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CHARCOALS
OF
NEW AND OLD
NEW YORK
OF NEW AND OLD
PICTURES AND TEXT BY
F. HOPKINSON SMITH
GARDENCITY NEWYORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
MCMXII
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF
TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES,
INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
IT
INTRODUCTION
: t c t t
INTRODUCTION
NEW YORK CITY, below its man-piled coverings, is a huge
stone lizard sprawled flat on its belly, its head erect at Spuyten-
Tuyvel, its arms and legs touching the two Rivers, its tail
flopping the Battery.
All along the spine and flanks of this Reptile of Gneiss tormenting
men dig and bore and blast: driving tunnels through its vitals; scoop-
ing holes for sub-cellars five floors under ground; running water pipes
and gas mains; puncturing its skin with hypodermics of steam; weight-
ing it with skyscrapers, the dismal streets below dark as sunless ravines;
plastering its sides with grass bordered by asphalt into which scraggly
shrubs are stuck and as a crowning indignity criss-crossing its
backbone with centipedes of steel, highways for endless puffing trains
belching heat and gas.
This has been going on in constantly increasing malevolence since
the Dutch landed, and will continue to go on until three or four, or per-
haps six, brand-new cities, each one exactly above the other, are piled
on top of the poor beast. What will happen then, especially if it loses
all patience and some fine morning gives an angry shiver, as would
an old horse shaking off flies, a lucky survivor near the Golden Gate
may know, but no one questions that it would be unpleasant for the
flies.
INTRODUCTION
In the mean time the sun shines on spider-web bridges; lofty
buildings with gold-headed canes of towers; miles of sidewalks obscured
by millions of people; endless ribbons of streets swarming with wheeled
beetles, and countless acres of upturned ground scarred with the ruins
of the old to make ready for the new, while over, through, and in it all
stir the breeze and thrill, the spirit and courage of a Great City, made
great by Great Men for other Great Men yet unborn to enjoy.
In this twisted, seething mass stand quaint houses with hipped
roofs; squat buildings crouching close to escape being trampled on -
some hugging the sides of huge steel giants as if for protection; patches
of thread-bare sod sighed over by melancholy trees guarding long for-
gotten graves; narrow, baffled streets dodging in and out, their tired
eyes on the river; stretches of wind-swept spaces bound by sea-walls,
off which the eager, busy tugs and statelier ships weave their way,
waving flags of white steam as they pass ; wooden wharves choked with
queer shaped bales smelling of spice, and ill-made boxes stained with-
bilge water, against which lie black and white monsters topped with
red funnels, surmounting decks of steel.
All these in the very chaos of their variety are the spoil of the
painter. Some of them are reproduced in these pages.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
I Wall Street . .... 1
II The Skyscraper ....... 7
III The Brooklyn Bridge ... 13
IV The City Hall . .... 19
V Castle Garden .... . 25
VI Behind Shinbone Alley . 33
VII Elizabeth Street . 41
VIII Clinton Court . . 47
IX No. 5 West Twenty-eighth Street . 55
X The Little Church Around the Corner . . 63
XI The Grand Canon of the Yellow ... 69
XII The Stock Exchange . . . . . .75
XIII The Upheaval 83
XIV The Subway Bridge Station ... 89
XV Manhattan . .95
XVI Madison Square . ... 101
XVII Gansevoort Market 107
XVIII Edgar Allan Poe's House at Fordham . . .115
XIX Jumel Mansion 123
XX The Bronx . 131
XXI The Willows . 139
I LLUSTRATIONS
PACE
The Washington Arch (Title) ... . v
The Harbor (Introduction) ....... ix
Wall Street 5
The Skyscraper . . . . . . . . .11
The Brooklyn Bridge . 17
The City Hall 23
Castle Garden ......... 29
Behind Shinbone Alley ........ 37
Elizabeth Street ......... 45
Clinton Court ......... 51
No. 5 West Twenty-eighth Street 59
The Little Church Around the Corner 67
The Grand Canon of the Yellow ...... 73
The Stock Exchange ........ 79
The Upheaval 87
The Subway Bridge Station ...... 93
Manhattan .......... 99
Madison Square . . . . . . . . .105
Gansevoort Market . . . . . . . .111
Edgar Allan Poe's House at Fordham . . . . .119
The Jumel Mansion ........ 127
The Bronx .......... 135
The Willows . 143
CHARCOALS
OF
NEW AND OLD
NEW YORK
WALL STREET
I
WALL STREET
WHEN old Peter Stuyvesant, in 1653, built his split tree-trunk
of a wall twelve feet high, running from river to river, he had
in mind the protection of a few isolated houses fronting a
parade ground guarded by sentries: we have the same dead line to-day,
but it is to keep out the thieves. The wall came down in 1699, and
then the Slave Market and slaughter houses followed, together with
all the horrors which the broom of Municipal Government sweeps be-
fore it.
Up the street, on the edge of the hill, old Trinity arbiter of peace
- raised its front, its shadow falling on the illustrious dead who had
fashioned one phase of the new out of the old, and whose names still tell
the story of the past. Then the years rolled on, and there came the Sub-
Treasury, its own inherent dignity glorified by Ward's statue, and then
along the narrow curb the fight for place began. One after another
huge structures of steel and stone arose; while big swaggering bullies
of buildings locked arms with the clouds, looking down boastfully on
lesser folk.
How he would storm, that hot-headed, irascible, honest old Peter,
could he see it all; and how his old wooden leg would stamp up and
down the asphalt when he found his own stentorian voice, which had
once dominated the colonies, drowned in the mighty surge and clash of
the forces of to-day: the never-ending roar of frenzied men bent on
gain; the rumble of wheels and clatter of hoofs; the hum and whirr of
3
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
countless machines, one great united orchestra shouting the Battle
Cry of the New Republic America's Song of Success.
Out of the din, overlooking the struggle, are, here, and there
oases of silence, where self-contained men sit in carpeted offices behind
guarded doors, armed with pens whose briefest tracings spell poverty
or wealth; their fingers pressing tiny buttons that sway the markets
of the world.
Hedged in but still defiant, the Old Church, undismayed, fearless,
guarding its dead still lifts its slender finger pointing up to God, its
chimes calling the people to prayer.
Oft-times, even in the thick of the fight, men listen; leave their
desks and within the sacred precincts, kneel and worship. Then there
soars a note of triumph that rises above the tumult of gain and en-
deavor, a note that lifts the struggle out of the sordid, a note that
steadies and redeems.
tffc
' ; -- s *
THE SKYSCRAPER
II
THE SKYSCRAPER
THE Demon of Gain and Unrest, that ruthless ogre which
recognizes nothing but its own interest, is responsible for
this, the greatest monstrosity of our time. No more time-
honored treasures, houses, churches and breathing spaces. No
more quaint doorways and twisted iron railings; no more slanting
roofs topped with honest chimneys; no more quiet back yards where a
man could sit and rest. Out of my way you back numbers !
So in go the testing drills, way down into the earth's vitals. Then
the blasting begins. Never mind your old-fashioned, rickety cup-
boards holding your grandmother's tea-cups lock them up in the
cellar until I get through. Now the caissons are sunk -- big round as a
ship's funnel and many times as long. Down they go, slowly slowly
- one foot at a time, the brown ground-hogs digging like moles in
the foul air. A swarm of Titans rush in. Up go the derricks, the
cranes swing, half a score of engines vomit steam and smoke. Then
huge beams of steel, heavy as a bridge-truss and as thick, punched
and ready, are swung into place, and the upward lift begins. Up -
up up into the blue, a gigantic skeleton of steel over which is
stretched a skin of stone punctured with a thousand browless eyes.
When the height is exhausted, that is, when the limit of the
crime is reached the flat lid is screwed on ; partitions are run, dividing
the open space into cells for the various bees who are to toil inside;
the eyes of the windows are glazed, shutting out the air; below, in the
9
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
bowels of the sub-cellars huge fires are kindled, while here and there
the express cars of a score of elevators mount and fall.
Outside this prison of industry, the free; those still uncondemned
-look up in wonder.
And well they may!
The vertical straight line is the line of the ugly. The rectangular
is two of these lines conspiring to strangle beauty. These are funda-
mental laws to the Demon --laws he dare not ignore. Build his
bee-hive on a curve, or a slant and it would sag like a battered basket.
How New York will look when the rest of our streets are lined with
this " dry-goods-box-set-up-on-end " style of architecture with fronts
but so many under-done waffles, is a thought that disturbs.
10
-
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE
Ill
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE
A GREAT triumph this: the master-work of a great archer who,
first, in thought, shot this bridge across the river; never in the
thirteen years of work that followed, doubting his ability to
make real his dream.
One wire at a time : the first carried in a rowboat in the hands of a
boy between towers 272 feet above tide-water, and a mile or more
apart - - 5,268 of these threads of steel; each one galvanized and oil-
coated, before Number One of the four huge cables was completed and
men landed dry shod on the opposite bank.
To-day the huge monster, both legs spread, carries on his flat
hands the hurrying millions of two cities, the roar of their tumult
echoing down from mid air.
These giant engineers men who have defied the impossible are
often forgotten in this our day of satisfactory results.
"Build me a railroad across the Rockies, here's the money"
said a capitalist, and mountains were pierced, alkali deserts crossed,
subterranean rivers caulked or syphoned, and spider-web bridges woven
above deadly ravines. And we lie in our berths, a mile beneath the
snow line in our mad whirl to the Pacific.
"Fasten a lighthouse to a single rock breasting the anger of
the Atlantic" -commanded a Government; and "All's well," rings
out from the port watch, as Minot's Ledge looms up out of the fog.
"Cut a continent in two" read an executive order- "so the
15
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
ships may pass and the West be as the East" - and the day is already
set when the eager hands of the two oceans will be clasped in an eternal
embrace.
Great men these, and not the least of them Roebling, the Bridge
Builder! Take your hats off to his memory the next time you cross
his master-work in a fog, your mind on some trip you made in one
of those big water-bugs of ferry-boats as it crunched its way through
the floating ice, the decks black with anxious people.
16
THE CITY HALL
IV
THE CITY HALL
HE has been there since 1810, this courtly old Gentleman of a
once famous School; a thoroughbred to his finger tips, or his
cornice line, of which he is especially proud.
During all that time he has never lost his dignity nor his fine
sense of the fitness of things. When inroads were made upon his
preserves he did not rant: no man of his class, one with the best
traditions of the country behind him, could so demean himself. To
the vulgar fellow who had insulted him by pre-empting his rear and
aping his style and manner, he has kept his back turned ever since
the very day the ground was broken. Indeed if reports of the scandal-
ous scenes constantly enacted inside his enemy's walls be true, he has
doubtless been glad that he gave him the cold shoulder in the very
beginning.
His only associate was an old chum with whom he frequently
hob-nobbed, a weather-beaten old fellow in ragged brown stone -
(since gone to his rest) who took care of the Records, a most
estimable person even if poor. Had not his own coat, in his youth, been
lined with brown stone ? This fact, indeed, of which he was never
ashamed, had been one of the bonds of sympathy between them.
Always the soul of hospitality, he has in his day opened his doors to
such distinguished men as Lafayette, Edward VII, then a beardless
stripling, Commodore Perry, to say nothing of such functions and
celebrations as the opening of the Erie Canal, the laying of the Atlantic
Cable and the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the City Charter.
21
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
Twice, too, have these same doors been swathed in funereal black;
- once when the great Martyr, Abraham Lincoln lay in State beneath
his roof; and again when the author of "Home, Sweet Home," was
being borne to his last resting place.
In late years vulgar parvenues have crowded in, shutting out his
view, upstarts, most of them, some as much as twenty stories high.
Once his enemy in the rear (for spite, no doubt) sent a gang of min-
ions to scrape his face and sand-paper his beautiful columned legs, mak-
ing gain out of the sacrilege. And yet he has borne it all; he knew
time would set him right, and it did. His old tea-rose complexion
came back, and all the dear lines of the face we love so well shone
with renewed lustre.
Classic old thoroughbred as he is, standard of men and manners,
arbiter of line and guardian of the laws that govern harmony: one
sorrow is his, one from which he will never recover. Every day he
must sit in contemplation of the Mullet-esque, as set forth in his op-
posite neighbor, the General Post Office.
What the old fellow has suffered because of this impudent up-
heaval of stone, only those familiar with his fine Greek Soul fully
understand.
22
CASTLE GARDEN
V
CASTLE GARDEN
A MOST disreputable person on the other hand is this bungalow
of a fort that sits on the edge of Battery Park, as if rumin-
ating on the dismal failure of its life. In its youth no one of its
class was more exclusive, set apart as it was from its fellows at the end
of a bridge. It must have sentries too, and a portcullis; big guns,
and a powder magazine : - - These to defend the Cause to which it had
pledged its most sacred honor.
When these appointments were discovered to be purely orna-
mental, the guns never being fired except in honor of the Owner,
the people became contemptuous, destroyed the bridge and filled in
the intervening space. Then the mortars and siege pieces were
dragged out and sent either to the melting pot or to guard cast-iron
dogs and lead dolphins in suburban parks.
Though his friends stormed and raved, swearing dreadful oaths,
he had to submit to still another outrage, that of having his name
changed from Clinton a most honorable patronymic to Garden,
- one of new birth and, at the tune, of unknown origin.
Then followed the crowning disgrace; the inner circle of the
fighting space was floored over; lights were strung; seats for an or-
chestra arranged and he was given over for a dance hall.
When taunted for his perfidy he threw back in the teeth of his
persecutors the excuse that many patriots had, under stress of fate,
exchanged the sword for the slipper. quoting any number of French
27
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
refugees with which the City swarmed and who, at the moment were
cutting pigeon-wings for a living.
When the alterations were complete, his old bumptiousness re-
turned. He would entertain none but the most distinguished. Thus
it was that Lafayette received a joyous welcome; that Kossuth was
able to set three thousand people crazy; that opera stars could shine
for consecutive nights, and that one political party in celebrating its
victory opened three pipes of wine and forty barrels of beer.
The one triumphant moment of his life, however, came in 1850:
one which came near reinstating him in public opinion, and would have
done so, had he not been too proud to acknowledge his obligations to
Barnum, that Prince of Showmen. Never were so many people packed
beneath his circular roof; mobs besieging the doors; men and women
pasted flat against the walls, a wide, clear stage with flickering foot-
lights awaiting her entrance.
A curtain parted and she floated out slowly gently as a
shaft of sunshine moves, illumining everything about it. Then a
mighty shout went up; roofs and walls crashed together in the tumult
of welcome.
There are a few old fellows still above ground who remember the
scene and who will tell you how her voice soared through the hushed
air. How like a bird in flight it rose, quivered and rose again until
every breath was held and tears from hundreds of eyes blurred the
vision of her beauty. Fat Barnum pounded his white-gloved hands
until he was on the verge of a collapse, and the house roared and
stamped for more, and the place became a bedlam, and so it con-
tinued until the curtain fell.
For years afterward only swarms of emigrants eight millions
of them, made a pigeon-roost of these openings, alighting for a
day only to spread their wings for a second flight. Of their joys and
sorrows no record remains, except the summing up of the size of the
flocks and the directions in which they winged their way.
Should you, however, care to revive one of its old time memories,
sit down under this same circular roof some afternoon when the shadows
28
CASTLE GARDEN
are lengthening, and while you watch the multi-colored fish glide and
flash in the old embrasures, let your imagination play over that wonder-
ful night when Jenny Lind sang out of "a heart full of goodness," and
if you listen long enough you may, perchance, again catch, echoing
through the overhead rafters, the cadences of the old familiar song
that stirred the breathless mob to tears: -
" there's no place like home."
31
BEHIND SHINBONE ALLEY
VI
BEHIND SHINBONE ALLEY
THIS old mansion was built in the days when yard gates opened
on back alleys; when the owner's stables were on these same
narrow thoroughfares and the man of the house could call to
his coachman over the top of his garden wall.
What painful scrimmage was responsible for the name of this
particular streetlet nobody knows no one I n%ve yet asked - - but
it must have been record-making, for it was Shinbone Alley in the old
days, and it is Shinbone Alley now.
The Man on the Corner a garrulous old fellow in throat whisk-
ers, outside suspenders and spectacles, who sells brass stencil plates
to the dry-goods merchants hereabouts, for marking their big packing
cases, and who has lived here forty years, brushed off a low bench
with his apron after I had shown him my sketch, in which he was
greatly interested "both of us working in black and white," -to
quote his exact words: The garrulous old man on the corner, I say,
in answer to my question as to who occupied the old house before the
steam pipe was run through its roof, told me this story, which you can
believe or not as you choose.
"There's a mystery about it, and it ain't all cleared up yet and
won't never be. That small back building you see behind the wall
that looks as if it was a part of the big house, is where he lived. The
big front part was then rented to a paper concern, and that gate was
cut so they could drive in and out of the yard with their loaded
35
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
teams. They claimed the small building too, and pushed open a
connecting door to see what it looked like inside and came bump up
against him sitting in a chair reading.
'"These are my private quarters,' he said, reaching out for a walking
stick, 'and I'll thank you to get out, or I'll have you up for damages.
As long as you keep to your side of the house I'm willing you should
stay, although I don't get a cent of the rent. If you cross that door-
sill again I'll have you thrown in the street. My lawyer will call on
you in the morning and tell you the rest.'
"What happened nobody knows, but the next day they boarded
up the door, and to make sure papered it over flush with the wall so
you couldn't tell there ever had been a door. That's God's truth, for
my father did the papering.
"After a while the paper concern busted, and then the lawyer let
the big house to a printer; and when he quit a straw-goods firm moved
in. None of them knew anything about the door, except the
lawyer, and he never let on. All this time the strange man was
living on the second floor of the back building you can see his
window now if you lift your head and came in and out through the
garden gate there, on the alley, which he kept locked. It's all covered
up with play-bills now, or you could find the old hinges and lock. When
anybody spoke to him he wouldn't answer same's if he was deaf. Once
my ball went inside and I shinned up over the wall and dropped down
among the bushes and come square on top of him crouching down in a
corner looking at me like a cat ready to spring and his eyes like a
cat's too. I stood staring, and then he crept out of his corner, picked
up the ball, grabbed my left foot and h'isted me back over the wall.
And all the tune he hadn't spoken a word.
"Funny thing was that some days you would see him coming out
of the gate with a bundle under his arm, looking like a tramp, and then
next night you'd meet him rigged out in swell togs and white choker,
same's if he was going to a ball. He moved quick too, one minute
he'd be turning the corner of the alley and the next he'd be gone -
like a curl of smoke.
36
?s
BEHIND SHINBONE ALLEY
"Sometimes the cops would watch him, thinking he was up to
some game keeping a fence, or cracking a crib, or counterfeiting.
One of the new ones, just app'inted, reported to the Captain that
he had seen him sneak in the gate near daylight looking as if he had
just stepped out of his carriage, and while he stood wondering what he
was up to, he was out again in a ragged overcoat and an old plug hat
crammed down over his ears. Next day word went around that it was
all right, no matter what he did.
"After my father died I took to watching him from my upstairs
window, or hanging around the corner with my eye up Shinbone. I
always liked something mysterious and this fellow was all that. Some-
times there'd be a light shining through his panes of glass till most
morning, and then again it would be all dark. That's how I kept tabs
on him. One night I see him stop at the corner cake-stand, wrap
something up, creep into Shinbone, and then the light flashed up and
was out as quick. That was something new was he going out
again? or was he short of candles? You see I was young then, and
full of crazy ideas, and believed in bandits and ghosts.
"I crept downstairs, opened the door softly and kept my eyes on
the gate: nothing happened. Then an idea got into my head: I'd
tie up his gate, loose-like, with a bit of string; if he broke it I'd know.
Still nothing happened. The string held, held for a week.
"The next Monday morning a hearse drove up to the front door
of the big house on the street side, and a coffin went in. That after-
noon it came out with him inside, and drove off to Trinity Churchyard
where they buried him close to an old monument with a Revolutionary
General's name on it, so the book-keeper of the straw goods firm told
me.
"He told me too that the man's father, once lived in the big house,
and was a crank and that he had had a row with him, and in his will had
left him the rear building and his brother the front. At that time the
strange man was rich, and belonged to one or two of the swagger clubs
up town. When his money was gone he came down here, living on the
sly, his rich pals thinking he was off shooting, or travelling, or in the coun-
39
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
try. When some of them invited him to dinner, he'd put on the only
decent suit of clothes he had, and go. When he had no invitations he
went hungry. His lawyer had come to see him that same Monday morn-
ing on some business, and finding the gate was locked on the inside, got
the book-keeper to help and the two put their shoulders to the old
papered-up door and in it went.
"They found him stone dead, not a thing in the room but his
bed and his swell togs. These last were carefully folded and laid on a
shelf with a newspaper over them. Everything else he had pawned."
40
ELIZABETH STREET
VII
ELIZABETH STREET
ELIZABETH STREET, between Prince and Houston, is an ill-
smelling thoroughfare, its two gutters choked with crawling lines
of push-carts piled high with the things most popular among the
inhabitants, from a yesterday's fish to a third-hand suit of clothes.
About these portable junk-shops swear and jabber samples of all
the nationalities of the globe, and in as many different tongues, fight-
ing every inch of the way from five cents down to three, their women
and children blocking the doorways, or watching the conflict from the
windows and fire escapes above.
It is the Rialto of the Impoverished, the alien and the stranded.
It is also enormously picturesque. Nowhere else in the great city are
the costumes so foreign and varied, and the facial characteristics so
diverse. Polish Jews with blue-black beards, and keen terrier eyes,
showing their white teeth when they smile; Hungarians in high boots
and blouses; Armenians, Greeks, Chinamen, with and without their
queues, but wearing their embroidered shoes and pajama coats with
loops and brass buttons; old women in wigs, a cheap jewel and band of
black velvet marking the beginning of the part in the hair, and now
and then a girl in short skirt, long ear-rings and flat head-dress, so
graceful and bewitching that your memory instantly reverts to the
gardens of Seville and Pesth.
One looked over my shoulder as I worked, it was the luncheon
hour, and she was out for a breath of fish-laden air a girl of twenty,
43
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
with a certain swing and nonchalance about her born of her absolute
belief in her own compelling beauty, an armor which had never failed
in her struggle from the curb-stone up. She had dark blue eyes and
light, almost golden, hair, caught up in a knot behind, and wore a
man's worsted sweater stretched over her full bosom and held around
her snug waist by a cheap leather belt. She made paper flowers, and
lived on the top floor with her mother, so I was told by the obliging
baker whose front stoop steadied my easel, and who was good enough
to keep the children, in their eagerness to see my sketch, from crawling
up my legs and secreting themselves in my side pockets.
"And she's de best ever," he added in up-to-date New Yorkish,
"and dere ain't no funny business nor nothin', or somebody'd be hol-
lerin' fur an amb'lance, and don't youse furgit it."
I agreed with him before she had passed the third push-cart in her
triumphant march. The china and tin-ware vender made room for her,
and so did the button and thread-and-needle fellow, and so did the pet-
ticoat pedler, each with a word of good-natured chaff. But there was
no chucking her under the chin or familiar nudge of the elbow. It was
the old story of dominating maiden-hood ; another of those indefinable
barriers which, like gray hairs and baby fingers, keep men above the
level of the beast.
44
CLINTON COURT
VIII
CLINTON COURT
^ "iHERE may be worm-eaten, fly-specked records hidden in some
old brass-handled bureau drawer telling the story of this for-
JL gotten nook or there may be, on the walls of our Historical
Societies, properly framed and labeled data and maps showing why it
was that this most modest, respectable court was first elbowed, and
then chucked neck and heels into a corner to make room for once
aristocratic Eighth Street, but so far I have not seen them.
Patchen Place and Milligan Place, and half a dozen others still
nurse their indignities and will tell you how they hid behind their
fences expecting that the upheaval would soon be over and their rights
restored, only to find themselves hopelessly side-tracked and finan-
cially ruined.
But after all what difference does it make ? The old-time flavor
is still left and so are the queer steps that tell of the myriads of passing
feet, and so too are the queerer roofs that sheltered them linking the
past with the present and, almost, without a break; the history, so to
speak, of a hundred years without a single volume missing.
It was raining when I first saw this victim through the wooden
gate shutting it off from the surge of the pavements, and began to take
in its picturesque dilapidation. An old black mammy, a shawl hooded
over her head and clothes-pinned tight under her chin by one skinny
finger, was peering out the first doorway on my left, as I entered from
under the spread legs of the modern house fronting the street curb.
49
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
"You live here, Auntie ?" I called out. All old black mammies are
"Auntie" to me. I learned that when I was a boy.
"Yas, sir, been yere more'n ten years."
"Where were you raised ?" That's another of my opening ques-
tions when I begin to make friends with an old darky. I get the
State, then, in which they were born, and a minute later the name of
the old "Marster" who owned them or their fathers. She evidently
understood, had, no doubt, been asked that same question before,
for she bridled up with : -
"I ain't none of yo' No'th Americans: I'm from Brazil. Ain't
nobody roun' yere like me an' dere's nothin' but colored people up-
stairs and down in every one ob dese houses," and in went her head and
the door closed with a bang.
I was glad. I had come to make a study of black and white, and
the materials were within reach. I passed her stone step, walked to
the other end of the court and took in its salient features.
On either side of a short, narrow courtyard sat a row of low, two-
story, dingy, soot-begrimed houses staring each other out of coun-
tenance, a pastime in which they have indulged since the days of
their youth. Those on the right are served with high wooden stoops
and handrails; those on the left have only squatty stone steps, the
door-sills level with the brick pavement, which explains at a glance
one cause of their social differences. Climbing up each front, as if
determined to be rid of the intolerable situation, fire-escapes mount
hand over hand, stopping now and then at some. window to catch
their breath. Here and there one more friendly than the others, plays
cats-cradle with its opposite neighbor across the bricks, the strings
laden with the week's wash.
At the farthest end, the one opposite the street entrance, rises a
high wall, spitting steam through a pipe on its top edge. This shuts
out most of the light and all of the sunshine, intensifying the gloom.
Not a flower on any window sill; not a green thing growing;
no trees, no shrubs, no weeds. No bit of yellow, or red, or blue stop-
ping a hole in a broken sash, or draping a pane. Even the old pump
50
CLINTON COURT
which has worked away for half a century is painted black, and so is
the single city gas lamp ; and so are the cats that slink in and out -
(born that way, not painted).
Has then the negro, when left to himself, and he is absolute in
Clinton Court, no sense of beauty, no love for flowers, no hunger
for color ? Rent the smallest room of the dingiest attic in either row
to a Latin and the first tomato can emptied would be filled with a
geranium. Why should not the negro do the same thing ? He loves
music, the double-shuffle and the rattle of the dice. All require imag-
ination.
I am going again to Clinton Court when the summer is at its full
and watch the windows, and if there is still no sign of life you scientists
who make a study of such things might better get busy. It is a prob-
lem worth the studying.
53
NO. 5 WEST TWENTY- EIGHTH
STREET
IX
NO. 5 WEST TWENTY-EIGHTH
STREET
YOU might think you were in Venice within reach of your gondola.
Here on these stone flags are lichen-stained pozzos ; cracked
marble seats ; crouching lions ; carved mantles ; soup-bowl-shaped
fountains supported by tailless dolphins, to say nothing of Venuses,
Apollos, Madonnas and Mercuries.
Up the wall of the adjoining house an ambitious wisteria worms
its way through a wooden trellis, just as the grape vines do in Italy,
its leaves clustered around scarred bas-reliefs, coats of arms, plaster
shields, brackets and busts. All about are rusty iron fire-dogs; iron
chests knobbed with big-headed rivets; pots, pans, shovels, tongs,
and the motley salvage of an oft-picked scrap heap.
Half way into the yard stands a low, squat building where my lady
once kept her carriage. This has a wide-open mouth of a door, and
above it two little twinkling eyes of windows peeping over low flower
boxes. When the squatty little building opens its mouth in a laugh -
and it does at the approach of a customer you can see clear down its
throat and as far up as its roof timbers. Inside, under the rafters,
against the mouldy walls, hiding the dusty windows, are old furniture,
stuffs, brass, china in and out of cupboards; miniatures in and out
of frames; prints, engravings, autographs one conglomerate mass
of heterogeneous matter; some good, some bad and some abomin-
able, but all charmingly arranged and all a delight to the eye so har-
57
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
monious is the coloring and so restful and inviting the atmosphere in
which they are housed. Outside are plates, hanging lamps, signs,
tongs, bellows, rugs, nailed up, tied up, plastered up, hung on spikes,
- all ways and any way so they'll stick tight and can be seen.
Again I say I might be within reach of my gondola. In fact I
know just such another place but a stone's throw from the Grand Canal
and at the rear of Lady Layard's palazzo. The difference is that
within the City of the Doges the antiques, especially the marbles,
are carved in a shop at the end of the Campo and soaked in the Canal
over night, sometimes for weeks, to give them that peculiar XV Cen-
tury tone so beloved by our connoisseurs. Here at No. 5, no such
doubt of their authenticity can arise. The Custom House certificate
not only proves it, but renders further discussion impossible.
I hear to my great delight that this No. 5 is tied up in some
way, and that the predatory Skyscraper is held in abeyance. It may
be that there is some flaw in the title ; or a defective will ; or that some
old skinflint is getting even with a grandson yet unborn. I sincerely
hope all this, or any part of it is true. I sincerely hope, too, that the
troubles may continue indefinitely, and that for all time this, or some
other, open air bric-a-brac genius will here find a resting place for his
collection. One twist of your heel from the crowded sidewalk and you
are inside its protecting fence, and not only inside, but away from the
rush and rumble, the snort and chug, the cry of the pedler and news-
boy; out of sight too, of the monstrosities of modern architecture climb-
ing up each other's backs on their way to the stars.
Perhaps the State or City might vote an appropriation to buy it
and keep it as it is. Don't laugh! Listen:
In my beloved Venice there has stood for two centuries on the
edge of San Trovaso, an old Squero where during that time thousands
of gondolas, barcos and lesser craft have been either made new, re-
paired or patched, inside and out. Back from the water is a rickety
building, crooned over by a tender old vine, cooling its parched sun-
burnt skin with soft shadows. Behind this is a white-washed wall and
against it always one or more adorable sooty-black boats, often big
58
NO. 5 WEST TWENTY-EIGHTH STREET
barcos, and over all the haze from the burning kettles drifting down
the lazy canal. For all these years it has been the Mecca of the lover of
the picturesque the world over, painters who gloat over its every line,
curve, tone and shadow as they do over the gold and bronze of San
Marco.
When its last owner died a few years ago, the big flour mill up the
Giudecca pounced upon the site for a ten-story barrel factory. Then,
a howl of protest went up that made each member of the Syndic clap
his fingers to his ears to save his hearing. The next day eighty thous-
and lira were handed over to the heirs.
It is still a squero : my own gondola was repaired there last summer.
Not a single thing has been moved, not even a pitch kettle.
61
THE LITTLE CHURCH AROUND
CORNER
THE
X
THE LITTLE CHURCH AROUND THE
CORNER
THIS patch of green and flowers snuggled close in the arms of the
Great City, should be holy ground to every lover of the Arts.
The views of our Clergy are broader than they were in the
old days when dear George Holland was laid away to rest. Those of
us who knew him, and who love his sons, still remember the sting of
that direct slap in the face when his body was refused Christian burial,
and our indignation and subsequent disgust when all the facts became
known. Let our clear Joseph Jefferson tell the story in his own
words : -
""When George Holland died I at once started in quest of the
minister, taking one of Mr. Holland's sons with me. On arriving at
the house I explained to the reverend gentleman the nature of my
visit, and arrangements were made for the time and place at which
the funeral was to be held. Something, I can scarcely say what, gave
me the impression that I had best mention that Mr. Holland was an
actor. I did so in a few words, and concluded by presuming that prob-
ably this would make no difference. I saw, however, by the restrained
manner of the minister and an unmistakeable change in the expression
of his face, that it would make, at least to him, a great deal of dif-
ference. After some hesitation he said, that he would be compelled,
if Mr. Holland had been an actor, to decline holding the service at the
church.
65
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
"While his refusal to perform the funeral rites for my old friend
would have shocked, under ordinary circumstances, the fact that it
was made in the presence of the dead man's son was more painful than
I can describe. I turned to look at the youth, and saw that his eyes
were filled with tears. He stood as one dazed with a blow just realized;
as if he felt the terrible injustice of a reproach upon the kind and loving
father who had often kissed him in his sleep, and had taken him on his
knee when the boy was old enough to know the meaning of the words,
and told him to grow up to be an honest lad. I was hurt for my young
friend, and indignant with the man, too much so to reply, and I rose
to leave the room with a mortification that I cannot remember to have
felt before or since. I paused at the door and said: -
'"Well, sir, in this dilemma is there no other church to which you
can direct me, from which my friend can be buried ? '
"He replied that -- 'There was a little church around the corner'
where I might get it done, to which I answered: -
'"Then if this be so, God bless the Little Church Around the
Corner,' and so I left the house."
And so I say as we all do "God bless the Little Church
Around the Corner," not only for that one Christian act but for its
well-merited rebuke to the hypocrite and the Pharisee the world over.
I once asked the distinguished author what he understood was
meant by the term "A gentleman ?"
"A man who practices toleration and sympathy," he answered
quickly, his dear old face lighting up. "Tolerant of the other fellow's
ignorance, of his hatred, of his narrow-mindedness. Sympathetic over
his sufferings, his disappointments and his yielding to evil."
Something like this must have been in his mind when he omitted
from his book the name of the Reverend Sir who refused his dead
friend the services of his church. Certain it is that never had his creed
of good manners been put to a severer test.
66
THE GRAND CANON
YELLOW
OF THE
XI
THE GRAND CANON OF THE YELLOW
IN this narrow gulch of a street into which the sun peeps timidly for
a brief space each day, there is stored above and beneath its asphalt
wealth enough to pay the National debt.
Money! Money everywhere!
In marble-lined vaults under the sidewalks; behind bronze doors
guarded by electric bells; inside huge steel globes opened by incorrup-
tible clocks; in bars all one man can lift; in bags (that some would
like to) in bundles held together by rubber bands; in drawers and
on counters, lying loose, handfuls of it. Here and there, poked in
a pigeon hole, are envelopes filled with slips of paper about the size of
a cigar lighter, with one name scrawled on its lower right-hand corner,
and another on its back, both good for millions.
At the far end of the Canon, under a bold needle of steel destined
to prick the tallest cloud (and did, until another of white marble
with the eye of a clock in its point, looked down upon it with contempt)
is another rich vein of the metal. This time it is hived in tin boxes,
- some big, some little, some absurdly and unjustly small - - (my
own among them).
In these deep pockets neither sky nor sun is seen, even the air
is pumped to those who sit and watch.
Midway the gulch, crowding close, squats the Meeting Place of the
Money Changers, men who have won out and who, because of their
triumphant scores, are not only umpires on the rules of the game, but
71
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
arbiters of trade; moulders of the coin of public opinion and self ap-
pointed judges of the Laws of Supply and Demand. These, so to
speak, are the Board of Directors of the Mine, who meet once a month
at its mouth to discuss the diggings going on under their feet.
A few more old landmarks of buildings swept away gashes in
the sky line and their sites built upon to the present height of these
canons, shutting out our light and air, the only thing we get for nothing
- and men will have to carry lanterns in broad daylight to find their
office doors.
What might possibly occur if this craze for financial concentration
in our commercial districts continues, can best be answered by the reply
that a distinguished engineer once made to me : -
" What might occur, you ask me ? Well, of course that is a matter
of figures, of displacement, really, but the probabilities are that if
some instantaneous signal of flash or sound should send each occupant
of all the buildings fronting this or any other of our canons flying panic
stricken for their lives, in one minute's time the street would be
packed solid with a struggling mass of terrified human beings, their
exit blocked by other equally crazed crowds from the side streets;
in three minutes more the pack would be immovable from slow suf-
focation, and in five the mound of bodies would be twenty feet high,
the life crushed out of them by the hundreds who jumped from the
windows."
On thinking the matter over, measuring the width of the gulch
and the height of the buildings with my eye, I have about deter-
mined to remove my small tin box.
72
THE STOCK EXCHANGE
XII
THE STOCK EXCHANGE
ONE pastime of the American public is the manly sport of throw-
ing mud. A shovelful of scandalous mud, a clean white
target and many a reputable and disreputable citizen is having
the time of his life.
We bespatter our philanthropists, our statesmen, merchants, law-
yers and divines. We even villify our presidents this brings intense
joy an d we keep it up long after they are dead, unless they hap-
pen to be martyrs, when we gather up the stones and things we have
thrown at them and erect monuments to their virtues.
We villify our art, our architecture (I take a hand in that some-
times myself) our literature, or anything else about which some one
has spoken a good word. So constant have been these assaults that
the sore spots on some of our victims have become callous. They
don't care any more, nor, for that matter, do we. There is always
a fresh target.
One of the time honored institutions of our land one which has
never ceased to be the centre of abuse, is the New York Stock Ex-
change. Here conspiracies are organized for robbing the poor and
grinding the rich; so despicable and damnable that Society is appalled.
Here plots are hatched which will eventually destroy the Nation, and
here the Gold Barons defraud the innocent and the unwary, by stock
issues based solely on hot air and diluted water. Here senators are
77
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
made; congressmen debauched and judges instructed; even plans
consummated for the seduction and capture of the Supreme Court.
All this is true absolutely true you have only to read the
daily papers to be convinced of it.
There is one thing, however, which you will not find in the daily
papers. It is not sufficiently interesting to the average reader who
needs his hourly thrill.
And this one thing is the unimpeachable, clear, limpid honesty of
its members.
When you buy a house, even if both parties sign, the agreement
is worthless unless you put up one American dollar and get the other
fellow's receipt for it in writing. If you buy a horse or a cow, or any-
thing else of value, the same precaution is necessary. So too, if you
sign a will. Your own word is not good enough. You must get two
others to sign with you before the Surrogate is satisfied.
None of this in the Stock Exchange. A wink, or two fingers held
up is enough. Often in the thick of the fight when the floor of the
Exchange is a howling mob, when frenzied brokers shout themselves
hoarse and stocks are going up and down by leaps and bounds, and
ruin or fortune is measured by minutes, the lifting of a man's hand
over the heads of the crowd is all that binds the bargain.
\Vhat may have happened in the half hour's interim before the
buyer and seller can compare and confirm, makes no difference in the
bargain. It may be ruin, possibly is, to one or the other; but
there is no crawling, no equivocation, no saying you didn't under-
stand, or "I was waving to the man behind you." Just the plain,
straight, unvarnished truth - "Yes, that's right, send it in."
If it be ruin, the loser empties out on the table everything he has
in his pockets; everything he has in his bank; all his houses, lots and
securities, often his wife's jewels, and pays thirty, forty, or seventy
per cent., as the case may be.
What he has saved from the wreck are his integrity and his good
name. In this salvage lies the respect with which his fellows hold
him.
78
THE STOCK EXCHANGE
Every hand is now held out. He has stood the test: he has
made good. Let him have swerved by so much as a hair's breadth
and his career in the Street would have been ended.
81
THE UPHEAVAL
XIII
THE UPHEAVAL
THIS hole in the ground and it is a big one, or was until
they began to fill it up with concrete and stone, furnishes an
outdoor object lesson in the triumphs of skilled labor.
Few of us can see a tunnel being driven through the heart of a
mountain, five thousand feet below the glaciers and seven miles long;
or watch human spiders spin a web of steel across a South American
ravine, its bottom blurred by millions of tons of water churned into
mist, but the units of such deeds are here in this hole on Fourth
Avenue.
The same kind of men climb derricks, work the steam drills and
tend the boilers. The same monkeys in overalls spring from beams
twenty stories above the sidewalk, or, pipe in mouth, drop vertically
hundreds of feet astride of an empty bucket. The same silent lone
fisherman of a Master of Explosives picks his way in search of drilled
holes, his bait box full of sticks of dynamite that would send him to
Kingdom Come if he blundered.
And then the precision of it all: the huge girders dumped on the
curb and chained: a wave of the foreman's hand and up she goes.
Another wave and the boom is lowered, or raised, or swung to the right
or the left. A minute more and she is in her socket, plumbed and
bolted, and so the basket-weaving of steel straws continues. Even
while you look between two suns, really, you can see the structure
grow. Out West a thousand miles west they are cutting the
85
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
stone, but there will be no chipping when it arrives and is lewised and
is swung to the masons. Each piece fits exactly fits.
In a few months it will be under roof, and before the year is out
the sign painters will be putting gold letters on the window panes and
another example of utilitarian architecture, known as the Dry-Goods-
Box-Set-Up-On-End Period will be added to our avenue.
I am sorry not being in dry-goods. I miss the old corner with
its collection of bottomless haircloth sofas, and three-legged repairable
chairs airing themselves in the sun on the sidewalk. I miss, too, their
owner, old Fay, Prince of bric-a-brac dealers, who would welcome
me between his labyrinths of colonial mahogany, glass, old china, and
the scrapings of the country from Georgia to Cape Cod. Even now I
catch the pungent smell of 'his turpentine and varnish, that wafted up
out of the cellar opening on the side street telling of new lamps for old,
or the making over of the new into the old which was quite the same
thing with Fay.
Then again, there are such a lot of dry-goods stores, and such heaps
of cottons, silks, and woolens, and there are so few such old landmarks
as Fay's!
86
THE SUBWAY BRIDGE STATION
XIV
THE SUBWAY BRIDGE STATION
ALONG the spine of the great stone lizard known as New York
City, and below its man-piled coverings, there lie, as we know,
many strange creatures: deadly gas pipes; bloated water
mains gorged to bursting; huge pythons, foul and venomous, fed by
carrion, who dare not face the light; and close under its skin, regardless
of them all, the Hydra of the Subway with its insatiable hunger, its
hooded heads thrust out just above the level of the sidewalks where,
with open mouths and blinking glassy eyes, it awaits its prey.
Singly, in flurries, in swarms they come, massing like flies, the
suction increasing as they feel the snake's hot breath smite their faces:
shop girls, boys, old women, tired brokers grabbing a journal as they
are swept in and down; clay-stained laborers clutching empty dinner
pails; women warm in furs; beggars cold in rags a moving mass of
all that the great city affords of poverty, wealth, misery and work.
And so great an appetite has this huge Saurian that three times
the population of the whole United States, including the Islands of the
Sea, were swallowed up and thrown out during the past twelve months.
More marvellous still is this year's traffic; an increase of seventeen mil-
lions over the previous year; a sum equal to four times the present
population of the city itself.
Strange to say the flies like it. They are jumbled, whirled,
bumped, banged, their bodies mashed to a pulp, and yet I repeat,
they like it. To their joy they have saved six minutes and a quarter
91
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
of their inexpressibly valuable time, those who live in Harlem have
saved nine. That they have no particular use for this increase of
wealth, once it is safely assured, makes no difference. They have
saved it. They even gloat over it, often boast of it, and sometimes
are extremely disagreeable in their remarks towards those of us who
would rather lose a day or a week than be whirled into an early grave
in the effort to cheat a clock.
It is the Imp of Hustle, first born of the Demon of Hurry, who has
fastened his grip upon them. He it was who made the Subway pos-
sible, and then with hellish glee, made it profitable. He knew his clien-
tele ; had seen them grow up ; had watched them gobble their
luncheons standing; devour the headlines of their morning and
afternoon papers between shunts on the elevated; phonograph their
correspondence for the use of the girl in the next room, and run for
street cars. He knew too, what would happen when he pried open the
jaws of the monster and bade them enter.
And the Imp made no mistake. Every day the crowd grows denser;
every hour the grip tightens. Two flags now wave over the mob, the
first bearing the legend :
"The survival of the Fittest"
And the second that of
"The Devil take the hindermost."
92
!
I* ' _ <
MANHATTAN
XV
MANHATTAN
SEEN by day from the banks of either river, it is a city built of
children's colored blocks piled one on top of the other, square
sided, and flat-roofed, with here and there a pinnacle or cam-
panile tower overlooking the group, the whole made gay by little
puffs of feathery steam coquetting in the crisp morning air.
On the rivers themselves, threading the currents like shuttles in a
tangled loom, cross and recross the ships of all nations Not ours,
the other fellows. Huge leviathans; ferry-boats from Hoboken to
Plymouth; high-waisted brigantines in from the Pacific; barks, steam-
ships ; oil tramps everything that floats carrying every known flag
but our own.
All are welcome. Hospitality is our strong point. In fact we
delight in taking second place, or third, or even fourth, if it suits
our guests the better. "After you Alphonse" should have been in-
serted in the Declaration of Independence, to make clearer the clause
that "All men are born free and equal."
For since the date of that historic document we have been keep-
ing open house to all the world. Last year in Manhattan alone we
welcomed and cared for nearly a million of these raw, unfilled, un-
lettered and unkempt dumpings; most of them Goths, Vandals and
Barbarians, eighty per cent, of them at any rate. And so enormous
and continuous has been the influx and to such proportions has it grown
that of our five million of souls almost one-half are foreign born.
97
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
The worst of it is that with them comes the yeast of unrest a
leaven that in the older days worked slowly and in moderation, but
which in these days ferments so quickly that the only check is the
mailed hand of the law. Indeed such gentle reminders as "Pay what
we ask or we blow up the mill," backed by a stick of dynamite, and
"Down with your flag and up with ours," (a red one,) backed by a
dirk, are being heard in every direction.
And this is not all. So busy have we been considering the comfort
of this influx, and so eager to house them, that we have ignored and
lost sight of the one thing that other nations less hospitable than our-
selves hold most dear the City Beautiful. For boast as we may,
Manhattan is not beautiful. Not as Constantinople is beautiful with
countless slender minarets and rounded domes; its fringe of white
palaces bordering the blue waters of the Bosphorus. Not as Venice
is beautiful with its marbles and bronzes, and stretches of silver lagoons
encircled by a necklace of pearls, each bead a priceless example of the
art of five centuries : Manhattan has only its ugly pile of children's
blocks.
No ours is not a beautiful city not by day.
But see it by night !
When the shadows soften the hard lines and the great mass loses
its details; and houses, lofts and skyscrapers melt into a purple grey!
When the glow-worms light their tapers in countless windows; when
towers and steeples flash greetings each to the other, and the dainty
bridges in webs of gossamer dance from shore to shore under loops and
arches of light; when the streets run molten gold and the sky is decked
with millions of jewels.
Then Manhattan rises in compelling glory, the most brilliant, the
most beautiful and the most inspiring of all the cities of the earth.
98
MADISON SQUARE
XVI
MADISON SQUARE
THIS is the Out Door Club of the Over Tired! No dues; no
complaint-box; no cocktail hour: Every seat free.
Of course a certain exclusiveness prevails and extreme care
is always exercised by the Committee of Admissions that no can-
didate is elected unless the hall marks of the fraternity can be found on
his person. Not on his hands and never on his palms: unscarred
by toil. It is his trousers that count, whether new, whether worn or
whether half soled - - the latter condition passing him with high honors
and making him Hors Concours for ever after.
Then there follows a minor test of the number of hours he can
watch a sparrow hunt for a meal without moving a muscle, or the
number of the minutes he can sleep behind a last week's newspaper,
the policeman on the beat believing him to be wide awake, search-
ing advertisements for work.
And they have certain rights these Knights of the Benches -
rights that the ineligible tax payer must respect. A few years ago
there was a revolt against their preemption of these sitting facilities
and several hundred sterilized chairs were moved in to be rented at a
penny each. Instantly the tocsin was sounded, the riot act read and
two platoons and an ambulance carted off the broken heads and legs -
the latter belonging to the chairs. An Englishman from Hyde Park
or a Frenchman from the Bois having grasped the situation in its
entirety, would have laughed himself to the verge of apoplexy
103
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
every park in Europe being provided with such chairs in addition to
the regular seats, but there was no merriment among the members of
the "Over-Tired." The crisis was too serious. Their rights under
the Constitution had been violated --the validity and power of the
document itself imperilled.
The discomfited tax payer showed fight. This time he was armed
with a wide brush and a pot of paint with which he labelled, "These
Benches are Reserved for Women and Children.'-'
"Suits us exactly," chorused the Members, and down they sat
and are there still.
Once in a great while some pale young girl who has tramped from a
sweat shop over by the river walks timidly past the row of outstretched
legs and feet of the Over-Tired to find a vacant seat. Then if a guardian
of the law happens along the nearest bundle of rags is brought to life
by a tap on his shins with a night stick or he is jerked to his feet by the
scruff of his neck should he grumble, and the girl is seated -- but this
is not often.
All these hideous vulgarities however fade and are forgotten when
one loiters through its mosaic of light and shade on one of our early spring
mornings and catches the shimmer of the new leaves bursting into song,
all their little cups of green held up to the kind sky as if they were offering
a libation to the gods for being so good to them. On these mornings
the vistas under their branches are softened by the intermingling of a
thousand tones. Hard lines fade, the rectangular and the straight are
broken by waving branches giving you only glimpses here and there.
Stanford's White's tower becomes a bit of old Spain seen above the
orange grove in Seville and McKim's temple with its pillars and pedi-
ment a part of Athens.
Over all is a sky unmatched in brilliancy the world over.
104
: V;
GANSEVOORT MARKET
XVII
GANSEVOORT MARKET
WEST of its present site there once lay the little Indian village
of Sappokanican, where in 1609 Hendrick Hudson is said to
have stopped for provisions. Dried and fresh fish, no doubt,
Indian corn off and on the cob, besides yams, venison and berries in
exchange for beads and gewgaws: the same kind of bargaining that
would go on to-day, the money standard abolished, and capons ex-
changed for spring bonnets.
Once a market always a market, is the record in most of the cities
I know. Generally it is found in the centre of the town, surrounded
by scraggly trees, and bare of everything except a place for carts and
booths. As the town grows, the bald spot widens, and as the in-
habitants become prosperous sheds are erected, and then bricks and
mortar are laid. When their wealth increases steel and concrete are
piled up.
The present market, by all the laws of logic, should have been
named after the old village of Sappokanican. Doubtless it would have
been had not a slight unpleasantness arisen some two hundred years
later (1812), between the United States and Great Britain. What
people ate and where they bought it and when, were questions of
secondary importance. The point was to let the enemy go hungry, and
a fort was accordingly built on a small tongue of land thrust out into
the river, to the right of where the big ocean steamships now dis-
embark freight and passengers. Indians had become back numbers
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CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
except those on wheels outside of tobacco shops, armed with wooden
tomahawks. Generals, however, were very much to the front, especi-
ally one by the name of Gansevoort, a distinguished officer in General
Washington's army. So the fort was called by his name. In 1851,
when it was sent to the scrap heap and the land was filled in around and
behind it and the present market relocated and built, the name of the
warlike gentleman followed as a matter of course, instead of the more
euphonious and altogether more appropriate one of Sappokanican.
Its old traditions were revived at once, and in the 'fifties men and
women really marketed; the poor filling their aprons, the rich, accom-
panied by their men servants, carrying big wicker baskets into which
fish, game, vegetables, butter and eggs were carefully stowed and
carried home afoot, as far as Madison Square and beyond.
In the 'fifties, too, every good housewife considered it part of her
duty to see her meat properly cut and weighed, a difference of two or
more cents on the pound being of immense value in her economies.
The progressive butcher boy had not yet begun his rounds at basement
doors, nor had the telephone simplified everything for her but certain
startling discrepancies and disclosures at' the end of the month.
This, too, was before the trade combinations of fishmen, butchers
and green grocers made every housekeeper's passbook common prop-
erty at the weekly meetings of the Clan where prices for the day are
fixed.
"What are you charging old Spondulicks for porterhouse?"
"Thirty-four cents. Why?"
" Oh ! he blew in here the other day kicking at your bills and wanted
to try me, so I got to be posted."
It is not the fault of the Clan, it is ours. We have not the time
to see our meat weighed, or to pick out a last week's cabbage or a this
year's chicken at Gansevoort or any one of the other markets where the
open space is filled with carts loaded with farm truck fresh from the
soil, free to whoever will buy, and one third less in price than the Clan
charges. It is the inconvenience, too, that counts. We dare not carry
too large a basket in the Elevated, and none in the Subway, and the
110
GANSEVOORT MARKET
expressman would eat up the difference on what we save or what we
think we save.
Manhattan is blessed on two sides with a marvellous water front.
Every two hundred feet from the Battery to Spuyten Duyvil there is a
street running from river to river. Some of this water front is pre-
empted and out of reach. Much of it can be bought. Were small
markets served by boats, our normal mode of carrying food products
- established on both rivers, say at every tenth or twelfth street,
the Middle Man would be out of business.
113
EDGAR ALLAN POE'S HOUSE
AT FORDHAM
115
XVIII
EDGAR ALLAN POE'S HOUSE
AT FORDHAM
IT is exactly as he left it : a ground floor room and an attic with a
box of a kitchen in the rear; close to the small windows looking
on the street a scraggly fence framing a garden no larger than a
grave plot, and on the side a narrow portico covered by a roof sup-
ported on short wooden pillars. It may have been painted since,
probably has, and here and there a new paling may have been added
to the fence, but that is about all. Everything else tells the story of
its sad past, with the helpless bitter poverty of the great poet.
For nearly four years he and his frail, slender wife, slept in the
attic under the low hipped roof, so low that his beloved Virginia
could hardly stand upright within its cramped walls. And in this one
attic room she died.
During that time all the furniture in the house would not have
made comfortable one half of either of its two rooms. A few oak
chairs and tables, a lounge on which his mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm
"Dear Muddie," -as he used to call her, slept; a chair and his desk
and their bed, with some vases for flowers, a few trifles and a shelf for
his books and manuscripts.
With the gaining of the libel suit against a contemporary, who
had maligned him in print, and the receipt of the meagre sum
awarded by the jury, a few more necessities were added, among them
a China checked-matting to cover the first floor, which "Dear Muddie"
117
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
had always scrubbed on her knees, as she had done similar floors in
their other poverty stricken dwelling places.
When this was spent the pinch again became acute and the poor
fellow resumed his weary tramp once more to the different offices -
not many of them in those days -- 1846 to '49 to sell the thoughts
his brain had coined. When his strength failed Mrs. Clemm would
tuck the thin slips under her cloak and tramp for him. Sometimes
there was one meal a day for the three, sometimes none, "The
Raven" bringing only ten dollars, and many of his poems and criticisms
less.
What this dear woman was to them both can best be told in the
words of N. P. Willis: "Winter after winter, for years, the most touch-
ing sight to us, in this whole city, has been that tireless minister
to genius, thinly and insufficiently clad, going from office to office with a
poem, or an article on some literary subject, to sell sometimes simply
pleading in a broken voice that he was ill, and begging for him -
mentioning nothing but that 'he was ill,' whatever might be the reason
for his writing nothing; and never, amid all her tears and recitals of
distress, suffering one syllable to escape her lips that could convey a
doubt of him, or a complaint, or a lessening of pride in his genius and
good intentions."
How keen was the suffering she tried to relieve is best described
in Mrs. Gove's words as quoted in Professor W'oodberry's life of the
poet: "I saw her (Poe's wife) in her bed-chamber," she writes; "every-
thing here was so neat, so purely clean, so scant and poverty-stricken,
that I saw the poor sufferer with such a heartache as the poor feel for
the poor.
'There was no clothing on the bed, which was only straw, but a
snow white counterpane and sheets. The weather was cold, and the
sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of
consumption. She lay on the straw bed, wrapped in her husband's
great-coat, with a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom. The wonderful
cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness. The coat and the cat
118
EDGAR ALLAN POE'S HOUSE AT FORDHAM
were the sufferer's only means of warmth, except as her husband held
her hands, and her mother her feet."
A short time ago I spent the afternoon transferring the sad homely
lines of the cottage to my canvas. The sun shone full upon it and the
cherry trees that Virginia loved were just bursting into bloom. Only
the dead stump of the big one whose blossoms brushed her window is
left, but others were near by, and while I worked on, my pencil feel-
ing its way around the doorway and window sashes through which
they so often looked; the chimney that bore away the smoke of the
small fire that warmed them; the old tired creaky porch which had
responded so often to his tread, my mind went over all the man had
suffered, and my soul rose in revolt against the injustice and ignorance
of those who had made it possible.
And yet, here is the pity of it, the same conditions exist
to-day.
Worse, really, for in Poe's time merit, or what was considered
merit, found its way into print. Now it must have, in addition,
the hall mark of money. The most successful novel of the past year,
the author's first, was hawked about for weeks and sold outright to
an unbelieving publisher for a few hundred dollars. The author's
second novel brought in as many dollars as the other had brought in
cents, only the begging was reversed, the publishers being the men-
dicants this time paying him a living wage paying him his due.
All true, you say, and has been true since the day Milton sold
"Paradise Lost" for the price of a week's board. And will continue to
be true until the end of time.
Yes! but shameful all the same. More than shameful, when
a simple business letter of Poe's covering a page and a half sold a
short time since for a thousand dollars and the original manuscript
of "The Raven" for a sum that would have made him and his dear
Virginia comfortable all their days.
121
THE JUMEL MANSION
123
XIX
THE JUMEL MANSION
STRANGE, almost human things, are houses.
Each one is started out in life with a special purpose; it may
be the preservation of a period of design; the maintenance of
a family's aristocratic standard, or the housing and protection of an
augmented offspring. Then, like men, some go to pieces from sheer
weakness, some lose their own identities in servility to passing whims,
while others, with individualities intact, keep their compelling dignities
through every change of fortune, triumphant to the end.
Changes many and well nigh overwhelming has this beautiful
house endured in the century and half of its existence, and yet to-day,
in spite of all its vicissitudes it stands out as a type of the best that its
time produced. Its youth began in a blaze of glory, when it welcomed
to its fireside the lovely Miss Philipse who as the American bride of
Colonel Morris an Englishman, entertained here in stately fashion
from 1765 to 1775, side by side with their neighbors, the de Peysters,
the de Lanceys, the Bayards, Van Courtlands and Livingstons. And
a rare hospitality it was, if we are to believe her contemporaries, the
polished mahogany deepened by the penetrating play of candle light
reflecting priceless silver and Spode, the room ringing with laughter as
flashes of wit swept around the table.
Then a shiver of anxiety ran through the country, stopping all
gayeties. War was declared, and over the very same tables where
Mistress Morris had spread her tea cups, maps were unrolled, and in
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CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
the very library where she had entertained her guests, grave men
planned campaigns. General Washington had moved in, and here he
stayed from September to November 16th. A short lived honor, for
the British, flushed with victory, seized the house for their own head-
quarters.
In 1778 a Hessian General with his German staff swaggered through
the halls, and the old house seemed determined to drink itself to death.
The Germans gone this was before the literati of the early Nineteenth
century added their restraining influence, it continued a downward
career, even to letting itself be proclaimed a public tavern, the sign of
the " Calumet House," swinging from its door. Every stage coach on
its way between Albany and New York stopped and made merry at
its gates. Sorry days these, bringing many a blush to the cheeks of
its admirers.
But the fine blood of its ancestry came to its rescue. In 1810 the
Jumels reclaimed it. What went on then everybody knows did at
the time or thought that they did, which comes nearer the truth.
At any rate there was a grand spring cleaning: such a scrubbing,
painting and glazing as the old fellow went through had not been known
in years. All the old cronies, of recent days, were given the cold shoulder.
Some were turned out of doors. -"Nothing shall be omitted to restore
it to its own once proud estate," boasted the Frenchman.
Now follows the period of the raised dais. What tales were told
of it! Of postilions on the highroad as Madame Jumel drove out in
her yellow coach; of routs and balls; of throngs of diplomats; exiled
royalties; banished statesmen, and imperialists, including the three
Bonaparte brothers, Louis, Joseph and Jerome. Last, came Madame's
second marriage, to Aaron Burr in 1833, an escapade which set every
tongue wagging from Washington Heights to Bowling Green.
Although an appreciative literary atmosphere prevailed recalling
its former days, and poets appeared where courtiers had flourished, the
poverty of the house was beginning to be apparent. It was getting
shabby and grey. Worse still, as time went on, the polite world turned
its back, as new faces were seen at the windows, rather disreputable
126
THE JUMEL MANSION
some of them. Eat, drink and be merry, was now the creed, for to-
morrow the front porch will cave in, and the old library topple down
the hill. These were its most disheartening experiences.
Ruin now marked it for its own. Its days were numbered. Unless
some hand were held out, the proud aristocrat would collapse. The
women heard the cry. The Daughters of the Revolution, rousing
themselves, went to its rescue. The City Fathers listened. An appro-
priation was made, and once more its proud doors were thrown wide.
To-day it maintains its compelling dignity and its individuality
intact. Its destiny fulfilled.
129
THE BRONX
131
XX
THE BRONX
1KNOW a grey-haired old lady who once told me that when she was
a child her father often took her to see another grey-haired old
lady who owned a little farm uptown a long way uptown -
where in a back lot there was pastured a cow. One of my old lady's
childish delights was a drink of warm milk from this cow. The farm,
and the cow and the old lady who milked her, occupied the corner of
Madison avenue and Twenty-third street, the present site of the big
white marble tower.
Several important changes have taken place since those days.
Miles of buildings have been constructed; great parks laid out, broad
avenues cut highways for future millions, and bridges thrown over
unfordable streams.
In its frenzied eagerness to bury its teeth in everything within
sight the Great City has here and there run past a quarry as a hound
outruns a fox the game keeping low: a back lot hiding near an
embankment; a tired out brook crouching under an abandoned bridge
or some old Colonial house standing at bay, sheltered by a defective
title. The Bronx or rather one little patch of ground through which
it runs is one of these : an old meadow really lying between the small
wooden bridge and the big new one of cut stone, near the Botanical
Gardens. An oasis of the long ago, is this patch all willows and lush
grasses, with big dock weeds flaunting their green flags ; thousands of
buttercups and daisies; grass up to your knees; and contemplative
133
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
frogs sunning themselves, one eye fixed upon you watching your
next move.
It is twenty years or more since I broke out into hyperbole over
this very oasis and from that time down to the present I have never
ceased to sing its praises. And strange to say in spite of all the many
changes made in its environment, my little patch has been left un-
touched.
What it was when I first knew it can best be told by repeating my
story of its charms published as far back as 1892. What it is to-day,
(in 1912) can be seen in the accompanying sketches. What it will
look like in another quarter of a century when the triumphant city
crushes out its life, some old lady of the future one of the many
children who to-day are gathering flowers along its brink, alone will
know.
"The Bronx is the forgotten,"! bubbled over in my enthusiasm,
"the' over-looked,' the 'disremembered' as the provincial puts it.
Somebody may know where it begins, I do not. I only know where
it ends. What its early life may be away up near White Plains,
what farms it waters, what dairies it cools, what herds it refreshes, I
know not. I only know when I get off at Woodlawn --that City of
the Silent --it comes down from somewhere up above the railroad
station, and that it 'takes a header,' as the boys say, under an old
mill, abandoned long since, and then, like another idler, goes singing
along through open meadows, and around big trees and clumps, their
roots washed bare, and then over sandy, stretches reflecting the flurries
of yellow butterflies, and then around a great hill and so on down to
Laguerre's.
"I tell you that in all my wanderings in search of the picturesque
nothing within a day's journey is half as charming; that its stretches
of meadows, willow clumps, and tangled densities are as lovely, fresh,
and as enticing as can be found, yes, within a thousand miles of your
door. The rocks are encrusted with the thickest of moss and lichens,
grey, green, black and brilliant emerald. That the trees are superb,
its solitude and rest complete.
134
THE BRONX
"But you must go now!
"Now, before the grip of the Great City has been fastened upon it:
- Now, when the tree lies as it falls ; when the violets bloom and are
there for the picking; when the dogwood sprinkles the bare branches
with white stars and the scent of the laurel fills the air."
137
THE WILLOWS
139
XXI
THE WILLOWS
FOR half a mile down-stream there is barely a current. Then
comes a break of a dozen yards just below the perched-up
bridge, and the stream divides, one part rushing like a mill-
race and the other spreading itself softly around the roots of lean-
ing willows through beds of water-plants, and creeping under masses
of wild grapes and underbrush. Below this is a broad pasture
fringed with another and a larger growth of willows. Here the weeds
are breast high and in early autumn they burst into purple asters,
and white immortelles, and golden rod, and flaming sumac."
But I repeat, you must go now.
You may have but a few months left, probably only days.
While I sat before my easel the other morning, they were burning
brush within sight of my beloved willows always a bad sign, meaning
the destruction of the old before beginning with the new. The Evil
Eye of the Dago was already fixed on some lovely dead branches which
had fallen at my feet from the gnarled trunks and were at peace in the
lush grass. They will soon be gathered up; by this time may-be.
Then the fiend with the shears will begin lopping off the twigs and
bent elbows of the live branches; a little truant stream an off-spurt
of the main brook which has always had these willows on its mind,
and has never failed to water them, will be spanked by another
dago's shovel and sent home to join its mother; and the asphalt man
will spread his foul-smelling and bottomless-pit compound in a geo-
141
CHARCOALS OF NEW AND OLD NEW YORK
metric curve; and there will be oval or pie-shaped beds of tulips,
and sloping banks of machine-cut grass coming down to cement walks,
stamped with the name of the contractor at frequent intervals; and
exquisite cast-iron or rustic benches, also at intervals only not so
frequent; and last, and not least, and because of all these modern
improvements, there will be heard the solemn tramp of the park police-
man in place of the hundreds of birds' songs which to-day are filling
my branches.
142
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
1 8 1930
