New York Sketches

by Jesse Lynch Williams

*****

Because it keeps the eyes so busy, seeing all the people that pass, one block of buildings seems very much like another the first few times the new-comer takes this walk, except, of course, for conspicuous landmarks like that of the new library on the site of the late reservoir or the Arcade on the site of the old Windsor Hotel, with its ghastly memories; but after awhile all the blocks begin to seem very different; not only the one where you saw a boy on a bicycle run down and killed, or where certain well-known people live, but the blocks formerly considered monotonous. There are volumes of stories along the way. Down Twenty-ninth Street can be seen, so near the avenue and yet so sequestered, the Church of the Transfiguration, as quaint and low and toy-like as a stage-setting, ever blessed by stage-people for the act which made the Little Church Around the Corner known to everyone, and by which certain pharisees were taught the lesson they should have learned from the parable in their New Testament.

Farther up is a church of another sort, where Europeans of more or less noble blood marry American daughters of acknowledged solvency, while the crowd covers the sidewalks and neighboring house-steps. Here, consequently, other people's children come to be married, though neither, perhaps, attended this church before the rehearsal, and get quite a good deal about it in the society column too, though, to tell the truth, they had hoped that the solemn union of these two souls would appropriately call forth more publicity. Shed a tear for them in passing. There are many similar disappointments in life along this thoroughfare.

Farther back we passed what a famous old rich man intended for the finest house in New York, and it has thus far served chiefly as a marble moral. Its brilliance is dingy now, its impressiveness is gone, and its grandeur is something like that of a Swiss chalet at the base of a mountain since the erection across the street of an overpowering, glittering hotel.

This is the region of clubs; they are more numerous than drug-stores, as thick as florists' shops. But it seems only yesterday that a certain club, in moving up beyond Fortieth Street, was said to be going ruinously far up-town. Now nearly all the well-known clubs are creeping farther and farther along, even the old Union Club, which for long pretended to enjoy its cheerless exclusiveness down at the corner of Twenty-first Street, stranded among piano-makers and publishers, and then with a leap and a bound went up to Fiftieth Street to build its bright new home.

Approaching St. Thomas's.

Soon the new, beautiful University Club at Fifty-fourth Street, with the various college coats of arms on its walls, which never fail to draw attention from the out-of-town visitors on 'bus-tops, will not seem to be very far up-town, and by and by even the great, white Metropolitan will not be so much like a lonely iceberg opposite the Park entrance. I wonder if anyone knows the names of them all; there always seem to be others to learn about. Also one learns in time that two or three houses which for a long time were thought to be clubs are really the homes of former mayors, receiving from the city, according to the old Dutch custom, the two lighted lamps for their doorways. This section of the avenue where, in former years, were well-known rural road-houses along the drive, is once more becoming, since the residence régime is over, the region of famous hostelries of another sort.

The University Club ... with college coats of arms.