The architectural appearance of the city was more meagre, more uniform, far more picturesquely simple. There were wooden houses, squat and irregular, and there were brick houses, low and solid; there were no great towering structures to make one crane the neck to see the top. It was a city where provinciality stared out at every corner, a city which has been swept so entirely away that what is left of it lingers only in odd nooks and corners and back streets where even the oldest New Yorker has lost sight of it, and where visitors spend many hours seeking out old-time curiosities in the byways of the metropolis.
The larger buildings of those days, the ones to catch the eye of a stranger, are all memories now, and it is a difficult matter to say even where they stood with any degree of certainty. There was Masonic Hall in Broadway and Pearl Street, with its great chamber in imitation of the Chapel of Henry VIII., that was quite the pride of the town, and indeed looked upon as the most elegant reception-room in detail and appointment to be found in America. Close by, on the other side of the way, was Contoit's Garden, a delightful resort, where could be had the finest of ices and cakes. Farther on the Apollo dancing-rooms were a Mecca for the youth of the town. Opposite the lower end of City Hall Park was Scudder's, the first museum in the city, the forerunner of Barnum's, filled to overflowing with curiosities of earth and sea and air. Across the way, on the opposite side of the park, was the Park Theatre with its broad white front and its record as the chief playhouse of the city, although there were hosts of admirers and patrons of the Old Bowery, and of the National in Leonard Street, and of the Olympic in Broadway, where Mitchell was established as a great favorite. Out beyond the city was Niblo's Garden, newly established and a real rural retreat; near to it, over on the Bowery Road, was the old Vauxhall, fast losing caste as a place of outdoor amusement. In Nassau Street the Middle Dutch Church still stood, its silvery bell sounding over the city in which Sunday was a day set apart for religious observance and had not come to be a day of merrymaking.
THE APOLLO ROOMS IN 1830.
It had come to be very near the end of the Knickerbocker days in this quiet city where brimstone matches and india-rubber overshoes had just been introduced,—indeed, it was close upon the year 1840,—when the Astor House was a new structure talked about all over the land as a wonderful palace. On the ground floor of this hotel John R. Bartlett kept a well stocked book-shop, and not a day but it was much visited by the literary folk of the town, for he was the friend of all bookish people. He himself was a quiet, scholarly man, and it was there in his shop, when his many friends left him leisure for work, that he arranged the greater part of his Dictionary of Americanisms, by which his name is remembered far better than by his historical records,—remembered when the fact that he was Secretary of State in Rhode Island is quite forgotten if it was ever widely known.