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 studying 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 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, 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 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. 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 suggestion 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.
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.