The former extraordinary picturesqueness of the waterfront has gone; but still there is much there that is strange, and a general odor of oakum and tar remains. And, leading back from the East-Side waterfront, narrow, ancient lanes have been preserved, and by these one may enter the old-time warehouse portion of the city, where still the permeative smell of drugs or leather or spice differentiates district from district.
Vanished is many a delightful old name. Pie Woman's Lane became Nassau Street. Oyster Pasty Alley became Exchange Alley. Clearly, early New Yorkers were a gustatory folk.
A notable vanishing has within a few months come to Wall Street itself—the vanishing of the last outward and visible sign of the feud of Alexander Hamilton[18] and Aaron Burr.[82] Hamilton was the leading spirit in establishing one bank in the city, and Burr, through a clause in a water-company charter, established another, and through all these decades the banks have been rivals. Now they have united their financial fortunes and become one bank.
An interesting rector of Trinity Church, which looks in such extraordinary fashion into the narrow gorge of Wall
Street, became over a century ago Bishop of New York, Benjamin Moore, and he is chiefly interesting, after all, through his early connection with the then distant region still known as Chelsea, in the neighborhood of Twenty-third Street and the North River, where he acquired great land-holdings that had been owned by the English naval captain who had made his home here and given the locality its name.
Chelsea still holds its own as an interesting neighborhood, mainly because of its possession of the General Theological Seminary, which has attracted and held desirable people and given an atmosphere of quiet seclusion.
The seminary buildings occupy the entire block between Ninth and Tenth avenues and Twentieth and Twenty-first streets. They are largely of English style, and there are long stretches of ten-foot garden wall. Now and then a mortar-boarded student strides hurriedly across an open space, and now and then a professor paces portentously. The buildings are mostly of brick, but the oldest is an odd-looking structure of silver-gray stone. The varied structures unite in effective conjunction. It may be mentioned that, owing to a Vanderbilt who looked about for something which in his opinion would set the seminary in the front rank, its library possesses more ancient Latin Bibles, so it is believed, than does even the Bodleian.[83]
The chapel stands in the middle of the square, and above it rises a square Magdalen-like tower,[84] softened by ivy; and, following a beautiful old custom as it has been followed since the tower was built, capped and gowned students gather at sunrise on Easter morning on the top of this tall tower and sing ancient chorals to the music of trombone and horn.
Chelsea ought to be the most home-like region in New York on account of its connection with Christmas; for a son of Bishop Moore, Clement C. Moore,[85] who gave this land to the seminary, and made his own home in Chelsea, wrote the childhood classic, “'Twas the night before Christmas.”
In this old-time neighborhood stand not only houses, but long-established little shops. One for drugs, for example, is marked as dating back to 1839. But, after all, that is not so old as a great Fifth Avenue shop which was established in 1826. However, there is this difference: the Chelsea shops are likely to be on the very spots where they were first opened, whereas the great shop of Fifth Avenue has reached its location by move after move, from its beginning on Grand Street, when that was the fashionable shopping street of the city.