At the suggestion of Mr. Christopher Clarke, the Three Hours for
Lunch Club made pilgrimage to the old seafaring tavern at No. 2
Fulton Street, and found it to be a heavenly place, with listing
brass-shod black walnut stairs and the equally black and delightful
waiter called Oliver, who (said Mr. Clarke) has been there since
1878.
But the club reports that the swordfish steak, of which it partook
as per Mr. Clarke's suggestion, did not appeal so strongly to its
taste. Swordfish steak, we feel, is probably a taste acquired by
long and diligent application. At the first trial it seemed to the
club a bit too reptilian in flavour. The club will go there again,
and will hope to arrive in time to grab one of those tables by the
windows, looking out over the docks and the United Fruit Company
steamer which is so appropriately named the _Banan_; but it is the
sense of the meeting that swordfish steak is not in its line.
The club retorts to Mr. Clarke by asking him if he knows the
downtown chophouse where one may climb sawdusted stairs and sit in a
corner beside a framed copy of the _New-York Daily Gazette_ of May
1, 1789, at a little table incised with the initials of former
habitués, and hold up toward the light a glass of the clearest and
most golden and amberlucent cider known to mankind, and before
attacking a platter of cold ham and Boston beans, may feel that
smiling sensation of a man about to make gradual and decent advances
toward a ripe and ruddy appetite.
Fulton Street has always been renowned for its taverns. The Old
Shakespeare Tavern used to be there, as is shown by the tablet at
No. 136 commemorating the foundation of the Seventh Regiment. The
club has always intended to make more careful exploration of Dutch
Street, the little alley that runs off Fulton Street on the south
side, not far from Broadway. There is an eating place on this byway,
and the organization plans to patronize it, in order to have an
excuse for giving itself the sub-title of the Dutch Street Club. The
more famous eating houses along Fulton Street are known to all: the
name of at least one of them has a genial Queen Anne sound. And
only lately a very seemly coffee house was established not far
from Fulton and Nassau. We must confess our pleasure in the
fact that this place uses as its motto a footnote from The
_Spectator_--"Whoever wished to find a gentleman commonly asked not
where he resided, but which coffee house he frequented."
Among the many things to admire along Fulton Street (not the least
of which are Dewey's puzzling perpetually fluent grape-juice bottle,
and the shop where the trained ferrets are kept, for chasing out
rats, mice, and cockroaches from your house, the sign says) we vote
for that view of the old houses along the south side of the street,
where it widens out toward the East River. This vista of tall,
leaning chimneys seems to us one of the most agreeable things in New
York, and we wonder whether any artist has ever drawn it. As our
colleague Endymion suggested, it would make a fine subject for
Walter Jack Duncan. In the eastern end of this strip of fine old
masonry resides the seafaring tavern we spoke of above; formerly
known as Sweet's, and a great place of resort (we are told) for
Brooklynites in the palmy days before the Bridge was opened, when
they used to stop there for supper before taking the Fulton Ferry
across the perilous tideway.
The Fulton Ferry--dingy and deserted now--is full of fine memories.
The old waiting room, with its ornate carved ceiling and fine,
massive gas brackets, peoples itself, in one's imagination, with the
lively and busy throngs of fifty and sixty years ago. "My life then
(1850-60) was curiously identified with Fulton Ferry, already
becoming the greatest in the world for general importance, volume,
variety, rapidity, and picturesqueness." So said Walt Whitman. It is
a curious experience to step aboard one of the boats in the drowsy
heat of a summer afternoon and take the short voyage over to the
Brooklyn slip, underneath one of the huge piers of the Bridge. A few
heavy wagons and heat-oppressed horses are almost the only other
passengers. Not far away from the ferry, on the Brooklyn side, are
the three charmingly named streets--Cranberry, Orange, and
Pineapple--which are also so lastingly associated with Walt
Whitman's life. It strikes us as odd, incidentally, that Walt, who
loved Brooklyn so much, should have written a phrase so capable of
humorous interpretation as the following: "Human appearances and
manners--endless humanity in all its phases--Brooklyn also." This
you will find in Walt's Prose Works, which is (we suppose) one of
the most neglected of American classics.
[Illustration: Drawing of "Lightning" statue]
But Fulton Street, Manhattan--in spite of its two greatest triumphs:
Evelyn Longman Batchelder's glorious figure of "Lightning," and the
strictly legal "three grains of pepsin" which have been a comfort to
so many stricken invalids--is a mere byway compared to Fulton
Street, Brooklyn, whose long bustling channel may be followed right
out into the Long Island pampas. At the corner of Fulton and
Cranberry streets "Leaves of Grass" was set up and printed, Walt
Whitman himself setting a good deal of the type. Ninety-eight
Cranberry Street, we have always been told, was the address of
Andrew and James Rome, the printers. The house at that corner is
still numbered 98. The ground floor is occupied by a clothing store,
a fruit stand, and a barber shop. The building looks as though it is
probably the same one that Walt knew. Opposite it is a sign where
the comparatively innocent legend BEN'S PURE LAGER has been
deleted.
The pilgrim on Fulton Street will also want to have a look at the
office of the Brooklyn _Eagle_, that famous paper which has numbered
among its employees two such different journalists as Walt Whitman
and Edward Bok. There are many interesting considerations to be
drawn from the two volumes of Walt's writings for the _Eagle_, which
were collected (under the odd title "The Gathering of the Forces")
by Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. We have always been struck by
the complacent naïveté of Walt's judgments on literature (written,
perhaps, when he was in a hurry to go swimming down at the foot of
Fulton Street). Such remarks as the following make us ponder a
little sadly. Walt wrote:
We are no admirer of such characters as Doctor Johnson. He was
a sour, malicious, egotistical man. He was a sycophant of power
and rank, withal; his biographer narrates that he "always spoke
with rough contempt of popular liberty." His head was educated
to the point of _plus_, but for his heart, might still more
unquestionably stand the sign _minus_. He insulted his equals
... and tyrannized over his inferiors. He fawned upon his
superiors, and, of course, loved to be fawned upon himself....
Nor were the freaks of this man the mere "eccentricities of
genius"; they were probably the faults of a vile, low nature.
His soul was a bad one.
The only possible comment on all this is that it is absurd, and that
evidently Walt knew very little about the great Doctor. One of the
curious things about Walt--and there is no man living who admires
him more than we do--is that he requires to be forgiven more
generously than any other great writer. There is no one who has ever
done more grotesquely unpardonable things than he--and yet, such is
the virtue of his great, saline simplicity, one always pardons them.
As a book reviewer, to judge from the specimens rescued from the
_Eagle_ files by his latest editors, he was uniquely childish.
Noting the date of Walt's blast on Doctor Johnson (December 7,
1846), it is doubtful whether we can attribute the irresponsibility
of his remarks to a desire to go swimming.
The editors of this collection venture the suggestion that the
lighter pieces included show Walt as "not devoid of humour." We fear
that Walt's waggishness was rather heavily shod. Here is a sample of
his light-hearted paragraphing (the italics are his):--
Carelessly knocking a man's eye out with a broken axe, may be
termed a _bad axe-i-dent_.
It was in Leon Bazalgette's "Walt Whitman" that we learned of Walt's
only really humorous achievement; and even then the humour was
unconscious. It seems that during the first days of his life as a
journalist in New York, Walt essayed to compromise with Mannahatta
by wearing a frock coat, a high hat, and a flower in his lapel. We
regret greatly that no photo of Walt in this rig has been preserved,
for we would like to have seen the gentle misery of his bearing.
[Illustration]