or else the plays are translations, into German-Yiddish, from such authors as Shakespeare and Sudermann! The management prides itself on giving the highest average of play in New York! — but of course, unless one is conversant with Yiddish, it is a little difficult to form a definite opinion as to this. The theater holds two thousand people, the au- diences are generally large, and the admission, al- though lower than Broadway standards, is double that of the best Broadway moving pictures — box seats be- ing two dollars and orchestra seats one dollar. Many classes and conditions go to make up the life of the great East Side. There is poverty there, and there is inconceivable crowding, and there is lack of food and air and there is unspeakable misery and there is ignorance. But there is also much of happi- ness and there are great numbers — perhaps the ma- jority — who have plenty of money for comforts and gayeties. Many of the tenement dwellers have pianos. Eents, when a number crowd into a few rooms, do not seem so extremely high ; often, and even generally, it is the case that not only is the father a wage- earner, but that two or three children are also wage- earners, so that the total income of a family may be comfortably large even though their tenement rooms are uncomfortably small. Iron fire-ladders gridiron the fronts of the build- ings, and in hot weather they are gridirons in very truth, baked by the sun to a furious heat. Social life, the cheerful intermingling with one an- 109 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK other, makes a vital difference between the tenement section and all other parts of New York. Social clubs are a great feature: and if I mention a dance to be given by the Broken Shutter Association, with such sponsors as Rock Hennessey, Tony Ferito, Tips Bags and Sol Carsella, it is because I noticed in a window a printed circular, with these names, only to-day. But the streets themselves — to make a contradic- tion express a fact — are the real club houses of the tenements. The tenement population, except when the weather is too wet or too cold, and especially in the early evening following a hot day, are mostly am- bulatory, moving about with genial aimlessness and shifting back and forth on the pavements and side- walk. The shufifling of feet, the chirring hum of talk, the laughter of children, make a wellnigh indistin- guishable medley. The vibrant clink of glasses, the twanging note of a guitar, the grinding rattle of sur- face cars, the thunder of the Elevated, the distant clanging of a gong, the tolling of a bell, such are among the familiar sounds: and whether the bell is for a funeral or for a mass, and whether the gong is fire or police or hospital, is known, as if instinctively, to all : for these people come to know the streets and all that pertains to the streets with a loving intimacy. And, thrown close together as they are, in their crowded tenements and in the streets, the people know the life about them in its every phase. Their friend- liness, one to another, their mutual helpfulness, es- pecially the generosity of those of slender purse, puts to shame the calculated charities of the rich. 110 AMONG THE TENEMENTS And the very crowdedness of life makes much for mutual mindfulness. If a courting couple wish to monopolize a fire-escape balcony instead of wander- ing away from home, neighborhood courtesy is apt to yield it to them. The great public recreation piers have become of vast good in the opportunities made cheerfully possible for social pleasure ; and the little parks that dot the city, numbers of them having been established within recent years, are also important social assets. "When the rooms at home are few and crowded, young people will generally go elsewhere, and it is fortunate that New York has so broad-mind- edly provided respectable public resorts. The first tenement house of New York was built in 1833, on Water Street, on a spot which is now within the limits of Corlears Park (how few, of those who deem themselves real New Yorkers, have any idea where that is !) ; it was four stories in height, and each floor was arranged for one family. The East Side, largely so comfortable and prosper- ous, does not understand why the rest of the city, and the country in general, feel and express pity for it! But it accepts, appreciatively, the vast benefits freely offered it by "settlements" and associations; and if great part of the benefits go without cost to people who could well afford to pay, the efforts are none the less well meant, and often do real good, and are an admirable outlet for money that otherwise would probably be put to not nearly such laudable purpose. On the whole, the East Side, in spite of such poverty and misery and crime as may really be there (and 111 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK it may be remarked that too little money, too much unhappiness, and incidental illegal acts, are not char- acteristic of this portion of the city alone!) repre- sents the happiest portion of New York. Yet it must not be supposed that the tenement re- gion is in every aspect picturesque, for much of it looks very humdrum indeed. But much of it is full of interest. There are great districts of the city where it is almost hopeless to find an English-speaking per- son to answer an ordinary question, either on the streets or at the doors of the little shops. In these sec- tions it is equally difficult to find a newspaper printed in English, though you may find on various stands newspapers printed in as many as twelve different languages or dialects. Perhaps no feature of tenement district life is so picturesque as that of the street markets, some of them busy daylight markets and some being markets at night. There is a fish market two evenings a week under the first arches of Williamsburg Bridge: the stalls, roofed by the bridge itself, and lighted by flambeaux, might be a market in an archway of ancient Florence. There are street markets, with long lines of push- carts lined along the curb, just outside of the side- walk, on Bleecker Street and just off Tompkins Square, and in many other places, and they are not only for fruits and vegetables but for cloth and hos- iery and kitchenware and a host of things. The market on Mulberry Street is of typical inter- est. Here the people are mostl}^ Italians. In the 112 AMONG THE TENEMENTS windows of the dirty little stores that line the street are such signs as "Ristorante. Prezzi 5 c. 10 c," and ''Trattoria Loganda," and "Banca Italiana," and "Grosseria Italiani," and "Lager Beer" — this last being clearly untranslatable ! The gutters are lined with push-carts standing end to end. The sidewalks beside them are lined with booths and boxes and tubs and stands. There are apples and chestnuts and olives. Some of the women sit on the curb, and the basket of one, beside her, is partitioned into two halves, one part filled with or- anges and the other — delightful incongruity! — with onions. There are baskets and boxes and booths filled with nothing but bread, as if to indicate defiance of the saying that man cannot live by bread alone ; and some of the bread is white, but much is dark and sodden, and you notice that any prospective customer feels at full liberty to pick up the loaves, press and feel them with more or less clean fingers, and lay them down again. There are quantities of peanuts, there are sweet potatoes, there are many strings of brilliant red peppers, there is booth after booth filled with onions, there are tomatoes. There are great bars of yellow soap of a size and length such as no one ever sees elsewhere. There are many stands for selling fish ; perch, smelt, codfish and other varieties. There are numberless eels, some of them of monster size and others diminutive. The ceaseless chaffering and dickering, and the talk and laughter of the people who crow^d each other on 113 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK the thronged sidewalks, and the cries of rival dealers calling attention to their wares, and the shouts of the children who are playing and dodging about, fill the air with discordant interest. The massed population, all about, is astounding, for it is not only that the buildings that line the street are filled to overflowing with poor humanity, but that behind these buildings are others, out of sight from the street, and reached only by narrow tunnel-like passages. New York is doing away with rear tene- ments, but numbers still remain. Many booths and stands are for the sale of all sorts of odds and ends, including cheap jewelry, and gaudy handkerchiefs, and woolen caps; and fish so thoroughly and completely dried that they are noth- ing but grisly skeletons. It amused me one day to see a Chinaman and Ital- ian holding a colloquy together. Tl^e Chinaman had thoughts of purchasing a string of some mysterious eatable, and the Italian was expatiating on its merits and its cheapness with a rapid flow of words. The Chinaman could not understand a word he was say- ing, but that did not check the eloquence in the least. The Italian gesticulated, he exclaimed, he made dra- matic pauses, he fluently began over again; hands, features and voice were all made to take part in his effort to make a sale, and throughout it all the China- man silently looked at him, and after some five min- utes of Italian eloquence he paid the price and took away the string. Most interesting of the night street markets is that 114 AMONG THE TENEMENTS of Grand Street. Grand Street is the Broadway of the East Side. It stretches off interminably in that part of it between the Bowery and the East River; that region being in the broadest part of Manhattan Island. It has long lines of shop fronts on both sides of the street, and on Saturday evenings, when the shops themselves are all brilliantly alight, the street market establishes itself along the curb in long lines. The movable booths and the standing push-carts are stacked high. In all, it is a vivid and picturesque sight. For on Saturday evening the Grand Street sidewalks are thick-jammed with thronging people, largely foreigners, dressed with the vivid colorings that foreigners love. The shops, the street booths, the people, the chirring happiness, the lights and colors, the eager rush of pleasure and of spending — it is a sight to be seen and to be remembered. Division Street, where the Second Avenue Elevated leads away from Chatham Square, is one of the dark- est and blackest of streets, for it is a narrow street, and is quite filled by the track structure that extends from side to side and blocks out all the sunlight. But this street has been picked out, in extraordinary fash- ion, for the hat and cloak and gown street of the East Side ! From Chatham Square to the Williams- burg Bridge the stores show nothing but hats and cloaks and gowns. In the windows are hundreds of wax figmres, furnished forth with the most recent styles. For these shops are not makeshift shops, they are not second-hand shops, but are retail houses that handle, for the East Side, the fashionable garb 115 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK of the moment, but at unfashionable prices! And, after dark, in the early evening hours, every shop is brilliantly lighted, and the daylight blight of the Ele- vated is forgotten. East Side business must needs give opportunity to its people to buy at night, for so many of them work throughout the day. Allen Street is another of the exceedingly narrow streets of the East Side, and it is also black and dis- mal through being completely shaded by the Elevated tracks that occupy its width. The street has, for years, been the center of the Russian brass trade, with fascinating little shops glittering and gleaming with thousands of candlesticks and bowls and boxes and sconces and kettles made of brass. And recently, that portion of the street near Canal Street has been the object of the strangest of migrations. For one little shop after another has established itself here, on this street of narrow blackness, for the handling of delicate silk underwear, fluify with soft lace ! There is no apparent reason for this : it seems but a freakish and needless choice. An interesting portion of the East Side is along the waterfront of the lower East River, where, al- though much of the seafaring life of old clipper days has gone, there are still doddering old taverns and lodging houses that shelter amphibious folk, and there are bowsprits still projecting far over the land, and there are strange sea smells of spices and for- eign things, and there are Lascars and such strange sailor folk leaning over the ships ' rails. On the East Side there is a ceaseless shift and 116 AMONG THE TENEMENTS change of nationalities and religions. Churches change to synagogues and synagogues to churches. The Irish give place to the Hebrews, the Hebrews to Italians, the Italians perhaps to Slavs. But the sea- faring Greeks and their long waterpipes have tena- ciously held to a little district not far from Brooklyn Bridge, and the flower-dealing Greeks to a district near Union Square : — and yet, in writing of New York, one cannot with impunity say that anything is a con- tinuing fact : even as I write this, the Greeks may be migrating to some other locality. Most permanent of all have been the Syrians and Chinese; the Syr- ians most marvelously so, for decades ago they chose tumble-down tenements near the North Eiver, at the extreme southern end of Manhattan: a locality that no one could have thought of as anything but tem- porary, for the most ordinary development would be expected to put up great business structures there. Yet the tumble-down buildings still unbelievably re- main, and the Syrians still inhabit them. Strictly speaking, there are many tenements in New York that rent for many thousands of dollars a year : for in the purview of the law an apartment house, no matter how expensive, is a tenement house. But in ordinary adaptation, nothing that is expensive is a tenement. Perhaps the most vital touchstone, of difference, is the front door, which in an apartment house is never left open but which, in a tenement house, is almost always left open. In many, and perhaps most, of the tenement houses — using the term again, in its accepted sense — there is 117 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK only the kitchen fire. The heat of the enclosed house, built tightly between other houses, the smallness of the rooms, the number of people in them, all make it possible to live quite comfortably with the heat of but a single stove. Many of the moderate-priced apartment houses have also but one fire, the kitchen fire, with no heat supplied in any other way; and some have heated hallways only. I have heard it es- timated that half the population of Manhattan has but the kitchen fire, but this estimate seems too high. A subtle change has within a few years past come over the mighty tenement district. A great part of its strength, its idiosyncrasies, its uniqueness, its characteristics, has come through its being unbrok- enly massed, in solid block after block of great houses. This unbroken m^assing gave it an aspect of being a city apart, a region by itself, a segregated section, and gave its people the feeling of being a people apart. All this is still, in the main, unchanged; and yet, the sense of being unbrokenly massed has been to some degree affected by the enormous tearing away of buildings for bridges and bridge approaches, for new parks, for public schools, new charitable institu- tions. There has been somewhat the effect as of dis- turbing and tearing apart an enormous ant hill, and thus setting its inhabitants into agitation. In the year in which ground was cleared for the Pennsylvania Railway Station, a clearing which lev- eled block after block of tenements, a clearing was also made for one of the great bridges, and these two causes made together a tremendous increase in the 118 AMONG THE TENEMENTS number of eviction notices: for unless notices were formally given, any tenant might at the last moment refuse to move, and thereby hamper a great improve- ment. The number of these evictions was not in the slightest sense a matter of hardship between landlord and tenant, but they gave a man an opportunity to rise to prominence as an authority on New York life, for he wrote a book telling of the oppression of the people of the tenements, and expatiating on the cruelty of tenement house owners, and he proved his point by giving the positively startling total of evic- tion notices for the year which had just ended. It is not at all improbable that he was himself unaware of the reason behind the notices, and that in conse- quence he wrote with all the fire of mistaken convic- tion. Tompkins Square is an unusually large square east of Second Avenue, surrounded by a region of tene- ments; the square itself being now used mainly for public playgrounds for the thousands of children who come here, especially on Saturdays. But perhaps it is most interesting on account of the memories evoked by a stone fountain, designed with simple dignity, which stands over in the south- west corner. On the face of the fountain are two attractive little children, a boy and a girl; the boy standing protectingly over the girl and the girl nes- tling at his feet. The fountain was erected in mem- ory of those who lost their lives through the burn- ing of the steamer Slociim, in the East River, in 1904. Hundreds of women and children were needlessly 119 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK drowned or burned to death on that terrible day, and most of the families lived in the immediate neighbor- hood of this square. I remember one of the bereaved parents, a grievously saddened man, saying that he did not understand why, if God should take such trouble to save the Hebrews in the Red Sea, he did not save New Yorkers in the East River. The lower East Side was the part of the city where, in early days, the greater part of the rich and pros- perous dwelt. Most of the early shipping docked along the East River. It was on the East Side that warehouses and stores first arose. Throughout that region long rows of fine mansions were built. Mean- while, the West Side was slow in developing, largely because to quite an extent it was swampy land, or cut by channels of sluggish water. Until well into the nineteenth century the East Side retained its social and business leadership. The city gave solemn commemorative exercises on the death of President Harrison, ' ' Old Tippecanoe, ' ' in 1841. Business was totally suspended for the day, the city was draped in black, and there was a proces- sion of some thirty thousand men, although it was a day of storm: and, to cover the very best part of the city, the paraders went from City Hall Park, by way of East Broadway and Grand Street and the Bowery, to Union Square, returning thence along Broadway : thus ignoring the West Side, and march- ing first through streets that are now in the very heart of the tenement district. Many a tremulous and superannuated old building 120 AMONG THE TENEMENTS still stands on the tenement streets, many and many a detail of interest has been preserved, many and many a charming old fanlight or fireplace or pillared door- way ; and at any time a house with such treasure may be torn down and if you are on hand at the time you may be able to carry some of the treasure away. Only yesterday I passed an old-time building near Washington Square that was in the last stages of demolition; a quick look about the fast disappearing ruins showed that only one thing remained, but that was a carved newel post of solid mahogany; and, so it happened, it was something that I especially hap- pened to need ! Stanford White, the great New York architect, used to come home from Europe with treasure torn out of old-time buildings, which he put into buildings in New York; but he also knew the value of old New York remains; and I remember, in particular, a beautiful mantelpiece which he secured at the tearing do^vn of DePauw Row, on Bleecker Street, and built into a hotel which he was at that time erecting. De Pauw Eow, itself, had long been a romantic relic of the past, with its traditions of wealthy living, and its arched entrances to the curving drive within its inner court — which, by the way, made the place, after the depart- ure of wealth and fashion, a veritable thieves ^ para- dise from the various exits and entrances w^hich fa- cilitated the dodging of the police. The most notable old spiral staircase in New York, a marvel of construction, was in the old Cafe Boule- vard on Second Avenue : and I read in a nev/spaper, 121 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK which told of the destruction of the building, that the wonderful stair was torn to pieces and thrown away ! What an opportunity missed by the many who could have used it to splendid advantage. The most beau- tiful doorway in Deerfield, that Massachusetts village of ancient houses of sweetness and charm, was not made for the house in which it stands, was not made in Deerfield or even in New England, but was secured by an artist on the tearing down of an old house in the Greenwich Village section of New York City ! Always and constantly, in New York, one notices changes. Going about, a few years ago, with an old gentleman of eighty, a visitor from the West, who had come back to New York to see the localities familiar when he was a man of middle-age, he was deeply in- terested in the retail business, which had advanced to the vicinity of 23rd Street, and he was amazed that it had gone so far north. How much more amazed would he now be, to find the center at 42nd Street, with no one able to say where it will be to-morrow! Then he insistently wanted to go down-town. Grand Street was the best shopping street of the city in his earlier years, he remembered, and so to Grand Street we went, where there had been the best retail stores, not merely for the East Side but for both sides of the city. But what changes he found! It was still a wonderfully busy street, but everything that he had known was gone. When I think of the picturesque things that I have seen among the tenements, always there comes the memory of the study-room of some rabbis, in a tum- 122 AMONG THE TENEMENTS ble-down old structure on Orchard Street ; a building of frame, standing tremulously as with the stoop of an old man. Perhaps the building has gone by now. I have not seen it for a year — and in New York all buildings, whether old or new, exist in the constant shadow of the terrible epitaph, ''Torn Down"; but it is, if the usual New York fate has not befallen it, an interest- ing place, with this low-ceilinged room reached by two flights of stumbling stairs. Around the room were cases filled with books and manuscripts. There were a few small tables and some chairs. The room was lighted by lamps that seemed to burn but dimly, and the old men, poring over the Talmud and the parch- ments of rabbinical lore, had thick dark hair under close-fitting skull-caps, and beards of great length, and softly glowing eyes, and fingers tenuous and al- most clawlike from the constant handling of crumbly pages. It was a place of silence and dignity, a pic- torial place, with patriarchal faces half in shadow and half in light, and lambent lusters on sheets of golden yellow. It made a scene that would be remarkable even in the Ghetto of Amsterdam or Frankfort-on- the-Main. 123 CHAPTEE X TAMMANY "HEN the American army was awaiting formal disband- ment, at the close of the Revolutionary War, and was lying in cantonments on the Hudson, ready to march in and take possession of New York and considered, so to speak, the entire Revolu- tionary incident closed, it came to the officers that it would be a fine thing to per- petuate their friendship in the bonds of an association. The idea, once thought of, was so attractive that offi- cer after officer declared himself enthusiastically for it, and an organization was effected. Washington was the first officer to sign the paper which represented the objects of the new society and outlined its plan. He signed in his oddly usual way, not with the "George," as would naturally, at least nowadays, be expected, and not simply with the in- itial *'G.," but with the abbreviation *'Go.," the tiny "o" being scarcely noticeable above the line, and 124 TAMMANY with a pronounced flourish in the crossing of the *'t.'* Those first signers of the constitution of the So- ciety of Cincinnati make an interesting list. There is an unobtrusive "Nath. Green, Maj.Gen."; then comes, with the flourish as of a schoolboy, a shakily written "Eufus Putnam, B.Genl."; there are lesser known generals, such as Greaton and Layton and Huntington; there is ''B.Lincoln,M.G."; there are colonels and surgeons and quartermasters mingling with the generals; there is the odd signature of the mighty Major-General Knox, ''H.Knox,'' with the *'H" and "K" making together a simple monogram; there is Baron Steuben, signing in his foreign way, without given name, and following with a fancifully scrolled ''M.G." The society was given its name of the Cincinnati because, "The officers of the American Army, hav- ing generally been taken from the Citizens of Amer- ica, possess high veneration for the character of that illustrious Roman, Lucius Quintius Cincinnatus, and are resolved to follow his example by returning to their citizenship." The organization was not only to perpetuate friendships, but also to "extend the most substantial acts of beneficence towards those officers and their families who may be under the ne- cessity of receiving it"; and the society Avas to con- tinue forever, through taking in descendants of the original members. All this arranged, and the planning of it having served to break the ennui of waiting for the British to complete their preparations and sail away, the 125 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK Americans gail}^ marched down into New York; Gen- eral Washington himself, first president of the Cin- cinnati, spending the night before actually entering the city at the Van Cortlandt mansion, still standmg in Van Cortlandt Park, where he dressed himself, as is recorded, with particular care for the solemn occasion of taking possession of the place that the British had held for years. It would almost seem that no man in history has had quite so much re- corded about his clothes as George Washington ; and this was not because he was in the least a Beau Brummel, but that he deemed the matter of excel- lent clothes a matter excellently worth while seeing to, and that in this, as in everything, he impressed his personality on all who wrote about him. And so the officers of the army had become the Cincinnati — and without the slightest suspicion that they had done something that was to raise a mighty storm! For the people in general did not like the idea of the well-meant Cincinnati with their elaborate jeweled insignia. To the mass of the people it sa- vored altogether too much of aristocratic exclusive- ness ; they feared that the officers were to perpetuate themselves as a powerful body, set apart in interests that would not be those of the nation. Such a storm of opposition arose as threatened the very existence of the Cincinnati, and made it everywhere unpopu- lar; but no result of the general opposition was so important as the formation of Tammany. For Tammany was organized six years after the organization of the Cincinnati, in the year in which 126 TAMMANY "Washington became President of the United States, and as a protest against the Cincinnati. As the first organization was held to represent an aristocracy of rank, the second was understood to stand for the in- terests of what are termed the common people. It is odd that the mighty New York organization of Tammany, which almost at once rose to promi- nence and power, should have taken as its name that of a Philadelphia Indian! For Tammany was a prominent Indian chief, commonly referred to as Tamenund, whose headquarters were in the vicinity of what is now Doylestown, a suburb to the north- ward of Philadelphia ; and that is why the Tammany men still call themselves ''Braves," and why their headquarters is the "Wigwam." As a political organization, Tammany became probably the strongest and best organized that the world has ever known. That it became not only a power, but at the same time a power for evil and for what is known as "graft," is well known; but there have been many phases that are not well known, for Tammany is by no means all evil. A central head dictates the affairs and policy of Tammany. It is thus an autocracy. But under this central head, supporting the leader and in turn by him supported, is a wonderful body of leaders, each man the choice of his district. And Tammany is thus a democracy. The district leaders, in turn, wield their power and gain their information through an organization of local captains. That many a Tammany man is a man entirely un- 127 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK scrupulous is quite true : selfishness, the acceptance of bribes, the levying of contributions — these things, on the part of some, are not to be denied. But Tammany can fairly point out, on the other hand, that "Reform" is often, if not usually, but a screen behind which are hiding men quite as unscrupulous as any of Tammany. Politics develops both the good and the bad of man- kind. I have not the slightest thought of either de- fending or attacking Tammany; it is only that the organization represents a vital phase of New York life, and therefore ought to be understood. And it is well that there have been alternations in city control, between Tammany and "Reform," for in that way there has always been a check upon both sides. And Tammany, and many a Tammany man, has done much for the city ; much of excellence and fineness and much of permanent value. The district leader is a picturesque figure, repre- senting a picturesque condition. For a district leader, to be successful, must be a man of ability and deter- mination, the possessor of tact and resourcefulness. He is mediaeval! He is the head of a clan, his clan being every member of his party, every actual and potential follower, within the bounds of his district. He must know, personally as far as possible, and with absolute completeness through his captains and their assistants, the main facts in regard to everybody and everything in his territory. And he does ! He watches over his followers with a fatherly and watchful eye. He is ready to help them in a hun- dred ways. He sees to the getting of jobs; generally 128 TAMMANY city jobs, but not infrequently jobs that are not politi- cal. And lie sees that his clansmen vote ''right." The district leader has the power and the responsi- bilities of a tribal chief, and he expects obedience. And when there is some upheaval imminent he must, even if he cannot prevent it, at least know all about it before it actually comes. The late "Battery Dan," one of the strongest of all district leaders, expected, in advance of any election, to be able to forecast, with absolute precision, how from 93 to 95 out of every 100 of the men of his district, of both parties, were going to vote. And if ever his prognostication was wrong he felt deeply mortified. The motto of another leader, who made a point of being generous in regard to giving pleasant times to the children, was, frankly, that ' ' There 's votes in the crying of a baby made sick by a stomachful of free ice cream ! ' ' That the Tammany district leaders are always ready to be called upon for aid or advice has been an im- mense bulwark of their strength. One of them, run- ning for alderman, against an extremely wealthy and public-spirited candidate put up by the opposition, based his campaign — and it was a difficult campaign, as the normal opposition outnumbered him — upon the declaration, repeated at meeting after meeting : ''You know me. Elect me and I'll be an alderman of the people, ready to help at any hour of the day or night. But elect a millionaire — and you'll be ar- rested if you ring his doorbell after dark ! ' ' And of 129 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK course he was elected. The leader of a neighboring district made himself a candidate for the State Legis- lature. "I'll be better for you than a Daniel Web- ster ! ' ' was his slogan — and he won. The district leader does not, as a rule, and unless for some special reason or the satisfying of some par- ticular personal ambition, take office : his power is ex- erted in selecting other men for office and in seeing that they are elected — if he can. For the important offices, beyond the local jurisdiction of the individual leader, the general council of leaders decides: or, as a matter of fact, the one man who is leader of Tam- many Hall and upon whose personal judgment the final decision must usually rest. Tammany displays, constantly, the successful practical combination of autocratic and democratic methods. Tammany has added so much of the interesting to New York life that, from the standpoint of pictur- esqueness, it is a pity that its power seems to be on the wane and its idiosyncrasies to be passing. The Sullivans, until death took them, one by one, held immense power as district leaders throughout recent years, and **Big Tim," the leader of the Sul- livan leaders, was a man of unusual personality. His annual picnic to College Point used to be one of the great features of the East Side. At least six thou- sand men would go, by specially chartered steamboats, and the day would be spent in games and play; for the day, the thousands of men were boys again. And that each member of the Sullivan organization had to pay five dollars for the day 's pleasure, which included 130 TAMMANY a grand dinner — ^the cooking for six thousand men being in itself an achievement of magnitude ! — was no deterrent. It was a favor to be permitted to pay the five dollars. And all the shop-keepers and contract- ors and other people, who hoped for favors, were glad to buy tickets even if they knew they could not use them. And the list of complimentary invitations was always small. The occasion was not made the excuse for an orgy ; it was always a well-ordered affair; only a few men would get drunk, and they were unostentatiously cared for in one way or another. The ' ' committee on fights ' ' was a delightful feature, it being composed of a number of the huskiest fighters, one or another of whom, when a man began to be disagreeable or to act as if he wanted a quarrel, would patiently try to curb his belligerence by pacific words, and then, if the dis- turber still wanted a fight — would obligingly and very swiftly give it to him ! It was a remarkably success- ful committee. The home-coming was always in the early darkness, and there was a parade to the club headquarters on the Bowery, and the people knew over which streets the men were to march, and crowds packed those streets, massing on the sidewalks and on the steps and at the windows. Every man and woman and child was out, either marching or welcoming ! And as the procession, headed by *'Big Tim," in an automo- bile, went on, with the music of many bands, innumer- able roman-candles, sent up from both sides of the streets, formed a brilliant arch of continuous fire, and 131 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK everybody was wildly happy, and when the procession turned into the Bowery, up near Cooper Union, and headed southward, and every band blew full strength on the spirited marching tunes of ''Tammany," or "The Bowery," and big bonfires blazed and vastly more roman-candles than on the other streets filled the air with colored fire, it made a strange and vividly inspiring sight. It was a great clan displaying pas- sionate devotion to its mediaeval head. Unless one knows something of the reciprocal per- sonal service and personal loyalty of leader and fol- lowers, the power of Tammany cannot be understood. A district leader who even yet wields enormous per- sonal power loves to make his annual "picnic" — a popular name, to describe varied forms of East Side happiness — an all-day affair at a great "garden" up Harlemward, beginning early in the day, with the women and children, for whom all sorts of entertain- ment are given free, with free refreshments, and con- tinuing well on into the night. I have seen this leader stand as at a reception, meeting and greeting each one of an interminable stream, apparently knowing every- one, calling most by name; I have seen the men im- mensely proud at being recognized and greeted and having their hands shaken, and have seen the shy pride with which their wives were led forward to re- ceive, also, a handclasp and a few cordial words, and it has seemed as if here could be seen the strength of Tammany, the explanation of it all. And the leaders, as if to add to the mediaeval simili- tude, maintain a great degree of personal dignity; 132 TAMMANY their cordiality and approachableness do not take away, in the minds of their following, from the sense of their being on a higher plane ; they are friends, but they make it clear that they are also rulers. The character of many of the acts of Tammany leaders and the callousness of their attitude in regard to such things have given plenty of justification for attack and criticism. But that Tammany could suffer from the disclosures of the ''Tweed Eing" and, after a short eclipse, could again wield supreme power in the city, is the strongest proof of its deep-based strength. And it did this because its strength had been organized with practical wisdom and was founded upon the affections of the mass of the voters. That the strength of the organization is on the wane is mainly due to causes outside of itself. For years it withstood the attacks of foes throughout the State, who tried to defeat its men and measures at general elections and by means of the Legislature, but a mighty blow at its power was struck when Greater New York was organized, for the tremendous voting power of Brooklyn, with that of Long Island City and the Bronx and Staten Island, none of which had sym- pathy with Tammany, was thus to be thrown into the scale at every election. But even yet it is a tremen- dous power. The secret of Tammany's success — quite an open secret, however little it may have been generally rec- ognized — has been that it has always had many men of education and capacity in its ranks. The Wigwam, the headquarters of Saint Tammany 133 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK — for, to add to the freaklshness of it, the appellation of *' Saint" has from early days been attached to the Indian chief's name — is on East 14th Street, just east of Irving Place and the Academy of Music. It is a brick building, several stories high, particularly hum- drum and ordinary of aspect ; and this is odd, for con- sidering the important things, bad and good, that Tammany has done, the power that it has wielded, the plans that have been formulated, it would seem natural to find a headquarters building which looks as the headquarters of such an old and interesting or- ganization, with its mediaeval form of power, ought to look. But nothing could be more unpicturesque than this dull and commonplace structure, or more the re- verse of mediaeval. And, after all, it might be suggested by its enemies, as to the society itself, that it possesses more of the evil than the mediaeval. CHAPTER XI THE CITY OF FOKEIGNEES |0 say such things as that New York has more Irish than Dublin and more Italians than Rome — and such statements, incredible though they ap- pear, are not jests but facts — only begins to represent the marvel of New York as a for- eign city. More races mingle here, and in greater numbers, than in any other city of any period of the world. There are, too, some Americans in New York ! As a New Yorker, Julian Street, has admirably expressed it, an American in New York is at the mercy of the Greeks, Italians, Russians, Irish, French and Swiss, with no American consul to appeal to ! That what used to be considered the American type has almost disappeared from the New York streets, is one of the interesting changes that have accompanied this making of the city into the *' melting pot" of the world. As a feature and a factor of the streets, the American type has been largely overwhelmed, oblit- erated, swamped, by the flood of new-comers. In the 135 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK course of years a new general type will be developed ; whether better or worse, more attractive or less at- tractive, to be decided only by time. Although it is to be regretted that a vast proportion of the foreigners who have come in within recent years have brought but little of their native picturesqueness with them, there is, if one but looks for it, much of the picturesque to be found. Turn aside from Fifth Avenue at 97th Street, and go eastward for half a block, and you may go straight into Moscow ! — for always, this is a city of potential surprises. Flush with the sidewalk, tight built between houses on either side, is a building with onion towers of blu- ish green, onion towers with the Kremlin twist ; and you enter the building, and are within the Russian Cathedral. Your first surprise is that, in this city of hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews, there are also enough Russians to have, not synagogues, but a cathe- dral. But so it is, for these are Russians of the Rus- sian Church. What first strikes you is color, colors of the Orient ; and yet not precisely of the Orient, for these colors are of shades that are entirely unusual, shades that give a sense of the barbaric, and yet which are at the same time highly effective in their combinations. The interior is very high, but the floor space is not large. There is a music gallery, filled with singers, and the voices, all male voices, richly chant, without instru- mental accompaniment, impressive Russian music with its unexpected time. 136 THE CITY OF FOEEIGNERS Across the entire front, behind the altar, is a rere- dos, brilliant with a line of archways each of which is filled by a richly colored holy picture ; and although the pictures are not art, as Western nations under- stand art, they are striking; and perhaps this effect- iveness comes because the long line of color adds to the general color effect of the cathedral. For the en- tire interior is rich in colors, and the rose and gold and blues, greens and grays and pinks, are just fas- cinatingly a little away from the pinks and grays and greens and blues and gold and rose that Americans know. The officiating priest, probably what we should term the archbishop, comes through an opening door from an inner shrine which seems a blaze of brilliant brass, like a room of gold. He is rotund of figure and oro- tund of voice; it is a voice which rolls and rumbles and soars and sinks gloriously. He is clad in a white garment, full-hanging, touching the very floor, a gar- ment of silver-tissue, a magnificent fabric; and in colorful contrast is his tall plain brimless Russian hat, all black. There are no chairs. The congregation stand ex- cept at kneeling-times and then all plump down with- out hesitation, including fur-clad women and prosper- ous men. Most of the congregation are ordinary humble-folk, but all, and the priests themselves, seem of an im- mense sincerity, freely kissing the cross, freely kissing a holy picture as they leave; and, more than this, evincing sincerity in their general aspect and conduct. 137 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK The floor space is packed to the doors. Fully two- thirds of the people are men. Most of the women carry babies, and they edge their way to the side of the altar, where a priest in black deftly takes the babies and carries them to the back of the altar, and blesses and sprinkles them, and hands the little tow- heads — for all seem really tow-heads! — ^back to the Tartar-faced high-cheek-boned mothers who now, ra- diant with happiness, eagerly grasp them again and creep quietly away. And intermittently and for long periods the choir sings and the priests antiphonally chant. Would you go from Russia to Southern France? You may do so by simply going from here to the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, over in Brooklyn. Behind the altar of the church is a representation of the Grotto of Lourdes, following it in shape and so far as possible in size, with imitation rocks and shrubs, and in the center of all an actual opening, a cave or grotto extending back for some fifteen feet. It is a church which carries on the idea, here in mod- ern New York, of the miraculous healing of the sick at the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in France. A special service that I attended began at eight in the evening. The large church was packed to the doors. At the signal of a handclap, little lights began to twin- kle all over the church, for every one of the congre- gation had been holding a candle in readiness. Soon the twinkling became a great soft glow. A procession was silently formed, and it slowly passed behind the altar and in front of the grotto, 138 THE CITY OF FOEEIGNEES where, in a curving line, those were now kneeling or sitting who had come for cure. Leading the proces- sion was a white-veiled child, with a face of wonderful sweetness ; following her were acolytes, in white and red, and white-veiled girls, and then, in irregular or- der, the entire congregation, and then came the cel- ebrant and his attendant priests; the celebrant gor- geous in cloth of gold and walking beneath a purple and gold canopy upheld by four pole-bearers. The celebrant walked slowly past the group of suf- ferers, touching each with the monstrance, blessing all, inaudibly praying for all. And it was pitiful to see the sick ones gradually look about, in slow and puzzled doubt, as congregation and priests moved on and left them. Some sobbed quietly, a few got up and crept away or mingled with the departing congregation ; a few still knelt and prayed as, one by one, the sexton extinguished the lights around the grotto. Of Asiatics, two races have segregated themselves in New York in considerable number : from the west- ern verge of Asia, the Syrians, and, from the eastern edge of Asia, the Chinese, who have a ''quarter" in a tiny section, on Mott Street, between Bayard Street and Chatham Square, with Pell Street and Doyer Street immediately adjoining. It makes an odd little triangular quarter, with an illusive sense of the intri- cate. The buildings of Chinatown are mostly old and almost tumbledown tenement houses; some are even the old two-story houses with dormered attics, but by some magic the Chinese have managed to infuse into 139 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK the district more than a touch of the magic and the mystery of the Orient. Fire-escapes glowing with color, narrow streets permeated by the silent-stepping, soft-slippered olive-faced folk, with their long eyes seeming to see nothing yet seeing all ; the shape of an a^vning, the odd mingling of hues, the flowery gar- ments, the projecting vertical Chinese signs, the tun- ics, the queues, the trinkets and fabrics and porcelains in the windows of the little shops, the idols, the vases, the silks, the sweetmeats, the boxes of tea, all tell of the distant Orient. An old Chinaman, at a window, is playing, on a Chinese flute, a tune that is older than the Chinese Wall: ** River of the Lotos," or some such name, a Chinaman will tell you that it is — if you are so for- tunate as to hit upon a Chinaman who will translate for you. But most of them, even of such as under- stand English, will not talk with strangers, and pre- tend to know nothing but prices. And from the olive masks that serve them as faces their slits of eyes look out at you with curious impassiveness. The soft clanging of a gong, the indistinct sounds of Chinese music, perhaps the clash of cymbals or a thrill- ing dissonance of strings, from some entranceway or floating down from some window or coming vaguely out of nowhere, some slender strain, vivid with its touch of something different and alien and Oriental; the soft voices in an unknown tongue, the serene and silent gravity ; all mark it as a place apart. And the maker of rice-cakes : — watch him on a hot night work- ing over the fire which is burning in his window ; how 140 THE CITY OF FOREIGNERS oblivious he is to the heat of the fire and of the night itself ! how cool and placid he is ! The private affairs of Chinatown are conducted by a committee, of a dozen or so, elected by themselves, and an annually chosen ''mayor," so called. But the rival Tongs are the forces which seem to an onlooker the most important: the On Leongs and Hip Sings, whose sleepless rivalry often becomes so fierce that murder is in the very air and death lies in wait at corners and in passageways. And for a few minutes following a tragedy there is a rush and a tangle, a scurry and flurry, a brief break in the placidity, and then the police, alike the uniformed and the ''plain- clothes men," pounce right and left to seize and in- terrogate, while the district swiftly resumes its baf- fling calm. And it is odd that such a folk, who walk and talk so quietly, should usually choose the noisy pistol rather than the quiet knife. The police are seldom out of sight in Chinatown, and the one familiar crime is that of killing, and the familiar misdemeanors those of gambling and opium-smoking. There is a joss-house, with incense and candles, that has great attraction for the sight-seers who pil- grimage to Chinato^vn, and there are restaurants where these pilgrims are given what they take to be Chinese food. There was long a theater there, but it has lately been discontinued : a theater which fol- lowed the best traditions of the Chinese stage, pre- senting plays without footlights, without scenery, without orchestra, to a Chinese audience that 141 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK watched without applause. Historic plays they usu- ally were, given with odd fancies as to action and ac- cessories. The tottering old tenements are cleaner than the average tenements of the city : for there is a neatness and orderliness and dislike of dirt among these peo- ple. Incredibly packed as they are in their restricted quarters, in their old houses with little rooms, their neat-handedness, their carefulness, their self-com- mand make their district by far the safest of all the tenement districts as to fire : in fact, a fire is a very rare event: and I remember into what a wild com- motion they were thrown, one day, by the dashing of engines and firemen into their narrow streets in response to an alarm. It was an excitement such as no mere killing could have caused! The Greeks of the city, picturesque from their long-tubed water-pipes, are mostly merchants in a small way: like the Chinese, they bring their own secret societies and racial ways, but if they must needs use a weapon they prefer the knife. But they are mostly a quiet folk, not always above a little genial guile. I noticed one day a Greek name over the door of an olive-oil shop: a positively lovely name, of precisely ten tempting syllables : and I said to myself that here would be the pure, unadulterated article from some sunny hill-slope by the blue ^gean, and when I looked in the window and saw bottles and demijohns of delectable shape I felt still more pro- foundly the sense that here was absolute reliability, that olive oil must be perfect if bought of a Greek 142 THE CITY OF FOREIGNERS whose name took ten syllables and if carried away in one of those delightful glass shapes: but at the door I hesitated — for at the back of the little shop I caught sight of three barrels, on each of which was plainly stenciled "South Carolina Cotton Seed Oil"! Wigged women of the Ghetto may still be seen — those of a branch of the Yiddish who, following an anciently established custom, cut their hair short at the time of their marriage so as to make themselves unattractive to other men than their husbands — who, of course, are expected still to be pleased with their looks! — and thereafter wear coarse black wigs. But the number of these wigged women seems to be decreasing: one does not so often see them: nor does one quite so often see the old Hebrew with a long curl hanging down in front of each ear. And one does notice, markedly, a new development in the American-born daughters of certain classes of the Yiddish, who, at work-quitting time, throng on the sidewalks and crowd into the street cars, with a push- ing boldness of manner and appearance which makes a new type that is neither European nor American. And there are still thousands of children in New York, the children of those who have been coming over from Southern Europe in cargo loads, who, in spite of the sanitary efforts of school teachers and visitors from the ''settlements," are sewed up when winter comes on, not to be unsewed until spring, thus keeping the children constantly warm and sav- ing the mothers a great deal of trouble ! The Italians have retained in New York a vast 143 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK amount of their native Italian ways. In the first place, they feel at home here, and especially those of the southern part of Italy. The tenements and tene- ment streets of New York are curiously like those of Naples. In both cities there are solid rows of tall buildings, filling street after street, with each build- ing a hive of human life. The chestnuts on long strings, the ninepin-shaped skins hanging full of lard, the cheeses of all colors, the dried mushrooms in garlands, the silvery garlic, the pastry-cakes of varied hues, the white sheets of macaroni, the red or green peppers, the street cries, the music — it is a veritable Naples. Nor are the Italian quarters of the city without the love of literature. There are the lives of S. Eocco, S. Girolamo, S. Luigi, S. Anna; there are little paper chapbooks on Gugiielmo Tell and Pablo y Virginia, and I even noticed a paper-backed trans- lation of "Ivanhoe," which the dealer handled re- spectfully, knowing it to be the work of an honored author, and pronouncing it, of course, with the ac- cent on the second syllable, *'Ee-van-ho-ay.*' Some of the streets leading northward from Chat- ham Square; the district immediately southwest of Washington Square; a great district around Prince Street, west of the Bowery; some of the tenement streets of the East Side up in Harlem — such, to- day, are among the most prominent of the Italian quarters. And all is so colorful! You see bright yellow headcloths, red kerchiefs, purple and lavender waists, 144 THE CITY OF FOBEIGNEES neckties of magenta or pink, strange Italian greens and blues, a man with a soft shirt in a pattern of red and yellow roses, a yellow neck handkerchief for tie and a cap of startling hue, a woman with skirt of red and waist of purple and handkerchief of blue. The American-born New Yorker has come to like the Italians: they are sunny-dispositioned and smil- ing and are born with manners: they are fruit and vegetable lovers: and these things make them seem human and kindred in spirit. Saint's Day in an Italian street of New York is unreservedly an Italian festa. The streets, arched with little oil lights in tumblers of colored glass, the flags, the banners, the festoonings, the tinsel, the flowers, the color and life of the throngs that are at once so gay and so devout, the scarlets and violets and saffrons and greens, the baldachino set up in the open air, in the open street, with its effigies of the Madonna and Child — yes ; it is a veritable Naples ! And, as in Naples, the language of the hands, the arms, the fingers, an elaborate language of gesticula- tion, is freely used. It came into use over there from the ease that it gave to conversation between any one in an upper room and one on the pavement, and the importance was accentuated by the constant police surveillance of the Neapolitan Camorra. You see an Italian, at an upper window, make a swift motion of the hands, away from the body, with the palms outward and a handkerchief in the right hand; and one who understands the sign language would know that he is saying to some distant friend, U5' THE BOOK OF NEW YORK **I don't want to go." The motion is slow, with a long sweep, and with the head thrown back, whereas precisely the same motion, with the head held nor- mal and still, and the motion itself made short and several times repeated, means, "I'll go" — and such a message may be the acknowledg-ment of an invita- tion or perhaps a warning. A sweep of the right hand, curving outward, with forefinger extended and head slightly inclined forward, means, ''To- morrow." The motions and signs and variants are infinite. As an Italian put it, one day when I spoke of this language of gesticulation — his name was, delight- fully, Giannottasio, and he had translated his first name into Michael — "For anything the heart say, we have the gestickle." '■mmm — ~. *- ^iJ-^- ''Uic=y 1*4, ' . "jrr^^^Vil 146 CHAPTEE XII TWO NOTABLE SQUAEES OW much higher, one won- ders, was the Tower of Babel, than this which so overtops all of central Man- hattan? Not so tall, surely. This tower of the Metropoli- tan Life building rises to the height of seven hundred feet: indeed, to write with meticulousness, one must needs say seven hundred feet and three inches. Un- fortunately, no record was left us as to the Tower of Babel, but surely it was not quite so high as this! Nor did Babel look down upon such a confusion of tongues as does this sky-piercing tower of New York. And instead of, as with Babel, the confusion of tongues bringing about a scattering of the people to the ends of the earth, it means more and more a drawing together of people from the ends of the earth. The main part of the building rises massively, in its light gray stone, story after story, and above this the tower, superb in design, continues the upward 147 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK mounting, rising as if interminably, and at length, and foursidedly, coming to an end in a pillar-sup- ported octagon surmounted by a lantern of gold. It is not only that the building has massiveness and size, not only that it harbors daily as many peo- ple as would make up the population of many a busy town — for the offices collectively have over three thou- sand occupants — but that it has positive distinction, and splendid beauty. The tower would be deemed a thing of beauty in any city of the world, no mat- ter how rich in traditions of architecture. The clock and its solemn striking, its flashing- lights to mark the time noiselessly at night, add to the interest of it all. And to mention the size and weight of one seemingly little thing, far up there, will give an unexpected impression of size and im- portance; the apparently little thing being the min- ute-hand of the clock, which, in actuality, is seventeen feet in length and Aveighs half a ton ! Literally, time weighs heavily on the hands — an unusual thing in New York, The totals of business transacted in this great building, by the company which built it, befit the size and cost of the structure : and yet, as a contrast, I one day came upon a curious fact, which is, that not only does the normal and usual business of such a company extend to all corners of the country, but that it also extends to a totally unexpected quarter — to the almshouse dwellers on Blackwell's Island! For many a pauper, looking from the Island to this superb tower of an insurance company, glistening 148 TWO NOTABLE SQUAEES in the sun, plainly in view, knows that it represents escape from a pauper's grave. On the same side of the square, but in the farther corner, is Madison Square Garden, designed by Stan- ford White; but, as with everything in New York, one cannot with certainty write ''is,'' for everything that stands is but waiting the usual New York fate, and Madison Square Garden, with all its traditions of fashion and Horse Shows and great public meet- ings, is understood to be doomed. It was a superb architectural thought that put this building here, in its immense area, with its Spanish architecture and its Giralda-like tower and with so charming and graceful a Diana over all. In the towering beauty of its tawny terra-cotta and brick it is a charming thing, and its tower and its arcaded sidewalks give a distinctly foreign air. The tower was once so high, now overtopped though it is by the surrounding buildings, that from its summit the Battery could be seen. Well, changes come— and although the Battery can no longer be seen from the Diana's tower, it may still be seen from the far loftier tower of the Metropolitan. On the same side of the square is the notable and uncompromisingly classic Madison Square Presby- terian Church, better known as ** Doctor Parkhurst's Church," superbly fine, with its front a triumph of restrained color, and Pantheon-like in design. The blue in the pediment, the white of the angels, the dull- gold tops of the pillars, with blue behind, the splen- did granite shafts of the pillars, of a gray that is 149 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK almost green, the apple-green overlaid with gold in the line of the eaves, the yellow and cream — yet all so quiet, so harmonious, so unobtrusive! These three great buildings on one side of the square are so important and so interesting that the eye almost fails to see the fine white building of the Appellate Court, which would attract notice in any other city. The Fifth Avenue Hotel, for so many years an im- portant center of New York life, stood facing out from the opposite side of the square, where Broad- way crosses Fifth Avenue on a long rakish angle. Long, very long, is the list of famous folk who were guests there, of the politicians who made their head- quarters there, of the notable receptions that were held there. For a quarter of a century it was pre- eminently the most prominent hotel of the city. It was in this hotel, and I mention it not so much for its imjDortance as for its curious interest, that the minister, Burchard, made the alliterative declaration about **Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" which de- feated Blaine for the Presidency and elected Cleve- land. The declaration attracted no apparent atten- tion when uttered: the politicians who heard it scarcely noticed it : but the newspapers published it and it swept like wildfire through the country. At the edge of the Fifth Avenue sidewalk, at the northern end of the square, is a statue of Farragut, on a bench-like base, the base and statue together making a united design of unusual effectiveness ; the statue being by St. Gaudens and the base by Stanford White. 150 ;]Pij!" ■■ ini 111 «" Til in w nilUiiS jniniii JUJUlU = in ni m injn iiJ in III i!i in m IIJ III III 111 ni III III III 111 III "I III V" I 1' I 'II nil Ill III III III III Ml THE TOWERS OF MADISON SQUARE TWO NOTABLE SQUAEES And one remembers tliat the funeral procession of Farragut, in 1870, went by this spot. The Admiral had died in New Hampshire and his body was brought to New York for burial in Woodlawn Cemetery, and as it was borne up Fifth Avenue and through Mad- ison Square, followed by thousands of troops, and the most distinguished civilians, and President Grant and members of his Cabinet, a drenching rain was steadily falling. Madison Square has other statues also, including one of Boscoe Conkling and one of Chester Arthur ; reminders, these, of a close personal and political friendship, bitterly broken by the tragedy of Gar- field's death and the succession of Arthur to the Pres- idency. What a figure Conkling once made ! How power- ful he was — and now, almost forgotten. Yet his con- test with President Garfield roused the nation to in- tense excitement; his holding together of the three hundred delegates for Grant, for ballot after ballot, day after day, at the National Convention where the effort was made to give Grant a third term, roused the nation to intense even though reluctant admiration. A great figure : but somehow, not much more than his superciliousness seems to be perpetuated by this bronze and he died from the effects of walking out in a terrible March blizzard— just as if it had been the Plains instead of the center of Manhattan. Over yonder sits Seward, looking a little bored and thoughtful on his noisy corner, and with some bronze books tucked under his bronze chair. In this square 151 THE BOOK OF NEAT YORK too is the AYortli monument, a tall memorial over the grave of a Avortliy officer, now quite forgotten, who fought bravely in a war of which America has al- ways been ashamed. Xot the least among the attractions of Madison Square is an auction establishment, with an unprom- ising exterior, which, once entered, leads up and back in labyrinthine fascination, with stairs and passages and one large room after another. Here at this Christie's or Hotel Drouot of New York have been held many of the city's most interesting sales of col- lections of antiques, paintings and objects of art. As night comes on, Madison Square becomes a spe- cial haven for derelicts, many of whom sleep on the benches until the policeman arouses them by beating on their feet ; and as for women derelicts, who would, if they could, sleep sitting, the benches are too high to permit them to put their feet on the ground. And finally, before leaving Madison Square, the question comes whether, after all, the widest and longest fame, in definite connection with it, has not been won by Miss Flora MacFlhnsy of Madison Square, whose complaint, so characteristic of the ex- travagance of Xew York, was that she had nothing to wear. A few blocks south of Madison Square is Union Square, with Broadway leading into and away from it and sweeping curiously along one side. Until re- cent years it was one of the greatest centres of New York life, but it has been left behind in the city's swift advance. 152 TWO NOTABLE SQUARES Here, where Fourth Avenue reaches Union Square, stands an equestrian statue of Washington; a capable, excellent statue; on the spot where the General stood when he was welcomed by the citizens of New York on the great day when he returned, with his army, to take possession at the time of the evacuation of the city by the British. It has frequently been stated that the statue stood originally where Cooper Union now stands; but I think that misapprehension arose from the fact that Fourth Avenue, from Cooper Union to Union Square, used to be deemed part of the Bowery, and that this statue stood, therefore, at ''the head of the Bowery," so that, when ''the head of the Bowery" came to be at Cooper Union, the wrong idea likewise came as to the location of the statue. The great occasion of Washington's reception makes it extremely interest- ing to have the precise locality in mind. Not far away is a Lafayette, eagerly bending for- ward on his pedestal, as if to hasten to the great leader whom he so worshiped; as if, indeed, actually in the act of motion toward his chief. At least it is so as I write, though in this city of change, Lafayette may be made to face in some other direction, or Washington may be moved away, if it happens to be some commissioner's whim or if it should be de- manded by some matter of subway construction, in this hurrotv of Manhattan. The statue of Lafayette brings the memory of a ride, one cold and drizzly morning, toward that lonely part of France, the Nez de Jobourg, in a tiny dili- 153 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK gence; for an old Frenchman, a fellow passenger, learning that I was an American, told me, with pride, that Lafayette went to America to aid in gaining our freedom, and then he told me that another French- man, Bartholdi, had made for America a great statue of Liberty to stand in New York harbor ! Confirma- tory knowledge of these things on the part of the American delighted the old Norman very much, and he was ecstatically happy when I told him that the statue of Lafayette himself stood in a square called Union Square, in New York City, and that Bartholdi was the maker of the statue ! Ever, in New York, the human happening is of im- portance: and ever there are occurring things dra- matic, full of interest. And here, in Union Square, there comes the picture of a political meeting, when a young orator from the West, who was looked upon in that, his first national campaign, as a sort of prophet, was to speak here in his own campaign for the Presidency. It was a rainy night. A huge crowd, with umbrel- las raised, massed in front of the stand. After a long wait a carriage rounded a corner and came to- ward the stand, and beside it, in the rain, came a running mass of men. The orator, Bryan, came out upon the platform — and every umbrella was instantly lowered and not a man moved away, though the rain poured down ; all stood there, massed and expectant, heedless of the drenching, waiting pathetically for the expected words of gold — though I should in this case call them silver. But the candidate opened his 154 TWO NOTABLE SQUARES lips only to ask that patient and drenched gathering to excuse him from speaking! — as if to show that not every man, given opportunity, is able to rise to the opportunity. This square used to be a notable place for public gatherings and we are told that in April of 1861 over one hundred thousand people came here, gathering in a patriotic meeting, presided over by the "If any man dares to haul down the American flag" Governor, John A. Dix. At the southwest corner of Union Square, calm and thoughtful at a little whirlpool of traffic, is Abraham Lincoln in bronze, overlooking what was long deemed the most dangerous street crossing in America, ''Dead Man's Curve," whose perils are now outdone on every street and road since the advent of the automobile. Near this statue, just one block down, at Univer- sity Place and 13th Street, there has been set into a building a tablet which Lincoln would have read with grievous pity and pride: for it tells that from this spot, on March 27, 1861, the Ninth Regiment ''marched away in defense of the Unicto, 850 strong" and that on June 11, 1864, "the return home was with 17 officers and 78 enlisted men." Both of these squares, Union and Madison, have as- sociation with the most famous name in American gastronomy. For, in turn, each of these squares has had the world-famous Delmonico's. The original Delmonico was, almost a century ago, chef and waiter and proprietor of a tiny restaurant 155 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK on William Street, with chairs, tables, table-ware and cutlery of the commonest. But the supreme excel- lence of his cooking brought him custom, and he moved to a larger place, and then, with his brother, to a still larger at William and Beaver Streets (still operated under the Delmonico name), and as his sons grew to manhood they also joined him, and a place was opened on Broadway near the City Hall. Long ago, this main establishment was removed to Union Square, and then to a building just past the northern edge of Madison Square, and at length, years ago, to the present locality at Fifth Avenue and 44th Street. Just before Dickens sailed for home, in 1868, after his second visit to the United States, he was given a banquet, at the Delmonico 's of that time, by some two hundred men of the American press, and the bill of fare named such literary dishes as ''creme d'as- perges a la Dumas, '* "cotelettes a la Fenimore Coo- per," **agneau farci a la Walter Scott," and '4es petites Zimballes a la Dickens. ' ' Horace Greeley presided, and told how, many years before, he had chosen, to print in his first weekly newspaper, a short story, that he had noticed in an English periodical, written by an unknown author who signed the name '^Boz!"— the story being ''A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle." It was at this dinner that Dickens made his famous declaration that, on his arrival in England, he would, in his o^vn English periodical, ''manfully, promptly, and plainly in my own person," tell of the ''gigantic changes" that he had seen, and that he would also 156 TWO NOTABLE SQUAEES tell that, ''wherever I have been, in the smallest place equally with the largest, I have been received with un- surpassed politeness, delicacy, sweet-temper, hospi- tality and consideration," and that "this testimony, so long as my descendants have any legal right m my books, I shall cause to be published, as an appendix, to every copy of those two books of mine m which i have referred to America. And this I will do, be- cause I regard it as an act of plain justice and honor So Dickens ''ate crow," and a very large dish of it, at that dinner, though it was not on the bill of fare- not even under the disguise of "corbeau a la Dick- ens." 157 CHAPTER XIII GRAMEECY AND STUYVESANT AND OLD CHELSEA ^ EW YORK architects and build- ers reveled for years in the building of humdrum, high- stoop houses: many and many a street is still double-lined with their monotony: and yet, that these commonplace build- ings may be made into build- ings of beauty, that the com- monplace may be changed into charm, has been shown on East 19th Street. For that street, for a short distance east of Irving Place, has been delightfully made into a studio street by the intelligent cooperation of artists and architects, who have taken in hand the prosaic old houses that have long stood there — fortunately, not the really narrow and mean houses of which the city has so many — and have altered them by taking away the steppy stoops, by setting down the doors to the level of the sidewalks, by adding little wrought iron balconies, with flower-boxes, by changing roof -lines, by putting on gables of old Dutch shape, by using red tiles, by differently grouping the windows, by chang- 158 GEAMEECY, STUYVESANT, OLD CHELSEA ing the glass to smaller panes, by the use of pictur- esquely heavy sash, by using such wood-work colors, quiet but at the same time noticeable, as verdigris green, by putting brass knockers on the doors. Such things have been done with comparatively small ex- pense; nothing compared with tearing down the old houses and putting up new ; and the resultant effect, with these made-over buildings, is a street of repose and good living and distinction and charm. On one of the roofs are a couple of storks, and, absurd though the idea may seem, the effect is not in the least ab- surd but very pictorial. That artists and others who love the picturesque in Europe, refer to this street as being "like a bit of Paris," *'a bit of London," ''a bit of Amsterdam"— each one reminded of some place which holds pictur- esque memories for him— represents the most cordial appreciation of the efforts of those who carried out the alterations. It is really something much better than a bit of Amsterdam or London or Paris, it is an expression of American blood and feeling, here in New York, and its importance lies in its showing how easily some miles of at present humdrum houses could be altered to some form of excellent good looks. ^ As if with intention, those who chose this particular section for picturesque living chose one that lies be- tween picturesque old Gramercy Park and the still picturesque Stuyvesant Square, and near to both. To many, even of those who know their New York well, Gramercy Park is a place that is hard to find; it seems not to be just where you expect it to be : and 159 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK yet it is eminently central and convenient, between Fourth and Third Avenues, with its north side 21st Street and its south side 20th Street, and with Irving Place leading to it from below and Lexington Ave- nue from above. It is a pleasant park, a tiny little park, a charming little park, an attractive, felicitous, captivating little park, a park of which it may be said that it is one of the things that still stand for good old New York living and at the same time that it is remindful of many a little park in England. Here, in former days, dwelt David Dudley Field and Cyrus W. Field, John Bigelow and Nicholas Fish and the Coopers and Stanford White; and most of the old houses still remain. It is not that they are, in- dividually, models for other buildings, but that as a whole they give a sense of the comfortable and worth while. The park, as a small residence section, buttressed by a little residential section in the streets immedi- ately around it, is notable, close as it is to Broadway, to busy 23d Street, to the rush of Third Avenue. It is reposeful. In that, I think, lies its chief merit. It is a quiet little pool, in the heart of swift currents of humanity and business. What has kept it a place apart has been, princi- pally, the greenery of its central space, its trees, its shrubs, its flowers, its grass. For all this space is enclosed within an iron fence, and only the o^vners of property facing into the park have keys, and thus strict privacy is assured in its walks and paths, and 160 GTBAMEECY, STUYYESANT, OLD CHELSEA a few nursemaids and children are usually, in pleasant weather, to be seen there, happy and cheerful. This shutting off into exclusiveness of the central space is not only successful in giving and maintaining the air of charming seclusion, but it has kept the park from being overrun by tenement dwellers: a tenement sec- tion is within a few minutes ' walk, and the park would tempt to general gregarious gathering were there benches there and a space for public playing. Naturally, clubs were drawn into this quiet little eddy. The Princeton Club was attracted to the oc- cupancy of a fine old house on the northern side. On the southern side, at 15, is the mansion that was the home of Samuel J. Tilden, lawyer, governor, al- most President, and the building was acquired by the National Arts Club ; it is a mansion of huge size, built in a style of chocolate-colored grandeur, a large-wm- dowed* house, with rooms cavernously large. Next door, at 16, is the Players' Club, also a large building, of comfort and spaciousness, the fine gift of the great Edwin Booth, who gave everything freely, house and furniture, merely reserving one room for his own use and one for Lawrence Barrett— the close friendship of these two actors, who might so easily have been unfriendly rivals, being one of the treasured mem- ories of the American stage. Booth's room is pre- served as it was on the day he died, even to the book which he was reading, which is open at the page where he left it when death came. Gramercy Park, in spite of the fact that none of its houses is very old, gives an impression of pleasant 161 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK old-timeness ; or, perhaps one might say that it looks, not old, but middle-aged. As a matter of fact, it was not laid out and set aside as a park until the early 1830 's. It is a pleasantly reposeful spot for which New York ought to be — and is — thankful : and I like to think of it as owing its name, in some never to be explained way, to this idea of thankfulness. The origin of the name has been laboriously traced, and perhaps but fanci- fully, to "Krom-merssche," meaning "Crooked little swamp '^; but I should like to think of it as being the delightful "Gramercy" of the olden time and of Spenser and Walter Scott, meaning not only thanks, but ''grandmerci," many and unusual thanks! I have heard the peasants in out of the way corners of ancient Normandy use the old time syllables with de- lightfully prolonged accent on the first — pronounced, I need not say, *'grah-mer-cy" — and I like to think that the long-ago use of the word in New York may have come from some picturesque connection with the picturesque Huguenots who refugeed here, or perhaps from some of the French who came in such numbers at the time of the Revolution. Of course, the laboriously made out **Krom-merssche'' derivation would also be interesting from its connection with the picturesque Dutch; but the Dutch gave name to another old- fashioned park, Stuyvesant Square, just a few blocks from Gramercy, so there would be no partiality in giving Gramercy to the French and leaving Stuyves- ant with its derivation from the domain of the worthy Petrus. 162 GRAMERCY, STUYVESANT, OLD CHELSEA Stuyvesant Square is a large area, consisting of two separate sections divided by Second Avenue, a little north of Mth Street, each section enclosed within high iron fencing, and unusually thick with trees and shrubs. Far down town though this now is, and over in the midst of the thronging East Side, it is one of the peaceful places in New York. Like Gramercy, it is restful and quiet, except for the gay twitter of birds, and this twitter itself seems to add to the sense of quietness and rest; and yet, though an attractive place, it is without the quite unusual charm of Gra- mercy. Facing the south-west corner are some buildings of dullish red, looking out into the greenery; Quaker buildings these, already growing old, for they were built in 1860; and they are built with much of the old-fashioned prim Quaker restraint such as one finds with the old Quaker meeting-houses in the vicinity of Philadelphia. The dull red of the brick, the white of the stone trimmings, the white of the slender pillared prim porticoes with their prim tops, the brown shut- ters, the window shades of Quaker drab, all unite to make a primly pleasant impression. Adjoining, and as if for a contrast to Quaker sim- plicity, is the brown mass of St. George's Church, long the most fashionable Episcopalian Church, even after fashion so long ago deserted this old Knicker- bocker center. It is a great brown structure, with two towers indicated but never built up. It is a mass- ive-fronted building of generous and dark interior. Its pulpit at the front of the altar is elaborately 163 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK designed and carved, and is inscribed with the state- ment that it was put up by the congregation in mem- ory of J. P. Morgan, who was born in Connecticut in 1837 and who died in Eome in 1913. Such a man, a veritable emperor of finance that he was, actually more powerful, more of a world force, than by far the greater number of those who wore the Roman purple, would have felt his fancy titillated — for he was a man of imagination — could he have known that it was in once imperial Rome that he was to end his financially imperial days. But I have seen him in this church, gravely walking down the aisle and gravely passing the collection plate to other men of wealth, thus de- manding money of them even on the Sabbath; and somehow there came the impression of Wall Street rather than of Rome. The square used to be a center of wealthy and cul- tivated life, but wealth and fashion have left; they would not stay over here, east of Third Avenue. Forming, in a general way, across Manhattan from side to side, a line of old-fashioned neighborhoods which still retain their old-fashioned charm, it seems as if Stuyvesant Square and Gramercy Park come nat- urally into association with attractive old Chelsea. And always, with Chelsea, there comes prominently to mind its association with Santa Claus : for, incongru- ous though it seems for any part of this ultra-modern city to be associated with so old-fashioned a belief, so quaint and old-fashioned a fantasy as that concerning good old Santa Claus, New York has precisely that association, because of Chelsea: for it was a New 164 GRAMERCY PARK AND THE PLAYERS CLUB GRAMERCY, STUYVESANT, OLD CHELSEA Yorker, a dweller here, who wrote those preeminently Santa Clausish lines beginning, " 'Twas the night be- fore Christmas." In New York, Santa Clans must go down a pipe in a kitchenette, or come up a furnace flue, or struggle with hot-water pipes, or be broiled with steam. It is not an encouraging city for old-time Christmas tradi- tions. It is not a place for stockings by the fireplace. And so it seems astonishing that any New Yorker should have been inspired to write these lines. And then one remembers that, after all, it was in the house- living days of New York, before the apartment days, that the verses were written ; although they are so gen- erally familiar, and give so entirely modern an im- pression, that one at first takes it for granted that they are of recent origin. As a matter of fact, they were written by a man who lived in New York a cen- tury ago. And he lived in this section, to which even yet tenements have not come. Old Chelsea, once Chelsea Village, still retaining much of its old-time comfortable aspect, its pictur- esqueness, is in the vicinity of 23rd Street and the North River. And he who would know New York must, from the first, know that the city is divided, not officially but none the less surely, into a great number of divisions, such as Yorkville, Poverty Hollow, Mur- ray Hill, Hell's Kitchen, Sunken Village, Penitentiary Row, Manhattanville, Harlem, Battle Row, Corcor- an 's Roost, Greenwich Village and Chelsea. The author of the Santa Claus verse was Clement C. Moore, son of Bishop Moore, and he inherited from 165 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK his father most of the great area of Chelsea, and gave, or leased forever without rent, a large part of his possessions to a theological seminary, which put up interesting college buildings in English stjde, and ce- mented jagged glass on the tops of stone walls to dis- courage trespassers — also in English style! — and on the whole gave such an atmosphere of peace and charm as to make Chelsea quite remindful of some pleasant ecclesiastical village of England. Delightful folk came to live in the vicinity of the college buildings and the professors ; and even yet, in spite of the north- ward sweep of commerce and business, this section re- mains an oasis of charm. The first house in the Chelsea neighborhood was built by Captain Thomas Clarke, about 1750, and the name of Chelsea seems to have been reminiscent of old Chelsea by the Thames, in England. Clarke's house was burned when he was on his deathbed, and he was carried away from it to die, but his widow bravely re- built on the same spot; but this second house also long ago disappeared. During the Eevolution the widow and her two daughters, frankly loyal to England, feared injury from the Americans during the brief time that the Continentals held New York, and there is a pretty story about General Washington himself hearing of this and riding over in person, one day, to assure the ladies of full safety. Indeed, our American George could be a very courtly gentleman when he chose. A vague story has also come down that a British frigate which had been doing target practice turned 166 GEAMEECY, STUYVESANT, OLD CHELSEA its guns toward the Americans when Washington's party was seen and that a cannon ball actually crashed into the Clarke house ; but this story seems to have no basis except that of legendary interest. The property passed from the possession of the Clarkes to that of Bishop Moore about the year 1800, but it still kept its name of Chelsea. And not only was the son of the bishop the author of what may fairly be termed the classic of child- hood, but he was also author of so utterly different a work, so absolutely unchildlike in its appeal, as a Hebrew lexicon! And the suggestion amusingly comes that if this classic of erudition could be as widely known as the classic of childhood, converse would be easy with the race who are more in evidence than any other of the many races of Manhattan ! ii^V-1- 167 CHAPTER XIV UP FIFTH TO FOETY-SECOND IIFTH Avenue marches off su- perbly from a noble gateway, an arch placed like a gateway at its lower end, where the avenue leads away from Washington Square. It is a distinguished arch, an arch of proportion, of grace, of dignity, of beauty, it is an arch of gray stone, and it rises effectively from a sweep of gray asphalt pavement, with the ""^ ~" soft greenery of grass and the swaying green of great old trees close by, and it rises against a sedate background of the mellow red of old mansions. It is not a large arch. It was inspired by the Arc de Triomphe of Paris just as that had been inspired by the arches of Rome; indeed this is far more like the arch of Titus than like the Parisian arch. At each corner of Fifth Avenue, and facing to- ward the arch, is a house of large and generous size, of ample and fine proportions; each is of mellowed brick, each has great wistarias, drooping clusters 168 UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND of purple over its balconies, each has a garden nooked behind a high brick wall, "a garden circum- mured with brick, ' ' each has the smoothest of narrow lawns and each is bright with flowering shrubs. If houses were human these might be twins, so delight- fully alike they are in general air and aspect. Fifth Avenue is a wonderful avenue, in its great straight length of mile on mile, in its setting forth of much of the very best that New York can offer, of people and homes and churches and clubs and hotels and places of business and parks, and in its posses- sion of the finest of American museums. For many years an avenue of homes, it now has as many busi- ness establishments as homes, and it still retains its leadership among American avenues. A white-fronted hotel, foreign-looking and distin- guished, just a little above the square, keeps in mind the name of Brevoort, the man who long ago owned acres and acres of land hereabouts, his estate extend- ing even beyond Broadway. He was born thirty years before the Revolution and lived for thirty years after the beginning of the War of 1812, and for his almost full century of life left the memory of one notable achievement : the preventing, by a bitter legal fight, of the cutting of 11th Street through his prop- erty, from Broadway to Fourth Avenue, his objection being that it would destroy a favorite tree — and hence the still unbroken space immediately adjoining Grace Church on the north. The junction of Fifth Avenue and 9th Street is of varied and unusual interest. At the south-east 169 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK corner is a rather narrow house, of three stories and a high basement, a house of red brick with imitation Venetian windows; not at all a distinguished house, yet here it was that Mark Twain came, to spend the closing years of his life. It has always seemed to me that the explanation of his choosing this home, whence he could look out upon great currents of human travel, was the feeling, perhaps subconscious, that Fifth Avenue itself was a sort of landward Mississippi Eiver, here in the East. I remember that on pleasant spring evenings he would stand at the top of his front steps, clad in the fa- mous white suit with which he won such attention in England, smoking his cigar (inveterate smoker that he was, he loved to say that he had made it a life- long rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time!) and looking out thoughtfully at the currents of life, of the passing people and vehicles. Across the street, at the north-east corner, lived old General Sickles, long surviving the war that had made him famous, and maintaining to the last his tulip bed as if it were a battalion holding a desper- ate position; and indeed it required determination and vigilance to hold those tulip lines ! Bluff old sol- dier that he was, his friends liked to remember that when he had lost his leg at Gettysburg, and his faith- ful negro body-servant blubbered about it, there came a curt admonition, with the words: "Don't you see you'll only have one boot to polish after this!" It gives the 9th Street junction a still further inter- est, and an interest of fiction instead of fact, that 170 UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND the square-fronted house at the north-west corner was the house of Van Bibber's burglar — thus bring- ing freshly to mind the memory of that kindly club- man, the delightful conception of the early career of Richard Harding Davis. At 10th Street is the Church of the Ascension, built of a rough and reddish stone, and with a square tower rising above its unpretentious but dignified front. A stone pavement is about it and there are privet bushes of great size, and the church is finely open daily, as a number of New York churches are, for rest, meditation and prayer ; and at services the seats are free. Inside, the interest goes at once to a great painting behind the altar, a painting of the Ascension by John LaFarge, occupying the entire end of the nave and rismg with curving top to the ceiling. It is in soft blues, in tawny colorings with touches of subdued rose, and shows some two-score figures of angels and disciples and friends, and on the whole is a notable thing. The interior of the church is effective. It is a lesson in good taste. It is most satisfactorily a churchly church, in its Gothic style, and with its stone floor, its stone columns on either side, its black and ancient-looking oak, its stained glass, already finely mellowing. As the organ softly sounds, a golden light streams in through the yellow glass of the high windows over the doorway, and you feel, in that dim religious light, as if you are infinite miles away from the busy city. This is a church by Upjohn, the archi- 171 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK tect of Trinity, a man of very real ability, who did so much to give ecclesiastical buildings of distinction to the city. West 10th Street, for the block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, is an interesting old New York street, an almost romantic street, a street mainly of individual houses instead of flats or apartments : and here still stands an old-fashioned block of studio buildings, the studios of the ''Old Masters" of New York, the studios of men who cheerfully painted and struggled for fame in the long ago, and whose pic- tures now sell from, say, from two to twenty thou- sand dollars each. Here, in Chase's studio, Car- mencita danced, as she dances forever in Sargent's painting in the gallery of the Luxembourg, in Paris : here were gay and happy times : but these ' ' Old Mas- ters" are dead, and the footsteps of a new generation of artists sound upon the red-tiled floors. That these old studio fronts are generously broad is a chief source of their comfortable cheerfulness of aspect; and this is remindful that the cause, more than any other, of a certain meagerness, a cramped uncomfortableness, which mark many miles of New York buildings, is that some one discovered how to build flats which, by dividing the frontage of a New York lot, gave to each family the width of half a lot — which was admirable for land and building specu- lators but the reverse of admirable for the city's looks. At 11th Street and Fifth Avenue is another Up- john church, the First Presbyterian, a church not un- 172 UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND like that of the Ascension, but with a broader and larger interior, with side galleries and a groined roof. This church occupies an entire block and has there- fore much of an air of spaciousness, and there is much of greenery roundabout, and there is a privet hedge behind a Gothic iron fence, and above the church rises a square Gothic tower. It is of rough stone, dark and reddish, and has in its outward aspect a little more of elaborateness of stone detail than has its sister church on the corner below. It should not be forgotten that it was on the stone ledge of the base of the iron fence in front of this church that George William Curtis, in *'Prue and I," placed the old apple-woman from whom the daily apple was bought, and whose basket was so distress- ingly overturned when the man was eagerly gazing at the pretty girl passing in the carriage! — for of such light things, with their sweet and wholesome flavor, was the literature of half and three-quarters of a century ago made ! On past 14th Street, with towering business blocks on either side, Fifth Avenue marches, and straight as an arrow through Madison Square, here crossing Broadway and aiming directly on to a far-distant northward. At East 29th Street one's eyes are drawn aside by the greenery and charm of the Little Church Around the Corner, so interesting in its name and its appear- ance and its setting, so delightfully unexpected as a bit of downtown New York landscape, so associated witli, fiction that seems as real as fact and with fact 173 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK that has all the interest of fiction. It is hut half a block from the avenue. The marriages that have taken place at what was so long looked upon as New York's Gretna Green represent romance illimitable; and one thinks first of the delightful marriage at which the always lika- ble Van Bibber was the deus ex machina, while he sent the angry brother off on a wildgoose chase to Chicago— and afterwards was mildly sorry that he had made it farther than Jersey City. Weddings at all hours so established the pleasant fame of this church that funerals seem almost incon- gruous ; and yet it was a funeral through which the fame of this church of marriages began, the funeral of George Holland ; nor can one forget that grim lit- tle story of Brander Matthews' in which he tells of the funeral of an actor, while the woman he was to have married sat unnoticed by the door in the most hopeless of all agony; and perhaps that story came to him from noticing how like the drop scene of a theater this church appears, in its long stretched-out but shallow surroundings. The long nave of the church is even parallel with the sidewalk, as if in an effort to accentuate the drop scene effect. The formal name, if one must have formality, is the Church of the Transfiguration, but its name of the Little Church Around the Corner is that by which it is always lovingly known. George Holland, an actor of ''useful career and unblemished character," to use the words of Joseph Jefferson, his close friend, died at the age of eighty, 174 UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND and Jefferson, accompanied by Holland's son, went to the minister of the church on Fifth Avenue that was attended by Holland's sister, to arrange for the funeral. The minister named the time; but then, learning from a remark dropped by Jefferson that Holland had been an actor, he absolutely declined to have the service at his church ! Jefferson was frankly shocked by this refusal, whereupon the minister carelessly remarked that ''there was a little church around the corner where you might get it done. " ' ' Might get it done ! ' ' We have Jefferson's own statement that those were the minister's words. And Jefferson, fine man as well as fine actor that he was, was equal to the occasion. ''If this be so, then God bless the Little Church Around the Cor- ner ! " he said, thus giving the church its lovable name by the swift adoption of the minister's flippantly meant phrase. Thus christened, the name was affec- tionately seized upon by Jefferson's friends and by the public. No church in the world has been more fondly referred to. From Holland's funeral there have come to be a long, long line, not only of funerals but in particular of weddings, and its reputation long ago made it the most romantic pilgrimage spot in New York. The ivy-clad little crowded clump of buildings nes- tles oddly away among the tall business structures closely surrounding it. It is of brick, with sharp- pointed gables. Its center square tower, prettily vil- 175 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK lage-like, runs up to a cross-tipped and pyramidal roof. The church buildings are very low set, almost as if seeking seclusion behind the hedge that borders the sidewalk. All is pleasantly Gothic in design. The windows are narrow and lancet like. The in- terior of the church is longer than would be expected from the outside; it is dusky and low, with almost the impression of the roof being close upon you. Outside there are grass and shrubs within the nar- row little space and even some trees ! And there is, of all thmgs for central New York, a lych-gate, which gives an air as of peacefully setting the church apart from the street. Business long ago invaded Fifth Avenue, but now it has conquered great sections from down near its beginning to far up toward Central Park. Nor are the businesses of the kind which first appeared here on this avenue, so long exclusive. At first they were expensive establishments for the sale of jewelry and furs, hats and flowers, china, costumes, paintings, en- gravings; and there were expensive hotels and res- taurants of world-wide fame. And these are still here ; the most expensive and exclusive of shops, and the most exclusive of dining places : but there is also now an admixture of shops that sell poorer and cheaper things, and of restaurants that are neither expensive nor fashionable. Most of all, a change has come through the mass- ing in this vicinity of garment makers, who have rec- ognized the importance of a Fifth Avenue, or near Fifth Avenue, address, as a business asset, and have 176 UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND therefore moved into this region. At the noon hour, now, the sidewalks of a great part of the avenue, below 34th Street, are packed, for blocks, solid with foreign-faced garment workers; all men, all quiet and orderly, almost all dressed in black, and all standing here or softly shuffling about getting a little sun and air before returning* to take up the after- noon's work. These men, who swarm so thickly on weekdays, vanish as evening comes, and on Sundays are not in evidence at all. And on Sunday mornings Americans come back here! You see again the American faces that you thought had disappeared from the New York side- walks! And you see Americans without foreigners. And not merely in the motor-cars; as a matter of fact the motors on Sunday are largely from New Jer- sey, over for a safe city spin, or even from Connecti- cut ; but the sidewalks from, say, 34th Street to Cen- tral Park are thronged with Americans. The high silk hat, too, polished to dazzling bright- ness, glowing, resplendent, is again brought out from the hiding place into v^^hich for the rest of the week it is thrust, and goes proudly along as of old. And under the silk hats you may pick out the face of this or that well-known New Yorker, this or that busi- ness man or lawyer. There are New Yorkers who know each other ! You see them bowing and smiling at each other in greeting. This is not the case on other days of the week, for in general New Yorkers are strangers to those who pass them by. One day I saw twenty-five thousand strikers, mostly 177 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK garment workers, marching up Fifth Avenue. There was not an American face in the entire twenty- five thousand. It was an object lesson as to whose are the hands into which we are throwing the con- trol of our country. The faces wore an expression of triumphant sullenness. It was as if they were warning Americans — as in very truth they were. And the crowds massed to watch them vv'ore mainly composed of men and women and children of their own class, immediate friends and sympathizers. And I noticed that with the marchers and spectators alike, the average physical size was quite beneath that of American citizens of the times now vanish- ing. The entire throng were frankly undersized, so markedly that any one reaching an average Ameri- can height was noticeable. And not only were they undersized, not only were there no American faces, but the tunes to which they marched — for they had a number of bands — were not only not American but were almost all of revolu- tionary tendency. There was no Irishman marching — but "The Wearing of the Green" was a favorite tune. There was not a single Frenchman — but far more than any other tune the bands vied with each other in the "Marseillaise." Unexpectedly and very pleasantly, in much of New York, and notably on Fifth Avenue, one sees flowers and greenery and vines in front of the shops, in lines along the sidewalks, in rows above the front-doors, in dots, in singles, in pots, even in hedges, giving in all a pleasurable sense of sweetness and color; quite 178 UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND Parisian, I was going to say, only in this regard really better than with the shops of Paris; more like the greenery showing on the shop-fronts of London. And to add to the homelikeness that still lingers, with the wealthy homes, there is often an unexpected bit of greenery over a wall, and even now and then the homely touch of a clothesline full of clothes. The big hotel at 34th Street, the Waldorf-Astoria, which has probably been more talked about than any other hotel in the world, is still a place where, if you will but sit down in the lobby, your friends from any corner of the world will in time appear. For every- body still seems to drift in here, even if but to see and be seen, even though fickle New York never keeps any hotel on an exclusive pinnacle, but is always reaching out for something new and more expensive — and with hotels, as with everything else, the new and more expensive is always given when looked for ! And the greatest hotels rival one another in vast number of rooms and vast number of guests and vast number of. servants: the figures offered seem like fantastic dreams of incredible quantities. And with all this and in spite of all this, there have been times in recent years, when every hotel in Manhattan was literally full and when those who could not find room had to go to sleep, not merely over to Brooklyn, but to towns in New Jersey; even Philadelphia claims part of this overflow of visitors, who would take an early train to New York each morning and return each night. Biggest of all the New York hotels — until some new 179 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK one shall outdo it ! — will be that of the Pennsylvania Railroad, put up opposite its station by the railroad itself because of the hesitation of outside capital as to buying a hotel site beneath which is a tunnel through which trains are forever to go: and this hotel, with its two thousand rooms and a private bath for every room, is not only to lead New York but, of course, the entire world. The big brown hotel at 34th Street, with its tea rooms, its ''Peacock Row," its permeative touch of wellrgowned femininity, has been the main influence in bringing about an interesting change. For it used to be that a woman at a hotel was condemned to se- clusion and monotony. Only a few years ago, the "Ladies' Parlor," on the second floor of all hotels, was a thing of gloom and dread. It was stern and solemn and severe. It was scant of light and air. Its atmosphere was hushed. Its voices were always low. Its furniture was soberly upholstered. No chair was ever to be moved. To go to a hotel was, for a woman, matter for penitence. She was a flower to blush unseen. But now it is understood that there must be brightness and music and gayety and lights for women as well as for men : and already this fact is as generally recognized as if it had always been self-evident. Nowadays, the revel of woman's beauty, the glitter of woman's gems, the sheen and glimmer of charming fashions, are openly a pleasure to the eye, in any good hotel. Busy and thronging with life is the Avenue at 34th Street, but even more thronging, more full of the 180 UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND splendor of life, is the corner of 42d Street, which seems, on the whole, to mark the crest of present-day New York life. It is a wonderful sight that one sees, on a pleasant sunny day, from the terrace in front of the great library building at this corner. Four mighty streams of traffic, east and west on 42d Street and north and south on Fifth Avenue converge and meet and pass here. Within the ten busiest hours of the day there pass this corner, so say those whose busi- ness it has been to count, 18,800 vehicles, the great majority being motor vehicles, and 113,780 pedestri- ans: making an average of one vehicle every two seconds and of three pedestrians a second: but fig- ures even such as these seem small when compared with the immense sight of the immense traffic itself, moving on in orderly lines; and from time to time halted, in a few moments, into lines of motor-cars stretching up and down the avenue for blocks. And it is not merely the mass, the numbers, the movement, the busy lif^ of the scene; it is opulence and glitter, it is splendor and beauty and wealth. One does not on this corner think of the tenements or poverty! On this corner it would seem even more absurd than on Wall Street to remember that the entire island of Manhattan was jjurchased from the Indians for some beads and ribbons of the value of twenty-four dollars ! The golden sunlight glows and glitters on a golden street. The very heart of the proud city is seen, ''That great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and 181 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls!" Here at 42d and Fifth, there was built, in the mid- dle of the last century, a building which, though it burned down shortly after its erection, is still remem- bered, as a memorable thing, by this city which so readily forgets. For it was the Crystal Palace. It stood not precisely at the corner, but on the space behind the present library building, and it was deemed one of the wonders of the world: and this, and its being still kept in memory, was much more from its having contained thirty-nine thousand square feet of glass than because it was built as a great exposition building or because it displayed, among many other things, the first important collec- tion of painting and sculpture ever seen in the United States. Paintings, and particularly those by famous art- ists, have become one of the extravagant items of New York life ; this line of expensiveness has devel- oped within the last hundred years, although even a century ago there were sums paid that were quite high for that period. In 1811 a certain Michael Paff opened a gallery at 208 Broadway for the exhibition of "a collection of original paintings," and there he exhibited what, whether originals or not, would now be deemed priceless examples of Teniers, Rubens, Vandyck and Wouvermans. I do not know what prices he obtained for most of his pictures, but a Wouvermans was offered for $2,000. Paff an- nounced that he had been upwards of ten years col- 182 UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND lecting Ms pictures ''and fitting them up in superior style." Likely enough, some of his paintings are now in the Metropolitan Museum or in prized pri- vate possession, and one can only hope that his om- inous phrase of ''fitting them up" meant nothing serious. At the corner of 42nd Street stands the Public Library; a great and noble building, occupying the space from 42nd to 40th Streets, and fronting Fifth Avenue with splendid pillared and terraced effective- ness, and with tall Venetian masts set charmingly in front. A building, this, which would be an honor to any country or any time ; and, as it is always the case that in New York the cost of anything is held im- portant, it may be said that the great and beautiful structure cost, exclusive of the cost of the land, nine millions of dollars. But it is more important to say that the building holds more than eight hundred thousand volumes, and innumerable manuscripts, in addition to the vast number of volumes contained in its many branch libraries scattered throughout the city. Within, the atmosphere is of restful studiousness, and the great central reading room, the impressive length of corridors, the admirable service, the rows on rows of books, the galleries of prints and engrav- ings and paintings, unite to make it notable among the libraries of the world; a noble building, nobly used. Its picture gallery is comparatively little known, but, though not large, it contains some extremely 183 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK interesting examples, and especially of American artists Here is that Washington, by Gilbert Stuart, which was the proud possession of Alexander Hamilton: a Washington holding a scroll and a sword, with a background of the sea and ships: a highly dignified Washington of lace ruffles and black velvet— and it is pleasant to remember somebody's felicitous com- ment that it was fortunate that in Washington's time a painter existed who was able to hand him down to posterity as the fine gentleman that he was. There are in existence a number of Gilbert Stu- art's Washingtons. Stuart had painted abroad, among many notables, George the Third and the prince who later became George the Fourth, but he gave up his English career for the purpose of coming back to America to paint a far greater George than either of those royal ones; and this Washington, here in the library, is believed to have been a gift to Ham- ilton from Washington himself. And one likes to remember that quaintly wise and quaintly humorous declaration by Mark Twain, that if George Washmg- ton should rise from the dead and should not resem- ble the portraits by Stuart, he would be denounced as an impostor ! -u „ Two other of the interesting portraits are by an exceptionally famous New Yorker who was not at all famous as a painter, S. F. B. Morse. He studied un- der the great Benjamin West in England, and came back to America determined to win fame as a painter of portraits. And he had excellent sitters and made 184 UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND - numerous pictures. And then he made one of the most amazing of changes ; for he quitted art and in- vented the telegraph. And it is recorded that this New Yorker (he was not born here, but, typical New Yorker that he was, came here to live and become famous) received more medals and honors and deco- rations from foreign governments than were ever given to any other American. Here is Morse's portrait of Fitz-Greene Halleck, and it is interesting to see what the famous New York poet looked like, in the eyes of the inventor of the telegraph, for Halleck wears a snuff-colored coat with a high velvet collar, he is a ruddy-faced, black-haired man of perhaps forty, and he smiles a little fatuously from the canvas. Here, too, is Morse's portrait of Lafayette, painted when the distinguished Frenchman was in America in 1825. It is an excellent bit of work, presenting Lafayette as a great-eyed, long-nosed, long-faced, highly likable man, with high-set eyebrows and nar- rowish forehead, with choker collar and ruffled shirt, dressed in black, with a dark red cloak. The por- trait is an example of how one's private griefs must often be submerged in one's work: for Morse's wife was taken ill in New Haven when this portrait was but half done, and he hurried to her bedside, and she died, and then he returned to the completion of this painting. It was in 1837, when Morse had rooms in the picturesque University Buildings, on Washington Square, that he completed his telegraphic invention, 185 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK and the monument which stands in Central Park can not be said to have been set up ''in his memory," for he was given the unusual honor of having the statue made and set up while he was still alive. He and Franklin, both Americans, had subjugated electricity, and so, when in 1872 a statue to Franklin was to be unveiled in Printing House Square, Morse was invited to be the unveiler. He accepted; but it was a bitter January day, and he was in his eighty- first year, and the doing honor to his mighty prede- cessor caused his death from the cold and exposure. :^:M^SB^£=± 186 CHAPTEE XV 1 ; " 1 -Q. A» r \^ ABOVE FORTY-SECOND EW YOEK is a clubable city. Every New Yorker is supposed to belong to at least one club. Many be- long to many clubs. Some join so many clubs as to seem to be trying to make a collection of clubs. Fifth Avenue gives the impression of having a great proportion of the clubs: and it does really have some of the best or most interesting, from the Salmagundi, with its new home far down toward Washington Arch, to the ^'Millionaires' Club," the Metropolitan, opposite lower Central Park. The most interesting of New York clubs have some special tang or atmosphere or character, from their representing the fine fieur of art or the stage or sci- ence or literature; and in this they follow the ex- ample of the early clubs of the city. The first New York club that was worthy the name of a club was the Friendly Club, organized shortly 187 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK before the Revolution. That Washington, when he lived in New York, liked to visit its rooms, would alone be sufficient to mark it as a club most highly worth while, and it had among its members such in- teresting men as Charles Brockden Bro-wn, who cut such a figure over a century ago only to become en- tirely forgotten, and the still famous James Kent, Kent of the Commentaries, one of the great lawyers, great judges, great legal writers of the English-speak- ing world; and it would be curious, were it not, for New York, so entirely typical, that he is not thought of as a New Yorker by this city where his fame was won! Had he lived in, let us say, Boston, and had done such permanent work, you would keep running against his statue, you would constantly keep reading about him, you would not be permitted to forget that he was a Bostonian. But while he was alive, New York honored him, and when he died his funeral was attended by an immense throng, and flags hung at half mast all over the city and even on many ships in the harbor. The second club of importance was the Bread and Cheese, founded in 1824; and that the club was founded by James Fenimore Cooper and had among its members such men as William Cullen Bryant and Fitz-Greene Halleck made it a club with typical New York tang. Bread and cheese were used in balloting for membership, bread meaning the affirmative and cheese the negative. Cooper himself has never been considered a New Yorker, because he betook himself to Cooperstown, and identified himself with that 188 ABOVE FORTY-SECOND place, and died there ; but he had so much to do with New York, and was here so long and so often, that any other city than this great indifferent city would be busily engaged in claiming him. But at the time of his death New York remembered him long enough to hold two special meetings to honor his memory: Washington Irving presided at the first, and Daniel Webster, with Irving sitting at his right, presided at the second. Even then, New York events were metro- politanly planned. That an author may not require, absolutely, that his surroundings fit his book, was shown by the fact that Cooper wrote the greater part of ''The Prairie," which in point of sequence closes the Leather Stock- ing series, at 345 Greenwich Street, in this city, and finished it in France ! — not writing the opening book of the series, "The Deerslayer," until fifteen years afterwards at Cooperstown. And one of the most curious of all literary sayings was that of the mighty Balzac who declared that, "Undoubtedly Cooper's re- no^vn is not due to his countrymen or to the English : he owes it mainly to the ardent appreciation of the French. ' ' Of the present day clubs, the Union Club is the old- est, dating back as it does to 1836 : its club house has gone naturally more and more nortlnvard, from one location to another, for the clubs of New York share to the full in the restless city's restlessness and change. The Lotos, until its recent removal to West 57th Street, was among the noted Fifth Avenue clubs, and 189 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK it was ou Fifth Avenue that it won its proud record for entertaining distinguished men. As General Horace Porter pleasantly said at a dinner in his honor, ''I realize that not to be dined by the Lotos Club •vrould cause in life the f eelmg of failure and regret. ' ' The University, in its splendid home at the corner of "West 54th Street, is one of the important Fifth Avenue clubs: for it is really a Fifth Avenue club even though the entrance to its club house is on the cross-street. The Century, too, whose members must be men who have achieved high personal distinction, is a Fifth Avenue club, although its club house is just away from the avenue, at 7 "West iSd Street. Innnediately north of 42nd Street, in the streets in the first Forties, to the right and to the left of Fifth Avenue, have gathered many of the fascinating shops of the city: not the greatest establishments, but the shops for specialties, the shops for embroideries, table-fittings, hangings, ivories, books, the shops of decorators and of purveyors of what may be termed small works of art, and the shops are remindful of the delightful specialty shops of Paris. At the corner of the avenue and 48th Street stands the ' ' Church in the Fort. ' ' Conforming to full for- mality, it is known as the Collegiate Dutch Eeformed Church, but it is really the principal of the lineal de- scendants of the little church which, in the long, long ago, stood within the stockade of the little fort which the Dutch set up in what is now Battery Park. It is claimed — for when New York forgets itself and really claims something of the past the claim is sure to be 190 Trr^ ABOVE FORTY-SECOND well worth while ! — it is claimed that this church is the descendant of what was not only the very first Prot- estant church organization of New York, but the old- est Protestant church organization in the Western hemisphere. The bell which hangs in the steeple of this Fifth Avenue church is not so old as the original church in the Fort, but was cast in Amsterdam, almost two hundred years ago, in 1728. Tradition still tells — and is confirmed pictorially, so far as early pictures show — that the ancient Church in the Fort had a shingle roof and a wooden tower, a bell, but no clock, and a sundial. At one time in its history there were three kinds of service held within its wooden walls, for the Dutch held their meetings in the forenoon, the French at noon, and the Church of England in the afternoon. And the three services were conducted in the three languages. In the time of Governor Dongan there was also a Roman Catholic service, not in the Fort Church itself but in a little chapel close beside it. And so this modern church at 48th Street brings up very old-time matters indeed. Occupying the block between 50th and 51st Streets is the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Patrick, bright and clean, as if new built, although it was put up half a century ago, James Renwick being the architect; a building antedating its surroundings but looking as new as any of them. The cornerstone was laid as long ago as 1858, in the presence of more than a hun- dred thousand people, who were massed upon the va- cant lots around about. With its twin gray spires, it is a finely impressive 191 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK building, standing just above the level of the side- walk ; an excellent building, a successful and pleasant building, really a most admirable building. Some- how, a much greater sense of spaciousness has been secured, by its being on a terrace and by the treatment of the terrace, than could have been expected for such a great building in a single narrow block, and there is an undoubted effect of freedom and of airiness. It is thirteenth century Gothic in design, and even for those who know the magnificent cathedrals of Eng- land and France there is much of the extremely satis- factory about it. In its interior it is large and long and lofty, and its pillars, its clustered shafts of stone, are fine and dignified. At 53d Street is another church edifice in Gothic style ; the best example of Gothic construction of the present day, designed by a profound lover of the Gothic, the Bostonian architect Cram. It is the Epis- copal Church of St. Thomas, and represents, more than does any other, combined wealth and social po- sition. It has much of the charming, much of strength and delicacy, but its lack of space, its being built in too tightly, is a drawback. At 59th Street we come to the Plaza, at the south- east corner of Central Park; the main approach to the park, overlooked by towering hotels ; and with its oncewhile great open space now mostly occupied by an expanse of stone fountain, finely designed. Directly in front is General Sherman by St. Gaud- ens, riding finely out from among elm trees ; he is all in gilded bronze, on a gilded horse, and a gilded Vic- 192 ABOVE FOETY-SECOND tory floats ahead of him at the horse's bridle; all is on a pedestal of dull red granite and the entire monu- ment is superbly done ; although I think that Sherman himself, or any other good soldier, would have ob- jected to any woman, even Victory, running into a battle in front of him. Business, which has been alternating with homes for many blocks past, has ceased, for the present, to push farther north along the avenue than the Plaza, so that from this point onward it is still an avenue of homes, facing into Central Park ; but even up in this northerly region the homes are no longer, all of them, single dwellings, for apartments have begun to make their appearance in this section above 59th Street. And it is not an unmixed evil that apartment houses are rapidly replacing individual homes even in such neighborhoods as those bordering Central Park and Riverside, for under the new system a far greater number of people will be able to enjoy the air and the view and the openness of life, and by so much there will be more of health and of happiness. And it may fairly be supposed that there will be something of what is known as exclusiveness when it is understood that there are apartments in these favored regions renting for as much as twenty or thirty thousand dol- lars a year. In a general way this upper part of Fifth Avenue for some blocks north and some blocks south of 59th Street, as to the homes of the avenue itself and those close by on the cross streets, has come to stand in the public mind for the richest of New Yorkers, for 193 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK the greatest of wealth and social power. With the permeative butlers and chauffeurs, with every symp- tom of costly living, with its air of orderly peaceful- ness and of holding aloof from the ordinary problems of ordinary mankind, it is the district which seems to be the most absolutely differentiated from those hum- ble sections of the city where crime is understood most to flourish, and degeneracy, and the short and simple scandals of the poor. But without any exploitation of the seamy side of life, it is well to know that scandal and crime and fam- ily dissension are not exclusively characteristic of the moneyless. Over yonder, in this district of great wealth, lived a man who rose from the penitentiary to world-wide prominence and the possession of millions of dollars. In that other house, easily within view of the 59th Street corner, lived a man of vast financial, social and political power, with the additional power of mighty family connections: but scandal came quietly into his life, and, indeed, quietly snuffed that life away — for a woman crept into this great palace one night, and faced him in his stately, somber library — and apoplexy was quietly set down as the cause of his sudden death. All, here, must be done quietly. The amour propre of these exclusive people must not be disturbed, even when trouble has come, as it so often has come, from what may be termed ^^ amours impropre." Those who may have been disappointed by the gen- eral orderliness of aspect of the Bowery will note that there is the same outward orderliness in Fifth Ave- 194 ABOVE FORTY-SECOND nue. And if I mention that crimes, divorces, scandal- ously swift new marriages, have come here, and that the entire gamut of disgrace has been run within some of these palatial homes, it is only to be remindful that the rich and the poor are brothers and sisters under the skin, and that shame and opprobrium come where there is no excuse of poverty and of straitened lives. If, to the numerous unhappy happenings of private life, it were advisable to add the savage tragedies of business in which dwellers hereabouts participated, and the ruthless ruin wrought by some of them in Wall Street, and the betrayals of friendship for gold, it would merely point out, still further, that the pos- session of money does not necessarily add to the sweetness of life. But there are many wealthy homes here that have remained untouched by scandal or by crime; there have been many wealthy folk here who have lived self- respecting lives, and many others whose only offense has been in a perhaps too ostentatious expenditure, and others, or at least one other, who lived in so pe- nurious a way that his clothes were cheaper than those that any clerk in his own office would dare to wear. Of this man, who left seventy millions or so, which is being administered in public-spirited undertakings and charities since his death, it used to be told that he loved to ride in the now vanished horse stages, on Fifth Avenue, for the fare was five cents, or six tickets for a quarter, and the money was passed from hand to hand up to the man at front who was driver and con- ductor in one; and this cunning seventy-millionaire 195 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK would take his seat by the money-box, would buy his quarter's worth of tickets, and, after putting his own in the box, would sequester the other nickels as they came and in place of them would put in tickets, thus making five cents, or on fortunate days even ten, on a single trip. It kept his hand in. A great society leader who lived not far above 59th Street, the greatest leader that New York society ever had, used especially to flaunt in the faces of her fol- lowers a magnificent necklace, one so altogether in- comparable that society worshiped it as the very sign and symbol of leadership. But after the great social dictator 's death, it was necessary to have an appraisal of her wealth — whereupon it was discovered that many of the jewels of the rich necklace that society had so worshiped were false ! — a striking example of the worship, by society, of false gauds. Quite a proportion of the homes of Fifth Avenue, now some and now others, are always shuttered and closed; in summer because it is warm, in winter be- cause it is cold, in spring or fall for unguessable rea- sons ; all with blinds drawn, doors boarded up tight, shut, repellent. A restless city this, with too much money. Many an owner of this or that home is in Florida or Maine, in the Grand Caiion on the way to the Pacific coast, or at Newport, in Bermuda, or in the Berkshires or in Europe. Fifth Avenue above 59th Street shows wide variety of architecture. There are imitation chateaus, some of them poor imitations, and some successful copies of the gay and laughing French Renaissance: there 196 ABOVE FOETY-SECOND are dungeon-like fortresses, the house of this or that sugar king or banker without taste : there are houses of that unattractive period known as Victorian : and there are also, among the newer homes, some that are simple and graceful and of real beauty. At 70th Street, and occupying the block to 71st is the finest of all, the finest private house in Manhattan. It was built by a typical New Yorker ; that is to say, a man who came here from another city — the Pitts- burgher, Frick, and if I should add his first names, Henry Clay, it would show, in good American fashion, that he was born when the Mill Boy of the Slashes was at the height of his fame. The Frick house is French Classic in design ; it is restful, restrained, simple, not high, admirable in proportion and symmetry ; and in front is a broad open space finely greened with grass and thickly edged with old box — one wonders what ancient garden in Maryland or Virginia was depleted to furnish forth this box ! A few blocks farther up the avenue than this best house in New York is the house of a western copper king which fills a great corner with a fantasy in rococo, a fantasy in stone and bronze on which has been lav- ished more money than on any other home in New York. The block between 90th and 91st is occupied by the home of Andrew Carnegie. It is built in the old Co- lonial way and is admirable so far as the Colonial is followed ; that is to say, up to the dormers, which are not precisely pleasing. On the whole it is an elf ective and even charming mansion, built of brick of a soft- 197 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK colored red, and with trimmings of a gray stone that is almost white. Like the Frick house, this has gen- erously been given setting and spaciousness, for a great open garden is in front of it; the house itself, rather oddly, facing 90th Street instead of Fifth Ave- nue; and about the open space is a great open-work iron fence with magnificent stone posts. And it is one of the most striking facts in regard to New York that what may be considered the three most distinguished private homes in the city, the Frick and Carnegie homes and the Schwab home on Riverside Drive, are the homes of wealthy men of Pittsburgh who came to New York after their fortunes were made! For New York is a magnet that draws not only young men eager to make their fortunes, but older men whose fortune has been gained. And all this makes for the noticeable lack of homogeneousness in the city. Most New Yorkers meet none with whom they are on terms of lifelong friendship. There is a marked absence of first-name intimacy. It is largely, and indeed mostly, a city of detached human units. Facing the Carnegie front is a bare lot, squalid and squatter-like, unsightly, even immensely ugly. For years the multi-millionaire has faced this squalor, but, as I write, he has belatedly bought the corner and will sell it to some one who will build a home there and not an apartment house. A curious feature of Fifth Avenue, in the portion facing upper Central Park, is that even yet there are 198 ABOVE FORTY-SECOND some spots which have never been built upon; there is land which has stood absolutely vacant, held for high prices during all these years of the city 's growth. Central Park, stretching from 59th to 110th Streets, and from Fifth to Eighth Avenues, is one of the noble city parks of the world, in dimensions, in beauty, in variety of water and trees and rolling ground and levels, in flowers and shrubs, in great spaces given over to play. There seem to be miles of rhododen- drons blooming on the banks, there is splendid dog- wood blossoming white, and everything is beautifully cared for. Retaining all the charm of wildness, Avith the characteristics of the best of landscape gardening, it fits finely that fine Wordsworthian line, * ' the pomp of cultivated nature. ' ' The prettiest feature of the park is the May Day parties, when many a Queen of the May leads her fol- lowers there, all gay and blythe and happy, all bub- bling with anticipation, all in holiday garb and fancy dress, which is usually white and tinsel and gold with ribbons of all shades, and usually there are vari-col- ored streamers for the girls to hold as they dance around a Maypole, and often there is music. So many parties ask for permits that time and space must be allotted, and not only does the first day of May make the great open space of the park gay and delightful, but for days thereafter many a party still comes gaily to the park. Toward evening after their day of proud excite- ment, the little girls trail homeward, tired, but still 199 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK steeped in happiness, ready to lie down sleepily and to dream of the excitement of the May Day of the year to come. The Metropolitan Museum, a great mass of build- ings which have gone up gradually since the founda- tion of the museum in 1870, is located in Central Park, just above Eightieth Street, and faces out on Fifth Avenue in a great long frontage. The distinguished collections, gathered here into spacious housing, make this preeminently the museum of America ; indeed, it has already become one of the great museums of the world. There are galleries of paintings by the greatest masters of the past and the present. Titian and Rem- brandt and Raphael are here. Van Dyck and Velas- quez are here, Botticelli and Franz Hals and Reynolds are here, and here also are the American, Sargent, and others of the recent and present years. The sumptuous collections seem to cover every branch of art and of artistic activity, and have been gathered from every corner of the world. There is a splendid collection of sculpture. There are laces and textiles that represent the finest technical artistry of the world. There are silver and glass and bronze and copper and iron. There are glorious gatherings of porcelain. There is a noble presentation of ancient armor. There is the work of unknown men of the past and there is the work of artists and artisans who won fame with their genius. Notable among all these things is what is known as the Rospigliosi Coupe, a wonderful cup by the won- 200 ABOVE FORTY-SECOND derful Florentine, Benvenuto Cellini, perfect in its gorgeousness, in its shape, in its gold and enamels and jewels. There are models of the most beautiful architecture of the entire world, temples, palaces, cathedrals, thus admirably bringing to New York the beauty of the world. In the labyrinthine rooms, endless in extent, there is opportunity for each to find the particular kind of col- lection which interests him ; and perhaps one will no- tice in particular a replica of Houdon's Washington; the French sculptor having been brought from France to America, through the efforts of Franklin, that he might give to the world George Washington in imper- ishable marble; and there is also Houdon's Paul Jones, this being a replica from Houdon 's studio, and precisely like one which is given a high place of honor in, of all places, Edinburgh !— for one would expect Paul Jones to be far from popular in Edinburgh, as he landed, an American privateer, at Edinburgh's port of Leith, frightened away the soldiers, and levied contributions at will. But I suppose the Scotch look on him after all as a famous Scotchman, even though as an adopted American he frightened Great Britain with American ships. There is an excellent collection of early American furniture, not only of the Sheraton and Chippendale and Heppelwhite styles, but also of pieces which set the collection in a class by itself through definitely representing the American point of view. For exam- ple, importance is given to the furniture of that Dun- 201 THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK can Pliyf e who, a New Yorker, with a shop near Cham- bers Street, made admirable pieces of furniture in the early eighteen hundreds, and won high reputation as a worker and designer of artistic skill. It marks dis- tinct advance in national taste and knowledge, that the best museums, such as those of New York and Boston and Philadelphia, include the furniture of a century and a century and a half ago among the products of real art — shapes and makes that may still be gathered — and it was this cabinet maker of New York, Phyf e, who, more than any other worker on his side of the Atlantic, carried on fine furniture making as an art. A further matter of interest from a local New York standpoint is a glorious punch bowl, of mighty dimen- sions, with a view of New York harbor covering its entire bottom. It was made in Canton and is of Chi- nese Lowestoft, and was presented to New York City on July 4, 1812, by a long forgotten General Morton. The view is from Brooklyn and shows the sky-line of early days ; and the bowl was until recent years kept on exhibition in the City Hall, and flowed with punch at all civic jollifications. Close behind the Museum buildings, stands what is almost forgotten in these busy modern days, although for a long time it was one of the most visited objects in the entire city. It is still referred to as Cleopatra's Needle, although it is far older than the time of that friend of Mark Antony. It is a tall obelisk, covered with hieroglyphics, and was brought here from Egypt years ago, towed in a box-like receptacle, behind a 202 ABOVE FORTY-SECOND steamer, and it is typically American that the one fact generally referred to in regard to it is that the cost of getting it here from Egypt was one hundred thousand dollars. It is seventy-one feet high, and was quarried in the sixteenth century before Christ, in the reign of Thotmes the Third, at Syene. Its weight is 488,000 pounds. It was set up before the Temple of the Sun, at Heliopolis. Its journey to New York, less than half a century ago, was not the first journey in its history, for it so attracted the attention of the ancient Romans, as standing for art and what even then was ancient his- tory, that it was carried down to Alexandria and set up there as a mighty trophy, it then being about six- teen hundred years of age. And this great obelisk, with its inscriptions of thou- sands of years ago still plainly upon it, stands here in the heart of New York ; this splendid relic of a mistily distant antiquity rises beside a park driveway in this most modern of cities ! It has outlasted wonderful civilizations. It saw the fall of Egypt. It stood while Rome rose to world su- premacy and sank to nothingness. Through the course of centuries, other mighty powers rose and fell. It was after it had stood at Alexandria about as long as it had before that stood at Heliopolis, that it was brought to New York ; and it may well be wondered what other journey, in the course of coming centuries, may yet be in store for it. As compared with the sixteen hundred years that it stood at Heliopolis, and 203 THE BOOK OF NEW YORK the eighteen hundred years that it stood at Alexan- dria, Americans need not think that any particular permanence is represented by the petty forty years or so that it has stood in Central Park. 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