THE ROBERTS HOUSE, RITTENHOUSE SQUARE, PHILADELPHIA.
houses were the “real stuff,” those of the London Terrace are sham in comparison.
In the Colonnade there dwelt at different times many noted individuals. When the first John Jacob Astor decided to devote some of his money to art, the Astor library and other gracious projects, he looked about him for some men of a gentler type than those with whom he had rubbed elbows in the accumulation of his wealth—men of some literary and artistic achievement who would be competent to direct the proposed outlay. Such spirits were rare in the forties, and Mr. Astor had difficulty in finding them. He induced the poet Halleck to become his protégé, and Washington Irving to pay him extended visits. I am not sure that Washington Irving was considered a guest of Mr. Astor when he lived in apartments at the Colonnade, but as he was often entrusted with various commissions in matters of literature and art, and the financing of same for Mr. Astor, who lived just over the way, it was nearly the same thing.
Washington Irving spoke and wrote the English language correctly, an uncommon accomplishment in his time, and for which the American people paid him nearly a quarter of a million dollars in royalties. He was the dilettante par excellence of his epoch, who, without having anything in particular to say, said it very gracefully. They did not pay according to real genius in the Transitional period, for otherwise, Poe should have made a fortune with two of his poems alone—namely, “The Raven” and “The Bells,” which we know, as a matter of fact, he did not. However, Washington Irving had his own mission to perform, though it must have been with extreme reluctance that he quitted his snug bachelor quarters at Wolfert’s Roost for the then palatial surroundings of the Colonnade even to serve Mr. Astor. For if you accept the hospitality of very rich people—and if you can do anything worth while you do not want for invitations—you are generally expected to return every penny’s worth of it in some way. Niecks in his “Life of Chopin” relates how when the “grand artiste” was asked to play after dinner at the hôtel of an opulent host, he begged off, pleading that he had eaten so very little, which was true enough, for the malady from which he suffered sadly
GOOD ARCHITECTURE OF THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD IN LOWER FIFTH AVENUE. NO. 1 FIFTH AVENUE.
WATERBURY HOME, FIFTH AVE. AND 11th ST.