"Oil lamps were in general use as street lights, and the light was easily blown out by the wind. The lamplighter was usually a tall man, a character, and his position was considered an important one. Fifth Avenue north of Fifty-ninth Street remained undeveloped for years, and it was not until sometime in the seventies that my father and I finished grading upper Fifth Avenue. Sixty years ago on both sides were stone walls where there were deep depressions. There was no traffic except drovers coming down to market with cattle. There were but two main thoroughfares, Boston Post Road on the east side, and Bloomingdale Road on the west side. From the Boston Post Road long lanes led to the residences of gentlemen who had country-seats on the East River, and similar lanes led from the old Bloomingdale Road to the country-seats on the Hudson River. The sites of the Plaza, the Savoy, and the Netherland Hotels were rocky knolls. A brook which came down Fifty-ninth Street formed several shallow pools which remained for a number of years after the Civil War."
Whether or not Saint Gaudens was right in his contention that the proper place for his equestrian statue of General Sherman was on the Riverside Drive by Grant's Tomb, without that gilded bronze figure of heroic size and the Winged Victory leading before, the Plaza would not be quite the Plaza. Obscured as it is in these days by the vast scaffolding, there is no true son of Manhattan who passes the corner on his way up the Avenue, or enters Central Park, who does not turn to look at the chief ornament of the broad square. The statue was made several years after Sherman's death, and the sculptor laboured on it for six years, from the time when he began the work in Paris, to its final unveiling, on Memorial Day, 1903. Of the statue and its surroundings as he saw them on the occasion of one of his later visits to the city of his birth and boyhood, Henry James wrote:
"The best thing in the picture, obviously, is Saint Gaudens's great group, splendid in its golden elegance and doing more for the scene (by thus giving the beholder a point of such dignity for his orientation) than all its other elements together. Strange and seductive for any lover of the reasons of things this inordinate value, on the spot, of dauntless refinement of the Sherman image; the comparative vulgarity of the environment drinking it up, on one side, like an insatiable sponge, and yet failing at the same time to impair its virtue. The refinement prevails and, as it were, succeeds; holds its own in the medley of accidents, where nothing else is refined unless it be the amplitude of the 'quiet' note in the front of the Metropolitan Club; amuses itself, in short, with being as extravagantly 'intellectual' as it likes. Why, therefore, given the surrounding medium, does it so triumphantly impose itself, and impose itself not insidiously and gradually, but immediately and with force? Why does it not pay the penalty of expressing an idea and being founded on one?—such scant impunity seeming usually to be enjoyed among us, at this hour, by any artistic intention of the finer strain? But I put these questions only to give them up—for what I feel beyond anything else is that Mr. Saint Gaudens somehow takes care of himself."
Facing the Sherman group, in the centre of the square, with the Cornelius Vanderbilt house in the background, is the Fountain of Abundance, or the Pulitzer Memorial Fountain, designed by Karl Bitter (his last work), executed by Isidore Konti, and erected in 1915 to the memory of the late Joseph Pulitzer, for many years proprietor of the New York "World." The structure is surmounted by the bronze figure of a nymph, bearing a basket laden with the fruits of the earth. The Vanderbilt residence which is the background when the Fountain is viewed from the north is of red brick with grey facings in the style of a French château of the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
CHAPTER XVIII
Stretches of the Avenue
Stretches of the Avenue—The Days of Squatter Kings—Seneca Village—"Millionaire's Row"—The Avenue Gates—The Soul of Central Park—Some Palaces of the Stretch—The Obelisk and the Metropolitan Museum—Northward Through Harlem.
Here and there in the Island, far to the north, may be found an unblasted rock on the top of which is perched an unpainted shanty with a crude chimney spout from which smoke issues voluminously. A quarter of a century ago there were thousands of such shanties along the upper West Side. From the lofty iron height of the El. Road one could survey them stretching all the way from the Sixties to One Hundred and Sixteenth. On the summits the Lords of the Manors smoked their clay pipes in bland disregard of the world and its rent-collectors, and the family goats gambolled; in the valleys the truck gardens waxed green and smiled luxuriously as if conscious of the enormous square-foot value of the land that they were pre-empting. But King Dynamite came, and the steam drill came, and the air clanged with the driving of many rivets, and the Mountain Men, and their goats, and their wives, and their unwashed offspring, and their Lares and Penates went forth into the wilderness—no one knows just where. The days of Squatter Sovereignty had passed.
But the Mountain men and women within the memory were the hardy, obstinate, unyielding survivors, the last to cling to the strongholds in a region that once seemed impregnable. Before Central Park was laid out Fifty-ninth Street was the dividing line. Below, rich brown-stone; above, along the country road which was then Fifth Avenue, a waste, squalid yet in its way picturesque, that extended almost to Mount Morris Park. "Here lived," "Fifth Avenue" tells us, "over five thousand as poverty-stricken and disreputable people as could be seen anywhere. The squatters' settlements in the Park were surrounded by swamps, and overgrown with briers, vines, and thickets. The soil that covered the rocky surface was unfit for cultivation. Here and there were stone quarries and stagnant pools. In this wilderness lived the squatters, in little shanties and huts made of boards picked up along the river fronts and often pieced out with sheets of tin, obtained by flattening cans. Some occupants paid ten dollars and twenty-five dollars rent, but the majority paid nothing. Three stone buildings, two brick buildings, eighty-five or ninety frame houses, one rope-walk and about two hundred shanties, barns, stables, piggeries, and bone-factories, appear in a census made just before Central Park was begun. Some of the shanties were dug-outs, and most had dirt floors. In this manner lived, in a state of loose morality, Americans, Germans, Irish, Negroes, and Indians. Some were honest and some were not; many were roughs and crooks. Much of their food was refuse, which they procured in the lower portion of the city, and carried along Fifth Avenue to their homes in small carts drawn by dogs. The mongrel dogs were a remarkable feature of squatter life, and it is said that the Park area contained no less than one hundred thousand 'curs of low degree,' which, with cows, pigs, cats, goats, geese, and chickens, roamed at will, and lived upon the refuse, which was everywhere. In the neighbourhood of these squatter settlements, of which the largest was Seneca Village, near Seventy-ninth Street, the swamps had become cesspools and the air was odoriferous and sickening."