New York Sketches

by Jesse Lynch Williams

An Old-fashioned Stone-arched Bridge. (Richmond, Staten Island.)

There are all those historic country-houses within the city limits, well known, and in some cases restored, chiefly by reason of being within the city, like the Van Cortlandt house, now a part of the park, and the Jumel mansion standing over Manhattan Field, a house which gets into most historical novels of New York. Similarly Claremont Park has adopted the impressive Zabriskie mansion; and the old Lorillard house in the Bronx might have been torn down by this time but that it has been made into a park house and restaurant. Nearly all these are tableted by the "patriotic" societies, and made to feel their importance. The Bowne place in Flushing, a very old type of Long Island farm-house, was turned into a museum by the Bowne family itself—an excellent idea. The Quaker Meeting-house in Flushing, though not so old by twenty-five years as it is painted in the sign which says "Built in 1695," will probably be preserved as a museum too.

An Old House in Flatbush.

Another relic in that locality well worth keeping is the Duryea place, a striking old stone farm-house with a wide window on the second floor, now shut in with a wooden cover supported by a long brace-pole reaching to the ground. Out of this window, it is said, a cannon used to point. This was while the house was head-quarters for Hessian officers, during the long monotonous months when "the main army of the British army lay at Flushing from Whitestone to Jamaica;" and upon Flushing Heights there stood one of the tar-barrel beacons that reached from New York to Norwich Hill, near Oyster Bay. The British officers used to kill time by playing at Fives against the blank wall of the Quaker Meeting-house, or by riding over to Hempstead Plains to the fox-hunts—where the Meadowbrook Hunt Club rides to the hounds to-day. The common soldiers meanwhile stayed in Flushing and amused themselves, according to the same historian, by rolling cannon-balls about a course of nine holes. That was probably the nearest approach to the great game at that time in America, and it may have been played on the site of the present Flushing Golf Club.

These same soldiers also amused themselves in less innocent ways, so that the Quakers and other non-combatants in and about this notorious Tory centre used to hide their live stock indoors over night, to keep it from being made into meals by the British. That may account for the habit of the family occupying the Duryea place referred to; they keep their cow in a room at one end of the house. At any rate it is not necessary for New Yorkers to go to Ireland to see sights of that sort.

Those are a few of the historic country places that have come to town. There is a surprisingly large number of them, and even when they are not adopted and tableted by the D. A. R. or D. R., or S. R. or S. A. R., they are at least known to local fame, and are pointed out and made much of.

But the many abandoned country houses which are not especially historic or significant—except to certain old persons to whom they once meant home—goodly old places, no longer even near the country, but caught by the tide well within the city, that is the kind to be sorry for. Nobody pays much attention to them. A forlorn For Sale sign hangs out in front, weather-beaten and discouraged. The tall Colonial columns still try to stand up straight and to appear unconscious of the faded paint and broken windows, hoping that no one notices the tangle of weeds in the old-fashioned garden, where old-fashioned children used to play hide-and-seek among the box-paths, now overgrown or buried under tin cans.... Across the way, perhaps, there has already squatted an unabashed row of cheap, vulgar houses, impudent, staring little city homes, vividly painted, and all exactly alike, with highly ornamented wooden stoops below and zinc cornices above, like false-hair fronts. They look at times as though they were putting their heads together to gossip and smile about their odd, old neighbor that has such out-of-date fan-lights, that has no electric bell, no folding-beds, and not a bit of zinc cornicing.

Meanwhile the old house turns its gaze the other way, thinking of days gone by, patiently waiting the end—which will come soon enough.