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LITERARY NEW YORK
Its Landmarks and Associations
by
CHARLES HEMSTREET
With 65 Illustrations
[Illustration]
G.P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1903
Copyright, 1903
by
Charles Hemstreet
Published, November, 1903
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
[Illustration: The "Half-Moon" on the Hudson--1609.
From the painting by L.W. SEAVEY.]
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
I. WRITERS OF NEW AMSTERDAM 1
II. BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 25
III. THE POET OF THE REVOLUTION 45
IV. IN THE DAYS OF THOMAS PAINE 67
V. THE CITY THAT IRVING KNEW 87
VI. WITH PAULDING, DRAKE, AND HALLECK 106
VII. COOPER AND HIS FRIENDS 125
VIII. THOSE WHO GATHERED ABOUT POE 145
IX. AT THE CLOSE OF THE KNICKERBOCKER DAYS 167
X. HALF A CENTURY AGO 189
XI. TWO FAMOUS MEETING-PLACES 209
XII. SOME OF THE WRITERS OF TO-DAY 230
Full-Page Illustrations
PAGE
THE "HALF MOON" ON THE HUDSON, 1609 _Frontispiece_
From the painting by L.W. Seavey.
THE STADT HUYS 8
BROAD STREET, 1642 30
KING'S COLLEGE, ABOUT 1773 42
THE DEBTORS' PRISON 48
WILLIAM SMITH }
PETER STUYVESANT }
PHILIP FRENEAU } 60
THOMAS PAINE }
JOEL BARLOW }
THE FIRST TAMMANY WIGWAM, CORNER NASSAU AND
SPRUCE STREETS 70
MAP OF STREETS IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK IN 1827 76
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING }
PHILIP HONE }
WASHINGTON IRVING } 100
JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE }
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK }
J. FENIMORE COOPER }
THE PARK THEATRE, PARK ROW, 1831 136
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD }
JOHN JAMES AUDUBON }
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT } 150
BAYARD TAYLOR }
EDGAR ALLAN POE }
ROBERT FULTON }
POE'S COTTAGE AT FORDHAM 158
From a drawing by C.W. Mielatz, by permission.
Copyright, 1899, by The Society of Iconophiles.
THE BATTERY IN 1830 164
From a drawing by C. Burton.
THE APOLLO ROOMS IN 1830 170
VIEW OF OLD BUILDINGS IN WILLIAM STREET,
LOOKING TOWARDS MAIDEN LANE, 1800 182
W.D. HOWELLS }
J.G. HOLLAND }
RICHARD GRANT WHITE } 200
BRANDER MATTHEWS }
WILLIAM WINTER }
From an engraving of the picture by J.H. Marble;
courtesy of W.E. Benjamin.
Illustrations in the Text
PAGE
SEAL OF NEW AMSTERDAM 1
EARLY DUTCH HOUSES 2
THE WALL AND GATE 5
AN OLD FAMILY BIBLE 6
STUYVESANT'S "WHITEHALL" 8
ALONG THE STRAND 9
DE SILLE'S HOUSE 14
A WOMAN'S COSTUME, NEW AMSTERDAM 16
STUYVESANT'S BOUWERIE HOUSE 20
THE CHURCH IN THE FORT 21
CAPTAIN KIDD'S HOUSE 23
THE CHURCH CALLED TRINITY 34
"THE NEW-YORK GAZETTE" 39
THE COLLECT 48
THE BRITISH PRISON-SHIP 53
THE MIDDLE DUTCH CHURCH 55
FRAUNCES' TAVERN 62
BROAD STREET AND FEDERAL HALL 63
RICHMOND HILL 64
THE CORNER STONE OF THE PARK THEATRE 69
THE POST OFFICE, WILLIAM STREET 78
GOLDEN HILL INN 88
ST. GEORGE'S CHAPEL, BEEKMAN ST. 89
THE CITY HOTEL 101
THE HOUSE OF ASTOR, WHERE IRVING WROTE "ASTORIA" 102
WHERE IRVING LIVED, 17TH STREET AND IRVING PLACE 104
THE SHAKESPEARE TAVERN 120
THE JUMEL MANSION 123
WASHINGTON HALL 132
ON BLOOMINGDALE ROAD, NEAR 75TH STREET, IN POE'S TIME 147
THE HOUSE IN CARMINE STREET 149
WHERE POE WROTE "THE RAVEN" 157
MUSEUM AT THE NORTH END OF THE PARK, 1825 170
NIBLO'S GARDEN 171
AUDUBON'S HOME, 156TH STREET AND NORTH RIVER 193
CLEMENT C. MOORE'S HOUSE, CHELSEA 196
THE UNIVERSITY BUILDING 219
THE STUDIO BUILDING IN WEST 10TH STREET 221
53 EAST 20TH STREET 223
10 WEST STREET 232
WHERE "HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES" WAS WRITTEN 237
146 MACDOUGAL STREET 239
108 WAVERLY PLACE 240
RICHARD GRANT WHITE'S HOME 241
WHERE RICHARD HENRY STODDARD DIED 243
WHERE THE AUTHORS' CLUB WAS ORGANIZED 244
HORACE GREELEY'S HOME 245
THE BEEKMAN MANSION 249
LAWRENCE HUTTON'S HOUSE 252
DE KAY'S HOUSE, LONDON TERRACE 254
Literary New York
Chapter I
Writers of New Amsterdam
[Illustration: Seal of New Amsterdam]
There is a fashion nowadays of trimming the fronts of brick houses by
placing black bricks among the red in such a way as to form odd and
unique designs. It is an attractive way of doing, for it varies the
staid simplicity of the solid color. But for all it may seem original
and new, it is a style that had its beginning long, long ago, even in
the days when the stern Peter Stuyvesant governed with an iron hand
over the Dutch colony of fifteen hundred people, the town that was one
day to be New York, but which in his time was called New Amsterdam.
[Illustration: Early Dutch Houses]
It was a tiny town then; picturesque, too, for the houses were low,
irregular, with sloping roofs and gable ends to the street. They were
built of wood--that is, all except the church, the Stadt Huys, the
Governor's house, and some few dwellings of colonists who had brought
much wealth with them from Holland. These were for the most part of
stone. It was usual in them all--there were scarcely more than a
hundred,--whether of wood or stone, to have chimneys outside the
walls, thus making less the danger of fire, and if any part of the
house were of brick it was sure to be the chimney. All the brick had
then to be brought from Holland, so it was an expensive building
material and but sparingly used.
At this time when Stuyvesant held full sway there were two industrious
colonists who held the idea that their short-cut to immense wealth lay
in the way of making bricks at home and supplying them to their fellow
colonists. So it came about, after long and slow deliberation, that
the first brickyard was started. To be sure the venturesome
fortune-hunters soon found that they were not to succeed all at once,
for, owing to their lack of knowledge, they ruined so many of their
bricks that the profits of the business were like to be consumed in
the black-burned material that they threw aside as worthless.
But just at this time an odd thing happened. This was no less than
the appearance of a colonist who agreed to buy--at a low price to be
sure, but still to buy--all the black-burned and apparently useless
brick. The brickmakers wondered very much at this, and without doubt
thought the man a trifle unsound in his mind, but they agreed, and
very soon the buyer had built himself a house, which when it was
completed showed the burnt brick alternating with the red, prettily
decorating the front and making of it the most attractive dwelling in
the town. And at this they were filled with admiration and respect.
All the townspeople went to look at the house, and while looking
marvelled that Jacob Steendam could have thought out such a useful
plan, for he was not known as a practical man. Anything but that, for
was he not a poet? More than this, was he not the only poet in the
colony? And still more than this, he was the first poet of New
Amsterdam.
[Illustration: The Wall and Gate]
And in other ways, too, this first literary man of the colony was no
ordinary man. He had come to New Amsterdam in the employ of the owners
of the colony, the Dutch West India Company, and he worked in the
Company's warehouse. But he had a mind which fixed itself on things
above the beaver skins which it was his task to register before they
were sent across the sea. He was clerk by day, poet by night. It was
his custom while the townspeople slept, and they were early abed, to
wander about in the moonlight. He could walk the length and breadth of
the town with no great exertion, for it merely tipped the triangular
point of the island of Manhattan, enclosed on two sides by rivers and
on the land side by a wall of wood and soil which served to keep the
Indians out--a wall stretching straight across the island quite from
river to river, following the line that Wall Street was to take later
when Indians should be no more and when the town itself should have
burst its bounds. Here then the poet walked through the narrow
streets--winding ways that had their birth as Indian trails, passed
their infancy as cow-paths, and had so wound around marshy tracts and
deviated from their course that as streets they must of necessity be
irregular and vacillating.
[Illustration: An Old Family Bible]
While this was a time of advancement for the little colony, as you may
have guessed from the brickmaking venture, yet it was certainly not a
literary period. The colonists who had left their homes in Holland to
seek their fortunes in a new world had found that Fortune overseas
frowned upon them as often as she smiled, and while she had raised the
hopes of some, the many were struggling for bare existence. There was
no book-making; indeed there were few books of any sort, and reading
meant conning over Bibles, prayer-books, psalm-books, and Testaments
which had been brought across the ocean. These were stoutly bound
volumes, many of them heirlooms, their pages bearing the marks of
patient and persistent handling.
[Illustration: Stuyvesant's "Whitehall"]
The poet Steendam dreamed and thought out many a verse as he stood on
the bridge that spanned the canal leading from the bay to the Sheep
Pasture,--the canal that was one day to be buried deep beneath Broad
Street. He must have walked beneath the wall of the weak little fort
at the water's edge, passed Governor Stuyvesant's new home that was
called Whitehall, and that was to pass away, leaving its name to the
road leading to it, which the road was still to bear more than two
hundred and fifty years later. And perhaps he went on along the strand
to the Stadt Huys (for it was only a few steps farther along the
waterside), the stone house that "William the Testy" had built as a
tavern and that in the first poet's day had become the first City Hall
of New Amsterdam. And he sometimes stood beside the first graveyard,
near the plaine that was to become the Bowling Green, and so on to
the city wall, with its gates locked while the townsmen slept.
[Illustration: THE STADT HUYS.]
[Illustration: Along the Strand]
Though the streets are to-day much changed from those which the poet
walked alone save for the company of his Muse, you can walk them even
now, until you come to a thoroughfare noticeable because it is so
short and winding, tucked away at the edge of the city's business
section. And if you do walk into Stone Street, you must of necessity
come to a bend from which both ends of the street curve out of sight,
while you stand in a kind of huge well, closed in by iron-shuttered
warehouses. Here in this bend you are standing on what was the garden
of Jacob Steendam's checker-fronted house. In his day it was Hoogh
Street, though in a few years it was to take its present name when it
was the first street to be paved with stone.
In those nightly walks through the quiet streets of the sleeping town,
the poet Steendam found inspiration for his verses--the first verses
ever penned in the colony, and called variously _The Praise of New
Netherland_, _The Complaint of New Amsterdam_, _The Thistle Finch_,
and others. Although these suggested true affection for the land of
his adoption, it was the home of his youth and the never-fading
remembrance of his childhood's days that haunted him and called to
him. And at last, one day after thirteen years, the sight of a ship
preparing to sail for Holland so overcame him that almost within the
hour he had bidden farewell and had sailed with her, leaving to the
townspeople his memory and his verse.
But by the time of his going there had come forward another poet to
take his place, by name Nicasius De Sille. There was a vast difference
between the first poet and the second. Steendam was a poor man, and in
his verses sought always to touch those who had never grasped the
skirts of fleeting Fortune. The second was a man of wealth, a kind of
"society poet." For even in that small circle, in the first
half-century of its existence, there were marked differences in
wealth, birth, and reputation, which were to develop with the passing
years into the distinctions of to-day.
The aristocracy of those times centred about the family of the Dutch
Governor, Peter Stuyvesant. Mrs. Stuyvesant had been, before her
marriage, Judith Bayard, the daughter of a Paris divine. Mrs. Bayard,
the sister of Peter Stuyvesant, had married Mrs. Stuyvesant's brother,
and when left a widow with three infant sons she followed her brother
when he became Governor of New Netherland. These two women had lived
in ease and refinement, and in coming to the colony well knew that
there they would find a life of comparative hardship. Yet they came
willingly enough, following husband and brother, and brought with them
an atmosphere of intellectual and social culture that left its impress
for all time. By the time Steendam returned to his boyhood home, a few
ambitious folk had gathered themselves about the Stuyvesants. There
was Oloff Van Cortlandt, a thriving merchant and one of the richest
men in New Netherland; there were Hendrick Kip and his three sons;
there were Dr. La Montagne and his daughters, and Govert Loockermans,
and others.
It was to this well-to-do-set that Nicasius De Sille belonged, and
after the going of Steendam he became the only literary man in the
colony. He also had come over in the service of the Dutch West India
Company, but in a far different capacity from Steendam. For he came,
when Stuyvesant's rule had run eight years of its course, as a
Councillor in the provincial government, and his life was thenceforth
closely connected with that of the Governor. He came, heralded as a
statesman, as a lawyer, as a man of deep learning, as a man of wealth.
But with not one word of his being a poet--yet only by reason of his
poems has his name lived. He built for himself a house beside the
little canal where Steendam walked in the night, just where now
Exchange Street touches Broad, and here, with his two motherless
daughters and one son, he lived more luxuriously than had yet been
seen. For he had brought with him from Holland heavy plate of rich
design, more plate than was in all the town beside; solid, carved
furniture and rare hangings; and on winter nights his guests sat down
to a table laden with blue and white china ornamented with strange
Chinese pictures, and drank their tea, alternately biting lumps of
sugar, from the tiniest china cups, and altogether were entertained
with all the pomp and circumstance he had known in The Hague. At these
evening entertainments De Sille read his poems in such perfect style
as to win much applause, and doubtless it was the reading of these, as
well as his courtly manner and great wealth, that very soon won for
him the love of fair Tryntie Croegers.
[Illustration: De Sille's House]
And then one day there was a grand gathering in the stone church
inside the fort--on the wedding-day of Nicasius De Sille and Mistress
Tryntie Croegers. Into the church went the friends: women, some with
petticoats of red cloth, some with skirts of blue or purple silk set
off with rare lace, all with silken hoods over much befrizzled hair,
and their fingers covered with glittering rings, and with great
lockets of gold on their bosoms. Each had a Bible fastened to her
girdle by links of gold--not the plain, strongly bound Bibles used by
Jacob Steendam and his friends, but elaborately wrought in silver,
with golden clasps. The men were just as gaily dressed as the women,
for they wore long coats adorned with shining buttons and pockets
trimmed with lace, and colored waistcoats, knee-breeches of velvet,
silk stockings, and low shoes set off by silver buckles. Outside the
fort among the townspeople of lower degree it was, too, quite a
holiday. Men with coarse frocks and leather aprons, women in homespun
gowns, turbaned negresses, swarthy negro slaves, dusky Indians,--all
made merry in their several ways as though glad of an excuse. And the
motley throng outside the fort and the elegant gathering within all
made way for the wrinkled little bell-ringer, who carried the cushions
from the Stadt Huys for the burgomasters and the schepens, who
insisted on every bit of their dignity, come what would, on this day
or on any other. So, with those inside the church looking on in
silence and the people outside keeping up an incessant din and
clatter, the poet of the rich was married to Tryntie Croegers by the
good Dominie Megapolensis.
[Illustration: A Woman's Costume
New Amsterdam]
But for all such a fair starting off this married life had an untimely
ending. Though Nicasius De Sille might win a wife by his poetry, it
seemed that he could not hold one. There were no poetic readings in
the house by the canal after the marriage, and the literature of the
town which had started out so bravely fell into a decline with the
languishing of De Sille's connubial bliss. Before the third year had
gone by, a commission of their friends was trying to tell the pair how
happy their lives should have been. But all the reasoning had no
effect, and the friends were forced to give it up and submit to a
decision, in very quaint wording, the tenor of which was that it was
acknowledged that there was no love between the two, and that the only
recommendation that could be made was that the property should be
divided equally and they go their several ways,--which they did. But
the earlier readings of poetry had sown the seed of still another
marriage. For at those readings, Anna, the youngest daughter of the
poet, had sat by her father's side, and young Hendrick Kip had sat by
his father's side, and about the time the commission of friends was
announcing its failure to patch up matters, Anna De Sille and Hendrick
Kip, all undismayed by the bad example, had decided to sit side by
side through the remainder of their lives.
[Illustration: Stuyvesant's Bouwerie House]
All this time De Sille was growing more and more rich, when there
came a great change. Of a sudden one day the English ship sailed into
the bay, and the English soldiers took possession of the town, and the
rule of the Dutch in New Amsterdam had passed, and the English became
governors of their province of New York. Then Stuyvesant went to live
in a little settlement he had built up and called Bouwerie Village,
which was far out on the Bouwerie Road, and Nicasius De Sille settled
down as a merchant, and little more was heard of him as a poet.
It was a simple enough thing to rename the town and call it after the
brother of an English king, but that made but little change in the
customs of the people. For many a long year it was to remain the
quaint, slow-going town it had been. Certainly no English brain or
hand added to the literature of this time, and the only bit of writing
which survives is the work of a Dutch minister.
In the eighteenth year after the coming of the English, when it had
come to be 1682, Dominie Henricus Selyns came to New York from
Holland. He had lived four years in the town when it was New
Amsterdam, and we have his own words for it that he found the
settlement scarcely altered a whit from the time he left. And now he
took charge of the little church in the fort, the same church where
Nicasius De Sille was married with such pomp. His congregation was
made up of much the same kind of people as of old, and perhaps it was
just as well, since he still preached in the Dutch language. The poems
he wrote, all in the Dutch language, were read as piously as were the
Bibles, and were quite at one with them in religious feeling. No one
then imagined that a day would come when a critic might hint that the
good Dominie's contributions to the early literature of New York might
be just a shade gloomy and despairing in their views of the
fearfulness of the after-life.
[Illustration: The Church in the Fort]
For quite twenty years the good Dominie lived to aid in fostering the
infant literature of infant New York, living a life as quiet and as
regular as any Dutch colonist could have demanded. On a Sunday morning
he preached in the church in the fort the long, heavy sermons that his
people loved. In the afternoon he rode away on the highway that led
into the country, past the Collect Pond, over the Kissing Bridge at
the Fresh Water, on to the stretch that was to grow into the Bowery,
through the forest till he came to the few clustering houses of the
Bouwerie Village, where Stuyvesant had spent his old age. In the
village church he preached of an afternoon,--the church which
Stuyvesant had built and beside which he was buried,--the church which
was to stand another hundred years and which was then to give way to a
house of worship to be called St. Mark's, which, in turn, two
centuries and more after Stuyvesant's day, was still to be found
standing in the core of a great metropolis.
[Illustration: Capt. Kidd's House]
Dominie Selyns lived long enough to see many changes. He lived to see
a Dutch prince become England's king; he lived to see New York rent
asunder through the overzealousness of one Jacob Leisler, who feared
lest the town should not recognize a king of Dutch blood; he lived to
see Lord Bellomont made Governor and riding through the streets in a
coach the gorgeousness of which astounded all; he lived to see
Captain William Kidd sail out of the harbor in the ship _Adventure
Galley_, with never a thought that a few years more would see him
executed as a pirate. And when Dominie Selyns died, bequeathing his
poems to swell the scanty literature of his times, the era of the
Dutch had well-nigh ended.