Around two corners from this spot is a curiously picturesque little bit caused by the street changes of a century ago. It is Patchin Place, opening from Tenth Street opposite Jefferson Market. The place is a cul-de-sac, with a double row of little three-story houses, each looking just like the other, of yellow-painted brick. Each house has a little area space, each front door is up two steps from its narrow sidewalk. Each door is of a futuristic green. Each has its ailantus-tree, making the little nooked place a delightful bower.
Immediately around the corner is the still more curious Milligan Place, a spot more like a bit of old London than any other in New York. It is a little nestled space, entered by a barely gate-wide opening from the busy Sixth Avenue sidewalk. Inside it expands a trifle, just sufficiently to permit the existence of four little houses, built close against one another. So narrowly does an edge of brick building come down beside the entrance that it is literally only the width of the end of the bricks.
In an instant, going through the entrance that you might pass a thousand times without noticing, you are miles away, you are decades away, in a fragment of an old lost lane.
Near by, where Sixth Avenue begins, there is still projective from an old-time building the sign of the Golden Swan, a lone survival of long ago. And this is remindful of the cigar-store Indians. Only yesterday they were legion, now a vanished race. And the sidewalk clocks that added such interest to the streets, they, too, have gone, banished by city ordinance.
The conjunction of Seventh Avenue and Greenwich Avenue and Eleventh Street makes a triangle, at the sharp point of which is a small, low, and ancient building, fittingly given over to that ancient and almost vanished trade, horseshoeing. A little brick building with outside wooden stair stands against and above it as the triangle widens, and then comes an ancient building a little taller still. And this odd conglomerate building was all, so you will be told, built in the good old days for animal houses for one of the earliest menageries! Next came a period of stage-coaches, with horses housed here. And, as often in New York, a great shabbiness accompanies the old. Within the triangle, inside of a tall wooden fence, are several ancient ailantus trees, remindful that long ago New York knew this locality as—name full of pleasant implications—“Ailanthus Gardens.” And every spring Ailanthus Gardens, oblivious to forgetfulness and shabbiness, still bourgeons green and gay.
An old man, a ghost-of-the-past old man, approached, and, seeing that we were interested, said abruptly, unexpectedly, “That's Bank Street over there, where the banks and the bankers came,” thus taking the mind far back to the time of a yellow-fever flight from what was then the distant city to what was in reality Greenwich.
Only a block from here, on Seventh Avenue, is a highly picturesque survival, a long block of three-story dwellings all so uniformly balconied, from first floor to roof-line, across the entire fronts, that you see nothing but balconies, with their three stories fronted with eyelet-pattern balustrades. In front of all the houses is an open grassy space, and up the face of the balconies run old wistaria-vines. Each house, through the crisscrossing of upright and lateral lines, is fronted with nine open square spaces, like Brobdingnagian pigeon-holes.
On West Eleventh Street is a row almost identical in appearance. If you follow Eleventh Street eastward, and find that it does not cut across Broadway, you will remember that this comes from the efforts of Brevoort, an early landowner, to save a grand old tree that stood there. And then Grace Church gained possession, and the street remained uncut.
A most striking vanishing hereabouts has been of the hotels. What an interesting group they were in this part of Broadway! Even the old Astor, far down town, has gone, only a wrecked and empty remnant remaining.
But a neighbor of the Astor House is an old-time building whose loss, frequently threatened, every one who loves noble and beautiful architecture would deplore—the more than century-old city hall, which still dominates its surroundings, as it has always dominated, even though now the buildings round about are of towering height.