Two Famous Meeting-Places
Looking backward to the days before the Civil War is to bring into
review a host of men who then walked through the city in which time
has wrought so many changes, and to bring to the mind's eye familiar
streets, but so altered that they seem like unknown highways.
There was the Battery, with its old-time appearance, when the green
grass of summer was not cast into deep and continual shade by an
overhanging device of modern travel, and when its broad walk was a
promenade, the like and popularity of which was not to be found
elsewhere. There stood squat Castle Garden, half in the water and half
on the land, of nondescript style of architecture, suggesting a means
of defence against an invading force and giving cause for wonder as to
how it ever came by the flowery half of its name.
Wandering swiftly through the lower end of the town, memory recalls
old houses whose begrimed fronts bore the markings of a good hundred
years. There, by the Bowling Green, was where Washington and Putnam
had their headquarters. Farther up-town a hotel arose where Franconi's
Hippodrome had been. Still farther along was Murray Hill, where there
was just enough elevation of land to account in a measure for its
name. Still farther on were country places beyond the town--beyond the
town then, but now come to be the very heart's core of the metropolis.
But of all the points of interest none comes fresher to the mind than
Broadway. And though they have all changed, some swept away, some
freshened up, others reconstructed into modern ways and made to keep
pace with the progress of the passing days, no change or series of
changes have brought about such complete renewal, if the reminiscent
eye of the mind is to be believed, as has come to Broadway. Blotting
out for the moment the city's chief canyon of travel as it is to-day,
with its brobdingnagian structures, and its sights and sounds of
business and pleasure and enterprise, let the highway of old take its
place. As far back as fifty years ago, residences were gradually
metamorphosed into business hives, but they managed to retain much of
their conservative appearance for a long time, as though a battle were
being waged as to whether Broadway should be a place of homes or a
business thoroughfare. Trees by the curb line waved their branches in
angry protest against commercial encroachments and in opposition to
great glaring signs that blurted out business announcements in a
bold-faced manner, that argued they had come to stay. While the
Broadway of to-day gives the impression of narrowness because of the
height of the sky-scrapers that border it, it then looked exceedingly
wide. It was never a quiet street, for a continual procession of
omnibuses and other vehicles on business and pleasure bent streamed
along it. Among the popular resorts at which they often stopped was
Charles Pfaff's, where beer was sold. There of an evening met the
literary Bohemians of the city, in the days when Bohemia really
existed and before the word had well-nigh lost significance and
respect. They were gifted men with great power of intellect, who
spoke without fear and without favor and whose every word expressed a
thought. They were real men and they made the world a real place, a
place without affectation, without pretence, without show, without
need of applause, and without undue cringing to mere conventional
forms. These were the characteristics of the Bohemians, and Bohemia
was wherever two or three of them were gathered together. Bohemia was
the atmosphere they carried with them, and whether upon the streets or
in Pfaff's cellar they were at home. Pfaff's happening to be a
convenient gathering-place, and beer happening to be the popular brew
with most of them, they gathered there.
It is a tradition that the place came into favor through the personal
efforts of the energetic Henry Clapp. He was attracted to it, so the
tradition runs, soon after he started the _Saturday Press_ in 1858,
that lively publication, so brilliant while it lasted, so soon to die,
and at its death having pasted on its outer door an announcement which
read: "This paper is discontinued for want of funds, which by a
coincidence is precisely the reason for which it was started." Whether
it is true or not that Clapp was the first to call attention to the
resort that came to be the meeting-place of the Bohemians, matters
little. It grew to be such a meeting-place, and it is quite true that
the members of the staff of the _Saturday Press_ did more than any one
else to give it a name that has lived through the years.
It is hard to locate Pfaff's place now. Go to look for it on the east
side of Broadway, above Bleecker Street three or four doors, and you
will be disappointed, for there is nothing to locate--just a
conventional business house. Take an idle hour and picture it in
memory; that will be better. Thinking of it now it is quite natural to
contrast it with modern eating- and drinking-houses, famous for their
mirror-lined walls, richly carved appointments, carpeted floors, and
flashing electric lights. Pfaff's was a hole beneath the surface of
the street, ill-lighted, ill-ventilated, ill-kept. But it is far
better to read George Arnold's poem embodying the spirit of the
cellar, and recording how the company was "very merry at Pfaff's."
This poet was one of the merry company in the days when he wrote
regularly for the columns of _Vanity Fair_. He has himself said that
some of the poems were written in the late hours after an evening
spent in the underground Broadway resort with Fitz-Hugh Ludlow, with
Mortimer Thomson, the famous "Q. K. Philander Doesticks," and a score
of like writers. It was Arnold, too, who caused an hour of sadness
when he took there the story of the death of Henry W. Herbert, who was
well known to all the habitues. They all knew his life's story; they
had heard him tell of his father, the Dean of Manchester and cousin to
the Earl of Carnarvon; they had heard him tell how he had come to New
York from London, how he had taught in the school in Beaver Street
near Whitehall, and how in that little school he had partly written
his historical romance _Cromwell_, and how he had mapped out some of
the others that followed it. They knew, too, how he had, under the
name of "Frank Forester," produced such books as _American Game in its
Season_, _The Horse and Horsemanship in North America_, and become
famous by novel-writing. He was the first to introduce sports of the
field into fiction in America. Some of his comrades knew the
unhappiness that had crept into his life, but even his dearest friends
were not prepared for the news which Arnold brought one day, that
"Frank Forester" had died by his own hand in a room on the second
floor of the Stevens House, there in Broadway by the Bowling Green,
not more than the throw of a stone from the place where, in his early
days in New York, he had taught school.
Another friend of George Arnold's, who sometimes spent hours with him
at Pfaff's, was George Farrar Browne, but few will remember him by
this name, while many will recall that which he made famous, Artemus
Ward. He had passed his apprenticeship as a printer and reporter, had
made the country ring with the name of the lively but illiterate
showman, and was in New York trying to carry _Vanity Fair_ to
success--a task which he could not accomplish.
Another of the Pfaff company was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. This was at a
time when he had editorial charge of the _Saturday Press_ after he had
come from Portsmouth and served three years at his desk in the
commission house of his rich uncle. Working over the books of the
firm, his mind was often busy with themes outside of the commission
house, all tending towards a literary career.
Another lounger at Pfaff's whose name has become famous in the world
of letters was William Winter, who was sometimes a visitor. Howells
went there on his first visit to New York and dined with Walt Whitman,
and there were others--Bayard Taylor and Stedman among them.
[Illustration: The University Building]
It was only a few minutes' walk from Pfaff's to Washington Square,
and there could be found the substantial-appearing University
building, where Theodore Winthrop had his office and where he wrote
_Cecil Dreeme_ and _John Brent_. From that gloomy building he was
called to the war, and to his home there friends brought the details
of his death--shot through the heart while rallying his men in an
attack which he had helped to plan at the action of Big Bethel in
June, 1861. At the time of his death he was scarcely known as a
writer, and it was not until the publication of _Cecil Dreeme_ that
the world realized that it had lost an entertaining story-teller as
well as a brave soldier when Winthrop fell.
Among others who served in the Seventh Regiment of New York, of which
Theodore Winthrop was a member, was Fitz-James O'Brien, the erratic
and brilliant journalist, whose tale of _The Diamond Lens_ was his
best contribution to the literature of the day. The only literary man
of the Seventh to return to New York was O'Brien's friend, Charles
Graham Halpine, who resigned, and lived to make his name famous by his
humorous sketches of army life supposed to have been penned by
"Private Miles O'Reilly."
The name of Winthrop naturally suggests the name of Dr. John W.
Draper, who was associated with the University of New York for more
than thirty years. His technical writings made his name known over the
world, and he spent many years of his life in the dingy old University
building working on a _History of Intellectual Development in Europe_.
[Illustration: The Studio Building in West 70th St.]
Fitz-James O'Brien has told of how he was once sent by a newspaper to
see Henry T. Tuckerman, in a big brown building in Tenth Street. This
studio building, just east of Sixth Avenue, is there yet, and the room
on the second floor where O'Brien had his talk with the scholarly
essayist and critic may be seen. At that time Tuckerman was writing
_The Criterion; or, The Test of Talk about Familiar Things_. In this
large room overlooking the street it was his custom on Sunday evenings
to entertain his literary friends.
Another home where there were Sunday-evening gatherings for many years
was that of Alice and Phoebe Cary. This house, one of the few
residences remaining in a neighborhood otherwise given up to business
structures to-day, is numbered 53 on East Twentieth Street. Here the
Carys lived when they made their home in this city, coming from their
Ohio birthplace to a wider field of activity. You can walk now into
the little parlor where the gatherings were held. You can go into the
room above, where Phoebe worked--when she found time; for in the
joint housekeeping of the sisters Phoebe often said that she had to
be the housekeeper before she could be the poet. In that room she
wrote, after coming from church one Sunday, the hymn which has made
her name famous and well-beloved, _Nearer My Home_.
[Illustration: 53 EAST 20th St.]
There on the same floor was the favorite work-corner of Alice, and
sitting close by the window, where she could look out into the street,
she wrote many of her poems of memory and of domestic affection. In
this room, too, she died.
To recite the names of those Sunday-evening callers would be to recall
all the writers in the city at that time, and to mention all those
prominent in the world of letters who came from out of town. James
Parton was often one of the company, in the days when he was arranging
the material for his _Life of Horace Greeley_, material gathered from
those who had known the great editor during his early days in New
Hampshire and Vermont. Greeley himself dropped in occasionally, and
also another member of the _Tribune_ staff, Richard Hildreth, the
writer from Massachusetts, who had been associate editor of the Boston
_Atlas_ and who in after years was United States Consul at Trieste.
Herman Melville was invited to the Twentieth Street house at the time
when he was at work on his _Battle Pieces_, and could look back on
years of adventure by land and by sea, and on the hardships that had
supplied him with the material from which to write so much that was
odd and interesting. At one of these Sunday-night receptions, at which
Alice Cary introduced him first, Melville told the company, and told
it far better than he had ever written anything (at least so one of
his hearers has recorded), the story of that life of trial and
adventure. He began at the beginning, telling of his boyhood in New
York, of his shipping as a common sailor, and of his youthful
wanderings in London and Liverpool. In true sailor fashion, and with
picturesque detail, he spun the tale of his eighteen months' cruise to
the sperm fisheries in the Pacific, and held his hearers' close
attention while he related the coarse brutality of his captain, who
had forced him to desert at the Marquesas Islands. Then he traced his
wanderings with his one companion through the trackless forest on the
island of Nukahiva and of his capture by the Typee cannibals. He
related how there was little hope in his heart that he could ever
escape, but that he still held tight to life and his courage did not
desert him; how with the thought of death before him by night and by
day he yet hourly studied the strange life about him and garnered
those facts and fancies which he afterwards used to such advantage in
his successful _Typee_. It was a thrilling tale to listen to, in
strange contrast to his humdrum later life when he was an employee of
the New York Custom House. When you go to see the home of the Cary
sisters, walk on a few blocks to East Twenty-sixth Street, and there
see the house numbered 104. On this site stood Melville's house, where
he lived for many years and where, when he had come to be an old man,
he died.
Mary L. Booth was another visitor to the home of the Cary sisters, and
with them she talked over a great many details of her _History of the
City of New York_, which she was at that time energetically engaged
upon. And there this future editor of _Harper's Bazar_ met Martha J.
Lamb when Mrs. Lamb came to the city from Chicago. A talk between the
two had much to do with directing Mrs. Lamb's thought into historical
lines, and led to her publishing, some seventeen years later, her
_History of New York_, and to her assuming, in 1883, the editorship of
the _Magazine of American History_. Mary L. Booth used to tell very
amusingly how she had once met Samuel G. Goodrich, then famous as
"Peter Parley," at the little house in Twentieth Street, and how
disappointed she had been in listening to his talk and not finding it
as impressive as it should have been as coming from the author and
editor of more than one hundred and fifty volumes. This incident
occurred within a year or two of "Peter Parley's" death.
That popular writer of juvenile tales, Alice Haven, was also a visitor
of the Cary sisters. Her early life had been spent in Philadelphia,
where she had been married to J.C. Neal, but after his death she had
removed to New York and made her home there. She was very much
interested in the work of St. Luke's Hospital, which was not a great
distance away, and often came to talk with Phoebe Cary about that
institution. Miss Cary herself was interested in it because of her
regard for its founder, Dr. William Augustus Muhlenberg, who had
written a hymn that was a great favorite of hers, _I Would Not Live
Alway_. Dr. Muhlenberg was the rector of the Church of the Holy
Communion, and in 1846 on St. Luke's Day after his sermon he suggested
to his congregation that of the collection that was about to be taken
half should be put aside as the commencement of a fund which should be
used to found an institution for the care of the sick poor. The fund
started that day with thirty dollars, and that was the beginning of
St. Luke's Hospital. It was not a great while before the actual
hospital work was begun in a building at 330 Sixth Avenue, near
Twentieth Street, and there had a home until the completion of that at
Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, where it remained until those
quarters were outgrown, and in 1896 it removed to the new buildings on
Cathedral Heights.