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BRANCH LIBRARIES

NEW YORK SKETCHES

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

BRANCH LIBRARIES

WEST 23fto
.'ING Dl u

W YC
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8 East 40th Street

CC4

. 10016

On the Harlem River University Heights from Fort George.

NEW YORK SKETCHES

JESSE LYNCH WILLIAMS

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

MID-1 N LIBRARY CC4

8 East 40th Street, N. Y., N. Y. 10016

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK ::::::::::::::::::::::::: 1902

CC4

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CO,',-KI::HT, 1902, BY

CHARLES-icRIBNER'S SONS

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' Published, November, 1902

THE

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Printing iSr" Bookbinding Company
New York

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NYPUBLCUBRARY THE BRANCH L BRAR ES

33333022870782

Crefgljton

N.Y.

T HEW YOSK PUBLIC
^MANHATTAN LIBRARY

8 East 40th Street, N.Y., N.Y. 1

MIL LIBEAEY

8 East 40th Street, N . ^ ^ y<

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE WATER-FRONT i

THE WALK Up-TowN 27

THE CROSS STREETS 63

RURAL NEW YORK CITY 99

THE NEW YC: -IOLII

MID-MANH- 1 . ,!..., L ,

8 East 40th Street, N. Y., N. Y. 10016

MID LiBRAEY

8 East 40th Street, N. Y., N. Y. ]

ILLUSTRATIONS

On the Harlem River University Heights from Fort George Frontispiece

PAGE

% Grant's Tomb and Riverside Drive (from the New Jersey Shore) . 3

Down along the Battery sea-wall is the place to watch the ships

go by 5

Old New Amsterdam 7

Just as it has been for years. (Between South Ferry and the Bridge.)

New New York, 9

Not a stone's throw farther up ... the towering white city of the new century. (Between
South Ferry and the Bridge. )

From the point of view of the Jersey commuter . . . some un-
common, weird effects 1 1

(Looking back at Manhattan from a North River ferry-boat.)

Swooping silently, confidently across from one city to the other 13

(East River and Brooklyn Bridge.)

Looking up the East River from the Foot of Fifty-ninth Street . 15

Even in sky-line he could find something new almost every week or

two 17

The end of the day looking back at Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge.

For the little scenes . . . quaint and lovable, one goes down

along the South Street water-front 19

Smacks and oyster-floats near Fulton Market. ( At the foot of Beekman Street, East River. )

This is the tired city's playground 21

Washington Bridge and the Speedway Harlem River looking south.

Here is where the town ends, and the country begins . 23

(High Bridge as seen looking south from Washington Bridge.)

The Old and the New, from Lower New York across the Bridge to

Brooklyn 24

From the top of the high building at Broadway and Pine Street.

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

The old town does not change so fast about its edges .... 25

(Along the upper East River front looking north toward BlackwelFs Island.)

opposite the oval of the ancient Bowling Green ... 29

immigrant hotels and homes ........ 30

No. i Broadway 30

Lower Broadway during a parade 30

The beautiful spire of Trinity 31

clattering, crowded, typical Broadway 32

City Hall with its grateful lack of height 33

What's the matter ? 34

In the wake of a fire-engine 35

No longer to be thrilled . . . will mean to be old . . -37

Grace Church spire becomes nearer 39

Through Union Square 40

windows which draw women's heads around . . . 41

Instead of buyers . . . mostly shoppers 42

crossing Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street .... 43

Madison Square with the sparkle of a clear . . . October morning . 44

In front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel 45

Diana on top glistening in the sun 46

Seeing the Avenue from a stage-top 47

people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue 48

A seller of pencils 49

It is also better walking up here . 50

those who walk for the sake of walking . . . 5 1

At the lower corner of the Waldorf-Astoria 52

with baby-carriages 53

This is the region of Clubs 54

(The Union League.)

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ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

close-ranked boarding-school squads . . . . . -55

the coachmen and footmen flock there 56

The Church of the Heavenly Rest 57

Approaching St. Thomas's 50,

The University Club . . . with college coats-of-arms ... 60

Olympia Jackies on shore leave 6 1

Down near the eastern end of the street 65

Across Trinity Church-yard, from the West 67

An Evening View of St. Paul's Church 69

The sights and smells of the water-front are here too . . . 71

An Old Landmark on the Lower West Side 73

(Junction of Canal and Laight Streets. )

Up Beekman Street 75

Each . . . has to change in the greatest possible hurry from block to block.

Under the Approach to Brooklyn Bridge 77

Chinatown 79

It still remains whimsically individual and village-like . . . .81

A Fourteenth Street Tree 83

Such as broad Twenty-third Street with its famous shops ... 85

A Cross Street at Madison Square 87

Across Twenty-fourth Street Madison Square when the Dewey Arch

was there 88

Herald Square 91

As it Looks on a Wet Night The Circle, Fifty-ninth Street and

Eighth Avenue 93

Hideous high buildings -95

Looking east from Central Park at night.

Flushing Volunteer Fire Department Responding to a Fire Alarm . 103
A Bit of Farm Land in the Heart of Greater New York . .105

Acre after acre, farm after farm, and never a sign of city in sight.

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

One of the Farmhouses that have Come to Town 107

The old Duryea House, Flushing, once used as a head-quarters for Hessian officers.

East End of Duryea House, where the Cow is Stabled .... 108

j '

The Old Water-power Mill from the Rear of the Old Country

Cross-roads Store 109

The Old Country Cross-roads Store, Established 1828 . . . . no

In the background is the old water-power mill.

Interior of the Old Country Cross-roads Store ill

The Colony of Chinese Farmers, Near the Geographical Centre of

New York City 112

Working as industrially as the peasants of Europe, blue skirts, red

handkerchiefs about their heads 113

Remains of a Windmill in New York City, Between Astoria and

j *

Stein way 114

The Dreary Edge of Long Island City . . . . . . 115

The Procession of Market-wagons at College Point Ferry . .116

Past dirty backyards and sad vacant lots 117

New York City Up in the Beginnings of the Bronx Regions Skat-
ing at Bronxdale 119

Another Kind of City Life Along the Marshes of Jamaica Bay . 121

There is profitable oyster-dredging in several sections of the ci'y . 123

Cemetery Ridge, Near Richmond, Staten Island 126

A Peaceful Scene in New York 127

In the distance is St. Andrew's Church, Borough of Richmond, Staten Island.

A Relic of the Early Nineteenth Century, Borough of Richmond . 128
An Old-fashioned, Stone-arched Bridge. (Richmond, Staten Island) . 129
An Old House in Flatbush 131

XI 1

8 East 40th Street, v v .

* *> N. Y. 10016

THE WATER-FRONT

PROPERTY OF
THE CITY OF /NEW YORK.

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New Jersey Shore).

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THE WATER-FRONT:::.-'

DOWN along the Battery sea-wall is the place to watch
the ships go by.

Coastwise schooners, lumber-laden, which can get far
up the river under their own sail ; big, full-rigged clipper
ships that have to be towed from the lower bay, their top-
masts down in order to scrape under the Brooklyn Bridge ;
barques, brigs, brigantines all sorts of sailing craft, with
cargoes from all seas, and flying the flags of all nations.

White-painted river steamers that seem all the more
flimsy and riverish if they happen to churn out past the
dark, compactly built ocean liners, who come so deliberately
and arrogantly up past the Statue of Liberty, to dock after

NEW YORK SKETCHES

the long, hard job of crossing, the home-comers on the
decks already waving handkerchiefs. Plucky little tugs (that
whistle on the slightest provocation), pushing queer, bulky
floats, which bear with ease whole trains of freight-cars,
dirty cars looking frightened and out of place, which the
choppy seas try to reach up and wash. And still queerer
old sloop 'scov.'t.. with soiled, awkward canvas and no shape

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to .speak of. hound for no one seems to know where and

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carrying you seldom see what. And always, everywhere, all

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ditv and night, whistling and pushing in and out between

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everybody, the ubiquitous, faithful, narrow-minded old ferry-
boats, with their wonderful helmsmen in the pilot-house,
turning tho wheel and looking unexcitable.

That is tht way it is down around Pier A, where the
New York Dock Commission meets and the Police Patrol
boat lies, and by Castle Garden, where the river craft pass so
close you can almost reach out and touch them with your
hand.

The " water-front " means something different when you
think of Riverside and its greenness, a few miles to the
north, with Grant's tomb, white and glaring in the sun, and
Columbia Library back on Cathedral Heights.

Here the " lordly " Hudson is not yet obliged to become
busy North River, and there is plenty of water between a
white-sailed schooner yacht and a dirty tug slowly towing in
silence for there is no excuse here for whistling a cargo
of brick for a new country house up at Garrisons ; while on

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NEW YORK SKETCHES

the shore itself instead of wharves and warehouses and ferry-
slips there are yacht and rowing club houses and an occa-
sional bathing pavilion ; and above the water edge, in place
of the broken ridge of stone buildings with countless win-
dows, there is the real bluff of good green earth with the
well-kept drive on top and the sun glinting on harness-
chains and automobiles.

Now, between these two contrasts you will find you
may find, I mean, for most of you prefer to exhaust Europe
and the Orient before you begin to look at New York as
many different sorts of interests and kinds of picturesqueness
as there are miles, as there are blocks almost.

For instance, down there by the starting-point. If you
go up toward the bridge from South Ferry r block or so and
pull down your hat-brim far enough to hide the tower of the
Produce Exchange, you have a bit of old New Amsterdam,
just as it has been for years, so old and so Amsterdamish,
with its long, sloping roofs, gable windows, and even
wooden-shoe-like canal-boats, that you may easily feel that
you are in Holland, if you like. As a matter of fact, it is
more like Hamburg, I am told, but either will do if you get
an added enjoyment out of things by noting their similarity
to something else and appreciate mountains and sunsets more
by quoting some other person's sensations about other sun-
sets and mountains.

But if you believe that there is also an inherent, charac-

reet>

Old New Amsterdam.

Just as it has been for years.

(Betwee.. South Ferry and the Bridge.)

NEW YORK SKETCHES

teristic beauty in the material manifestations or the spirit of
our own new, vigorous, fearless republic and whether you do
or not, if you care to look at one of these sudden contrasts
referred to not a stone's throw farther up the water-front
there is a notable sight of newest New York. This, too, is
good to look at. Behind a foreground of tall masts with
their square rigging and mystery (symbols of the world's
commerce, if you wish), looms up a wondrous bit of the
towering white city of the new century, a cluster of modern
high buildings which, notwithstanding the perspective of a
dozen blocks, are still high, enormously, alarmingly high
symbols of modern capital, perhaps, and its far-reaching pos-
sibilities, or they may remind you, in their massive grouping,
of a cluster of mountains, with their bright peaks glistening
in the sun far above the dark shadows of the valleys in
which the streams of business flow, down to the wharves and
so out over the world.

Now, separately they may be impossible, these high
buildings of ours these vulgar, impertinent " sky-scrapers ;"
but, as a group, and in perspective, they are fine, with a
strong, manly beauty all their own. It is the same as with
the young nation ; we have grown up so fast and so far that
some of our traits, when considered alone, may seem dis-
pleasing, but they appear less so when we are viewed as a
whole and from the right point of view.

Or, on the other hand, for scenes not representatively
commercial, nor residential either in the sense that Riverside

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New New York.

Not a stone's throw farther up ... the towering white city of the new century.
(Between South Ferry and the Bridge.)

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8 Last 40th Street, N. Y., N. Y. 10016 ,'

NEW YORK SKETCHES

is, but more of the sort that the word " picturesque" sug-
gests to most people : There are all those odd nooks and
corners, here and there up one river and down the other,
popping out upon you with unexpected vistas full of life and
color. Somehow the old town does not change so fast
about its edges as back from the water. It seems to take a
longer time to slough off the old landmarks.

The comfortable country houses along the shore, half-
way up the island, first become uncomfortable city houses ;
then tenements, warehouses, sometimes hospitals, even police
stations, before they are finally hustled out of existence to
make room for a foul-smelling gas-house or another big
brewery. Many of them are still standing, or tumbling
down ; pathetic old things they are, with incongruous cupo-
las and dusty fanlights and, on the river side, an occasional
bit of old-fashioned garden, with a bunker which was for-
merly a terrace, and the dirty remains of a summer-house
where children once had a good time and still do have,
different-looking children, who love the nearby water just
as much and are drowned in it more numerously. It is not
only by way of the recreation piers that these children and
their parents enjoy the water. It is a deep-rooted instinct
in human nature to walk out to the end of a dock and sit
down and gaze ; and hundreds of them do so every day in
summer, up along here. Now and then through these
vistas you get a good view of beautiful Blackwell's Island
with its prison and hospital and poorhouse buildings. Those

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NEW YORK SKETCHES

who see it oftenest do not consider it beautiful. They
always speak of it as "The Island."

For those who do not care to prowl about for the scat-
tered bits of interest or who prefer what Baedeker would
call " a magnificent panorama," there are plenty of good
points of vantage from which to see whole sections at once,
such as the Statue of Liberty or the tops of high buildings,
or, obviously, Brooklyn Bridge, which is so very obvious
that many Manhattanese would never make use of this
opportunity were it not for an occasional out-of-town visitor
on their hands. No one ought to be allowed to live in
New York City he ought to be made to live in Brooklyn
who does not go out there and look back at his town
once a year. He could look at it every day and get new
effects of light and color. Even in sky-line he could rind
something new almost every week or two. In a few years
there will be a more or less even line at least a gentle un-
dulation instead of these raw, jagged breaks that give a
disquieting sense of incompletion, or else look as if a great
conflagration had eaten out the rest of the buildings.

The sky-line and its constant change can be watched to
best advantage from the point of view of the Jersey com-
muter on the ferry ; he also has some wonderful coloring to
look at and some uncommon, weird effects, such as that of
a late autumn afternoon (when he has missed the 5.15 and
has to go out on the 6.26) and it is already quite dark, but
the city is still at work and the towering office-buildings are

THE WATER-FRONT

Swooping silently, confidently across from one city to the other.
(East River and Brooklyn Bridge.)

lighted are brilliant indeed with many perfectly even rows
of light dots. The dark plays tricks with the distance, and
the water is black and snaky and smells of the night. All

8 E -eet, N. Y., N. Y. 10016

NEW YORK SKETCHES

sorts of strange flares of light and puffs of shadow come
from somewhere, and altogether the commuter, if he were
not so accustomed to the scene, ought not to mind being
late for dinner. However, the commuter is used to this,
too.

That scene is spectacular. There is another from the
water that is dramatic. Possibly the pilots on the Fall River
steamers become hardened, but to most of us there is an
exciting delight in creeping up under that great bridge
of ours and daringly slipping through without having it
fall down this time ; and then looking rather boastfully
back at it, swooping silently, confidently across from one
city to the other, as graceful and lean and characteristically
American in its line as our cup defenders, and as overwhelm-
ingly powerful and fearless as Niagara Falls. However
much like the Thames Embankment is the bit of East Fifty-
ninth Street in a yellow fog, and however skilful you may
be in making an occasional acre of the Bronx resemble the
Seine, our big bridges cannot very well remind anyone of
anything abroad, because there aren't any others.

For the little scenes that are not inspiring or awful, but
simply quaint and lovable, one goes down along the South
Street water-front. Fulton Market with its memorable
smells and the marketeers and 'longshoremen ; and behind it
the slip where clean-cut American-model smacks put in, and
sway excitedly to the wash from the Brooklyn ferry-boats,
which is not noticed by the sturdy New Haven Line steam-

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Looking up the East River from the Foot of Fifty-ninth Street.

4TEEJ T

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8 East 40th Street, N. Y., N. Y. 10016 /

NEW YORK SKETCHES

ers nearby. On the edge of the street and the water are the
oyster floats, half house and half boat, which look like solid
shops, with front doors, from the street side until, the seas
hitting them, they, too, begin to sway awkwardly and startle
the unaccustomed passer-by.

It is down around here that you find slouching idly in
front of ship-stores, loafing on cables and anchors, the jolly
jack tar of modern days. From all parts of the world he
comes, any number of him, if you can tell him when you see
him, for he is seldom tarry and less often jolly, unless drunk
on the very poor grog he gets in the various evil-looking
dives thickly strewn along the water-fronts. Some of these
are modern plate-glass saloons, but here and there is a cosey
old-time tavern (with a step-down at the entrance instead of
a step-up), low ceiling, dark interior, and in the window a
thickly painted ship's model with rlies on the rigging.

Farther down, near Wall Street ferry, where the smells
of the world are gathered, you may see the stevedores un-
loading liqueurs and spices from tropical ports, and coffees
and teas ; nearby are the places where certain men make
their livings tasting these teas all day long, while the horse-
cars jangle by.

Old Slip and other odd-named streets are along here,
where once the water came before the city outgrew its
clothes ; before Water Street, now two or three blocks back,
had lost all right to its name. Here the big slanting bow-
sprits hunch away in over South Street as if trying to-be

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NEW YORK SKETCHES

quits with the land for its encroachment, and the plain old
brick buildings huddled together across the way have no
cornices for fear of their being poked off. Queer old build-
ings they are, sail lofts with their peculiar roofs, and sailors'
lodging-houses, and the shops where the seaman can buy
everything he needs from suspenders to anchor cables, so
that after a ten-thousand mile cruise he can spend all his
several months' pay within t\vo blocks of where he first puts
foot on shore and within one night from when he does so.
Very often he has not energy to go farther or money to buy
anything, thanks to the slavery system which conducts the
sailors' lodging-houses across the way. There is nothing
very picturesque about our modern merchant marine and its
ill-used and over-worked sailors ; it is only pathetic.

Those are some of the reasons, I think, why East
River is more interesting to most of us than North River.
Another reason, perhaps, is that East River is not a
river at all, but an arm of the ocean which makes Long
Island, and true to its nature in spite of man's error it holds
the charm of the sea. The North River side of the town
in the old days had less to do with the business of those who
go down to the sea in ships, was more rural and residential ;
and now its water-front is so jammed with railway ferry-
houses and ocean-steamship docks that there is little room
for anything else.

However, these long, roofed docks of famous Cunarders

and American and White Star Liners, and of the French

MID-MANHATTAN I^BAEY

8 East 40th Street, N Y N V

NEW YORK SKET<

steamers (which have a round-roof dock of a sort all their
own) are interesting in their way, too, and the names of the
foreign ports at the open entrance cause a strange fret to be
up and going ; especially on certain days of the week when
thick smoke begins to pour from the great funnels which
stick out so enormously above the top story of the now noisy
piers. Cabs and carriages with coachmen almost hidden by
trunks and steamer-rugs crowd in through the dock-gates,
while, within, the hold baggage-derricks are rattling and
there is an excited chatter of good-by talk.

By the time you get up to Gansevoort Market, with its
broad expanse of cobble-stones, the steamship lines begin to
thin out and the ferries are now sprinkled more sparsely.
Where the avenues grow out into their teens, there are coal-
yards and lumber-yards. On the warehouses and factories
are great twenty-foot letters advertising soap and cereals, all
of which are the best. . Farther up is the region

of slaughter-houses and their smells, gas-houses and their
smells. . . . And so on up to Riverside, and across
the new bridge to the unknown wildness of Manhattan's
farthest north, and Fort Washington with its breastworks,
which, it is pleasing to see, are being visited and picnicked
upon more often than formerly.

But over on the east edge of the town there is more to
look at and more of a variety. All the way from the Bridge
and the big white battle-ships squatting in the Navy Yard
across the river ; up past Kip's Bay with its dapper steam-

This is the tired city's playground.
Washington Bridge and the Speedway- Harlem River looking south.

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NEW YORK SKETCHES

yachts waiting to take their owners home from business ;
past Bellevue Hospital and its Morgue, past Thirty-fourth
Street ferry with its streams of funerals and fishing-parties;
Blackwell's Island with its green grass and the young doc-
tors playing tennis, oblivious to their surroundings ; Hell
Gate with its boiling tide, where so many are drowned
every year ; East River Park with its bit of green turf (it is
too bad there are not more of these parks on our water-
fronts) ; past Ward's Island with its public institutions ; Ran-
dall's Island with more public institutions and so, up into
the Harlem, where soon, around the bend, the occasional tall
mast looks very incongruous when seen across a stretch of
real estate.

And now you have a totally different feel in the air and
a totally different sort of " scenery." It is as different as the
use it is put to. Below McComb's Dam Bridge, clear to the
Battery, it was nearly all work ; up here it is nearly all play.

On the banks of the river, rowing clubs, yacht clubs,
bathing pavilions they bump into each other, they are so
thick ; on the water itself their members and their contents
bump into each other on holidays launches, barges, racing-
shells and all sorts of small pleasure craft.

Near the Manhattan end of McComb's Dam Bridge are
the two fields famous for football victories, baseball cham-
pionships, track games, open-air horse shows ; across the
bridge go the bicyclers and automobilists, hordes of them,
brazen-braided bicyclists who use chewing-gum and lean far

Here is where the town ends, and the country begins.
(High Bridge as seen looking south from Washington Bridge.)

SEW YOBK PUBLIC LIBRA

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8 East 40th Street, N - Y " r

NEW YORK SKETCHES

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The Old and the New, from Lower New
York Across the Bridge to Brooklyn.

Prom the top of the high building at Broadway
and Pine Street.

over, leather coated
chauffeurs with their
eyes unnecessarily pro-
tected.

Up the river are college and school ovals and athletic
fields ; on the ridges upon either side are walks and paths
for lovers. For the lonely pedestrian and antiquarians, two
old revolutionary forts and some good colonial architecture.
Whirly-go-rounds and big wheels for children, groves and
beer-gardens for picnickers ; while down on one bank of
the stream upon the broad Speedway go the thoroughbred
trotters with their red-faced masters behind in light -colored
driving coats, eyes goggled, arms extended.

On the opposite banks are the two railroads taking peo-
ple to Ardsley Casino, St. Andrew's Golf Club, and the
other country clubs and the public links at Van Cortlandt

THE WATER-FRONT

Park, and taking picnickers and family parties to Mosholu
Park, and regiments and squadrons to drill and play battle
in the inspection ground nearby, and botanists and natural-
ists and sportsmen for their fun farther up in the good green
country.

No wonder there is a different feeling in the air up

- . -ic

The old town does not change so fast about its edges.
(Along the upper East River front looking- north toward Blackwell's Island.)

2 5

NEW YORK SKETCHES

along the best known end of the city's water-front. The
small, unimportant looking winding river, long distance
views, wooded hills, green terraces, and even the great solid
masonry of High Bridge, and the asphalt and stone resting-
places on Washington Bridge somehow help to make you
feel the spirit of freedom and outdoors and relaxation. This
is the tired city's playground. Here is where the town
ends, and the country begins.

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THE WALK UP-TOWN

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8 East 40th Street, N.Y., N.7. 1

. opposite the oval of the ancient Bowling Green.

THE WALK UP-TOWN

1HE walk up-town reaches from the bottom of the
buzzing region where money is made to the bright
zone where it is spent and displayed ; and the walk is a de-
light all the way. It is full of variety, color, charm, exhil-
aration almost intoxication, on its best days.

Indeed, there are connoisseurs in cities who say that of
all walks of this sort in the world New York's is the best.
The walk in London from the city to the West End by

way of Fleet Street, the Strand, and Piccadilly, is teeming with

PUBLIC L

8 East 40th Street,

MID-MANHATTAN LJ

8 East 40th Street, N. Y.. N. Y. 10016

immigrant hotels and homes.

No. i Broadway.

Lower Broadway during a parade,

NEW YORK SKETCHES

interest to the tourist Temple
Bar, St. Clement's, Trafalgar
Square and all but, for a walk
up-town, a walk home to be taken
daily, it is apt to be oppressive
and saddening, even without the
fog ; so say many of those who
know it best. Paris, with her
boulevards, undoubtedly has unap-
proachable opportunities for the
flaneur, but like Rome and Vienna
and most of the other European
capitals, she has no one main ar-
tery for a homeward stream of
working humanity at close of day;
and that is what " the walk up-
town ' means.

And yet so few, comparative-
ly, of those whose physique and
office hours permit, take this ap-
petizing, worry-dispelling walk of
ours ; this is made obvious every
afternoon, from three o'clock on,
by the surface and elevated cars,
into which the bulk of scowling
New York seems to prefer to push
itself, after a day spent mostly in-
3

THE WALK UP-TOWN

doors ; here to get bumped and ill-tempered, snatching an
occasional glimpse of the afternoon ( yiper held in the hand
which does not clutch the strap overhead. It seems a great
pity. The walk is just the
right length to take before
dressing for dinner. A line
drawn eastward from the
park plaza at Fifty-eighth
Street will almost strike an
old mile-stone still standing
in Third Avenue, which
says, " 4 miles from City
Hall, New York." The
City Hall was in Wall
Street when those old-fash-
ioned letters were cut, and
Third Avenue was the Post
Road.

The beautiful spire of Trinity

MANY good New York-
ers (chiefly, however, of
that small per cent, born in New York, who generally know
rather little about their town except that they love it ) have
not been so remotely far down the island as Battery Park for
a decade, unless to engage passage at the steamship offices
which until recently were to be found in the sturdy houses

' L1BRAE

8 East 40th Street,

N.Y., N.Y. 10016

J.J.J1

MID-MANIMTAIN L, .,4

8 East 40thi Street, N. Y., N. Y. 10018 J

YORK SKETCHES

of the good old Row (though once called " Mushroom
Row : '] opposite the wal of the ancient Bowling Green,
where now the oddly placed statue of Abram de Peyster sits

and stares all day. (Now
that these old gable win-
dows and broad chimneys
are gone I wonder how be
will like the new Custom-
house.)

Now, the grandmothers
of these same New York-
ers, long ago, before there
were any steamships, when
Castle Garden was a sepa-
rate island and Battery Park
was a fashionable esplanade
from which to watch the
shipping in the bay and the sunsets over the Jersey hills
their grandmothers, dressed in tight pelisses and carrying ret-
icules, were wont to take a brisk walk, in their very low-cut
shoes, along the sea-wall before breakfast and breathe the
early morning air. They did not have so far to go in those
days, and it was a fashionable thing to do. To-day you can
see almost every variety of humanity on the cement paths
from Pier A to Castle Garden, except that known as fashion-
able. But the sunsets are just as good and the lights on the
gentle hills of Staten Island quite as soft and there are more

3 2

clattering, crowded, typical Broadway.

THE WALK UP-TOWJ

varieties of water-craft to
gaze at in the bristling bay.
I should think more people
would come to look at it all.

I mean of those even
who do not like to mingle
with other species than their
own and yet want fresh air
and exercise. On a Sunday
in winter if they were to
come down here for their afternoon stroll they would find
(after a pleasant trip on nearly empty elevated cars) less
" objectionable ' people and fewer of them than on the
crowded up-town walks.

What there are of strollers down here in winter

City Hall with its grateful lack of height

are

representatives of the various sets of eminently respectable
janitors' families (of which there are almost as many grades
as there are heights of the roofs from which they have de-
scended), and modest young jackies, with flapping trousers,
and open-mouthed emigrants, though more of the latter are
to be seen on those flimsy, one-horsed express wagons com-
ing from the Barge Office, seated on piles of dirty baggage
with steerage tags still fresh whole families of them,
bright-colored head-gear and squalling children, bound for
the foreign-named emigrant hotels and homes which are as
interesting as the immigrants. Some of these latter are right
opposite there on State Street, including one with " pillared

IL: PUBLIC

HID-' , ty

8 East jet, N. Y., N. Y.

MID-MANlfe

8 Eastuast 40th Street,

N.I. lOOlff

NEW YORK SKETCHES

of the good

< Row ") op

What's the matter?

balcony rising from the
second floor to the roof,'*
which is said to be the ear-
lier home of Jacob Dolph
in Banner's novel a better
fate surely than that of the
other New York house for
which the book was named.
Across the park and up
and around West Street are
more of these immigrant
places, some with foreign lettering and some plain Raines's
law hotels with mirrored bars. One of them, perhaps the
smallest and lowest- ceiled of all, is where Stevenson slept, or
tried to, in his amateur emigranting.

These are among the few older houses in New York
used for the same purposes as from the beginning. They
seem to have been left stranded down around this earliest
part of the town by an eddy in the commercial current
which sweeps nearly everything else to the northward from
its original moorings. . . . But this is not what is com-
monly meant by " down-town," though it is the farthest
down you can go, nor is it where the walk up-town prop-
erly begins.

The Walk Up-town begins where the real Broadway
begins, somewhat above the bend, past the foreign consulates,
away from the old houses and the early nineteenth century

THE WALK UP-TOWN

In the wake of a fire-engine.

atmosphere. Crowded side-
walks, a continuous roar,
intent passers-by, jammed
streets, clanging cable-cars
with down-towners dodg-
ing them automatically ;
the region of the modern
high business building.

Above are stories un-
countable (unless you are
willing to be bumped
into) ; beside you, hurried-looking people gazing straight
ahead or dashing in and out of these large doors which
are kept swinging back and forth all day ; very heavy doors
to push, especially in winter, when there are sometimes
three sets of them. Within is the vestibule bulletin-board
with hundreds of men's names and office-numbers on it ;
near by stands a judicial-looking person in uniform who
knows them all, and starts the various elevators by ex-
claiming " Up ! ' in a resonant voice. While outside the
crowd still hums and hurries on ; it never gets tired ; it
seems to pay no attention to anything. It is a matter of
wonder how a living is made by all the newsstands on the
corners; all the dealers in pencils and pipe-cleaners and shoe-
strings and rubber faces who are thick between the corners,
to whom as little heed is given as to the clatter of trucks or
the wrangling of the now-blocked cable-cars, or the cursing

NEW YORK SKETCHES

truck-drivers, or the echoing hammering of the iron-workers
on the huge girders of that new office building across the way.

But that is simply because the crowd is accustomed to
all these common phenomena of the city street. As a
matter of fact, half of them are not so terrifically busy and
important as they consider themselves. They seem to be in
a great hurry, but they do not move very fast, as all know
who try to take the walk up-town at a brisk pace, and most
of them wear that intent, troubled expression of countenance
simply from imitation or a habit generated by the spirit of
the place. But it gives a quaking sensation to the poor
young man from the country who has been walking the
streets for weeks looking for a job ; and it makes the visit-
ing foreigner take out his note-book and write a stereotyped
phrase or two about Americans next to his note about our
"Quick Lunch" signs which never fail to astonish him,
and behind which may be seen lunchers lingering for the
space of two cigars.

An ambulance, with its nervous, arrogant bell, comes
scudding down the street. A very important young interne
is on the rear keeping his balance with arrogant ease. His
youthful, spectacled face is set in stony indifference to all
possible human suffering. The police clear the way for
him. And now see your rushing " busy throng ' forget
itself and stop rushing. It blocks the sidewalk in five
seconds, and still stays there, growing larger, after those
walking up-town have passed on.

THE WALK UP-TOWN

The beautiful spire of Trinity, with its soft, brown stone
and the green trees and quaintly lettered historic tombs
beneath and the damp monument to Revolutionary martyrs
over in one corner no longer looks down benignly on all
about it, because, for the
most part, it has to look
up. On all sides men have
reared their marts of com-
merce higher than the
house of God.

It seems perfectly prop-
er that they should, for they
must build in some direc-
tion and see what valuable
real estate they have given
up to those dead people
who cannot even appreciate
it. Here among the quiet
graves the thoughtful stran-
ger is accustomed to moral-
ize tritely on how thoughtless of death and eternity is " the
hurrying throng ' just outside the iron fence, who, by the
way, have to pass that church every day, in many cases three
or four times, and so can't very well keep on being impressed
by the nearness of death, etc., about which, perhaps, it is just
as well not to worry during the hours God meant for work.
Even though one cannot get much of a view from the stee-

No longer to be thrilled

will mean to be old.

NEW YORK SKETCHES

pie, except down Wall Street, which looks harmless and dis-
appointingly narrow and quiet at first sight, Trinity is still
one of the show-places of New York, and it makes a pleasing
and restful landmark in the walk up Broadway. It deserves
to be starred in Baedeker.

Now comes the most rushing section of all down-town :
from Trinity to St. Paul's, clattering, crowded, typical
Down-Town. So much in a hurry is it that at Cedar Street
it skips in twenty or thirty feet a whole section of numbers
from 119 to 135. The east side of the street is not so
capricious; it skips merely from No. 120 to 128.

The people that cover the sidewalks up and down this
section, occasionally overflowing into the streets, would
probably be pronounced a typical New York crowd, al-
though half of them never spend an entire day in New York
City from one end of the month to the other, and half of
that half sleep and eat two of their meals in another State of
the Union. The proportion might seem even greater than
that, perhaps it is, if at the usual hour the up-town walker
should be obliged to struggle up Cortlandt Street or any of
the ferry streets down which the torrents of commuters
pour.

Up near St. Paul's the sky-scrapers again become thick,
so that the occasional old-fashioned five or six story build-
ings of solid walls with steep steps leading up to the door,
seem like playthings beside which the modern building

TH3 ir 7 ^"" - rn

UTTTV ir

JttlD-M

THE WALK UP-TOWN

shoots up on up, as if just beginning where the old ones
left off. More like towers are many of these new edifices,
or magnified obelisks, as seen from the ferries, the windows
and lettering for hieroglyphics. Others are shaped like
plain goods-boxes on end,
or suggest, the ornate ones,
pieces of carefully cut cake
standing alone and ready to
fall over at any moment
and damage the icing.

Good old St. Paul's,
which is really old and, to
some of us, more lovable
than ornate, Anglican Trin-
ity, has also been made to

J *

look insignificant in size by
its overpowering commer-
cial neighbors, especially as
seen from the Sixth Avenue
Elevated cars against the
new, ridiculous high build-
ing on Park Row. But St. Paul's turns its plain, broad, Co-
lonial back upon busy Broadway and does not seem to care
so much as Trinity. The church-yard is not so old nor so
large as Trinity's, but somehow it always seems to me more
rural and church-yardish and feels as sunny and sequestered as
though miles instead of a few feet from Broadway and business.

Grace Church spire becomes nearer.

NEW YORK SKETCHES

Through Union Square.

Now, off to the right
oblique from St. Paul's,
marches Park Row with its
very mixed crowd, which
overflows the sidewalks, not
only now at going-home
time, but at all hours of
the day and most of the
night ; and on up, under
the bridge conduit, black just now with home-hurrying
Brooklynites and Long Islanders, we know we could soon
come to the Bowery and all that the Bowery means, and
that, of course, is it walk worth taking. But The Walk
Up-town, as such, lies straight up Broadway, between the
substantial old Astor House, the last large hotel remaining
down-town, and the huge, obtrusive post-office building, as
hideous as a badly tied bundle, but which leads us on be-
cause we know or, if strangers, because we do not know
that when once we get beyond it we shall see the calm,
unstrenuous beauty of the City Hall with its grateful lack
of height, in its restful bit of park. Here, under the first
trees, is the unconventional statue of Nathan Hale, and there,
under those other trees up near the court-house, I suppose
-is where certain memorable boy stories used to begin,
with a poor, pathetic newsboy who did noble deeds and in
the last chapter always married the daughter of his former

employer, now his partner.

THE NEW YCHS

MID-MANHATTAN I CC4

8 But 40th Street, *.? K ,y, mu

THE WALK UP-TOWN

By this time some of the regular walkers up-town have
settled down to a steady pace ; others are just falling in at
this point just falling in here where once (not so very
many years ago) the city fathers thought that few would
pass but farmers on the way to market, and so put cheap
red sandstone in the back
of the City Hall.

Over there, on the west
side of the street, still stands
a complete row of early
buildings one of the very
few remaining along Broad-
way with gable windows
and wide chimneys. Law-
yers' offices and insurance
signs are very prominent
for a time. Then comes a
block or two chierly of
sporting-goods stores with
windows crowded full of
hammerless guns, smokeless cartridges, portable canoes, and
other delights which from morning to night draw sighs out of
little boys who press their faces against the glass awhile and
then run on. Next is a thin stratum composed chierly of
ticket-scalpers, then suddenly you rind yourself in the heart
of the wholesale district, with millions of brazen signs, one
over another, with names " like a list of Rhine wines ; '
block after block of it, a long, unbroken stretch.

windows which draw women's heads around.

NEW YORK SKETCHES

Instead of buyers . . . mostly shoppers.
II

THIS comes nearer to being monotonous than any part
of the walk. But even here, to lure the walker on, far
ahead, almost exactly in the centre of the canon of commer-
cial Broadway, can be seen the pure white spire of Grace
Church, planted there at the bend of the thoroughfare, as if
purposely to stand out like a beacon and signal to those
below that Broadway changes at last and that up there are
some Christians.

But there are always plenty of people to look at, nor are
they all black-mustached, black-cigared merchants talking
dollars ; at six o'clock women and girls pour down the stairs
and elevators, and out upon the street with a look of re-
lief; stenographers, cloak inspectors, forewomen, and little
girls of all ages. Then you hear " Good-night, Mame."
''Good-night, Rachel." "What's your hurry? Got a
date?' And off they go, mostly to the eastward, looking

exceedingly happy and not invariably overworked.

THE NEV7 YOKK PUBLIC LI Y"

MID-MANHATTAN LIBRARY CC4

8 East 40th Street, N . Y .. N. Y.

THE WALK UP-TOWN

. . crossing Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street.

Others are emissaries from the sweat-shops, men with
long beards and large bundles and very sober eyes, patri-
archal-looking sometimes when the beard is white, who go
upstairs with their loads and come down again and trudge
off down the side-street once more to go on where they left
off, by gas-light now.

And all this was once the great Broadway where not
many years ago the promenaders strutted up and down in
the afternoon, women in low neck and India shawls ; dan-
dies, as they were then called-, in tremendous trousers with
huge checks. Occasionally even now you see a few stroll-
ers here by mistake, elderly people from a distance revisit-
ing New York after many years and bringing their families
with them. "Now, children, you are on Broadway!' the
fatherly smile seems to say. " Look at everything." They
probably stop at the Astor House.

As the wholesale dry-goods district is left behind and
the realm of the jobbers in " notions ' is reached, and the

et, X. Y., N. Y.

NEW YORK SKETCHES

Madison Square with the sparkle of a clear
( >ctober morning.

handlers of artificial flowers
and patent buttons and all
sorts of specialties, Grace
Church spire becomes near-
er and clearer, so that the
base of it can be seen.
Here, as below, and farther
below and above and every-
where along Broadway, are
the stoop and sidewalk sell-
ers of candies, dogs, combs,
chewing-gum, pipes, looking - glasses, and horrible burn-
ing smells. They seem especially to love the neighbor-
hood of what all walkers up-town detest, a new building in
the course of erection with sidewalks blocked, and a set of
steep steps to mount only, your true walker up-town always
prefers to go around by way of the street, where he is almost
run down by a cab, perhaps, which he forgets entirely a
moment later when he suddenly hears a stirring bell, an ap-
proaching roar, and a shrieking whistle growing louder :

Across Broadway flashes a fire-engine, with the horses at
a gallop, the earth trembling, the hatless driver leaning for-
ward with arms out straight, and a trail of sparks and smoke
behind. Another whizz, and the long ladder-wagon shoots
across with firemen slinging on their flapping coats, while
behind in its wake are borne many small crazed boys, who
could no more keep from running than the alarm-bell

40th Street,

. looifl

In front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

THE WALK UP-TOWN

at the engine-house could
keep from ringing when
the policeman turned on
the circuit. And young
boys are not the only ones.
No more to be thrilled by
this delight it will mean
to be old.

Ill

AT last Grace Church,
with its clean light stone, is
reached ; and the green grass and shrubbery in front of the
interesting-looking Gothic rectory. It is a glad relief. And
now in fact, a little before this point about where stood
that melancholy building bearing the plaintive sign " Old
London Street " which was used now for church ser-
vices and now prize-fights and had never been much of a
success at anything about here, the up-town walkers no-
tice (unless lured off to the left by the thick tree-tops of
Washington Square to look at the goodliest row of houses in
all the island) that the character of Broadway has changed
even more than the direction of the street changes. A
short distance below the bend all the stores were wholesale,
now they are becoming solidly retail. Instead of buyers the
people along the street are mostly shoppers. Down there
were very few women ; up here are very few men. This

[CL

3RA11Y

Street,

N.Y., N.Y.

NEW YORK SKETCHES

. . . Diana on top glistening in the sun.

is especially noticeable
when Union Square is
reached, with cable - cars
clanging around Dead
Man's Curve in front of
Lafayette's statue. Here,
down Fourteenth Street,
may be seen shops and
shoppers of the most viru-
lent type ; windows which
draw women's heads around
whether they want to look
or not, causing them to run
you down and making them deaf to your apologies for it.
Big dry-goods stores and small millinery shops ; general
stores and department stores, and the places where the side-
walks are crowded with what is known to the trade as
" Louis Fourteenth Street furniture." All this accounts for
there being more restaurants now and different smells and
another feeling in the air.

From the upper corner of Union Square, with its glit-
tering jewellery-shops and music-stores and publishers' build-
ings, and its somewhat pathetic-looking hotels, once fash-
ionable but now fast becoming out-of-date and landmarky
(though they seem good enough to those who sit and wait
on park benches all day), the open spaciousness of Madison

Square comes into view, the next green oasis for the up-

TEE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

MID-MANHATTAN LiLRAHY

8 East 40th Street, .Y,, >!,

THE WALK UP-TOWN

Seeing the Avenue from a stage-top.

town traveller. This will
help him up the interven-
ing blocks if he is not in-
terested in the stretch of
stores, though these are a
different sort of shop, and
they seem to say, with their
large, impressive windows,
their footmen, their buttons
at the door," We are very su-
perior and fashionable."

The shoppers, too, are
not so rapacious along here,
because they have more time ; and the clatter is not so
great, because there are more rubber-tired carriages in the
street. Nor are all these people shoppers by any means, for
along this bit of Broadway mingle types of all the different
sorts of men and women who use Broadway at all : nuns,
actors, pickpockets, detectives, sandwich-men, little girls
going to Huyler's, artists on the way to the Players' the
best people and the worst people, the most mixed crowd in
town may be seen here of a bright afternoon.

When they get up to Madison Square the crowd divides
and, as some would have us think, all the " nice ' people go
to the right, up Fifth Avenue, while all the rest go the left,
up the Broadway Rialto and the typical part of the Tender-
loin.

8 E

LIBRARY

/ -ot,

N.Y. 10016

NEW YORK SKETCHES

people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue.

But when Madison
Square is reached you have
come to one of the Places
of New York. It is the
picture so many confirmed
New Yorkers see when
homesick, Madison Square
with the sparkle of a clear,
bracing October morning,
the creamy Garden Tower
over the trees, standing out
clear-cut against the sky,
Diana on top glistening in
the sun ; a soft, purple light under the branches in the park,
a long, decorative row of cabs waiting for " fares," over to-
ward the statue of Farragut, and lithe New York women,
wearing clothes as they alone know how to wear them, cross-
ing Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street while a tall Tam-
many policeman holds the carriages back with a wave of his
little finger.

It is all so typically New York. Over on the north side
by the Worth monument I have heard people exclaim,
" Oh, Paris ! ' because, I suppose, there is a broad open ex-
panse of asphalt and the street-lights are in a cluster, but it
seems to me to be as New Yorkish as New York can be.
It has an atmosphere distinctively its own so distinctly its
own that many people, as I tried to say on an earlier page,

THE WALK UP-TOWN

A seller of pencils.

miss it entirely, simply be-
cause they are looking for
and failing to find the at-
mosphere of some other
place.

Now this last lap of the
walk from green Madison
Square and the new Mar-
tin's up the sparkling ave-
nue to the broad, bright
Plaza at the Park entrance,
where the brightly polished hotels look down at the driving,
with their awnings flapping and flags out straight makes
the most popular part of all the walk.

This is the land of liveried servants and jangling harness,
far away, or pretending to be, from work and worry ; this
is where enjoyment is sought and vanity let loose and that,
with the accompanying glitter and glamour, is always more
interesting to the great bulk of humanity.

It is also better walking up here. The pavements are
cleaner now and there is more room upon them. A man
could stand still in the middle of the broad, smooth walk
and look up in the air without collecting a crowd instanta-
neously. You can talk to your companion and hear the
reply since the welcome relief of asphalt.

: PUBLIC LJ

. LIBRARY
g East 40th Street, N.Y, N.Y. 10016

NEW YORK SKETCHES

It is also better walking up here.

Here can be seen hun-
dreds of those who walk for
the sake of walking, not
only at this hour but all day
long. In the morning,
large, prosperous - looking
New Yorkers with side-
whiskers and well-fed bod-
ies - - and, unintentionally,
such amusing expressions,
sometimes - - walking part
way, at least, down to business, with partly read newspapers
under their arms; while in the opposite direction go young
girls, slender, erect, with hair in a braid and school-books
under their arms and well-prepared lessons.

Then come those that walk at the convenience of dogs,
attractive or kickable, and a little later the close-ranked
boarding-school squads and the cohorts of nurse-maids with
baby-carriages four abreast, charging everyone off the side-
walk. Next come the mothers of the babies and their
aunts, setting out for shopping, unless they have gone to

ride in the Park, and for Guild Meetings and Reading Clubs
and Political Economy Classes and Heaven knows what
other important morning engagements, ending, perhaps,
with a visit to the nerve-specialist.

And so on throughout the morning and afternoon and
evening hours, each with its characteristic phase, until the

THE WALK UP-TOWN

those who walk for the sake of walking.

last late theatre-party has
gone home, laughing and
talking, from supper at
Sherry's or the Waldorf-
Astoria; the last late bach-
elor has left the now quiet
club ; the rapping of his
cane along the silent avenue
dies away down an echoing
side-street ; a n d a lonely
policeman nods in the
shadow of the church gate-post. Suddenly the earliest milk-
wagon comes jangling up from the ferry ; then dawn comes
up over the gas-houses along East River and it all begins
over again.

But the most popular and populous time of all is the
regular walking-home hour, not only for those who have
spent the day down toward the end of the island at work,
but for those w T ho have no more serious business to look
after than wandering from club to club drinking cocktails,
or from house to house drinking tea.

All who take the walk regularly meet many of the same
ones every day, not only acquaintances, but others whom we
somehow never see in any other place, but learn to know
quite well, and we wonder who they are and they wonder
who we are, I suppose. Pairs of pink-faced old gentlemen,
walking arm-in-arm and talking vigorously. Contented

8 E

. 7.

NEW YORK SKETCHES

At the lower corner of the Waldorf-Astoria.

young couples who look at
the old furniture in the
antique-shop windows and
who are evidently married,
and other younger couples
who evidently soon will be,
and see nothing, not even
their friends. Intent-
browed young business men
with newspapers under
their arms ; governesses out
with their charges ; bevies of fluffy girls with woodcock
eyes, especially on matinee day with programmes in their
hands, talking gushingly.

It is a sort of a club, this walking-up-the-avenue crowd;
and each member grows to expect certain other members at
particular points in the walk, and is rather disappointed
when, for instance, the old gentleman with the large nose is
not with his daughter this evening. " What can be the
matter ? ' the rest of us ask each other, seeing her alone.

There is one man, the disagreeable member of the
club, a bull-frog-looking man of middle age with a Ger-
manic face and beard, a long stride, and a tightly buttoned
walking-coat (I'm sure he's proud of his chest), who comes
down when we are on the way up and gets very indignant
every time we happen to be late. His scowl says, as plainly
as this type, " What are you doing way down here by the

5 2

THE WALK UP-TOWN

with baby-carriages.

Reform Club ? You know
you ought to be passing the
Cathedral by this time ! "

And the worst of it is, we
always do feel ashamed,
and I'm afraid he sees it.

This mile and a half
from where Flora McFlim-
sey lived to the beginning
of the driving in the Park
is not the staid, sombre, provincial old Fifth Avenue which
Flora McFlimsey knew. Up Fifth Avenue to the Park
New York is a world-city.

Not merely have so many of the brown-stone dwellings,
with their high stoops and unattractive impressiveness, been
turned over to business or pulled down altogether to make
room for huge, hyphenated hotels, but the old spirit of the
place itself has been turned out ; the atmosphere is different.

The imported smartness of the shops, breeches makers
to His Royal Highness So-and-So, and millinery establish-
ments with the same Madame Luciles and Mademoiselle
Lusettes and high prices, that have previously risen to fame
in Paris and London, together with the numerous clubs and
picture-galleries, all furnish local color; but it is the people
themselves that you see along the streets, the various lan-
guages they speak, their expression of countenance, the way

NEW YORK SKETCHES

This is the region of clubs. (The Union League.)

they hold themselves, the
manner of their servants
in a word, it is the atmos-
phere of the spot that
makes you feel that it is
not a mere metropolis, but
along this one strip at least
our New York is a cos-
mopolis.

And the Walk-Up-town
hour is the best time to ob-
serve it, when all the world is driving or walking home from
various duties and pleasures.

There, on that four-in-hand down from Westchester
County comes a group of those New Yorkers who, unwill-
ingly or otherwise, get their names so often in the papers.
The lackey stands up and blows the horn and they manage
very well to endure the staring of those on the sidewalks.

Here, in the victoria behind them, is a woman who
worships them. She would give many of her husband's
new dollars to be up there too, though pretending not to see
the drag. See how she leans back in the cushions and tries
to prop her eyebrows up, after the manner of the Duchess
she once saw in the Row. She succeeds fairly well, too, if
only her husband wouldn't spoil it by crossing his legs and
exposing his socks.

Here are other women with sweet, artless faces who do

Street,

<4
. tnnta

THE WALK UP-TOWN

close-ranked boarding-school squads.

not seem to be strenuous or
spoiled (as yet) by the world
they move in, and these are

i *

the most beautiful women
in all the world ; some in
broughams (as one popular
story-writer invariably puts
his heroines), or else walk-
ing independently with an
interesting gait.

Here, in that landau,
comes the latest foreign-titled visitor, urbane and thought-
fully attentive to all that his friends are saying and pointing
out to him. And here is a bit of color, some world-exam-
ining, tired-eyed Maharajah, with silk clothes or was it only
one of the foreign consuls who drive along here every day.

There goes a fashionable city doctor, who has a high
gig, and correspondingly high prices, hurrying home for his
office hours. Surely, it would be more comfortable to get
in and out of a low phaeton ; this vehicle is as high as that
loud, conspicuous, advertising florist's wagon can it be for
the same reason ?

Here in that grinding automobile come a man and two
women on their way to an East Side table d'hote, to see
Bohemia, as they think ; see how reckless and devilish they
look by anticipation ! Up there on that 'bus are some peo-
ple from the country, real people from the real country, and

K.Y., N.Y. 10016

NEW YORK SKETCHES

the coachmen and footmen flock there.

their mouths are open and
they don't care. They are
having much more pleasure
out of their trip than the
self-conscious family group
entering that big gilded
hotel, whose windows are
constructed for seeing in as
well as out (and that is
another way of advertis-
ing)-
Here comes a prominent citizen outlining his speech on

his way home to dress for the great banquet to-night, for
he is a well-known after-dinner orator, and during certain
months of the year never has a chance to dine at home with
his family. Suppose, after all, he fails of being nominated !

Here come a man and his wife walking down to a well-
known restaurant early, so that he will have plenty of time
to smoke at the table and she to get comfortably settled at
the theatre with the programme folded before the curt ; n
rises ; such a sensible way. He is not prominent at all, but
they have a great deal of quiet happiness out of living, these
two.

And there goes the very English comedian these two are
to see in Pinero's new piece after dinner, though they did
not observe him, to his disappointment. It is rather late for
an actor to be walking down to his club to dine, but he is

The Church of the Heavenly Rest.

THE WALK UP-TOWN

the star and doesn't come on
until the end of the first act,
and his costume is merely
that same broad-shouldered
English-cut frock coat he
now has on. We, how-
ever, must hurry on.

Because it keeps the
eyes so busy, seeing all the
people that pass, one block
of buildings seems very much like another the first few times
the new-comer takes this walk, except, of course, for con-
spicuous landmarks like that of the new library on the site
of the late reservoir or the Arcade on the site of the old
Windsor Hotel, with its ghastly memories ; but after awhile
all the blocks begin to seem very different ; not only the
one where you saw a boy on a bicycle run down and killed,
or where certain well-known people live, but the blocks
formerly considered monotonous. There are volumes of
stories along the way. Down Twenty-ninth Street can be
seen, so near the avenue and yet so sequestered, the Church of
the Transfiguration, as quaint and low and toy-like as a stage-
setting, ever blessed by stage-people for the act which made
the Little Church Around the Corner known to everyone, and
by which certain pharisees were taught the lesson they should
have learned from the parable in their New Testament.

NEW YORK SKETCHES

Farther up is a church of another sort, where Europeans
of more or less noble blood marry American daughters of
acknowledged solvency, while the crowd covers the side-
Walks and neighboring house-steps. Here, consequently,
other people's children come to be married, though neither,
perhaps, attended this church before the rehearsal, and get
quite a good deal about it in the society column too, though,
to tell the truth, they had hoped that the solemn union
of these two souls would appropriately call forth more
publicity. Shed a tear for them in passing. There are
many similar disappointments in life along this thorough-
fare.

Farther back we passed what a famous old rich man
intended for the finest house in New York, and it has thus
far served chiefly, as a marble moral. Its brilliance is dingy
now, its impressiveness is gone, and its grandeur is some-
thing like that of a Swiss chalet at the base of a mountain
since the erection across the street of an overpowering, glit-
tering hotel.

This is the region of clubs ; they are more numerous
than drug-stores, as thick as florists' shops. But it seems
only yesterday that a certain club, in moving up beyond
Fortieth Street, was said to be going ruinously far up-town.
Now nearly all the well-known clubs are creeping farther
and farther along, even the old Union Club, which for long
pretended to enjoy its cheerless exclusiveness down at the
corner of Twenty-first Street, stranded among piano-makers

THE WALK UP-TOWN

Approaching St. Thomas's.

and publishers, and then with a leap and a bound went up
to Fiftieth Street to build its bright new home.

Soon the new, beautiful University Club at Fifty-fourth
Street, with the various college coats of arms on its walls,
which never fail to draw attention from the out-of-town
visitors on 'bus-tops, will not seem to be very far up-town,
and by and by even the great, white Metropolitan will not
be so much like a lonely iceberg opposite the Park en-
trance. I wonder if anyone knows the names of them all ;
there always seem to be others to learn about. Also one
learns in time that two or three houses which for a long
time were thought to be clubs are really the homes of
former mayors, receiving from the city, according to the
old Dutch custom, the two lighted lamps for their door-
ways. This section of the avenue where, in former years,
were well-known rural road-houses along the drive, is once

NEW YORK SKETCHES

more becoming, since the
residence regime is over, the
region of famous hostelries
of another sort.

There is just one of the
old variety left, and it,
strangely enough, is within
a few feet of two of the
most famous restaurants in
America the somewhat

The University Club . . . with college coats of arms. j -i , ,

quaint and quite dirty old

Willow Tree Cottage ; named presumably for the tough
old willow-tree which still persistently stands out in front,
not seeming to mind the glare and stare of the tall elec-
tric lights any more than the complacent old tumble-
down frame tavern itself resents the proximity of Delmon-
ico's and Sherry's, with whom it seems to fancy itself to be
in bitter but successful rivalry for do not all the coachmen
and footmen rlock there during the long, wet waits of
winter nights, while the dances are going on across at
Sherry's and Delmonico's ? Business is better than it has
been for years.

In time, even the inconspicuous houses that formerly
seemed so much alike become differentiated and, like the
separate blocks, gain individualities of their own, though
you may never know who are the owners. They mean

something to you, just as do so many of the regular up-town

1
i I

1 -

THE WALK UP-TOWN

Olympia Jackies on shore leave.

walkers whose names you

do not know ; fine old com-

fortable places many of

them are, even though the

architects of their day did

try hard to make them un-

comfortable with high,

steep steps and other absurd-

ities. When a " For Sale '

sign comes to one of these

you feel sorry, and finally

when one day in your walk up-town you see it irrevocably

going the way of all brick, with a contractor's sign out in front,

blatantly boasting of his wickedness, you resent it as a per-

sonal loss.

It seems all wrong to be pulling down those thick
walls; exposing the privacy of the inside of the house, its
arrangement of rooms and fireplaces, and the occupant's taste
in color and wall decorations. Two young women who take
the walk up-town always look the other way when they pass
this sad display ; they say it's unfair to take advantage of the
house. Soon there will be a deep pit there with puffing
derricks, the sidewalk closed, and show-bills boldly scream-
ing. And by the time we have returned from the next so-
journ out of town there will be an office-building of ever-
so-many stories or another great hotel. Already the sign
there will tell about it.

61 **-

East 40th Street, ,.,,

NEW YORK SKETCHES

You quicken your pace as you draw near the Park ; some
of the up-town walkers who live along here have already
reached the end of their journey and are running up the
steps taking out door-keys. The little boy in knickerbock-
ers who seems responsible for lighting Fifth Avenue has
already begun his zigzag trip along the street ; soon the
long double rows of lights will seem to meet in perspective.
A few belated children are being hurried home by their
maids from dancing-school ; their white frocks sticking out
beneath their coats gleam in the halt light. Cabs and car-
riages with diners in them go spinning by, the coachmen
whip up to pass ahead of you at the street-crossing ; you
catch a gleam of men's shirt-bosoms within and the light
rluffiness of women, with the perfume of gloves. Fewer
people are left on the sidewalks now those that are look
at their watches. The sun is well set by the time you
reach the Plaza, but down Fifty-ninth Street you can see
long bars of after-glow across the Hudson.

In the half-dark, under the Park trees, comes a group
of Italian laborers ; their hob - nailed shoes clatter on the
cement-walk, their blue blouses and red neckerchiefs stand
out against the almost black of the trees ; they, too, are
walking home for the night. The Walk Up-town is fin-
ished and the show is over for to-day.

THE CROSS STREETS

iY CCd

8 East 40th Street, . N. Y., N. T. 10016

THE RE

MD-M1KL N L_1L,;</
8 East 40th Street, N . Y . ? N _ y

Down near the eastern end of the street.

THE CROSS STREETS

A CITY should be laid out like a golf links ; except for
an occasional compromise in the interest of art or
expediency it should be allowed to follow the natural topog-
raphy of the country.

But this is not the way the matter was regarded by the
commission appointed in 1807 to layout the rural regions
beyond New York, which by that time had grown up to
the street now called Houston, and then called North Street,
probably because it seemed so far north though, to be sure,
there were scattered hamlets and villages, with remembered
and forgotten names, here and there, all the way up to the

AKY
8 East 40th Street, N. y. ? N- y~

NEW YORK SKETCHES

historic town of Haarlem. The commissioners saw fit to
mark off straight street after shameless straight street with
the uncompromising regularity of a huge foot-ball field, and
gave them numbers like the white five-yard lines, instead of
names. They paid little heed to the original arrangements
of nature, which had done very well by the island, and still
less to man's previous provisions, spontaneously made along
the lines of least resistance except, notably, in the case of
Greenwich, which still remains whimsically individual and
village-like despite the attempt to swallow it whole by the
" new " city system.

This plan, calling for endless grading and levelling, re-
mains to this day the official city chart as now lived down
to in the perpendicular gorges cut through the hills of solid
rock seen on approaching Manhattan Field ; but the com-
missioners' marks have not invariably been followed, or
New York would have still fewer of its restful green spots
to gladden the eye, nor even Central Park, indeed, for that
space also is checkered in their chart with streets and ave-
nues as thickly as in the crowded regions above and below it.

However, anyone can criticise creative work, whether it
be the plan of a play or a city, but it is difficult to create.
Not many of us to-day who complacently patronize the hon-
orable commissioners would have made a better job of it if
we had lived at that time and had been consulted. For at
that time, we must bear in mind, even more important for-
eign luxuries than golf were not highly regarded in Amer-

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N.Y., N.Y. 1

NEW YORK SKETCHES

ica, and America had quite recently thrown off a foreign
power. That in itself explains the matter. Our country
was at the extreme of its reaction from monarchical ideals,
and democratic simplicity was running into the ground. In
our straining to be rid of all artificiality we were ousting
art and beauty too. It was so in most parts of our awkward
young nation ; but especially did the materialistic tendencv
of this dreary disagreeable period manifest itself here in com-
mercial New York, where Knickerbocker families were
lopping the " Vans ' off their names to the amusement of
contemporaneous aristocracy in older, more conservative
sections of the country, and in some cases to the sincere
regret of their present-day descendants.

Now, the present-day descendants have, in some in-
stances, restored the original spelling on their visiting cards ;
in other cases they have consoled themselves with hyphens,
and most of them, it is safe to say, are bravely recovering
from the tendency to over-simplicity. But the present-day
city corporation of Greater New York could not, if it so
desired, put a Richmond Hill back where it formerly stood,
southwest of Washington Square and skirted by Minetta
River any more than it can bring to life Aaron Burr and
the other historical personages who at various times occu-
pied the hospitable villa which stood on the top of it and
which is also gone to dust. They cannot restore the Collect
Pond, which was filled up at such great expense, and covered

by the Tombs prison and which, it is held by those who

68
JRY

,iiABY CC4

8 East 40ft Street, N - Y "

An Evening View of St. Paul's Church.

3LIO LIBRAS*

LioRAKY CC4

N.Y.,N.Y. 10016

NEW YORK SKETCHES

ought to know, would have made an admirable centre of a
fine park much needed in that section, as the city has since
learned. They cannot re-establish Love Lane, which used
to lead from the popular Bloomingdale road (Broadway),
nearly through the site of the building where this book is
published, and so westward to Chelsea village.

They wanted to be very practical, those commissioners
of 1807. They prided themselves upon it. Naturally they
did not fancy eccentricities of landscape and could not tole-
rate sentimental names. " Love Lane ? What nonsense,"
said these extremely dignified and quite humorless offi-
cials ; "this is to be Twenty-first Street." They wanted to
be very practical, and so it seems the greater pity that with
several years of dignified deliberation they were so unpracti-
cal as to make that notorious mistake of providing posterit/
with such a paucity of thoroughfares in the directions in
which most of the traffic was bound to flow that is, up and
down, as practical men might have foreseen, and of running
thick ranks of straight streets, as numerously as possible,
across the narrow island from river to river, where but few
were needed ; thus causing the north and south thorougr -
fares, which they have dubbed avenues, "to be swamped with
heterogeneous traffic, complicating the problem for later-day
rapid transit, giving future generations another cause for crit-
icism, and furnishing a set of cross streets the like of which
cannot be found in any other city of the world.

THE CROSS STREETS

THESE are the streets which visitors to New York
always remark; the characteristic cross streets of the typical
up-town region of long regular rows of rectangular resi-

The sights and smells of the water-front are here too.

dences that look so much alike, with steep similar steps
leading up to sombre similar doors and a doctor's sign in
every other window. Bleak, barren, echoing streets where
during the long, monotonous mornings " rags-an-bot'l ' ' are
called for, and bananas and strawberries are sold from
wagons by aid of resonant voices, and nothing else is heard

NEW YORK SKETCHES

except at long intervals the welcome postman's whistle or
the occasional slamming of a carriage door. Meantime the
sun gets around to the north side of the street, and the air-
ing of babies and fox-terriers goes on, while down at the
corner one elevated train after another approaches, roars, and
rumbles away in the distance all day long until at last the
men begin coming home from business. These are the or-
dinary unromantic streets on which live so few New York-
ers in fiction (it is so easy to put them on the Avenue or
Gramercy Park or Washington Square), but on which most
of them seem to live in real life. A slice of all New York
with all its layers of society and all its mixed interests may
be seen in a walk along one of these typical streets which
stretch across the island as straight and stiff as iron grooves
and waste not an inch in their progress from one river, out
into which they have gradually encroached, to the other
river into which also they extend. It is a short walk, the
island is so narrow.

Away over on the ragged eastern edge of the city it
starts, out of a ferry-house or else upon the abrupt water-
front with river waves slapping against the solid bulwark.
Here are open, free sky, wide horizon, the smell of the
water, or else of the neighboring gas-house, brisk breezes
and sea-gulls flapping lazily. The street's progress begins
between an open lot where rival gangs of East Side boys
meet to fight, on one side, and, on the other, a great

roomy lumber-yard, with a very small brick building for

An Old Landmark on the Lower West Side.
(Junction of Canal and Laight Streets.)

.IUBY

N.Y., N.Y. 1001*

NEW YORK SKETCHES

an office. A dingy saloon, of course, stands on the corner
of the first so-called avenue. Away over here the avenues
have letters instead of numbers for names. Across the way
and it is easily crossed, for on some of these remote
thoroughfares the traffic is so scarce that occasional blades
of grass come up between the cobble-stones is a weather-
boarded and weather-beaten old house of sad mien, whose
curtainless gable windows stare and stare out toward the
river, thinking of other days. . . . Some warehouses
and a factory or two are usually along here, with buzz-
saws snarling ; then another lettered avenue or two and
the first of the elevated railroads roars overhead. This is
now several blocks nearer the splendor of Fifth Avenue, but
the neighborhood does not look it, for here is the thick of
the tenement district, with dingy fire-escapes above, and be-
low in the street, bumping against everyone, thousands of
city children, each of them with at least one lung. The
traffic is more crowded now, the street darker, the air not so
good. Above are numerous windows showing the subdi-
visions where many families - live very comfortably and
happily in numerous cases ; you could not induce them to
move into the sunshine and open of the country. Here, on
the ground floor of the fiat, is a grocery with sickening
fruit out in front ; on one side of it a doctor's sign, on the
other an undertaker's. The window shows a three-foot
coffin lined with soiled white satin, much admired by the
wise-eyed little girls.

THE CROSS STREETS

Up Beekman Street. Each . . . has to change in the greatest possible hurry from block to block.

As each of these succeeding avenues is crossed, with its
rush and roar of up-town and down-town traffic, the neigh-
borhood is said to be more "respectable," meaning more
expensive ; more of the women on the sidewalks wear hats
and paint, and there are fewer children without shoes ; pri-
vate houses are becoming more frequent ; babies less fre-

v s BRANCH LIBRARIES, ,

NEW YORK SKETCHES

quent ; there is more pretence and less spontaneity. The
flats are now apartments ; they have ornate, hideous entrances,
which add only to the rent. ... So on until here is
Madison Avenue and a whole block of private houses, varied
only by an occasional stable, pleasant, clean-looking little
stables, preferable architecturally to the houses in some cases.
And here at last is Fifth Avenue ; and it seems miles away
from the tenements, sparkling, gay, happy or pretending to
be, with streams of carefully dressed people flowing in both
directions ; New York's wonderful women, New York's
well-built, tight-collared young men; shining carriages with
good-looking horses and well-kept harness, mixed with big,
dirty trucks whose drivers seem unconscious of the incon-
gruity, but quite well aware of their own superior bumping
ability. Dodging in and out miraculously are a few bicy-
cles. . . . And now when the other side of the avenue
is reached the rest is an anti-climax. Here is the trades-
people's entrance to the great impressive house on the cor-
ner, so near that other entrance on the avenue, but so far
that it will never be reached by that white-aproned butcher-
boy's family in this generation, at least. Beyond the con-
servatory is a bit of backyard, a pathetic little New York
yard, but very green and cheerful, bounded at the rear by a
high peremptory wall which seems to keep the ambitious
brownstone next door from elbowing its way up toward the
avenue.

These next houses, however, are quite fine and impres-

THE CROSS STREETS

Under the Approach to Brooklyn Bridge.

sive, too, and they are not so alike as they seem at first ; in
fact, it is quite remarkable how much individuality architects
have learned of late years to put into the eighteen or twenty
feet they have to deal with. The monotony is varied occa-
sionally with an English basement house or a tall wrought-
iron gateway and a hood over the entrance. Here is a

U MM <v

3H LIBRARIES

NEW YORK SKETCHES

white Colonial doorway with side-lights. The son of the
house studied art, perhaps, and persuaded his father to make
this kind of improvement, though the old gentleman was
inclined to copy the rococo style of the railroad president
opposite. . . . Half-way down the block, unless a wed-
ding or a tea is taking place, the street is as quiet as Wall
Street on a Sunday. Behind us can be seen the streams
of people flowing up and down Fifth Avenue.

By the time Sixth Avenue is crossed brick frequently
come into use in place of brownstone, and there are not
only doctors' signs now, but " Robes et Manteaux " are an-
nounced, or sometimes, as on that ugly iron balcony, merely
Madame somebody. By this time also there have already
appeared on some of the newel-posts by the door-bell,
" Boarders," or " Furnished Rooms ' -modestly written on
a mere slip of paper, as though it had been deemed unneces-
sary to shout the words out for the neighborhood to hear.
In there, back of these lace- curtains, yellow, though not
with age, is the parlor the boarding-house parlor wit 1
tidies which always come off and small gilt chairs whic
generally break, and wax wreaths under glass, like cheese,s
under fly-screens in country groceries. In the place of honor
hangs the crayon portrait of the dear deceased, in an ornate
frame. But most of the boarders never go there, except to
pay their bills ; down in the basement dining-room is where
they congregate, you can see them now through the grated
window, at the tables. Here, on the corner, is the little

THE CROSS STREETS

Chinatown.

tailor-shop or laundry, which is usually found in the low
building back of that facing the avenue, which latter is al-
ways a saloon unless it is a drug-store ; on the opposite
corner is still another saloon rivals very likely in the Tam-
many district as well as in business, with a policy-shop or a
pool-room on the rloor above, as all the neighbors know,
though the local good government club cannot stop it.
Here is the " family entrance " which no family ever enters.
Then come more apartments and more private residences,
not invariably passe, more boarding-houses, many, many
boarding-houses, theatrical boarding-houses, students' board-
ing-houses, foreign boarding-houses ; more small business

NEW YORK SKETCHES

places, and so on across various mongrel avenues until here
is the region of warehouses and piano factories and finally
even railway tracks with large astonishing trains of cars.
Cross these tracks and you are beyond the city, in the sub-
urbs, as much as the lateral edges of this city can have sub-
urbs ; yet this is only the distance of a long golf-hole from
residences and urbanity. Here are stock-yards with squeal-
ing pigs, awful smells, deep, black mire, and then a long
dock reaching far out into the Hudson, with lazy river
barges flopping along-side it, and dock-rats fishing off the
end a hot, hateful walk if ever your business or pleasure
calls you out there of a summer afternoon. There the typi-
cal up-town cross street ends its dreary existence.

DOWN-TOWN it is so different.

Down-town " 'way down-town," in the vernacular
in latitude far south of homes and peace and contemplation,
where everything is business and dollars and hardness, and
the streets might well be economically straight, and rigor-
ously business-like, they are incongruously crooked, running
hither and thither in a dreamy, unpractical manner, begin-
ning where they please and ending where it suits them best,
in a narrow, Old-World way, despite their astonishing, New-
World architecture. Numbers would do well enough for

names down here, but instead of concise and business-like

THE CROSS STREETS

It still remains whimsically individual and village-like.

street-signs, the lamp-posts show quaint, incongruous names,
sentimental names, poetic names sometimes, because these
streets were born and not made.

They were born of the needs or whims of the early
population, including cows, long before the little western
:ity became self-conscious about its incipient greatness, and
rdered a ready-made plan for its future growth. It was
late for the painstaking commissioners down here. One
ttle settlement of houses had gradually reached out toward
lothef, each with its own line of streets or paths, until
nally they all grew together solidly into a city, not caring
hether they dovetailed or not, and one or the other or
oth of the old road names stuck fast. The Beaver's

ath, leading from the Parade (which afterward became the

-tf
8

NEW YORK SKETCHES

Bowling Green) over to the swampy inlet which by drain-
age became the sheep pasture and later was named Broad
Street, is still called Beaver Street to this day. The Maiden
Lane, where New York girls used to stroll (and in still more
primitive times used to do the washing) along-side the
stream which gave the street its present winding shape and
low grading, is still called Maiden Lane, though probably
the only strollers in the modern jostling crowd along this
street, now the heart of the diamond district, are the special
detectives who have a personal acquaintance with every dis-
tinguished jewellery crook in the country, and guard " the
Lane," as they call it, so carefully that not in fifteen years
has a member of the profession crossed the " dead-line '
successfully. There is Bridge Street, which no longer has
any stream to bridge ; Dock Street, where there is no dock .
Water Street, once upon the river-front but now separatee
from the water by several blocks and much enormousl)
valuable real estate ; and Wall Street, which now seems to
lack the wooden wall by which Governor Stuyvesant sought
to keep New Englanders out of town. His efforts were o^
no permanent value.

Nowadays they seem such narrow, crowded little run
ways, these down-town cross streets; so crowded that mer
and horses share the middle of them together ; so narrow
that from the windy tops of the irregular white cliffs whicl
line them you must lean far over in order to see the bus
little men at the dry asphalt bottom, far below, rapidl

THE CROSS STREETS

A Fourteenth Street Tree.

crawling hither and thither like excitable ants whose hill has
been disturbed. And in modern times they seem dark and
gloomy, near the bottom, even in the clear, smokeless air of
Manhattan, so that lights are turned on sometimes at mid-day,
for at best the sun gets into these valleys for only a few min-
utes, so high have the tall buildings grown. But they were
not narrow in those old days of the Dutch ; seemed quite
the right width, no doubt, to gossip across, from one Dutch
stoop to another, at close of day, with the after-supper pipe
when the chickens and children had gone to sleep and there

."AN LIBEA3Y

10th Street,

H.I. 2

NEW YORK SKETCHES

was nothing to interrupt the peaceful, puffing conversation
except the lazy clattering bell of an occasional cow coming
home late for milking. Nor were they gloomy in those
days, for the sun found its way unobstructed for hours at a
time, when they were lined with small low-storied houses
which the family occupied upstairs, with business below.
Everyone went home for luncheon in those days a pleasant,
simple system adhered to in this city, it is said, until com-
paratively recent times by more than one family whose pres-
ent representatives require for their happiness two or three
homes in various other parts of the world in addition to
their town house. This latter does not contain a shop on
the ground riour. It is situated far up the island, at some
point beyond the marsh where their forebears went duck-
shooting (now Washington Square), or in some cases even
beyond the site of the second kissing bridge, over which the
Boston Post road crossed the small stream where Seventy-
seventh Street now runs.

Now, being such a narrow island, none of its cross
streets can be very long, as was pointed out, even at the
city's greatest breadth. The highest cross-street number I
ever found was 742 East Twelfth. But these down-town
cross streets are much shorter, even those that succeed in
getting all the way across without stopping; they are so
abruptly short that each little street has to change in the
greatest possible hurry from block to block, like vaudeville
performers, in order to show all the features of a self-re-

Such as broad Twenty-third Street with its famous shops.

NEW YORK SKETCHES

specting cross street in the business section. Hence the
sudden contrasts. For instance, down at one end of a cer-
tain well-known business street may be seen some low
houses of sturdy red brick, beginning to look antique now
with their solid walls and visible roofs. They line an open,
sunny spot, with the smell of spices and coffee in the air.
A market was situated here over a hundred years ago, and
this broad, open space still has the atmosphere of a market-
place. The sights and smells of the water-front are here,
too, ships and stevedores unloading them, sailors lounging
before dingy drin king-places, and across the cobble-stones is
a ferry-house, with " truck ' wagons on the way back to
Long Island waiting for the gates to open, the unmistakable
country mud, so different from city mire, still sticking in
cakes to the spokes, notwithstanding the night spent in
town. Nothing worth remarking, perhaps, in all this, but
that the name of the street is Wall Street, and all this seems so
different from the Wall Street of a stone's-throw inland, with
crowded walks, dapper business men, creased trousers, tall,
steel buildings, express elevators, messengers dashing in and
out, tickers busy, and all the hum and suppressed excitement
of the Wall Street the world knows, as different and as sud-
denly different as the change that is felt in the very air upon
stepping across through the noise and shabby rush of lower
Sixth Avenue into the enchanted peace of Greenwich village,
with sparrows chirping in the wistaria vines that cover old-
fashioned balconies on streets slanting at unexpected angles.

A Cross Street at Madison Square.

NEW YORK SKETCHES

The typical part of these down-town cross streets is, of
course, that latter part, the section more or less near Broad-
way, and crowded to suffocation with great businesses in

great buildings, common-
ly known as hideous
American sky - scrapers.
This is the real down-
town to most of the men
who are down there, and
who are too busy think-
ing about what these
streets mean to each of
them to - day to bother
much with what ths
streets were in the past,
or even to notice how the
modern tangle of spars
and rigging looks as seen
down at the end of the
street from the office
window.

Of course, all these men in the tall buildings, whether
possessed of creative genius or of intelligence enough only
to run one of the elevators, are alike Philistines to those
persons who rind nothing romantic or interesting in our
modern, much-maligned sky-scrapers, which have also been
called " monuments of modern materialism," and even worse

Across Twenty-fourth Street Madison Square when the
Dewey Arch was there.

8 East 40tu

--., -,.

Y. 10Q16

THE CROSS STREETS

names, no doubt, because they are unprecedented and unaca-
demic, probably, as much as because ugly and unrestrained.
To many of us, however, shameless as it may be to confess
it, these down-town streets are fascinating enough for what
they are to-day, even it they had no past to make them all
the more charming ; and these erect, jubilant young build-
ings, whether beautiful or not, seem quite interesting from
their bright tops, where, far above the turmoil and confu-
sion, Mrs. Janitor sits sewing in the sun while the children
play hide-and-seek behind water-butts and air-shafts (there
is no danger of falling off, it is a relief to know, because the
roof is walled in like a garden), down to the dark bottom
where are the safe-deposit vaults, and the trusty old watch-
men, and the oblong boxes with great fortunes in them,
along-side of wills that may cause family rights a few years
later, and add to the affluence of certain lawyers in the
offices overhead. Deep down, thirty or forty feet under the
crowded sidewalk, the stokers shovel coal under big boilers
all day, and electricians do interesting tricks with switch-
boards, somewhat as in the hold of a modern battle-ship.
In the many tiers of floors overhead are the men with the

minds that make these high buildings necessary and make
down-town what it is, with their dreams and schemes, their
courage and imagination, their trust and distrust in the
knowledge and ignorance of other human beings which are
the means by which they bring about great successes and
great failures, and have all the fun of playing a game, with

.PUBLIC -
; LIBRARY

1. 1,!

NEW YORK SKETCHES

the peace of conscience and self-satisfaction which come
from hard work and manly sweat.

Here during daylight, or part of it, they are moving
about, far up on high or down near the teeming surface, in
and out of the numerous subdivisions termed offices, until
finally they call the game off for the day, go down in the
express elevator, out upon the narrow little streets, and turn
north toward the upper part of the island. And each, like
a homing pigeon, finds his own division or subdivision in a
long, solid block of divisions called homes, in the part of
town where run the many rows of even, similar streets.

Ill

THESE two views across two parts of New York, the two
most typical parts, deal chiefly with what a stranger might
see and feel, who came and looked and departed. Very
little has been said to show what the cross-streets mean to
those who are in the town and of it, who know the town
and like it either because their "father's father's father'
did, or else because their work or fate has cast them upon
this island and kept them there until it no longer seems a
desert island. The latter class, indeed, when once they have
learned to love the town of their adoption, frequently be-
come its warmest enthusiasts, even though they may have-
held at one time that city contentedness could not be had

without the symmetry, softness, and repose of older civiliza-

9 o

o 1
en

NEW YORK SKETCHES

tions, or even that true happiness was impossible when
walled in by stone and steel from the sight and smell of
green fields and running brooks.

He who loves New York loves its streets for what they
have been and are to him, not for what they may seem to
those who do not use them. They who know the town
best become as homesick when away from it for the straight-
ness of the well-kept streets up-town as for the crookedness
and quaintness of the noisy thoroughfares below. The
straightness, they point out complacently, is very convenient
for getting about, just as the numbering system makes it easy
for strangers. On the walk up-town they enjoy looking
down upon the expected unexpectedness of the odd little
cross streets, which tw r ist and turn or end suddenly in blank
walls, or are crossed by passageways in mid-air, like the
Bridge of Sighs, down Franklin Street, from the Criminal
Court-house to the Tombs. But farther along in their walk
they are just as fond of looking down the perspective of the
straight side streets from the central spine of Fifth Avenue
past block after block of New York homes, away down be-
yond the almost-converging rows of even lamp-posts to the
Hudson and the purple Palisades of Jersey, with the glorious
gleam and glow of the sunset ; while the energetic " L '
trains scurry past, one after another, trailing beautiful swirls
of steam and carrying other New Yorkers to other homes.
None of this could be enjoyed if the cross streets tied knots

in themselves like those in London and some American

THE CROSS STREETS

As it Looks on a Wet Night The Circle, Fifty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue.

cities. Even outsiders appreciate these characteristic New
York vistas ; and nearly every poet who comes to town dis-
covers its symbolic incongruity afresh and sings it to those
who have enjoyed it before he was born, just as most young
writers of prose feel called upon to turn their attention the
other way and unearth the great East Side of New York.
There is no such thing as a typical cross street to New

~ L

' i

eet,

NEW YORK SKETCHES

Yorkers. Individually, each thoroughfare departs as widely
from the type as the men who walk along them differ from
the figure known in certain parts of this country as the
typical New Yorker. In New York there is no typical New
Yorker. These so-called similar streets, which look so much
alike to a visitor driving up Fifth Avenue, end so very dif-
ferently. Some of them, for instance, after beginning their
decline toward the river and oblivion, are redeemed to re-
spectability, not to say exclusiveness, again, like some of the
streets in the small Twentieths running out into what was
formerly the village of Chelsea ; and those who know New
York even when standing where the Twentieth Streets are
tainted with Sixth Avenue are cognizant of this fact, just
as they are of the peace and green campus and academic
architecture of the Episcopal Theological Seminary away
over there, and of the thirty-foot lawns of London Terrace,
far down along West Twenty-third Street.

There are other residence streets which do not decline
at all, but are solidly impressive and expensive all the way
over to the river, like those from Central Park to Riverside
Drive. And your old New Yorker does not feel depressed
by their conventional similarity, their lack of individuality;
he likes to think that these streets and houses no longer
seem so unbearably new as they were only a short time ago,
but in some cases are at last acquiring the atmosphere of
home and getting rid of the odor of a real-estate project.
Then, of course, so many cross streets would refuse to be

J *** 40th Street,

THE CROSS STREETS

Hideous high buildings.
Looking east from Central Park at night.

classed as typical because they run through squares or parks,
or into reservoirs or other streets, or jump over railroad
tracks by means of viaducts, burrow under avenues by means
of tunnels, or end abruptly at the top of a hill on a high
embankment of interesting masonry, as at the eastern termi-
nus of Forty-first Street a spot which never feels like New
York at all to me.

Some notice should be taken also of those all-important

'tt

-j

"**itii9

NEW YORK SKETCHES

up-town cross streets where business has eaten out residence
in streaks, as moths devour clothes, such as broad Twenty-
third Street with its famous shops, and narrow Twenty-
eighth Street, with its numerous cheap table d'hotes, each of
which is the best in town; and I25th Street, which is a
Harlem combination of both. These are the streets by
which surface-car passengers are transferred all over the city.
These are the streets upon which those who have grown up
with New York, if they have paid attention to its growth
as well as their own, delight to meditate. Even compara-
tively young old New Yorkers can say " I remember when '
of memorable evenings in the old Academy of Music in
Fourteenth Street off Union Square, and of the days when
Delmonico's had got as far up-town as Fourteenth Street
and Fifth Avenue.

Furthermore, it could easily be shown that, for those
who love old New York, there is plenty of local historical
association along these same straight, unromantic-looking
cross streets for those who know how to find it. For that
matter one might go still further and hold that there would
not be so much antiquarian delight in New York if these
streets were not new and straight and non-committal look-
ing. If, for instance, the old Union Road, which was the
roundabout, wet-weather route to Greenwich village, had
not been cut up and mangled by a merciless city plan there
wouldn't be the fun of tracing it by projecting corners and

odd angles of houses along West Twelfth Street between

' *

B.t.

Street,

THE CROSS STREETS

Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It would be merely an open, or-
dinary street, concealing nothing, and no more exciting to
follow than Pearl Street down-town - - and not half so
crooked or historical as Pearl Street. There would not be
that odd, pocket-like courtway called Mulligan " Place,"
with a dimly lighted entrance leading off Sixth Avenue be-
tween Tenth and Eleventh Streets. Nor would there be
that still more interesting triangular remnant of an old Jew-
ish bury ing-ground over the way, behind the old Grapevine
Tavern. For either the whole cemetery would have been
allowed to remain on Union Road (or Street), which is not
likely, or else they would have removed all the graves and
covered the entire site with buildings, as was the case with a
dozen other burying-grounds here and there. If the com-

oo missioners had not had their way we could not have all those
(\J .

^ inner rows of houses to explore, like the " Weaver's Row,'
w

once near the Great Kiln Road, but now buried behind

a Sixth Avenue store between Sixteenth and Seventeenth

Streets, and entered, if entered at all, by way of a dark, ill-
smelling alley. Nor would the negro quarter, a little farther
up-town, have its inner rows which seem so appropriate for
negro quarters, especially the whitewashed courts opening
off Thirtieth Street, where may be found, in these secluded
spots, trees and seats under them, with old, turbanned mam-
mies smoking pipes and looking much more like Richmond
darkies than those one expects to see two blocks from Daly's
Theatre. Colonel Carter of Cartersville could not have

NEW YORK SKETCHES

found such an interesting New York residence if the com-
missioners had not had their way, nor could he have en-
tered it by a tunnel-like passage under the house opposite
the Tenth Street studios. Even Greenwich would not be
quite so entertaining without those permanent marks of the
conflict between village and city which resulted in separating
West Eleventh Street so far from Tenth, and in twisting
Fourth Street around farther and farther until it finally ends
in despair in Thirteenth Street. If the commissioners had
not had their way we should have had no " Down Love
Lane ' written by Mr. Janvier.

Looked at from the point of view of use and knowledge,
every street, like every person, gains a distinct personality,
some being merely more strongly distinguished than others.
And just as every human being, whatever his name or his
looks may be, continues to win more or less sympathy the
more you know of him and his history and his ambitions, so
with these streets, and their checkered careers, their sudden
changes from decade to decade or in still less time, in our
American cities, their transformation from farm land to
suburban road, and then to fashionable city street, and then
to small business and then to great business. Such, after all,
is the stuff of which abiding city charm is made, not of
plans and architecture.

RURAL NEW YORK CITY

THERE is pretty good snipe shooting within the city
limits of New York, and I have heard that an occa-
sional trout still rises to the fly in one or two spots along a
certain stream which need not be made better known than
it is already, though it can hardly be worth whipping
much longer at any rate.

O J

A great many ducks, however, are still shot every season
in the city, by those who know where to go for them ; and
as for inferior sport, like rabbits if you include them as
game on certain days of the year probably more gunners
and dogs are out after rabbits within the limits of Greater
New York than in any region of equal extent in the world,
though to be sure the bags brought in hardly compare with
those of certain parts of Australia or some of our Western
States. Down toward Far Rockaway, a little this side of
the salt marshes of Jamaica Bay, in the hedges and cabbage-
patches of the " truck ' farms, there is plenty of good cover

101

NEW YORK SKETCHES

for rabbits, as well as in the brush-piles and pastures of the
rolling Borough of Richmond on Staten Island, and the for-
ests and stone fences of the hilly Bronx, up around Pelham
Bay Park for instance. But the gunners must keep out of
the parks, of course, though many ubiquitous little boys with
snares do not.

In such parts of the city, except when No Trespassing
signs prevent, on any day of the open season scores of men
and youths may be seen whose work and homes are gener-
ally in the densest parts of the city, respectable citizens from
the extreme east and west sides of Manhattan, artisans and
clerks, salesmen and small shopkeepers, who, quite unex-
pectedly in some cases, share the ancient fret and longing of
the primitive man in common with those other New York-
ers who can go farther out on Long Island or farther up
into New York State to satisfy it. To be sure, the former
do not get as many shots as the latter, but they get the out-
doors and the exercise and the return to nature, which is
the main thing. And the advantage of going shooting in
Greater New York is that you can tramp until too dark to
see, and yet get back in time to dine at home, thus satisfy-
ing an appetite acquired in the open with a dinner cooked
in the city.

Once a certain young family went off to a far corner of
Greater New York to attack the perennial summer problem.
By walking through a hideously suburban village with a
beautifully rural name they found, just over the brow of a

IO2

MID-MAN II Al T. .

8 East 40th Street, K. ,.

Flushing Volunteer Fire Department Responding to a Fire Alarm.

NEW YORK SKETCHES

hill, quite as a friend had told them they would, tucked
away all alone in a green glade beside an ancient forest, a
charming little diamond-paned, lattice-windowed cottage,
covered thick with vines outside, and yet supplied with
modern plumbing within. It seemed too good to be true.
There was no distinctly front yard or back yard, not even a
public road in sight, and no neighbors to bother them ex-
cept the landlord, who lived in the one house near by and was
very agreeable. All through the close season they enjoyed
the whistling of quail at their breakfast ; in their afternoon
walks, squirrels and rabbits and uncommon song-birds were
too common to be remarked ; and once, within forty yards
of the house, great consternation was caused by a black snake,
though it was not black snakes but mosquitoes that made
them look elsewhere next year, and taught them a life-lesson
in regard to English lattice-windows and American mosquito-
screens.

But until the mosquitoes became so persistent it seemed
this country-place within a city, or rus in urbe, as they
probably enjoyed calling it an almost perfect solution of
the problem for a small family whose head had to be within
commuting distance of down-town. For though so remote,
it was not inaccessible ; two railroads and a trolley line were
just over the dip of the hill that hid them, so that there was
time for the young man of the house to linger with his
family at breakfast, which was served out-of-doors, with no

more objectionable witnesses than the thrushes in the hedges.

104

RURAL NEW YORK CITY

;-W

A Bit of Farm Land in the Heart of Greater New York.
"Acre after acre, farm after farm, and never a sign of city in sight."

And then, too, there was time to get exercise in the after-
noon before dinner. " It seemed an ideal spot," to quote
their account of it, " except that on our walks, just as we
thought that we had found some sequestered dell where no-
body had come since the Indians left, we would be pretty
sure to hear a slight rustle behind us, and there not an
Indian but a Tammany policeman would break through the
thicket, with startling white gloves and gleaming brass but-
tons, looking exactly like the policemen in the Park. Of
course he would continue on his beat and disappear in a mo-
ment, but by that time we had forgotten to listen to the
birds and things, and the distant hum of the trolley would
break in and remind us of all things we have wanted to forget."

105

NEW YORK SKETCHES

IN a way, that is rather typical of most of the rurality
found within the boundaries of these modern aggregations or
trusts of large and small towns, and intervening country,
held together (more or less) by one name, under one munic-
ipal government, and called a " city ' by legislature. There
is plenty that is not at all city-like within the city walls-
called limits there is plenty of nature, but in most cases
those wanting to commune with it are reminded that it is no
longer within the domain of nature. The city has stretched
out its hand, and the mark of the beast can usually be seen.

You can find not only rural seclusion and bucolic sim-
plicity, but the rudeness and crudeness of the wilderness and
primeval forest ; indeed, even forest fires have been known
in Greater New York. But the trouble is that so often the
bucolic simplicity has cleverly advertised lots staked out
across it ; the rural seclusion shows a couple of factory chim-
neys on the near horizon. The forest fire was put out by
the fire department.

There are numerous peaceful duck-ponds in the Borough
of Queens, for instance, as muddy and peaceful as ever you
saw, but so many of them are lighted by gas every evening.
Besides the fisheries, there is profitable oyster-dredging in
several sections of this city ; and in at least one place it can
be seen by electric light. There are many potato-patches
patrolled by the police.

106

RURAL NEW YORK CITY

\\ . .
\ .1

One of the Farmhouses that Have Come to Town.
The old Duryea House, Flushing, once used as a head-quarters for Hessian officers.

Not far from the geographical centre of the city there
are fields where, as all who have ever commuted to and from
the north shore of Long Island must remember, German
women may be seen every day in the tilling season, working
away as industriously as the peasants of Europe, blue skirts,

red handkerchiefs about their heads, and all ; while not far

107

PUBLIC fr

NEW YORK SKETCHES

away, at frequent intervals, passes a whining, thumping trol-
ley-car, marked Brooklyn Bridge.

In another quarter, on a dreary, desolate waste, neither

East End of Duryea House, where the Cow is Stabled.

farm land, nor city, nor village, there stands an old weather-
beaten hut, long, low, patched up and tumbled down, with
an old soap-box for a front doorstep all beautifully toned
by time, the kind amateurs like to sketch, when found far
away from home in their travels. The thing that recalls
the city in this case, rather startlingly, is a rudely lettered
sign, with the S's turned the wrong way, offering lots for
sale in Greater New York.

It is not necessary to go far away from the beaten paths

108

RURAL NEW YORK CITY

of travel in Greater New York to witness any of these
scenes of the comedy, sometimes tragedy, brought about by
the contending forces of city and country. Most of what

The Old Water-power Mill from the Rear of the Old Country Cross-roads Store.

has been cited can be observed from car-windows. For that
matter, somewhat similar incongruity can be found in all of
our modern, legally enlarged cities, London, with the hedges
and gardens of Hampstead Heath, and certain parts of the
Surrey Side, or Chicago, with its broad stretches of prairie
and farms the subject of so many American newspaper
jokes a few years ago.

But New York and this is another respect in which

it is different from other cities our great Greater New

109

NEW YORK SKETCHES

The Old Country Cross-roads Store, Established 1828.
In the background is the old water-power mill.

York, which is better known as having the most densely
populated tenement districts in the world, can show places
that are more truly rural than any other city of modern
times, places where the town does not succeed in obtruding
itself at all. From Hampstead Heath, green and delightful
as it is, every now and then the gilded cross of St. Paul's
may be seen gleaming far below through the trees. And in
Chicago, bucolic as certain sections of it may be, one can
spy the towers of the city for miles away, across the prairie ;
even when down in certain wild, murderous-looking ravines
there is ever on high the appalling cloud of soft-coal smoke.
But out in the broad, rolling farm lands of Long Island you

I 10

RURAL NEW YORK CITY

Interior of the Old Country Cross-roads Store.

can walk on for hours and not find any sign of the city you
are in, except the enormous tax-rate, which, by the way, has
the effect of discouraging the farmers (many of whom did
not want to become city people at all) from spending money
for paint and improvements, and this only results in making

NEW YORK SKETCHES

*'T WW .PJ^Cfl*'

-<' '#?:>

'r*

^VT-^Tr-SS"^ iS- '',,

^pp

The Colony of Chinese Farmers, Near the Geographi-
cal Centre of New York City.

the country look more prim-
itive, and less like what is
absurdly called a city.

But the best of these rural
parts of town cannot be spied
from car - windows, or the
beaten paths of travel.

MAKE a journey out
through the open country to
the southeast of Flushing, past

112

RURAL NEW YORK CITY

-<-\

4&&\ *- r ','/ 'v ;?v< 1 ^'

^ .. ^^e^^^^^^ ? .;v :; ;", ; : .::

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iiisss&i ::liii;p^^:^=?

Working as industrially as the peasants of Europe, blue skirts, red handkerchiefs
about their heads .

the Oakland
Golf Club, and
over toward the
Creedmoor Ri-
fle Range, after
a while turn
north and fol-
low a twisting

road that leads down into the ravine at the head of Little
Neck Bay, where a few of the. many Little Neck clams come
from. All of these places are well within the eastern boun-
dary of the city, and this little journey will furnish a very
good example of a certain kind of rural New York, but
only one kind, for it is only one small corner of a very
big place.

As soon as you have ridden, or walked it is better to
walk if there is plenty of time beyond the fine elms of
the ancient Flushing streets, you will be in as peaceful look-

NEW YORK SKETCHES

ing farming country as can be found anywhere. But the in-
teresting thing about it is that here are seen not merely a few
incongruous green patches that happen to be left between rap-
idly devouring suburban towns like the fields near Wood-
side where the German women work out here one rides

through acre after acre of it,
farm after farm, mile after mile,
up hill, down hill, corn-fields,
wheat-fields, stone fences, rail
fences, no fences, and never a
town in sight, much less any-
thing to suggest the city, except
the procession of market-wagons
at certain hours, to or from Col-
lege Point Ferry, and they aren't
so conspicuously urban after all.
Even the huge advertising
sign-boards which usually shout
to passers-by along the approaches

Rema.ns of a Windmill in New York City, Be- tO CltieS arC Hither SCarCC ill this

tween Astoria and Steinway.

country, for it is about midway

between two branches of the only railroad on Long Island,
and there is no need for a trolley. There is nothing but
country roads, with more or less comfortable farm-houses
and large, squatty barns ; not only old farm-houses, but what
is much more striking, farm-houses that are new. Now, it
does seem odd to build a new farm-house in a city.

114

RURAL NEW YORK CITY

33MCS-

The Dreary Edge of Long Island City.

Out in the fields the men are ploughing. A rooster
crows in the barn-yard. A woman comes out to take in
the clothes. Children climb the fence to gaze when
people pass by. And one can ride for a matter of miles
and see no other kind of life, except the birds in the hedge
and an occasional country dog, not suburban dogs, but dis-
tinctly farm dogs, the kind that have deep, ominous barks, as
heard at night from a distance. By and by, down the dusty,
sunny, lane-like road plods a fat old family Dobbin, pulling
an old-fashioned phaeton in which are seated a couple of prim
old maiden ladies, dressed in black, who try to make him
move faster in the presence of strangers, and so push and
jerk animatedly on the reins, which he enjoys catching

NEW YORK SKETCHES

with his tail, and holds serenely until beyond the bend in
the road.

Of course, this is part of the city. The road map proves
it. But there are very few places along this route where you
can find it out in any other way. The road leads up over
a sort of plateau ; a wide expanse of country can be viewed

The Procession of Market-wagons at College Point Ferry.

in all directions, but there are only more fields to see, more
farm-houses and squatty barns, perhaps a village church
steeple in the distance, a village that has its oldest inhabitant
and a church with a church-yard. Away off to the north,
across a gleaming strip of water, which the map shows to
be Long Island Sound, lie the blue hills of the Bronx.
They, too, are well within Greater New York. So is all
that country to the southwest, far beyond the range of the

eye, Jamaica, and Jamaica Bay and Coney Island. And over

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RURAL NEW YORK CITY

Past dirty backyards and sad vacant lots.

there, more to the west, is dreary East New York and end-
less Brooklyn, and dirty Long Island City, and, still farther,
crowded Manhattan Island itself. Then one realizes some-
thing of the extent of this strange manner of city. It is
very ridiculous.

When at last the head of Little Neck Bay is reached,
here is another variety of primitive country scene. The up-
land road skirting the hill, beyond which the rifles of Creed-
moor are crashing, takes a sudden turn down a steep grade,
a guileless-looking grade, but very dangerous for bicyclists,
especially in the fall when the ruts and rocks are covered
thick with leaves for days at a time. Then, after passing a

nearer view (through a vista of big trees) of the blue Sound,

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NEW YORK SKETCHES

with the darker blue of the hills beyond, the road drops
down into a peaceful old valley, tucked away as serene and
unmolested as it was early in the nineteenth century, when
the country cross-roads store down there was first built, along-
side of the water-power mill, which is somewhat older. In
front is an old dam and mill-pond, called " The Alley," re-
cently improved, but still containing black bass ; in the rear
Little Neck Bay opens out to the Sound beyond, one of the
sniping and ducking places of Greater New York. The old
store, presumably the polling-place of that election district
of the city, is where prominent personages ot the neighbor-
hood congregate and tell fishing and shooting stories, and gos-
sip, and talk politics, seated on boxes and barrels around the
white-bodied stove, for the sake of which they chew tobacco.

It is one of those stores that contain everything from
anchor-chains to chewing-gum. There are bicycle sundries
in the show-case and boneless bacon suspended from the old
rafters, but the best thing in the place is a stream of running
water. This is led down by a pipe from the side of the
hill, acts as a refrigerator for a sort of bar in one corner of
the store for this establishment sells a greater variety of
commodities than most department stores and passes out
into Long Island Sound in the rear.

The fact that they are in Greater New York does not
seem to bother them much down in this happy valley , at
least it hasn't changed their mode of life apparently. The
last time we were there a well-tanned Long Islander was

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

BRANCH LIBRARIES
RURAL NEW YORK CITY

New York City Up in the Beginnings of the Bronx Regions Skating at Bronxdale.

buying some duck loads ; he said he was merely going out
after a few snipe, but he ordered No. 5*5.

" Have you a policeman out here ? ' we asked him.

" Oh, yes, but he doesn't come around very often."

"How often ?"

" Oh, I generally catch a glimpse of him once a month
or so," said the gunner. " But then, you see, these here city
policemen have to be pretty careful, they're likely to get lost."

" Down near Bay Ridge," a man on the cracker-barrel
put in as he stroked the store-cat, " one night a policeman
got off his beat and floundered into the swamp, and if it
hadn't been that some folks of the neighborhood rescued

him, he'd have perished of mosquitoes."

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NEW YORK SKETCHES

" We don't have any mosquitoes here on the north
shore," put in the other, addressing us without blinking. He
is probably the humorist of the neighborhood.

This is only one of the many pilgrimages that may be
made in Greater New York, and shows only one sort of
rurality. It is the great variety of unurban scenes that is the
most impressive thing about this city. Here is another sort,
seen along certain parts of Jamaica Bay :

Long, level sweeps of flat land, covered with tall, wild grass
that the sea-breezes like to race across. The plain is intersect-
ed here and there with streams of tide-water. At rare intervals
there are lonely little clumps of scrub-oaks, huddled close to-
gether for comfort. Away off in the distance the yellow
sand-dunes loom up as big as mountains, and beyond is the
deep, thrilling blue of the open sea, with sharp-cut horizon.

The sun comes up, the wonderful color tricks of the
early morning are exhibited, and the morning flight of birds
begins. The tide comes hurrying in, soon hiding the mud
flats where the snipe were feeding. The breeze freshens up,
and whitecaps, like specks, can be seen on the distant blue
band of the ocean. . . . The sun gets hot. The tide
turns. The estuaries begin to show their mud-banks again.
The sun sinks lower ; and distant inlets reflect it brilliantly.
The birds come back, the breeze dies down, and the sun
sets splendidly across the long, flat plain ; another day has
passed over this part of a so-called city and no man has been

I2O

IIS NE~ -I- LIBRAE-

MID-MAN] [ - ,. i

8 East 40th Street, ^ v

RURAL NEW YORK CITY

Another Kind of City Life Along the Marshes of Jamaica Bay.

within a mile of the spot. The nearest sign of habitation is
the lonely life-saving station away over there on the dunes,
and, perhaps, a fisherman's shanty. Far out on the sky-line
is the smoke of a home-coming steamer, whose approach
has already been announced from Fire Island, forty miles
down the coast.

Then, here is another sort : A rambling, stony road, oc-
casionally passing comfortable old houses historic houses
in some cases with trees and lawns in front, leading down
to stone walls that abut the road. The double-porticoed
house where Aaron Burr died is not far from here. An old-
fashioned, stone-arched bridge, a church steeple around the
bend, a cluster of trees, and under them, a blacksmith shop.

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*, x. r.

NEW YORK SKETCHES

Trudging up the hill is a little boy, who stares and sniffles,
carrying a slate and geography in one hand, and leading a
little sister by the other, who also sniffles and stares. This,
too, is Greater New York, Borough of Richmond, better
known as Staten Island. This borough has nearly all kinds
of wild and tame rurality and suburbanity. Its farms need
not be described.

Ill

POINTING out mere farms in the city becomes rather
monotonous ; they are too common. But there is one kind
of farm in New York that is not at all common, that has
never existed in any other city, so far as I know, in ancient
or modern times. It is situated, oddly enough, in about the
centre of the 3 1 7 square miles of New York so well as the
centre of a boot-shaped area can be located.

Cross Thirty-fourth Street Ferry to Long Island City,
which really does not smell so bad as certain of our poets
would have us believe ; take the car marked " Steinway,"
and ride for fifteen or twenty minutes out through dreary
city edge, past small, unpainted manufactories, squalid tene-
ments, dirty backyards, and sad vacant lots that serve as the
last resting-place for decayed trucks and overworked wagons.
Soon after passing a tumble-down windmill, which looks
like an historic old relic, on a hill-top, but which was built
in 1867 and tumbled down only recently, the Steinway Silk
Mills will be reached (they can be distinguished by the long,

122

There is profitable oyster-dredging in several sections of the city.

NEW YORK SKETCHES

low wings of the building covered with windows like a hot-
house). Leave the car here and strike off to the left, down
the lane which will soon be an alley, and then a hundred
yards or so from the highway will be seen the first of the
odd, paper-covered houses of a colony of Chinese farmers
who earn their living by tilling the soil of Greater New York.

At short distances are the other huts crouching at the
foot of big trees, with queer gourds hanging out in front to
dry, and large unusual crocks lying about, and huge
baskets, and mattings all clearly from China ; they are as
different from what could be bought on the neighboring
avenue as the farm and farmers themselves are different
from most Long Island farms and farmers. Out in the
fields, which are tilled in the Oriental way, utilizing every
inch of ground clean up to the fence, and laid out with even
divisions at regular intervals, like rice-fields, the farmers
themselves may be seen, working with Chinese implements,
their pigtails tucked up under their straw hats, while the
western world wags on in its own way all around them.
This is less than five miles from the glass-covered parade-
ground of the Waldorf-Astoria.

They have only three houses among them, that is, there
are only three of these groups of rooms, made of old boards
and boxes and covered with tar paper ; but no one in the
neighborhood seems to know just how many Chinamen live
there. The same sleeping space would hold a score or more
over in Pell Street.

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RURAL NEW YORK CITY

Being Chinamen, they grow only Chinese produce, a
peculiar kind of bean and some sort of salad, and those large,
artistic shaped melons, seen only in China or Chinatown,
which they call something that sounds like " moncha," and
which, one of them told me, bring two cents a pound from
the Chinese merchants and restaurateurs of Manhattan. For
my part, I was very glad to learn of these farms, for I had
always been perplexed to account for the fresh salads and
green vegetables, of unmistakably Chinese origin, that can be
found in season in New York's Chinatown. Under an old
shed near by they have their market-wagon, in which, look-
ing inscrutable, they drive their stuff to market through
Long Island City, and by way of James Slip Ferry over to
Chinatown ; then back to the farm again, looking inscrutable.
And on Sundays, for all we know, they leave the wagon be-
hind and go to gamble their earnings away in Mott Street,
or perhaps away over in some of the well-known places of
Jersey City. Then back across the two ferries to farming
on dreary Monday mornings.

EVEN up in Manhattan there are still places astonishingly
unlike what is expected of the crowded little island on
which stands New York proper. There is Fort Washington
with tall trees growing out of the Revolutionary breast-
works, and, under their branches, a fine view up the Hud-

125

NEW YORK SKETCHES

son to the mountains a quiet, sequestered bit of public park
which the public hasn't yet learned to treat as a park, though
within sight of the crowds crossing the viaduct from the
Grant Monument on Riverside. There are wild flowers up
there every spring, and until quite recently so few people

Cemetery Ridge, Near Richmond, Staten Island.

visited this spot for days at a time that there were sometimes
woodcock and perhaps other game in the thickly wooded
ravine by the railroad. Soon, however, the grass on the
breastworks will be worn off entirely, and the aged deaf
man who tends the river light on Jeffreys Hook will become
sophisticated, if he is still alive.

It will take longer, however, for the regions to the
north, beyond Washington Heights, down through Inwood
and past Tubby Hook, to look like part of a city. And
across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek from Manhattan Island, up
through the winding roads of Riverdale to Mount St. Vin-

r 26

RURAL NEW YORK CITY

cent, and so across the line to Yonkers, it is still wooded,
comparatively secluded and country-like, even though so
many of the fine country places thereabouts are being de-
serted. Over to the eastward, across Broadway, a peaceful
road which does not look like a part of the same thorough-

A Peaceful Scene in New York.
In the distance is St. Andrew's Church, Borough of Richmond, Staten Island.

fare as the one with actors and sky-scrapers upon it, there are
the still wilder stretches of Mosholu and Van Cortlandt Park,
where, a year or two ago, large, well-painted signs on the
trees used to say " Beware of the Buffaloes."

The open country sport of golf has had a good deal to
do with making this rural park more generally appreciated.
Golf has done for Van Cortlandt what the bicycle had done
for the Bronx and Pelham Bay Parks. There are still nat-
ural, wild enough looking bits, off from the beaten paths, in
all these parks, scenes that look delightfully dark and sylvan

in the yearly thousands of amateur photographs the camera

127

NEW YORK SKETCHES

does not show the German family approaching from the rear,
or the egg-shells and broken beer-bottles behind the bushes
but beware of the police if you break a twig, or pick a
blossom.

THOSE who enjoy the study of all the forms of nature
except the highest can find plenty to sigh over in the way

A Relic of the Early Nineteenth Century, Borough of Richmond.

the city thrusts itself upon the country. But to those who
think that the haunts and habits of the Man are not less
worthy of observation than those of the Beaver and the
Skunk, it is all rather interesting, and some of it not so
deeply deplorable.

There are certain old country taverns, here and there, up
toward Westchester, and down beyond Brooklyn and over on

Staten Island not only those which everybody knows, like

128

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8 East 40th Street,

K<,, fl,Y, 10016

RURAL NEW YORK CITY

the Hermitage in the Bronx and Garrisons over by the fort
at Willets Point, but remote ones which have not yet been
exploited in plays or books, and which still have a fine old
flavor, with faded prints of Dexter and Maud S. and much
earlier favorites in the bar-room. In some cases, to be sure,
though still situated at a country cross-roads, with green fields
all about, they are now used for Tammany head-quarters
with pictures of the new candidate for sheriff in the old-

An Old-fashioned Stone-arched Bridge. (Richmond, Staten Island.)

fashioned windows but most of them would have gone out
of existence entirely after the death of the stage-coach, if it
had not been for the approach of the city, and the side-
whiskered New Yorkers of a previous generation who drove
fast horses. If the ghosts of these men ever drive back to
lament the good old days together, they must be somewhat
surprised, possibly disappointed, to find these rural road-
houses doing a better business than even in their day. The

129

NEW YORK SKETCHES

bicycle revived the road-house, and though the bicycle has
since been abandoned by those who prefer fashion to exer-
cise, the places that the wheel disclosed are not forgotten.
They are visited now in automobiles.

There are all those historic country-houses within the

city limits, well known, and in some cases restored, chiefly
by reason of being within the city, like the Van Cortlandt
house, now a part of the park, and the Jumel mansion stand-
ing over Manhattan Field, a house which gets into most his-
torical novels of New York. Similarly Claremont Park has
adopted the impressive Zabriskie mansion ; and the old Lor-
illard house in the Bronx might have been torn down by this
time but that it has been made into a park house and restau-
rant. Nearly all these are tableted by the " patriotic " socie-
ties, and made to feel their importance. The Bowne place
in Flushing, a very old type of Long Island farm-house,
was turned into a museum by the Bowne family itself an
excellent idea. The Quaker Meeting-house in Flushing,
though not so old by twenty-five years as it is painted in the
sign which says " Built in 1695," will probably be pre-
served as a museum too.

Another relic in that locality well worth keeping is the
Duryea place, a striking old stone farm-house with a wide
window on the second floor, now shut in with a wooden
cover supported by a long brace-pole reaching to the
ground. Out of this window, it is said, a cannon used to
point. This was while the house was head-quarters for Hes-

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RURAL NEW YORK CITY

An Old House in Flatbush.

sian officers, during the long monotonous months when " the
main army of the British army lay at Flushing from White-
stone to Jamaica ; ' and upon Flushing Heights there stood
one of the tar-barrel beacons that reached from New York to
Norwich Hill, near Oyster Bay. The British officers used
to kill time by playing at Fives against the blank wall of the
Quaker Meeting-house, or by riding over to Hempstead
Plains to the fox-hunts where the Meadowbrook Hunt
Club rides to the hounds to-day. The common soldiers
meanwhile stayed in Flushing and amused themselves, ac-
cording to the same historian, by rolling cannon-balls about
a course of nine holes. That was probably the nearest ap-

NEW YORK SKETCHES

proach to the great game at that time in America, and it
may have been played on the site of the present Flushing
Golf Club.

These same soldiers also amused themselves in less inno-
cent ways, so that the Quakers and other non-combatants in
and about this notorious Tory centre used to hide their live
stock indoors over night, to keep it from being made into
meals by the British. That may account for the habit of
the family occupying the Duryea place referred to ; they
keep their cow in a room at one end of the house. At any
rate it is not necessary for New Yorkers to go to Ireland to
see sights of that sort.

Those are a few of the historic country places that have
come to town. There is a surprisingly large number of
them, and even when they are not adopted and tableted by
the D. A. R. or D. R., or S. R. or S. A. R., they are at
least known to local fame, and are pointed out and made
much of.

But the many abandoned country houses which are not
especially historic or significant except to certain old ] ar-
sons to whom they once meant home goodly old places no
longer even near the country, but caught by the tide well
within the city, that is the kind to be sorry for. NobDdy
pays much attention to them. A forlorn For Sale sign
hangs out in front, weather-beaten and discouraged. The
tall Colonial columns still try to stand up straight and to ap-
pear unconscious of the faded paint and broken windows,

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RURAL NEW YORK CITY

hoping that no one notices the tangle of weeds in the old-
fashioned garden, where old-fashioned children used to play
hide-and-seek among the box-paths, now overgrown or
buried under tin cans. . . . Across the way, perhaps,
there has already squatted an unabashed row of cheap,
vulgar houses, impudent, staring little city homes, vividly
painted, and all exactly alike, with highly ornamented
wooden stoops below and zinc cornices above, like false-hair
fronts. They look at times as though they were putting
their heads together to gossip and smile about their odd, old
neighbor that has such out-of-date fan-lights, that has no
electric bell, no folding-beds, and not a bit of zinc cornicing.
Meanwhile the old house turns its gaze the other way,
thinking of days gone by, patiently waiting the end which
will come soon enough.

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