New York Sketches

by Jesse Lynch Williams

I

Many good New Yorkers (chiefly, however, of that small per cent. born in New York, who generally know rather little about their town except that they love it) have not been so remotely far down the island as Battery Park for a decade, unless to engage passage at the steamship offices which until recently were to be found in the sturdy houses of the good old Row (though once called "Mushroom Row") opposite the oval of the ancient Bowling Green, where now the oddly placed statue of Abram de Peyster sits and stares all day. (Now that these old gable windows and broad chimneys are gone I wonder how he will like the new Custom-house.)

... clattering, crowded, typical Broadway

Now, the grandmothers of these same New Yorkers, long ago, before there were any steamships, when Castle Garden was a separate island and Battery Park was a fashionable esplanade from which to watch the shipping in the bay and the sunsets over the Jersey hills—their grandmothers, dressed in tight pelisses and carrying reticules, were wont to take a brisk walk, in their very low-cut shoes, along the sea-wall before breakfast and breathe the early morning air. They did not have so far to go in those days, and it was a fashionable thing to do. To-day you can see almost every variety of humanity on the cement paths from Pier A to Castle Garden, except that known as fashionable. But the sunsets are just as good and the lights on the gentle hills of Staten Island quite as soft and there are more varieties of water-craft to gaze at in the bristling bay. I should think more people would come to look at it all.

... City Hall with its grateful lack of height ...

I mean of those even who do not like to mingle with other species than their own and yet want fresh air and exercise. On a Sunday in winter if they were to come down here for their afternoon stroll they would find (after a pleasant trip on nearly empty elevated cars) less "objectionable" people and fewer of them than on the crowded up-town walks.

What there are of strollers down here—in winter—are representatives of the various sets of eminently respectable janitors' families (of which there are almost as many grades as there are heights of the roofs from which they have descended), and modest young jackies, with flapping trousers, and open-mouthed emigrants, though more of the latter are to be seen on those flimsy, one-horsed express wagons coming from the Barge Office, seated on piles of dirty baggage—with steerage tags still fresh—whole families of them, bright-colored head-gear and squalling children, bound for the foreign-named emigrant hotels and homes which are as interesting as the immigrants. Some of these latter are right opposite there on State Street, including one with "pillared balcony rising from the second floor to the roof," which is said to be the earlier home of Jacob Dolph in Bunner's novel—a better fate surely than that of the other New York house for which the book was named.

What's the matter?

Across the park and up and around West Street are more of these immigrant places, some with foreign lettering and some plain Raines's law hotels with mirrored bars. One of them, perhaps the smallest and lowest-ceiled of all, is where Stevenson slept, or tried to, in his amateur emigranting.

These are among the few older houses in New York used for the same purposes as from the beginning. They seem to have been left stranded down around this earliest part of the town by an eddy in the commercial current which sweeps nearly everything else to the northward from its original moorings.... But this is not what is commonly meant by "down-town," though it is the farthest down you can go, nor is it where the walk up-town properly begins.

The Walk Up-town begins where the real Broadway begins, somewhat above the bend, past the foreign consulates, away from the old houses and the early nineteenth century atmosphere. Crowded sidewalks, a continuous roar, intent passers-by, jammed streets, clanging cable-cars with down-towners dodging them automatically; the region of the modern high business building.

In the wake of a fire-engine.

Above are stories uncountable (unless you are willing to be bumped into); beside you, hurried-looking people gazing straight ahead or dashing in and out of these large doors which are kept swinging back and forth all day; very heavy doors to push, especially in winter, when there are sometimes three sets of them. Within is the vestibule bulletin-board with hundreds of men's names and office-numbers on it; near by stands a judicial-looking person in uniform who knows them all, and starts the various elevators by exclaiming "Up!" in a resonant voice. While outside the crowd still hums and hurries on; it never gets tired; it seems to pay no attention to anything. It is a matter of wonder how a living is made by all the newsstands on the corners; all the dealers in pencils and pipe-cleaners and shoe-strings and rubber faces who are thick between the corners, to whom as little heed is given as to the clatter of trucks or the wrangling of the now-blocked cable-cars, or the cursing truck-drivers, or the echoing hammering of the iron-workers on the huge girders of that new office building across the way.

But that is simply because the crowd is accustomed to all these common phenomena of the city street. As a matter of fact, half of them are not so terrifically busy and important as they consider themselves. They seem to be in a great hurry, but they do not move very fast, as all know who try to take the walk up-town at a brisk pace, and most of them wear that intent, troubled expression of countenance simply from imitation or a habit generated by the spirit of the place. But it gives a quaking sensation to the poor young man from the country who has been walking the streets for weeks looking for a job; and it makes the visiting foreigner take out his note-book and write a stereotyped phrase or two about Americans—next to his note about our "Quick Lunch" signs which never fail to astonish him, and behind which may be seen lunchers lingering for the space of two cigars.

An ambulance, with its nervous, arrogant bell, comes scudding down the street. A very important young interne is on the rear keeping his balance with arrogant ease. His youthful, spectacled face is set in stony indifference to all possible human suffering. The police clear the way for him. And now see your rushing "busy throng" forget itself and stop rushing. It blocks the sidewalk in five seconds, and still stays there, growing larger, after those walking up-town have passed on.

The beautiful spire of Trinity, with its soft, brown stone and the green trees and quaintly lettered historic tombs beneath and the damp monument to Revolutionary martyrs over in one corner—no longer looks down benignly on all about it, because, for the most part, it has to look up. On all sides men have reared their marts of commerce higher than the house of God.

No longer to be thrilled ... will mean to be old.

It seems perfectly proper that they should, for they must build in some direction and see what valuable real estate they have given up to those dead people who cannot even appreciate it. Here among the quiet graves the thoughtful stranger is accustomed to moralize tritely on how thoughtless of death and eternity is "the hurrying throng" just outside the iron fence, who, by the way, have to pass that church every day, in many cases three or four times, and so can't very well keep on being impressed by the nearness of death, etc., about which, perhaps, it is just as well not to worry during the hours God meant for work. Even though one cannot get much of a view from the steeple, except down Wall Street, which looks harmless and disappointingly narrow and quiet at first sight, Trinity is still one of the show-places of New York, and it makes a pleasing and restful landmark in the walk up Broadway. It deserves to be starred in Baedeker.

Now comes the most rushing section of all down-town: from Trinity to St. Paul's, clattering, crowded, typical Down-Town. So much in a hurry is it that at Cedar Street it skips in twenty or thirty feet a whole section of numbers from 119 to 135. The east side of the street is not so capricious; it skips merely from No. 120 to 128.

The people that cover the sidewalks up and down this section, occasionally overflowing into the streets, would probably be pronounced a typical New York crowd, although half of them never spend an entire day in New York City from one end of the month to the other, and half of that half sleep and eat two of their meals in another State of the Union. The proportion might seem even greater than that, perhaps it is, if at the usual hour the up-town walker should be obliged to struggle up Cortlandt Street or any of the ferry streets down which the torrents of commuters pour.

*****

Up near St. Paul's the sky-scrapers again become thick, so that the occasional old-fashioned five or six story buildings of solid walls with steep steps leading up to the door, seem like playthings beside which the modern building shoots up—on up, as if just beginning where the old ones left off. More like towers are many of these new edifices, or magnified obelisks, as seen from the ferries, the windows and lettering for hieroglyphics. Others are shaped like plain goods-boxes on end, or suggest, the ornate ones, pieces of carefully cut cake standing alone and ready to fall over at any moment and damage the icing.

... Grace Church Spire becomes nearer.

Good old St. Paul's, which is really old and, to some of us, more lovable than ornate, Anglican Trinity, has also been made to look insignificant in size by its overpowering commercial neighbors, especially as seen from the Sixth Avenue Elevated cars against the new, ridiculous high building on Park Row. But St. Paul's turns its plain, broad, Colonial back upon busy Broadway and does not seem to care so much as Trinity. The church-yard is not so old nor so large as Trinity's, but somehow it always seems to me more rural and church-yardish and feels as sunny and sequestered as though miles instead of a few feet from Broadway and business.

Through Union Square.

Now, off to the right oblique from St. Paul's, marches Park Row with its very mixed crowd, which overflows the sidewalks, not only now at going-home time, but at all hours of the day and most of the night; and on up, under the bridge conduit, black just now with home-hurrying Brooklynites and Long Islanders, we know we could soon come to the Bowery and all that the Bowery means, and that, of course, is a walk worth taking. But The Walk Up-town, as such, lies straight up Broadway, between the substantial old Astor House, the last large hotel remaining down-town, and the huge, obtrusive post-office building, as hideous as a badly tied bundle, but which leads us on because we know—or, if strangers, because we do not know—that when once we get beyond it we shall see the calm, unstrenuous beauty of the City Hall with its grateful lack of height, in its restful bit of park. Here, under the first trees, is the unconventional statue of Nathan Hale, and there, under those other trees—up near the court-house, I suppose—is where certain memorable boy stories used to begin, with a poor, pathetic newsboy who did noble deeds and in the last chapter always married the daughter of his former employer, now his partner.

By this time some of the regular walkers up-town have settled down to a steady pace; others are just falling in at this point—just falling in here where once (not so very many years ago) the city fathers thought that few would pass but farmers on the way to market, and so put cheap red sandstone in the back of the City Hall.

... windows which draw women's heads around.

Over there, on the west side of the street, still stands a complete row of early buildings—one of the very few remaining along Broadway—with gable windows and wide chimneys. Lawyers' offices and insurance signs are very prominent for a time. Then comes a block or two chiefly of sporting-goods stores with windows crowded full of hammerless guns, smokeless cartridges, portable canoes, and other delights which from morning to night draw sighs out of little boys who press their faces against the glass awhile and then run on. Next is a thin stratum composed chiefly of ticket-scalpers, then suddenly you find yourself in the heart of the wholesale district, with millions of brazen signs, one over another, with names "like a list of Rhine wines;" block after block of it, a long, unbroken stretch.

Instead of buyers ... mostly shoppers.