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, 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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.