Writers of Knickerbocker New York

Transcriber’s Note
Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-clicking them and selecting an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping and/or stretching them.
Of this book there have been printed three hundred copies from type and original wood blocks on French hand-made paper, and three copies on Roman parchment, by order of the Committee on Publications of The Grolier Club of the City of New York, November, Nineteen Hundred and Twelve
THE WRITERS OF KNICKERBOCKER NEW YORK
BY HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE
ILLUSTRATIONS ENGRAVED BY WALWORTH STILSON
THE GROLIER CLUB OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK 1912
Copyright, 1912, by The Grolier Club of the City of New York
In these days, when New York has become a metropolitan city with a population of four million souls, and the old city has shrunk politically into the Borough of Manhattan, it is not easy to recall the obliterated outlines of the Town which was satirized by the vivacious young men who wrote the “Salmagundi” papers. Unlike Rome, which has been rebuilt half a dozen times on its early site and largely out of its old materials, so that the city of to-day is a kind of palimpsest in stone, brick, and mortar, New York has grown by the process of destruction, and has become metropolitan through successive stages of self-effacement. Here and there one comes upon a building which has survived from the late colonial period, but no structure now standing bears witness to the taste or lack of taste of the Dutch settlers, and the streets preserve no traces of the old lanes and highways save an occasional name as misleading descriptively as the Bowery. Canal Street is as stolid a reminiscence of a water-channel as is the heavy warehouse frontage of Grub Street of the humorous or tragic traditions of literary Bohemia in the days of Mr. Pope and Dr. Johnson. New York has changed its form almost as often as, according to the physiologists, men change their bodies. It has kept certain characteristics which marked its youth and predicted the traits of its maturity; but its growth has been so great that the divergencies between the latest and the earliest city seem to be differences in kind rather than in degree.