New York Sketches

by Jesse Lynch Williams

It will take longer, however, for the regions to the north, beyond Washington Heights, down through Inwood and past Tubby Hook, to look like part of a city. And across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek from Manhattan Island, up through the winding roads of Riverdale to Mount St. Vincent, and so across the line to Yonkers, it is still wooded, comparatively secluded and country-like, even though so many of the fine country places thereabouts are being deserted. Over to the eastward, across Broadway, a peaceful road which does not look like a part of the same thoroughfare as the one with actors and sky-scrapers upon it, there are the still wilder stretches of Mosholu and Van Cortlandt Park, where, a year or two ago, large, well-painted signs on the trees used to say "Beware of the Buffaloes."

A Peaceful Scene in New York.

In the distance is St. Andrew's Church, Borough of Richmond, Staten Island.

The open country sport of golf has had a good deal to do with making this rural park more generally appreciated. Golf has done for Van Cortlandt what the bicycle had done for the Bronx and Pelham Bay Parks. There are still natural, wild enough looking bits, off from the beaten paths, in all these parks, scenes that look delightfully dark and sylvan in the yearly thousands of amateur photographs—the camera does not show the German family approaching from the rear, or the egg-shells and broken beer-bottles behind the bushes—but beware of the police if you break a twig, or pick a blossom.

V

Those who enjoy the study of all the forms of nature except the highest can find plenty to sigh over in the way the city thrusts itself upon the country. But to those who think that the haunts and habits of the Man are not less worthy of observation than those of the Beaver and the Skunk, it is all rather interesting, and some of it not so deeply deplorable.

A Relic of the Early Nineteenth Century, Borough of Richmond.

There are certain old country taverns, here and there, up toward Westchester, and down beyond Brooklyn and over on Staten Island—not only those which everybody knows, like the Hermitage in the Bronx and Garrisons over by the fort at Willets Point, but remote ones which have not yet been exploited in plays or books, and which still have a fine old flavor, with faded prints of Dexter and Maud S. and much earlier favorites in the bar-room. In some cases, to be sure, though still situated at a country cross-roads, with green fields all about, they are now used for Tammany head-quarters with pictures of the new candidate for sheriff in the old-fashioned windows—but most of them would have gone out of existence entirely after the death of the stage-coach, if it had not been for the approach of the city, and the side-whiskered New Yorkers of a previous generation who drove fast horses. If the ghosts of these men ever drive back to lament the good old days together, they must be somewhat surprised, possibly disappointed, to find these rural road-houses doing a better business than even in their day. The bicycle revived the road-house, and though the bicycle has since been abandoned by those who prefer fashion to exercise, the places that the wheel disclosed are not forgotten. They are visited now in automobiles.