With the old Astor Library so stripped and deserted, one wonders if a similar fate awaits the stately and palatial building to which it has gone. Will the new building some day vanish? And similarly the superb and mighty structures that have in recent years come in connection with the city's northern sweep?
A curious fate has attended the Lenox Library property. Given to the city, land and building and contents, the land and building were sold into private ownership when the consolidation of libraries was decided upon. The granite stronghold, built to endure forever, was razed, and where it had stood arose the most beautiful home in New York, which, gardened in boxwood, its owner filled with priceless treasures. And now he is dead, and again the land, a building, and costly contents are willed to the city.
Across from the old Astor Library stood Colonnade Row, a long and superb line of pillar-fronted grandeur; but only a small part now remains, with only a few of the fluted Corinthian pillars. All is shabby and forlorn, but noble even in shabbiness. And the remnant, one thinks, must shortly fall a victim to the destructive threat that hangs over everything in our city.
Colonnade Row was built in the eighteen twenties. Washington Irving lived there. One gathers the impression that Irving, named after Washington, lived in as many houses as those in which Washington slept. In the row occurred the wedding of President Tyler,[80] an event not characterized by modest shrinking from publicity, for after the ceremony the President and his bride were driven down Broadway in an open carriage, drawn by four horses, to the Battery, whence a boat rowed them out to begin their married life on—of all places!—a ship of war!
It is interesting to find two Virginia-born Presidents of the United States coming to Lafayette Street; for here dwelt Monroe,[81] he of the “Doctrine,” during the latter part of his life, at what is now the northwest corner of Lafayette Street and Prince; and he died there. Long since the house fell into sheer dinginess and wreck, and a few months ago was sold to be demolished; but New York may feel pride in her connection with the American who, following Washington's example, declared against “entangling ourselves in the broils of Europe, or suffering the powers of the old world to interfere with the affairs of the new.”
Near this house Monroe was buried, in the Marble Cemetery on Second Street, beyond Second Avenue, a spot with high open iron fence in front and high brick wall behind, with an atmosphere of sedateness and repose, although a tenement district has come round about. Monroe's body lay here for a quarter of a century, and then Virginia belatedly carried it to Virginian soil.
Close by, entered through a narrow tunnel-like entrance at 41-1/2 Second Avenue, is another Marble Cemetery (the Monroe burying-place is the New York City Marble Cemetery, and this other is the New York Marble Cemetery), and this second one is quite hidden away in inconspicuousness, as befits a place which, according to a now barely decipherable inscription, was established as “a place of interment for gentlemen,” surely the last word in exclusiveness!
Across the street from the entrance to this cemetery for gentlemen is a church for the common people, one of the pleasant surprises of a kind which one frequently comes upon in New York—a building really distinguished in appearance, yet not noticed or known. A broad flight of steps stretches across the broad church front. There are tall pillars and pilasters, excellent iron fencing and gateway. The interior is all of the color of pale ivory, with much of classic detail and with a “Walls-of-Troy” pattern along the gallery. There were a score of such classic churches in New York early in the last century.
Always in finding the unexpected there is charm, as when, the other day, we came by the merest chance upon “Extra Place”! What a name! It is a little court nooked out of First Street,—how many New Yorkers know that there is a First Street in fact and not merely in theory?—between Second and Third avenues. Extra Place is a stone's throw in length, a forgotten bit of forlornness, but at its end, beyond sheds and tall board fencing, are suggestions of pleasant homes of a distant past, great fireplace chimneys and queer windows, and an old shade tree, and under the tree a brick-paved walk, formal in its rectangle, where happy people walked in the long ago, and where once a garden smiled, but where now no kind of flower grows wild.
The tree of the New York tenements is the ailantus, palm-like in its youth, brought originally from China for the gardens of the rich. It grows in discouraging surroundings, is defiant of smoke, does not even ask to be planted; for, Topsy-like, it “jest grows.” Cut it down, and it comes up again. It is said to have no insect enemies. An odd point in its appearance is that every branch points up.