Chapter XII
Some of the Writers of To-Day
THERE is little of old-time picturesqueness in the city of New York to-day, where buildings are too towering, too massive, too thickly clustered to offer artistic and unique effects. But a stroll about the homes of the writers of the city invests their rather commonplace surroundings with more than passing interest.
In the older part of the town, the section that was all of New York a hundred years ago and is now the far down-town, there are many reminders of those friends whose books are on the most easily reached library shelf.
To No. 10 West Street, that stands on the river front, Robert Louis Stevenson was taken by a fellow-voyager in 1879; here he stopped the first night he spent in America, and of this house he wrote in the Amateur Emigrant. From the waterside just at dusk, catching a dim outline of the varying housetops is to glimpse some old castle of feudal times. The lowest building in all this block is No. 10—a meagre, dingy, two-story structure that has come to be very old. The doors and windows seem to have been made for some other building, and to be trying to get back to where they belong, bulging out in the struggle and making rents in the house-front.
Crossing Battery Park to State Street, at No. 17 is the tall Chesebrough building that has sprung up on the spot where William Irving, brother of Washington, lived, and where the Salmagundi wits gathered sometimes in the evening. Two or three doors farther along is a survival of old New York which delights the eye, with its porticoes and oval windows, odd appearing and many-sided; a mansion when wealth and affluence clustered around the Battery. This is the scene of the first few chapters of Bunner's Story of a New York House. Around the corner and through the wide doors of the Produce Exchange, at the back of that building and literally hidden in the middle of the block, is an old street that seems to have lost its usefulness, a quaint and curious way full half a century and more behind the times, now bearing the name of Marketfield Street, but once called Petticoat Lane. It is no longer a thoroughfare, for in its length of half a block it has neither beginning nor end. Here is all that is left of the house in which Julia Ward Howe was born.
Passing along Broad Street, where Edmund C. Stedman, the poet and financier, has an office close to Wall Street, you come in a few minutes to the Custom House. To enter that building is to get lost in a moment. Pass through the door into a veritable trackless wilderness of narrow black halls, with rooms that open in the most unexpected corners, and come after a while to the Debenture Room of old, and to the window near which Richard Henry Stoddard had his desk for close upon twenty years.