_Fourteenth to Madison Square_
Stretches of the Avenue--Fourteenth to Madison Square--From Brevoort to
Spingler--The Story of Sir Peter Warren--The First City Hospital--The
Paternoster Row of New-York--Former Homes and Birthplaces--Lower Fifth
Avenue Residents in the Fifties--Blocks of Departed Glories--The Centre
of the Universe--Madison Square in Colonial Days--Franconi's
Hippodrome--The Opening of the Fifth Avenue Hotel--A Thanksgiving Day of
the Nineties--Monuments of the Square--The Garden, the Presbyterian
Church, and the Metropolitan Tower--The Face of the Clock.
In 1762, a Brevoort--Elias was his Christian name--sold a part of the
family farm to John Smith, a wealthy slave-holder. On the choicest site
of the purchase, now the centre of Fourteenth Street just west of Fifth
Avenue, Smith built his country residence. After he died his widow
continued to occupy the house until 1788, when the executors of Smith's
estate, among whom was James Duane, Mayor of the city, sold the property
for about four thousand seven hundred dollars to Henry Spingler.
Spingler lived in the house until his death in 1813, and used the land,
comprising about twenty-two acres, as a market garden farm. Spingler's
granddaughter, Mrs. Mary S. Van Beuren, fell heiress to most of the
property, and built the Van Beuren brown-stone front house on
Fourteenth Street, where she lived for years, and maintained a little
garden with flowers and vegetables, a cow and chickens. In the
fifty-seven years between the Smith sale and 1845 the value of the
estate had increased from four thousand seven hundred dollars to two
hundred thousand dollars. Keeping still to the bucolic days of the
Avenue, we pass, going from Fifteenth to Eighteenth Street, through what
was the farm of Thomas and Edward Burling, relatives of John and James
Burling, old-time merchants whose name was given to Burling Slip, down
by the East River. Also in the course of these blocks the Avenue crosses
land that was the farm of John Cowman until 1836. Between Eighteenth and
Twenty-first Streets was part of the farm acquired in 1791 by Isaac
Varian, who bought from the heirs of Sir Peter Warren.
This Sir Peter Warren was one of the great figures of the old town. Many
have written of him. It was only a year or so ago that Miss Chapin
devoted to his story a chapter of her book on Greenwich Village. So here
the outline of his career will be of the briefest possible nature. It
was in 1728 that he first saw New York Harbour. He was twenty-five years
of age then, and in command of the frigate "Solebay." Irish to the core,
a Warren of Warrenstown, County Meath, who got their estates in the
time of "Strongbow," he had already seen a dozen years of active service
in southern and African waters, and as captain of the "Grafton," had had
a share in the seizure of the rock of Gibraltar by the British. But New
York was his first official post, and here he had been sent at the
orders of the home government, to keep an eye on events, and to sound
the loyalty of the American colonies. The little island above the great
bay and between the two broad rivers won his heart from the first, and
after every new adventure he returned to it, until, in 1747, he was
summoned to London, to enter Parliament and to be made Admiral of the
Red Squadron. The affection for the town seems to have been reciprocal,
for two years after his introduction to New York, the Common Council of
the city voted to him the "freedom of the city." Then, when he was
twenty-eight years old he married Susanna DeLancey, whose father,
Etienne DeLancey, was a Huguenot refugee, who, settling here, soon
changed the Etienne to Stephen, and married a daughter of one of the
Dutch Van Cortlandts. At first the young Warrens lived downtown, but in
later years, when wealth came as the result of treasure-seeking
adventure on the high seas, Peter bought lands in Greenwich Village, and
eventually there erected a great mansion.
Throughout the 1730's he was busy, but his opportunity did not come
until the end of that decade. In 1739 trouble broke out between Great
Britain and Spain. Five years later Captain Warren was fabulously rich.
Early in 1744 he had been made commodore of a sixteen-ship squadron in
the Caribbean. Before summer of that year he had captured twenty-four
French and Spanish merchant ships, had brought them to New York, turned
them over to his father-in-law's firm, "Messieurs Stephen De Lancey and
Company," and had pocketed the proceeds of the sale. His "French and
Spanish swag," is the way Thomas A. Janvier expressed it. Of the house
in Greenwich Village on land that is bounded by the present Charles,
Perry, Bleecker, and Tenth Streets, Janvier wrote: "The house stood
about three hundred yards back from the river, on ground which fell away
in a gentle slope towards the waterside. The main entrance was from the
east; and at the rear--on the level of the drawing room and a dozen feet
or so above the sloping hillside--was a broad veranda commanding the
view westward to the Jersey Highlands and southward down the bay to the
Staten Island Hills." After Sir Peter Warren went away the Manse became
the home of Abraham Van Nest, and stood there more than a century. Not
until 1865 did it entirely disappear.
In 1745 Warren played a part in the Siege of Louisbourg that won him
promotion to the rank of Rear Admiral of the Blue, and his knighthood.
New York, for his share in the exploit, voted him some extra land. In
August, 1747, he was in command of the "Devonshire" at the naval battle
off Cape Finisterre, capturing the ship of the French Commodore, "La
Joncquiere." Then came his recall to England, where, on account of his
vast wealth and famous achievements, he was a conspicuous figure. One of
his daughters, Charlotte, married Willoughby, Earl of Abingdon. Another,
Ann, became the wife of Charles Fitzroy, Baron Southampton. The
youngest, Susanna, after her mother, was wedded to Colonel Skinner. New
York's affection and esteem for Sir Peter Warren extended to his
daughters and through them to their husbands. The old name of
Christopher Street was Skinner Road. There was a Fitzroy Road that ran
northward from Fourteenth Street. Then, still existing, is Abingdon
Square, and Abingdon Road, better known as "Love Lane," was somewhere in
the neighbourhood of the present Twenty-first Street. It is to the past
rather than the present that the student of the Avenue turns in
contemplating the stretch between Fourteenth and Twenty-second Streets.
Here and there an historical point may be indicated. On Sixteenth
Street, a few yards to the west, is the New York Hospital, the oldest
in the city. It received its charter from George the Third some years
before the first gun was fired in the War of the Revolution. It was not
regularly opened until 1791, but the building, then at Broadway and
Duane Street, served as a place for anatomical experiments. In 1788, the
story is, a medical student threatened a group of prying boys with a
dissected human arm. Soldiers were needed to quell the resulting riot.
The reddish brick hospital of today dates from 1877. A chapter in the
story of the New York Hospital as an institution concerns the
Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum, for which the land was purchased in 1816,
and the building completed in 1821.
Respectively at 150 and 156 Fifth Avenue are the building of the New
York Society of the Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Building. The
latter houses the Methodist Book Concern and a collection of relics
belonging to the Historical Society. A few years ago the stretch was
sometimes called the Paternoster Row of New York on account of the
number of publishing houses that lined it. Also it was long the home of
many of the churches that were erected in the middle of the last
century, among them the South Dutch Reformed Church, built in 1850, at
the southwest corner of Twenty-first Street, and the Fifth Avenue
Presbyterian Church at Nineteenth Street. In Nineteenth Street, just
east of the Avenue, was the former home of Horace Greeley, and in
Twentieth Street (No. 28) Theodore Roosevelt was born.
"Worth noting," says "Fifth Avenue," the publication issued by the Fifth
Avenue Bank, "are the names of prominent New Yorkers who, during the
fifties, lived on Fifth Avenue between Washington Square and
Twenty-first Street. Among them were Lispenard Stewart, Thomas Eggleson,
Silas Wood, Henry C. De Rham, Thomas F. Woodruff, Francis Cottinet,
David S. Kennedy, James Donaldson, Dr. J. Kearney Rodgers, C.N. Talbot,
N.H. Wolfe, James McBride, Charles M. Parker, L.M. Hoffman, August
Belmont, Benjamin Aymer, Henry C. Winthrop, Eugene Schiff, Captain
Lorillard Spencer, Moses Taylor, John C. Coster, Henry A. Coster, Sidney
Mason, Marshall O. Roberts, Robert L. Cutting, Gordon W. Burnham, Robert
C. Townsend, George Opdyke, Robert L. Stuart, whose magnificent art
collection was given to the Lenox Library, and James Lenox, the founder
of the Lenox Library. The fortunes of these gentlemen as recorded in
'Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of New York,' averaged
between one hundred and three hundred thousand dollars. One of the
richest men in New York at that time was James Lenox, who had inherited
the then huge fortune of three million dollars; another large fortune
was that of James McBride, estimated at seven hundred thousand dollars."
Then there were the clubs, the Union at the northwest corner of
Twenty-first Street, the Lotos Club, just across the Avenue, the
Athenæum, at the southwest corner of Sixteenth Street, the Travellers;
in the building that had formerly been the residence of Gordon W.
Burnham, at the southwest corner of Eighteenth Street, the Arcadian, at
No. 146, between Nineteenth and Twentieth Streets, the Manhattan,
occupying the Charles C. Parker house at the southwest corner of
Fifteenth Street, the New York, which, occupying another corner at the
same street, until 1874, then moved a few blocks northward to a house on
the Avenue facing Madison Square. How the window loungers of that
clubland stretch of the seventies and eighties would have stared and
rubbed their eyes had it been given to them to see the procession that
throngs the sidewalks today!
The stretch of glories departed is quickly passed. The nine blocks are
really eight, for it is at Twenty-second Street that the Flatiron
begins, and the drab hives behind are forgotten as the vision of the
Square strikes the eye. The Parisian, sipping an _apéritif_ at the
corner table of the Café de la Paix, believes himself to be occupying
the exact centre of the universe. The Manhattanite knows him to be wrong
by a matter of three thousand and some odd miles. Be he plutocrat or
panhandler he knows that it is some spot from which he can look up and
see the lithe figure of Diana, and the illuminated clock in the tower of
the Metropolitan Building.
Although not formally opened as Madison Square until 1847, the story of
the land goes back almost two hundred and fifty years. It was in 1670
that Sir Edward Andros, Governor of the Province, granted to Solomon
Peters, a free negro, thirty acres of land between what is now
Twenty-first and Twenty-sixth Streets, extending east and west from the
present Broadway (Bloomingdale Road) to Seventh Avenue. Forty-six years
later the negro's descendants sold the tract to John Horn and Cornelius
Webber, and a hundred years after it became vested in John Horn the
second. In the middle of the present roadway west of the Flatiron
Building the Horn farmhouse, occupied by John the Second's daughter and
son-in-law, Christopher Mildenberger, stood when the Avenue was cut
through to Twenty-third Street in 1837. It was allowed to remain there
two years more, when it was removed to the famous site at the northwest
corner of Twenty-third Street and became the Madison Cottage. The old
chroniclers tell of the joyous spirit and flavour of that roadhouse, a
favourite _rendezvous_ of horsemen in the forties, and of the genial
management of its proprietor, Corporal Thompson. In the Collection of
Amos F. Eno there is a photograph of the business card of the Cottage,
with the announcement that the stages "leave every 4 minutes." A picture
shows the stages before the building with its slanting roof and its
three dormer windows facing the Avenue and Park. Several miles beyond
the city proper, it was a post tavern in the coaching days, and the huge
pair of antlers announced the "Sign of the Buck-horn."
It had its brief and glorious day and then passed. Early in 1853 it was
torn down to make room for a circus, known as Franconi's Hippodrome,
built by a syndicate of American showmen, among whom were Avery Smith,
Richard Sands, and Seth B. Howe. The lithograph in the Collection of J.
Clarence Davies shows a combination of tent roof and permanent wall.
There was a turretted sexagonal entrance at the corner facing the Avenue
and Twenty-third Street, and another at the northern end of the
building. Seven hundred feet in circumference was the Hippodrome, of
brick sides, two stories high, with an oval ring in the centre two
hundred feet wide by three hundred feet long, seating six thousand
people, and having standing room for about half as many more. It was a
bold venture, perhaps too bold for its time. When the novelty had worn
off the profits began to dwindle and then ceased entirely. Amos F. Eno,
a New Englander who had prospered exceedingly in New York, bought the
property and planned to erect a hotel that was to surpass anything that
the city had already known. Sceptics ridiculed the idea, predicting that
a situation so far uptown meant certain disaster. But the Hippodrome
building was torn down, the new structure begun, and in September, 1859,
the Fifth Avenue Hotel opened its doors under the direction of Colonel
Paran Stevens. It was of white marble, six stories in height. Among the
innovations and conveniences that made it the wonder of its day was the
first passenger elevator ever installed. New York then knew the device
as "the vertical railway."
[Illustration: "THE TOWER OF THE METROPOLITAN BUILDING. WHATEVER ARTISTS
MAY THINK OF IT THE TOWER IS, STRUCTURALLY, ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE
WORLD. EXACTLY HALFWAY BETWEEN SIDEWALK AND POINT OF SPIRE IS THE GREAT
CLOCK WITH THE IMMENSE DIALS"]
But between the time when Solomon Peters received his grant and the day
when the opening of the Fifth Avenue Hotel ushered in a new era, the
land experienced many vicissitudes. In the last years of the eighteenth
century it was a Parade Ground, at one time extending from Twenty-third
to Thirty-fourth Streets, bounded on the east by the Eastern Post-road
and on the west by the Bloomingdale Road. At the southern end a Potter's
Field was opened in 1794, and there were buried the victims of the
frequent yellow-fever epidemics. But in 1797 a new Potter's Field was
opened in Washington Square. According to the plans of the
Commissioners' Map of 1811, there was to be no Fifth Avenue between
Twenty-third Street and Thirty-fourth Street. The Avenue was to end
temporarily at the former point, and resume its journey eleven blocks
farther north. As early as 1785 a powder magazine stood within the
present domains of the Square. A United States Arsenal, erected in 1808,
was near the spot of the Farragut statue. In 1823 the Arsenal building
became the house of refuge of the Society for the Reformation of
Juvenile Delinquents, the first organization instituted in America to
care for youthful offenders. In 1839 it was destroyed by fire. That was
two years after the Parade Ground had been reduced to its present limits
of 6.84 acres and renamed in honour of President Madison. In 1844 the
Eastern Post-road was closed. Its course may still be traced by the
double row of trees that runs northeast towards Madison Square Garden.
In 1847 the Square was formally opened and soon after society began to
migrate there. That was during the mayoralty of James Harper. From 1853
until the end of the Civil War it was the social centre of the city.
"Among those who lived in this vicinity," says "Fifth Avenue," "were
Leonard W. Jerome, and his elder brother, Addison G. Jerome, who, with
William R. Travers, were social leaders and prominent Wall Street
brokers; James Stokes, who, in 1851, built at No. 37 Madison Square,
East, the first residence on Madison Square, and whose wife was a
daughter of Anson G. Phelps; John David Wolfe, whose daughter, Catherine
Lorillard Wolfe, gave her magnificent art collection to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art; Frank Work, William and John O'Brien, Henry M.
Schieffelin, James L. Schieffelin, Samuel B. Schieffelin, Benjamin H.
Field, Peter Ronalds, and William Lane."
Elsewhere is told of the glories of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, of the part
it played as one of the Hosts of the Avenue, of its share in the great
days, of its Amen Corner, and of the distinguished men like General W.T.
Sherman, former Senator Platt, and the actor, William J. Florence, who
for years made it their home. A quarter of a century ago the entrance to
the hotel was the starting point, every Thanksgiving Day noon, for many
gaily decorated coaches bound for the old Manhattan Field. In earlier
days the destination had been Berkeley Oval at Williamsbridge, or the
old Polo Grounds at One Hundred and Tenth Street and Fifth and Sixth
Avenues. Draped down to the wheels with bunting of dark blue or of
orange and black the tally-hos drew up before the portico and were soon
topped with eager, ardent youth. As they were whirled away up the Avenue
there broke out upon the autumn air the sharp "Brek-a Coex-Coex-Coex" of
Yale, or the sky-rocket of Princeton. The return was marked by high
elation or deep depression according as the Fates had decided on the
chalk-lined turf. For the collection of sundry wagers the victors
hurried into the near-by Hoffman House, where the presiding genius and
stakeholder, Billy Edwards, divided attention with the paintings of
fauns and nymphs that adorned the walls. That youth of yesteryear has
come to grizzled hair. There are crow's feet about the eyes, and the
world is one of vastly changed values, and the game at which the heart
is throbbing is a more poignant one than that which involved touchdowns
and goals from the field and desperate stands on the two-yard line. But
it is the same old-time spirit, that then expressed itself in the call,
"Hold them, Yale," or "Hold them for Old Nassau!" that, passed on to
succeeding generations, is grimly awaiting the shock on the plains of
Picardy.
Of all the monuments that have graced Madison Square that which first
comes to mind is one that has gone. Twenty years ago a splendid white
arch spanned the Avenue, with one pier close to the sidewalk in front of
the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the other touching the edge of the opposite
Park. It was in direct line with Washington Arch seventeen blocks away.
Under it, on September 30, 1898, passed the victor of Manila Bay, whose
name it bore, bowing right and left to the city's riotous welcome. For
months it remained there, and then disappeared. Why was the beautiful
structure not made permanent? The Worth Monument, in the centre of the
triangular piece of ground bounded by Fifth Avenue, Broadway,
Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Streets, dates from 1857. By order of the
Common Council the plot was set apart for the erection of the shaft in
December, 1854. Major-General William J. Worth, of Mexican War fame,
died at San Antonio, Texas, June 7, 1849. The monument was dedicated
with a parade and a review November 25, 1857, and the General's remains
interred under the south side. In bands around the obelisk are recorded
the names of the battles in which Worth took part. On the east face, cut
in the stone, may be read "_Ducit Amor Patriae"_ and on the west face,
"By the Corporation of the City of New York, 1857--Honor the Brave." At
the moment of writing the building beyond the Worth Monument, at the
corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street, is in the process of
demolition. At one time the New York Club was housed there, and there,
for years, the sign of the Berlitz School for Languages stretched
across the southern face of the structure.
"Were all the statues in New York made by St. Gaudens?" was the recent
naïve and ingenuous question of a visitor from the West who had just
completed the first two days of his stay. "Most of the good ones were,"
was the laughing rejoinder of an artist. "At least that is the way it
seems. And nearly all the pedestals for them were made by Stanford
White." In query and response there is a certain amount of justice. It
is Augustus St. Gaudens's benevolent presentment of Peter Cooper that
stands within the little park enclosed by Cooper Square. The name of St.
Gaudens is associated with those of John La Farge, White, MacMonnies,
MacNeil, and Calder in the making of the Washington Arch. To St. Gaudens
belongs the equestrian statue of William Tecumseh Sherman in the Plaza.
And here, in Madison Square, the Farragut statue is his. Unveiled in
1881, executed in Paris when the sculptor was thirty years of age, and
exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1880, the Farragut is, in the opinion of
Miss Henderson, the base upon which St. Gaudens's great reputation
rests. "And while," she writes, "in New York its merits are often
balanced with those of the Sherman equestrian group, at the entrance to
Central Park; the Peter Cooper, in Cooper Square; and the relief of Dr.
Bellows, in the All-Souls' Church--all later works--it has never had to
yield precedence to any, but holds its own by force of its splendid
vigour and youthful plasticity. It has the essential characteristics of
the portrait, but so combined with the attitude of the artist that the
figure stands as much more than a portrait, having in it something more
living, more typical, deeper than the mere outward mould of the man. St.
Gaudens's Farragut has the bearing of a seaman, balanced on his two
legs, in a posture easy, yet strong. He is rough and bluff with the
courage and simplicity of a commander; his eye is accustomed to deal
with horizons, while the features are clean-cut and masterful. The
inscription is happy: 'That the memory of a daring and sagacious
commander and gentle great-souled man, whose life from childhood was
given to his country, but who served her supremely in the war for the
Union, 1861-1865, may be preserved and honored, and that they who come
after him and who will love him so much may see him as he was seen by
friend and foe, his countrymen have set up this monument A.D.
MDCCCLXXXI.'"
There are other statues in the Square besides the noble one
commemorating the deeds of the hero of "Full steam ahead, and damn the
torpedoes!" At the southwest corner there is a bronze one of William H.
Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, the work of Randolph Rogers. The
effigy of Roscoe Conkling, by J.Q.A. Ward, is at the southeast corner.
Cold and proud is the stone as the man was cold, and proud, and biting.
What chance had haranguing abuse against his icy: "I have no time to
bandy epithets with the gentleman from Georgia"? Then there is the
drinking fountain by Emma Stebbins, given to the city by the late
Catherine Lorillard Wolfe, and the Bissell statue of Chester A. Arthur.
No other structure in the city is so many different things to so many
different people as the Madison Square Garden. To the old-time New
Yorker, who likes to babble reminiscently of the past, the site recalls
the railway terminus of the sixties, when the outgoing trains were drawn
by horses through the tunnel as far north as the present Grand Central.
To one artistically inclined the creamy tower, modelled on that of the
Giralda in Seville, suggests the collaboration of St. Gaudens and White,
and the surmounting Diana the early work of the former inspired by
Houdon's Diana of the Louvre. To the more frivolous, the sportingly
inclined, the seekers after gross pleasures, the Garden has meant the
Arion Ball, or the French Students Ball, the Horse Show, Dog Show, Cat
Show, Poultry Show, Automobile Show, Sportsman's Show, the Cake-Walk,
the Six-Day Bicycle Race, or events of the prize-ring from the days of
Sullivan and Mitchell to those of Willard and Moran; Buffalo Bill and
his Wild West Show, or the circus, the Greatest Show on Earth, with its
houris of the trapeze and the saddle, and its animals, almost as fearful
and wonderful as the menagerie of adjectives that its press-agent, the
renowned, or notorious, Tody Hamilton, gathers annually out of the
jungles of the dictionary. Also the interior of the vast structure
echoes in memory with political oratory, now thunderous and now
persuasive. Through the words directed immediately at the thousands that
fought their way within the walls Presidents and candidates for
president have sent ringing utterance throughout the land.
Opposite the Garden, at the southeast corner of Twenty-sixth Street, is
the Manhattan Club, in a house that was formerly the home of the
University Club, and adjoining it to the south, is the Appellate Court
House, architecturally one of the city's most distinguished buildings.
Designed by James Brown Lord, it was completed in 1900, at a cost of
three-quarters of a million dollars. Among the men whose work is
represented in this home of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court
for the City and County of New York are Maitland Armstrong, Karl Bitter,
Charles Henry Niehaus, Charles Albert Lopez, Thomas Shields Clarke,
George Edwin Bissell, Philip Martiny, Robert Reid, Willard L. Metcalf,
Henry Augustus Lukeman, John Donoghue, Henry Kirke Bush Brown, Edward
Clark Potter, Henry Siddons Mowbray, Frederick W. Ruckstuhl, Herbert
Adams, George Willoughby Maynard, Joseph Lauber, Maximilian M.
Schwartzott, and Kenyon Cox.
The old home of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church was in the block
between Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets. Then, on the northeast
corner of the latter street stood one of the last surviving residences
recalling the days when the Square was the possession of Flora McFlimsey
and her kind, the old brown-stone dwelling of Catherine Lorillard Wolfe.
The Wolfe property, offered for sale, was purchased by an official of
the Metropolitan Company, and an exchange was effected by which the
church relinquished its old site and moved to the northern corner. The
present church was designed by Stanford White, who met his death in
1906, the year before the formal dedication. With its grey brick
exterior, showing repeatedly the Maltese Cross, its interior following
the spirit of the Mosque of Santa Sophia in Constantinople, and its
mural paintings and windows, many of them the work of Louis C. Tiffany,
it is one of the most beautiful of all the city's edifices for religious
worship. But to the casual eye it is quite lost on account of its
proximity to its gigantic neighbour.
The traveller approaching Paris can see from miles away, the apex of the
Eiffel Tower outlined against the sky. The eye of one nearing New York,
whether his point of observation be the deck of an incoming steamer, or
a car-chair in a train arriving from the West, is met first by the
cluster of skyscrapers at the southern end of the island, and then by a
shaft vastly more conspicuous by reason of its isolation, the tower of
the Metropolitan Building. Whatever artists may think of it--and there
is division of opinion--that tower is, structurally, one of the wonders
of the world. Rising seven hundred feet above the sidewalk, topping the
Singer Building by ninety feet and being outclimbed only by the
Woolworth Building (seven hundred and ninety-two feet), the tower is
seventy-five feet by eighty-five at its base, and carries the building
to its fifty-second story. Exactly half-way between sidewalk and point
of spire is the great clock with the immense dials of reinforced
concrete faced with mosaic tile, each twenty-six and a half feet in
diameter, with the hour hand thirteen and a half feet long, weighing
seven hundred and fifty pounds, and the minute hand seventeen feet long
and weighing one thousand pounds. At night the indicating flashes, the
hours in white, the quarters in one, two, three, or four, red, may be
seen at a distance of twenty miles.
But nearer at hand, as the hours creep one by one towards the dawn, are
the derelicts of the Square, dozing fitfully on the park benches. In
waking moments their dull eyes watch the illuminated face, and the hands
pushing forward to another day. The spectacle moved one of them, Prince
Michael, heir to the throne of the Electorate of Valleluna, in O.
Henry's "The Caliph, Cupid, and the Clock," to pessimistic utterance.
"Clocks," he said, "are shackles on the feet of mankind. I have observed
you looking persistently at that clock. Its face is that of a tyrant,
its numbers are false as those on a lottery ticket; its hands are those
of a bunco-steerer, who makes an appointment with you to your ruin. Let
me entreat you to throw off its humiliating bonds and to cease to order
your affairs by that insensate monitor of brass and steel."
Sang Sara Teasdale:
"We walked together in the dusk
To watch the tower grow dimly white,
And saw it lift against the sky,
Its flower of amber light."