Fitz-James O'Brien has told of how he was once sent by a newspaper to see Henry T. Tuckerman, in a big brown building in Tenth Street. This studio building, just east of Sixth Avenue, is there yet, and the room on the second floor where O'Brien had his talk with the scholarly essayist and critic may be seen. At that time Tuckerman was writing The Criterion; or, The Test of Talk about Familiar Things. In this large room overlooking the street it was his custom on Sunday evenings to entertain his literary friends.
Another home where there were Sunday-evening gatherings for many years was that of Alice and Phœbe Cary. This house, one of the few residences remaining in a neighborhood otherwise given up to business structures to-day, is numbered 53 on East Twentieth Street. Here the Carys lived when they made their home in this city, coming from their Ohio birthplace to a wider field of activity. You can walk now into the little parlor where the gatherings were held. You can go into the room above, where Phœbe worked—when she found time; for in the joint housekeeping of the sisters Phœbe often said that she had to be the housekeeper before she could be the poet. In that room she wrote, after coming from church one Sunday, the hymn which has made her name famous and well-beloved, Nearer My Home.
There on the same floor was the favorite work-corner of Alice, and sitting close by the window, where she could look out into the street, she wrote many of her poems of memory and of domestic affection. In this room, too, she died.
To recite the names of those Sunday-evening callers would be to recall all the writers in the city at that time, and to mention all those prominent in the world of letters who came from out of town. James Parton was often one of the company, in the days when he was arranging the material for his Life of Horace Greeley, material gathered from those who had known the great editor during his early days in New Hampshire and Vermont. Greeley himself dropped in occasionally, and also another member of the Tribune staff, Richard Hildreth, the writer from Massachusetts, who had been associate editor of the Boston Atlas and who in after years was United States Consul at Trieste.
Herman Melville was invited to the Twentieth Street house at the time when he was at work on his Battle Pieces, and could look back on years of adventure by land and by sea, and on the hardships that had supplied him with the material from which to write so much that was odd and interesting. At one of these Sunday-night receptions, at which Alice Cary introduced him first, Melville told the company, and told it far better than he had ever written anything (at least so one of his hearers has recorded), the story of that life of trial and adventure. He began at the beginning, telling of his boyhood in New York, of his shipping as a common sailor, and of his youthful wanderings in London and Liverpool. In true sailor fashion, and with picturesque detail, he spun the tale of his eighteen months' cruise to the sperm fisheries in the Pacific, and held his hearers' close attention while he related the coarse brutality of his captain, who had forced him to desert at the Marquesas Islands. Then he traced his wanderings with his one companion through the trackless forest on the island of Nukahiva and of his capture by the Typee cannibals. He related how there was little hope in his heart that he could ever escape, but that he still held tight to life and his courage did not desert him; how with the thought of death before him by night and by day he yet hourly studied the strange life about him and garnered those facts and fancies which he afterwards used to such advantage in his successful Typee. It was a thrilling tale to listen to, in strange contrast to his humdrum later life when he was an employee of the New York Custom House. When you go to see the home of the Cary sisters, walk on a few blocks to East Twenty-sixth Street, and there see the house numbered 104. On this site stood Melville's house, where he lived for many years and where, when he had come to be an old man, he died.
Mary L. Booth was another visitor to the home of the Cary sisters, and with them she talked over a great many details of her History of the City of New York, which she was at that time energetically engaged upon. And there this future editor of Harper's Bazar met Martha J. Lamb when Mrs. Lamb came to the city from Chicago. A talk between the two had much to do with directing Mrs. Lamb's thought into historical lines, and led to her publishing, some seventeen years later, her History of New York, and to her assuming, in 1883, the editorship of the Magazine of American History. Mary L. Booth used to tell very amusingly how she had once met Samuel G. Goodrich, then famous as "Peter Parley," at the little house in Twentieth Street, and how disappointed she had been in listening to his talk and not finding it as impressive as it should have been as coming from the author and editor of more than one hundred and fifty volumes. This incident occurred within a year or two of "Peter Parley's" death.
That popular writer of juvenile tales, Alice Haven, was also a visitor of the Cary sisters. Her early life had been spent in Philadelphia, where she had been married to J.C. Neal, but after his death she had removed to New York and made her home there. She was very much interested in the work of St. Luke's Hospital, which was not a great distance away, and often came to talk with Phœbe Cary about that institution. Miss Cary herself was interested in it because of her regard for its founder, Dr. William Augustus Muhlenberg, who had written a hymn that was a great favorite of hers, I Would Not Live Alway. Dr. Muhlenberg was the rector of the Church of the Holy Communion, and in 1846 on St. Luke's Day after his sermon he suggested to his congregation that of the collection that was about to be taken half should be put aside as the commencement of a fund which should be used to found an institution for the care of the sick poor. The fund started that day with thirty dollars, and that was the beginning of St. Luke's Hospital. It was not a great while before the actual hospital work was begun in a building at 330 Sixth Avenue, near Twentieth Street, and there had a home until the completion of that at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, where it remained until those quarters were outgrown, and in 1896 it removed to the new buildings on Cathedral Heights.