the topics in the first column. Begin your work by writing a series of
poetic paragraphs that will present the spirit of your essay. Continue
to write in a somewhat poetic style, but make many definite allusions
to history, literature or the facts of life.
Throughout your work express your own personality as much as you can.
End your essay by making some personal appeal but do not make your work
too didactic.
FOOTNOTES:
[59] Provincetown or Gloucester. Famous sea-coast towns on the coast of
Massachusetts.
[60] Sacramento. A river of California, near which gold was discovered
in 1848.
[61] Sir Francis Drake (1540-1596). A great English sailor and naval
commander. He was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the earth, and
was one of the commanders in the fight with the Spanish Armada, 1888.
[62] Sir Martin Frobisher (1535-1594). The discoverer of Frobisher Bay;
one of the leaders against the Spanish Armada.
[63] John C. Fremont (1813-1890). An American general noted for his
explorations of the West.
[64] Daniel Boone (1735-1820). An early American explorer, pioneer and
Indian fighter.
VANISHING NEW YORK
By ROBERT and ELIZABETH SHACKLETON
_Robert Shackleton (1860--) and his wife, Elizabeth Shackleton,
have written much in collaboration. Among such works are:_ The
Quest of the Colonial; Adventures in Home Making; The Charm of the
Antique. _Mr. Shackleton was at one time associate editor of_ The
Saturday Evening Post. _He is the author of many books, among which
are_ Touring Great Britain; History of Harper's Magazine, _and_ The
Book of New York.
=Washington Irving's _Sketch Book_ tells of Irving's delighted
wanderings around old London, and of his interest in streets and
buildings that awoke memories of the past. _Vanishing New York_
is an essay that corresponds closely with the essays written by
Irving so many years ago. In this modern essay Robert and Elizabeth
Shackleton tell of their wanderings about old New York, of odd
streets, curious buildings, and romantic and historic associations.
The essay gives to New York an interest that makes it, in the eyes
of the reader, as fascinating as Irving's old London.=
=The writers do more than tell the story of a walk about New York,
and much more than merely name and describe the places they saw. By
a skilful use of adjectives, and by an interested suggestiveness,
they throw over the places they mention an atmosphere of charm. We
feel that we are with them, enjoying and loving the curious old
places that seem so destined to vanish forever.=
What is left of old New York that is quaint and charming? The New
York of the eighties and earlier, of Henry James,[65] of Gramercy
Park, Washington and Stuyvesant squares, quaint old houses on
curious by-streets? The period of perhaps a more beautiful and
certainly a more leisurely existence? All places of consequence and
interest that remain to-day are herewith described.
To one, vanishing New York means a little box garden up in the Bronx,
glimpsed just as the train goes into the subway. To another, it is a
fan-light on Horatio Street; an old cannon, planted muzzle downward at
a curb-edge; a long-watched, ancient mile-stone; a well; a water-tank
bound up in a bank charter; a Bowling Green sycamore; an ailantus
beside the twin French houses of crooked Commerce Street. And what a
pang to find an old landmark gone! To another it is the sad little iron
arch of the gate of old St. John's at the end of the once-while quaint
St. John's Place, all that is now left of the beautiful pillared and
paneled old church and its English-made wrought-iron fence. To many
it is the loss of the New York sky-line, one of the wonders of the
world--lost, for it has vanished from sight. Now the sky-line is to
be seen only from the water, and the city is no longer approached by
water except by a few; but is entered under the rivers on each side,
by tunnels down into which the human currents are plunged. A positive
thrill, a morning-and-evening thrill that was almost a worship of the
noble and the beautiful, used to sweep over the packed thousands on the
ferry-boats as they gazed at the sky-line.
It is extraordinary how swiftly New York destroys and rebuilds. There
is the story of a distinguished visitor who, driven uptown on the
forenoon of his arrival, was, on his departure in the late afternoon
of the same day, driven downtown over the same route in order that he
might see what changes had meanwhile taken place. The very first vessel
built in New York--it was three hundred years ago--was named in the
very spirit of prophecy, for it was called the _Onrust_ (_Restless_).
Yet it is astonishing how much of interest remains in this iconoclastic
city, although almost everything remains under constant threat of
destruction. Far over toward the North River is one of the threatened
survivals. It is shabby, ancient; indeed, it has been called the
oldest building in New York, though nothing certain is known beyond
1767. But it is very old, and may easily date much further back. It
is called the Clam Broth House, and is on Weehawken Street, which,
closely paralleling West Street, holds its single block of length
north from Christopher. It is a lost and forgotten street, primitively
cobblestoned with the worst pavement in New York, and it holds several
lost and forlorn old houses--low-built houses, with great broad,
sweeping roofs reaching almost to the ground, houses tremulous with
age. Of these the one now called the Clam Broth House, low, squat,
broad-roofed, is the oldest. In a sense the fronts are on West Street,
but all original characteristics have there been bedizenedly lost, and
the ancient aspect is on Weehawken Street.
These were fishermen's houses in ancient days, waterside houses; for
West Street is filled-in ground, and the broad expanse of shipping
space out beyond the street is made land. When these houses were
built, the North River reached their doors, and, so tradition has it,
fishermen actually rowed their boats and drew their shad-seines beneath
this Clam Broth House.
Of a far different order of interest is a demure little church, neat
and trim, on Hudson street. It is built of brick, bright red, with long
red wings stretching oddly away from the rear, with a low, squat tower
of red, and in the midst of gray old houses that hover around in fading
respectability. It is St. Luke's, is a century old, and with it is
connected the most charming custom of New York.
In 1792 a certain John Leake died, leaving a sum to Trinity Church for
the giving forever, to “such poor as shall appear most deserving,” as
many “six-penny wheaten loaves” as the income would buy, and this sweet
and simple dole has ever since been regularly administered, and it
will go on through the centuries, like the ancient English charity at
Winchester, where for eight hundred years bread and ale have been given.
But there is one strictly New York feature about this already old Leake
dole that differentiates it from the dole of Winchester, for it is
still at the original wicket that the Winchester dole is given. There
the custom was instituted, and there it has continued through all
these centuries. But in New York the dole began at Trinity, but after
something more than half a century, as population left the neighborhood
of Trinity, the dole was transferred to St. John's, on Varick Street,
once known as “St. John's in the Fields,” and now, after more than
another half-century, there has come still another removal, and the
dole is given at quaint old St. Luke's. Thus it has already had three
homes, and one wonders how many it will have as the decades and the
centuries move on. One pictures it peripatetically proceeding hither
and thither as further changes come upon the city, the dole for the
poor that never vanish.
A short distance south from St. Luke's, on the opposite side of Hudson
Street, is an open space that is a public playground and a public
garden. It was a graveyard, but a few years ago the city decreed
that it should vanish, with the exception of a monument put up to
commemorate the devotion of firemen who gave their lives for duty in a
fire of the long ago. It was not the graveyard of St. Luke's, although
near, but of farther away St. John's; and it is pleasant to remember
that it was in walking to and fro among the now vanished graves and
tombs that Edgar Allan Poe[66] composed his “Raven.”
Cheerful in its atmosphere--but perhaps this is largely from its
name--is short little Gay Street, leading from Waverley Place,
just around the corner from Sixth Avenue. Immediately beyond this
point--for much of the unexpected still remains in good old Greenwich
Village--Waverley becomes, by branching, a street with four sidewalks;
for both branches hold the name of Waverley. It is hard for people
of to-day to understand the power of literature in the early half
of the last century, when Washington Irving[67] was among the most
prominent citizens, and James Fenimore Cooper[68] was publicly honored,
and admirers of the Waverley Novels made successful demand on the
aldermen to change the name of Sixth Street, where it left Broadway,
to Waverley Place, and to continue it beyond Sixth Avenue, discarding
another name on the way, and at this forking-point to do away with both
Catharine and Elizabeth streets in order to give Waverley its four
sidewalks. Could this be done in these later days with the names, say
of Howells[69] or of Hopkinson Smith![70] Does any one ever propose to
have an “O” put before Henry Street![71]
At the forking-point is a triangular building, archaic in aspect, and
very quiet. It is a dispensary, and an ancient jest of the neighborhood
is, when some stranger asks if it has patients, to reply, “It doesn't
need 'em; it's got money.”
Gay Street is miniature; its length isn't long and its width isn't
wide. It is a street full of the very spirit of old Greenwich, or,
rather, of the old Ninth Ward; for thus the old inhabitants love to
designate the neighborhood, some through not knowing that it was
originally Greenwich Village, and a greater number because they are
not interested in the modern development, poetic, artistic, theatric,
empiric, romantic, sociologic, but are proud of the honored record of
the district as the most American ward of New York City.
In an apartment overlooking a Gay Street corner there died last year a
man who had rented there for thirty-four years. There loomed practical
difficulties for the final exit, the solution involving window and
fire-escape. But the landlord, himself born there, said, “No; he has
always gone in and out like a gentleman, and he shall still go out, for
the last time, as a gentleman,” thereupon he called in carpenter and
mason to cut the wall.
Then some old resident will tell you, pointing out house by house and
name by name, where business men, small manufacturers, politicians, and
office-holders dwelt. And, further reminiscent, he will tell of how,
when a boy, at dawn on each Fourth of July, he used to get out his toy
[Illustration: =“It has been called the oldest building
in New York.”=] (_page 185_)
cannon and fire it from a cellar entrance (pointing to the entrance),
and how one Fourth the street was suddenly one shattering crash, two
young students from the old university across Washington Square having
experimentally tossed to the pavement from their garret window a stick
of what was then “a new explosive, dynamite.” No sane and safe Fourths
then!
It is still remembered that some little houses at the farther end
of Gay Street, on Christopher, were occupied by a little colony of
hand-loom weavers from Scotland, who there looked out from these
“windows in Thrums.”[72]
Around two corners from this spot is a curiously picturesque little
bit caused by the street changes of a century ago. It is Patchin
Place, opening from Tenth Street opposite Jefferson Market. The place
is a cul-de-sac, with a double row of little three-story houses, each
looking just like the other, of yellow-painted brick. Each house
has a little area space, each front door is up two steps from its
narrow sidewalk. Each door is of a futuristic green. Each has its
ailantus-tree, making the little nooked place a delightful bower.
Immediately around the corner is the still more curious Milligan Place,
a spot more like a bit of old London than any other in New York. It
is a little nestled space, entered by a barely gate-wide opening from
the busy Sixth Avenue sidewalk. Inside it expands a trifle, just
sufficiently to permit the existence of four little houses, built close
against one another. So narrowly does an edge of brick building come
down beside the entrance that it is literally only the width of the end
of the bricks.
In an instant, going through the entrance that you might pass a
thousand times without noticing, you are miles away, you are decades
away, in a fragment of an old lost lane.
Near by, where Sixth Avenue begins, there is still projective from an
old-time building the sign of the Golden Swan, a lone survival of long
ago. And this is remindful of the cigar-store Indians. Only yesterday
they were legion, now a vanished race. And the sidewalk clocks that
added such interest to the streets, they, too, have gone, banished by
city ordinance.
The conjunction of Seventh Avenue and Greenwich Avenue and Eleventh
Street makes a triangle, at the sharp point of which is a small, low,
and ancient building, fittingly given over to that ancient and almost
vanished trade, horseshoeing. A little brick building with outside
wooden stair stands against and above it as the triangle widens, and
then comes an ancient building a little taller still. And this odd
conglomerate building was all, so you will be told, built in the good
old days for animal houses for one of the earliest menageries! Next
came a period of stage-coaches, with horses housed here. And, as
often in New York, a great shabbiness accompanies the old. Within the
triangle, inside of a tall wooden fence, are several ancient ailantus
trees, remindful that long ago New York knew this locality as--name
full of pleasant implications--“Ailanthus Gardens.” And every spring
Ailanthus Gardens, oblivious to forgetfulness and shabbiness, still
bourgeons green and gay.
An old man, a ghost-of-the-past old man, approached, and, seeing that
we were interested, said abruptly, unexpectedly, “That's Bank Street
over there, where the banks and the bankers came,” thus taking the mind
far back to the time of a yellow-fever flight from what was then the
distant city to what was in reality Greenwich.
Only a block from here, on Seventh Avenue, is a highly picturesque
survival, a long block of three-story dwellings all so uniformly
balconied, from first floor to roof-line, across the entire fronts,
that you see nothing but balconies, with their three stories fronted
with eyelet-pattern balustrades. In front of all the houses is an open
grassy space, and up the face of the balconies run old wistaria-vines.
Each house, through the crisscrossing of upright and lateral lines, is
fronted with nine open square spaces, like Brobdingnagian pigeon-holes.
On West Eleventh Street is a row almost identical in appearance. If
you follow Eleventh Street eastward, and find that it does not cut
across Broadway, you will remember that this comes from the efforts
of Brevoort, an early landowner, to save a grand old tree that stood
there. And then Grace Church gained possession, and the street remained
uncut.
A most striking vanishing hereabouts has been of the hotels. What
an interesting group they were in this part of Broadway! Even the
old Astor, far down town, has gone, only a wrecked and empty remnant
remaining.
But a neighbor of the Astor House is an old-time building whose
loss, frequently threatened, every one who loves noble and beautiful
architecture would deplore--the more than century-old city hall, which
still dominates its surroundings, as it has always dominated, even
though now the buildings round about are of towering height.
Time-mellowed, its history has also mellowed, with myriad associations
and happenings and tales. That a man who was to become Mayor of
New York (it was Fernando Wood) made his first entry into the city
as the hind leg of an elephant of a traveling show, and in that
capacity passed for the first time the city hall, is a story that
out-Whittingtons Whittington.[73]
And noblest and finest of all the associations with the city hall is
one which has to do with a time before the city hall arose; for here,
on the very spot where it stands, George Washington paraded his little
army on a July day in 1776, and with grave solemnity, while they
listened in a solemnity as grave, a document was read to them that had
just been received from Philadelphia and which was forever to be known
as the Declaration of Independence.
It used to be, three quarters of a century ago, that people could go
northward from the city hall on the New York and Harlem Railway, which
built its tracks far down in this direction. It used the Park Avenue
tunnel, which had been built in 1837 for the first horse-car line in
the world. After the railway made Forty-second Street its terminal,
horse-cars again went soberly through the tunnel. What a pleasure to
remember the tinkle, tinkle as they came jerkily jogging through, from
somewhere up Harlemward, and, with quirky variety as to course, to an
end somewhere near University Place! A most oddly usable line.
A few minutes' walk from University Place is one of the most
fascinating spots in New York--“St. Mark's in the Bouwerie,” although
it is actually on Second Avenue and Stuyvesant Street.
The church was built in 1799, but it stands on property that the
mighty Petrus Stuyvesant[74] owned, and on the site of a chapel that
he built, and his tomb is beneath the pavement of the church, and the
tombstone is set in the foundation-wall on the eastern side. There
is an excellent bronze close by, fittingly made in Holland, of this
whimsical, irascible, kind-hearted, clear-headed captain-general and
governor who ruled this New Amsterdam. Nothing else in the city so
gives the smack of age, the relish of the saltness of time, as this old
church built on Stuyvesant's land and holding his bones. For Stuyvesant
was born when Elizabeth reigned in England and when Henry of Navarre,
with his white plume, was King of France. The great New-Yorker was born
in the very year that “Hamlet” was written.[75]
He loved his city, and lived here after the English came and conquered
him and seized the colony.
This highly pictorial old church, broad-fronted, pleasant-porticoed,
stands within a great open graveyard space, green with grass and
sweetly shaded, and its aloofness and beauty are markedly enhanced by
its being set high above the level of the streets.
On Lafayette Street, once Lafayette Place, a quarter of a mile from
St. Mark's, still stands the deserted Astor Library, just bought by
the Y. M. H. A. as a home for immigrants, built three quarters of a
century ago for permanence, but now empty and bare and grim, shorn of
its Rialto-like[76] steps, with closed front, as if harboring secrets
behind its saddening inaccessibility. Once-while stately gate-posts and
gateway, now ruinous, beside the library building, marked the driveway
entrance of a long-vanished Astor home.
All is dreary, dismal, desolate, and the color of the Venetian-like
building has become a sad combination of chocolate brown and dull red.
The tens of thousands of books from here, the literature and art of the
Lenox collection, and the fine foundation of Tilden are united at Fifth
Avenue and Forty-second Street. From what differing sources did these
three mighty foundations spring! One from the tireless industry of a
great lawyer;[77] one from a far-flung fur trade that over a century
ago reached through trackless wilderness to the Pacific;[78] one from
a fortune wrung by exactions from American soldiers of the Revolution,
prisoners of war, who paid all they had in the hope of alleviating
their suffering--a fortune inherited by a man who studied to put it
out for the benefit of mankind in broad charity and helpfulness, in
hospitals and colleges, and in his library, left for public use.[79]
With the old Astor Library so stripped and deserted, one wonders if a
similar fate awaits the stately and palatial building to which it has
gone. Will the new building some day vanish? And similarly the superb
and mighty structures that have in recent years come in connection with
the city's northern sweep?
A curious fate has attended the Lenox Library property. Given to the
city, land and building and contents, the land and building were sold
into private ownership when the consolidation of libraries was decided
upon. The granite stronghold, built to endure forever, was razed, and
where it had stood arose the most beautiful home in New York, which,
gardened in boxwood, its owner filled with priceless treasures. And now
he is dead, and again the land, a building, and costly contents are
willed to the city.
Across from the old Astor Library stood Colonnade Row, a long and
superb line of pillar-fronted grandeur; but only a small part now
remains, with only a few of the fluted Corinthian pillars. All is
shabby and forlorn, but noble even in shabbiness. And the remnant, one
thinks, must shortly fall a victim to the destructive threat that hangs
over everything in our city.
Colonnade Row was built in the eighteen twenties. Washington Irving
lived there. One gathers the impression that Irving, named after
Washington, lived in as many houses as those in which Washington
slept. In the row occurred the wedding of President Tyler,[80] an
event not characterized by modest shrinking from publicity, for after
the ceremony the President and his bride were driven down Broadway in
an open carriage, drawn by four horses, to the Battery, whence a boat
rowed them out to begin their married life on--of all places!--a ship
of war!
It is interesting to find two Virginia-born Presidents of the United
States coming to Lafayette Street; for here dwelt Monroe,[81] he of
the “Doctrine,” during the latter part of his life, at what is now the
northwest corner of Lafayette Street and Prince; and he died there.
Long since the house fell into sheer dinginess and wreck, and a few
months ago was sold to be demolished; but New York may feel pride in
her connection with the American who, following Washington's example,
declared against “entangling ourselves in the broils of Europe, or
suffering the powers of the old world to interfere with the affairs of
the new.”
Near this house Monroe was buried, in the Marble Cemetery on Second
Street, beyond Second Avenue, a spot with high open iron fence in
front and high brick wall behind, with an atmosphere of sedateness and
repose, although a tenement district has come round about. Monroe's
body lay here for a quarter of a century, and then Virginia belatedly
carried it to Virginian soil.
Close by, entered through a narrow tunnel-like entrance at 41-1/2
Second Avenue, is another Marble Cemetery (the Monroe burying-place
is the New York City Marble Cemetery, and this other is the New
York Marble Cemetery), and this second one is quite hidden away in
inconspicuousness, as befits a place which, according to a now barely
decipherable inscription, was established as “a place of interment for
gentlemen,” surely the last word in exclusiveness!
Across the street from the entrance to this cemetery for gentlemen is
a church for the common people, one of the pleasant surprises of a
kind which one frequently comes upon in New York--a building really
distinguished in appearance, yet not noticed or known. A broad flight
of steps stretches across the broad church front. There are tall
pillars and pilasters, excellent iron fencing and gateway. The interior
is all of the color of pale ivory, with much of classic detail and with
a “Walls-of-Troy” pattern along the gallery. There were a score of such
classic churches in New York early in the last century.