Penguin Persons & Peppermints

by Walter Prichard Eaton

The Metropolitan tower in Madison Square is less intimate. It has its moods, but they are the moods of the mountain. It has dwarfed the graceful, Spanish tower of the Madison Square Garden, without a doubt, and taken the proud Diana down a peg. But there are compensations in its mightiness. Have you ever seen it on a foggy day going up out of sight into the driving vapors? Have you stood in ancient Gramercy Park—still a bit of the old, domestic New York of the '70's—and seen it booming up over the red brick dwellings, white and confident into the sun? Have you ever come down through Madison Square late at night, when the relic of a moon was rising behind the tower, and the ghostly shaft stood up tremendous against the pale, racing cloud-rack? Have you seen it with the last pink glow of sunset upon it, and upon the western wall of the Flatiron Building, and upon nothing else, all lower buildings being in shadows of obscuring twilight? That is one of its delicate mountain moods, when it seems to lift above our earth-bound vision and look over those western cloud ranges into the Land Beyond the Sunset.

Have you seen it, too, down Madison Avenue in the mysterious twilight hour of blue and gold when all New York is beautiful? The street lamps have come on; the dark figures of home-going pedestrians hurry past you; there are lamps in the windows of houses. A filmy blue veil of twilight obscures the distances, so that they are soft, alluring. The tower is pale, almost ethereal, at the end of the vista. Its great clock, pricked out with golden lamps, seems scarce a third of the way up its side. The white walls rise on, and on, with here and there a spot of gold, and taper into nothing. They are lost in the gloom of coming night. But still they must go on, for far aloft you see the lantern glowing like a star, hung between earth and heaven. In this twilight hour of blue and gold the tower is the mighty guardian spirit of the scene, sending down sonorous word of the hours as they pass, and lifting our eyes, like its steady lantern, toward the watch-towers of Eternity. Must we be forever reminded that those glowing window squares up its flanks denote lawyers toiling late at their briefs, or mining stock promoters planning a new cast of the net? Must we be forever told that this is not a spire in praise of God but a monument in praise of Mammon? Aspiration is in its lines, beauty in its sky-borne shaft of blue and gold, wonder in its shrouded summit.

“They builded better than they knew—
The conscious stone to beauty grew.”

It is enough. Let us wonder and be glad.

There are many odd views of the tower to be had for a little searching, spots where its peak appears in unexpected places, or with unusual suggestion. There is just one point in Union Square, for example, about halfway round “dead man's curve,” where you see the tapering pyramid and the golden lantern overtopping the high buildings between. You do not see it again, if you are walking up Broadway, till you are close to Madison Square. Then, if you lift your eyes, you are suddenly aware of it looming far aloft over the cornice-line to your right, shredding the mists on a stormy day, or by night lifting its lantern up with the stars. There is always an added impressiveness about a tower when we cannot see the base. The sheer drop of its sides is left to our imagination, and the human imagination may generally be trusted to embroider fact. For that reason alone, the view of the tower from a certain point on East Thirty-first Street, between Madison and Fourth Avenues, would be worth the searching out. But it has another and unique charm. If you will walk along Thirtieth Street toward Fourth Avenue you will see, tucked in between larger and more modern buildings on the south side, a little two-story-and-a-half wooden cottage, set back a few feet behind an iron fence. It must have stood there many years, for the wooden age in New York was long, long ago. It is a quaint little dwelling, with quaint pseudo-Gothic ornamentations, and until recently was used as an antique shop. A large weather-stained Venus stood upon the front porch, ironically beside a spinning-wheel! Now the house is untenanted, so that you lift your eyes the sooner to look above and beyond it. It occupies, of course, a slit between higher buildings. Through that slit, as you stand on the opposite curb, you look over a few spindly black chimney-stacks in the foreground directly to the Metropolitan Tower, booming up suddenly and unexpectedly. You see only that for a moment, because of its Titanic size and white impressiveness. Then you notice something outlined against it, a lower tower, much more slender, a mere tracery of delicate shafts and belfries, and crowning it, her bow forever poised, the lovely limbed Diana. Whence either of these towers come, you see not. They merely spring up into the vision over the roof of the little wooden house, the darker one outlined against the other for comparison. Between and around them steam plumes from unseen buildings drift like clouds. Diana turns a little, and points her shaft into the wind anew. The might of the new tower is mightier for this close comparison. Yet the other tower, too, does not suffer, its femininity is the more alluring. But lift your eyes as you walk through this commonplace cross-street of New York, and you may see as picturesque a vista, over the quaint wooden cottage, as any city, anywhere, affords—forty stories looking down on two and a half, and between them, in intermediate flight, St. Gaudens' bronze Diana.

Snow in the city! We in New York think of bespattered boots, of horses falling down, of dirty piles, more black than white, lining the streets like igloos till the tip-carts come and carry them off. “The frolic architecture” of the snow is a thing of memory, not of present fact. Like Whittier, we recall the hooded well-sweep or fantastic pump, and the great drifts by the pasture wall. Yet, once again, it is the seeing eye we lack, nor do we need even to enter the Park to discover the snow at its artistic handiwork. Let Sixty-fifth Street enter the Park for you, from the east, and do you stand upon Fifth Avenue and note the conversion from ugliness to beauty of a paved road, dipping into a dugway between dirty stone walls. The soiled pavement is hidden now, each rough stone on the bounding walls is softly outlined with white, not far into the Park a graceful stone foot-bridge spans the sunken street, supporting a second and more graceful arch of snow, and the street curves alluringly into the trees which rise beyond, a gray wall of misty shadow, the eye is satisfied with a clean, well-composed, strongly lined picture, and the imagination almost deluded into a belief of its rusticity.

I remember once walking down Broadway late at night, after an evening at some tiresome play and supper at some yet more tiresome and tawdry restaurant. I had been having what is popularly supposed to be a “good time,” and I was bored. There had been a recent deep fall of snow. The night was clear and cold. Below Herald Square I met comparatively few pedestrians, and those few were not of the sort to dispel my despondent mood.

“Back home,” I thought, “the moon should be shining on the white, clean hills, and underneath my boots the snow-crust would squeak. Perhaps a screech-owl would whistle his plaintive call in the ghostly orchard. How beautiful there the night would be! But here—” and I flung out my arm instinctively toward the walls which hemmed me in.

But as I drew near Madison Square, and lifted my eyes to the soaring ship's-prow of the Flatiron Building, I noted suddenly that its upper stories were bathed in a pale, golden glow; and coming full into the square, I saw the moon, riding small and high beyond the white tower. The next strip of canon street shut it out once more, but at Union Square it was waiting to greet me, and as I entered the slit of Broadway to the south and drew near Eleventh street, I was aware of the snow-covered northward pitch of Grace Church roof gleaming in its light, a great rectangle of pale radiance at the bend of the street. Above the roof the Gothic spire stood up serenely. There were no passers at the moment, not even a trolley-car. The greatest traffic artery in town was hushed as death. The high buildings about were dark and shadowy. At the angle commanding the vista in either direction the church slept in the moonlight.

“Deep on the convent roof the snows
Are sparking to the moon.”