Freed from the intricacies of the old building, continue the stroll up-town, and in Park Row, at No. 29, on the third floor, is found the old home of the Commercial Advertiser, where Jesse Lynch Williams worked, and wrote A City Editor's Conscience, and other stories. A little way farther on is the Tribune building, where William Winter has his den, and under the same roof the room where Irving Bacheller conducted a newspaper syndicate before Eben Holden was thought of. Then on again a few steps to the Sun building and into the room, little changed from the time when Charles A. Dana sat there so many years, and, close by, the reporters' room where Edward W. Townsend worked, and wrote about Chimmie Fadden. There is a winding staircase, that the uninitiated could never find, leading into the rooms of the Evening Sun, where Richard Harding Davis "reported," and where he conceived some of the Van Bibber stories. Directly across the street is the World office, and looking from the windows, so high up that the city looks like a Lilliputian village, you have the view that Elizabeth Jordan looked upon during the ten years she was getting inspiration for the Tales of a City Room. Down narrow Frankfort Street is Franklin Square, the home of Harper's Magazine, where George W. Curtis established his Easy Chair in which he was enthroned so long, and which is now occupied by William Dean Howells.
Cherry Street leads out of Franklin Square direct to Corlear's Hook Park. Half a hundred feet before that green spot is reached, in a squalid neighborhood of dirty house-fronts, ragged children, begrimed men, and slovenly women, there is a house numbered 426, above the door of which are the words: "I was sick and ye visited Me." Dwellers in the neighborhood know that this is a hospital for those suffering from incurable disease, but, beyond this, seem to know very little about it. It is the home of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who has given up her entire life to brighten many another. In the same block, but nearer to Scammel Street, which is next towards the south, Brent's foundry used to be in the days when Richard Henry Stoddard was an iron-worker and the friend of Bayard Taylor, whom he visited in Murray Street.
From this far East Side to Washington Square is quite a distance, but stop half-way at Police Headquarters and the nearby reporters' offices. Any one there will be glad to point out the room where Jacob A. Riis worked so many years and wrote most of How the Other Half Lives, and from which he carried out his ideas for benefiting the city poor—carried them out so well that President Roosevelt called him New York's most useful citizen.
In Washington Square the wanderer has much to think of in the literary associations recalled by this green garden that has blossomed from a pauper graveyard, and which has been written of by Howells, Brander Matthews, Bayard Taylor, Bunner, Henry James, F. Hopkinson Smith, and almost every writer who has brought New York into fiction.
From the square, stroll in any direction for definite reminders. Towards the south and around into Macdougal Street, at No. 146, there is a dingy brick house with a trellised portico, where Brander Matthews and his friends used to dine, and which James L. Ford made the Garibaldi of his Bohemia Invaded. Walk towards the east, past the site of the University building, and stand at the Greene Street corner, at No. 21 Washington Place, where Henry James was born. Towards the west a few steps into Waverly Place, at No. 108, is a squat red brick house where Richard Harding Davis wrote his newspaper tales. Across, at the corner, lived George Parsons Lathrop when he wrote Behind Time, and there his wife, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, wrote Along the Shore. An historic site this house stands on, for it is where Stoddard and Taylor once lived together. A block to the north is old-time Clinton Place, which now, for modern convenience, recking not of memory or of sentiment, has become Eighth Street. There, to the left of Fifth Avenue, at No. 18, is where Paul du Chaillu wrote Ivar the Viking, and to the right the house opposite, covered from basement to eaves with green clustering vines, is the home of Richard Watson Gilder.