Across town, where Fifty-first Street touches the East River, is a street so short and so out-of-the-way that few New Yorkers have ever heard of it. It is called Beekman Place, and in it survives the memory of the old Beekman house which stood near by, and which in the days of the Revolution was used as a British headquarters. It was in the Beekman house that Nathan Hale rested his last night on earth. Here in this quiet spot Henry Harland lived in the eighties, when he was employed in the Register's Office and got up at two o'clock many and many a morning to write (under the name of Sidney Luska) some of his earlier books. The windows of his home looked out upon a beautiful and unusual city scene. Any one going now to where Fifty-first Street ends at an embankment high above the river may see it just as he saw it then—see the waves splashing on a rocky shore, with neither docks nor wharves nor factories to interfere; see a broad river; see a green island with stone turreted towers, and in the distance, forming a background, the irregular sky-line of the Brooklyn borough shore.
Farther up-town to Central Park, and there on the south side is the mammoth apartment house close to Sixth Avenue, where William Dean Howells did much of his work; and on beyond the avenue, at No. 150, Kate Douglas Wiggin evolved Penelope's Experiences. Still on up-town, following the easterly side of the park, in Sixty-fourth Street, at No. 16, Carl Schurz lived, and in Seventy-seventh Street is the square house of stone where Paul Leicester Ford met such a fearful death.
Crossing Central Park to the far west side, the journeyer comes to wide, tree-lined West End Avenue, and there at Ninety-third Street, almost upon the shores of the Hudson River, in a locality of beautiful homes, Brander Matthews, author of Vignettes of Manhattan and A Confident To-morrow, lives and works. Returning down-town on the westerly side of the city, stop just beyond Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street before a house, colonial as to its doors and windows at least, the home of that distinguished naval officer and writer, Captain A.T. Mahan. On the nearest corner is the church where funeral services were held over Paul du Chaillu when his body was brought back from Russia. Down a few streets, John Denison Champlin, author and encyclopædist, has his home, in a yellow apartment house, and half a block along Seventy-eighth Street stands the terra cotta building occupied by Stedman before he moved to Bronxville. Down to Sixty-fifth Street now, a dozen steps or more west of Central Park, Edgar Fawcett conceived A Romance of Old New York, before going to Europe for an indefinite stay.
In Thirty-fourth Street, midway between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, visit the solid little brick house, with green shutters and an air of dignity that proclaims it of another time. This has stood for three quarters of a century and at one time had no neighbors. There, until 1898, when he went to Princeton, Lawrence Hutton gathered his collection of objects artistic from all parts of the world; there he kept his assortment of death masks; there he wrote and entertained his friends, authors, actors, men of different callings.
Let the last step be to that reminder of old Chelsea Village, in Twenty-third Street beyond Ninth Avenue, called London Terrace. The Terrace was built when Chelsea was really a village, and exists to-day long after the village has ceased to have an identity. One house in the row, No. 413, is particularly interesting, picturesquely and historically, carrying as its literary association the name of Charles De Kay, critic and author—a name of to-day and of the past as well, for he is the grandson of the poet, Joseph Rodman Drake.
