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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Fifth Avenue, by Arthur Bartlett Maurice,
+Illustrated by Allan G. Cram
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Fifth Avenue
+
+
+Author: Arthur Bartlett Maurice
+
+
+
+Release Date: September 15, 2005  [eBook #16691]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIFTH AVENUE***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Audrey Longhurst, Charlene Taylor, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 16691-h.htm or 16691-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/6/6/6/16691/16691-h/16691-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/6/6/6/16691/16691-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+FIFTH AVENUE
+
+by
+
+ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE
+
+Author of "New York in Fiction," "The New York of
+the Novelists," "Bottled up in Belgium," etc.
+
+Drawings by Allan G. Cram
+
+New York
+Dodd, Mead and Company
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "MASSIVE AND SPLENDIDLY GOTHIC IS ST. THOMAS'S. THE
+CHURCH DATES FROM 1825. IN 1867 THE PRESENT SITE WAS SECURED, AND THE
+BROWN-STONE EDIFICE OF THE EARLY SEVENTIES WAS FOR NEARLY TWO
+GENERATIONS THE ULTRA-FASHIONABLE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF THE CITY"]
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+In the making of this book the author has drawn from many sources.
+First, for many suggestions, he is indebted to Mr. Guy Nichols, the
+librarian of the Players Club, whose knowledge of the city is so
+profound that his friends occasionally refer to him as "the man who
+invented New York." The author is indebted to the Fifth Avenue
+Association and to the invariable courtesy of those persons in the New
+York Public Library with whom he has come in contact.
+
+Among the books that have been consulted are, first of all, the
+admirable monographs, "Fifth Avenue," and "Fifth Avenue Events," issued
+by the Fifth Avenue Bank. From these he has drawn freely. Among other
+volumes are "The Diary of Philip Hone," Ward McAllister's "Society as I
+Have Found It," George Cary Eggleston's "Recollections of a Varied
+Life," Matthew Hale Smith's "Sunshine and Shadow in New York" (1869),
+Seymour Dunbar's "A History of Travel in America," Miss Henderson's "A
+Loiterer in New York," William Allen Butler's "A Retrospect of Forty
+Years," Fremont Rider's "New York City," Francis Gerry Fairfield's "The
+Clubs of New York," Anna Alice Chapin's "Greenwich Village," Theodore
+Wolff's "Literary Haunts and Homes," Rupert Hughes's "The Real New
+York," James Grant Wilson's "Thackeray in the United States," Mrs.
+Burton Harrison's "Recollections, Grave and Gay," Abram C. Dayton's
+"Last Days of Knickerbocker Life in New York," and Martha J. Lamb's
+"History of the City of New York." Also various articles in the
+magazines and newspapers.
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                        Page
+
+      I THE SHADOW OF THE KNICKERBOCKERS           1
+
+     II THE STRETCH OF TRADITION                  29
+
+    III A KNICKERBOCKER PEPYS                     41
+
+     IV GLIMPSES OF THE SIXTIES                   60
+
+      V FOURTEENTH TO MADISON SQUARE              78
+
+     VI SOME GREAT DAYS ON THE AVENUE            100
+
+    VII SOME AVENUE CLUBS IN THE EARLY DAYS      125
+
+   VIII LITERARY LANDMARKS AND FIGURES           150
+
+     IX FIFTH AVENUE IN FICTION                  165
+
+      X TRAILS OF BOHEMIA                        183
+
+     XI THE SLOPE OF MURRAY HILL                 199
+
+    XII CONFESSIONS OF AN EXILED BUS             211
+
+   XIII A POST-KNICKERBOCKER PETRONIUS           226
+
+    XIV THE CREST OF MURRAY HILL                 244
+
+     XV GIANT STRIDES OF COMMERCE                255
+
+    XVI BEYOND MURRAY HILL                       266
+
+   XVII APPROACHING THE PLAZA                    285
+
+  XVIII STRETCHES OF THE AVENUE                  297
+
+    XIX MINE HOST ON THE AVENUE                  312
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+  "Massive and splendidly Gothic is St. Thomas's. The church
+  dates from 1825. In 1867 the present site was secured,
+  and the brown-stone edifice of the early seventies was for
+  nearly two generations the ultra-fashionable Episcopal
+  church of the city"                                          Frontispiece
+
+                                                                FACING PAGE
+
+  The Washington Arch. A splendid sentinel guarding the
+  approach to the Avenue. Beyond, houses dating from the
+  thirties of the last century, that mark the beginning of the
+  Stretch of Tradition                                               14
+
+  At the northeast corner of the Avenue and Tenth Street is the
+  Episcopal Church of the Ascension, built in 1840, and
+  consecrated November 5, 1841. It belongs to a part of
+  the Avenue, from the Square to Twelfth Street, which has
+  changed little since 1845                                          32
+
+  Madison Square. Yesterday it was the home of the Flora
+  McFlimsies of the William Allen Butler poem "Nothing
+  to Wear." Today, in the eyes of the Manhattanite, it is
+  the centre of the Universe                                         68
+
+  "The Tower of the Metropolitan Building. Whatever artists
+  may think of it the tower is, structurally, one of the wonders
+  of the world. Exactly halfway between sidewalk and
+  point of spire is the great clock with the immense dials"          86
+
+  In the bright sunlight the Avenue glitters with the pavillions
+  of patriotism. Old Glory may be counted by the tens of
+  thousands; England's Union Jack, and the Tricolour of
+  France by the thousands. To forestall the Kaiser the
+  Avenue is "coming across"                                         112
+
+  Where the Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street cross stands the
+  building popularly known as the Knickerbocker Trust Company.
+  Here, in the middle of the last century, "Sarsaparilla"
+  Townsend built in brown-stone, and A.T. Stewart
+  later built in white marble                                       136
+
+  "At the northwest corner of Fifty-fourth Street is the
+  University Club, to the mind of Arnold Bennett ('Your
+  United States'), the finest of all the fine structures that
+  line the Avenue"                                                  172
+
+  "The site of the old Lenox Library is now occupied by the
+  house of Mr. Henry C. Frick, one of the great show residences
+  of the Avenue and the City. A broad garden
+  separates the house, which is eighteenth century English,
+  from the sidewalk"                                                218
+
+  The terrace of the Public Library. Today the spot is the
+  scene of the activities of those engaged in the work of
+  speeding America's Answer. Once it was far uptown, and
+  on the eastern side of the Avenue were the residences
+  known as "Spanish Row," or "The House of Mansions".               248
+
+  Commerce, with giant stride, is marching up the stately Avenue.
+  The story of a business house that began in the neighbourhood
+  of Cherry Hill, migrated to Grand Street, thence
+  to Broadway and Union Square, and again to the slope
+  of Murray Hill, is, in epitome, the story of the city itself.     260
+
+  "On the site of the old Croton Reservoir the cornerstone of
+  the Public Library was laid November 10, 1902, and the
+  building opened to the public May 23, 1911. To it were
+  carried the treasures of the Astor Library and the Lenox
+  Library"                                                          268
+
+  Entrance to the Public Library. The Library, 590 feet long
+  and 270 deep, was built by the City at a cost of about nine
+  million dollars. The material is largely Vermont marble,
+  and the style that of the modern renaissance                      274
+
+  "O beautiful, long, loved Avenue,
+  So faithless to truth and yet so true."--JOAQUIN MILLER           280
+
+  South of where "St. Gaudens's hero, gaunt and grim, rides on
+  with Victory leading him," may be seen the Fountain of
+  Abundance, and, in the background, the new Plaza Hotel            290
+
+  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on the site of what was once
+  the Deer Park, had its origin in a meeting of the Art
+  Committee of the Union League Club in November, 1869              304
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FIFTH AVENUE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+_The Shadow of the Knickerbockers_
+
+
+The Shadow of the Knickerbockers--An Old-time Map--The Beginnings
+of the Avenue--Watering Place Life--The Beach at Rockaway--Coney
+Island--Newspapers in the Thirties--Early Day Marriages--The
+Knickerbocker Sabbath--Home Customs--Restaurants and Hotels--The
+Leather-heads--Conditions of Travel--Stage-coaches and Steamers--The
+Clipper Ships--When Dickens First Came.
+
+    Boughton, had you bid me chant
+    Hymns to Peter Stuyvesant.
+    Had you bid me sing of Wouter.
+    (He! the Onion-head! the Doubter!)
+    But to rhyme of this one-mocker,
+    Who shall rhyme to Knickerbocker?
+                                        --_Austin Dobson_.
+
+
+Before the writer, as he begins the pleasant task, is an old
+half-illegible map, or rather, fragment of a map. Near-by are three or
+four dull prints. They are of a hundred years ago, or thereabouts, and
+tell of a New York when President Monroe was in the White House, and
+Governor De Witt Clinton in the State Capitol, at Albany, and Mayor
+Colden in the City Hall. To pore over them is to achieve a certain
+contentment of the soul. Probably it held itself to be turbulent in
+its day--that old New York. Without doubt it had its squabbles, its
+turmoils, its excitements. We smile at the old town--its limitations,
+its inconveniences, its _naivetes_. But perhaps, in these years of
+storm, and stress, and heartache, we envy more than a little. It is not
+merely the architectural story that the old maps, prints, diaries tell;
+in them we can find an age that is gone, catch fleeting glimpses of
+people long since dust to dust, look at past manners, fashions,
+pleasures and contrast them with our own.
+
+But to begin with the old map. The lettering beneath conveys the
+information that it was prepared for the City in 1819-1820 by John
+Randel, Jr., and that it shows the farms superimposed upon the
+Commissioner's map of 1811. Through the centre of the map there is a
+line indicating Fifth Avenue north to Thirteenth Street. Here and there
+is a spot apparently intended to represent a farmhouse, but that is all;
+for in 1820, though Greenwich Village and Chelsea were, the city proper
+was far to the south. Some of the names on the old map are familiar and
+some are not.
+
+Just above the bending lane that ran along the north side of Washington
+Square, then the Potter's Field, may be read "Trustees of Sailor's Snug
+Harbor." The land thus marked extends from what is now Waverly Place to
+what is now Ninth Street. In 1790 Captain Robert Richard Randall paid
+five thousand pounds sterling for twenty-one acres of good farming land.
+In 1801 he died, and his will directed that a "Snug Harbor" for old
+salts be built upon his farm, the produce of which, he believed, would
+forever furnish his pensioners with vegetables and cereal rations. Later
+Randall's trustees leased the farm in building lots and placed "Snug
+Harbor" in Staten Island. Above the estate, in diagonal form, and at one
+point crossing Fifth Avenue to the west, was the large farm of Henry
+Brevoort. More limited holdings, in the names of Gideon Tucker, William
+Hamilton, and John Morse, separate, in the map, the Brevoort property
+from the estates of John Mann, Jr., and Mary Mann. The latter must have
+been a landowner of some importance in her day, for the fragment of a
+chart runs into the margin above the line of Thirteenth Street without
+indicating the beginning of any other ownership.
+
+On the land to the west of the Avenue line may be read "Heirs of John
+Rogers," "William W. Gilbert," "Nicholson" (the Christian name lies
+somewhere beyond the map horizon), and "Heirs of Henry Spingler."
+Irrigation is indicated by a line, running in a general northwesterly
+direction, bearing the name "Manetta Water," while a thinner line,
+joining the first line from the northeast, is described as "East Branch
+of Manetta Water." Manetta Water was the English name. The Dutch had
+called it "Bestavaer's Rivulet." It was a sparkling stream, beloved of
+trout fishermen, rising in the high ground above Twenty-first Street,
+flowing southeasterly to Fifth Avenue at Ninth Street, then on to midway
+between the present Eighth Street and Waverly Place, where it swung
+southwesterly and emptied into the Hudson River near Charlton Street. It
+ran between sandhills, sometimes rising to the height of a hundred feet,
+and marked the course of a famous Indian hunting ground.
+
+The joy of the Izaak Waltons of the past is occasionally the despair of
+the Fifth Avenue householders of the present. Flooded cellars and
+weakened foundations may be traced to the purling waters of the
+sparkling stream. But perhaps the trout were jumping. Then the last
+fisherman probably worried very little about the annoyances to which his
+descendants were to be subjected. In much the same spirit we are saying
+today, "What will it all matter a hundred years hence?"
+
+Beginning at the Potter's Field, the line of what is now Fifth Avenue
+left the "Road over the Sandhills" or the "Zantberg" of the Dutch, later
+known as Art Street, long since gone from the map, and crossed the
+Robert Richard Randall Estate. Thence it ran through the Henry Brevoort
+farm, which originally extended from Ninth to Eighteenth Streets, and
+which had been bought in 1714 for four hundred pounds. Crossing the
+tributary stream at Twelfth Street, it passed a small pond between
+Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets, and then ran on, over low and level
+ground, to Twenty-first Street, then called "Love's Lane." To the right
+was the swamp and marsh that afterwards became Union Square. Following
+the trail farther, the hardy voyager wandered over "hills and valleys,
+dales and fields," through a countryside where trout, mink, otter, and
+muskrat swam in the brooks and pools; brant, black duck, and yellow-leg
+splashed in the marshes and fox, rabbit, woodcock, and partridge found
+covert in the thicket. Here and there was a farm, but the city, then
+numbering one hundred thousand persons, was far away. Then, in 1824, the
+first stretch of the Avenue, from Waverly Place to Thirteenth Street,
+was opened, and the northward march of the great thoroughfare began. Let
+us try to picture the old town of that day, the city that was still
+under the shadow of the Knickerbockers.
+
+First, at the southern extremity of the island, was the Battery and
+Battery Park. When, in "The Story of a New York House," the late H.C.
+Bunner described the little square of green jutting into the waters of
+the upper bay, it was as it had been some years before the earliest
+venturesome pioneers builded in lower Fifth Avenue. From the pillared
+balcony of his house on State Street--the house may still be seen--Jacob
+Dolph caught a glimpse of the morning sun, that loved the Battery far
+better than Pine Street, where Dolph's office was. It was a
+poplar-studded Battery in those days, and the tale tells how the wind
+blew fresh off the bay, and the waves beat up against the sea-wall, and
+a large brig, with all sails set, loomed conspicuous to the view, and
+two or three fat little boats, cat-rigged, after the good old New York
+fashion, were beating down towards Staten Island, to hunt for the
+earliest bluefish. That was in 1808, and sixteen years later, the
+Battery, with its gravelled, shady paths, and its somewhat irregular
+plots of grass, was still the city's favourite breathing spot. There, of
+summer evenings, after the stately walk down Broadway, the crinolined
+ladies and the beaux with their bell-crowned hats gathered to watch the
+sun set behind the low Jersey hills, and perhaps to inspect the review
+of the Tompkins Blues, or the Pulaski Cadets. There was fierce rivalry
+between these two commands, one under Captain Vincent, and the other
+under Captain McArdle, and each corps had its admiring sympathizers.
+Both Blues and Cadets presented a fine, martial appearance as they swung
+across the Battery, marching like veterans who had faced fire and would
+not flinch. "Sure it was," a flippant chronicler has recorded, "both had
+an undisputed reputation for charging upon a well-loaded board with a
+will that left no tell-tale vestige." Very likely, in the throng, all
+were not of New York. There were doubtful strangers, too, looking with
+yearning eyes out over the dancing waters of the blue bay--swarthy,
+weather-beaten men with huge earrings. They called themselves
+"privateers-men." But there were those who smiled at the word, for
+romance had it that there were still buccaneers in the Spanish Main.
+
+In many families that daily visit to the Battery was all the summer
+change. Mr. Dayton, in his "Last Days of Knickerbocker Life," informed
+us that neither belle nor gallant lost caste by declining to participate
+in the routine of watering place life, simple and inexperienced as it
+then was. Yet there were summer resorts, and they were patronized by the
+best and most prominent citizens of the country. The springs at Saratoga
+had already been discovered, and there were many New Yorkers who made
+the then long and arduous trip.
+
+But nearer at hand was the "Beach at Rockaway," sung by the military
+poet, George P. Morris, and Coney Island. At the latter resort
+conditions were primitive. Unheard were the blaring of bands, and the
+raucous cry of the "Hot-Dog man," and the riot and roar of the rabble.
+Mr. Blinker, of O. Henry's "Brick Dust Row," could not then have seen
+his vision and found his light. For there was no mass of vulgarians
+wallowing in gross joys to be recognized as his brothers seeking the
+ideal. But he might have been as well pleased with the unpretentious
+hotel at the water's edge, where the urbanite could enjoy the cooling
+ocean breezes, and listen to the waves, and dine upon broiled chicken
+and succulent clams.
+
+The press of the third decade of the last century was high-priced and
+vitriolic. Of the morning papers now known to New Yorkers there was
+none. The "Sun," the first to appear, began in 1833. But of the
+afternoon journals there was the "Evening Post," perhaps even then
+"making virtue odious," as a wit of many years later was to express it,
+and the "Commercial Advertiser," now the "Globe," the oldest of all
+metropolitan journals. Before the appearance of the "Sun," the morning
+papers had been the "Morning Courier and New York Enquirer," the
+"Standard," the "Democratic Chronicle," the "Journal of Commerce," the
+"New York Gazette and General Advertiser," and the "Mercantile
+Advertiser and New York Advocate." In the evening there were the "Star,"
+and the "American," besides the "Post" and "Commercial Advertiser."
+These newspapers were mere appendages of party, "organs" in the
+narrowest and most restricted sense, espousing blindly certain interests
+or ideas, expounding in long editorials the views of small groups of
+politicians.
+
+"Here's this morning's New York Sewer! Here's this morning's New York
+Stabber! Here's the New York Family Spy! Here's the New York Private
+Listener! Here's the New York Peeper! Here's the New York Plunderer!
+Here's the New York Keyhole Reporter! Here's the New York Rowdy Journal!
+Here's all the New York papers! Here's full particulars of the patriotic
+Locofoco movement yesterday, in which the Whigs were so chawed up; and
+the last Alabama gouging case; and the interesting Arizona dooel with
+bowie knives; and all the political, commercial, and fashionable news.
+Here they are! Here they are! Here's the papers! Here's the papers!
+Here's the Sewer! Here's the New York Sewer! Here's some of the twelve
+thousand of today's Sewer, with the best accounts of the markets, and
+four whole columns of country correspondence, and a full account of the
+ball at Mrs. White's last night, where all the beauty and fashion of New
+York was assembled; with the Sewer's own particulars of the private
+lives of all the ladies that were there. Here's the Sewer! Here's the
+Sewer's exposure of the Wall Street gang, and the Sewer's exposure of
+the Washington gang, and the Sewer's exclusive account of a flagrant
+act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight
+years old; now communicated, at great expense, by his own nurse. Here's
+the Sewer! Here's the New York Sewer in its twelfth thousand, with a
+whole column of New Yorkers to be shown up, and all their names printed.
+Here's the Sewer's article upon the judge that tried him, day afore
+yesterday, for libel, and the Sewer's tribute to the independent jury
+that didn't convict him, and the Sewer's account of what might have
+happened if they had! Here's the Sewer, always on the lookout; the
+leading journal of the United States!"
+
+Such were the cries, according to the veracious account of Charles
+Dickens, who had paid his first visit to us a short time before, that
+greeted the ears of Martin Chuzzlewit upon his arrival in the gate city
+of the western world. That amiable caricature reflects what the English
+novelist thought or pretended to think, of the New York journalism of
+the day. Exaggeration, of course: the bad manners of a young genius of
+the British lower middle classes. But quite good-naturedly today we
+concede that beneath bad manners and exaggeration there was a foundation
+of truth. Into the making of Colonel Diver, the editor of the "Rowdy
+Journal," may have gone a little of old Noah, of the "Star," or James
+Watson Webb, of the "Courier and Enquirer," or Colonel Stone, of the
+"Commercial." Can't you see those grim figures of an old world strutting
+down Broadway, glaring about belligerently and suspiciously? Almost
+every editor of that period had a theatre feud at one day or another. On
+the luckless mummer who had incurred his displeasure he poured out the
+vials of his wrath. He incited audiences to riot. Against his brother
+editors he hurled such epithets as "loathsome and leprous slanderer and
+libeller," "pestilential scoundrel," "polluted wretch," "foul jaws,"
+"common bandit," "prince of darkness," "turkey buzzard," "ghoul."
+Somehow, in thinking of the old days, I find it hard to reconcile those
+men and women who lived under the Knickerbocker sway with their
+newspapers. It is pleasanter to dwell upon the old customs, to picture
+Mr. Manhattan leaving the scurrilous sheet behind him when he departed
+from his store or counting house, and repairing with clean hands to the
+wife of his bosom and his family, somewhere in Greenwich Village, or
+Richmond Hill, or Bond Street, or the beginnings of Fifth Avenue.
+
+But to revert to the manners of the old town. First of all there was the
+business of getting married. It was with an idea of permanency then, and
+the Knickerbocker wedding was, in consequence, a ceremony. To it, the
+groom, his best-man, and the ushers went attired in blue coats, brass
+buttons, high white satin stocks, ruffled-bosomed shirts, figured satin
+waistcoats, silk stockings, and pumps. The New Yorker's tailor, if his
+pretensions to fashion were well-founded, was Elmendorf, or Brundage, or
+Wheeler, or Tryon and Derby; his hatter, St. John, and his bootmakers,
+Kimball and Rogers. For the wedding ceremony, the man's hair was tightly
+frizzed by Maniort, the leading hair-dresser of the day. He was the
+proprietor of the Knickerbocker Barber-Shop at Broadway and Wall Street,
+and the town gossip. Years later he was to enjoy the patronage of the
+Third Napoleon in Paris as a reward for favours extended to the Prince
+when the latter was an exile here. There is little record of elaborate
+pre-nuptial bachelor dinners in the style of modern New York. What would
+have been the use? The gardens of the city's fashionable homes boasted
+no extensive circular fountains or artificial fishponds into which the
+best-man or the father of the bride-to-be could be flung as an artistic
+diversion. As has been said, it was something of a slow old world,
+lacking in many of the modern comforts.
+
+The robe of the bride was of white satin, tinged with yellow, the bodice
+cut low in the neck and shoulders, and ornamented with lace. Over her
+hair, built up by Martell, was flung the coronet of artificial orange
+blossoms held by the blonde lace veil. Then the satin boots and the
+six-button gloves. At the wedding-supper the bride's cake, rich, and of
+formidable proportions, was the _piece de resistance_. Also there was
+substantial fare; hams, turkeys, chicken, and game; besides fruits,
+candies, and creams. In place of the champagne of later days there were
+Madeira, Port, and Sherry. Round the table, illuminated by wax candles
+and astral lamps, young and old gathered; the women of a past generation
+in stiff brocades, powdered puffs, and tortoise-shell combs. From the
+first to last the Fifth Avenue wedding of those days reflected the
+patriarchal system that had not yet passed.
+
+It was not a matter of denomination, but when the world was young, the
+pioneers of the Avenue did not smile on the way to worship. The Sabbath
+day still retained a good deal of the funereal aspect with which the New
+England Puritans had invested it. The city was silent save for the
+tolling of the church bells. At ten o'clock in the morning, at three in
+the afternoon, and again, at seven at night, the solemn processions of
+men, women, and children, clad in their Sunday best, issued from the
+homes, and slowly wended their way to church. When the congregation had
+gathered, and the service was about to begin, heavy iron chains were
+drawn tightly across the streets adjacent to the various places of
+worship. It was the hour for serious meditation. No distracting noise
+was to be allowed to fall upon those devout ears.
+
+Abram C. Dayton, in his "Last Days of Knickerbocker Life," left a
+description of the service at the Dutch Reformed Church of that day. He
+told of the long-drawn-out extemporaneous prayers, the allusions to
+"benighted heathen"; to "whited sepulchres"; to "the lake which burns
+with fire and brimstone." Of instrumental accompaniment there was none,
+and free scope was both given and taken by the human voice divine. Then
+the sermon! Men were strong in those days! Clergymen had not become
+affected with the throat troubles prevalent in later times. No
+hour-glass or warning clock was displayed in the bleak spare edifice. In
+the exuberance of zeal often the end of the discourse came only with
+utter physical exhaustion. Then the passing of the plate; an
+eight-stanza hymn, closing with the vehemently shouted Doxology; and the
+concluding Benediction. From that old-time Sabbath day the affairs of
+the world were rigidly excluded. It was a day of rest not only for the
+family but for the family's man-servant and maid-servant. Saturday had
+seen the preparation of the necessary food.
+
+[Illustration: THE WASHINGTON ARCH. A SPLENDID SENTINEL GUARDING THE
+APPROACH TO THE AVENUE. BEYOND, HOUSES DATING FROM THE THIRTIES OF THE
+LAST CENTURY, THAT MARK THE BEGINNING OF THE STRETCH OF TRADITION]
+
+On the Sabbath only cold collations were served. Public opinion was a
+stern master. Woe betide the one rash enough to defy the established
+conventions! The physician on his rounds, or the church-goer too aged or
+infirm to walk to the place of worship, were the only ones permitted to
+make use of a horse and carriage. Now and then one of the godless would
+slip away northward for a drive on some unfrequented road. Detection
+meant society's averted face and stern reprimand. For an indefinite
+period the sinner would be a subject of intercession at evening prayers.
+
+The weekday life was in keeping with the Knickerbocker Sabbath. Home was
+the family castle, over which parental authority ruled with an iron
+hand. Hospitality was genuine and whole-hearted; but tempered by frugal
+moderation. Strict punctuality was demanded of every member of the
+household. The noon repast was the meal of the day. At the stroke of
+twelve old New York sat down to table. In the home there was variety and
+abundance, but the dinner was served as one course. Meats, poultry,
+vegetables, pies, puddings, fruits, and sweets were crowded together on
+the board. This adherence to the midday meal must have been the weak
+point in the armour in which the old order encased itself. For there the
+first breach was made. New Yorkers, returning from visits to Europe,
+hooted at the primitive noon repast of their youth. At first what were
+called the "foreign airs" of these would-be innovators were treated with
+derision. But they persisted, and by slow stages three o'clock became
+the extra fashionable hour for dinner. The old City Hotel was one of the
+first public places to fall into line.
+
+The time was to come when a dining establishment, second to none of its
+day in social prestige and culinary excellence, was to stand on a corner
+of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. But when those who dwelt on lower
+Fifth Avenue were still pioneers, dining out in public places meant a
+long and venturesome journey to the southward. The restaurants of that
+time--they were more generally called "eating houses,"--were almost all
+established in the business portions of the city. The midday dinner was
+the meal on which they depended for their main support. Then masculine
+New York left its shop or its counting house, hurried a block to the
+right, or a block to the left, and fell greedily on the succulent
+oyster, the slice of rare roast beef, or the sizzling English mutton
+chop. Conspicuous among the refectories of this type were the Auction
+Hotel, on Water Street, near Wall; the dining room of Clark and Brown,
+on Maiden Lane, near Liberty Street, one of the first of the so-called
+English chop-houses; the United States Hotel, which stood, until a few
+years ago, at the corner of Water and Fulton Streets, and which was the
+chosen home of the captains of the whaling ships from New London,
+Nantucket, New Bedford, and Sag Harbor; Downing's, on Broad Street,
+famed for its Saddle Rocks and Blue Points, and its political patrons;
+and the basement on Park Row, a few doors from the old Park Theatre,
+presided over by one Edward Windust. This last was a _rendezvous_ for
+actors, artists, musicians, newspaper-men--in short, the Bohemian set of
+that day--and its walls were covered with old play-bills, newspaper
+clippings, and portraits of tragedians and comedians of the past.
+
+But already a demand had been felt for viands of another nature;
+hospitality of another sort. The womankind of the day was looking for an
+occasional chance to break away from the monotonous if wholesome and
+substantial table of the home. Those stiff Knickerbockers knew it not;
+but the modern dining-out New York was already in the making. At first
+the movement was ascribed to the European Continental element. In New
+York Delmonico and Guerin were the pioneers in the field. The former
+began in a little place of pine tables and rough wooden chairs on
+William Street, between Fulton and Ann. The original equipment consisted
+of a broad counter covered with white napkins, two-tine forks,
+buck-handled knives, and earthenware plates and cups. From such humble
+beginnings grew the establishments that have subsequently carried the
+name. Francis Guerin's first cafe was on Broadway, between Pine and
+Cedar Streets, directly opposite the old City Hotel. Another resort of
+the same type was the _Cafe des Mille Colonnes_, kept by the Italian,
+Palmo, on the west side of Broadway, near Duane Street. It was
+apparently on a scale lavish for those days. Long mirrors on the walls
+reflected, in an endless vista, the gilded columns that supported the
+ceiling. The fortune accumulated by Palmo in the restaurant was lost in
+an attempt to introduce Italian opera into the United States. Palmo's
+Opera House, in Chamber Street, between Centre Street and Broadway,
+later became Burton's Theatre.
+
+Until 1844, New York was guarded against crime by the old
+"Leather-heads." This force patrolled the city by night, or that part of
+it known as the lamp district. They were not watchmen by profession, but
+were recruited from the ranks of porters, cartmen, stevedores, and
+labourers. They were distinguished by a fireman's cap without front
+(hence the name "Leather-head"), an old camlet coat, and a lantern. They
+had a wholesome respect for their skins, and were inclined to keep out
+of harm's way, seldom visiting the darker quarters of the city. When
+they bawled the hour all rogues in the vicinity were made aware of their
+whereabouts. Above Fourteenth Street the whole city was a neglected
+region. It was beyond the lamp district and in the dark.
+
+In no way, to the mind of the present scribe, can the contrast between
+the life of the modern city and of the town of the days when Fifth
+Avenue was in the making be better emphasized than by comparing the
+conditions of travel. It was in the year 1820 that John Stevens of
+Hoboken, who had become exasperated because people did not see the value
+of railroads as he did, resolved to prove, at his own expense, that the
+method of travel urged by him was not a madman's scheme. So on his own
+estate on the Hoboken hill he built a little railway of narrow gauge and
+a small locomotive. Long enough had he been sneered at and called
+maniac. He put the locomotive on the track with cars behind it, and ran
+it with himself as a passenger, to the amazement of those before whom
+the demonstration was made. So far as is known that was the first
+locomotive to be built or run on a track in America. But even with
+Stevens's successful example, years passed before steam travel assumed a
+practical form.
+
+When the pioneer of Fifth Avenue wished to voyage far afield it was
+toward the stage-coach as a means of transportation that his mind
+turned, for the stage-coach was the only way by which a large portion of
+the population could accomplish overland journeys. To go to Boston, for
+example, the traveller from New York usually left by a steamboat that
+took him to Providence in about twenty-three hours, and travelled the
+remaining forty miles by coach. Five hours was needed for the overland
+journey, and was considered amazing speed. By the year 1832 the overland
+trip between New York and Boston had been reduced to forty-one hours.
+But the passengers were not allowed to break the journey at a tavern,
+even for four or five hours of sleep, as they had formerly done, but
+were carried forward night and day without intermission. A fare of
+eleven dollars was usually exacted for the trip.
+
+Even to go to one of the towns of Connecticut, the shore towns of the
+Boston Post Road, was an undertaking that called for serious preliminary
+study. A New York paper, now before the writer, carries in its first
+column an advertisement of a new steamer, the "Fairfield," plying
+between New York and Norwalk. But in order to make use of its services,
+the traveller had to be at the pier at the foot of Market Street at six
+o'clock in the morning. Upon the arrival at Norwalk stages were at hand
+for the convenience of such of the passengers who wished to travel on
+to Saugatuck, Fairfield, Bridgeport, Stratford, Milford, and other
+points. The same column carried information for those who contemplated
+voyaging to Newport or Providence. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
+the steamboats "Benjamin Franklin" (Capt. E.S. Bunker) and "President"
+(Capt. R.S. Bunker) left New York for those Rhode Island towns at five
+o'clock in the evening.
+
+The Post Road to Boston of those days differed much from the Boston Post
+Road of the present; especially in its first stages going northward from
+New York. There was no spacious Pelham Parkway skirting the waters of
+the Long Island Sound. Before crossing the Harlem the road followed in a
+general way the Broadway trail. Beyond the river it zigzagged in a
+northeasterly direction through Eastchester. Not until the crossing of
+the Byram River transferred the road from New York to New England did it
+take on any resemblance to the trail of today, and even beyond, the town
+of Greenwich seems to have been neglected entirely.
+
+Yet, in comparison, the East was developed. It was the bold Sinbad
+turning his face resolutely and courageously towards the setting sun who
+experienced the real inconveniences and perils. Nor, at first, did that
+mean the adventurous journey into the lands that were beyond the great
+Appalachian range. The shining countenance of the unknown was nearer at
+hand. It is just a matter of turning the clock back a hundred years.
+
+From the windows of the apartment houses looking down on the Riverside
+Drive the Delaware River is just beyond the Jersey hills. To journey
+there today does not even call for the study of time-tables. Mr.
+Manhattan rises at the usual hour and eats his usual leisurely
+breakfast. At, say, nine o'clock, he settles back behind the
+steering-wheel of his motor-car. Crossing the Hudson by the Forty-second
+Street Ferry, he climbs the Weehawken slope, and swings westward over
+one of the uninviting turnpikes that disfigure the marshy land between
+the Passaic and the Hackensack. Then he finds the real Jersey, the
+Jerseyman's Jersey, of rolling hills, and historic memories of
+Washington's Continental troops in ragged blue and buff.--Morristown,
+with its superb estates, the stiff climb of Schooley's Mountain, the
+descent along the wooded ravine, the road following the winding
+Musconetcong River through Washington, the clustered buildings of
+Lafayette College crowning the Pennsylvania shore, and in good time for
+luncheon Mr. Manhattan is over the bridge connecting Easton and
+Phillipsburg.
+
+A few years ago there appeared a little book telling of the experiences
+of a family migrating from Connecticut to Ohio in 1811. In interesting
+contrast to the morning dash just outlined is the story of that journey
+of a little more than one hundred years ago. Before crossing the North
+River the voyagers solemnly discussed the perilous waters that
+confronted them. "Tomorrow we embark for the opposite shore: may Heaven
+preserve us from the raging, angry waves!" The first night's stop was at
+Springfield, where, within the living memory of the older members of the
+party, a skirmish between the American troops and the soldiers of King
+George had taken place.
+
+Another day's travel carried the party as far as Chester. At that point
+the task of travel became arduous. Over miry roads, in places blocked by
+boulders, there was the painful, laborious ascent of the steep grade
+leading to the summit of what we now call Schooley's Mountain. There the
+party camped for the night, beginning the descent early the morning of
+the following day. The brisk three or four hours' run that gives the
+motorist of today just the edge of appetite needed for the full
+enjoyment of his midday meal was to those hardy adventurers of a century
+ago almost the journey of a week.
+
+For transatlantic travel there was the Black Ball line, between New York
+and Liverpool, first of four ships, and later of twelve. That service
+had been founded in 1816 by New York merchants. The Red Star line
+followed in 1821, and soon after the Swallowtail line. The packets were
+ships of from six hundred to fifteen hundred tons burden, and made the
+eastward trip in about twenty-three days and the return trip in about
+forty days. The record was held by the "Canada," of the Black Ball line,
+which had made the outward run in fifteen days and eighteen hours. That
+time was reduced later by the "Amazon." The first steamer to cross the
+Atlantic was the American ship "Savannah." She made the trial trip from
+New York to Savannah in April, 1819, and in the following month her
+owners decided to send her overseas. The time of her passage was
+twenty-six days, eight under steam and eighteen under sail. Stephen
+Rogers, her navigator, in a letter to the New London "Gazette," wrote
+that the "Savannah" was first sighted from the telegraph station at Cape
+Clear, on the southern coast of Ireland, which reported her as being on
+fire, and a king's cutter was sent to her relief. "But great was their
+wonder at their inability to come up with a ship under bare poles. After
+several shots had been fired from the cutter the engine was stopped, and
+the surprise of the cutter's crew at the mistake they had made, as well
+as their curiosity to see the strange Yankee craft, can be easily
+imagined." From Liverpool the "Savannah" proceeded to St. Petersburg,
+stopping at Stockholm, and on her return she left St. Petersburg on
+October 10th, arriving at Savannah November 30th. But the prestige that
+the journey had won did not compensate for the heavy expense. Her
+boilers, engines, and paddles were removed, and she was placed on the
+Savannah route as a packet ship, being finally wrecked on the Long
+Island coast. The successful establishment of steam as a means of
+conveying a vessel across the Atlantic did not come until the spring of
+1838, when, on the same day, April 23rd, two ships from England reached
+New York. They were the "Sirius," which had sailed from Cork, Ireland,
+April 4th, and the "Great Western," which had left Bristol April 8th.
+The following year marked the founding of the Cunard Line.
+
+About the same time began the famous Clippers, which carried
+triumphantly the American flag to every corner of the Seven Seas. They
+were at first small, swift vessels of from six hundred to nine hundred
+tons, and designed for the China tea trade. Later came the "Challenge,"
+of two thousand tons, and the "Invincible," of two thousand one hundred
+and fifty tons. "That clipper epoch," said a writer in "Harper's
+Magazine" for January, 1884, "was an epoch to be proud of; and we were
+proud of it. The New York newspapers abounded in such headlines as
+these: 'Quickest Trip on Record,' 'Shortest Passage to San Francisco,'
+'Unparalleled Speed,' 'Quickest Voyage Yet,' 'A Clipper as is a
+Clipper,' 'Extraordinary Dispatch,' 'The Quickest Voyage to China,' 'The
+Contest of the Clippers,' 'Great Passage from San Francisco,' 'Race
+Round the World.'" Runs of three hundred and even three hundred and
+thirty miles a day were not uncommon feats of those clipper ships, a
+rate of speed far surpassing the achievement of the steam-propelled
+vessels of the period.
+
+When Charles Dickens first came to New York, in 1842, it was after a
+transatlantic journey that had landed him at Boston. There is extant a
+picture of the cabin that he occupied on the "Britannia" on the trip
+across that throws an interesting light on the limitations and
+inconveniences to which early Fifth Avenue was subjected when it visited
+the old world. Leaving Boston on a February afternoon, Dickens proceeded
+by rail to Worcester. The next morning another train carried him to
+Springfield. The next stop was Hartford, a distance of only twenty-five
+miles. But at that time of the year, Dickens records, the roads were so
+bad that the journey would probably have occupied ten or twelve hours.
+So progress was accomplished by means of the waters of the Connecticut
+River, in a boat that the Englishman described as so many feet short,
+and so many feet narrow, with a cabin apparently for a certain
+celebrated dwarf of the period, yet somehow containing the ubiquitous
+American rocking chair. Going from Hartford to New Haven consumed three
+hours of train travel; and, rising early after a night's rest, Dickens
+went on board the Sound packet bound for New York. That was the first
+American steamboat of any size that he had seen, and he wrote that, to
+an Englishman, it was less like a steamboat than a huge floating bath,
+and that its cabin, to his unaccustomed eyes, seemed about as long as
+the Burlington Arcade. From the deck of this packet he first viewed
+Hell's Gate, the Hog's Back, the Frying Pan, and other notorious
+localities attractive to readers of the Diedrich Knickerbocker History.
+When, later, Dickens left New York for Philadelphia, he wrote of the
+journey as being made by railroad and two ferries, and occupying between
+five and six hours.
+
+The ten years that separated the first visit of Dickens and the first
+visit of Thackeray had wrought many changes. Thackeray, too, came to New
+York from Boston, but in his case it was the matter of one unbroken
+train journey, in the course of which he reread the "Shabby Genteel
+Story" of a dozen years before. Dickens's transatlantic trip had
+consumed nineteen days. The "Canada," which carried Thackeray, made the
+crossing in thirteen. In New York Thackeray stayed at the Clarendon
+Hotel, on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Eighteenth Street; but his
+favourite haunt in the city was the third home of the Century, in
+Clinton Place. Though not in the least given to flattery or
+over-effusiveness in his comments on Americans and American
+institutions, Thackeray wrote and spoke of the Century as "the best and
+most comfortable club in the world."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+_The Stretch of Tradition_
+
+
+Stretches of the Avenue--The Stretch of Tradition--Washington Arch--Old
+Homes and Gardens--The Mews and MacDougal Alley--In the Fourth Decade--A
+Genial Ruffian of the Olden Time--Sailor's Snug Harbor--The Miss Green
+School--Andrew H. Green, John Fiske, John Bigelow, Elihu Root, and
+Others as Teachers--The Brevoort Farm--The First Hotel of the Avenue--A
+Romance of 1840--"Both Sides of the Avenue."
+
+    A snug little farm was the old Brevoort
+    Where cabbages grew of the choicest sort;
+    Full-headed, and generous, ample and fat,
+    In a queenly way on their stems they sat,
+    And there was boast of their genuine breed,
+    For from old Utrecht had come their seed.
+      --_Gideon Tucker, "The Old Brevoort Farm."_
+
+
+Passing under the Washington Arch, the march up the Avenue properly
+begins. To commemorate the centenary of the inauguration of the nation's
+first President a temporary arch was erected in the spring of 1889. The
+original structure reached from corner to corner across Fifth Avenue,
+opposite the Park, and the expense was borne by Mr. William Rhinelander
+Stewart and other residents of Washington Square. It added so much to
+the beauty of the entrance to the Avenue that steps were taken to make
+it permanent, and the present Arch was the result of popular
+subscription. One hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars was the cost
+of the structure, which was designed by Stanford White. Comparatively
+recent additions to the Arch are the two sculptured groups on northern
+facade, to the right and left of the span. They are the work of H.A.
+MacNeil.
+
+Of all the blocks in the stretch of tradition that carries the Avenue up
+to Fourteenth Street, the richest in interest is, naturally, that which
+lies immediately north of the Square. Dividing this block in two, and
+running respectively east and west, are Washington Mews and MacDougall
+Alley. When Fifth Avenue was young and addicted to stately horse-drawn
+turnouts, it was in these half streets that were stabled the steeds and
+the carriages. Of comparatively recent date is the remodelling that has
+converted the old stables into quaint, if somewhat garish artist
+studios.
+
+From the top of a north-bound bus as it leaves the Square may be seen
+the beautiful gardens that have always been a feature of these first
+houses. Mrs. Emily Johnston de Forest, in her life of her grandfather,
+John Johnston, has described these gardens as they were from 1833 to
+1842. "The houses in the 'Row,' as this part of Washington Square was
+called, all had beautiful gardens in the rear about ninety feet deep,
+surrounded by white, grape-covered trellises, with rounded arches at
+intervals, and lovely borders full of old-fashioned flowers." Although
+some of the "Row" had cisterns, all the residents went for their washing
+water to "the pump with a long handle" that stood in the Square. Of that
+pump Mrs. de Forest tells the following tale. One of her grandfather's
+neighbours told his coachman to fetch a couple of pails of water for
+Mary, the laundress. The coachman said that this was not his business,
+and upon being asked what his business was, replied: "To harness the
+horses and drive them." Thereupon he was told to bring the carriage to
+the door. His employer then invited the laundress with her two pails to
+step in and bade the coachman to drive her to the pump. There was no
+further trouble with the coachman.
+
+As has been told elsewhere, before the Avenue was ever dreamed of, this
+land belonged to the Randall estate. The founder of the family was one
+Captain Thomas Randall, described as a freebooter of the seas, who
+commanded the "Fox," and sailed for years in and out of New Orleans,
+where he sold the proceeds of his voyages and captures. To this genial
+old ruffian was born a son, Robert Richard, after which event the father
+settled down and became a respectable merchant in Hanover Street, New
+York. He was coxswain of the barge crew of thirteen ship's captains who
+rowed General Washington from Elizabethtown Point to New York, on the
+way to the first inauguration. When Robert Richard came to die, in 1801,
+he dictated, propped up in bed, his last will. After the bequests to
+relatives and servants, he whispered to his lawyer: "My father was a
+mariner, his fortune was made at sea. There is no snug harbour for
+worn-out sailors. I would like to do something for them." Incidentally,
+the lawyer who drew up the will was Alexander Hamilton.
+
+[Illustration: AT THE NORTHEAST CORNER OF THE AVENUE AND TENTH STREET IS
+THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF THE ASCENSION, BUILT IN 1840, AND CONSECRATED
+NOVEMBER 5, 1841. IT BELONGS TO A PART OF THE AVENUE, FROM THE SQUARE TO
+TWELFTH STREET, WHICH HAS CHANGED LITTLE SINCE 1845]
+
+So the Sailor's Snug Harbor Estate came into being, later to be
+transferred to its present home on Staten Island. As I survey it from
+the Richmond Terrace, which it faces, I like to recall its origin. That
+origin does not in the least seem to interfere with the comfort of the
+old salts in blue puffing away at their short pipes before the gate or
+strolling across the broad lawn. Never mind the source of Captain Tom's
+money. It is not for them to worry about the "Fox," or the "De Lancey,"
+a brigantine with fourteen guns, which the "financier" took out in 1757,
+and with which he made some sensational captures, or the "Saucy Sally."
+Eventually the "De Lancey" was taken by the Dutch and the "Saucy Sally"
+by the English. But before these misfortunes befell him Captain Tom had
+amassed a fat property. Ostensibly he plied a coastwise trade mostly
+between New York and New Orleans. But the same chronicler to whom we owe
+the significant expression: "In those days a man was looked upon as
+highly unfortunate if he had not a vessel which he could put to
+profitable use," summed the matter up when he said: "The Captain went
+wherever the Spanish flag covered the largest amount of gold."
+
+At the northeast corner of Washington Square and Fifth Avenue is the
+James Boorman house, now, I believe, the residence of Mr. Eugene
+Delano. Helen W. Henderson, in "A Loiterer in New York," alludes to
+certain letters about old New York written by Mr. Boorman's niece.
+"She writes," says Miss Henderson, "of her sister having been sent to
+boarding school at Miss Green's, No. 1 Fifth Avenue, and of how she
+used to comfort herself, in her home-sickness for the family, at
+Scarborough-on-the-Hudson, by looking out of the side windows of her
+prison at her uncle, 'walking in his flower-garden in the rear of his
+house on Washington Square!'" When James Boorman built his house, it was
+all open country behind it. Mr. Boorman built also the houses Nos. 1 and
+3 Fifth Avenue and the stables that were the nucleus of the Washington
+Mews of the present day. In the houses was opened, in 1835, a select
+school for young ladies, presided over at first by Mr. Boorman's only
+sister, Mrs. Esther Smith.
+
+Soon, from Worcester, Massachusetts, came a Miss Green, a girl of
+eighteen, to teach in the school. Another sister followed and in the
+course of a few years the establishment became the Misses Green School,
+which, for a long period, before and after the Civil War, was one of the
+most distinguished institutions of its kind in the city. Later it was
+carried on by the Misses Graham. There were educated the daughters of
+the commercial and social leaders of New York. Among the pupils were
+Fanny and Jenny Jerome, the latter afterwards to become Lady Randolph
+Churchill, and the mother of Winston Churchill. A brother of Lucy and
+Mary Green was Andrew H. Green, the "Father of Greater New York." He had
+for a time a share in the direction of the establishment, and in 1844,
+taught a class in American history. Some of the younger teachers came
+from the Union Theological Seminary in Washington Square. Among the men
+later to become distinguished, who lectured at the school, were Felix
+Foresti, professor at the University, and at Columbia College, Clarence
+Cook, Lyman Abbott, John Fiske, John Bigelow, teaching botany and
+charming the young ladies because he was "so handsome," and Elihu Root,
+then a youth fresh from college. To quote from Miss Henderson: "Miss
+Boorman has often told me of the amusement that the shy theological
+students and other young teachers afforded the girls in their classes,
+and how delighted these used to be to see instructors fall into a trap
+which was unconsciously prepared for them. The room in which the
+lectures were given had two doors, side by side, and exactly alike, one
+leading into the hall and the other into a closet. The young men having
+concluded their remarks, and feeling some relief at the successful
+termination of the ordeal, would tuck their books under their arms, bow
+gravely to the class, open the door, and walk briskly into the closet.
+Even Miss Green's discipline had its limits, and when the lecturer
+turned to find the proper exit he had to face a class of grinning
+schoolgirls not much younger than himself, to his endless mortification.
+Elihu Root recently met at a dinner a lady who asked him if he
+remembered her as a member of his class at Miss Green's school. 'Do I
+remember you?' the former secretary of State replied. 'You are one of
+the girls who used to laugh at me when I had to walk into the closet.'"
+
+It was in 1835, when the new avenue was in the first flush of its lusty
+infancy, that a hotel was opened at the northeast corner of Eighth
+Street. They call it the Lafayette today: tomorrow it may have still
+another name. But to one with any feeling for old New York it will
+always be remembered by its appellation of yesterday, which it drew from
+the old proprietors of the land on which it stands, that family that is
+descended from Hendrick Brevoort who had served Haarlem as constable and
+overseer, and later emigrated to New York, where he was an alderman from
+1702 to 1713. The Brevoort farm adjoined the Randall farm and ran
+northeasterly to about Fourth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Among the
+descendants of the Dutch burgher was one Henry Brevoort, to whose
+obstinacy of disposition is owed a curious inconsistency of the city of
+today. His farmhouse was on the west side of Fourth Avenue and on his
+land were certain favourite trees. When the Commissioners were
+replanning the town in 1807 there was a projected Eleventh Street. But
+the trees were in the way of the improvement, so old Brevoort stood in
+the doorway, blunderbuss in hand, and defied the invaders to such
+purpose that to this day Eleventh Street has never been cut through.
+Instead, Grace Church, its garden and rectory cover the site of the old
+homestead. Later the vestry of Grace Church was to play old Brevoort's
+game. "Boss" Tweed determined to cut through or make the church pay
+handsomely for immunity. The vestry defied him. Tweed never acted.
+
+There was another Henry Brevoort in the family. He it was who built the
+house that now stands at the northwest corner of the Avenue and Ninth
+Street. That Henry was the grandfather of James Renwick, Jr., the
+architect who built Grace Church and St. Patrick's Cathedral. His house
+was one of the great houses of the early days. Now known as the De Rham
+house--Brevoort sold it in 1857 to Henry De Rham for fifty-seven
+thousand dollars,--it still strikes the passer-by on account of its
+individuality of appearance. But long before the De Rhams entered in
+possession it had its romance. There, the evening of February 24, 1840,
+was held the first masked ball ever given in New York. It was, to quote
+Mr. George S. Hellman, "the most splendid social affair of the first
+half of the nineteenth century." But it was also the last masked ball
+held in the town for many years.
+
+The name of the British Consul to New York at the time was Anthony
+Barclay, and he had a daughter. Her name was Matilda; she is described
+as having been a belle of great charm and beauty, and as having had a
+number of suitors. Of course, after the fashion of all love stories, the
+suitor favoured by her was the one of whom her parents most disapproved.
+He was a young South Carolinian named Burgwyne. Opposition served only
+to fan the flame, and the lovers met by stealth, and the gay Southerner
+wooed the fair Briton in the good old school poetical manner. In soft
+communion of fancy they wandered together to far lands; to:
+
+         "that delightful Province of the Sun,
+    The first of Persian lands he shines upon,
+    Where all the loveliest children of his beam,
+    Flow'rets and fruits, blush over every stream,
+    And, fairest of all streams, the Murga roves
+    Among Merou's bright palaces and groves."
+
+It was "Tom" Moore's "Lalla Rookh" that was dearest to their hearts.
+Then came the great masked ball, to which practically all "society" was
+invited.
+
+Matilda and Burgwyne agreed to go in the guise of their romantic
+favourites; she as Lalla Rookh, and he as Feramorz, the young Prince.
+She wore "floating gauzes, bracelets, a small coronet of jewels, and a
+rose-coloured bridal veil." His dress was "simple, yet not without marks
+of costliness, with a high Tartarian cap, and strings of pearls hanging
+from his flowered girdle of Kaskan." Till four o'clock in the morning
+they danced. Then, still wearing the costumes of the romantic poem, they
+slipped away from the ball and were married before breakfast. It seems
+quite harmless, and natural, and as it should have been, when we regard
+it after all the years. But it caused a great uproar and scandal at the
+time, and brought masked balls into such odium that there was, a bit
+later, a fine of one thousand dollars imposed on anyone who should give
+one,--one-half to be deducted in case you told on yourself.
+
+There is a little magazine published in New York designed to entertain
+and instruct those who view from the top of a bus of one of the various
+lines that are the outgrowth of the old Fifth Avenue stage line. The
+magazine is called "From a Fifth Avenue Bus," and a feature from month
+to month is the department known as "Both Sides of Fifth Avenue." In the
+stretch between the Square and Eleventh Street, it points out as
+residences of particular interest those of Paul Dana, No. 1, George T.
+Bestle, No. 3, F. Spencer Witherbee, No. 4, and Lispenard Stewart, No.
+6; all below Eighth Street. Then, between Eighth and Ninth, Pierre Mali,
+No. 8, John C. Eames, No. 12, Miss Abigail Burt, No. 14, Dr. J. Milton
+Mabbott, No. 17, Dr. Edward L. Partridge, No. 19, and Dr. Robert J. Kahn
+(former Mark Twain home), No. 21. Between Ninth and Tenth, Charles De
+Rham, No. 24, Mrs. George Ethridge, No. 27, Mrs. Peter F. Collier, No.
+29, and Edwin W. Coggeshall, No. 30. On the next block, Frank B. Wiborg,
+No. 40, Gen. Rush Hawkins, No. 42, Miss Elsie Borg, No. 43, Howard
+Carter Dickinson, No. 45, Mrs. J.P. Cassidy, No. 49, and William W.
+Thompkins, No. 68. Besides the private residences are mentioned the
+Hotel Brevoort (the traditional name is used), the Berkeley at No. 20,
+and the Church of the Ascension, at Tenth Street, one of the very first
+of the Fifth Avenue churches, and the scene, on June 26, 1844, of the
+marriage of President John Tyler and Miss Julia Gardiner, the first
+marriage of a President of the United States during his term of office.
+The church a block farther north, on the same side of the Avenue is the
+First Presbyterian, dating from 1845, when the congregation moved uptown
+from the earlier edifice on Wall Street, just east of New Street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+_A Knickerbocker Pepys_
+
+
+A Knickerbocker Pepys--The Span of a Life--A Man of Many
+Responsibilities--Storm and Stress--Political Protestations--Hone and
+the Journalists--Contemporary Impressions of Bryant and Bennett--Hone
+and the Men of Letters--The Ways of British Lions.
+
+
+There is one kind of immortality that is not so much a matter of amount
+and quality of achievement as of the particular period of achievement.
+That, for example, of Samuel Pepys.
+
+Pepys, living in the turbulent, densely populated London of our time,
+and recording day by day the events coming under his observation, would
+probably have his audience of posterity limited to a little circle of
+venerating descendants who would certainly bore the neighbours. It is
+quite easy to picture the members of that circle in the year 1998, or
+2024. "Listen to what Grandpapa's Diary says of the awful Zeppelin raids
+of February, 1917," or, "But Great-grandpapa, who had just finished his
+walk in the Park, and was passing Downing Street when the news came,
+etc." "Il est fatiguant," whispered Mr. St. John of General Webb at one
+of the dinners in "Henry Esmond," "avec sa trompette de Wynandael."
+That persistent blowing of the "trompette" of grandpapa would likewise
+be voted "fatiguant." "Grandpapa! A plague upon their grandpapa!"
+
+It needed the smaller town, the more limited age, the greater intimacy
+of life, to make Pepys's Diary the vivid human narrative that it has
+been for so many years.
+
+And as with the Pepys of seventeenth century London, so with the
+chronicler of events day by day in the New York of the first half of the
+nineteenth century. If there was a Knickerbocker Pepys it was Philip
+Hone, who in the span of his life saw his city expand from twenty-five
+thousand to half a million, and whose diary has been described as one of
+the most fascinating personal documents ever penned.
+
+There is a little thoroughfare far downtown called Dutch Street. It runs
+from Fulton to John Street. There Philip Hone was born on the 25th of
+October, 1780, and there he passed his boyhood in a wooden house at the
+corner of John and Dutch Streets which his father bought in 1784. After
+a common school education, he became, at seventeen years of age, a clerk
+for an older brother whose business as an auctioneer consisted mainly in
+selling the cargoes brought to New York by American merchantmen. Two
+years as a clerk, and then Philip was made a partner. The firm
+prospered, and by 1820, the future diarist, though only forty years old,
+had become a rich man. With the best years of his mature life before
+him, with a wish to see the world and a desire for self-improvement, he
+retired from business, and in 1821, made his first journey to Europe,
+sailing from New York on the "James Monroe." When he returned, he bought
+a house on Broadway, near Park Place, on the exact spot now occupied by
+the Woolworth Building, for which he paid twenty-five thousand dollars.
+There is extant an old print of the house, showing also the American
+Hotel on the corner, and another residence, the ground floor of which
+was occupied by Peabody's Book Shop. On the block below, where the Astor
+House was built later, were the homes of John G. Coster, David Lydig,
+and J.J. Astor. It was one of the most magnificent dwellings of the
+town, and there Hone entertained not only the distinguished men of New
+York, but also such Americans of country-wide fame as Daniel Webster,
+Henry Clay, and Harrison Gray Otis; and such old-world visitors as
+Charles Dickens, Lord Morpeth, Captain Marryat, John Galt, and Fanny
+Kemble. He had children growing up--his marriage to Catherine Dunscomb
+had taken place in 1801, when he was in his twenty-second year--and for
+the benefit of the young people his was practically open house. Public
+and private honours were thrust upon him. An assistant alderman from
+1824 to 1826, in the latter year he was appointed Mayor. (The Mayor was
+not elected until 1834.) William Paulding had preceded him in the
+office, and William Paulding succeeded him in 1827. But the Hone
+administration was long remembered on account of its civic excellence
+and its social dignity. For more than thirty years he served
+gratuitously the city's first Bank of Savings, which was established in
+1816, and in 1841 he became its president. Governor of the New York
+Hospital, trustee of the Bloomingdale Asylum, founder of the Clinton
+Hall Association, and of the Mercantile Library, trustee of Columbia
+College, of the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company, president of
+the American Exchange Bank, and of the Glenham Manufacturing Company,
+vice-president of the Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and
+Dumb, of the American Seamen's Fund Society, of the New York Historical
+Society, of the Fuel Saving Society, a director in the Matteawan Cotton
+and Machine Company, the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, the Eagle
+Fire Insurance Company, the National Insurance Company, a member of the
+Chamber of Commerce, a manager of the Literary and Philosophical
+Society, of the Mechanic and Scientific Association, a founder and a
+governor of the Union Club, and a vestryman of Trinity Church--the
+wonder is that he found time to write in his Diary at all. According to
+Bayard Tuckerman, who edited the Diary and wrote the Introduction to it,
+an ordinary day's work for Hone was "to ride out on horseback to the
+Bloomingdale Asylum, to return and pass the afternoon at the Bank for
+Savings, thence to attend a meeting of the Trinity Vestry, or to preside
+over the Mercantile Library Association." "He was never," said Mr.
+Tuckerman, "voluntarily absent from a meeting where the interest of
+others demanded his presence, and many were the good dinners he lost in
+consequence." Again: "He had personal gifts which extended the influence
+due to his character. Tall and spare, his bearing was distinguished, his
+face handsome and refined; his manners were courtly, of what is known as
+the 'old school'; his tact was great--he had a faculty for saying the
+right thing. In his own house his hospitality was enhanced by a graceful
+urbanity and a ready wit."
+
+The story of Philip Hone's life is substantially the story of the town
+from 1780 till 1851. When he first saw the light in Dutch Street, there
+were but twenty thousand persons for the occupying British troopers to
+keep in order. When, after his return from Europe in the early '20s he
+bought on Broadway in the neighbourhood of City Hall Park, that was the
+centre of fashionable residence.
+
+But by 1837 trade was claiming the section, and Hone sold out and built
+himself a new home, this time at the corner of Broadway and Great Jones
+Street. He saw the residence portion of the city go beyond that point,
+saw it grope up Fifth Avenue as far as Twentieth Street. The first entry
+in the Diary bears the date of May 18, 1828; the last of April 30, 1851,
+just four days before his death. That last entry shows that he felt that
+the end was near at hand. "Has the time come?" he asks, and then quotes
+seven stanzas from James Montgomery's "What is Prayer?", adding four
+stanzas of his own.
+
+Just eleven months to a day before the last entry, under date of May 30,
+1850, Hone commented on the swiftly changing aspect of the city. To him
+the renovation of Broadway seemed to be an annual occurrence. If the
+houses were not pulled down they fell of their own accord. He wrote:
+"The large, three-story house, corner of Broadway and Fourth Street,
+occupied for several years by Mrs. Seton as a boarding-house, fell today
+at two o'clock, with a crash so astounding that the girls, with whom I
+was sitting in the library, imagined for a moment that it was caused by
+an earthquake. Fortunately the workmen had notice to make their escape.
+No lives were lost and no personal injury was sustained.
+
+"The mania for converting Broadway into a street of shops is greater
+than ever. There is scarcely a block in the whole extent of this fine
+street of which some part is not in a state of transmutation. The City
+Hotel has given place to a row of splendid stores.
+
+"Stewart is extending his stores to take in the whole front from
+Chambers to Reade Street; this is already the most magnificent dry-goods
+establishment in the world. I certainly do not remember anything to
+equal it in London or Paris; with the addition now in progress this
+edifice will be one of the 'wonders' of the Western world. Three or four
+good brick houses on the corner of Broadway and Spring Street have been
+levelled, I know not for what purpose--shops, no doubt. The
+houses--fine, costly edifices, opposite to me extending from Driggs's
+corner down to a point opposite to Bond Street--are to make way for a
+grand concert and exhibition establishment."
+
+It is far from being all mellowness and amiability, that Diary. Hone had
+his prejudices and dislikes and strong political opinions. In the
+portraits that have been preserved there is the suggestion of
+intolerance and smug self-satisfaction. Also life did not turn out quite
+so rosy as it promised in 1828, when he retired from business with a
+handsome competence. In 1836, during the commercial depression, he met
+with financial reverses which forced him to return to the game of
+money-getting. He became president of the American Mutual Insurance
+Company, which was ruined by the great fire of July 19, 1845.
+
+"A fire has occurred," he recorded in the entry of that date, "the loss
+of which is probably $5,000,000; several of the insurance companies are
+ruined, and all are crippled. My office, I fear, is in the former
+category. We have lost between three and four hundred thousand dollars,
+which is more than we can pay.
+
+"This is a hard stroke for me. I was pleasantly situated with a moderate
+support for my declining years, and now, 'Othello's occupation's gone.'"
+
+But he met his reverses in a courageous manner, and in 1849 President
+Taylor appointed him Naval Officer of the Port of New York, a place
+which he held until his death.
+
+As became his day, Hone was a good trencherman. In the index to the
+Diary there are one hundred and sixteen pages marked as containing
+reference of some kind to dinner parties. The old New York names appear
+again and again. H. Brevoort, Chancellor and Mrs. Kent, Mr. and Mrs.
+W.B. Astor, Bishop Hobart, C. Brugiere and Miss Brugiere, Robert
+Maitland, Dr. Wainwright, Mr. and Mrs. Anthon, Judge Spencer, Judge
+Irving, Dr. Hosack, Peter Jay, P. Schemerhorn. And only the formal
+dinner parties are indexed. Aside from them there are scores of
+allusions to where the diarist dined and who dined with him. Small
+wonder that the passing of a cook of unusual abilities was an event to
+be recorded. An early entry, that of February 17, 1829, reads: "Died
+this morning, Simon, the celebrated cook. He was a respectable man, who
+has for many years been the fashionable cook in New York, and his loss
+will be felt on all occasions of large dinner and evening parties,
+unless it should be found that some suitable shoulders should be ready
+to receive the mantle of this distinguished _cuisinier_." When Hone was
+not entertaining at his own home or being entertained at somebody
+else's, he was trying out the fare at some one of the public hostelries.
+Date of December 18, 1830, there is reference to a familiar name.
+"Moore, Giraud, and I went yesterday to dine at Delmonico's, a French
+_restaurateur_, in William Street, which I had heard was on the Parisian
+plan, and very good. We satisfied our curiosity, but not our appetites."
+
+We are prone to regard the Civil War as an affair of the sixties. Hone
+was one of those who perceived the threat of it thirty years before.
+Always a bitter political opponent of Jackson, there was one occasion
+when he was loud in his applause. The South Carolina Convention had
+passed a number of resolutions regarded by Hone as rank treason, and the
+beginning of rebellion. The President had dealt with the matter in a
+proclamation, of which the diarist wrote December 12, 1832: "Very much
+to the surprise of some, and to the satisfaction of all our citizens, we
+have a long proclamation of President Jackson, which was published in
+Washington on the 12th. inst., and is in all our papers this day. It is
+a document addressed to the nullifiers of South Carolina, occasioned by
+the late treasonable proceedings of their convention. The whole subject
+is discussed in a spirit of conciliation, but with firmness and
+decision, and a determination to put down the wicked attempt to resist
+the laws. On the constitutionality of the laws which the nullifiers
+object to, and their right to recede from the Union, this able State
+paper is full and conclusive. The language of the President is that of a
+father addressing his wayward children, but determined to punish with
+the utmost severity the first open act of insubordination. As a
+composition it is splendid, and will take its place in the archives of
+our country, and will dwell in the memories of our citizens alongside of
+the farewell address of the 'Father of his Country.' It is not known
+which of the members of the cabinet is entitled to the honour of being
+the author; it is attributed to Mr. Livingston, the Secretary of State,
+and to Governor Cass, the Secretary of War. Nobody, of course, supposes
+it was written by him whose name is subscribed to it. But whoever shall
+prove to be the author has raised to himself an imperishable monument of
+glory. The sentiments, at least, are approved by the President, and he
+should have the credit of it, as he would have the blame if it were bad;
+and, possessing these sentiments, we have reason to believe that he has
+firmness enough to do his duty.
+
+"I say, Hurrah for Jackson, and so I am willing to say at all times when
+he does his duty. The only difference between the thorough-going Jackson
+man and me is, that I will not 'hurrah' for him right or wrong. And I
+think that Jackson's election may save the Union."
+
+If he disliked Jackson on account of his policies, he seemed to dislike
+journalists regardless of their political creeds. To his eyes they were
+a pestilential crew. Here is the first glimpse of Bryant, the great
+William Cullen Bryant, who as a mere boy had penned the beautiful
+"Thanatopsis." It is of the date of April 20, 1831. "While I was shaving
+this morning at eight o'clock, I witnessed from the front window an
+encounter in the street nearly opposite, between William C. Bryant and
+William L. Stone, the former one of the editors of the _Evening Post_,
+and the latter the editor of the _Commercial Advertiser_. The former
+commenced the attack by striking Stone over the head with a cow-skin;
+after a few blows the men closed, and the whip was wrested away from
+Bryant and carried off by Stone." Here and there are flung expressions
+of admiration for Bryant's verse, but the tone is of one speaking of the
+cleverness of a trained lizard. Thirteen years intervened between the
+first and the last Bryant entry. In February, 1844, Nicholas Biddle, the
+great financier, died. Something that Bryant wrote roused Hone's wrath.
+Here is his comment of February 28: "Bryant, the editor of the _Evening
+Post_, in an article of his day, virulent and malignant as are usually
+the streams which flow from that polluted source, says that Mr. Biddle
+'died at his country-seat, where he passed the last of his days in
+elegant retirement, which, if justice had taken place, would have been
+spent in the penitentiary.' This is the first instance I have known of
+the vampire of party-spirit seizing the lifeless body of its victim
+before its interment, and exhibiting its bloody claws to the view of
+mourning relatives and sympathizing friends. How such a black-hearted
+misanthrope as Bryant should possess an imagination teeming with
+beautiful poetical images astonishes me; one would as soon expect to
+extract drops of honey from the fangs of the rattlesnake."
+
+But this was kindly tolerance compared to his attitude towards the elder
+Bennett. The latter apparently came under Hone's notice in January,
+1836, and the first mention in the Diary reads: "There is an
+ill-looking, squinting man called Bennett, formerly connected with Webb
+in the publication of his paper, who is now editor of the _Herald_, one
+of the penny papers which are hawked about the streets by a gang of
+troublesome, ragged boys, and in which scandal is retailed to all who
+delight in it, at that moderate price. This man and Webb are now bitter
+enemies, and it was nuts for Bennett to be the organ of Mr. Lynch's late
+vituperative attack upon Webb, which Bennett introduced in his paper
+with evident marks of savage exultation." To that famous masked ball
+given by the Brevoorts on the evening of February 24, 1840, in their
+house at Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue Hone went attired as Cardinal
+Wolsey. He forgot to tell of the romance of the night, the elopement of
+Miss Barclay and young Burgwyne, devoting his space to the expression of
+his resentment over the presence at the affair of an emissary of
+Bennett. "Whether the notice they" (the guests) "took of him" (the
+"Herald" reporter), "and that which they extend to Bennett when he shows
+his ugly face in Wall Street, may be considered approbatory of the
+dirty slanders and unblushing impudence of the paper they conduct, or is
+intended to purchase their forbearance towards themselves, the effect is
+equally mischievous." Again, date of June 2, 1840: "The punishment of
+the law adds to the fellow's notoriety, and personal chastisement is
+pollution to him who undertakes it. Write him down, make respectable
+people withdraw their support from the vile sheet, so that it will be
+considered disgraceful to read it, and the serpent will be rendered
+harmless." In the entry of February 14, 1842, Bennett is: "The impudent
+disturber of the public peace, whose infamous paper, the _Herald_, is
+more scurrilous, and of course more generally read, than any other."
+September 2, 1843, Hone records that: "Bennett, the editor of the
+_Herald_, is on a tour through Great Britain, whence he furnishes lies
+and scandal for the infamous paper which has contributed so much to
+corrupt the morals and degrade the taste of the people of New York." In
+one of the last entries of the Diary, a few months before Hone's death,
+allusion is made to a personal attack on the editor by the defeated
+candidate of the Locofoco party for the District-Attorneyship. "I should
+be well pleased to hear of this fellow being punished in this way, and
+once a week for the remainder of his life, so that new wounds might be
+inflicted before the old ones were healed, or until the fellow left off
+lying; but I fear that the editorial miscreant in this case will be more
+benefited than injured by this attack."
+
+A man of literary tastes, or at least a man who wished to be regarded as
+one of bookish inclinations, Hone seems never to have had any great
+liking for men of letters as such. All of the gifted and unhappy Poe's
+life in New York came within the period of the Diary, but in it is to be
+found not a single mention of his name. There was no place at the Hone
+table for the shabby, impossible genius. There was an impassable gulf
+between the well-ordered household facing the City Hall Park, or at the
+Broadway and Great Jones Street corner, and the humble Carmine Street
+lodging, or the Fordham Cottage. Early references to Fenimore Cooper,
+whom Hone first met at an American dinner to Lafayette in Paris in 1831,
+are gracious enough, for the creator of Leather-Stocking was a
+personage, and it suited Hone to stand well with personages. But when,
+seven years later, Cooper returned to the United States after his long
+stay abroad, and incurred the displeasure of his fellow-countrymen, Hone
+was quite ready to join in the hue and cry.
+
+With Washington Irving it was another matter. But who could have failed
+to feel genial towards the quiet, scholarly, altogether charming
+gentleman of Sunnyside? Also the legs of Irving fitted well and often
+under the Hone mahogany, and the part of the author that was perceptible
+above the table gave a flavour and dignity to the board. Somehow we see
+Hone's cheeks puffed out with pride as he chronicles: "My old friend,
+Washington Irving, who visits his native country after an absence of
+seventeen years. I passed half an hour with him very pleasantly." "I
+have devoted nearly the whole day to Washington Irving." "Irving and I
+left them and came to town to meet friends whom I had engaged to dine
+with me." "Washington Irving acquainted me with a circumstance, etc."
+"We next visited Washington Irving, who lives with his sister and nieces
+on the bank of the river." Any one who reads the Diary can see that Hone
+thoroughly approved of Irving. But just what, in his heart of hearts,
+did Irving think of Hone?
+
+The Diary gives some significant glimpses of Charles Dickens in America.
+In 1842 New York welcomed the Englishman riotously. Washington laughed
+at New York for doing too much and went to the other extreme. John
+Quincy Adams gave the Dickenses a dinner at which Hone was a guest.
+"Some clever people were invited to meet them" is the way the ingenuous
+Hone puts it. "They" (Dickens and Mrs. Dickens) "came, he in a
+frock-coat, and she in her bonnet. They sat at table until four o'clock,
+when he said: 'Dear, it is time for us to go home and dress for dinner.'
+They were engaged to dine with Robert Greenhow at the fashionable hour
+of half-past five! A most particularly funny idea to leave the table of
+John Quincy Adams to dress for a dinner at Robert Greenhow's!" Hone
+referred to the visitors as "The Boz and Bozess," and described the
+author of "Pickwick" as "a small, bright-eyed, intelligent-looking young
+fellow, thirty years of age, somewhat of a dandy in his dress, with
+'rings and things and fine array,' brisk in his manner, and of a lively
+conversation"; and Mrs. Dickens as "a little, fat, English-looking
+woman, of an agreeable countenance, and, I should think, 'a nice
+person.'"
+
+Dickens was not the only British author of those days to kindle the
+flames of American resentment. Almost all who came to our shores seemed
+to possess the faculty of "getting a rise" out of Yankee sensibilities.
+Captain Marryat was one of the offenders. At a dinner in Toronto he gave
+an injudicious toast. Thereupon the town of Lewistown, Maine, built a
+huge bonfire on the shore directly opposite Queenstown and destroyed all
+the "Midshipman Easys," "Peter Simples," "Japhets," and "Jacob
+Faithfuls" that could be obtained. Hone commented sensibly on the
+affair in his Diary for May 5, 1838. "Captain Marryat, I dare say, made
+a fool of himself (not a very difficult task, I should judge, from what
+I have seen of him); but the Lewistownians have beaten him all to smash,
+as the Kentuckians say. How mortified he must have been to hear that his
+books had been burned after they were paid for!" A year before Marryat
+had dined at the Hone house in New York and the host wrote: "The lion,
+Captain Marryat, is no great things of a lion, after all. In truth, the
+author of 'Peter Simple' and 'Jacob Faithful' is a very every-day sort
+of a man. He carries about him in his manner and conversation more of
+the sailor than the author, has nothing student-like in his appearance,
+and savours more of the binnacle lamp than of the study." And again, six
+months after the Lewistown flare-up: "It would have been better for both
+parties if the sailor author had been known on this side of the Atlantic
+only by his writings ... he has evidently not enjoyed the benefits of
+refined society, or intercourse with people of literary talents."
+
+The Knickerbocker Pepys grew mellower as he advanced in years. There is
+a marked change in the tone of the Diary dating from the very time when
+he himself suffered financial reverses. It was the test of the man that
+misfortune did not embitter him, but made him more kindly in his
+judgments of those about him. The smug self-satisfaction belonged to
+the early days. In the closing years of his useful life there was but
+one thing that disturbed him greatly. He foresaw the Deluge that was to
+come. December 12, 1850, was his last Thanksgiving. He wrote: "The
+annual time-honoured Thanksgiving-day throughout the state. No nation,
+ancient or modern, ever had more causes for thanksgiving, and reasons to
+praise the Author of all good, than the people of the United States. Yet
+there are many, at the present time, ignorant and unworthy of the
+blessings they enjoy, who would throw all things into confusion, break
+up the blessed Union which binds the States, and should bind the
+individuals forming their population; who would destroy the harmony, and
+condemn the obligations, of Constitution and law. Factionists, traitors,
+madmen--the Lord preserve us from the unholy influence of such
+principles!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+_Glimpses of the Sixties_
+
+
+Glimpses of the Sixties--At the "Sign of the Buck-horn"--Madison Square
+in Civil War Times--A Contemporary Chronicler--Mushroom
+Fortunes--Foreign Adventurers--Filling the Ballroom--Brown of Grace
+Church--Sunshine and Shadow--The Avenue and the Five Points--The Old
+Bowery--Blackmail--The Haunts of Chance--Two Famous Poems, William Allen
+Butler's "Nothing to Wear," and Edmund Clarence Stedman's "The Diamond
+Wedding."
+
+
+It seems but yesterday that the old Fifth Avenue Hotel passed to the
+limbo of bygone things. When "Victoria's Royal Son" came to visit us it
+was new and stately, and held by loyal patriots to be something for
+strangers from beyond the seas to behold and wonder at. But before the
+hotel there had been a famous tavern on the site, and then a hippodrome.
+
+"Can it be true," wrote Mrs. Schuyler Van Rennselaer in an article in
+the "Century Magazine" many years ago, "that I dreamily remember a
+canvas hippodrome where the Fifth Avenue Hotel stands? Kids curvetting
+in idiotic pride over imaginary mountain peaks on the rough ground of
+what is Madison Square? Can it be true that when we looked from our
+nursery windows towards Sixteenth Street we saw, on a lot foolishly
+called vacant, the most interesting of possible houses, an abandoned
+street-car, fitted with a front door and a chimney pot, and inhabited by
+an Irish family of considerable size?" That delightful Swiss Family
+Robinson-like habitation may have been a creation of Mrs. Van
+Rennselaer's fancy, but Franconi's Hippodrome was an historical fact,
+and the tavern that she remembers was Corporal Thompson's Madison
+Cottage, where, at the "Sign of the Buck-horn," trotting men gathered.
+When Fifth Avenue was in its infancy Madison Square still recalled the
+name of Tieman's, and in the centre there was a House of Refuge for
+sinful boys. At the Square the old Boston Post Road for a moment touched
+what was afterwards to be the Avenue before it twisted off in a
+northeasterly direction.
+
+Corporal Thompson's establishment was a diminutive frame cottage,
+surrounded by what might be called "a five acre lot," which was used,
+when used at all, for cattle exhibitions. It was, Mr. Dayton recorded,
+"the last stopping place for codgers, old and young. Laverty, Winans,
+Niblo, the Costers, Hones, Whitneys, Schermerhorns, Sol Kipp, Doctor
+Vache, Ogden Hoffman, Nat Blount, and scores more of _bon vivants_, hail
+fellows well met, would here end their ride for the day by 'smiling'
+with the worthy Corporal, and wash down any of their former
+improprieties with a sip of his _ne plus ultra_, which was always kept
+in reserve for a special nightcap. There was a special magnetism about
+the snug little bar-room, always trim as a lady's boudoir, which induced
+the desire to tarry awhile, as if that visit were destined to be the
+last; so it frequently happened that a jolly party was compelled to
+grope slowly homewards through the unlighted, gloomy road that led to
+the city."
+
+But all that has been in the days before. By the time that the Fifth
+Avenue Hotel had been firmly established on the site of the Buck-horn,
+the corner had become the centre of the new town. Across the Square, at
+the northeast angle, on the site of the building now capped by the
+figure of Diana, was a low, sordid shed. It was the Harlem Railroad
+Station. There, from one side started the cars for Boston, and from the
+other, the cars for Albany. Cars, not trains, for horses were the motive
+power as far as Thirty-second Street. There engines were attached in the
+open street. Later, the horses ran through the tunnel as far as
+Forty-second Street where the Grand Central Station now stands. In the
+Square the Worth Monument had been erected in 1857, and on the east side
+of the park, then enclosed by a high railing, was the brown church which
+dated from 1854. That decade from 1860 to 1870 was one of constant
+changes and shiftings. The New England soldier who marched through the
+town on his way to the front in 1861 rubbed his eyes a little when he
+passed through it again homeward bound after the surrender of Lee's army
+at Appomattox Court House had brought the War of Secession to a close.
+The last vestige of Knickerbocker life had disappeared forever.
+
+It had been, and still was, an era of extravagant speculation. Mushroom
+fortunes were springing up, and their possessors, as socially ambitious
+as they were socially inept, invaded Fifth Avenue strong in the belief
+in the all-conquering power of the Almighty Dollar. In most cases they
+did not last long. But they served a purpose. They erected the splendid
+houses on the Avenue that a few years later the clubs were to occupy and
+enjoy. Of the clubs that were on the Avenue in 1868, a contemporary
+chronicler wrote that nearly every one recorded the brief life of a New
+York aristocrat. "A lucky speculation, a sudden rise in real estate," so
+runs the rhetorical statement, "a new turn of the wheel-of-fortune,
+lifts the man who yesterday could not be trusted for his dinner, and
+gives him a place among men of wealth. He buys a lot on Fifth Avenue,
+puts up a palatial residence, outdoing all who have gone before him;
+sports his gay team in Central Park, carpets his sidewalk, gives two or
+three parties, and disappears from society. His family return to the
+sphere from which they were taken, and the mansion, with its gorgeous
+furniture, becomes a club-house." Perhaps this picture should be
+regarded with a certain restraint. The observer was an up-state
+minister, looking for the excesses, wickednesses, and extravagances of
+the great city. His judgment may have been as faulty as his style.
+
+But, if merely for the sake of learning a certain point of view, it is
+amusing to turn over those old volumes dealing with the sunshine and
+shadow of the city of the sixties. High Life and Moneyocracy, we are
+told, were synonymous. To use the Tennysonian line, "Every door was
+barred with gold, and opened but to golden keys." "If you wish parties,
+soirees, balls, that are elegant, attractive, and genteel (how they
+loved those dreadful adjectives 'elegant' and 'genteel'!) you will not
+find them among the snobbish clique, who, with nothing but money,
+attempt to rule New York." The words are of the clerical visitor before
+quoted. "Talent, taste, and refinement do not dwell with these. But high
+life has no passport except money. If a man has this, though destitute
+of character and brains, he is made welcome. One may come from Botany
+Bay or St. James; with a ticket-of-leave from a penal colony or St.
+Cloud; if he has diamond rings and a coach, all places will be open to
+him. The leaders of upper New York were, a few years ago, porters,
+stable boys, coal-heavers, pickers of rags, scrubbers of floors, and
+laundry women. Coarse, rude, uncivil, and immoral many of them still
+are. Lovers of pleasure and men of fashion bow and cringe to such, and
+approach hat in hand. One of our new-fledged millionaires gave a ball in
+his stable. The invited came with tokens of delight. The host, a few
+years ago, was a ticket-taker at one of our ferries, and would have
+thankfully blacked the boots or done any menial service for the people
+who clamour for the honour of his hand. At the gate of Central Park,
+every day splendid coaches may be seen, in which sit large, fat, coarse
+women, who carry with them the marks of the wash-tub." That was the kind
+of hot shot that the rural districts wanted from those they sent to look
+into the iniquities of the Metropolis. At once it made them sit up and
+filled them with a sense of their own sanctity.
+
+According to the same ingenuous chronicler, the most famous figure in
+the social life of the New York of the sixties, the later Petronius, or
+the forerunner of Mr. Ward McAllister, was Brown, the sexton of Grace
+Church, which, for many years, had been the fashionable centre.
+"Arrogant old Isaac Brown," Mrs. Burton Harrison called him in her
+"Recollections, Grave and Gay," "the portly sexton who transmitted
+invitations for the elect, protested to one of his patronesses that he
+really could not undertake to 'run society' beyond Fiftieth Street. To
+be married or buried within Grace Church's walls was considered the
+height of felicity. It was Brown who passed on worthiness in life or
+death. He arranged the parties, engineered the bridals, conducted the
+funerals. The Lenten season is a horribly dull season, but we manage to
+make our funerals as entertaining as possible"--Brown said, according to
+the quoted story. Without Brown no Fifth Avenue function was complete.
+"A fashionable lady, about to have a fashionable gathering at her house,
+orders her meats from the butcher, her supplies from the grocer, her
+cakes and ices from the confectioner; but her invitations she puts in
+the hands of Brown. He knows whom to invite and whom to omit. He knows
+who will come, who will not come, but will send regrets. In case of a
+pinch, he can fill up the list with young men, picked up about town, in
+black swallow-tailed coats, white vests, and white cravats, who, in
+consideration of a fine supper and a dance, will allow themselves to be
+passed off as the sons of distinguished New Yorkers. The city has any
+quantity of ragged noblemen, seedy lords from Germany, Hungarian Barons
+out at the elbow, members of the European aristocracy who left their
+country for their country's good, who can be served up in proper
+proportions at a fashionable party when the occasion demands it. No man
+knows their haunts better than Brown."
+
+Here is a picture of the famous Brown, drawn by the same pen:
+
+     "Brown is a huge fellow, coarse in his features, resembling a
+     dressed up carman. His face is very red, and on Sundays he
+     passes up and down the aisles of Grace Church with a peculiar
+     swagger. He bows strangers into a pew, when he deigns to give
+     them a seat, with a majestic and patronizing air designed to
+     impress them with a relishing sense of the obligation he has
+     conferred upon them."
+
+Later Peter Marie wrote the poem, "Brown of Grace Church," beginning:
+
+    "O glorious Brown! thou medley strange,
+    Of church-yard, ball-room, saint and sinner,
+    Flying in morn through fashion's range,
+    And burying mortals after dinner,
+    Walking one day with invitations,
+    Passing the next with consecrations."
+
+This is the eloquent story of Mr. and Mrs. Newly-Rich who did not seek
+the social chaperonage of the all-powerful Brown. He had been a
+reputable and successful hatter. She had made vests for a fashionable
+tailor. By a turn of fortune they found themselves rich. He gave up
+hatting and she abandoned vests. They bought a house on upper Fifth
+Avenue and proposed to storm society by giving a large party. The
+acquaintances of the humbler days were to be ignored. It was guests from
+another world that were wanted. But instead of going to Brown and
+slipping him a handsome fee, Mr. and Mrs. Newly-Rich took the Directory,
+selected five hundred names, among them some of the most prominent
+persons of the city, and sent out invitations. The first caterer of the
+town laid the table. Dodsworth was engaged for the music. The result is
+easy to guess. The brilliantly lighted house, the silent bell, the
+over-dressed mother and daughter sitting hour after hour in lonely,
+heartbroken magnificence. But save for its association with the
+omnipotent Brown, it is the story, not of the sixties in particular, but
+of any decade of social New York.
+
+It may be worth while to follow the critic from up-state in some of his
+venturesome explorations of other parts of New York. Those to whom he
+was to return, those for whose entertainment and instruction his book
+was written, wanted to hear of the shadows as well as the sunshine. It
+was the picture of a very sinful metropolis that they demanded, and the
+author was bound that he was not going to disappoint them.
+
+[Illustration: MADISON SQUARE. YESTERDAY IT WAS THE HOME OF THE FLORA
+MC FLIMSIES OF THE WILLIAM ALLEN BUTLER POEM "NOTHING TO WEAR." TO-DAY,
+IN THE EYES OF THE MANHATTANITE, IT IS THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE.]
+
+The frontispiece of the book shows the Stewart Mansion at the corner
+of Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, and by contrast, the Old
+Brewery at the Five Points. Before the Mission was opened the Five
+Points was a dangerous locality, the resort of burglars, thieves, and
+desperadoes, with dark, underground chambers, where murderers often hid,
+where policemen seldom went, and never unarmed. A good citizen going
+through the neighbourhood after dark was sure to be assaulted, beaten,
+and probably robbed. Nightly the air was filled with the sound of
+brawling. Wretchedness, drunkenness, and suffering stalked abroad. There
+were such rookeries as Cow Bay and Murderer's Alley, the latter of which
+continued to exist, though its sinister glory had long since departed,
+until fifteen or twenty years ago. The lodging houses of the section
+were underground, without ventilation, without windows, overrun with
+rats and vermin.
+
+For diversion the miserable denizens of the quarter sought the near-by
+Bowery, with its brilliantly lighted drinking dens, its concert halls,
+where negro minstrelsy was featured, and its theatres where the plays
+were immoral comedies or melodramas glorifying the exploits of
+picturesque criminals. News-boys, street-sweepers, rag-pickers, begging
+girls filled the galleries of these places of amusement. Here is the
+clerical visitor's description of the thoroughfare that was then the
+second principal street of the city: "Leaving the City Hall about six
+o'clock on Sunday night, and walking through Chatham Square to the
+Bowery, one would not believe that New York had any claim to be a
+Christian city, or that the Sabbath had any friends. The shops are open,
+and trade is brisk. Abandoned females go in swarms, and crowd the
+sidewalk. Their dress, manner, and language indicate that depravity can
+go no lower. Young men known as Irish-Americans, who wear as a badge
+long frock-coats, crowd the corners of the streets, and insult the
+passer-by. Women from the windows arrest attention by loud calls to the
+men on the sidewalk, and jibes, profanity, and bad words pass between
+the parties. Sunday theatres, concert-saloons, and places of amusement
+are in full blast. The Italians and Irish shout out their joy from the
+rooms they occupy. The click of the billiard ball, and the booming of
+the ten-pin alley, are distinctly heard. Before night, victims watched
+for will be secured; men heated with liquor, or drugged, will be robbed,
+and many curious and bold explorers in this locality will curse the hour
+in which they resolved to spend a Sunday in the Bowery."
+
+To find adventure and danger the rural visitor did not have to seek out
+the Bowery and the adjacent streets to the east and west. Adroit rogues
+were everywhere. Bland gentlemen introduced themselves to unwary
+strangers. Instead of the mining stock or the sick engineer's story of
+our more enlightened and refined age, these pleasant urbanites resorted
+to the cruder weapon of blackmail. The art was reduced to a system.
+Terrible warnings were conveyed to the innocent country-side by the
+chronicler in such sub-heads as "A Widower Blackmailed," "A Minister
+Falls among Thieves," "Blackmailers at a Wedding," "A Bride Called On."
+
+Darkly the investigator painted the gambling evil of the New York of the
+sixties. The dens of chance were in aristocratic neighbourhoods and
+superbly appointed. Heavy blinds or curtains, kept drawn all day, hid
+the inmates from prying eyes. Within, rosewood doors, deep carpets, and
+mirrors of magnificent dimensions. The dinner table spread with silver
+and gold plate, costly chinaware, and glass of exquisite cut: the viands
+embracing the luxuries of the season and the wines of the choicest.
+"None but men who behave like gentlemen are allowed the entree of the
+rooms" is the naive comment. "Play runs on by the hour, and not a word
+spoken save the low words of the parties who conduct the game. But for
+the implements of gaming there is little to distinguish the room from a
+first-class club-house. Gentlemen well known on 'change' and in public
+life, merchants of a high grade, whose names adorn charitable and
+benevolent associations, are seen in these rooms, reading and talking.
+Some drink only a glass of wine, walk about, and look on the play with
+apparently but little curiosity. The great gamblers, besides those of
+the professional ring, are men accustomed to the excitement of the Stock
+Board. They gamble all day in Wall and Broad Streets, and all night on
+Broadway. To one not accustomed to such a sight, it is rather startling
+to see men whose names stand high in church and state, who are well
+dressed and leaders of fashion, in these notable saloons, as if they
+were at home." Conspicuous among the keepers of the gambling hells was
+John Morrissey, who had begun life as the proprietor of a low drinking
+den in Troy, and as a step in the march of prosperity, had fought
+Heenan, the Benicia Boy, for the championship of Canada. He was a
+personality of the city of the sixties. The author of the curious volume
+thought it necessary to tell of his career as he told of the career of
+A.T. Stewart, and Henry Ward Beecher, and the particular Astor of the
+day, and the particular Vanderbilt, Fernando Wood, and Leonard W.
+Jerome, and George Law, and James Gordon Bennett, the elder, and Daniel
+Drew, and General Halpin, and half a dozen more of the town's
+celebrities.
+
+The Franconi Hippodrome on the Fifth Avenue Hotel site had become a
+memory, but far downtown Barnum's Museum was flourishing, with the doors
+open from sunrise till ten at night. Early visitors from the country
+inspected the gallery of curiosities before sitting down to breakfast.
+The great showman was living in a brown-stone house on Fifth Avenue, at
+the corner of Thirty-ninth Street. He was approaching his sixtieth year,
+and had retired from active life, although he still held the controlling
+interest in the Museum. A.T. Stewart was living in the white stone home
+he had erected at Thirty-fourth Street. James Gordon Bennett's city
+residence was on the Avenue at Thirty-eighth Street. In fact, with a few
+notable exceptions who still clung to their downtown homes, such as the
+Astors and the Vanderbilts, all the great money kings of the decade were
+gathering in the upper stretches of the ripening thoroughfare. But the
+descendants of the Patroons held to the sweep from Washington Square to
+Fourteenth Street, or to lower Second Avenue, which, to the eyes of its
+"set," embracing a number of old-school families of Colonial ancestry,
+was the "Faubourg St. Germain" of New York.
+
+In every other memoir touching on the New York of the sixties will be
+found an allusion to the Flora McFlimseys. For example, Mr. W.D.
+Howells, in "Literary Friends and Acquaintances," told of his first
+visit to the city at the time of the Civil War. After Clinton Place was
+passed, he wrote: "Commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union
+Square, and Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose
+kin and kind dwelt unmolested in the brown-stone stretches of Fifth
+Avenue." There are two poems linked with the story of New York. They are
+Edmund Clarence Stedman's "The Diamond Wedding," and "Nothing to Wear,"
+and the William Allen Butler verses, beginning:
+
+    "Miss Flora McFlimsey, of Madison Square
+    Has made three separate journeys to Paris.
+    And her father assures me, each time she was there,
+    That she and her friend Mrs. Harris
+    (Not the lady whose name is so famous in history,
+    But plain Mrs. H., without romance or mystery)
+    Spent six consecutive weeks, without stopping,
+    In one continuous round of shopping--"
+
+were the very spirit of the Fifth Avenue of that day. Butler wrote the
+poem in 1857, in a house in Fourteenth Street, within a stone's throw of
+the Avenue. After finishing it, and reading it to his wife, he took it
+one evening to No. 20 Clinton Place, to try it on his friend, Evart A.
+Duyckinck. Not only did the verses themselves have a Fifth Avenue
+inspiration and origin, but the woman who later claimed that she had
+written the nine first lines and thirty of the concluding lines, told
+in her story that she had dropped the manuscript while passing through a
+crowd at Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. It was a famous case in its
+day, and the claimant found supporters, just as the absurd Tichborne
+Claimant found supporters. But Butler's right to "Nothing to Wear" was
+fully substantiated. Horace Greeley made the controversy the subject of
+a vigorous editorial in the "Tribune," and "Harper's Weekly," in which
+the poem had originally appeared, pointed out that although the verses
+were published in February, the spurious claim was not put forward until
+July. Writing of "Nothing to Wear" forty years later, W.D. Howells said:
+
+     "For the student of our literature 'Nothing to Wear' has the
+     interest and value of satire in which our society life came to
+     its full consciousness for the first time. To be sure there
+     had been the studies of New York called 'The Potiphar Papers,'
+     in which Curtis had painted the foolish and unlovely face of
+     our fashionable life, but with always an eye on other methods
+     and other models; and 'Nothing to Wear' came with the
+     authority and the appeal of something quite indigenous in
+     matter and manner. It came winged, and equipped to fly wide
+     and to fly far, as only verse can, with a message for the
+     grand-children of 'Flora McFlimsey,' which it delivers today
+     in perfectly intelligible terms.
+
+     "It does not indeed find her posterity in Madison Square. That
+     quarter has long since been delivered over to hotels and
+     shops and offices, and the fashion that once abode there has
+     fled to upper Fifth Avenue, to the discordant variety of
+     handsome residences which overlook the Park. But it finds her
+     descendants quite one with her in spirit, and as little
+     clothed to their lasting satisfaction."
+
+The nuptials that Edmund Clarence Stedman satirized in "The Diamond
+Wedding" united Miss Frances Amelia Bartlett and the Marquis Don Estaban
+de Santa Cruz de Oviedo, and were held in October, 1859, under the
+direction of "the fat and famous Brown, Sexton of Grace Church." Miss
+Bartlett, a tall and willowy blonde, still in her teens, was the
+daughter of a retired lieutenant in the United States Navy. The Bartlett
+home was in West Fourteenth Street, a few doors from the Avenue. The
+groom, many years the bride's senior, and of strikingly unprepossessing
+appearance, was a Cuban of great wealth. The wedding was the talk of the
+town, and Stedman, then a young man of twenty-six, satirized the
+ill-mating in a poem that appeared first in the New York "Tribune." The
+poem began:
+
+    "I need not tell,
+    How it befell;
+    (Since Jenkins has told the story
+    Over and over and over again,
+    And covered himself with glory!)
+    How it befell, one summer's day,
+    The King of the Cubans passed that way,
+    King January's his name, they say,
+    And fell in love with the Princess May,
+    The reigning belle of Manhattan.
+    Nor how he began to smirk and sue,
+    And dress as lovers who come to woo,
+    Or as Max Maretzek or Jullien do,
+    When they sit, full bloomed, in the ladies' view,
+    And flourish the wondrous baton.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "He wasn't one of your Polish nobles,
+    Whose presence their country somehow troubles,
+    And so our cities receive them;
+    Nor one of your make-believe Spanish grandees,
+    Who ply our daughters with lies and candies,
+    Until the poor girls believe them.
+    No, he was no such charlatan,
+    Count de Hoboken Flash-in-the-pan.
+    Full of Gasconade and bravado,
+    But a regular, rich Don Rataplan,
+    Santa Claus de la Muscavado,
+    Senor Grandissimo Bastinado.
+    His was the rental of half Havana,
+    And all Matanzas; and Santa Anna--"
+
+Famous as the wedding had been, the verses became more so. They were
+copied into the weekly and tri-weekly issues of the "Tribune," and into
+the evening papers. Stedman, in later years, told of being startled by a
+huge signboard in front of the then young Brentano's, opposite the New
+York Hotel, at the corner of Broadway and Waverly Place, reading: "Read
+Stedman's great poem on the Diamond Wedding in this evening's
+'Express'!" The father of the bride, infuriated by the unpleasant
+publicity, challenged the poet to a duel, which never took place. Years
+later Stedman and the woman he had lampooned met and became the best of
+friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+_Fourteenth to Madison Square_
+
+
+Stretches of the Avenue--Fourteenth to Madison Square--From Brevoort to
+Spingler--The Story of Sir Peter Warren--The First City Hospital--The
+Paternoster Row of New-York--Former Homes and Birthplaces--Lower Fifth
+Avenue Residents in the Fifties--Blocks of Departed Glories--The Centre
+of the Universe--Madison Square in Colonial Days--Franconi's
+Hippodrome--The Opening of the Fifth Avenue Hotel--A Thanksgiving Day of
+the Nineties--Monuments of the Square--The Garden, the Presbyterian
+Church, and the Metropolitan Tower--The Face of the Clock.
+
+
+In 1762, a Brevoort--Elias was his Christian name--sold a part of the
+family farm to John Smith, a wealthy slave-holder. On the choicest site
+of the purchase, now the centre of Fourteenth Street just west of Fifth
+Avenue, Smith built his country residence. After he died his widow
+continued to occupy the house until 1788, when the executors of Smith's
+estate, among whom was James Duane, Mayor of the city, sold the property
+for about four thousand seven hundred dollars to Henry Spingler.
+Spingler lived in the house until his death in 1813, and used the land,
+comprising about twenty-two acres, as a market garden farm. Spingler's
+granddaughter, Mrs. Mary S. Van Beuren, fell heiress to most of the
+property, and built the Van Beuren brown-stone front house on
+Fourteenth Street, where she lived for years, and maintained a little
+garden with flowers and vegetables, a cow and chickens. In the
+fifty-seven years between the Smith sale and 1845 the value of the
+estate had increased from four thousand seven hundred dollars to two
+hundred thousand dollars. Keeping still to the bucolic days of the
+Avenue, we pass, going from Fifteenth to Eighteenth Street, through what
+was the farm of Thomas and Edward Burling, relatives of John and James
+Burling, old-time merchants whose name was given to Burling Slip, down
+by the East River. Also in the course of these blocks the Avenue crosses
+land that was the farm of John Cowman until 1836. Between Eighteenth and
+Twenty-first Streets was part of the farm acquired in 1791 by Isaac
+Varian, who bought from the heirs of Sir Peter Warren.
+
+This Sir Peter Warren was one of the great figures of the old town. Many
+have written of him. It was only a year or so ago that Miss Chapin
+devoted to his story a chapter of her book on Greenwich Village. So here
+the outline of his career will be of the briefest possible nature. It
+was in 1728 that he first saw New York Harbour. He was twenty-five years
+of age then, and in command of the frigate "Solebay." Irish to the core,
+a Warren of Warrenstown, County Meath, who got their estates in the
+time of "Strongbow," he had already seen a dozen years of active service
+in southern and African waters, and as captain of the "Grafton," had had
+a share in the seizure of the rock of Gibraltar by the British. But New
+York was his first official post, and here he had been sent at the
+orders of the home government, to keep an eye on events, and to sound
+the loyalty of the American colonies. The little island above the great
+bay and between the two broad rivers won his heart from the first, and
+after every new adventure he returned to it, until, in 1747, he was
+summoned to London, to enter Parliament and to be made Admiral of the
+Red Squadron. The affection for the town seems to have been reciprocal,
+for two years after his introduction to New York, the Common Council of
+the city voted to him the "freedom of the city." Then, when he was
+twenty-eight years old he married Susanna DeLancey, whose father,
+Etienne DeLancey, was a Huguenot refugee, who, settling here, soon
+changed the Etienne to Stephen, and married a daughter of one of the
+Dutch Van Cortlandts. At first the young Warrens lived downtown, but in
+later years, when wealth came as the result of treasure-seeking
+adventure on the high seas, Peter bought lands in Greenwich Village, and
+eventually there erected a great mansion.
+
+Throughout the 1730's he was busy, but his opportunity did not come
+until the end of that decade. In 1739 trouble broke out between Great
+Britain and Spain. Five years later Captain Warren was fabulously rich.
+Early in 1744 he had been made commodore of a sixteen-ship squadron in
+the Caribbean. Before summer of that year he had captured twenty-four
+French and Spanish merchant ships, had brought them to New York, turned
+them over to his father-in-law's firm, "Messieurs Stephen De Lancey and
+Company," and had pocketed the proceeds of the sale. His "French and
+Spanish swag," is the way Thomas A. Janvier expressed it. Of the house
+in Greenwich Village on land that is bounded by the present Charles,
+Perry, Bleecker, and Tenth Streets, Janvier wrote: "The house stood
+about three hundred yards back from the river, on ground which fell away
+in a gentle slope towards the waterside. The main entrance was from the
+east; and at the rear--on the level of the drawing room and a dozen feet
+or so above the sloping hillside--was a broad veranda commanding the
+view westward to the Jersey Highlands and southward down the bay to the
+Staten Island Hills." After Sir Peter Warren went away the Manse became
+the home of Abraham Van Nest, and stood there more than a century. Not
+until 1865 did it entirely disappear.
+
+In 1745 Warren played a part in the Siege of Louisbourg that won him
+promotion to the rank of Rear Admiral of the Blue, and his knighthood.
+New York, for his share in the exploit, voted him some extra land. In
+August, 1747, he was in command of the "Devonshire" at the naval battle
+off Cape Finisterre, capturing the ship of the French Commodore, "La
+Joncquiere." Then came his recall to England, where, on account of his
+vast wealth and famous achievements, he was a conspicuous figure. One of
+his daughters, Charlotte, married Willoughby, Earl of Abingdon. Another,
+Ann, became the wife of Charles Fitzroy, Baron Southampton. The
+youngest, Susanna, after her mother, was wedded to Colonel Skinner. New
+York's affection and esteem for Sir Peter Warren extended to his
+daughters and through them to their husbands. The old name of
+Christopher Street was Skinner Road. There was a Fitzroy Road that ran
+northward from Fourteenth Street. Then, still existing, is Abingdon
+Square, and Abingdon Road, better known as "Love Lane," was somewhere in
+the neighbourhood of the present Twenty-first Street. It is to the past
+rather than the present that the student of the Avenue turns in
+contemplating the stretch between Fourteenth and Twenty-second Streets.
+Here and there an historical point may be indicated. On Sixteenth
+Street, a few yards to the west, is the New York Hospital, the oldest
+in the city. It received its charter from George the Third some years
+before the first gun was fired in the War of the Revolution. It was not
+regularly opened until 1791, but the building, then at Broadway and
+Duane Street, served as a place for anatomical experiments. In 1788, the
+story is, a medical student threatened a group of prying boys with a
+dissected human arm. Soldiers were needed to quell the resulting riot.
+The reddish brick hospital of today dates from 1877. A chapter in the
+story of the New York Hospital as an institution concerns the
+Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum, for which the land was purchased in 1816,
+and the building completed in 1821.
+
+Respectively at 150 and 156 Fifth Avenue are the building of the New
+York Society of the Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Building. The
+latter houses the Methodist Book Concern and a collection of relics
+belonging to the Historical Society. A few years ago the stretch was
+sometimes called the Paternoster Row of New York on account of the
+number of publishing houses that lined it. Also it was long the home of
+many of the churches that were erected in the middle of the last
+century, among them the South Dutch Reformed Church, built in 1850, at
+the southwest corner of Twenty-first Street, and the Fifth Avenue
+Presbyterian Church at Nineteenth Street. In Nineteenth Street, just
+east of the Avenue, was the former home of Horace Greeley, and in
+Twentieth Street (No. 28) Theodore Roosevelt was born.
+
+"Worth noting," says "Fifth Avenue," the publication issued by the Fifth
+Avenue Bank, "are the names of prominent New Yorkers who, during the
+fifties, lived on Fifth Avenue between Washington Square and
+Twenty-first Street. Among them were Lispenard Stewart, Thomas Eggleson,
+Silas Wood, Henry C. De Rham, Thomas F. Woodruff, Francis Cottinet,
+David S. Kennedy, James Donaldson, Dr. J. Kearney Rodgers, C.N. Talbot,
+N.H. Wolfe, James McBride, Charles M. Parker, L.M. Hoffman, August
+Belmont, Benjamin Aymer, Henry C. Winthrop, Eugene Schiff, Captain
+Lorillard Spencer, Moses Taylor, John C. Coster, Henry A. Coster, Sidney
+Mason, Marshall O. Roberts, Robert L. Cutting, Gordon W. Burnham, Robert
+C. Townsend, George Opdyke, Robert L. Stuart, whose magnificent art
+collection was given to the Lenox Library, and James Lenox, the founder
+of the Lenox Library. The fortunes of these gentlemen as recorded in
+'Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of New York,' averaged
+between one hundred and three hundred thousand dollars. One of the
+richest men in New York at that time was James Lenox, who had inherited
+the then huge fortune of three million dollars; another large fortune
+was that of James McBride, estimated at seven hundred thousand dollars."
+
+Then there were the clubs, the Union at the northwest corner of
+Twenty-first Street, the Lotos Club, just across the Avenue, the
+Athenaeum, at the southwest corner of Sixteenth Street, the Travellers;
+in the building that had formerly been the residence of Gordon W.
+Burnham, at the southwest corner of Eighteenth Street, the Arcadian, at
+No. 146, between Nineteenth and Twentieth Streets, the Manhattan,
+occupying the Charles C. Parker house at the southwest corner of
+Fifteenth Street, the New York, which, occupying another corner at the
+same street, until 1874, then moved a few blocks northward to a house on
+the Avenue facing Madison Square. How the window loungers of that
+clubland stretch of the seventies and eighties would have stared and
+rubbed their eyes had it been given to them to see the procession that
+throngs the sidewalks today!
+
+The stretch of glories departed is quickly passed. The nine blocks are
+really eight, for it is at Twenty-second Street that the Flatiron
+begins, and the drab hives behind are forgotten as the vision of the
+Square strikes the eye. The Parisian, sipping an _aperitif_ at the
+corner table of the Cafe de la Paix, believes himself to be occupying
+the exact centre of the universe. The Manhattanite knows him to be wrong
+by a matter of three thousand and some odd miles. Be he plutocrat or
+panhandler he knows that it is some spot from which he can look up and
+see the lithe figure of Diana, and the illuminated clock in the tower of
+the Metropolitan Building.
+
+Although not formally opened as Madison Square until 1847, the story of
+the land goes back almost two hundred and fifty years. It was in 1670
+that Sir Edward Andros, Governor of the Province, granted to Solomon
+Peters, a free negro, thirty acres of land between what is now
+Twenty-first and Twenty-sixth Streets, extending east and west from the
+present Broadway (Bloomingdale Road) to Seventh Avenue. Forty-six years
+later the negro's descendants sold the tract to John Horn and Cornelius
+Webber, and a hundred years after it became vested in John Horn the
+second. In the middle of the present roadway west of the Flatiron
+Building the Horn farmhouse, occupied by John the Second's daughter and
+son-in-law, Christopher Mildenberger, stood when the Avenue was cut
+through to Twenty-third Street in 1837. It was allowed to remain there
+two years more, when it was removed to the famous site at the northwest
+corner of Twenty-third Street and became the Madison Cottage. The old
+chroniclers tell of the joyous spirit and flavour of that roadhouse, a
+favourite _rendezvous_ of horsemen in the forties, and of the genial
+management of its proprietor, Corporal Thompson. In the Collection of
+Amos F. Eno there is a photograph of the business card of the Cottage,
+with the announcement that the stages "leave every 4 minutes." A picture
+shows the stages before the building with its slanting roof and its
+three dormer windows facing the Avenue and Park. Several miles beyond
+the city proper, it was a post tavern in the coaching days, and the huge
+pair of antlers announced the "Sign of the Buck-horn."
+
+It had its brief and glorious day and then passed. Early in 1853 it was
+torn down to make room for a circus, known as Franconi's Hippodrome,
+built by a syndicate of American showmen, among whom were Avery Smith,
+Richard Sands, and Seth B. Howe. The lithograph in the Collection of J.
+Clarence Davies shows a combination of tent roof and permanent wall.
+There was a turretted sexagonal entrance at the corner facing the Avenue
+and Twenty-third Street, and another at the northern end of the
+building. Seven hundred feet in circumference was the Hippodrome, of
+brick sides, two stories high, with an oval ring in the centre two
+hundred feet wide by three hundred feet long, seating six thousand
+people, and having standing room for about half as many more. It was a
+bold venture, perhaps too bold for its time. When the novelty had worn
+off the profits began to dwindle and then ceased entirely. Amos F. Eno,
+a New Englander who had prospered exceedingly in New York, bought the
+property and planned to erect a hotel that was to surpass anything that
+the city had already known. Sceptics ridiculed the idea, predicting that
+a situation so far uptown meant certain disaster. But the Hippodrome
+building was torn down, the new structure begun, and in September, 1859,
+the Fifth Avenue Hotel opened its doors under the direction of Colonel
+Paran Stevens. It was of white marble, six stories in height. Among the
+innovations and conveniences that made it the wonder of its day was the
+first passenger elevator ever installed. New York then knew the device
+as "the vertical railway."
+
+[Illustration: "THE TOWER OF THE METROPOLITAN BUILDING. WHATEVER ARTISTS
+MAY THINK OF IT THE TOWER IS, STRUCTURALLY, ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE
+WORLD. EXACTLY HALFWAY BETWEEN SIDEWALK AND POINT OF SPIRE IS THE GREAT
+CLOCK WITH THE IMMENSE DIALS"]
+
+But between the time when Solomon Peters received his grant and the day
+when the opening of the Fifth Avenue Hotel ushered in a new era, the
+land experienced many vicissitudes. In the last years of the eighteenth
+century it was a Parade Ground, at one time extending from Twenty-third
+to Thirty-fourth Streets, bounded on the east by the Eastern Post-road
+and on the west by the Bloomingdale Road. At the southern end a Potter's
+Field was opened in 1794, and there were buried the victims of the
+frequent yellow-fever epidemics. But in 1797 a new Potter's Field was
+opened in Washington Square. According to the plans of the
+Commissioners' Map of 1811, there was to be no Fifth Avenue between
+Twenty-third Street and Thirty-fourth Street. The Avenue was to end
+temporarily at the former point, and resume its journey eleven blocks
+farther north. As early as 1785 a powder magazine stood within the
+present domains of the Square. A United States Arsenal, erected in 1808,
+was near the spot of the Farragut statue. In 1823 the Arsenal building
+became the house of refuge of the Society for the Reformation of
+Juvenile Delinquents, the first organization instituted in America to
+care for youthful offenders. In 1839 it was destroyed by fire. That was
+two years after the Parade Ground had been reduced to its present limits
+of 6.84 acres and renamed in honour of President Madison. In 1844 the
+Eastern Post-road was closed. Its course may still be traced by the
+double row of trees that runs northeast towards Madison Square Garden.
+
+In 1847 the Square was formally opened and soon after society began to
+migrate there. That was during the mayoralty of James Harper. From 1853
+until the end of the Civil War it was the social centre of the city.
+"Among those who lived in this vicinity," says "Fifth Avenue," "were
+Leonard W. Jerome, and his elder brother, Addison G. Jerome, who, with
+William R. Travers, were social leaders and prominent Wall Street
+brokers; James Stokes, who, in 1851, built at No. 37 Madison Square,
+East, the first residence on Madison Square, and whose wife was a
+daughter of Anson G. Phelps; John David Wolfe, whose daughter, Catherine
+Lorillard Wolfe, gave her magnificent art collection to the Metropolitan
+Museum of Art; Frank Work, William and John O'Brien, Henry M.
+Schieffelin, James L. Schieffelin, Samuel B. Schieffelin, Benjamin H.
+Field, Peter Ronalds, and William Lane."
+
+Elsewhere is told of the glories of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, of the part
+it played as one of the Hosts of the Avenue, of its share in the great
+days, of its Amen Corner, and of the distinguished men like General W.T.
+Sherman, former Senator Platt, and the actor, William J. Florence, who
+for years made it their home. A quarter of a century ago the entrance to
+the hotel was the starting point, every Thanksgiving Day noon, for many
+gaily decorated coaches bound for the old Manhattan Field. In earlier
+days the destination had been Berkeley Oval at Williamsbridge, or the
+old Polo Grounds at One Hundred and Tenth Street and Fifth and Sixth
+Avenues. Draped down to the wheels with bunting of dark blue or of
+orange and black the tally-hos drew up before the portico and were soon
+topped with eager, ardent youth. As they were whirled away up the Avenue
+there broke out upon the autumn air the sharp "Brek-a Coex-Coex-Coex" of
+Yale, or the sky-rocket of Princeton. The return was marked by high
+elation or deep depression according as the Fates had decided on the
+chalk-lined turf. For the collection of sundry wagers the victors
+hurried into the near-by Hoffman House, where the presiding genius and
+stakeholder, Billy Edwards, divided attention with the paintings of
+fauns and nymphs that adorned the walls. That youth of yesteryear has
+come to grizzled hair. There are crow's feet about the eyes, and the
+world is one of vastly changed values, and the game at which the heart
+is throbbing is a more poignant one than that which involved touchdowns
+and goals from the field and desperate stands on the two-yard line. But
+it is the same old-time spirit, that then expressed itself in the call,
+"Hold them, Yale," or "Hold them for Old Nassau!" that, passed on to
+succeeding generations, is grimly awaiting the shock on the plains of
+Picardy.
+
+Of all the monuments that have graced Madison Square that which first
+comes to mind is one that has gone. Twenty years ago a splendid white
+arch spanned the Avenue, with one pier close to the sidewalk in front of
+the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the other touching the edge of the opposite
+Park. It was in direct line with Washington Arch seventeen blocks away.
+Under it, on September 30, 1898, passed the victor of Manila Bay, whose
+name it bore, bowing right and left to the city's riotous welcome. For
+months it remained there, and then disappeared. Why was the beautiful
+structure not made permanent? The Worth Monument, in the centre of the
+triangular piece of ground bounded by Fifth Avenue, Broadway,
+Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Streets, dates from 1857. By order of the
+Common Council the plot was set apart for the erection of the shaft in
+December, 1854. Major-General William J. Worth, of Mexican War fame,
+died at San Antonio, Texas, June 7, 1849. The monument was dedicated
+with a parade and a review November 25, 1857, and the General's remains
+interred under the south side. In bands around the obelisk are recorded
+the names of the battles in which Worth took part. On the east face, cut
+in the stone, may be read "_Ducit Amor Patriae"_ and on the west face,
+"By the Corporation of the City of New York, 1857--Honor the Brave." At
+the moment of writing the building beyond the Worth Monument, at the
+corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street, is in the process of
+demolition. At one time the New York Club was housed there, and there,
+for years, the sign of the Berlitz School for Languages stretched
+across the southern face of the structure.
+
+"Were all the statues in New York made by St. Gaudens?" was the recent
+naive and ingenuous question of a visitor from the West who had just
+completed the first two days of his stay. "Most of the good ones were,"
+was the laughing rejoinder of an artist. "At least that is the way it
+seems. And nearly all the pedestals for them were made by Stanford
+White." In query and response there is a certain amount of justice. It
+is Augustus St. Gaudens's benevolent presentment of Peter Cooper that
+stands within the little park enclosed by Cooper Square. The name of St.
+Gaudens is associated with those of John La Farge, White, MacMonnies,
+MacNeil, and Calder in the making of the Washington Arch. To St. Gaudens
+belongs the equestrian statue of William Tecumseh Sherman in the Plaza.
+And here, in Madison Square, the Farragut statue is his. Unveiled in
+1881, executed in Paris when the sculptor was thirty years of age, and
+exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1880, the Farragut is, in the opinion of
+Miss Henderson, the base upon which St. Gaudens's great reputation
+rests. "And while," she writes, "in New York its merits are often
+balanced with those of the Sherman equestrian group, at the entrance to
+Central Park; the Peter Cooper, in Cooper Square; and the relief of Dr.
+Bellows, in the All-Souls' Church--all later works--it has never had to
+yield precedence to any, but holds its own by force of its splendid
+vigour and youthful plasticity. It has the essential characteristics of
+the portrait, but so combined with the attitude of the artist that the
+figure stands as much more than a portrait, having in it something more
+living, more typical, deeper than the mere outward mould of the man. St.
+Gaudens's Farragut has the bearing of a seaman, balanced on his two
+legs, in a posture easy, yet strong. He is rough and bluff with the
+courage and simplicity of a commander; his eye is accustomed to deal
+with horizons, while the features are clean-cut and masterful. The
+inscription is happy: 'That the memory of a daring and sagacious
+commander and gentle great-souled man, whose life from childhood was
+given to his country, but who served her supremely in the war for the
+Union, 1861-1865, may be preserved and honored, and that they who come
+after him and who will love him so much may see him as he was seen by
+friend and foe, his countrymen have set up this monument A.D.
+MDCCCLXXXI.'"
+
+There are other statues in the Square besides the noble one
+commemorating the deeds of the hero of "Full steam ahead, and damn the
+torpedoes!" At the southwest corner there is a bronze one of William H.
+Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, the work of Randolph Rogers. The
+effigy of Roscoe Conkling, by J.Q.A. Ward, is at the southeast corner.
+Cold and proud is the stone as the man was cold, and proud, and biting.
+What chance had haranguing abuse against his icy: "I have no time to
+bandy epithets with the gentleman from Georgia"? Then there is the
+drinking fountain by Emma Stebbins, given to the city by the late
+Catherine Lorillard Wolfe, and the Bissell statue of Chester A. Arthur.
+
+No other structure in the city is so many different things to so many
+different people as the Madison Square Garden. To the old-time New
+Yorker, who likes to babble reminiscently of the past, the site recalls
+the railway terminus of the sixties, when the outgoing trains were drawn
+by horses through the tunnel as far north as the present Grand Central.
+To one artistically inclined the creamy tower, modelled on that of the
+Giralda in Seville, suggests the collaboration of St. Gaudens and White,
+and the surmounting Diana the early work of the former inspired by
+Houdon's Diana of the Louvre. To the more frivolous, the sportingly
+inclined, the seekers after gross pleasures, the Garden has meant the
+Arion Ball, or the French Students Ball, the Horse Show, Dog Show, Cat
+Show, Poultry Show, Automobile Show, Sportsman's Show, the Cake-Walk,
+the Six-Day Bicycle Race, or events of the prize-ring from the days of
+Sullivan and Mitchell to those of Willard and Moran; Buffalo Bill and
+his Wild West Show, or the circus, the Greatest Show on Earth, with its
+houris of the trapeze and the saddle, and its animals, almost as fearful
+and wonderful as the menagerie of adjectives that its press-agent, the
+renowned, or notorious, Tody Hamilton, gathers annually out of the
+jungles of the dictionary. Also the interior of the vast structure
+echoes in memory with political oratory, now thunderous and now
+persuasive. Through the words directed immediately at the thousands that
+fought their way within the walls Presidents and candidates for
+president have sent ringing utterance throughout the land.
+
+Opposite the Garden, at the southeast corner of Twenty-sixth Street, is
+the Manhattan Club, in a house that was formerly the home of the
+University Club, and adjoining it to the south, is the Appellate Court
+House, architecturally one of the city's most distinguished buildings.
+Designed by James Brown Lord, it was completed in 1900, at a cost of
+three-quarters of a million dollars. Among the men whose work is
+represented in this home of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court
+for the City and County of New York are Maitland Armstrong, Karl Bitter,
+Charles Henry Niehaus, Charles Albert Lopez, Thomas Shields Clarke,
+George Edwin Bissell, Philip Martiny, Robert Reid, Willard L. Metcalf,
+Henry Augustus Lukeman, John Donoghue, Henry Kirke Bush Brown, Edward
+Clark Potter, Henry Siddons Mowbray, Frederick W. Ruckstuhl, Herbert
+Adams, George Willoughby Maynard, Joseph Lauber, Maximilian M.
+Schwartzott, and Kenyon Cox.
+
+The old home of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church was in the block
+between Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets. Then, on the northeast
+corner of the latter street stood one of the last surviving residences
+recalling the days when the Square was the possession of Flora McFlimsey
+and her kind, the old brown-stone dwelling of Catherine Lorillard Wolfe.
+The Wolfe property, offered for sale, was purchased by an official of
+the Metropolitan Company, and an exchange was effected by which the
+church relinquished its old site and moved to the northern corner. The
+present church was designed by Stanford White, who met his death in
+1906, the year before the formal dedication. With its grey brick
+exterior, showing repeatedly the Maltese Cross, its interior following
+the spirit of the Mosque of Santa Sophia in Constantinople, and its
+mural paintings and windows, many of them the work of Louis C. Tiffany,
+it is one of the most beautiful of all the city's edifices for religious
+worship. But to the casual eye it is quite lost on account of its
+proximity to its gigantic neighbour.
+
+The traveller approaching Paris can see from miles away, the apex of the
+Eiffel Tower outlined against the sky. The eye of one nearing New York,
+whether his point of observation be the deck of an incoming steamer, or
+a car-chair in a train arriving from the West, is met first by the
+cluster of skyscrapers at the southern end of the island, and then by a
+shaft vastly more conspicuous by reason of its isolation, the tower of
+the Metropolitan Building. Whatever artists may think of it--and there
+is division of opinion--that tower is, structurally, one of the wonders
+of the world. Rising seven hundred feet above the sidewalk, topping the
+Singer Building by ninety feet and being outclimbed only by the
+Woolworth Building (seven hundred and ninety-two feet), the tower is
+seventy-five feet by eighty-five at its base, and carries the building
+to its fifty-second story. Exactly half-way between sidewalk and point
+of spire is the great clock with the immense dials of reinforced
+concrete faced with mosaic tile, each twenty-six and a half feet in
+diameter, with the hour hand thirteen and a half feet long, weighing
+seven hundred and fifty pounds, and the minute hand seventeen feet long
+and weighing one thousand pounds. At night the indicating flashes, the
+hours in white, the quarters in one, two, three, or four, red, may be
+seen at a distance of twenty miles.
+
+But nearer at hand, as the hours creep one by one towards the dawn, are
+the derelicts of the Square, dozing fitfully on the park benches. In
+waking moments their dull eyes watch the illuminated face, and the hands
+pushing forward to another day. The spectacle moved one of them, Prince
+Michael, heir to the throne of the Electorate of Valleluna, in O.
+Henry's "The Caliph, Cupid, and the Clock," to pessimistic utterance.
+"Clocks," he said, "are shackles on the feet of mankind. I have observed
+you looking persistently at that clock. Its face is that of a tyrant,
+its numbers are false as those on a lottery ticket; its hands are those
+of a bunco-steerer, who makes an appointment with you to your ruin. Let
+me entreat you to throw off its humiliating bonds and to cease to order
+your affairs by that insensate monitor of brass and steel."
+
+Sang Sara Teasdale:
+
+    "We walked together in the dusk
+    To watch the tower grow dimly white,
+    And saw it lift against the sky,
+    Its flower of amber light."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+_Some Great Days on the Avenue_
+
+
+Some Great Days on the Avenue--Pictures and Pageants--When a Prince Came
+Visiting--A Regiment Departs--Honour to the Captains--Funeral
+Processions--Receptions--Dinners--The Orient and the Avenue--When
+Admiral Dewey Came Home--Greeting a Marshal of France--The Roar of the
+City and the Guns of the Marne.
+
+
+In the stirring times in which we are living, it seems as if every day
+is a great day on the Avenue. Take a single example: The morning broke
+dark and threatening. Heavy clouds presaged showers. But after an hour
+or two they passed from the heavens, and warmth and golden sunshine
+came. In the course of various activities the writer made his way to
+points between the Battery and Fifty-ninth Street, and the means of
+travel employed included three journeys on top of Fifth Avenue buses. If
+one of the early settlers could only have seen the proud and amazing
+thoroughfare!
+
+The air vibrant with excitement. Flags everywhere. Tens of thousands of
+the Stars and Stripes. Thousands of Union Jacks and Tricolours of
+France. Hundreds of pavilions of Italy and Belgium. Every few yards
+gaily decorated booths from which smiling women or lusty-lunged men
+harangued the passers-by to "come across or the Kaiser will."
+
+On a platform erected on the steps in front of the Public Library a
+slight figure in kilts addressing a swaying, surging crowd. As the bus,
+held up for a minute by the cross-town traffic, stopped, we could hear
+the pleasing burr of Harry Lauder. Two hours later; a mile and a half
+farther downtown. The sound of a band in the distance. The horses of the
+mounted policemen forcing back the curious thousands to the curb. A
+regiment of regulars, two regiments of militia, and then, swinging along
+lightly in loose step, a handful of men in soiled blue, Chasseurs a pied
+of France, who, at Verdun, in the Vosges Mountains, and on the Picardy
+front, had lived splendidly up to the traditions of the men with the
+hairy knapsacks and the hearts of steel whose tramp had shaken the
+continent of Europe one hundred years before.
+
+It was just a day similar to other days that had gone before and to days
+that were to follow. To feel the thrill of what were held to have been
+the great days of the past we must put ourselves in the mood of old New
+York, or at the very least think of the world as it was wagging along a
+brief four years ago.
+
+"The national banquet-hall where heroes and statesmen have been feted,
+or the parade-ground toward which a nation has turned to witness great
+demonstrations in celebration of national events of a civic or military
+or mournful nature. Along it have gone to the music of dirges and the
+sound of mournful drums the funeral corteges of many of the country's
+leading statesmen and greatest men, and here, too, have occurred riots
+and disastrous fires which have startled the city and shocked the
+nation." So runs the introduction to a little pamphlet issued some years
+ago by the Fifth Avenue Bank. One of the earliest and most notable
+visits, the brochure goes on to tell us, was that of the then Prince of
+Wales, later Edward VII., in the autumn of 1860. He was then nineteen
+years old. The city turned out to greet him. On Thursday, October 11th,
+the revenue cutter, "Harriet Lane," brought the Prince to New York from
+South Amboy. Then, a day of blaring bands, of blended flags, of great
+transparencies, that eventually led to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. He was
+still very young, still very much of a boy, very much bored with all the
+tumult and ceremony. Once out of sight of the crowd he threw dignity to
+the winds and played leap-frog in the corridor with his retinue. But
+once again, from his bed, to which he had gone with a bad headache, he
+was called at midnight to acknowledge the salutes of the Caledonia
+Club. That organization, made up mostly of members of the Scotch
+Regiment commanded by Colonel McLeay, headed by Dodsworth's Band,
+marched up Broadway to the hotel. In the Prince's honour a serenade was
+given, the band blared out with "God Save the Queen!", "Hail Columbia!"
+and other national airs, and once more the sleepy and sorely tried royal
+visitor was obliged to appear to bow his thanks.
+
+The next day, Friday, was given over to visiting such public buildings
+as the Astor Library, Cooper Union, the Free Academy, and in riding
+through Central Park.
+
+A ball, famous in city annals, was given at the Academy of Music. Among
+those who attended that ball and left a record of it was the late Ward
+McAllister. "Our best people, the smart set, the slow set, all sets,
+took a hand in it, and the endeavor was to make it so brilliant and
+beautiful that it would always be remembered by those present as one of
+the events of their lives."
+
+The ball was opened by a quadrille d'honneur. Governor and Mrs. Morgan,
+the historian Bancroft and Mrs. Bancroft, Colonel and Mrs. Abraham Van
+Buren, with others were to dance in it. The rush was so great that the
+floor gave way, and in tumbled the whole centre of the stage.
+Carpenters set feverishly to work to floor over the chasm.
+
+"I well remember," said McAllister, "the enormous form of old Isaac
+Brown, sexton of Grace Church, rushing around and encouraging the
+workmen."
+
+In the course of the evening the Prince danced with Miss Fish, Miss
+Mason, Miss Fannie Butler, and others, and was conceded to have danced
+well. The supper was served at a horseshoe table. At one end of the room
+was a raised dais, where the royal party supped. At each stage door a
+prominent citizen stood guard; the moment the supper room was full, no
+one else was admitted. "I remember," confesses Mr. McAllister, "on my
+attempting to get in through one of these doors, stealthily, the
+vigilant eye of John Jacob Astor met mine. He bid me wait my turn."
+
+Despite the assiduity with which McAllister danced after the figure of
+the Prince, he was not among those presented. That honour he sought the
+next day, on the trip to West Point:
+
+"As General Scott was presenting Colonel Delafield's guests to the
+Prince I approached the General, asking him to present me to his Royal
+Highness. A giant, as he was in height, he bent down his head to me, and
+asked sharply, 'What name, sir?' I gave him my name, but at the sound of
+'Mc,' not thinking it distinguished enough, he quietly said, 'Pass on,
+sir,' and I subsequently was presented by the Duke of Newcastle."
+
+Forty-three years after that clamorous greeting of New York to the young
+Prince of Wales the present writer was to witness in Paris the visit of
+Edward VII. for the purpose of cementing the Entente Cordiale. The tired
+face told the story of the hardest-worked public servant in the world.
+In 1860, on Fifth Avenue, he had already begun to pay the price of the
+royal privilege of his exalted birth to bear the arduous burden of royal
+responsibility.
+
+There are extant many old wood-cuts showing the Prince at the Academy of
+Music ball. But the following morning, that brought repose to so many,
+brought none to him. There were visits to be paid to Brady's
+photographic studios at the corner of Tenth Street and Broadway, to
+Barnum's Museum, to General Scott at his Twelfth Street residence, and
+the Broadway store of Ball, Black & Company.
+
+That night a great torchlight parade in honour of the Prince was given
+by the New York firemen. The Prince, with his suite and a number of city
+officials, stood on the hotel balcony, while five thousand men in
+uniform, with apparatus and many bands, marched by. Fireworks were set
+off, the brilliant beams of the calcium light--then a novelty--were
+thrown upon the standing, boyish figure of the Prince, thousands of
+flaring torches danced and waved against the darkness of the opposite
+square.
+
+The next day, Sunday, October 14th, brought some rest. In the morning
+there were services at Trinity, where Dr. Vinton preached; then a quiet
+afternoon at the hotel. With Monday came the Prince's departure. At
+half-past nine he left the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and in company with the
+Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of St. Albans, and Mayor Wood, was driven
+down to the harbour where the "Harriet Lane" was waiting to take him to
+West Point and Albany.
+
+The next reception that the chronicler of Fifth Avenue events has seen
+fit to record was that given to General Grant after the close of the
+Civil War. At the Fifth Avenue Hotel a number of the city's leading
+business men met and planned the public greeting, and one hundred and
+fifty men subscribed one hundred dollars apiece. The reception to the
+returning soldier, which took place at the Fifth Avenue Hotel November
+20, 1865, was hardly one of which the city or the street had reason to
+be proud.
+
+Loose management led to disorder and dissatisfaction. Twenty-five
+hundred jostling, pushing persons crowded the halls, corridors, and
+reception rooms. The General stood in one of the hotel parlours
+surrounded by the committee, with Mrs. Grant and other ladies to his
+right, and on his left Generals Wool, Cook, and Hooker, John Van Buren,
+Ethan Allen, and others.
+
+Little judgment seems to have been used in issuing the invitations. The
+throng was indiscriminate. Farce comedy was in the air. Religious
+fanatics, passing before the hero, offered up prayers for the salvation
+of his soul. Precocious children were thrust forward to his attention.
+Preposterous questions were propounded by preposterous people. To add to
+the confusion the names of those persons who fought their way through
+the throng to be presented to the General were announced to him by a
+little man who got most of them wrong.
+
+In a postscript to his "American Notes," written many years later,
+Charles Dickens told of the vast changes he found on the occasion of his
+second visit to the United States--"changes moral, changes physical,
+changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise
+of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of
+recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life." Making all
+allowances for that greater charity, tolerance, and kindliness of
+judgment which comes with the riper years--nobody ever could have
+remained as Britishly bumptious, or as bumptiously British as Dickens
+was in his younger days when he first came to pay us a visit--taking
+also into consideration the fact that a certain explanatory softening of
+earlier criticisms was politic, that the novelist found a city far more
+to his taste in 1868 than he had found in 1842 is not for a moment to be
+questioned. Also, at the time he came to New York from Boston, he was
+naturally in a rather placid and contented mood. For in letters home,
+even while complaining of the trying changes of the wintry climate, he
+had told how he was making a clear profit of thirteen hundred English
+pounds a week, even allowing seven dollars to the pound. When he
+returned to New York in April, after an extended tour throughout the
+country, he had still better cause to be pleased with the young
+Republic. Says Forster in his "Life":
+
+     "In New York, where there were five farewell nights, $3,298
+     were the receipts of the last, on the 20th. of April; those of
+     the last at Boston, on the eighth, having been $3,456. But, on
+     earlier nights in the same cities respectively, these sums
+     also had been reached; and indeed, making allowance for an
+     exceptional night here and there, the receipts varied so
+     wonderfully little, that a mention of the highest average
+     returns from other places will give no exaggerated impression
+     of the ordinary receipts throughout. Excluding fractions of
+     dollars, the lowest were New Bedford ($1,640), Rochester
+     ($1,906), Springfield ($1,970), and Providence ($2,140).
+     Albany and Worcester averaged something less than $2,400;
+     while Hartford, Buffalo, Baltimore, Syracuse, New Haven, and
+     Portland rose to $2,600. Washington's last night was $2,610,
+     no night there having less than $2,500. Philadelphia exceeded
+     Washington by $300, and Brooklyn went ahead of Philadelphia by
+     $200. The amount taken at the four Brooklyn readings was
+     $11,128."
+
+And only a few years ago there were Americans deploring loudly the
+shabby financial treatment we gave Dickens, and figuratively and
+literally passing round the hat!
+
+Fifth Avenue's greeting to Charles Dickens, on the occasion of his
+second visit, was in the form of the dinner that was tendered to him at
+Delmonico's, on the evening of April 18, 1868. The hosts were two
+hundred men of the New York press. Covers were laid for a hundred and
+eighty-seven guests.
+
+Five o'clock was the time appointed--we were a rugged, early-dining race
+in those days--but the guest had a slight stroke of illness and did not
+appear until after six. Then it was a limping old man, aged just
+sixty-six, who, by the aid of a cane, climbed laboriously up the great
+staircase. He was led to his seat at the table by Horace Greeley, and
+seated between Mr. Greeley and Henry J. Raymond. The editor of the
+"Tribune," acting as master of ceremonies, began the speech-making by
+referring to his first discovery, many years before, of a story by the
+then unknown "Boz."
+
+In concluding his reply to the toast, Mr. Dickens promised: "manfully,
+promptly, and plainly in my own person, to bear for the behalf of my own
+countrymen such testimony of the gigantic changes in this country as I
+have hinted at here tonight. Also to record that wherever I have been,
+in the smallest place equally with the largest, I have been received
+with unsurpassed politeness, delicacy, sweet-temper, and
+consideration.... This testimony, so long as I live, and so long as my
+descendants have any legal right in my books, I shall cause to be
+republished, as an appendix to every copy of those two books of mine in
+which I have referred to America. And this I will do and cause to be
+done, not in mere love and thankfulness, but because I regard it as an
+act of plain justice and honour."
+
+The amende honorable was not less welcome for being long due and the
+distinguished visitor sat down to loud applause and the strains of "God
+Save the Queen." Mr. Raymond responded to the toast "The New York
+Press," and was followed by George William Curtis, William Henry
+Hurlbert, Charles Eliot Norton, Joseph R. Hawley, Murat Halstead, Edwin
+de Leon, and E.L. Youmans.
+
+Three and a half years after the dinner to Dickens Fifth Avenue greeted
+in a similar way a distinguished Russian guest. That was the Grand Duke
+Alexis Alexandrovitch, who was entertained by the New York Yacht Club at
+Delmonico's December 2, 1871. James Gordon Bennett, the younger, was
+then Commodore of the club, and received the Grand Duke in the
+restaurant's parlours at seven o'clock. The guests included the Grand
+Duke and his suite, the Russian Minister, General Gorloff, Admiral
+Poisset, Admiral Rowan, members of the Russian legation, Russian
+officers, and members of the yacht club. Against the walls of the
+banquet hall the Stars and Stripes blended with the blue St. Andrew's
+Cross. The guests were in naval uniform. The "Queen's Cup," which had
+been won by the "America" in 1851, had the place of honour among the
+club trophies. To the toast to the Czar, General Gorloff responded. The
+club Commodore answered to that to President Grant. After the Grand Duke
+had been informed that he had been elected to honorary membership, he
+responded with a brief sailor-like speech.
+
+On December 22, 1877, President Hayes was the guest of honour of the New
+England Society at Delmonico's. Among those there besides the President
+were Secretary of State William M. Evarts, Presidents Eliot of Harvard
+and Porter of Yale, General Horace Porter, ex-Governor Morgan, and
+Governor Horace Fairbanks of Vermont. Mr. Evarts answered the toast "The
+Day We Celebrate." The presidents of Yale and Harvard, speaking in
+behalf of their institutions, indulged in good-natured contrasts and
+comparisons. In the old days, according to President Porter, when they
+found a man in Boston a little too bad to live with, they sent him to
+Rhode Island, and when they found him a little too good to live with,
+they sent him to Connecticut, where, among other things, he founded Yale
+College; while people of average respectability and goodness were
+allowed to remain in Massachusetts Bay, where, looking into each others'
+faces constantly, they contracted a habit of always praising each other
+with special emphasis--a habit which they have not altogether outgrown.
+
+[Illustration: IN THE BRIGHT SUNLIGHT THE AVENUE GLITTERS WITH THE
+PAVILLIONS OF PATRIOTISM. OLD GLORY MAY BE COUNTED BY THE TENS OF
+THOUSANDS; ENGLAND'S UNION JACK, AND THE TRICOLOR OF FRANCE BY THE
+THOUSANDS. TO FORESTALL THE KAISER THE AVENUE IS "COMING ACROSS"]
+
+The Union League gave a reception to General Grant on October 23, 1880,
+in the theatre of the club-house. Among those present were Joseph H.
+Choate, General Chester A. Arthur, Chauncey M. Depew, General Adam
+Badeau, Colonel Fred Grant, Peter Cooper, Henry Ward Beecher, General
+Horace Porter, and Rev. Dr. Newman. Another reception to General Grant
+was given at the Hotel Brunswick May 5, 1883, by the Saturday Night
+Club. Certain remarks by the former President and by Roscoe Conkling on
+the subject of Mexico were considered of much significance at the
+time. Both spoke strongly in favour of the formation of a
+Mexican-American alliance. Mr. Conkling suggested General Grant as the
+logical leader of a great movement to aid the sister republic in
+developing its resources.
+
+Nearly two thousand guests were present at the reception given by the
+Union League Club to President Arthur on January 23, 1884. With the
+Chief Executive, who arrived about nine o'clock, were Secretaries Teller
+and Folger, of his Cabinet. After shaking hands with the reception
+committee the President was escorted upstairs by William M. Evarts.
+About the President were the Cabinet officers, Mr. and Mrs. Evarts,
+Jesse Seligman, and Salem H. Wales, and Attorney General and Mrs.
+Brewster. In the distinguished gathering were Mayor Edson, Dr. Lyman
+Abbott, General and Mrs. George B. McClellan, Whitelaw Reid, Henry Ward
+Beecher, Parke Godwin, Elihu Root, Cyrus W. Field, Mr. and Mrs. John
+Bigelow, and Lionel Sackville-West, the British Minister.
+
+At the supper, which was served at midnight, one of the features was the
+striking pieces of confectionery. In gleaming white sugar was a model of
+the Capitol, and a tall monument supported statuettes of the President
+and his Cabinet. Also there was a twenty-four-foot model of the
+Brooklyn Bridge with the President and troops crossing it.
+
+At the banquet to Lieutenant Greely of Arctic fame, at the Lotos Club,
+on January 16, 1886, Vice-President General Horace Porter was in the
+chair, in the absence of President Whitelaw Reid. Besides Lieutenant
+Greely, Chief Engineer Melville, and Commander Schley, who headed the
+expedition to relieve Greely, were guests of the club, and among others
+at the table were Chief Justice Daly, Colonel C. McK. Leoser, Robert
+Kirby, Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, Dr. Pardee, Frank Robinson, Herman
+Oelrichs, C.H. Webb, Colonel Thomas W. Knot, George Masset, J.
+O'Sullivan, Douglas Taylor, James Bates, and Chandos Fulton. In his
+speech the guest of the evening told the story of his expedition to the
+Far North and explained the reason for every action. Arctic exploration,
+he declared, could not be futile when eleven nations were offering the
+lives of their men in the cause of science. He told the story of the
+splendid spirit of his own men during the dreary months at Cape Sabine
+and lauded American courage and achievement in all the corners of the
+earth. There were speeches by Judge Daly and Commander Schley, and then
+two fun-makers were introduced in the persons of Thorne and Billington,
+_Poo-bah_ and _Ko-Ko_, from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera, "The
+Mikado," that was then playing in New York.
+
+Late in November of the same year the Lotos Club honoured another
+explorer, Henry M. Stanley, who had just returned to New York after many
+years' absence, completing Livingstone's work in Central Africa. Stanley
+sat between Mr. Reid, the Club's president, and Chauncey M. Depew.
+Others at the guest's table were Lieutenant Greely, General Porter,
+General Winslow, Colonel Knox, Major Pond, General Townsend, Lieutenant
+Hickey, Commissioner Andrews, G.F. Rowe, Bruce Crane, Henry Gillig, and
+Daniel E. Bandmann. The speakers, besides Mr. Stanley, were Lieutenant
+Greely, Mr. Depew, and Horace Porter.
+
+At Delmonico's, December 20, 1889, a dinner was given by the
+Spanish-American Commercial Union to the visiting delegates to the
+Pan-American Congress. William M. Ivins, as the principal speaker,
+touched upon South American relations and international arbitration as a
+prevention of war. Among those present were Mayor Hugh J. Grant, Elihu
+Root, Andrew Carnegie, Chauncey M. Depew, and Horace White. On the walls
+were portraits of Washington and General Bolivar, and intertwined with
+the Stars and Stripes, the vividly coloured banners of the South
+American nations. At the right of the chairman, William H.T. Hughes,
+sat Senor F.C.C. Zegarra of Peru, and at the left Mayor Grant. The
+address of welcome was delivered first in English and then in Spanish by
+Mr. Hughes, who possessed a perfect command of both languages. Senor
+Zegarra responded. The toast "Our Next Neighbour" was answered by Senor
+Matias Romero of Mexico. Other toasts and speakers were: "International
+American Commerce," William M. Ivins; "International Justice," Elihu
+Root; "Our Homes," Rev. Dr. John R. Paxton; "America--All Republican,"
+John B. Henderson, and random addresses from the gallery by Mr. Depew
+and Judge Jose Alfonso of Chile.
+
+The next Fifth Avenue reception of importance was that given by the
+Union League Club to General W.T. Sherman on April 17, 1890. It was a
+belated celebration of the old soldier's seventieth birthday which had
+taken place on February 8. In the centre of the decorations of the usual
+patriotic colours and design was the Daniel Huntington portrait of the
+General in uniform. Regulars of the 5th U.S. Artillery lined the
+stairway leading from the lobby to the reception hall. The General,
+reaching the club-house at eight-thirty, was met by James Otis, J.
+Seaver Page, and General S. Van Vliet, and, between the lines of
+soldiers at present arms, conducted to a place beneath his own
+portrait. There, surrounded by President Depew of the Club, Secretary of
+the Interior John W. Noble, and General Van Vliet, he greeted the six or
+seven hundred invited guests. The gathering included representatives of
+the army, the navy, the bench, the clergy, as well as business,
+professional, and political life. The Vice-President of the United
+States, Levi P. Morton, was there, and Secretary Noble, Senators W.M.
+Evarts and Nelson W. Aldrich, Generals Schofield, Howard, Porter, and
+Breckenridge, and foreign diplomats from Russia, Chile, Brazil, and
+Peru. Of the march to the sea Chauncey M. Depew said: "It was a feat
+which captured the imagination of the country and of the world, because
+it was both the poetry of war and the supreme fact of the triumph over
+the rebellion."
+
+Another great day on the Avenue was August 28, 1896, which witnessed the
+arrival of the famous Chinese statesman, Li Hung Chang. He came as a
+special envoy of the Chinese Emperor and stayed at the Waldorf, then a
+comparatively new hotel. President Cleveland sent General Thomas H.
+Ruger to welcome the visitor. In his cabin on the "St. Louis" in the Bay
+Li Hung Chang received the welcoming delegation. The author of "Fifth
+Avenue Events" thus describes the great Chinaman on that occasion: "His
+appearance was most striking. Over six feet tall, with a slight stoop,
+he wore the bright yellow jacket denoting his high rank, a viceroy's cap
+with a four-eyed peacock feather attached to it by amber fastenings, and
+a beautifully coloured skirt of rich material. His finger-nails were
+polished till they shone, a huge diamond flashed on his right hand, and
+he peered out benignantly over the tops of a pair of gold-bowed
+spectacles. Dignified in bearing, he looked every inch the statesman and
+scholar. His gracious manner won him friends during his stay in New
+York, and his indefatigable propensity for asking questions--some of
+them rather embarrassing to those questioned, as when he politely
+inquired the ages of the ladies whom he met and the salaries of the
+officials who entertained him--aroused much merriment."
+
+In the way of a distinguished visitor Li Hung Chang was a novelty. New
+York gave him a rousing reception. The Avenue was lined by cheering
+throngs as the Ambassador and his suite were driven to the hotel. The
+carriages were flanked by U.S. Cavalry. Over the gaily decorated
+Waldorf the golden imperial banner of the Celestial Kingdom with the
+great blue Dragon snapping at a crimson ball fluttered in the breeze.
+But Li Hung Chang did not pay the hostelry the compliment of relying on
+its cuisine, preferring the services of his own Chinese cooks. The day
+after his arrival the Ambassador was received by President Cleveland at
+the home of ex-Secretary of the Navy William C. Whitney, Fifth Avenue
+and Fifty-seventh Street. Surrounding the President were the Secretaries
+of State, War, the Treasury, the Attorney-General, and other officials.
+The visiting statesman was presented to Mr. Cleveland by Richard Olney,
+Secretary of State, and to the Chief Executive turned over his
+credentials from the Chinese Emperor.
+
+The banquet that evening, given by former American diplomats to the
+Celestial Empire, began at six o'clock, as Li wished to set for the
+Western world the example of early retiring. In his attentions to the
+splendid repast before him he was most abstemious, but he finished by
+smoking a cigar. John E. Ward, a former Minister to China, began the
+speech-making by a toast to the Emperor, the President of the United
+States, and Li Hung Chang. George F. Seward, another former Minister to
+China, lauded the Ambassador's long and distinguished services to his
+country and to the world at large. After a brief response through his
+interpreter, Li left the banquet hall at eight-thirty, and went to his
+night's rest. His hosts, however, were not to be balked of their
+evening's entertainment, and the oratorical feast was continued till
+midnight.
+
+About General Grant's tomb, when Li visited it, a crowd of more than
+twenty thousand persons was gathered. From his carriage Li stepped into
+his chair of state, and was borne to the tomb by four policemen. At the
+stairway he left the chair and made his way slowly and laboriously on
+foot into the vault. To those about him Li said that this visit to the
+hero's tomb was one of the chief things he had in mind in planning his
+journey to America, and that he had thought of it continually during the
+trip. General Horace Porter recalled that Li's contribution of five
+hundred dollars, one of the first received, was something that had never
+been forgotten by the American people. Other events of the Prime
+Minister's stay in New York were his reception of a delegation of
+American missionary societies, his visits to Chinatown, and to Brooklyn,
+and the dinner given to him at Delmonico's the evening of September 2nd.
+
+Earlier events of the Avenue fade into comparative unimportance when we
+come to September 30, 1899. For Admiral George Dewey had come home, and
+Fifth Avenue had the chance to acclaim the victor of Manila Bay. Down
+the broad street, from Fifty-ninth Street, under the Arch at Madison
+Square, and on to Washington Square, the procession in the hero's honour
+passed. This was the order of march:
+
+  Major-General Roe and Staff.
+  Sousa's Band.
+  Sailors of the Admiral's Flagship, the "Olympia."
+  Admiral Dewey, seated beside Mayor Van Wyck
+    of New York in a carriage, at the head of a
+    line of carriages containing Governor Roosevelt,
+    Rear Admirals Schley and Sampson,
+    General Miles, and others.
+  West Point Cadets.
+  United States Regulars.
+  New York National Guard and Naval Militia.
+  National Guard of other States.
+  Union and Confederate Veterans.
+  Veterans of the Spanish War.
+
+When the head of the procession reached Thirty-fourth Street, the
+sailors from the Admiral's flagship halted and drew up along the side of
+the Avenue. The Admiral left his carriage and entered the reviewing
+stand at Madison Square. Admiral Sampson was on his right. Admiral
+Schley on his left. Surrounding them were officers of both branches of
+the service. For four hours Admiral Dewey stood there, acknowledging the
+salutes and saluting the flag. The following day, October 1st, saw the
+great naval parade through the waters of the Hudson River.
+
+A decade passed, and then came the Hudson-Fulton celebration of
+September 25--October 9, 1909. Of chief importance to the Avenue was the
+civic procession of September 28th, when the floats, depicting a great
+number of historical events, moved down the Avenue to Washington Square.
+On the east side of the thoroughfare, from Fortieth to Forty-second
+Street, opposite the Public Library, there had been erected a Court of
+Honour. Against the stately pillars of the Court, the procession moved
+swiftly by. Every nation that went into the "melting pot" was
+represented, with the harped green flag of Ireland at the head of the
+long column. Following the Ancient Order of Hibernians and other Irish
+societies came the Italian organizations, then Poles, English, Dutch,
+French, Scotch, Bohemian, Hungarian, and Syrian.
+
+It was the nation's history of four hundred years that passed in effigy
+on the floats. Pocahontas again interceded with her father Powhatan for
+the life of Captain John Smith. Balboa caught sight of the waters of the
+Pacific. The tea was dumped into Boston Harbour. The Minute Men stood
+fast on the Common. Mad Anthony Wayne stormed Stony Point. Molly Stark's
+husband said, "There are the red-coats. We must beat them today, or
+Molly Stark's a widow!" Cornwallis surrendered his sword at Yorktown.
+Somebody in the Mexican War said, "Give them a little more grape,
+General Bragg!" and Dewey said: "You may fire when you're ready,
+Gridley!"
+
+In some of these events of the later years the writer had a personal
+share. From a seventh-story window at Twenty-first Street he looked
+down on the procession in honour of Admiral Dewey. From a vantage point
+at Thirty-fifth Street he witnessed the passing of floats in the
+Hudson-Fulton celebration. But there was one day on the Avenue, perhaps
+the greatest and most inspiring of them all, in which he did not share.
+That was the day that saw the visit of the Allied Commissions, the day
+of the coming of a Marshal of France. About the time that the guns on
+the warships and land batteries at Hampton Roads were thundering out
+their message of welcome to the distinguished guests, the writer in
+company with six other Americans who had been with the Commission for
+Relief in Belgium was entering French territory, after a
+never-to-be-forgotten journey through Germany. How such of us who
+claimed New York as our own thrilled as we pictured three thousand miles
+away the city's greeting to the grave, silent man whose cool genius had
+hurled back the Teuton hordes at the very gates of Paris! How we built
+up on the limited descriptions that had been cabled across the Atlantic!
+We saw the sweep of the procession up the Avenue, the thousands upon
+thousands of flags, the densely packed throngs lining the sidewalks, the
+eager faces in the windows of the tall buildings, and in the motor-car,
+for which all eyes were searching, the smiling, saluting Marshal.
+
+"About now," said one of us, "he should be passing Madison Square."
+
+"I can see the people on the sidewalks and crowding the windows and the
+housetops," said another.
+
+"And I," said a third, "can hear the roar that goes up from the Avenue
+when the people catch sight of him."
+
+"When he hears that roar," said a fourth, "he will recall the guns of
+the Marne as gentle zephyrs."
+
+To that last statement and sentiment we all proudly agreed. For despite
+the three thousand miles of intervening ocean it was our New York and
+our Fifth Avenue.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+_Some Avenue Clubs in the Early Days_
+
+
+Some Avenue Clubs in the Early Days--The Invention of the Club--Cato or
+Dr. Johnson?--The Judgment of Thackeray--The Union--The Prolific
+Diedrich Knickerbocker--Omens of 1836--The Century--Its Descent from the
+Sketch and the Column--Old-Time Austerity--Leaders of the Talk--The
+Lotos--The Union League--The Manhattan--The First of the College
+Clubs--The Columbia Yacht--The New York Athletic--Rise and Fall of the
+Traveller's--The Arcadian.
+
+
+"Presuming that my dear Bobby would scarcely consider himself to be an
+accomplished man about town until he had obtained an entrance into a
+respectable club, I am happy to inform you that you are this day elected
+a member of the 'Polyanthus,' having been proposed by my friend, Lord
+Viscount Colchicum, and seconded by your affectionate uncle. I have
+settled with Mr. Stiff, the worthy secretary, the preliminary pecuniary
+arrangements regarding the entrance fee and the first annual
+subscription--the ensuing payments I shall leave to my worthy nephew.
+You were elected, sir, with but two black-balls; and every other man who
+was put up for ballot had four, with the exception of Tom Harico, who
+had more black balls than white. Do not, however, be puffed up by this
+victory, and fancy yourself more popular than other men. Indeed, I don't
+mind telling you (but of course I do not wish it to go any farther) that
+Captain Slyboots and I, having suspicions of the meeting, popped a
+couple of adverse balls into the other candidates' boxes; so that, at
+least, you should, in case of mishap, not be unaccompanied in
+ill-fortune."--Thackeray's "Mr. Brown the Elder takes Mr. Brown the
+Younger to a Club."
+
+Very likely there are a few thousand New Yorkers, who like the present
+writer, not having considered the subject very deeply, have held to the
+vague idea that the club was an invention of a certain Dr. Samuel
+Johnson. Also that it came about in some such way as this. The Doctor
+had grown weary of bullying the patient Boswell, and browbeating the
+acquaintance met by chance in Fleet Street or the Strand did not
+entirely satisfy him. So one day, storming out of the Cheshire Cheese,
+after roundly abusing the larkpie of which he had consumed an enormous
+quantity, he founded the first club, with the object of gathering
+together a number of his fellow-mortals in one place, and upon them
+pouring out the vials of his pompous and splenetic wrath.
+
+One day, however, the "De Senectute" that had been long forgotten was
+recalled by a passage in Mr. James W. Alexander's "History of the
+University Club of New York." There it was pointed out, that as far back
+as 200 B.C., Cicero represented Cato as saying: "To begin with, I have
+always remained a member of a 'Club.' Clubs, as you know, were
+established in my _quaestorship_ on the reception of the Magna Mater
+from Ida. So _I used to dine at their feast_ with members of my club--on
+the whole with moderation." But, except as a point of historical
+interest, whether stern Cato or voluble Johnson was the inventor does
+not matter greatly to the New York club member who is airing his weekly
+grievance by drawing up a petition, or writing a scorching letter a day
+to the House Committee.
+
+If you will listen to the Manhattanite of the older generation, you are
+likely to derive the impression that club life in New York is a matter
+of the last half-century at most. He is rather inclined to fleer at any
+pretension to American club life of earlier date. In one sense he is
+right. The club as we know it now is essentially a British institution
+modelled on British lines. More and more is the British idea being
+carried to the extreme, until we are associating club life with the vast
+club-house of spacious lounges and marble swimming pools, and a cuisine
+rivalling that of one of the great new hotels. The Fifth Avenue club of
+half a century ago had little magnificence as we now understand the
+word. It was a simpler and more limited hospitality that was offered to
+the friend or the distinguished stranger from overseas. Yet that
+hospitality must have had a rare flavour and atmosphere. There must have
+been something about it that went far to make up for mere material
+deficiencies, if we are to credit the verdicts of those who were in a
+position to compare American club life with club life in England and on
+the Continent. Thackeray was as fine a judge of the matter as any man
+who ever strutted through St. James's Park and scowled back at the
+Barnes Newcomeses and Captain Heavysideses in the club windows along
+Pall Mall, and there was what he said and wrote about the Century.
+
+It was in the middle of the sixth decade of the last century that the
+clubs began to find their way into Fifth Avenue. One of the first was
+the Union Club. Writing of that organization in 1906, M. Charles Huard,
+in "New York comme je l'ai vu," volunteered the puzzling information
+that it was "_fonde en 1836 par les descendants de Knickerbocker, le
+plus vieux donc des grand clubs de New York_." If the Frenchman was to
+be taken literally he apparently regarded the offspring of Washington
+Irving's creation as an exceedingly prolific race. The Union, in 1855,
+moved from Broadway near Fourth Street into a house on the northwest
+corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-first Street. That home, which the
+Union occupied until fifteen or twenty years ago, was described as "a
+superb structure which cost three hundred thousand dollars." It was the
+first building erected in the city solely for club purposes. Almost to
+the day of its demolition, although the neighbourhood about it was
+changing rapidly, the old house wore an aspect of dignity. To the corner
+the habitues of other years seldom come today. Instead, at the noon
+hour, the sidewalks swarm with foreign faces and there is excited babble
+in an alien tongue. The cloak and suit firm of Potash and Perlmutter is
+as much at home here now as it was in its East Broadway--or was it
+Division Street?--loft when the present century was coming into being.
+
+There is an old volume, bearing the date 1871, called "The Clubs of New
+York." The author was a Francis Gerry Fairfield, and the chapters that
+make up the book were originally contributed to the columns of the "Home
+Journal." There is a perceptible smile on Mr. Fairfield's face as he
+writes of the town of thirty years before. To the present generation
+that smile is irresistibly funny. He recalls the year 1836, when the
+Union was founded as one of meteorological oddities. "Tradition
+preserves the record of the season under the designation of the cold
+summer. Weird auroras did not forbear to lift themselves in mountains of
+fire along the north, even in July; and more than once the canopy-aurora
+hung like a mock sun in the very centre of the heavens. People predicted
+strange things; but the strange things did not happen. The hyena of
+pestilence, the wolf of want, and the red death of war were conjured,
+but emerged not, nevertheless, from the vasty deep supposed by
+Shakespeare to be inhabited by their spirits." But Mr. Fairfield
+disclaims any suggestion that "the gestation of the Union Club, then in
+progress, had any material influence in the evolution of these omens, or
+that the weather was affected by the parturition of the great social
+event." With the metropolitan sophistication of 1871 he pats 1836 on the
+head as a year when New York was a bit of a village, of rather more than
+three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. Houston, then North
+Street, Bleecker, and Bond Streets were particularly uptown, and
+thoroughfares of fashion and aristocracy. The old regime was still in
+its glory; and real counts, in plaid pantaloons, were sensational
+occurrences to be petted, set up as lions, and finally entrapped into
+matrimony, just by way of improving the blood of the first families. He
+tells of "the little white-faced hotel now termed the Tremont" as having
+been kept by a real count, expatriated for political reasons, but
+afterwards restored to titles and estates. There are those of the Year
+of Grace 1918 who recall the "little white-faced Tremont." But its soul
+has long since passed to t'other side of Styx.
+
+From the day when the Union first opened its doors at No. 1 Bond
+Street, it was one of the wealthiest and most exclusive of New York
+clubs. The names of its organizers are names associated with the history
+of the city. Ogden Hoffman, whom Mr. Fairfield describes as "a
+bald-headed, dreamy-eyed man, in his day the star of the New York Bar,
+both for fervid eloquence and profound learning"; Philip Hone, he of the
+immortal "Diary"; Thomas P. Oakley, Samuel Jones, Beverly Robinson, W.B.
+Lewrence, Charles King, E.T. Throop, and J. Depeyster Ogden. These were
+some of the men whose names were appended to the provisional
+constitution drawn up on June 30, 1836. C. Fenno Hoffman, "next to
+Morris the sweetest song-writer America has produced," later became a
+member of the association, which from its inception, was the
+representative organization of the old families. Livingstons, Clasons,
+Dunhams, Griswolds, Van Cortlandts, Paines, Centers, Vandervoorts,
+Stuyvesants, Van Renssalaers, Irelands, Suydams, and other names of
+Knickerbocker fame, filled its list of membership with a sort of
+aristocratic monotony of that Knickerbockerism, which has since, to use
+the words of Mr. Fairfield again, "in solemn and silent Second Avenue
+(the Faubourg St. Germain of the city), earned the epithet of the
+Bourbons of New York." Solemn and silent Second Avenue is solemn and
+silent no more. Long since gone are the social glories of that
+thoroughfare that once boldly stepped forward to challenge the supremacy
+of the street that is the subject of this book. "Sic transit!" or
+something of the kind would have been the probable comment of Mr.
+Fairfield, for he, in common with others of his age, delighted in
+flinging in a scrap of Latin or French on every possible occasion. They
+were industrious investigators of the thesaurus in those days.
+
+The first home of the Union, at No. 1 Bond Street, was in reality the
+house of its secretary, John H.L. McCrackan. In 1837 a building on
+Broadway near Leonard Street was secured, and the club moved into it,
+there to remain for three years. Then, for seven years, it was in a
+house on the other side of Broadway, and in 1847, obeying the prevalent
+impulse up-townward, it shifted its quarters to the spot from which it
+was later to remove to the Twenty-first Street home. That structure at
+Broadway and Fourth Street was the property of the Stuyvesant family,
+and after the departure of the men of the Union, was occupied by the
+confectioner Maillard as a hotel and restaurant. In 1852 the question of
+a permanent building began to be discussed, and in 1854 the land at the
+Twenty-first Street corner was secured and the work of erecting the
+structure that in its day was the most imposing of all that lined Fifth
+Avenue between Waverly Place and the Broadway junction begun. The club
+moved into the new quarters in May, 1855, at a time when its membership
+numbered approximately five hundred. In writing of the Union as it was
+in 1871 Mr. Fairfield made the comment that literature was hardly
+represented at all, and journalism only by Manton Marble of the "World."
+As had been the case of Thackeray and the Athenaeum of London, Mr.
+Marble, at the time of his first candidacy, had been blackballed. The
+objection, also as in the case of Thackeray, was ascribed not to the
+personality of the man, but to his profession. But Mr. Marble was
+eventually admitted through the efforts of a member of the Board of
+Directors, who declared boldly that not a new member should be elected
+until the blackballs against the journalist had been withdrawn. Robert
+J. Dillon, landscape gardener, and J.H. Lazarus, portrait painter, were
+almost the sole art representatives, and in 1871 J. Lester Wallack was
+the only actor on the club list. Wallack's great contemporary of the
+stage, Edwin Booth, was a member of the Century and of the Lotos. The
+law of the day was represented by such men as Mayor Hall, until he
+resigned as a result of the criticism of fellow-members growing out of
+the exposures of the Tammany frauds in the summer and autumn of 1871,
+W.M. Evarts, Judge Garvin, Judge Gunning S. Bedford, Eli P. Norton, and
+John E. Burrill. Of men prominent in political and municipal life were
+August Belmont, Samuel J. Tilden, Peter B. Sweeny, former Mayor George
+Opdyke, Isaac Bell, and Andrew H. Green, later to become the "Father of
+Greater New York." Among the dominant financial figures, in addition to
+August Belmont, were A.T. Stewart, John J. Cisco, Henry Clews, and John
+Jacob Astor. From the Army were U.S. Grant, then the nation's President,
+John H. Coster, George W. Cullom, Samuel W. Crawford, Howard Stockton,
+Rufus Ingalls, J.L. Rathbone, I.U.D. Reeve, and Stewart Van Vliet. From
+the Navy, James B. Breese, James Alden, Edward C. Gratton, Thomas M.
+Potter, Henry O. Mayo, James Glynn, W.C. Leroy, L.M. Powell, and John H.
+Wright.
+
+By virtue of its descent from the Sketch and the Column, the Century
+Association might lay claim to seniority among the clubs of Fifth
+Avenue. The Sketch Club was the result of the union of the literary and
+artistic elements of New York, which, in 1829, were producing an annual
+called "The Talisman." Among the writers in the Sketch were Bryant,
+Verplanck, and Sands, and later Washington Irving and J.K. Paulding
+joined it. There was no regular home, the club meeting at the houses of
+members in turn. For six months, during 1830, it did not exist, having
+been dissolved in May of that year, and reorganized in December.
+Thereafter, for a few years, it met in the Council Room of the National
+Academy of Design, and then returned to the custom of meeting at the
+homes of the members. That organization was the embryo Century. The
+Sketch Club had first taken form in 1829. Four years before that a
+society called the Column had been established by graduates of Columbia
+College. That organization, too, had a share in the moulding of the new
+club.
+
+The meeting that brought the Century into being was held the evening of
+January 13, 1847, in the rotunda of the New York Gallery of Fine Arts in
+the City Hall Park. The call for the meeting had been sent out a few
+weeks before, the men composing the signing committee being John G.
+Chapman, A.B. Burand, C.C. Ingham, A.M. Cozzens, F.W. Edmonds, and H.T.
+Tuckerman. The original Centurions were forty-two in number, of whom
+twenty-five came from the Sketch, and six from the Column. There were
+ten artists, ten merchants, four authors, three bankers, three
+physicians, two clergymen, two lawyers, one editor, one diplomat, and
+three men of leisure. All were more or less representative men of the
+city, which had grown from the town of three hundred and fifty thousand
+of the day of the Union's formation, to a young metropolis of six
+hundred thousand. Gulian C. Verplanck was the club's first president,
+and back in his day began the Century's peculiar Twelfth Night Festival,
+which has been continued ever since. Twelfth Night with the Centurions
+is distinctive in that it is not an annual event nor the event of any
+given year. The very uncertainty of the ceremonial has added zest to the
+revel, which usually ends with an old-fashioned Virginia Reel. A few
+years ago the reel was led by Theodore Roosevelt and the late Joseph H.
+Choate.
+
+The first home of the Century, which it occupied for two years, was in
+rooms at 495 Broadway--between Broome and Spring Streets. During this
+period a journal called the "Century" was started, and edited by F.S.
+Cozzens and John H. Gourley. Then, in 1848, the club moved to 435 Broome
+Street; thence, in 1850, to 575 Broadway; in 1852, to Clinton Place,
+where Thackeray learned to love it, and where, by virtue of proximity,
+it first laid claim to be regarded as a Fifth Avenue club.
+
+[Illustration: WHERE THE AVENUE AND THIRTY-FOURTH STREET CROSS STANDS
+THE BUILDING POPULARLY KNOWN AS THE KNICKERBOCKER TRUST COMPANY. HERE,
+IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LAST CENTURY, "SARSAPARILLA" TOWNSEND BUILT IN
+BROWN-STONE, AND A.T. STEWART LATER BUILT IN WHITE MARBLE]
+
+In Clinton Place the Century stayed until it went to its Fifteenth
+Street house, where it was so long to remain. Gulian Verplanck's
+presidency lasted for many years. At first it was a happy tenure of
+office. But the Civil War came, bringing with it grave dissensions.
+Verplanck may be said to have invited the divisions that crept into
+the club, and which led to his overwhelming defeat in the election of
+1864. He was succeeded by the historian Bancroft, who held office until
+1868, when he resigned because of his departure for Prussia as the
+United States Minister to Berlin.
+
+From the very day when it took form the Century seems to have had an
+atmosphere--almost a history. In the years long before the more modern
+clubs of a literary flavour were dreamed of, the Century was bringing
+together the leading men-of-letters and of art of New York. Yet somehow
+the Century of early times impresses newer generations as having been
+tremendously portentous and dignified. There was never any suggestion of
+Bohemia. After the establishment of the Century the gifted Poe was to
+enjoy, or rather to endure, two more years of life. By no stretch of the
+imagination can we think of his being in the club, even as the guest of
+an evening. There was plenty of good-fellowship, no doubt, and good
+cheer, but also the chill of a certain reserve. The talk seems, after
+all the years, to have been essentially serious--men expressing
+themselves not lightly, but judicially, and after long deliberation; Mr.
+Bryant gravely conceding the right of Pope or Dryden or Watts, according
+to the subject of discussion, to be ranked as a poet, or denying the
+same, while members of lesser note sat about listening and nodding, but
+preserving becoming reticence. There was almost a Bostonese austerity
+about the great men of that early time and circle. They wore their
+garments as Roman Senators wore their togas. It was not good form for
+the stranger to break lightly into the talk of the Immortals. To have
+done so would have been to provoke the amazement and censure that was
+the lot of Mark Twain many years after, when, at a dinner in the Hub, he
+sought to jest irreverently with the sacred names of Holmes, Emerson,
+and Longfellow. Again try to fancy the shy, eccentric, improvident
+genius of "Ulalume," "The Bells," and "The Fall of the House of Usher"
+at ease in a company that, while delightful, was all propriety and solid
+intellectuality. No, Poe would no more have fitted into the Century than
+Balzac or Zola would have fitted into the French Academy which so
+persistently denied them. And, to be perfectly frank, had the writer
+been a Centurion of that period, and had the name of Edgar Allan Poe
+come up for election, he might have been one of the first to drop a
+black pill in the box, loudly acclaiming the genius, but deploring the
+impossible and unclubable personality.
+
+After the presidency of Bancroft came that of Bryant. He held the office
+until his death in 1878, but as he was always averse to crowds, he was
+seldom seen at the club except in official meetings. An enthusiastic
+Centurion, writing of the club at the time of Bryant's death, when it
+had been in existence thirty-one years, spoke of it as having drawn
+together the choicest spirits of that generation of New York. "Without
+formality or design, it had become an institute of mutual enlightenment
+among men knowing the worth of one another's work, likened by Bellows,
+more than half seriously, to the French Academy. A sure result of this
+communion was absolute equality among those who shared it. No true
+Centurion ever assumed anything, each standing in his real place. The
+atmosphere killed pretension and stifled shams. The pedant or the
+conceited person silently drifted away. How could it be otherwise, while
+a famous painter was describing some scene, or a noted philosopher
+illustrating some theory, or an acute statesman drawing some historical
+parallel, than that the egotist should drop himself, and the proser
+forget to prose?" The late Clarence King was in his day a leader in the
+Century talk, and his comment on the club was that it contained "the
+rag-tag and bob-tail of all that was best in the country." Many times
+has it been introduced under thin disguises in the fiction dealing with
+New York. In some of the novels of Robert W. Chambers it appears as the
+Pyramid. Twenty years ago Paul Leicester Ford brought it into "The
+Story of an Untold Love," calling it The Philomathean. According to the
+hero of that tale, the Philomathean was the one club where charlatanry
+and dishonesty must fail, however it succeeded with the world, and where
+the poorest man stood on a par with the wealthiest. The Centurion of all
+times has had much to be proud of, and he has not been blind to his
+blessings, nor ashamed to acquaint the world with his great good
+fortune.
+
+Although most of them began in side streets, and many of them have in
+the later years migrated again to side streets, through the greater part
+of their history the clubs here discussed belong essentially to the
+"Avenue" from which they have drawn so much of their inspiration. It
+does not matter that the present home of the Century is at 7 West
+Forty-third Street, or that the Lotos for the past few years has been at
+110 West Fifty-seventh Street. They remain, as they always have been,
+Fifth Avenue clubs. Part of the history of the Lotos Club is written in
+the chapter dealing with "Some Great Days on the Avenue." For the fame
+of the organization as a giver of elaborate banquets to distinguished
+guests has spread through the land. The Lotos dates back to the early
+spring of 1870, when a group of young New York journalists met in the
+office of the New York "Leader" to take the initiatory steps necessary
+for the formation of a club. These men were De Witt Van Buren of the
+"Leader," Andrew C. Wheeler of the "Daily World," George W. Hows of the
+"Evening Express," F.A. Schwab of the "Daily Times," W.L. Alden of the
+"Citizen," and J.H. Elliot of the "Home Journal." As the founders were
+all connected with the literary, musical, art, or dramatic departments
+of their papers, it was not surprising that the projected association
+was to be modelled upon the Savage, Garrick, and Junior Garrick of
+London. Earlier failure had shown that a strictly literary organization
+was out of the question. A wider and more comprehensive membership was a
+necessity. As set forth in Article I., Section 2 of the Lotos
+Constitution, the primary object of the club was "to promote social
+intercourse among journalists, literary men, artists, and members of the
+theatrical profession."
+
+From the first temporary quarters in the parlours of the Belvidere
+House, then at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, the
+club moved into a permanent home at No. 2 Irving Place, a building
+adjoining the Academy of Music. In the autumn of 1870 the first
+president, De Witt Van Buren, died, and was succeeded by A. Oakley Hall,
+then the Mayor of New York, who assumed the office entirely in his
+social capacity, as a journalist, dramatist, and patron of the arts. It
+was he who suggested the famous "Lotos Saturday Nights." There is a
+flavour of high Bohemia in the list of members of that period. Among the
+artists were Beard, Reinhart, Burling, Lumley, Chapin, Bispham, and
+Pickett; there were such pianists as Wehli, Mills, Hopkins, Colby, and
+Bassford; singers like Randolfi, Laurence, Thomas, MacDonald, Perring,
+Seguin, Matthison, and Davis; and actors like Edwin Booth, Lawrence
+Barrett, Mark Smith, John Brougham, and George Clark.
+
+Some one has said that every generation must express itself in a new
+club. The decade from 1861-1870 expressed itself in several. To those
+years of New York date the Columbia Yacht (1867), the Harvard, first of
+the college clubs (1865), the Manhattan (1865), the New York Athletic
+(1868), and the Union League (1863). The last named organization owes
+its birth to the doubts and complications of the darkest hour of the War
+of Secession. Unite to stand behind the President with our full
+strength, was the slogan of the men who met in January, 1863, to form
+the plans for the new association. At the beginning there was talk of
+adopting the name "Loyal League." The first work of the club was the
+organization of negro troops in New York City. Despite the opposition of
+Governor Seymour, and the ridicule of the newspapers, who held up the
+idea of the negro as a soldier as a huge joke, the Leaguers persisted in
+their efforts, with the result that in December, 1863, the Twentieth
+Regiment of U.S. coloured troops was enlisted, and within a few months,
+two more regiments, known as the Twenty-sixth and the Thirty-first.
+
+In those days the club-house faced Union Square, at the junction of
+Seventeenth Street and Broadway. Early in 1868 the Union League moved to
+a house at the corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, the
+building afterwards to be occupied in turn by the University Club and
+the Manhattan Club. The structure had been erected by Mr. Jerome for the
+use of the Jockey Club, but was leased to the Union League for a term of
+ten years. Among the early honorary members of the Union League were
+Abraham Lincoln, General U.S. Grant, General W.T. Sherman,
+Lieutenant-General "Phil" Sheridan, Major-Generals Burnside, Wright, and
+Hancock, Admiral David G. Porter, and Rear-Admiral Bailey. The active
+membership of 1870 included such names as William Cullen Bryant, William
+M. Evarts, Whitelaw Reid, Parke Godwin, Horace Greeley, Chester A.
+Arthur, Thomas Nast, Joseph H. Choate, Eastman Johnson, George P.
+Putnam, Daniel P. Appleton, Dr. Samuel Osgood, George Griswold, E.D.
+Stanton.
+
+To the name of the Union League is inevitably linked that of the
+Manhattan Club, for, the Civil War once at an end, the latter became the
+expression of the political aims and aspirations of the Democratic Party
+as the former was of the Republican. The Manhattan had its origin in the
+turmoil of the election of 1864, and the defeat of the Democratic
+candidate, General McClellan. The first movers in its foundation were
+Douglass Taylor, then secretary of the Tammany society, Street
+Commissioner George W. McLean, S.L.M. Barlow of the "World," Judge
+Hilton, the Hon. A. Schell, A.L. Robertson, and John T. Hoffman, later
+Governor of New York State from 1869 till 1872. The earlier meetings
+were held in the old Delmonico's, at the corner of Fourteenth Street and
+Fifth Avenue, and then the Manhattan moved into its first real home at
+No. 96 Fifth Avenue, just a block above the famous restaurant, where
+many of the meetings continued to be held. John Van Buren was the first
+president, with Augustus Schell first vice-president, A.L. Robertson
+second vice-president, Manton Marble secretary, and W. Butler Duncan
+treasurer.
+
+In the winter of 1867-8 the club was enlivened by a bout of fisticuffs
+that was a "celebrated case" of its day. There was then a strict club
+rule forbidding the introduction of a guest. Manager Bateman, the
+father of Miss Bateman the actress, saw fit to violate this law. A
+member of the House Committee, perhaps overzealous in the idea of his
+duties, carried his protest to the point of forbidding the servants of
+the club to serve the unwelcome guest. Mr. Bateman's resentment of the
+action took the form of a personal assault, which became the sensation
+of the hour and the topic of the newspapers. "Evidently," remarked the
+"Herald" (those were the days of the elder Bennett, who in his vast
+experience in New York journalism had more than once felt the sting of a
+horse-whip), "to be slapped is what some faces are made for!" But the
+Governors did not see the matter in the light that the "Herald" did, and
+the pugilistically inclined manager was summarily expelled, the board
+refusing to settle the matter by accepting his resignation.
+
+Another Fifth Avenue club that claimed 1865 as the year of its origin
+was the Traveller's. For obvious reasons many of the clubs of the
+seventh decade of the last century chose to be near the old Delmonico
+restaurant, and the Traveller's was no exception, making its first home
+on the opposite corner. The object of the association was to bring
+together travellers of all nations, and to do proper honour to
+distinguished who were visiting the United States. After two years at
+the Fourteenth Street corner the Traveller's moved northward to a new
+home at No. 222 Fifth Avenue, the George W. Burnham residence at
+Eighteenth Street. Mr. Fairfield apparently did not regard the club with
+entire favour, for in his book of 1873 he speaks of the club-house as
+being "a leading resort for America-examining Englishmen, and the
+headquarters of an English coterie of considerable social importance."
+"_O tempora! O mores_!" he exclaims. There were palmy days in the past,
+when the receptions were social reunions of _eclat_. But "they have made
+an end of all that, having settled into a body as quiet as Mr. Mantilini
+expected to be after taking a bath in the Thames." But, granting Mr.
+Fairfield's claim that the literary quality of the Traveller's had
+deteriorated, there still remained the list of Honorary Members carrying
+a certain prestige. Professor Louis Agassiz headed the list; and others
+were Paul Du Chaillu, the African explorer whose adventures were for a
+long time regarded as clever romance; the Hon. Anson Burlingame, who had
+been an envoy from the Chinese Emperor; Sir Samuel Baker, of London;
+Rev. J.C. Fletcher, Professor Raphael Pumpelly, the Right Rev. Bishop
+Southgate, the Hon. J. Ross Browne, and M. Michel Chevalier, of the
+French Senate.
+
+"Lotos and Arcadian: both stuff for dreams. The one excogitated in
+spring-time, when Nature was taking her break-of-day drowse, previous to
+getting up and going about business; the other suggestive of Nature
+indulging in a half-light reverie in a sort of crimson and scarlet
+dressing-gown, previous to putting on her night-cap and going to bed,
+after a hard summer's work. The one reminding of a land where it is
+always afternoon of a day in the last of June, when one can almost hear
+the music of corn-growing, the mystic throes of buds toiling into
+blossom; the other of a land where it is always about eight o'clock in
+the morning with the dew still on the meadow-grass, and the world
+rubbing its eyes and brushing away cobwebs of dream, before buckling
+down to the struggle. The one somewhat reminiscent of Egypt and
+crocodiles, lisping palms and Arabs, of long and lotos-eating days of
+_keff_, in which even the lazy hours loiter in shady nooks, and the wind
+holds its breath in sympathy with the general doziness, and seems to be
+listening to something; the other of vivid Greek life, with its
+shepherds:
+
+    "'Piping on hollow reeds to their pent sheep,
+      Calm be thy Lyra's sleep,'
+
+of Pindar, of Orphic song, of lost Milesian tales, of a life growing
+into sculpture or breaking into sinuous hexameter waves. The one mystic,
+the other beautiful, both symbolical."
+
+With this rhapsody Mr. Fairfield introduced the Arcadian Club of New
+York, an organization that for a time threatened to rival the Lotos in
+the latter's particular field. Writing men snatched up into the clouds
+in those days for their metaphors, and combed Mythology for
+illustrations with which to garnish descriptions of the most commonplace
+events of everyday life. Here is another gem from Mr. Fairfield's book,
+also in his chapter about the Arcadian Club.
+
+"Gentlemen of society, bankers, stylish young men with vast ideas of
+personal importance, amateurs and patrons! City Hall is the brain of New
+York, of the continent, and it is one of the laws of the world that
+brains will rule. Rebel as muscles merely of the body politic, and ye
+rebel against inexorable law: that scribbling _literati_ in the fifth
+story--for newspapers like men have their brains in the upper story--is
+more potent than you in settling the artistic position of a Lucca or a
+Rubenstein, a Dickens or a Dore, a Tennyson or a Carlyle. Have ye ever
+read a wonderful little ballad by Uhland, entitled 'The Minstrel's
+Curse?' If so, recall it--for it is typical, not of that which comes
+by-and-by, but of that which is: the exponent of the beautiful having
+become in his way an autocrat. Unfortunate it is that journalism is not
+always representative of the best culture--that managing editors will
+now and then entrust criticism to incompetents, but its popular power is
+quite the same, notwithstanding, and this good the popular newspaper has
+wrought, to wit--that the exponent of the arts, media of culture as they
+are, is no longer dependent upon the caprices and whims of isolated
+patrons, nor hampered in his freedom of expression by canons of theirs."
+And so on ad infinitum. The present writer confesses in all humility
+that he has not the least idea as to what the eloquent gentleman meant.
+But remember that it was the age that produced the "St. Elmo" of Augusta
+Evans Wilson.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+_Literary Landmarks and Figures_
+
+
+Literary Landmarks and Figures--A Vision of Pall Mall--The Paris of the
+Forties--Mark Twain's Fifth Avenue Home--In the Time of Poe--Where Henry
+James was Born--The Old University Building--An Encounter in Washington
+Square--Clinton Place--Memories of the Past--Irving, Cooper, Halleck,
+Drake, Dickens, and Trollope as Shades of the Avenue--A Home of
+Janvier--The "Griffou Push"--The Tenth Street Studio Building--The Tile
+Club--The Cary Sisters--Stoddard, Whittier, Aldrich, and Ripley--"Peter
+Parley"--"Fanny Fern"--James Parton--Some Figures of the Recent Past.
+
+
+If, of a day of the fifties of the last century, I had been an arrival
+in London, my first thought would probably have been of a sole at
+Sweeting's or a slice of saddle of mutton at Simpson's in the Strand,
+provided, of course, that the establishments named then existed, and the
+dishes in question were as delectable as in later years, when I came to
+know them in the life. The baser appetite satisfied, the first
+pilgrimage would have been, not to the Tower, or to Lambeth Palace, or
+the British Museum, but to Pall Mall, in the hopes of catching a
+glimpse, in a club window or on the pavement, of the "good grey head" of
+Thackeray. The first impression might have been disappointing. There
+was in the spectacles and high-carried chin something pompous and
+supercilious. The great man, had he noticed them at all, would probably
+have been quite contemptuous of my admiring glances, his mind occupied
+with the idea of winning a nod from a passing duke; but I would have
+seen the "good grey head," and thrilled at the memory of "Vanity Fair"
+and "Henry Esmond." Similarly, in the Paris of that time or of a little
+earlier period, I would have considered the day well spent if in the
+course of it I had seen Victor Hugo with his umbrella, riding on the
+Imperiale of an omnibus, or the good Dumas exhibiting his woolly pate
+conspicuously in a boulevard cafe, or the author of "The Mysteries of
+Paris" and "The Wandering Jew" posing at a table in the Restaurant de
+Paris or Bignon's, or the fat figure of M. de Balzac waddling in the
+direction of a printing house to toil and groan and sweat over the
+proofs of the latest addition to the "Comedie Humaine." We cannot behold
+such giants in our generation, city, and street. Yet Fifth Avenue, from
+the day the first houses pushed northward from Washington Square, has
+had its literary landmarks, figures, and traditions.
+
+Ten years ago, had you been passing of a summer's day a house at the
+southeast corner of the Avenue and Ninth Street, you might have seen
+emerging from the front door, a figure clad in white flannel, and
+looked upon the countenance of the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
+Finn. It was, and is, a house of red brick, a house of three stories and
+a high basement, built by the architect who had designed Grace Church.
+The number is 21. Clemens went to live there in the autumn of 1904,
+remaining for a time at the near-by Grosvenor while the new habitation
+was being put in order, and the home furniture that had been brought
+from Hartford was being installed. When No. 21 was ready for occupation,
+only Clemens and his daughter Jean went to live there, for Clara had not
+recovered from the strain of her mother's long illness, and the shock of
+her death, and was in retirement under the care of a trained nurse.
+Clemens, according to his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, was lonely
+in No. 21, and sought to liven matters by installing a great AEolian
+Orchestrelle. In January, 1906, Paine paid his first visit to the house
+and found the great man propped up in bed, with his head at the foot,
+turning over the pages of "Huckleberry Finn" in search of a paragraph
+about which some random correspondent had asked explanation.
+
+But to go back long before Clemens's time, and to begin in the
+neighbourhood of the old square. In the days when Fifth Avenue was
+young Poe must have found his way there, accompanied, perhaps, by the
+pale, invalided Virginia, to gaze at the fine new houses, for only a few
+hundred yards away was his last city residence, where Lowell called and
+found his host "not himself that day," and where were penned "The Facts
+in the Case of M. Valdemar," the "Philosophy of Composition," and "The
+Literati of New York." Then there was the house in Waverly Place, the
+home of Anne Lynch, the poet of "The Battle of Life," which was a kind
+of literary salon of its day, where Poe once read aloud the newly
+published "Raven," and where Bayard Taylor visited, and Taylor's friend
+Caroline Kirkland, and Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Child, and Ann S.
+Stephens, who wrote "Fashion and Famine" and "Mary Derwent," and young
+Richard Henry Stoddard, and Elizabeth Barstow, who became his wife. Not
+far from the Lynch house was the humble dwelling in which Poe wrote "The
+Fall of the House of Usher."
+
+Just off the Square, at 21 Washington Place, Henry Jones was born. In a
+house that once stood at the northwest corner Bayard Taylor lived for a
+time and wrote the "Epistle from Mount Tmolus," and some of the "Poems
+of the Orient." In later days a large apartment house grew up on the
+site, and there George Parsons Lathrop dwelt, and penned some of the
+verse of his "Days and Dreams," while his wife, the daughter of the
+author of "The Scarlet Letter," composed portions of "Along the Shore."
+In the old University building on the east side of the Square Theodore
+Winthrop--later as Colonel Winthrop to meet a soldier's death at Big
+Bethel--wrote "John Brent," and the famous but utterly dreary "Cecil
+Dreeme," and a few doors below is the red brick apartment where in more
+modern days so many of the younger scribblers have toiled in the years
+of their pseudo-Bohemia. Across the Square N.P. Willis, the town's crack
+descriptive writer, was in the habit of making his way, and on one
+occasion with sorry results. The actor, Edwin Forrest, appeared in his
+path and fell upon him with vigorous assault. Bystanders were on the
+point of intervening. "Stand back, gentlemen!" cried the Thespian. "He
+has interfered in my domestic affairs." And he proceeded with the
+whacking.
+
+Not only the Square, but the side streets below Fourteenth, must be
+taken into a consideration of the old literary landmarks and figures of
+Fifth Avenue. Thackeray was only one of the foreign authors visiting
+America who found ease and comfort in the club-house of the Century in
+Clinton Place. In the same thoroughfare lived and died Evert Augustus
+Duyckinck, co-author with his brother George of the "Cyclopedia of
+American Literature," and author of "The War for the Union"; and Mrs.
+Botta, the Anne Lynch of earlier mention, had for a time a home there;
+and in the street Richard Watson Gilder dwelt later, and in No. 33, in a
+third-story back room, a young clerk named Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote
+his "Ballad of Babie Bell"; and there, at No. 84 which was the residence
+of Judge Daly, the African explorer Paul Du Chaillu wrote fiction and
+fact that by sceptical contemporaries was generally accepted as fiction.
+A block farther north was another home of Mrs. Botta, and the house of
+the actress who is remembered as Tom Moore's first sweetheart, and the
+one-time abode of William Cullen Bryant, who wrote of it as being near
+the home of Irving's friend Brevoort. The neighbourhood is rich with
+memories. We have but to beckon and the ghosts of those literary men and
+women whose names have been forgotten, and of those whose reputations
+have endured, step forth in imagination to fill the street. I see
+Irving, down from his Sunny side estate for a visit to the town that was
+once the fat village of his Diedrich Knickerbocker, strolling over from
+the Irving Place structure that is reputed to have been his, but which
+was not his, to study the new manners and fashions, and to mull on the
+startling changes and swift passage of time. I see the irascible author
+of the "Leather Stocking Tales," for the moment weary of squabbling
+over land agreements with his Cooperstown neighbours and prosecuting
+suits against up-state newspapers, stealing into New York for a glimpse
+of his first city residence down in Beach Street in Greenwich Village,
+where he wrote "The Pilot," and "Lionel Lincoln," and incidentally
+satisfying his curiosity as to the new developments in urban elegance
+and fashion. I can see FitzGreene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake, a
+mile or two away from their accustomed haunts; and any one else whom it
+pleases me to see; our foreign guests and critics, Dickens, looking
+about superciliously, or Anthony Trollope, breathing hard, or Trollope
+_mere_, or Harriet Martineau, or Captain Marryat, or Mayne Reid, or
+Samuel Lover. For in a case like this a trifling matter like an
+anachronism or a misstatement counts for little or nothing.
+
+On Ninth Street, just west of the Charles De Rhams house, which was
+formerly the Henry Brevoort house, are the two or three buildings that
+in bygone days made up the Hotel Griffou. There, twenty years or so ago,
+the late Thomas A. Janvier lived and studied the queer Latin-American
+types that went into his stories of the Efferanti family. There also
+William Dean Howells frequently dined, and the late Edmund Clarence
+Stedman and Richard Watson Gilder went from time to time. Then the older
+and more dignified men drifted away, and the tables in the dining room
+rang with the laughter and high talk of a younger group, known as the
+"Griffou Push." Brave dreams were there, and limitless ambitions, and
+some achievement. But in many cases _Pallida mors_ came knocking all too
+soon, and those who lived sought other environments, and the "Push" was
+no more, and the little hotel became a memory of yesterday.
+
+There were literary associations about the old Studio Building in Tenth
+Street long before the "Old Masters" of New York went there to work, and
+Carmencita came to dance in Chase's studio. In the big brown structure
+Henry T. Tuckerman once lived, and kept his library, and wrote "The
+Criterion," and the "Book of the Artists," and entertained his friends
+of the world of letters; and there Fitzjames O'Brien, the genial Fitz,
+the "gipsy of letters," the author of "The Diamond Lens," visited him.
+Almost across the street, in a little rear wooden house that was to
+serve as the New York home of F. Hopkinson Smith's Colonel Carter of
+Cartersville, was at one time the quarters of the Tile Club, where, in
+the golden days, men ceased to be known by the stiff and formal names
+used in more ceremonious surroundings, and became instead the Owl, or
+the Griffin, or the Pagan, or the Chestnut, or the Puritan, or the
+O'Donoghue, or the Bone, or the Grasshopper, or the Marine, or the
+Terrapin, or the Gaul, or the Bulgarian, or Briareus, or Sirius, or
+Cadmius, or Polyphemus.
+
+A little off the Avenue, on East Twentieth Street, was the home of the
+Cary sisters, Alice and Phoebe; and to the unpretentious little brick
+dwelling of Sunday evenings repaired Stoddard, and Whittier, and
+Aldrich, and Ripley, and Herman Melville, and Mary L. Booth, who
+afterwards became Mrs. Lamb, and wrote the "History of New York," and
+Samuel G. Goodrich, the famous "Peter Parley," and Alice Haven, popular
+writer of juvenile tales, and Justin McCarthy, and James Parton, husband
+of "Fanny Fern," himself one of these rare scribes of his age whose
+writing can be genuinely enjoyed by readers of the present generation,
+and occasionally, grim old Horace Greeley, who, if, as he said, in the
+course of forty years had never been able to get a day off to go
+"a-fishing," managed, now and then, to find an evening of leisure in
+which to divert himself with the pleasant, bookish talk at No. 53. A
+_salon_ as "was a _salon_"--that of the Cary girls. With the vast,
+unwieldy city of today in mind we wonder how they managed it, by what
+charm and persuasion they gathered with such regularity so many of the
+_literati_ really worth while. But it was a smaller town then. It was
+easier to be neighbourly. When Thackeray, on the evening of New Year's
+Day, 1853, journeyed in a sleigh from his hotel to a reception held in a
+house on the west side of Fifth Avenue between Thirty-seventh and
+Thirty-eighth Streets, the destination was characterized as a villa in
+the country.
+
+To revert to the note with which this chapter began. Were it possible
+for us to be transported back to the London of the fifties the sight of
+a Thackeray, a Dickens, a Tennyson, or a Browning would not have been
+necessary to stir our pulses. It would have been an event to have seen
+in the flesh some of the humbler men, G.P.R. James, or Samuel Warren, of
+"Ten Thousand a Year," or any of the ephemeral celebrities who adorned
+the pages of the Maclise Gallery of Portraits. So why disdain, merely
+because they are of our own time, the makers of copy who may be seen on
+the Fifth Avenue of today? I remember my first literary walk down the
+Avenue. It was in the company of Mr. Edward W. Townsend. I was very
+young, and he was the creator of Chimmie Fadden, and the author of "A
+Daughter of the Tenements," and I wished that all the world might see.
+Then the time came when the sight of literary faces was less of a
+novelty, when it was not unusual to meet the author of "The Rise of
+Silas Lapham," who had left his home on Fifty-ninth Street, facing the
+Park, for an afternoon stroll, and to receive his nod of kindly
+recognition; or to pass Edmund Clarence Stedman, to whom I owed, as so
+many others have owed, the first words of encouragement, or to see Frank
+R. Stockton, or Mr. Gilder and Mr. Johnson of the "Century," or Brander
+Matthews on his way to the club in West Forty-third Street.
+
+Looking down upon the Avenue, at the corner of Thirty-third Street, just
+below the Waldorf, are familiar windows. They belonged to a hotel that
+was, or is, the Cambridge, and in the rooms behind the windows, I recall
+occasional pleasant and profitable hours spent in the company of Richard
+Harding Davis. There was another window some blocks farther down, in the
+building occupying the point where Fifth Avenue and Broadway join. That
+window gave light to the workshop of James L. Ford, the obstinate
+satirist, who resents the charge of amiability, and who will not be
+pleased if you tell him that in the pages of "The Literary Shop" he did
+the best work of his life. At another corner, between the two already
+mentioned, the early riser of a few years ago might have seen the
+literary pride of Indiana assuming the duties of the traffic policeman
+who had not yet reached his post, and with the aid of a whistle joyously
+acquired ordering east and west-bound vehicles to proceed and north and
+south-bound vehicles to halt.
+
+If you know your Avenue well enough, the countenances of nearly all of
+the "Best-Selling" kings are easy of recognition. Arriving at the
+Thirties, Robert W. Chambers is likely to turn off, bound for one of the
+antique shops that are to be found in the parallel thoroughfare two
+blocks to the east. At any point on the Avenue between the Washington
+Arch and the Plaza you may stumble upon the cane-swinging discoverer of
+the principality of Graustark, and the cane-swinging inventor of the
+"Tennessee Shad," appraising together the new styles in women's hats, or
+investigating the display in a shop-window. What is the subject that
+they are so earnestly discussing? The Influence of Rabelais on the
+Monastic System of the Fifteenth Century? The obscurity of Robert
+Browning? Whether or not the art of the novel is a finer art than it was
+in the days of the Victorians? Not at all. The point in dispute is the
+figure of Delehanty's batting average in 1867. The vital importance of
+the matter is the reason of their obvious excitement.
+
+Of more serious aspect is Mr. James Lane Allen, whose tales of the
+Kentucky Blue Grass Region I hope will be read as they deserve for many
+generations to come. Rex Beach swings along musing perhaps on the
+solitudes of Lake Hopatcong. Rupert Hughes studies the faces in the
+Avenue throng with the hope of finding the inspiration for a title for
+the projected novel that will be more eccentric, if possible, than the
+title of the last. Jesse Lynch Williams and Arthur Train seek rest after
+their perambulatory efforts in the luxurious seclusion of the University
+Club at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street--the "Morgue" of the
+flippant--where, from the windows, the former first saw My Lost Duchess,
+and the latter discovered the possibilities of McAllister. A few years
+ago in one of the business buildings that had broken into the
+residential stretch below Fourteenth Street, was the office that F.
+Marion Crawford always maintained for use during the occasional visits
+he made to New York. The tall figure of the author of the Saracinesca
+novels was a familiar sight on the Avenue of the late nineties and the
+first years of the present century. But his stays were brief. The call
+of the vineyard-covered mountains about Sorrento was too strong.
+
+From time to time the Avenue has seen literary visitors whose appearance
+could not be regarded as a temporary home coming. Twenty years have
+passed since Rudyard Kipling paid us his last visit, and it was a very
+different Fifth Avenue from the street of today that he knew. But even
+then it was a part of the town that moved him to dreams of "heavenly
+loot." There was, until a year or two ago at least, in an office at
+Fourth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, an old cane-bottomed chair. Once it
+had been in a room on the seventh story of a building at Fifth Avenue
+and Twenty-first Street, and there it had been known as the Barrie
+Chair, for in it the creator of Thrums had been wont to curl himself up,
+and from its comfortable depths, peer through the window down at the
+busy sidewalk below. In the church-going crowds of a Fifth Avenue Sunday
+there are many who recall the sturdy figure of Dr. John Watson, the Ian
+MacLaren of the "Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush" tales, who on several
+occasions occupied a New York pulpit. The last time those who sat under
+him saw a man apparently in the full vigour of rugged health. Yet a few
+days later brought the news of his sudden death, far away from the
+heather of his Scotland. The author of "The Beloved Vagabond" is no more
+a stranger to the Avenue than he is to Bond Street, or the Rue de la
+Paix; and Arnold Bennett has recorded impressions that are at once
+disparaging and polite; and Jeffery Farnol used to trudge it,
+impecunious and unknown, before "The Broad Highway" came to strike the
+note of popular favour.
+
+Many more are the names that might be mentioned, for the street has ever
+been a magnet, and even those who toil in the attics of Bohemia find
+their way here, in the hours of leisure, to see and to be observed.
+Grub Street has assumed the garments of propriety, and shorn itself of
+its long hair, and in the prosperous, well-dressed throng that surges up
+and down the Fifth Avenue pavement, its denizens pass to and fro, no
+longer shyly, furtively, and conspicuously out of place, but with the
+easy assurance of those who are "to the manor born."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+_Fifth Avenue in Fiction_
+
+
+Fifth Avenue in Fiction--Pages of Romance--The Henry James Heroes and
+Heroines--George William Curtiss's "Prue and I"--Edgar Fawcett and Edgar
+Saltus--The "Big Four" of Archibald Clavering Gunter--The Home of Dr.
+Sloper--O. Henry and Arthur Train--Bunner and Washington
+Square--"Predestined"--The De Rham House and Van Bibber's
+Burglar--Delmonico's--The "Amen Corner"--Union and Madison Squares--The
+Coming of Potash and Perlmutter--Up the Avenue.
+
+
+To Macaulay's New Zealander, contemplating from London Bridge the ruins
+of St. Paul's, and the miles upon miles of silent stones stretching to
+north and west and east, there would undoubtedly have come the desire to
+reconstruct a mental picture of the vast, dead city in certain of the
+various periods in which it had been teeming and throbbing with human
+life. Had the wish become the task, formal history would have played its
+part. Informal history would have proved more fruitful, and bygone days
+would have taken shape in the study of old prints, letters, and diaries.
+But for the full flavour of the town that once was and now had become
+crumbling dust he would have turned to pages that had been professedly
+pages of romance.
+
+Suppose Elizabethan London had been his especial interest. That he
+would have seen through the eyes of Sir John Falstaff and his riotous,
+dissolute cronies of the Boar's Head Tavern. Georgian London? What
+better companion could he have had in his scheme of investigation than
+Mr. Thomas Jones, recently come up from the West Country? For a vision
+of Corinthian London could he have done better than take up Conan
+Doyle's "Rodney Stone," with its vivid pictures of the stilted
+eccentrics who hovered about the Prince-Regent, the coffee-houses
+thronged with England's warriors of the land and sea, and the haunts of
+the hard-faced men of the Prize Ring?
+
+The Artful Dodger, guiding the innocent Oliver to the den of Fagin the
+Jew, would have introduced that last New Zealander to the sordid section
+of London about Great Saffron Hill and Little Saffron Hill that existed
+before the construction of the Holborn Viaduct. In the pages of
+Thackeray and George Meredith he would have studied the West-End of
+Victorian days. Certain seamy aspects of London life of the last years
+of the nineteenth century would have been revealed in the novels of
+George Gissing; and the books of a score of scribes, whose permanent
+place in letters is still a matter of conjecture, would have flashed
+glimpses of the city's streets, foibles, manners, and emotions in the
+early years of the twentieth century.
+
+Our literature has, as yet, given us no figure analogous to that Last
+New Zealander of Macaulay. But in the bustling New York of fifty or one
+hundred years hence the dreamer or the student wishing to feel how the
+inhabitants of Manhattan lived three or four score years ago, or how we
+are living today, will not disdain to turn over pages originally
+designed to lighten the tedium of idle hours.
+
+Now and again, in the novels of the fifties and sixties, there are
+glimpses of the stretch from Washington Square to Fourteenth Street, but
+the greater Fifth Avenue, as a factor in fiction, dates from about the
+time when Daisy Miller became a type. To those who really understand
+them, every one of the great, vital streets of the world has a soul as
+well as a body. The social invader from the West, the merchant whose
+establishment still found profit in Grand Street, the banker from Broad
+Street, or the ship's chandler from South, the club awakening to the
+fact that its quarters on Broadway or in one of the side streets near
+Irving Place was too far downtown, or in size inadequate to its growing
+membership--those were the agencies that wrought the Avenue's material
+development. But it was the American travelling in Europe in the days
+when we first found Henry James's heroine on the shores of Lake Geneva
+and later in Rome, when transatlantic voyagers were not so commonplace
+as they became later, whose pangs of homesickness in his _pension_ in
+the Rue de Clichy in Paris, or his hotel in Sorrento, first invested
+Fifth Avenue with a spirit. It was different perhaps when he returned
+home with a slight pose of foreign manners, to bask for a brief moment
+in the sunny flood of distinction that was due him as a kind of later
+Sir John Franklin. But over there what were cathedral naves and spires,
+or art galleries, or purple Mediterranean waves, or laboriously acquired
+French verbs, to the jutting brown-stone stoops and the maples breaking
+into blossom?
+
+There was a kind of writing, not fish or flesh or good red herring, but
+just the same altogether charming in its day, inspiring of dreams, and a
+vehicle for pleasant fancy. It belonged to what, from our grave old
+point of view, was the youth of the world, and the spirit of youth, its
+ingenuousness, and its ardour, were needed to appreciate it. Ik Marvel's
+"Reveries of a Bachelor" was of that _genre_--and how the hearth logs
+blazed and the fair faces flickered in the flames in those pages of Mr.
+Donald G. Mitchell!--and George William Curtiss's "Prue and I"; and the
+latter book was one of the first in which was to be found the flavour
+of the old Fifth Avenue. Then there were the forgotten novelists of the
+seventies and early eighties, and some who are not quite forgotten, such
+as the two Edgars, Fawcett and Saltus, and the days when every visiting
+Englishman, no matter what he might have done in real life, in fiction
+had to stay, while in New York, at the Brevoort House. All sorts of
+inconsequential novels flit through the mind in recalling that bygone
+period. There was a gentleman whose atrociously written, but
+marvellously constructed "thrillers" were to be found in every deck
+chair at the noon hour on transatlantic steamers of thirty years ago.
+That was the late Archibald Clavering Gunter. The present generation
+knows him and his works not at all; but how a past generation used to
+read and reread "Mr. Barnes of New York," and "Mr. Potter of Texas," and
+"Miss Nobody of Nowhere," and "That Frenchman," which should have been
+called "M. De Vernay of Paris." Those were the earliest and the "big
+four." The list of successors is a long one, but that certain something,
+that indefinable quality, which had made the first books great trash was
+irrevocably gone. Of all the flamboyant characters of the tales Mr.
+Barnes was deservedly the most popular, and at such times as he was not
+winning international rifle matches at Monte Carlo, or racing about
+Europe in respectable pursuit of desirable young ladies, he inhabited a
+dwelling on lower Fifth Avenue. Practically all Fifth Avenue were the
+scenes of "Miss Nobody of Nowhere," with its charming heroine and her
+adopted parents, its wicked English nobleman, and its comical little
+Anglo-maniac dude. Under some name or other a "Gussie Van Beekman" was a
+necessary ingredient of every Gunter novel.
+
+It is a far cry from Gunter to Henry James, though each wrought
+according to his lights, and served his purpose in his time. It was when
+the Avenue was in its infancy that Dr. Sloper, of James's "Washington
+Square," went to live in the brick house with white stone trimmings,
+that, practically unchanged, may be seen today, diagonally across the
+street from the Arch. The novelist wrote of the locality as having "a
+kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other
+quarters of the long, shrill city"; and ascribed to it, "a richer, riper
+look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal
+thoroughfare--the look of having had something of a social history."
+That "richer, riper look," that suggestion of a past, is there to-day,
+and is likely to be there tomorrow. The particular Sloper house is quite
+easy of identification. It is the third from the corner as one goes
+westward from the Avenue. In 1835, when Dr. Sloper first took
+possession, moving uptown from the neighbourhood of the City Hall, which
+had seen its best days socially, the Square, then the ideal of quiet and
+genteel retirement, was enclosed by a wooden paling. The edifice in
+which the Slopers lived and its neighbours were then thought to embody
+the last results of architectural science. It actually dates to 1831.
+Among the merchants who built in that year were Thomas Suffern, Saul
+Allen, John Johnston, George Griswold, James Boorman, and William C.
+Rhinelander. It was their type of house that was accepted for the
+neighbourhood as the first streets began to open to the right and left
+of Fifth Avenue. That northern stretch of the Square, first invaded in
+fiction by Henry James, has ever been a favourite background of the
+story-spinners, who never tire of contrasting its tone of well-bred
+aristocracy with the squalor, half-Bohemian and half-proletarian, that
+faces it from across the Park. In fiction one does not necessarily have
+to be of an old New York family in order to inhabit one of those
+north-side dwellings. Robert Walmsley, of O. Henry's "The Defeat of the
+City," lived there, and the boyhood to which he looked back was one
+spent on an up-state farm; while another erstwhile tenant in the
+exclusive row was the devious Artemas Quibble, of Mr. Arthur Train's
+narrative, who began life humbly somewhere in grey New England, and
+ended it, so far as the reader was informed, in Sing Sing Prison. Then
+there was the home of Mrs. Martin, the "Duchess of Washington Square" of
+Brander Matthews's "The Last Meeting," and that of Miss Grandish, of
+Julian Ralph's "People We Pass," and the house of Mrs. Delaney, of Edgar
+Fawcett's "Rutherford," and the structure which inspired one-half of
+Edward W. Townsend's "Just Across the Square," and the five-room
+apartment "at the top of a house with dormer windows on the north side"
+where Sanford lived according to F. Hopkinson Smith's "Caleb West," and
+where his guests, looking out, could see the "night life of the Park,
+miniature figures strolling about under the trees, flashing in brilliant
+light or swallowed up in dense shadow as they passed in the glare of
+many lamps scattered among the budding foliage." Also over the Square,
+regarded in the light of fiction, is the friendly shadow of Bunner, who
+liked it at any time, but liked it best of all at night, with the great
+dim branches swaying and breaking in the breeze, the gas lamps
+flickering and blinking, when the tumults and the shoutings of the day
+were gone and "only a tramp or something worse in woman's shape was
+hurrying across the bleak space, along the winding asphalt, walking over
+the Potter's Field of the past on the way to the Potter's Field to be."
+
+[Illustration: "AT THE NORTHWEST CORNER OF FIFTY-FOURTH STREET IS THE
+UNIVERSITY CLUB, TO THE MIND OF ARNOLD BENNETT ('YOUR UNITED STATES'),
+THE FINEST OF ALL THE FINE STRUCTURES THAT LINE THE AVENUE"]
+
+But to turn into the Avenue proper, and to follow the trail of the
+novelists northward. At the very point of departure we are on the site
+of the imaginary structure that gave the title to Leroy Scott's "No. 13
+Washington Square," for the reason that there is no such number at all,
+and that the house in question must have occupied the space between Nos.
+12 and 14, respectively, on the east and west corners facing Waverly
+Place. Before the next street is reached we have passed the home of the
+Huntingdons of Edgar Fawcett's "A Hopeless Case," and at the southwest
+corner of the Avenue and Eighth Street, facing the Brevoort, is No. 68
+Clinton Place, which was not only the setting, but also the _raison
+d'etre_ of Thomas A. Janvier's "A Temporary Deadlock." Almost diagonally
+across the street is an old brick house, with Ionic pillars of marble
+and a fanlight at the arched entrance--one of those houses that, to use
+the novelist's words, "preserve unobtrusively, in the midst of a city
+that is being constantly rebuilt, the pure beauty of Colonial
+dwellings." It was the home of the Ferrols of Stephen French Whitman's
+"Predestined," one of the books of real power that appear from time to
+time, to be strangely neglected, and through that neglect to tempt the
+discriminating reader to contempt for the literary judgment of his age.
+
+At the northwest corner of Ninth Street there is a brownish-green
+building erected in the long, long ago to serve as a domicile of the
+Brevoort family, which had once exercised pastoral sway over so many
+acres of this region. Later it became the home of the De Rhams. But to
+Richard Harding Davis, then a reporter on the "Evening Sun," it had
+nothing of the flavour of the Patroons. It was simply the house where
+young Cortlandt Van Bibber, returning from Jersey City where he had
+witnessed the "go" between "Dutchy" Mack and a coloured person
+professionally known as the Black Diamond, found his burglar. There is
+no mistaking the house, which "faced the avenue," nor the stone wall
+that ran back to the brown stable which opened on the side street, nor
+the door in the wall, that, opening cautiously, showed Van Bibber the
+head of his quarry. "The house was tightly closed, as if some one was
+lying inside dead," was a line of Mr. Davis's description. Many years
+after the writing of "Van Bibber's Burglar," another maker of fiction
+associated with New York was standing before the Ninth Street house, of
+the history of which he knew nothing. "Grim tragedy lives there, or
+should live there," said Owen Johnson, "I never pass here without the
+feeling that there is some one lying dead inside."
+
+Van Bibber's presence in the neighbourhood was in no wise surprising,
+for it was one of his favourite haunts when he was not engaged farther
+up the Avenue, in his daily labour, which was, as he explained to the
+chance acquaintance met at the ball in Lyric Hall described in
+"Cinderella," "mixing cocktails at the Knickerbocker Club." Only a few
+doors distant from the Ninth Street house there is an apartment hotel
+known as the Berkeley, and it was to a Berkeley apartment that Van
+Bibber, as related in "Her First Appearance," took the child that he had
+practically kidnapped to restore her to her father and to be rewarded
+for his intrusion by being sensibly called a well-meaning fool. But
+there is another apartment house at the south-west corner of the Avenue
+and Twenty-eighth Street which better fits the description, which tells
+how Van Bibber, from the windows, could see the many gas lamps of
+Broadway where it crossed the Avenue a few blocks away, and the bunches
+of light on Madison Square Garden.
+
+Edgar Fawcett was hardly of the generation of the Flora McFlimseys. As a
+matter of fact he was a small boy in knickerbockers when the famous
+William Allen Butler poem, "Nothing to Wear," first appeared in the
+pages of "Harper's Weekly." But Miss McFlimsey was an enduring young
+lady, who, for many years was accepted as symbolizing the foibles of
+Madison Square, and she was in a measure in Fawcett's mind when he
+wrote, in "A Gentleman of Leisure," that vigorous description
+contrasting socially the stretch of the Avenue below Fourteenth Street
+with the later development a dozen blocks to the north. In another
+Fawcett novel, "Olivia Delaplaine," we find the home of the heroine's
+husband in Tenth Street, just off the Avenue; and, reverting to "A
+Gentleman of Leisure," Clinton Wainwright, the gentleman in question,
+lived, like a "visiting Englishman," at the Brevoort.
+
+There have been many Delmonicos. But for the purposes of fiction there
+has never been one just like the establishment that occupied a corner at
+the junction of the Avenue and Fourteenth Street. It was a more limited
+town in those days. The novelist wishing to depict his hero doing the
+right thing in the right way by his heroine did not have the variety of
+choice he has now. Two squares away, the Academy of Music was,
+theatrically and operatically, the social centre, so to carry on the
+narrative with a proper regard for the conventions, the preceding dinner
+or the following supper was necessarily at the old Delmonico's. They
+were good trenchermen and trencherwomen, those heroes and heroines of
+yesterday! Many oyster-beds were depleted, and bins of rare vintage
+emptied to satisfy the healthy appetites of the inked pages. Somehow the
+mouth waters with the memory. When Delmonico's moved on to Twenty-sixth
+Street, and from its terraced tables its patrons could look up at
+graceful Diana, there were many famous dinners of fiction, such as the
+one, for example, consumed by the otherwise faultless Walters, for a
+brief period in the service of Mr. Van Bibber--the menu selected:
+"Little Neck clams first, with chablis, and pea-soup, and caviare on
+toast, before the oyster crabs, with Johannisberger Cabinet; then an
+_entree_ of calves' brains and rice; then no roast, but a bird, cold
+asparagus with French dressing, Camembert cheese, and Turkish coffee,"
+may be accepted as indicating the gastronomical taste of the author in
+the days when youth meant good digestion--but with the departure from
+the old Fourteenth Street corner something of the flavour of the name
+passed forever.
+
+If New York has never had another restaurant that meant to the novelist
+just what the traditional Delmonico's meant, there has also never been
+another hotel like the old Fifth Avenue. In actual life the so-called
+"Ladies' Parlour" on the second floor, reached, if I remember rightly,
+by means of an entrance on the Twenty-third Street side, was dreary
+enough; but turn to the pages of the romance of the sixties and
+seventies and eighties, and on the heavily upholstered sofas enamoured
+couples sat in furtive meeting, and words of endearment were whispered,
+and all the stock intrigue of fiction was set in motion. Then, on the
+ground floor, was the Amen Corner, without which no tale of political
+life was complete, and the various rooms for more formal gatherings,
+such as the one in which took place "The Great Secretary of State
+Interview," as narrated by Jesse Lynch Williams many years ago.
+
+But for the full flavour of the romance of this section of Fifth Avenue
+it is not necessary to go back to the leisurely novelists of the
+eighties and before. Recall the work of a man who, a short ten years
+ago, was turning out from week to week the mirth-provoking,
+amazement-provoking tales dealing with the life of what he termed his
+"Little Old Bagdad on-the-Subway," his "Noisyville on-the-Hudson," his
+"City of Chameleon Changes." For the Avenue as the expression of the
+city's wealth and magnificence and aristocracy the late O. Henry had
+little love. The glitter and pomp and pageantry were not for "the likes
+of him." He preferred the more plebeian trails, the department-store
+infested thoroughfare to the west, with the clattering "El" road
+overhead; or Fourth Avenue to the east, beginning at the statue of
+"George the Veracious," running between the silent and terrible
+mountains, finally, with a shriek and a crash, to dive headlong into the
+tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street, and never to be seen again; or even
+some purlieu of the great East Side, where he could sit listening at
+ease in the humble shop of Fitbad the Tailor.
+
+There was, however, one portion of land belonging to the Avenue where he
+felt himself thoroughly at home. When, of a summer's evening, darkness
+had fallen, and the leaves were fluttering in the warm breeze, and high
+overhead Diana's light was twinkling, and the derelicts were gathered on
+the Park benches, the world was full of delightful mystery and magic.
+Close to the curb, at one corner of the Square, a low grey motor-car
+with engine silent. Then whimsical fancy and a haunting memory of Robert
+Louis Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights" builded up the story "While the
+Auto Waits." Or perhaps the sight of a car swiftly moving with its
+emergency tire dangerously loose, and to that fertile brain were flashed
+the ingredients of "The Fifth Wheel." "There is an aristocracy of the
+public parks and even of the vagabonds who use them for their private
+apartments," wrote Sidney Porter in "The Shocks of Doom." Vallance of
+the story felt rather than knew this, but when he stepped down out of
+his world into chaos his feet brought him directly to Madison Square.
+Probably Sherard Plumer, the down-and-out artist, was another to
+recognize its quality even before he fell in with Carson Chalmers, as
+outlined in "A Madison Square Arabian Night"; and also Marcus Clayton of
+Roanoke County, Virginia, and Eva Bedford, of Bedford County of the same
+State; and the disreputable Soapy, of "The Cop and the Anthem," when he
+sought a park bench on which to ponder over just what violation of the
+law would insure his deportation to Blackwell's Island, which was his
+Palm Beach and Riviera for the winter months. Here, to O. Henry, was the
+common ground of all, the happy and the unfortunate, the just and the
+unjust, the Caliph and the cad; and far above, against the sky, was the
+dainty goddess who presided over the destinies of all, Miss Diana, who,
+according to the opinion expressed by Mrs. Liberty in "The Lady Higher
+Up," has the best job for a statue in the whole town, with the Cat-Show,
+and the Horse-Show, and the military tournaments where the privates
+"look grand as generals, and the generals try to look grand as
+floorwalkers," and the Sportsman's Show, and above all, the French Ball,
+"where the original Cohens and the Robert Emmet-Sangerbund Society dance
+the Highland fling with one another."
+
+Other figures of fiction, in fancy, flit across the Square, or throng
+the near-by streets. In that dense, pushing, alien-tongued multitude
+that at the noon hour congests the sidewalks of the Avenue to the south
+of Twenty-third Street, one may catch a glimpse of Mr. Montague Glass's
+Abe Potash and Morris Perlmutter, long since moved uptown from their
+original loft in Division Street in the stories, and in Leonard Street
+in fact. The crowd is thickest at the Twenty-first Street corner, where,
+in the novels of other days, the mature burghers used to watch the
+passing ladies from the windows of the Union Club. But there is little
+inclination to tarry long there. The environment of the Square is a
+pleasanter environment. When Delmonico's was at the Twenty-sixth Street
+corner, the hero of one of Brander Matthews's "Vignettes of Manhattan"
+pointed out of one of its windows and confessed that, failure in life as
+he was, he would die out of sight of the tower of the Madison Square
+Garden. A reminiscent sign or two is all that is left of the old Hotel
+Brunswick, which, among the hostelries of other days, yielded precedence
+only to the Fifth Avenue and the Brevoort as a factor in fiction.
+
+Reverting to Mr. Davis, the Tower was one of the staple subjects of
+conversation of his heroes and heroines when they happened to be in the
+Congo, or Morocco, or looking longingly from the decks of steamers in
+South American waters; and the shadowy personage--very probably Van
+Bibber--who took "A Walk up the Avenue" started on his journey from the
+Square. Van Bibber! Of course it was Van Bibber. It must have been Van
+Bibber. For when he reached Thirty-second Street a half-dozen men nodded
+to him in that casual manner in which men nod to a passing club-mate.
+The particular club has since moved some thirty blocks uptown, but to
+the old building you will find frequent references not only in the Davis
+stories, but also in the novels of Robert W. Chambers, who was in the
+habit of indicating it as the Patroon.
+
+Beyond Madison Square the novelists of earlier generations seldom went.
+It is to the men of today, above all to those who have been specializing
+in what may be called the New York "_novel a la mode_" that we must turn
+in order to follow farther the trail. Here is the stately street as
+portrayed in Mr. Chambers's "The Danger Mark," or "The Firing Line," or
+"The Younger Set," or in any one of a dozen swiftly moving serials of
+the hour, whether the author be Mr. Rupert Hughes, or Mr. Owen Johnson,
+or Mr. Gouverneur Morris, or Mr. Rex Beach. The novel may serve its
+light purpose today and tomorrow be forgotten. But the current of human
+life up and down the Avenue is ever running more swiftly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+_Trails of Bohemia_
+
+
+Trails of Bohemia--The Avenue and its Tributaries--The "Musketeers of
+the Brush"--The Voice of the Ghetto--South Fifth Avenue and the Old
+French Quarter--The Garibaldi--"A la Ville de Rouen "--The Restaurant du
+Grand Vatel--The New Bohemia--The Lane of the Mad Eccentrics--Sheridan
+Square--"The Pirate's Den"--Absolam, a Slave--Gonfarone's--Maria's.
+
+
+Once upon a time an over-astute critic found grave fault with the title
+of a novel by Mr. William Dean Howells. There was to his mind at least
+an unfortunate suggestion in calling a book "The Coast of Bohemia," even
+though "Bohemia" was used in its figurative sense. What if the title had
+been derived from a line in Shakespeare? That did not alter the fact
+that ascribing a coast to Bohemia was like giving the Swiss Republic an
+Admiralty and alluding to Berne as a naval base. What would that
+censorious critic have to say of the association of Bohemia with stately
+Fifth Avenue? For to him and his kind it is not given to realize that
+Bohemia is a state of mind, a period of ardour and exaltation, a
+reminiscence of youth rather than a material region.
+
+The great stream has its tributaries. To Fifth Avenue belong the side
+streets that feed it and in turn draw from it flavour and inspiration.
+To it belong Washington Square, the south side as well as the north
+side, and the street beyond, that today is known as West Broadway, and
+yesterday was South Fifth Avenue, and before that, in the remote past,
+was Laurens Street; and the crossing thoroughfares that constituted the
+French Quarter of the late seventies and early eighties; and the
+northeastern part of Greenwich Village, that was once the "American
+Quarter," and is now masquerading as a super Monmartre, with its
+"Vermillion Hounds," and "Purple Pups," and "Pirates' Dens."
+
+Nor for the flavour of Bohemia is there actual need of leaving the
+Avenue itself. It was more than twenty years ago that the writer,
+turning into Fifth Avenue at Twenty-sixth Street of a sunshiny
+afternoon, was confronted with an apparition, or rather with
+apparitions, direct from the Latin Quarter of Paris. Three top-hatted
+young men were walking arm in arm. One, of imposing stature, wore
+conspicuously the type of side whiskers formerly known as "Dundrearys."
+The second, of medium height, was adorned by an aggressive beard. The
+third, small and slight, was smooth shaven. A similar trio was
+encountered a dozen blocks farther up the Avenue, and, in the
+neighbourhood of the Plaza, a third trio. It was a time when George Du
+Maurier's "Trilby" was in the full swing of its great popularity, when
+the name of the sinister Svengali was on every lip, and certain young
+eccentrics found huge delight in attracting attention to themselves by
+parading the Avenue attired as "Taffy," the "Laird," and "Little
+Billee."
+
+There is a stretch of the Avenue upon which the Fifth Avenue Association
+frowns; which the native American avoids; and which the old-time New
+Yorker regards with passionate regret as he recalls the departed glories
+of the Union Club and the jutting brown-stone stoops of yesterday. At
+the noon hour the sidewalks swarm with foreign faces. There is shrill
+chatter in alien tongues and the air is laden with strange odours. Even
+here Bohemia may be. Perhaps, toiling over a machine in one of the
+sweat-shops of the towering buildings a true poet may be coining his
+dreams and aspirations and heartaches into plaintive song; another, like
+the Sidney Rosenfeld of a score of years ago, who, over his work in the
+Ghetto of the lower East Side, asked and answered:
+
+    "Why do I laugh? Why do I weep?
+    I do not know; it is too deep."
+
+The attic, the studio, the restaurant, the cafe are the accepted symbols
+of Bohemia. What reader of Henri Murger's "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme"
+has ever forgotten the Cafe Momus, where the riotous behaviour of
+Marcel, Schaunard, Rodolphe, and Colline brought the proprietor to the
+verge of ruin? Who has not in his heart a tender spot for Terre's
+Tavern, in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, where the bouillebaisse came
+from--the bouillebaisse, of which some of the ingredients were "red
+peppers, garlic, saffron roach, and dace"? It is of no great importance
+whether the particular scene be on the "_rive gauche_" of the River
+Seine, or in the labyrinth of narrow streets that make up the Soho
+district of London, or in rapidly shifting New York. All that is needed
+is youth, or unwilling middle age still playing at youth, and the
+atmosphere where artistic and literary aspirations are in the air, and
+poverty wearing a conspicuous stock, and the "glory that was Greece and
+the grandeur that was Rome," and the relative merits of Tennyson and
+Browning being talked over to the accompaniment of knives and forks
+rattling against plates of spaghetti and the clinking of wine glasses.
+
+Years ago, to find the tangible New York Bohemia would have been a
+matter of crossing from the Avenue's southern extremity, and diving into
+the streets that lie to the south of Washington Square. There was the
+old French Quarter, and there foregathered the professional joke-makers
+and the machine poets who contributed to "Puck," and the "New York
+Ledger" when that periodical felt the guiding hand of Robert Bonner. Of
+that group Henry Cuyler Bunner was probably the most conspicuous. In his
+early days he was a twenty-four-hour Bohemian. In later life, when he
+had moved to the country, he remained a noon Bohemian. He was the prime
+spirit of the little Garibaldi in MacDougal Street of which James L.
+Ford wrote in "Bohemia Invaded." Not often did he stray over to
+Greenwich Village. He disliked what he called its bourgeois
+conservatism.
+
+For a period of years that section immediately to the south of the
+Square was the French Quarter. There were the peaceful artisans, and
+also there were political refugees of dangerous proclivities, men who
+had had a share in the blazing terrors of the Commune, and who, in some
+cases, had paid the price in years of imprisonment under the tropical
+sun of Cayenne. In all their wanderings they had carried the spirit of
+revolution with them and spouted death to despots over their glasses of
+absinthe in cellar cafes. William H. Rideing, in an article which was
+published in "Scribner's Magazine" for November, 1879, described these
+men as he had found them in the Taverne Alsacienne in Greene Street:
+"gathered around the tables absorbed in piquet, ecarte, or vingt-et-un
+... most of them without coats, the shabbiness of their other garments
+lighted up by a brilliant red bandanna kerchief or a crimson overshirt."
+Keen glances were shot at strangers, for the tavern had a certain
+_clientele_ outside of which it had few customers and suspicion was rife
+at any invasion. "They are drinking wine, vermouth, and greenish opaline
+draughts of absinthe. Staggering in unnerved and stupefied from the
+previous night's debauch, they show few signs of vitality until four or
+five glasses of the absinthe have been drunk, and then they awaken;
+their eyes brighten and their tongues are loosened--the routine of play,
+smoke, and alcohol is resumed."
+
+Pleasanter to recall are the sober, industrious men and women who were
+denizens of the neighbourhood in the years gone by--Mademoiselle Berthe
+and her little sisters, fabricating roses and violets out of muslin and
+wax in their attic apartment, Madame Lange, the _blanchisseuse_, ironing
+in front of an open window, Triquet, the _charcutier_, Roux, the
+_bottier_, Malvaison, the _marchand de vin_. Then there were others of
+the colony, higher in the social scale and less prosperous in their
+finances, the impecunious music-teachers and professors of languages who
+maintained themselves with a frosty air of shabby gentility on a very
+slender income, and the practitioners of literature and art who
+maintained themselves somehow on no income at all. For the leisure hours
+of these there were the innocent wine-shops of South Fifth Avenue, such
+as the Brasserie Pigault, which Bunner introduced to the readers of "The
+Midge" with a quaint conceit. The sign of the little cafe from without
+read: "A LA VILLE DE ROUEN. J. PIGAULT. LAGER BEER. FINE WINES AND
+LIQUEURS." But its regular patrons knew it best from within, from
+the warm tables they liked to scan the letters backward, against the
+glass that protected them from the winter's night. It was a quaint
+haunt, where gathered Doctor Peters and Father Dube, and Parker Prout,
+the old artist who had failed in life because of too much talent, and M.
+Martin, and the venerable Potain, who had lost his mind after his wife's
+death, and Ovide Marie, the curly-haired musician from Amity Street.
+
+But the prize exhibit, the _piece de resistance_ of that old Bohemia of
+the French Quarter to the south of Washington Square was the Restaurant
+du Grand Vatel in Bleecker Street. Not only the French strugglers, but
+American artists and authors in embryo used to dine there substantially
+and economically. As Mr. Rideing described it: "The floor is sanded, and
+the little tables are covered with oil-cloth, each having a pewter cruet
+in the centre. A placard flutters from the wall, announcing a grand
+festival, banquet, ball, and artistic tombola in celebration of the
+eighth anniversary of the bloody revolution of March 18, 1871, under the
+auspices of the 'Societe des Refugies de la Commune'--'Family tickets,
+twenty-five cents, hat-room checks, ten cents'--from which we gather
+that the 'Restaurant du Grand Vatel' has some queer patrons. The
+landlady sits behind a little desk in the corner. She is a woman of
+enormous girth, with short petticoats which reveal her thick, white
+woolen socks; her complexion is dark, her eyes are black and deep, and
+large golden rings dangle from her ears."
+
+The regular patrons begin to come in. The poor professor, after his
+unprofitable labours of the day, enters, and bows to the landlady, who
+is cordial or severe in her greeting according to the items on the
+little slate which records her accounts. He begins his meal. "He has
+_soupe aux croutons_, _veau a la Marengo_, _pommes frites_, a small
+portion of _Gruyere_, and a bottle of wine. He eats appreciatively after
+the manner of a _bon vivant;_ he uses his napkin gently and frequently;
+he glances blandly at the surroundings; watching him, you would suppose
+the viands were the choicest of the season, exquisitely prepared, while,
+in reality, they are poor and unsubstantial stuff, the refuse, perhaps,
+of better restaurants. Having finished the edibles, he calls for a
+'gloria,' that is, black coffee and cognac; and, sipping this, he
+communes with his fancies which come and vanish in the blue waves of
+cigarette smoke. His aspect bespeaks perfect complacency--Fate cannot
+harm me; I have dined today."
+
+To Mr. Rideing we are indebted for certain items indicating the very
+moderate scale of prices at the Restaurant du Grand Vatel. Outside there
+was a sign that read: _"Tous les plats,_ eight cents; _plats extra
+varies; cafe superieur,_ three cents; _cafe au lait,_ five cents." Here
+is a list of some of the dishes and their cost: Soup and a plate of beef
+and bread, ten cents; _soupe aux croutons_, five cents; _boeuf_,
+_legumes_, ten cents; _veau a la Marengo_, twelve cents; _mouton a
+Ravigotte_, ten cents; _ragout de mouton aux pommes_, eight cents;
+_boeuf braise aux oignons_, ten cents; _macaroni au gratin_, six cents;
+_celeri salade_, six cents; _compote de pommes_, four cents; _fromage
+Neufchatel_, three cents; _Limbourg_, four cents; _Gruyere_, three
+cents; bread, one cent. Thus, Mr. Rideing figured out, the professor's
+dinner, wine included, cost him the sum of forty cents, and with five
+cents added for a roll and a cup of coffee in the morning, his daily
+expenditure for food was less than half a dollar.
+
+The trails of Bohemia, or of pseudo-Bohemia, have never been so flaming
+and flagrant as they are today. From that corner of the Avenue facing
+the Arch cross the Square diagonally to the head of Washington Place. A
+hundred yards to the west lies the Lane of the Mad Eccentrics. Two or
+three years ago the little triangle of a park known as Sheridan Square
+was surrounded by structures of red brick that dated from the days when
+Greenwich Village preserved something of its proud individuality. Then a
+plan of transformation, involving a new avenue, cleared a wide path with
+the suddenness of a Kansas cyclone. Bits of the picturesque past went
+tumbling down before the onslaught of the demolishers. But in various
+nooks and corners that remained there sprang up bits of a picturesque
+although probably ephemeral present.
+
+It is easy to regard the Lane of the Mad Eccentrics from the point of
+view of metropolitan sophistication; to dismiss the Vermilion Hound and
+the Hell Hole and the Pirate's Den and the Purple Pup and Polly's as
+clap-trap and tinsel designed for the mystification of yokels and social
+investigators from Long Island City. But it is impossible to deny that
+the crazy decorations have added a touch of real colour to what had been
+a drab corner of the town. The present writer has no intention of going
+into a detailed sketch of this fragment of Bohemia for the reason that
+Anna Alice Chapin discussed it so well, so buoyantly, and so
+sympathetically in her book on "Greenwich Village" published a year or
+so ago. A few lines from her description of the Pirate's Den will give
+the flavour of any one of the enterprises that line the Lane of the Mad
+Eccentrics and are to be found, here and there, in the neighbouring
+streets.
+
+"It is a very real pirate's den, lighted only by candles. A coffin casts
+a shadow, and there is a regulation 'Jolly Roger,' a black flag
+ornamented with skull and crossbones. Grim? Surely, but even a
+healthy-minded child will play at gruesome and ghoulish games once in a
+while.
+
+"There is a Dead Man's Chest, too--and if you open it you will find a
+ladder leading down into the mysterious depths unknown. If you are very
+adventurous you will climb down and bump your head against the cellar
+ceiling and inspect what is going to be a subterranean grotto as soon as
+it can be fitted up. You climb down again and sit in the dim, smoky
+little room and look about you. It is the most perfect pirate's den you
+can imagine. On the walls hang huge casks and kegs and wine bottles in
+their straw covers--all the sign manuals of past and future orgies. Yet
+the 'Pirate's Den' is 'dry'--straw-dry, brick-dry--as dry as the Sahara.
+If you want a 'drink' the well-mannered 'cut-throat' who serves you will
+give you a mighty mug of ginger-ale or sarsaparilla. If you are a real
+Villager and can still play at being a real pirate you drink it without
+a smile, and solemnly consider it real red wine filched at the end of a
+cutlass from captured merchantmen on the high seas. On the big, dark
+centre table is carefully drawn the map of 'Treasure Island.'
+
+"The pirate who serves you (incidentally he writes poetry and helps to
+edit a magazine among other things) apologizes for the lack of a
+Stevenson parrot. 'A chap we know is going to bring back one from the
+South Sea Islands,' he declares seriously. 'And we are going to teach it
+to say: "Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!"'"
+
+Then there is the Bohemian trail that leads along three sides of
+Washington Square. In the red Benedick much literary ink has been
+spilled. Until a few years ago there were several studios of artists
+along the south side of the Square. One of the artists, highly talented
+but quite mad, boasted for a brief period the possession of a slave--a
+huge Riff from the mountains of Morocco, acquired in some mysterious
+manner. All Bohemia flocked to the studio to witness the anachronism.
+For the benefit of those of New York who did not belong to Bohemia the
+artist delighted to promenade the streets followed at a respectful
+distance by his serf. Absolam--so the chattel was called--bearing his
+chains lightly, considered his main duty to be to make love to the
+ladies of Bohemia. The artist's real troubles began when he undertook to
+rid himself of his slave. Absolam, waxing greasily fatter and fatter,
+basking in the warmth of delightful celebrity, refused to be lost.
+
+Long before the days of Absolam and his master there were painter men
+about the Square. Morse, according to Helen W. Henderson's "A Loiterer
+in New York," was the first artist to work there. He lived in the old
+New York University building, and when he was not before his easel, was
+experimenting with the telegraph. In that building also Draper wrote,
+and perfected his invention of the daguerreotype, and Colt invented the
+revolver named after him. The old grey castellated structure, erected in
+1837, stood on the east side of the Square until 1894.
+
+Of a restaurant that played a part in one of his stories O. Henry wrote:
+"Formerly it was a resort of interesting Bohemians; but now only
+writers, painters, actors, and musicians go there." The same
+topsy-turvical irony might have been directed with equal happiness at
+the cafe of the Brevoort, or the Black Cat on West Broadway, or
+Gonfarone's at the corner of Eighth and MacDougal Streets, or at old
+Maria's. Whatever else it may be Bohemia is a democracy, and regardless
+of condition or occupation any one who so wishes may lay claim to and
+enjoy the privileges of immediate citizenship. We have become more
+tolerant with the years. He who prates of Philistines is himself a
+Philistine.
+
+Formerly it was different. To escape the reproach of the uplifted
+eyebrow, the quizzical look, the "_que diable allait il faire dans cette
+galere_?" expression, it was necessary to be one of the Mr. Lutes or
+Miss Nedra Jennings Nuncheons, of Stephen French Whitman's
+"Predestined," who were regular habitues of "Benedetto's," under which
+name Gonfarone's was thinly disguised. Mr. Lute wrote a quatrain once
+every three months for the "Mauve Monthly," and Miss Nuncheon, tall and
+thin, with a mop of orange-coloured hair, contributed somewhere stories
+about the "smart set," "a society existing far off amid the glamour of
+opera-boxes, conservatories full of orchids, yachts like ocean
+steamships, mansions with marble stairways, Paris dresses by the gross,
+and hatfuls of diamonds, where the women were always discovered in
+boudoirs with a French maid named Fanchette in attendance, receiving
+bunches of long-stemmed roses from potential correspondents, while the
+men, all very tall and dark, possessed of interesting pasts, were
+introduced before fireplaces in sumptuous bachelor apartments, the veins
+knotted on their temples, and their strong yet aristocratic fingers
+clutching a photograph or a scented note."
+
+Gonfarone's, the "Benedetto's" of the tale, is an old, converted
+dwelling house. There are the brown-stone steps, flanked by a pair of
+iron lanterns, giving entrance to a narrow corridor; and, beyond, to the
+right, the dining room, extending through the house, linoleum underfoot,
+hat-racks and buffets of oak aligned against the brownish walls, and,
+everywhere, little tables, each covered with a scanty cloth, set close
+together. In the days when Felix Piers was in the habit of patronizing
+the place there floated to his ears such phrases as "bad colour scheme!"
+"sophomoric treatment!" "miserable drawing!" "no atmosphere!" But all
+that was years ago. When the writer dined there last, a month or so
+back, fragments of conversation caught from the clatter of the tongues
+of the Bohemians were: "Take it from me, kid!" "If old man Weinstein
+thinks he can put that over, he's got another guess coming!" "And then I
+give her the juice and we lost that super-six in the dust!" "Yes,
+Huggins has got _some_ infield!"
+
+Fifteen or twenty years ago the trail of Bohemia would have inevitably
+led to Maria's in West Twelfth Street. For there to be found, among
+others, was a certain Mickey Finn, as celebrated in his day and town as
+Aristide Bruant was in a section of Paris of the nineties. About Finn
+gathered a group of newspaper men and journalists. The distinction was
+that the newspaper man was one who earned his daily bread on Park Row,
+while the journalist had written a sketch for the New York "Sun" in
+1878, and still carried and proudly exhibited the clipping. The original
+Maria, a large Italian cook who presided autocratically over the kitchen
+of the basement restaurant, long since migrated somewhere to the north.
+She had exacted her share of the homage and the substance of her
+clients. After her departure there was still the attempt to keep up the
+ancient fire of witticism, and "la la la la!" was still uttered in what
+was thought to be the best Parisian accent, and the judgments of
+magazine editors, and the achievements of the painters who sold their
+portraits, and the writers whose novels crept into the lists of the "six
+bestsellers" continued to be damned in no uncertain tones. But the old
+spirit seems irrevocably gone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+_The Slope of Murray Hill_
+
+
+Stretches of the Avenue--Murray Hill: a Slope in Transition--Early Astor
+Land Purchases--The Brunswick Building--A Deserted Clubland--Churches of
+the Stretch--The Marble Collegiate--The "Little Church Around the
+Corner" and its Story--When Grant's Funeral Procession Passed--The
+Waldorf and the Astoria--On the Hill in 1776--When the Red-Coats
+Loitered.
+
+
+After its half-mile journey between the great, square sordid mountains
+of stone and steel that lie to the north of Fourteenth Street, Fifth
+Avenue emerges into the sunshine of Madison Square. There it draws in
+deep breaths of pure ozone before resuming its way as a canyon at
+Twenty-sixth Street. Reverting to the past, from the Square to
+Thirty-first Street, the lane runs through what was the Caspar Samler
+farm. North of that were the twenty acres that John Thompson bought in
+1799 for four hundred and eighty-two pounds and ten shillings. A little
+later, a more familiar name appeared on the maps. In 1827 the Astor hand
+reached up to this then remote section, William B. Astor purchasing a
+half-interest, including Fifth Avenue from Thirty-second to
+Thirty-fifth, for twenty thousand five hundred dollars. While other
+real-estate investors who considered themselves astute were planning for
+the future by gobbling up stretches of land along the shore of the East
+River the Astors were buying across what was primitively known as the
+backbone of the island.
+
+The sharp rise to what was the old summit and to the modified hill of
+the present does not begin until Thirty-third Street is reached. But
+there is perceptible a grade of a kind as soon as the Avenue leaves the
+northern line of the Square. Today it is a slope in transition. Here and
+there the change has been wrought. A modern structure reaches
+superciliously skyward. Beside it and below it the buildings of
+yesterday give the impression of feeling acutely conscious of their
+impending doom. They know. Their race is almost run. Tomorrow the old
+bricks will be tumbled down, the chutes will roar with their passing,
+and the air will be shrill with the steam drills and riveters ushering
+into the world the young giants that will take their places. At the
+northeast corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where the Avenue touches the
+Square, there is a vast edifice of surpassing ugliness. It is the
+Brunswick Building, on the site of the old Brunswick Hotel, once famous
+as the headquarters of the Coaching Club. At one end the principal
+establishment of one of those firms that have given the term "grocer" a
+new meaning, at the other, a great book-shop of international
+reputation, and between, a booking office where the pictures and maps in
+the show windows stir the passer-by to disquieting dreams on streams of
+Canada and Maine in the summer, and of semi-tropical verdure in the
+winter.
+
+Now and again, on the way up the slope, there is a house, which,
+sturdily and stubbornly, has remained what it was built for, a place of
+residence, despite the encroachments of commerce. But there are only
+four or five such. Until a few years ago this was a section of Clubland
+with the Reform, and the Knickerbocker, the latter at the Thirty-second
+Street corner, and the New York, just above the Thirty-fourth Street
+crossing. But the clubs, too, have moved on to the north, and the
+stretch of today is a riot without order or design, tailors, automats,
+art shops, opticians, railway offices, steamship offices, florists,
+leather goods, cigars, Japanese gardens, Chinese gardens, toys, pianos,
+and even an antique shop or two, which have somehow found their way over
+from Fourth Avenue to the more aristocratic thoroughfare to the west,
+and where the visitor, like Raphael of Balzac's "Le Peau de Chagrin,"
+may wander in imagination up and down countless galleries of the mighty
+past. At the Twenty-eighth Street corner there is a tall apartment
+house, retaining a sort of left-behind dignity; and there are two
+churches which belong to the Avenue's story, one of them on the Avenue
+itself, and the other in a side street, a stone's throw to the east. The
+first is the Marble Collegiate Church, which is at the northeast corner
+of Twenty-ninth Street, adjoining the Holland House. It is one of the
+six Collegiate churches that trace their origin to the first church
+organized by the Dutch settlers in 1628. Its succession to the "church
+in the fort" is commemorated by a tablet, and in the yard is preserved
+the bell which originally hung in the North Church.
+
+Then, in East Twenty-ninth Street, is the rambling old Church of the
+Transfiguration, loved by all true New Yorkers irrespective of creed,
+under the name of the "Little Church Around the Corner." From it the
+actors Wallack, Booth, and Boucicault were buried, and in it is the
+memorial window to Edwin Booth, executed by John La Forge, and erected
+by the Players Club in 1898, in loving memory of the club's founder.
+Below the window is Booth's favourite quotation.
+
+    "As one, in suffering all:
+    That suffers nothing;
+    A man that fortune's buffets and rewards
+    Hast ta'en with equal thanks."
+    --_Hamlet_, III., 2.
+
+Often as the story from which the church derived its familiar name has
+been told, no narrative dealing with New York would be quite complete
+without it. As it deals with Joseph Jefferson, let it be related in the
+words of the stage Rip Van Winkle's Reminiscences. Mr. Jefferson was
+trying to arrange for the funeral, and in company of one of the dead
+actor's sons, was seeking a clergyman to officiate. Here is his story:
+
+"On arriving at the house I explained to the reverend gentleman the
+nature of my visit, and arrangements were made for the time and place at
+which the funeral was to be held. Something, I can hardly say what, gave
+me the impression that I had best mention that Mr. Holland was an actor.
+I did so in a few words, and concluded by presuming that this would make
+no difference. I saw, however, by the restrained manner of the minister
+and an unmistakable change in the expression of his face, that it would
+make, at least to him, a great deal of difference. After some hesitation
+he said he would be compelled, if Mr. Holland had been an actor, to
+decline holding the service at his church.
+
+"While his refusal to perform the funeral rites for my old friend would
+have shocked, under ordinary circumstances, the fact that it was made in
+the presence of the dead man's son was more painful than I can describe.
+I turned to look at the youth and saw that his eyes were filled with
+tears. He stood as one dazed with a blow just realized; as if he felt
+the terrible injustice of a reproach upon the kind and loving father who
+had often kissed him in his sleep and had taken him upon his lap when a
+boy old enough to know the meaning of the words and told him to grow up
+to be an honest lad. I was hurt for my young friend and indignant with
+the man--too much so to reply, and as I rose to leave the room with a
+mortification that I cannot remember to have felt before or since, I
+paused at the door and said: 'Well, sir, in this dilemma, is there no
+other church to which you can direct me from which my friend can be
+buried?' He replied that 'There was a little church around the corner'
+where I might get it done--to which I answered, 'Then if this be so, God
+bless the Little Church Around the Corner,' and so I left the house."
+
+A photograph from the collection of J. Clarence Davies, reproduced in
+the book issued by the Fifth Avenue Bank, shows Grant's funeral
+procession climbing the slope of Murray Hill, August 8, 1885, and
+passing the residences of John Jacob Astor and William B. Astor, on the
+sites of which is the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel of the present. The house of
+John Jacob was at Thirty-third Street, and that of William B. at
+Thirty-fourth Street, and there was a garden between shut off from the
+Avenue by a ten-foot brick wall. The Waldorf, named after the little
+town of Waldorf, Germany, the ancestral home of the family, occupies the
+site of the John Jacob house, and was opened March 14, 1893. Four and a
+half years later, on November 1, 1897, the Astoria came formally into
+being, and the two hotels linked by the hyphen and merged under one
+management. That point where Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street cross
+is one of the great corners of New York. It is the one that made the
+profoundest impression on Arnold Bennett: "The pale-pillared, square
+structure of the Knickerbocker Trust against a background of the lofty
+red of the AEolian Building, and the great white store on the opposite
+pavement." A city of amazement has been left behind. Here we are at the
+threshold of still another city. It is different at every hour of the
+day. But whether we see it in the sweet-scented dawn, or at high noon,
+or at the shopping hour, or later, when, to use Arnold Bennett's words,
+"the street lamps flicker into a steady, steely blue, and the windows of
+the hotels and restaurants throw a yellow radiance, and all the
+shops--especially the jewellers' shops--become enchanted treasure
+houses, whose interiors recede away behind their facades into infinity,"
+it is ever the essence of our New York of Anno Domini 1918.
+
+Then, in an instant, the Hill of today vanishes. The show windows of
+the great shops, gorgeous with display, the vast hotels, the clubs, the
+fluttering Starry Banners and Tricolours and Union Jacks, the stirring
+posters that bring the heart into the throat and send the hand down into
+the pocket for Liberty Loan or Red Cross, the line of creeping
+motor-cars on the asphalt, the swarming sidewalks, swim away in a mist,
+and in their place there is rolling woodland, and a silver stream, and
+in the distance, a great white house. The years drop away. A boy of
+eight, curled up in a big chair, is dipping for the first time into the
+pages of his country's history. His face is flushed, his eyes are
+bright. With that vividness that belongs to impressionable childhood,
+and to no other period of life he is seeing bits of the past that he
+will never forget. To the end of his days the rhetorical phrases will
+ring in his ears and the letters forming them will dance before his
+eyes.
+
+Boston Common. The line of defiant Minute Men drawn up. The curt order,
+"Disperse, ye Rebels!" and the volley that followed so closely upon the
+words. _This was the first blood shed in the American Revolution._ The
+morning of an impending battle: the Continental leader exhorting his
+men. "_There are the Red Coats! We must beat them today, or Molly
+Stork's a widow!_" Again, the boy is being awakened from sleep in his
+bed in a quiet street of eighteenth-century Philadelphia. The voice of
+the watchman is crying the hour and the thrilling tidings. "_Two o'clock
+in the morning! All's well, and Cornwallis has surrendered!_"
+
+Here, on the Murray Hill of May, 1918, the man becomes the boy once
+more. Perhaps the suggestion comes from one of the women's faces that
+are looking straight at him, beseechingly and rebukingly, from the
+posters that line the Avenue; the face of "The Greatest Mother in the
+World," or that younger face beyond which the eye perceives dim outlines
+of marching men in khaki. The veil with the Red Cross is transformed
+into a coiffure of powdered hair, crowning the countenance and figure of
+a _grande dame_ of the eighteenth century. She is standing before the
+doorway of a great country house, smiling and beckoning welcome, and at
+the invitation officers on horseback halt the column of rapidly moving
+men. The soldiers break ranks and throw themselves down in the shade of
+the trees. The officers advance bowing, and enter the house. The lady is
+smiling.
+
+The hostess with the powdered hair is Mrs. Mary Lindley Murray, wife of
+Robert Murray, British sympathizer and Quaker, and mother of Lindley
+Murray, the grammarian of later days; the house is the Murray
+Homestead, or the Manor of Incleberg, that in Revoluntionary times stood
+in the neighbourhood of what is now Park Avenue and Thirty-seventh
+Street; the Red Coats whose march westward she has interrupted are the
+troops of Lord Howe, in close pursuit of the badly demoralized soldiers
+of General Washington; the day is one of September, 1776.
+
+A few weeks before the disastrous battle of Long Island had been fought.
+The Continental cause seemed at the point of immediate collapse. Day by
+day the list of deserters swelled. Washington, leaving his campfires
+burning to lull the suspicions of the confident victors, had transported
+his men across the East River. On September 15th the British began
+sending over boat-loads, landing them at Kip's Bay, where the Murray
+estate ended, now the easterly point of Thirty-fourth Street. In
+overwhelming numbers, fully equipped, and with elated morale, they began
+the pursuit of the shattered Americans. The detachment of Continentals
+left at Kip's Bay to oppose the landing had fled without firing a shot.
+Washington, watching the debacle, had spurred his horse furiously
+forward, striking the men with the flat of his sword, lashing them with
+his tongue, in vain attempt to stop the panic. He was on the point of
+advancing alone when his bridle-rein was seized by a young officer. In
+an instant, again completely master of himself, he was building new
+plans in the hopes of saving his army.
+
+The situation on Manhattan Island was this. To the south was General
+Knox, in command of a fort known as Bunker Hill on an eminence of what
+is now Grand Street. Near-by was General Israel Putnam--probably less
+known to posterity (above all, to youthful posterity) for his qualities
+as a commander than for the mad dash down "Put's Hill" at Greenwich by
+which he escaped the closely pursuing Red Coats. With Putnam was
+Alexander Hamilton, in charge of a battery. To the generals Washington
+sent word to retreat to the north in order to effect a junction of
+forces. Knox withdrew men and cannon from Bunker Hill. The young man who
+guided Putnam's troops along obscure paths and by winding lanes close to
+the Hudson was named Aaron Burr. The busy Washington chanced to spend a
+night in the Murray home. If there had been any hesitation in Mrs.
+Murray's patriotism before, it vanished entirely under the grave charm
+of the Virginia leader. Henceforth she was heart and soul with the
+Continental cause.
+
+Two days later the British came. Mrs. Murray knew the danger that
+threatened the Americans. Her woman's wit and woman's charm must save
+the hour. So smiling she stood in the doorway, curtseying and inviting.
+The day was hot; the officers thirsty. To the minds of the British,
+contemptuous of the prowess of the troops in ragged blue and buff, what
+difference would an hour or two make when the _coup de grace_ was so
+easy to deliver? The lady was charming, _grande dame,_ and her husband
+was known for devotion to King George. So they stayed and drank and
+drank again, while the American forces were meeting on the site of the
+present Longacre Square. A few days later came the Battle of Harlem
+Heights, where the Continentals gloriously redeemed themselves. The wine
+cups of Mrs. Murray made possible the victory of the "Bloody Buckwheat
+Field." Had not a lady with powdered hair been standing before the door
+of her house on Murray Hill, the signers of the Declaration of
+Independence might, instead of hanging together, have hanged separately.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+_Confessions of an Exiled Bus_
+
+
+After all, it was a hoary-haired scoundrel of a bus; a very reprobate of
+a bus; an envious, evil-thinking, ill-conditioned, flagrantly thieving,
+knavish blackguard of a bus. Under no circumstances am I proud of the
+acquaintance. But then, in extenuation, be it said that it was never
+anything but an acquaintance of Shadow-Land, conjured up, perhaps, by a
+material repast that had been palatable and indigestible.
+
+Have you read Alphonse Daudet's delightful "Tartarin of Tarascon"? Are
+you acquainted with the "baobab villa," and the elusive Montenegrin
+Prince, who had spent three years in Tarascon, but who never went out,
+and who decamped with Tartarin's well-filled wallet; and the jaundiced
+Costlecalde, and the embarrassingly affectionate camel, and the blind
+lion from the hide of which grew the great man's subsequent fame, and
+all the other whimsical creations of the novelist's pleasant fancy? The
+book is one of my favourite books, one of the tomes that are taken to
+bed to pave the way to restful, happy slumber. Perhaps that night it
+had been the last volume to be tossed aside before turning out the
+light, for as I slept, to use the words of the tinker of Bedford, I
+dreamed a dream.
+
+There was a consciousness of being jolted about abominably in a
+ramshackle vehicle. The surroundings were vague, as they always are in
+dreams. Low hills and sandy waste and sparse shrubs. Where was it, the
+"Great Desert," or some stretch in South America or in Mexico? In my
+dream I was dozing, trying to forget the painful bumping and twisting. A
+familiar voice brought me to with a sudden start.
+
+"Say! Listen! Hey you! Wake up, can't you?" Far off as the voice seemed
+at first, there was a delicious, home-sickness-provoking, nasal twang to
+the accents.
+
+"Who are you?" I asked sleepily.
+
+"Who am I? Now that is a question. Don't you recognize me? Why I am one
+of the old Fifth Avenue buses that used to run from Washington Square up
+to Fifty-ninth Street. That's who I am."
+
+"But why are you here?" I stammered. "What brought you to this strange
+corner of the world?"
+
+"Believe me," the spluttering voice replied, "I am not here of my own
+will. You can bet your tintype on that, Mr. Washington Arch, or Mr.
+Hoffman House Bar, or Mr. Flatiron Building."
+
+"Your mode of address is somewhat obsolete," I ventured. "Changes have
+taken place."
+
+"Yes, I know. You want to be strictly up-to-date, like all the rest of
+the New Yorkers. As you say, changes have taken place. That is our
+unfortunate story. We were discarded, tossed aside, just as soon as they
+found that they could replace us by those evil-smelling, noise-making,
+elongated, double-decked children of the devil. Without a word, without
+a regret, they packed us off. Some of us were sent to the end of Long
+Island, some to Florida to haul crackers and northern tourists, some,
+like myself, to the uttermost ends of the earth. But the worst fate was
+that of those who stayed. They were sold to a department store, and kept
+to run between its door and a Third Avenue El. station, to be packed to
+bursting with fat women and squalling children from the Bronx. Think of
+their degradation! Think of their feelings when they reflect upon the
+days of past glory!
+
+"It was hard," the confidences continued, "but I do not complain. We
+were growing old, no doubt of that. We were of yesterday, and you know
+the old saying of the ring that youth must be served. Even John L.
+learned that, and before him, Joe Coburn and Paddy Ryan. Then Jim
+Corbett learned it too, and freckled 'Bob' Fitzsimmons, and now there
+is a young fellow named Jim Jeffries who perhaps will find it out in his
+turn. You see, in my youth I was something of a patron of sport. I knew
+them all, and they are all down and out, and I am down and out." There
+was a plaintive whine in the spluttering, squeaky voice.
+
+"We knew that our hour was passing. We read the story in the averted
+eyes of those who in earlier days we had regarded as our fast friends,
+or we heard it in the outspoken, contemptuous remarks of those who had
+no regard whatever for our feelings. To strangers, above all, were we
+objects of derision. Throaty, mid-western voices made disparaging
+comparison reflecting, not only on us, but on our fair city. Visiting
+Englishmen surveyed us through monocles and talked of the buses of the
+Strand and Regent Street. There was a French artist, a Baron
+Somebody-or-other, who afterwards wrote a book called 'New York as I
+Have Seen It.' He had married an American girl, the daughter of a
+comedian at whose clever whimsicalities my passengers used to laugh
+uproariously. I had carried him often--that actor, and knew him as one
+of the most genial and companionable of men. One day the Frenchman,
+accompanied by his father-in-law, stopped me at a street corner down
+near Washington Square, climbed up beside my driver, and rode to the
+end of the route. Here, thought I, is where I get a little appreciation.
+Here is a critic from the older civilization, a man with a proper
+reverence for the past, who can look beyond the freshness of varnish. I
+have a right to expect something in the nature of consideration from
+him. Bah! All he said was: 'Among the splendid carriages and the
+high-priced automobiles, perhaps to prove that we are in a land of
+freedom, the black, dirty, wretched omnibuses ply from one end of the
+Avenue to the other.' Honest now, wouldn't it jar you?
+
+"I called you Mr. Washington Arch just now. I was wrong," the accents
+were now no longer plaintive, but raucous and sneering. If I had doubted
+before, there was now no questioning the old rascal's claim to
+recognition as a fellow New Yorker. "But I was wrong. You are Mr. Piker
+from Uptown Somewhere. Had you been Mr. Arch, you would have recognized
+me as soon as I did you. We real ones do not forget. But I have your
+number. Would you like me to tell you a few things? Oh, I have your
+_dossier_, all right. Let me see. The first time I carried you you were
+an infant howling abominably. You were lifted in somewhere in the
+'Fifties,' and three blocks farther down a fat old man got out,
+muttering, 'Why don't they keep those brats off the stages!' The next
+time you were still howling. You were about six, and you had been taken
+to the old Booth Theatre at the corner of Twenty-third Street and Sixth
+Avenue, and had seen 'Little Red Riding Hood,' and when the wolf said,
+'All the better to eat you with, my dear,' you burst into a frightened
+bawl, and had to be hurried out. Soon after I saw you on a balcony near
+the Square watching a political procession go by. Then there were a few
+years that I missed you, and then a period when I saw you often. I had
+grown rather to like you, until one Thanksgiving Day morning. You
+snubbed me direct. There were buses covered with coloured bunting in
+front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. You climbed on one. Again you were
+howling, this time methodically, deliberately, in chorus with a number
+of other young lunatics. I tried my best to be friendly, but not a look
+would you give me. You were too busy shouting and waving a flag. Say, do
+you want any more of those little personal reminiscences?"
+
+I did not. I mumbled a few words of lame apology, pleading the
+thoughtlessness of youth. The excuses were apparently taken in the
+proper spirit, for again the voice was tearful.
+
+"Ah, but those were the good old days! Out here I love to think of them
+and to recall my youth. I am battered now, and my joints creak. But
+once I was all fresh paint and varnish, one of the aristocrats of city
+travel. How I used to look down upon the bob-tailed cars at the
+cross-town streets. Besides I was not merely one of the splendid Old
+Guard, I was _the_ bus--the one of which they used to tell the famous
+story. Others may claim the distinction, but they are impostors, sir,
+rank impostors. I was the bus. What! You don't mean to say that you have
+never heard it?"
+
+Humbly I acknowledged my ignorance, and listened to a tale that, I was
+assured, had once been told in every club corner and over every dinner
+table on the Avenue.
+
+"It was nine o'clock of a blustery March night. Mulligan was not my
+driver on the trip, but Casey, who had been imbibing rather freely at
+the corner place of refreshment during the wait. Empty we left the
+starting point under the 'L. curve on South Fifth Avenue. Empty we
+crossed the Square. At the Eighth Street corner, in front of the
+Brevoort, we stopped. A gentleman and his wife entered. We proceeded. At
+Nineteenth Street we were again hailed. Three young men were standing at
+the curb. The one in the middle had evidently been drinking, for his
+head was drooping, and he was leaning heavily upon his companions. He
+was helped in and placed far forward, just under the coin box. Casey
+pulled the strap attached to his leg, closing the door, and we moved
+on, across Madison Square, past St. Leo's, up the slope of Murray Hill.
+At Thirty-seventh Street there was a tug at the strap, and one of the
+young men said a curt 'good-night' and alighted. We passed the old
+Reservoir, crossed Forty-second Street. Two blocks more and the second
+of the young men signalled. 'Good-night, Dick!' he said and was gone.
+As we resumed the journey the gentleman who with his wife had climbed
+aboard at Eighth Street noticed that the head of the third young man,
+the one apparently intoxicated, was sinking lower and lower. Thinking
+that he might be carried beyond his destination he stepped forward and
+touched his arm. 'We are passing Fifty-third Street,' he said. There
+was no response. He shook the shoulder and repeated the information.
+Suddenly he turned to his wife. 'We will get out,' he said quickly.
+'But, George--' she began. 'We will get out,' he repeated, pulling the
+strap. As they stood under the lamp light at the corner the wife
+continued her protests. 'But there were four more blocks to go.' 'My
+dear,' said the husband, '_that young man's throat was cut from ear to
+ear!_'"
+
+"You are," I remarked crossly, "a most infernal old liar."
+
+"Maybe, maybe," was the wheezy response.
+
+[Illustration: "THE SITE OF THE OLD LENOX LIBRARY IS NOW OCCUPIED BY
+THE HOUSE OF MR. HENRY C. FRICK, ONE OF THE GREAT SHOW RESIDENCES OF THE
+AVENUE AND THE CITY. A BROAD GARDEN SEPARATES THE HOUSE, WHICH IS
+EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH, FROM THE SIDEWALK"]
+
+"But I haven't said that it was true, have I? Nor again have I said
+that it wasn't. Strange things have happened on the Avenue. There have
+been nights of violence. Sometimes, on late trips, my nerves have jumped
+at the sound of some terrified cry. Often it has come from one of the
+most respectable of houses. Again, in broad daylight, I have seen
+startled faces pressed against upper windows. I have seen hands dropping
+notes to the pavement. Once in a while a passer-by has picked up one of
+those notes. But as a rule they were caught by the wind and whisked
+away. What was in those notes? That's what I want to know. Again, when
+it was dark, there has been the sound of running feet, and a panting man
+has jumped from the roadway to my rear step while we were in motion. The
+next morning there were stains on my cushions--the stains left by bloody
+hands. They never could wash them out. They never could wash them out."
+
+There was a lurch as a wheel bumped down into a hollow in the rough
+road, and the exile fell to groaning and blaspheming.
+
+"Ah, my rheumatic joints; my poor old bones! This climate!"
+
+So the old Fifth Avenue bus complained of the rheumatism. I recalled
+that the diligence that carried M. Tartarin across the Algerian desert
+also gave vent to many "Ai's" about aching joints and sudden twinges.
+What creatures of imitation we are, to be sure!
+
+"But it is the loss of old friends that hurts the most," so the
+confidences went on. "There was Mulligan, for example, of whom I was
+speaking just now--he of the long coat and the dented brown derby hat.
+Far up, near the end of the line, there was an old one-story frame
+roadhouse, that had been there in my father's time, in my grandfather's
+time, in my great-grandfather's time. Mulligan knew it well, and many
+the time, when he came out of it, he was swaying slightly, and had to
+pull himself up to the box by means of the seat rails. Then there were
+anxious moments, as we raced over the cobble-stones, and my wheels
+scraped other wheels to the right and left. In those days there was a
+strap, one end of which was attached to the driver's boot, and the other
+end to the door at the rear. When a passenger wished to alight he pulled
+the strap and the driver released his hold. Sometimes the young
+bucks--we called them dudes in those days--inside had been dining well,
+and were hunting for mischief. Two or three of them would grab the strap
+and pull with all their strength. My sides are creaky now, but they ache
+with laughing when I recall how Mulligan used to swear. Sometimes the
+strap gave and sometimes the driver' leg was twisted half off. Was that
+the origin of the expression 'pulling his leg'? I wonder! The fare was
+dropped into the box up in front. At first the driver was the one who
+made the change. Later the change was handed out in sealed paper
+envelopes. Mulligan was of the early days. What became of him? Oh, he
+went into politics.
+
+"I'll tell you what you can do for me," the exile went on. "Some day,
+when you are back in the old town just drop into the Hoffman House bar
+and take a drink for me, all the time looking up at the pictures of the
+lovely ladies about to go in bathing in a beautiful brook in the woods."
+
+"Stop!" said I, sternly. The piratical old plagiarist of a vehicle was
+about to begin filching from another source. There had been a guilty
+squeak in the voice that had roused my suspicions. "No doubt," I said,
+with pointed sarcasm, "among the many passengers you carried at various
+times was the late Mr. Richard Harding Davis. He was a literary man of
+parts, and wrote, among other books, a charming little story called 'The
+Exiles.'"
+
+"What! Is he d----? I mean I never heard of the gent," was the brazen
+response. "There was a Davis, now, a Sebastian Davis, I think the name
+was, in the hair-oil business, if I am not mistaken. A little fellow,
+with mutton-chop side whiskers. But as I was saying, I don't know
+anything better than Fifth Avenue at Madison Square of a summer's night,
+with the hobos dozing already on the park benches, and people hanging
+round the entrance of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the men lined up three
+deep at the Hoffman bar, and the girls walking by on their way to dance
+the minuet at the Haymarket up at Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street. I
+said the minuet. Do you get me?" There was an evil chuckle. "Across the
+Square Diana is twinkling up there in the sky, and beneath, in the
+Garden, they are pulling off a middle-weight bout to a decision. Just
+round the corner, in the Madison Square Theatre, you can hear the
+clapping. The play is Hoyt's 'A Trip to Chinatown.' Listen:
+
+    "'Oh, the Bowery, the Bowery,
+    They say such things and they do such things
+    On the Bowery,'
+
+"Or maybe it's:
+
+    "'You will think she's going to faint,
+    But she'll fool you, for she ain't;
+    She has been there many times before.'"
+
+"I see," said I, for both the theft of ideas and the pretence of
+innocence were too flagrant; "that your memories are of what we lovingly
+called 'the golden,' and detractors called the 'yellow' nineties. We
+were both young once."
+
+But the assumption of friendliness seemed only to irritate.
+
+"The nineties! Why, I was an old man in the nineties! An old, old man! I
+wasn't a youngster in the eighties, or the seventies, for that matter.
+There's another one of the old Avenue buses on this line. No. 27. He
+says he is older than I am. He's a liar. Sometimes I think I am the
+oldest bus in all the world, and that I ought to be enjoying myself in
+the Smithsonian, instead of dragging out my existence bumping over
+boulders and prairie grass.
+
+"Come to think of it," the old bus went on meditatively, "the
+Smithsonian does not appeal to me after all. I think that I would be
+better pleased in a corner of the Third Degree room down at Number 300
+Mulberry Street, or in the Chamber of Horrors at the Eden Musee. For, as
+you may have noticed, I am partial to crime. It is the result of my
+bringing up. It is the excitement of my early days that I miss most now.
+When I first came out here it was with a feeling of pleased expectancy.
+I anticipated a daily hold-up. I had visions of stage robbers in cambric
+masks, and running gun fights, and horses in frightened flight, and my
+driver stricken to the heart and tumbling from his seat. But it is a
+degenerate and tame world out here. Give me little old New York."
+
+"But the statistics--" I began.
+
+"You do not know one-quarter. The police do not know one-half. But I
+know. You have read what the papers have printed, or what some retired
+Inspector has seen fit to tell in his Memoirs. You did not pass, night
+after night, the sinister house of the woman whose open boast was that,
+if she wished to, she could take half the roofs off the Avenue. You did
+not know how real that terrible threat was, for you never saw the
+cloaked men issuing from its doors bearing their ghastly burdens. You
+have heard of the Burdell murder but you never knew the real solution.
+You have read of the Nathan murder at the corner of the Avenue and
+Twenty-third Street. But you did not hear, as I heard, that piercing
+wail, or see the shaking figure that climbed on my rear step at
+Twenty-fourth Street and rode twenty blocks northward. A man once wrote
+an Australian story called 'The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.' My life had
+not one mystery but a score of mysteries. You think you know something
+of Fifth Avenue. What do you know of the killing the Girl in Green, or
+of Colt and the William Street printer, the Suicides of No. X Washington
+Square, North, or The Enigma of the Fifteenth Street House, or of The
+Case of Giuseppe and the Italian Ambassador, which was hushed up by
+orders from Washington and Rome, or The Affair of the Titled Sexton, or
+The Madison Square Tower Episode?"
+
+But I was growing weary of the voice of the old impostor.
+
+"Ever hear of Conan Doyle?" I asked.
+
+"Now come to think of it, a drummer from Altoona left a paper copy of
+one of his books the last trip."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+_A Post-Knickerbocker Petronius_
+
+
+A Post-Knickerbocker Petronius--The Early Life of Mr. Ward McAllister--A
+Discovery of Europe--A Glimpse of British High Life--The Judgment of a
+Diplomat--The South and Newport--Organizing New York Society--The
+"Four Hundred"--Maxims of a Master and Maitre d'Hotel.
+
+    He does not reign in Russia cold,
+        Nor yet in far Cathay,
+    But o'er this town he's come to hold
+        An undisputed sway.
+
+    When in their might the ladies rose,
+        "To put the Despot down,"
+    As blandly as Ah Sin, he goes
+        His way without a frown.
+
+    Alas! though he's but one alone,
+        He's one too many still--
+    He's fought the fight, he's held his own,
+        And to the end he will.
+
+--_From a Lady after the Ball of February 25, 1884._
+
+
+Mrs. Burton Harrison, in "Recollections, Grave and Gay," told of a visit
+made in 1892 as one of a party of invited guests travelling by special
+train to the newly built Four Seasons Hotel at Cumberland Gap, in
+Tennessee, where the directors of a new land company and health-resort
+scheme had arranged a week of sports and entertainments. About forty
+congenial persons from New York and Washington made the trip, the
+mountaineers and their families along the route assembling at stations
+to see the notabilities among them. The chief attraction, Mrs. Harrison
+recorded, seemed to be Ward McAllister, who had been expected, but did
+not go. At one station, James Brown Potter, engaged in taking a
+constitutional to remove train stiffness, was pointed out by another of
+the party to a group of staring natives as the famous arbiter of New
+York fashion.
+
+"I want to know!" said a gaunt mountain horseman. "Wal, I've rid fifteen
+miles a-purpus to see that dude McAllister, and I don't begrutch it, not
+a mite."
+
+All over the land there were yokels and the spouses of yokels and even
+the children of yokels, moved by a like interest and curiosity; while
+rural visitors to New York, and also New Yorkers born for that
+matter--if such a person as a born New Yorker actually existed--craned
+their necks from the tops of the Fifth Avenue buses in the hope of
+catching a glimpse of the great man, who, for a brief, flitting moment
+was an institution of as much importance as the Obelisk or the
+Metropolitan Museum of Art.
+
+But so far as the great world beyond the Weehawken Hills went, Ward
+McAllister's was an ephemeral glory. It was a clear case of
+anachronism. He was born one hundred years too late, or two hundred
+years, or two thousand. His was the soul of the Roman Petronius, or of
+one of the Corinthian eccentrics, who strutted in St. James's Park or
+past Carlton House in the early days of the Regency, and gave colour to
+that otherwise grim England that was grappling for life with the
+Corsican; or of "King" Nash of Bath. It was the "King," perhaps, that he
+suggested most of all. But in the Carlton House circle he might have
+out-Brummelled Brummel, and supplanted that famous Beau as the object of
+the fat Prince's attentions and ingratitude. Indeed there was a flavour
+of Brummel's biting insolence in some of the sayings that were
+attributed to the New Yorker. For example, there was a well-known
+literary woman of New York, who had in some way incurred the arbiter's
+august disapproval.
+
+"She write stories of New York society!" he said. "Why, I have seen her
+myself, buying her Madeira at Park & Tilford's in a demijohn."
+
+When Thackeray was contemplating writing "The Virginians," he desired
+information about the personality of Washington, and applied to the
+American historian Kennedy. Kennedy began to impart his knowledge in the
+manner that might have been expected from a historian when the
+Englishman interrupted rather testily, "No, no. That's not what I want.
+Tell me, was he a fussy old gentleman in a wig, who spilled snuff down
+the front of his coat?" It was in some such spirit that I applied to
+that old friend of the fine Italian manner, and the profound personal
+and inherited knowledge of the ways and the men and women of New York. I
+did not, I explained, wish to be unkind, but the memory of that
+latter-day Petronius was one of the most mirth-provoking memories of my
+boyhood. Was he fair game for a chapter of a flippant nature? But why
+not? was the retort. He himself would have adored it.
+
+Fame came to him through the newspaper reporter. It was a smaller New
+York, a more limited Fifth Avenue in those days, and Mrs. Astor ruled
+its society without any one to question her sovereignty. She was about
+to give a great ball, and Ward McAllister, as the self-appointed and
+generally accepted secretary of society, was in charge of the list of
+invitations.
+
+To the reporter sent to interview him Mr. McAllister explained that,
+owing to problems of space, only four hundred cards were to be sent out,
+commenting: "After all, there are only four hundred persons in New York
+who count in a social way."
+
+"And who are those four hundred persons?" asked the quick-witted
+reporter.
+
+On that point Mr. McAllister was more reticent. But the reporter
+obtained the list of those who were to be invited to the ball, and the
+names were printed as those who constituted New York's "Four Hundred."
+
+"Society," said my friend sagely, "needs to be managed just as a circus
+is managed. Of good family, with an independent income large enough to
+make him free from the necessity of work, and small enough to keep him
+from the time-using diversions of extravagance, with a knowledge of
+wines, and a bent for selecting the proper kind of buttons for the coat
+in which to attend a cock-fight, he was the man for his circle and age.
+A Brummel? Hardly that. There was nothing of the ill-starred Beau in his
+appearance. His influence was good, as Brummel's was occasionally good.
+You recall the saying of the Duchess of York to the effect that it
+was Brummel's influence which more or less reformed the manners of
+the smart young men who were notorious for their excesses, their
+self-assertiveness, their want of courtesy. He was more akin to the
+ill-favoured Richard Nash, whose wise autocracy helped so much in the
+redeeming of the city of Bath."
+
+After all, whether it was part pose, or whether the man was quite
+sincere in his professed belief in the profound importance of what most
+of the world is inclined to regard as trivialities, he was always
+consistent. As a youth he went to live in the house of a relative, in
+Tenth Street, New York, when that neighbourhood retained a flavour of
+aristocracy. A legacy of one thousand dollars fell to him. It was his
+first legacy. A cannier soul would have made the money go a long way. He
+spent it all for the costume that he was to wear at the fancy dress ball
+that was to be given by Mrs. John C. Stevens at her residence in College
+Place. "I flattered myself that it was the handsomest and richest
+costume at the ball." A little later, in 1850, he went to San Francisco,
+to join his father in the practice of law. It was in the first days of
+the gold rush, when the city was in the making, and fabulous prices were
+paid for the commodities of life. In the make-up of a man there had to
+be a certain amount of stern stuff if he was to survive in that struggle
+for existence. Young McAllister prospered, and in the course of time
+built himself a house. "My furniture," he recorded, "just from Paris,
+was acajou and white and blue horse-hair. My bed quilt cost me $250. It
+was a lovely Chinese floss silk shawl." His talents as a giver of
+dinners were in evidence at that early age, and his father made use of
+them in connection with the law business. There was a French _chef_, at
+a salary of ten thousand dollars a year. High prices and scarcity
+served only as spurs to the young Petronius.
+
+"Such dinners as I gave I have never seen surpassed anywhere," he
+complacently recorded in later years. Some one spoke to the elder
+McAllister of the admirable manner in which his son kept house. "Yes,"
+was the sapient retort. "He keeps everything but the Ten Commandments."
+
+Two years of California, and then he returned East. At that period of
+his life the idea of the Diplomatic Service as a career appealed to him.
+Mr. Buchanan was going to England as Minister, and Ward McAllister
+applied to President Pierce for the post of Secretary of Legation. He
+was _persona grata_ with Buchanan, he had the influence necessary to
+push his petition, and the matter seemed settled. But just then along
+came his father, who wanted to be made Circuit Judge of the United
+States for the State of California. Two appointments at the same time to
+one family were out of the question, so the young man stepped aside as
+became a dutiful son. But see Europe he would, and if he could not go in
+the Government's service and at the public expense as a dabbler with
+official sealing wax, he would go as a private citizen. The record he
+preserved of that journey gives a marvellous picture of the man.
+
+In London he met a Californian, in with all the sporting world, on
+intimate terms with the champion prize-fighter of England, the Queen's
+pages, and the Tattersalls crowd. Chaperoned by this curious countryman,
+McAllister's first introduction to London life took the form of a dinner
+at a great house in the suburbs. It was a strange house and a strange
+company, more in keeping with the eighteenth century than the middle of
+the nineteenth. The rat-pit, the drawing of the badger, the bloody
+battling of the bull terriers, the high betting, the Gargantuan eating
+and drinking and shouting, the smashing of glasses and plates, the
+imperturbable footmen in green and gold liveries calmly replacing in
+their chairs the guests overcome by strong potations--it was a picture
+for Hogarth's pencil at its best, or Gillray's at its craziest.
+
+The intimation is that, in the course of this and similar adventures,
+McAllister was defraying his own expenses and those of his Californian
+companion. Provided it was the kind of life he wanted to see, it was
+money well spent.
+
+Then he went off to Windsor, and there, at the village inn, dined with
+Her Majesty's _chef_ and the keeper of the jewel-room. Again it was
+probably the visitor from across the seas who gave the dinner, as a
+result of which he was permitted to visit the royal kitchen, and see the
+roasts turning on the spits.
+
+"I saw Prince Albert and the Prince of Wales that morning shooting
+pheasants alongside of the Windsor Long Walk, and stood within a few
+yards of them. I feel sure we ate, that day, the pheasants that had been
+shot by Prince Albert." Doesn't it read like a bit of Thackeray--say
+from the paper in "The Book of Snobs" on "The Court Circular" with its
+references to the shooting methods of a certain German Prince-Consort?
+
+    "A tiny bit of orange peel,
+      The butt of a cigar,
+    Once trod on by a Princely heel,
+      How beautiful they are!"
+
+Having exhausted England the young discoverer travelled to Paris and
+thence to Florence. There are believed to be a few art galleries in
+Florence and some monuments of historical interest. But about these
+Lochinvar did not disturb his head greatly. Instead he discovered a
+cook--"I paid the fellow twenty-four Pauls a day"--whose manner of
+roasting a turkey was most extraordinary. He cultivated the English
+doctor of the city and through him procured invitations to the balls
+given by the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The King of Bavaria attended one of
+these balls, and something very terrible happened. It was _lese-majeste_
+in its most virulent form.
+
+The offender was an American girl who committed the crime while being
+whirled about in McAllister's arms. "I did it! I was determined to do
+it! As I passed the King I dug him in in the ribs with my elbow. Now I
+am satisfied." "I soon disposed of the young woman," recorded her
+partner of the dance, "and never 'attempted her' again."
+
+There were other eccentric Americans at large in Europe in those days
+besides the fair belle of Stonington. One of them, in Rome, wore a
+decoration that excited the curiosity of his host, the Austrian
+Minister. His Excellency finally found the opportunity to refer to it
+questioningly. "Sir!" said the American, drawing himself up. "My country
+is a Republic. If it had been a Monarchy, I would have been the Duke of
+Pennsylvania. The order I wear is that of the Cincinnati." The Minister,
+deeply impressed, withdrew. In Rome McAllister found that the American
+Minister was in the habit of inviting Italians to meet Italians, and
+Americans to meet Americans. When asked the reason, he replied: "I have
+the greatest admiration for my countrymen: they are enterprising,
+money-getting, in fact, a wonderful nation, but there is not a gentleman
+among them."
+
+In reading the blasting comment I am moved to wonder what manner of man
+the Minister was who took no shame in giving expression to such an
+opinion of his brethren of the western world. "And then," Thackeray
+might have written, "I sink another shaft, and come upon another rich
+vein of Snob-ore. The Diplomatic Snob, etc." Yesterday Americans
+travelling in other lands had every reason to resent a type of
+representative that had been sent abroad to uphold the honour and
+dignity of our flag; the uncouth manners, the shirt sleeves, the narrow
+intolerance, that told all too plainly the story of party reward. Yet,
+somehow, I rather prefer that man, unpleasant as he was, and humiliating
+to patriotic pride as he was, to the dandy and ingrate of whom Mr.
+McAllister told. I like to think that, however Europeans may have
+laughed and wondered at the yokel out of place, for the sycophant
+denying his compatriots was reserved the bitterest of their contempt.
+
+From Italy McAllister went to spend the summer at Baden-Baden. The
+Prince of Prussia, later the Emperor William, was there. It pained the
+young American to find that the royal visitor was no connoisseur,
+gulping his wine instead of sipping and lingering over it. But there is
+haste to express intense admiration. "His habit of walking two hours
+under the trees of the Allee Lichtenthal was also mine, and it was with
+pleasure I bowed most respectfully to him day by day." The final touch
+to the McAllister education came at Pau, where he passed the following
+winter, and the winter after. He ran down to Bordeaux, made friends with
+all the wine fraternity there, tasted and criticized, wormed himself
+into the good graces of the owners of the enormous Bordeaux caves, and
+learned there for the first time what claret was. "There I learned how
+to give dinners; to esteem and value the Coq de Bruyere of the Pyrenees,
+and the Pic de Mars."
+
+Thus equipped for the serious business of life as he conceived it, he
+returned home. He entertained old Commodore Vanderbilt at a dinner that
+caused the ex-Staten Island ferryman to remark: "My young friend, if you
+go on giving such dinners as these you need have no fear of planting
+yourself in this city." He was at first disappointed at the reception
+accorded him by his native city of Savannah. He had prided himself on
+giving that town the benefit of his European education. But there was a
+certain resentment at his attitude until "I took up the young fry, who
+let their elders very soon know that I had certainly learned something
+and that Mc's dinners were bound to be a feature of Savannah." Then came
+his _coup_. Certain noble lords were expected from England, the son of
+the Duke of Devonshire and the son of the Earl of Shaftesbury, and all
+wondered who would have the honour of entertaining them.
+
+The British Consul counted on the distinction. "He was a great
+character there, giving the finest dinners, and being an authority on
+wine, _i.e._, Madeira, 'Her Majesty's Consul will have the honour.' I
+secretly smiled, as I knew they were coming to me, and I expected them
+the next day. This same good old Consul had ignored me, hearing that I
+had the audacity to give at my table _filet de boeuf aux truffes et
+champignons_. I returned home feeling sure that these young noblemen
+would be but a few hours under my roof before Her Majesty's Consul would
+give me the honour of a visit." He was right. The strangers had not been
+settled an hour when the tactful Briton rushed up the front steps.
+Throwing his arms around McAllister's neck, he exclaimed: "My dear boy,
+I was in love with your mother thirty years ago; you are her image;
+carry me to your noble guests." "Ever after," is the naive record of our
+hero, "I had the respect and esteem of this dear old man."
+
+Let us get back to our sheep. The narrative has been rambling too far
+from Fifth Avenue, and it is with the arbiter of the Avenue that we have
+to do. Behold him launched, laughed at perhaps, occasionally, but feared
+and courted. He was at the ball given to the Prince of Wales in the
+Academy of Music, being the first after the royal guest to take the
+floor for the waltz.
+
+He devoted an entire day in railway travel in order to procure a
+dress-suit, as he called it, in which to appear at a dinner to two
+English lords. He began to arrange for cotillon dinners, figuring the
+cost, checking off the invitations, standing at the door of the salon,
+naming to each man the lady he was to take in.
+
+There was one point to which his subserviency to British visitors would
+not go. Gastronomically he was as sturdy a patriot as any farmer who
+blazed away at the Red Coats from behind the Lexington hedges. Stoutly
+he defended the "saddle" of venison instead of the "haunch." Our
+tenderloin steak was quite as good as the English rump. Of Madeira he
+once said, with the spirit of Nathan Hale, "You have none to liken unto
+ours."
+
+That Prince of Wales who afterwards became George the Fourth, in the
+vigour of his youth, and the prime force of his invention, invented a
+shoe-buckle. The crowning work in the life of Ward McAllister was
+probably the institution of the F.C.D.C.'s, abbreviation for the Family
+Circle Dancing Class. The Patriarch Balls, of which the first were given
+in the winters of 1872 and 1873, were growing too large and were being
+monopolized by the married women. The new association was for the _jeune
+fille_, and was to be more limited and intimate. Its dances were held
+at Dodworth's, later Delmonico's, and in the _foyer_ of the Metropolitan
+Opera House. The arbiter paid the price of his greatness. "From the
+giving of the first to the time of my giving them up, I had no peace
+either at home or abroad. I was assailed on all sides, became in a sense
+a diplomat, committed myself to nothing, promised much and performed as
+little as possible....
+
+"My mornings were given up to being interviewed of and about them;
+mothers would call at my house, entirely unknown to me, the sole words
+of introduction being, 'Kind sir, I have a daughter.' These words were
+cabalistic; I would spring up, bow to the ground, and reply: 'My dear
+Madam, say no more, you have my sympathy; we are in accord; no
+introduction is necessary; you have a daughter and want her to go to the
+F.C.D.C.'s. I will do all in my power to do this for you; but my dear
+lady, please understand, that in all matters concerning these little
+dances I must consult the powers that be. I am their humble servant; I
+must take orders from them.' All of which was a figure of speech on my
+part." The arbiter would then diplomatically suggest the possibility of
+a friend of social influence, and make some allusion to family. That
+always started the fair visitor. The family always went back to King
+John and, in some instances, to William the Conqueror. "'My dear
+Madam,' I would reply, 'does it not satisfy any one to come into
+existence with the birth of one's country? In my opinion, four
+generations of gentlemen make as good and true a gentleman as forty. I
+know my English brethren will not agree with me in this, but, in spite
+of them, it is my belief.' With disdain, my visitor would reply: 'You
+are easily satisfied, sir.' And so on, from day to day, these interviews
+would go on; all were Huguenots, Pilgrims, or Puritans. I would
+sometimes call one a Pilgrim instead of a Puritan, and by this would
+uncork the vials of wrath."
+
+To the credit of the post-Knickerbocker Petronius it must be said that
+he was ever content with his lot. If there were poses to laugh at, there
+were qualities to respect. A meaner soul might have turned the peacock
+prestige to financial account. "Had I charged a fee for every
+consultation with anxious mothers on this subject" (that of introducing
+a young girl into New York society) "I would be a rich man." A Wall
+Street banker visiting him in his modest home in Twenty-first Street
+exclaimed against the surroundings, offering to buy a certain stock at
+the opening of the Board, and send the resulting profits in the
+afternoon of the same day. Commodore Vanderbilt, who apparently never
+forgot that first dinner, once advised: "Mac, sell everything you have
+and put it in Harlem stock; it is now twenty-four; you will make more
+money than you know how to take care of."
+
+But steadfastly McAllister refused to be tempted. So long as his cottage
+was a "cottage of gentility," why try to augment his fortune? "A
+gentleman can afford to walk; he cannot afford to have a shabby
+equipage," he once said. That distinction which he felt to be his was
+not to be impaired by his trudging afoot.
+
+It is not in the pictures of his youth, winning his way into society to
+rule it; but come to ripe years, secure in his position, imparting his
+creed on points of social usage, with mellow dogmatism laying down the
+law in all matters of vintages and viands, that he is most impressive.
+"My dear sir, I do not argue, I inform."
+
+It was that spirit that led to the dictum that made him famous. "My dear
+boy, there are only four hundred persons in New York who really count
+socially." It was as if he had said: "Decant all your clarets before
+serving them, even your _vin ordinaire_. If at a dinner you give both
+Burgundy and claret, give your finest claret with the roast, your
+Burgundy with the cheese. Stand up both wines the morning of the dinner,
+and in decanting, hold the decanter in your left hand, and let the wine
+first pour against the inside of the neck of the decanter, so as to
+break its fall." Doubtless, t'other side of Styx, his spirit has found
+congenial companions. I see his shade in dignified disputation with
+other shades. He argues with Brummel about the tying of a cravat, with
+Nash about a minuet, the proper composition of a sauce is the subject of
+a weighty dialogue with the great Vatel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+_The Crest of Murray Hill_
+
+
+Stretches of the Avenue--The Crest of Murray Hill--The House of
+"Sarsaparilla" Townsend--A.T. Stewart's Italian Palace--The
+Knickerbocker Trust Company--The Coventry Waddell Mansion--A House at
+Thirty-ninth Street--The Present Union League--A Tavern of the
+Fifties--The "House of Mansions"--The Old Reservoir, and Egyptian
+Temple--The Crystal Palace--The Latting Tower--"Quality Hill."
+
+
+Although the name it now bears and has borne for four or five years is
+the Columbia Trust Company, the building at the northwest corner of
+Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street is likely to be known and referred
+to as the Knickerbocker Trust for a long time to come. As such it was
+the storm centre of the great panic which shook the country in 1907,
+ruining many, shaking some of America's supposedly most solid fortunes,
+and involving a dramatic suicide. The story of the site goes back almost
+three-quarters of a century. There, at the beginning of the Civil War,
+was the residence of "Dr." Samuel P. Townsend. Originally a contractor,
+he had "discovered" a sarsaparilla, advertised it on an extensive scale,
+acquired a fortune and the nickname of "Sarsaparilla" Townsend. His
+house, a four-story brown-stone, was one of the wonders of the town. For
+some reason he did not live in it long, selling it in 1862 to Dr. Gorham
+D. Abbott, an uncle of Dr. Lyman Abbott of the "Outlook." For a number
+of years Dr. Abbott, who had been the principal of the Spingler
+Institute on Union Square, conducted a school there. Then A.T. Stewart,
+the famous merchant, bought the site. He found brown-stone and left
+marble. "Sarsaparilla" Townsend's pride and folly was tumbled to the
+ground, carted away, and in its place there went up the Italian palace
+that is still a familiar memory to most New Yorkers. It cost two million
+dollars. Stewart did not live long to enjoy it. But after his death in
+1876, his widow occupied the palace until her death in 1886, when the
+property was leased to the Manhattan Club. There was a story to the
+effect that during the club's occupancy it was found necessary to make
+certain interior alterations. One of the committee in charge was an
+Irishman. He complained that the work was unduly expensive for the
+reason that "the woodwork was all marble."
+
+But before Stewart demolished and built, and before "Sarsaparilla"
+Townsend built what Stewart later demolished, there had been a famous
+mansion in this neighbourhood. Thackeray, in one of his letters to the
+Baxter family, alluded to the long journey he was about to undertake in
+order to travel from his hotel to a certain famous house up in the
+country at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street. That was the Coventry
+Waddell house, on land where the Brick Presbyterian Church now stands.
+Waddell was a close friend of President Jackson, and his fortune sprang
+from the services he rendered as financial representative of the "Old
+Hickory" Administration. In 1845, when he went "into the wilderness" to
+build, the Avenue, beyond Madison Square, was nothing but a country road
+lined with farms. It is told that when he was bargaining for the land,
+his wife sat under an apple-tree in a neighbouring orchard. Nine
+thousand one hundred and fifty dollars he paid for the tract, which ten
+years later brought eighty thousand dollars, and for part of which the
+Brick Church paid fifty-eight thousand dollars in 1856. The Fifth Avenue
+Bank monograph contains a print of the villa, as it was called,
+reproduced from "Putnam's Magazine." What the print apparently shows is
+the Thirty-seventh Street stretch, with the wicket fence near the
+corner, and the low brick wall extending westward beyond. The villa was
+of yellowish grey stucco with brown-stone trim, Gothic in style, and had
+so many towers, oriels, and gables, that when Waddell's brother saw it
+and was asked what he would call it, replied, "Waddell's Caster; here
+is a mustard pot, there is a pepper bottle, and there is a vinegar
+cruet." There were a conservatory and a picture-gallery, and the house
+stood considerably above the Avenue level upon grounds that descended to
+the street by sloping grass banks. A winding staircase led from the
+broad marble hall to a tower from which there was a fine view of the
+rolling country, the rivers to the east and west, and the growing city
+far to the south. There were celebrities other than the author of
+"Vanity Fair" who sampled the quality of the Waddell hospitality. For
+ten years the Waddells lived there, entertaining magnificently. Then
+came the financial crash of 1857, Mr. Waddell was one of those whose
+fortunes tumbled with the market, and he was obliged to sacrifice his
+estate. The villa was torn down, and the grounds levelled. "I remember,"
+"Fifth Avenue" quotes Mr. John D. Crimmins as saying, "very vividly the
+old Waddell mansion. I was taken into it by my father the day they began
+to dismantle it, and remember very distinctly the courteous manner in
+which we were received by Mrs. Waddell, and how she regretted the
+destruction of her home. At that time the Reservoir was an attraction
+for the view it furnished. There were no buildings high enough to
+interfere, and visitors could get a bird's-eye view of the entire city
+and the Palisades. The neighbourhood at that time is well illustrated
+in the old New York print showing the Reservoir and the Crystal Palace,
+1855. There were no pretentious houses north of Forty-second Street. It
+was interesting to see the drovers--tall men, with staffs in their
+hands, herding eight, ten, or twenty cattle--driving the cattle to
+market, generally on Sunday, as Monday was market day."
+
+[Illustration: THE TERRACE OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY. TO-DAY THE SPOT IS THE
+SCENE OF THE ACTIVITIES OF THOSE ENGAGED IN THE WORK OF SPEEDING
+AMERICA'S ANSWER. ONCE IT WAS FAR UPTOWN, AND ON THE EASTERN SIDE OF THE
+AVENUE WERE THE RESIDENCES KNOWN AS "SPANISH ROW," OR "THE HOUSE OF
+MANSIONS"]
+
+About the time that the Waddell villa was being pulled down there was
+going up, two blocks to the north, a New York residence that has endured
+to the present day. The original Wendell and the original Astor were
+partners in the fur trade, and at the time of the death of the late John
+Gottlieb Wendell his holdings in Manhattan real estate were second only
+to those of the Astors. There was a General David Wendell, known as
+"Fighting Dave," who fought in the War of the Revolution. The first
+Wendell and the first Astor, his partner, married sisters, and they
+bequeathed to their descendants the sound principle of buying land and
+buying beyond. The John Gottlieb Wendell of recent memory, a
+great-great-grandson of the founder of the family fortune, was
+distinguished for his eccentricities. Although he collected his own
+rents, would never give more than three-year leases, and could not be
+persuaded to part with a foot of his land holdings, he was
+characterized as "one of the squarest landlords in the city." In the
+old-fashioned brick and brown-stone house he lived in extreme
+simplicity. From the top of a passing bus may be seen the garden beyond
+the high board fence. Many covetous eyes of commerce have regarded it;
+many tempting offers have been made. But according to popular tradition
+Mr. Wendell clung to the garden because his sisters desired it as a
+place in which to exercise their dogs. Now, after the death of John
+Gottlieb, the three elderly sisters still live in the house, in a state
+of the same old-time plainness. They, with a married sister, are the
+sole heirs of the eighty million dollars in New York real estate left by
+their brother. The house, a few years ago, was assessed at five thousand
+dollars, the site is valued at two million.
+
+Directly across the Avenue from the Wendell house is the Union League
+Club, on land that formerly was occupied by Dickel's Riding Academy,
+fifty years ago the fashionable equestrian school of New York. The early
+story of the organization will be found in another chapter. The present
+home at the northeast corner of Thirty-ninth Street was built in
+1879-1880 at a cost of four hundred thousand dollars. The building is in
+Queen Anne style, of Baltimore pressed brick, with brown-stone
+trimmings, the interior decorations are the work of John La Farge, Louis
+Tiffany, and Franklin Smith, and the club's art collection includes
+Carpenter's Inauguration of Lincoln. The long room on the first floor
+facing Fifth Avenue, from the windows of which at any hour of the day
+may be seen comfortable-looking gentlemen blandly surveying the passing
+procession, is the Reading Room, decorated in Pompeian style.
+
+On the corner above where the Union League now stands there was, in
+1854, a small country tavern known as the Croton Cottage. It took its
+name from the Croton Reservoir, a block above, then on the other side of
+the Avenue. A yellow, wooden structure, with a veranda reached by deep
+stoops from the sidewalk, and surrounded by trees and shrubbery, it
+flourished by vending ice cream and other refreshment to those who came
+to view the city from the top of the Reservoir walls. During the Draft
+Riots in 1863 it was burned down, and Commodore Vanderbilt bought the
+site in 1866 for eighty thousand dollars, built a house, lived in it,
+and left it to his son, Frederick W. Vanderbilt. It is the Arnold,
+Constable site. On the same side of the Avenue as the Croton Cottage, in
+the block between Forty-first and Forty-second Street, was the Rutgers
+Female Cottage. This institution was first opened in 1839 on ground
+given it by William B. Crosby in Madison Street. The Madison Street
+property had been part of the estate of Colonel Henry Rutgers, of
+Revolutionary fame, after whom the college was named. In 1855 certain
+buildings known as "The House of Mansions," or "The Spanish Row," were
+erected opposite the Reservoir by George Higgins, who thought "that
+eleven buildings, uniform in size, price, and amount of accommodation,
+of durable fire-brick, and of a chosen cheerful tint of colour and
+variegated architecture," would suit the most fastidious home-seeker. In
+his prospectus to the public he informed that the view from the windows
+was unrivalled, as it commanded the whole island and its surroundings.
+But either "The House of Mansions" had some defect, or the situation was
+still too remote from the city. The project was not a success, and in
+1860 the Rutgers Female College, incidentally the first institution for
+the higher education of young women in the city, moved from its downtown
+home and occupied the neglected buildings. Then there is the story of
+the great square opposite, running from Fifth to Sixth Avenues, between
+Fortieth and Forty-second Streets. The Public Library holds the eastern
+half of it now and Bryant Park the western. Like Washington Square and
+Madison Square the land once served as a burial place for the poor and
+the nameless dead. Between the years 1822 and 1825 that northern square
+was the Potter's Field. Then, on October 14, 1842, the massive
+Reservoir, which remained to see almost the dawn of the twentieth
+century, was opened with impressive ceremonies. The distributing
+reservoir of the Croton Water system, it occupied more than four acres,
+and was divided into two basins by a partition wall. The enclosing
+walls, constructed of granite, were about forty-five feet high. This
+vast structure, resembling an Egyptian temple, contained twenty million
+gallons of water. The Reservoir had been there eleven years, when the
+Crystal Palace, modelled after the London Crystal Palace at Sydenham,
+was formally opened July 14, 1853, by President Franklin Pierce. Six
+hundred and fifty thousand dollars was the cost of the building, which
+was shaped like a Greek cross, of glass and iron, with a graceful dome,
+arched naves, and broad aisles. Upon the completion of the Atlantic
+Cable in 1858 an ovation was given in the Palace to Cyrus W. Field.
+Beyond the Palace, to the north, was the Latting Tower, an observatory,
+three hundred and fifty feet high, an octagon seventy-five feet across
+the base, of timber, braced with iron, and anchored at each of the eight
+angles with about forty tons of stone and timber. The tower was the
+design of Warren Latting, and cost one hundred thousand dollars.
+Immediately over the first story there was a refreshment room, and above
+three view landings, the highest being three hundred feet from the
+pavement. The proprietors were as sanguine as the promoters of the
+Crystal Palace and the builder of "The House of Mansions" had been. They
+took a ten-year lease of the ground and counted on reaping a fortune.
+But like the other ventures the Tower was a failure. It was sold under
+execution and destroyed by fire August 30, 1856, twenty-five months
+before the burning of the Palace. In 1862 Union troops camped on the
+site of the latter building, and the ground became known in 1871 as
+Reservoir Park, which name was changed to Bryant Park in 1884.
+
+Like other world-great cities, New York has many hearts. The spot that
+means the very centre of things varies according to mood, occupation,
+and manner of life. To high finance and those who play feverishly with
+it, the heart of the town is where Wall Street, running from Trinity
+Church down to the East River, is crossed by Nassau zigzagging into
+Broad. At high noon the colossal figure of Washington on the steps of
+the Sub-Treasury looks down on the centre of the earth. To the swarming
+thousands of the Ghetto, who seldom venture west of the Bowery, there is
+a point on the East Side that represents the pivot of things. There are
+descendants of the Knickerbockers who cling arrogantly to the corner
+facing the Washington Arch. Profound is the belief of the pleasure
+seeker in the lights, signs, theatres, and lobster palaces of Longacre
+Square. To others nothing counts as the trees and fountains of Madison
+Square and graceful Diana and the great clock in the Metropolitan Tower
+count. But in these stirring days of the spring and early summer of
+1918, for the throb of the universe climb Murray Hill to a point on the
+Fifth Avenue sidewalk opposite the stone lions that guard the entrance
+to the Public Library. There, as nowhere else, has the quiet of other
+days been changed to the clamour of the present. To the passing
+thousands the uniforms of khaki or of navy blue and the blaring band are
+calling. "In this the vital hour let us show that the Spirit of '76 is
+not dead! Americans, to arms!" And yesterday it was "Quality Hill," of
+which Mr. Clinton Scollard sang:
+
+    "Quality Hill! Lo! It flourishes still,
+    And who can deny that forever it will?
+    A blending of breeding with puff and with plume;
+    A strange sort of mixture of rick and mushroom.
+    Some amble, some scramble, (some gamble), to fill
+    The motley and medley of Quality Hill."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+_Giant Strides of Commerce_
+
+
+Giant Strides of Commerce--The Reasoning of M. Honore de Balzac--The
+Aristocracy of Trade--The Story of a New York Shop--When Fifth Avenue
+Began to Rival Bond Street and the Rue de la Paix--Shopping in
+1901--Publishing Houses at the Beginning of the Century--Prices of
+Real Estate--Some Great Houses of the Present.
+
+
+Once upon a time, so the story goes, a French publisher, planning an
+elaborate volume on the streets of Paris, went to Honore de Balzac, then
+at the height of his fame, to ask him to contribute the chapter on a
+particular thoroughfare--let us say, the Rue Une Telle, or the Avenue
+Quelque-Chose. The idea appealed to the fancy of the great man, and
+matters were going along swimmingly, until it came to the point of
+settling upon a price to be paid the novelist for his labour. "And now,
+_cher maitre,_ we must consider the painful triviality of emolument."
+Without hesitation Balzac mentioned a figure that was simply staggering.
+It was a minute or two before the astonished publisher could gather his
+wits together sufficiently to protest and bargain. But Balzac was not to
+be moved. He explained that the sum named was not merely for the work
+but also for expenses that would be unavoidable in carrying on the
+work. "It is this way, _cher Monsieur_. To write about a street it is
+necessary to know it thoroughly. It is not enough to glance at the
+_etalage,_ one must investigate the shop behind. Let us consider the
+street that you wish me to describe. As I recall it, first on the right
+is the establishment of B., the gunsmith. In studying his premises it
+will, of course, be necessary for me to purchase a rifle or a revolver
+and a box of cartridges. Next door to B., as you may remember, is the
+business of X., the perfumer. Luckily for you, Monsieur, a bottle of
+perfume is not expensive. But beyond that shop there is the one of Y.,
+the furrier, and furs just now, as you doubtless know, are rather high.
+Of course, proceeding in my investigation, I shall be obliged to buy a
+ring at the jeweller's, a _chapeau de forme_ at the hatter's, a pair of
+boots at the shoe-maker's, and a waistcoat at least at the tailor's. In
+view of such a condition I protest that the price I name for writing the
+article is astonishingly reasonable." Needless to say, M. de Balzac did
+not write the paper desired. The publisher managed to find another
+scribe who finished the task creditably without purchasing so much as a
+sheet of paper. But imagine the expense account that would be presented
+by a writer engaged to describe the stretch of shopping Fifth Avenue
+from Thirty-fourth Street to Fiftieth who considered it necessary to
+follow the method suggested by the creator of the _Comedie Humaine_!
+
+Paraphrasing the saying of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, three or four
+generations in the story of a New York store make an aristocrat of
+trade. There are names of commerce that stand out in the imagination of
+the New Yorkers like the names of great soldiers and statesmen. Solid,
+imposing, facing the Avenue at a corner that represents land value that
+is computed by the square inch, is the structure of Brown-Smith. In some
+cases the passer-by will search in vain for any indication of the
+name--the information being deemed wholly superfluous. It matters not in
+the least whether the commodity upon which Brown-Smith has reared its
+history be hats, or groceries, or furs, or jewelry, or silverware, or
+boots, or men's furnishings. The story of the enterprise, its growth and
+its migrations, is, in epitome, the story of the city.
+
+The beginning of the tale, dealing with the first Brown-Smith, is the
+narrative of the Industrious Apprentice, coming to the growing town
+towards the close of the eighteenth century, a raw-boned country youth
+from New Hampshire or Vermont, finding after much tramping and many
+rebuffs employment which meant sleeping on a counter in the hours when
+he was not running errands, sweeping out dusty corners, and polishing
+up the handle of the big front door, slowly, persistently winning his
+way to promotion and pay, perhaps, by way of romance, marrying his
+employer's daughter, eventually setting up for himself and emblazoning
+the name destined to be great over the entrance of a shop in Catherine
+or Cherry Street, and there to purvey to the residents of the near-by
+fashionable Franklin Square. Then the development of the hundred years.
+The first migration, suggested and urged by an ambitious and far-seeing
+son, to a corner on remote Grand Street. That was probably the hardest
+and most radical step in all the history of the house, and there must
+have been strange doubts and misgivings in the soul of the founder, now
+grown grey, as he said good-bye to the familiar dwellings of Quality Row
+in Cherry Street and prepared to venture forth on unknown seas. Be sure
+that he took with him, as a sacred treasure, his first day-book, with
+its quaint entries of expenses and receipts. Very likely he did not long
+survive the change, and was never quite happy in it.
+
+Probably, if you happen to be a patron of the Brown-Smith establishment,
+and scrupulously leave its communications unopened in the letterbox at
+the club, you received, three or four years ago, a little book,
+commemorating the centenary of the house. They differ from one another
+merely in form and detail--these souvenir booklets. In substance and
+flavour they are all pretty much the same. There are the old prints
+reproduced from Valentine's Manual, the allusions to the horse-propelled
+ferry-boats to Brooklyn, to the advertisement that appeared in a City
+Directory of one of the years of the fifties, to the attack upon the
+establishment during the stirring times of the Draft Riots of the Civil
+War, to the frequent extensions of business and the migrations that
+carried the name from Grand Street over to Broadway and Prince Street,
+thence up the great street to a point near Twelfth, then to Union
+Square, to Madison Square, and finally, to the stately and spacious
+edifice of the present, far up the Avenue. And who will venture to
+predict how many years will pass before that structure, today regarded
+as the last cry in the matter of architecture and convenience, will be
+outgrown and inadequate, and its situation hopelessly far to the south?
+
+It was about 1901 that the movement began that was to transform Fifth
+Avenue from a residential thoroughfare into a shopping street beside
+which the vaunted glories of London's Bond Street and Paris's Rue de la
+Paix seem dim. In the Knickerbocker days the important shops of the town
+lined lower Broadway and the adjacent streets. Then it was to Grand
+Street that the ladies journeyed to barter and bargain for the latest
+fashions from the Paris whose styles were dominated by the Empress
+Eugenie. When Grand Street had been outgrown the shops moved northward
+to Fourteenth Street and Union Square. There are tens of thousands of
+New Yorkers whose childhood dates back to the early eighties who recall
+as one of the delights of the Yuletide season the visit to the revolving
+show in the window of old Macy's at the corner of Fourteenth Street and
+Sixth Avenue. For a decade or so Sixth Avenue was the shop paradise.
+Above Macy's were O'Neill's, and Simpson, Crawford and Simpson's, and
+Altman's, and Ehrich's, besides the countless emporiums of lesser
+magnitude. Macy's moved north to Greeley Square, and Gimbel's came to
+take its place on an adjoining corner, but the movement in bulk turned
+eastward at Twenty-third Street, lining the south side of that
+thoroughfare as far as Fifth Avenue. Some of the pioneers had ventured
+farther to the north, but Twenty-third Street was the centre as the
+nineteenth century came to a close.
+
+[Illustration: COMMERCE, WITH GIANT STRIDE, IS MARCHING UP THE STATELY
+AVENUE. THE STORY OF A BUSINESS HOUSE THAT BEGAN IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF
+CHERRY HILL, MIGRATED TO GRAND STREET, THENCE TO BROADWAY AND UNION
+SQUARE, AND AGAIN TO THE SLOPE OF MURRAY HILL, IS, IN EPITOME, THE STORY
+OF THE CITY ITSELF]
+
+A writer in the "Century Magazine," describing "Shopping in New York" in
+1901, said that even then New York was known as a City of Shops just as
+Brooklyn was known as a City of Churches, and went on: "The district
+begins at Eighth Street, where the wholesale establishments end, and
+follows Broadway as far as Thirty-fourth Street. At Fourteenth Street
+and again at Twenty-third Street it diverges to the west until it
+strikes Sixth Avenue, including that part of Sixth Avenue only which
+lies between the two thoroughfares. From Broadway at Twenty-third
+Street, it makes another departure, running up Fifth Avenue and ending
+at Forty-seventh Street." When the department stores lined the south
+side of Twenty-third Street a number of the great book-shops were on the
+north side, near the old Fifth Avenue Hotel. Among such was the
+long-established Putnam, and adjoining that shop was the shop of the
+Duttons. Of the publishing houses that carried in their traditions back
+to Knickerbocker days Harper's was in the home of its beginnings and to
+which it still clings to the present time, the rambling structure hard
+by Franklin Square, while on Fifth Avenue, below Twenty-third, were the
+houses of D. Appleton and Company, Charles Scribner's Sons, and Dodd,
+Mead and Company, the last-named being the pioneer in the movement
+northward when it relinquished its corner at the Avenue and Twenty-first
+Street to try the slope of Murray Hill at Thirty-fifth Street on land
+that is now occupied by the Bazaar of Best and Company. The
+international house of Brentano, before it moved into its present
+headquarters in the Brunswick Building at Twenty-seventh Street, was in
+Union Square. Today Brentano's is the largest shop of its kind in the
+city, while Scribner's, on the east side of the Avenue at Forty-eighth
+Street, has been called "the most beautiful bookstore in the world."
+
+In the new shopping district beginning at Thirty-fourth Street and
+running along the Avenue almost to the Plaza, like the Waldorf-Astoria
+Hotel, so the saying goes, exclusiveness for the masses, Altaian was the
+pioneer. In view of what was then considered the prohibitively high
+price of real estate the projected invasion of the Avenue by the
+department stores was thought extremely hazardous. In 1901 the street
+still suggested the time when it had been lined by the dull, monotonous
+high stoops. Those old fronts had been knocked away, business had
+invaded many of the lower stories, but there still remained something of
+the former flavour. But property holders were awake to their
+opportunities. Inside lots twenty-five by one hundred feet on the Avenue
+were held at one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, and corner
+lots correspondingly higher. Within two years these prices had doubled
+and trebled. Altman's, covering an entire block, eight stories in
+height, with an addition that rises twelve stories, is a stately
+guardian of the corner at which the Avenue becomes the Lane of
+magnificent commerce. The building, of French stone, was designed by
+Trowbridge and Livingston. Directly across the street is an entrance to
+McCreery's, although that establishment faces on Thirty-fourth Street.
+Above McCreery's, opposite the corner where the New York Club once had
+its home, and on property part of which was formerly the house of the
+Engineers Club, is Best's, once Lilliputian in more than one sense, but
+no more so. Thereafter every block has its imposing monument to
+commerce. Silverware is represented by Gorham's at Thirty-sixth Street.
+Furs in magnificent display fill the windows of Gunther's Sons between
+Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh. At the southeast corner of
+Thirty-seventh Street is Tiffany's. Information as to the nature of the
+merchandise in which the establishment deals would be superfluous, and
+the management is evidently of the opinion that the display in the
+windows tells the story to all the world, for the passer-by will look in
+vain for any lettering indicating the ownership. Instead, there is a
+bronze figure of Atlas, bearing a huge clock on his shoulders, adorning
+the facade of the edifice. The clock is the old Tiffany clock. Of
+American make, dating from 1850, it was for many years in front of the
+original Tiffany Building at 550 Broadway, near Prince Street. Then, in
+Union Square, it presided over the fortunes of the house, again to be
+removed to serve as guardian of the destinies of the present structure,
+which is of marble, adapted from the Palazzo Grimani of Venice, of which
+Ruskin once wrote: "There is not an erring line, not a mistaken
+proportion throughout its noble front." On the corresponding corner
+above Tiffany's is Bonwit, Teller and Company, and directly facing the
+latter on the west side of the Avenue is Franklin Simon and Company.
+Conspicuous on the next block are Lord and Taylor's, and Vantine's, the
+former Italian Renaissance, with vestibules finished in Bitticino marble
+and Travertine stone, ceilings of Guastavino tile, and aisles bordered
+with black Egyptian marble. Today this establishment represents the last
+cry in construction and administration. Adjoining it to the north is
+Vantine's, its dimly lighted and incense-scented aisles running between
+counters covered with rare and costly curios from the Orient.
+
+Northward to the Plaza commerce has moved with giant stride. The march
+might be studied and pictured block by block, corner by corner, and page
+after page blackened with detail and description. Any one of a dozen or
+a dozen dozen shops of the Avenue might be made the subject of a fat
+volume. For the present purpose it is enough to mention a few of them by
+name, and in the order of march. At the south-east corner of Fortieth
+Street, on land that was formerly occupied by the residence of Frederick
+W. Vanderbilt, is the department store of Arnold, Constable and Company.
+It is the new home of a house that dates from 1827. To the west of the
+Avenue, on the north side of Forty-second Street, is Stern's. Other
+names that have a commercial significance, that are conspicuous in the
+stretch from the Public Library to the Plaza are W. and J. Sloane, the
+well-known rug house, on the east side of the Avenue, between
+Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh Streets; Davis, Collamore and Company
+(china and glass), Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street; Duveen Brothers
+(antiques), 720 Fifth Avenue; Fleischman and Thorley (florists),
+respectively at 500 and 502 Fifth Avenue; the jewellers and
+silversmiths, Black, Starr, and Frost, 594 Fifth Avenue; Carlton and
+Company, 634 Fifth Avenue; Kirkpatrick and Company, 624 Fifth Avenue;
+and Gattle and Company, 634 Fifth Avenue; and such emporiums designed to
+delight the hearts of extravagant women as J.M. Giddings and Company,
+L.P. Hollander and Company, and Alice Maynard, all on the Avenue in the
+neighbourhood of Forty-fifth Street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+_Beyond Murray Hill_
+
+
+Stretches of the Avenue--The Public Library--Temple Emanuel--The Draft
+Riots--The Coloured Orphan Asylum--The Willow Tree Inn--Remaining
+Residences--Clubs of the Section--As Seen by Arnold Bennett and Henry
+James--Three Churches and a Cathedral--The Elgin Botanical Gardens--Old
+Land Values.
+
+    O beautiful, long, loved Avenue,
+    So faithless to truth and yet so true.
+
+--_Joaquin Miller._
+
+
+On the site of the old Croton Reservoir the cornerstone of the Public
+Library was laid November 10, 1902, and the building opened to the
+public May 23, 1911. To it were carried the treasures of the Astor
+Library on Lafayette Place, and the Lenox Library at Fifth Avenue and
+Seventieth Street. Designed by Carrere and Hastings, the Library was
+built by the city at a cost of about nine million dollars. It is three
+hundred and ninety feet long and two hundred and seventy feet deep, the
+material is largely Vermont marble, and the style that of the modern
+renaissance. The lions that guard the main entrance from the Fifth
+Avenue side are the work of E.C. Potter. The pediments at the ends of
+the front, the one at the north representing History and the one at the
+south Art, are by George Grey Barnard. The fountains are by Frederick
+MacMonnies. Above the main entrance are six figures by Paul Bartlett, in
+order from south to north, Philosophy, Romance, Religion, Poetry, Drama,
+and History. Augustus St. Gaudens, who was to have directed the choice
+of the sculptors and supervised the work died before the Library was
+completed.
+
+Although consideration of the Public Library must necessarily be brief,
+a word should be said of the collection of paintings. The paintings
+comprise the gifts of three donors: James Lenox, whose collection of
+about fifty paintings was presented in 1877; the Robert Stuart
+Collection of about two hundred and fifty paintings, bequeathed by Mrs.
+Stuart in 1892; and some of John Jacob Astor's pictures, presented by
+William Waldorf Astor in 1896. Paintings of importance are, in the main
+room, Munkacsy's Blind Milton Dictating "Paradise Lost" to his
+Daughters, Sir Henry Raeburn's Portrait of Lady Belhaven, Copley's
+Portrait of Lady Frances Wentworth, Turner's Scene on the French Coast,
+Sir Joshua Reynolds's Mrs. Billington as Saint Cecilia, Gilbert Stuart's
+Washington, Horace Vernet's Siege of Saragossa, Raeburn's Portrait of
+Van Brugh Livingston; in the Stuart Room, Boughton's Pilgrims Going to
+Church, Schreyer's The Attack, Inness's Hackensack Meadows, Sunset,
+Troyon's Cow and Sheep, Detaille's Chasseur of the French Imperial
+Guard, Bougereau's The Secret, and Weir's View of the Highlands from
+West Point.
+
+[Illustration: "ON THE SITE OF THE OLD CROTON RESERVOIR THE CORNER-STONE
+OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY WAS LAID NOVEMBER 10, 1902, AND THE BUILDING
+OPENED TO THE PUBLIC MAY 23, 1911. TO IT WERE CARRIED THE TREASURES OF
+THE ASTOR LIBRARY AND THE LENOX LIBRARY"]
+
+About 1825 the land on the east side of Fifth Avenue from Forty-second
+to Forty-fourth Streets belonged to Isaac Burr, whose estate extended
+along the old Middle Road. The present Seymour Building at the
+north-east corner of Forty-second Street is on the site formerly
+occupied by the home of Levi P. Morton, and before that by the Hamilton
+Hotel. Near the adjoining corner to the north is No. 511, the late
+residence of Mr. Richard T. Wilson, Jr. That number was once the home of
+"Boss" Tweed. Arrested for robbing the city, Tweed asked permission to
+return to his house for clothes. While policemen were guarding the Fifth
+Avenue entrance he escaped through a rear alley, made his way to his
+yacht in the East River, and sailed to Spain. Today unsightly
+advertising signs, thorns in the flesh of the Fifth Avenue Association,
+disfigure the north-west corner of Forty-second Street. Behind the signs
+there is an office building. Until a few years ago the Bristol Hotel
+stood here, and back in the days before the Civil War there was a small
+tavern on the site, while on the adjoining lot was the garden of
+William H. Webb, the ship-builder. Webb's house was at 504 Fifth Avenue,
+and 506 was once the home of Russell Sage.
+
+The brown synagogue, Temple Emanuel, at the north-east corner of
+Forty-third Street, dates from 1868. The congregation was organized in
+1845, first holding services in the Grand Street Court Room, thence
+moving in 1850 to a remodelled Unitarian Church in Chrystie Street, and
+again, in 1856, to a Baptist Church in Twelfth Street. The present
+structure, considered one of the finest examples of Saracenic
+architecture in the country, was designed by Leopold Eidlitz, and
+completed at a cost of six hundred thousand dollars. The materials are
+brown and yellow sandstone, with black and red tiles alternating on the
+roof. Within, near the entrance, are memorial tablets to Dr. Leo
+Merzbacher, first Rabbi, 1845-56, and to his successors, Dr. Samuel
+Adler (father of Felix Adler), 1857-74, and Dr. Gustav Gottheil,
+1873-1903. The present Rabbi is the Rev. Joseph Silverman.
+
+Back from the Avenue, on the west side, between Forty-third and
+Forty-fourth Streets, there once stood the Coloured Orphan Asylum. It
+was a square four-story building, occupying almost the entire block, and
+there was a garden in front extending to the road. The Asylum, which was
+under the management of the Association for the Benefit of Coloured
+Orphans, organized in 1836 by a number of prominent New York women,
+received from the city in 1842 a grant of twenty-two lots and erected
+the building in which the children were housed and taught trades. In the
+summer of 1863 there were between two hundred and two hundred and fifty
+children in the institution. Then Congress passed the Conscription Law.
+In the evening papers of Saturday, July 11th, the names of those drafted
+from New York were announced. Excitement seethed that night and all day
+Sunday. Monday the storm broke. The draft offices were surrounded by a
+mob, and as the first name was called a stone crashed through a window.
+That was the signal. The offices were rushed and the building soon in
+flames. The police were routed, and a squad of soldiers sent to their
+aid disarmed and badly beaten. Then the mob ranged, pillaging the house
+of William Turner on Lexington Avenue, firing the Bull's Head Hotel at
+Forty-fourth Street, and the Croton Cottage opposite the Reservoir,
+plundering the Provost Marshal's office at 1148 Broadway, and destroying
+an arms factory at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-first Street. Then some one
+in the mob cried out that the war was being fought on account of the
+negroes and the rioters started in the direction of the Asylum. When
+they reached the spot they found an empty building, for the alarm had
+been given and the children taken to the Police Station and later
+conducted under guard to the Almshouse on Blackwell's Island. But the
+structure they destroyed, and when they came upon a coloured man in the
+neighbourhood they hanged him to the nearest tree or lamp-post.
+
+During the riot the draft-rioters made their headquarters at the Willow
+Tree Inn, which stood near the south-east corner of Fifth Avenue and
+Forty-fourth Street, and which at one time was run by Tom Hyer, of
+prize-ring fame. A photograph shows it as it was in 1880, with the tree
+from which it took its name in front, and the Henry W. Tyson Fifth
+Avenue Market adjoining it. "Fifth Avenue" quotes from Mr. John T.
+Mills, Jr., whose father owned the cottage: "My mother planted the old
+willow tree," said Mr. Mills, "and I remember distinctly the Orphan
+Asylum fire. The only reason our home was not destroyed was that father
+ran the Bull's Head stages which carried people downtown for three
+cents, and the ruffians did not care to destroy the means of
+transportation." There were many vacant lots in this section of Fifth
+Avenue at the time of the Civil War, and a small shanty below the Willow
+Cottage was the only building that stood between Madison Avenue and
+Fifth Avenue. On the north-west corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth
+Street, then considered far north, stood a three-story brick building.
+The stockyards were between Fifth Avenue and Fourth Avenue from
+Forty-fourth to Forty-sixth Street, and Madison Avenue was not then cut
+through. The stockyards were divided into pens of fifty by one hundred
+feet, into which the cattle were driven from runs between the yards. On
+the east side of Fifth Avenue, just above Forty-second Street, stood
+four high brown-stone-front houses, the first to be built in this
+neighbourhood. In the rear of these were stables that had entrances on
+Fifth Avenue. "Fifth Avenue" points to the Willow Tree Inn as
+illustrating the appreciation of Fifth Avenue real estate. "In 1853 this
+corner was the extreme south-west angle of the Fair and Lockwood farm,
+and was sold for eight thousand five hundred dollars. Here in 1905 a
+twelve-story office building was erected, replacing Tyson's meat market
+and the old Willow Tree Inn. The corner was then held at two million
+dollars. The property was bought in 1909 for one million nine hundred
+thousand dollars by the American Real Estate Company."
+
+At No. 7 West Forty-third Street is the home of the Century Association,
+at the corresponding number in Forty-fourth Street that of the St.
+Nicholas Club, formed of descendants of residents, prior to 1785, of
+either the City or State of New York, and facing diagonally at
+Forty-fourth Street, are the establishments of Delmonico and Sherry. The
+site of the former restaurant was occupied from 1846 to 1865 by the
+Washington Hotel, otherwise known as "Allerton's," a low white frame
+building surrounded by a plot of grass. The rest of the block was a
+drove yard. Thomas Darling bought the entire block in 1836 for
+eighty-eight thousand dollars. David Allerton, to whom he leased part of
+it, ran the Washington Hotel during the Civil War. When the cattle-yards
+were removed to Fortieth Street and Eleventh Avenue the tavern's living
+was gone. John H. Sherwood, a prominent builder who contributed much
+towards developing upper Fifth Avenue as a residential section, bought
+the site and erected the Sherwood House. It was in the basement of the
+hotel that the Fifth Avenue Bank first opened for business. An
+interesting record of early rental values is found in the original
+minute book of the Bank. The Bank's offices in the basement of the
+Sherwood House were secured "at a rental of two thousand six hundred
+dollars per year, said rental to include the gas used and the heating of
+the rooms." There have been but four transfers of the corner upon which
+the Bank now stands at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street since Peter
+Minuit, in 1626, bought the island from the Indians for a handful of
+trinkets.
+
+[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE PUBLIC LIBRARY. THE LIBRARY, 590 FEET
+LONG AND 270 FEET DEEP, WAS BUILT BY THE CITY AT A COST OF ABOUT NINE
+MILLION DOLLARS. THE MATERIAL IS LARGELY VERMONT MARBLE, AND THE STYLE
+THAT OF THE MODERN RENAISSANCE]
+
+Despite the invasion of business there are many houses in this stretch
+of the Avenue that recall the tradition and flavour of the older New
+York. Between Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth, Nos. 555 and 559,
+respectively, are the residences of Mrs. James R. Jessup and Mrs. John
+H. Hall. At the north-east corner of Forty-seventh Street is the home of
+Mrs. Finley J. Shepard, formerly Miss Helen Gould. Between Forty-seventh
+and Forty-eighth live Captain W.C. Beach (585), Mrs. James B. Haggin
+(587), Mrs. Robert W. Goelet (591), Mrs. Russell Sage (604), Mrs. Ogden
+Goelet (608), and Mrs. Daniel Butterfield (616). On the next block,
+Charles F. Hoffman (620), and August Hecksher (622); and between
+Fifty-first and Fifty-second, William B. Coster (641), William B.O.
+Field (645), and Robert Goelet (647). Then, on to the Plaza, comes the
+sweep of the houses of the Vanderbilts, and the residence of Lewis
+Stuyvesant Chanler (673), Samuel Untermeyer (675), F. Lewisohn (683), H.
+McK. Twombly (684), William Rockefeller (689), Mrs. M.H. Dodge (691), W.
+Kirkpatrick Brice (693), Mrs. Benjamin B. Brewster (695), Adrian Iselin,
+Jr. (711), Mrs. N.W. Aldrich (721), John Markle (723), Mrs. Lewis T.
+Hoyt (726), H.E. Huntington (735), Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs (739), Joseph
+Guggenheim (741), and William E. Iselin (745).
+
+Of this land the stretch from Forty-fifth Street to Forty-eighth on the
+east side of the Avenue was a part of the fifty-five-acre estate bought
+by Thomas Buchanan between 1803 and 1807 from the city, which was then
+disposing of its common land, for the sum of seven thousand five hundred
+and thirty-seven dollars. One hundred and eight years later "Fifth
+Avenue" appraised its value at twenty million dollars. For his
+country-seat Buchanan purchased a tract of ground along the East River
+front between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-seventh Streets. Buchanan died in
+1815. A daughter, Almy, married Peter Goelet, and another daughter,
+Margaret, married Robert Ratzer Goelet, which accounts for the large
+Goelet holdings in this section.
+
+In this stretch of the Avenue and in the adjacent streets is the heart
+of the new Clubland. The Century in Forty-third and the St. Nicholas in
+Forty-fourth have been mentioned. At No. 10 West Forty-third Street is
+the home of the Columbia University Club. In Forty-fourth Street are the
+City Club (55 W.), the New York Yacht (37 W.), and the Harvard (27 W.).
+Until a few years ago the Yale Club was diagonally across the street
+from the Harvard Club, but now the alumni of "Old Eli" have a superb
+club-house of their own on Vanderbilt Avenue between Forty-fourth and
+Forty-fifth Streets, which they are occupying jointly with the alumni of
+Princeton for the duration of the war. Farther up the Avenue, on the
+northeast corner of Fifty-first Street, is the Union Club, which moved
+there after relinquishing the house it held so long at the corner of
+Twenty-first Street. Then, at the north-west corner of Fifty-fourth
+Street, is the University Club, to the mind of Mr. Arnold Bennett, the
+finest of all the fine buildings that line the Avenue. "The residential
+blocks to the north of Fifty-ninth Street," he wrote in the book that on
+this side of the North Atlantic was known as "Your United States," "fall
+short of their pretensions in beauty and interest. But except for
+the miserly splitting, here and there, in the older edifices, of an
+inadequate ground floor into a mezzanine and a narrow box, there is
+nothing mean in the whole street from the Plaza to Washington Square.
+Much mediocre architecture, of course, but the general effect
+homogeneous and fine, and, above all, grandly generous.... The single
+shops, as well as the general stores and hotels on Fifth Avenue, are
+impressive in the lavish spaciousness of their disposition. Neither
+stores nor shops could have been conceived, or could be kept, by
+merchants without genuine imagination and faith."
+
+Bennett, though not in an unkindly spirit, was looking for aspects, not
+to praise, but to abuse. It was a far different neighbourhood forty-five
+years ago. Henry James, writing in 1873, in "The Impressions of a
+Cousin" (Tales of Three Cities), said: "How can I sketch Fifty-third
+Street? How can I even endure Fifty-third Street? When I turn into it
+from the Fifth Avenue the vista seems too hideous, the narrow,
+impersonal houses with the hard, dry tone of their brown-stone, a
+surface as uninteresting as that of sandpaper, their steep, stiff
+stoops, their lumpish balustrades, porticos, and cornices. I have yet to
+perceive the dignity of Fifty-third Street."
+
+Besides being a stretch of clubs it is a stretch of churches. Shrinking
+back from the sidewalk on the east side of the Avenue between
+Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Streets is the Church of the Heavenly Rest.
+So inconspicuous in appearance is it that once a passer-by commented: "I
+can perceive the Heavenly, but where is the Rest?" Two blocks to the
+north, at the corner of Forty-eighth, is the Collegiate Church of St.
+Nicholas, occupying the block between Fiftieth and Fifty-first is the
+Cathedral, and at Fifty-third is Saint Thomas's. Once the tract from
+Forty-seventh to Fifty-first Street was occupied by the Elgin Botanical
+Gardens. The story of the Gardens, says "Fifth Avenue," "begins in 1793
+in the garden of Professor Hamilton near Edinburgh, where Dr. David
+Hosack, a young American, who was studying with the professor, was much
+mortified by his ignorance of botany, with which subject the other
+guests were familiar. Hosack took up the study of botany so diligently
+that in 1795 he was made professor of botany at Columbia College, and in
+1797 held the chair of Materia Medica. He resigned to take a similar
+professorship in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he
+remained until 1826. For over twenty years he was one of the leading
+physicians of New York, bore a conspicuous part in all movements
+connected with art, drama, literature, city or State affairs, and was
+frequently mentioned as being, with Clinton and Hobart, 'one of the
+tripods upon which the city stood.' He was one of the physicians who
+attended Alexander Hamilton after his fatal duel with Burr. While
+professor of botany at Columbia he endeavoured to interest the State in
+establishing a botanical exhibit for students of medicine, but failing
+to accomplish this he acquired from the city, in 1801, the plot
+mentioned above, for the purpose of establishing a botanical garden. In
+1804 the Elgin Botanical Gardens were opened. By 1806 two thousand
+species of plants with one spacious greenhouse and two hot houses,
+having a frontage of one hundred and eighty feet, occupied what today is
+one of the most valuable real estate sites in New York, the tract being
+now valued without buildings at over thirty million dollars. The
+financial burden of maintaining the garden was more than the doctor
+could carry, and he appealed to the Legislature for support. Finally on
+March 12, 1810, a bill was passed authorizing the State, for the purpose
+of promoting medical science, to buy the garden. The doctor sold it for
+seventy-four thousand two hundred and sixty-eight dollars and
+seventy-five cents, which was twenty-eight thousand dollars less than he
+had spent on it. The State finally conveyed the grounds in 1814 to
+Columbia College, and this property, part of which the College still
+holds, has largely contributed to the wealth of the great University."
+
+But to revert to the churches. The Heavenly Rest is noted for its fine
+wood carvings and its stained glass windows. In the tower of the
+Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas hangs a bell, cast in Amsterdam in
+1731, which for years hung in the Middle Dutch Church in Nassau Street.
+While the British held New York the bell was taken down and secreted.
+When the Middle Dutch Church became the Post Office in 1845 the bell was
+removed, first to the Ninth Street Church, then to the Lafayette Place
+Church, and later to its present location. The crocketed spire of the
+Church of St. Nicholas is two hundred and seventy feet high. Within the
+edifice is a tablet to the soldiers and sailors of the Revolution,
+placed by the Daughters of the Revolution, and oil portraits of all the
+ministers of the church from Dominie Du Bois, who, in 1699, preached in
+the old Church in the Fort.
+
+[Illustration: "O BEAUTIFUL, LONG, LOVED AVENUE, SO FAITHLESS TO TRUTH
+AND YET SO TRUE"--JOAQUIN MILLER]
+
+Then St. Patrick's Cathedral. It was conceived, in 1850, by Bishop
+Hughes of the Diocese of New York, the cornerstone was laid in 1858, and
+the Cathedral dedicated in 1879 by Cardinal McClosky. It was designed by
+James Renwick, the architect of Grace Church and St. Bartholomew's. The
+Cathedral is three hundred and thirty-two feet in length and one hundred
+and seventy-four feet in breadth, the spires rise three hundred and
+thirty feet above the ground, and the seating capacity of the edifice is
+two thousand five hundred. But its full capacity is eighteen thousand,
+and it is eleventh in point of size among the cathedrals of the world.
+Considering St. Patrick's in its artistic aspect Miss Henderson, in "A
+Loiterer in New York," has said: "Renwick considered it his chief work;
+and the cathedral holds high rank as an example of the decorated, or
+geometric, style of Gothic architecture that prevailed in Europe in the
+thirteenth century, and of which the cathedrals of Rheims, Cologne,
+and Amiens are typical.... The modern French and Roman windows, which,
+to the eye of the later criticism, impair the beauty of the simple
+interior, were considered something most desirable in their day, and
+their completion was hurried in order that they might be shown at the
+Centennial Exhibition, of 1876, where they were a feature much admired.
+One of them--the window erected to St. Patrick--has at least an
+antiquarian interest. It was given by the architect, and includes, in
+the lower section, a picture of Renwick presenting the plans of the
+Cathedral to Cardinal McClosky. The rose window is said to be a
+fac-simile of the rose window at Rheims, recently destroyed by German
+bombs; a _provenance_ that may be the more securely claimed since the
+original has been immolated. As a matter of fact, it too bears the
+stigma of the Centennial period, of which it is a characteristic
+example. The only windows of aesthetic interest in the church are the
+recent lights in the ambulatory, made by different firms in competition
+for the windows of the Lady Chapel, which is to be treated in the same
+rich manner."
+
+Massive and splendidly Gothic is St. Thomas's. The church dates from
+1823. In 1867 the present site was secured, and the brown-stone edifice
+of the early seventies, designed by Richard Upjohn, was for nearly two
+generations the ultra-fashionable Episcopal church of the city. In 1905
+it was destroyed by fire, and with it, in the flames, perished its
+artistic contents, among them the decorations made by John La Farge and
+Augustus Saint Gaudens. For six months the congregation was without a
+home. Then a wooden structure was erected and the new church was built
+without interfering with the services during the following years.
+Designed by Ralph Adams Cram, the present St. Thomas's is of white
+limestone from Kentucky. The left entrance, which is surmounted with a
+garland of Gothic foliage composed of orange blossoms, is the Bride's
+Door. Carved on each side of the niche above the keystone is a
+"true-lover's-knot." A cynical observer (Rider's "New York City")
+comments: "Few visitors note the sly touch of irony which, by a few
+strokes of the chisel, has converted the lover's knot on the northerly
+side into an unmistakable dollar sign."
+
+On the west side of the Avenue, running from Fifty-first to
+Fifty-second, are the Vanderbilt twin residences, the wonder of the town
+of a quarter of a century ago. They were built, in 1882, by the late
+William H. Vanderbilt, the southerly for his own use, and the northerly
+one for his daughter, Mrs. William D. Sloane. In 1868 the land on which
+the brown-stone mansions stand was occupied by one Isaiah Keyser, whose
+small three-story frame house was in the middle of a vegetable garden.
+That garden supplied the residents along lower Fifth Avenue, and its
+owner also dealt in ice and cattle. In the house which Mr. Vanderbilt
+erected for himself Henry C. Frick lived for a time. The Vanderbilt
+family spent millions of dollars in purchasing property to protect
+themselves against business encroachments.
+
+In former days the neighbourhood was given over largely to philanthropic
+and religious institutions. The New York Institution for the Instruction
+of the Deaf and Dumb stood between Forty-eighth and Fiftieth Streets and
+Fourth and Fifth Avenues. That was from 1829 to 1853. The building was
+one hundred and ten feet long, sixty feet wide, four stories high, with
+a beautiful colonnade fifty feet long in front. The grounds are
+described as "beautifully laid out in lawns and gardens, planted with
+trees and shrubbery." When the Asylum sold the property in 1853 it moved
+to Washington Heights. For many years the National Democratic Club and
+the Buckingham Hotel have stood on the land. The site of St. Patrick's,
+originally part of the Common Lands of the City, was sold in 1799 for
+four hundred and five pounds and an annual quit rent of "four bushels of
+good merchantable wheat, or the value thereof in gold or silver coin."
+Then it became the property of the Jesuit Fathers, and in 1814 the
+Trappist Monks conducted an orphan asylum there. Eventually it passed
+into the hands of the trustees of St. Peter's Church on Barclay Street,
+and St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mulberry Street, who, in 1842, conveyed
+about one hundred feet square on the north-east corner of Fifth Avenue
+and Fiftieth Street to the Church of St. John the Evangelist. The ground
+now occupied by the Union Club was once part of the site of the Roman
+Catholic Orphan Asylum.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+_Approaching the Plaza_
+
+
+Stretches of the Avenue--Approaching the Plaza--The Great Hotels--Old
+St. Luke's Hospital--"Marble Row"--Some Reminiscences of Mr. John D.
+Crimmins--Men and Manners of Sixty Years Ago--Early Transportation--The
+Saint Gaudens Sherman Group--The Cryptic Henry James--The Fountain of
+Abundance.
+
+    One August day I sat beside
+    A cafe window open wide,
+    To let the shower-freshened air
+    Blow in across the Plaza, where,
+    In golden pomp against the dark
+    Green, leafy background of the Park,
+    St. Gaudens's hero, gaunt and grim,
+    Rides on with Victory leading him.
+
+    --_Bliss Carman, On the Plaza._
+
+
+Approaching the Plaza, besides the churches, clubs, and the various
+houses associated with the name of Vanderbilt, there is conspicuous the
+cluster of great hotels. To sum up the nature of these hostelries
+briefly, imagine an Englishman. "We now crossed their Thames over what
+would have been Westminster Bridge, I fancy, and were presently bowling
+through a sort of Battersea part of the city," was the way in which the
+British butler in Mr. Harry Leon Wilson's "Ruggles of Red Gap" described
+part of a hazy, riotous ride about Paris. Later, the same worthy, come
+to our own New York, indicated the hotel of sojourn by the information
+that it overlooked "what I dare say in their simplicity they call their
+Hyde Park." Beneath the caricature there was a sound understanding of
+the workings of the British mind. So if an Englishman contemplating a
+visit seeks advice in the matter of hotels there is the obvious short
+cut. Certain of the less pretentious places in the side streets and
+overlooking the minor parks may be described as "the sort of thing you
+find about Russell Square." The Waldorf-Astoria, the Knickerbocker, the
+McAlpin, or the Astor as "like the Cecil, Savoy, or the Northumberland
+Avenue Hotels." The vast, expensive edifices of public welcome in the
+neighbourhood of the Plaza as "something rather on the order of
+Claridge's and the Carlton."
+
+These hotels are the St. Regis and the Gotham on opposite corners of the
+Avenue at Fifty-fifth Street, the Savoy and the Netherland on the east
+side of the Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street, and the huge new Plaza Hotel
+facing them from across the square. When the St. Regis was first opened
+popular fancy ascribed to it a scale of prices crippling to the average
+purse. The idea was the subject of derisive vaudeville ditties. When a
+"Seeing New York" car approached the Fifty-fifth Street corner the
+guide invariably took up his megaphone and called out, "Ladies and
+gentlemen! We are passing on the right the far-famed St. Regis Hotel! If
+you order beefsteak it will cost you five dollars. If you call for
+chicken they will look you up in Bradstreet before serving the order!"
+
+St. Luke's Hospital, now crowning Morningside Heights, opposite the
+Cathedral of St. John the Divine, was formerly on the land now occupied
+by the Gotham and the adjoining University Club. A photograph in the
+Collection of the Fifth Avenue Bank shows the old Hospital as it was in
+1867. The point from which the picture was taken was in the middle of
+Fifty-fourth Street, east of the Avenue. At the north-east corner an
+iron rail fence separates the hospital grounds from the sidewalk, but
+the other three corners are vacant lots. To the west, on the south side
+of Fifty-fourth Street, a solitary house looms up. It is No. 4, now the
+residence of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Near the Hospital, until 1861, was
+the Public Pound. The Hospital was opened May 13, 1858, with three
+"Sister Nurses" and nine patients. Its cost was two hundred and
+twenty-five thousand dollars. It was a red brick building, facing south,
+and consisted of a central edifice with towers. The cornerstone of the
+present St. Luke's was laid May 6, 1893.
+
+"Marble Row" was the name given for years to the block on the east side
+of the Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets. John
+Mason, at one time president of the Chemical National Bank, bought the
+land from the city in 1825 for fifteen hundred dollars. Mason was
+another of the early New Yorkers who foresaw the future possibilities of
+the real estate of the island. Buying mostly from the Common Lands of
+the City, he purchased sixteen blocks from Park to Fifth Avenue, and
+from Fifty-fourth to Sixty-third Street. When he died, in 1839, he left
+a will cutting off with small annuities both his son James Mason, who
+had married Emma Wheatley, a member of the famous Stock Company of the
+old Park Theatre, the favourite "Desdemona," "Julia," "Mrs. Heller" of
+her day; and his daughter Helen, who had also married against his
+wishes. The will was contested, and eventually the block between
+Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets passed into the hands of Mrs.
+Mary Mason Jones. In 1871 she erected on the land houses of white marble
+in a style that was a radical departure from the accepted brown-stone
+type. At once they became known as the "Marble Row." Mrs. Mary Mason
+Jones, in her day a social leader, lived in the house at the
+Fifty-seventh Street corner. Later the dwelling was occupied by Mrs.
+Paran Stevens.
+
+To "Fifth Avenue" is owed the following description of the
+neighbourhood of the present Plaza in the middle of the last century. It
+is from the reminiscences of John D. Crimmins, who has been already
+quoted in the course of this book. Mr. Crimmins's father was a
+contractor and at one time in the employ of Thomas Addis Emmet, whose
+country-seat was on the Boston Post Road near Fifty-ninth Street.
+
+[Illustration: SOUTH OF WHERE "ST. GAUDENS'S HERO, GAUNT AND GRIM, RIDES
+ON WITH VICTORY LEADING HIM," MAY BE SEEN THE FOUNTAIN OF ABUNDANCE,
+AND, IN THE BACKGROUND, THE NEW PLAZA HOTEL]
+
+Says Mr. Crimmins: "In the immediate vicinity were the country-seats of
+other prominent New Yorkers, such as the Buchanans, who were the
+forebears of the Goelets, the Adriance, Jones, and Beekman families, the
+Schermerhorns, Hulls, Setons, Towles, Willets, Lenoxes, Delafields,
+Primes, Rhinelanders, Lefferts, Hobbs, Rikers, Lawrences, and others. A
+little farther to the north were the country-seats of the Goelets,
+Gracies, and the elder John Jacob Astor. With all these people, who were
+practically the commercial founders of our city, my father had an
+acquaintance. The wealthy merchants of New York at that period
+frequently invested their surplus in outlying property and left its care
+largely in the hands of my father, who opened up estates, as he did the
+Anson Phelps place in the vicinity of Thirtieth Street, which ran north
+and extended from the East River to Third Avenue. He also opened up the
+Cutting and other large estates. When I was a lad, as I was the oldest
+son, my father would take me to the residences of these gentlemen,
+several of whom had their permanent homes on Fifth Avenue or in the
+vicinity. At that period, these wealthy citizens conducted much of their
+business at their homes. James Lenox had his office in the basement of
+his house at Fifth Avenue and Twelfth Street. R.L. Stuart attended to
+much of his business at his residence, Twentieth Street and Fifth
+Avenue, and the same may be said of the Costers, Moses Taylor, and
+others. These men had no hesitation in receiving in their homes after
+business hours the people whom they employed. I remember distinctly
+before gas was generally introduced how very economical in its use those
+who had it were. In the absence of the butler the gentleman of the house
+would often walk to the door with his visitor and then lower the gas.
+The estates of many of these wealthy merchants were rented to market
+gardeners. And it was not an unusual sight to see a merchant drive in
+his carriage to the vegetable garden, select his vegetables, and carry
+them to his table, showing the economy and simple manners of the people
+of that older day as compared with our present extravagance.
+
+"After the Board of Aldermen had acceded to the petition of the
+residents of Fifth Avenue for permission to enclose a part of the
+roadway in a closed yard or area, it was not an uncommon sight to see
+many of the older men standing at their gates, in high stocks, white
+cravats, cutaway coats with brass buttons, greeting their neighbours as
+they passed along the Avenue--a custom which survived to about 1870,
+when the white cravat, too, passed into history. The improvements on
+Fifth Avenue, north of Thirty-fourth Street, began with the erection of
+the Townsend house, which was a feature of the city and shown to
+visitors. The location was the foot of a high hill.
+
+"On the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, where the Cathedral
+now stands, stood the frame church, thirty by seventy feet, in which I
+was baptized in May, 1844. A path and a road led to the Post Road which
+ran east of the church and bordered the Potter's Field. To the north was
+the Orphan Asylum, and farther on was another cattle yard, Waltemeir's,
+a family well known to cattle men. From Fiftieth Street to St. Luke's
+Hospital at Fifty-fourth Street there were a few frame houses, and the
+ground extending to Sixth Avenue was used for market gardens. Old maps
+of New York show the lanes crossing this section at the time, much like
+the country roads we see today thirty or forty miles distant from the
+city. Walls ran along these roads with an occasional house with its
+gable of the old Dutch type. Mr. Keyser, who dealt in ice gathered from
+ponds, occupied the site of the present Vanderbilt houses, Fifty-first
+to Fifty-second Street. The Decker house of Dutch architecture occupied
+the block between Fourth and Fifth Avenues, Fifty-sixth to Fifty-seventh
+Street.
+
+"Peter and Robert Goelet I recall very well. Those who called on Peter
+Goelet would find him in a jumper, bluish in colour, such as we see
+mechanics wear, with pockets in front. He loved to be occupied and
+always had a rule and other articles in his pockets. His brother,
+Robert, was the grandfather of the present Goelets. Peter was the elder
+and a bachelor. They accompanied each other on walks, Peter, the more
+active of the two, in front, and Robert a pace behind. They dealt
+directly with their tenants and those whom they employed in taking care
+of their properties. I can recall them coming on foot to my father to
+have him repair a sidewalk or fence. I doubt if these men in their day,
+except for ordinary living expenses, spent five thousand dollars a year.
+They were simple in their manners and tastes.
+
+"The older generation was noted for industry, thrift, and economy. An
+old merchant, an executor of the Burr estate which owned property
+opposite the new Public Library, once stated that no man who had a
+million dollars invested, could spend his income in a year. Money at
+that time brought seven per cent. The contents of an office did not
+exceed in cost fifty dollars, a pine desk and table, and a few chairs.
+There were no stenographers and typewriters were unknown.
+
+"Transportation was principally by stage. There were car lines on
+Second, Third, Sixth, and Eighth Avenues. The men who kept carriages
+were few and they generally lived in Harlem or Manhattanville.
+Occasionally smart four-in-hands were seen, and I recall Madame Jumel
+driving to town and how we boys used to run to the side of the road to
+see her pass. Many business men would go to the city driving a rockaway
+with a single horse. Few of the streets were paved, and there were but
+two classes of pavements, macadam and cobblestones. Where streets were
+not paved the sidewalks were in bad condition. In some places the high
+banks of earth on either side of the street were washed down by heavy
+rains and deposited on the sidewalks.
+
+"Oil lamps were in general use as street lights, and the light was
+easily blown out by the wind. The lamplighter was usually a tall man, a
+character, and his position was considered an important one. Fifth
+Avenue north of Fifty-ninth Street remained undeveloped for years, and
+it was not until sometime in the seventies that my father and I finished
+grading upper Fifth Avenue. Sixty years ago on both sides were stone
+walls where there were deep depressions. There was no traffic except
+drovers coming down to market with cattle. There were but two main
+thoroughfares, Boston Post Road on the east side, and Bloomingdale Road
+on the west side. From the Boston Post Road long lanes led to the
+residences of gentlemen who had country-seats on the East River, and
+similar lanes led from the old Bloomingdale Road to the country-seats on
+the Hudson River. The sites of the Plaza, the Savoy, and the Netherland
+Hotels were rocky knolls. A brook which came down Fifty-ninth Street
+formed several shallow pools which remained for a number of years after
+the Civil War."
+
+Whether or not Saint Gaudens was right in his contention that the proper
+place for his equestrian statue of General Sherman was on the Riverside
+Drive by Grant's Tomb, without that gilded bronze figure of heroic size
+and the Winged Victory leading before, the Plaza would not be quite the
+Plaza. Obscured as it is in these days by the vast scaffolding, there is
+no true son of Manhattan who passes the corner on his way up the Avenue,
+or enters Central Park, who does not turn to look at the chief ornament
+of the broad square. The statue was made several years after Sherman's
+death, and the sculptor laboured on it for six years, from the time when
+he began the work in Paris, to its final unveiling, on Memorial Day,
+1903. Of the statue and its surroundings as he saw them on the occasion
+of one of his later visits to the city of his birth and boyhood, Henry
+James wrote:
+
+"The best thing in the picture, obviously, is Saint Gaudens's great
+group, splendid in its golden elegance and doing more for the scene (by
+thus giving the beholder a point of such dignity for his orientation)
+than all its other elements together. Strange and seductive for any
+lover of the reasons of things this inordinate value, on the spot, of
+dauntless refinement of the Sherman image; the comparative vulgarity of
+the environment drinking it up, on one side, like an insatiable sponge,
+and yet failing at the same time to impair its virtue. The refinement
+prevails and, as it were, succeeds; holds its own in the medley of
+accidents, where nothing else is refined unless it be the amplitude of
+the 'quiet' note in the front of the Metropolitan Club; amuses itself,
+in short, with being as extravagantly 'intellectual' as it likes. Why,
+therefore, given the surrounding medium, does it so triumphantly impose
+itself, and impose itself not insidiously and gradually, but immediately
+and with force? Why does it not pay the penalty of expressing an idea
+and being founded on one?--such scant impunity seeming usually to be
+enjoyed among us, at this hour, by any artistic intention of the finer
+strain? But I put these questions only to give them up--for what I feel
+beyond anything else is that Mr. Saint Gaudens somehow takes care of
+himself."
+
+Facing the Sherman group, in the centre of the square, with the
+Cornelius Vanderbilt house in the background, is the Fountain of
+Abundance, or the Pulitzer Memorial Fountain, designed by Karl Bitter
+(his last work), executed by Isidore Konti, and erected in 1915 to the
+memory of the late Joseph Pulitzer, for many years proprietor of the New
+York "World." The structure is surmounted by the bronze figure of a
+nymph, bearing a basket laden with the fruits of the earth. The
+Vanderbilt residence which is the background when the Fountain is viewed
+from the north is of red brick with grey facings in the style of a
+French chateau of the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+_Stretches of the Avenue_
+
+
+Stretches of the Avenue--The Days of Squatter Kings--Seneca
+Village--"Millionaire's Row"--The Avenue Gates--The Soul of Central
+Park--Some Palaces of the Stretch--The Obelisk and the Metropolitan
+Museum--Northward Through Harlem.
+
+
+Here and there in the Island, far to the north, may be found an
+unblasted rock on the top of which is perched an unpainted shanty with a
+crude chimney spout from which smoke issues voluminously. A quarter of a
+century ago there were thousands of such shanties along the upper West
+Side. From the lofty iron height of the El. Road one could survey them
+stretching all the way from the Sixties to One Hundred and Sixteenth. On
+the summits the Lords of the Manors smoked their clay pipes in bland
+disregard of the world and its rent-collectors, and the family goats
+gambolled; in the valleys the truck gardens waxed green and smiled
+luxuriously as if conscious of the enormous square-foot value of the
+land that they were pre-empting. But King Dynamite came, and the steam
+drill came, and the air clanged with the driving of many rivets, and the
+Mountain Men, and their goats, and their wives, and their unwashed
+offspring, and their Lares and Penates went forth into the
+wilderness--no one knows just where. The days of Squatter Sovereignty
+had passed.
+
+But the Mountain men and women within the memory were the hardy,
+obstinate, unyielding survivors, the last to cling to the strongholds in
+a region that once seemed impregnable. Before Central Park was laid out
+Fifty-ninth Street was the dividing line. Below, rich brown-stone;
+above, along the country road which was then Fifth Avenue, a waste,
+squalid yet in its way picturesque, that extended almost to Mount Morris
+Park. "Here lived," "Fifth Avenue" tells us, "over five thousand as
+poverty-stricken and disreputable people as could be seen anywhere. The
+squatters' settlements in the Park were surrounded by swamps, and
+overgrown with briers, vines, and thickets. The soil that covered the
+rocky surface was unfit for cultivation. Here and there were stone
+quarries and stagnant pools. In this wilderness lived the squatters, in
+little shanties and huts made of boards picked up along the river fronts
+and often pieced out with sheets of tin, obtained by flattening cans.
+Some occupants paid ten dollars and twenty-five dollars rent, but the
+majority paid nothing. Three stone buildings, two brick buildings,
+eighty-five or ninety frame houses, one rope-walk and about two hundred
+shanties, barns, stables, piggeries, and bone-factories, appear in a
+census made just before Central Park was begun. Some of the shanties
+were dug-outs, and most had dirt floors. In this manner lived, in a
+state of loose morality, Americans, Germans, Irish, Negroes, and
+Indians. Some were honest and some were not; many were roughs and
+crooks. Much of their food was refuse, which they procured in the lower
+portion of the city, and carried along Fifth Avenue to their homes in
+small carts drawn by dogs. The mongrel dogs were a remarkable feature of
+squatter life, and it is said that the Park area contained no less than
+one hundred thousand 'curs of low degree,' which, with cows, pigs, cats,
+goats, geese, and chickens, roamed at will, and lived upon the refuse,
+which was everywhere. In the neighbourhood of these squatter
+settlements, of which the largest was Seneca Village, near Seventy-ninth
+Street, the swamps had become cesspools and the air was odoriferous and
+sickening."
+
+Those hovels of yesterday have made way for the beautiful Park and the
+superb mansions that have earned for the eastern stretch of Fifth Avenue
+overlooking the Park the title of "Millionaire's Row." There is one
+impression of the "Row" which one is bound to take away whether the
+point of observation be the top of a passing omnibus or the sidewalk
+adjoining the stone wall guarding the boundaries of the Park. That is of
+a mysterious unreality, due, perhaps to the shades being always lowered
+and the curtains tightly drawn. In considerable excitement an
+immaculately garbed little old gentleman was one day seen to descend
+hurriedly from the Imperiale of the snorting monster by which he had
+designed to travel down to Washington Square. On the sidewalk,
+flourishing his cane, he pointed in the direction of a stately palace of
+white marble. "It is incredible," he kept repeating, "but I certainly
+saw some one come out of that house. I am the original New Yorker, and I
+know the thing has never happened before."
+
+As the great lane beyond Fifty-ninth Street is known as "Millionaire's
+Row," it could have no more appropriate guarding outpost than the
+Metropolitan Club, more generally called the "Millionaire's Club." The
+organization was founded in 1891 by members of the Union Club, and the
+present white marble club-house, at the north-east corner of Sixtieth
+Street, on land formerly owned by the Duchess of Marlborough, was
+erected in 1903. The gate to the Park diagonally across from the club,
+at Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, is the Scholars' Gate. The other
+gates along the stretch of the Avenue are the Students' Gate, at
+Sixty-fourth Street, the Children's Gate, at Seventy-second Street, the
+Miners' Gate, at Seventy-ninth Street, the Engineers' Gate, at Ninetieth
+Street, the Woodman's Gate, at Ninety-sixth Street, and the Girls' Gate,
+at One Hundred and Second Street.
+
+"Park life with us," writes Miss Henderson, "has perhaps become
+obsolete; our national breathlessness cannot brook this paradox of
+pastoral musings within sight and sound and smell of the busy lure of
+money making. Within its gates we pass into a new element; and this
+element is antipathetic to the one-sided development imposed by city
+life. Instead of resting us, it presents a problem, and the last thing
+for which we now have time is abstract thought. And so we prefer the
+dazzling, twinkling, clashing, clamoring, death-dealing, sinking,
+eruptive, insistent Broadway, where every blink of the eye catches a new
+impression, where the brain becomes a passive, palpitating receptacle
+for ideas which are shot into it through all the senses; and where,
+between 'stepping lively' and 'watching your step,' a feat of
+contradictoriness only equalled in its exaction by the absorbing
+exercise of slapping with one hand and rubbing with the other,
+independent thought becomes an extinct function."
+
+Perhaps. These may be the doubts of the grown-ups and the sophisticated.
+Meditate thus cantering along the bridle-path or lolling back in the
+tonneau of the motor-car that has come to replace the stately, absurd
+horse-drawn equipage of yesterday. Survey with _ennui_. Brood over
+unpatriotic comparisons. Paraphrase Laurence Sterne to the extent of
+mumbling how "they order this matter much better in Hyde Park or in the
+Bois de Boulogne." Quote Mr. Henry James about "the blistered _sentiers_
+of asphalt, the rock-bound caverns, the huge iron bridges spanning
+little muddy lakes, the whole, crowded, cockneyfied place." In that way
+jaundiced happiness lies. But the soul of Central Park is not for you.
+Once upon a time there was a Central Park. The approaches to it were
+along sedate avenues or by restful side streets. When the Park was
+reached there were donkeys to ride, and donkey-boys, highly amusing in
+their cynicism and worldly knowledge, in attendance. The "rock-work"
+caverns were in fancy of an amazing vastness, and the abode of goblins,
+elves, gnomes, enchanted knights, persecuted princesses--all the
+creatures of delightful Fairyland. A certain dark, winding, apparently
+endless tunnel was the Valley of the Shadow of Death of John Bunyan's
+allegory. On the sward before the entrance Christian grappled with
+Apollyon: "_And Apollyon, espying his opportunity, began to gather up
+close to Christian, and wrestling with him, gave him a dreadful fall;
+and with that Christian's sword flew out of his hand. Then said
+Apollyon, I am sure of thee now. And with that he had almost pressed him
+to death; so that Christian began to despair of life. But, as God would
+have it, while Apollyon was fetching of his last blow, thereby to make
+an end of this good man, Christian nimbly reached out his hand for his
+sword, and caught it, saying, Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy; when
+I fall, I shall arise; and with that gave him a deadly thrust, which
+made him give back, as one that had received his mortal wound. Christian
+perceiving that, made at him again, saying, Nay, in all these things we
+are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. And with that
+Apollyon spread forth his dragon wings, and sped him away, that
+Christian saw him no more_."
+
+"And Christian saw him no more!" With the thrill that those words bring
+the years fall away and again a boy's eyes are wide in wonder at the
+mystery of the world. Then the lake. It was not muddy to the gaze of
+youth. Instead, it was of a crystal clearness that sparkled in the
+summer sunshine, and the ride in the swan-boats was a joyous adventure,
+just as it was a little later to the little girls who owed it to the
+knightly bounty of Mr. Cortlandt Van Bibber. And what was better than
+the hours in the Menagerie, when the antics of the monkeys provoked
+side-splitting laughter, and to stand steady close before the cage when
+the lions stretched and roared was to feel the thrill of a young
+Tartarin? "Now, this is something like a hunt!" Times change, and
+conditions change, and aspects change, but it is we who change most of
+all, and Romance is still there, given the eyes of youth with which to
+see it.
+
+[Illustration: THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, ON THE SITE OF WHAT WAS
+ONCE THE DEER PARK, HAD ITS ORIGIN IN A MEETING OF THE ART COMMITTEE OF
+THE UNION LEAGUE CLUB IN NOVEMBER, 1869]
+
+But back to our sheep and to the Avenue. At the south-east corner of
+Sixty-second Street is the Knickerbocker Club, which moved there a few
+years ago from the home it held so long at the Avenue and Thirty-second
+Street, but before it is reached are passed the residences of Mrs. J.A.
+Bostwick (800), Mrs. Fitch Gilbert (801), William Emlen Roosevelt (804),
+and William Lanman Bull (805). On Sixty-second Street, near the
+Knickerbocker, is the house of the late Joseph H. Choate. Continuing
+along the Avenue to Sixty-eighth Street the residences are: Mrs.
+Hamilton Fish (810), Francis L. Loring (811), George G. McMurty (813),
+Robert L. Gerry (816), Clifford V. Brokaw (825), Henry Mortimer Brooks
+(826), William Guggenheim (833), Frank Jay Gould (834), Frederick
+Lewisohn (835), Mrs. Isadore Wormser (836), Mrs. William Watts Sherman
+(838), Vincent Astor (840), Mrs. Henry O. Havemeyer, south-east corner
+of Sixty-sixth (No. 3 East Sixty-sixth is the former home of General
+Grant), Miss Elizabeth Kean (844), George Barney Schley (845), the late
+Colonel Oliver H. Payne (852), George Grant Mason (854), Perry Belmont
+(855), Judge Elbert H. Gary (856), George J. Gould (857), and Thomas F.
+Ryan (858).
+
+At this point begins what prior to 1840 was the farm of Robert Lenox,
+extending on to what is now Seventy-third Street. The uncle of Robert
+Lenox was a British commissary during the Revolution. The farm, which is
+worth at the present day perhaps ten million dollars, was bought in the
+twenties of the last century for forty thousand dollars. Under the
+various sections of his will which bear the dates of 1829, 1832, and
+1839, Lenox, or "Lennox" as it was then spelled, devised his farm, then
+comprising about thirty acres, to his only son, James, with his stock of
+horses, cattle, and farming utensils, during the term of his life and
+after his death, to James's heirs forever. The will reads: "My motive
+for so leaving this property is a firm persuasion that it may, at no
+distant date, be the site of a village, and as it cost me more than its
+present worth, from circumstances known to my family, I will to cherish
+that belief that it may be realized to them. At all events, I want the
+experiment made by keeping the property from being sold." Under a clause
+in the will dated 1832, however, he withdrew the restriction covering
+the sale of the farm, but, nevertheless, urged his son not to sell it,
+as he was still of the firm conviction that some day there would be a
+village near by, and the property would appreciate. It was the son James
+Lenox who erected the Lenox Library, which was a conspicuous mark on the
+upper Avenue until it was merged with the Astor in the formation of the
+present Public Library. The Lenox Library antedated by some years the
+Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was designed by Richard Morris Hunt, who
+died in 1893, and whose Memorial, the work of Daniel Chester French, is
+on the edge of the opposite Park.
+
+The site of the old Library is now occupied by the house of Mr. Henry C.
+Frick, one of the great show residences of the Avenue and the city.
+Beautiful as it unquestionably is, the veriest layman is conscious of
+the fact that, for the full effect, a longer approach is needed. A broad
+garden separates the house, which is eighteenth-century English, from
+the sidewalk. The gallery, the low wing at the upper corner, with
+lunettes in sculpture by Sherry Fry, Phillip Martiny, Charles Keck, and
+Attilio Piccirilli, contains pictures by Titian, Paul Veronese,
+Velasquez, Murillo, Van Dyck, Franz Hals, Rembrant, Daubigny, Corot,
+Diaz, Manet, Millet, Rousseau, Troyon, Constable, Gainsborough,
+Lawrence, Raeburn, Reynolds, Romney, Turner, and Whistler. The chief
+artistic feature of the interior decorations of the house, which, with
+the land upon which it is placed, cost, in round figures, five millions
+of dollars, is the famous series of Fragonard Panels, in the
+drawing-room. Painted originally for the _chere amie_ of Louis the
+Fifteenth, they are known as the Du Barry Panels, despite the fact that
+the fair lady did not find them quite satisfactory and the artist placed
+them in his own home on the shores of the Mediterranean.
+
+But before the Frick residence is reached there are the houses of Harry
+Payne Whitney (871) at the north-east corner of Sixty-eighth Street,
+Mrs. Joseph Stickney (874), Henry J. Topping (875), Frances Burton
+Harrison (876), Mrs. Ogden Mills (878), Mrs. E.H. Harriman (880), and
+Mrs. William E.S. Griswold (883). Just beyond are Mrs. Abercrombie
+Burden (898), James A. Burden (900), John W. Sterling (912), Samuel
+Thorne (914), Nicholas F. Palmer (922), George Henry Warren (924), Mrs.
+Herbert Leslie Terrell (925), John Woodruff Simpson (926), Simeon B.
+Chapin (930), Mortimer L. Schiff (932), Lamon V. Harkness (933), Alfred
+M. Hoyt (934), and Edwin Gould (936). Then, at Seventy-sixth Street, is
+the Temple Beth-El, which was completed in 1891, and which represents
+the first German-Jewish congregation in this country, dating back to
+1826. The dwelling houses that come next belong to Mrs. Samuel W.
+Bridgham (954), and J. Horace Harding (955). Then, at the northeast
+corner of Seventy-seventh Street, is the famous house of Senator W.A.
+Clark, reputed to have been built at a cost of fifteen million dollars.
+Beyond, Charles F. Dietrich (963), Mrs. George H. Butler (964), Jacob H.
+Schiff (965), William V. Lawrence (969), the James B. Duke house with
+its simple lines at the Seventy-eighth Street corner, Payne Whitney
+(972), Isaac D. Fletcher (977), Howard C. Brokaw (984), Irving Brokaw
+(985), William J. Curtis (986), Walter Lewisohn (987), Hugh A. Murray
+(988), Nicholas F. Brady (989), Frank W. Woolworth (990), D. Crawford
+Clark (991), E.D. Faulkner (992), Mrs. Hugo Reisinger (993)--there is
+an apartment house at 998 where the rents are so high that it is
+popularly known as the "Millionaires Apartments"--Mrs. Henry G.
+Timmerman (1007), Angier B. Duke (1009), J. Francis A. Clark (1013),
+Senator George B. Peabody Wetmore (1015), Mrs. W.M. Kingland (1026),
+and George Crawford Clark (1027).
+
+This part of the Avenue faces the Obelisk, Cleopatra's Needle, a present
+to the United States from the Khedive of Egypt, brought to this country
+in 1877, and erected here in 1880; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
+the latter on the site of what was once the Deer Park. The Museum had
+its origin in a meeting of the art committee of the Union League Club in
+November, 1869. Among the founders were William Cullen Bryant, president
+of the Century Association, Daniel Huntington, president of the National
+Academy of Design, Dr. Barnard, president of Columbia, Richard M. Hunt,
+president of the New York chapter of the American Institute of
+Architects, and Dr. Henry W. Bellows. Andrew H. Green, the "Father of
+Greater New York," who was one of those representing the city, was the
+first to suggest placing the Museum in the Park. For a time the
+collection was kept in a house rented for the purpose in West Fourteenth
+Street. The first wing of the present building was opened in 1880.
+
+To continue the list of the private residences of the Avenue. Jonathan
+Thorne (1028), Louis Gordon Hammersley (1030), Countess Annie Leary
+(1032), George C. Smith (1033), Herbert D. Robbins (1034), James B.
+Clews (1039), Lloyd Warren (1041), Mrs. James Hedges (1044), R.F.
+Hopkins (1045), Michael Dricer (1046), George Leary (1053), William H.
+Erhart (1055), James Speyer (1058), Henry Phipps (1063), Abraham Stein
+(1068), Dr. James H. Lancashire (1069), Mrs. Herbert T. Parsons (1071),
+W.W. Fuller (1072), J.H. Hanan (1073), Benjamin Duke (1076), Malcolm D.
+Whitman (1080), McLane Van Ingen (1081), A.M. Huntington (1083).
+
+In the block between Ninetieth and Ninety-first Streets, on land where
+once the squatter gloried, is the home of the Iron Master, perhaps of
+all the residences in the long line of the Avenue the one most observed
+by the stranger within our gates. "So well have the architect and the
+landscape gardener co-operated," is the comment of "Fifth Avenue," "that
+this mansion and its surroundings have already the dignity and
+picturesqueness which age alone can give, although the building is of
+comparatively recent date. It is the only house on all Fifth Avenue
+which looks as if it might have been transplanted from old England." The
+Carnegie house is almost the outpost to the north of "Millionaire's
+Row." Two blocks beyond, after the I. Townsend Burden house, and the
+Warburg house, and the Willard D. Straight house have been passed, we
+are once more in the region of unprepossessing chaos. Between
+Ninety-third Street and the end of the Park there is a riot of hideous
+signboards, and vacant lots, and lots that though occupied, are
+unadorned. The only relief in the unpleasant picture is the Mount Sinai
+Hospital at One Hundredth Street. In name at least the Avenue marches
+on, its progress being suspended for a space where Mount Morris Park
+rises to the summit of the Snag Berg, or Snake Hill, where, in the days
+of the Revolution, a Continental battery for a moment commanded the
+valley of the Harlem, only to be whisked away, when the enemy came, and
+a Hessian battery was installed in its place. But where the stretch of
+magnificence breaks, although it continues to be Fifth Avenue in name,
+it ceases to be Fifth Avenue in spirit.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+_Mine Host on the Avenue_
+
+
+Mine Host on the Avenue--A Gentleman of Brussels--Poulard's--Some Old
+New York Hotels--High Prices of 1836--The American--The
+Metropolitan--Holt's--The Brevoort and the Steamship
+Captains--Delmonico's--Famous Menus--The Glory of the Fifth Avenue--The
+Logerot--A Bohemian Chop-house--The Great Mince Pie Contest--About
+Madison Square--Lost Youth.
+
+
+Is there anything that civilized man recalls more poignantly than the
+menus of yesterday? Of the Brussels of the winter of 1917, the last
+winter that the Americans of the Commission for Relief were allowed to
+remain, I have many vivid memories. One of them is of a crowd gathered
+before a shop-window in the Rue de Namur, a street that winds down from
+the circle of boulevards to the Place Royale. Within, the object of
+hungry curiosity, a fowl, adorned by a placard informing that the price
+is forty-four francs. Conspicuous in the crowd, his face pressed against
+the glass of the _etalage_, a little old gentleman. The bowl of
+municipal soup and the loaf of bread are all that he has to look forward
+to as the day's sustenance. But as he gazes his mouth waters
+quiveringly, and for the moment the grey-green uniforms of the invaders
+that are all about him, and the hated flag that is flying over the
+Palais de Justice are forgotten. Soon he will go home and sit down and
+write a letter to _La Belgique_, in which he will recall the happier
+days, and tell of how one once was able to dine at the Taverne Royale
+for the sum of two francs, fifty, or three francs, fifty, enumerating
+carefully and lovingly the various courses. His letter, and others of
+similar nature and inspiration, were the only genuine letters that the
+occupying military authorities allowed to appear in the Belgian press.
+
+But a world tragedy was not needed to invest with romance the menus of
+yesterday. A memory of youth is the rock of Mont St. Michel on the
+French coast. The name suggests a towering, isolated height in the
+ocean, close to the mouth of the river dividing Normandy from Brittany,
+surrounded at high tide by lashing waves, and at low tide by a muddy
+morass, save where a causeway joins it to the mainland. The monks of St.
+Michel sent ships to help convey the armies of William to Hastings, and
+when the yoke of the Normans on England was young two sons of the
+Conqueror waged battle here, and Henry besieged Robert or Robert
+besieged Henry. When Philip Augustus burned it and it was the only
+Norman fortress that withstood Henry the Fifth, and many years later, in
+Maupassant's "Notre Coeur," a certain Madame de Burne entered a room of
+one of its hotels and there blew out a candle. But above all I recall,
+and ninety-five out of every hundred others who have visited the rock
+recall, the breakfast that was once renowned throughout Europe--a
+breakfast at two francs, fifty, brought to perfection for the reason
+that it was always the same, the shrimps, the cutlets, the chicken, and
+the amazing omelette, which the portly Madame Poulard prepared in full
+view, tossing it like a flapjack, to a chorus of delighted "Ahs!"
+
+There is no need to go far afield. There is the older New York, with its
+memories of Mine Host of oyster-bar and chop-house, of culinary joys and
+the ghosts of viands. Yesterday the personality of the landlord was more
+in evidence and that of his staff happily less so. Mine Host was an
+individual and not yet a corporation. He oozed welcome. He walked from
+table to table, bland, smiling, eager for commendation, keen-eared for
+criticism. Although paid for, it was none the less his hospitality that
+was being dispensed, and he was acutely sensitive to appreciation. His
+retainers were fewer in number and were retainers only. Then, from the
+Spanish Main the last of the pirates disappeared, bequeathing to their
+descendants the tables and hat-stands of the hostelries of Fifth Avenue
+and the Great White Way. There they are today, insolent-eyed and
+"walk-the-plank" mannered to all but the few whom they feel they can
+hold to high ransom. To those of us who do not belong to that few of the
+race of Dives there is satisfaction in turning over the old
+bills-of-fare, and musing on the repasts that were once within the reach
+of the purses of the humble.
+
+When Horace Greeley arrived in New York in 1831, he had ten dollars in
+his pocket and knew no one in the city. He entered a tavern. The
+bartender looked him over superciliously. "We are too high for you. We
+charge six a week." Horace agreed with him, and found shelter in a
+boarding-house where he paid two dollars and a half a week.
+Occasionally, when the table there palled, he and the other boarders
+sought a change by repairing to a Sixpenny Dining Saloon in Beekman
+Street where a splendid feast was to be had for a shilling (twelve and a
+half cents).
+
+Two years after Horace Greeley arrived in New York Holt's Hotel opened
+its doors. It was the wonder of the town, the largest and most
+magnificent inn erected up to that time. Even by rich people its prices
+were thought exorbitant. They were one dollar and a half a day. That, of
+course, meant the American plan. Even the panic years, from 1835 to
+1837, when prices soared in a manner that brought consternation to the
+breasts of careful housekeepers, do not very much startle us who are
+living in the present Anno Domini 1918. Philip Hone, in his "Diary,"
+wrote of living in New York in 1835 as exorbitantly dear, and went on to
+say: "it falls pretty hard on persons like me who live upon their
+incomes, and harder still upon that large and respectable class whose
+support is derived from fixed salaries." The sweat of the brow of New
+York all ran into the pockets of the farmers. Hone laid in a winter
+stock of butter at twenty-nine cents a pound. "In the course of
+thirty-four years housekeeping I have never buttered my bread at so
+extravagant a rate." In March, 1836, he recorded: "The market was higher
+this morning than I have ever known it. Beef, twenty-five cents; mutton
+and veal, fifteen to eighteen; small turkeys, one dollar and a half.
+Poor New York!"
+
+A few years later and the prices were back to what was then held to be
+normal. According to a Guide Book of the city issued in 1846, there were
+one hundred and twenty-three eating-houses in the town, besides the
+oyster-houses. At the cheaper places the prices were six cents a plate
+of meats and three cents a plate of vegetables. In the more pretentious
+restaurants the rates were of course considerably higher. Chamberlain's
+Saloon in Pearl Street was a famous restaurant in 1851. Here is its
+advertised bill-of-fare. Soups: beef, mutton, chicken, six cents; roast
+pig, turkey, goose, chicken, duck, twelve and a half cents; beef, lamb,
+pork, mutton, six cents; beefsteak pie, lamb pie, mutton pie, clam pie,
+six cents; boiled beef, any kind, six cents. Made dishes: pork and
+beans, veal pie, six cents; oyster pie, chicken pot-pie, twelve and a
+half cents.
+
+Philip Hone lived in a house on Broadway, facing City Hall Park. When he
+wished to dine out he did not have to go far, for almost next door was
+the American Hotel, one of the most famous hostelries of the period. Its
+cooking was as sturdily patriotic as its name, although the menu is
+flavoured with badly written French. Here is a sample bill-of-fare,
+bearing the date of June 10, 1848.
+
+                     Soup.
+                   Rice Soup.
+                     Fish.
+                   Blackfish.
+                    Boiled.
+             Leg of Mutton.
+              Fowl, oyster sauce.
+               Corn beef.
+                 Ham, Tongue, Lobsters.
+                     Entrees.
+      Fricassee of chicken, a la New York.
+  Tete de Veau en Tortue.
+    Cotellettes de mouton, saute aux pommes.
+  Filet de veau, pique a la Macedoine.
+    Tendon d'Agneau, puree au navets.
+    Fois de volaille, sautee, a la Bordelaise.
+      Croquettes de pommes de terre.
+        Stewed oysters.
+         Boeuf bouilli, sauce piquante.
+          Macaroni a l'Itallienne.
+                     Roast.
+  Beef, Veal, Lamb, mint sauce, Chicken, Duck.
+                  Vegetables.
+      Mashed potatoes.          Asparagus.
+       Spinach.                  Rice.
+        Turnips.                  Pears.
+                    Pastry.
+      Rice custard.          Roman punch.
+       Pies.                  Tarts, etc.
+                    Dessert.
+    Strawberries and cream.       Almonds.
+     Raisins.                      Walnuts, etc.
+
+The day came when the hotels farther downtown yielded the palm to the
+Metropolitan, opened in the middle fifties at Broadway and Prince
+Street. The late Alfred Henry Lewis thus rhetorically pictured the
+Metropolitan, in the winter of 1857-58, when to dine there was the thing
+to do. "Over near a window are Bayard Taylor, the poet Stoddard, and
+Boker, who wrote 'Francesca da Rimini,' which Miss Julia Dean is playing
+at Wallack's. Beyond them is Edmund Clarence Stedman, with lawyers David
+Dudley Field and Charles O'Connor. The second table from the door is
+claimed by Sparrow Grass Cozzens and Fitz-James O'Brien, who have
+adjourned from Pfaff's beer-cellar near Leonard Street, where, under the
+Broadway sidewalk, they were quaffing lager and getting up quite an
+appetite on onions, pretzels, and cheese. They have with them Walt
+Whitman, who, silent and wholly wanting in that barbaric yawp, is
+distinguished by what William Dean Howells, ever slopping over in his
+phrase-making, will one day speak of as his 'branching beard and Jovian
+hair.' The theatres have a place in the Leland cafe, and that dark,
+thin-faced scimetar-nosed Jewish woman, who coughs a great deal, is the
+French actress, Rachel. She has been playing at the New York Theatre,
+and caught a cold on that overventilated stage, as open to the winds as
+a sawmill, which will kill her within a year. With her are the singer,
+Brignoli, and that man of orchestras, Theodore Thomas. The sepulchral
+Herman Melville enters, and saunters funereally across to Taylor,
+Stoddard, and Boker. Rachel and Brignoli are talking of the operatic
+failure at the Academy of Music under Manager Payne. They speak, too, of
+Mrs. Wood's success at Wallack's, and of Burton's reopening of the old
+Laura Keene Theatre, in Broadway across from Bond. Thomas mentions the
+accident at Niblo's the other evening, when Pauline Genet, of the Revel
+troupe, was so savagely burned. Speculation enlists O'Connor, Stedman,
+and Field, and Field is prophesying impending money troubles, which
+prophecies the panic six months away will largely bear out."
+
+Then, quietly at first, but none the less surely, Fifth Avenue began to
+play its part to the town and to the visiting stranger. Now that the
+Astor House and the old Fifth Avenue Hotel are gone it is to the
+Brevoort, or the Lafayette-Brevoort, just as you choose to call it, that
+one turns to find the ghosts of yesterday. They are nothing to shy at,
+being comfortable, well-fed spirits, compositely cosmopolitan. For
+legend has it that the management in the old days was particularly
+gracious to the captains of the transatlantic steamers when they were in
+this port, and the seamen were correspondingly appreciative. So as the
+vessel was passing the Nantucket Lightship the titled Englishman bound
+for the Canadian Rockies to hunt big game, or the French banker, seeking
+first-hand information about values in mines or railroads, or the
+Neapolitan tenor about to fill an engagement at the Academy of Music,
+turned to the captain for advice as to where to stay during the sojourn
+in New York, the Briton, or the Gaul, or the Italian was likely to hear
+such a flattering account of the comfort of the Brevoort and the
+excellence of its _cuisine_, that any previous suggestions were promptly
+forgotten. In the old-time novels of New York visiting Englishmen in
+particular always "stopped" at the Brevoort. It would have been heresy
+on the part of the novelist to have sent them elsewhere. Nor can any
+blame be attached to romancer or steamship captain. It was always a
+good hotel, but in the old days it had not yet been invaded by those who
+like to play at Bohemia.
+
+Delmonico's has had many incarnations since the day when the brothers,
+Peter and John, established themselves in the humble basement at No. 27
+William Street, back in 1827. First there was the move to 76 Broad
+Street, and then to Broadway and Chambers Street. But to that generation
+of New Yorkers of which only a few remain, there has been only one great
+Delmonico's, the one which in 1861 opened its doors at the northeast
+corner of Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. It was the centre of the
+town in the sixties and early seventies. Two blocks away was the Academy
+of Music, the Metropolitan Opera House of the time, and Fourteenth
+Street was burgeoning out as the new Rialto. Society set its seal upon
+the establishment. The clubs of the immediate neighbourhood, of which
+there were several, did not think it necessary to install _cuisines_
+when Delmonico's was so close at hand. The name of the house is still a
+byword in the land, but the names of Filippini and Lattard, two of the
+_maitre d'hotel_ who helped to make Delmonico's famous, have been
+forgotten by all but a very few. What supper parties were given in the
+old establishment, and what dances of that exclusive circle to which Mr.
+Ward McAllister was later to give the sticking designation of the "Four
+Hundred," before the house again marched on northward to Madison Square,
+and a rug-man installed himself and his wares in the halls that had been
+the scene of such good cheer and so much well-bred revelry!
+
+M. de Balzac, planning to entertain a Russian nobleman at the Restaurant
+de Paris, asked the management to "put its best foot forward" for the
+occasion. "Certainly, Monsieur," was the retort, "for the simple reason
+that it is what we are in the habit of doing every day." Old-time
+patrons of the Fourteenth Street corner will tell you that such a reply
+might have fittingly come from the _maitre d'hotel_ of the "Del's" that
+was. But conceding the quality of the everyday service there were famous
+dinners that have stood out in the annals of the house. Here, for
+example, is the menu of what was known as the "Swan Dinner" held the
+evening of February 17, 1873.
+
+  Potages.
+  Consomme Imperial.   Bisque aux crevettes.
+
+  Hor d'oeuvres.
+  Timbales a la Conde.
+
+  Poissons.
+  Red Snapper a la Venetienne.
+  Eperlan, sauce des gourmets.
+
+  Releve.
+  Filet de boeuf a la l'Egyptienne.
+
+  Entrees.
+  Ailes de canvas back, sauce bigurade.
+  Cotellettes de volaille Sevigne.
+  Asperges froide en branche.
+  Sorbet a l'Ermitage.
+
+  Rotis.
+  Chapon truffes. Selle de mouton.
+
+  Entremets.
+  Choufleurs, sauce creme. Carbons a la moelle.
+  Petits pois au beurre.
+  Poires a la Richelieu.
+  Gelee aux ananas. Gaufres Chantilly Sultanne.
+  Gateaux a la Reine. Coupole a l'Anglaise.
+  Pain de peche Marechale. Gelee au fruits.
+
+  Dessert.
+  Delicieux aux noisettes. Biscuit Tortoni.
+  Fruit glaces.
+  Petit fours.    Bonbons.
+  Pieces montes.
+
+The musty inn of mid-Europe will boast till the end of time of the
+two-hour visit within its walls of a certain Elector and his suite in
+the year sixteen hundred and something or seventeen hundred and
+something. There is not a hostelry in England dating back to Tudor times
+without a bed in which Queen Elizabeth is reputed to have slept. But for
+famous guests, authentically established, there is probably no other
+hotel in the world that is to be compared to the Fifth Avenue. When the
+boyish Prince of Wales played leap-frog in its corridors at the time of
+his visit to the United States in 1860, he began a distinguished
+procession. Every president of the nation from the day the hotel was
+opened until it closed at some time stayed there. That meant Lincoln,
+Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, McKinley, and
+Roosevelt. At the time of Grant's funeral in August, 1885, the
+immediate family, the relatives, President Cleveland, Vice-President
+Hendricks, former Presidents Hayes and Arthur, the members of the
+Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court, the
+Diplomatic Corps, and the Governors of the various States were all
+guests of the hotel. Not only did great men stay there, but they did
+things there. It was at the Peabody dinner at the Fifth Avenue that the
+movement to nominate Grant for President started. In 1880, after his
+nomination, Garfield, at the solicitation of Arthur, came all the way
+from Mentor to meet Roscoe Conkling. But the haughty and powerful
+Conkling would not see him. If the hotel had not been the recognized
+shelter of visiting Republican statesmen in New York it is reasonably
+certain that Tilden, instead of Hayes, would have occupied the White
+House from 1877 to 1881, for it was there that a rescue of the
+Republican candidate was set on foot in 1876 after he had been given up
+as lost. In one of the parlours of the hotel the ill-advised Dr. S.A.
+Burchard doomed Blaine to defeat when he said: "We are Republicans, and
+we do not intend to leave our party to identify ourselves with a party
+whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion."
+
+Today it would be hard to find a hotel below Forty-second Street that
+still continues on what is known as the American plan. But when the
+Fifth Avenue was young that system of prices was supposed to embody the
+national spirit of democracy. Yet the idea had its wise critics, who
+found in it a certain injustice. For example there was an editorial on
+the subject, apropos of the Fifth Avenue, in the issue of October 1,
+1859, soon after the hotel was opened, which ran, in part: "In the first
+place, what can be more preposterous than to establish a fixed rate of
+fare at hotels? Big, fat, bloated, blustering Guzzle goes to the Astor
+House for a week, and, in virtue of his standing and his paunch, gets a
+room near the dining saloon--a large, airy room looking on the Park,
+with lounge, arm-chairs, pier-glasses, Brussels carpet, and other
+furniture, all rich and luxurious; at dinner he eats _pate de fois gras_
+and woodcock, at supper he has elaborate little dishes which exercise an
+experienced cook for an hour or two, at breakfast he has salmon at fifty
+cents a pound, for all of which Guzzle pays two dollars and a half a
+day. The Rev. John Jones has a cup of weak tea for his breakfast, a
+slice of beef for his dinner, and a room under the tiles, and pays the
+same two dollars and a half." Perhaps there was a little exaggeration in
+the Harper editorial. But judge of Guzzle's opportunities from the
+following menu of the first dinner served by the Fifth Avenue, that of
+Tuesday, August 23, 1859.
+
+                           Soups.
+                  Green Turtle.   Barley.
+                            Fish.
+  Boiled Salmon, shrimp sauce. Baked Bass, wine sauce.
+                           Boiled.
+      Leg of Mutton, caper sauce. Chicken, with pork.
+           Calf's Head, brain sauce. Beef tongue.
+      Turkey, oyster sauce. Corn Beef and Cabbage.
+                         Cold Dishes.
+  Ham, Roast Beef, Pressed Corn Beef, Tongue, Ham.
+     Lobster Salad. Boned Turkey with truffles.
+                           Entrees.
+     Fricasseed Chicken a la Chevaliere.
+       Macaroni, Parmesan.
+         Lamb cutlets, breaded.
+           Oysters, fried in crumbs.
+             Currie of Veal, in border of rice.
+               Queen Fritters.
+                 Kidneys, champagne sauce.
+                   Pigeons, en compote.
+                     Sweetbreads, larded green peas.
+                             Roasts.
+                   Beef.   Lamb, mint sauce.
+                 Loin of Veal, stuffed.  Goose.
+                      Turkey.     Chicken.
+                      Ham, champagne sauce.
+                            Vegetables.
+       Mashed Potatoes, Boiled Potatoes.    Boiled Rice.
+         Baked Potatoes. Stewed Tomatoes.    Squash.
+           Turnips. Cabbage. Beans.
+                             Pastry.
+             Sponge Cake Pudding. Apple Pies.
+               Madeira Jelly.      Peach Pies.
+                 Peach Meringues.   Squash Pies.
+                   Gateaux Modernes.  Cols de Cygne.
+                             Dessert.
+       Raisins. Almonds. Peaches. English Walnuts.
+         Pecan Nuts. Filberts. Bartlett Pears.
+           Citron Melons. Water-melons.
+             Vanilla, lemon ice-cream.
+
+Considering that this was not an exceptional dinner, but was a sample
+of the fare that was served every day one is inclined to envy Guzzle and
+to deplore the neglected opportunities of the Rev. Jones.
+
+Below the Fifth Avenue Mine Host flourished yesterday. At the corner of
+Eighteenth Street there was the Logerot, sometime called Fleuret's.
+There, as at the old Martin's, at University Place and Ninth Street, a
+little play of the imagination enabled the diner to hug the delusion
+that he was at Foyot's, and that the gentleman with the white goatee at
+the table opposite was a Senator of France from the near-by Palace of
+the Luxembourg. After he had eaten of the _moules marinieres_ and the
+_escargots_ it was no longer imagination, he felt sure of the fact. To
+stimulate through the palate such pleasant fancy was the idea of Richard
+de Croisac, Marquis de Logerot, who opened the place in 1892. When
+Logerot's passed the setting was made to serve a purpose ignominious,
+though highly laudable. It became an incubator shop, and tiny coloured
+babies squirmed mysteriously where once the _casserole_ steamed.
+
+The neighbourhood is rich in gastronomical memories. At the same corner
+for twenty years the chop-house of John Wallace flourished. In the
+eighties it was one of the few chop-houses uptown. There was a flavour
+of Bohemia about the clientele. Characters who were famous in their day
+but whose very names are now forgotten, congregated there for the steaks
+and kidneys and the ale drawn from the wood. There, so the story goes,
+was sown the seed of the Great Mince Pie Contest. An actor, dropping
+into Wallace's late one evening for the after-work rarebit, overheard
+fragments of ah argument about the relative merits of the mince pies of
+certain of the city's hotels and refectories. He was playing at the time
+in the dramatization of Mr. Tarkington's "Monsieur Beaucaire," and the
+next evening he brought up the subject for discussion with various
+ladies and gentlemen of the company. Had it been a matter of lobsters he
+might have had an apathetic response. But the homely mince pie roused to
+riotous enthusiasm. Each player protested that he or she knew of a place
+from which came a mince pie surpassing all others. So the contest was
+arranged and a jury of unimpeachable character selected, and two nights
+later the pies were brought proudly in and in turn sampled. Incidentally
+the winning pasty came from the old Ashland House at Fourth Avenue and
+Twenty-fourth Street, and its sponsor was Mr. A.G. (better known as
+"Bogey") Andrews.
+
+There was a family hotel called the Glenham on the Avenue between
+Twenty-first and Twenty-second Streets, and at the north-east corner of
+Twenty-second, where part of the base of the "Flatiron Building" now
+is, was the old Cumberland. There was one man, at least, who appreciated
+the Cumberland. In fact he liked it so well that, when the structure was
+to be demolished to make way for the new skyscraper, he refused to move
+out, and having a lease, could not be evicted. So he stayed there to the
+last, while the bricks came tumbling down about his ears. Then, just
+around the corner, where Broadway joins Madison Square, was the
+Bartholdi, celebrated by the patronage of Mr. Fitzsimmons, alias Ruby
+Robert, the Freckled One, the Kangaroo, and beyond, still standing, a
+memento of yesterday, Dorlon's, uptown heir to the glories of the old
+Fulton Market place, which boasted a history that goes back
+three-quarters of a century. A relic of the old establishment, a
+mahogany table round which Cornelius Vanderbilt and Judge Roosevelt (the
+grandfather of T.R.), and John Jacob Astor, and John Swan used to sit
+at their oyster dinner consisting of oysters raw, stewed, roasted in the
+shell, and broiled, is still preserved.
+
+Perhaps, at night, the shades of famous dishes of the past come forth
+from remodelled walls or forgotten cupboards and meet in the Park to
+recall the glories that once were. For all about are memories. Beyond
+where the Fifth Avenue was was the Hoffman House where one went to dine
+as well as to feast the eyes on the twenty-five-thousand-dollar
+Bougereau of "Nymphs and Satyr," and "Pan and Bacchante." Then the
+Albermarle and Saint James, the Brunswick, and the famous south-west
+corner of the Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street. The Brunswick had its
+adherents, who proclaimed its table the best in New York, and the land
+once rang with a Tammany dinner that was held there. But that south-west
+corner. It was famous as "Del's" and it was famous when it was Martin's.
+Who that knew it will ever forget what was known as the "Broadway Room,"
+and the special soup for every day of the week, and the _cuisine Russe_
+with the _plats du jour_ for luncheon and dinner, and the vodka that one
+might have if one wished? And also, the chestnut soup!
+
+If your palate of yesterday craved the exotic in the way of food there
+was the Indian Palace that once flourished at No. 325 Fifth Avenue. In
+1900, a Prince Ranji Something or Other, who claimed to be a son of the
+Sultan of Sulu or Beloochistan, opened it, establishing the first
+smoking room for women in the city. He brought the aspect of the East in
+the shape of Indians, and dancing girls, and jugglers, and Hindoo tango
+dancers, and flower girls, and cigarette girls, and music girls, all in
+their native costumes. There was prosperity for a time, and rich
+promise, until the Prince ran against the callous, unsympathetic
+Occident in the shape of the contract labour law.
+
+On up the Avenue as far as the Plaza, where, as early as 1870, "Boss"
+Tweed attempted to erect a hotel on the site of the present Netherlands,
+the gastronomical trail of the past may be followed. Five years ago it
+was said that New York had more good restaurants than any city in the
+world except Paris. Today there is no longer the exception. In the
+spirit that has long moved the people of Marseilles to the saying: "If
+Paris had a Cannebiere it would be a little Marseilles," an American
+city has said: "Paris might cook as well as New Orleans if it only had
+New Orleans's markets." To an even greater arrogance in its culinary
+past and present New York has a right. Turning over some of the menus of
+yesterday is recalling when the world was young. Lost youth is in the
+memory of "the wharves, and the slips, and the sea-tides tossing free;
+and the Spanish sailors with bearded lips, and the beauty and mystery of
+the ships, and the magic of the sea." It is also in the memory of the
+flavour of certain delectable, never-to-be-forgotten repasts.
+
+
+
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