The Project Gutenberg eBook of Literary New York, by Charles Hemstreet

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Literary New York

Chapter I
Writers of New Amsterdam

T HERE is a fashion nowadays of trimming the fronts of brick houses by placing black bricks among the red in such a way as to form odd and unique designs. It is an attractive way of doing, for it varies the staid simplicity of the solid color. But for all it may seem original and new, it is a style that had its beginning long, long ago, even in the days when the stern Peter Stuyvesant governed -2- with an iron hand over the Dutch colony of fifteen hundred people, the town that was one day to be New York, but which in his time was called New Amsterdam.

It was a tiny town then; picturesque, too, for the houses were low, irregular, with sloping roofs and gable ends to the street. They were built of wood—that is, all except the church, the Stadt Huys, the Governor's house, and some few dwellings of colonists who had brought much wealth with them from Holland. These were for the most part of stone. It was usual in them all—there were scarcely more than a hundred,—whether of wood or stone, to have chimneys outside the walls, thus making less the danger of fire, and if any part of the house -3- were of brick it was sure to be the chimney. All the brick had then to be brought from Holland, so it was an expensive building material and but sparingly used.

At this time when Stuyvesant held full sway there were two industrious colonists who held the idea that their short-cut to immense wealth lay in the way of making bricks at home and supplying them to their fellow colonists. So it came about, after long and slow deliberation, that the first brickyard was started. To be sure the venturesome fortune-hunters soon found that they were not to succeed all at once, for, owing to their lack of knowledge, they ruined so many of their bricks that the profits of the business were like to be consumed in the black-burned material that they threw aside as worthless.

But just at this time an odd thing happened. This was no less than the -4- appearance of a colonist who agreed to buy—at a low price to be sure, but still to buy—all the black-burned and apparently useless brick. The brickmakers wondered very much at this, and without doubt thought the man a trifle unsound in his mind, but they agreed, and very soon the buyer had built himself a house, which when it was completed showed the burnt brick alternating with the red, prettily decorating the front and making of it the most attractive dwelling in the town. And at this they were filled with admiration and respect. All the townspeople went to look at the house, and while looking marvelled that Jacob Steendam could have thought out such a useful plan, for he was not known as a practical man. Anything but that, for was he not a poet? More than this, was he not the only poet in the colony? And still more than this, he was the first poet of New Amsterdam. -5-

And in other ways, too, this first literary man of the colony was no ordinary man. He had come to New Amsterdam in the employ of the owners of the colony, the Dutch West India Company, and he worked in the Company's warehouse. But he had a mind which fixed itself on things above the beaver skins which it was his task to register before they were sent across the sea. He was clerk by day, poet by night. It was his custom while the townspeople slept, and they were early abed, to wander about in the moonlight. He could walk the length and breadth of the town with no great exertion, for it merely tipped the triangular point of the island of Manhattan, enclosed on two sides by rivers and on the land side by a wall of wood and soil -6- which served to keep the Indians out—a wall stretching straight across the island quite from river to river, following the line that Wall Street was to take later when Indians should be no more and when the town itself should have burst its bounds. Here then the poet walked through the narrow streets—winding ways that had their birth as Indian trails, passed their infancy as cow-paths, and had so wound around marshy tracts and deviated from their course that as streets they must of necessity be irregular and vacillating.

While this was a time of advancement for the little colony, as you may have guessed from the brickmak -7- ing venture, yet it was certainly not a literary period. The colonists who had left their homes in Holland to seek their fortunes in a new world had found that Fortune overseas frowned upon them as often as she smiled, and while she had raised the hopes of some, the many were struggling for bare existence. There was no book-making; indeed there were few books of any sort, and reading meant conning over Bibles, prayer-books, psalm-books, and Testaments which had been brought across the ocean. These were stoutly bound volumes, many of them heirlooms, their pages bearing the marks of patient and persistent handling.

The poet Steendam dreamed and thought out many a verse as he stood on the bridge that spanned the canal leading from the bay to the Sheep Pasture,—the canal that was one day to be buried deep beneath Broad -8- Street. He must have walked beneath the wall of the weak little fort at the water's edge, passed Governor Stuyvesant's new home that was called Whitehall, and that was to pass away, leaving its name to the road leading to it, which the road was still to bear more than two hundred and fifty years later. And perhaps he went on along the strand to the Stadt Huys (for it was only a few steps farther along the waterside), the stone house that "William the Testy" had built as a tavern and that in the first poet's day had become the first City Hall of New Amsterdam. And he sometimes stood beside the first graveyard, near the plaine that was to become the Bowling Green, and -9- so on to the city wall, with its gates locked while the townsmen slept.

Though the streets are to-day much changed from those which the poet walked alone save for the company of his Muse, you can walk them even now, until you come to a thoroughfare noticeable because it is so short and winding, tucked away at the edge of the city's business section. And if you do walk into Stone Street, you must of necessity come to a bend from which both ends of the street curve out of sight, while you stand in a kind of huge well, closed in by iron-shuttered warehouses. Here in this bend you are standing on what was the garden of Jacob Steendam's checker-fronted house. In his day it was -10- Hoogh Street, though in a few years it was to take its present name when it was the first street to be paved with stone.

In those nightly walks through the quiet streets of the sleeping town, the poet Steendam found inspiration for his verses—the first verses ever penned in the colony, and called variously The Praise of New Netherland , The Complaint of New Amsterdam , The Thistle Finch , and others. Although these suggested true affection for the land of his adoption, it was the home of his youth and the never-fading remembrance of his childhood's days that haunted him and called to him. And at last, one day after thirteen years, the sight of a ship preparing to sail for Holland so overcame him that almost within the hour he had bidden farewell and had sailed with her, leaving to the townspeople his memory and his verse. -11-

But by the time of his going there had come forward another poet to take his place, by name Nicasius De Sille. There was a vast difference between the first poet and the second. Steendam was a poor man, and in his verses sought always to touch those who had never grasped the skirts of fleeting Fortune. The second was a man of wealth, a kind of "society poet." For even in that small circle, in the first half-century of its existence, there were marked differences in wealth, birth, and reputation, which were to develop with the passing years into the distinctions of to-day.

The aristocracy of those times centred about the family of the Dutch Governor, Peter Stuyvesant. Mrs. Stuyvesant had been, before her marriage, Judith Bayard, the daughter of a Paris divine. Mrs. Bayard, the sister of Peter Stuyvesant, had married Mrs. Stuyvesant's brother, and when -12- left a widow with three infant sons she followed her brother when he became Governor of New Netherland. These two women had lived in ease and refinement, and in coming to the colony well knew that there they would find a life of comparative hardship. Yet they came willingly enough, following husband and brother, and brought with them an atmosphere of intellectual and social culture that left its impress for all time. By the time Steendam returned to his boyhood home, a few ambitious folk had gathered themselves about the Stuyvesants. There was Oloff Van Cortlandt, a thriving merchant and one of the richest men in New Netherland; there were Hendrick Kip and his three sons; there were Dr. La Montagne and his daughters, and Govert Loockermans, and others.

It was to this well-to-do-set that -13- Nicasius De Sille belonged, and after the going of Steendam he became the only literary man in the colony. He also had come over in the service of the Dutch West India Company, but in a far different capacity from Steendam. For he came, when Stuyvesant's rule had run eight years of its course, as a Councillor in the provincial government, and his life was thenceforth closely connected with that of the Governor. He came, heralded as a statesman, as a lawyer, as a man of deep learning, as a man of wealth. But with not one word of his being a poet—yet only by reason of his poems has his name lived. He built for himself a house beside the little canal where Steendam walked in the night, just where now Exchange Street touches Broad, and here, with his two motherless daughters and one son, he lived more luxuriously than had yet been seen. For -14- he had brought with him from Holland heavy plate of rich design, more plate than was in all the town beside; solid, carved furniture and rare hangings; and on winter nights his guests sat down to a table laden with blue and white china ornamented with strange Chinese pictures, and drank their tea, alternately biting lumps of sugar, from the tiniest china cups, and altogether were entertained with all the pomp and circumstance he had known in The Hague. At these evening entertainments De Sille read his poems in such perfect style as to win much applause, and doubtless it was the reading of these, as well as his courtly man -15- ner and great wealth, that very soon won for him the love of fair Tryntie Croegers.

And then one day there was a grand gathering in the stone church inside the fort—on the wedding-day of Nicasius De Sille and Mistress Tryntie Croegers. Into the church went the friends: women, some with petticoats of red cloth, some with skirts of blue or purple silk set off with rare lace, all with silken hoods over much befrizzled hair, and their fingers covered with glittering rings, and with great lockets of gold on their bosoms. Each had a Bible fastened to her girdle by links of gold—not the plain, strongly bound Bibles used by Jacob Steendam and his friends, but elaborately wrought in silver, with golden clasps. The men were just as gaily dressed as the women, for they wore long coats adorned with shining buttons and -16- pockets trimmed with lace, and colored waistcoats, knee-breeches of velvet, silk stockings, and low shoes set off by silver buckles. Outside the fort among the townspeople of lower degree it was, too, quite a holiday. Men with coarse frocks and leather aprons, women in homespun gowns, turbaned negresses, swarthy negro slaves, dusky Indians,—all made merry in their several ways as though glad of an excuse. And the motley throng outside the fort and the elegant gathering within all made way for the wrinkled little bell-ringer, who carried the cushions from the Stadt Huys for the -17- burgomasters and the schepens, who insisted on every bit of their dignity, come what would, on this day or on any other. So, with those inside the church looking on in silence and the people outside keeping up an incessant din and clatter, the poet of the rich was married to Tryntie Croegers by the good Dominie Megapolensis.

But for all such a fair starting off this married life had an untimely ending. Though Nicasius De Sille might win a wife by his poetry, it seemed that he could not hold one. There were no poetic readings in the house by the canal after the marriage, and the literature of the town which had started out so bravely fell into a decline with the languishing of De Sille's connubial bliss. Before the third year had gone by, a commission of their friends was trying to tell the pair how happy their lives should have been. But all the reasoning -18- had no effect, and the friends were forced to give it up and submit to a decision, in very quaint wording, the tenor of which was that it was acknowledged that there was no love between the two, and that the only recommendation that could be made was that the property should be divided equally and they go their several ways,—which they did. But the earlier readings of poetry had sown the seed of still another marriage. For at those readings, Anna, the youngest daughter of the poet, had sat by her father's side, and young Hendrick Kip had sat by his father's side, and about the time the commission of friends was announcing its failure to patch up matters, Anna De Sille and Hendrick Kip, all undismayed by the bad example, had decided to sit side by side through the remainder of their lives.

All this time De Sille was growing -19- more and more rich, when there came a great change. Of a sudden one day the English ship sailed into the bay, and the English soldiers took possession of the town, and the rule of the Dutch in New Amsterdam had passed, and the English became governors of their province of New York. Then Stuyvesant went to live in a little settlement he had built up and called Bouwerie Village, which was far out on the Bouwerie Road, and Nicasius De Sille settled down as a merchant, -20- and little more was heard of him as a poet.

It was a simple enough thing to rename the town and call it after the brother of an English king, but that made but little change in the customs of the people. For many a long year it was to remain the quaint, slow-going town it had been. Certainly no English brain or hand added to the literature of this time, and the only bit of writing which survives is the work of a Dutch minister.

In the eighteenth year after the coming of the English, when it had come to be 1682, Dominie Henricus Selyns came to New York from Holland. He had lived four years in the town when it was New Amsterdam, and we have his own words for it that he found the settlement scarcely altered a whit from the time he left. And now he took charge of the little church in the fort, the same church -21- where Nicasius De Sille was married with such pomp. His congregation was made up of much the same kind of people as of old, and perhaps it was just as well, since he still preached in the Dutch language. The poems he wrote, all in the Dutch language, were read as piously as were the Bibles, and were quite at one with them in religious feeling. No one then imagined that a day would come when a critic might hint that the good Dominie's contributions to the early literature of New York might be just a shade gloomy and despairing in their views of the fearfulness of the after-life.

For quite twenty years the good -22- Dominie lived to aid in fostering the infant literature of infant New York, living a life as quiet and as regular as any Dutch colonist could have demanded. On a Sunday morning he preached in the church in the fort the long, heavy sermons that his people loved. In the afternoon he rode away on the highway that led into the country, past the Collect Pond, over the Kissing Bridge at the Fresh Water, on to the stretch that was to grow into the Bowery, through the forest till he came to the few clustering houses of the Bouwerie Village, where Stuyvesant had spent his old age. In the village church he preached of an afternoon,—the church which Stuyvesant had built and beside which he was buried,—the church which was to stand another hundred years and which was then to give way to a house of worship to be called St. Mark's, which, -23- in turn, two centuries and more after Stuyvesant's day, was still to be found standing in the core of a great metropolis.

Dominie Selyns lived long enough to see many changes. He lived to see a Dutch prince become England's king; he lived to see New York rent asunder through the overzealousness of one Jacob Leisler, who feared lest the town should not recognize a king of Dutch blood; he lived to see Lord Bellomont made Governor and riding through the streets in a coach the gorgeousness of which as -24- tounded all; he lived to see Captain William Kidd sail out of the harbor in the ship Adventure Galley , with never a thought that a few years more would see him executed as a pirate. And when Dominie Selyns died, bequeathing his poems to swell the scanty literature of his times, the era of the Dutch had well-nigh ended.

Chapter II
Before the Revolution

W HEN William Bradford came to New York, in 1693, the town had grown so large that it must needs have a night-watch—four men who each carried a lantern, and who, strolling through the quiet streets, proclaimed at the start of each hour that the weather was fair, or that the weather was foul, and told beside that all was as well as it should be in those nightly hours. More than this, the town went a step farther towards the making of a metropolis, and lit the streets by night (whether for the benefit of the night-watch or for some other the records say not), by placing on a pole projecting from each seventh house a lantern with a candle in it. -26-

Pilgrims who year after year seek out the shrines that are connected in one way or another with the literature of the city have worn a path plain to be seen along the stone pavement about Trinity Church, a path leading straight to a bit of greensward where, beside a gravel walk, is the tomb of William Bradford. Although Bradford made slight pretence of being a man of letters, he is remembered as one who loved to foster literature. And, there being little enough left to recall the writings of the seventeenth century, this tombstone has its many visitors. The pilgrims who find their way to it have but half completed their journey. If they leave the churchyard and stray on, not going by way of crowded Wall Street, which would be the direct course, but taking one of the more winding and narrow streets to the south, they will come after a time to a thoroughfare where -27- the structure of the Elevated Road forms a bridge to convey heavy trains that hurry past, stirring the air with constant vibration. In this street, dark even when the sun shines brightest, is another reminder of William Bradford,—a tablet in form, but quite as much a tombstone as the other; for its brazen letters tell in true epitaph how he lived here two hundred years gone by, and how here on this spot he set up the first printing-press in the colony, and that here he did the public printing, as well as such books and psalms, tracts and almanacs, and such like things as he had time for. These were all queer, rough-lettered, black-lined pamphlets, and none was more quaint than John Clapp's Almanac , the first which came from the press and the first written in the city.

John Clapp had time without end to write this almanac, and yet no one ever knew just when he did it. He was -28- the keeper of the inn in the Bouwerie Village, and, having more idle moments than busy ones, he spent most of his time on the broad stoop of the inn, pipe in mouth, looking first at the house where Peter Stuyvesant had lived, then at the dusty road leading away up country towards the King's Bridge in one direction, and down country towards the town. But write it he did, and Bradford printed it, and John Clapp was shrewd enough to advertise himself well by writing in his Table of Contents concerning his tavern:

Again, in a Chronological Table, under the June date, he made the interesting announcement: -29-

In response to this there came such a large gathering as would make it seem that all the townsmen had been baptized by one name.

It was by an odd slip that the only important book planned and partly written in these last years of the seventeenth century was not printed by Bradford. More than once had the Episcopal minister, the Rev. John Miller, talked with this first printer of his plan for a history of the colony which he was then writing. This would have been carried out, beyond all doubt, if the clergyman had not just then decided to go to England -30- to settle some troublesome Church matters, taking his history with him. As ill-fortune would have it, the ship in which he sailed was captured by the French,—France then being at war with England,—and rather than have the slightest bit of information conveyed to the enemy through his means, the clergyman tossed the precious pages into the sea. In the course of time, released by the French, he reached England, and there rewrote the history from memory, and drew for it a quaint map of the town as he had known it. Having done so much he died, leaving his work to lie for more than a century and a quarter unpublished, until, in 1843, a London bookseller put it into print. The original, being sold again passed through several hands until it finally found a resting-place in the British Museum, where it is now preserved.

The early days of the eighteenth century saw the fitting out of the first library to which the townsmen had general access—a library that in the next fifty years was to change from the private property of the Rev. John Sharpe into the Corporation Library, and later be chartered as the Society Library, under which title it was to live to grow richer and richer in literary treasures until it came to be called the oldest library in America in the days when the city had grown far beyond any bounds then thought of. In the first days of its existence, the library occupied tiny quarters, quite large enough for all the books it contained, in a room in the City Hall. This was not in the old Stadt Huys of the Dutch by the waterside, for that was gone now, but in a pretentious building facing the "broad street" that had been made by the filling up of the Heere -32- Graft of old. Other buildings were set up at this same time. There was the new French Huguenot church which had been in Petticoat Lane and was now rebuilt in the newly laid-out street below the Maiden's Lane, called Pine Street from the pine-trees there. Then there was the church called Trinity. Though it, too, was a new church, the ground on which it stood had a history that harked back to the very earliest Dutch times. For it was upon the lower edge of the Annetje Jans Farm, the strip of land above the city to the west which had been given to the husband of Annetje Jans far back in the year 1635; that had been linked with another farm by Governor Lovelace to make the Duke's Farm; and had become the King's Farm when the duke after whom it was named became a king. And then, it having become the Queen's Farm (and -33- Queen Anne graciously presenting it in the year 1703 to Trinity Church for all time), it took the last name that it was to have and became the Church Farm—a name that was to cling to it after every vestige of country green had disappeared from its surface, and when houses had been set upon it as thick as the stalks of grain that once ripened upon its rolling bosom.

The library in the City Hall was yet quite a new thing, the church called Trinity had stood on the historic ground but a few years, the French church was barely completed, and the town was so sprightly and full of activity that 't is small wonder Madame Sarah Knight, coming at such a time, should find much to wonder at and to write about. Her coming marks another advance in literary New York, for Madame Knight was a bookish woman come from far-off -34- Boston town, and was a teacher well versed in the "art of composition." She found all quite different as compared with her own Massachusetts, where her father had been sentenced to stand for two hours in the stocks, his conduct having been found "lewd and unseemly" when, on a Sabbath day, after an absence of three years, he had kissed his wife when she met him at his own door-step! No wonder Madame Knight thought New York society quite gay and reckless, for at this time Lord Cornbury governed, and he had an odd fancy for wearing women's clothing indoors for his own delectation and to the amusement of the -35- citizens as he walked the walls of the fort. Though Madame Knight met many persons of quality and witnessed many interesting scenes, had her visit in the city been extended, say for half a dozen years, until the coming of Governor Robert Hunter, she would have met a man truly in full accord with her ideas and tastes.

Had Governor Hunter's hopes been fulfilled there might have been a far different writing of literary history. He came from England in the summer of 1710, from the midst of a busy and troublous life, seeing before him in imagination quiet and peaceful years with the wife he cherished, and a career which should be helped on by his correspondence with his English friends, Dean Swift, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, and some others. It would be an ideal life; he had planned it well. But the repose he sought he scarce for an hour realized. -36- Undreamed-of turmoil kept him in a whirl of unsettledness. And though the wife of his heart stood by his side, and he gained comfort from knowing that nothing could turn her away, differences with the Government at home, which refused to reimburse him for money spent; wrangling with the Assembly, which refused money for the conduct of affairs in the colony; the uprising of negro slaves; the turbulent actions of unfriendly Indians—these things and others left him never an hour for the work he had planned. It was a note of despair that he sounded when he wrote to Swift across the sea:

Still, for all this, he found time for some writing, especially for a play, the one called Androborus —The Man-eater,—in which he wrote in such a bantering, humorous, satirical manner of the colonial officers as to set the town going with laughter. From this on he got along better and the people came to appreciate their Governor. Gradually there centred about the house in the fort a "Court Circle," where the Lady Hunter shone brightly, not alone because she was the first lady of the province, nor because her husband was Governor and a writer, but because others came to know her as a loving, lovely, and lovable woman. But when it looked as though the Governor was to have at last the ease and rest and quiet he had hoped for from the beginning, Lady Hunter died! This was the worst that could happen to Robert Hunter. There was nothing more for him to -38- live and struggle for, he said. He resigned his office and, before many years, his life.

At this time of the "Court Circle," a mild, quiet man, the son of a Presbyterian minister, came from Philadelphia to visit the Governor. And no one could foresee that this Cadwallader Colden would remain during the rest of his life and be, for almost half a century, the leader of literary New York.

Colden came to be a friend of William Bradford, as he had been of Hunter, and watched his work with deep interest. He often advised Bradford when that first printer of New York published the New York Gazette , in 1725, the first newspaper in the city, and upheld him a few years later when the second newspaper was issued by Bradford's old apprentice boy, Peter Zenger, who had become his rival. -39-

In the first ten years that Colden lived in New York he wrote diligently, and published his History of the Five Nations , an exhaustive work telling of the powerful Indian tribes, of their forms of government, and their wars. This was one of the earliest books of importance, and he was planning a second part of this same history when, in the year 1732, Cosby came to be Governor. In after years Colden told how his studies and his writings were interrupted by the coming of the new and lively Governor.

And now it seemed as though there were to be dissensions in the city. There was trouble with the Governor; trouble with Peter Zenger, who wished to print what the king's representatives did not want printed; trouble about who should be Chief Justice. But when these were straightened out there began a season of festivity, and during one entire winter there were entertainments at which the culture, the refinement, and the wit of the province gathered. These were days of splendor, when women wore gay brocades and arranged their hair in a variety of bewildering, towering, and fantastic shapes; when wide skirts were in the heyday of their fashion; when tight-lacing was in vogue; when men wore enormous wigs, and attired themselves in many colors, adorning themselves with buttons of silver—large, and decorated with the initials of the wearer. -41-

In the height of this brilliant season there came from England, to visit the Governor's family, Lord Augustus Fitzroy, son of that Duke of Grafton who was Chamberlain to King George II. He was received with all the ceremony due to his rank. The Mayor, the Recorder, and some other city officials met, and presented to him the freedom of the city in a box of burnished gold. Soon Lord Augustus had made himself so vastly agreeable to one of the daughters of Governor Cosby that there was talk of a marriage. But everybody agreed that this could not be, for the match was beneath him, according to the ideas of English society. Still, the young man was determined, the young woman was inclined, and the Governor's wife was a strategist. So one mild summer's night the young nobleman, resplendent in gay clothes, with a couple of his friends, assisted -42- Dominie Campbell over the fort wall, where they found the young woman waiting, and there in the silence and the darkness the marriage occurred. There was some stern talk of what ought to be done to Dominie Campbell, and wonderment as to what the Duke of Grafton would say, but nothing serious came of it, although the romantic wedding was the talk of the town for many a year.

Cadwallader Colden lived down by the waterside near the fort wall over which Dominie Campbell was dragged. And in his house there, when Cosby's rule quieted down, Colden got to his studies again. He lived until the days of the Revolution were at hand; lived to exercise the duties of Governor in a stormy period; lived to see the town rent by turmoil and political rancor; lived to be hated by many people for loyalty to a king they would no longer serve. Quite -43- to the end of his life he remained a leader, and, dying, left writings on history, medicine, geology, botany, metaphysics, and other learned subjects.

It was in this midway time between the days of Cosby and the period of the Revolution that William Smith lived and wrote. Not so marked a figure in literature as Colden, nor so profound a student; not one to leave so strong and lasting an imprint, but well to be remembered as a writer whose birthplace was New York. Born in the year after Colden published his History of the Five Nations , he attained a high place as a lawyer, giving his attention to the political and legal records. When still a young man he was one of those who spoke at the ceremony of the laying of the corner-stone of King's College—which was to be in existence a century and a half later as Columbia -44- University. For many years he lived close by Colden and intercourse would have led to mutual good, but the two were not friendly after Smith wrote a history of the city and Colden criticised it.

Although William Smith was one of the earliest writers to own New York as his birthplace, he would not join in a revolt against the king whom he had served all his life. So he accepted the post of Chief Justice of Canada, leaving others to become the writers of the Revolution.

Chapter III
The Poet of the Revolution

I N the far down-town business section of New York, there is a street so short that you can walk its entire length in ten minutes or less time. It leads from the park where the City Hall is, straight to the river. Beginning at the tall buildings where the newspapers have their homes, it continues along between the warehouses of leather merchants and the solid stonework of the bridge that crosses from the Manhattan to the Brooklyn shore; leads to the open space at the top of Cherry Hill, then makes a steep descent as though about to plunge deep into the river. For much of its length it is a constant scene of noise and bustle and -46- disorder—that is, in the daylight hours. At night, when it is silent and deserted, it suggests the time, far back in the year 1678, when it was a country lane some distance from the city, a by-path leading from the house of Jacob Leisler to the river. It was Frankfort Lane then, Leisler calling it so as a reminder of the German town of his birth. Now it has become Frankfort Street. Leisler's garden was close upon the spot where the street touches the parkside, and here Leisler was executed in 1691, a martyr to the cause of constitutional liberty.

The lane was beginning to assume the proportions of a street in the year 1752, when there lived in one of the dainty houses that fronted it the family of Pierre Freneau, the last of a long line of Huguenots. There were Freneaus who fought with the Huguenots at La Rochelle, and there -47- were Freneaus still living in that ancient city when the revocation of the Edict of Nantes forced so many to strange lands. The Freneau family, refugees from their native land, prospered in America, and a son born in the Frankfort Street house in this year 1752 gave historic interest to the name. The boy was christened Philip, and came to be called the Poet of the Revolution.

Philip Freneau struggled through babyhood in Frankfort Street, and just as he was able to walk was whisked away to a farm in New Jersey, where his father had built a house, calling it Mount Pleasant after the old homestead in La Rochelle.

Quite within the throw of a stone of Frankfort Street, and in the very year of Philip Freneau's birth, was born Eliza Schuyler, who with the passing of years was to marry and bear the name of Eliza Bleecker and -48- the title of the first poetess of New York.

In her childhood, the future poetess had a favorite walk over the bit of rolling ground to the south of Frankfort Street, the spot called Golden Hill, which a few years later was to be trampled by many soldiers, where the tall grass was to be reddened by the blood of patriots—the first blood shed in the Revolution. She strolled hand in hand with her father over the green Common, which was to become the City Hall Park. Sometimes, in the mid-summer, she was taken on excursions to the shores of a pleasant lake, called the Collect, -49- quite a journey from the city. It was there that John Fitch's boat sailed years before Fulton's successful boat was launched into the Hudson. When the city outgrew its early bounds, the lake was drained and solid ground made, and the Tombs Prison rose in gloomy majesty where the deep waters had been.

Eliza Schuyler preserved a lively memory of playing about a little square frame building on the Common, and though she never spoke of it by name it was the first Poor House of the city. She wrote, too, of a certain day when she went to the Common with her father—he was an important man that day and served on a committee—to see laid the first stone of another building. It was only a Debtors' Prison, but it was looked upon as the most beautiful structure in the city for many a day. For it was in the main patterned -50- after the temple of Diana of Ephesus. The townsmen of those early days admired the building, and would have grieved if they could have foreseen that the day would come when city officials would forget that the old prison had been copied from so perfect a model; would forget that it had been a military prison when the British held possession of the city; would forget that many a brave officer of the Continental Army and many a true patriot soldier had passed bitter days there, and dying had left memories of sentiment and poetry and historic interest hovering about the old place.

Still, though it could not be foretold, the day did come when it was no longer a prison but had become the Hall of Records, when it was called an ugly and unsightly structure which obstructed the view of newer and taller ones—buildings that Tammany -51- architects considered the perfection of beauty perhaps on account of their costliness. So it must be torn down.

At the age between girlhood and womanhood, Eliza Schuyler left New York to live in the village of Tomhannock, and when news of her again reached her friends in the city she was the wife of John J. Bleecker. Only twice after that did she revisit the scenes of her early life, and it was not until her death that the writings of this first poetess of New York became well known and popular.

The short and peaceful life of Eliza Bleecker was nearing an end before—his college days being over—Philip Freneau again trod the streets of New York. Already his tireless pen was at work, the pen that was to aid the cause of the Revolution. But when it looked to him as though his country would not be able to throw off the kingly yoke, he decided on a -52- journey. He passed two years in the West Indies writing of the Beauties of Santa Cruz and the House of Night . Then a longing for the home from which he received scant word came upon him. He started homeward, only to be lured from his course by the beauties of Bermuda, where he fell in love with the Governor's daughter, remembered in his verse as the "Fair Amanda." He was still writing, lolling his time away beneath tropical skies, when tardy news came that the colonies had declared themselves free. Swiftly he threw off the languor of repose, of love, of romance, and returned home. The charm of the sea life was on him then, so taking out letters of reprisal from the Continental Congress, Freneau the poet sailed over the sea, actively aiding his country's cause by capturing British merchantmen and sinking British ships for a year, until in 1780 -53- he had a ship of his own built. But on her first voyage disaster befell her, and almost within sight of land the Aurora was captured. When Philip Freneau next saw New York it was as a prisoner on the hulk Scorpion , as she lay anchored alongside another notorious prison-ship, the Jersey , close by the Battery shore.

There never was such an energetic prisoner. Each moment was employed for his country, if not with his sword at least with his pen, which was quite as powerful a weapon.

In those days of wretched misery and suffering, within view of the city by day, in the noisome ship's hold by night, Freneau thought out his best-remembered poem, The British Prison-Ship and many another line which in the later days of -54- the Revolution was to rouse American feeling; verse that was to be distributed to the American soldiers, to be read by them on the march and by the light of the camp-fires; lines that were to commemorate the victories and the heroism of the soldiers of the Revolution; lines ridiculing each separate act of the British.

New York, in this time that the poet Freneau lay a prisoner, was not as it had been in his college days. The battle of Long Island had been fought, and Washington and his army had been driven from New York. And on the night of the British entry a great fire had started in the lower part of the city, swept away the house where Bradford's press had been, leaped across Broadway and laid Trinity Church a mass of ruins scattered over the churchyard where Freneau's father lay buried.

The British soldiers were quartered -55- in the public buildings; the British officers had taken possession of the houses deserted by wealthy patriots; the Middle Dutch Church, which had been the architectural pride of the city, had become a riding school for troopers.

There was a red-painted wooden building in John Street, a few feet from Broadway, the only theatre in the city. The actors had closed it, and fled at the coming of the British. But the house was open again now, and the British officers played at mimic war between the intervals of real battles.

No one threw himself more heartily into these performances than Major John André, who was so soon to give up his life for his country. He -56- even wrote some of the speeches used by the actors, and one of the poems he wrote for Rivington's Gazetteer was printed while he was away on his last mission, conferring with Benedict Arnold on the banks of the Hudson.

After the treason was discovered, Arnold sought a safe retreat within the British lines at New York, and lived for a time in a solid, picturesque little house by the Bowling Green. It stood on a grassy slope that stretched down to the water's edge a few boat lengths from where the Scorpion lay with the poet prisoner on board.

There was a picket fence, painted white, on one side of the green slope, and Sergeant John Champe once hid his men behind it to carry off Arnold when he should take his nightly walk by the waterside, an attempt that failed through Arnold's changing his quarters on the selfsame day. -57-

When the Revolution was over, Freneau was again in New York, which slowly recovered from the ravages of war. Hanover Square was a favorite haunt of his. He has left the record that he loved to linger in that open space, where might be seen a mingling of business and home life. Freneau liked it, for there books were printed and sold, and, too, it was the "Newspaper Row" of the town. This open space had been at first Van Brugh Street, taking its name from Johannes Pietersen Van Brugh, a wealthy Hollander whose home faced the square for close upon half a century. It bore his name until in 1714, when with the accession of George I. of Hanover it took the name of Hanover Square.

In a house facing this square, Bradford printed the first newspaper, and though in Freneau's time it was still standing, a more stately building was -58- to take its place and bear a tablet telling of the old one. It was here that the other early newspapers came into existence: Parker's Weekly Post-Boy , in 1742; Weyman's New York Gazette , in 1759; Holt's New York Journal , in 1766. It was here, too, that was prominently displayed the "Sign of the Bible and Crown," before the house of Hugh Gaine. Freneau had flayed this man in his verse many a time.

Gaine was an Irishman who published the New York Mercury , and changed his politics to whichever side was uppermost—Whig to-day, Tory to-morrow. He printed Freneau's satires against Great Britain as a Whig, and then as a Tory fell under the power of Freneau's pen, for Freneau hated inconstancy quite as much as he did Tory principles.

Then there was close at hand the home of Rivington's New York Ga -59- zetteer . This Rivington, failing as a bookseller in London, planted his sign in Hanover Square and proudly proclaimed himself as the only London bookseller in America. He established his Tory newspaper, the New York Gazetteer , and had it wrecked by patriots, who threw the furniture out into Hanover Square and moulded the type into bullets. It was he who printed the poems of André; who after the war gave up a Tory paper and was strong for the cause of the new nation and was in consequence denounced by Freneau.

Freneau smiled to see the signs of Gaine and Rivington changed to suit the views of the new republic and rivalling one another in their show of patriotism. Tempted into Gaine's bookstore by the display of volumes, he chanced upon a friend who called him by name. And old Hugh Gaine, turning slowly about at the sound of -60- a name he knew so well, stared at the enemy he had never seen:

"I want to shake your hand; you have given me and my friend Rivington a lasting reputation."

It was in one of these very bookstores that Freneau met Lindley Murray in the year after the peace was declared. From their first meeting the two were friends. Murray had accumulated a fortune as a salt merchant on Long Island during the British occupation. Strong patriot as Freneau was, he was attracted to the son at first through the memory of the parent, for it was Lindley Murray's mother, living on Murray Hill, who had saved Putnam's troops from being trapped by the British. The -61- friendship of Freneau and Lindley Murray might have ripened, but that in the year after their meeting Murray went to England, where he was to devote himself, for his own amusement, to horticulture, in a pretty little garden beside his home near York, and where he wrote his famous grammar for a young ladies' school.

1. WILLIAM SMITH.
2. PETER STUYVESANT.
3. PHILIP FRENEAU.
4. THOMAS PAINE.
5. JOEL BARLOW.

Even in the lifetime of Freneau, changes came to Hanover Square. For more than half a century it was the "Newspaper Row," then it gradually became the dry-goods district, then settled down to a general centre for wholesale houses. At one corner of the square lived for a time Jean Victor Moreau, the French General, after he had been banished for supposed participation in the plot of Cadoudal and Pichegru against the life of the First Consul.

In the years that followed the Revolution, Freneau spent much of his -62- time in sea trips, but he was in the city again when George Washington took the oath of office as the first President of the United States at the Federal Hall in Wall Street; and was in the quaint St. Paul's Chapel, then quite a new structure, when Washington went there on the day of his inauguration. In the same year, Freneau lived for a time in Wall Street, close by the house where Alexander Hamilton lived, who in those days was a figure in literary New York by reason of his writing of the Federalist papers. That was thirteen years before Hamilton occupied his country house, "The Grange," far up the island, which -63- was to be still standing a hundred years later, when the city had crept up to and beyond it, and left it where One Hundred and Forty-first Street crosses Convent Avenue. Close by, in narrow Nassau Street, when Freneau lived in Wall, was the home of a man who had been his classmate in college. This was Aaron Burr. He, too, in a few years, was to leave the humble house in Nassau Street, to live in the Richmond Hill house, where the British Commissary Mortier had lived, and from which Burr walked forth on an eventful morning in 1804 to fight a mortal combat with Hamilton on the Jersey shore.

In 1791 Philip Freneau was in -64- Philadelphia editing the National Gazette , the strongest political paper of his day, memorable for partisan abuse and for such bitter attacks on the administration that Washington alluded to its editor as "that rascal Freneau." The paper continued under Freneau until 1793, when he returned to New York for a time.

In those days of 1793 there were three or four detached houses in Cedar Street close by Nassau. In the one nearest the corner, on any -65- day of the week a man, slender and tall, with eyes that were keen and gray, with dress always in perfect taste, with broad-brimmed hat and queue, could be seen. He came from this house and walked over to Broadway, and his neighbors watched regularly for his going and his coming. He was Noah Webster, editor of The Minerva , a paper at that time devoted to the support of President Washington's administration. His name was to become a household word, for his paper became the Commercial Advertiser (that lived and throve even in the twentieth century), and after he had left the city he wrote a world-famed dictionary.

The poetic muse hovered closest about Philip Freneau in the days of stirring scenes and momentous events. The Poet of the Revolution was less active when quieter days came. Still he continued to pass a life of restless -66- energy, and lived far into another century and long after many another writer had arisen to eclipse him in the literary life of New York.

Chapter IV
In the Days of Thomas Paine

W HEN the eighteenth century was within two years of its close, a group of men, perhaps half a dozen in all, made up the writers of New York.

The city then lay between the park (a name that had just been bestowed upon the Common of old) and the Battery; with Broadway, the main thoroughfare of the town, sending out tendrils of narrow streets to tangle and turn about themselves in such persistent fashion that they were never to be straightened out. Quite abruptly, where the park began, Broadway dwindled from a street to a lane, but with a strong branch thoroughfare to the east which, with the advent -68- of years, was to become Park Row. It was not a new thoroughfare by any means, since, as far back as the days of the Dutch Governors, it had been the one road that led up through the forested island.

There faced the road, and so quite of necessity faced the park as well, a square building, its front so taken up with windows and doors as to cause wonder that there should be any pretence whatsoever of a front wall. Not an attractive building, with these many windows always staring, like eyes, across the road into the park, but one to be remembered because, for one reason or another, it could well be called the literary centre of the town. Here it stood, the first Park Theatre, towering above its neighbors, glistening in its newness.

It was rare in the days when the Park Theatre was new, just as it is rare nowadays, for writers to be of a -69- practical turn of mind. But in this little group, oddly enough, there was one man of business. He was the proprietor of the theatre, and although he wrote plays, and painted pictures, -70- and wrote books, William Dunlap was a man of affairs. His home was around the corner in quiet Ann Street, which in another hundred years came to be a very noisy street indeed, crowded with venders of every sort of odds and ends that can be imagined. A block away, around another corner in Beekman Street, on the south side below Nassau, was Dunlap's home when he had given up the theatre, settled down to literature, and got to writing his important books, the American Theatre and the History, Rise, and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States . While he was yet managing the theatre, Dunlap's favorite strolling-place was up along the parkside, past the Brick Church, and so on a few steps across Nassau Street to where Spruce Street has its start. On any pleasant afternoon he could be found standing on that corner, for -71- a time at least, before the door of Martling's Tavern, where the Tammany Society had its first home. Looking at that first Wigwam after this lapse of time, it seems picturesque enough, and it must in truth have been so, for the enemies of the Tammany Society were in the habit of referring to it as the "Pig-pen." A frame building, low, rough, and unpainted, with a bar-room at one end, a kitchen at the other, and between the two a "long room," some steps lower than the general floor,—that was Martling's.

In the tap-room at Martling's, after an evening in which the untimely death of George Frederick Cooke had been discussed, Dunlap announced his intention of writing a life of his actor-friend, who then lay in a new-made grave in St. Paul's Churchyard. The book was written, and though few remember the volume -72- now, it was widely read and served to keep alive the actor's memory. Since that time the grave has been cared for, and the marble tombstone, later erected by Edmund Kean, still stands amid the bushes close by the entrance door of the Chapel.

It was in the year 1810 that Cooke played at the Park Theatre, the first foreign "star" to come to the city and to attract the townspeople in such wise that they almost mobbed the playhouse in their efforts to see him. It was this same Cooke, who, hearing many speak of a young actor who had played there the year before, said, "I should have liked to have seen this Payne of yours." Cooke saw him the next year, and they appeared together in this same Park Theatre, Payne playing Edgar to Cooke's Lear.

The name of John Howard Payne did not then have the significance -73- that it came to have later. For he was known only as a youth who had acted Norval in the tragedy of Douglas with such fiery earnestness as to be proclaimed the "Young American Roscius." Who could have foreseen that adventurous "boy actor" grown to manhood, and writing a song that was to live and be known the world over by reason of its appeal to all hearts?

In Pearl Street, scarce a foot of which is left untrod by the footsteps of the writers of the city, Payne was born. Around the modest house that bore the number 33, near to Whitehall Street, he first toddled with baby steps, and the nearby "broad" street, where the canal had been, was his first journey when he could walk. His parents moved to East Hampton, on Long Island, so early in his childhood, and so many of his childish days were passed in the fields there -74- while his father taught school in the Clinton Academy, that East Hampton is often spoken of as the place of his birth. But for all that the "lowly thatched cottage" of his song was there, and for all that much of his later life was passed in foreign countries, Payne loved the city of his birth and took occasion many times to say so.

In London, when ill-luck bore hardest upon him, he wrote Clari, the Maid of Milan , and gave Home, Sweet Home to the heroine as her principal song. He received the honors of New York when he returned for a brief period, twenty-two years after his boyish triumph at the Park Theatre, and was so affectionately remembered that when, a decade later, he died in far-away Tunis, it was felt that he should not be left in a foreign land. But, although this sentiment was strong, it was not until -75- 1883 that his body was brought to America. Then, for a day, the coffin lay in state in the City Hall, in the Governor's Room, close by a window from which a view could be had of where the old Park Theatre had stood, just across the stretch of green sward. And the people, in honor of the man whose one song had thrilled an entire world, filed past the sealed coffin by the thousands, and shed many a tear that day.

One of the tortuous streets springing from Broadway, starting close by Trinity Church, winding away to the east, and mingling with other streets until brought to an abrupt halt by the river, was called, and is still called, Pine Street. In the first days of the nineteenth century it bore no suggestion, save in name, of a forest that once stretched above the city. In those good old days when the Dutch held full sway, Cornelius van -76- Tienhoven was the bookkeeper of the West India Company, and when he married the step-daughter of Jan Jansen Damen, the bride brought him as dower a slice of this forest. When, later, a clearing was cut through the wood it was called Tienhoven's Street. But such a name rang too strongly Dutch for those who served an English king, and when the English came they quickly called it King Street. And so it remained until after the Revolution, when, in remembrance of the Dutch forest, the name was changed to Pine Street.

Now, whether it was pure accident or whether he searched and found the prettiest street in all the town, it is nevertheless a fact that here Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith had fixed his home, scarce more than a block from Trinity Church, and here he wrote much of his verse. Here, too, in his house, on many a Tuesday evening, -77- met the Friendly Club, and at these meetings, following the custom of the club from the time that Washington lived in the city, each member in turn read a passage from some favorite author, thus giving impetus to the conversation. In Dr. Smith's parlor, joining in these discussions, sat William Dunlap, Charles Brockden Brown, James Kent, Joseph Dennie, and all the writers of the circle. It was Dr. Smith who wrote the prologue for the Park Theatre upon its opening, and not a member of the Friendly Club but attended the first performance.

It is small wonder that Charles Brockden Brown was the foremost member of the club. He had just claim. Thrusting aside criticism and advice, ignoring the fact that he was an invalid facing the hardship that must be overcome, he stood forth as the first writer in America to support -78- himself by his pen alone. The Bar, even though there was ever so fair a prospect of his earning a living by it, could not attract him against his natural desire. The writings of this determined genius could not but be successful. Seeking no friends, but having many, preferring the single companionship of Dr. Smith, with whom he lived, Charles Brockden Brown wrote his novel, Wieland , and followed it in the next three years with Ormond , Edgar Huntley , Arthur Mervyn , Jane Talbot , and Clara Howard . -79- Many a man of the pen, in admiration of the iron will of this first American novelist, finds a delight in thinking of him and in following his footsteps along Pine Street and the lower end of Broadway to the Battery.

In the days of bereavement following the death of Dr. Smith, the companion of Brown's solitude was Joseph Dennie. Often in the intervals of work they wandered through the quiet park, and many a time they knelt together in the Brick Church, a square beyond the Park Theatre, with the memory of their dead companion strong upon them. The shadow of their friend's death was still over them when they parted, and Joseph Dennie went to Philadelphia to start his magazine, The Portfolio , which was to cause the name of "The Lay Preacher" to ring through the land. He was in Philadelphia when Brown, -80- in 1803, started The Literary Magazine and American Register . But the next year he was in New York again, occasionally joining in a literary partnership in which there was a third member now, for Brown had married the daughter of Dr. Linn, the Presbyterian minister. The years rolled on, and Brown sought to fight off death by terrific work. But death only clutched him the tighter. The strolls with Elizabeth, his gentle-hearted wife, grew shorter and shorter and less frequent, until they ceased altogether six years after his marriage, and another landmark in the literary history of the city had gone down.

There was one stately and studious member of the Friendly Club who, it is recorded, could seldom be persuaded to go to the Park Theatre except on the "great nights." James Kent, then a Professor of Law at Columbia College, when not at work -81- (those were rare moments indeed), loved best to wander over the College grounds. These are now lost beyond all tracing in the overcrowding between the City Hall and Hudson River. Then it was a delightful country spot. When Professor Kent did not walk on the College grounds by the riverside, he strolled up Broadway past the hospital with his friend, Dr. David Hosack, and the two discussed at length the Elgin Botanical Garden that the physician had just laid out three miles above the city. It was this James Kent who came to be Chancellor of New York and whose memory lives in his Commentaries on American Law .

Beyond the city, separated from it in summer by a mile of marshy and untilled land, in winter by a dreary waste with a single road leading across a snow-bound way, lay the village of Greenwich. A dreamy little country -82- place that had been an Indian village before the settling of New Amsterdam; with lines of peaked-roof houses on zig-zagged lanes, and now and again, in the midst of a farm-like garden, a rambling house of stone, with great square windows and gables enough for half a dozen houses. The village might have been thousands of miles away from New York for all the likeness it bore to it.

On a dusty and rarely travelled lane, that led from the village towards the city, lived a man who had won the hearts of Americans by writing Common Sense , but who lived to reap their hatred by writing The Age of Reason , a deistic argument against Christianity. In the quiet village his house was pointed out as the abode of a friendless man, and when they spoke of him the villagers whispered the dread name—Tom Paine.

There he lived with Madame Bon -83- neville and her two sons, the only companions he cared to have near him save his own thoughts. In that picturesque spot he was fully content to pass his final days in solitude and marked contrast to a life of energy and excitement.

It is close upon a century since that time, and the pilgrim feet that seek to follow Paine through Greenwich Village must walk Bleecker Street (the dusty lane in much changed form), must pass Grove Street, and the fourth house from the corner, on the north side, walking towards the east, is Paine's. It was humble enough in the days when he lived there. It is far humbler now in contrast to the buildings that have grown up about it. A two-story frame house, the ground floor is made into a store, as though it made an effort to keep up with the business character of the street. Two brick structures -84- rise above it on each side and seem to have forced the roof to a frightful angle, so different is it from its new neighbors. Once Joel Barlow went to see Paine there, and the two spent almost an entire day beside a front window, talking of many things. Paine recalled the troublous days of the French Revolution, when he had written his Age of Reason in the prison of the Luxembourg, and had given it to Barlow to find a publisher. The author of the Columbiad often spoke of the visit later.

The dusty road where the house stood, even though it was little travelled, came to be too noisy a place for Paine, for in his illness even the chance passer-by irritated him. So he moved away to a house in a nearby field, so far from the road that he found absolute quiet. In after days Grove Street swept this home away, and another building, numbered 59, -85- is pointed out as the place where Paine died shortly after his removal.

The hatred of many people followed Thomas Paine even after death, and there could be no rest for an advocate of infidel opinions in a town where dwelt descendants of stern Huguenots. His body was taken to New Rochelle, and there, refused burial in hallowed ground, was finally laid to rest outside the town, in a corner of the farm given to him by the State in recognition of his services in the cause of the colonies against the mother country. Ten years later, William Cobbett, the English Radical, an ardent admirer of Paine, visited New Rochelle, and, seeing the neglected grave by the wayside, had the bones dug up one night and spirited away to England. In another twenty years the followers of Thomas Paine had grown in number, and the Paine Historical Society -86- erected a monument over the empty grave by the roadside. But on this spot, where no rest had been permitted him in life or in death, it seems rather to mock than to bless his grave.

Chapter V
The City that Irving Knew

S TRETCHING from Broadway towards the east, starting from the ivy-covered walls of the Chapel of St. Paul—here lay the scenes of Washington Irving's childhood. Golden Hill was the name given to this district, long before Irving was born; called so because of its golden appearance in the autumn days. It was a wondrously beautiful place, and set squarely upon the hill-top was an inn that, in the days of the Revolution, came to be a meeting-place for patriots. Even now, when the glories of Golden Hill seem quite forgotten, there are those who love to walk its crowded ways, and who firmly believe that it came by its name in prophecy -88- of the golden flower of literature one day to be born close by it.

The lane that once had its course up the grain-covered hill is there yet; now, a crowded, dismal thoroughfare bearing the name of William Street. It is well to start with this old lane, partly because it is the oldest street in the Golden Hill district, and partly because the Golden Hill inn of old still stands upon it: a squatty building built of narrow bricks that were brought from Holland, with a tall chimney like none of its neighbors; a venerable house full of cracks and crevices, carved mantels, open fireplaces, wide doorways; made over to conform to modern business ideas, but not conform -89- ing to these very well; painted and patched up to look new, but looking quite its age to any one with half an eye for architecture.

Almost opposite this inn of Golden Hill, midway of the block between Fulton and John streets, there stood in the year 1783 a quaint little two-storied dwelling with high-backed roof. One morning the patrons of the inn had a bit to gossip about. It was a year for gossip anyway, for the War of the Revolution was near its close. The talk was of a child that had been born to the Irving family over the way, and who was to be called Washington in honor of the man so well named the "Father of his Country." Before another year the Irving family moved into a house next to the inn on the north and separated from it only by a garden. In this house Washington Irving spent his youth. Close by he was -90- baptized, in the Chapel of St. George. The Chapel is gone now, but where Beekman Street crosses Cliff, on the front of a building appear in raised letters the words "St. George Building," that show the spot where it once stood.

Not far off is the place where the John Street Theatre was, where Irving went with his friend James K. Paulding, who was himself to make a name in the literature of the city. Irving's parents were not given to theatre-going, but Irving, when the family prayers had been said and he had been sent to bed, ofttimes crept out of the gable window, slid down the slanting roof, dropped to the ground, and stole away. He went, just as now following in his footsteps you can go, past the old inn, around the next corner where, on a house wall, is a tablet reciting the departed glories of Golden Hill, then on a few steps -91- until you reach, close by Broadway, a dreary arcade. Walk through the arcade and you will find it heavy with the sounds of workmen and machines. The arcade was a covered way leading to the playhouse, and is all that remains of the theatre.

Two minutes' walk away in Ann Street was Mrs. Ann Kilmaster's school, where Irving studied. Ann Street is only three blocks long and far from an inviting spot at any point, but here, in the last block of its length, it dwindles to half the width it had in starting.

A score of steps from the school, -92- at the northwest corner of Ann Street and William, Irving lived with his mother after his father's death. The house is no longer there, but there is one just like it five houses farther along William Street, that stood there in Irving's time.

In the Ann Street house, when he was a law clerk, he did his first writing, the sketches signed "Jonathan Oldstyle," and published in the Morning Chronicle , which was conducted by his brother Peter. From this house, while still a lad, he loved to wander down the streets that stretched over the eastern slope of Golden Hill, and spent hours on the piers watching the ships loading and unloading, dreaming of the foreign ports where they had touched, hoping that he might one day see the shores of those far-away lands. For even in his boyhood the longing for travel was strong upon him. -93-

He was still a law clerk, and still living in this Ann Street house, when he sat in an upper room with his brother William and James K. Paulding, and they planned a magazine of their own. They went to see David Longworth, the printer, in his shop beside the Park Theatre,—"Dusky Davie" they called him, after a song that was popular at the time,—and after many conferences and much secret doing the three stripling writers started the sparkling Salmagundi on its way, with the avowed purpose "to instruct the young, reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age." Paulding was the "Launcelot Langstaff" of the publication, and William Irving was "Pindar Cockloft" the poet.

To the west of Golden Hill, Cortlandt Street extends to the river. In a house on that street close by Broadway, the three writers of Salmagundi -94- spent much time at the home of the Fairlie sisters. There lived Mary Fairlie, known to Salmagundi readers as "Sophia Sparkle," and who married Cooper the tragic actor.

In the Ann Street house most of the Knickerbocker History of New York was written. Washington Irving and his brother Peter were to write it as an extravagant burlesque on Dr. Samuel Mitchill's Picture of New York , then a very popular and learned work. But Peter Irving was forced to Europe by ill health in 1808, and Washington settled down to the history, changing its plan and scope. Ten minutes' walk to the north of where Irving lived in Ann Street is a little park—a green spot that has taken the place of the squalid Mulberry Bend slum. In Mulberry Street opposite the park was the location of the imaginary Independent Columbian Hotel where -95- Dietrich Knickerbocker was supposed to have lived, and left his manuscript in payment of his board bill.

But by far the most important house connected with this part of Irving's life is gone now. This was in Broadway where Leonard Street now crosses. A square house of many rooms, indeed it was a mansion in the city of 1809. Here lived Josiah Ogden Hoffman, the protector of the youthful author, in whose office Irving came by his law training. In the Hoffman mansion, Irving courted Matilda Hoffman, the lawyer's fair daughter; here he saw her sicken and grow more feeble day by day; here she died, and so ended the romance of his life. He never mentioned her name in after days and could not bear to hear it spoken. But she lived in his memory, and he never married. In the depths of his seclusion, during the first months of his sorrow, he -96- finished the History . But his heart was not in the laughter of the book, and he made joy for others out of his own sorrow.

Two years after this, Irving was living beside the Bowling Green, at 16 Broadway, with his friend, Henry Brevoort, at the house of Mrs. Ryckman. While here he edited the Analectic Magazine . From here he often strolled up Broadway as far as Cortlandt Street, to dine at the house of Jane Renwick, then passing her widowhood in the city. Her son became the Professor James Renwick of Columbia College. It was she of whom Burns sang as The Blue-Eyed Lassie .

Still another house knew the Irving of early days, the boarding-house of Mrs. Brandish, at Greenwich and Rector streets, where he went from Bowling Green. It was a pretty brick building on a quiet street then, but it is a gloomy-enough place to -97- look upon now, darkened by the Elevated Railroad and overrun with hoards of noisy children and tenement dwellers; a strange spot to look for memories of the gentle-hearted Irving.

When Irving left New York in 1815, it was with no intention of remaining away any length of time. In England he wrote Rip Van Winkle , though he had never been in the Catskills, where the scene of his classic lay. In Paris he met John Howard Payne, and the two worked together, in the Rue Richelieu, adapting French plays to English representation—but this partnership came to little. He went to Spain and there, while writing the Life and Voyages of Columbus , he met a young man then fitting himself by travel to enter on the duties of Professor of Modern Languages in Bowdoin College. This was Henry W. Longfellow, unknown then as a poet. While in Spain, Irving occupied -98- the Governor's quarters in the Alhambra, an otherwise deserted palace, abiding there in a kind of Oriental dream, and living over in imagination the Conquest of Granada . Back in London again as Secretary of the Legation to the Court of St. James, he arranged his material for the Voyages of the Companions of Columbus , and half a dozen other works. Then, after seventeen years of wandering, he returned to his native city.

Although he tells us that his heart throbbed at sight of New York, and that in all his travels he had seen no place that caused such a thrill of joy, it was no longer the city of his youth. He had left a town of one hundred thousand people and found a city of two hundred thousand. The companions of his youth had grown to be men, and many of them were renowned in literature and business life. He found streets grown long out of all -99- remembrance, houses tall beyond all knowing, strangers who knew him simply as a name. He found many silent graves where he had left blooming youth. But for all this there were many ready and anxious to do him honor.

A few steps beyond Trinity Churchyard on Broadway is a narrow thoroughfare called Thames Street. It is easy to be found, and beside it is a tall building on which is a tablet relating how the Burns's Coffee-House once stood on the spot. This had been a mansion built by Étienne De Lancey, a Huguenot noble, and Thames Street was the carriage-way that led to the door. In this coffee-house the merchants of the city signed the Non-Importation Agreement in the days before the Revolution.

When Irving returned to the city the coffee-house was gone, and on -100- its site was the City Hotel, the main hostelry of the city. Here the chief citizens gathered and a banquet was held and all honor paid to the "illustrious guest, thrice welcome to his native city."

From the site of this old house, it is a pleasant walk down Broadway, past the Bowling Green to Bridge Street, where, at No. 3, Irving, after his return, went to live with his brother Ebenezer, who had been the Captain Greatheart of "Cockloft Hall." Here, in this home, Irving spent many happy days. It was called by him "the family hive," for it was always filled to overflowing with relatives.

1. JAMES KIRKE PAULDING.
2. PHILIP HONE.
3. WASHINGTON IRVING.
4. JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE.
5. FITZ GREENE HALLECK.
6. J. FENIMORE COOPER.

But one place above all others in New York is filled with the memory of Irving. This is a bit of ground on the east side of the city, a point of land stretching out into the river. Here of all places the spirit of Irving -101- still lingers, for here of all places it is less changed in appearance since his feet trod the ground. In Irving's day it was a stretch of countryside with summer houses of the wealthy at long distances facing the river. Now, though the city has encompassed it, there is still left the one green spot by the riverside beyond Eighty-eighth Street. The East River Park they call it, and there are rough stone steps leading to the waterside, winding paths and overhanging trees—the trees that Irving stood beneath. And there, across the stretch of water, is Hell Gate, its tempestuous waters tamed by the hand of -102- man, but nevertheless the same Hell Gate that Irving looked upon and that Irving wrote about. Part of this park were the grounds of John Jacob Astor, the friend of Irving. His house stood beyond the park, where Eighty-eighth Street now touches East End Avenue,—a square two-story frame dwelling of colonial type, painted white, with deep veranda, wide halls, and spacious rooms; set high upon a hill, backed by a forest of towering trees, and fronted by a vast lawn stretching by gentle slope to the cliff at the riverside. Here Irving was a guest, and wrote Astoria , telling of Astor's settlement on the Columbia River and of scenes beyond the Rockies; here he met Captain Bonneville and his friends, and the journals of the one and thrilling tales of the other gave material for the Adventures of Captain Bonneville . -103-

The house of Astor is gone now, but within the limits of this park still stands the home of Gracie, the merchant, where Irving was a constant visitor, and where, in the rooms given over to stranger hands, still linger memories of Paulding and Halleck, Bancroft and Drake, and a host of others.

It was while working on Astoria that Irving began the building of Wolfert's Roost, the Van Tassel house of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow , on that delightful spot on the Hudson -104- which in the first days of Irving's residence there was called Dearman. In after time the name was changed to Irvington, in his honor, and Wolfert's Roost, in honor of the glorious country, became Sunnyside. It is Sunnyside to this day, altered by additions made in the intervening years, but still the house of Irving; and the ivy clinging to its walls has sprung from a root taken from the ruins of Scott's "fair Melrose" and planted where it now grows by the friendly hand of Jane Renwick.

On the corner of Seventeenth Street and Irving Place (a thoroughfare to which his memory gave a name), late in life, Irving lived betimes. Here was once the home of John T. Irving, a -105- nephew of the author. It is a sturdy house still, and looks as youthful as its neighbors that were built many a day after it. Then it stood quite alone in a stretch of country. From the windows of the large room on the ground floor, Irving could see the waters of the East River. In this room he wrote portions of Oliver Goldsmith , parts, too, of the Life of Mahomet , and arranged the notes of what was to be his last book—the Life of Washington .

But his real home was Sunnyside, and there, in the year 1859, when he was seventy-six years old, he died.

Chapter VI
With Paulding, Drake, and Halleck

I N the summer of 1797, a tall, well-built lad with a face showing just a suggestion of melancholy, landed from the weekly market sloop and walked along the streets of New York for the first time. He was a country boy, well versed in trees and brooks and used to pathless hills and rough country roads, and his first impression of New York was that the dwellers there were great lumpkins. He could not imagine why they pointed at him and nodded at him and laughed as he walked in the middle of the street, quite disregarding the paved walk. He stopped, from time to time, to ask his way, -107- until he came to a little square brick house in Vesey Street, below Church, bearing the number 43, the home of William Irving. There he went in and was given a good hug by Mrs. Irving. The boy was James Kirke Paulding, and she who welcomed him was his sister, with whom he was to live until he should get a start in the ways and work of the city.

William Irving lived in a house delightfully situated, though no one would think so now when the spot is jammed with merchants' warehouses, and sounds of trade fill the air. When Paulding came to town, it was beyond the ken of the business section, and there were not so many houses about but that he could enjoy an inviting view. From the front door he looked straight before him over the grounds of Columbia College, and to the left across green gardens to the river. From his little -108- window in the upper story he saw the city to the south, and to the east St. Paul's Chapel, with the steeple that came to be so gray with age looking then so new, for it had just been added to the church. Beyond the graveyard and across Broadway, he had a good view of the park with its three buildings—the Bridewell, the Almshouse, and the Prison,—and across the park could see the Park Theatre and the Brick Church. He could catch a glimpse of Broadway winding over a hill toward the Stone Bridge at Canal Street, and other roads leading into the country towards the north, where level stretches led past rude farmhouses and quaint inns.

The first few years of Paulding in the city, when he was clerk in the United States Loan Office, were years of hard work. But there were relaxations, too, for his relationship to William Irving brought him in contact -109- with the other members of the family—young Washington Irving and Dr. Peter Irving. When, in a few years, Dr. Irving published his newspaper, the Morning Chronicle , Paulding wrote bits of prose and verse for it. So his first writings appeared in the same publication and at the same time as the first writings of Washington Irving, and it was the interchange of thought in the Vesey Street house and the opportunities afforded by the Morning Chronicle that led Paulding's thoughts towards writing as a profession.

Meantime there was much going on in the way of improvement. The new City Hall was erected in the park; the first free schoolhouse was opened; and Fulton's Clermont sailed up the Hudson, the first successful steamboat. A commission had been appointed, too, with the object of directing the course of the streets, -110- which up to that time had grown out of the paths left by the cows in their wanderings to pasture. The commissioners did their work so that, as time went on, the highways were laid out to form a city of strict right angles. The cows certainly did their part in a manner that left far more picturesque twists and turns than were to be found in the upper part laid out by the commissioners in such a scientifically uninteresting way.

Paulding lived with William Irving in the Vesey Street house for nine years, and then the Irvings moved a few blocks the other side of Columbia College, to 287 Greenwich Street, and Paulding went with them. Here began the meetings of a literary set, which in a few months developed into the "Ancient Club of New York," with Washington, Peter, and William Irving, Paulding, Henry Brevoort, and Gouverneur Kemble -111- leading members. Kemble owned some land in New Jersey, on which was located Salmagundi's Cockloft Hall, and on this account was called "The Patroon." From one of the informal meetings of the Ancient Club, Washington Irving, his brother William, and Paulding went secretly to Irving's house in Ann Street to discuss details of Salmagundi . Paulding wrote his share of Salmagundi on the upper floor of the Greenwich Street house, while the lower floor was the mill of Pindar Cockloft, conducted by William Irving.

From this house on many an evening the friends went to dine at Dyde's, the fascinating eating-house near the Park Theatre, then beginning a long career with the founders of Salmagundi as a foundation for the memories that were to cluster around its doors, to be passed over, years later, to Windust's still more -112- famous resort on almost the same spot.

Paulding was still living with the Irving family when, in 1807, they went to live at No. 17 in aristocratic State Street, at the corner of Pearl, facing the Battery Park. Here, overlooking the blue waters of the bay dotted with sailboats and rowboats, and beyond to the stretches of Jersey shore, Paulding wrote his contributions to the Analectic Magazine , edited by Washington Irving from his home little more than a stone's throw away across the Bowling Green; also, The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan . Here, too, replying to an attack on his country, he wrote, The United States and England , a pamphlet that attracted the notice of President Madison, who summoned Paulding to Washington for eight years as Secretary of the Board of Navy Commis -113- sioners. During those eight years he wrote The Backwoodsman his longest poem and the one which he liked best of all, a liking not generally shared by his readers; the second series of Salmagundi ; and Koningsmarke .

Having married Gertrude, the sister of his friend and companion Gouverneur Kemble, his days were moving smoothly along when the death of his wife's father took him again to New York and he went to live in what had long been the home of "The Patroon." This was a mansion of solid type in Whitehall Street, corner of Stone, set in the midst of a wide-spreading garden, a site blurred out in later days by the Produce Exchange. Here he lived during the fourteen years he acted as Navy Agent at New York, devoting his evenings to literary work, writing his most successful book, The Dutchman's -114- Fireside , also John Bull in America , Tales of the Good Woman , and Westward Ho! In the evening he went often to the Park Theatre, and came to know James H. Hackett, the greatest Falstaff America had seen, writing for him The Lion of the West , which Hackett acted for many years. And then after fifteen years in this house he left it, and with his family went to Washington as Secretary of the Navy.

Once more, in 1841, he returned to New York, to live in Beach Street, then the fashionable St. John's Park neighborhood. But, his wife dying before he was really settled, he soon left New York and passed the last days of his life in Dutchess County, the region of his birth.

At about the time Paulding moved into the State Street house two young men met one afternoon at the home of a mutual friend. One was study -115- ing medicine and beginning to see something more in life than a struggle for mere existence. He was Joseph Rodman Drake. The other, Fitz-Greene Halleck, was a bookkeeper and had but just come from his birthplace in Guilford, Connecticut. He had read much poetry and had written some stray verse. A few days after their meeting, the two came together again in the rooms where Halleck boarded in Greenwich Street, not half a dozen houses from the place where Washington Irving was living with Mrs. Brandish. The second meeting was the real start of an inseparable friendship which has caused them to be looked upon as the Orestes and Pylades of American poets.

Halleck had begun his work for Jacob Barker. The warehouse where he was employed stands yet and can easily be found by walking down John -116- Street to Burling Slip, and so on around the corner into South Street by the waterside. Drake ofttimes took that walk and sat there by the side of his friend's desk. Often, too, in the late afternoon, Halleck walked from there to the green that since has been called the City Hall Park, and sat until Drake came from his studies in the nearby College of Physicians and Surgeons. The college was part of Columbia, which lay to the west of the green. In time the city overgrew the college grounds so completely that those interested in remembering where they had been set up a tablet at West Broadway and Murray Street, as a reminder that they should not be entirely forgotten. From the park it was the wont of the youthful poets to walk along Broadway below Trinity Church—then the fashionable promenade,—and so on to the Battery, -117- past where Irving had lived by the Bowling Green, past where Paulding was then living.

The time came when Drake was graduated, and then there were the long evenings together back of his office in the store numbered 121 Bowery, just above Hester Street. From this house the friends made their long excursions across the Harlem River, far beyond the town, into the romantic Bronx of which Drake sang so often and so well.

One night, starting from the Bowery shop, Drake took Halleck down Broadway into Thames Street, and there, back of the City Hotel, dined him in a dingy little public house, the first of many pleasant evenings there. It was the ale-house kept by William Reynolds, a genial, red-faced man who had been a grave-digger in the nearby Trinity Churchyard.

The tavern remained a place of -118- entertainment for close upon a hundred years, most of the time known as "Old Tom's," from Reynolds's successor. It came to be a landmark for the curious, but as the curious always stood outside and never by any chance went in to buy of what was on sale there, it went the way of all old places. To-day, if you turn into Thames Street, from busy Broadway, you come upon a mass of buildings in perpetual shade, and with a decidedly provincial air not at all in keeping with the up-to-date city. A walk of half a block brings you to Temple Street—a thoroughfare leading nowhere in particular, but which wise chroniclers have quarrelled over, some urging that it came by its name because of being close by Trinity Church, which is a temple of worship, and others quite as vigorously contending that it took its name from Charlotte Temple, who lived nearby. -119- Here you find Reynolds's tavern metamorphosed into a modern place of business, and though the street is still quaint-appearing, every suggestion of romance has vanished from the tavern. Nevertheless the curious, who in its days of need regarded it from afar, love to sit in it, surrounded by modern conveniences, and tell what it was like "in Drake's time."

Drake prospered, and after a time set up his pharmacy in the busiest part of town, that later grew to be the core of Newspaper Row. When Drake lived in Park Row, the second door from Beekman Street, he and Halleck hit upon the idea of the "Croaker Papers," a series of satires in verse, printed in the Evening Post , in which the poets sailed into the public characters of the day. This was the house where Halleck went to read his Fanny to Drake, and made some corrections at his friend's sug -120- gestion before he gave it to the world.

Around the corner from the Park Row shop, the Shakespeare Tavern was conducted by Thomas Hawkins Hodgkinson, the actor; a resort for the actors, the artists, the writers, the talkers of the town; a popular rendezvous quite in contrast to Reynolds's quiet inn. It stood at the southwest corner of Fulton and Nassau streets, a double house of brick, having for its sign a bust of the great poet over the door. In after years a tablet was set to mark the spot. Halleck tells of a meeting here with James Lawson, the journalist, who came to write the Tales and Sketches of a Cosmopolite . -121-

On a night when Drake and Paulding and some others gathered for a friendly evening there arose a discussion, argued for and against by all the company, as to whether or not the rivers of America were rich enough in legend and romance to lend themselves to poetic treatment. And after the talk had lengthened into the morning hours, Drake went to the room over his Park Row shop to put his view of the subject into writing. In a few days he read to Halleck the poem on which his fame chiefly rests, The Culprit Fay —a poetic fantasy illumining the Highlands of the Hudson.

In the year 1820, Halleck sat in the Park Row house by the bedside of his friend, who was dying of consumption, and here, at the age of twenty-five, Joseph Rodman Drake passed away. Halleck followed the coffin to that beautiful spot beyond the Harlem -122- that they both loved so well, and there by the side of the Bronx streamlet the poet Drake was buried. In the depth of his grief Halleck wrote the lines:

And now after more than three quarters of a century the words still murmur their message of friendship and sorrow above Drake's grave. The city has sped on far beyond the little graveyard, and harsh sounds throb where once was only the singing of birds; but the consecrated spot remains, cared for year by year as well as may be in despite of relic-hunting vandals.

Halleck outlived his friend by many long years. He gave up bookkeeping for Jacob Barker, and during -123- eighteen years was the confidential manager of the affairs of John Jacob Astor. But he never failed to regret the comrade of his youth, losing with him much of his inspiration.

Half an hour's journey from Drake's grave, on the western side of the Harlem River, there stands, at One Hundred and Sixtieth Street and Edgecombe Avenue, a house on a bluff so high above the river that it can be seen from afar—white in the sunlight. This is the Morris house, where Mary Philipse lived after she became the wife of Roger -124- Morris; where Washington had his headquarters; where Madame Jumel lived, and where she married Aaron Burr. To the one who strolls in the footsteps of littérateurs of a bygone day, it is, more than all, the house where Halleck visited, and where he wrote Marco Bozzaris . Although this was his most widely known poem, and though it was written five years after the death of Drake, the memory of his friend was like a fresh sorrow to him while he wrote. During forty odd years from that time he continued the gently courteous, witty talker, the dignified life of each gathering he attended. But, as he knew so well, his Muse was sorely wounded when Drake died, and the fuller poetic life that might have been his was buried on the green slope of the Bronx with his friend.

Chapter VII
Cooper and His Friends

I N that cheerless precinct of New York City to which still clings the name St. John's Park, though there has been no park there this half-century,—in Beach Street, a dozen or perhaps twenty steps from Hudson Street, there stands a house that could not fail to attract the attention of an observant passer-by. A brick building, its architectural features suggest roomy attractiveness—a condition little sought after in these days when the value of every inch of ground calls for compactness regardless of beauty of appearance. One looking at this building and given to sentiment might argue that it is strongly reminiscent of a human being who -126- had once been vigorous and had made a considerable show in the world of fashion and pride, but who had sunk to poverty and decrepitude. For the carved window-cases are hacked and beaten away, the wrought-iron railings are twisted and rusty, the marble steps are cracked and crumbling, the high ceilings with their heavy and ornate mouldings are seamed and discolored, and the massive oaken doors are cracked by many a rusty nail driven into them, holding ragged and worn-out garments. Yet even in its age and neglect are found traces of its primal sturdy and artistic proportions.

In the year 1821, this house was the home of James Fenimore Cooper. His first book, Precaution , had failed utterly. His second book, The Spy , had been prodigiously successful, when in this year he went to New York to live in what was then the fashionable district of St. John's Park. -127- He was thirty-one years old, had lived at Cooperstown, studied at Yale, shipped as a sailor before the mast, made voyages to England and Spain, been appointed midshipman, and seen service on Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain, had resigned his commission, and had married Augusta de Lancey at Heathcote Hill Manor, Mamaroneck. After the birth of his daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, who became a writer of rural sketches, he settled down in Westchester County to live the life of a country gentleman. He might have remained there all his days but that one day he got hold of a particularly stupid book of English life, and was so bored by it that it forced from him the exclamation that he could write a better himself! Which remark being interpreted literally by his wife, there was nothing for the country gentleman but to make good his boast. So he wrote a -128- dull and stupid story which even his friends had difficulty in reading to the end, and then, doubtless finding writing more agreeable than farming, wrote another that destined him evermore to a literary life.

This much of Cooper's life was behind him when he moved into the Beach Street house. In this home he wrote The Pioneers , first of the famous Leatherstocking Tales and, too, The Pilot .

In the New York of that day there was one place where he loved to go for a quiet dinner and discussion with the literary friends whom he quickly gathered around him. This was the chief hostelry of the day, the City Hotel, which stood close by where Wall Street runs into Broadway. It was at one of these dinners that he met James A. Hillhouse, who, though he had already written The Judgment and was recognized as a poet, -129- was then engaged in mercantile pursuits in the city; but was very soon to make a home in New Haven and remain there during the rest of his life. Hillhouse was not a regular diner with Cooper, but he introduced there a friend who became much more regular in his attendance. Samuel Woodworth was even then shouldering aside adversity with intermittent success. It was his habit to walk briskly up from his printing office at the foot of Wall Street, very much in the manner of a man having an imperative appointment. Four years before Cooper came to town, on a very hot summer day, Woodworth had walked in this same eager manner to his house farther up-town in Duane Street, and there, drinking from a pump before his door, had said: "I'd like to have a drink to-day from the old bucket that hung in my father's well." Whereupon his kindly wife -130- hinted that the old bucket of his remembrance would make a good subject for a poem—a hint that within the hour took the form of The Old Oaken Bucket , a pastoral poem well remembered and much sung, though many another of his, many an operetta, and even the historical romance, The Champion of Freedom , have faded from memory.

At these dinners, when Cooper sat with his friends, Woodworth and Morris held the first discussions of the plans for The Mirror , which was started in 1823, but from which the inconstant Woodworth soon retired.

On more than one occasion one of the dinner party was Richard Henry Dana, a founder of the North American Review and the friend of Bryant. The City Hotel was quite convenient for him, for he had made a sort of headquarters in the place of Wiley, the publisher, around the corner in -131- Wall Street by New Street. At that time he issued from Wiley's shop The Idle Man , that literary publication which scarcely lived long enough to include his novels, Tom Thornton and Paul Felton , and some contributions from Washington Allston and Bryant.

Many a good idea came from the meetings at the City Hotel, but possibly none more felicitous than that of the Bread-and-Cheese Club. This remained so long in the germ that the realization seemed far off, but finally, in 1824, began the holding of its fortnightly meetings in Washington Hall—afterwards swept away to give place to the Stewart Building at Broadway and Reade Street. The club derived its name from Cooper's conceit of having candidates balloted for with bread and cheese, a bit of bread favoring election and cheese deciding against it.

As Cooper had in the main origin -132- ated the club, he was the leading spirit around whom gathered Halleck and Bryant, Percival, Professor Renwick, Dr. J.W. Francis, and all the writers of the day. An enthusiastic member was Philip Hone, who had just retired from business and bought a house at 235 Broadway opposite the park, a site considered a good way up-town for a residence. His diary, which in after years led him to be called the Pepys of America, was commenced in this house, but the greater part was written at his residence of later date, at the southwest -133- corner of Broadway and Great Jones Street.

Gulian C. Verplanck was a member too. At the time he occupied a professorship in the General Theological Seminary. From one of the meetings he walked down Broadway and through Wall Street past the house, near Broad Street, where he was born, discussing with Bryant and Robert C. Sands an early suggestion of the Talisman magazine, which was not to ripen into an accomplished fact for a good three years. On this same walk, too, he took part while Bryant and Sands discussed plans for the Atlantic Monthly , which Sands established the next year.

But writers were not the only members of the Bread-and-Cheese Club. There were scholars and professional men, and often there were statesmen and men of national distinction as guests. But as Cooper was its lead -134- ing spirit, when he left for his trip abroad the club went to pieces. He started in 1825 on his foreign travels, and at the time of his going was living at 345 Greenwich Street, where he had finished work on The Last of the Mohicans .

In the year after his going there was a gala night at the Lafayette Theatre, when The Spy was enacted. The Lafayette was the largest theatre then. Upon its site in West Broadway near Canal Street St. Alphonsus's Church now stands. To that performance came from up-State Enoch Crosby, who was said to be the original Spy, and when he appeared in a box with some friends the audience gave him a thunderous ovation.

Cooper returned from abroad in 1833, having added The Prairie , The Red Rover , The Water Witch , and The Bravo to his list of published -135- books, and went to live in Bleecker Street, two blocks from Broadway, near Thompson Street. This was a select neighborhood then of pretty, irregular brick dwellings. The house is there yet, but the neighborhood is no longer elegant. Italian merchants, unkempt in appearance, carry on meagre and uncertain kinds of business, and Cooper's old house is so decorated with signs inside and out as to be picturesque only for its dinginess and disorder. Cooper did not live there long, for he soon moved to Broadway at Prince Street, into a house that later gave way to Niblo's Garden, and there he completed work on the volumes covering his stay in Europe, under the titles Sketches in Switzerland and Gleanings in Europe . But he made no very long stay on Broadway, for he moved again, this time to St. Mark's Place, a few doors from Third Avenue, into an unpre -136- tentious brick house of three stories that is there still. There he wrote Homeward Bound and began in earnest that fierce combat with his critics which was to last to the end of his days and leave many a regret that he had not been a more even-tempered man. From this house he went to Cooperstown, which became his final home.

At the time that Cooper lived in New York there walked along Broadway, between Canal Street and the Chapel of St. Paul's, on almost every pleasant afternoon, a man who in appearance was a veritable Hamlet. His garb was a customary suit of solemn black, and his eyes sought the ground as he moved with pensive step. This was McDonald Clarke, whose eccentric appearance and acts and whose melancholy verses gave him the name of The Mad Poet.

If Broadway was his walk of an -137- afternoon, Park Row was his haunt by night; and Windust's place, a door or two below the Park Theatre (literally below it, for it was beneath the sidewalk), was his centring point.

The resort of Edward Windust was not an old place, but a famous one. It was opened in 1824 and lasted only until 1837, when the proprietor thought himself cramped in space and opportunity and, moving away to seek a larger field, found failure. It was the actors' museum of the city. Its walls were lined with reminders of the stage: playbills, and swords that had seen the service of savage mimic wars; pictures, and frames of clippings, and bits of the wardrobes of kings and queens who had strutted their brief hour and passed away. It was the nightly gathering point of such actors as were in town, such writers, such wits, such gallant gentlemen. Edmund Kean and the Wal -138- lacks, Harry Placide and Cooper, Jack Scott, Mitchell, Brown, and Junius Brutus Booth were frequenters, with Fitz-Greene Halleck, Willis, Morris, and the rest, who nightly crowded the tier of stalls that ranged along one side of the room, making them resound with gay and brilliant talk.

In Windust's, too, sat McDonald Clarke in gloomy majesty night after night. There he formed among many others the acquaintance of Mordecai M. Noah, journalist and playwright, who had been Consul at Tunis and who in the years to come was to start several unsuccessful papers, until in 1843 he was to publish the Sunday Times and Messenger , which continued for more than half a century.

From Windust's McDonald Clarke often wandered out into the City Hall Park over the way, and sat there through many a long summer night -139- dreaming over his Elixir of Moonshine , or, with the memory of his afternoon walks upon him, composing lines for his Afara, or the Belles of Broadway , and many another melancholy verse. Often he sat there until daybreak, then went on into Broadway again. He had a favorite early-morning stand on the Fulton Street side of St. Paul's Churchyard, and there, an hour before the town was stirring, soliloquized as he looked through the railings at the brown tombstones.

On these same mornings, but a few hours later, another writer looked down on the same faded tombstones, for Ray Palmer was the teacher of a young ladies' school down Fulton Street beyond Broadway. He was young then, in his twenty-second year, in ill-health, and suffering under discouragements that would have been unendurable to a weaker-dis -140- positioned man. As he looked from the school window into the churchyard he wrote a hymn which remained in his desk for several years, until it was published in quite an accidental manner by Dr. Lowell Mason, when he needed material for a book of church music which he had compiled. In a few years this hymn, My Faith Looks Up to Thee , was to be sung oftener than any other American hymn.

The sights and the sounds of the busy city that were an inspiration to Ray Palmer always sent The Mad Poet in another direction,—on up Broadway to Leonard Street, turning down there two short blocks to Chapel Street, to the house where at that time he made his home. It was a dreary enough street and a dismal enough upper room, but there was a narrow window where the poet could look over the housetops in the mid -141- night hour and watch the stars that he seemed ever to hold converse with. Or, if it was in the early evening, he had but to lean forward from his window to see the people going into the Italian Opera House on the next corner. The Italian Opera House had a great deal of attraction for The Mad Poet. Not that he went there often to attend the performances, but he liked to inspect it from his window height as though he caught a glimpse of the sorrows and disappointments connected with it. He had moved into the house in the year 1833—the year that the opera house was opened after it had been built for a company headed by Lorenzo Da Ponte.

This Da Ponte had come to America in 1805, having a record as an Italian dramatist, who had furnished libretti for Mozart's operas, Don Giovanni and Nozze di Figaro . He -142- was professor in Columbia College when he matured an idea for establishing a home for Italian opera in New York, a plan which led to the building of the opera house near which The Mad Poet lived. It opened splendidly with the singers of the Cavalier di Rivafinoli, but a short season ended Lorenzo Da Ponte's hopes.

If The Mad Poet from his housetop could have seen what the next few years had in store, he would have beheld the aged dramatist dying at his home in Spring Street, close to Broadway, his body followed from there by his mourning friends—Halleck and Verplanck and Woodworth and some few others,—followed to the churchyard surrounding the nearby St. Patrick's Church; he would have seen the mark above the grave crumbling away, leaving nothing to point the spot where Da Ponte lay -143- buried with his dreams and his hopes. But no inspiration hinted any of these things to McDonald Clarke, and once, in speaking of Da Ponte, he said that there at least was a man who had lived long unrewarded but had attained his ambition at last.

For nine years after The Mad Poet went to the Chapel Street house his Broadway walks continued, his dress each year growing more shabby, his eye more downcast, and his verse more melancholy. Then one day he was seen close by his favorite stand near the Churchyard of St. Paul's, acting so strangely that he was thought to be intoxicated. Next morning he awoke to find himself a prisoner in a vagrant cell, and the shock to his sensitive nature sent him, a madman indeed, to the Blackwell's Island Asylum, where in a few days he died.

Years after, the author of Glimpses -144- of Home Life , Emma C. Embury, whose home was in Brooklyn, told of a knoll in Greenwood Cemetery by the side of a little lake where the oak-trees shaded a modest tomb on which there were some lines of verse. They were lines written by McDonald Clarke. The tomb is there yet, still shaded by oaks that have grown sturdier with the passing years, and the grave by the lake is the grave of The Mad Poet.

Chapter VIII
Those Who Gathered about Poe

W HEN New York was a much younger city than it is, when it was well within bounds on the lower part of the island of Manhattan, long before there was a thought that it would overspread the island, jump over a stream and go wandering up the mainland, overleap a river and go spreading over another island to the sea,—long before the time when these things came to be, there lay scattered in several directions on the island of Manhattan and dotting the rolling country land beyond, several tiny villages. These were Harlem, and Yorkville, and Odellville, and Bloomingdale, and Chelsea, and Greenwich. The last was the ham -146- let closest to the city. Quaint and curious, it spread its scattered way along the Hudson River where houses had been set up according to the needs and vagaries of men on roads natural and unplanned. When the city grew larger and finally swept around Greenwich Village, the roads becoming city streets, the village continued a labyrinthian way, where strangers wandered and were lost before they knew it.

In the very core of this old-time Greenwich section and at the very place where the streets are so tangled, so irregular, so crooked, so often no thoroughfare, so winding that they seem to be seeking out the old farmhouses which they led to in early days, there is a pretty little playground for children. This Hudson Park is an open spot with green lawns and marble walks and a tall iron fence surrounding it; quite a -147- model park with everything about fresh, and new, and modern. It is so very new and so very neat and so very clean that one would not look there for old-time flavor. But curiously enough one thing about it seems out of tone. On the green lawn is a monument old and faded which, in an effort to match it with its natty surroundings, has been set upon a base of glistening white marble. The monument is a sort of key for the antiquarian, for without it this playground in its spick-and-span newness might not be readily identified as the old St. John's Burying-Ground, where once stood the accumulated tombstones of more than fourscore years, until they were swept away and buried as deep as those -148- whose memories they marked. A new generation tramples in and romps over the new park, with no knowledge or thought of what is below the surface.

The graveyard of St. John's was a quiet, restful place in a quiet, restful locality in the year 1837, when Edgar Allan Poe had a habit of wandering through it. In that year Poe lived within a few steps of the burial-ground in a modest wooden house that was numbered 113 Carmine Street. He was then in his twenty-eighth year, had published three volumes of poems, and had written some short stories and criticisms. He had but just given up the editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger at Richmond, a position he had secured through the friendship of John P. Kennedy, who had been his friend in his early struggles in Baltimore and who was to continue a friend to him through all his life. In 1832 Poe had -149- first met him, when Kennedy was writing Swallow Barn . Afterwards Kennedy wrote Horseshoe Robinson and other books before abandoning literature for politics and, in time, becoming Secretary of the Navy.

So Poe came to New York, and with him Virginia, his child wife, who was already marked a victim of consumption, and there in the Carmine Street house they lived. Sometimes she walked with her sombre-faced husband through the nearby burying-ground, but more often she sat at an upper window from which she could watch him on his ramble. In the same house lived William Gowans the bookseller of Nassau Street; and there Poe did work for the New York Quarterly Review ; there also -150- he finished The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym .

In another house, some little distance away but in a direct course up Carmine Street, in Sixth Avenue close by Waverley Place, Poe lived for a short time, but long enough to write The Fall of the House of Usher and some magazine work, when he went to Philadelphia to The Gentleman's Magazine , edited by William E. Burton, the famous comedian. Oddly enough, when Burton died years afterwards, he found a resting place in the obscure St. John's Burying-Ground.

1. RICHARD HENRY STODDARD.
2. JOHN JAMES AUDUBON.
3. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.
4. BAYARD TAYLOR.
5. EDGAR ALLAN POE.
6. ROBERT FULTON.

It was not until 1844 that Poe returned to New York, and during the years of his absence several writers with whom he was to become acquainted on his return had forged their literary way. There was Seba Smith, more generally known as "Major Jack Downing," from the hu -151- morous papers which he wrote under that name, and who about this time was writing the romance in verse called Powhatan . There was William Ross Wallace, the lawyer and magazine writer, who in after years was to be known through his poem of The Liberty Bell . There was the Congregational clergyman George B. Cheever making his way, having resigned his first pastorate, at Salem, Massachusetts, where he had been imprisoned for libel on account of his temperance sketch Deacon Giles's Distillery . There was Robert H. Messinger, known through his Horatian ode, Give Me the Old , his fame daily expanding in fashionable and literary circles. There was Edward Robinson, Professor in the Union Theological Seminary, just returned from a tour of exploration in Palestine with Rev. Eli Smith, publishing Biblical Researches in Palestine . And -152- there was Isaac McLelland, whose verse was as good as his sportsmanship. These were some few of the men who were first to recognize the genius of the poet.

Poe returned to New York the wiser for his experience with The Gentleman's Magazine and with Graham's Magazine , but having failed to establish The Stylus , a proposed publication of his own, which during all his life was to be a vision of Tantalus, just beyond his grasp. He returned rich in experience, strong in adversity, poor in pocket. There was no glorious opening for him, and finally he accepted a sub-editorship on the Evening Mirror , grinding out copy for several hard-working hours each day.

The Evening Mirror was a newly started publication, but its interests were so entwined with others that its history stretched back something -153- more than twenty years from the day when Poe first occupied a desk in the office. Going back these one and twenty years, the better to understand the atmosphere in which Poe worked, to the spring of 1823, the time is reached when George P. Morris and Samuel Woodworth joined forces and opened an office for the publication of the New York Mirror at 163 William Street. Morris was a young man then, but already gave strong evidence of the decided character he was to develop as an eminently practical printer and successful writer of songs—a man of such unusual personal magnetism that well-nigh every man who walked towards him a stranger walked away from him a friend. The eight years which followed the starting of the New York Mirror saw many changes; saw Morris becoming more and more popular as a writer of songs; saw him -154- publishing the memorable Woodman, Spare that Tree , that was to make his name known over the land; saw Woodworth withdraw from the Mirror , and that publication strengthened and starting anew when Morris drew to the enterprise Theodore S. Fay and Nathaniel P. Willis; saw Fay going abroad in a few years as Secretary of Legation at Berlin, in which city he was to live out most of his life.

N.P. Willis was a young man, too, in those early days of his association with Morris. He had given up the American Monthly Magazine at Boston to devote his energies to the New York Mirror . In the year that he became associated with Morris, 1831, he went abroad at a salary of ten dollars a week, hoping to add strength and diversity to the paper by a series of letters. In London, poor and struggling, he managed to introduce -155- himself into the fashionable set at that time presided over by Lady Blessington, and he came to be the adoration of all the sentimental young ladies in that set. There was a daintiness about his dress, a suggestion of foppishness in the arrangement of his blond hair, trifles about him which suggested the dandy and the idler; but withal there was a terrific capacity for work under the smooth outside. His letters to the Mirror and other papers did much for the refinement of literature and art, and, indirectly, for the manners of the times. He was in America again in 1836, bringing with him an English lady as a bride,—the Mary for whom the country place Glen Mary at Owego was named, where he wrote his delightful Letters from under a Bridge . He was again in Europe in 1839, soon starting The Corsair , and back to America in -156- 1844, to join his friend Morris (the Mirror by this time being defunct) in the starting of a daily paper which took the name of the Evening Mirror . From this on Willis lived an active social-literary life, singing of Broadway with the same facileness as he sang of country scenes. He came to be a grave and patient invalid, living happily with his second wife as he had with his first, and ending his days at Idlewild,—his home on the Hudson.

It was with the newly started Evening Mirror that Poe became connected on his return from Philadelphia, and it would seem that if he ever had prospects bright to look forward to it was with the fair-minded, business-like Morris and the gentle-hearted Willis. But when Poe had continued with them a brief six months even that gentle restraint proved too much. The Evening -157- Mirror did not last long after his going, though this had little to do with its failure. Then the indefatigable Morris, with Willis, started the Home Journal at 107 Fulton Street, which continued into the twentieth century, and is now known under its changed title of Town and Country .

While Poe was working on the Mirror he lived with his frail wife Virginia and her mother, Mrs. Clemm, in Bloomingdale Village. It was a village indeed then, and about the -158- scattered houses were broad roads and shaded lanes and clustering trees. The house in which Poe lived was on a high bluff beside a country road which is now Eighty-fourth Street, the house standing (as the thoroughfares run now) between Broadway and West End Avenue. It was a plain, square, frame dwelling with brick chimneys reaching high above the pointed roof, kept by Mrs. Mary Brennan, and Poe rented rooms of her. Two windows faced towards the Hudson, and he could sit and looking through the trees catch a silvery glimpse of the river. Here he wrote The Raven and The Imp of the Perverse . From here he sent The Raven to the American Review at 118 Nassau Street, where it was published over the pen name of "Quarles"; and he was still living here when the poem was reprinted in the Evening Mir -159- ror , for the first time over his own name.

POE’S COTTAGE AT FORDHAM.
(From a drawing by C.W. Mielatz, by permission.)
Copyright, 1899, by The Society of Iconophiles.

It had come to be the summer of 1845 when Poe left the Evening Mirror for the long black desk in lower Nassau Street where he helped Charles F. Briggs conduct the Broadway Journal . Briggs was the matter-of-fact "Harry Franco," a journalist of great ability who in another ten years was to edit Putnam's Magazine from 10 Park Place. More than one of Poe's friends said that the combination of Harry Franco and the poet must assuredly bring forth great literary results and financial success. But the partnership did not work at all well. In a very short time Poe bought out his partner's interest through an arrangement with Horace Greeley and moved the office of the paper into Clinton Hall. But the Broadway Journal under the management of Poe was less of a success -160- than it had been under Briggs and Poe, and the poet retired from it in the first month of 1846.

This Clinton Hall in which Poe had his office was a substantial building at the southwest corner of Nassau and Beekman streets. Temple Court now stands on the site. A second and a third building of the name have arisen in Astor Place, the second having been remodelled in 1854 from the Astor Place Opera House, the scene of the Forrest-Macready riots. The present building, tall and heavy-looking, is the home of the Mercantile Library, as each Clinton Hall has been in its turn, and still retains the name first given to it in 1830, when Governor De Witt Clinton presented a History of England as a nucleus for the library.

About the time when Poe was with the Broadway Journal he moved into a house not a great many steps -161- from Broadway, in Amity Street, since renamed West Third Street. Here amid surroundings marked by a simplicity due less to simple tastes than poverty Poe lived and wrote by the side of the delicate wife who was wasting away before his eyes. Here he penned the Philosophy of Composition , by which he would make it appear that The Raven was not a product of inspiration, but the work of calm reason and artistic construction,—a theory which no one seems to have accepted. Here, too, he wrote The Literati of New York , a series of papers that appeared in Godey's Lady's Book , and were the sensation of the hour in literary circles. Their criticisms were severe and impassioned, and one of the criticised, believing himself ill-treated and his writings unjustly abused, sought vindication. His answer entirely overlooked the libel laws and -162- he was promptly sued for damages by Poe. This was Thomas Dunn English, a young man then twenty-four years old, who a few years before, in 1843, had been asked by N.P. Willis to write a poem for the New Mirror . The poem was written and sent to Willis with the suggestion that he either print it or tear it up as he thought best. Willis printed it, and though the writer came to be known as a poet, author, physician, lawyer, and statesman, the best known of his achievements were these verses of Ben Bolt .

In the spring of 1846, when the poet's wife grew more feeble, her brilliant eyes more brilliant, and her pallid look more unearthly, Poe moved out into the country to a little village called Fordham in Westchester County. This was then far out from the city, a secluded spot with rocky heights from which a view -163- could be had of country lanes and broad sweeps of meadow where farmers worked in the fields. Since then the open landscape has given way to the regularity of city streets and buildings.

Not a great distance from the railroad station still stands the house where Poe lived; such a plain, low wooden building that those that have grown up around it seem to be shouldering it out of the way, and the widening and improving of streets have pushed it somewhat aside from its original position. But there the dingy little house still stands with its veranda, where Poe walked in the night just outside the sitting-room windows,—walked and dreamed out his Eureka . There are the door and the dwarf hallway. Inside, to the right, is the room, with its meagre furniture, much of which was purchased with the proceeds of the suit -164- against Thomas Dunn English, where Poe received the friends who remembered him in his hours of illness, of poverty, and distress. In a room towards the front lay the dying wife on her straw bed, covered with the poet's coat and clasping the tortoise-shell cat closely to her wasted form. Up the stairs is the attic chamber, with its slanting roof, where Poe worked, with the cat at his elbow; where after his wife's death he penned a dirge for her in the exquisite Annabel Lee ; where he wrote the first draught of The Bells , which he was to revise and complete while on his lecture trip to Lowell. Next to it is the room where slept Mrs. Clemm, his more than mother.

So many memories cling to this home of Poe that those who search for substantial literary reminders have made it a visiting shrine, much to the dismay of landowners who hold -165- to the strong belief that historic old houses are well enough as curiosities, but are inconvenient things when they stand in the way of money-making improvements.

After passing through these rooms and with the memory of Poe strong upon you, walk away along the street remembering that in Poe's time it was a delightful country road. Stroll towards the Harlem River as he wandered many a moonlight night, his brain busy with the deep problems of The Universe . After a time you will pass on to the High Bridge, that carried the pipes of the Croton Aqueduct over the river,—this at least unchanged since his day. Walk over the path there, high above the water, and visit the lonely spot where the suggestion came to Poe for that requiem of despair, the mystic Ulalume .

In the little wooden house at Ford -166- ham Poe lived, weak and lonely and poor, after the death of his wife, making daily visits to her nearby grave,—the grave that is there no longer. He was cared for by Virginia's mother for something more than two years. Then in the June of 1849 he left Fordham. Before the end of the year he was dead.

Chapter IX
At the Close of the Knickerbocker Days

A BUSTLING, energetic, but provincial city was New York between the years 1830 and 1840, the last days of the Knickerbockers. After 1840 it changed greatly, speeding rapidly on in the making of a metropolis. Looking back now it is plain that the progress of enlargement went steadily on year by year, but then the changes came on imperceptibly enough.

To any one who knows the great metropolis of this twentieth century, it will seem remarkable that Hanover Square was the place where merchants and jobbers most did congregate, and that the business part of the city (and -168- that really meant all the town in those times) lay all below Canal Street. Beyond that was the country, crossed by sand hills, watered by many rivulets, traversed by roads that led to the country places of the wealthy or to popular wayside taverns. The main thoroughfares looked wider than they do now, for they were far less crowded, although there were busses, and coaches, and drays, and many other vehicles of a variety that would look quite odd on the streets of this day, and in fact anywhere except in old prints, for they became extinct many a day ago. There were no surface roads, no elevated roads, no clanging electric cars, no bicycles, no motor carriages, no thousand and one conveniences of comfort and confusion that inventive genius and modern methods have called forth. To be sure the first street railroad in the world had just been projected and -169- the cars were about to run through the streets, but this was not as yet established.

The architectural appearance of the city was more meagre, more uniform, far more picturesquely simple. There were wooden houses, squat and irregular, and there were brick houses, low and solid; there were no great towering structures to make one crane the neck to see the top. It was a city where provinciality stared out at every corner, a city which has been swept so entirely away that what is left of it lingers only in odd nooks and corners and back streets where even the oldest New Yorker has lost sight of it, and where visitors spend many hours seeking out old-time curiosities in the byways of the metropolis.

The larger buildings of those days, the ones to catch the eye of a stranger, are all memories now, and it is a -170- difficult matter to say even where they stood with any degree of certainty. There was Masonic Hall in Broadway and Pearl Street, with its great chamber in imitation of the Chapel of Henry VIII., that was quite the pride of the town, and indeed looked upon as the most elegant reception-room in detail and appointment to be found in America. Close by, on the other side of the way, was Contoit's Garden, a delightful resort, where could be had the finest of ices and cakes. Farther on the Apollo dancing-rooms were a Mecca for the youth of the town. Opposite the lower end of City -171- Hall Park was Scudder's, the first museum in the city, the forerunner of Barnum's, filled to overflowing with curiosities of earth and sea and air. Across the way, on the opposite side of the park, was the Park Theatre with its broad white front and its record as the chief playhouse of the city, although there were hosts of admirers and patrons of the Old Bowery, and of the National in Leonard Street, and of the Olympic in Broadway, where Mitchell was established as a great favorite. Out beyond the city was Niblo's Garden, newly established and a real rural retreat; near to it, over on the Bowery Road, was the old Vauxhall, fast losing caste as a place of outdoor amusement. In Nassau Street the Middle Dutch Church still stood, its silvery bell sounding over -172- the city in which Sunday was a day set apart for religious observance and had not come to be a day of merrymaking.

It had come to be very near the end of the Knickerbocker days in this quiet city where brimstone matches and india-rubber overshoes had just been introduced,—indeed, it was close upon the year 1840,—when the Astor House was a new structure talked about all over the land as a wonderful palace. On the ground floor of this hotel John R. Bartlett kept a well stocked book-shop, and not a day but it was much visited by the literary folk of the town, for he was the friend of all bookish people. He himself was a quiet, scholarly man, and it was there in his shop, when his many friends left him leisure for work, that he arranged the greater part of his Dictionary of Americanisms , by which his name is remem -173- bered far better than by his historical records,—remembered when the fact that he was Secretary of State in Rhode Island is quite forgotten if it was ever widely known.

One of the familiar figures in Bartlett's book-shop was a keen-eyed, spectacled man who walked with quite a noticeable limp. This was Charles Fenno Hoffman, a notable man of his time, whose song, Sparkling and Bright , was on everybody's tongue. Thirty-four years of his life were behind him, years that were full to overflowing. He was a New Yorker in the full meaning of the term, and many of the events of his active life had centred about the little book-shop. His birthplace was only eight blocks away, there where the structure of the Elevated Road throws its shadow over Greenwich Street at its crossing with Rector. Those interested searchers who have visited the -174- house where Washington Irving boarded close by this same corner will find the house where Hoffman was born nearby it. Thoughts of Irving and Hoffman entwine themselves naturally and closely, for Hoffman's half-sister was that Matilda who was affianced to Irving and whose early death shadowed his whole life.

Just around the corner from Bartlett's shop Hoffman went to school at Columbia College, where the present Park Place now wends its way from the river to Printing House Square. After leaving college he studied law, but soon gave up that profession to become the associate editor of the American as the commencement of a literary career. In 1833 he founded the Knickerbocker magazine, and while conducting it enjoyed the intimate fellowship of Harry Franco, William Cullen Bry -175- ant, Lewis Gaylord Clark, William L. Stone, the brothers Duyckinck, Frederick S. Cozzens, Park Benjamin, John L. Stephens, and a great many others in the same field of writing.

All this was behind him when he became a familiar figure in Bartlett's shop; and more, too, for he had worked with N.P. Willis on the Mirror , and had travelled far in the wild West despite an accident in his youth which had crushed his leg between a boat and the wharf, leaving him a life-long cripple. In this western journeying he gathered material for A Winter in the West and Wild Scenes in Forest and Prairie . He had already written Vanderlyn , and now in the book-shop was daily discussing his plans for Grayslaer . No hint came to the minds of those who listened to his witty talk in idle hours at the book-shop that in another ten years he would be taken from his last -176- city home in Greene Street to live out the remaining thirty-four years of his life in the asylum at Harrisburg, Pa., a mental wreck.

It was Hoffman who introduced Lewis Gaylord Clark to the book-shop. Clark had been associated with him on the Knickerbocker magazine, and it was Clark who continued that publication for many years in the office on Broadway, just south of Cortlandt Street. To the office very often went his twin brother, Willis Gaylord Clark, editor of the Philadelphia Gazette , who contributed his now long-forgotten verse to his brother's magazine almost to the day of his death.

It was quite natural that John L. Stephens should make Bartlett's book-shop a headquarters while he was in town, for Bartlett and he were firm friends of years' standing, and their minds ran along in very much the -177- same historical groove. Many a story the famous traveller recounted to his friend and to the others who were gathered there, and his presence was eagerly looked for. He had been to Egypt and had written from there letters that were published in the Knickerbocker when Hoffman was at its head. He had been to Arabia, to Poland, and to half a dozen other countries, and had written of his travels with a straightforward directness that was very much like his clear ringing talk. His visits to the book-shop happened years before he became interested in the Panama Railroad, for when this project came to his hand he devoted so much of himself to the building of the road across the Isthmus that he gave little time to writing.

Another man who lingered in the book-shop more than any of the others was a sort of protégé of Clark's, since -178- Clark had in a great measure discovered him. His name was Frederick S. Cozzens, a wine merchant, and almost every afternoon he walked from his place around the next corner in Vesey Street, the second block below Broadway. It was Clark who recognized him as a humorist long before any one else appreciated him. His merry conversation was a delightful incident in the book-shop years and years before he moved to Yonkers and was then a great deal talked about as the author of the Sparrowgrass Papers .

This book-shop was a veritable treasury of literary secrets, for if there was to be anything new in the literary world it was sure to be spoken of there before it was rumored about anywhere else. In this way the book-shop was first to hear of the publication of that journal of books and opinions, Arcturus , for Evert A. -179- Duyckinck was one of the habitués there. This is the author who, seven years later, with his brother George was to start the publication of The Literary World ; and these are the brothers Duyckinck who while editing this publication collected material and wrote their Encyclopædia of American Literature , which gave them fame long after both were dead.

The publication of literary periodicals was in the air that year of 1840, and the little book-shop, being a literary world unto itself, heard of all of them in turn before public announcement was made. James Aldrich, who four years before had given up a prosperous business for a writer's career, projected his Literary Gazette , in which most of his poems afterwards appeared; and Park Benjamin, rather a newcomer in the town, it having been only three years since he transferred his New England Magazine to -180- New York under the title of the American Monthly Magazine , the same year established Our New World . He was a pleasant, affable man, and his companions at Bartlett's place thought much of the author of The Old Sexton .

William Cullen Bryant lived in New York through these last days of Knickerbocker life and still lived there when these times were looked back upon as a period of great good-fellowship. He arrived in the city a young man, scarcely known, but he lived to be old, still a citizen, so entwined with the literary, social, and business interests that innumerable places can be pointed out to-day as bearing closely upon the poet's life and suggesting many reminders of himself and his work.

In the far down-town, in Broadway at the Pine Street corner, these memories start. At that corner, in a -181- building long gone now, when Bryant was quite a stranger in the city, he edited the New York Review and Athenæum , in which his own poem, Death of the Flowers , was published, and in which Halleck's Marco Bozzaris first appeared. In his office there Bryant often talked with Percival and with Hillhouse, and there he discussed with Verplanck and Sands what manner of verse he would contribute to the newly started Talisman magazine.

Up Broadway a little farther, at the Fulton Street corner, is the publication office of the Evening Post , a building which more than any other in New York should call forth thoughts of Bryant, for he was the editor of that newspaper for two-and-fifty years. When he joined the staff in 1826, in two years succeeding Coleman as editor and remaining so until his death, the Evening Post had its office -182- in William Street, near Pine. But Bryant spent many years of his editorial life in the Broadway building, and one of its attractions, now pointed out to all visitors, is the poet's window on an upper floor where he sat at his desk, that was always stacked high and negligently with all manner of useless papers and rejected manuscripts, and looked over the city to the south as he worked.

Standing beside this window there are memories of other men than Bryant to be called up, for here remembrance of many of his associates comes vividly to mind. There was William Leggett, the poet's friend and business companion, the brilliant journalist who wrote Tales of a Country Schoolmaster , and who worked beside Bryant from 1829 to 1836. With thoughts of him come those of Parke Godwin, who joined the Evening Post staff the year after Leggett -183- left it, who as long as the poet lived was his close friend, and who, marrying Bryant's daughter Fanny, wove closer year by year the relations that bound them. There are memories, too, of John Bigelow, who occupied an editorial chair on the Post for a dozen years after 1849.

Going still farther up Broadway in search of Bryant reminders, you walk past the Post-Office and over the stretch of pavement made historic by the personal encounter between the poet and William L. Stone. This happened in 1831, and Stone, then editor of the Commercial Advertiser , was not at all friendly to Bryant. The two met there on the parkside, just opposite where Philip Hone lived, and Hone, looking from his window, saw the encounter. Sitting down he immediately wrote of it in the diary which is such a perfect reflection of the city's history -184- during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Those were the days when Stone was collecting his information concerning the Indians which he afterwards utilized to such advantage in The Life of Joseph Brant , The Life of Red Jacket , and kindred books.

Keeping on up Broadway to Leonard Street, thence over across town three blocks west to 92 Hudson Street, the stroller comes to a warehouse that has been reared above the home where Bryant lived when he became editor of the Evening Post and from which he often walked around the corner to 345 Greenwich Street to make an evening call on his near neighbor and friend J. Fenimore Cooper.

On a little farther, up Varick Street this time, past the old Chapel of St. John's, lingering in its stately age -185- quiet and dignified amid the unwholesome neighbors that have grown up around it. On the very next block, close by Canal Street, there is a red brick house with stone steps, and here Bryant lived after his removal from Hudson Street.

This same Varick Street leads straight north for half a mile until it touches Carmine Street, and in the second block of that thoroughfare is the house of age-worn brick that was the poet's "home in Carmine Street," of which he spoke so often and so affectionately.

From this point, a walk due east straight across town to the Bowery is as direct a route as could be found to the house where Bryant boarded in Fourth Street near the Bowery. It was here he entertained the friendly Unitarian clergyman, Orville Dewey, and discussed poetry with him. Here too he began the acquaintance with -186- his fellow-lodger, Parke Godwin, without a thought that Godwin would one day be his son-in-law, without a thought that they would walk side by side through a literary life for close upon half a century.

Still on up-town, this time to Union Square. Between that green spot and Irving Place in Fifteenth Street, you come upon the home of the Century Club in its early days, when it was the chief place in America for the entertainment of men of letters. This club, founded by Bryant, was presided over at various times by Bancroft, Verplanck, and men whose names are equally well remembered. Bryant was the president when he died. The club now has a sumptuous home in Forty-third Street near Fifth Avenue.

Last home of all of Bryant in New York is the brownstone house next to the College of St. Francis Xavier, -187- in Sixteenth Street. Here he lived during the last years of his life when he was not passing the long spring and summer months at his well-beloved Cedarmere at Roslyn, Long Island, which had been his favorite abiding place since 1843. It was in this Sixteenth Street house that he wrote his last lines of verse—on the birthday of Washington; it was here that he died.

One more structure not a great distance away calls up strongly the memory of Bryant. In Fourth Avenue at Twentieth Street is picturesque All Souls' Church, which has been there since 1855. Built of brick trimmed with Caen stone, planned in the form of a Greek cross, it was the first example of the Byzantine style of architecture in America. It was to have a tall, square, tower-like steeple, but this was never built. To this church the body of Bryant was -188- taken, and there in the presence of all literary New York, and while the whole city mourned, Dr. Bellows, who had been his long-time friend, preached his funeral sermon.

Chapter X
Half a Century Ago

L IKE many a landed estate, like many a quiet village, like many a battle-ground, like many a winding and historic road, like so many other places of interest of which the island of Manhattan has been the scene in days agone—Minniesland is not easy to locate. Relentlessly and remorselessly the great masses of brick and mortar have forged ahead in their furtherance of the city's growth, seeking a level as they spread, dominating the island, levelling the hills, and stretching over valleys until the surface of the land is altered beyond all knowing. Minniesland is one of the almost buried districts of the great city. Its last surviving relic, a square -190- ornamental structure, is the one token that it ever existed. Now that the town has surrounded this building, and streets have cut through and mutilated the first plan of the district, this house may be found standing where One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street slopes down to the Hudson River. Enter it; pass through its ancient halls, and, standing on its porch, blot from the mind the spot as it is and reconstruct it as it was half a century ago.

Fifty years ago the city was far away there to the south, and this house, miles and miles away up-country, was at the edge of a forest stretching down the hillside to the river. There were other farmhouses around it. To the north was the mansion where Colonel Morris had lived before the Revolution; where Madame Jumel in later days had married Aaron Burr. To the south was the square -191- frame building, close by a clump of thirteen trees, where Alexander Hamilton had lived and where his widow stayed on after his death.

Forgetting for a moment these old-time surroundings of the house by the forest edge, turn to the building itself, and imagine at the window a man sitting. He has long hair and clear blue eyes. He is painting at a small easel and working in quite a wonderful manner, for he is ambidextrous. He stops in his work and looks over the trees towards the Hudson. If that ever-moving river recalls to him his past life, John James Audubon, ornithologist, is reviewing a strange and adventurous career in many countries, full of losses, of suffering, of changes, of perils. He thinks of himself as a boy wandering through the dense, hot wilds of San Domingo; as a youth hard at his art studies in Paris under the master David; as a -192- man at his father's country place on the Schuylkill, failing utterly and absolutely when he goes into business, and letting his father's fortune slip away from his nerveless grasp. He remembers, too, his marriage, and how his wife followed his restless career with unchanging love and remained always a balance-wheel to his impetuosity. He recalls how, through all the changes of that early and unsettled life, the naturalist-love born in him when he roamed the tropical home of his youth was always strongest in his nature, and was constantly cropping out in his mania for collecting beautiful things that were quite worthless from a commercial point of view, just as it was shown in his personal appearance; for his manner of dressing, always with his hair falling over his shoulders, marked him as a man regardless of conventionality, a man so bound within the circle of his own -193- thoughts that he had little time or inclination to peek out and see which way the world was moving.

Audubon had passed through the hardest struggles of his life, had travelled in England, in France, in Scotland, arranging for the publication of his bird pictures, that remarkable work which set his memory apart; he had succeeded in his life's object, and at the close of 1840 had come here to this forest hillside by the -194- Hudson, built the house on the estate Minniesland, named in honor of his wife, made it a luxurious abode, and there gathered his friends about him.

With this home of Audubon there is associated a memory of the early days of the telegraph. When Samuel F.B. Morse built the first telegraph line to Philadelphia, he had it strung across the river from Fort Lee to the basement of Audubon's house, and there he received the first telegraphic message ever sent to the island of Manhattan. Here Audubon lived, wrote, and painted until even his rugged strength was worn out. He worked until those clever ambidextrous hands lost the cunning to work out the forms his active brain could still conceive. The day came, in 1851, when he died, fortunately before any great change had come over the beauties of Minniesland. The -195- peacefulness of Trinity Cemetery, which takes in part of the Audubon farm, is still faintly reminiscent of the scene of the ornithologist's later life, and there, close by the old house, is the grave of Audubon, and upon his tomb are sculptured the birds he loved so well, now keeping watch over him.

While Audubon worked in his out-of-town retreat, another scholar and writer lived farther down the island towards the city. Clement C. Moore lived in a little district of his own called Chelsea Village, now merged into the city by so deft a laying out of streets that there is little irregularity at the point where town and village met. A bit of the old village remains exactly as it was in the General Theological Seminary, and the block on which it stands, Twentieth to Twenty-first streets, Ninth and Tenth avenues, is still called Chelsea Square. Clement C. Moore inherited -196- from his father, Bishop Benjamin Moore, a large tract of land along the river near the present Chelsea Square, and gave the land on which the seminary was built to that institution. He himself lived in a house which his father had occupied before him and which stood on the line of the present Twenty-third Street on the block between Ninth and Tenth avenues. It was a very old building, renowned for the fact that General Washington had stopped there one afternoon when he had his headquarters in the city. Clement C. Moore was a professor in the General Theological Seminary, and while there compiled the first Greek and Hebrew lexicons ever published in this country. But it is not by reason of his learned books or his philanthropy that his name is -197- best recalled, but by a poem which he wrote for his children and of which the world at large might never have known but that it was sent without his knowledge and published in an up-State paper. This poem, the Christmas classic of The Visit of St. Nicholas , begins with "'T was the night before Christmas," and its simple yet merry jingle and delightful word-pictures have endeared it to all children since his time and will endure to please many more to come.

All that there was of literary New York half a century ago centred about Anne C. Lynch. She established a circle, a gathering which increased or fell off in numbers as men and women of brains came and went. This was the first near approach to a salon in this country. In the early days of her coming to the city, Miss Lynch lived in a neat-appearing brick house in Waverly Place, just off Washington -198- Square. She moved elsewhere from time to time, the literary coterie moving about as she moved. At the height of her success, in 1855, she married the Italian educator, Vincenzo Botta, then in his second year in New York and occupying a professorship of Italian literature in the University of New York. The receptions of Mrs. Botta flourished and were as popular as had been those of Miss Lynch. Her writings, too, went on, and her most widely known work, the material for which she gathered during her intimate personal association with many authors, the Handbook of Universal Literature , was written when she lived in Thirty-seventh Street, a few doors west of Fifth Avenue.

In the early years of Anne C. Lynch's receptions, one of her intimates was Caroline M. Kirkland, the friend of Bayard Taylor. Mrs. Kirk -199- land, who had just returned after a residence in Michigan, sought her advice before she published Forest Life , which was the second of her descriptions of the sparsely settled region where she had spent three years of her life. The intimacy between these two continued for years, indeed until Mrs. Kirkland died, in 1864, stricken with paralysis while under the strain of managing a great sanitary fair during the Civil War.

Through Mrs. Kirkland, Lydia M. Child was introduced at the Lynch receptions, when she was associated with her husband in conducting the National Anti-Slavery Standard . She had been a writer since her youth, having published her first book, Hobomok , in 1821. Her works had been much read, but lost much of their popularity after she published the first anti-slavery book in America, in 1833, under the title An -200- Appeal for that Class of Americans Called Africans . She ever remained prominent as an abolitionist, but because of her opinions lost caste as a writer of novels. But Miss Lynch cared little what opinions any one held so long as they really had opinions and would stand by them, and Mrs. Child was welcomed to her home until she left the city, in 1844, to spend the rest of her life in Wayland, Massachusetts.

Very often Edgar Allan Poe attended the Lynch receptions, taking with him his delicate wife, who seemed to get better for the moment when she saw her husband the centre of a notable gathering. For even here Poe had quite a following of his own. It was on one of these evenings that he gave it as his opinion that The Sinless Child was one of the strongest long poems ever produced in America. This poem was -201- just then making a great stir and on this special evening had been the subject of much discussion. The author was present, as she usually was where writers congregated, for the beautiful and witty Elizabeth Oakes Smith carried enthusiasm and inspiration wherever she went. She found time to form part of many a circle, even though her days were well filled, for she assisted her husband, "Major Jack Downing," in his editorial work. For many a year before she finally retired to Hollywood, South Carolina, she held her place as the first and only woman lecturer in America.

1. W.D. HOWELLS.
2. J.G. HOLLAND.
3. RICHARD GRANT WHITE.
4. BRANDER MATTHEWS.
5. WILLIAM WINTER.

Another dear friend of Poe's might usually be found at these receptions. "Estella" Lewis, the poet, lived in Brooklyn and held there quite a court of clever people. The time came when she was, indeed, a friend in need to Poe in his time of dire necessity at Fordham. It was at her -202- Brooklyn home that he read The Raven before it was published, and Estella Lewis was the last friend he visited before he left New York on the journey south which ended in his death.

On the "Poe nights," too, Ann S. Stephens was usually to be found at Miss Lynch's. She became a much-read novelist, writing Fashion and Famine and Mary Derwent . On these nights, too, might be seen Margaret Fuller, the transcendentalist. She had left her Massachusetts home to take her place with Horace Greeley as literary editor of the Tribune , and between whiles devoted herself to charitable work in an effort to better the social condition of the poor of the metropolis. During most of her stay she lived in a locality much changed since her time, near where Forty-ninth Street touches the East River. A picturesque spot it -203- was, overlooking the green stretches of Blackwell's Island, in the midst of suburban life. Her stay in New York was short. After a year or so she went to Europe and in Italy married the Marquis Ossoli. She was on her way back to America, in 1850, a passenger in the merchantman Elizabeth , when the ship was wrecked off Fire Island and she perished with it.

To this group of writers also belongs Frances Sargent Osgood. While, somewhere about the year 1846, the country was ringing with her praise, she was living the secluded life of an invalid, with her husband, in what was then becoming a fashionable neighborhood, 18 East Fourteenth Street. Once, in 1845, she had met Poe, had been instantly attracted by him, and became thereafter his staunch admirer, expressing her opinion persistently whenever opportunity -204- offered. He, on his part, appreciated her poetic genius, and more than once referred to the scrupulous taste, faultless style, and magical grace of her verse. And several of his poems are addressed directly to her.

There was a young man named Richard Henry Stoddard who frequented the Lynch receptions. He had worked for six years in a foundry learning the trade of iron moulder, and writing poetry as he worked. By the year 1848 he was beginning to make a name for himself, and his first volume of poems, Footnotes , had just been published. At Miss Lynch's house he met Miss Elizabeth Barstow, herself a poet, and some time later visited her at her home in Mattapoisett. This led to their marriage. Early in the year of his meeting with Miss Barstow, Stoddard made the acquaintance of Bayard Taylor. -205- Taylor had already travelled on foot over Europe, had crystallized the results of these travels in Views Afoot , and was then working under Greeley on the Tribune , as one of the several editors. Side by side with him worked that pure-hearted and thoughtful man who had been the instigator and supporter of the Brook Farm experiment, George Ripley, who wrote the Tribune's book criticisms.

Views Afoot was the most popular book of the day when Stoddard walked into the Tribune office and introduced himself to the author, finding him very hard at work in a little pen of a room. This was the start of a friendship which lasted for thirty years, and was only broken in upon by death.

A few days after, Stoddard called upon Taylor, who then lived in Murray Street, a few steps from Broadway. -206- Charles Fenno Hoffman, who occupied rooms in the same building, was then beginning to show signs of the mental breakdown which was to cloud the last thirty-four years of his life. But Hoffman was prosperous and occupied luxurious quarters on the ground floor, while Taylor, despite the popularity of his book, led a life of hard work and struggle. He was ill paid for his services on the Tribune , as Greeley did not believe in high salaries, and he lived up four flights of stairs in a sort of two-roomed attic. There Stoddard went almost every Saturday after his labors at the iron foundry, and there the friendship strengthened week by week; there Taylor taught Stoddard to smoke; there they discussed books and writers, and there wrote poetry together. There Taylor wrote Kubleh and Ariel in the Cloven Pine , and, too, the song that won for him -207- a prize when Barnum invited the entire country to a competition in writing a song for Jenny Lind. Taylor was visited by a great many friends, and with them the youthful Stoddard became acquainted. Sometimes to the house in Murray Street came Rufus W. Griswold, author of Poets and Poetry of America , Prose Writers of America , and kindred works. He had been one of Taylor's early advisers. The diplomatist and playwright, George H. Boker, often made one of the party at this time, when his tragedy, Calaynos , was being acted with great success at Sadlers's Wells Theatre in England. Another visitor was Richard Kimball, the lawyer-author, then enthusiastically putting the finishing touches to St. Leger .

These days of changing fortunes were the most romantic of Taylor's career. Many other places in the -208- city are associated with him, one a house near Washington Square, where he lived for some years and wrote among other things the Poems of the Orient . His last city home was at 142 East Eighteenth Street. There he wrote Deukalion , and from there he started out, after being dined and fêted, on his mission as United States Minister to Germany. In England he met Carlyle. In Paris he had a "queer midnight supper" with Victor Hugo. In Germany, though he was then quite an ill man, he threw himself into official business with an energy that his constitution, worn by years of persistent hard work, would not warrant. Before the end of the year, the friends in America who had wished him farewell in April, congratulating him that he had attained an honor that he prized, knew that he lay dead in Berlin.

Chapter XI
Two Famous Meeting-Places

L OOKING backward to the days before the Civil War is to bring into review a host of men who then walked through the city in which time has wrought so many changes, and to bring to the mind's eye familiar streets, but so altered that they seem like unknown highways.

There was the Battery, with its old-time appearance, when the green grass of summer was not cast into deep and continual shade by an overhanging device of modern travel, and when its broad walk was a promenade, the like and popularity of which was not to be found elsewhere. There stood squat Castle Garden, half in the water and half on the -210- land, of nondescript style of architecture, suggesting a means of defence against an invading force and giving cause for wonder as to how it ever came by the flowery half of its name.

Wandering swiftly through the lower end of the town, memory recalls old houses whose begrimed fronts bore the markings of a good hundred years. There, by the Bowling Green, was where Washington and Putnam had their headquarters. Farther up-town a hotel arose where Franconi's Hippodrome had been. Still farther along was Murray Hill, where there was just enough elevation of land to account in a measure for its name. Still farther on were country places beyond the town—beyond the town then, but now come to be the very heart's core of the metropolis.

But of all the points of interest -211- none comes fresher to the mind than Broadway. And though they have all changed, some swept away, some freshened up, others reconstructed into modern ways and made to keep pace with the progress of the passing days, no change or series of changes have brought about such complete renewal, if the reminiscent eye of the mind is to be believed, as has come to Broadway. Blotting out for the moment the city's chief canyon of travel as it is to-day, with its brobdingnagian structures, and its sights and sounds of business and pleasure and enterprise, let the highway of old take its place. As far back as fifty years ago, residences were gradually metamorphosed into business hives, but they managed to retain much of their conservative appearance for a long time, as though a battle were being waged as to whether Broadway should be a place of homes -212- or a business thoroughfare. Trees by the curb line waved their branches in angry protest against commercial encroachments and in opposition to great glaring signs that blurted out business announcements in a bold-faced manner, that argued they had come to stay. While the Broadway of to-day gives the impression of narrowness because of the height of the sky-scrapers that border it, it then looked exceedingly wide. It was never a quiet street, for a continual procession of omnibuses and other vehicles on business and pleasure bent streamed along it. Among the popular resorts at which they often stopped was Charles Pfaff's, where beer was sold. There of an evening met the literary Bohemians of the city, in the days when Bohemia really existed and before the word had well-nigh lost significance and respect. They were gifted men with great -213- power of intellect, who spoke without fear and without favor and whose every word expressed a thought. They were real men and they made the world a real place, a place without affectation, without pretence, without show, without need of applause, and without undue cringing to mere conventional forms. These were the characteristics of the Bohemians, and Bohemia was wherever two or three of them were gathered together. Bohemia was the atmosphere they carried with them, and whether upon the streets or in Pfaff's cellar they were at home. Pfaff's happening to be a convenient gathering-place, and beer happening to be the popular brew with most of them, they gathered there.

It is a tradition that the place came into favor through the personal efforts of the energetic Henry Clapp. He was attracted to it, so the tradition -214- runs, soon after he started the Saturday Press in 1858, that lively publication, so brilliant while it lasted, so soon to die, and at its death having pasted on its outer door an announcement which read: "This paper is discontinued for want of funds, which by a coincidence is precisely the reason for which it was started." Whether it is true or not that Clapp was the first to call attention to the resort that came to be the meeting-place of the Bohemians, matters little. It grew to be such a meeting-place, and it is quite true that the members of the staff of the Saturday Press did more than any one else to give it a name that has lived through the years.

It is hard to locate Pfaff's place now. Go to look for it on the east side of Broadway, above Bleecker Street three or four doors, and you will be disappointed, for there is noth -215- ing to locate—just a conventional business house. Take an idle hour and picture it in memory; that will be better. Thinking of it now it is quite natural to contrast it with modern eating- and drinking-houses, famous for their mirror-lined walls, richly carved appointments, carpeted floors, and flashing electric lights. Pfaff's was a hole beneath the surface of the street, ill-lighted, ill-ventilated, ill-kept. But it is far better to read George Arnold's poem embodying the spirit of the cellar, and recording how the company was "very merry at Pfaff's." This poet was one of the merry company in the days when he wrote regularly for the columns of Vanity Fair . He has himself said that some of the poems were written in the late hours after an evening spent in the underground Broadway resort with Fitz-Hugh Ludlow, with Mortimer Thomson, the famous "Q. -216- K. Philander Doesticks," and a score of like writers. It was Arnold, too, who caused an hour of sadness when he took there the story of the death of Henry W. Herbert, who was well known to all the habitués. They all knew his life's story; they had heard him tell of his father, the Dean of Manchester and cousin to the Earl of Carnarvon; they had heard him tell how he had come to New York from London, how he had taught in the school in Beaver Street near Whitehall, and how in that little school he had partly written his historical romance Cromwell , and how he had mapped out some of the others that followed it. They knew, too, how he had, under the name of "Frank Forester," produced such books as American Game in its Season , The Horse and Horsemanship in North America , and become famous by novel-writing. He was the first -217- to introduce sports of the field into fiction in America. Some of his comrades knew the unhappiness that had crept into his life, but even his dearest friends were not prepared for the news which Arnold brought one day, that "Frank Forester" had died by his own hand in a room on the second floor of the Stevens House, there in Broadway by the Bowling Green, not more than the throw of a stone from the place where, in his early days in New York, he had taught school.

Another friend of George Arnold's, who sometimes spent hours with him at Pfaff's, was George Farrar Browne, but few will remember him by this name, while many will recall that which he made famous, Artemus Ward. He had passed his apprenticeship as a printer and reporter, had made the country ring with the name of the lively but illiterate showman, -218- and was in New York trying to carry Vanity Fair to success—a task which he could not accomplish.

Another of the Pfaff company was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. This was at a time when he had editorial charge of the Saturday Press after he had come from Portsmouth and served three years at his desk in the commission house of his rich uncle. Working over the books of the firm, his mind was often busy with themes outside of the commission house, all tending towards a literary career.

Another lounger at Pfaff's whose name has become famous in the world of letters was William Winter, who was sometimes a visitor. Howells went there on his first visit to New York and dined with Walt Whitman, and there were others—Bayard Taylor and Stedman among them.

It was only a few minutes' walk from Pfaff's to Washington Square, -219- and there could be found the substantial-appearing University building, where Theodore Winthrop had his office and where he wrote Cecil Dreeme and John Brent . From that gloomy building he was called to the war, and to his home there friends brought the details of his death—shot through the heart while rallying his men in an attack which he had helped to plan at the action of Big Bethel in June, 1861. At the time -220- of his death he was scarcely known as a writer, and it was not until the publication of Cecil Dreeme that the world realized that it had lost an entertaining story-teller as well as a brave soldier when Winthrop fell.

Among others who served in the Seventh Regiment of New York, of which Theodore Winthrop was a member, was Fitz-James O'Brien, the erratic and brilliant journalist, whose tale of The Diamond Lens was his best contribution to the literature of the day. The only literary man of the Seventh to return to New York was O'Brien's friend, Charles Graham Halpine, who resigned, and lived to make his name famous by his humorous sketches of army life supposed to have been penned by "Private Miles O'Reilly."

The name of Winthrop naturally suggests the name of Dr. John W. Draper, who was associated with the -221- University of New York for more than thirty years. His technical writings made his name known over the world, and he spent many years of his life in the dingy old University building working on a History of Intellectual Development in Europe .

Fitz-James O'Brien has told of how he was once sent by a newspaper to see Henry T. Tuckerman, in a big brown building in Tenth Street. This studio building, just east of Sixth Avenue, is there yet, and the room on the second floor where -222- O'Brien had his talk with the scholarly essayist and critic may be seen. At that time Tuckerman was writing The Criterion; or, The Test of Talk about Familiar Things . In this large room overlooking the street it was his custom on Sunday evenings to entertain his literary friends.

Another home where there were Sunday-evening gatherings for many years was that of Alice and Phœbe Cary. This house, one of the few residences remaining in a neighborhood otherwise given up to business structures to-day, is numbered 53 on East Twentieth Street. Here the Carys lived when they made their home in this city, coming from their Ohio birthplace to a wider field of activity. You can walk now into the little parlor where the gatherings were held. You can go into the room above, where Phœbe worked—when she found time; for in the joint -223- housekeeping of the sisters Phœbe often said that she had to be the housekeeper before she could be the poet. In that room she wrote, after coming from church one Sunday, the hymn which has made her name famous and well-beloved, Nearer My Home .

There on the same floor was the favorite work-corner of Alice, and sitting close by the window, where she could look out into the street, she wrote many of her poems of memory and of domestic affection. In this room, too, she died.

To recite the names of those Sunday-evening callers would be to recall all the writers in the city at that -224- time, and to mention all those prominent in the world of letters who came from out of town. James Parton was often one of the company, in the days when he was arranging the material for his Life of Horace Greeley , material gathered from those who had known the great editor during his early days in New Hampshire and Vermont. Greeley himself dropped in occasionally, and also another member of the Tribune staff, Richard Hildreth, the writer from Massachusetts, who had been associate editor of the Boston Atlas and who in after years was United States Consul at Trieste.

Herman Melville was invited to the Twentieth Street house at the time when he was at work on his Battle Pieces , and could look back on years of adventure by land and by sea, and on the hardships that had supplied him with the material -225- from which to write so much that was odd and interesting. At one of these Sunday-night receptions, at which Alice Cary introduced him first, Melville told the company, and told it far better than he had ever written anything (at least so one of his hearers has recorded), the story of that life of trial and adventure. He began at the beginning, telling of his boyhood in New York, of his shipping as a common sailor, and of his youthful wanderings in London and Liverpool. In true sailor fashion, and with picturesque detail, he spun the tale of his eighteen months' cruise to the sperm fisheries in the Pacific, and held his hearers' close attention while he related the coarse brutality of his captain, who had forced him to desert at the Marquesas Islands. Then he traced his wanderings with his one companion through the trackless forest on the -226- island of Nukahiva and of his capture by the Typee cannibals. He related how there was little hope in his heart that he could ever escape, but that he still held tight to life and his courage did not desert him; how with the thought of death before him by night and by day he yet hourly studied the strange life about him and garnered those facts and fancies which he afterwards used to such advantage in his successful Typee . It was a thrilling tale to listen to, in strange contrast to his humdrum later life when he was an employee of the New York Custom House. When you go to see the home of the Cary sisters, walk on a few blocks to East Twenty-sixth Street, and there see the house numbered 104. On this site stood Melville's house, where he lived for many years and where, when he had come to be an old man, he died. -227-

Mary L. Booth was another visitor to the home of the Cary sisters, and with them she talked over a great many details of her History of the City of New York , which she was at that time energetically engaged upon. And there this future editor of Harper's Bazar met Martha J. Lamb when Mrs. Lamb came to the city from Chicago. A talk between the two had much to do with directing Mrs. Lamb's thought into historical lines, and led to her publishing, some seventeen years later, her History of New York , and to her assuming, in 1883, the editorship of the Magazine of American History . Mary L. Booth used to tell very amusingly how she had once met Samuel G. Goodrich, then famous as "Peter Parley," at the little house in Twentieth Street, and how disappointed she had been in listening to his talk and not finding it as impressive as it -228- should have been as coming from the author and editor of more than one hundred and fifty volumes. This incident occurred within a year or two of "Peter Parley's" death.

That popular writer of juvenile tales, Alice Haven, was also a visitor of the Cary sisters. Her early life had been spent in Philadelphia, where she had been married to J.C. Neal, but after his death she had removed to New York and made her home there. She was very much interested in the work of St. Luke's Hospital, which was not a great distance away, and often came to talk with Phœbe Cary about that institution. Miss Cary herself was interested in it because of her regard for its founder, Dr. William Augustus Muhlenberg, who had written a hymn that was a great favorite of hers, I Would Not Live Alway . Dr. Muhlenberg was the rector of the Church of -229- the Holy Communion, and in 1846 on St. Luke's Day after his sermon he suggested to his congregation that of the collection that was about to be taken half should be put aside as the commencement of a fund which should be used to found an institution for the care of the sick poor. The fund started that day with thirty dollars, and that was the beginning of St. Luke's Hospital. It was not a great while before the actual hospital work was begun in a building at 330 Sixth Avenue, near Twentieth Street, and there had a home until the completion of that at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, where it remained until those quarters were outgrown, and in 1896 it removed to the new buildings on Cathedral Heights.

Chapter XII
Some of the Writers of To-Day

T HERE is little of old-time picturesqueness in the city of New York to-day, where buildings are too towering, too massive, too thickly clustered to offer artistic and unique effects. But a stroll about the homes of the writers of the city invests their rather commonplace surroundings with more than passing interest.

In the older part of the town, the section that was all of New York a hundred years ago and is now the far down-town, there are many reminders of those friends whose books are on the most easily reached library shelf.

To No. 10 West Street, that stands on the river front, Robert Louis -231- Stevenson was taken by a fellow-voyager in 1879; here he stopped the first night he spent in America, and of this house he wrote in the Amateur Emigrant . From the waterside just at dusk, catching a dim outline of the varying housetops is to glimpse some old castle of feudal times. The lowest building in all this block is No. 10—a meagre, dingy, two-story structure that has come to be very old. The doors and windows seem to have been made for some other building, and to be trying to get back to where they belong, bulging out in the struggle and making rents in the house-front.

Crossing Battery Park to State Street, at No. 17 is the tall Chesebrough building that has sprung up on the spot where William Irving, brother of Washington, lived, and where the Salmagundi wits -232- gathered sometimes in the evening. Two or three doors farther along is a survival of old New York which delights the eye, with its porticoes and oval windows, odd appearing and many-sided; a mansion when wealth and affluence clustered around the Battery. This is the scene of the first few chapters of Bunner's Story of a New York House . Around the corner and through the wide doors of the Produce Exchange, at the back of that building and literally hidden in the middle of the block, is an old street that seems to have lost its usefulness, a quaint and curious way full half a century and more behind the times, now bearing the name of Marketfield -233- Street, but once called Petticoat Lane. It is no longer a thoroughfare, for in its length of half a block it has neither beginning nor end. Here is all that is left of the house in which Julia Ward Howe was born.

Passing along Broad Street, where Edmund C. Stedman, the poet and financier, has an office close to Wall Street, you come in a few minutes to the Custom House. To enter that building is to get lost in a moment. Pass through the door into a veritable trackless wilderness of narrow black halls, with rooms that open in the most unexpected corners, and come after a while to the Debenture Room of old, and to the window near which Richard Henry Stoddard had his desk for close upon twenty years.

Freed from the intricacies of the old building, continue the stroll up-town, and in Park Row, at No. 29, -234- on the third floor, is found the old home of the Commercial Advertiser , where Jesse Lynch Williams worked, and wrote A City Editor's Conscience , and other stories. A little way farther on is the Tribune building, where William Winter has his den, and under the same roof the room where Irving Bacheller conducted a newspaper syndicate before Eben Holden was thought of. Then on again a few steps to the Sun building and into the room, little changed from the time when Charles A. Dana sat there so many years, and, close by, the reporters' room where Edward W. Townsend worked, and wrote about Chimmie Fadden . There is a winding staircase, that the uninitiated could never find, leading into the rooms of the Evening Sun , where Richard Harding Davis "reported," and where he conceived some of the Van Bibber stories. Directly across -235- the street is the World office, and looking from the windows, so high up that the city looks like a Lilliputian village, you have the view that Elizabeth Jordan looked upon during the ten years she was getting inspiration for the Tales of a City Room . Down narrow Frankfort Street is Franklin Square, the home of Harper's Magazine , where George W. Curtis established his Easy Chair in which he was enthroned so long, and which is now occupied by William Dean Howells.

Cherry Street leads out of Franklin Square direct to Corlear's Hook Park. Half a hundred feet before that green spot is reached, in a squalid neighborhood of dirty house-fronts, ragged children, begrimed men, and slovenly women, there is a house numbered 426, above the door of which are the words: "I was sick and ye visited Me." Dwellers in the -236- neighborhood know that this is a hospital for those suffering from incurable disease, but, beyond this, seem to know very little about it. It is the home of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who has given up her entire life to brighten many another. In the same block, but nearer to Scammel Street, which is next towards the south, Brent's foundry used to be in the days when Richard Henry Stoddard was an iron-worker and the friend of Bayard Taylor, whom he visited in Murray Street.

From this far East Side to Washington Square is quite a distance, but stop half-way at Police Headquarters and the nearby reporters' offices. Any one there will be glad to point out the room where Jacob A. Riis worked so many years and wrote most of How the Other Half Lives , and -237- from which he carried out his ideas for benefiting the city poor—carried them out so well that President Roosevelt called him New York's most useful citizen.

In Washington Square the wanderer has much to think of in the literary associations recalled by this green garden that has blossomed from a pauper graveyard, and which has been written of by Howells, Brander Matthews, Bayard Taylor, Bunner, Henry James, F. Hopkinson Smith, and almost every writer who has brought New York into fiction.

From the square, stroll in any direction for defi -238- nite reminders. Towards the south and around into Macdougal Street, at No. 146, there is a dingy brick house with a trellised portico, where Brander Matthews and his friends used to dine, and which James L. Ford made the Garibaldi of his Bohemia Invaded . Walk towards the east, past the site of the University building, and stand at the Greene Street corner, at No. 21 Washington Place, where Henry James was born. Towards the west a few steps into Waverly Place, at No. 108, is a squat red brick house where Richard Harding Davis wrote his newspaper tales. Across, at the corner, lived George Parsons Lathrop when he wrote Behind Time , and there his wife, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, wrote Along the Shore . An historic site this house stands on, for it is where Stoddard and Taylor once lived together. A block to the north is old-time Clinton Place, which now, -239- for modern convenience, recking not of memory or of sentiment, has become Eighth Street. There, to the left of Fifth Avenue, at No. 18, is where Paul du Chaillu wrote Ivar the Viking , and to the right the house opposite, covered from basement to eaves with green clustering vines, is the home of Richard Watson Gilder.

It is only a question now of crossing half a dozen city blocks towards the east to wander into what was called the Bouwerie Village. Modern streets and modern improvements have so overridden the village of old that traces of it are few and difficult to find. Here in this -240- district many a writer of New York has lived. At Fourth Avenue and Tenth Street still stands the house, known to all who lived there as "The Deanery," in which Miss Annie Swift kept boarders, and where the family of Richard Henry Stoddard lived during the last four years that Mr. Stoddard held his post in the Custom House. Here Stedman, and Bayard Taylor, and Howells were visitors, with scores of other writers; here Mrs. Stoddard wrote The Morgensons , and here Stoddard himself wrote The King's Bell , Melodies and Madrigals , and other poems. Not more than a block away, in the house num -241- bered 118, Richard Grant White had his home when he wrote The New Gospel of Peace, According to St. Benjamin .

Around the corner in Third Avenue, at Thirteenth Street, is a tablet telling of the pear tree that Peter Stuyvesant brought from Holland, that grew and flourished on the edge of the Stuyvesant orchard for more than two hundred years. Within a stone's throw of the tree in the sixties, and while it yet bloomed, Stoddard lived with his friend Bayard Taylor, and here the Life of Humboldt came from Stoddard's pen. Around another corner into Fourteenth Street and down a block to No. 224, Paul du Chaillu had apartments when he -242- wrote The Land of the Midnight Sun ; but the tree-filled yard and the vine-covered cottage next to it, on which the writer's window looked, are buried beneath a dwelling in the full flush of newness.

In Fifteenth Street, just past Stuyvesant Park, is a really picturesque row of tiny houses that must have been there when Stuyvesant Park was very new indeed. They have balconies enclosed by iron fretwork, and the first in the row is especially dainty and attractive, and quite overshadowed by the lofty building that has grown up beside it. In this out-of-the-way corner the Stoddards lived for something more than a quarter of a century, and here they died, the brilliant son first, then Mrs. Stoddard, and finally Richard Henry Stoddard, in 1903.

Along the parkside and around the corner to Seventeenth Street, No. 330 was another interesting landmark -243- until, quite lately, it was swept away. Brander Matthews lived there, and could look across the square to the gray towers of St. George's while he wrote the French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century . H.C. Bunner had quarters there when he wrote A Woman of Honor and other stories of that period, and Richard Grant White was a long dweller there.

Northward a few streets, on the south side of Gramercy Park, is the house of John Bigelow, writer of half a dozen important books, who fifty years and more ago assisted William Cullen Bryant in the editorial conduct of the Evening -244- Post . Only a few steps away, in historic Irving Place, the ivy-covered house is where Mrs. Burton Harrison wrote Sweet Bells out of Tune , and on another block farther to the south the Lotus Club long had its home, the building now given over to commercial uses.

In the short stretch of Fifteenth Street that leads from Irving Place to Union Square are two points closely associated with the literature of the city. One is midway the distance, the prosaic office of a brewer now, but once the home of the Century Club when Bancroft the historian was its president. The other is nearer to the square, with a tall iron -245- fence, and a gateway not at all in keeping with the modern appearance of the street. Behind the tall fence is a bit of greensward, and beyond that a house quaintly unusual in appearance, seeming to shrink from sight in the shadows cast about it. This is where Richard Watson Gilder at one time lived, where Charles De Kay organized the Authors' Club, and where the Society of American Artists was formed.

Beyond Union Square there is in Eighteenth Street the house numbered 121 where Brander Matthews lived for fourteen or more years, where he wrote many of his books, and where was held the first meeting to organize the American Copyright -246- League. It was Professor Matthews who gave the dinner at which the unique society known as the Kinsmen came into being, at the Florence on the same street at number 105,—an apartment house in which Ellen Glasgow, Elizabeth Bisland, and Edgar Saltus have made their homes, and in which the widow of Herman Melville is now living.

In nearby Nineteenth Street is still standing No. 35, a house where Horace Greeley lived, with William Allen Butler, the author of Nothing to Wear , for a next-door neighbor. Three blocks farther on is the big office building where Dr. Josiah Strong wrote most of Our Country , and where Hamilton W. Mabie has a study in the editorial rooms of The Outlook . A few steps farther in Twenty-second Street, at No. 33, Stephen Crane wrote part of The Red Badge of Courage and worked -247- on the daily newspapers. Close by in Fifth Avenue is the publishing house where the critic and essayist, William Crary Brownell, author of French Traits , and other works, spends his business hours. Around the corner in Twenty-third Street, on the top floor of another publishing house is the den of the energetic author, editor, and critic, Jeannette L. Gilder. Across Madison Square, at the Twenty-fifth Street corner, Edgar Saltus had apartments for some time, and just off Broadway in Twenty-seventh Street, at No. 26, Edgar Fawcett wrote A Mild Barbarian .

On up Madison Avenue past Twenty-eighth Street is a brownstone dwelling with a luxuriantly blooming window garden, where James Lane Allen lives when he is in town and revises his writings. A few steps into the next thoroughfare -248- the Little Church Around the Corner nestles in a populous district, and in the next block, just beyond the Woman's Hotel, Mrs. Burton Harrison has written many of her books. Two blocks away, in the Life building, John A. Mitchell, founder of the paper, spends several working hours of each day.

Going farther up-town in Park Avenue just beyond Thirty-sixth Street is a substantial building where Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland wrote and where he died. In nearby Thirty-seventh Street hover memories of Parke Godwin, who married the daughter of William Cullen Bryant, and whose business and literary interests were closely entwined with those of his father-in-law. A few steps westward is the solemnly quiet Brick Presbyterian Church, where Dr. Henry van Dyke preached before he was called to Princeton. -249- Turning into Forty-sixth Street, note a house distinguished from its neighbors by a doorway of wrought-iron, where John A. Mitchell did much of the writing of Amos Judd .

Across town, where Fifty-first Street touches the East River, is a street so short and so out-of-the-way that few New Yorkers have ever heard of it. It is called Beekman Place, and in it survives the memory of the old Beekman house which stood near by, and which in the days of the Revolution was used as a British headquarters. It was in the -250- Beekman house that Nathan Hale rested his last night on earth. Here in this quiet spot Henry Harland lived in the eighties, when he was employed in the Register's Office and got up at two o'clock many and many a morning to write (under the name of Sidney Luska) some of his earlier books. The windows of his home looked out upon a beautiful and unusual city scene. Any one going now to where Fifty-first Street ends at an embankment high above the river may see it just as he saw it then—see the waves splashing on a rocky shore, with neither docks nor wharves nor factories to interfere; see a broad river; see a green island with stone turreted towers, and in the distance, forming a background, the irregular sky-line of the Brooklyn borough shore.

Farther up-town to Central Park, and there on the south side is the -251- mammoth apartment house close to Sixth Avenue, where William Dean Howells did much of his work; and on beyond the avenue, at No. 150, Kate Douglas Wiggin evolved Penelope's Experiences . Still on up-town, following the easterly side of the park, in Sixty-fourth Street, at No. 16, Carl Schurz lived, and in Seventy-seventh Street is the square house of stone where Paul Leicester Ford met such a fearful death.

Crossing Central Park to the far west side, the journeyer comes to wide, tree-lined West End Avenue, and there at Ninety-third Street, almost upon the shores of the Hudson River, in a locality of beautiful homes, Brander Matthews, author of Vignettes of Manhattan and A Confident To-morrow , lives and works. Returning down-town on the westerly side of the city, stop just beyond Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-sixth -252- Street before a house, colonial as to its doors and windows at least, the home of that distinguished naval officer and writer, Captain A.T. Mahan. On the nearest corner is the church where funeral services were held over Paul du Chaillu when his body was brought back from Russia. Down a few streets, John Denison Champlin, author and encyclopædist, has his home, in a yellow apartment house, and half a block along Seventy-eighth Street stands the terra cotta building occupied by Stedman before he moved to Bronxville. Down to Sixty-fifth Street now, a dozen steps or more west of Central Park, Edgar -253- Fawcett conceived A Romance of Old New York , before going to Europe for an indefinite stay.

In Thirty-fourth Street, midway between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, visit the solid little brick house, with green shutters and an air of dignity that proclaims it of another time. This has stood for three quarters of a century and at one time had no neighbors. There, until 1898, when he went to Princeton, Lawrence Hutton gathered his collection of objects artistic from all parts of the world; there he kept his assortment of death masks; there he wrote and entertained his friends, authors, actors, men of different callings.

Let the last step be to that reminder of old Chelsea Village, in Twenty-third Street beyond Ninth Avenue, called London Terrace. The Terrace was built when Chelsea was really a village, and exists to-day -254- long after the village has ceased to have an identity. One house in the row, No. 413, is particularly interesting, picturesquely and historically, carrying as its literary association the name of Charles De Kay, critic and author—a name of to-day and of the past as well, for he is the grandson of the poet, Joseph Rodman Drake.

Index

A

Adventures of Captain Bonneville, The , 102

Afara , 139

Age of Reason, The , 32 , 84

Aldrich, James, 179

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 218

Allen, James Lane, 247

All Souls' Church, 188

Along the Shore , 238

Amateur Emigrant , 231

American , 174

American Copyright League, 245

American Game in its Season , 216

American Monthly Magazine , 154 , 180

American Review , 158

American Theatre, The , 70

Amos Judd , 249

Analectic Magazine , 96 , 112

An Appeal for that Class of Americans Called Africans , 200

"Ancient Club of New York," 110

André, Major John, 55 , 56

Androborus , 37

Annabel Lee , 164

Apollo dancing rooms, 170

Arcturus , 178

Ariel in the Cloven Pine , 206

Arnold, Benedict, House of, 56

Arnold, George, 215 , 216

Arthur Mervyn , 78

Astor House, 172

Astor, John Jacob, 102 , 123

Astor Place Opera House, 160

Astoria , 102 -256-

Atlantic Monthly , 133

Audubon, John James, 189 - 195

Authors' Club, 245

B

Bacheller, Irving, 234

Backwoodsman, The , 113

Bancroft, George, 103 , 186

Barlow, Joel, 84

Barstow, Elizabeth, 204

Bartlett, John R., 172 - 180

Bartlett's Book Shop, 172 - 180

Battle Pieces , 224

Beauties of Santa Cruz , 52

Beekman House, The, 249

Behind Time , 238

Bells, The , 164

Ben Bolt , 162

Benjamin, Park, 175 , 179 , 180

Biblical Researches in Palestine , 151

Bigelow, John, 183 , 243

Bisland, Elizabeth, 246

Bleecker, Eliza, 47 - 51

Bleecker Street, 83

Bloomingdale Village, 145 , 157

Bohemia Invaded , 238

Boker, George H., 207

Bonneville, Captain, 102

Bonneville, Madame, 82 , 83

Books of New Amsterdam, 7

Booth, Mary L., 227

Botta, Mrs., 197 , 199 , 200

Botta, Vincenzo, 198

Bouwerie Village, 19 , 22

Bowling Green, 8

Bradford's printing press, 27

Bradford, William, 38 , 57

Bradford, William, tomb of, 25 - 29

Bravo, The , 134

Bread-and-Cheese Club, 131 - 133

Brevoort, Henry, 110

Brickmaking in New Amsterdam, 3 -257-

Briggs, Charles F., 159 , 160

British Prison Ship, The , 53

Broad Street, 7 , 13 , 31

Broadway, 67

Broadway Journal , 159

Brook Farm, 205

Brown, Charles Brockden, 77 , 78 - 80

Browne, George Farrar, 217

Brownell, William Crary, 247

Bryant, William Cullen, 132 , 133 , 174 , 180 - 188

Bunner, H.C., 243

Burns's Coffee House, 99

Burr, Aaron, 63 , 190

Burton, William E., 150

Butler, William Allen, 246

C

Calaynos , 207

Cary, Alice, 222 - 228

Cary, Phœbe, 222 - 228

Cecil Dreeme , 219

Century Club, 186 , 244

Champion of Freedom, The , 130

Champlin, John Denison, 252

Cheever, George B, 151

Chelsea Square, 195 , 196

Chelsea Village, 145 , 195 , 196

Child, Lydia M., 199 , 200

Chimmie Fadden , 234

Church Farm, 33

Church in the Fort, 15 , 20

Church of the Holy Communion, 229

City Editor's Conscience, A , 234

City Hall, First, 8

City Hall in Wall Street, 31

City Hall Park, 48 , 67 , 108

City Hall (Present), 75 , 109

City Hotel, 100 , 128

City Plan Commission, 109 , 110

Clapp, Henry, 213

Clapp's Almanac , John, 27 - 29

Clara Howard , 78 -258-

Clari, the Maid of Milan , 74

Clark, Lewis Gaylord, 175 - 178

Clark, Willis Gaylord, 176

Clarke, McDonald, 136 - 144

Clermont, The , 109

Clinton Hall, 159 , 160

Cobbett, William, 85

Colden, Cadwallader, 38 , 39 , 42 , 43

Collect Pond, 22 , 48

Columbia College, 81 , 116 , 174

Columbia University, 43

Columbiad , 84

Commentaries on American Law , 81

Commercial Advertiser , 65 , 183

Common Sense , 82

Common, The, 48 , 49 , 67

Complaint of New Netherland, The , 10

Confident To-morrow, A , 251

Conquest of Grenada , 97

Contoit's Garden, 170

Cooke, George Frederick, 71 , 72

Cooper, James Fenimore, 125 - 136 , 184

Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 127

Cornbury, Lord, 34 , 35

Corporation Library, 31

Corsair, The , 155

Cosby, Governor, 39 - 43

Cozzens, Frederick S., 175 , 178

Crane, Stephen, 246

Criterion, The , 222

"Croaker Papers," 119

Croegers, Tryntie, 15

Cromwell , 216

Culprit Fay, The , 121

Curtis, George William, 235

D

Dana, Charles A., 234

Dana, Richard Henry, 130 , 131

Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 141 , 142

Davis, Richard Harding, 234 , 238

Deacon Giles's Distillery , 151 -259-

Dearman, 104

Death of the Flowers , 181

Debtors' Prison, 49 - 51

DeKay, Charles, 245 , 254

De Lancey, Étienne, 99

Dennie, Joseph, 77 , 79 , 80

De Sille, Anna, 18

De Sille, Nicasius, 11 - 19

Deukalion , 208

Dewey, Orville, 185

Diamond Lens, The , 220

Dictionary of Americanisms , 172

Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan , 112

Don Giovanni , 141

Downing, Major Jack, 150 , 201

Drake, Joseph Rodman, 103 , 115 - 124

Draper, Dr. John W., 220 , 221

Du Chaillu, Paul, 239 , 241 , 252

Duke's Farm, 32

Dunlap, William, 70 , 71 , 77

Dutchman's Fireside, The , 113

Duyckinck, Evert A., 175 , 178 , 179

Duyckinck, George, 179

Dyde's, 111

E

East River Park, 101

Eben Holden , 234

Edgar Huntley , 78

Elgin Botanical Garden, 81

Elixir of Moonshine , 139

Embury, Emma C., 144

Encyclopædia of American Literature , 179

English, Thomas Dunn, 162 , 164

Eureka , 163

Evening Mirror , 152 , 156 - 159

Evening Post , 181 , 182

Exchange Street, 13

F

Fairlie, Mary, 94

Fall of the House of Usher , 150 -260-

Fanny , 118

Fashion and Famine , 202

Fawcett, Edgar, 247 , 253

Fay, Theodore S., 154

Federal Hall, 62

Federalist , 62

Fire of 1776, 54

First almanac printed, 27 - 29

First City Hall, 8

First free school, 109

First library, 31

First museum, 171

First newspaper, 38 , 57

First newspaper row, 57

First night watch, 25

First poet of New Amsterdam, 4 - 10

First Poorhouse, 49

First printing press, 27

First street lighting, 25

First Tammany Hall, 71

First telegraphic message, 194

Fitzroy, Lord Augustus, 41 , 42

Footnotes , 204

Fordham, 162 - 166

Ford, James L., 238

Ford, Paul Leicester, 251

Forester, Frank, 216

Forest Life , 199

Forrest-Macready Riots, 160

Francis, Dr. J.W., 132

Frankfort Street, 45 , 46

French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century , 243

French Traits , 247

Freneau, Philip, 47 , 51 - 66

Friendly Club, 77

Fuller, Margaret, 202 , 203

G

Gaine, Hugh, 58 - 60

Gazetteer , Rivington's, 56 -261-

General Theological Seminary, 195 , 196

Gentleman's Magazine, The , 150 , 152

Gilder, Jeannette L., 247

Gilder, Richard Watson, 239 , 245

Give Me the Old , 151

Glasgow, Ellen, 246

Gleanings in Europe , 135

Glimpses of Home Life , 143

Godey's Lady's Book , 161

Godwin, Parke, 182 , 183 , 186 , 248

Golden Hill, 48 , 87 , 88

Golden Hill Inn, 88

Goodrich, Samuel G., 227

Gowans, William, 149

Gracie's house, 103

Graham's Magazine , 152

Grayslaer , 175

Greeley, Horace, 202 , 205 , 206 , 224 , 246

Greenwich Village, 81 - 83 , 145 , 146

Griswold, Rufus W., 207

Grove Street, 84

H

Hackett, James H., 114

Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 103 , 115 - 124 , 132 , 138 , 142

Hall of Records, 49 - 51

Halpine, Charles Graham, 220

Hamilton, Alexander, 62 , 191

Hamilton Grange, 62

Handbook of Universal Literature , 198

Hanover Square, 57 - 59 , 61

Harland, Henry, 250

Harlem, 145

Harrison, Mrs. Burton, 244 , 248

"Harry Franco," 159 , 174

Haven, Alice, 228

Hell Gate, 101

Herbert, Henry W., 216 , 217

Hildreth, Richard, 224

Hillhouse, James A., 128 , 181

History of Intellectual Development in Europe , 221 -262-

History of New York , 227

History of the City of New York , 227

History of the Five Nations , 39

History, Rise, and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States , 70

Hobomok , 199

Hodgkinson, Thomas Hawkins, 120

Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 173 - 176 , 206

Hoffman, Josiah Ogden, 95

Hoffman, Matilda, 95 , 174

Holland, Dr. Josiah Gilbert, 248

Home Journal , 157

Home, Sweet Home , 74

Homeward Bound , 136

Hone, Philip, 132 , 183

Hoogh Street, 10

Horse and Horsemanship in North America, The , 216

Horseshoe Robinson , 149

Hosack, Dr. David, 81

House of Night, The , 52

Houses of New Amsterdam, 2 , 3

Howe, Julia Ward, 233

Howells, William Dean, 218 , 235 , 251

How the Other Half Lives , 236

Hudson Park, 146 - 148

Huguenot Church, 32

Hunter, Governor Robert, 35 - 38

Hutton, Lawrence, 253

I

Idle Man, The , 131

Idlewild, 156

Imp of the Perverse, The , 158

Independent Columbian Hotel, 94

Irving, Ebenezer, 100

Irving, John T., 104

Irving, Peter, 92 , 94 , 109 , 110

Irvington, 104

Irving, Washington, 87 - 105 , 109 - 112 , 115 , 174

Irving, Washington, birthplace of, 89

Irving, William, 93 , 107 , 108 , 110 - 112 , 231 -263-

Italian Opera House, 141

Ivar the Viking , 239

I Would Not Live Alway , 228

J

James, Henry, 238

Jane Talbot , 78

Jans Farm, Annetje, 32 , 33

Jersey , The prison ship, 53

John Brent , 219

John Bull in America , 114

John Street Theatre, 55 , 56 , 90 , 91

Jordan, Elizabeth, 235

Judgment, The , 128

Jumel, Madame, 190

Jumel Mansion, 190

K

Kean, Edmund, 137

Kemble, Gouverneur, 110 , 111 , 113

Kennedy, John P., 148 , 149

Kent, James, 77 , 80 , 81

Kidd, Captain William, 24

Kilmaster's School, 91

Kimball, Richard, 207

King's Bell , 240

King's College, 43

King's Farm, 32

Kinsmen, The, 246

Kip, Hendrick, 12 , 18

Kirkland, Caroline M., 198 , 199

Kissing Bridge, 22

Knickerbocker Days, Close of the, 167 - 172

Knickerbocker History of New York , 94

Knickerbocker Magazine, 174 , 176 , 177

Knight, Madame Sarah, 33 - 35

Koningsmarke , 113

Kubleh , 206 -264-

L

Lafayette Theatre, 134

Lamb, Martha J., 227

La Montagne, Dr., 12

Land of the Midnight Sun, The , 242

Last of the Mohicans, The , 134

Lathrop, George Parsons, 238

Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne, 236 , 238

Lawson, James, 120

"Lay Preacher, The," 79

Legend of Sleepy Hollow , 103

Leggett, William, 182

Leisler, Jacob, 46

Letters from under a Bridge , 155

Lewis, Estella, 201 , 202

Liberty Bell, The , 151

Life and Voyages of Columbus , 97

Life of Horace Greeley , 224

Life of Humboldt , 241

Life of Joseph Brant, The , 184

Life of Mahomet , 105

Life of Red Jacket, The , 184

Life of Washington , 105

Lion of the West, The , 114

Literary Gazette , 179

Literary Magazine and American Register, The , 80

Literary World, The , 179

Literati of New York, The , 161

London Terrace, 253

Longfellow, Henry W., 97

Longworth, David, 93

Loockermans, Govert, 12

Ludlow, Fitz-Hugh, 215

Luska, Sidney, 250

Lynch, Anne C., 197 - 204

M

Mabie, Hamilton W., 246

Mad Poet, The, 136 - 144

Magazine of American History , 227 -265-

Mahan, Captain A.T., 252

"Major Jack Downing," 150 , 201

Marco Bozzaris , 124 , 181

Martling's Tavern, 71

Mary Derwent , 202

Masonic Hall, 170

Matthews, Brander, 238 , 243 , 245 , 246 , 251

McLelland, Isaac, 152

Melodies and Madrigals , 240

Melville, Herman, 224 - 226

Mercantile Library, 160

Messinger, Robert H., 151

Middle Dutch Church, 55 , 171

Mild Barbarian, A , 247

Miller, John, 29 , 30

Minerva, The , 65

Minniesland, 189 , 194

Mirror, The , 130

Mitchell, John A., 248 , 249

Mitchill, Dr. Samuel, 94

Moore, Bishop Benjamin, 196

Moore, Clement C., 195 , 196

Moreau, Jean Victor, 61

Morgensons, The , 240

Morning Chronicle , 92 , 109

Morris, George P., 130 , 138 , 153 , 154 , 156 , 157

Morris House, 123 , 190

Morse, Samuel F.B., 194

Muhlenberg, Dr. William Augustus, 228

Murray Hill, 60

Murray, Lindley, 60 , 61

Murray, Mrs., 60

My Faith Looks up to Thee , 140

N

Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , 150

National Anti-Slavery Standard , 199

National Gazette , 64

Nearer My Home , 223

New Amsterdam, 2 - 6

New England Magazine , 179 -266-

New Gospel of Peace, The , 241

New Mirror , 162

Newspaper, First, 38 , 57

Newspaper Row, The first, 57

New York before the Civil War, 209 - 212

New York Gazette , 38 , 58

New York Gazetteer , 58

New York in 1830, 167 - 172

New York Journal , 58

New York Mercury , 58

New York Mirror , 153 - 156

New York Quarterly Review , 149

New York Review and Athenæum , 181

Niblo's Garden, 171

Night watch, The first, 25

Noah, Mordecai M., 138

Nothing to Wear , 246

Nozze di Figaro , 141

O

O'Brien, Fitz-James, 220 , 221

Odellville, 145

Old Oaken Bucket, The , 130

Old Sexton, The , 180

"Old Tom's," 118 , 119

Oliver Goldsmith , 105

O'Reilly, Miles, 220

Ormond , 78

Osgood, Frances Sargent, 203 , 204

Our Country , 246

Our New World , 180

Outlook, The , 246

P

Paine, Thomas, 82 - 86

Paine, Thomas, Grave of, 85 , 86

Paine, Thomas, House of, 83 , 84

Palmer, Ray, 139 , 140

Park Row, 68

Park Theatre, 68 , 72 , 75 , 77 , 171 -267-

Parton, James, 224

Paulding, James Kirke, 90 , 93 , 103 , 107 - 114

Paul Felton , 131

Payne, John Howard, 72 - 75 , 97

Penelope's Experiences , 251

Percival, James G., 132 , 181

"Peter Parley," 227

Petticoat Lane, 233

Pfaff's, 213 - 218

Philosophy of Composition , 161

Picture of New York , 94

Pilot, The , 128

Pine Street, 32 , 75 , 76

Pioneers, The , 128

Poe, Edgar Allan, 145 - 166 , 200 - 204

Poe, Virginia, 149 , 157 , 162 , 164

Poems of the Orient , 208

Poet, First, of New Netherland, 4 - 10

Poets and Poetry of America , 207

Poorhouse, First, 49

Portfolio, The , 79

Powhatan , 151

Prairie, The , 134

Praise of New Netherland, The , 10

Precaution , 126

Prose Writers of America , 207

Putnam's Magazine , 159

Q

Queen's Farm, 32

R

Raven, The , 158 , 161 , 202

Red Badge of Courage, The , 246

Red Rover, The , 134

Renwick, Jane, 96 , 104

Renwick, Professor James, 96 , 132

Revolution, New York during the, 54 - 56

Reynold's Ale House, 117 - 119

Richmond Hill, 63

Riis, Jacob A., 236 -268-

Ripley, George, 205

Rip Van Winkle , 97

Rivington, James, 58 , 59

Robinson, Edward, 151

Romance of Old New York, A , 253

S

St. George's Chapel, 90

St. John's Burying-Ground, 147 , 148 , 150

St. John's Park, 125 , 126

St. Leger , 207

St. Luke's Hospital, 228 , 229

St. Mark's Church, 22 , 23

St. Patrick's Church, 142

St. Paul's Chapel, 62 , 108

Salmagundi , 41 , 93

Salmagundi's Cockloft Hall, 111

Saltus, Edgar, 246 , 247

Sands, Robert C, 133 , 181

Saturday Press , 214 , 218

Schurz, Carl, 251

Scudder's Museum, 171

Second City Hall, 12

Selyns, Henricus, 20 - 24

Shakespeare Tavern, 120

"Sign of the Bible and Crown," 58

Sinless Child, The , 200

Sketches in Switzerland , 135

Smith, Rev. Eli, 151

Smith, Dr. Elihu Hubbard, 76 - 79

Smith, Elizabeth Oakes, 201

Smith, Seba, 150

Smith, William, 43 , 44

Society Library, 31

Society of American Artists, 245

Southern Literary Messenger , 148

Sparkling and Bright , 173

Sparrowgrass Papers , 178

Spy, The , 126 , 134

Stadt Huys, 8

Stedman, Edmund C., 218 , 233 , 253 -269-

Steendam, Jacob, 4 - 10

Stephens, Ann S., 202

Stephens, John L., 175 - 177

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 230 , 231

Stoddard, Richard Henry, 204 - 207 , 233 , 236 , 238 , 240 - 242

Stoddard, Mrs. Richard Henry, 240 , 242

Stone Street, 9

Stone, William L., 175 , 183 , 184

Story of a New York House, The , 232

Streets first lighted, 25

Strong, Dr. Josiah, 246

Stuyvesant, Judith, 11

Stuyvesant, Peter, 1 , 11 , 12 , 19

Stylus, The , 152

Sunday Times and Messenger , 138

Sunnyside, 104

Swallow Barn , 149

Sweet Bells Out of Tune , 244

T

Tales and Sketches of a Cosmopolite , 120

Tales of a City Room , 235

Tales of a Country Schoolmaster , 182

Tales of the Good Woman , 114

Talisman Magazine, 181

Talisman, The , 133

Tammany Hall, First, 71

Taylor, Bayard, 198 , 204 - 208 , 218 , 238 , 241

Temple, Charlotte, 118

Temple Street, 118

Thames Street, 99

Thistle Finch, The , 10

Thomson, Mortimer, 215

Tienhoven's Street, 76

Tom Thornton , 131

Town and Country , 157

Townsend, Edward W., 234

Trinity Church, 26 , 32

Tuckerman, Henry T., 221 , 222

Typee , 226 -270-

U

Ulalume , 165

United States and England , 112

Universe, The , 165

V

Van Brugh Street, 57

Van Cortlandt, Oloff, 12

Vanderlyn , 175

Van Dyke, Henry, 248

Vanity Fair , 215 , 218

Van Tassel house, 103

Vauxhall, 171

Verplanck, Gulian C., 133 , 142 , 181 , 186

Views Afoot , 205

Vignettes of Manhattan , 251

Visit of St. Nicholas , 197

Voyages of the Companions of Columbus , 98

W

Wallace, William Ross, 151

Wall Street, 6

Wall, The city, 5

Ward, Artemus, 217

Washington, George, 62 , 64

Washington Hall, 131

Water Witch, The , 134

Webster, Noah, 65

Weekly Post-Boy , 58

Westward Ho! , 114

Whitehall, 8

White, Richard Grant, 241 , 243

Whitman, Walt, 218

Wieland , 78

Wiggin, Kate Douglas, 251

Wild Scenes in Forest and Prairie , 175

Wiley, the publisher, 130

Williams, Jesse Lynch, 234

William Street, 88 -271-

Willis, Nathaniel P., 138 , 154 - 157 , 162

Windust's, 111 , 137 , 138

Winter in the West, A , 175

Winter, William, 218 , 234

Winthrop, Theodore, 219 , 220

Wolfert's Roost , 103 , 104

Woman of Honor, The , 243

Woodman, Spare that Tree , 154

Woodworth, Samuel, 129 , 130 , 142 , 153 , 154

Y

Yorkville, 145

"Young American Roscius," 73

Z

Zenger, Peter, 38 , 40

		PAGE
The “Half Moon” on the Hudson , 1609 From the painting by L.W. Seavey.		Frontispiece
The Stadt Huys		8
Broad Street , 1642		30
King’s College, about 1773		42
The Debtors’ Prison		48
William Smith Peter Stuyvesant Philip Freneau Thomas Paine Joel Barlow		60
The First Tammany Wigwam, Corner Nassau and Spruce Streets		70
Map of Streets in the City of New York in 1827		76
James Kirke Paulding Philip Hone Washington Irving Joseph Rodman Drake Fitz-Greene Halleck J. Fenimore Cooper		100
-vi- The Park Theatre, Park Row , 1831		136
Richard Henry Stoddard John James Audubon William Cullen Bryant Bayard Taylor Edgar Allan Poe Robert Fulton		150
Poe’s Cottage at Fordham From a drawing by C.W. Mielatz, by permission. Copyright, 1899, by The Society of Iconophiles.		158
The Battery in 1830 From a drawing by C. Burton.		164
The Apollo Rooms in 1830		170
View of Old Buildings in William Street, Looking Towards Maiden Lane , 1800		182
W.D. Howells J.G. Holland Richard Grant White Brander Matthews William Winter		200
From an engraving of the picture by J.H. Marble; courtesy of W.E. Benjamin.

Jacob Morton W m Henderson Carlile Pollock	}	Commissioners

Lewis Hallem John Hodgkinson	}	managers

CHAPTER		PAGE
I.	Writers of New Amsterdam	1
II.	Before the Revolution	25
III.	The Poet of the Revolution	45
IV.	In the Days of Thomas Paine	67
V.	The City that Irving Knew	87
VI.	With Paulding, Drake, and Halleck	106
VII.	Cooper and his Friends	125
VIII.	Those who Gathered about Poe	145
IX.	At the Close of the Knickerbocker Days	167
X.	Half a Century ago	189
XI.	Two Famous Meeting-Places	209
XII.	Some of the Writers of To-Day	230

	PAGE
Seal of New Amsterdam	1
Early Dutch Houses	2
The Wall and Gate	5
An Old Family Bible	6
Stuyvesant’s “Whitehall”	8
Along the Strand	9
De Sille’s House	14
A Woman’s Costume, New Amsterdam	16
Stuyvesant’s Bouwerie House	20
The Church in the Fort	21
Captain Kidd’s House	23
The Church Called Trinity	34
“ The New-York Gazette ”	39
The Collect	48
The British Prison-Ship	53
The Middle Dutch Church	55
Fraunces’ Tavern	62
Broad Street and Federal Hall	63
Richmond Hill	64
The Corner Stone of the Park Theatre	69 -viii-
The Post Office, William Street	78
Golden Hill Inn	88
St. George’s Chapel, Beekman St.	89
The City Hotel	101
The House of Astor, where Irving Wrote “Astoria”	102
Where Irving Lived, 17th Street and Irving Place	104
The Shakespeare Tavern	120
The Jumel Mansion	123
Washington Hall	132
On Bloomingdale Road, near 75th Street, in Poe’s Time	147
The House in Carmine Street	149
Where Poe Wrote “The Raven”	157
Museum at the North End of the Park , 1825	170
Niblo’s Garden	171
Audubon’s Home, 156th Street and North River	193
Clement C. Moore’s House, Chelsea	196
The University Building	219
The Studio Building in West 10th Street	221
53 East 20th Street	223 -ix-
10 West Street	232
Where “How the Other Half Lives” was Written	237
146 Macdougal Street	239
108 Waverly Place	240
Richard Grant White’s Home	241
Where Richard Henry Stoddard Died	243
Where the Authors’ Club was Organized	244
Horace Greeley’s Home	245
The Beekman Mansion	249
Lawrence Hutton’s House	252
De Kay’s House, London Terrace	254

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Literary New York: Its Landmarks and Associations

LITERARY NEW YORK

Its Landmarks and Associations

By Charles Hemstreet

With 65 Illustrations

Contents

Full-Page Illustrations

Illustrations in the Text

Literary New York

Chapter I Writers of New Amsterdam

Chapter II Before the Revolution

Chapter III The Poet of the Revolution

Chapter IV In the Days of Thomas Paine

Chapter V The City that Irving Knew

Chapter VI With Paulding, Drake, and Halleck

Chapter VII Cooper and His Friends

Chapter VIII Those Who Gathered about Poe

Chapter IX At the Close of the Knickerbocker Days

Chapter X Half a Century Ago

Chapter XI Two Famous Meeting-Places

Chapter XII Some of the Writers of To-Day