In Chelsea are still to be found the old pineapple-topped newel-posts of wrought iron, like openwork urns; there are old houses hidden erratically behind those on the street-front. One in particular remains in mind, a large old-fashioned dwelling, now reached only by a narrow and built-over passage, a house that looks like a haunted house, from its desolate disrepair, its lost loneliness of location.
Chelsea is a region of yellow cats and green shutters, shabby green on the uncared for and fresh green for the well kept. Old New York used typically to temper the dog-days behind green slat shutters, or under shop awnings stretched to the curb, and with brick sidewalks, sprinkled in the early afternoon from a sprinkling-can in the 'prentice hand.
One of the admirable old houses of Chelsea is that where dwelt that unquiet spirit, Edwin Forrest,[86] the actor. It is at 436 West Twenty-second Street, a substantial-looking, square-fronted house, with a door of a great single panel. And the interior is notable for the beautiful spiral stair that figured in court in his marital troubles.
There are in Chelsea two more than usually delightful residential survivals, with the positively delightful old names of Chelsea Cottages and London Terrace. The cottages are on Twenty-fourth Street, and the Terrace is on Twenty-third, and each is between Ninth and Tenth avenues, and both were built three quarters of a century ago.
The cottages are alternating three-story and two-story houses, built tightly shoulder to shoulder, astonishingly narrow-fronted, each with a grassy space in front. Taken together, they make one of the last stands on Manhattan of simple and modest and concerted picturesque living.
The Terrace is a highly distinguished row of high-pilastered houses, set behind grassy, deep dooryards. There are precisely eighty-eight three-and-a-half-story pilasters on the front of this stately row. The houses have a general composite effect of yellowish gray. They are built on the London plan of the drawing-room on the second floor, so that those that live there “go down to dinner.” The drawing-rooms are of pleasant three-windowed spaciousness, extending across each house-front.
The terrace is notable in high-stooped New York in having the entrance-doors on virtually the sidewalk level. That the familiar and almost omnipresent high-stooped houses of the nineteenth century ought all to have been constructed without the long flight of outside stone steps characteristic of the city is shown by a most interesting development on East Nineteenth Street, between Third Avenue and Irving Place. There the houses have been excellently and artistically remodeled, with highly successful and highly satisfactory results. With comparatively slight cost, there has been alteration of commonplaceness into beauty.
The high front steps have been removed, and the front doors put down to where they ought to be. Most of the house-fronts have been given a stucco coat, showing what could be done with myriad commonplace houses of the city.
The houses are colorfully painted tawny red or cream or gray or pale pink or an excellent shade of brown. You think of it as the happiest-looking street in New York. Solid shutters add their effect, some the green of bronze patina. There are corbeled gables. Some of the roofs are red-tiled. Two little two-story stables have been transformed by little Gothic doors. There are vines. There are box-bushes. There are flowers in terra-cotta boxes on low area walls. Here and there is a delightful little iron balcony, here and there a gargoyle. On one roof two or three storks are gravely standing! There are charming area-ways, and plane-trees have been planted for the entire block. And here the vanishing is of the undesirable.
On Stuyvesant Square, near by, are the Quaker buildings, standing in an atmosphere of peace which they themselves have largely made—buildings of red brick with white trimmings, and with a fine air of gentleness and repose; a little group that, so one hopes, is very far indeed from the vanishing point.