Time-mellowed, its history has also mellowed, with myriad associations and happenings and tales. That a man who was to become Mayor of New York (it was Fernando Wood) made his first entry into the city as the hind leg of an elephant of a traveling show, and in that capacity passed for the first time the city hall, is a story that out-Whittingtons Whittington.[73]
And noblest and finest of all the associations with the city hall is one which has to do with a time before the city hall arose; for here, on the very spot where it stands, George Washington paraded his little army on a July day in 1776, and with grave solemnity, while they listened in a solemnity as grave, a document was read to them that had just been received from Philadelphia and which was forever to be known as the Declaration of Independence.
It used to be, three quarters of a century ago, that people could go northward from the city hall on the New York and Harlem Railway, which built its tracks far down in this direction. It used the Park Avenue tunnel, which had been built in 1837 for the first horse-car line in the world. After the railway made Forty-second Street its terminal, horse-cars again went soberly through the tunnel. What a pleasure to remember the tinkle, tinkle as they came jerkily jogging through, from somewhere up Harlemward, and, with quirky variety as to course, to an end somewhere near University Place! A most oddly usable line.
A few minutes' walk from University Place is one of the most fascinating spots in New York—“St. Mark's in the Bouwerie,” although it is actually on Second Avenue and Stuyvesant Street.
The church was built in 1799, but it stands on property that the mighty Petrus Stuyvesant[74] owned, and on the site of a chapel that he built, and his tomb is beneath the pavement of the church, and the tombstone is set in the foundation-wall on the eastern side. There is an excellent bronze close by, fittingly made in Holland, of this whimsical, irascible, kind-hearted, clear-headed captain-general and governor who ruled this New Amsterdam. Nothing else in the city so gives the smack of age, the relish of the saltness of time, as this old church built on Stuyvesant's land and holding his bones. For Stuyvesant was born when Elizabeth reigned in England and when Henry of Navarre, with his white plume, was King of France. The great New-Yorker was born in the very year that “Hamlet” was written.[75]
He loved his city, and lived here after the English came and conquered him and seized the colony.
This highly pictorial old church, broad-fronted, pleasant-porticoed, stands within a great open graveyard space, green with grass and sweetly shaded, and its aloofness and beauty are markedly enhanced by its being set high above the level of the streets.
On Lafayette Street, once Lafayette Place, a quarter of a mile from St. Mark's, still stands the deserted Astor Library, just bought by the Y. M. H. A. as a home for immigrants, built three quarters of a century ago for permanence, but now empty and bare and grim, shorn of its Rialto-like[76] steps, with closed front, as if harboring secrets behind its saddening inaccessibility. Once-while stately gate-posts and gateway, now ruinous, beside the library building, marked the driveway entrance of a long-vanished Astor home.
All is dreary, dismal, desolate, and the color of the Venetian-like building has become a sad combination of chocolate brown and dull red.
The tens of thousands of books from here, the literature and art of the Lenox collection, and the fine foundation of Tilden are united at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. From what differing sources did these three mighty foundations spring! One from the tireless industry of a great lawyer;[77] one from a far-flung fur trade that over a century ago reached through trackless wilderness to the Pacific;[78] one from a fortune wrung by exactions from American soldiers of the Revolution, prisoners of war, who paid all they had in the hope of alleviating their suffering—a fortune inherited by a man who studied to put it out for the benefit of mankind in broad charity and helpfulness, in hospitals and colleges, and in his library, left for public use.[79]