It is only a question now of crossing half a dozen city blocks towards the east to wander into what was called the Bouwerie Village. Modern streets and modern improvements have so overridden the village of old that traces of it are few and difficult to find. Here in this district many a writer of New York has lived. At Fourth Avenue and Tenth Street still stands the house, known to all who lived there as "The Deanery," in which Miss Annie Swift kept boarders, and where the family of Richard Henry Stoddard lived during the last four years that Mr. Stoddard held his post in the Custom House. Here Stedman, and Bayard Taylor, and Howells were visitors, with scores of other writers; here Mrs. Stoddard wrote The Morgensons, and here Stoddard himself wrote The King's Bell, Melodies and Madrigals, and other poems. Not more than a block away, in the house numbered 118, Richard Grant White had his home when he wrote The New Gospel of Peace, According to St. Benjamin.
Around the corner in Third Avenue, at Thirteenth Street, is a tablet telling of the pear tree that Peter Stuyvesant brought from Holland, that grew and flourished on the edge of the Stuyvesant orchard for more than two hundred years. Within a stone's throw of the tree in the sixties, and while it yet bloomed, Stoddard lived with his friend Bayard Taylor, and here the Life of Humboldt came from Stoddard's pen. Around another corner into Fourteenth Street and down a block to No. 224, Paul du Chaillu had apartments when he wrote The Land of the Midnight Sun; but the tree-filled yard and the vine-covered cottage next to it, on which the writer's window looked, are buried beneath a dwelling in the full flush of newness.
In Fifteenth Street, just past Stuyvesant Park, is a really picturesque row of tiny houses that must have been there when Stuyvesant Park was very new indeed. They have balconies enclosed by iron fretwork, and the first in the row is especially dainty and attractive, and quite overshadowed by the lofty building that has grown up beside it. In this out-of-the-way corner the Stoddards lived for something more than a quarter of a century, and here they died, the brilliant son first, then Mrs. Stoddard, and finally Richard Henry Stoddard, in 1903.
Along the parkside and around the corner to Seventeenth Street, No. 330 was another interesting landmark until, quite lately, it was swept away. Brander Matthews lived there, and could look across the square to the gray towers of St. George's while he wrote the French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century. H.C. Bunner had quarters there when he wrote A Woman of Honor and other stories of that period, and Richard Grant White was a long dweller there.
Northward a few streets, on the south side of Gramercy Park, is the house of John Bigelow, writer of half a dozen important books, who fifty years and more ago assisted William Cullen Bryant in the editorial conduct of the Evening Post. Only a few steps away, in historic Irving Place, the ivy-covered house is where Mrs. Burton Harrison wrote Sweet Bells out of Tune, and on another block farther to the south the Lotus Club long had its home, the building now given over to commercial uses.