Literary New York Part 8

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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+pping as a common sailor, and of his youthful wanderings in London and Liverpool. In true sailor fas.h.i.+on, 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 coa.r.s.e 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 publis.h.i.+ng, some seventeen years later, her _History of New York_, and to her a.s.suming, in 1883, the editors.h.i.+p 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 inst.i.tution. 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 inst.i.tution 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.

Chapter XII

Some of the Writers of To-Day

There is little of old-time picturesqueness in the city of New York to-day, where buildings are too towering, too ma.s.sive, too thickly cl.u.s.tered to offer artistic and unique effects. But a stroll about the homes of the writers of the city invests their rather commonplace surroundings with more than pa.s.sing interest.

In the older part of the town, the section that was all of New York a hundred years ago and is now the far down-town, there are many reminders of those friends whose books are on the most easily reached library shelf.

To No. 10 West Street, that stands on the river front, Robert Louis Stevenson was taken by a fellow-voyager in 1879; here he stopped the first night he spent in America, and of this house he wrote in the _Amateur Emigrant_. From the waterside just at dusk, catching a dim outline of the varying housetops is to glimpse some old castle of feudal times. The lowest building in all this block is No. 10--a meagre, dingy, two-story structure that has come to be very old. The doors and windows seem to have been made for some other building, and to be trying to get back to where they belong, bulging out in the struggle and making rents in the house-front.

[Ill.u.s.tration: No. 10 West St.]

Crossing Battery Park to State Street, at No. 17 is the tall Chesebrough building that has sprung up on the spot where William Irving, brother of Was.h.i.+ngton, lived, and where the Salmagundi wits gathered sometimes in the evening. Two or three doors farther along is a survival of old New York which delights the eye, with its porticoes and oval windows, odd appearing and many-sided; a mansion when wealth and affluence cl.u.s.tered around the Battery. This is the scene of the first few chapters of Bunner's _Story of a New York House_. Around the corner and through the wide doors of the Produce Exchange, at the back of that building and literally hidden in the middle of the block, is an old street that seems to have lost its usefulness, a quaint and curious way full half a century and more behind the times, now bearing the name of Marketfield Street, but once called Petticoat Lane. It is no longer a thoroughfare, for in its length of half a block it has neither beginning nor end. Here is all that is left of the house in which Julia Ward Howe was born.

Pa.s.sing along Broad Street, where Edmund C. Stedman, the poet and financier, has an office close to Wall Street, you come in a few minutes to the Custom House. To enter that building is to get lost in a moment. Pa.s.s through the door into a veritable trackless wilderness of narrow black halls, with rooms that open in the most unexpected corners, and come after a while to the Debenture Room of old, and to the window near which Richard Henry Stoddard had his desk for close upon twenty years.

Freed from the intricacies of the old building, continue the stroll up-town, and in Park Row, at No. 29, on the third floor, is found the old home of the _Commercial Advertiser_, where Jesse Lynch Williams worked, and wrote _A City Editor's Conscience_, and other stories. A little way farther on is the _Tribune_ building, where William Winter has his den, and under the same roof the room where Irving Bach.e.l.ler conducted a newspaper syndicate before _Eben Holden_ was thought of.

Then on again a few steps to the _Sun_ building and into the room, little changed from the time when Charles A. Dana sat there so many years, and, close by, the reporters' room where Edward W. Townsend worked, and wrote about _Chimmie Fadden_. There is a winding staircase, that the uninitiated could never find, leading into the rooms of the _Evening Sun_, where Richard Harding Davis "reported,"

and where he conceived some of the Van Bibber stories. Directly across the street is the _World_ office, and looking from the windows, so high up that the city looks like a Lilliputian village, you have the view that Elizabeth Jordan looked upon during the ten years she was getting inspiration for the _Tales of a City Room_. Down narrow Frankfort Street is Franklin Square, the home of _Harper's Magazine_, where George W. Curtis established his Easy Chair in which he was enthroned so long, and which is now occupied by William Dean Howells.

Cherry Street leads out of Franklin Square direct to Corlear's Hook Park. Half a hundred feet before that green spot is reached, in a squalid neighborhood of dirty house-fronts, ragged children, begrimed men, and slovenly women, there is a house numbered 426, above the door of which are the words: "I was sick and ye visited Me." Dwellers in the neighborhood know that this is a hospital for those suffering from incurable disease, but, beyond this, seem to know very little about it. It is the home of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who has given up her entire life to brighten many another. In the same block, but nearer to Scammel Street, which is next towards the south, Brent's foundry used to be in the days when Richard Henry Stoddard was an iron-worker and the friend of Bayard Taylor, whom he visited in Murray Street.

From this far East Side to Was.h.i.+ngton Square is quite a distance, but stop half-way at Police Headquarters and the nearby reporters'

offices. Any one there will be glad to point out the room where Jacob A. Riis worked so many years and wrote most of _How the Other Half Lives_, and from which he carried out his ideas for benefiting the city poor--carried them out so well that President Roosevelt called him New York's most useful citizen.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Where "How The Other Half Lives" was written]

In Was.h.i.+ngton Square the wanderer has much to think of in the literary a.s.sociations recalled by this green garden that has blossomed from a pauper graveyard, and which has been written of by Howells, Brander Matthews, Bayard Taylor, Bunner, Henry James, F. Hopkinson Smith, and almost every writer who has brought New York into fiction.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 146 Macdougal St.]

From the square, stroll in any direction for definite reminders.

Towards the south and around into Macdougal Street, at No. 146, there is a dingy brick house with a trellised portico, where Brander Matthews and his friends used to dine, and which James L. Ford made the Garibaldi of his _Bohemia Invaded_. Walk towards the east, past the site of the University building, and stand at the Greene Street corner, at No. 21 Was.h.i.+ngton Place, where Henry James was born.

Towards the west a few steps into Waverly Place, at No. 108, is a squat red brick house where Richard Harding Davis wrote his newspaper tales. Across, at the corner, lived George Parsons Lathrop when he wrote _Behind Time_, and there his wife, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, wrote _Along the Sh.o.r.e_. An historic site this house stands on, for it is where Stoddard and Taylor once lived together. A block to the north is old-time Clinton Place, which now, for modern convenience, recking not of memory or of sentiment, has become Eighth Street. There, to the left of Fifth Avenue, at No. 18, is where Paul du Chaillu wrote _Ivar the Viking_, and to the right the house opposite, covered from bas.e.m.e.nt to eaves with green cl.u.s.tering vines, is the home of Richard Watson Gilder.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 108 Waverly Place]

It is only a question now of crossing half a dozen city blocks towards the east to wander into what was called the Bouwerie Village. Modern streets and modern improvements have so overridden the village of old that traces of it are few and difficult to find. Here in this district many a writer of New York has lived. At Fourth Avenue and Tenth Street still stands the house, known to all who lived there as "The Deanery," in which Miss Annie Swift kept boarders, and where the family of Richard Henry Stoddard lived during the last four years that Mr. Stoddard held his post in the Custom House. Here Stedman, and Bayard Taylor, and Howells were visitors, with scores of other writers; here Mrs. Stoddard wrote _The Morgensons_, and here Stoddard himself wrote _The King's Bell_, _Melodies and Madrigals_, and other poems. Not more than a block away, in the house numbered 118, Richard Grant White had his home when he wrote _The New Gospel of Peace, According to St. Benjamin_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Richard Grant White's Home]

Around the corner in Third Avenue, at Thirteenth Street, is a tablet telling of the pear tree that Peter Stuyvesant brought from Holland, that grew and flourished on the edge of the Stuyvesant orchard for more than two hundred years. Within a stone's throw of the tree in the sixties, and while it yet bloomed, Stoddard lived with his friend Bayard Taylor, and here the _Life of Humboldt_ came from Stoddard's pen. Around another corner into Fourteenth Street and down a block to No. 224, Paul du Chaillu had apartments when he wrote _The Land of the Midnight Sun_; but the tree-filled yard and the vine-covered cottage next to it, on which the writer's window looked, are buried beneath a dwelling in the full flush of newness.

In Fifteenth Street, just past Stuyvesant Park, is a really picturesque row of tiny houses that must have been there when Stuyvesant Park was very new indeed. They have balconies enclosed by iron fretwork, and the first in the row is especially dainty and attractive, and quite overshadowed by the lofty building that has grown up beside it. In this out-of-the-way corner the Stoddards lived for something more than a quarter of a century, and here they died, the brilliant son first, then Mrs. Stoddard, and finally Richard Henry Stoddard, in 1903.

Along the parkside and around the corner to Seventeenth Street, No.

330 was another interesting landmark until, quite lately, it was swept away. Brander Matthews lived there, and could look across the square to the gray towers of St. George's while he wrote the _French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century_. H.C. Bunner had quarters there when he wrote _A Woman of Honor_ and other stories of that period, and Richard Grant White was a long dweller there.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Where Richard Henry Stoddard Died]

Northward a few streets, on the south side of Gramercy Park, is the house of John Bigelow, writer of half a dozen important books, who fifty years and more ago a.s.sisted William Cullen Bryant in the editorial conduct of the _Evening Post_. Only a few steps away, in historic Irving Place, the ivy-covered house is where Mrs. Burton Harrison wrote _Sweet Bells out of Tune_, and on another block farther to the south the Lotus Club long had its home, the building now given over to commercial uses.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Where the Author's Club was organized]

In the short stretch of Fifteenth Street that leads from Irving Place to Union Square are two points closely a.s.sociated with the literature of the city. One is midway the distance, the prosaic office of a brewer now, but once the home of the Century Club when Bancroft the historian was its president. The other is nearer to the square, with a tall iron fence, and a gateway not at all in keeping with the modern appearance of the street. Behind the tall fence is a bit of greensward, and beyond that a house quaintly unusual in appearance, seeming to shrink from sight in the shadows cast about it. This is where Richard Watson Gilder at one time lived, where Charles De Kay organized the Authors' Club, and where the Society of American Artists was formed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Horace Greeley's Home]

Beyond Union Square there is in Eighteenth Street the house numbered 121 where Brander Matthews lived for fourteen or more years, where he wrote many of his books, and where was held the first meeting to organize the American Copyright League. It was Professor Matthews who gave the dinner at which the unique society known as the Kinsmen came into being, at the Florence on the same street at number 105,--an apartment house in which Ellen Glasgow, Elizabeth Bisland, and Edgar Saltus have made their homes, and in which the widow of Herman Melville is now living.

In nearby Nineteenth Street is still standing No. 35, a house where Horace Greeley lived, with William Allen Butler, the author of _Nothing to Wear_, for a next-door neighbor. Three blocks farther on is the big office building where Dr. Josiah Strong wrote most of _Our Country_, and where Hamilton W. Mabie has a study in the editorial rooms of _The Outlook_. A few steps farther in Twenty-second Street, at No. 33, Stephen Crane wrote part of _The Red Badge of Courage_ and worked on the daily newspapers. Close by in Fifth Avenue is the publis.h.i.+ng house where the critic and essayist, William Crary Brownell, author of _French Traits_, and other works, spends his business hours. Around the corner in Twenty-third Street, on the top floor of another publis.h.i.+ng house is the den of the energetic author, editor, and critic, Jeannette L. Gilder. Across Madison Square, at the Twenty-fifth Street corner, Edgar Saltus had apartments for some time, and just off Broadway in Twenty-seventh Street, at No. 26, Edgar Fawcett wrote _A Mild Barbarian_.

On up Madison Avenue past Twenty-eighth Street is a brownstone dwelling with a luxuriantly blooming window garden, where James Lane Allen lives when he is in town and revises his writings. A few steps into the next thoroughfare the Little Church Around the Corner nestles in a populous district, and in the next block, just beyond the Woman's Hotel, Mrs. Burton Harrison has written many of her books. Two blocks away, in the _Life_ building, John A. Mitch.e.l.l, founder of the paper, spends several working hours of each day.

Going farther up-town in Park Avenue just beyond Thirty-sixth Street is a substantial building where Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland wrote and where he died. In nearby Thirty-seventh Street hover memories of Parke G.o.dwin, who married the daughter of William Cullen Bryant, and whose business and literary interests were closely entwined with those of his father-in-law. A few steps westward is the solemnly quiet Brick Presbyterian Church, where Dr. Henry van d.y.k.e preached before he was called to Princeton. Turning into Forty-sixth Street, note a house distinguished from its neighbors by a doorway of wrought-iron, where John A. Mitch.e.l.l did much of the writing of _Amos Judd_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Beekman Mansion near 52nd St. [Transcriber's Note: should be 51st St.] East River]

Across town, where Fifty-first Street touches the East River, is a street so short and so out-of-the-way that few New Yorkers have ever heard of it. It is called Beekman Place, and in it survives the memory of the old Beekman house which stood near by, and which in the days of the Revolution was used as a British headquarters. It was in the Beekman house that Nathan Hale rested his last night on earth. Here in this quiet spot Henry Harland lived in the eighties, when he was employed in the Register's Office and got up at two o'clock many and many a morning to write (under the name of Sidney Luska) some of his earlier books. The windows of his home looked out upon a beautiful and unusual city scene. Any one going now to where Fifty-first Street ends at an embankment high above the river may see it just as he saw it then--see the waves splas.h.i.+ng on a rocky sh.o.r.e, with neither docks nor wharves nor factories to interfere; see a broad river; see a green island with stone turreted towers, and in the distance, forming a background, the irregular sky-line of the Brooklyn borough sh.o.r.e.

Farther up-town to Central Park, and there on the south side is the mammoth apartment house close to Sixth Avenue, where William Dean Howells did much of his work; and on beyond the avenue, at No. 150, Kate Douglas Wiggin evolved _Penelope's Experiences_. Still on up-town, following the easterly side of the park, in Sixty-fourth Street, at No. 16, Carl Schurz lived, and in Seventy-seventh Street is the square house of stone where Paul Leicester Ford met such a fearful death.

Crossing Central Park to the far west side, the journeyer comes to wide, tree-lined West End Avenue, and there at Ninety-third Street, almost upon the sh.o.r.es of the Hudson River, in a locality of beautiful homes, Brander Matthews, author of _Vignettes of Manhattan_ and _A Confident To-morrow_, lives and works. Returning down-town on the westerly side of the city, stop just beyond Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street before a house, colonial as to its doors and windows at least, the home of that distinguished naval officer and writer, Captain A.T. Mahan. On the nearest corner is the church where funeral services were held over Paul du Chaillu when his body was brought back from Russia. Down a few streets, John Denison Champlin, author and encyclopaedist, has his home, in a yellow apartment house, and half a block along Seventy-eighth Street stands the terra cotta building occupied by Stedman before he moved to Bronxville. Down to Sixty-fifth Street now, a dozen steps or more west of Central Park, Edgar Fawcett conceived _A Romance of Old New York_, before going to Europe for an indefinite stay.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lawrence Hutton's House]

In Thirty-fourth Street, midway between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, visit the solid little brick house, with green shutters and an air of dignity that proclaims it of another time. This has stood for three quarters of a century and at one time had no neighbors. There, until 1898, when he went to Princeton, Lawrence Hutton gathered his collection of objects artistic from all parts of the world; there he kept his a.s.sortment of death masks; there he wrote and entertained his friends, authors, actors, men of different callings.

[Ill.u.s.tration: De Kay's House--London Terrace]

Let the last step be to that reminder of old Chelsea Village, in Twenty-third Street beyond Ninth Avenue, called London Terrace. The Terrace was built when Chelsea was really a village, and exists to-day long after the village has ceased to have an ident.i.ty. One house in the row, No. 413, is particularly interesting, picturesquely and historically, carrying as its literary a.s.sociation the name of Charles De Kay, critic and author--a name of to-day and of the past as well, for he is the grandson of the poet, Joseph Rodman Drake.