_The Crest of Murray Hill_
Stretches of the Avenue--The Crest of Murray Hill--The House of
"Sarsaparilla" Townsend--A.T. Stewart's Italian Palace--The
Knickerbocker Trust Company--The Coventry Waddell Mansion--A House at
Thirty-ninth Street--The Present Union League--A Tavern of the
Fifties--The "House of Mansions"--The Old Reservoir, and Egyptian
Temple--The Crystal Palace--The Latting Tower--"Quality Hill."
Although the name it now bears and has borne for four or five years is
the Columbia Trust Company, the building at the northwest corner of
Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street is likely to be known and referred
to as the Knickerbocker Trust for a long time to come. As such it was
the storm centre of the great panic which shook the country in 1907,
ruining many, shaking some of America's supposedly most solid fortunes,
and involving a dramatic suicide. The story of the site goes back almost
three-quarters of a century. There, at the beginning of the Civil War,
was the residence of "Dr." Samuel P. Townsend. Originally a contractor,
he had "discovered" a sarsaparilla, advertised it on an extensive scale,
acquired a fortune and the nickname of "Sarsaparilla" Townsend. His
house, a four-story brown-stone, was one of the wonders of the town. For
some reason he did not live in it long, selling it in 1862 to Dr. Gorham
D. Abbott, an uncle of Dr. Lyman Abbott of the "Outlook." For a number
of years Dr. Abbott, who had been the principal of the Spingler
Institute on Union Square, conducted a school there. Then A.T. Stewart,
the famous merchant, bought the site. He found brown-stone and left
marble. "Sarsaparilla" Townsend's pride and folly was tumbled to the
ground, carted away, and in its place there went up the Italian palace
that is still a familiar memory to most New Yorkers. It cost two million
dollars. Stewart did not live long to enjoy it. But after his death in
1876, his widow occupied the palace until her death in 1886, when the
property was leased to the Manhattan Club. There was a story to the
effect that during the club's occupancy it was found necessary to make
certain interior alterations. One of the committee in charge was an
Irishman. He complained that the work was unduly expensive for the
reason that "the woodwork was all marble."
But before Stewart demolished and built, and before "Sarsaparilla"
Townsend built what Stewart later demolished, there had been a famous
mansion in this neighbourhood. Thackeray, in one of his letters to the
Baxter family, alluded to the long journey he was about to undertake in
order to travel from his hotel to a certain famous house up in the
country at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street. That was the Coventry
Waddell house, on land where the Brick Presbyterian Church now stands.
Waddell was a close friend of President Jackson, and his fortune sprang
from the services he rendered as financial representative of the "Old
Hickory" Administration. In 1845, when he went "into the wilderness" to
build, the Avenue, beyond Madison Square, was nothing but a country road
lined with farms. It is told that when he was bargaining for the land,
his wife sat under an apple-tree in a neighbouring orchard. Nine
thousand one hundred and fifty dollars he paid for the tract, which ten
years later brought eighty thousand dollars, and for part of which the
Brick Church paid fifty-eight thousand dollars in 1856. The Fifth Avenue
Bank monograph contains a print of the villa, as it was called,
reproduced from "Putnam's Magazine." What the print apparently shows is
the Thirty-seventh Street stretch, with the wicket fence near the
corner, and the low brick wall extending westward beyond. The villa was
of yellowish grey stucco with brown-stone trim, Gothic in style, and had
so many towers, oriels, and gables, that when Waddell's brother saw it
and was asked what he would call it, replied, "Waddell's Caster; here
is a mustard pot, there is a pepper bottle, and there is a vinegar
cruet." There were a conservatory and a picture-gallery, and the house
stood considerably above the Avenue level upon grounds that descended to
the street by sloping grass banks. A winding staircase led from the
broad marble hall to a tower from which there was a fine view of the
rolling country, the rivers to the east and west, and the growing city
far to the south. There were celebrities other than the author of
"Vanity Fair" who sampled the quality of the Waddell hospitality. For
ten years the Waddells lived there, entertaining magnificently. Then
came the financial crash of 1857, Mr. Waddell was one of those whose
fortunes tumbled with the market, and he was obliged to sacrifice his
estate. The villa was torn down, and the grounds levelled. "I remember,"
"Fifth Avenue" quotes Mr. John D. Crimmins as saying, "very vividly the
old Waddell mansion. I was taken into it by my father the day they began
to dismantle it, and remember very distinctly the courteous manner in
which we were received by Mrs. Waddell, and how she regretted the
destruction of her home. At that time the Reservoir was an attraction
for the view it furnished. There were no buildings high enough to
interfere, and visitors could get a bird's-eye view of the entire city
and the Palisades. The neighbourhood at that time is well illustrated
in the old New York print showing the Reservoir and the Crystal Palace,
1855. There were no pretentious houses north of Forty-second Street. It
was interesting to see the drovers--tall men, with staffs in their
hands, herding eight, ten, or twenty cattle--driving the cattle to
market, generally on Sunday, as Monday was market day."
[Illustration: THE TERRACE OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY. TO-DAY THE SPOT IS THE
SCENE OF THE ACTIVITIES OF THOSE ENGAGED IN THE WORK OF SPEEDING
AMERICA'S ANSWER. ONCE IT WAS FAR UPTOWN, AND ON THE EASTERN SIDE OF THE
AVENUE WERE THE RESIDENCES KNOWN AS "SPANISH ROW," OR "THE HOUSE OF
MANSIONS"]
About the time that the Waddell villa was being pulled down there was
going up, two blocks to the north, a New York residence that has endured
to the present day. The original Wendell and the original Astor were
partners in the fur trade, and at the time of the death of the late John
Gottlieb Wendell his holdings in Manhattan real estate were second only
to those of the Astors. There was a General David Wendell, known as
"Fighting Dave," who fought in the War of the Revolution. The first
Wendell and the first Astor, his partner, married sisters, and they
bequeathed to their descendants the sound principle of buying land and
buying beyond. The John Gottlieb Wendell of recent memory, a
great-great-grandson of the founder of the family fortune, was
distinguished for his eccentricities. Although he collected his own
rents, would never give more than three-year leases, and could not be
persuaded to part with a foot of his land holdings, he was
characterized as "one of the squarest landlords in the city." In the
old-fashioned brick and brown-stone house he lived in extreme
simplicity. From the top of a passing bus may be seen the garden beyond
the high board fence. Many covetous eyes of commerce have regarded it;
many tempting offers have been made. But according to popular tradition
Mr. Wendell clung to the garden because his sisters desired it as a
place in which to exercise their dogs. Now, after the death of John
Gottlieb, the three elderly sisters still live in the house, in a state
of the same old-time plainness. They, with a married sister, are the
sole heirs of the eighty million dollars in New York real estate left by
their brother. The house, a few years ago, was assessed at five thousand
dollars, the site is valued at two million.
Directly across the Avenue from the Wendell house is the Union League
Club, on land that formerly was occupied by Dickel's Riding Academy,
fifty years ago the fashionable equestrian school of New York. The early
story of the organization will be found in another chapter. The present
home at the northeast corner of Thirty-ninth Street was built in
1879-1880 at a cost of four hundred thousand dollars. The building is in
Queen Anne style, of Baltimore pressed brick, with brown-stone
trimmings, the interior decorations are the work of John La Farge, Louis
Tiffany, and Franklin Smith, and the club's art collection includes
Carpenter's Inauguration of Lincoln. The long room on the first floor
facing Fifth Avenue, from the windows of which at any hour of the day
may be seen comfortable-looking gentlemen blandly surveying the passing
procession, is the Reading Room, decorated in Pompeian style.
On the corner above where the Union League now stands there was, in
1854, a small country tavern known as the Croton Cottage. It took its
name from the Croton Reservoir, a block above, then on the other side of
the Avenue. A yellow, wooden structure, with a veranda reached by deep
stoops from the sidewalk, and surrounded by trees and shrubbery, it
flourished by vending ice cream and other refreshment to those who came
to view the city from the top of the Reservoir walls. During the Draft
Riots in 1863 it was burned down, and Commodore Vanderbilt bought the
site in 1866 for eighty thousand dollars, built a house, lived in it,
and left it to his son, Frederick W. Vanderbilt. It is the Arnold,
Constable site. On the same side of the Avenue as the Croton Cottage, in
the block between Forty-first and Forty-second Street, was the Rutgers
Female Cottage. This institution was first opened in 1839 on ground
given it by William B. Crosby in Madison Street. The Madison Street
property had been part of the estate of Colonel Henry Rutgers, of
Revolutionary fame, after whom the college was named. In 1855 certain
buildings known as "The House of Mansions," or "The Spanish Row," were
erected opposite the Reservoir by George Higgins, who thought "that
eleven buildings, uniform in size, price, and amount of accommodation,
of durable fire-brick, and of a chosen cheerful tint of colour and
variegated architecture," would suit the most fastidious home-seeker. In
his prospectus to the public he informed that the view from the windows
was unrivalled, as it commanded the whole island and its surroundings.
But either "The House of Mansions" had some defect, or the situation was
still too remote from the city. The project was not a success, and in
1860 the Rutgers Female College, incidentally the first institution for
the higher education of young women in the city, moved from its downtown
home and occupied the neglected buildings. Then there is the story of
the great square opposite, running from Fifth to Sixth Avenues, between
Fortieth and Forty-second Streets. The Public Library holds the eastern
half of it now and Bryant Park the western. Like Washington Square and
Madison Square the land once served as a burial place for the poor and
the nameless dead. Between the years 1822 and 1825 that northern square
was the Potter's Field. Then, on October 14, 1842, the massive
Reservoir, which remained to see almost the dawn of the twentieth
century, was opened with impressive ceremonies. The distributing
reservoir of the Croton Water system, it occupied more than four acres,
and was divided into two basins by a partition wall. The enclosing
walls, constructed of granite, were about forty-five feet high. This
vast structure, resembling an Egyptian temple, contained twenty million
gallons of water. The Reservoir had been there eleven years, when the
Crystal Palace, modelled after the London Crystal Palace at Sydenham,
was formally opened July 14, 1853, by President Franklin Pierce. Six
hundred and fifty thousand dollars was the cost of the building, which
was shaped like a Greek cross, of glass and iron, with a graceful dome,
arched naves, and broad aisles. Upon the completion of the Atlantic
Cable in 1858 an ovation was given in the Palace to Cyrus W. Field.
Beyond the Palace, to the north, was the Latting Tower, an observatory,
three hundred and fifty feet high, an octagon seventy-five feet across
the base, of timber, braced with iron, and anchored at each of the eight
angles with about forty tons of stone and timber. The tower was the
design of Warren Latting, and cost one hundred thousand dollars.
Immediately over the first story there was a refreshment room, and above
three view landings, the highest being three hundred feet from the
pavement. The proprietors were as sanguine as the promoters of the
Crystal Palace and the builder of "The House of Mansions" had been. They
took a ten-year lease of the ground and counted on reaping a fortune.
But like the other ventures the Tower was a failure. It was sold under
execution and destroyed by fire August 30, 1856, twenty-five months
before the burning of the Palace. In 1862 Union troops camped on the
site of the latter building, and the ground became known in 1871 as
Reservoir Park, which name was changed to Bryant Park in 1884.
Like other world-great cities, New York has many hearts. The spot that
means the very centre of things varies according to mood, occupation,
and manner of life. To high finance and those who play feverishly with
it, the heart of the town is where Wall Street, running from Trinity
Church down to the East River, is crossed by Nassau zigzagging into
Broad. At high noon the colossal figure of Washington on the steps of
the Sub-Treasury looks down on the centre of the earth. To the swarming
thousands of the Ghetto, who seldom venture west of the Bowery, there is
a point on the East Side that represents the pivot of things. There are
descendants of the Knickerbockers who cling arrogantly to the corner
facing the Washington Arch. Profound is the belief of the pleasure
seeker in the lights, signs, theatres, and lobster palaces of Longacre
Square. To others nothing counts as the trees and fountains of Madison
Square and graceful Diana and the great clock in the Metropolitan Tower
count. But in these stirring days of the spring and early summer of
1918, for the throb of the universe climb Murray Hill to a point on the
Fifth Avenue sidewalk opposite the stone lions that guard the entrance
to the Public Library. There, as nowhere else, has the quiet of other
days been changed to the clamour of the present. To the passing
thousands the uniforms of khaki or of navy blue and the blaring band are
calling. "In this the vital hour let us show that the Spirit of '76 is
not dead! Americans, to arms!" And yesterday it was "Quality Hill," of
which Mr. Clinton Scollard sang:
"Quality Hill! Lo! It flourishes still,
And who can deny that forever it will?
A blending of breeding with puff and with plume;
A strange sort of mixture of rick and mushroom.
Some amble, some scramble, (some gamble), to fill
The motley and medley of Quality Hill."