Many good New Yorkers (chiefly, however, of that small per cent. born in New York, who generally know rather little about their town except that they love it) have not been so remotely far down the island as Battery Park for a decade, unless to engage passage at the steamship offices which until recently were to be found in the sturdy houses of the good old Row (though once called "Mushroom Row") opposite the oval of the ancient Bowling Green, where now the oddly placed statue of Abram de Peyster sits and stares all day. (Now that these old gable windows and broad chimneys are gone I wonder how he will like the new Custom-house.)
... clattering, crowded, typical Broadway
Now, the grandmothers of these same New Yorkers, long ago, before there were any steamships, when Castle Garden was a separate island and Battery Park was a fashionable esplanade from which to watch the shipping in the bay and the sunsets over the Jersey hills—their grandmothers, dressed in tight pelisses and carrying reticules, were wont to take a brisk walk, in their very low-cut shoes, along the sea-wall before breakfast and breathe the early morning air. They did not have so far to go in those days, and it was a fashionable thing to do. To-day you can see almost every variety of humanity on the cement paths from Pier A to Castle Garden, except that known as fashionable. But the sunsets are just as good and the lights on the gentle hills of Staten Island quite as soft and there are more varieties of water-craft to gaze at in the bristling bay. I should think more people would come to look at it all.
... City Hall with its grateful lack of height ...
I mean of those even who do not like to mingle with other species than their own and yet want fresh air and exercise. On a Sunday in winter if they were to come down here for their afternoon stroll they would find (after a pleasant trip on nearly empty elevated cars) less "objectionable" people and fewer of them than on the crowded up-town walks.
What there are of strollers down here—in winter—are representatives of the various sets of eminently respectable janitors' families (of which there are almost as many grades as there are heights of the roofs from which they have descended), and modest young jackies, with flapping trousers, and open-mouthed emigrants, though more of the latter are to be seen on those flimsy, one-horsed express wagons coming from the Barge Office, seated on piles of dirty baggage—with steerage tags still fresh—whole families of them, bright-colored head-gear and squalling children, bound for the foreign-named emigrant hotels and homes which are as interesting as the immigrants. Some of these latter are right opposite there on State Street, including one with "pillared balcony rising from the second floor to the roof," which is said to be the earlier home of Jacob Dolph in Bunner's novel—a better fate surely than that of the other New York house for which the book was named.
What's the matter?