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,
looking 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 behind 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.
IV
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 breastworks, land, under their branches, a fine view up
the Hudson 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 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.
[Illustration: Cemetery Ridge, Near Richmond, Staten Island.]
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. Vincent,
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 deserted. Over to the eastward, across
Broadway, a peaceful road which does not look like a part of the same
thoroughfare 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."
[Illustration: A Peaceful Scene in New York.
In the distance is St. Andrew's Church, Borough of Richmond, Staten
Island.]
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 natural, 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 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.
V
Those who enjoy the study of all the forms of nature except the highest
can find plenty to sigh over in the way 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.
[Illustration: A Relic of the Early Nineteenth Century, Borough of
Richmond.]
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 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-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 bicycle
revived the road-house, and though the bicycle has since been abandoned
by those who prefer fashion to exercise, the places that the wheel
disclosed are not forgotten. They are visited now in automobiles.
[Illustration: An Old-fashioned Stone-arched Bridge. (Richmond, Staten
Island.)]
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 standing over Manhattan Field, a house which gets into
most historical novels of New York. Similarly Claremont Park has adopted
the impressive Zabriskie mansion; and the old Lorillard house in the
Bronx might have been torn down by this time but that it has been made
into a park house and restaurant. Nearly all these are tableted by the
"patriotic" societies, 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
preserved as a museum too.
[Illustration: An Old House in Flatbush.]
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 Hessian officers, during
the long monotonous months when "the main army of the British army lay
at Flushing from Whitestone 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, according to the
same historian, by rolling cannon-balls about a course of nine holes.
That was probably the nearest approach 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 innocent 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 persons 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.
Nobody 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 appear unconscious of the faded
paint and broken windows, 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.
[Illustration]
Transcriber's Notes:
Simple typographical errors were corrected.
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
Page 8, first line: "manifestations of the spirit" could be "or".
End of Project Gutenberg's New York Sketches, by Jesse Lynch Williams