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MASSIVE AND SPLENDIDLY GOTHIC IS ST. THOMAS'S. THE CHURCH DATES FROM 1825. IN 1867 THE PRESENT SITE WAS SECURED, AND THE BROWN-STONE EDIFICE OF THE EARLY SEVENTIES WAS FOR NEARLY TWO GENERATIONS THE ULTRA-FASHIONABLE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF THE CITY

FIFTH AVENUE

BY

ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE

Author of "New York in Fiction," "The New York of the Novelists," "Bottled up in Belgium," etc.

DRAWINGS BY
ALLAN G. CRAM

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1918

FOREWORD

In the making of this book the author has drawn from many sources. First, for many suggestions, he is indebted to Mr. Guy Nichols, the librarian of the Players Club, whose knowledge of the city is so profound that his friends occasionally refer to him as "the man who invented New York." The author is indebted to the Fifth Avenue Association and to the invariable courtesy of those persons in the New York Public Library with whom he has come in contact.

Among the books that have been consulted are, first of all, the admirable monographs, "Fifth Avenue," and "Fifth Avenue Events," issued by the Fifth Avenue Bank. From these he has drawn freely. Among other volumes are "The Diary of Philip Hone," Ward McAllister's "Society as I Have Found It," George Cary Eggleston's "Recollections of a Varied Life," Matthew Hale Smith's "Sunshine and Shadow in New York" (1869), Seymour Dunbar's "A History of Travel in America," Miss Henderson's "A Loiterer in New York," William Allen Butler's "A Retrospect of Forty Years," Fremont Rider's "New York City," Francis Gerry Fairfield's "The Clubs of New York," Anna Alice Chapin's "Greenwich Village," Theodore Wolff's "Literary Haunts and Homes," Rupert Hughes's "The Real New York," James Grant Wilson's "Thackeray in the United States," Mrs. Burton Harrison's "Recollections, Grave and Gay," Abram C. Dayton's "Last Days of Knickerbocker Life in New York," and Martha J. Lamb's "History of the City of New York." Also various articles in the magazines and newspapers.

Contents

Illustrations

FIFTH AVENUE

CHAPTER I

The Shadow of the Knickerbockers

The Shadow of the Knickerbockers—An Old-time Map—The Beginnings of the Avenue—Watering Place Life—The Beach at Rockaway—Coney Island—Newspapers in the Thirties—Early Day Marriages—The Knickerbocker Sabbath—Home Customs—Restaurants and Hotels—The Leather-heads—Conditions of Travel—Stage-coaches and Steamers—The Clipper Ships—When Dickens First Came.

Boughton, had you bid me chant
Hymns to Peter Stuyvesant.
Had you bid me sing of Wouter.
(He! the Onion-head! the Doubter!)
But to rhyme of this one-mocker,
Who shall rhyme to Knickerbocker?
—Austin Dobson.

Before the writer, as he begins the pleasant task, is an old half-illegible map, or rather, fragment of a map. Near-by are three or four dull prints. They are of a hundred years ago, or thereabouts, and tell of a New York when President Monroe was in the White House, and Governor De Witt Clinton in the State Capitol, at Albany, and Mayor Colden in the City Hall. To pore over them is to achieve a certain contentment of the soul. Probably it held itself to be turbulent in its day—that old New York. Without doubt it had its squabbles, its turmoils, its excitements. We smile at the old town—its limitations, its inconveniences, its naïvetés. But perhaps, in these years of storm, and stress, and heartache, we envy more than a little. It is not merely the architectural story that the old maps, prints, diaries tell; in them we can find an age that is gone, catch fleeting glimpses of people long since dust to dust, look at past manners, fashions, pleasures and contrast them with our own.

But to begin with the old map. The lettering beneath conveys the information that it was prepared for the City in 1819-1820 by John Randel, Jr., and that it shows the farms superimposed upon the Commissioner's map of 1811. Through the centre of the map there is a line indicating Fifth Avenue north to Thirteenth Street. Here and there is a spot apparently intended to represent a farmhouse, but that is all; for in 1820, though Greenwich Village and Chelsea were, the city proper was far to the south. Some of the names on the old map are familiar and some are not.

Just above the bending lane that ran along the north side of Washington Square, then the Potter's Field, may be read "Trustees of Sailor's Snug Harbor." The land thus marked extends from what is now Waverly Place to what is now Ninth Street. In 1790 Captain Robert Richard Randall paid five thousand pounds sterling for twenty-one acres of good farming land. In 1801 he died, and his will directed that a "Snug Harbor" for old salts be built upon his farm, the produce of which, he believed, would forever furnish his pensioners with vegetables and cereal rations. Later Randall's trustees leased the farm in building lots and placed "Snug Harbor" in Staten Island. Above the estate, in diagonal form, and at one point crossing Fifth Avenue to the west, was the large farm of Henry Brevoort. More limited holdings, in the names of Gideon Tucker, William Hamilton, and John Morse, separate, in the map, the Brevoort property from the estates of John Mann, Jr., and Mary Mann. The latter must have been a landowner of some importance in her day, for the fragment of a chart runs into the margin above the line of Thirteenth Street without indicating the beginning of any other ownership.

On the land to the west of the Avenue line may be read "Heirs of John Rogers," "William W. Gilbert," "Nicholson" (the Christian name lies somewhere beyond the map horizon), and "Heirs of Henry Spingler." Irrigation is indicated by a line, running in a general northwesterly direction, bearing the name "Manetta Water," while a thinner line, joining the first line from the northeast, is described as "East Branch of Manetta Water." Manetta Water was the English name. The Dutch had called it "Bestavaer's Rivulet." It was a sparkling stream, beloved of trout fishermen, rising in the high ground above Twenty-first Street, flowing southeasterly to Fifth Avenue at Ninth Street, then on to midway between the present Eighth Street and Waverly Place, where it swung southwesterly and emptied into the Hudson River near Charlton Street. It ran between sandhills, sometimes rising to the height of a hundred feet, and marked the course of a famous Indian hunting ground.

The joy of the Izaak Waltons of the past is occasionally the despair of the Fifth Avenue householders of the present. Flooded cellars and weakened foundations may be traced to the purling waters of the sparkling stream. But perhaps the trout were jumping. Then the last fisherman probably worried very little about the annoyances to which his descendants were to be subjected. In much the same spirit we are saying today, "What will it all matter a hundred years hence?"

Beginning at the Potter's Field, the line of what is now Fifth Avenue left the "Road over the Sandhills" or the "Zantberg" of the Dutch, later known as Art Street, long since gone from the map, and crossed the Robert Richard Randall Estate. Thence it ran through the Henry Brevoort farm, which originally extended from Ninth to Eighteenth Streets, and which had been bought in 1714 for four hundred pounds. Crossing the tributary stream at Twelfth Street, it passed a small pond between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets, and then ran on, over low and level ground, to Twenty-first Street, then called "Love's Lane." To the right was the swamp and marsh that afterwards became Union Square. Following the trail farther, the hardy voyager wandered over "hills and valleys, dales and fields," through a countryside where trout, mink, otter, and muskrat swam in the brooks and pools; brant, black duck, and yellow-leg splashed in the marshes and fox, rabbit, woodcock, and partridge found covert in the thicket. Here and there was a farm, but the city, then numbering one hundred thousand persons, was far away. Then, in 1824, the first stretch of the Avenue, from Waverly Place to Thirteenth Street, was opened, and the northward march of the great thoroughfare began. Let us try to picture the old town of that day, the city that was still under the shadow of the Knickerbockers.

First, at the southern extremity of the island, was the Battery and Battery Park. When, in "The Story of a New York House," the late H. C. Bunner described the little square of green jutting into the waters of the upper bay, it was as it had been some years before the earliest venturesome pioneers builded in lower Fifth Avenue. From the pillared balcony of his house on State Street—the house may still be seen—Jacob Dolph caught a glimpse of the morning sun, that loved the Battery far better than Pine Street, where Dolph's office was. It was a poplar-studded Battery in those days, and the tale tells how the wind blew fresh off the bay, and the waves beat up against the sea-wall, and a large brig, with all sails set, loomed conspicuous to the view, and two or three fat little boats, cat-rigged, after the good old New York fashion, were beating down towards Staten Island, to hunt for the earliest bluefish. That was in 1808, and sixteen years later, the Battery, with its gravelled, shady paths, and its somewhat irregular plots of grass, was still the city's favourite breathing spot. There, of summer evenings, after the stately walk down Broadway, the crinolined ladies and the beaux with their bell-crowned hats gathered to watch the sun set behind the low Jersey hills, and perhaps to inspect the review of the Tompkins Blues, or the Pulaski Cadets. There was fierce rivalry between these two commands, one under Captain Vincent, and the other under Captain McArdle, and each corps had its admiring sympathizers. Both Blues and Cadets presented a fine, martial appearance as they swung across the Battery, marching like veterans who had faced fire and would not flinch. "Sure it was," a flippant chronicler has recorded, "both had an undisputed reputation for charging upon a well-loaded board with a will that left no tell-tale vestige." Very likely, in the throng, all were not of New York. There were doubtful strangers, too, looking with yearning eyes out over the dancing waters of the blue bay—swarthy, weather-beaten men with huge earrings. They called themselves "privateers-men." But there were those who smiled at the word, for romance had it that there were still buccaneers in the Spanish Main.

In many families that daily visit to the Battery was all the summer change. Mr. Dayton, in his "Last Days of Knickerbocker Life," informed us that neither belle nor gallant lost caste by declining to participate in the routine of watering place life, simple and inexperienced as it then was. Yet there were summer resorts, and they were patronized by the best and most prominent citizens of the country. The springs at Saratoga had already been discovered, and there were many New Yorkers who made the then long and arduous trip.

But nearer at hand was the "Beach at Rockaway," sung by the military poet, George P. Morris, and Coney Island. At the latter resort conditions were primitive. Unheard were the blaring of bands, and the raucous cry of the "Hot-Dog man," and the riot and roar of the rabble. Mr. Blinker, of O. Henry's "Brick Dust Row," could not then have seen his vision and found his light. For there was no mass of vulgarians wallowing in gross joys to be recognized as his brothers seeking the ideal. But he might have been as well pleased with the unpretentious hotel at the water's edge, where the urbanite could enjoy the cooling ocean breezes, and listen to the waves, and dine upon broiled chicken and succulent clams.

The press of the third decade of the last century was high-priced and vitriolic. Of the morning papers now known to New Yorkers there was none. The "Sun," the first to appear, began in 1833. But of the afternoon journals there was the "Evening Post," perhaps even then "making virtue odious," as a wit of many years later was to express it, and the "Commercial Advertiser," now the "Globe," the oldest of all metropolitan journals. Before the appearance of the "Sun," the morning papers had been the "Morning Courier and New York Enquirer," the "Standard," the "Democratic Chronicle," the "Journal of Commerce," the "New York Gazette and General Advertiser," and the "Mercantile Advertiser and New York Advocate." In the evening there were the "Star," and the "American," besides the "Post" and "Commercial Advertiser." These newspapers were mere appendages of party, "organs" in the narrowest and most restricted sense, espousing blindly certain interests or ideas, expounding in long editorials the views of small groups of politicians.

"Here's this morning's New York Sewer! Here's this morning's New York Stabber! Here's the New York Family Spy! Here's the New York Private Listener! Here's the New York Peeper! Here's the New York Plunderer! Here's the New York Keyhole Reporter! Here's the New York Rowdy Journal! Here's all the New York papers! Here's full particulars of the patriotic Locofoco movement yesterday, in which the Whigs were so chawed up; and the last Alabama gouging case; and the interesting Arizona dooel with bowie knives; and all the political, commercial, and fashionable news. Here they are! Here they are! Here's the papers! Here's the papers! Here's the Sewer! Here's the New York Sewer! Here's some of the twelve thousand of today's Sewer, with the best accounts of the markets, and four whole columns of country correspondence, and a full account of the ball at Mrs. White's last night, where all the beauty and fashion of New York was assembled; with the Sewer's own particulars of the private lives of all the ladies that were there. Here's the Sewer! Here's the Sewer's exposure of the Wall Street gang, and the Sewer's exposure of the Washington gang, and the Sewer's exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old; now communicated, at great expense, by his own nurse. Here's the Sewer! Here's the New York Sewer in its twelfth thousand, with a whole column of New Yorkers to be shown up, and all their names printed. Here's the Sewer's article upon the judge that tried him, day afore yesterday, for libel, and the Sewer's tribute to the independent jury that didn't convict him, and the Sewer's account of what might have happened if they had! Here's the Sewer, always on the lookout; the leading journal of the United States!"

Such were the cries, according to the veracious account of Charles Dickens, who had paid his first visit to us a short time before, that greeted the ears of Martin Chuzzlewit upon his arrival in the gate city of the western world. That amiable caricature reflects what the English novelist thought or pretended to think, of the New York journalism of the day. Exaggeration, of course: the bad manners of a young genius of the British lower middle classes. But quite good-naturedly today we concede that beneath bad manners and exaggeration there was a foundation of truth. Into the making of Colonel Diver, the editor of the "Rowdy Journal," may have gone a little of old Noah, of the "Star," or James Watson Webb, of the "Courier and Enquirer," or Colonel Stone, of the "Commercial." Can't you see those grim figures of an old world strutting down Broadway, glaring about belligerently and suspiciously? Almost every editor of that period had a theatre feud at one day or another. On the luckless mummer who had incurred his displeasure he poured out the vials of his wrath. He incited audiences to riot. Against his brother editors he hurled such epithets as "loathsome and leprous slanderer and libeller," "pestilential scoundrel," "polluted wretch," "foul jaws," "common bandit," "prince of darkness," "turkey buzzard," "ghoul." Somehow, in thinking of the old days, I find it hard to reconcile those men and women who lived under the Knickerbocker sway with their newspapers. It is pleasanter to dwell upon the old customs, to picture Mr. Manhattan leaving the scurrilous sheet behind him when he departed from his store or counting house, and repairing with clean hands to the wife of his bosom and his family, somewhere in Greenwich Village, or Richmond Hill, or Bond Street, or the beginnings of Fifth Avenue.

But to revert to the manners of the old town. First of all there was the business of getting married. It was with an idea of permanency then, and the Knickerbocker wedding was, in consequence, a ceremony. To it, the groom, his best-man, and the ushers went attired in blue coats, brass buttons, high white satin stocks, ruffled-bosomed shirts, figured satin waistcoats, silk stockings, and pumps. The New Yorker's tailor, if his pretensions to fashion were well-founded, was Elmendorf, or Brundage, or Wheeler, or Tryon and Derby; his hatter, St. John, and his bootmakers, Kimball and Rogers. For the wedding ceremony, the man's hair was tightly frizzed by Maniort, the leading hair-dresser of the day. He was the proprietor of the Knickerbocker Barber-Shop at Broadway and Wall Street, and the town gossip. Years later he was to enjoy the patronage of the Third Napoleon in Paris as a reward for favours extended to the Prince when the latter was an exile here. There is little record of elaborate pre-nuptial bachelor dinners in the style of modern New York. What would have been the use? The gardens of the city's fashionable homes boasted no extensive circular fountains or artificial fishponds into which the best-man or the father of the bride-to-be could be flung as an artistic diversion. As has been said, it was something of a slow old world, lacking in many of the modern comforts.

The robe of the bride was of white satin, tinged with yellow, the bodice cut low in the neck and shoulders, and ornamented with lace. Over her hair, built up by Martell, was flung the coronet of artificial orange blossoms held by the blonde lace veil. Then the satin boots and the six-button gloves. At the wedding-supper the bride's cake, rich, and of formidable proportions, was the pièce de resistance. Also there was substantial fare; hams, turkeys, chicken, and game; besides fruits, candies, and creams. In place of the champagne of later days there were Madeira, Port, and Sherry. Round the table, illuminated by wax candles and astral lamps, young and old gathered; the women of a past generation in stiff brocades, powdered puffs, and tortoise-shell combs. From the first to last the Fifth Avenue wedding of those days reflected the patriarchal system that had not yet passed.

It was not a matter of denomination, but when the world was young, the pioneers of the Avenue did not smile on the way to worship. The Sabbath day still retained a good deal of the funereal aspect with which the New England Puritans had invested it. The city was silent save for the tolling of the church bells. At ten o'clock in the morning, at three in the afternoon, and again, at seven at night, the solemn processions of men, women, and children, clad in their Sunday best, issued from the homes, and slowly wended their way to church. When the congregation had gathered, and the service was about to begin, heavy iron chains were drawn tightly across the streets adjacent to the various places of worship. It was the hour for serious meditation. No distracting noise was to be allowed to fall upon those devout ears.

Abram C. Dayton, in his "Last Days of Knickerbocker Life," left a description of the service at the Dutch Reformed Church of that day. He told of the long-drawn-out extemporaneous prayers, the allusions to "benighted heathen"; to "whited sepulchres"; to "the lake which burns with fire and brimstone." Of instrumental accompaniment there was none, and free scope was both given and taken by the human voice divine. Then the sermon! Men were strong in those days! Clergymen had not become affected with the throat troubles prevalent in later times. No hour-glass or warning clock was displayed in the bleak spare edifice. In the exuberance of zeal often the end of the discourse came only with utter physical exhaustion. Then the passing of the plate; an eight-stanza hymn, closing with the vehemently shouted Doxology; and the concluding Benediction. From that old-time Sabbath day the affairs of the world were rigidly excluded. It was a day of rest not only for the family but for the family's man-servant and maid-servant. Saturday had seen the preparation of the necessary food.

THE WASHINGTON ARCH. A SPLENDID SENTINEL GUARDING THE APPROACH TO THE AVENUE. BEYOND, HOUSES DATING FROM THE THIRTIES OF THE LAST CENTURY, THAT MARK THE BEGINNING OF THE STRETCH OF TRADITION

On the Sabbath only cold collations were served. Public opinion was a stern master. Woe betide the one rash enough to defy the established conventions! The physician on his rounds, or the church-goer too aged or infirm to walk to the place of worship, were the only ones permitted to make use of a horse and carriage. Now and then one of the godless would slip away northward for a drive on some unfrequented road. Detection meant society's averted face and stern reprimand. For an indefinite period the sinner would be a subject of intercession at evening prayers.

The weekday life was in keeping with the Knickerbocker Sabbath. Home was the family castle, over which parental authority ruled with an iron hand. Hospitality was genuine and whole-hearted; but tempered by frugal moderation. Strict punctuality was demanded of every member of the household. The noon repast was the meal of the day. At the stroke of twelve old New York sat down to table. In the home there was variety and abundance, but the dinner was served as one course. Meats, poultry, vegetables, pies, puddings, fruits, and sweets were crowded together on the board. This adherence to the midday meal must have been the weak point in the armour in which the old order encased itself. For there the first breach was made. New Yorkers, returning from visits to Europe, hooted at the primitive noon repast of their youth. At first what were called the "foreign airs" of these would-be innovators were treated with derision. But they persisted, and by slow stages three o'clock became the extra fashionable hour for dinner. The old City Hotel was one of the first public places to fall into line.

The time was to come when a dining establishment, second to none of its day in social prestige and culinary excellence, was to stand on a corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. But when those who dwelt on lower Fifth Avenue were still pioneers, dining out in public places meant a long and venturesome journey to the southward. The restaurants of that time—they were more generally called "eating houses,"—were almost all established in the business portions of the city. The midday dinner was the meal on which they depended for their main support. Then masculine New York left its shop or its counting house, hurried a block to the right, or a block to the left, and fell greedily on the succulent oyster, the slice of rare roast beef, or the sizzling English mutton chop. Conspicuous among the refectories of this type were the Auction Hotel, on Water Street, near Wall; the dining room of Clark and Brown, on Maiden Lane, near Liberty Street, one of the first of the so-called English chop-houses; the United States Hotel, which stood, until a few years ago, at the corner of Water and Fulton Streets, and which was the chosen home of the captains of the whaling ships from New London, Nantucket, New Bedford, and Sag Harbor; Downing's, on Broad Street, famed for its Saddle Rocks and Blue Points, and its political patrons; and the basement on Park Row, a few doors from the old Park Theatre, presided over by one Edward Windust. This last was a rendezvous for actors, artists, musicians, newspaper-men—in short, the Bohemian set of that day—and its walls were covered with old play-bills, newspaper clippings, and portraits of tragedians and comedians of the past.

But already a demand had been felt for viands of another nature; hospitality of another sort. The womankind of the day was looking for an occasional chance to break away from the monotonous if wholesome and substantial table of the home. Those stiff Knickerbockers knew it not; but the modern dining-out New York was already in the making. At first the movement was ascribed to the European Continental element. In New York Delmonico and Guerin were the pioneers in the field. The former began in a little place of pine tables and rough wooden chairs on William Street, between Fulton and Ann. The original equipment consisted of a broad counter covered with white napkins, two-tine forks, buck-handled knives, and earthenware plates and cups. From such humble beginnings grew the establishments that have subsequently carried the name. Francis Guerin's first café was on Broadway, between Pine and Cedar Streets, directly opposite the old City Hotel. Another resort of the same type was the Café des Mille Colonnes, kept by the Italian, Palmo, on the west side of Broadway, near Duane Street. It was apparently on a scale lavish for those days. Long mirrors on the walls reflected, in an endless vista, the gilded columns that supported the ceiling. The fortune accumulated by Palmo in the restaurant was lost in an attempt to introduce Italian opera into the United States. Palmo's Opera House, in Chamber Street, between Centre Street and Broadway, later became Burton's Theatre.

Until 1844, New York was guarded against crime by the old "Leather-heads." This force patrolled the city by night, or that part of it known as the lamp district. They were not watchmen by profession, but were recruited from the ranks of porters, cartmen, stevedores, and labourers. They were distinguished by a fireman's cap without front (hence the name "Leather-head"), an old camlet coat, and a lantern. They had a wholesome respect for their skins, and were inclined to keep out of harm's way, seldom visiting the darker quarters of the city. When they bawled the hour all rogues in the vicinity were made aware of their whereabouts. Above Fourteenth Street the whole city was a neglected region. It was beyond the lamp district and in the dark.

In no way, to the mind of the present scribe, can the contrast between the life of the modern city and of the town of the days when Fifth Avenue was in the making be better emphasized than by comparing the conditions of travel. It was in the year 1820 that John Stevens of Hoboken, who had become exasperated because people did not see the value of railroads as he did, resolved to prove, at his own expense, that the method of travel urged by him was not a madman's scheme. So on his own estate on the Hoboken hill he built a little railway of narrow gauge and a small locomotive. Long enough had he been sneered at and called maniac. He put the locomotive on the track with cars behind it, and ran it with himself as a passenger, to the amazement of those before whom the demonstration was made. So far as is known that was the first locomotive to be built or run on a track in America. But even with Stevens's successful example, years passed before steam travel assumed a practical form.

When the pioneer of Fifth Avenue wished to voyage far afield it was toward the stage-coach as a means of transportation that his mind turned, for the stage-coach was the only way by which a large portion of the population could accomplish overland journeys. To go to Boston, for example, the traveller from New York usually left by a steamboat that took him to Providence in about twenty-three hours, and travelled the remaining forty miles by coach. Five hours was needed for the overland journey, and was considered amazing speed. By the year 1832 the overland trip between New York and Boston had been reduced to forty-one hours. But the passengers were not allowed to break the journey at a tavern, even for four or five hours of sleep, as they had formerly done, but were carried forward night and day without intermission. A fare of eleven dollars was usually exacted for the trip.

Even to go to one of the towns of Connecticut, the shore towns of the Boston Post Road, was an undertaking that called for serious preliminary study. A New York paper, now before the writer, carries in its first column an advertisement of a new steamer, the "Fairfield," plying between New York and Norwalk. But in order to make use of its services, the traveller had to be at the pier at the foot of Market Street at six o'clock in the morning. Upon the arrival at Norwalk stages were at hand for the convenience of such of the passengers who wished to travel on to Saugatuck, Fairfield, Bridgeport, Stratford, Milford, and other points. The same column carried information for those who contemplated voyaging to Newport or Providence. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday the steamboats "Benjamin Franklin" (Capt. E. S. Bunker) and "President" (Capt. R. S. Bunker) left New York for those Rhode Island towns at five o'clock in the evening.

The Post Road to Boston of those days differed much from the Boston Post Road of the present; especially in its first stages going northward from New York. There was no spacious Pelham Parkway skirting the waters of the Long Island Sound. Before crossing the Harlem the road followed in a general way the Broadway trail. Beyond the river it zigzagged in a northeasterly direction through Eastchester. Not until the crossing of the Byram River transferred the road from New York to New England did it take on any resemblance to the trail of today, and even beyond, the town of Greenwich seems to have been neglected entirely.

Yet, in comparison, the East was developed. It was the bold Sinbad turning his face resolutely and courageously towards the setting sun who experienced the real inconveniences and perils. Nor, at first, did that mean the adventurous journey into the lands that were beyond the great Appalachian range. The shining countenance of the unknown was nearer at hand. It is just a matter of turning the clock back a hundred years.

From the windows of the apartment houses looking down on the Riverside Drive the Delaware River is just beyond the Jersey hills. To journey there today does not even call for the study of time-tables. Mr. Manhattan rises at the usual hour and eats his usual leisurely breakfast. At, say, nine o'clock, he settles back behind the steering-wheel of his motor-car. Crossing the Hudson by the Forty-second Street Ferry, he climbs the Weehawken slope, and swings westward over one of the uninviting turnpikes that disfigure the marshy land between the Passaic and the Hackensack. Then he finds the real Jersey, the Jerseyman's Jersey, of rolling hills, and historic memories of Washington's Continental troops in ragged blue and buff.—Morristown, with its superb estates, the stiff climb of Schooley's Mountain, the descent along the wooded ravine, the road following the winding Musconetcong River through Washington, the clustered buildings of Lafayette College crowning the Pennsylvania shore, and in good time for luncheon Mr. Manhattan is over the bridge connecting Easton and Phillipsburg.

A few years ago there appeared a little book telling of the experiences of a family migrating from Connecticut to Ohio in 1811. In interesting contrast to the morning dash just outlined is the story of that journey of a little more than one hundred years ago. Before crossing the North River the voyagers solemnly discussed the perilous waters that confronted them. "Tomorrow we embark for the opposite shore: may Heaven preserve us from the raging, angry waves!" The first night's stop was at Springfield, where, within the living memory of the older members of the party, a skirmish between the American troops and the soldiers of King George had taken place.

Another day's travel carried the party as far as Chester. At that point the task of travel became arduous. Over miry roads, in places blocked by boulders, there was the painful, laborious ascent of the steep grade leading to the summit of what we now call Schooley's Mountain. There the party camped for the night, beginning the descent early the morning of the following day. The brisk three or four hours' run that gives the motorist of today just the edge of appetite needed for the full enjoyment of his midday meal was to those hardy adventurers of a century ago almost the journey of a week.

For transatlantic travel there was the Black Ball line, between New York and Liverpool, first of four ships, and later of twelve. That service had been founded in 1816 by New York merchants. The Red Star line followed in 1821, and soon after the Swallowtail line. The packets were ships of from six hundred to fifteen hundred tons burden, and made the eastward trip in about twenty-three days and the return trip in about forty days. The record was held by the "Canada," of the Black Ball line, which had made the outward run in fifteen days and eighteen hours. That time was reduced later by the "Amazon." The first steamer to cross the Atlantic was the American ship "Savannah." She made the trial trip from New York to Savannah in April, 1819, and in the following month her owners decided to send her overseas. The time of her passage was twenty-six days, eight under steam and eighteen under sail. Stephen Rogers, her navigator, in a letter to the New London "Gazette," wrote that the "Savannah" was first sighted from the telegraph station at Cape Clear, on the southern coast of Ireland, which reported her as being on fire, and a king's cutter was sent to her relief. "But great was their wonder at their inability to come up with a ship under bare poles. After several shots had been fired from the cutter the engine was stopped, and the surprise of the cutter's crew at the mistake they had made, as well as their curiosity to see the strange Yankee craft, can be easily imagined." From Liverpool the "Savannah" proceeded to St. Petersburg, stopping at Stockholm, and on her return she left St. Petersburg on October 10th, arriving at Savannah November 30th. But the prestige that the journey had won did not compensate for the heavy expense. Her boilers, engines, and paddles were removed, and she was placed on the Savannah route as a packet ship, being finally wrecked on the Long Island coast. The successful establishment of steam as a means of conveying a vessel across the Atlantic did not come until the spring of 1838, when, on the same day, April 23rd, two ships from England reached New York. They were the "Sirius," which had sailed from Cork, Ireland, April 4th, and the "Great Western," which had left Bristol April 8th. The following year marked the founding of the Cunard Line.

About the same time began the famous Clippers, which carried triumphantly the American flag to every corner of the Seven Seas. They were at first small, swift vessels of from six hundred to nine hundred tons, and designed for the China tea trade. Later came the "Challenge," of two thousand tons, and the "Invincible," of two thousand one hundred and fifty tons. "That clipper epoch," said a writer in "Harper's Magazine" for January, 1884, "was an epoch to be proud of; and we were proud of it. The New York newspapers abounded in such headlines as these: 'Quickest Trip on Record,' 'Shortest Passage to San Francisco,' 'Unparalleled Speed,' 'Quickest Voyage Yet,' 'A Clipper as is a Clipper,' 'Extraordinary Dispatch,' 'The Quickest Voyage to China,' 'The Contest of the Clippers,' 'Great Passage from San Francisco,' 'Race Round the World.'" Runs of three hundred and even three hundred and thirty miles a day were not uncommon feats of those clipper ships, a rate of speed far surpassing the achievement of the steam-propelled vessels of the period.

When Charles Dickens first came to New York, in 1842, it was after a transatlantic journey that had landed him at Boston. There is extant a picture of the cabin that he occupied on the "Britannia" on the trip across that throws an interesting light on the limitations and inconveniences to which early Fifth Avenue was subjected when it visited the old world. Leaving Boston on a February afternoon, Dickens proceeded by rail to Worcester. The next morning another train carried him to Springfield. The next stop was Hartford, a distance of only twenty-five miles. But at that time of the year, Dickens records, the roads were so bad that the journey would probably have occupied ten or twelve hours. So progress was accomplished by means of the waters of the Connecticut River, in a boat that the Englishman described as so many feet short, and so many feet narrow, with a cabin apparently for a certain celebrated dwarf of the period, yet somehow containing the ubiquitous American rocking chair. Going from Hartford to New Haven consumed three hours of train travel; and, rising early after a night's rest, Dickens went on board the Sound packet bound for New York. That was the first American steamboat of any size that he had seen, and he wrote that, to an Englishman, it was less like a steamboat than a huge floating bath, and that its cabin, to his unaccustomed eyes, seemed about as long as the Burlington Arcade. From the deck of this packet he first viewed Hell's Gate, the Hog's Back, the Frying Pan, and other notorious localities attractive to readers of the Diedrich Knickerbocker History. When, later, Dickens left New York for Philadelphia, he wrote of the journey as being made by railroad and two ferries, and occupying between five and six hours.

The ten years that separated the first visit of Dickens and the first visit of Thackeray had wrought many changes. Thackeray, too, came to New York from Boston, but in his case it was the matter of one unbroken train journey, in the course of which he reread the "Shabby Genteel Story" of a dozen years before. Dickens's transatlantic trip had consumed nineteen days. The "Canada," which carried Thackeray, made the crossing in thirteen. In New York Thackeray stayed at the Clarendon Hotel, on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Eighteenth Street; but his favourite haunt in the city was the third home of the Century, in Clinton Place. Though not in the least given to flattery or over-effusiveness in his comments on Americans and American institutions, Thackeray wrote and spoke of the Century as "the best and most comfortable club in the world."

CHAPTER II

The Stretch of Tradition

Stretches of the Avenue—The Stretch of Tradition—Washington Arch—Old Homes and Gardens—The Mews and MacDougal Alley—In the Fourth Decade—A Genial Ruffian of the Olden Time—Sailor's Snug Harbor—The Miss Green School—Andrew H. Green, John Fiske, John Bigelow, Elihu Root, and Others as Teachers—The Brevoort Farm—The First Hotel of the Avenue—A Romance of 1840—"Both Sides of the Avenue."

A snug little farm was the old Brevoort
Where cabbages grew of the choicest sort;
Full-headed, and generous, ample and fat,
In a queenly way on their stems they sat,
And there was boast of their genuine breed,
For from old Utrecht had come their seed.
—Gideon Tucker, "The Old Brevoort Farm."

Passing under the Washington Arch, the march up the Avenue properly begins. To commemorate the centenary of the inauguration of the nation's first President a temporary arch was erected in the spring of 1889. The original structure reached from corner to corner across Fifth Avenue, opposite the Park, and the expense was borne by Mr. William Rhinelander Stewart and other residents of Washington Square. It added so much to the beauty of the entrance to the Avenue that steps were taken to make it permanent, and the present Arch was the result of popular subscription. One hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars was the cost of the structure, which was designed by Stanford White. Comparatively recent additions to the Arch are the two sculptured groups on northern façade, to the right and left of the span. They are the work of H. A. MacNeil.

Of all the blocks in the stretch of tradition that carries the Avenue up to Fourteenth Street, the richest in interest is, naturally, that which lies immediately north of the Square. Dividing this block in two, and running respectively east and west, are Washington Mews and MacDougall Alley. When Fifth Avenue was young and addicted to stately horse-drawn turnouts, it was in these half streets that were stabled the steeds and the carriages. Of comparatively recent date is the remodelling that has converted the old stables into quaint, if somewhat garish artist studios.

From the top of a north-bound bus as it leaves the Square may be seen the beautiful gardens that have always been a feature of these first houses. Mrs. Emily Johnston de Forest, in her life of her grandfather, John Johnston, has described these gardens as they were from 1833 to 1842. "The houses in the 'Row,' as this part of Washington Square was called, all had beautiful gardens in the rear about ninety feet deep, surrounded by white, grape-covered trellises, with rounded arches at intervals, and lovely borders full of old-fashioned flowers." Although some of the "Row" had cisterns, all the residents went for their washing water to "the pump with a long handle" that stood in the Square. Of that pump Mrs. de Forest tells the following tale. One of her grandfather's neighbours told his coachman to fetch a couple of pails of water for Mary, the laundress. The coachman said that this was not his business, and upon being asked what his business was, replied: "To harness the horses and drive them." Thereupon he was told to bring the carriage to the door. His employer then invited the laundress with her two pails to step in and bade the coachman to drive her to the pump. There was no further trouble with the coachman.

As has been told elsewhere, before the Avenue was ever dreamed of, this land belonged to the Randall estate. The founder of the family was one Captain Thomas Randall, described as a freebooter of the seas, who commanded the "Fox," and sailed for years in and out of New Orleans, where he sold the proceeds of his voyages and captures. To this genial old ruffian was born a son, Robert Richard, after which event the father settled down and became a respectable merchant in Hanover Street, New York. He was coxswain of the barge crew of thirteen ship's captains who rowed General Washington from Elizabethtown Point to New York, on the way to the first inauguration. When Robert Richard came to die, in 1801, he dictated, propped up in bed, his last will. After the bequests to relatives and servants, he whispered to his lawyer: "My father was a mariner, his fortune was made at sea. There is no snug harbour for worn-out sailors. I would like to do something for them." Incidentally, the lawyer who drew up the will was Alexander Hamilton.

AT THE NORTHEAST CORNER OF THE AVENUE AND TENTH STREET IS THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF THE ASCENSION, BUILT IN 1840, AND CONSECRATED NOVEMBER 5, 1841. IT BELONGS TO A PART OF THE AVENUE, FROM THE SQUARE TO TWELFTH STREET, WHICH HAS CHANGED LITTLE SINCE 1845

So the Sailor's Snug Harbor Estate came into being, later to be transferred to its present home on Staten Island. As I survey it from the Richmond Terrace, which it faces, I like to recall its origin. That origin does not in the least seem to interfere with the comfort of the old salts in blue puffing away at their short pipes before the gate or strolling across the broad lawn. Never mind the source of Captain Tom's money. It is not for them to worry about the "Fox," or the "De Lancey," a brigantine with fourteen guns, which the "financier" took out in 1757, and with which he made some sensational captures, or the "Saucy Sally." Eventually the "De Lancey" was taken by the Dutch and the "Saucy Sally" by the English. But before these misfortunes befell him Captain Tom had amassed a fat property. Ostensibly he plied a coastwise trade mostly between New York and New Orleans. But the same chronicler to whom we owe the significant expression: "In those days a man was looked upon as highly unfortunate if he had not a vessel which he could put to profitable use," summed the matter up when he said: "The Captain went wherever the Spanish flag covered the largest amount of gold."

At the northeast corner of Washington Square and Fifth Avenue is the James Boorman house, now, I believe, the residence of Mr. Eugene Delano. Helen W. Henderson, in "A Loiterer in New York," alludes to certain letters about old New York written by Mr. Boorman's niece. "She writes," says Miss Henderson, "of her sister having been sent to boarding school at Miss Green's, No. 1 Fifth Avenue, and of how she used to comfort herself, in her home-sickness for the family, at Scarborough-on-the-Hudson, by looking out of the side windows of her prison at her uncle, 'walking in his flower-garden in the rear of his house on Washington Square!'" When James Boorman built his house, it was all open country behind it. Mr. Boorman built also the houses Nos. 1 and 3 Fifth Avenue and the stables that were the nucleus of the Washington Mews of the present day. In the houses was opened, in 1835, a select school for young ladies, presided over at first by Mr. Boorman's only sister, Mrs. Esther Smith.

Soon, from Worcester, Massachusetts, came a Miss Green, a girl of eighteen, to teach in the school. Another sister followed and in the course of a few years the establishment became the Misses Green School, which, for a long period, before and after the Civil War, was one of the most distinguished institutions of its kind in the city. Later it was carried on by the Misses Graham. There were educated the daughters of the commercial and social leaders of New York. Among the pupils were Fanny and Jenny Jerome, the latter afterwards to become Lady Randolph Churchill, and the mother of Winston Churchill. A brother of Lucy and Mary Green was Andrew H. Green, the "Father of Greater New York." He had for a time a share in the direction of the establishment, and in 1844, taught a class in American history. Some of the younger teachers came from the Union Theological Seminary in Washington Square. Among the men later to become distinguished, who lectured at the school, were Felix Foresti, professor at the University, and at Columbia College, Clarence Cook, Lyman Abbott, John Fiske, John Bigelow, teaching botany and charming the young ladies because he was "so handsome," and Elihu Root, then a youth fresh from college. To quote from Miss Henderson: "Miss Boorman has often told me of the amusement that the shy theological students and other young teachers afforded the girls in their classes, and how delighted these used to be to see instructors fall into a trap which was unconsciously prepared for them. The room in which the lectures were given had two doors, side by side, and exactly alike, one leading into the hall and the other into a closet. The young men having concluded their remarks, and feeling some relief at the successful termination of the ordeal, would tuck their books under their arms, bow gravely to the class, open the door, and walk briskly into the closet. Even Miss Green's discipline had its limits, and when the lecturer turned to find the proper exit he had to face a class of grinning schoolgirls not much younger than himself, to his endless mortification. Elihu Root recently met at a dinner a lady who asked him if he remembered her as a member of his class at Miss Green's school. 'Do I remember you?' the former secretary of State replied. 'You are one of the girls who used to laugh at me when I had to walk into the closet.'"

It was in 1835, when the new avenue was in the first flush of its lusty infancy, that a hotel was opened at the northeast corner of Eighth Street. They call it the Lafayette today: tomorrow it may have still another name. But to one with any feeling for old New York it will always be remembered by its appellation of yesterday, which it drew from the old proprietors of the land on which it stands, that family that is descended from Hendrick Brevoort who had served Harlem as constable and overseer, and later emigrated to New York, where he was an alderman from 1702 to 1713. The Brevoort farm adjoined the Randall farm and ran northeasterly to about Fourth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Among the descendants of the Dutch burgher was one Henry Brevoort, to whose obstinacy of disposition is owed a curious inconsistency of the city of today. His farmhouse was on the west side of Fourth Avenue and on his land were certain favourite trees. When the Commissioners were replanning the town in 1807 there was a projected Eleventh Street. But the trees were in the way of the improvement, so old Brevoort stood in the doorway, blunderbuss in hand, and defied the invaders to such purpose that to this day Eleventh Street has never been cut through. Instead, Grace Church, its garden and rectory cover the site of the old homestead. Later the vestry of Grace Church was to play old Brevoort's game. "Boss" Tweed determined to cut through or make the church pay handsomely for immunity. The vestry defied him. Tweed never acted.

There was another Henry Brevoort in the family. He it was who built the house that now stands at the northwest corner of the Avenue and Ninth Street. That Henry was the grandfather of James Renwick, Jr., the architect who built Grace Church and St. Patrick's Cathedral. His house was one of the great houses of the early days. Now known as the De Rham house—Brevoort sold it in 1857 to Henry De Rham for fifty-seven thousand dollars,—it still strikes the passer-by on account of its individuality of appearance. But long before the De Rhams entered in possession it had its romance. There, the evening of February 24, 1840, was held the first masked ball ever given in New York. It was, to quote Mr. George S. Hellman, "the most splendid social affair of the first half of the nineteenth century." But it was also the last masked ball held in the town for many years.

The name of the British Consul to New York at the time was Anthony Barclay, and he had a daughter. Her name was Matilda; she is described as having been a belle of great charm and beauty, and as having had a number of suitors. Of course, after the fashion of all love stories, the suitor favoured by her was the one of whom her parents most disapproved. He was a young South Carolinian named Burgwyne. Opposition served only to fan the flame, and the lovers met by stealth, and the gay Southerner wooed the fair Briton in the good old school poetical manner. In soft communion of fancy they wandered together to far lands; to:

"that delightful Province of the Sun,
The first of Persian lands he shines upon,
Where all the loveliest children of his beam,
Flow'rets and fruits, blush over every stream,
And, fairest of all streams, the Murga roves
Among Merou's bright palaces and groves."

It was "Tom" Moore's "Lalla Rookh" that was dearest to their hearts. Then came the great masked ball, to which practically all "society" was invited.

Matilda and Burgwyne agreed to go in the guise of their romantic favourites; she as Lalla Rookh, and he as Feramorz, the young Prince. She wore "floating gauzes, bracelets, a small coronet of jewels, and a rose-coloured bridal veil." His dress was "simple, yet not without marks of costliness, with a high Tartarian cap, and strings of pearls hanging from his flowered girdle of Kaskan." Till four o'clock in the morning they danced. Then, still wearing the costumes of the romantic poem, they slipped away from the ball and were married before breakfast. It seems quite harmless, and natural, and as it should have been, when we regard it after all the years. But it caused a great uproar and scandal at the time, and brought masked balls into such odium that there was, a bit later, a fine of one thousand dollars imposed on anyone who should give one,—one-half to be deducted in case you told on yourself.

There is a little magazine published in New York designed to entertain and instruct those who view from the top of a bus of one of the various lines that are the outgrowth of the old Fifth Avenue stage line. The magazine is called "From a Fifth Avenue Bus," and a feature from month to month is the department known as "Both Sides of Fifth Avenue." In the stretch between the Square and Eleventh Street, it points out as residences of particular interest those of Paul Dana, No. 1, George T. Bestle, No. 3, F. Spencer Witherbee, No. 4, and Lispenard Stewart, No. 6; all below Eighth Street. Then, between Eighth and Ninth, Pierre Mali, No. 8, John C. Eames, No. 12, Miss Abigail Burt, No. 14, Dr. J. Milton Mabbott, No. 17, Dr. Edward L. Partridge, No. 19, and Dr. Robert J. Kahn (former Mark Twain home), No. 21. Between Ninth and Tenth, Charles De Rham, No. 24, Mrs. George Ethridge, No. 27, Mrs. Peter F. Collier, No. 29, and Edwin W. Coggeshall, No. 30. On the next block, Frank B. Wiborg, No. 40, Gen. Rush Hawkins, No. 42, Miss Elsie Borg, No. 43, Howard Carter Dickinson, No. 45, Mrs. J. P. Cassidy, No. 49, and William W. Thompkins, No. 68. Besides the private residences are mentioned the Hotel Brevoort (the traditional name is used), the Berkeley at No. 20, and the Church of the Ascension, at Tenth Street, one of the very first of the Fifth Avenue churches, and the scene, on June 26, 1844, of the marriage of President John Tyler and Miss Julia Gardiner, the first marriage of a President of the United States during his term of office. The church a block farther north, on the same side of the Avenue is the First Presbyterian, dating from 1845, when the congregation moved uptown from the earlier edifice on Wall Street, just east of New Street.

CHAPTER III

A Knickerbocker Pepys

A Knickerbocker Pepys—The Span of a Life—A Man of Many Responsibilities—Storm and Stress—Political Protestations—Hone and the Journalists—Contemporary Impressions of Bryant and Bennett—Hone and the Men of Letters—The Ways of British Lions.

There is one kind of immortality that is not so much a matter of amount and quality of achievement as of the particular period of achievement. That, for example, of Samuel Pepys.

Pepys, living in the turbulent, densely populated London of our time, and recording day by day the events coming under his observation, would probably have his audience of posterity limited to a little circle of venerating descendants who would certainly bore the neighbours. It is quite easy to picture the members of that circle in the year 1998, or 2024. "Listen to what Grandpapa's Diary says of the awful Zeppelin raids of February, 1917," or, "But Great-grandpapa, who had just finished his walk in the Park, and was passing Downing Street when the news came, etc." "Il est fatiguant," whispered Mr. St. John of General Webb at one of the dinners in "Henry Esmond," "avec sa trompette de Wynandael." That persistent blowing of the "trompette" of grandpapa would likewise be voted "fatiguant." "Grandpapa! A plague upon their grandpapa!"

It needed the smaller town, the more limited age, the greater intimacy of life, to make Pepys's Diary the vivid human narrative that it has been for so many years.

And as with the Pepys of seventeenth century London, so with the chronicler of events day by day in the New York of the first half of the nineteenth century. If there was a Knickerbocker Pepys it was Philip Hone, who in the span of his life saw his city expand from twenty-five thousand to half a million, and whose diary has been described as one of the most fascinating personal documents ever penned.

There is a little thoroughfare far downtown called Dutch Street. It runs from Fulton to John Street. There Philip Hone was born on the 25th of October, 1780, and there he passed his boyhood in a wooden house at the corner of John and Dutch Streets which his father bought in 1784. After a common school education, he became, at seventeen years of age, a clerk for an older brother whose business as an auctioneer consisted mainly in selling the cargoes brought to New York by American merchantmen. Two years as a clerk, and then Philip was made a partner. The firm prospered, and by 1820, the future diarist, though only forty years old, had become a rich man. With the best years of his mature life before him, with a wish to see the world and a desire for self-improvement, he retired from business, and in 1821, made his first journey to Europe, sailing from New York on the "James Monroe." When he returned, he bought a house on Broadway, near Park Place, on the exact spot now occupied by the Woolworth Building, for which he paid twenty-five thousand dollars. There is extant an old print of the house, showing also the American Hotel on the corner, and another residence, the ground floor of which was occupied by Peabody's Book Shop. On the block below, where the Astor House was built later, were the homes of John G. Coster, David Lydig, and J. J. Astor. It was one of the most magnificent dwellings of the town, and there Hone entertained not only the distinguished men of New York, but also such Americans of country-wide fame as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Harrison Gray Otis; and such old-world visitors as Charles Dickens, Lord Morpeth, Captain Marryat, John Galt, and Fanny Kemble. He had children growing up—his marriage to Catherine Dunscomb had taken place in 1801, when he was in his twenty-second year—and for the benefit of the young people his was practically open house. Public and private honours were thrust upon him. An assistant alderman from 1824 to 1826, in the latter year he was appointed Mayor. (The Mayor was not elected until 1834.) William Paulding had preceded him in the office, and William Paulding succeeded him in 1827. But the Hone administration was long remembered on account of its civic excellence and its social dignity. For more than thirty years he served gratuitously the city's first Bank of Savings, which was established in 1816, and in 1841 he became its president. Governor of the New York Hospital, trustee of the Bloomingdale Asylum, founder of the Clinton Hall Association, and of the Mercantile Library, trustee of Columbia College, of the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company, president of the American Exchange Bank, and of the Glenham Manufacturing Company, vice-president of the Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, of the American Seamen's Fund Society, of the New York Historical Society, of the Fuel Saving Society, a director in the Matteawan Cotton and Machine Company, the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, the Eagle Fire Insurance Company, the National Insurance Company, a member of the Chamber of Commerce, a manager of the Literary and Philosophical Society, of the Mechanic and Scientific Association, a founder and a governor of the Union Club, and a vestryman of Trinity Church—the wonder is that he found time to write in his Diary at all. According to Bayard Tuckerman, who edited the Diary and wrote the Introduction to it, an ordinary day's work for Hone was "to ride out on horseback to the Bloomingdale Asylum, to return and pass the afternoon at the Bank for Savings, thence to attend a meeting of the Trinity Vestry, or to preside over the Mercantile Library Association." "He was never," said Mr. Tuckerman, "voluntarily absent from a meeting where the interest of others demanded his presence, and many were the good dinners he lost in consequence." Again: "He had personal gifts which extended the influence due to his character. Tall and spare, his bearing was distinguished, his face handsome and refined; his manners were courtly, of what is known as the 'old school'; his tact was great—he had a faculty for saying the right thing. In his own house his hospitality was enhanced by a graceful urbanity and a ready wit."

The story of Philip Hone's life is substantially the story of the town from 1780 till 1851. When he first saw the light in Dutch Street, there were but twenty thousand persons for the occupying British troopers to keep in order. When, after his return from Europe in the early '20s he bought on Broadway in the neighbourhood of City Hall Park, that was the centre of fashionable residence.

But by 1837 trade was claiming the section, and Hone sold out and built himself a new home, this time at the corner of Broadway and Great Jones Street. He saw the residence portion of the city go beyond that point, saw it grope up Fifth Avenue as far as Twentieth Street. The first entry in the Diary bears the date of May 18, 1828; the last of April 30, 1851, just four days before his death. That last entry shows that he felt that the end was near at hand. "Has the time come?" he asks, and then quotes seven stanzas from James Montgomery's "What is Prayer?", adding four stanzas of his own.

Just eleven months to a day before the last entry, under date of May 30, 1850, Hone commented on the swiftly changing aspect of the city. To him the renovation of Broadway seemed to be an annual occurrence. If the houses were not pulled down they fell of their own accord. He wrote: "The large, three-story house, corner of Broadway and Fourth Street, occupied for several years by Mrs. Seton as a boarding-house, fell today at two o'clock, with a crash so astounding that the girls, with whom I was sitting in the library, imagined for a moment that it was caused by an earthquake. Fortunately the workmen had notice to make their escape. No lives were lost and no personal injury was sustained.

"The mania for converting Broadway into a street of shops is greater than ever. There is scarcely a block in the whole extent of this fine street of which some part is not in a state of transmutation. The City Hotel has given place to a row of splendid stores.

"Stewart is extending his stores to take in the whole front from Chambers to Reade Street; this is already the most magnificent dry-goods establishment in the world. I certainly do not remember anything to equal it in London or Paris; with the addition now in progress this edifice will be one of the 'wonders' of the Western world. Three or four good brick houses on the corner of Broadway and Spring Street have been levelled, I know not for what purpose—shops, no doubt. The houses—fine, costly edifices, opposite to me extending from Driggs's corner down to a point opposite to Bond Street—are to make way for a grand concert and exhibition establishment."

It is far from being all mellowness and amiability, that Diary. Hone had his prejudices and dislikes and strong political opinions. In the portraits that have been preserved there is the suggestion of intolerance and smug self-satisfaction. Also life did not turn out quite so rosy as it promised in 1828, when he retired from business with a handsome competence. In 1836, during the commercial depression, he met with financial reverses which forced him to return to the game of money-getting. He became president of the American Mutual Insurance Company, which was ruined by the great fire of July 19, 1845.

"A fire has occurred," he recorded in the entry of that date, "the loss of which is probably $5,000,000; several of the insurance companies are ruined, and all are crippled. My office, I fear, is in the former category. We have lost between three and four hundred thousand dollars, which is more than we can pay.

"This is a hard stroke for me. I was pleasantly situated with a moderate support for my declining years, and now, 'Othello's occupation's gone.'"

But he met his reverses in a courageous manner, and in 1849 President Taylor appointed him Naval Officer of the Port of New York, a place which he held until his death.

As became his day, Hone was a good trencherman. In the index to the Diary there are one hundred and sixteen pages marked as containing reference of some kind to dinner parties. The old New York names appear again and again. H. Brevoort, Chancellor and Mrs. Kent, Mr. and Mrs. W. B. Astor, Bishop Hobart, C. Brugière and Miss Brugière, Robert Maitland, Dr. Wainwright, Mr. and Mrs. Anthon, Judge Spencer, Judge Irving, Dr. Hosack, Peter Jay, P. Schemerhorn. And only the formal dinner parties are indexed. Aside from them there are scores of allusions to where the diarist dined and who dined with him. Small wonder that the passing of a cook of unusual abilities was an event to be recorded. An early entry, that of February 17, 1829, reads: "Died this morning, Simon, the celebrated cook. He was a respectable man, who has for many years been the fashionable cook in New York, and his loss will be felt on all occasions of large dinner and evening parties, unless it should be found that some suitable shoulders should be ready to receive the mantle of this distinguished cuisinier." When Hone was not entertaining at his own home or being entertained at somebody else's, he was trying out the fare at some one of the public hostelries. Date of December 18, 1830, there is reference to a familiar name. "Moore, Giraud, and I went yesterday to dine at Delmonico's, a French restaurateur, in William Street, which I had heard was on the Parisian plan, and very good. We satisfied our curiosity, but not our appetites."

We are prone to regard the Civil War as an affair of the sixties. Hone was one of those who perceived the threat of it thirty years before. Always a bitter political opponent of Jackson, there was one occasion when he was loud in his applause. The South Carolina Convention had passed a number of resolutions regarded by Hone as rank treason, and the beginning of rebellion. The President had dealt with the matter in a proclamation, of which the diarist wrote December 12, 1832: "Very much to the surprise of some, and to the satisfaction of all our citizens, we have a long proclamation of President Jackson, which was published in Washington on the 12th. inst., and is in all our papers this day. It is a document addressed to the nullifiers of South Carolina, occasioned by the late treasonable proceedings of their convention. The whole subject is discussed in a spirit of conciliation, but with firmness and decision, and a determination to put down the wicked attempt to resist the laws. On the constitutionality of the laws which the nullifiers object to, and their right to recede from the Union, this able State paper is full and conclusive. The language of the President is that of a father addressing his wayward children, but determined to punish with the utmost severity the first open act of insubordination. As a composition it is splendid, and will take its place in the archives of our country, and will dwell in the memories of our citizens alongside of the farewell address of the 'Father of his Country.' It is not known which of the members of the cabinet is entitled to the honour of being the author; it is attributed to Mr. Livingston, the Secretary of State, and to Governor Cass, the Secretary of War. Nobody, of course, supposes it was written by him whose name is subscribed to it. But whoever shall prove to be the author has raised to himself an imperishable monument of glory. The sentiments, at least, are approved by the President, and he should have the credit of it, as he would have the blame if it were bad; and, possessing these sentiments, we have reason to believe that he has firmness enough to do his duty.

"I say, Hurrah for Jackson, and so I am willing to say at all times when he does his duty. The only difference between the thorough-going Jackson man and me is, that I will not 'hurrah' for him right or wrong. And I think that Jackson's election may save the Union."

If he disliked Jackson on account of his policies, he seemed to dislike journalists regardless of their political creeds. To his eyes they were a pestilential crew. Here is the first glimpse of Bryant, the great William Cullen Bryant, who as a mere boy had penned the beautiful "Thanatopsis." It is of the date of April 20, 1831. "While I was shaving this morning at eight o'clock, I witnessed from the front window an encounter in the street nearly opposite, between William C. Bryant and William L. Stone, the former one of the editors of the Evening Post, and the latter the editor of the Commercial Advertiser. The former commenced the attack by striking Stone over the head with a cow-skin; after a few blows the men closed, and the whip was wrested away from Bryant and carried off by Stone." Here and there are flung expressions of admiration for Bryant's verse, but the tone is of one speaking of the cleverness of a trained lizard. Thirteen years intervened between the first and the last Bryant entry. In February, 1844, Nicholas Biddle, the great financier, died. Something that Bryant wrote roused Hone's wrath. Here is his comment of February 28: "Bryant, the editor of the Evening Post, in an article of his day, virulent and malignant as are usually the streams which flow from that polluted source, says that Mr. Biddle 'died at his country-seat, where he passed the last of his days in elegant retirement, which, if justice had taken place, would have been spent in the penitentiary.' This is the first instance I have known of the vampire of party-spirit seizing the lifeless body of its victim before its interment, and exhibiting its bloody claws to the view of mourning relatives and sympathizing friends. How such a black-hearted misanthrope as Bryant should possess an imagination teeming with beautiful poetical images astonishes me; one would as soon expect to extract drops of honey from the fangs of the rattlesnake."

But this was kindly tolerance compared to his attitude towards the elder Bennett. The latter apparently came under Hone's notice in January, 1836, and the first mention in the Diary reads: "There is an ill-looking, squinting man called Bennett, formerly connected with Webb in the publication of his paper, who is now editor of the Herald, one of the penny papers which are hawked about the streets by a gang of troublesome, ragged boys, and in which scandal is retailed to all who delight in it, at that moderate price. This man and Webb are now bitter enemies, and it was nuts for Bennett to be the organ of Mr. Lynch's late vituperative attack upon Webb, which Bennett introduced in his paper with evident marks of savage exultation." To that famous masked ball given by the Brevoorts on the evening of February 24, 1840, in their house at Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue Hone went attired as Cardinal Wolsey. He forgot to tell of the romance of the night, the elopement of Miss Barclay and young Burgwyne, devoting his space to the expression of his resentment over the presence at the affair of an emissary of Bennett. "Whether the notice they" (the guests) "took of him" (the "Herald" reporter), "and that which they extend to Bennett when he shows his ugly face in Wall Street, may be considered approbatory of the dirty slanders and unblushing impudence of the paper they conduct, or is intended to purchase their forbearance towards themselves, the effect is equally mischievous." Again, date of June 2, 1840: "The punishment of the law adds to the fellow's notoriety, and personal chastisement is pollution to him who undertakes it. Write him down, make respectable people withdraw their support from the vile sheet, so that it will be considered disgraceful to read it, and the serpent will be rendered harmless." In the entry of February 14, 1842, Bennett is: "The impudent disturber of the public peace, whose infamous paper, the Herald, is more scurrilous, and of course more generally read, than any other." September 2, 1843, Hone records that: "Bennett, the editor of the Herald, is on a tour through Great Britain, whence he furnishes lies and scandal for the infamous paper which has contributed so much to corrupt the morals and degrade the taste of the people of New York." In one of the last entries of the Diary, a few months before Hone's death, allusion is made to a personal attack on the editor by the defeated candidate of the Locofoco party for the District-Attorneyship. "I should be well pleased to hear of this fellow being punished in this way, and once a week for the remainder of his life, so that new wounds might be inflicted before the old ones were healed, or until the fellow left off lying; but I fear that the editorial miscreant in this case will be more benefited than injured by this attack."

A man of literary tastes, or at least a man who wished to be regarded as one of bookish inclinations, Hone seems never to have had any great liking for men of letters as such. All of the gifted and unhappy Poe's life in New York came within the period of the Diary, but in it is to be found not a single mention of his name. There was no place at the Hone table for the shabby, impossible genius. There was an impassable gulf between the well-ordered household facing the City Hall Park, or at the Broadway and Great Jones Street corner, and the humble Carmine Street lodging, or the Fordham Cottage. Early references to Fenimore Cooper, whom Hone first met at an American dinner to Lafayette in Paris in 1831, are gracious enough, for the creator of Leather-Stocking was a personage, and it suited Hone to stand well with personages. But when, seven years later, Cooper returned to the United States after his long stay abroad, and incurred the displeasure of his fellow-countrymen, Hone was quite ready to join in the hue and cry.

With Washington Irving it was another matter. But who could have failed to feel genial towards the quiet, scholarly, altogether charming gentleman of Sunnyside? Also the legs of Irving fitted well and often under the Hone mahogany, and the part of the author that was perceptible above the table gave a flavour and dignity to the board. Somehow we see Hone's cheeks puffed out with pride as he chronicles: "My old friend, Washington Irving, who visits his native country after an absence of seventeen years. I passed half an hour with him very pleasantly." "I have devoted nearly the whole day to Washington Irving." "Irving and I left them and came to town to meet friends whom I had engaged to dine with me." "Washington Irving acquainted me with a circumstance, etc." "We next visited Washington Irving, who lives with his sister and nieces on the bank of the river." Any one who reads the Diary can see that Hone thoroughly approved of Irving. But just what, in his heart of hearts, did Irving think of Hone?

The Diary gives some significant glimpses of Charles Dickens in America. In 1842 New York welcomed the Englishman riotously. Washington laughed at New York for doing too much and went to the other extreme. John Quincy Adams gave the Dickenses a dinner at which Hone was a guest. "Some clever people were invited to meet them" is the way the ingenuous Hone puts it. "They" (Dickens and Mrs. Dickens) "came, he in a frock-coat, and she in her bonnet. They sat at table until four o'clock, when he said: 'Dear, it is time for us to go home and dress for dinner.' They were engaged to dine with Robert Greenhow at the fashionable hour of half-past five! A most particularly funny idea to leave the table of John Quincy Adams to dress for a dinner at Robert Greenhow's!" Hone referred to the visitors as "The Boz and Bozess," and described the author of "Pickwick" as "a small, bright-eyed, intelligent-looking young fellow, thirty years of age, somewhat of a dandy in his dress, with 'rings and things and fine array,' brisk in his manner, and of a lively conversation"; and Mrs. Dickens as "a little, fat, English-looking woman, of an agreeable countenance, and, I should think, 'a nice person.'"

Dickens was not the only British author of those days to kindle the flames of American resentment. Almost all who came to our shores seemed to possess the faculty of "getting a rise" out of Yankee sensibilities. Captain Marryat was one of the offenders. At a dinner in Toronto he gave an injudicious toast. Thereupon the town of Lewistown, Maine, built a huge bonfire on the shore directly opposite Queenstown and destroyed all the "Midshipman Easys," "Peter Simples," "Japhets," and "Jacob Faithfuls" that could be obtained. Hone commented sensibly on the affair in his Diary for May 5, 1838. "Captain Marryat, I dare say, made a fool of himself (not a very difficult task, I should judge, from what I have seen of him); but the Lewistownians have beaten him all to smash, as the Kentuckians say. How mortified he must have been to hear that his books had been burned after they were paid for!" A year before Marryat had dined at the Hone house in New York and the host wrote: "The lion, Captain Marryat, is no great things of a lion, after all. In truth, the author of 'Peter Simple' and 'Jacob Faithful' is a very every-day sort of a man. He carries about him in his manner and conversation more of the sailor than the author, has nothing student-like in his appearance, and savours more of the binnacle lamp than of the study." And again, six months after the Lewistown flare-up: "It would have been better for both parties if the sailor author had been known on this side of the Atlantic only by his writings ... he has evidently not enjoyed the benefits of refined society, or intercourse with people of literary talents."

The Knickerbocker Pepys grew mellower as he advanced in years. There is a marked change in the tone of the Diary dating from the very time when he himself suffered financial reverses. It was the test of the man that misfortune did not embitter him, but made him more kindly in his judgments of those about him. The smug self-satisfaction belonged to the early days. In the closing years of his useful life there was but one thing that disturbed him greatly. He foresaw the Deluge that was to come. December 12, 1850, was his last Thanksgiving. He wrote: "The annual time-honoured Thanksgiving-day throughout the state. No nation, ancient or modern, ever had more causes for thanksgiving, and reasons to praise the Author of all good, than the people of the United States. Yet there are many, at the present time, ignorant and unworthy of the blessings they enjoy, who would throw all things into confusion, break up the blessed Union which binds the States, and should bind the individuals forming their population; who would destroy the harmony, and condemn the obligations, of Constitution and law. Factionists, traitors, madmen—the Lord preserve us from the unholy influence of such principles!"

CHAPTER IV

Glimpses of the Sixties

Glimpses of the Sixties—At the "Sign of the Buck-horn"—Madison Square in Civil War Times—A Contemporary Chronicler—Mushroom Fortunes—Foreign Adventurers—Filling the Ballroom—Brown of Grace Church—Sunshine and Shadow—The Avenue and the Five Points—The Old Bowery—Blackmail—The Haunts of Chance—Two Famous Poems, William Allen Butler's "Nothing to Wear," and Edmund Clarence Stedman's "The Diamond Wedding."

It seems but yesterday that the old Fifth Avenue Hotel passed to the limbo of bygone things. When "Victoria's Royal Son" came to visit us it was new and stately, and held by loyal patriots to be something for strangers from beyond the seas to behold and wonder at. But before the hotel there had been a famous tavern on the site, and then a hippodrome.

"Can it be true," wrote Mrs. Schuyler Van Rennselaer in an article in the "Century Magazine" many years ago, "that I dreamily remember a canvas hippodrome where the Fifth Avenue Hotel stands? Kids curvetting in idiotic pride over imaginary mountain peaks on the rough ground of what is Madison Square? Can it be true that when we looked from our nursery windows towards Sixteenth Street we saw, on a lot foolishly called vacant, the most interesting of possible houses, an abandoned street-car, fitted with a front door and a chimney pot, and inhabited by an Irish family of considerable size?" That delightful Swiss Family Robinson-like habitation may have been a creation of Mrs. Van Rennselaer's fancy, but Franconi's Hippodrome was an historical fact, and the tavern that she remembers was Corporal Thompson's Madison Cottage, where, at the "Sign of the Buck-horn," trotting men gathered. When Fifth Avenue was in its infancy Madison Square still recalled the name of Tieman's, and in the centre there was a House of Refuge for sinful boys. At the Square the old Boston Post Road for a moment touched what was afterwards to be the Avenue before it twisted off in a northeasterly direction.

Corporal Thompson's establishment was a diminutive frame cottage, surrounded by what might be called "a five acre lot," which was used, when used at all, for cattle exhibitions. It was, Mr. Dayton recorded, "the last stopping place for codgers, old and young. Laverty, Winans, Niblo, the Costers, Hones, Whitneys, Schermerhorns, Sol Kipp, Doctor Vache, Ogden Hoffman, Nat Blount, and scores more of bon vivants, hail fellows well met, would here end their ride for the day by 'smiling' with the worthy Corporal, and wash down any of their former improprieties with a sip of his ne plus ultra, which was always kept in reserve for a special nightcap. There was a special magnetism about the snug little bar-room, always trim as a lady's boudoir, which induced the desire to tarry awhile, as if that visit were destined to be the last; so it frequently happened that a jolly party was compelled to grope slowly homewards through the unlighted, gloomy road that led to the city."

But all that has been in the days before. By the time that the Fifth Avenue Hotel had been firmly established on the site of the Buck-horn, the corner had become the centre of the new town. Across the Square, at the northeast angle, on the site of the building now capped by the figure of Diana, was a low, sordid shed. It was the Harlem Railroad Station. There, from one side started the cars for Boston, and from the other, the cars for Albany. Cars, not trains, for horses were the motive power as far as Thirty-second Street. There engines were attached in the open street. Later, the horses ran through the tunnel as far as Forty-second Street where the Grand Central Station now stands. In the Square the Worth Monument had been erected in 1857, and on the east side of the park, then enclosed by a high railing, was the brown church which dated from 1854. That decade from 1860 to 1870 was one of constant changes and shiftings. The New England soldier who marched through the town on his way to the front in 1861 rubbed his eyes a little when he passed through it again homeward bound after the surrender of Lee's army at Appomattox Court House had brought the War of Secession to a close. The last vestige of Knickerbocker life had disappeared forever.

It had been, and still was, an era of extravagant speculation. Mushroom fortunes were springing up, and their possessors, as socially ambitious as they were socially inept, invaded Fifth Avenue strong in the belief in the all-conquering power of the Almighty Dollar. In most cases they did not last long. But they served a purpose. They erected the splendid houses on the Avenue that a few years later the clubs were to occupy and enjoy. Of the clubs that were on the Avenue in 1868, a contemporary chronicler wrote that nearly every one recorded the brief life of a New York aristocrat. "A lucky speculation, a sudden rise in real estate," so runs the rhetorical statement, "a new turn of the wheel-of-fortune, lifts the man who yesterday could not be trusted for his dinner, and gives him a place among men of wealth. He buys a lot on Fifth Avenue, puts up a palatial residence, outdoing all who have gone before him; sports his gay team in Central Park, carpets his sidewalk, gives two or three parties, and disappears from society. His family return to the sphere from which they were taken, and the mansion, with its gorgeous furniture, becomes a club-house." Perhaps this picture should be regarded with a certain restraint. The observer was an up-state minister, looking for the excesses, wickednesses, and extravagances of the great city. His judgment may have been as faulty as his style.

But, if merely for the sake of learning a certain point of view, it is amusing to turn over those old volumes dealing with the sunshine and shadow of the city of the sixties. High Life and Moneyocracy, we are told, were synonymous. To use the Tennysonian line, "Every door was barred with gold, and opened but to golden keys." "If you wish parties, soirees, balls, that are elegant, attractive, and genteel (how they loved those dreadful adjectives 'elegant' and 'genteel'!) you will not find them among the snobbish clique, who, with nothing but money, attempt to rule New York." The words are of the clerical visitor before quoted. "Talent, taste, and refinement do not dwell with these. But high life has no passport except money. If a man has this, though destitute of character and brains, he is made welcome. One may come from Botany Bay or St. James; with a ticket-of-leave from a penal colony or St. Cloud; if he has diamond rings and a coach, all places will be open to him. The leaders of upper New York were, a few years ago, porters, stable boys, coal-heavers, pickers of rags, scrubbers of floors, and laundry women. Coarse, rude, uncivil, and immoral many of them still are. Lovers of pleasure and men of fashion bow and cringe to such, and approach hat in hand. One of our new-fledged millionaires gave a ball in his stable. The invited came with tokens of delight. The host, a few years ago, was a ticket-taker at one of our ferries, and would have thankfully blacked the boots or done any menial service for the people who clamour for the honour of his hand. At the gate of Central Park, every day splendid coaches may be seen, in which sit large, fat, coarse women, who carry with them the marks of the wash-tub." That was the kind of hot shot that the rural districts wanted from those they sent to look into the iniquities of the Metropolis. At once it made them sit up and filled them with a sense of their own sanctity.

According to the same ingenuous chronicler, the most famous figure in the social life of the New York of the sixties, the later Petronius, or the forerunner of Mr. Ward McAllister, was Brown, the sexton of Grace Church, which, for many years, had been the fashionable centre. "Arrogant old Isaac Brown," Mrs. Burton Harrison called him in her "Recollections, Grave and Gay," "the portly sexton who transmitted invitations for the elect, protested to one of his patronesses that he really could not undertake to 'run society' beyond Fiftieth Street. To be married or buried within Grace Church's walls was considered the height of felicity. It was Brown who passed on worthiness in life or death. He arranged the parties, engineered the bridals, conducted the funerals. The Lenten season is a horribly dull season, but we manage to make our funerals as entertaining as possible"—Brown said, according to the quoted story. Without Brown no Fifth Avenue function was complete. "A fashionable lady, about to have a fashionable gathering at her house, orders her meats from the butcher, her supplies from the grocer, her cakes and ices from the confectioner; but her invitations she puts in the hands of Brown. He knows whom to invite and whom to omit. He knows who will come, who will not come, but will send regrets. In case of a pinch, he can fill up the list with young men, picked up about town, in black swallow-tailed coats, white vests, and white cravats, who, in consideration of a fine supper and a dance, will allow themselves to be passed off as the sons of distinguished New Yorkers. The city has any quantity of ragged noblemen, seedy lords from Germany, Hungarian Barons out at the elbow, members of the European aristocracy who left their country for their country's good, who can be served up in proper proportions at a fashionable party when the occasion demands it. No man knows their haunts better than Brown."

Here is a picture of the famous Brown, drawn by the same pen:

"Brown is a huge fellow, coarse in his features, resembling a dressed up carman. His face is very red, and on Sundays he passes up and down the aisles of Grace Church with a peculiar swagger. He bows strangers into a pew, when he deigns to give them a seat, with a majestic and patronizing air designed to impress them with a relishing sense of the obligation he has conferred upon them."

Later Peter Marié wrote the poem, "Brown of Grace Church," beginning:

"O glorious Brown! thou medley strange,
Of church-yard, ball-room, saint and sinner,
Flying in morn through fashion's range,
And burying mortals after dinner,
Walking one day with invitations,
Passing the next with consecrations."

This is the eloquent story of Mr. and Mrs. Newly-Rich who did not seek the social chaperonage of the all-powerful Brown. He had been a reputable and successful hatter. She had made vests for a fashionable tailor. By a turn of fortune they found themselves rich. He gave up hatting and she abandoned vests. They bought a house on upper Fifth Avenue and proposed to storm society by giving a large party. The acquaintances of the humbler days were to be ignored. It was guests from another world that were wanted. But instead of going to Brown and slipping him a handsome fee, Mr. and Mrs. Newly-Rich took the Directory, selected five hundred names, among them some of the most prominent persons of the city, and sent out invitations. The first caterer of the town laid the table. Dodsworth was engaged for the music. The result is easy to guess. The brilliantly lighted house, the silent bell, the over-dressed mother and daughter sitting hour after hour in lonely, heartbroken magnificence. But save for its association with the omnipotent Brown, it is the story, not of the sixties in particular, but of any decade of social New York.

It may be worth while to follow the critic from up-state in some of his venturesome explorations of other parts of New York. Those to whom he was to return, those for whose entertainment and instruction his book was written, wanted to hear of the shadows as well as the sunshine. It was the picture of a very sinful metropolis that they demanded, and the author was bound that he was not going to disappoint them.

MADISON SQUARE. YESTERDAY IT WAS THE HOME OF THE FLORA MC FLIMSIES OF THE WILLIAM ALLEN BUTLER POEM "NOTHING TO WEAR." TO-DAY, IN THE EYES OF THE MANHATTANITE, IT IS THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE.

The frontispiece of the book shows the Stewart Mansion at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, and by contrast, the Old Brewery at the Five Points. Before the Mission was opened the Five Points was a dangerous locality, the resort of burglars, thieves, and desperadoes, with dark, underground chambers, where murderers often hid, where policemen seldom went, and never unarmed. A good citizen going through the neighbourhood after dark was sure to be assaulted, beaten, and probably robbed. Nightly the air was filled with the sound of brawling. Wretchedness, drunkenness, and suffering stalked abroad. There were such rookeries as Cow Bay and Murderer's Alley, the latter of which continued to exist, though its sinister glory had long since departed, until fifteen or twenty years ago. The lodging houses of the section were underground, without ventilation, without windows, overrun with rats and vermin.

For diversion the miserable denizens of the quarter sought the near-by Bowery, with its brilliantly lighted drinking dens, its concert halls, where negro minstrelsy was featured, and its theatres where the plays were immoral comedies or melodramas glorifying the exploits of picturesque criminals. News-boys, street-sweepers, rag-pickers, begging girls filled the galleries of these places of amusement. Here is the clerical visitor's description of the thoroughfare that was then the second principal street of the city: "Leaving the City Hall about six o'clock on Sunday night, and walking through Chatham Square to the Bowery, one would not believe that New York had any claim to be a Christian city, or that the Sabbath had any friends. The shops are open, and trade is brisk. Abandoned females go in swarms, and crowd the sidewalk. Their dress, manner, and language indicate that depravity can go no lower. Young men known as Irish-Americans, who wear as a badge long frock-coats, crowd the corners of the streets, and insult the passer-by. Women from the windows arrest attention by loud calls to the men on the sidewalk, and jibes, profanity, and bad words pass between the parties. Sunday theatres, concert-saloons, and places of amusement are in full blast. The Italians and Irish shout out their joy from the rooms they occupy. The click of the billiard ball, and the booming of the ten-pin alley, are distinctly heard. Before night, victims watched for will be secured; men heated with liquor, or drugged, will be robbed, and many curious and bold explorers in this locality will curse the hour in which they resolved to spend a Sunday in the Bowery."

To find adventure and danger the rural visitor did not have to seek out the Bowery and the adjacent streets to the east and west. Adroit rogues were everywhere. Bland gentlemen introduced themselves to unwary strangers. Instead of the mining stock or the sick engineer's story of our more enlightened and refined age, these pleasant urbanites resorted to the cruder weapon of blackmail. The art was reduced to a system. Terrible warnings were conveyed to the innocent country-side by the chronicler in such sub-heads as "A Widower Blackmailed," "A Minister Falls among Thieves," "Blackmailers at a Wedding," "A Bride Called On."

Darkly the investigator painted the gambling evil of the New York of the sixties. The dens of chance were in aristocratic neighbourhoods and superbly appointed. Heavy blinds or curtains, kept drawn all day, hid the inmates from prying eyes. Within, rosewood doors, deep carpets, and mirrors of magnificent dimensions. The dinner table spread with silver and gold plate, costly chinaware, and glass of exquisite cut: the viands embracing the luxuries of the season and the wines of the choicest. "None but men who behave like gentlemen are allowed the entrée of the rooms" is the naïve comment. "Play runs on by the hour, and not a word spoken save the low words of the parties who conduct the game. But for the implements of gaming there is little to distinguish the room from a first-class club-house. Gentlemen well known on 'change' and in public life, merchants of a high grade, whose names adorn charitable and benevolent associations, are seen in these rooms, reading and talking. Some drink only a glass of wine, walk about, and look on the play with apparently but little curiosity. The great gamblers, besides those of the professional ring, are men accustomed to the excitement of the Stock Board. They gamble all day in Wall and Broad Streets, and all night on Broadway. To one not accustomed to such a sight, it is rather startling to see men whose names stand high in church and state, who are well dressed and leaders of fashion, in these notable saloons, as if they were at home." Conspicuous among the keepers of the gambling hells was John Morrissey, who had begun life as the proprietor of a low drinking den in Troy, and as a step in the march of prosperity, had fought Heenan, the Benicia Boy, for the championship of Canada. He was a personality of the city of the sixties. The author of the curious volume thought it necessary to tell of his career as he told of the career of A. T. Stewart, and Henry Ward Beecher, and the particular Astor of the day, and the particular Vanderbilt, Fernando Wood, and Leonard W. Jerome, and George Law, and James Gordon Bennett, the elder, and Daniel Drew, and General Halpin, and half a dozen more of the town's celebrities.

The Franconi Hippodrome on the Fifth Avenue Hotel site had become a memory, but far downtown Barnum's Museum was flourishing, with the doors open from sunrise till ten at night. Early visitors from the country inspected the gallery of curiosities before sitting down to breakfast. The great showman was living in a brown-stone house on Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Thirty-ninth Street. He was approaching his sixtieth year, and had retired from active life, although he still held the controlling interest in the Museum. A. T. Stewart was living in the white stone home he had erected at Thirty-fourth Street. James Gordon Bennett's city residence was on the Avenue at Thirty-eighth Street. In fact, with a few notable exceptions who still clung to their downtown homes, such as the Astors and the Vanderbilts, all the great money kings of the decade were gathering in the upper stretches of the ripening thoroughfare. But the descendants of the Patroons held to the sweep from Washington Square to Fourteenth Street, or to lower Second Avenue, which, to the eyes of its "set," embracing a number of old-school families of Colonial ancestry, was the "Faubourg St. Germain" of New York.

In every other memoir touching on the New York of the sixties will be found an allusion to the Flora McFlimseys. For example, Mr. W. D. Howells, in "Literary Friends and Acquaintances," told of his first visit to the city at the time of the Civil War. After Clinton Place was passed, he wrote: "Commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kind dwelt unmolested in the brown-stone stretches of Fifth Avenue." There are two poems linked with the story of New York. They are Edmund Clarence Stedman's "The Diamond Wedding," and "Nothing to Wear," and the William Allen Butler verses, beginning:

"Miss Flora McFlimsey, of Madison Square
Has made three separate journeys to Paris.
And her father assures me, each time she was there,
That she and her friend Mrs. Harris
(Not the lady whose name is so famous in history,
But plain Mrs. H., without romance or mystery)
Spent six consecutive weeks, without stopping,
In one continuous round of shopping—"

were the very spirit of the Fifth Avenue of that day. Butler wrote the poem in 1857, in a house in Fourteenth Street, within a stone's throw of the Avenue. After finishing it, and reading it to his wife, he took it one evening to No. 20 Clinton Place, to try it on his friend, Evart A. Duyckinck. Not only did the verses themselves have a Fifth Avenue inspiration and origin, but the woman who later claimed that she had written the nine first lines and thirty of the concluding lines, told in her story that she had dropped the manuscript while passing through a crowd at Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. It was a famous case in its day, and the claimant found supporters, just as the absurd Tichborne Claimant found supporters. But Butler's right to "Nothing to Wear" was fully substantiated. Horace Greeley made the controversy the subject of a vigorous editorial in the "Tribune," and "Harper's Weekly," in which the poem had originally appeared, pointed out that although the verses were published in February, the spurious claim was not put forward until July. Writing of "Nothing to Wear" forty years later, W. D. Howells said:

"For the student of our literature 'Nothing to Wear' has the interest and value of satire in which our society life came to its full consciousness for the first time. To be sure there had been the studies of New York called 'The Potiphar Papers,' in which Curtis had painted the foolish and unlovely face of our fashionable life, but with always an eye on other methods and other models; and 'Nothing to Wear' came with the authority and the appeal of something quite indigenous in matter and manner. It came winged, and equipped to fly wide and to fly far, as only verse can, with a message for the grand-children of 'Flora McFlimsey,' which it delivers today in perfectly intelligible terms.

"It does not indeed find her posterity in Madison Square. That quarter has long since been delivered over to hotels and shops and offices, and the fashion that once abode there has fled to upper Fifth Avenue, to the discordant variety of handsome residences which overlook the Park. But it finds her descendants quite one with her in spirit, and as little clothed to their lasting satisfaction."

The nuptials that Edmund Clarence Stedman satirized in "The Diamond Wedding" united Miss Frances Amelia Bartlett and the Marquis Don Estaban de Santa Cruz de Oviedo, and were held in October, 1859, under the direction of "the fat and famous Brown, Sexton of Grace Church." Miss Bartlett, a tall and willowy blonde, still in her teens, was the daughter of a retired lieutenant in the United States Navy. The Bartlett home was in West Fourteenth Street, a few doors from the Avenue. The groom, many years the bride's senior, and of strikingly unprepossessing appearance, was a Cuban of great wealth. The wedding was the talk of the town, and Stedman, then a young man of twenty-six, satirized the ill-mating in a poem that appeared first in the New York "Tribune." The poem began:

"I need not tell,
How it befell;
(Since Jenkins has told the story
Over and over and over again,
And covered himself with glory!)
How it befell, one summer's day,
The King of the Cubans passed that way,
King January's his name, they say,
And fell in love with the Princess May,
The reigning belle of Manhattan.
Nor how he began to smirk and sue,
And dress as lovers who come to woo,
Or as Max Maretzek or Jullien do,
When they sit, full bloomed, in the ladies' view,
And flourish the wondrous baton.

* * * * *

"He wasn't one of your Polish nobles,
Whose presence their country somehow troubles,
And so our cities receive them;
Nor one of your make-believe Spanish grandees,
Who ply our daughters with lies and candies,
Until the poor girls believe them.
No, he was no such charlatan,
Count de Hoboken Flash-in-the-pan.
Full of Gasconade and bravado,
But a regular, rich Don Rataplan,
Santa Claus de la Muscavado,
Señor Grandissimo Bastinado.
His was the rental of half Havana,
And all Matanzas; and Santa Anna—"

Famous as the wedding had been, the verses became more so. They were copied into the weekly and tri-weekly issues of the "Tribune," and into the evening papers. Stedman, in later years, told of being startled by a huge signboard in front of the then young Brentano's, opposite the New York Hotel, at the corner of Broadway and Waverly Place, reading: "Read Stedman's great poem on the Diamond Wedding in this evening's 'Express'!" The father of the bride, infuriated by the unpleasant publicity, challenged the poet to a duel, which never took place. Years later Stedman and the woman he had lampooned met and became the best of friends.

CHAPTER V

Fourteenth to Madison Square

Stretches of the Avenue—Fourteenth to Madison Square—From Brevoort to Spingler—The Story of Sir Peter Warren—The First City Hospital—The Paternoster Row of New-York—Former Homes and Birthplaces—Lower Fifth Avenue Residents in the Fifties—Blocks of Departed Glories—The Centre of the Universe—Madison Square in Colonial Days—Franconi's Hippodrome—The Opening of the Fifth Avenue Hotel—A Thanksgiving Day of the Nineties—Monuments of the Square—The Garden, the Presbyterian Church, and the Metropolitan Tower—The Face of the Clock.

In 1762, a Brevoort—Elias was his Christian name—sold a part of the family farm to John Smith, a wealthy slave-holder. On the choicest site of the purchase, now the centre of Fourteenth Street just west of Fifth Avenue, Smith built his country residence. After he died his widow continued to occupy the house until 1788, when the executors of Smith's estate, among whom was James Duane, Mayor of the city, sold the property for about four thousand seven hundred dollars to Henry Spingler. Spingler lived in the house until his death in 1813, and used the land, comprising about twenty-two acres, as a market garden farm. Spingler's granddaughter, Mrs. Mary S. Van Beuren, fell heiress to most of the property, and built the Van Beuren brown-stone front house on Fourteenth Street, where she lived for years, and maintained a little garden with flowers and vegetables, a cow and chickens. In the fifty-seven years between the Smith sale and 1845 the value of the estate had increased from four thousand seven hundred dollars to two hundred thousand dollars. Keeping still to the bucolic days of the Avenue, we pass, going from Fifteenth to Eighteenth Street, through what was the farm of Thomas and Edward Burling, relatives of John and James Burling, old-time merchants whose name was given to Burling Slip, down by the East River. Also in the course of these blocks the Avenue crosses land that was the farm of John Cowman until 1836. Between Eighteenth and Twenty-first Streets was part of the farm acquired in 1791 by Isaac Varian, who bought from the heirs of Sir Peter Warren.

This Sir Peter Warren was one of the great figures of the old town. Many have written of him. It was only a year or so ago that Miss Chapin devoted to his story a chapter of her book on Greenwich Village. So here the outline of his career will be of the briefest possible nature. It was in 1728 that he first saw New York Harbour. He was twenty-five years of age then, and in command of the frigate "Solebay." Irish to the core, a Warren of Warrenstown, County Meath, who got their estates in the time of "Strongbow," he had already seen a dozen years of active service in southern and African waters, and as captain of the "Grafton," had had a share in the seizure of the rock of Gibraltar by the British. But New York was his first official post, and here he had been sent at the orders of the home government, to keep an eye on events, and to sound the loyalty of the American colonies. The little island above the great bay and between the two broad rivers won his heart from the first, and after every new adventure he returned to it, until, in 1747, he was summoned to London, to enter Parliament and to be made Admiral of the Red Squadron. The affection for the town seems to have been reciprocal, for two years after his introduction to New York, the Common Council of the city voted to him the "freedom of the city." Then, when he was twenty-eight years old he married Susanna DeLancey, whose father, Etienne DeLancey, was a Huguenot refugee, who, settling here, soon changed the Etienne to Stephen, and married a daughter of one of the Dutch Van Cortlandts. At first the young Warrens lived downtown, but in later years, when wealth came as the result of treasure-seeking adventure on the high seas, Peter bought lands in Greenwich Village, and eventually there erected a great mansion.

Throughout the 1730's he was busy, but his opportunity did not come until the end of that decade. In 1739 trouble broke out between Great Britain and Spain. Five years later Captain Warren was fabulously rich. Early in 1744 he had been made commodore of a sixteen-ship squadron in the Caribbean. Before summer of that year he had captured twenty-four French and Spanish merchant ships, had brought them to New York, turned them over to his father-in-law's firm, "Messieurs Stephen De Lancey and Company," and had pocketed the proceeds of the sale. His "French and Spanish swag," is the way Thomas A. Janvier expressed it. Of the house in Greenwich Village on land that is bounded by the present Charles, Perry, Bleecker, and Tenth Streets, Janvier wrote: "The house stood about three hundred yards back from the river, on ground which fell away in a gentle slope towards the waterside. The main entrance was from the east; and at the rear—on the level of the drawing room and a dozen feet or so above the sloping hillside—was a broad veranda commanding the view westward to the Jersey Highlands and southward down the bay to the Staten Island Hills." After Sir Peter Warren went away the Manse became the home of Abraham Van Nest, and stood there more than a century. Not until 1865 did it entirely disappear.

In 1745 Warren played a part in the Siege of Louisbourg that won him promotion to the rank of Rear Admiral of the Blue, and his knighthood. New York, for his share in the exploit, voted him some extra land. In August, 1747, he was in command of the "Devonshire" at the naval battle off Cape Finisterre, capturing the ship of the French Commodore, "La Joncquiere." Then came his recall to England, where, on account of his vast wealth and famous achievements, he was a conspicuous figure. One of his daughters, Charlotte, married Willoughby, Earl of Abingdon. Another, Ann, became the wife of Charles Fitzroy, Baron Southampton. The youngest, Susanna, after her mother, was wedded to Colonel Skinner. New York's affection and esteem for Sir Peter Warren extended to his daughters and through them to their husbands. The old name of Christopher Street was Skinner Road. There was a Fitzroy Road that ran northward from Fourteenth Street. Then, still existing, is Abingdon Square, and Abingdon Road, better known as "Love Lane," was somewhere in the neighbourhood of the present Twenty-first Street. It is to the past rather than the present that the student of the Avenue turns in contemplating the stretch between Fourteenth and Twenty-second Streets. Here and there an historical point may be indicated. On Sixteenth Street, a few yards to the west, is the New York Hospital, the oldest in the city. It received its charter from George the Third some years before the first gun was fired in the War of the Revolution. It was not regularly opened until 1791, but the building, then at Broadway and Duane Street, served as a place for anatomical experiments. In 1788, the story is, a medical student threatened a group of prying boys with a dissected human arm. Soldiers were needed to quell the resulting riot. The reddish brick hospital of today dates from 1877. A chapter in the story of the New York Hospital as an institution concerns the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum, for which the land was purchased in 1816, and the building completed in 1821.

Respectively at 150 and 156 Fifth Avenue are the building of the New York Society of the Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Building. The latter houses the Methodist Book Concern and a collection of relics belonging to the Historical Society. A few years ago the stretch was sometimes called the Paternoster Row of New York on account of the number of publishing houses that lined it. Also it was long the home of many of the churches that were erected in the middle of the last century, among them the South Dutch Reformed Church, built in 1850, at the southwest corner of Twenty-first Street, and the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church at Nineteenth Street. In Nineteenth Street, just east of the Avenue, was the former home of Horace Greeley, and in Twentieth Street (No. 28) Theodore Roosevelt was born.

"Worth noting," says "Fifth Avenue," the publication issued by the Fifth Avenue Bank, "are the names of prominent New Yorkers who, during the fifties, lived on Fifth Avenue between Washington Square and Twenty-first Street. Among them were Lispenard Stewart, Thomas Eggleson, Silas Wood, Henry C. De Rham, Thomas F. Woodruff, Francis Cottinet, David S. Kennedy, James Donaldson, Dr. J. Kearney Rodgers, C. N. Talbot, N. H. Wolfe, James McBride, Charles M. Parker, L. M. Hoffman, August Belmont, Benjamin Aymer, Henry C. Winthrop, Eugene Schiff, Captain Lorillard Spencer, Moses Taylor, John C. Coster, Henry A. Coster, Sidney Mason, Marshall O. Roberts, Robert L. Cutting, Gordon W. Burnham, Robert C. Townsend, George Opdyke, Robert L. Stuart, whose magnificent art collection was given to the Lenox Library, and James Lenox, the founder of the Lenox Library. The fortunes of these gentlemen as recorded in 'Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of New York,' averaged between one hundred and three hundred thousand dollars. One of the richest men in New York at that time was James Lenox, who had inherited the then huge fortune of three million dollars; another large fortune was that of James McBride, estimated at seven hundred thousand dollars."

Then there were the clubs, the Union at the northwest corner of Twenty-first Street, the Lotos Club, just across the Avenue, the Athenæum, at the southwest corner of Sixteenth Street, the Travellers; in the building that had formerly been the residence of Gordon W. Burnham, at the southwest corner of Eighteenth Street, the Arcadian, at No. 146, between Nineteenth and Twentieth Streets, the Manhattan, occupying the Charles C. Parker house at the southwest corner of Fifteenth Street, the New York, which, occupying another corner at the same street, until 1874, then moved a few blocks northward to a house on the Avenue facing Madison Square. How the window loungers of that clubland stretch of the seventies and eighties would have stared and rubbed their eyes had it been given to them to see the procession that throngs the sidewalks today!

The stretch of glories departed is quickly passed. The nine blocks are really eight, for it is at Twenty-second Street that the Flatiron begins, and the drab hives behind are forgotten as the vision of the Square strikes the eye. The Parisian, sipping an apéritif at the corner table of the Café de la Paix, believes himself to be occupying the exact centre of the universe. The Manhattanite knows him to be wrong by a matter of three thousand and some odd miles. Be he plutocrat or panhandler he knows that it is some spot from which he can look up and see the lithe figure of Diana, and the illuminated clock in the tower of the Metropolitan Building.

Although not formally opened as Madison Square until 1847, the story of the land goes back almost two hundred and fifty years. It was in 1670 that Sir Edward Andros, Governor of the Province, granted to Solomon Peters, a free negro, thirty acres of land between what is now Twenty-first and Twenty-sixth Streets, extending east and west from the present Broadway (Bloomingdale Road) to Seventh Avenue. Forty-six years later the negro's descendants sold the tract to John Horn and Cornelius Webber, and a hundred years after it became vested in John Horn the second. In the middle of the present roadway west of the Flatiron Building the Horn farmhouse, occupied by John the Second's daughter and son-in-law, Christopher Mildenberger, stood when the Avenue was cut through to Twenty-third Street in 1837. It was allowed to remain there two years more, when it was removed to the famous site at the northwest corner of Twenty-third Street and became the Madison Cottage. The old chroniclers tell of the joyous spirit and flavour of that roadhouse, a favourite rendezvous of horsemen in the forties, and of the genial management of its proprietor, Corporal Thompson. In the Collection of Amos F. Eno there is a photograph of the business card of the Cottage, with the announcement that the stages "leave every 4 minutes." A picture shows the stages before the building with its slanting roof and its three dormer windows facing the Avenue and Park. Several miles beyond the city proper, it was a post tavern in the coaching days, and the huge pair of antlers announced the "Sign of the Buck-horn."

It had its brief and glorious day and then passed. Early in 1853 it was torn down to make room for a circus, known as Franconi's Hippodrome, built by a syndicate of American showmen, among whom were Avery Smith, Richard Sands, and Seth B. Howe. The lithograph in the Collection of J. Clarence Davies shows a combination of tent roof and permanent wall. There was a turretted sexagonal entrance at the corner facing the Avenue and Twenty-third Street, and another at the northern end of the building. Seven hundred feet in circumference was the Hippodrome, of brick sides, two stories high, with an oval ring in the centre two hundred feet wide by three hundred feet long, seating six thousand people, and having standing room for about half as many more. It was a bold venture, perhaps too bold for its time. When the novelty had worn off the profits began to dwindle and then ceased entirely. Amos F. Eno, a New Englander who had prospered exceedingly in New York, bought the property and planned to erect a hotel that was to surpass anything that the city had already known. Sceptics ridiculed the idea, predicting that a situation so far uptown meant certain disaster. But the Hippodrome building was torn down, the new structure begun, and in September, 1859, the Fifth Avenue Hotel opened its doors under the direction of Colonel Paran Stevens. It was of white marble, six stories in height. Among the innovations and conveniences that made it the wonder of its day was the first passenger elevator ever installed. New York then knew the device as "the vertical railway."

"THE TOWER OF THE METROPOLITAN BUILDING. WHATEVER ARTISTS MAY THINK OF IT THE TOWER IS, STRUCTURALLY, ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD. EXACTLY HALFWAY BETWEEN SIDEWALK AND POINT OF SPIRE IS THE GREAT CLOCK WITH THE IMMENSE DIALS"

But between the time when Solomon Peters received his grant and the day when the opening of the Fifth Avenue Hotel ushered in a new era, the land experienced many vicissitudes. In the last years of the eighteenth century it was a Parade Ground, at one time extending from Twenty-third to Thirty-fourth Streets, bounded on the east by the Eastern Post-road and on the west by the Bloomingdale Road. At the southern end a Potter's Field was opened in 1794, and there were buried the victims of the frequent yellow-fever epidemics. But in 1797 a new Potter's Field was opened in Washington Square. According to the plans of the Commissioners' Map of 1811, there was to be no Fifth Avenue between Twenty-third Street and Thirty-fourth Street. The Avenue was to end temporarily at the former point, and resume its journey eleven blocks farther north. As early as 1785 a powder magazine stood within the present domains of the Square. A United States Arsenal, erected in 1808, was near the spot of the Farragut statue. In 1823 the Arsenal building became the house of refuge of the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, the first organization instituted in America to care for youthful offenders. In 1839 it was destroyed by fire. That was two years after the Parade Ground had been reduced to its present limits of 6.84 acres and renamed in honour of President Madison. In 1844 the Eastern Post-road was closed. Its course may still be traced by the double row of trees that runs northeast towards Madison Square Garden.

In 1847 the Square was formally opened and soon after society began to migrate there. That was during the mayoralty of James Harper. From 1853 until the end of the Civil War it was the social centre of the city. "Among those who lived in this vicinity," says "Fifth Avenue," "were Leonard W. Jerome, and his elder brother, Addison G. Jerome, who, with William R. Travers, were social leaders and prominent Wall Street brokers; James Stokes, who, in 1851, built at No. 37 Madison Square, East, the first residence on Madison Square, and whose wife was a daughter of Anson G. Phelps; John David Wolfe, whose daughter, Catherine Lorillard Wolfe, gave her magnificent art collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Frank Work, William and John O'Brien, Henry M. Schieffelin, James L. Schieffelin, Samuel B. Schieffelin, Benjamin H. Field, Peter Ronalds, and William Lane."

Elsewhere is told of the glories of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, of the part it played as one of the Hosts of the Avenue, of its share in the great days, of its Amen Corner, and of the distinguished men like General W. T. Sherman, former Senator Platt, and the actor, William J. Florence, who for years made it their home. A quarter of a century ago the entrance to the hotel was the starting point, every Thanksgiving Day noon, for many gaily decorated coaches bound for the old Manhattan Field. In earlier days the destination had been Berkeley Oval at Williamsbridge, or the old Polo Grounds at One Hundred and Tenth Street and Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Draped down to the wheels with bunting of dark blue or of orange and black the tally-hos drew up before the portico and were soon topped with eager, ardent youth. As they were whirled away up the Avenue there broke out upon the autumn air the sharp "Brek-a Coex-Coex-Coex" of Yale, or the sky-rocket of Princeton. The return was marked by high elation or deep depression according as the Fates had decided on the chalk-lined turf. For the collection of sundry wagers the victors hurried into the near-by Hoffman House, where the presiding genius and stakeholder, Billy Edwards, divided attention with the paintings of fauns and nymphs that adorned the walls. That youth of yesteryear has come to grizzled hair. There are crow's feet about the eyes, and the world is one of vastly changed values, and the game at which the heart is throbbing is a more poignant one than that which involved touchdowns and goals from the field and desperate stands on the two-yard line. But it is the same old-time spirit, that then expressed itself in the call, "Hold them, Yale," or "Hold them for Old Nassau!" that, passed on to succeeding generations, is grimly awaiting the shock on the plains of Picardy.

Of all the monuments that have graced Madison Square that which first comes to mind is one that has gone. Twenty years ago a splendid white arch spanned the Avenue, with one pier close to the sidewalk in front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the other touching the edge of the opposite Park. It was in direct line with Washington Arch seventeen blocks away. Under it, on September 30, 1898, passed the victor of Manila Bay, whose name it bore, bowing right and left to the city's riotous welcome. For months it remained there, and then disappeared. Why was the beautiful structure not made permanent? The Worth Monument, in the centre of the triangular piece of ground bounded by Fifth Avenue, Broadway, Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Streets, dates from 1857. By order of the Common Council the plot was set apart for the erection of the shaft in December, 1854. Major-General William J. Worth, of Mexican War fame, died at San Antonio, Texas, June 7, 1849. The monument was dedicated with a parade and a review November 25, 1857, and the General's remains interred under the south side. In bands around the obelisk are recorded the names of the battles in which Worth took part. On the east face, cut in the stone, may be read "Ducit Amor Patriae" and on the west face, "By the Corporation of the City of New York, 1857—Honor the Brave." At the moment of writing the building beyond the Worth Monument, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street, is in the process of demolition. At one time the New York Club was housed there, and there, for years, the sign of the Berlitz School for Languages stretched across the southern face of the structure.

"Were all the statues in New York made by St. Gaudens?" was the recent naïve and ingenuous question of a visitor from the West who had just completed the first two days of his stay. "Most of the good ones were," was the laughing rejoinder of an artist. "At least that is the way it seems. And nearly all the pedestals for them were made by Stanford White." In query and response there is a certain amount of justice. It is Augustus St. Gaudens's benevolent presentment of Peter Cooper that stands within the little park enclosed by Cooper Square. The name of St. Gaudens is associated with those of John La Farge, White, MacMonnies, MacNeil, and Calder in the making of the Washington Arch. To St. Gaudens belongs the equestrian statue of William Tecumseh Sherman in the Plaza. And here, in Madison Square, the Farragut statue is his. Unveiled in 1881, executed in Paris when the sculptor was thirty years of age, and exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1880, the Farragut is, in the opinion of Miss Henderson, the base upon which St. Gaudens's great reputation rests. "And while," she writes, "in New York its merits are often balanced with those of the Sherman equestrian group, at the entrance to Central Park; the Peter Cooper, in Cooper Square; and the relief of Dr. Bellows, in the All-Souls' Church—all later works—it has never had to yield precedence to any, but holds its own by force of its splendid vigour and youthful plasticity. It has the essential characteristics of the portrait, but so combined with the attitude of the artist that the figure stands as much more than a portrait, having in it something more living, more typical, deeper than the mere outward mould of the man. St. Gaudens's Farragut has the bearing of a seaman, balanced on his two legs, in a posture easy, yet strong. He is rough and bluff with the courage and simplicity of a commander; his eye is accustomed to deal with horizons, while the features are clean-cut and masterful. The inscription is happy: 'That the memory of a daring and sagacious commander and gentle great-souled man, whose life from childhood was given to his country, but who served her supremely in the war for the Union, 1861-1865, may be preserved and honored, and that they who come after him and who will love him so much may see him as he was seen by friend and foe, his countrymen have set up this monument A.D. MDCCCLXXXI.'"

There are other statues in the Square besides the noble one commemorating the deeds of the hero of "Full steam ahead, and damn the torpedoes!" At the southwest corner there is a bronze one of William H. Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, the work of Randolph Rogers. The effigy of Roscoe Conkling, by J. Q. A. Ward, is at the southeast corner. Cold and proud is the stone as the man was cold, and proud, and biting. What chance had haranguing abuse against his icy: "I have no time to bandy epithets with the gentleman from Georgia"? Then there is the drinking fountain by Emma Stebbins, given to the city by the late Catherine Lorillard Wolfe, and the Bissell statue of Chester A. Arthur.

No other structure in the city is so many different things to so many different people as the Madison Square Garden. To the old-time New Yorker, who likes to babble reminiscently of the past, the site recalls the railway terminus of the sixties, when the outgoing trains were drawn by horses through the tunnel as far north as the present Grand Central. To one artistically inclined the creamy tower, modelled on that of the Giralda in Seville, suggests the collaboration of St. Gaudens and White, and the surmounting Diana the early work of the former inspired by Houdon's Diana of the Louvre. To the more frivolous, the sportingly inclined, the seekers after gross pleasures, the Garden has meant the Arion Ball, or the French Students Ball, the Horse Show, Dog Show, Cat Show, Poultry Show, Automobile Show, Sportsman's Show, the Cake-Walk, the Six-Day Bicycle Race, or events of the prize-ring from the days of Sullivan and Mitchell to those of Willard and Moran; Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show, or the circus, the Greatest Show on Earth, with its houris of the trapeze and the saddle, and its animals, almost as fearful and wonderful as the menagerie of adjectives that its press-agent, the renowned, or notorious, Tody Hamilton, gathers annually out of the jungles of the dictionary. Also the interior of the vast structure echoes in memory with political oratory, now thunderous and now persuasive. Through the words directed immediately at the thousands that fought their way within the walls Presidents and candidates for president have sent ringing utterance throughout the land.

Opposite the Garden, at the southeast corner of Twenty-sixth Street, is the Manhattan Club, in a house that was formerly the home of the University Club, and adjoining it to the south, is the Appellate Court House, architecturally one of the city's most distinguished buildings. Designed by James Brown Lord, it was completed in 1900, at a cost of three-quarters of a million dollars. Among the men whose work is represented in this home of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court for the City and County of New York are Maitland Armstrong, Karl Bitter, Charles Henry Niehaus, Charles Albert Lopez, Thomas Shields Clarke, George Edwin Bissell, Philip Martiny, Robert Reid, Willard L. Metcalf, Henry Augustus Lukeman, John Donoghue, Henry Kirke Bush Brown, Edward Clark Potter, Henry Siddons Mowbray, Frederick W. Ruckstuhl, Herbert Adams, George Willoughby Maynard, Joseph Lauber, Maximilian M. Schwartzott, and Kenyon Cox.

The old home of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church was in the block between Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets. Then, on the northeast corner of the latter street stood one of the last surviving residences recalling the days when the Square was the possession of Flora McFlimsey and her kind, the old brown-stone dwelling of Catherine Lorillard Wolfe. The Wolfe property, offered for sale, was purchased by an official of the Metropolitan Company, and an exchange was effected by which the church relinquished its old site and moved to the northern corner. The present church was designed by Stanford White, who met his death in 1906, the year before the formal dedication. With its grey brick exterior, showing repeatedly the Maltese Cross, its interior following the spirit of the Mosque of Santa Sophia in Constantinople, and its mural paintings and windows, many of them the work of Louis C. Tiffany, it is one of the most beautiful of all the city's edifices for religious worship. But to the casual eye it is quite lost on account of its proximity to its gigantic neighbour.

The traveller approaching Paris can see from miles away, the apex of the Eiffel Tower outlined against the sky. The eye of one nearing New York, whether his point of observation be the deck of an incoming steamer, or a car-chair in a train arriving from the West, is met first by the cluster of skyscrapers at the southern end of the island, and then by a shaft vastly more conspicuous by reason of its isolation, the tower of the Metropolitan Building. Whatever artists may think of it—and there is division of opinion—that tower is, structurally, one of the wonders of the world. Rising seven hundred feet above the sidewalk, topping the Singer Building by ninety feet and being outclimbed only by the Woolworth Building (seven hundred and ninety-two feet), the tower is seventy-five feet by eighty-five at its base, and carries the building to its fifty-second story. Exactly half-way between sidewalk and point of spire is the great clock with the immense dials of reinforced concrete faced with mosaic tile, each twenty-six and a half feet in diameter, with the hour hand thirteen and a half feet long, weighing seven hundred and fifty pounds, and the minute hand seventeen feet long and weighing one thousand pounds. At night the indicating flashes, the hours in white, the quarters in one, two, three, or four, red, may be seen at a distance of twenty miles.

But nearer at hand, as the hours creep one by one towards the dawn, are the derelicts of the Square, dozing fitfully on the park benches. In waking moments their dull eyes watch the illuminated face, and the hands pushing forward to another day. The spectacle moved one of them, Prince Michael, heir to the throne of the Electorate of Valleluna, in O. Henry's "The Caliph, Cupid, and the Clock," to pessimistic utterance. "Clocks," he said, "are shackles on the feet of mankind. I have observed you looking persistently at that clock. Its face is that of a tyrant, its numbers are false as those on a lottery ticket; its hands are those of a bunco-steerer, who makes an appointment with you to your ruin. Let me entreat you to throw off its humiliating bonds and to cease to order your affairs by that insensate monitor of brass and steel."

Sang Sara Teasdale:

"We walked together in the dusk
To watch the tower grow dimly white,
And saw it lift against the sky,
Its flower of amber light."

CHAPTER VI

Some Great Days on the Avenue

Some Great Days on the Avenue—Pictures and Pageants—When a Prince Came Visiting—A Regiment Departs—Honour to the Captains—Funeral Processions—Receptions—Dinners—The Orient and the Avenue—When Admiral Dewey Came Home—Greeting a Marshal of France—The Roar of the City and the Guns of the Marne.

In the stirring times in which we are living, it seems as if every day is a great day on the Avenue. Take a single example: The morning broke dark and threatening. Heavy clouds presaged showers. But after an hour or two they passed from the heavens, and warmth and golden sunshine came. In the course of various activities the writer made his way to points between the Battery and Fifty-ninth Street, and the means of travel employed included three journeys on top of Fifth Avenue buses. If one of the early settlers could only have seen the proud and amazing thoroughfare!

The air vibrant with excitement. Flags everywhere. Tens of thousands of the Stars and Stripes. Thousands of Union Jacks and Tricolours of France. Hundreds of pavilions of Italy and Belgium. Every few yards gaily decorated booths from which smiling women or lusty-lunged men harangued the passers-by to "come across or the Kaiser will."

On a platform erected on the steps in front of the Public Library a slight figure in kilts addressing a swaying, surging crowd. As the bus, held up for a minute by the cross-town traffic, stopped, we could hear the pleasing burr of Harry Lauder. Two hours later; a mile and a half farther downtown. The sound of a band in the distance. The horses of the mounted policemen forcing back the curious thousands to the curb. A regiment of regulars, two regiments of militia, and then, swinging along lightly in loose step, a handful of men in soiled blue, Chasseurs à pied of France, who, at Verdun, in the Vosges Mountains, and on the Picardy front, had lived splendidly up to the traditions of the men with the hairy knapsacks and the hearts of steel whose tramp had shaken the continent of Europe one hundred years before.

It was just a day similar to other days that had gone before and to days that were to follow. To feel the thrill of what were held to have been the great days of the past we must put ourselves in the mood of old New York, or at the very least think of the world as it was wagging along a brief four years ago.

"The national banquet-hall where heroes and statesmen have been fêted, or the parade-ground toward which a nation has turned to witness great demonstrations in celebration of national events of a civic or military or mournful nature. Along it have gone to the music of dirges and the sound of mournful drums the funeral cortèges of many of the country's leading statesmen and greatest men, and here, too, have occurred riots and disastrous fires which have startled the city and shocked the nation." So runs the introduction to a little pamphlet issued some years ago by the Fifth Avenue Bank. One of the earliest and most notable visits, the brochure goes on to tell us, was that of the then Prince of Wales, later Edward VII., in the autumn of 1860. He was then nineteen years old. The city turned out to greet him. On Thursday, October 11th, the revenue cutter, "Harriet Lane," brought the Prince to New York from South Amboy. Then, a day of blaring bands, of blended flags, of great transparencies, that eventually led to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. He was still very young, still very much of a boy, very much bored with all the tumult and ceremony. Once out of sight of the crowd he threw dignity to the winds and played leap-frog in the corridor with his retinue. But once again, from his bed, to which he had gone with a bad headache, he was called at midnight to acknowledge the salutes of the Caledonia Club. That organization, made up mostly of members of the Scotch Regiment commanded by Colonel McLeay, headed by Dodsworth's Band, marched up Broadway to the hotel. In the Prince's honour a serenade was given, the band blared out with "God Save the Queen!", "Hail Columbia!" and other national airs, and once more the sleepy and sorely tried royal visitor was obliged to appear to bow his thanks.

The next day, Friday, was given over to visiting such public buildings as the Astor Library, Cooper Union, the Free Academy, and in riding through Central Park.

A ball, famous in city annals, was given at the Academy of Music. Among those who attended that ball and left a record of it was the late Ward McAllister. "Our best people, the smart set, the slow set, all sets, took a hand in it, and the endeavor was to make it so brilliant and beautiful that it would always be remembered by those present as one of the events of their lives."

The ball was opened by a quadrille d'honneur. Governor and Mrs. Morgan, the historian Bancroft and Mrs. Bancroft, Colonel and Mrs. Abraham Van Buren, with others were to dance in it. The rush was so great that the floor gave way, and in tumbled the whole centre of the stage. Carpenters set feverishly to work to floor over the chasm.

"I well remember," said McAllister, "the enormous form of old Isaac Brown, sexton of Grace Church, rushing around and encouraging the workmen."

In the course of the evening the Prince danced with Miss Fish, Miss Mason, Miss Fannie Butler, and others, and was conceded to have danced well. The supper was served at a horseshoe table. At one end of the room was a raised dais, where the royal party supped. At each stage door a prominent citizen stood guard; the moment the supper room was full, no one else was admitted. "I remember," confesses Mr. McAllister, "on my attempting to get in through one of these doors, stealthily, the vigilant eye of John Jacob Astor met mine. He bid me wait my turn."

Despite the assiduity with which McAllister danced after the figure of the Prince, he was not among those presented. That honour he sought the next day, on the trip to West Point:

"As General Scott was presenting Colonel Delafield's guests to the Prince I approached the General, asking him to present me to his Royal Highness. A giant, as he was in height, he bent down his head to me, and asked sharply, 'What name, sir?' I gave him my name, but at the sound of 'Mc,' not thinking it distinguished enough, he quietly said, 'Pass on, sir,' and I subsequently was presented by the Duke of Newcastle."

Forty-three years after that clamorous greeting of New York to the young Prince of Wales the present writer was to witness in Paris the visit of Edward VII. for the purpose of cementing the Entente Cordiale. The tired face told the story of the hardest-worked public servant in the world. In 1860, on Fifth Avenue, he had already begun to pay the price of the royal privilege of his exalted birth to bear the arduous burden of royal responsibility.

There are extant many old wood-cuts showing the Prince at the Academy of Music ball. But the following morning, that brought repose to so many, brought none to him. There were visits to be paid to Brady's photographic studios at the corner of Tenth Street and Broadway, to Barnum's Museum, to General Scott at his Twelfth Street residence, and the Broadway store of Ball, Black & Company.

That night a great torchlight parade in honour of the Prince was given by the New York firemen. The Prince, with his suite and a number of city officials, stood on the hotel balcony, while five thousand men in uniform, with apparatus and many bands, marched by. Fireworks were set off, the brilliant beams of the calcium light—then a novelty—were thrown upon the standing, boyish figure of the Prince, thousands of flaring torches danced and waved against the darkness of the opposite square.

The next day, Sunday, October 14th, brought some rest. In the morning there were services at Trinity, where Dr. Vinton preached; then a quiet afternoon at the hotel. With Monday came the Prince's departure. At half-past nine he left the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and in company with the Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of St. Albans, and Mayor Wood, was driven down to the harbour where the "Harriet Lane" was waiting to take him to West Point and Albany.

The next reception that the chronicler of Fifth Avenue events has seen fit to record was that given to General Grant after the close of the Civil War. At the Fifth Avenue Hotel a number of the city's leading business men met and planned the public greeting, and one hundred and fifty men subscribed one hundred dollars apiece. The reception to the returning soldier, which took place at the Fifth Avenue Hotel November 20, 1865, was hardly one of which the city or the street had reason to be proud.

Loose management led to disorder and dissatisfaction. Twenty-five hundred jostling, pushing persons crowded the halls, corridors, and reception rooms. The General stood in one of the hotel parlours surrounded by the committee, with Mrs. Grant and other ladies to his right, and on his left Generals Wool, Cook, and Hooker, John Van Buren, Ethan Allen, and others.

Little judgment seems to have been used in issuing the invitations. The throng was indiscriminate. Farce comedy was in the air. Religious fanatics, passing before the hero, offered up prayers for the salvation of his soul. Precocious children were thrust forward to his attention. Preposterous questions were propounded by preposterous people. To add to the confusion the names of those persons who fought their way through the throng to be presented to the General were announced to him by a little man who got most of them wrong.

In a postscript to his "American Notes," written many years later, Charles Dickens told of the vast changes he found on the occasion of his second visit to the United States—"changes moral, changes physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life." Making all allowances for that greater charity, tolerance, and kindliness of judgment which comes with the riper years—nobody ever could have remained as Britishly bumptious, or as bumptiously British as Dickens was in his younger days when he first came to pay us a visit—taking also into consideration the fact that a certain explanatory softening of earlier criticisms was politic, that the novelist found a city far more to his taste in 1868 than he had found in 1842 is not for a moment to be questioned. Also, at the time he came to New York from Boston, he was naturally in a rather placid and contented mood. For in letters home, even while complaining of the trying changes of the wintry climate, he had told how he was making a clear profit of thirteen hundred English pounds a week, even allowing seven dollars to the pound. When he returned to New York in April, after an extended tour throughout the country, he had still better cause to be pleased with the young Republic. Says Forster in his "Life":

"In New York, where there were five farewell nights, $3,298 were the receipts of the last, on the 20th. of April; those of the last at Boston, on the eighth, having been $3,456. But, on earlier nights in the same cities respectively, these sums also had been reached; and indeed, making allowance for an exceptional night here and there, the receipts varied so wonderfully little, that a mention of the highest average returns from other places will give no exaggerated impression of the ordinary receipts throughout. Excluding fractions of dollars, the lowest were New Bedford ($1,640), Rochester ($1,906), Springfield ($1,970), and Providence ($2,140). Albany and Worcester averaged something less than $2,400; while Hartford, Buffalo, Baltimore, Syracuse, New Haven, and Portland rose to $2,600. Washington's last night was $2,610, no night there having less than $2,500. Philadelphia exceeded Washington by $300, and Brooklyn went ahead of Philadelphia by $200. The amount taken at the four Brooklyn readings was $11,128."

And only a few years ago there were Americans deploring loudly the shabby financial treatment we gave Dickens, and figuratively and literally passing round the hat!

Fifth Avenue's greeting to Charles Dickens, on the occasion of his second visit, was in the form of the dinner that was tendered to him at Delmonico's, on the evening of April 18, 1868. The hosts were two hundred men of the New York press. Covers were laid for a hundred and eighty-seven guests.

Five o'clock was the time appointed—we were a rugged, early-dining race in those days—but the guest had a slight stroke of illness and did not appear until after six. Then it was a limping old man, aged just sixty-six, who, by the aid of a cane, climbed laboriously up the great staircase. He was led to his seat at the table by Horace Greeley, and seated between Mr. Greeley and Henry J. Raymond. The editor of the "Tribune," acting as master of ceremonies, began the speech-making by referring to his first discovery, many years before, of a story by the then unknown "Boz."

In concluding his reply to the toast, Mr. Dickens promised: "manfully, promptly, and plainly in my own person, to bear for the behalf of my own countrymen such testimony of the gigantic changes in this country as I have hinted at here tonight. Also to record that wherever I have been, in the smallest place equally with the largest, I have been received with unsurpassed politeness, delicacy, sweet-temper, and consideration.... This testimony, so long as I live, and so long as my descendants have any legal right in my books, I shall cause to be republished, as an appendix to every copy of those two books of mine in which I have referred to America. And this I will do and cause to be done, not in mere love and thankfulness, but because I regard it as an act of plain justice and honour."

The amende honorable was not less welcome for being long due and the distinguished visitor sat down to loud applause and the strains of "God Save the Queen." Mr. Raymond responded to the toast "The New York Press," and was followed by George William Curtis, William Henry Hurlbert, Charles Eliot Norton, Joseph R. Hawley, Murat Halstead, Edwin de Leon, and E. L. Youmans.

Three and a half years after the dinner to Dickens Fifth Avenue greeted in a similar way a distinguished Russian guest. That was the Grand Duke Alexis Alexandrovitch, who was entertained by the New York Yacht Club at Delmonico's December 2, 1871. James Gordon Bennett, the younger, was then Commodore of the club, and received the Grand Duke in the restaurant's parlours at seven o'clock. The guests included the Grand Duke and his suite, the Russian Minister, General Gorloff, Admiral Poisset, Admiral Rowan, members of the Russian legation, Russian officers, and members of the yacht club. Against the walls of the banquet hall the Stars and Stripes blended with the blue St. Andrew's Cross. The guests were in naval uniform. The "Queen's Cup," which had been won by the "America" in 1851, had the place of honour among the club trophies. To the toast to the Czar, General Gorloff responded. The club Commodore answered to that to President Grant. After the Grand Duke had been informed that he had been elected to honorary membership, he responded with a brief sailor-like speech.

On December 22, 1877, President Hayes was the guest of honour of the New England Society at Delmonico's. Among those there besides the President were Secretary of State William M. Evarts, Presidents Eliot of Harvard and Porter of Yale, General Horace Porter, ex-Governor Morgan, and Governor Horace Fairbanks of Vermont. Mr. Evarts answered the toast "The Day We Celebrate." The presidents of Yale and Harvard, speaking in behalf of their institutions, indulged in good-natured contrasts and comparisons. In the old days, according to President Porter, when they found a man in Boston a little too bad to live with, they sent him to Rhode Island, and when they found him a little too good to live with, they sent him to Connecticut, where, among other things, he founded Yale College; while people of average respectability and goodness were allowed to remain in Massachusetts Bay, where, looking into each others' faces constantly, they contracted a habit of always praising each other with special emphasis—a habit which they have not altogether outgrown.

IN THE BRIGHT SUNLIGHT THE AVENUE GLITTERS WITH THE PAVILLIONS OF PATRIOTISM. OLD GLORY MAY BE COUNTED BY THE TENS OF THOUSANDS; ENGLAND'S UNION JACK, AND THE TRICOLOR OF FRANCE BY THE THOUSANDS. TO FORESTALL THE KAISER THE AVENUE IS "COMING ACROSS"

The Union League gave a reception to General Grant on October 23, 1880, in the theatre of the club-house. Among those present were Joseph H. Choate, General Chester A. Arthur, Chauncey M. Depew, General Adam Badeau, Colonel Fred Grant, Peter Cooper, Henry Ward Beecher, General Horace Porter, and Rev. Dr. Newman. Another reception to General Grant was given at the Hotel Brunswick May 5, 1883, by the Saturday Night Club. Certain remarks by the former President and by Roscoe Conkling on the subject of Mexico were considered of much significance at the time. Both spoke strongly in favour of the formation of a Mexican-American alliance. Mr. Conkling suggested General Grant as the logical leader of a great movement to aid the sister republic in developing its resources.

Nearly two thousand guests were present at the reception given by the Union League Club to President Arthur on January 23, 1884. With the Chief Executive, who arrived about nine o'clock, were Secretaries Teller and Folger, of his Cabinet. After shaking hands with the reception committee the President was escorted upstairs by William M. Evarts. About the President were the Cabinet officers, Mr. and Mrs. Evarts, Jesse Seligman, and Salem H. Wales, and Attorney General and Mrs. Brewster. In the distinguished gathering were Mayor Edson, Dr. Lyman Abbott, General and Mrs. George B. McClellan, Whitelaw Reid, Henry Ward Beecher, Parke Godwin, Elihu Root, Cyrus W. Field, Mr. and Mrs. John Bigelow, and Lionel Sackville-West, the British Minister.

At the supper, which was served at midnight, one of the features was the striking pieces of confectionery. In gleaming white sugar was a model of the Capitol, and a tall monument supported statuettes of the President and his Cabinet. Also there was a twenty-four-foot model of the Brooklyn Bridge with the President and troops crossing it.

At the banquet to Lieutenant Greely of Arctic fame, at the Lotos Club, on January 16, 1886, Vice-President General Horace Porter was in the chair, in the absence of President Whitelaw Reid. Besides Lieutenant Greely, Chief Engineer Melville, and Commander Schley, who headed the expedition to relieve Greely, were guests of the club, and among others at the table were Chief Justice Daly, Colonel C. McK. Leoser, Robert Kirby, Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, Dr. Pardee, Frank Robinson, Herman Oelrichs, C. H. Webb, Colonel Thomas W. Knot, George Masset, J. O'Sullivan, Douglas Taylor, James Bates, and Chandos Fulton. In his speech the guest of the evening told the story of his expedition to the Far North and explained the reason for every action. Arctic exploration, he declared, could not be futile when eleven nations were offering the lives of their men in the cause of science. He told the story of the splendid spirit of his own men during the dreary months at Cape Sabine and lauded American courage and achievement in all the corners of the earth. There were speeches by Judge Daly and Commander Schley, and then two fun-makers were introduced in the persons of Thorne and Billington, Poo-bah and Ko-Ko, from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera, "The Mikado," that was then playing in New York.

Late in November of the same year the Lotos Club honoured another explorer, Henry M. Stanley, who had just returned to New York after many years' absence, completing Livingstone's work in Central Africa. Stanley sat between Mr. Reid, the Club's president, and Chauncey M. Depew. Others at the guest's table were Lieutenant Greely, General Porter, General Winslow, Colonel Knox, Major Pond, General Townsend, Lieutenant Hickey, Commissioner Andrews, G. F. Rowe, Bruce Crane, Henry Gillig, and Daniel E. Bandmann. The speakers, besides Mr. Stanley, were Lieutenant Greely, Mr. Depew, and Horace Porter.

At Delmonico's, December 20, 1889, a dinner was given by the Spanish-American Commercial Union to the visiting delegates to the Pan-American Congress. William M. Ivins, as the principal speaker, touched upon South American relations and international arbitration as a prevention of war. Among those present were Mayor Hugh J. Grant, Elihu Root, Andrew Carnegie, Chauncey M. Depew, and Horace White. On the walls were portraits of Washington and General Bolivar, and intertwined with the Stars and Stripes, the vividly coloured banners of the South American nations. At the right of the chairman, William H. T. Hughes, sat Señor F. C .C. Zegarra of Peru, and at the left Mayor Grant. The address of welcome was delivered first in English and then in Spanish by Mr. Hughes, who possessed a perfect command of both languages. Señor Zegarra responded. The toast "Our Next Neighbour" was answered by Señor Matias Romero of Mexico. Other toasts and speakers were: "International American Commerce," William M. Ivins; "International Justice," Elihu Root; "Our Homes," Rev. Dr. John R. Paxton; "America—All Republican," John B. Henderson, and random addresses from the gallery by Mr. Depew and Judge José Alfonso of Chile.

The next Fifth Avenue reception of importance was that given by the Union League Club to General W. T. Sherman on April 17, 1890. It was a belated celebration of the old soldier's seventieth birthday which had taken place on February 8. In the centre of the decorations of the usual patriotic colours and design was the Daniel Huntington portrait of the General in uniform. Regulars of the 5th U. S. Artillery lined the stairway leading from the lobby to the reception hall. The General, reaching the club-house at eight-thirty, was met by James Otis, J. Seaver Page, and General S. Van Vliet, and, between the lines of soldiers at present arms, conducted to a place beneath his own portrait. There, surrounded by President Depew of the Club, Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble, and General Van Vliet, he greeted the six or seven hundred invited guests. The gathering included representatives of the army, the navy, the bench, the clergy, as well as business, professional, and political life. The Vice-President of the United States, Levi P. Morton, was there, and Secretary Noble, Senators W. M. Evarts and Nelson W. Aldrich, Generals Schofield, Howard, Porter, and Breckenridge, and foreign diplomats from Russia, Chile, Brazil, and Peru. Of the march to the sea Chauncey M. Depew said: "It was a feat which captured the imagination of the country and of the world, because it was both the poetry of war and the supreme fact of the triumph over the rebellion."

Another great day on the Avenue was August 28, 1896, which witnessed the arrival of the famous Chinese statesman, Li Hung Chang. He came as a special envoy of the Chinese Emperor and stayed at the Waldorf, then a comparatively new hotel. President Cleveland sent General Thomas H. Ruger to welcome the visitor. In his cabin on the "St. Louis" in the Bay Li Hung Chang received the welcoming delegation. The author of "Fifth Avenue Events" thus describes the great Chinaman on that occasion: "His appearance was most striking. Over six feet tall, with a slight stoop, he wore the bright yellow jacket denoting his high rank, a viceroy's cap with a four-eyed peacock feather attached to it by amber fastenings, and a beautifully coloured skirt of rich material. His finger-nails were polished till they shone, a huge diamond flashed on his right hand, and he peered out benignantly over the tops of a pair of gold-bowed spectacles. Dignified in bearing, he looked every inch the statesman and scholar. His gracious manner won him friends during his stay in New York, and his indefatigable propensity for asking questions—some of them rather embarrassing to those questioned, as when he politely inquired the ages of the ladies whom he met and the salaries of the officials who entertained him—aroused much merriment."

In the way of a distinguished visitor Li Hung Chang was a novelty. New York gave him a rousing reception. The Avenue was lined by cheering throngs as the Ambassador and his suite were driven to the hotel. The carriages were flanked by U. S. Cavalry. Over the gaily decorated Waldorf the golden imperial banner of the Celestial Kingdom with the great blue Dragon snapping at a crimson ball fluttered in the breeze. But Li Hung Chang did not pay the hostelry the compliment of relying on its cuisine, preferring the services of his own Chinese cooks. The day after his arrival the Ambassador was received by President Cleveland at the home of ex-Secretary of the Navy William C. Whitney, Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. Surrounding the President were the Secretaries of State, War, the Treasury, the Attorney-General, and other officials. The visiting statesman was presented to Mr. Cleveland by Richard Olney, Secretary of State, and to the Chief Executive turned over his credentials from the Chinese Emperor.

The banquet that evening, given by former American diplomats to the Celestial Empire, began at six o'clock, as Li wished to set for the Western world the example of early retiring. In his attentions to the splendid repast before him he was most abstemious, but he finished by smoking a cigar. John E. Ward, a former Minister to China, began the speech-making by a toast to the Emperor, the President of the United States, and Li Hung Chang. George F. Seward, another former Minister to China, lauded the Ambassador's long and distinguished services to his country and to the world at large. After a brief response through his interpreter, Li left the banquet hall at eight-thirty, and went to his night's rest. His hosts, however, were not to be balked of their evening's entertainment, and the oratorical feast was continued till midnight.

About General Grant's tomb, when Li visited it, a crowd of more than twenty thousand persons was gathered. From his carriage Li stepped into his chair of state, and was borne to the tomb by four policemen. At the stairway he left the chair and made his way slowly and laboriously on foot into the vault. To those about him Li said that this visit to the hero's tomb was one of the chief things he had in mind in planning his journey to America, and that he had thought of it continually during the trip. General Horace Porter recalled that Li's contribution of five hundred dollars, one of the first received, was something that had never been forgotten by the American people. Other events of the Prime Minister's stay in New York were his reception of a delegation of American missionary societies, his visits to Chinatown, and to Brooklyn, and the dinner given to him at Delmonico's the evening of September 2nd.

Earlier events of the Avenue fade into comparative unimportance when we come to September 30, 1899. For Admiral George Dewey had come home, and Fifth Avenue had the chance to acclaim the victor of Manila Bay. Down the broad street, from Fifty-ninth Street, under the Arch at Madison Square, and on to Washington Square, the procession in the hero's honour passed. This was the order of march:

Major-General Roe and Staff.
Sousa's Band.
Sailors of the Admiral's Flagship, the "Olympia."
Admiral Dewey, seated beside Mayor Van Wyck
of New York in a carriage, at the head of a
line of carriages containing Governor Roosevelt,
Rear Admirals Schley and Sampson,
General Miles, and others.
West Point Cadets.
United States Regulars.
New York National Guard and Naval Militia.
National Guard of other States.
Union and Confederate Veterans.
Veterans of the Spanish War.

When the head of the procession reached Thirty-fourth Street, the sailors from the Admiral's flagship halted and drew up along the side of the Avenue. The Admiral left his carriage and entered the reviewing stand at Madison Square. Admiral Sampson was on his right. Admiral Schley on his left. Surrounding them were officers of both branches of the service. For four hours Admiral Dewey stood there, acknowledging the salutes and saluting the flag. The following day, October 1st, saw the great naval parade through the waters of the Hudson River.

A decade passed, and then came the Hudson-Fulton celebration of September 25—October 9, 1909. Of chief importance to the Avenue was the civic procession of September 28th, when the floats, depicting a great number of historical events, moved down the Avenue to Washington Square. On the east side of the thoroughfare, from Fortieth to Forty-second Street, opposite the Public Library, there had been erected a Court of Honour. Against the stately pillars of the Court, the procession moved swiftly by. Every nation that went into the "melting pot" was represented, with the harped green flag of Ireland at the head of the long column. Following the Ancient Order of Hibernians and other Irish societies came the Italian organizations, then Poles, English, Dutch, French, Scotch, Bohemian, Hungarian, and Syrian.

It was the nation's history of four hundred years that passed in effigy on the floats. Pocahontas again interceded with her father Powhatan for the life of Captain John Smith. Balboa caught sight of the waters of the Pacific. The tea was dumped into Boston Harbour. The Minute Men stood fast on the Common. Mad Anthony Wayne stormed Stony Point. Molly Stark's husband said, "There are the red-coats. We must beat them today, or Molly Stark's a widow!" Cornwallis surrendered his sword at Yorktown. Somebody in the Mexican War said, "Give them a little more grape, General Bragg!" and Dewey said: "You may fire when you're ready, Gridley!"

In some of these events of the later years the writer had a personal share. From a seventh-story window at Twenty-first Street he looked down on the procession in honour of Admiral Dewey. From a vantage point at Thirty-fifth Street he witnessed the passing of floats in the Hudson-Fulton celebration. But there was one day on the Avenue, perhaps the greatest and most inspiring of them all, in which he did not share. That was the day that saw the visit of the Allied Commissions, the day of the coming of a Marshal of France. About the time that the guns on the warships and land batteries at Hampton Roads were thundering out their message of welcome to the distinguished guests, the writer in company with six other Americans who had been with the Commission for Relief in Belgium was entering French territory, after a never-to-be-forgotten journey through Germany. How such of us who claimed New York as our own thrilled as we pictured three thousand miles away the city's greeting to the grave, silent man whose cool genius had hurled back the Teuton hordes at the very gates of Paris! How we built up on the limited descriptions that had been cabled across the Atlantic! We saw the sweep of the procession up the Avenue, the thousands upon thousands of flags, the densely packed throngs lining the sidewalks, the eager faces in the windows of the tall buildings, and in the motor-car, for which all eyes were searching, the smiling, saluting Marshal.

"About now," said one of us, "he should be passing Madison Square."

"I can see the people on the sidewalks and crowding the windows and the housetops," said another.

"And I," said a third, "can hear the roar that goes up from the Avenue when the people catch sight of him."

"When he hears that roar," said a fourth, "he will recall the guns of the Marne as gentle zephyrs."

To that last statement and sentiment we all proudly agreed. For despite the three thousand miles of intervening ocean it was our New York and our Fifth Avenue.

CHAPTER VII

Some Avenue Clubs in the Early Days

Some Avenue Clubs in the Early Days—The Invention of the Club—Cato or Dr. Johnson?—The Judgment of Thackeray—The Union—The Prolific Diedrich Knickerbocker—Omens of 1836—The Century—Its Descent from the Sketch and the Column—Old-Time Austerity—Leaders of the Talk—The Lotos—The Union League—The Manhattan—The First of the College Clubs—The Columbia Yacht—The New York Athletic—Rise and Fall of the Traveller's—The Arcadian.

"Presuming that my dear Bobby would scarcely consider himself to be an accomplished man about town until he had obtained an entrance into a respectable club, I am happy to inform you that you are this day elected a member of the 'Polyanthus,' having been proposed by my friend, Lord Viscount Colchicum, and seconded by your affectionate uncle. I have settled with Mr. Stiff, the worthy secretary, the preliminary pecuniary arrangements regarding the entrance fee and the first annual subscription—the ensuing payments I shall leave to my worthy nephew. You were elected, sir, with but two black-balls; and every other man who was put up for ballot had four, with the exception of Tom Harico, who had more black balls than white. Do not, however, be puffed up by this victory, and fancy yourself more popular than other men. Indeed, I don't mind telling you (but of course I do not wish it to go any farther) that Captain Slyboots and I, having suspicions of the meeting, popped a couple of adverse balls into the other candidates' boxes; so that, at least, you should, in case of mishap, not be unaccompanied in ill-fortune."—Thackeray's "Mr. Brown the Elder takes Mr. Brown the Younger to a Club."

Very likely there are a few thousand New Yorkers, who like the present writer, not having considered the subject very deeply, have held to the vague idea that the club was an invention of a certain Dr. Samuel Johnson. Also that it came about in some such way as this. The Doctor had grown weary of bullying the patient Boswell, and browbeating the acquaintance met by chance in Fleet Street or the Strand did not entirely satisfy him. So one day, storming out of the Cheshire Cheese, after roundly abusing the larkpie of which he had consumed an enormous quantity, he founded the first club, with the object of gathering together a number of his fellow-mortals in one place, and upon them pouring out the vials of his pompous and splenetic wrath.

One day, however, the "De Senectute" that had been long forgotten was recalled by a passage in Mr. James W. Alexander's "History of the University Club of New York." There it was pointed out, that as far back as 200 B.C., Cicero represented Cato as saying: "To begin with, I have always remained a member of a 'Club.' Clubs, as you know, were established in my quaestorship on the reception of the Magna Mater from Ida. So I used to dine at their feast with members of my club—on the whole with moderation." But, except as a point of historical interest, whether stern Cato or voluble Johnson was the inventor does not matter greatly to the New York club member who is airing his weekly grievance by drawing up a petition, or writing a scorching letter a day to the House Committee.

If you will listen to the Manhattanite of the older generation, you are likely to derive the impression that club life in New York is a matter of the last half-century at most. He is rather inclined to fleer at any pretension to American club life of earlier date. In one sense he is right. The club as we know it now is essentially a British institution modelled on British lines. More and more is the British idea being carried to the extreme, until we are associating club life with the vast club-house of spacious lounges and marble swimming pools, and a cuisine rivalling that of one of the great new hotels. The Fifth Avenue club of half a century ago had little magnificence as we now understand the word. It was a simpler and more limited hospitality that was offered to the friend or the distinguished stranger from overseas. Yet that hospitality must have had a rare flavour and atmosphere. There must have been something about it that went far to make up for mere material deficiencies, if we are to credit the verdicts of those who were in a position to compare American club life with club life in England and on the Continent. Thackeray was as fine a judge of the matter as any man who ever strutted through St. James's Park and scowled back at the Barnes Newcomeses and Captain Heavysideses in the club windows along Pall Mall, and there was what he said and wrote about the Century.

It was in the middle of the sixth decade of the last century that the clubs began to find their way into Fifth Avenue. One of the first was the Union Club. Writing of that organization in 1906, M. Charles Huard, in "New York comme je l'ai vu," volunteered the puzzling information that it was "fondé en 1836 par les descendants de Knickerbocker, le plus vieux donc des grand clubs de New York." If the Frenchman was to be taken literally he apparently regarded the offspring of Washington Irving's creation as an exceedingly prolific race. The Union, in 1855, moved from Broadway near Fourth Street into a house on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-first Street. That home, which the Union occupied until fifteen or twenty years ago, was described as "a superb structure which cost three hundred thousand dollars." It was the first building erected in the city solely for club purposes. Almost to the day of its demolition, although the neighbourhood about it was changing rapidly, the old house wore an aspect of dignity. To the corner the habitués of other years seldom come today. Instead, at the noon hour, the sidewalks swarm with foreign faces and there is excited babble in an alien tongue. The cloak and suit firm of Potash and Perlmutter is as much at home here now as it was in its East Broadway—or was it Division Street?—loft when the present century was coming into being.

There is an old volume, bearing the date 1871, called "The Clubs of New York." The author was a Francis Gerry Fairfield, and the chapters that make up the book were originally contributed to the columns of the "Home Journal." There is a perceptible smile on Mr. Fairfield's face as he writes of the town of thirty years before. To the present generation that smile is irresistibly funny. He recalls the year 1836, when the Union was founded as one of meteorological oddities. "Tradition preserves the record of the season under the designation of the cold summer. Weird auroras did not forbear to lift themselves in mountains of fire along the north, even in July; and more than once the canopy-aurora hung like a mock sun in the very centre of the heavens. People predicted strange things; but the strange things did not happen. The hyena of pestilence, the wolf of want, and the red death of war were conjured, but emerged not, nevertheless, from the vasty deep supposed by Shakespeare to be inhabited by their spirits." But Mr. Fairfield disclaims any suggestion that "the gestation of the Union Club, then in progress, had any material influence in the evolution of these omens, or that the weather was affected by the parturition of the great social event." With the metropolitan sophistication of 1871 he pats 1836 on the head as a year when New York was a bit of a village, of rather more than three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. Houston, then North Street, Bleecker, and Bond Streets were particularly uptown, and thoroughfares of fashion and aristocracy. The old régime was still in its glory; and real counts, in plaid pantaloons, were sensational occurrences to be petted, set up as lions, and finally entrapped into matrimony, just by way of improving the blood of the first families. He tells of "the little white-faced hotel now termed the Tremont" as having been kept by a real count, expatriated for political reasons, but afterwards restored to titles and estates. There are those of the Year of Grace 1918 who recall the "little white-faced Tremont." But its soul has long since passed to t'other side of Styx.

From the day when the Union first opened its doors at No. 1 Bond Street, it was one of the wealthiest and most exclusive of New York clubs. The names of its organizers are names associated with the history of the city. Ogden Hoffman, whom Mr. Fairfield describes as "a bald-headed, dreamy-eyed man, in his day the star of the New York Bar, both for fervid eloquence and profound learning"; Philip Hone, he of the immortal "Diary"; Thomas P. Oakley, Samuel Jones, Beverly Robinson, W. B. Lewrence, Charles King, E. T. Throop, and J. Depeyster Ogden. These were some of the men whose names were appended to the provisional constitution drawn up on June 30, 1836. C. Fenno Hoffman, "next to Morris the sweetest song-writer America has produced," later became a member of the association, which from its inception, was the representative organization of the old families. Livingstons, Clasons, Dunhams, Griswolds, Van Cortlandts, Paines, Centers, Vandervoorts, Stuyvesants, Van Renssalaers, Irelands, Suydams, and other names of Knickerbocker fame, filled its list of membership with a sort of aristocratic monotony of that Knickerbockerism, which has since, to use the words of Mr. Fairfield again, "in solemn and silent Second Avenue (the Faubourg St. Germain of the city), earned the epithet of the Bourbons of New York." Solemn and silent Second Avenue is solemn and silent no more. Long since gone are the social glories of that thoroughfare that once boldly stepped forward to challenge the supremacy of the street that is the subject of this book. "Sic transit!" or something of the kind would have been the probable comment of Mr. Fairfield, for he, in common with others of his age, delighted in flinging in a scrap of Latin or French on every possible occasion. They were industrious investigators of the thesaurus in those days.

The first home of the Union, at No. 1 Bond Street, was in reality the house of its secretary, John H. L. McCrackan. In 1837 a building on Broadway near Leonard Street was secured, and the club moved into it, there to remain for three years. Then, for seven years, it was in a house on the other side of Broadway, and in 1847, obeying the prevalent impulse up-townward, it shifted its quarters to the spot from which it was later to remove to the Twenty-first Street home. That structure at Broadway and Fourth Street was the property of the Stuyvesant family, and after the departure of the men of the Union, was occupied by the confectioner Maillard as a hotel and restaurant. In 1852 the question of a permanent building began to be discussed, and in 1854 the land at the Twenty-first Street corner was secured and the work of erecting the structure that in its day was the most imposing of all that lined Fifth Avenue between Waverly Place and the Broadway junction begun. The club moved into the new quarters in May, 1855, at a time when its membership numbered approximately five hundred. In writing of the Union as it was in 1871 Mr. Fairfield made the comment that literature was hardly represented at all, and journalism only by Manton Marble of the "World." As had been the case of Thackeray and the Athenæum of London, Mr. Marble, at the time of his first candidacy, had been blackballed. The objection, also as in the case of Thackeray, was ascribed not to the personality of the man, but to his profession. But Mr. Marble was eventually admitted through the efforts of a member of the Board of Directors, who declared boldly that not a new member should be elected until the blackballs against the journalist had been withdrawn. Robert J. Dillon, landscape gardener, and J. H. Lazarus, portrait painter, were almost the sole art representatives, and in 1871 J. Lester Wallack was the only actor on the club list. Wallack's great contemporary of the stage, Edwin Booth, was a member of the Century and of the Lotos. The law of the day was represented by such men as Mayor Hall, until he resigned as a result of the criticism of fellow-members growing out of the exposures of the Tammany frauds in the summer and autumn of 1871, W. M. Evarts, Judge Garvin, Judge Gunning S. Bedford, Eli P. Norton, and John E. Burrill. Of men prominent in political and municipal life were August Belmont, Samuel J. Tilden, Peter B. Sweeny, former Mayor George Opdyke, Isaac Bell, and Andrew H. Green, later to become the "Father of Greater New York." Among the dominant financial figures, in addition to August Belmont, were A. T. Stewart, John J. Cisco, Henry Clews, and John Jacob Astor. From the Army were U. S. Grant, then the nation's President, John H. Coster, George W. Cullom, Samuel W. Crawford, Howard Stockton, Rufus Ingalls, J. L. Rathbone, I. U. D. Reeve, and Stewart Van Vliet. From the Navy, James B. Breese, James Alden, Edward C. Gratton, Thomas M. Potter, Henry O. Mayo, James Glynn, W. C. Leroy, L. M. Powell, and John H. Wright.

By virtue of its descent from the Sketch and the Column, the Century Association might lay claim to seniority among the clubs of Fifth Avenue. The Sketch Club was the result of the union of the literary and artistic elements of New York, which, in 1829, were producing an annual called "The Talisman." Among the writers in the Sketch were Bryant, Verplanck, and Sands, and later Washington Irving and J. K. Paulding joined it. There was no regular home, the club meeting at the houses of members in turn. For six months, during 1830, it did not exist, having been dissolved in May of that year, and reorganized in December. Thereafter, for a few years, it met in the Council Room of the National Academy of Design, and then returned to the custom of meeting at the homes of the members. That organization was the embryo Century. The Sketch Club had first taken form in 1829. Four years before that a society called the Column had been established by graduates of Columbia College. That organization, too, had a share in the moulding of the new club.

The meeting that brought the Century into being was held the evening of January 13, 1847, in the rotunda of the New York Gallery of Fine Arts in the City Hall Park. The call for the meeting had been sent out a few weeks before, the men composing the signing committee being John G. Chapman, A. B. Burand, C. C. Ingham, A. M. Cozzens, F. W. Edmonds, and H. T. Tuckerman. The original Centurions were forty-two in number, of whom twenty-five came from the Sketch, and six from the Column. There were ten artists, ten merchants, four authors, three bankers, three physicians, two clergymen, two lawyers, one editor, one diplomat, and three men of leisure. All were more or less representative men of the city, which had grown from the town of three hundred and fifty thousand of the day of the Union's formation, to a young metropolis of six hundred thousand. Gulian C. Verplanck was the club's first president, and back in his day began the Century's peculiar Twelfth Night Festival, which has been continued ever since. Twelfth Night with the Centurions is distinctive in that it is not an annual event nor the event of any given year. The very uncertainty of the ceremonial has added zest to the revel, which usually ends with an old-fashioned Virginia Reel. A few years ago the reel was led by Theodore Roosevelt and the late Joseph H. Choate.

The first home of the Century, which it occupied for two years, was in rooms at 495 Broadway—between Broome and Spring Streets. During this period a journal called the "Century" was started, and edited by F. S. Cozzens and John H. Gourley. Then, in 1848, the club moved to 435 Broome Street; thence, in 1850, to 575 Broadway; in 1852, to Clinton Place, where Thackeray learned to love it, and where, by virtue of proximity, it first laid claim to be regarded as a Fifth Avenue club.

WHERE THE AVENUE AND THIRTY-FOURTH STREET CROSS STANDS THE BUILDING POPULARLY KNOWN AS THE KNICKERBOCKER TRUST COMPANY. HERE, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LAST CENTURY, "SARSAPARILLA" TOWNSEND BUILT IN BROWN-STONE, AND A. T. STEWART LATER BUILT IN WHITE MARBLE

In Clinton Place the Century stayed until it went to its Fifteenth Street house, where it was so long to remain. Gulian Verplanck's presidency lasted for many years. At first it was a happy tenure of office. But the Civil War came, bringing with it grave dissensions. Verplanck may be said to have invited the divisions that crept into the club, and which led to his overwhelming defeat in the election of 1864. He was succeeded by the historian Bancroft, who held office until 1868, when he resigned because of his departure for Prussia as the United States Minister to Berlin.

From the very day when it took form the Century seems to have had an atmosphere—almost a history. In the years long before the more modern clubs of a literary flavour were dreamed of, the Century was bringing together the leading men-of-letters and of art of New York. Yet somehow the Century of early times impresses newer generations as having been tremendously portentous and dignified. There was never any suggestion of Bohemia. After the establishment of the Century the gifted Poe was to enjoy, or rather to endure, two more years of life. By no stretch of the imagination can we think of his being in the club, even as the guest of an evening. There was plenty of good-fellowship, no doubt, and good cheer, but also the chill of a certain reserve. The talk seems, after all the years, to have been essentially serious—men expressing themselves not lightly, but judicially, and after long deliberation; Mr. Bryant gravely conceding the right of Pope or Dryden or Watts, according to the subject of discussion, to be ranked as a poet, or denying the same, while members of lesser note sat about listening and nodding, but preserving becoming reticence. There was almost a Bostonese austerity about the great men of that early time and circle. They wore their garments as Roman Senators wore their togas. It was not good form for the stranger to break lightly into the talk of the Immortals. To have done so would have been to provoke the amazement and censure that was the lot of Mark Twain many years after, when, at a dinner in the Hub, he sought to jest irreverently with the sacred names of Holmes, Emerson, and Longfellow. Again try to fancy the shy, eccentric, improvident genius of "Ulalume," "The Bells," and "The Fall of the House of Usher" at ease in a company that, while delightful, was all propriety and solid intellectuality. No, Poe would no more have fitted into the Century than Balzac or Zola would have fitted into the French Academy which so persistently denied them. And, to be perfectly frank, had the writer been a Centurion of that period, and had the name of Edgar Allan Poe come up for election, he might have been one of the first to drop a black pill in the box, loudly acclaiming the genius, but deploring the impossible and unclubable personality.

After the presidency of Bancroft came that of Bryant. He held the office until his death in 1878, but as he was always averse to crowds, he was seldom seen at the club except in official meetings. An enthusiastic Centurion, writing of the club at the time of Bryant's death, when it had been in existence thirty-one years, spoke of it as having drawn together the choicest spirits of that generation of New York. "Without formality or design, it had become an institute of mutual enlightenment among men knowing the worth of one another's work, likened by Bellows, more than half seriously, to the French Academy. A sure result of this communion was absolute equality among those who shared it. No true Centurion ever assumed anything, each standing in his real place. The atmosphere killed pretension and stifled shams. The pedant or the conceited person silently drifted away. How could it be otherwise, while a famous painter was describing some scene, or a noted philosopher illustrating some theory, or an acute statesman drawing some historical parallel, than that the egotist should drop himself, and the proser forget to prose?" The late Clarence King was in his day a leader in the Century talk, and his comment on the club was that it contained "the rag-tag and bob-tail of all that was best in the country." Many times has it been introduced under thin disguises in the fiction dealing with New York. In some of the novels of Robert W. Chambers it appears as the Pyramid. Twenty years ago Paul Leicester Ford brought it into "The Story of an Untold Love," calling it The Philomathean. According to the hero of that tale, the Philomathean was the one club where charlatanry and dishonesty must fail, however it succeeded with the world, and where the poorest man stood on a par with the wealthiest. The Centurion of all times has had much to be proud of, and he has not been blind to his blessings, nor ashamed to acquaint the world with his great good fortune.

Although most of them began in side streets, and many of them have in the later years migrated again to side streets, through the greater part of their history the clubs here discussed belong essentially to the "Avenue" from which they have drawn so much of their inspiration. It does not matter that the present home of the Century is at 7 West Forty-third Street, or that the Lotos for the past few years has been at 110 West Fifty-seventh Street. They remain, as they always have been, Fifth Avenue clubs. Part of the history of the Lotos Club is written in the chapter dealing with "Some Great Days on the Avenue." For the fame of the organization as a giver of elaborate banquets to distinguished guests has spread through the land. The Lotos dates back to the early spring of 1870, when a group of young New York journalists met in the office of the New York "Leader" to take the initiatory steps necessary for the formation of a club. These men were De Witt Van Buren of the "Leader," Andrew C. Wheeler of the "Daily World," George W. Hows of the "Evening Express," F. A. Schwab of the "Daily Times," W. L. Alden of the "Citizen," and J. H. Elliot of the "Home Journal." As the founders were all connected with the literary, musical, art, or dramatic departments of their papers, it was not surprising that the projected association was to be modelled upon the Savage, Garrick, and Junior Garrick of London. Earlier failure had shown that a strictly literary organization was out of the question. A wider and more comprehensive membership was a necessity. As set forth in Article I., Section 2 of the Lotos Constitution, the primary object of the club was "to promote social intercourse among journalists, literary men, artists, and members of the theatrical profession."

From the first temporary quarters in the parlours of the Belvidere House, then at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, the club moved into a permanent home at No. 2 Irving Place, a building adjoining the Academy of Music. In the autumn of 1870 the first president, De Witt Van Buren, died, and was succeeded by A. Oakley Hall, then the Mayor of New York, who assumed the office entirely in his social capacity, as a journalist, dramatist, and patron of the arts. It was he who suggested the famous "Lotos Saturday Nights." There is a flavour of high Bohemia in the list of members of that period. Among the artists were Beard, Reinhart, Burling, Lumley, Chapin, Bispham, and Pickett; there were such pianists as Wehli, Mills, Hopkins, Colby, and Bassford; singers like Randolfi, Laurence, Thomas, MacDonald, Perring, Seguin, Matthison, and Davis; and actors like Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, Mark Smith, John Brougham, and George Clark.

Some one has said that every generation must express itself in a new club. The decade from 1861-1870 expressed itself in several. To those years of New York date the Columbia Yacht (1867), the Harvard, first of the college clubs (1865), the Manhattan (1865), the New York Athletic (1868), and the Union League (1863). The last named organization owes its birth to the doubts and complications of the darkest hour of the War of Secession. Unite to stand behind the President with our full strength, was the slogan of the men who met in January, 1863, to form the plans for the new association. At the beginning there was talk of adopting the name "Loyal League." The first work of the club was the organization of negro troops in New York City. Despite the opposition of Governor Seymour, and the ridicule of the newspapers, who held up the idea of the negro as a soldier as a huge joke, the Leaguers persisted in their efforts, with the result that in December, 1863, the Twentieth Regiment of U. S. coloured troops was enlisted, and within a few months, two more regiments, known as the Twenty-sixth and the Thirty-first.

In those days the club-house faced Union Square, at the junction of Seventeenth Street and Broadway. Early in 1868 the Union League moved to a house at the corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, the building afterwards to be occupied in turn by the University Club and the Manhattan Club. The structure had been erected by Mr. Jerome for the use of the Jockey Club, but was leased to the Union League for a term of ten years. Among the early honorary members of the Union League were Abraham Lincoln, General U. S. Grant, General W. T. Sherman, Lieutenant-General "Phil" Sheridan, Major-Generals Burnside, Wright, and Hancock, Admiral David G. Porter, and Rear-Admiral Bailey. The active membership of 1870 included such names as William Cullen Bryant, William M. Evarts, Whitelaw Reid, Parke Godwin, Horace Greeley, Chester A. Arthur, Thomas Nast, Joseph H. Choate, Eastman Johnson, George P. Putnam, Daniel P. Appleton, Dr. Samuel Osgood, George Griswold, E. D. Stanton.

To the name of the Union League is inevitably linked that of the Manhattan Club, for, the Civil War once at an end, the latter became the expression of the political aims and aspirations of the Democratic Party as the former was of the Republican. The Manhattan had its origin in the turmoil of the election of 1864, and the defeat of the Democratic candidate, General McClellan. The first movers in its foundation were Douglass Taylor, then secretary of the Tammany society, Street Commissioner George W. McLean, S. L. M. Barlow of the "World," Judge Hilton, the Hon. A. Schell, A. L. Robertson, and John T. Hoffman, later Governor of New York State from 1869 till 1872. The earlier meetings were held in the old Delmonico's, at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, and then the Manhattan moved into its first real home at No. 96 Fifth Avenue, just a block above the famous restaurant, where many of the meetings continued to be held. John Van Buren was the first president, with Augustus Schell first vice-president, A. L. Robertson second vice-president, Manton Marble secretary, and W. Butler Duncan treasurer.

In the winter of 1867-8 the club was enlivened by a bout of fisticuffs that was a "celebrated case" of its day. There was then a strict club rule forbidding the introduction of a guest. Manager Bateman, the father of Miss Bateman the actress, saw fit to violate this law. A member of the House Committee, perhaps overzealous in the idea of his duties, carried his protest to the point of forbidding the servants of the club to serve the unwelcome guest. Mr. Bateman's resentment of the action took the form of a personal assault, which became the sensation of the hour and the topic of the newspapers. "Evidently," remarked the "Herald" (those were the days of the elder Bennett, who in his vast experience in New York journalism had more than once felt the sting of a horse-whip), "to be slapped is what some faces are made for!" But the Governors did not see the matter in the light that the "Herald" did, and the pugilistically inclined manager was summarily expelled, the board refusing to settle the matter by accepting his resignation.

Another Fifth Avenue club that claimed 1865 as the year of its origin was the Traveller's. For obvious reasons many of the clubs of the seventh decade of the last century chose to be near the old Delmonico restaurant, and the Traveller's was no exception, making its first home on the opposite corner. The object of the association was to bring together travellers of all nations, and to do proper honour to distinguished who were visiting the United States. After two years at the Fourteenth Street corner the Traveller's moved northward to a new home at No. 222 Fifth Avenue, the George W. Burnham residence at Eighteenth Street. Mr. Fairfield apparently did not regard the club with entire favour, for in his book of 1873 he speaks of the club-house as being "a leading resort for America-examining Englishmen, and the headquarters of an English coterie of considerable social importance." "O tempora! O mores!" he exclaims. There were palmy days in the past, when the receptions were social reunions of éclat. But "they have made an end of all that, having settled into a body as quiet as Mr. Mantilini expected to be after taking a bath in the Thames." But, granting Mr. Fairfield's claim that the literary quality of the Traveller's had deteriorated, there still remained the list of Honorary Members carrying a certain prestige. Professor Louis Agassiz headed the list; and others were Paul Du Chaillu, the African explorer whose adventures were for a long time regarded as clever romance; the Hon. Anson Burlingame, who had been an envoy from the Chinese Emperor; Sir Samuel Baker, of London; Rev. J. C. Fletcher, Professor Raphael Pumpelly, the Right Rev. Bishop Southgate, the Hon. J. Ross Browne, and M. Michel Chevalier, of the French Senate.

"Lotos and Arcadian: both stuff for dreams. The one excogitated in spring-time, when Nature was taking her break-of-day drowse, previous to getting up and going about business; the other suggestive of Nature indulging in a half-light reverie in a sort of crimson and scarlet dressing-gown, previous to putting on her night-cap and going to bed, after a hard summer's work. The one reminding of a land where it is always afternoon of a day in the last of June, when one can almost hear the music of corn-growing, the mystic throes of buds toiling into blossom; the other of a land where it is always about eight o'clock in the morning with the dew still on the meadow-grass, and the world rubbing its eyes and brushing away cobwebs of dream, before buckling down to the struggle. The one somewhat reminiscent of Egypt and crocodiles, lisping palms and Arabs, of long and lotos-eating days of keff, in which even the lazy hours loiter in shady nooks, and the wind holds its breath in sympathy with the general doziness, and seems to be listening to something; the other of vivid Greek life, with its shepherds:

"'Piping on hollow reeds to their pent sheep,
Calm be thy Lyra's sleep,'

of Pindar, of Orphic song, of lost Milesian tales, of a life growing into sculpture or breaking into sinuous hexameter waves. The one mystic, the other beautiful, both symbolical."

With this rhapsody Mr. Fairfield introduced the Arcadian Club of New York, an organization that for a time threatened to rival the Lotos in the latter's particular field. Writing men snatched up into the clouds in those days for their metaphors, and combed Mythology for illustrations with which to garnish descriptions of the most commonplace events of everyday life. Here is another gem from Mr. Fairfield's book, also in his chapter about the Arcadian Club.

"Gentlemen of society, bankers, stylish young men with vast ideas of personal importance, amateurs and patrons! City Hall is the brain of New York, of the continent, and it is one of the laws of the world that brains will rule. Rebel as muscles merely of the body politic, and ye rebel against inexorable law: that scribbling literati in the fifth story—for newspapers like men have their brains in the upper story—is more potent than you in settling the artistic position of a Lucca or a Rubenstein, a Dickens or a Doré, a Tennyson or a Carlyle. Have ye ever read a wonderful little ballad by Uhland, entitled 'The Minstrel's Curse?' If so, recall it—for it is typical, not of that which comes by-and-by, but of that which is: the exponent of the beautiful having become in his way an autocrat. Unfortunate it is that journalism is not always representative of the best culture—that managing editors will now and then entrust criticism to incompetents, but its popular power is quite the same, notwithstanding, and this good the popular newspaper has wrought, to wit—that the exponent of the arts, media of culture as they are, is no longer dependent upon the caprices and whims of isolated patrons, nor hampered in his freedom of expression by canons of theirs." And so on ad infinitum. The present writer confesses in all humility that he has not the least idea as to what the eloquent gentleman meant. But remember that it was the age that produced the "St. Elmo" of Augusta Evans Wilson.

CHAPTER VIII

Literary Landmarks and Figures

Literary Landmarks and Figures—A Vision of Pall Mall—The Paris of the Forties—Mark Twain's Fifth Avenue Home—In the Time of Poe—Where Henry James was Born—The Old University Building—An Encounter in Washington Square—Clinton Place—Memories of the Past—Irving, Cooper, Halleck, Drake, Dickens, and Trollope as Shades of the Avenue—A Home of Janvier—The "Griffou Push"—The Tenth Street Studio Building—The Tile Club—The Cary Sisters—Stoddard, Whittier, Aldrich, and Ripley—"Peter Parley"—"Fanny Fern"—James Parton—Some Figures of the Recent Past.

If, of a day of the fifties of the last century, I had been an arrival in London, my first thought would probably have been of a sole at Sweeting's or a slice of saddle of mutton at Simpson's in the Strand, provided, of course, that the establishments named then existed, and the dishes in question were as delectable as in later years, when I came to know them in the life. The baser appetite satisfied, the first pilgrimage would have been, not to the Tower, or to Lambeth Palace, or the British Museum, but to Pall Mall, in the hopes of catching a glimpse, in a club window or on the pavement, of the "good grey head" of Thackeray. The first impression might have been disappointing. There was in the spectacles and high-carried chin something pompous and supercilious. The great man, had he noticed them at all, would probably have been quite contemptuous of my admiring glances, his mind occupied with the idea of winning a nod from a passing duke; but I would have seen the "good grey head," and thrilled at the memory of "Vanity Fair" and "Henry Esmond." Similarly, in the Paris of that time or of a little earlier period, I would have considered the day well spent if in the course of it I had seen Victor Hugo with his umbrella, riding on the Imperiale of an omnibus, or the good Dumas exhibiting his woolly pate conspicuously in a boulevard café, or the author of "The Mysteries of Paris" and "The Wandering Jew" posing at a table in the Restaurant de Paris or Bignon's, or the fat figure of M. de Balzac waddling in the direction of a printing house to toil and groan and sweat over the proofs of the latest addition to the "Comedie Humaine." We cannot behold such giants in our generation, city, and street. Yet Fifth Avenue, from the day the first houses pushed northward from Washington Square, has had its literary landmarks, figures, and traditions.

Ten years ago, had you been passing of a summer's day a house at the southeast corner of the Avenue and Ninth Street, you might have seen emerging from the front door, a figure clad in white flannel, and looked upon the countenance of the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. It was, and is, a house of red brick, a house of three stories and a high basement, built by the architect who had designed Grace Church. The number is 21. Clemens went to live there in the autumn of 1904, remaining for a time at the near-by Grosvenor while the new habitation was being put in order, and the home furniture that had been brought from Hartford was being installed. When No. 21 was ready for occupation, only Clemens and his daughter Jean went to live there, for Clara had not recovered from the strain of her mother's long illness, and the shock of her death, and was in retirement under the care of a trained nurse. Clemens, according to his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, was lonely in No. 21, and sought to liven matters by installing a great Æolian Orchestrelle. In January, 1906, Paine paid his first visit to the house and found the great man propped up in bed, with his head at the foot, turning over the pages of "Huckleberry Finn" in search of a paragraph about which some random correspondent had asked explanation.

But to go back long before Clemens's time, and to begin in the neighbourhood of the old square. In the days when Fifth Avenue was young Poe must have found his way there, accompanied, perhaps, by the pale, invalided Virginia, to gaze at the fine new houses, for only a few hundred yards away was his last city residence, where Lowell called and found his host "not himself that day," and where were penned "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," the "Philosophy of Composition," and "The Literati of New York." Then there was the house in Waverly Place, the home of Anne Lynch, the poet of "The Battle of Life," which was a kind of literary salon of its day, where Poe once read aloud the newly published "Raven," and where Bayard Taylor visited, and Taylor's friend Caroline Kirkland, and Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Child, and Ann S. Stephens, who wrote "Fashion and Famine" and "Mary Derwent," and young Richard Henry Stoddard, and Elizabeth Barstow, who became his wife. Not far from the Lynch house was the humble dwelling in which Poe wrote "The Fall of the House of Usher."

Just off the Square, at 21 Washington Place, Henry Jones was born. In a house that once stood at the northwest corner Bayard Taylor lived for a time and wrote the "Epistle from Mount Tmolus," and some of the "Poems of the Orient." In later days a large apartment house grew up on the site, and there George Parsons Lathrop dwelt, and penned some of the verse of his "Days and Dreams," while his wife, the daughter of the author of "The Scarlet Letter," composed portions of "Along the Shore." In the old University building on the east side of the Square Theodore Winthrop—later as Colonel Winthrop to meet a soldier's death at Big Bethel—wrote "John Brent," and the famous but utterly dreary "Cecil Dreeme," and a few doors below is the red brick apartment where in more modern days so many of the younger scribblers have toiled in the years of their pseudo-Bohemia. Across the Square N. P. Willis, the town's crack descriptive writer, was in the habit of making his way, and on one occasion with sorry results. The actor, Edwin Forrest, appeared in his path and fell upon him with vigorous assault. Bystanders were on the point of intervening. "Stand back, gentlemen!" cried the Thespian. "He has interfered in my domestic affairs." And he proceeded with the whacking.

Not only the Square, but the side streets below Fourteenth, must be taken into a consideration of the old literary landmarks and figures of Fifth Avenue. Thackeray was only one of the foreign authors visiting America who found ease and comfort in the club-house of the Century in Clinton Place. In the same thoroughfare lived and died Evert Augustus Duyckinck, co-author with his brother George of the "Cyclopedia of American Literature," and author of "The War for the Union"; and Mrs. Botta, the Anne Lynch of earlier mention, had for a time a home there; and in the street Richard Watson Gilder dwelt later, and in No. 33, in a third-story back room, a young clerk named Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote his "Ballad of Babie Bell"; and there, at No. 84 which was the residence of Judge Daly, the African explorer Paul Du Chaillu wrote fiction and fact that by sceptical contemporaries was generally accepted as fiction. A block farther north was another home of Mrs. Botta, and the house of the actress who is remembered as Tom Moore's first sweetheart, and the one-time abode of William Cullen Bryant, who wrote of it as being near the home of Irving's friend Brevoort. The neighbourhood is rich with memories. We have but to beckon and the ghosts of those literary men and women whose names have been forgotten, and of those whose reputations have endured, step forth in imagination to fill the street. I see Irving, down from his Sunny side estate for a visit to the town that was once the fat village of his Diedrich Knickerbocker, strolling over from the Irving Place structure that is reputed to have been his, but which was not his, to study the new manners and fashions, and to mull on the startling changes and swift passage of time. I see the irascible author of the "Leather Stocking Tales," for the moment weary of squabbling over land agreements with his Cooperstown neighbours and prosecuting suits against up-state newspapers, stealing into New York for a glimpse of his first city residence down in Beach Street in Greenwich Village, where he wrote "The Pilot," and "Lionel Lincoln," and incidentally satisfying his curiosity as to the new developments in urban elegance and fashion. I can see FitzGreene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake, a mile or two away from their accustomed haunts; and any one else whom it pleases me to see; our foreign guests and critics, Dickens, looking about superciliously, or Anthony Trollope, breathing hard, or Trollope mère, or Harriet Martineau, or Captain Marryat, or Mayne Reid, or Samuel Lover. For in a case like this a trifling matter like an anachronism or a misstatement counts for little or nothing.

On Ninth Street, just west of the Charles De Rhams house, which was formerly the Henry Brevoort house, are the two or three buildings that in bygone days made up the Hotel Griffou. There, twenty years or so ago, the late Thomas A. Janvier lived and studied the queer Latin-American types that went into his stories of the Efferanti family. There also William Dean Howells frequently dined, and the late Edmund Clarence Stedman and Richard Watson Gilder went from time to time. Then the older and more dignified men drifted away, and the tables in the dining room rang with the laughter and high talk of a younger group, known as the "Griffou Push." Brave dreams were there, and limitless ambitions, and some achievement. But in many cases Pallida mors came knocking all too soon, and those who lived sought other environments, and the "Push" was no more, and the little hotel became a memory of yesterday.

There were literary associations about the old Studio Building in Tenth Street long before the "Old Masters" of New York went there to work, and Carmencita came to dance in Chase's studio. In the big brown structure Henry T. Tuckerman once lived, and kept his library, and wrote "The Criterion," and the "Book of the Artists," and entertained his friends of the world of letters; and there Fitzjames O'Brien, the genial Fitz, the "gipsy of letters," the author of "The Diamond Lens," visited him. Almost across the street, in a little rear wooden house that was to serve as the New York home of F. Hopkinson Smith's Colonel Carter of Cartersville, was at one time the quarters of the Tile Club, where, in the golden days, men ceased to be known by the stiff and formal names used in more ceremonious surroundings, and became instead the Owl, or the Griffin, or the Pagan, or the Chestnut, or the Puritan, or the O'Donoghue, or the Bone, or the Grasshopper, or the Marine, or the Terrapin, or the Gaul, or the Bulgarian, or Briareus, or Sirius, or Cadmius, or Polyphemus.

A little off the Avenue, on East Twentieth Street, was the home of the Cary sisters, Alice and Phoebe; and to the unpretentious little brick dwelling of Sunday evenings repaired Stoddard, and Whittier, and Aldrich, and Ripley, and Herman Melville, and Mary L. Booth, who afterwards became Mrs. Lamb, and wrote the "History of New York," and Samuel G. Goodrich, the famous "Peter Parley," and Alice Haven, popular writer of juvenile tales, and Justin McCarthy, and James Parton, husband of "Fanny Fern," himself one of these rare scribes of his age whose writing can be genuinely enjoyed by readers of the present generation, and occasionally, grim old Horace Greeley, who, if, as he said, in the course of forty years had never been able to get a day off to go "a-fishing," managed, now and then, to find an evening of leisure in which to divert himself with the pleasant, bookish talk at No. 53. A salon as "was a salon"—that of the Cary girls. With the vast, unwieldy city of today in mind we wonder how they managed it, by what charm and persuasion they gathered with such regularity so many of the literati really worth while. But it was a smaller town then. It was easier to be neighbourly. When Thackeray, on the evening of New Year's Day, 1853, journeyed in a sleigh from his hotel to a reception held in a house on the west side of Fifth Avenue between Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Streets, the destination was characterized as a villa in the country.

To revert to the note with which this chapter began. Were it possible for us to be transported back to the London of the fifties the sight of a Thackeray, a Dickens, a Tennyson, or a Browning would not have been necessary to stir our pulses. It would have been an event to have seen in the flesh some of the humbler men, G. P. R. James, or Samuel Warren, of "Ten Thousand a Year," or any of the ephemeral celebrities who adorned the pages of the Maclise Gallery of Portraits. So why disdain, merely because they are of our own time, the makers of copy who may be seen on the Fifth Avenue of today? I remember my first literary walk down the Avenue. It was in the company of Mr. Edward W. Townsend. I was very young, and he was the creator of Chimmie Fadden, and the author of "A Daughter of the Tenements," and I wished that all the world might see. Then the time came when the sight of literary faces was less of a novelty, when it was not unusual to meet the author of "The Rise of Silas Lapham," who had left his home on Fifty-ninth Street, facing the Park, for an afternoon stroll, and to receive his nod of kindly recognition; or to pass Edmund Clarence Stedman, to whom I owed, as so many others have owed, the first words of encouragement, or to see Frank R. Stockton, or Mr. Gilder and Mr. Johnson of the "Century," or Brander Matthews on his way to the club in West Forty-third Street.

Looking down upon the Avenue, at the corner of Thirty-third Street, just below the Waldorf, are familiar windows. They belonged to a hotel that was, or is, the Cambridge, and in the rooms behind the windows, I recall occasional pleasant and profitable hours spent in the company of Richard Harding Davis. There was another window some blocks farther down, in the building occupying the point where Fifth Avenue and Broadway join. That window gave light to the workshop of James L. Ford, the obstinate satirist, who resents the charge of amiability, and who will not be pleased if you tell him that in the pages of "The Literary Shop" he did the best work of his life. At another corner, between the two already mentioned, the early riser of a few years ago might have seen the literary pride of Indiana assuming the duties of the traffic policeman who had not yet reached his post, and with the aid of a whistle joyously acquired ordering east and west-bound vehicles to proceed and north and south-bound vehicles to halt.

If you know your Avenue well enough, the countenances of nearly all of the "Best-Selling" kings are easy of recognition. Arriving at the Thirties, Robert W. Chambers is likely to turn off, bound for one of the antique shops that are to be found in the parallel thoroughfare two blocks to the east. At any point on the Avenue between the Washington Arch and the Plaza you may stumble upon the cane-swinging discoverer of the principality of Graustark, and the cane-swinging inventor of the "Tennessee Shad," appraising together the new styles in women's hats, or investigating the display in a shop-window. What is the subject that they are so earnestly discussing? The Influence of Rabelais on the Monastic System of the Fifteenth Century? The obscurity of Robert Browning? Whether or not the art of the novel is a finer art than it was in the days of the Victorians? Not at all. The point in dispute is the figure of Delehanty's batting average in 1867. The vital importance of the matter is the reason of their obvious excitement.

Of more serious aspect is Mr. James Lane Allen, whose tales of the Kentucky Blue Grass Region I hope will be read as they deserve for many generations to come. Rex Beach swings along musing perhaps on the solitudes of Lake Hopatcong. Rupert Hughes studies the faces in the Avenue throng with the hope of finding the inspiration for a title for the projected novel that will be more eccentric, if possible, than the title of the last. Jesse Lynch Williams and Arthur Train seek rest after their perambulatory efforts in the luxurious seclusion of the University Club at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street—the "Morgue" of the flippant—where, from the windows, the former first saw My Lost Duchess, and the latter discovered the possibilities of McAllister. A few years ago in one of the business buildings that had broken into the residential stretch below Fourteenth Street, was the office that F. Marion Crawford always maintained for use during the occasional visits he made to New York. The tall figure of the author of the Saracinesca novels was a familiar sight on the Avenue of the late nineties and the first years of the present century. But his stays were brief. The call of the vineyard-covered mountains about Sorrento was too strong.

From time to time the Avenue has seen literary visitors whose appearance could not be regarded as a temporary home coming. Twenty years have passed since Rudyard Kipling paid us his last visit, and it was a very different Fifth Avenue from the street of today that he knew. But even then it was a part of the town that moved him to dreams of "heavenly loot." There was, until a year or two ago at least, in an office at Fourth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, an old cane-bottomed chair. Once it had been in a room on the seventh story of a building at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-first Street, and there it had been known as the Barrie Chair, for in it the creator of Thrums had been wont to curl himself up, and from its comfortable depths, peer through the window down at the busy sidewalk below. In the church-going crowds of a Fifth Avenue Sunday there are many who recall the sturdy figure of Dr. John Watson, the Ian MacLaren of the "Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush" tales, who on several occasions occupied a New York pulpit. The last time those who sat under him saw a man apparently in the full vigour of rugged health. Yet a few days later brought the news of his sudden death, far away from the heather of his Scotland. The author of "The Beloved Vagabond" is no more a stranger to the Avenue than he is to Bond Street, or the Rue de la Paix; and Arnold Bennett has recorded impressions that are at once disparaging and polite; and Jeffery Farnol used to trudge it, impecunious and unknown, before "The Broad Highway" came to strike the note of popular favour.

Many more are the names that might be mentioned, for the street has ever been a magnet, and even those who toil in the attics of Bohemia find their way here, in the hours of leisure, to see and to be observed. Grub Street has assumed the garments of propriety, and shorn itself of its long hair, and in the prosperous, well-dressed throng that surges up and down the Fifth Avenue pavement, its denizens pass to and fro, no longer shyly, furtively, and conspicuously out of place, but with the easy assurance of those who are "to the manor born."

CHAPTER IX

Fifth Avenue in Fiction

Fifth Avenue in Fiction—Pages of Romance—The Henry James Heroes and Heroines—George William Curtiss's "Prue and I"—Edgar Fawcett and Edgar Saltus—The "Big Four" of Archibald Clavering Gunter—The Home of Dr. Sloper—O. Henry and Arthur Train—Bunner and Washington Square—"Predestined"—The De Rham House and Van Bibber's Burglar—Delmonico's—The "Amen Corner"—Union and Madison Squares—The Coming of Potash and Perlmutter—Up the Avenue.

To Macaulay's New Zealander, contemplating from London Bridge the ruins of St. Paul's, and the miles upon miles of silent stones stretching to north and west and east, there would undoubtedly have come the desire to reconstruct a mental picture of the vast, dead city in certain of the various periods in which it had been teeming and throbbing with human life. Had the wish become the task, formal history would have played its part. Informal history would have proved more fruitful, and bygone days would have taken shape in the study of old prints, letters, and diaries. But for the full flavour of the town that once was and now had become crumbling dust he would have turned to pages that had been professedly pages of romance.

Suppose Elizabethan London had been his especial interest. That he would have seen through the eyes of Sir John Falstaff and his riotous, dissolute cronies of the Boar's Head Tavern. Georgian London? What better companion could he have had in his scheme of investigation than Mr. Thomas Jones, recently come up from the West Country? For a vision of Corinthian London could he have done better than take up Conan Doyle's "Rodney Stone," with its vivid pictures of the stilted eccentrics who hovered about the Prince-Regent, the coffee-houses thronged with England's warriors of the land and sea, and the haunts of the hard-faced men of the Prize Ring?

The Artful Dodger, guiding the innocent Oliver to the den of Fagin the Jew, would have introduced that last New Zealander to the sordid section of London about Great Saffron Hill and Little Saffron Hill that existed before the construction of the Holborn Viaduct. In the pages of Thackeray and George Meredith he would have studied the West-End of Victorian days. Certain seamy aspects of London life of the last years of the nineteenth century would have been revealed in the novels of George Gissing; and the books of a score of scribes, whose permanent place in letters is still a matter of conjecture, would have flashed glimpses of the city's streets, foibles, manners, and emotions in the early years of the twentieth century.

Our literature has, as yet, given us no figure analogous to that Last New Zealander of Macaulay. But in the bustling New York of fifty or one hundred years hence the dreamer or the student wishing to feel how the inhabitants of Manhattan lived three or four score years ago, or how we are living today, will not disdain to turn over pages originally designed to lighten the tedium of idle hours.

Now and again, in the novels of the fifties and sixties, there are glimpses of the stretch from Washington Square to Fourteenth Street, but the greater Fifth Avenue, as a factor in fiction, dates from about the time when Daisy Miller became a type. To those who really understand them, every one of the great, vital streets of the world has a soul as well as a body. The social invader from the West, the merchant whose establishment still found profit in Grand Street, the banker from Broad Street, or the ship's chandler from South, the club awakening to the fact that its quarters on Broadway or in one of the side streets near Irving Place was too far downtown, or in size inadequate to its growing membership—those were the agencies that wrought the Avenue's material development. But it was the American travelling in Europe in the days when we first found Henry James's heroine on the shores of Lake Geneva and later in Rome, when transatlantic voyagers were not so commonplace as they became later, whose pangs of homesickness in his pension in the Rue de Clichy in Paris, or his hotel in Sorrento, first invested Fifth Avenue with a spirit. It was different perhaps when he returned home with a slight pose of foreign manners, to bask for a brief moment in the sunny flood of distinction that was due him as a kind of later Sir John Franklin. But over there what were cathedral naves and spires, or art galleries, or purple Mediterranean waves, or laboriously acquired French verbs, to the jutting brown-stone stoops and the maples breaking into blossom?

There was a kind of writing, not fish or flesh or good red herring, but just the same altogether charming in its day, inspiring of dreams, and a vehicle for pleasant fancy. It belonged to what, from our grave old point of view, was the youth of the world, and the spirit of youth, its ingenuousness, and its ardour, were needed to appreciate it. Ik Marvel's "Reveries of a Bachelor" was of that genre—and how the hearth logs blazed and the fair faces flickered in the flames in those pages of Mr. Donald G. Mitchell!—and George William Curtiss's "Prue and I"; and the latter book was one of the first in which was to be found the flavour of the old Fifth Avenue. Then there were the forgotten novelists of the seventies and early eighties, and some who are not quite forgotten, such as the two Edgars, Fawcett and Saltus, and the days when every visiting Englishman, no matter what he might have done in real life, in fiction had to stay, while in New York, at the Brevoort House. All sorts of inconsequential novels flit through the mind in recalling that bygone period. There was a gentleman whose atrociously written, but marvellously constructed "thrillers" were to be found in every deck chair at the noon hour on transatlantic steamers of thirty years ago. That was the late Archibald Clavering Gunter. The present generation knows him and his works not at all; but how a past generation used to read and reread "Mr. Barnes of New York," and "Mr. Potter of Texas," and "Miss Nobody of Nowhere," and "That Frenchman," which should have been called "M. De Vernay of Paris." Those were the earliest and the "big four." The list of successors is a long one, but that certain something, that indefinable quality, which had made the first books great trash was irrevocably gone. Of all the flamboyant characters of the tales Mr. Barnes was deservedly the most popular, and at such times as he was not winning international rifle matches at Monte Carlo, or racing about Europe in respectable pursuit of desirable young ladies, he inhabited a dwelling on lower Fifth Avenue. Practically all Fifth Avenue were the scenes of "Miss Nobody of Nowhere," with its charming heroine and her adopted parents, its wicked English nobleman, and its comical little Anglo-maniac dude. Under some name or other a "Gussie Van Beekman" was a necessary ingredient of every Gunter novel.

It is a far cry from Gunter to Henry James, though each wrought according to his lights, and served his purpose in his time. It was when the Avenue was in its infancy that Dr. Sloper, of James's "Washington Square," went to live in the brick house with white stone trimmings, that, practically unchanged, may be seen today, diagonally across the street from the Arch. The novelist wrote of the locality as having "a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city"; and ascribed to it, "a richer, riper look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social history." That "richer, riper look," that suggestion of a past, is there to-day, and is likely to be there tomorrow. The particular Sloper house is quite easy of identification. It is the third from the corner as one goes westward from the Avenue. In 1835, when Dr. Sloper first took possession, moving uptown from the neighbourhood of the City Hall, which had seen its best days socially, the Square, then the ideal of quiet and genteel retirement, was enclosed by a wooden paling. The edifice in which the Slopers lived and its neighbours were then thought to embody the last results of architectural science. It actually dates to 1831. Among the merchants who built in that year were Thomas Suffern, Saul Allen, John Johnston, George Griswold, James Boorman, and William C. Rhinelander. It was their type of house that was accepted for the neighbourhood as the first streets began to open to the right and left of Fifth Avenue. That northern stretch of the Square, first invaded in fiction by Henry James, has ever been a favourite background of the story-spinners, who never tire of contrasting its tone of well-bred aristocracy with the squalor, half-Bohemian and half-proletarian, that faces it from across the Park. In fiction one does not necessarily have to be of an old New York family in order to inhabit one of those north-side dwellings. Robert Walmsley, of O. Henry's "The Defeat of the City," lived there, and the boyhood to which he looked back was one spent on an up-state farm; while another erstwhile tenant in the exclusive row was the devious Artemas Quibble, of Mr. Arthur Train's narrative, who began life humbly somewhere in grey New England, and ended it, so far as the reader was informed, in Sing Sing Prison. Then there was the home of Mrs. Martin, the "Duchess of Washington Square" of Brander Matthews's "The Last Meeting," and that of Miss Grandish, of Julian Ralph's "People We Pass," and the house of Mrs. Delaney, of Edgar Fawcett's "Rutherford," and the structure which inspired one-half of Edward W. Townsend's "Just Across the Square," and the five-room apartment "at the top of a house with dormer windows on the north side" where Sanford lived according to F. Hopkinson Smith's "Caleb West," and where his guests, looking out, could see the "night life of the Park, miniature figures strolling about under the trees, flashing in brilliant light or swallowed up in dense shadow as they passed in the glare of many lamps scattered among the budding foliage." Also over the Square, regarded in the light of fiction, is the friendly shadow of Bunner, who liked it at any time, but liked it best of all at night, with the great dim branches swaying and breaking in the breeze, the gas lamps flickering and blinking, when the tumults and the shoutings of the day were gone and "only a tramp or something worse in woman's shape was hurrying across the bleak space, along the winding asphalt, walking over the Potter's Field of the past on the way to the Potter's Field to be."