On the earliest of the really spring-like mornings as the Easy Chair
turned into Church Street it could not help perceiving that in some
romantic ways the New-Yorker has the advantage of the Londoner and
Parisian. Church Street does not, indeed, seem at the first mention to
be a promising domain of romance, nor a fond haunt of the Muses. Indeed,
it must not be denied that it has an unsavory name; and when the city
loiterer recalls Wapping, or a May morning on the Seine quais, he will
smile at Church Street as a field of romance, and the Easy Chair grants
him absolution. London, perhaps, does not strike the American
imagination, or, let us more truly say, the imagination of the
travelling American, as a romantic city. That citizen of the world
reserves for himself Venice, Constantinople, Grand Cairo. Yet if after
his arrival he will buy Peter Cunningham's _Hand-book for London_ at the
nearest book-store, and turn its pages slowly, he will discover that for
him, an American, he is in a very romantic city indeed. Mr. Hepworth
Dixon's _Tower of London_ will show him how copious a sermon may be
preached from one romantic text. Of course he can be expected to have no
feeling but pity for the unfortunates who fill the streets, and whose
fate it was to be born Britishers. Yet, let him reflect that it was not
their fault, and except for that precise unhappy fact of being
Britishers, which causes all the mischief, their parents too would have
lived elsewhere.
Then the American citizen of the world, pitying England, will cross to
France, to another country, a new world, and in Paris will breathe more
freely as being at last in the metropolis of the globe--always excepting
New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, or Chicago, as the case may
be. If he opens _Galignani's Guide_, the excellent and well-informed
traveller will immediately discover that he is in another romantic city,
and that there is something more to see and consider than the bal
d'opera, and the Chateau Rouge; and if some Easy Chair accidentally
encountered straying along the Boulevards, or seated at the door of a
cafe, should chance to ask whether the well-informed traveller had ever
taken a romantic stroll in Church Street, New York, he would be rewarded
with a smile for his admirable humor. By-and-by, after the coffee was
drunk and the pipe smoked out, the Easy Chair and his approving Mentor
would perhaps stroll about until they came far away from the haunts of
to-day to the respectable old Place Louis Quinze. It is always an
attractive spot for that well-informed traveller. He looks at it with
pensive emotion, and turns warmly to the Easy Chair and says:
"How delightful this is! Here dwelt the noblesse! This is the Fifth
Avenue--what do I say?--the Murray Hill of old Paris! And now all is
gone! Fashion is an emigre. Inquire in the Faubourg St. Germain. What a
pity we have nothing of this kind in America."
"But we have," replies the Easy Chair.
The incredulous well-informed traveller again smiles a mild, melancholy
smile at the inscrutable methods of Providence, which has provided no
Place Louis Quinze for the Yankees and aborigines.
"We certainly have," persists the Easy Chair.
"Where, pray?"
"Well, Church Street."
The reply seems to be beating out a jest very thin; but gradually the
Easy Chair contrives to explain.
The movement of life in New York is so rapid, fashion and trade sweep
from one point to another with such impetuosity, that the romance of
changed interest can be enjoyed in the same spot twice or thrice in a
lifetime. In older cities, in Paris or London, it is not the individual
experience, but history only which covers the change. The gentlemen and
dames of the Louis Quinze era do not moralize over the Place from which
the glory has departed, but only their descendants. The change is so
gradual that it is not within their personal experience. It is a tide
that rises and falls once in sixscore years, not in six hours. But the
fortunate New-Yorker has his romance making for him while he sleeps. The
sorry streets of to-day will disappear within a dozen years, and the
instant they are gone, or seen just at the moment of the final lapse,
they have passed into the realm of romance.
Here is Church Street, for instance; it is not very long, and you turn
into it from Fulton or from Canal. So turned the Easy Chair, and there
was the long, narrow vista walled by lofty buildings, the spacious
houses of trade, built yesterday, piled with dry goods, bold with
prosperous newness, but instantly suggesting the street of palaces in
Genoa. And a few rods off some old Knickerbocker is gravely stalking
down Broadway who has not turned aside into Church Street for many a
year, and who supposes Church Street is still a place not to be named,
an unspeakable Gehenna. So it was a dozen years ago. Once, also, it was
the Black Broadway. It was a kind of voluntary Ghetto of the colored
people. Then, again, it was an offshoot of the Five Points. There were
low ranges of dingy buildings. Dirty men and women slouched along on the
walks and lounged out of the windows, and their idle, ribald laughter
echoed along the street that few carriages travelled. Dens of every kind
were just around every corner. Slatternly women emptied slops upon the
pavement, and the stench was perpetual. Dirty little children screamed
and played, and sickly babies squalled unheeded. It was a street fallen
out of Hogarth; the street of worst repute in the city.
And now it is a double range of stately buildings--symmetrical, massive.
Horse-cars struggle on it with light carts of dry-goods dealers, with
the slow, enormous teams that shake the ground. At every corner there is
an inextricable snarl of wagons, and porters are heaving boxes, and
young clerks are directing, and huge windows are filled with huge
pattern cards, so that the narrow way is tapes-tried. "Look out,
there!" cries a porter-compelling clerk to the Easy Chair, which smiles
to think that only yesterday it was in Exchange Place, and Pearl Street,
and elsewhere that the peremptory youth was ordering him to mind his
eye. And if the employer who now sits in the spacious office opposite
had known that his clerk was familiar with Church Street, he would have
warned him of the gates of destruction, and have admonished him that
Church Street, though a narrow street, was a broad way.
The people that push and hurry and skip along this busy avenue are alert
and well dressed. The slouchers and loungers, the old slatterns with the
slop-pails, the fat, frouzy, jolly, dirty women with bare red arms and
loud voices, the sneaks, the thieves, and the unclean groups at the
grog-shop, where are they? No sneaks now, no thieves--honorable
gentlemen with clean collars everywhere. What a consolation! As you
watch the passers closely, as you read the signs, it occurs to you that
the population, with the universal tendency in our mental and spiritual
habits that Matthew Arnold sparklingly deplores, is clearly Hebraized.
Here, where this especially fine warehouse or handsome shop stands,
stood the French church. It has jumped up-town a few miles. Here was the
church of Dr. Potts. Could you believe that the people who go to meeting
in the snug, brown little edifice in an ivy mantle at the corner of
University Place and Tenth Street, which probably seems to the young
clerk coeval with the city, day before yesterday, as it were, came down
here among the merchants? Then they came once a week for an hour or two.
What did you say was the name of the deity to whom these temples were
dedicated?
And at this corner--why, if it were an April thicket it could not more
sweetly bubble with song, only this music is the spirit ditty of no
tone--here was the old National Theatre. Do you see that very
respectable old gentleman in the office who carries an ostrich egg in
his hat? for so his grandchildren describe grandpapa's baldness. He sits
and reads the paper, and is presently going down to the bank of which
he is a director, and of which he seems always to those grandchildren to
smell, so tenacious is the peculiar odor of a bank; that is the very
gentleman who in the temple of the Drama upon this spot used to lead the
loud applause, and at whom in his buckish costume of those merry days
and nights, the lovely Shirreff herself used to level her eyes and her
voice as she trilled: "Oh, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad." Can
you imagine that excellent grandparent kissing his hand rapturously to
the retiring prima donna, going off to sup at the Cafe de
l'Independence, and hieing home at two in the morning waking the echoes
of Murray Street with a reproduction of that arch song, followed by a
loud whistle to prove whether that vision of delight really will come to
him, and bringing only the gruff Charley, obese guardian of the night?
Will you find in your famous Place Louis Quinze any roisterer of the
regency grown old and careful of his diet?
Here is one wall which survives from the prehistoric days of thirty
years ago; it is the rear wall of the old hospital, that blessed green
spot in the midst of the city, which is to be green no more, but will
soon be piled with more palaces. And opposite this wall is a short
street running from Church to West Broadway. A few years ago this was
one of the worst of city slums. At the corner of West Broadway a wooden
building still remains--a sullen, sickly, defiant cur of a
building--that sits and snarls impotent over the savagery departed. And
there is one tall rookery still, a tenement-house, with a system of
fire-escapes in front, and the slattern slopping at the curb as in the
ancient day, and a cooper's shop, and a blacksmith's, and one, two,
three, how many whiskey shops? But they are all faint and feeble and
submerged in the lofty buildings, and to-morrow all trace of them will
be gone. And then who will remember the murder? The mysterious, awful,
romantic murder. The murder that filled all the newspapers, and fed
speculation at all the corner groggeries and in all offices. The murder
that was done into a romance, and of which the hero--that is the
murderer--was acquitted, after one of the famous eloquent criminal
appeals which are so effective because their power is measured by human
life. And this hero occasionally reappears in the newspapers even to
this day. Somebody writes from a remote somewhere that on a steamer far
away a mysterious man, after much mysterious conduct, imparts the awful
truth that he is the hero. Does he sometimes return to this spot? Does
he look at the site of the house where the deed was done? Does he appear
in the guise of a merchant, a jobber, a retailer from that remote
southwestern somewhere, and higgle and chaffer in the noble warehouse on
the very site of the wretched building where he murdered his mistress?
Good heavens! Do you see that man of about those years, looking about as
if to find a sign or number? (As if he didn't know the very place; as if
it were not burned and cut into his heart and conscience!) Do you think
it could possibly be he, or is it, after all, only the honest Timothy
Tape, the modest retailer from Skowhegan or Palmyra?... The
typhus-fever used to rage here; the cholera was fearful. The sanitary
reports say that there were always cases of the worst diseases to be
found here. The city missionaries also used to find their worst cases
here too, and now, what cleanliness of collar, what modishness of coat!
No more sin; what a consolation!
And so, as the Easy Chair strolled along, bumped and hustled and
severely looked upon by the eager throng in the narrow street, more
radically reconstructed than any doubtful State, it could not help
feeling that London with Her Majesty's Tower, and Paris with her
deserted Place Louis Quinze, are not the only romantic cities in the
world, and that a city of such rapid and incessant change as New York
offers even some poetic aspects which its elder sisters want. The Easy
Chair has pleaded formerly for some respect towards old historic
buildings, like the old State-house in Boston, for instance, and has
been indignantly laughed at for its pains. It will not deny that,
unabashed by such laughter, it contemplates the old Walton House with
satisfaction. It repairs, also, to the corner of Broad and Pearl
streets, and, reflecting upon General Washington's parting with his
officers, turns its eyes towards Wall Street, and beholds the Grecian
temple which has taken the place of the old City Hall, upon whose
balcony the first predecessor of President Grant was inaugurated. But
the romance of Church Street is of another kind. It is the romance of
striking and sudden change merely, not of historic interest, nor of
personal association. Perhaps the gentle reader may not find it when he
goes there. Then let him carry it.