_The Slope of Murray Hill_
Stretches of the Avenue--Murray Hill: a Slope in Transition--Early Astor
Land Purchases--The Brunswick Building--A Deserted Clubland--Churches of
the Stretch--The Marble Collegiate--The "Little Church Around the
Corner" and its Story--When Grant's Funeral Procession Passed--The
Waldorf and the Astoria--On the Hill in 1776--When the Red-Coats
Loitered.
After its half-mile journey between the great, square sordid mountains
of stone and steel that lie to the north of Fourteenth Street, Fifth
Avenue emerges into the sunshine of Madison Square. There it draws in
deep breaths of pure ozone before resuming its way as a canyon at
Twenty-sixth Street. Reverting to the past, from the Square to
Thirty-first Street, the lane runs through what was the Caspar Samler
farm. North of that were the twenty acres that John Thompson bought in
1799 for four hundred and eighty-two pounds and ten shillings. A little
later, a more familiar name appeared on the maps. In 1827 the Astor hand
reached up to this then remote section, William B. Astor purchasing a
half-interest, including Fifth Avenue from Thirty-second to
Thirty-fifth, for twenty thousand five hundred dollars. While other
real-estate investors who considered themselves astute were planning for
the future by gobbling up stretches of land along the shore of the East
River the Astors were buying across what was primitively known as the
backbone of the island.
The sharp rise to what was the old summit and to the modified hill of
the present does not begin until Thirty-third Street is reached. But
there is perceptible a grade of a kind as soon as the Avenue leaves the
northern line of the Square. Today it is a slope in transition. Here and
there the change has been wrought. A modern structure reaches
superciliously skyward. Beside it and below it the buildings of
yesterday give the impression of feeling acutely conscious of their
impending doom. They know. Their race is almost run. Tomorrow the old
bricks will be tumbled down, the chutes will roar with their passing,
and the air will be shrill with the steam drills and riveters ushering
into the world the young giants that will take their places. At the
northeast corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where the Avenue touches the
Square, there is a vast edifice of surpassing ugliness. It is the
Brunswick Building, on the site of the old Brunswick Hotel, once famous
as the headquarters of the Coaching Club. At one end the principal
establishment of one of those firms that have given the term "grocer" a
new meaning, at the other, a great book-shop of international
reputation, and between, a booking office where the pictures and maps in
the show windows stir the passer-by to disquieting dreams on streams of
Canada and Maine in the summer, and of semi-tropical verdure in the
winter.
Now and again, on the way up the slope, there is a house, which,
sturdily and stubbornly, has remained what it was built for, a place of
residence, despite the encroachments of commerce. But there are only
four or five such. Until a few years ago this was a section of Clubland
with the Reform, and the Knickerbocker, the latter at the Thirty-second
Street corner, and the New York, just above the Thirty-fourth Street
crossing. But the clubs, too, have moved on to the north, and the
stretch of today is a riot without order or design, tailors, automats,
art shops, opticians, railway offices, steamship offices, florists,
leather goods, cigars, Japanese gardens, Chinese gardens, toys, pianos,
and even an antique shop or two, which have somehow found their way over
from Fourth Avenue to the more aristocratic thoroughfare to the west,
and where the visitor, like Raphael of Balzac's "Le Peau de Chagrin,"
may wander in imagination up and down countless galleries of the mighty
past. At the Twenty-eighth Street corner there is a tall apartment
house, retaining a sort of left-behind dignity; and there are two
churches which belong to the Avenue's story, one of them on the Avenue
itself, and the other in a side street, a stone's throw to the east. The
first is the Marble Collegiate Church, which is at the northeast corner
of Twenty-ninth Street, adjoining the Holland House. It is one of the
six Collegiate churches that trace their origin to the first church
organized by the Dutch settlers in 1628. Its succession to the "church
in the fort" is commemorated by a tablet, and in the yard is preserved
the bell which originally hung in the North Church.
Then, in East Twenty-ninth Street, is the rambling old Church of the
Transfiguration, loved by all true New Yorkers irrespective of creed,
under the name of the "Little Church Around the Corner." From it the
actors Wallack, Booth, and Boucicault were buried, and in it is the
memorial window to Edwin Booth, executed by John La Forge, and erected
by the Players Club in 1898, in loving memory of the club's founder.
Below the window is Booth's favourite quotation.
"As one, in suffering all:
That suffers nothing;
A man that fortune's buffets and rewards
Hast ta'en with equal thanks."
--_Hamlet_, III., 2.
Often as the story from which the church derived its familiar name has
been told, no narrative dealing with New York would be quite complete
without it. As it deals with Joseph Jefferson, let it be related in the
words of the stage Rip Van Winkle's Reminiscences. Mr. Jefferson was
trying to arrange for the funeral, and in company of one of the dead
actor's sons, was seeking a clergyman to officiate. Here is his story:
"On arriving at the house I explained to the reverend gentleman the
nature of my visit, and arrangements were made for the time and place at
which the funeral was to be held. Something, I can hardly say what, gave
me the impression that I had best mention that Mr. Holland was an actor.
I did so in a few words, and concluded by presuming that this would make
no difference. I saw, however, by the restrained manner of the minister
and an unmistakable change in the expression of his face, that it would
make, at least to him, a great deal of difference. After some hesitation
he said he would be compelled, if Mr. Holland had been an actor, to
decline holding the service at his church.
"While his refusal to perform the funeral rites for my old friend would
have shocked, under ordinary circumstances, the fact that it was made in
the presence of the dead man's son was more painful than I can describe.
I turned to look at the youth and saw that his eyes were filled with
tears. He stood as one dazed with a blow just realized; as if he felt
the terrible injustice of a reproach upon the kind and loving father who
had often kissed him in his sleep and had taken him upon his lap when a
boy old enough to know the meaning of the words and told him to grow up
to be an honest lad. I was hurt for my young friend and indignant with
the man--too much so to reply, and as I rose to leave the room with a
mortification that I cannot remember to have felt before or since, I
paused at the door and said: 'Well, sir, in this dilemma, is there no
other church to which you can direct me from which my friend can be
buried?' He replied that 'There was a little church around the corner'
where I might get it done--to which I answered, 'Then if this be so, God
bless the Little Church Around the Corner,' and so I left the house."
A photograph from the collection of J. Clarence Davies, reproduced in
the book issued by the Fifth Avenue Bank, shows Grant's funeral
procession climbing the slope of Murray Hill, August 8, 1885, and
passing the residences of John Jacob Astor and William B. Astor, on the
sites of which is the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel of the present. The house of
John Jacob was at Thirty-third Street, and that of William B. at
Thirty-fourth Street, and there was a garden between shut off from the
Avenue by a ten-foot brick wall. The Waldorf, named after the little
town of Waldorf, Germany, the ancestral home of the family, occupies the
site of the John Jacob house, and was opened March 14, 1893. Four and a
half years later, on November 1, 1897, the Astoria came formally into
being, and the two hotels linked by the hyphen and merged under one
management. That point where Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street cross
is one of the great corners of New York. It is the one that made the
profoundest impression on Arnold Bennett: "The pale-pillared, square
structure of the Knickerbocker Trust against a background of the lofty
red of the Æolian Building, and the great white store on the opposite
pavement." A city of amazement has been left behind. Here we are at the
threshold of still another city. It is different at every hour of the
day. But whether we see it in the sweet-scented dawn, or at high noon,
or at the shopping hour, or later, when, to use Arnold Bennett's words,
"the street lamps flicker into a steady, steely blue, and the windows of
the hotels and restaurants throw a yellow radiance, and all the
shops--especially the jewellers' shops--become enchanted treasure
houses, whose interiors recede away behind their façades into infinity,"
it is ever the essence of our New York of Anno Domini 1918.
Then, in an instant, the Hill of today vanishes. The show windows of
the great shops, gorgeous with display, the vast hotels, the clubs, the
fluttering Starry Banners and Tricolours and Union Jacks, the stirring
posters that bring the heart into the throat and send the hand down into
the pocket for Liberty Loan or Red Cross, the line of creeping
motor-cars on the asphalt, the swarming sidewalks, swim away in a mist,
and in their place there is rolling woodland, and a silver stream, and
in the distance, a great white house. The years drop away. A boy of
eight, curled up in a big chair, is dipping for the first time into the
pages of his country's history. His face is flushed, his eyes are
bright. With that vividness that belongs to impressionable childhood,
and to no other period of life he is seeing bits of the past that he
will never forget. To the end of his days the rhetorical phrases will
ring in his ears and the letters forming them will dance before his
eyes.
Boston Common. The line of defiant Minute Men drawn up. The curt order,
"Disperse, ye Rebels!" and the volley that followed so closely upon the
words. _This was the first blood shed in the American Revolution._ The
morning of an impending battle: the Continental leader exhorting his
men. "_There are the Red Coats! We must beat them today, or Molly
Stork's a widow!_" Again, the boy is being awakened from sleep in his
bed in a quiet street of eighteenth-century Philadelphia. The voice of
the watchman is crying the hour and the thrilling tidings. "_Two o'clock
in the morning! All's well, and Cornwallis has surrendered!_"
Here, on the Murray Hill of May, 1918, the man becomes the boy once
more. Perhaps the suggestion comes from one of the women's faces that
are looking straight at him, beseechingly and rebukingly, from the
posters that line the Avenue; the face of "The Greatest Mother in the
World," or that younger face beyond which the eye perceives dim outlines
of marching men in khaki. The veil with the Red Cross is transformed
into a coiffure of powdered hair, crowning the countenance and figure of
a _grande dame_ of the eighteenth century. She is standing before the
doorway of a great country house, smiling and beckoning welcome, and at
the invitation officers on horseback halt the column of rapidly moving
men. The soldiers break ranks and throw themselves down in the shade of
the trees. The officers advance bowing, and enter the house. The lady is
smiling.
The hostess with the powdered hair is Mrs. Mary Lindley Murray, wife of
Robert Murray, British sympathizer and Quaker, and mother of Lindley
Murray, the grammarian of later days; the house is the Murray
Homestead, or the Manor of Incleberg, that in Revoluntionary times stood
in the neighbourhood of what is now Park Avenue and Thirty-seventh
Street; the Red Coats whose march westward she has interrupted are the
troops of Lord Howe, in close pursuit of the badly demoralized soldiers
of General Washington; the day is one of September, 1776.
A few weeks before the disastrous battle of Long Island had been fought.
The Continental cause seemed at the point of immediate collapse. Day by
day the list of deserters swelled. Washington, leaving his campfires
burning to lull the suspicions of the confident victors, had transported
his men across the East River. On September 15th the British began
sending over boat-loads, landing them at Kip's Bay, where the Murray
estate ended, now the easterly point of Thirty-fourth Street. In
overwhelming numbers, fully equipped, and with elated morale, they began
the pursuit of the shattered Americans. The detachment of Continentals
left at Kip's Bay to oppose the landing had fled without firing a shot.
Washington, watching the debacle, had spurred his horse furiously
forward, striking the men with the flat of his sword, lashing them with
his tongue, in vain attempt to stop the panic. He was on the point of
advancing alone when his bridle-rein was seized by a young officer. In
an instant, again completely master of himself, he was building new
plans in the hopes of saving his army.
The situation on Manhattan Island was this. To the south was General
Knox, in command of a fort known as Bunker Hill on an eminence of what
is now Grand Street. Near-by was General Israel Putnam--probably less
known to posterity (above all, to youthful posterity) for his qualities
as a commander than for the mad dash down "Put's Hill" at Greenwich by
which he escaped the closely pursuing Red Coats. With Putnam was
Alexander Hamilton, in charge of a battery. To the generals Washington
sent word to retreat to the north in order to effect a junction of
forces. Knox withdrew men and cannon from Bunker Hill. The young man who
guided Putnam's troops along obscure paths and by winding lanes close to
the Hudson was named Aaron Burr. The busy Washington chanced to spend a
night in the Murray home. If there had been any hesitation in Mrs.
Murray's patriotism before, it vanished entirely under the grave charm
of the Virginia leader. Henceforth she was heart and soul with the
Continental cause.
Two days later the British came. Mrs. Murray knew the danger that
threatened the Americans. Her woman's wit and woman's charm must save
the hour. So smiling she stood in the doorway, curtseying and inviting.
The day was hot; the officers thirsty. To the minds of the British,
contemptuous of the prowess of the troops in ragged blue and buff, what
difference would an hour or two make when the _coup de grace_ was so
easy to deliver? The lady was charming, _grande dame,_ and her husband
was known for devotion to King George. So they stayed and drank and
drank again, while the American forces were meeting on the site of the
present Longacre Square. A few days later came the Battle of Harlem
Heights, where the Continentals gloriously redeemed themselves. The wine
cups of Mrs. Murray made possible the victory of the "Bloody Buckwheat
Field." Had not a lady with powdered hair been standing before the door
of her house on Murray Hill, the signers of the Declaration of
Independence might, instead of hanging together, have hanged separately.