THE 'NEW 'YORK OF ^ THE 'NOVELISTS ARTHUR BART LETT MAURICE CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library PS 144.N4M451 The New York of the novelists 3 1924 021 975 663 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021975663 THE NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS "THE BIG CANONS OF THE MONEY GRUBBING TRIBE" BY DAY THE NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS BY ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1916 COPTBIGBT, 1915 By DODD, mead AND COMPANY Copyright, 1916 By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Iso TO THE -94 SPIRIT CONTENTS Introduction xii PART I The Canons of the Monet Grubbers CHAPTER PAGE I When the Town was Young — The City of Irving, Cooper, Poe, and Their Contemporaries 3 II The Battery— Bowling Green— Old Wall Street — Bunner's New York — Jacob Dolph's House 9 III Other Trails of Yesterday — Janvier — ^Warner — Crawford — Mrs. Barr — ^Admiral Porter . . 16 IV Gateways of Invasion — ^Approaching the Sky- line — Kipling's "Dimbula" — 0. Henry's "Little Old Bagdad on the Subway" ... 21 V The Big Canons of the Money Grubbing Tribe — The Office of Carteret and Carteret — ^Wilton Sargent: American — Muldoon, A New York Horse 30 VI Edwin Lefevre's Wall Street— "The Woman and Her Bonds" 36 VII Some Men of the Street— The Lane of the Ticker —"The Golden Flood"— "Sampson Eock of Wall Street" — ^Lefevre and Frank Norris . . 41 VIII Park Row in Fiction— The Old Time Figures- Journalistic Bohemia — Jesse Lynch Williams — ^David Graham Phillips — Stephen Whitman —Edward W. Townsend 47 IX The Five Points and Chimmie Fadden ... 63 CONTENTS PART II The Mysterious East Side ohafteb • page I The Trail of Potash and Perlmutter — ^Wasser- bauer's Cafe — Henry D. Feldman — The Lis- penard Street Loft 61 II The Origin of the Tales— The Vernacular of the Cloak and Suit Business — Selling by the Gross 64 in Police Headquarters and Criminal Court — The Firm of Shaw and Shimmel — Arthur Train's Artemas Quibble — Pontin's Restaurant . . 69 IV "Case's" and "The Big Barracks"— Scenes of Stories by R. H. Davis and Julian Ralph . . 74 V The Search for the Mysterious East Side — ^The London of Dickens and the Paris of Sue and Balzac . 77 VI Tales of Mean Streets— Batavia Street— The Jolly Albanians — Washington's Cherry Street Home — Doyer Street — Allen Street ... 80 VII Tales of Mean Streets— Orchard Street— The Bowery — The Straw Cellar — McTurk's — Monkey Hill 86 VIII The Ghetto— Sidney Rosenfeld— Abraham Cahan — The Kosciuszko Bank — James Oppen- heim — East Broadway — Division Street — ^Nor- folk Street 95 IX Tales of Mean Streets — Henry Street — Grand Street — Mulberry Street — Chinatown — ^Helen Van Campen — The Slums of Stephen Crane . 100 X The East Side of 0. Henry— the Cafe Maginnis —The Blue Light Drug Store— Dutch Mike's Saloon— No. 12 Avenue C 108 CONTENTS PART III The Remnants of Bohemia chapter page I The Hunt for Bohemia — The Paris Latin Quar- ter — Finding the New York Maison Vauquer . 115 II The Old-Time Haunts— The Grand Vatel— The Taverne Alsacienne — Pfaff's 120 III Washington Square — Henry James — Brander Matthews — The Midge — As Bunner Saw the Square 124 IV The Garibaldi— Brasserie Pigault— The Casi Napoleon of the Thomas A. Janvier Stories . 132 V The Square of Phillips and Whitman— The Boarding House of "The Great God Success" — How Phillips Began as a Novelist — The Trail of "Predestined" 139 VI Mr. Davis and his Van Bibber — Stevenson's Velvet Jacket— The Fourteenth Street of "The Exiles" 146 VII Purlieus of Greenwich Village — The Pie Houses of "The Man Hunt"— West Tenth Street . . 154 VIII From Poe to Porter — Abingdon Square — ^Varick Street— Sheridan Park— The Wall of "The Last Leaf 160 IX The Trail of "Max Fargus"— The House of the Tin Sailor — Shysters' Row— A Mythical Part of Irving Place — The Course of Empire — 68 Clinton Place 166 X Crawford's New York — Old Second Avenue — Tompkins Square — The House of "The Last Meeting" — Colonel Carter's Home .... 174 CONTENTS PAET IV The Heart of New Arabu OHAFIEB PAGE I The Outstanding Figures — Kobert Bums's Ayr- shire — The Trance of "Quentin Durward" — What California Meant to Kipling — Thunder in the Catskills 187 II The Story of "The Bread Line"— Identifying the Characters — Publication^ Offices of "The Whole Family" 193 III The Maison de Shine — The Original of the Actor's Boarding House in the Helen Van Campen Stories — Following Vaudeville to Its Lair 197 IV Lower Second Avenue Again — Stu3rvesant Square— "The Fortune Hunter"— St. Mark's Place— "Felix O'Day" ....... 201 V The Heart of 0. Henry Land — Where Porter Lived — The Hotel America — Old Munich and the Little Eheinschloss . .i 205 VI Once More in Washington Square — "The Last of the Knickerbockers" — ^Waverly Place — St. George's— "The Boule Cabinet"— The Mara- thon — ^No. 13 Washington Square — Eupert Court .214 Vll Gratnercy Park — The Home of the Von der Euyslings — "The Alternative" — Clubs on the North and Clubs on the South 222 VIII The Heart of New Arabia— The City as the Artists See It — The Bed Line — Madison Square — Union Square — Stuffy Pete's Bench 228 CONTENTS PART V Tea, Tango, and Toper Land OHAFTEB , PAGE I The Inns of Fiction — Mine Host of Yesterday — The Trenchermen Beyond the Magic Door — A Little Dinner in the Land of Make-Believe . 237 II Doubling on the Trail— "The King in Yellow"— The Blind Alleys of New York — London Terrace 243 III The Later Eobert W. Chambers— The Plaza and the Park — The Patroon and the Pyramid — "lole" 251 rV The Berkeley— Old Delmonico's— The Manhat- tan Club — Poverty Flat 257 V "The Avenue"— The Old Curiosity Shop of "Felix O'Day"— The Suicide of a Street . . 264 VI Concerning the Town of the Playwright — "The Charity BaU"— "The Old Homestead"— Clyde Fitch's New York 271 VII The Department Store in Fiction — Montague Glass — Edna Ferber — Samuel Merwin's "The Honey Bee"— The Shop Girls of 0. Henry . 277 Vni The Shifting Scene— Hotels of the Great White Way— The Zig Zag Trail— The Metropolitan Opera House— The Old Grand Central . . 284 IX "The House of Mirth" and Others— Bryant Park— "Stanfleld's"— Stewart Edward White and 127 Madison Avenue ...... 294 X New Bohemias — ^Westover Court — Teagan's Ar- cade — The House of a Million Intrigues . . 298 (CONTENTS PAET VI The Crrr Eemote and the City Beyond CHAFTEB PAGE I Some Suburbs of Fiction — Southward Bound — The London of Esmond — The Environs of Paris 305 II The Water Side — Jabez BuUtongue of Locust VaUey— On a North River Pier— DeWitt Clinton Park 311 III Eoads to the North — Yorkville — ^A. House in rifty-fonrth Street— St. John's Cathedral and Momingside Park — No Man's Land — The Polo Grounds and Manhattan Field — Dobbs Ferry 315 lY The Cosmopolitan City — Beekman Place — The Terrace — Recalling Henry Harland — Repro- ducing The Old World 322 V More Roads to the North — Laguerre's — Pelham Bay — The Boston Post Road — ^White Plains — Pound Ridge — "Keeping Up with Lizzie" — Sleepy Hollow 330 VI Harlem Heights — The Neutral Ground — Scenes of "Chimmie Fadden"— The Country of "The Spy" 338 VII Greenpoint and Edgar Faweett — F. Hopkinson Smith's "Tom Grogan" — Over the River — Columbia Heights and "The Harbour"— The Brooklyn Water Front 344 VIII The City of Joys, Tawdry and Sublime— The Statue of Liberty— The Old Coney Trans- formed — Blinker Finds His Brothers . . . 358 IX The New Jersey Trail — The Atlantic Highlands — Days of the Revolution — The Rumson Road —The Country of the "Pig People"— Gothic Towers and Stately Elms 363 ILLUSTEATIONS "The Big Canons of the Money Grubbing Tribe," by Day Frontispiece FACING PACE Entering the Great Canons of the Money Grubbing Tribe 16 Monkey Hill, in "Eben Holden" 34 New Street, the Street of the Derelicts 46 The Old Slip Police Station 46 Trail of Potash and Perlmutter 56 "The Cafe of the Jolly Albanians," Cherry Street . . 78 The Dark Alley 78 Batavia Street 78 The "Big Barracks" Tenement in Forsythe Street . . 88 Pontin's Restaurant in Franklin Street ..... 96 The Bend 96 The Blue Light Drug Store 104 Norfolk Street 104 Greenwich Village 110 House Belonging to Mrs. Osbom, facing Rutherford Square 130 On Washington Square South, between Sullivan and Macdougal Streets 130 Colonnade Row, in Lafayette Place, opposite the old Astor Library 142 xiii xiv ILLUSTEATIONS FACING PAGE The Home of the Ferrols, of Stephen French "Whitman's "Predestined" 150 Opposite the Jefferson Market Police Court is a Short Eow of Dingy Houses 150 Where Van Bibber Found the Runaway Couple . . 176 Captain Peter's Home — ^Washington Square . . . 176 Chrysalis College — Theodore Winthrop's "Cecil Dreeme" 192 Irving Place Looking South from Gramercy Park . . 200 In the Old-time Novels of New York Life Visiting Englishmen invariably stopped at the Brevoort . . 218 The Princeton Club of New York 324 Old St. George's on Rutherford Square 224 Across the Square and through the White Arch Bo- hemia and Proletaire Gaze Curiously and Enviously at Belgravia 230 Gramercy Park, South. Here was the Siwash Club of the George Fitch Stories 244 Washington Square North, Peopled by the Ghosts of Countless Aristocrats of New York Fiction . . . 244 The Type of Antique Shop at Fourth Avenue and Thirtieth Street 254 The Studio of Harrison Fisher, in West Thirty-second Street 254 The Melancholy Pleasure Ground of Bryant Park . 266 The Waiting Room of the Old Grand Central Station . 280 The House in Fifty-fourth Street Out of which Grew James Lane Allen's "A Heroine in Bronze" . . . 288 The Part of the City Associated with Owen Johnson's "The Sixty-first Second" 288 The Aristocratic Sweep of Fifth Avenue Overlooking the Park » . 296 ILLUSTBATIONS ' xv FACING PAGE The Office of Daniel Froliinan at the Top of the Lyceum Theatre Building 308 Columbus Circle. All about Here are the "Lobster Palaces" of the Tea, Tango and Toper Land of New York Fiction 314 The Ferry at West Forty-second Street. 0. Henry's "The Poet and the Peasant" 318 De Witt Clinton Park. 0. Henry's "Vanity and Some Sables" 318 Glimpse through the Trees of Laguerre's "Most De- lightful of French Inns in the Quaintest of French Settlements" 336 The City of Joys, Tawdry and Sublime 342 The Light House at Bamegat. F. Hopkinson Smith's "The Tides of Bamegat" 362 Mrs. Liberty. "Made by a Dago and Presented to the American People on Behalf of the French Govern- ment" 366 ILLUSTRATIONS In the Text PAGE A Passing Gateway of Invasion ....... 22 In Washington Street in the Curious Little Syrian Colony 28 The Street Ten Years Ago 38 One of the Most Sinister of all the Sinister Comers of the Five Point District 54 The Newgate of New York 70 The Old Restaurant of the Grand Vatel, on West Houston Street 121 A Temporary New York Home of Hnrstwood . . . 128 A la Ville de Rouen 133 A Remnant of the Greenwich Village that Was . . 155 The "Pie Houses" of Greenwich Village . . . .157 Cosmopolitan New York. A London Slum . . . 161 The Jefferson Market Police Court 167 On Fourteenth Street very nearly Opposite the South- em End of Irving Place 171 The Home F. Hopkinson Smith Found for Colonel Carter 180 A Shrine of Yesterday 182 The "Maison de Shine" 198 In "The Fortune Hunter" David Graham Phillips staked a very definite claim to a Section of the City 203 Fronting on Irving Place Is the Saloon of 0. Henry's "The Lost Blend" .......... 209 xvii xviii ILLUSTEATIONS PAGE The Interior of "Old Munich" 212 The Cosmopolitan City, Venice 223 The House on Gramercy Park, North, Used in "Her Letter to His Second Wife" 225 A Little Dinner in the Land of Make Believe . . . 241 The Opening Through which the People who Live in Milliken Place Eeach the Outside World . . . .246 "Beyond the Gate Lies Milliken Place" 247 On the North Side of West Twenty-third Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues 249 George Barr McCuteheon Tound a New York Residence for Monty Brewster 258 The House of Richard Harding Davis's "Vera the Medium" 262 "With a Crash and a Shriek Fourth Avenue Dives Headlong into the Tunnel" 270 The Cosmopolitan City, London 274 The Cosmopolitan City, Paris 285 One of the Exits that Leads Over the Roof Tops in "The Castle of a Million Intrigues" 301 Beekman Place, George Bronson-Howard's "God's Man" 323 Provincial France 325 Italy 327 The Cosmopolitanism of New York — Ireland . . . 328 The Gardens from Montague Terrace. Ernest Poole's "The Harbour" 350 The Gardens Looking Toward the Inner Bay. Ernest Poole's "The Harbour" 352 Pierrepont Place. Ernest Poole's "The Harbour" . 355 INTEODUCTION Seventeen years ago the writer of this vol- ume, with a note book under one arm and a camera under the other, was engaged in roam- ing through the streets of New York and its suburbs, following the trails of such men and women of fiction as the novelist, until that time, had been considerate enough to provide. It was a task undertaken with a very genuine lik- ing and enthusiasm and there should be no reticence in recalling its direct inspiration. In previous visits to London the writer had had many pleasant hours in following the footsteps of Thackeray and Dickens, paying his respects to the house in Curzon Street where the Raw- don Crawleys lived on nothing a year, the home of the Sedleys, near Eussell Square, or wan- dering down the High Street of the Borough of Southwark, and turning down Angel Court in search of the few remaining stones of the XX INO^RODUCTION old Marshalsea Prison of Little Dorrit. When it was a matter of Dickens and TKackeray the task was easy enough. In various places "ramhles" with the former had been printed, and there was Mr. William H. Rideing's Thack- eray's London, a subject which has in later years been more amply handled by Mr. Lewis Melville, and pictorially by the late F. Hopkin- son Smith. But when it was a case of the dwelling of Eoljert Louis Stevenson's Mr. Hyde, or the Upper Baker Street rooms shared by Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, or the Gunnison Street of Kipling's "The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot," the writer was thrown upon his own resources. In those cases there were new trails to be blazed. So also in Paris were new trails to be blazed when the writer started out in the hunt for this or that street or domicile associated with some chapter of Balzac's La Comedie Humaine, or to follow the knightly rambles in the Seventeenth Century Lutetia of the immortal four of the elder Du- mas, or to take up with the relentlessness of Javert the pursuit of Jean Valjean in his flight from the home near the southern barriers of INTEODUCTION xxi the city skirting the Latin Quarter, across the river, to the refuge he finally found in the Con- vent of the Little Picpus. For at that time the late Benjamin Ellis Martin's The Stones of Paris had not yet been printed. These ram- bles abroad led to the rambles at home. Why should not some one, \ras the inevitable thought, try to do for some great American city what had been done for the London of Dickens and Thackeray? Of course there were no really great dominant figures, but the trail of the novelist in bulk was sure to be worth while. That New York was the city chosen was due to the fact that it was the city that offered the most, and the city best known and most easily accessible to the writer. The papers written in the summer of 1899 under the title of New York in Fiction appeared serially in the fol- lowing autumn, and later in a volume which has long been out of print. That they did something, that they did a great deal toward stimulating the cult of local colour the writer does not hesitate to affirm. Though little more than seventeen years have passed the New York of the novelists to-day offers fully three xxii INTRODUCTION times as much as it did then. Hence this new pilgrimage, in which the writer has attempted to show the rapidly changing city, both as it appeared then, and as it is seen now by the nov- elists of the new generation. PAET I The Canons op the Money Grubbers THE NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS CHAPTER I When the Town "Was Young — The City of Irving, Cooper, Poe, and Their Contemporaries. PoBB over the old prints and maps. Turn the pages of the old diaries. A little imagination and there comes into being the city that was, the restful, sedate, Kjiiekerbockerish town, that knew the genial Irving, and the irascible Coop6r, and the saturnine Foe, and Paulding, and Halleck, and Drake, and McDonald Clarke, the "Mad Poet," and a score more. How re- mote it seems from the tumultuous New York of to-day. Here is a small section of the city map of 1827. The very names of the streets r— Herring Street, Eaisin Street, Burrows Street — ^have passed into oblivion. To the east of Broadway, on a line with St. Paul's Chapel, there stretches to-day a region that is known, and has for many years been known. 4 THE NEW YOEK as "the Swamp." It smells atrociously of leather. When Washington Irving was a youth, back in the last years of the eighteenth century, there was in the neighbourhood a hill known as Golden Hill. It was a very beautiful place, so the chroniclers tell us, and upon the hilltop was an inn that had been much fre- quented by the patriots in the Eevolutionary days. The lane that climbed over the grain covered hill is there yet. It is now William Street. In a house on the side of Grolden Hill Irving was born in 1783, and in this region he spent his boyhood. In the nearby Ann Street he went to school, and later was a law clerk. There he did his first writing, the sketches signed "Jonathan Oldstyle," and with his brother William and James K. Paulding laid the foundations of the Salmagundi. There also he wrote most of the Knickerbocher History of New Torh. In 1815 Irving left New York for seventeen years of European wandering. He had known a town of one hundred thousand in- habitants. He returned to find a city of twice that size. The Coffee House at Broadway and Thames Street that he remembered had been OF THE NOVELISTS 5 replaced by the City Hotel. The changed ap- pearance of the streets puzzled him ; the houses seemed amazingly tall. He went to live down near the Battery, at number 3 Bridge Street, with his brother Ebenezer, who had been the Captain Greatheart of "Cockloft Hall." Far out in the country, overlooking the East Eiver at what is now Eighty-eighth Street — ^the site of the present East Eiver Park — ^was the home of Irving 's friend, John Jacob Astor. There Trying stayed as a guest; there he wrote As- toria, and there he met Captain Bonneville and his friends. At the corner of Seventeenth Street and Irving Place to-day is the house, now the home of the Authors' League of Amer- ica, so frequently associated with Irving 's name. An old, three story brick house painted white, with a long sheltered balcony overhanging the sidewalk, and a bay window looking north and west to Union Square. To this house of his nephew, John T. Irving, came the travelled old writer for short visits to town in the late forties. Here he wrote portions of Oliver Goldsmith, and of The Life of Mahomet, and arranged the notes of the Life of Washington. It is !Wash- 6 THE NEW YOEK ington living's last New York home, since the passing of his birthplace on Golden Hill, the family "hive" hard by the Battery, and the rooms he occupied in Colonnade Row in Lafa- yette Place. The City Hotel, which Irving found on his return from Europe in 1832, was a favourite haunt of the author of the "Leatherstocking Tales." There Cooper organised the Bread and Cheese Club, which met in a building at the corner of Broadway and Eeade Street, and which derived its name from Cooper's idea of having candidates balloted for with bread and cheese, a bit of bread favouring election, and cheese deciding against it. But Cooper's home life in New York centred about the then fash- ionable district of St. John's Park in lower Greenwich Village. In 1821 he was living in Beach Street. The success of The Spy, his second novel, had made him a conspicuous man. From Beach Street he moved to 345 Greenwich Street where he began the "Leatherstocking Tales." There he wrote The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans, respectively the fourth and second books chronologically of the series. OF THE NOVELISTS 7 In 1825 Cooper went to Europe, returning in 1832. His first New York home after his re- turn was in Bleecker Street, two hlooks west of Broadway. He did not remain there long but moved to a house on Broadway at Prince Street that later gave way to Niblo's Garden. Thence he moved to the house in St. Mark's Place where he wrote Homeward Bound and began the struggle with his critics that so embittered his later days. That was Cooper's last New York home. From there he went to Coopers- town. The name of Poe, like the name of Cooper, is associated with old St. John's. The author of "The Eaven" drew inspiration from wander- ing through the gralveyard. In 1837 he lived near by in a little wooden house that was num- bered 113 Carmine Street. He was then twenty-seven years old and had just resigned the editorship of the Southern Literary Mes- senger. From Carmine Street Poe and his child wife, Virginia, moved to a house in Sixth Avenue, near Waverly Place. There was writ- ten ' ' The Fall of the House of Usher. ' ' There were some years of absence from New York, 8 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS and then, in 1844, Poe returned to tlie city to work on the Evening Mirror and to live in what was then Bloomingdale Village, in a house on a high bluff which corresponds to one of the present Eighties between Broadway and "West End Avenue. In this home were written "The Eaven" and "The Imp of the Perverse." Then he left the Mirror for the Broadway Jour- nal, and for greater convenience went to live in Amity Street, which afterwards became West Third Street. The next step, taken in 1846, was the move to the Fordham Cottage. There the child wife died, and there for two years Poe continued to live lonely and almost alone. In the summer of 1849 he left Fordham. He was dead before the year's close. CHAPTER II The Battery— Bowling Green— Old Wall Street— Bun- ner's New York — Jacob Dolph's House. Of that city of the poets and novelists of the first half of the century there is but little trace. The quaint homes of the people of Irving 's Knickerbocker History of New York belong to the irrevocable past; the Broadway of which Paulding, Halleck, Willis, Drake and Clarke, the "mad poet," sung is very different from the Broadway of the year 1916. We can find traces of the Fordham Cottage of Edgar Allan and Virginia Poe, and follow Cooper's Harvey Birch through rapidly changing Westchester, but the New York of brick and stone belongs essentially to the work of the younger literary generation. In the name of Henry Cuyler Bunner is a link connecting the remote past and the present. Among the men who seem so thoroughly enam- oured of the city's history and traditions as to have been strongly moved by its rush and tur- 10 THE NEW YORK moil and perplexity, Bunner is unique. He once wrote somewhere: "Why do I love New York, my dear ? I know not. Were my father here — And his — and his — the three and I Might, perhaps, make you some reply. His affection for the old town was very pro- found and sincere. He felt very keenly the sig- nificance of the phrase, "little old New York" — a phrase which, though applied to a city that was not so very old, and was certainly not little, was none the less sincere and sympathetic. In his books he made us feel how much he would have liked to see the old beaux with their bell- crown hats ogling the crinolined ladies on lower Broadway of a spring or a summer afternoon. How he pored over the old chronicles in the hope of seeing the ghosts of old vanities and follies and wickednesses rise up out of their graves and dance, smirk and gibber again! Bunner seemed to be equally at home in the old town, in Greenwich village and about Wash- ington Square. In one of his later poems he told us of "The Eed Box at Vesey Street," and its part in the human comedy of New York life. OF THE NOVELISTS 11 The scenes of The Midge will be described in another chapter; the houses and streets of the first part of The Story of a New York House belong to old New York. The house in which Jacob Dolph the elder lived during the first years of the century, and from the pillared bal- cony of which his family and friends looked out and down on the glinting waters of the bay, is one of the few noble structures that are left to us of the older city. Bunner's choice is easily understood. Even now the Mission of Our Lady of the Eosary, a home for Irish im- migrant girls. No. 7 State Street, despite the incongruity of the neighbouring edifices, im- presses one as having been in its day the fitting mansion of a merchant prince of old Manhattan. The former grandeur of the locality is gone, the air shrill with the rush and clatter of the ele- vated trains, the clanging of cable bells, the rattle of heavily laden trucks, the surrounding streets are grimy and dirty, but the old house attracts and holds attention by its sedate dig- nity. The original builder, or the architect who designed it, probably changed his plans more than once in the course of building. It 12 THE NEW YOEK is supported by three tall rude columns of stone and stucco. The windows of the second story are thrown in shadow by the peculiar curve of the upper balcony. From the State Street sidewalk stone steps lead up to the entrance on both sides. Over the iron railing is the gilded cross of the Mission.^ A few doors away, at No. 17 State Street, was the home of William Irving, Washington Irving 's elder brother, and of J. K. Paulding — a meeting place for the literary wits of the pe- riod. William Irving was the "Pindar Cock- loft" of Salmagundi, and No. 17 was known as Cockloft Hall. It was only a few hundred yards away by the water front of Battery Park that, half a century later, the Jacob Dolph who in 1807 was a little boy attending Mrs. Kil- 1 In 1804, which, according to Mr. Bunner's story, wa3 the period of the occupancy of Jacob Dolph; the house was really tenanted by William Van Vredenburgh, who had served under Washington with the rank of Colonel. The Van Vredenburghs emigrated not to Greenwich Village, but to the Valley of the Mohawk, embarking for their journey in a sloop at the foot of Whitehall Street. Among the Onondaga Indians of the Mohawk, the erstwhile continental ofBcer was known as "The Great Clear Sky." In a letter before the present writer when this note was written there were the words, "The great-grand- daughter of the Colonel now sits opposite me, absorbed in the perusal of A New York House." OF THE NOVELISTS 13 master's private school on Ann Street, fell to the ground with the apoplectic stroke that brought about his death. Mr. Howells wrote of the Battery in Their Wedding Journey and in A Hazard of New Fortunes; and Edmund Clarence Stedman was among the poets who found in it poetical inspiration. Eetracing our steps across the t*ark, we leave State Street, turn into Whitehall Street, move northward past Bowling Green, where, before the days of the new Custom House, on the site of one of the steamship offices that so long lined the southern side of the triangle, Martin Krieger's tavern stood, and where the bruised and mutilated iron palings stand mute witnesses of patriotic scorn for the crest and features of King George. Jacob Dolph, to revert to Bunner's story, had a naive belief in the city's future, and builded fine day-dreams of a New York that was to reach far beyond the City Hall, beyond Eich- mond Hill, perhaps even as far as the Parade it- self. He strenuously opposed the plan to have the north end of the new City Hall, which in 1807 was in the course of erection, constructed 14 THE NEW YOBK of cheap red stone, in the face of the popular belief that only a few suburbans would ever look down on it from above Chambers Street. In the first decade of the century the phrase "from the Battery to Bull's Head" was a fine and effective hyperbole. Part of the Bull's Head Tavern still stood until a few years ago on the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. When the Commission- ers made the aforementioned map, Wall Street was already typical. The Stock Exchange had been in existence almost ten years, and the street which in the earlier colonial times had marked the northern boundary of the Dutch New Amsterdam became, almost immediately, to a certain extent the pulse of the nation's finance. Since that time there has been no thoroughfare so widely used and so roundly abused by the maker of New York fiction — scarcely one of them but at some time has taken his stand on the Broadway sidewalk in front of old Trinity and shouted his dismal de- nunciation. The heroes and heroines of Amer- ican fiction very often achieve fabulous wealth through speculation; apparently worthless se- OF THE NOVELISTS 15 curities bouglit for a mere song and laid away in deposit vaults, or, better still, in old attic trunks or musty cupboards or woollen stock- ings, and forgotten, soar skyward on the Pin- daric wings of romance ; but Wall Street in the guise of the Fairy Godmother somehow never gets its due. This is the significant distinction, that in fiction fortune comes to men and women through "lucky speculation," ruin through Wall Street. CHAPTER III Other Trails of Yesterday — Janvier — Warner — Crawford — Mrs. Barr — ^Admiral Porter. Leavustg for a minute the men and women of Bunner's story, the vicinity conjures up the people of Charles Dudley Warner's Golden House; the Brights, Bemans, Lauderdales, Ealstons of Marion Crawford's novels of New York life; the hero of Thomas Janvier's At the Casa Napoleon, who day after day took his stand at the southwest comer of Broad and "Wall Streets to study idly the great statue of Washington on the stone steps of the Sub- Treasury, and build fine day-dreams of the three thousand dollar clerkship that never seem to come true. Joris Van Heemskirk, of whom Mrs. Barr told us in The Bow of Orange Ribbon, was an important figure in the Wall Street of 1765. A two-storied house at the lower end of Pearl Street was the home of Jacob Cohen and his granddaughter Miriam. The Kalchook, or Kalch Hoek, where Captain Hyde 16 f Uilw ill "iX. f ? ' r^ib ftftfc I !\-fil^. ENTERING THE GREAT CANONS OF THE MONEY GRUBBING TRIBE NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS 17 and Neil Semple fought their duel, was a hill of considerable elevation, to the west of the pres- ent line of Broadway. Its southern boundary was about Warren Street, its northern bound- ary about Canal. The district lying at its base was a fever-breeding marsh until drained by Anthony Eutgers. Afterward it was known as Lispenard Meadows, from Eutgers 's daughter, Mrs. Lispenard. The little lake or pond at its foot was called first Kalk-Hook, and afterward became known as the Collect Pond. The cor- ner of Broadway and Franklin Street marks what was then the summit of the Kalchook Hill. The slope is still perceptible. The speculations that swept away all that was left of the once great Dolph family estate in the panic of 1873 were conducted in an office on William Street, near where the Cotton Exchange now stands. On Front Street was the wholesale grocery firm, "Files and Nelson," of which Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote in My Cousin the Colonel. The ship-chandlering firm of Abram Van Eiper and Son, whence Eustace Dolph fled a forger, and where the delightful Mr. Daw, a very Dick- ensy creation, once tried a rolled-top desk and 18 THE^ NEW YOEK a revolving chair to his alarm and discomfiture, was on Water Street. Of Mrs. Kihaaster's pri- vate school on Ann Street, attended by Jacob Dolph the second, or of the Van Eiper mansion on Pine Street, opposite the great Burril House, of course no traces remain. Bay, the hero of William Dean Howells's World of Chance, com- ing to seek his fortune in New York, noted first from the deck of the North Eiver ferryboat "the mean, ugly fronts and roofs of the build- ings beyond, and hulking high overhead in farther distance in vast bulks and clumsy tow- ers the masses of those ten-story edifices which are the necessity of commerce and the despair of art." The men who figure in the first part of The Story of a New York House were in the habit of meeting to discuss trade and politics in the barber shop of one Huggins. This shop was on the northeast corner of Broadway and Wall Street, the site now occupied by the First Na- tional Bank Building, a structure which has been in existence less than forty years. In one of the old office buildings that formerly occupied the same site was Ugly Hall, the headquarters of OF THE NOVELISTS 19 the Ugly Club, a literary organisation, of which Halleck was a leading member. The entrance to Huggins 's barber shop was about on the spot now marked by the first Broadway door of the bank building. Before the yellow-fever plague of 1822, the fashionable residence quarter of the city was about Bowling Green, Water, Pearl, Beaver, Broad, Whitehall Streets and the lower end of Broadway. Merchants, shop- keepers, lawyers, as a rule, resided over their offices and stores. Mr. Charles H. Haswell, in his Reminiscences of an Octogenarian in the City of New York, spoke of the "Dutch-designed and Dutch-built houses," with sharply pitched roofs and gable ends to the street, that were at that day remaining in Broad Street. The plague drove people to the open fields that lay between the city proper and Greenwich village. One night during this period, when the sky was red with the light of the tar barrels that were being burned in Ann Street, Mrs. Jacob Dolph was buried in the churchyard of St. Paul's. In Chambers Street, opposite the north end of City HaU, was, in 1820, the office of the Chief of Police, where Allan Dare (Admiral Porter's 20 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS Allan Dare and Robert le Diable) made his first appearance on the stage of that story. Farther up Broadway, in an office building near Worth Street, was the one-room law office of Peter — afterward the Honourable Peter Stirling. At the Duane Street corner, adjoining the grounds of the New York Hospital, was the cigar store of John Anderson, which Edgar Allan Poe's story of The Mystery of Marie Roget assured a permanent place among the scenes of New York fiction. CHAPTEE IV Gateways of Invasion — ^ApproaeMng the Skyline — Kip- ling's Dimbula — 0. Henry's Little Old Bagdad on the Sub- way. A OENTUEY and more has passed since Jacob Dolph of Bunner's The Story of a New York House uB&di to sit on his balcony in the long summer evenings, and build dreams of the city's future as he looked across Battery Park and out over the dancing waters of the Upper Bay. At that time his house was a monument to be pointed out by those on the deck of the mer- chantmen entering the port. The house is still there. But from the incoming Mauretania, or St. Paul, or France, you would be hard put to find it, be your eyes ever so sharp. In the towering jungle of steel, and stone, and ma- sonry, it is no more than a little shrub. The contrast between what was and what is can hardly be called the epitome of the hundred years. For rightly, in accordance with the spirit of the city. No. 7 State Street should have 21 22 THE NEW TOEK undergone a series of transformations, in the course of wMch. the original three-story house would have been torn down and replaced by a structure of seven stories, which in turn would A PASSING GATEWAY OP INVASION have given way to an edifice of fifteen stories, and then — ^but who knows how far up that mar- vellous sky line that greets the eyes of the home comer and the new comer will have reached in OF THE NOVELISTS 23 the year of Grrace 1925 ? Who or "what the ob- server is matters but little. It is the city that counts ; the city, ugly or beautiful, as you will, but never commonplace. The city that may mean welcome, or may mean loneliness, or op- portunity, or danger, or refuge, or despair. The Narrows are passed, and there it is behind the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps it is the soul of the Dimbula, Eudyard Kipling's "The Ship that Found Herself" that speaks. But in the Dimbula the spectacle roused only the overpow- ering desire for self-assertion, for the song of achievement. "Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Princes, Dukes, and Barons of the High Seas! Know ye by these presents, we are the Dimbula, fif- teen days nine hours from Liverpool, having crossed the Atlantic with four thousand tons of cargo for the first time in our career ! We have not foundered. We are here. 'Eer! 'Eer ! We are not disabled. But we have had a time wholly unparalleled in the annals of ship- building ! Our decks were swept ! We pitched ; we rolled ! We thought we were going to die ! Hi ! Hi ! But we didn't. We wish to give no- tice that we have come to New York all the way 24 THE NEW YOEZ across the Atlantic througli the worst weather in the world ; and we are the Dimhula! We are- arr-ha-ha-ha-r-r-r ! " A natural and pardona- ble exuberance. But perhaps on her second trip westward the Dimhula had calmed down to the point where some consideration of the city itself was possible, and New York was com- pared to Liverpool, and voted rather "ripping" or the reverse. Of the writing men and women of the newer generation, the men and women whose trails are the subject of this rambling book, there are many who have staked claims to certain New York streets or quarters. There has been but one conqueror of Alexander-like ambitions. That is, of course, the late O. Henry, and Sidney Porter's name will naturally appear again and again in this and in ensuing pages. To north, east, south, and west, stretch his trails ; to north, east, south, and west, he wandered like a modern Haroun al Easchid. And like a conqueror he rechristened the city to suit his whimsical humour. At one moment it is his "Little Old Bagdad on the Subway"; at another, "The City of Too Many Caliphs"; at another "Noisyville OF THE NOVELISTS 25 on the Hudson"; or, "Wolfville on the Sub- way"; or, "The City of Chameleon Changes." Bunner, as he told us in certain lines already quoted, had inherited New York from his father, his grandfather, and his great grandfather. Sidney Porter discovered the city comparatively late in life, lived in it but the few brief last years. "Pull up the shades," he whispered a few min- utes before the end came, "I don't want to go home in the dark." Perhaps also he did not want to go home without one last glimpse of the city that he had learned to love so well ; one last glimpse of his ' ' Little Old Bagdad on the Sub- way," his "City of Too Many Caliphs." But turn, for the moment, in the approach to the city, to the grotesque. There is a very hu- man note in the emotions roused in the breasts of Abe Potash and Moe Griesman by the sight of the metropolis of their adoption as they view it from the steamer deck after their return from their European trip as told in Mr. Montague Glass's "The Judgment of Paris." There, on the dock, Eosie was waiting for her Abe, to be- stow upon him a series of kisses that re-echoed do^vTi the long pier. That pier, contiguous piers. 26 THE NEW YORK and similar piers across the North, and East Eivers, play their parts in every third or fourth novel that touches on New York life. The note may be grave or gay, trivial or comparatively important. Denoting departure, these piers are the gateways to adventure. A hero from one of Mr. George Barr McCutcheon's novels walks lightly down the gang-plank to the deck of the ship that is to bear him away to love-making, and intrigue, and the clash of battle in the some- where principality of Graustark. A brave little heroine from Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett's pages embarks on a journey that is quite as knightly, although it takes her no farther than the pleasant, peaceful English countryside. The painter hero of Eichard Harding Davis's The Princess Aline begins the whimsical pur- suit that takes him over half Europe, loses him a dream, but wins him very material happiness. In a word, in the picture that is presented by the sailing of any big transatlantic liner you have a picture that, with certain variations, is conven- tional to the novel touching the social side of the city life, whether the author be Mrs. Wharton, or Mrs. Burnett, or Mrs. Eiggs, or Mr. Davis, OF THE NOVELISTS 27 or Mr. Chambers, or Mr. Johnson, or Mr. McCutcheon, or any of a score more. But the pier of the transatlantic liner is but one of the gateways of invasion. Probably in all fiction there is no single epi- sode that has left an impression on succeeding generations of story spinners more obvious than that in Balzac's Pere Goriot where Eugene de Eastignac, from the heights of the cemetery of Pere La Chaise, bids defiance to Paris — "a nous deux, maintenant!" In the New York of the novelists the episode has been constantly imi- tated. The young hero (we might for example say that it is Frank Sartain of Brander Mat- thews 's A Confident To-morrow) sees the big city for the first time at night. From the deck of a ferry boat crossing from the New Jersey shore he beholds the great towers of glittering light. His heart beats fast at the thought of the coming struggle. * * I will conquer you ! " he whimpers to himself, "or I will die in the at- tempt." Or perhaps the second or third night after his arrival the vision comes to him and he feels the thrill of conflict. The vastness and the indifference of the city have for the moment IN WASHINGTON STREET, FAB DOWN ON THE LOWER WEST SIDE OP MANHATTAN ISLAND, THERE HAS BEEN, FOR THE LAST FIFTEEN TEARS, A CURIOUS LITTLE SYRIAN COLONY. IN FICTION IT HAS BEEN EXPLOITED BY MB. NORMAN DUNCAN IN HIS VOL- UME ENTITLED "SYRIAN STORIES." ABOUT THE YEAH 1900 ME. DUNCAN WAS A WRITER OF "SPE- CIALS" FOB THE NEW YORK "EVENING POST." IT WAS WHILE DOING THIS WORK THAT HE BEGAN TO EXPLORE THE VARIOUS "QUARTERS" OF THE CITY, NOT FROM MERE CUEIOSITT, BUT BECAUSE HE KEENLY SAW AND APPRECIATED THEIR ARTISTIC BIDE. THE SYRIAN QUARTER HAD A SPECIAL AP- PEAL TO HIM. HE BECAME INTIMATE WITH THE PRINCIPAL MEN OF THE COLONY, AND FORMED FRIENDSHIPS WITH SEVEEAL OF THE LEADERS. DISPUTES WERE REFERRED TO HIM FOE SETTLE- MENT, AND HIS ADVICE WAS SOUGHT AND FOL- LOWED. IN A WORD, HE BECAME A POWER IN "little SYRIA." WHEN THE TURKISH MINISTER TO THE UNITED STATES VISITED THE QUARTER MR. DUNCAN WAS PRESENT AT THE REQUEST OF THE LEADERS. HE MADE THE PRINCIPAL SPEECH OF THE EVENING AND PRESENTED TO THE TURKISH REPRESENTATIVES THE BEQUESTS OF CERTAIN AM- BITIOUS SYRIANS. 2S NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS 29 cowed his spirit. The solitude of his hall bed- room in Chelsea or Grreenwich Village has be- come a horror to him. He finds himself aim- lessly walking the streets to the south and east. Then he is in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, the black waters beneath him, and the myriads of lights of Manhattan stretching away far to the north. Ah, those myriads of lights! In comparison how dim seem "the lights of London flaring like a dreary dawn" of the Tennysonian poem ! Some day let the New Yorker go down to the end of the long dock between the Erie and Atlantic Basins in Brooklyn, and turn his eyes toward Manhattan. Governor 's Island, with its thick growth of trees, seems to blend and merge with the lower part of the city, hiding all but the few great skyscrapers. The city itself is gone. The effect is that of an enchanted park in which it has pleased some medisBval giant to conjure up vast castles of fairy-like beauty. But it mat- ters not from where you have seen the city, so long as you have felt once, with the throbbing heart of so many heroes and heroines of fiction, the spirit of invasion. CHAPTER V The Big Canons of the Money Grubbing Tribe — The Office of Carteret and Carteret — ^Wilton Sargent : American — Muldoon, a New York Horse. The heroine is always an uncertainty. She may be grey-eyed and earnest, with a leaning to set- tlement work, or she may have no ideals or as- pirations that take her beyond the boundaries of "Tea, Tango and Toper Land." It may be on the Drive that you meet her first, or along the Park bridle path, or being propelled by Afro- mobile through the Jungle at Palm Beach, or on the links of Cannes, or in Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo. But whether his business be stocks, or leather, or cotton, the father of the heroine, pro- vided the novel be one of New York life, will spend certain hours of every working day in his office, which will be situated somewhere in the Big Canons of the Money Grubbing Tribes. In "Thimble, Thimble," that delightfully whim- sical story of the Old Nigger Man, the Hunting Case Watch, and the Open Faced Question, 0. 30 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 31 Henry gave the specific directions for the finding of the canons in general and the office of Carteret and Carteret, Mill Supplies and Leather Belting, in particular. * ' You follow the Broadway trail until you pass the Crosstown Line, the Bread Line and the Dead Line, and come to the Big Canons of the Money Grubbing Tribe. Then you turn to the left, to the right, dodge a pushcart, and the tongue of a two-ton four-horse dray, and hop, skip, and jump to a granite ledge on the side of a twenty-one story synthetic mountain of stone and iron. In the twelfth story is the office of Carteret and Car- teret." For the benefit of those readers who are not familiar with New York and its argot, it may be said that by the Crosstown Line is meant Fourteenth Street, the Bread Line Eleventh Street, and the Dead Line, Fulton Street, below which thoroughfare no professional criminal may go without making himself liable to arrest. Very luckily for the purposes of the novelist, what has become known as the malefactor of great wealth is not yet subject to this particular restriction, Tom Scribe has been at liberty to populate these canons to his heart's coi^tent. 32 THE NEW YOEK with the result that from the Battery to the Dead Line fiction stalks. Just the list of the finan- ciers of the world of make-believe who have occupied the expensive and extravagantly equipped offices of this part of Manhattan would fill a chapter. It is hard to know where to begin, or what order to follow. The pilgrim has but to take his stand on the steps of the new Custom House that replaced the row of red- brick buildings on Bowling Green that a decade ago were the offices of the transatlantic steam- ' ship lines and gaze northward between the great walls of steel and concrete. There, over on the right, is No. 26 Broadway. That is not a mere indication of a number and a street. No. 26 Broadway has come to stand for the Standard Oil Company as much as Downing Street stands for the British Government or the Quai d'Orsay for the French Government. Somewhere in one of the great adjoining skyscrapers are the offices of Wilton Sargent of Rudyard Kipling's "An Error in the Fourth Dimension." To reach them he travelled down the Hudson on his twelve-hundred-ton ocean-going steam yacht Columbia, and from Bleecker Street by the Ele- OF THE NOVELISTS 33 vated, hanging on to a leather strap between an Irish washerwoman and a German anarchist. Once, at Holt Hangars, he tried to make himself an Englishman. But the Induna of the Great Buchonian line was stopped — "for the first time since King Charles hid in her smoke-stack" — such was the picturesque exaggeration of the offender — and Wilton Sargent once more as- sumed allegiance to the land of his birth, which had reviled him. Nor, with the Kipling trail for the moment in mind, shall we overlook, while the Battery and West Street are close by, the Belt Line of horse-drawn surface cars. On that line, as told in "A Walking Delegate," served Muldoon, born in Iowa, but to end his equine days swearing by the New York of his adop- tion. "Any horse dat knows beans gits outer Kansas 'fore dey crip his shoes," Muldoon de- fiantly told the yellow frame house of a horse, trying to rouse the spirit of rebellion against the tyrant man. * ' I blew in dere from loway in de days o' me youth an' innocence an' I wuz grate- ful when dey boxed me for N' York. Yer can't tell me anything about Kansas I don't wanter fergit. J)e Belt Line stables ain't no Hoffman 34 THE NEW YORK House, but dey're Vanderbilts 'long side o' Kansas." To resume the Broadway trail. On the nine- teenth floor of one of these mammoth structures towering above Battery Park were the offices, commanding a superb view of the Bay, the Staten Island hills and the New Jersey High- lands beyond, of "The Goldfish" of Arthur Train's story of that name. Perhaps just across the hall was the fighting lair of the multi- millionaire, Jim Breed, on whose appearance, clothes and deportment Harry Leon Wilson's "Bunker Bean" used to make caustic steno- graphic comments in moments of irritation. But as it is very unlikely that Mr. Train or Mr. Wilson or any other of the novelists of this part of the city had any particular buildings in mind, it is perhaps wiser to curtail. With old Trin- ity's spire facing the western end of Wall Street, there are perhaps bits of definite description, such as the "that last white meadow of New Amsterdam, where the brown church stands mothering her graves at bay," of the late Her- man Ejiickerbocker Viele's The Last of the Knickerbockers. But of lower Broadway and p o« w == « ft ; ^ S o OF THE NOVELISTS 35 Wall Street, and Broad Street, and the Ex- change of most of the novelists of the last decade and a half, it is perhaps best to speak only in tenns of generality. There is so much and yet comparatively so little. The exception to this rule is Mr. Edwin Lefevre, whose "Lane of the Ticker" and its associations will be discussed in the following chapter. Of such novelists as Mrs. Wharton, Mr. Eobert W. Chambers, David Graham Phillips, George Barr McCutcheon, Eex Beach, Owen Johnson, Samuel Merwin, Thomas Dixon, it is enough to say that their invasions of "The Street" have been at best vague. Else- where in the city we shall find their trails far more definite and distinct. CHAPTEE VI Edwin Lefevre's Wall Street — The Woman and Her Bonds. Wall Street, like other sections or phases of the city, has had its specialist, the man who, making it the basis of fiction, has written about the life from the inside, in the person of Mr. Edwin Lefevre, the author of Wall Street Stories, Sampson Rock of Wall Street and The Golden Flood. Of the collection gathered under the title of Wall Street Stories, which Mr. Le- fevre afterward wished that he had called Stock Exchange Stories, the most successful and far reaching by far was "The Woman and Her Bonds." The tale deals with the efforts of FuUerton F. Colwell, "the politest man in Wall Street," to aid the widow of a business friend. At 96 he buys for her account certain thoroughly reliable bonds. A slight pressure in the market forces the price down to 93. Despite Colwell 's reassurances Mrs. Hunt is seriously perturbed by the paper loss, and in order to relieve her 36 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS 37 mind the broker buys back at 96 the bonds that he could have purchased in the open market for 93, thereby pocketing an actual loss to himself of three thousand dollars. But when the bonds rise again Mrs. Hunt decides that she would like to buy them back at 93. All Colwell's explana- tions are useless. "Are those not the same bonds?" she asks sadly. "Then why are they not my bonds?" Through life the woman went clinging to the conviction that her husband's friend had robbed her. The original of Fuller- ton F. Colwell was Elverton R. Chapman. The Stock Exchange brokerage house of Wilson and Graves of the story was Moore and Schley, at 80 Broadway, in which Mr. Chapman was a part- ner. As to the heroine, Mrs. Hunt, the author had no particular woman in mind. He kept the sex before him and did his best. The result was that his sister" told him when she read the story, that it was a shame for him to poke fun at his own mother. But his brother-in-law, who is a banker, told him proudly that he recognised his own wife. John S. Phillips, who was then the Editor of McClure's Magazine (in which the tale originally appeared), told Lefevre he did not THE STREET TEN YEAKS AGO. FROM A DRAWING BY WALTER HALE 38 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 39 know whether he had produced a burlesqtie or a masterpiece. So he read the story to Mrs. Phil- lips, and when he had finished Mrs. Phillips said: "Well, why didn't he give her back the bonds 1 ' ' Thereupon, Phillips added, * ' Then of course I knew that it, was a great story." Mr. Phillips also told Mr. Lefevre that Booth Tark- ington told him that he had read the story aloud to his mother and sister and that they did not speak to him for a long time afterward, and, if any additional testimony on the subject is needed, the writer of this book recalls that he read "The Woman and Her Bonds" to his own mother and sister with the resulting comment : "Wasn't it dreadful the way he robbed that poor woman." "The Woman and Her Bonds" was written at a single sitting before breakfast. Mr. Lefevre had written half a dozen Wall Street stories which he was going to hand into McClure's, and it suddenly struck him that he had not done one about a woman. At first he thought he would do a woman gambler, for he had some striking originals. On second thought he decided that it was too disagreeable a type ; and, after all, not 40 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS really typical. So he thought of the woman in- vestor — ^Heaven help the brokers! After the story was finished no end of stock brokers told him, "Say, you got that story from seeing Mrs. in my office." Many of them swore that they had told him all about Mrs. Hunt. But they had not. CHAPTEE VII Some Men of the Street— The Lane of the Ticker— The Golden Flood — Sampson Rock of Wall Street — Lef evre and Frank Norris. All. the streets in the vicinity of the New York Stock Exchange have definite associations with the men of Mr, Lef evre 's stories. The office of "Sam" Sharpe, which plays such a part in "The Break in Turpentine," based upon the old "Whiskey pool," was on the fifth floor of the Johnson Building, at the corner of Exchange Place and New Street. The haunts of "the tip- ster" of the tale of that name were in New Street, between Exchange Place and Wall. It was there that tlae old "Put and Call" brokers, or "privilege men," used to be. This type is now practically defunct, and professional tip- sters are scarce. The hero of the story was a composite of several men that the author knew. Percy's bucketshop was in New Street. This was the only bucketshop where they used to trade in as little as two shares. The old build- 41 42 THE NEW YOEK ing, torn down some years ago, was on the east side of New Street, between Exchange Place and Beaver Street. By the "Lane of the Ticker" was of course meant "Wall Street. ' ' At the head of the Street was old Trinity; to the right the Sub-Treasury; to the left the Stock Exchange." The Colonel Josiah T. Treadwell of "A Phil- anthropic Whisper" was former governor Eos- well P. Flower. He was the leader of the Big Bull market in 1898 and 1899. He was a gen- erous, genial man, who was forever doing kind things. His office was always full of men like William Rockefeller, D. 0. Mills, H. H. Porter, E. H. Harriman, and Anthony N. Brady. Mr. Lef evre recalls the time a poor woman came into the office with some tale of woe about her hus- band, who had been a friend of the governor's, and had died leaving nothing. She had some jewels which she thought she would like to sell and invest the proceeds. The governor told her to sit down, went into his office, where some multi-millionaires were talking about the Mar- ket, and held an auction sale of the jewellery. He was the auctioneer, and he made his friends pay royal prices. The office of Flower and OF THE NOVELISTS 43 Company was in 45 Broadway. It is now occu- pied by the Hamburg American Line. Gov- ernor Flower used to say, * ' Stop sitting on the shirt tail of progress, hollering whoa! Stop jumping on the trusts. Get into them!" Then there was The Golden Flood, which told of a young man opening a bank account with a deposit of something over one hundred thou- sand dollars, increasing it week by week until the seemingly inexhaustible golden flood threat- ens the financial leaders of the nation with de- struction, * ' The greatest bank in Wall Street, ' ' called in the tale the Metropolitan National, is, of course, the National City Bank. The Mar- shall National is the Chase Bank. It was in the big room in the City Bank that "the clink of gold was aristocratically inaudible, the clerks habitually spoke in whispers." At the south- east corner of Pine and William Streets was the Wolff Building, containing the offices of Wolff, Herzog and Company, a firm drawn from Kuhn, Loeb and Company. Into the Assay Office, by the Pine Street entrance, "on Mondays William Watson took a loan of bullion bars, painted black to disguise their nature." The Hein- 44 THE NEW YOEK sheimer Exploration Company was the Guggen- heim Exploration Company at 71 Broadway. "Dawson entered the huge home of the Inter- national Distributing Syndicate." At first it was called the Natural Uluminant Syndicate, but this disguise was too thin, and the name was changed. At all events there is hardly any in- discretion in identifying the enterprise in ques- tion as the Standard Oil Company at 26 Broad- way. When Wall Street Stories first appeared read- ers who were familiar with the Street found amusement in identifying the characters. Here is a list which was drawn up at the time by a member of the Stock Exchange. Samuel W. Sharpe James R. Keene Colonel Treadwell Roswell P. Flower John F. Greener Jay Gould Daniel Dittenhoeffer Charles Woerishoeflfer Silas Shaw Daniel Drew. For The Golden Flood the following identifi- cations were suggested: Richard Dawson The Mellons Isaac Herzog F. W. Harding James R. Stillman The Rockefellers Jacob Schiff Frank W. Savin. OF THE NOVELISTS 45 In writing Sampson Rock of Wall Street Mr. Lefevre had a composite in mind for Sampson Eock ; a combination of E. H. Harriman, James E. Keene, and others. He put Eock's office in the Mills Building, at the corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place, because neither Keene nor Harriman had theirs there. The "War Street News Agency" was the New York News Bureau on Beaver Street. In connection with Mr. Lefevre 's Wall Street experiences there is a graphic little story con- cerning him and the late Frank Norris. Dur- ing Mr. Norris 's last year in New York the two were close friends, and it was at one time agreed between them that Mr. Lefevre should revise the proofs of Mr. Norris 's story, The Pit, in all the chapters relating to the wheat market, receiving due credit in the preface for his share of the work. As it turned out, they never succeeded in coming together for that purpose, and the plan was abandoned. But frequently, at Nor- ris 's request, Mr. Lefevre explained the intrica- cies of stock markets, speculations, corners and the like; and one night he found himself launched upon an eloquent description of a 46 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS panic. He described the pandemonium reigning on tlie floor of tlie Exchange, the groups of frenzied, yelling brokers, the haggard faces of men to whom the next change of a point or two meant ruin. And then he followed one man in particular through the events of the day, and pictured him groping his way blindly out from the gallery, a broken, ruined man. So far, Mr. Lef evre had told only what he had seen, all too often, with his own eyes. But at this point, car- ried away by his own story, he yielded to the temptation to fake a dramatic conclusion, and he told how the man was still striding restlessly, aimlessly along the corridor, when the elevator shot past and some one shouted **Down!" and the ruined man, his mind still bent upon the fall- ing market, continued his nervous striding, ges^ ticulating fiercely and repeating audibly, "Down! down! down!" "There you are!" in- terrupted Mr. Norris, springing up excitedly. "There you are! That is one of those things that no novelist could invent!" And yet, added Mr. Lef evre in telling the story, "it was the one bit df fake in my whole description." o '/ y , 1 m ^ , 1 2 g u ed K H < c^ <- o to < ;s > U-; k. OT O !ji O a: O O z; S ?; < o S W o a: c O 8 f- s Q o pa ^5 2b m u m ■»« a, X ^ CO g g5 n d" 2 is o H 7: n w Q O ,1 H W J ;^H H o U < < r» b: !- m u )4 hj : 1 u >^ ' o 2 i 2 < fe S a o u • ^ § S « " S b: ^ h? ° '^ I W oi S 1 2|b w S " Sou h (* J ft 2 <5 O - O! u H » s m > 2 CHAPTER Vin Park Row in Fiction — The Old Time Figures — Jonrnal- istie Bohemia — Jesse Lynch "Williams — David Graham Phil- lips — Stephen Whitman — Edward W. Townsend. Pabk Row in fiction has had a twofold signifi- cance and interest. In the first place, the Row and the adjacent streets are hallowed by the lit- erary and histrionic memories of the past. IWhere the Park Row Syndicate Building stands, was the old Park Theatre, the scene of the triumphs of Edmund Kean, Sinclair, Cooke, Young, Charles Kemble, Tyrone Power, Ellen Tree, Fanny Kemble, Emma Wheatley, Clara Fisher, Junius Brutus Booth, J. W. Wallack, John and Charles Mason, Charlotte Cushman. These pavements were trod by Irving, Poe, Hal- leck, Cozzens, Du Chaillu, "Harry Franco," Brougham, Hoffman, Morris ; and Clark passed many a night on the benches in the park oppo- site. Later, it has belonged to Edmund Clar- ence Stedman, George William Curtis, William Dean Howells, Richard Henry Stoddard and to 47 48 THE NEW YOEK the young and middle-aged poets and novelists of the present day. In the second place, as a background, as a part, a phase, of the Human Comedy of New York life, it is beginning to have a meaning. True, we have had, as yet, nothing descriptive of the life comparable to Balzac's analytic and terrible arraignment of Paris jour- nahsm in Illusions Perdues, or even to the chap- ters dealing with the life of Fleet Street and the Fleet Prison in Pendennis. The stories of Park Eow life of former days did not go very far below the surface, but two or three young news- paper men and at least one newspaper woman wrote very cleverly and entertainingly of "beats" and "sticks" and "copy-readers" and "cub reporters" and "star" men. Then, too, there were the "lady novelists," to whom the Row was as useful as it is vague, who found it a well of local colour, although it might not have been polite to question them too closely as to the whereabouts of Ann or Beekman or Spruce or Franklin Streets. The "'journalist" — he was never a mere newspaper man — of this sort of fiction was forever stalking criminals, scent- ing out big news, talking in rather flabby epi- OF THE NOVELISTS 49 gram or making violent love. He was usually dashing off editorials that made statesmen sit up, and when he wrote "stories," they were never less than a column in length and were inevitably found the next morning under big black headlines at the beginning of the first page. He lived in Bohemia, a neighbourhood of which most city editors, who are supposed to know a good deal about everything pertaining to the city's streets and corners, would have professed entire ignorance. In short, the jour- nalist of that type was very beautiful and well groomed, but it must be confessed he was con- siderably different from the practical news- paper man of real life. But into the fiction of the last decade or so there has crept a sturdier and more realistic type. The figures of the Eow have been drawn by men who have themselves been newspaper men. David Graham Phillips, writing of New York journalism builded upon years of practical experience and observation. Pitilessly close to life was the career of Felix Piers of Stephen Whitman's "Predestined." The newspaper office of that story was the office of the Evenmg 50 THE NEW YORK Sun, which has always been a favourite setting for fiction, even before Jesse Lynch Williams wrote "The Stolen Story," a tale which the late Eichard Harding Davis, himself the author of "Gallegher" and "The Derelict," generously characterised as the best individual tale of American newspaper life yet written. Then there was another story by Mr. Williams with a flavour of distinct local colour. If, ten years ago, as you went up the Eow, you had turned in at the dark doorway at No. 29, and mounted three pairs of stairs, you would have found the long, grimy one-room newspaper office which was the scene of Jesse Lynch Williams's story of "The City Editor's Conscience." That story concerned a certain Maguire. Ma- guire, who got the gold watch and chain, and of whom Henderson said in his speech that he was "about the squarest city editor in Park Eow, even if he did flare up occasionally and get red in the face," was once identified as "Jerry" Donnelly. It may be of interest to add that the real name of the telegraph editor mentioned in the opening sentence of the story was Clark; that Brown, who was sent to the telephone to OF THE NOVELISTS 5l take from the Police Headquarters man, Wint- ringer (who in real life is Watson Sands), the story of a "bull that has broken loose on its way to a slaughter-house uptown, and been ter- rorising people on Fifty-ninth Street, near the river," was Albert M. Chapman; that the cub reporter who was sent out on the ferry accident assignment was John E. Weier. It was the old Commercial Advertiser, now the Globe and in- habiting other quarters, of which Mr. Williams wrote in that tale. The author was with that paper after leaving the Sun. But the Sun was the setting that he usually chose. There worked Hamilton Knox, the cub reporter, who found it easier to write his facts and then make them ("The Cub Eeporter and the King of Spain") and Eufus Carrington, who beat all the older men from the other papers on the * ' Great Secre- tary of State Interview"; and Townsend's Philip Peyton and Terence Lynn and T. Fitz- gerald Lyon and that pathetic figure Tommy Nod; while just over the way was the office of the Earth, where Billy Woods was employed for a few eventful hours after being discharged by the Day. In the Park opposite. Colonel Peter S2 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS Stirling's regiment was quartered during the riots described in Paul Leicester Ford's book. It was there that took place the bomb explosion which killed Podds. Over on the Park Eow sidewalk Peter Stirling was found sleeping with his. head pillowed on a roll of newspapers by Leonore and Watts D'Alloi. CHAPTEE IX The Five Points and Chimmie Fadden. At tlie angle made by the running together of Worth and Park Streets is, as any one with the slightest pretension to an acquaintance with New York knows, what remains of the little tri- angular park that marks the site of what was once the Five Points. It was there, about 1874, that Peter Stirling made friends with the tene- ment-house children and took the first step to- ward the achievement of his career. The park lies directly to the east of the Broadway build- ing in which he had his office. "It had no right to be there, for the land was wanted for business purposes, but the hollow on which it was built had been a swamp in the old days, and the soft land, and perhaps the un- healthiness, had prevented the erection of great warehouses and stores, which almost sur- rounded it. So it had been left to the storage of human souls, instead of merchandise, for val- uable goods need careful housing, while any S3 54 THE NEW YORK place serves to pack humanity." While there remains much to remind us of the conditions of ONE OF THE MOST SINISTER OP ALL THE SINISTEE COBNEBS OF THE FIVE POINTS DISTRICT OP THE OTHEE DATS WAS WHAT WAS KNOWN AS "MUBDEBBSS' ALLEY." IT WOUND ITS WAT THROUGH THE GRIMY TENEMENTS FROM THE ENTRANCE AT NO. 14 BAXTER STREET TO AN OUTLET ON PEARL STREET. "MUBDEREBS' ALLEY" WAS USED AND ELABORATELY STAGED BY AUGUSTIN DALY IN "PIQUE," IN WHICH PLAY FANNY DAVENPORT ENACTED THE HEROINE'S PAST. THE DRAWING SHOWS ALL THAT IS LEFT OP "murderers' ALLEY" IN THE EABLY PART OF SEPTEMBER, 1915. forty years ago, the construction of the greater park, only a stone's throw distant, has done a OF THE NOVELISTS 55 great deal toward the reclamation of the quar- ter. A few hundred yards to the west of this little park could formerly be found on Centre Street the saloon of Dennis Moriarty, Peter's staunch friend and political henchman. When Edward W, Townsend was a reporter on the New York Sun he was one day sent out on a "story" which took him to the offices of a fossilised company with a nine-worded name. Two or three antiquated clerks sat about on high stools, poring over musty ledgers, and the business atmosphere was that of the sixth rather than the last decade of the century. These offices were in No. 51 Exchange Place, between Broad and William Streets, and that structure played a conspicuous part in A Daughter of the Tenements under the name of the Niantic. It was there that Dan Lyon, the "Lord of Mul- berry Court," was janitor, that Mark Waters schemed and that the Chinaman Chung stole the papers that he afterward concealed in the sole of his shoe. No. 51 was on the north side of the street, next to the Mills Building. It was five stories in height; it had an elevator — a, startling concession to modernity in the build- 56 THE NEW YOEK ings tliat then lined Exchange Place. At every story iron balconies jutted out over the sidewalk and grooved grey columns ran up along the front of the main office. There was a barber shop in the basenient. In the book the Niantic was characterised as "one of the old-fashioned five-story granite office buildings, where com- mercial aristocracy transacts its business af- fairs in the same manner as when the tenants of the building lived on Park Place or Barclay Street or thereabouts, and took drives to the homes of that venturesome colony of other aris- tocrats who had located out of the country as far uptown as Washington Square. ' ' How many readers of the younger generation are acquainted with the virtues and eccentrici- ties of Chimmie Fadden? Probably very few. Yet, for a time, some twenty years ago, Mr. Ed- ward W. Townsend's little Bowery boy was the most talked of character in American fiction. He was as famous, if not as permanent, as Mr. Dunne's Mister Dooley. In an age when rules of deportment and expression were, outwardly at least, more rigid, debutantes found his "Wot 'ell" convenient and expressive. Chim- ; w O ■ H M m OF THE NOVELISTS 57 mie was the spirit of the old Bowery, its crudi- ties and its finer impulses. Like Mr. Dooley, he came into existence casually. Mr. Town- send, then with the New York Sun, was sent to report a newsboys ' dinner. There he found the idea of Chimmie, and the woman, a slum worker, who was the original of Miss Fannie of the sto- ries. The first tale was written, and Charles A. Dana sent out word calling for the second. Soon the stories began to be known and quoted and Mr. Chester S. Lord, then the managing editor of the paper, said: "Can't you run up and find the little Bowery boy you've been writ- ing about and get him to talk some more?" "Oh," said Mr. Townsend, "he's purely an imaginary character." "Then imagine some more about him. ' ' There came a time when the author applied to Mr. Dana for the privilege of bringing out the stories in book form. In giv- ing the required consent the editor added ex- travagantly: "And I hope you sell ten thou- sand of them." A few months later a dinner was given to Mr. Townsend in celebration of the hundred thousandth copy of Chimmie Fadden sold. The next morning Mr. Dana went to Mr. 58 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS Townsend's desk in the Sun office, and after re- ferring to the dinner, said: "Can you tell me why Ckimmie Fadden has reached a hundred thousand?" "Because," replied Mr. Town- send, "of the sentimental relations of Chimmie Fadden and Mr. Paul toward Miss Fannie." PART II The Mysterious Bast Side CHAPTEE I The Trail of Potash and Perlmutter — Wasserbauer's Cafe — Henry D. Feldman — The Lispenard Street Loft. Those who saw the play made from the Potash and Perhnutter stories took away some false im- pressions of certain of the characters and also of the definite background. For example, stage exigencies made something of a rascal of the lawyer, Henry D. Feldman. As a matter of fact the original Henry D. Feldman was a thor- oughly respectable and reliable member of the New York bar, who practised in offices at 51 Chambers Street, opposite the County Court House. The first business establishment of the firm of Potash and Perlmutter was placed in East Broadway. In reality it was in Lispenard Street. There, in a loft in a rickety old brown building bearing the number 19, Potash and Perlmutter first came upon the scene of fiction. Afterward, in both stories and play, the busi- ness, feeling the spirit of progress, moved up to Fifth Avenue and Twentieth Street, the very 61 62 THE NEW YORK centre of the new clothing district. Just round the corner, at 11 West Nineteenth Street, was the business of Max Koblin, the "Cravenette king." The Prince Clarence Hotel was, of course, the Prince George. In the play the home of Potash was placed in Lexington Ave- nue. Potash really lived in an apartment over a drug store at the corner of Lenox Avenue and One Hundred and Eighteenth Street. The Harlem Winter Garden, where "Abe" enter- tained his family, and, on occasion, an out-of- town customer, was drawn from Pabst's, on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Probably no place mentioned in the stories has left a more definite impression on the minds of readers than Wasserbauer's Cafe. Over the tables there were enacted the tragedies and comedies of business. There frugal self-denial was practised and extravagant gluttony given free rein. Wasserbauer's was a composite of many restaurants and hosts. Far back, the original of Wasserbauer's was Glogau's, in Canal Street, where eating was incidental and business was the reigning sport. Then there OF THE NOVELISTS 63 was a restaurant kept by a man named Wasser, who very closely resembled the Wasserbauer of the tales. Years ago he forsook the business district for more aristocratic fields, and an up- town Wasser 's came into existence. But most closely approximating Wasserbauer 's was Fe- lix's, in Greene Street. In Canal Street, well over to the East Eiver, was the tailor shop which plays a part in the story * ' Opportunity, ' ' The region is a study in colour and laughable contradictions. The Yid- dish tailors have an abundance of signs de- signed to exploit their wares, but owing to their limited knowledge of English, hang any sign on any suit, with rather astonishing results. Near by was New Eiga Hall, the scene of the social activities described in "E. S. V. P." CHAPTER n The Origin of the Tales — The Vernacular of the Cloak and Suit Business — Selling by the Gross. By reason of the extraordinary success of the stories, and the additional extraordinary suc- cess of the play subsequently based upon them, there is no more vital trail in recent fiction deal- ing with the city than that of Mr. Montague Glass's "Abe" Potash and "Mawruss" Perl- mutter. A year or two ago Mr. Glass told of the origin of these tales. The first three that he wrote introducing the characters went the rounds of the magazines and were found much too radical for acceptance by the editors. Eventually the author disposed of two of them to a magazine proprietor in Detroit. The pro- prietor promptly failed. The magazine, how- ever, continued under new management, and a compromise was reached by which Mr. Glass sold the stories to the new owner at an absurdly low figure. The third story appeared in the Scrap Booh, and the fourth in Munsey's. Then 64 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS 65 came ''Taking It Easy" in the Saturday Eve- ning Post, followed by "The Arverne Sacque." "With, that," commented Mr. Glass, "the sea- son opened." Henry D. Feldman had a definite original, but Potash and Perlmutter were composite charac- ters. Feldman 's habit of quoting law Latin for the benefit of his clients is a trick of many prac- titioners of New York City, and as for his re- puted infallibility, there are few business men who have not exalted ideas of the powers of some particular lawyer. Of course, the adven- tures of Potash and Perlmutter were pure in- vention, but their speech, thought, and action were drawn from life. For ten years Mr. Glass was present almost daily at bankruptcy meet- ings, closing of titles to real estate, and confer- ences with reference to the entrance into or dis- solution of co-partnerships. At these times he had the opportunity of seeing many Potashes and Perlmutters stripped to the skin, for there is nothing which more effectually peels off a man's jacket of politeness than a good old-fash- ioned row over a real estate or co-partnership difficulty. 66 THE NEW YOEK The fruits of this experience are the Potash and Perlmutter stories, which, by the way, are not dialect stories in the editorial sense. The latter class of stories comprises the narratives in which "Hoot mon" and "Ah'm gwuine, Suh," are sprinkled as liberally as caraway seeds in rye bread ; but it will be noticed that, with few exceptions, when Abe and Morris speak, they utter words which conform strictly to the spell- ing in Webster's Unabridged, the Standard or the Century Dictionary. ("I hold," said Mr. Glass, "no brief for any of these publications.") The reason for this is that the speech of "Pot- ash and Perlmutter" differs so subtly from the vernacular of the ignorant New Yorker as to evade a phonetic spelling, more especially as it is not mispronunciation of words but their in- version of sentences which stamps "Abe's" and "Morris's" dialect as foreign. They contin- ually utter such introductory phrases as "Take it from me, Mawruss," or "Look-y here, Abe, I want you to tell me something," and there are one hundred and one different mannerisms in their conversation which can be faithfully re- produced without misspelling a single word. OF THE NOVELISTS 67 Mr. Glass took tip an inquiry that has been made often. "Was I ever in the cloak and suit business ? I will not deny it further than to say that I have never been in any business but the law business, which in New York City is the trouble department of every other business in the directory from 'architectural iron work' down to 'yarns, cotton and woollen.' I was as- sociated with a firm whose practice was largely of the kind called 'commercial' and many of their clients were engaged in the women's outer garment business. From this source I derived some knowledge of the cloak and suit business, but not enough to prevent me from getting into technical difficulties. No doubt you read in the early 'Potash and Perlmutter' stories that Abe and Morris received many orders for garments in gross lots. After the third story they ceased to do business on quite so wholesale a scale, and this sudden falling off in trade was due to about a hundred letters I received from readers throughout the United States. They all wrote me that they enjoyed the stories very much, but cloaks were not sold by the gross. Cloak and suit acquaintances accosted me on the street to 68 NEW YOEK OP THE NOVELISTS tell me that cloaks were not sold by the gross. I was called on the telephone at home and in my office and asked by strange and familiar voices if I knew that cloaks were not sold by the gross. I saw that any attempt I might make to change the long-established custom of a trade would be hopeless, so Potash and Perlmutter now sell cloaks and suits by the single garment. ' ' CHAPTEE III Police Headquarters and Criminal Court — The Firm of Shaw and Shimmel — Arthur Train's Artemas Quibble — Pontin's Kestaurant. What Scotland Yard is to the English novelist who allows his imagination to play about Lon- don crime^ what the Eue Jerusalem is to the French novelist, No. 300 Mulberry Street is to the novelist of New York life. In former years it was almost exclusively "300 Mulberry Street. ' ' Now it is as much interpreted by its telephonic symbol. A young District Attorney in a recent story by Eichard Harding Davis was inveigled to a road house on the old Boston Post Eoad, and there confronted with a trumped-up situation designed to lead to his political un- doing. Tempted to hush up the pretended scandal involving his sister and brother-in-law, his reply came when he took up the telephone and said: "Central, give me Spring 3100." For to ask for Spring 3100 is equivalent to Sherlock Holmes calling for direct communica- 70 THE NEW YOEK tion with Scotland Yard. The number signifies the vast, complex underworld of New York life ; the struggle between the powers that rule and the powers that prey. From 300 Mulberry THE NEWGATE OF NEW TOEK Street the logical sequence is to Centre Street, first to the Criminal Court Building and then to the Tombs Prison. All about the Criminal Court are the offices of the shyster, black-mail- ing lawyers of New York fiction. Here, on one OF THE NOVELISTS 71 corner are the rooms where Bansemer of George Barr McCutcheon's Jane Gable spun his web. In bygone years there was a dingy, red brick building in the shadow of the Criminal Court which flaunted the sign of a notorious firm that has since been dissolved. That firm and that dingy structure are continually serving as models. Back in the days of Mrs. Peixdda, the late Henry Harland, writing under the pseudonym of "Sidney Luska," introduced the firm as that of Shaw and Shimmel. David Graham Phillips in The Fortune Hunter called it "Loeb, Lynn, Levy, and McCafferty." It was there that the shady Feuerstein resorted with the hopes of buying immunity from just punishment and was naturally bled. But per- haps in no book has that representative firm and the life of chicanery and legal corruption for which it stood been more vigorously indicted than in Arthur Train's The Confessions of Artemas Quibble. There is set forth "the in- genuous and unvarnished history of Artemas Quibble, Esq., one time practitioner in the New York Criminal Courts, together with an account of the divers wiles, tricks, sophistries, techni- 72 THE NEW YOEK calities, and sundry artifices of himself and others of the Fraternity, commonly yclept 'shysters' or 'shyster lawyers.' " Quibble, ejected from his desk with the dignified legal firm of Haight and Foster, at No. 10 Wall Street, contracts a partnership with Gottlieb, and for nearly a generation makes a fat living by blackmail, bribery, and perjury ; by ruining homes and reputations ; and by directing the op- erations of organised bands of criminals. They become the Fagins of the City of New York. Once the poor and defenceless fall into their powei', they extort tribute from them and turn them into the paths of crime. But growing bolder with each year of success they make the one false step that brings them within reach of the arms of the law and with the sentence to ten years in States Prison at hard labour the firm of Gottlieb and Quibble comes to an end. Artemas Quibble and Abraham Gottlieb, like many of the habitues of the Criminal Court Building, were in the habit of taking their mid- day meal at Pontin's. That restaurant is in Franklin Street. Now it is on the south side of the street. But for forty-four years, and OF THE NOVELISTS 73 until 1912, it was on the north side, almost ex- actly opposite its present situation. For nearly half a century there has hardly been a single great case tried in the New York Criminal Court in which the lawyers for the prosecution and for the defence did not lunch at Pontin's and over the tables discuss the points brought out at the morning session. A portrait of the original from which Arthur Train drew Gott- lieb, whose checkered career as a New York law- yer came to an end a few years ago, hangs on the wall to one side of the little stairway leading from the street to the second floor. CHAPTER IV "Case's" and "The Big Barracks" — Scenes of Stories by E. H. Davis and Julian Ralph. On the south side of Hester Street, about fifty- yards west of the Bowery, was Case's Tenement, where the disreputable Mr. Eaegan lay in hid- ing after his fatal fight with Pike McGonegal at the end of Wakeman's Dock on the East Eiver front, and which is spoken of in many of Eich- ard Harding Davis's earlier stories. It was a very dirty and dilapidated structure — ^broken panes of glass, twisted railings, glaring discol- ourations. There was a Chinese laundry on the main floor. Twenty odd years ago Mr. Davis, who was then a reporter on the Evening Sun, was one day sent up to this place to "cover" the story of a greengoods game that was sup- posed to be running there under the supervision of a man named Perceval. Mr. Perceval was found, but refused to believe in the sincerity of his visitor as a "come-on," and the interview ended by Mr. Davis beating a very hasty and undignified retreat. Later, the author of Van 74 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS 75 Bibber met the messenger boy, who acted as trailer for the greengoods man, and offered him ten dollars for information as to the exact na- ture of his employer's business, the boy proving incorruptible. The incident was elaborated in the story of "The Trailer of Eoom No. 8." The Big Barracks Tenement, the scene of the majority of the stories in Julian Ealph's People We Pass, was a great yellow brick structure on the west side of Forsythe Street, near the north- ern end. The Big Barracks was the home of Dr. Whitfield and his daughter, Mrs. Ericson, "Petey" and Nora Burke, and the scene of "The Lineman's Wedding," arranged and re- ported by Mr. "Bamy" Kelley of the Daily Camera. Allusion is also due to the stories of "Love in the Big Barracks," probably the tru- est and strongest tale of all in People We Pass, and "The Mother Song," with its touching pathos and quaint humour. Speaking of these stories, Mr. Ealph once said: "In truth, like so many other things of the kind, my stories grew out of many pieces. First I adopted the name of the house because of the brutal and insulting name, 'The Big Flat' I saw on a dou- 76 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS ble-decker tenement in lower Mott or Baxter Street. Next I described the house with which I was familiar — or a type of tenement found elsewhere. Finally I chose Forsythe Street, be- cause I knew more tenement folks there than elsewhere, knew them better, and thought that the mixture of races and worldly conditions of- fered as much scope for stories as I could get from any other quarter. Innumerable as were the kinds and points at which I touched these tenement people in my reporting experience, it was only here that I was received in their clubs or societies, at their dances and on their picnics, on a basis of complete friendliness and frank- ness. In other words, I looked on in other tene- ment districts, but in this one I took part. And here I found at least one lay employer of skilled labour living in old-world fraternity with his employes and their families, as well as an un- usual number of well-to-do and more than ordi- narily respectable tavern- and shop-keepers. It's all a thing of the past. A very few years ago I went back and tried to resurrect the old conditions, but they were buried and their spirit had moved uptown. " CHAPTER V The Search for the Mysterious East Side — The London of Dickens and the Paris of Sue and Balzac. As a respectable, rent-paying, pew-holding, in- come-tax-resenting inmate of the city directory, the novelist is bound to give his endorsement and support to every movement for the obliter- ation of the slum, and the amelioration of the condition of the people who dwell therein. As the creator of fiction of a certain kind he is per- mitted to think of the passing of the dim alley and the rear tenement with a little twinge of re- gret. When the last bit of the East Side that was once mysterious is gone, when settlement workers, sociological cranks, impertinent re- formers, self-advertising politicians, and bil- lionaire Socialists have thoroughly done their work, where will the novelist, engaged upon a book of New York life in which there is to be plenty of action, and the high lights and low lights of social contrast, turn for his Thieves' Court, his Gunmen's Kitchen? There is an epic 77. 78 THE NEW YORK swing to the account of tlie first journey through London made by Oliver Twist at the heels of the Artful Dodger — "From the Angel into St. John's Eoad; down the small street which ter- minates at Sadler's Wells Theatre ; through Ex- mouth Street, and Coppice Eow ; down the little court by the side of the workhouse : across the classic ground which once bore the name of Hockley-in-the-Hole ; thence into Little Saffron Hill: and so into Saffron Hill the Great" — and the den of Fagin. The very names are sinister. Years ago the creation of a great viaduct swept away the labyrinth of foul alleys, but with the wise improvement went a corner of romance. What reader can ever forget the Cite as Eugene Sue pictured it in the opening chapters of The Mysteries of Paris — the cluster of narrow, winding, ill-paved, dimly lighted streets back of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the den of the "Ogress," and the men and women who an- swered to such names as "The Slasher," "The School Master, " and " Fleur de Marie " ? That is gone, too, as almost all of Balzac's city of the shadows is gone. And there was once a New York in which the novelist could allow his in- [J- UJ a •7^ X X X H H H H' O O S H Oh < g >• te fe td !% w IT X M M o P - K n n H r>. H '^ P X O o H f- <* ci; UJ M-l ^ nl X o ^2; K O >— > < M :z H >< ?^ ^ ffi J K n J ■ft' H c^ < ^1 O w S OS < a < O m U ui — X H M o -< a O ^ X O g S w n X X h" ^ H u u M X >i n, C* <- H ex: v^ en > < 13 < ^ < W < ^ O u; 03 n M 0- o <: < O ^-l ^ >H >H a, ij .1 '•UJ B: UJ •-1 u l^: OF THE NOVELISTS 79 vention free play. Perhaps, like the vanished Bohemia, this vanished proletaire never really existed save in imagination. But it was a place where, if you were walking through one of the side streets and looked up, you were sure to see a wild, frightened, never-to-be-forgotten face outlined against the window. Letters calling for assistance or apprising you that some stu- pendous crime was maturing were constantly fluttering down to the pavement at your feet. The rivers, especially by night, were places to inspire pleasurable thrills of terror. The land and the structures along the water front were thought to be honeycombed with caves and se- cret passages. Before the imagination the en- tire lower East Side loomed up as a vast mys- terious region where crime stalked brazen when night came down upon the city. The very name, the Five Points, carried with it an impression of gloom. As a child the present writer recalls the perturbation with which the mention of Chatham Square, a place that he had never seen, filled him. CHAPTER VI Tales of Mean Streets — Batavia Street — The Jolly Al- banians — Washington's' Cherry Street Home — Doyer Street — Allen Street. Much of the old East Side is gone, more of it has changed or is in the changing. But some remains, enough to serve the purposes of the novelists of the shadows, provided he be suf- ficiently diligent in his search. For example, take a very recent novel, Mr. Rupert Hughes's Empty Pockets, a tale of the good old melo- dramatic sort. In it Mr. Hughes has laid very definite claim to a section of the East Side that lies in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, a cor- ner of the city that had hitherto escaped the novelist's attention. As a specific background for certain episodes he wanted the ideal street ; he sought it in the course of many taxicab rides ; he found it in Batavia Street. ' * I wanted some- thing with the flavour of Dickens's London," Mr. Hughes told the writer, "and Batavia Street is the most Dickensy street in New 80 NEW yOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 81 York." As it impressed the novelist it im- pressed its characters. Muriel Schuyler, the heroine of the tale, saw it as "a narrow alley, a few hundred feet long. ' ' It reminded her of London, with its air of being mislaid, its brevity, and its gloomy antiquity. "It is the region where an arch of the first of the big city bridges soars above the roofs, and where the white height of the Municipal Building thrusts its icy pinnacles up and up into the sky." "In Ba- tavia Street the tenements are not very high and have little wooden steps set sidewise." This curious little thoroughfare, just as Mr. Hughes has described it, can be easily found and studied at leisure by any one willing to take the two short blocks walk from Eoosevelt Street to James Street. It is the typical changing neigh- bourhood in which, years ago, the American gave away to the Irish, and then, in turn, the Irish to the Jew, the Jew to the Italian, and now the Italian is giving before the Grreek. Nearby, within a stone's throw, in Cherry Street, long, long years ago was the first New York home of the first president of the United States. Nearby, tO-day, in Cherry Street, is the 82 THE NEW YOEK I cafe of the Jolly Albanians, a scene of Empty Pockets, and a resort patronised by "Kill Papa," which was the abbreviation of the lei- surely Brooklyn Bridge of a name, Achilles Papademetrakopoulos. You have but to cross the street from the Jolly Albanians to find the sinister back alley which plays a part in the story. In the picture of this Greek quarter Mr. Hughes believes that he has found a new phase of New York slum life. But the East Side of Empty Pockets ranges beyond the Greek Quar- ter, winding its way through the entire lower East Side. On the roof of a tenement in Or- chard Street Merithew is found murdered. There are descriptions of the clamorous New Bowery, the packed Division Street, and Allen "a very tunnel of a street." "If Batavia is the most Dickensy of New York streets," said Mr. Hughes, "Allen is the most horrible. There is a blacksmith shop now in the street which is the best setting in the city for a really pictur- esque assassination." Mr. Hughes alluded to the first home of the first president of the United States. As it was in the last years of the eighteenth century that OF THE NOVELISTS 83 home is pictured in Gertrude Atherton's The Conqueror, a book wMch, incidentally, seems to be one of the most vital of all the novels that have been published in the last ten or fifteen years. In Mrs. Atherton's book we were told that Washington was occupying temporarily the house of Walter Franklin, on the corner of Cherry Street and Franklin Square, a country residence at which society grumbled, for all the world lived between the present site of the City Hall and Battery Park. Hamilton rode up on horseback, and was shown into the library, which overlooked the present garden. But after a few months in this residence Washing- ton moved to the McComb house in lower Broad- way, one of the largest in town, with a recep- tion room of superb dimensions. Here Mrs. Washington, standing on a dais, usually assisted by Mrs. Adams and Mrs. Hamilton, received, with the rigid formality of foreign courts, all who dared to attend her levees. These, accord- ing to Mrs. Atherton, were, exceedingly frigid. The President was very fond of the theatre, and invited a party once a week to accompany him to John Street. 84 , THE NEW YOEK All about this section were laid scenes of Cleveland Moffett's A King in Rags. Doyer Street with evil looking Chinamen skulking under dark doorways, the smell of burning opium: the harsh tom-tom in the Chinese thea- tre, and from the Doyer Street mission just be- yond the fragment of a Gospel hymn. ' ' Oh, Depths of Mercy ! Can it be That gate was left ajar for me!" Chatham Square and Catharine Street at half -past six in the evening, when the vast tene- ment region of the East Side was drawing back into its sordid streets and hallways the great toiling army. The sinister asylums on the Bowery where bunks are offered to human wrecks at twenty or fifteen cents a night or less. A character in the book says : " 'I'll tell you how one man escaped by saving,' he pointed down Orchard Street, 'he lived in that second house, he was a poor capmaker, and he shot himself because he was out of work, and couldn't bear to see his wife and little children suffer. He knew they would get the insurance money anyway. That's how he saved. And two years ago, over there on Eldridge Street,' he pointed again, 'I found a family of poor Jews living in a dark corner of the hallway, under OF THE NOVELISTS 85 the stairs. There was no window, no door, it wasn't a room at all, only a narrow, slanting space roughly boarded off, and the landlord made them pay eight dollars a month for it. There the mother had a baby. That's how they saved. And back in Allen Street you can find whole families to-day living in a single room, dark and damp, and swarming with vermin, and sleeping five or six in a bed. That's how they save.' " And again, speaking of this region fifty years ago: " 'And there were slaughter-houses everywhere, and fat-boilers, and such vile tenements that — They're all gone now, "Bone Alley," and "Kerosene Row," and the "Big Flat" in Mott Street, and "Ban- dits' Roost," but I tell you it was worth a man's life to go past them at night. Now you can go any- where.' " CHAPTER VII Tales of Mean Streets — Orchard Street — The Bowery— ^ The Straw Cellar— McTurk's— Monkey Hill. To turn to the trails of other writers in Orchard Street, near the tenement that saw the mur- der of Merithew, George Barr McCutcheon, in The Rose in the Ring, placed the basement joint where gathered the yeggmen to await the execution of Dick Oronk for the murder of Colonel Grand. In this group was the hunch- back brother of the condemned man, Ernie Cronk, the real murderer. Any street in the neighbourhood will do as the background for Josephine Daskam Bacon's Ardelia walking derisively behind the policeman after her brief visit to Arcady. About here are the scenes of John A. Moroso's The Quarry. Down on the East Eiver water front is the shooting gallery that figures in Arthur Stringer's The Hand of Peril, while from the Central office at 300 Mul- berry Street, Blake, the Second Deputy, started on the pursuit of Connie Binhart that was to 86 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 87 take him twice round the world as narrated in the same author's The Shadow. Over toward the Bowery there was a dance hall which Booth Tarkington in his undergraduate days discov- ered in the course of certain sociological investi- gations. Under the name of the "Straw Cel- lar" it played a part in The Conquest of Ca- naan. It was there that Eugene Bantry found himself involved in a stabhing affray, and was rescued by his stepbrother, Joe Loudin. Until the appearance of his recent Harlequin and Pantomime, a story of theatrical life in the metropolis, the episode in the Straw Cellar was Mr. Tarkington 's only use of New York in his fiction. For all practical purposes the "Straw Cellar" of Booth Tarkington 's The Conquest of Canaan may have been the same dance hall that Eichard Harding Davis casually introduced into Sanson's Folly under the name of McTurk's. Until ten years or so ago, there was on the east side of the Bowery, far up near where that thor- oughfare merges into Third Avenue, a dive kept by a man whose name closely resembled McTurk. In the Western army post which was the scene of Eanson's activities and occasional 88 THE NEW YOEK impertinences there was a whisper that Cahill, the post trader, and the father of Mary Cahill, the heroine, had once kept bar for McTurk. Cahill heard the whisper, sullenly denied it, but in an unguarded moment bewrayed an incrimi- nating familiarity with the cry of the Whyo Gang. Some twenty years ago there were a number of New York newspaper men who had the habit of dining at the same table. They met at Mou- quin's, Pedro's, or some like place in the neigh- bourhood of Printing House Square. Stephen Crane, Charles K. Gaines, Edward Marshall, Willis B. Hawkins and Irving Bacheller were members of this cheerful company. A little club grew out of the association which became rather famous in its time as * ' The Sign of the Lanthorne." In a part of William Street, known as Monkey Hill, they found their club house — a sort of Swiss chalet approached by a hanging stair that ascended the brick wall of an ironmonger's shop. The little house was really an upper rear extension of this shop. Its doorstep rose from the broad roof that covered a stable yard. Inside, it was furnished in the THE "BIG barracks" TENEMENT IN FORSYTHE STREET, THE SCENE OF MOST OF THE STORIES OF JULIAN RALPH'S "PEOPLE WE PASS." THIS WAS A TYPICAL NEW YORK TENEMENT STREET OF SIXTEEN YEARS AGO OF THE NOVELISTS 89 fashion of a ship 's cabin. It was supplied with many cheerful accessories; there were fine old bits of mahogany and rosewood; leathern win- dow seats, easy-chairs, and all kinds of lanterns. A passage-way connected with the kitchen over the iron shop. There the group ate luncheons and had a dinner every Saturday night, and there read to one another little tales and sketches, dealing mostly with local colour and character. Criticism was freely offered and re- ceived in good part. The only applause allowed was silence. Some tales which have become famous were read there and many great men sat by the fireside and spent cheerful and careless nights with the company. One of these tales was Mr. Irving Bacheller's "The Story of a Passion. ' ' That little sketch of an old shop and violin maker was first read and duly jumped upon at "The Sign of the Lanthorne." The old violin shop of the tale was on the Bowery. Mr. Bacheller called there one day and had an interesting chat with the wife of the violin maker. She told him of a wonderful old Maggini which her husband had been looking after for years. A certain old gentleman had 90 THE NEW YORK been coming into the shop every day for weeks to look at the Maggini. They, supposing he might be a customer, allowed him to look at the instrument and try its tone. The old gentleman seemed to have fallen in love with it. He thrummed and fondled it every time he visited the shop. The dear old lady explained how one day when the old gentleman was trying the in- strument she stepped into the back room for a moment, and on her return man and Maggini had disappeared. She told in her simple way of the panic they fell into over this calamity. When her husband returned she told him what had happened. "He stood in the door and looked at me and went a lead colour." There was much talk in the newspapers of this theft, but the Maggini was never recovered. There is another point which perhaps ought to be men- tioned in connection with the tale. Violin makers say that every good violin has a certain individuality. Its tone differs from that of any other violin in the world. In that respect it re- sembles the voice of a human being. The orig- inal of the old violin maker of "The Story of a Passion" once showed Mr. Bacheller a remark- OF THE NOVELISTS 91 able instrument with a marked richness and in- dividuality of tone. He said, "I was showing it one day to a connoisseur." "Great Scott," said he, " I never heard anything like that qual- ity of tone in a violin but once, and that was when I was visiting in New Orleans in 1860." "This violin was there at that time," I told him, "and it was undoubtedly the same violin that he had heard." Monkey Hill, the home of the "Lanthorne Club," was also used by Mr. Bacheller in Ehen Holden, a novel which contained several chap- ters dealing with the old Tribune office in the days of Horace Greeley. At the time of the outbreak of the Civil War there were on the Hill some neat and friendly looking houses of wood and brick and brownstone inhabited by small tradesmen ; a few shops, a big stable, and the chalet sitting on a broad, flat roof that cov- ered a portion of the stable yard. The yard it- self was the summit of Monkey Hill. It lay be- tween two brick buildings and up the hill from the walk, one looking into the gloomy cavern of the stable ; and under the low roof, on one side, there were dump-carts and old coaches in vary- 92 THE NEW YOEK ing stages of infirmity. ' ' There was an old iron shop, that stood flush with the sidewalk, flanking the stable yard. A lantern and a mammoth key were suspended above the door, and hanging upon the side of the shop was a wooden stair ascending to the chalet. The latter had a sheathing of weather-worn clapboards. It stood on the rear end of the brick building, com- municating with the front rooms above the shop. A little stair of five steps ascended from the landing to its red door that overlooked an ample yard of roofing, adorned with potted plants. The main room of the chalet had the look of a ship 's cabin. There were stationary seats along the wall covered with leathern cushions. There were port and starboard lanterns, and a big one of pohshed brass that overhung the table. A ship's clock that had a noisy and cheerful tick was set in the wall. A narrow passage led to the room in front, and the latter had slanting sides. A big window of little panes, in its further end, let in the light of William Street. In Ludlow Street was the home of Lena (Ed- ward W. Townsend's "By Whom the Offence Cometh"), before she went to live with Bat the OF THE NOVELISTS 93 pickpocket. One of the dim alleys that lead back from Eivington Street was used by Charles Dudley Warner in The Golden Rouse; it was also in Eivington Street that Van Bibber thrashed the toughs with a scientific vehemence which showed that he might have risen to high distinction in the welter or light-weight divi- sion. Meeting on the northwest corner of Eiv- ington Street and the Bowery, John Suydam and the novelist De Euyter start out together in "The Search for Local Colour" (Brander Mat- thews) ; near by Chimmie Fadden made an ef- > fective political speech from the tail end of a cart, and the atmosphere and life of this quar- ter of the city were admirably portrayed in a short fugitive sketch called "Extermination," by J. L. Steffens, published in a New York news- paper years ago. The scene of "Extermina- tion" was Cat Alley, opposite the Police Head- quarters in Mulberry Street. * ' Looney Leimy ' ' was "Silly Willie" or "Willie" Gallegher, a messenger for the headquarters newspaper men. Brander Matthews has written of the old wooden houses of this neighbourhood "as pa- thetic survivals of the time when New York still 94 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS remembered that it had been New Amsterdam." Here he found the streak of local colour that went to make "Before the Break of Day." While the telephone number was given, the sa- loon of the story was purely imaginary. The episode on which the tale was based actually took place in a house in Denver. CHAPTER Vin The Ghetto — Sidney Rosenfeld— Abraham Cahan— The Koseiuszko Bank — James Oppenheim — East Broadway — Division Street — Norfolk Street. In the last year or so of the nineteenth century the note of the New York Ghetto was first sound- ing in literature. From Eussian Poland, where he was born in 1862, by way of Holland and London, to the lower East Side came Sidney Eosenfeld. He found employment as a tailor in a sweatshop, but was obliged to abandon this work on account of failing health, and became a penny-a-liner on the Yiddish newspapers. The Songs from the Ghetto — ^plaintive, won- dering heart notes — of this tailor poet paved the way for the work that Abraham Cahan did in prose fiction. Israel Zangwill recognised in Ca- han 's "Yekl" the only Jew in American fic- tion. "Yekl" worked in a sweatshop in Pitt Street. In The Imported Bridegroom Cahan dealt with the New York of 1880 or thereabouts, and the old Ghetto in the neighbourhood of 9S 96 THE NEW YOEK Bayard and Catharine Streets whicli, in the years following the Civil War, had been settled by a prosperous class of Eussian Jews. The quarter, part of which remained at the time of the writing of the story, is now entirely gone. About the time of the writing of Yekl and The Imported Bridegroom Mr. Cahan was a re- porter on the New York Commercial Advertiser. He is now, and has been for a number of years, the editor of Vorwaerts, the leading Jewish pa- per of New York, and in that capacity has been in daily contact with the Ghetto, but so swift have been the changes in that, as in most other sections of the city, that he would probably find too much for him the task of finding the Essex Street sweatshop of the Lipmans, the home of Boris and Tatyana in Madison Street, or the Cherry Street tenement house to which Nathan and Goldy repaired after "A Ghetto Wedding." Fifteen years ago Mr. Cahan told the writer that there were four distinct New York Ghettos : the great Ghetto bounded by the East Eiver, by Cherry Street, by the Bowery, and by East Tenth Street ; the Ghetto lying between Ninety- eighth and One Hundred and Sixteenth Streets, OF THE NOVELISTS 97 east of Central Park ; the Brownsville Ghetto in the Twenty-sixth Ward, Brooklyn; and the Wil- liamsburg Ghetto. Even then the first men- tioned was the largest Ghetto in the world, greater even than the Warsaw Ghetto, and Hes- ter Street, its heart, was known throughout Europe, Into the Ghetto of Yekl have come the men and women of James Oppenheim, Bruno Lessing, and Montague Glass, and the little Jew- ish children of the sketches of Myra Kelly. Hester Street, four blocks east of the Bowery, is the scene of Lessing 's Children of Men, while the firm of Potash and Perlmutter, wishing to borrow money, hurried from the loft in Lispe- nard Street, which was their original home in the cloak and suit business, crossed Broadway, and dodging the pushcarts and the children on Grand Street, found their way to the doors of the Kosciuszko Bank. Perhaps there is no novel that better mirrors the New York Ghetto of the last decade than James Oppenheim 's Dr. East. In it are flung before the reader the pathos, the squalor, the ambitions, the heartaches of the men and women of the great melting pot. And the trail of the OF THE NOVELISTS 97 east of Central Park ; the Brownsville Ghetto in the Twenty-sixth Ward, Brooklyn ; and the Wil- liamsburg Ghetto. Even then the first men- tioned was the largest Ghetto in the world, greater even than the Warsaw Ghetto, and Hes- ter Street, its heart, was known throughout Europe. Into the Ghetto of YeM have come the men and women of James Oppenheim, Bruno Lessing, and Montague Glass, and the little Jew- ish children of the sketches of Myra Kelly. Hester Street, four blocks east of the Bowery, is the scene of Lessing 's Children of Men, while the firm of Potash and Perlmutter, wishing to borrow money, hurried from the loft in Lispe- nard Street, which was their original home in the cloak and suit business, crossed Broadway, and dodging the pushcarts and the children on Grand Street, found their way to the doors of the Kosciuszko Bank. Perhaps there is no novel that better mirrors the New York Ghetto of the last decade than James Oppenheim 's Br. Bast. In it are flung before the reader the pathos, the squalor, the ambitions, the heartaches of the men and women of the great melting pot. And the trail of the 98 THE NEW YORK story leads intimately from street to street. To Mr. Oppenheim as to Mr. Hughes, Allen Street, shut out from the light by the elevated railway overhead, is particularly repulsive. On East Broadway, in a familiar old tenement with a musty hallway, was Dr. East's home and oflSce. His devotion to his profession did not blind him to the colour of the life about him. The lighted windows of one of these hideous tenements at night conjured up to him a whole novel — a whole tragedy or comedy. To his mind there were greater dramas down East Broadway than Shakespeare ever suspected. In Division Street, just beyond where the "el" curved in from Allen on its way downtown, was the four- story, green-painted tenement in which the Grabo family dwelt. On the ground floor was an artificial flower factory; in the cellar lived the Matches Man, the beggar who made his way into uptown brownstone houses with a single. box of unbuyable matches. The home of the Sinns, where the doctor and his wife attended the golden wedding, was definitely placed at No. 76 Henry Street. Another episode shows Nor- folk Street seen from the second story of a tene- OF THE NOVELISTS 99 ment, "a grey, foaming torrent of faces and forms — eddies of fat women in shrill council — homeward racing pushcarts, with their back- bent man-power — laughing cataracts of chil- dren — ancient men lounging at the doors of lit- tle shops — the evening tide of the spent toilers — ^here and there a blue arc light glaring in the dying day — and one block downtown the Grand Street crossing, glowing ruddy gold with the western sun." Everywhere are flashes of de- scription of Grand Street ; of the Canal Street station of the Second Avenue elevated; of the Seward Playground Park and the Educational Alliance ; of the East Kiver waterfront ; and the local colour is not a thing apart, but the very life blood of the book. Incidentally the original of Dr. East was a certain Dr. Stark. CHAPTEE IX Tales of Mean Streets — Henry Street — Grand Street — Mulberry Street — Chinatown — Helen Van Campen — The Slums of Stephen Crane. In Henry Street was the first New York home of the Everetts (Edgar Fawcett's A New York Family) after their migration from Hoboken. The Everett children attended school in Scam- mel Street. That was in the early half of the century, when Broome, Prince and Bond Streets were fashionable thoroughfares, and the best shops were on Grand Street and the Bowery. With the passing of the Bend disappeared Mul- berry Court, the strange, grim and picturesque bit of proletarian New York that Edward W. Townsend described in A Daughter of the Tene- ments. The entrance to the narrow alley that led to the court was on the west side of Mul- berry Street, about fifty paces below Bayard Street, and directly opposite the Italian banks and the Italian library. The site of Mulberry Court is marked by a tree that, surrounded by 100 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS 101 a circle of turf, stands in the northeast corner of the new park. On the east side of Baxter Street, south of Bayard, a tunnel led back to the rear tenement where Carminella and Miss Eleanor Hazlehurst of North Washington Square visited the child stricken with fever. The tunnel was next door to a saloon. All this, of course, was swept away when the block was converted into a park. Mr. Townsend, as be- came the historian of this quarter, spoke of the colour and brightness of Mulberry Street, which was fairly ahve with the scarlet and orange and green and bronze of the shops and pushcarts. In direct contrast was the hideous blackness of old Baxter Street, with its ghastly and inhuman stretches of second-hand clothes. Moving up the steep incline that begins at Mulberry and Park Streets, we find at the corner of Mott Street the little Eoman Catholic Church of the Transfiguration, where the white slaves of Chinatown died in Townsend 's story of "The House of Yellow Brick." The House of Yel- low Brick stands on the north side of Pell Street, about thirty yards from the Bowery. Only a few doors away a saloon at the corner of 102 THE NEW YORK Doyer and Pell Streets marks the site of the Old Tree House in which Mrs. Susanna Eow- son's "Charlotte Temple" died about 1776. The original of "Charlotte Temple" was Char- lotte Stanley, the mistress of Lieutenant-Colonel John Montresor, the Montraville of the novel. She is buried in Trinity churchyard. At No. 16 Mott Street, a quaint and striking brick build- ing only a few doors from Chatham Square, was the opium den kept by the Chinaman Chung, who, as told in Mr. Townsend's A Daughter of the Tenements, stole the papers from Mark Waters 's office in the Niantic building on Ex- change Place. The Chinese fish, flesh and fowl shop described in the book has disappeared, but the restaurant on the second floor and the Joss Temple, with windows opening on the iron bal- cony, remain. A flight of well-worn stone steps runs up from the sidewalk in front. Since the structure was made use of in Townsend's novel another story has been added. This building is known as the City Hall of Chinatown. A little farther up Mott Street was the Chinese restau- rant to which Lena ("By Whom the Offence Cometh") went, after Bat had been convicted OF THE NOVELISTS 103 and sentenced for picking pockets on Fifth Av- enue. Near Mott Street lived Berthold Lindau, the fanatical socialist of Mr. Howells in A Eaz- ard of New Fortunes. A few blocks away, on the Bowery above Bayard Street, was the At- lantic Garden, thinly disguised under the name of the Arctic Garden, where "Tom" Lyon and Carminella and her mother would come after the young heroine's dance was over for a real supper of beer and sandwiches, and Philip Pey- ton would "send drinks to the performers and hear the fact alluded to in the next song. ' ' The "Tivoli" Theatre, where Carminella made her first appearance and scored her early successes, was, long ago, given over to Yiddish melodrama. Eeturning to Baxter Street, a dark passage run- ning back from the dirty green door of No. 14 led until two or three years ago to what re- mained of Murderers' Alley, one of the most tragic and gruesome corners of the old Five Points region. Murderers' Alley was used and elaborately staged by the late Augustin Daly in his play called Pique. The heroine, who was enacted by Fanny Davenport, was murdered there. The Brace Memorial Newsboys' Lod^- 104 THE NEW YOEK ing House, where the idea of "Chimmie Fad- den" first came to Mr. Townsend, is on New Chambers Street, a block east of Park Eow. Over on Cherry Hill were born Hefty Burke and the disreputable Mr. Raegan, two of Eichard Harding < Davis's earlier creations. East Broadway was the scene of the work of Conrad Dryfoos and of Margaret Vance, described in Mr. Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes. The old Chinatown was most intimately por- trayed by Mr. Edward W. Townsend. If in the new Chinatown the claim of any one writer of fiction is paramount, it is that of Helen Van Campen, whose trail we shall meet later in Irv- ing Place and along the Great White Way. The stories that appeared in book form eight or nine years ago under the title of At the Actors' Boarding House were not confined exclusively to the exploits of the various vaudeville teams who patronised the Maison de Shine. There were tales that treated vividly of the seamy side of life in the neighbourhood of Chatham Square, of opium joints in Pell Street, and corner sa- loons, where the thieves and pickpockets and yeggmen gather for the exchange of confidences. H Q , en m Wl •31 a! w 3 [ZJ H (S4 «C < < n O < Jl H m o 2 CO -S ° « " "^ K> Bi J W ^ w : e^ O Zi ' "■ O ►'^ - ttl iJ H Bi K ^ ffi o J = ^ S :^ . iz: OS 13 to S W a [^ m a S; O Z 'J « < '£. S W " O M m g " W ^ K S 3 w H_ S W § g " < g > MOO J Q u o 2 i S ? S 2 - s < O J Ik u < OF THE NOVELISTS 111 Mike, where the Mulberry Hill gang and the Dry Dock gang met in the Homeric conflict, the outcome of which sent Cork McManus, first to the East Eiver front, and then to strange lands west of the Bowery and the adventures narrated in "Past One at Eooney's." Although by rea- son of its situation Eooney's properly belongs to another paper, it may be identified here as Sweeney's, formerly on the north side of Twen- ty-ninth Street, just west of Sixth Avenue. On Second Avenue, near its southerly end, will be found the boarding house where Andy Donovan wooed Miss Conway, and where she showed him the locket containing the portrait of her purely imaginary lover ("The Count and the Wedding Guest"). In Orchard Street were the rooms of the Give and Take Athletic Association, where, as told in "The Coming Out of Maggie," Tony Spinelli played Prince Charming at the ball of the Clover Leaf Social Club under the pseudonym of Terry 'Sullivan. The care with which Porter sought his local colour is indicated in "The Sleuths," in which a man from the Middle West goes to New York to find his sister. At her address he learns that 112 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS she has moved away a month before, leaving no clue, and to help in the search he enlists the services of the famous detectives MuUins and Shamrock Jolnes. The science of deduction leads to No. 12 Avenue C, which is described as an "old-fashioned broMTistone house in a pros- perous and respectable neighbourhood." Now, if any neighbourhood in New York is not pros- perous and respectable, it is that about Avenue C and Second Street. The Mulberry Bend of other years was hardly more unsightly and un- kempt. 0. Henry had sensed its offensiveness through his eyes and his nostrils. The selection of the number 12 was not mere chance. He knew that there was no such number ; that on the southeast corner was a saloon bearing the num- ber 10 and on the northeast corner the pharmacy was designated as No. 14, Just as there is no No. 13 Washington Square, there is no No. 12 Avenue C. Also there is no No. 162 Chilton Street, where the missing sister was alleged to have been eventually found, for the reason that in the Borough of Manhattan there is no Chil- ton Street at all. PAET III The Eemnants of Bohemia CHAPTER I The Hunt for Bohemia — The Paris Latin Quarter — ^Find- ing the New York Maison Vauquer. In one of his two hundred and seventy-odd stories 0. Henry introduced a certain restaurant which will be visited more intimately in the course of the present volume. "Formerly," he said, "it was a resort for interesting Bohe- mians; but now only writers, painters, actors, and musicians go there." That was half irony and half serious. For whatever else Bohemia may be it is almost always yesterday. With the exception of Henry Murger, who has so often been charged with idealising a life that was in reality very commonplace, the men who have been most conspicuous in bringing Bo- hemia into fiction, such men as du Maurier and Thackeray, for example, have drawn upon their memories, and tinged their pages with the colour born of reminiscence. "At twenty," James Huneker recently chronicled, "I discov- ered with sorrow, that there was no such on- us 116 THE NEW YOEK chanted spot as the Latin Quarter. An old Frenchman informed me that Paris had seen the last of the famous Quarter after the Com- mune, but a still older person swore that the Latin Quarter had not been in existence since 1848." That is just it. Probably the sceptic of 1848 would have contended that the real Bo- hemia went out with the Hundred Days ; the men of 1812 have explained that it had been obsolete since 1789; and so on back to Erangois Villon, who himself might have jeered at it as a memory of yesterday. For Bohemia is not a country or a neighbour- hood. Eather it is a state of mind, or a suscep- tible period of life, or a glow of reminiscence. There is one figure of a hero that is always turn- ing up in the novels that are being written about New York. It is easy to sketch him. In age he is two or three and twenty; he has just come from a university on the banks of a river in Massachusetts, or near a far in-reaching bay on the Long Island Sound, or on the shores of a New Jersey lake, and he has found employment (on a specific salary of fifteen dollars a week) as a promising cub reporter on a paper which OF THE NOVELISTS 117 is designated as the Evening Sphere, or some- thing of the kind. That employment is, of course, merely temporary, only a stepping stone, a bit of preparation for the great, domi- nant novel of American life he is to write; an aspiration born in the days when he was work- ing for the Lit, or the Lampoon, or the News. In the meantime he is living in a high-stooped, red brick boarding-house on Washington Square South, or is sharing, with another young genius, of similar hopes, tastes, and occupation, some- thing that is called a studio somewhere in Green- wich Village, where the streets cross one an- other at all kinds of absurd angles. Mentally he likens the boarding-house to the Maison Vauquer of Balzac's Pere Goriot, seeking to find in some one of his fellow-lodgers a resem- blance to Trompe-la-Mort, or Eugene de Eas- tignac ; or the studio to the den in Pump Court, the Inner Temple, where George Warrington and Arthur Pendennis waited for the little printer's boy, and listened patiently to the literary flounderings of Colonel Thomas New- come. With the appetite of his age he dines at some restaurant at a cost of "deux francs, cin- 118 THE NEW YORK quante" with "dix sous de pourhoire pour le g argon," or at a chop house for "two and six- pence." Matters not the queer flavour of the gigot or the toughness of the grilled kidneys. Just a little play of the imagination, and he is in the Cafe Momus, with Schaunard, Marcel, Colline, and Eodolphe of Murger's Vie de Bo- heme, or in Flicoteaux, of Balzac's Illusions Perdues, or in the particular cafe of the Latin Quarter that was most favoured by Du Mau- rier's Musketeers of the Brush, or joining in the chorus in the Cider Cellar after some particu- larly unconventional ditty of Captain Costigan, For him it is Bohemia, for Bohemia is singing in his heart. Well the writer remembers the ardour with which he hunted for Bohemia in the streets about Washington Square in that earlier pil- grimage of fifteen years ago. "You are too late," said an older man discouragingly, "Bo- hemia passed with the passing of the Eestaurant of the Grand Vatel in Bleecker Street and the Taverne Alsacienne, and other similar hostel- ries. Of course there used to be a Bohemia. The men of the eighties knew it and bits of it OF THE NOVELISTS 119 survived into the early nineties. Men like Frank E. Stockton and Henry Cuyler Bunner and Laurence Hutton and Edgar Fawcett and Edgar Saltus tasted its joys and its ennuis. But now it is gone, all gone," he shrugged his shoulders with disillusionment of the man who has passed his thirtieth year. "And we shall never see it again." Very likely the past to which this pessimist referred was equally scep- tical. Very Hkely the men who fpregathered at the Grand Vatel, or the more modest Taveme Alsacienne, where the dinner of four courses vin compris, cost thirty-five cents, or at Oscar's, opposite the old Academy of Design, a kind of New York "Back kitchen" of nearly forty years ago, shook their heads sadly as they de- plored the Bohemia that was no more — ^the Bo- hemia that had gone out with Pfaff 's down on Broadway. CHAPTEE II The Old-Time Haunts— The Grand Vatel— The Taveme Alsaeienne — PfafE's. In view of the allusions to the Grand Vatel and the Taverne Alsaeienne perhaps a few lines of description will not be out of place. Thirty- seven years ago Mr. William H. Eideing, had an article in Scribner's Magazine on "The French Quarter of New York" as it then was. Natu- rally there was much said of the two hostelries in question. In the Grand Vatel the floor was sanded, and the little tables were covered with oil cloth, each having a pewter cruet in the centre. Behind a little desk in a corner sat the landlady, a woman of enormous girth, with short petticoats that revealed her thick, white woollen socks. Over her head were perched two noisy parrots of revolutionary tendencies. The sign of the Grand Vatel indicated an exceed- ingly moderate tariff, thus: Tons les plats, eight cents; cafe superieur, three cents, and cafe an lait, five cents ; but the menu was such a 120 NEW YOKK OF THE NOVELISTS 121 marvel that it is worth, reproducing. A dish of soup and a plate of beef and bread were ten cents; soup aux croutons, that is, with toasted crusts, cost five cents ; hoeuf, legumes, ten cents ; THE OLD EESTAUEANT OF THE GRAND VATEL ON WEST HOUSTON STBEET veau a la Marengo, twelve cents; mouton a la Ravigote, ten cents; ragout de moutons aux pommes, eight cents; hoeuf braise aux oignons, ten cents ; macaroni au gratin, six cents ; celeri 122 THE NEW YOEK salade, six cents; compote de pommes, four cents; fromage Neufchdtel, three cents; Lim- bourg, four cents, and Gruyere three cents. Bread was one cent extra. The Taverne Alsacienne in Greene Street was somewhat lower in the social scale. The en- trance was a gloomy basement with an impover- ished bar at one side and a much worn billiard table at t^ie end. It mattered not what the hour was, whether in the forenoon, af ternoonj or past midnight, a circle of men were gathered around the tables absorbed in piquet, ecarte, or vingt-et- un. Most of them were without coats. Keen glances were shot at intruders; for the tavern had a certain clientele, outside of which it had few customers, and suspicion was rife at an in- vasion. A stranger in the Taverne Alsacienne in those days was very likely to be a spy or a detective, and the habitues were sensitive under inspection. When the Grand Vatel and the Tavern Al- sacienne that were flourished, the earlier Bo- hemia that was summed up in Pfaff's was a memory. Yet it is linked to the city of to-day in the person of Mr. Howells, who has recorded OF THE NOVELISTS 123 how, on his first visit to New York, he supped at the table under the pavement, and was pre- sented to "Walt Whitman. The old beer cellar, in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, was in the basement of a store in Broad- way two or three doors above Bleecker Street. Occasional visitors were Bayard Taylor and Ed- mund Clarence Stedman, but Artemus Ward, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Wil- liam Winter, Charles G. Halpine, George Ar- nold, the "poet of beer," who sang "We were very merry at Pfaff 's," and Fitzjames O'Brien, the "gipsy of letters" — ^those were the quaff- ing, smoking, chanting Bohemians of letters of the year 1860 or thereabouts. They were all young then, or most of them were ; living by the pen was a precarious mode of existence ; so per- haps about Pfaff's there was the flavour of a real Bohemia. CHAPTEE III Washington Square — Henry James — Brander Matthews — The Midge — As Bunner Saw the Square. Henby James, in his novel, Washington Square, spoke of the locality having "a kind of estab- lished repose which is not of frequent occur- rence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a richer, riper look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thorough- fare — the look of having had something of a so- cial history." Probably in the last words we have the key to the hold which the Square has had on almost every novelist who has written of New York life. An imaginary circle, with its centre in the white Memorial Arch and a radius of five or six hundred yards, would hold fully one-half of what is best in the local colour of New York fiction. That is true to-day, and it was more strikingly so with the fiction of fifteen years ago. In the two short blocks from Mac- dougal Street to Washington Square East, along the north side of the quadrangle, are many 124 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 125 of the structures that served in the books of Brander Matthews, Henry James, F. Hopkin- son Smith, Edward W. Townsend and Julian Ealph. On the south side lived Captain Peters and Philip Morrow. Only a few blocks away were the Casa Napoleon of Janvier, the struc- ture in which Colonel Carter lived; the Gari- baldi of James L, Ford; the office of Every Other Week exploited in A Hazard of New For- tunes; the house where Van Bibber found his burglar ; the home of the Lauderdales — ^the list is a very long one. And it is curious to note that novelists, who elsewhere were at best su- perficial, here became sincere and convincing. Dr. Sloper's house, described in Henry James's Washington Square, is on the north side of the Square, between Fifth Avenue and Macdougal Street. In 1835, when Dr. Sloper first took pos- session, moving uptown from the neighbour- hood of the City Hall, which had seen its best days socially, the Square, then the ideal of quiet and genteel retirement, was enclosed by a wooden paling. The structure, in which the Slopers lived, and its neighbours were then sup- posed to embody the last results of architec- 126 THE NEW YORK tural science. It was then and is to-day a mod- ern house, wide-fronted with a balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of white marble steps ascending to a portal also faced with white marble. In the twenties Mrs. Sloper was "one of the pretty girls of the small but promising capital which clustered about the Battery and overlooked the Bay, and of which ^ the uppermost boundary was indicated by the grassy waysides of Canal Street." A few doors away was the home of Mrs. Martin, kaown as "the Duchess of "Washington Square," which Brander Matthews assured us, in The Last Meeting, "has now regained the fashion it had lost for a score of years." George William Curtis babbled charmingly of the old square in Prue and I. Mr. Howells, in A Hazard of New Fortunes, wrote of the "old-fashioned American respecta- bility which keeps the north side of the Square in vast mansions of red brick, and the interna- tional shabbiness which has invaded the south- ern border and broken it up into lodging houses, shops, beer gardens and studios." Basil and Isabel March came here when worn out by futile OF THE NOVELISTS 127 flat-hunting and "strolled over the asphalt walks under the thinning shadows of the au- tumn-stricken sycamores." In one of the brick houses with white trimmings on Waverly Place, to the east of the Arch, lived Miss Grand- isTi (in Julian Ealph's People We Pass) . Petey Burke, from the sidewalk opposite, watched the comings and goings of Jenson, the husband of Agnes Whitfield, the angel of the Big Barracks tenement on Forsythe Street. The striking so- cial contrast presented by the north and south sides of the Square was admirably caught by Mr. Townsend in "Just Across the Square." F. Hopkinson Smith brought in the Square in Caleb West, Sanf ord living in a five-room apart- ment at the top of a house with dormer windows on the north side. His guests looking out could see the "night life of the Park, miniature fig- ures strolling about under the trees, flashing in brilliant light or swallowed up in dense shadow as they passed in the glare of the many lamps scattered among the budding foliage." An- other of these houses was tenanted by Mrs. De- laney, of Edgar Fawcett's Rutherford; and the Square was the scene of Mrs. Burton Harrison's 128 THE NEW YORK Sweet Bells Out of Tune. Near the soutlieast comer of the Square was the Benedick, a red- brick bachelor apartment building, used under A TEMPOEA.EY NKW YOBK HOME OF HUESTWOOD, A CHABACTEE IN THEO- DOEE DEEISEE'S GEIM NOVEL OE A FEW YEARS AGO, "SISTEB CABEIE" the name of the Monastery by Robert W. Cham- bers in Outsiders. An intimate friend of the late author-editor OF THE NOYELISTS 129 told the present writer that The Midge "was written by Bunner to get married on." The book was dashed off in the house on Seventeenth Street, in which he was then living. It was one of the rare occasions on which Bunner was ever seen to work. This characteristic was always a mystery to his friends and business associates. He was seldom seen at his writing table, and yet the end of the year showed an extraordinary amount of work to his credit. The secret lay in the ease and speed with which he wrote. There has probably never been a novel written that is so drenched with the spirit of Washing- ton Square as The Midge. Bunner lived there in his younger Bohemian days, and throughout his life he seemed always to think of it with a great love and sympathy. To other writers the Square was something to be studied in its E^rchi- tectural aspects or as a problem in social con- trasts. Bunner liked it best at night, with the great dim branches swaying and breaking in the breeze, the gas lamps flickering and blinking, when the tumults and the shoutings of the day were gone and "only a tramp or something worse in woman's shape was hurrying across 130 THE^NEW YORK the bleak space, along the winding asphalt, walking over the Potter's Field of the past on the way to the Potter's Field to be." Captain Peters, or Dr. Peters, as he preferred to be called, lived on the top floor of No. 50, a three- story brick structure on the "dark south side," between Thompson and Sullivan Streets. The house, adjoining the Judson Memorial, stood back from the street, and was even darker and gloomier than those about it. A low iron railing, once green, separated the sidewalk from the poor little plot of sod and stunted grass. The door, a single step above the ground, was flanked by thin grooved columns. From the second-story windows jutted out little balconies. It was through the dormer windows jutting from the roof that Peters looked out upon the Square. In the story allusion was made to two vacant lots in the rear, stretching through to West Third Street. "These yards in summer were green and bright, and in the centre of one there was a tree." Years ago buildings were erected on this site, but until ten or a dozen years ago, taking one's stand on the east side- walk of Thompson Street and looking over the ^ \ \ ^ en H '-' w _ CQ en H K "" is s ° o < o Z; W < H 3 f- 5 w w S M OS a o i-. w OF THE NOVELISTS 131 wooden fence in the rear of the Memorial Build- ing, the top branches of this tree could be seen. On one of the benches of the Square Father Dube confessed to Dr. Peters the unhappihess of his mistaken avocation, and advised the latter to brighten his life by marrying the Midge. At the University Place comer of the Square Dr. Peters and Paul Hathaway, to whom the Midge was ultimately married, had their first meeting. When the University of New York buildings were torn down, some twenty years ago, there disappeared the last traces of Chrysalis College, used by Theodore Winthrop in Cecil Dreeme. The same time marked the passing of the little church in which Katharine Lauderdale and John Ealston of the Marion Crawford novels, were married. CHAPTER IV The Garibaldi — ^Brasserie Pigault — The Casa Napoleon of the Thomas A. Janvier Stories. FoEMEELY as One went down Macdougal Street from the southwest corner of Washington Square, where the French quarter of other days merged into the Greenwich Village of other days, the second house on the left-hand side, No. 146, was a three-story trellised-stoop structure rapidly going the way of most of the houses of this vicinity. Behind a long, narrow table, cov- ered with dirty white oilcloth, that stood close to the basement windows, directly under the bal- cony, an ancient and toothless Italian vended soft drinks. The house was tenanted by three or four Italian families. People acquainted with this part of New York remembered that a very few years before this building was occu- pied by a rather pretentious Franco-Italian hotel. In the late seventies and early eighties it was frequented by Bunner, James L. Ford, Brander Matthews and other newspaper men 132 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 133 and artists, and as sucli it was used by Mr. Ford in his humorous sketch "Bohemia In- vaded" under the name of the Garibaldi. The Garibaldi was a basement restaurant, and the yard in the rear beyond the window, guarded by thick iron bars, was littered with old casks. Here Tommy Steele and Charlie Play and Kitty M3UDfl3D3JJIVAJA TJUADIR .L n33a FI30AJ S3iai1ARa.23MiW3l1H .anu^upuanA Bainbridge of the Merry Idlers and all the gay Bohemians held high carnival until young Etch- ley, the artistic person, made his appearance and precipitated the onslaught of the Philis- tines. The grated window in the rear, through which Charlie Play passed in his caustic com- ments on the restaurants' commercial habitues, is still to be seen. What was then the dining- 134 THE NEW YORK room was later partitioned into a number of little living rooms. With the strange and pleasant conceit on the preceding page Mr. Bunner introduced the read- ers of The Midge to the Brasserie Pigault, that quaint and mysterious haunt of Dr. Peters and Father Dube, and Parker Prout, the old artist, who had failed in his career because of too much talent, and M. Martin and old Potain, who lost his mind after his wife's death, and Ovid Marie, the curly-haired music-teacher from Amity Street. It was as printed that the pat- rons of the old wine shop saw and liked best its sign. Thoughts of that sign and of the warmth and comfort and cleanliness within, and of Madame Pigault, neat and comely, knitting — now knitting t'other side of Styx — and of the sawdust-covered floor and of the little noises of a gentle sort inspired Mr. Bunner to that fine anti-prohibition sermon in which he showed with truth and keen humour the "estimable gentlemen who go about this broad land de- nouncing the Demon Drink," that there were wine shops not wholly iniquitous and that bred not crime, but gentleness and good cheer. But OF THE NOVELISTS 135 not only has there been for many years no trace of the Brasserie Pigault; it is doubtful if it ever had any tangible existence. Brasserie Pi- gault, Mr. Ford, who knew Bunner in the early days, says, was any one of the quaint little French wine shops of which there were so many in the quarter to the south of "Washington Square in the later seventies and early eighties. No. 159 Greene Street, the site of the old French bakery mentioned in The Midge, has been long occupied by a tall office building. On Houston Street, near what was then South Fifth Avenue, was the shop of Goubaud, the dealer in feathers, where died Lodviska Leezvinski, the mother of the Midge. Charlemagne's, where Peter and the Midge went often to dine, was probably our old friend, the Eestaurant du Grand Vatel. "De Duchess," Chimmie Fadden, his friend "de barkeep," and the latter 's "loidy fren," during one of their outings in the city strolled down South Fifth Avenue and lunched together at the restaurant of the White Pup. The iden- tity of the White Pup is obvious enough to any one whose memory of New York goes back a 136 THE NEW YOEK dozen years or so. It served many times as a background for fiction. For example, it was used by Miss Ellen Glasgow for one of the New York scenes of The Descendant. Eecrossing Washington Square and moving up Fifth Ave- nue we find at 19 and 21 West Ninth Street two houses made over into furnished rooms. But only a short time back and it was the little Franco-Spanish South-American Hotel, which was the original of the Casa Napoleon, the modest and inviting hostelry where lived so many of Mr. Thomas Janvier's men and women — Mrs. Myrtle Vane, who did the New York so- ciety news for Western papers; Mr. Dunbar and Miss Bream, Mr. Witherby and Mrs. Mor- timer, the web-spinning capitalist in a small way — the home of the genial Duvant and the refuge of the family Efferati. "Janvier knows his New York," once said John Breslin — high praise, for few have known the city as did the old fire chief. His comments on the New. York of some of the other writers were more forceful and less polite. The Casa Napoleon — or the Hotel Griffon, to give it its real name — had another literary in- OF THE NOVELISTS 137 terest. It was the little restaurant to which Mr. Howells sent Ray (in The World of Chance) during the young writer's first weeks in New York. Mr. Janvier, who at such times as he was in the later years of his life in New York was a frequent visitor at the Casa Napoleon, dwelt at length in his stories on the establish- ment's "attractive look," and the balcony that ran along the line of the second-story windows, in which flowers were growing in great green wooden tubs. The Louis Napoleon of Mr. Jan- vier's tales was Louis Napoleon Griffon. In the odd little white frame building that in bygone years was No. 581/2 West Tenth Street, Frederick Olyphant, who figures in Brander Matthews 's The Last Meeting, had his studio. The house was reached from West Tenth Street by passing through a dim alley, "worn by the feet of three generations of artists." This structure, which holds a very important place in the New York of fiction, will later be de- scribed at length. The artist life about Tenth Street was also the theme of the Van Dyke Brown stories. On Eleventh Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, was the building in 138 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS whicli Fulkerson, Conrad Dryfoos and Basil March conducted Every Other Week. It was on Union Square, in front of Brentano's, that Margaret Vance and Conrad Dryfoos met for the last time before the latter was killed in the great strike. CHAPTER V The Square of Phillips and Whitman — The Boarding House of "The Great God Success" — ^How Phillips Began as a Novelist — The Trail of "Predestined." So rich is Washington Square South with its frontage of decay, degeneration, and poverty, grinning derisively across the Square at Wash- ington Square North, in its associations with the fiction dealing with New York life, that it is difficult to make a beginning. But let us stop, first of all, before a three-story, red brick struc- ture between Sullivan and Macdougal Streets, a structure that has to do not only with an in- dividual tale, but with the turning point of a career that was as rich in achievement as it was unhappily brief. David Graham Phillips was living in that house when he wrote The Great God Success, and there he laid the scenes of a story that was in many ways autobiographical. From the inside he knew the boarding-house with the high stoop on the steps of which the boarders gathered of summer evenings to watch 139 140 THE NEW YOEK the children sprung from many nations play in the Square. In the story iToward, the hero, two months out of Yale, finds employment with inadequate returns on the reportorial staff of the News Record (The New York World) and goes to live in this house, where he meets the girl Alice and experiences one of life's poign- ant tragedies. David Graham Phillips, in writing TTie Great God Success, was trying his prentice hand, which means that he was in a measure in the imitative stage, and there is a curious echo of Balzac's Pere Goriot in one par- agraph of the tale. Like Madame Vauquer (nee de Conflans) Mrs. Sands was keeping what might be called une pension hourgeoise. And in the Pension Sands, as in the Pension Vauquer, a new lodger, we were told, generally took the best rooms ; then slowly or swiftly came the so- cial and financial disintegration, marked by ascending step from story to story until the cubby hole under the eaves was reached. , Only occasionally in the tale the characters moved far from the neighbourhood. Just round the cor- .ner, in South Fifth Avenue as it was then called, was formerly the Bestaurant of the Chat OF THE NOVELISTS 141 Noir, where Howard and Alice usually dined. True, there were occasionally times when they went farther afield, to the Manhattan over on Second Avenue, or to the Terrace Garden fal up on the East Side. As has been indicated, it was The Great God Success that led Phillips to take the decisive step. It was against the wishes and advice of many of his closest friends. They pointed out that it was giving up a com- fortable position in journalism for the uncer- tainties of fiction. They called it "spoiling a good newspaper man to make a poor novelist." It was indeed a step that called for courage. Phillips's only perceptible resources for the mo- ment were two articles that had been accepted by George Horace Lorimer for the Saturday Evening Post at a price of seventy-five dollars each. Few books of the last decade and a half con- jure up more vividly Washington Square than Stephen French Whitman's Predestined, a very unusual and unfortunately neglected novel of five or six years ago, and from the Square, to north, east, south and west, lead the trails of Felix Piers in the swift, pitiless years of his 142 THE NEW YOEK degeneration. There was, on the south side of the Square, a hotel which marked a definite step on the way. It was described as a ' * small hotel, square, flat-roofed, built of green brick, six sto- ries high, the narrow entrance trimmed with ex- ceedingly thin slabs of greenish marble." As a matter of fact, while Mr. Whitman had a definite edifice in mind, a hotel that for years has been housing writing and painting men and women, the description was written in such a way that it served as a thin disguise. On the north side of Eighth Street, close to the Square, an old, white dwelling house had been converted into an Italian restaurant called "Benedetto's," where a table d'hote dinner was served for sixty cents. It was there, through the tobacco smoke, Felix watched the patrons, their feet twisted be- hind chair legs, their elbows on the table, all arguing with gesticulations. Sometimes, there floatfed to him such phrases as: "Bad colour scheme! Bad colour scheme!" "Sophomoric treatment!" "Miserable drawing!" "No at- mosphere!" Benedetto's, Mr. Whitman ex- plained, was a Bohemian resort. It may read- ily be identified as the Hotel Gonfarone at the COLONNADE ROW. IN LAFAYETTE PLACE, OPPOSITE THE OLD ASTOR LI- BRARY, WAS THIS CURIOUS RELIC OF THE OLDER NEW Y'ORK. THESE HOUSES WERE WHITE, WITH TALL PILLARS AND DEEP BALCONIES. LITTLE GARDENS, SURROUNDED BY IRON RAILINGS, SEPARATED THEM FROM THE STREET, f. MARION CR.4WF0RD INTRODUCED THE SECOND HOUSE FROM THE NORTH IN THE ROW IN "THE RALSIONS," AND ANOTHER HOUSE WAS USED BY MRS. BURTON HARRISON IN "THE ANGLO-MANIACS" OF THE NOVELISTS 143 southwest corner of Eighth and Macdougal, Streets. Just one block to the south, on the south side of the street between the Square and Sixth Avenue, was the boarding-house in which Emma lived before Felix took her to wife. It was a house with old window shutters and the brownstone portico crumbling at the pediment. There have been plenty of bits of descriptive writing about Washington Square in the novels of the past fifteen years. Here is a fragment from Predestined: It had been drizzling: the pavements, beaded with rain, showed, under mistily irradiating street lamps, humid footprints. From the juncture of Macdougal Street and Waverly Place, the trees of "Washington Square spread out a mass of grey-black shadows un- derlaid with the horizontal pearly lustre of wet asphalt paths. Here and there, a yellow shaft of light, en- larged in the damp air, streamed past the tree-trunks, and beyond upper branches, illuminated window-panes shone peacefully, their mellow squares etched over, as it were, by delicate traceries of twigs. On lower Fifth Avenue, two blocks north of the Square, in one of those old brick houses of massive, plain exterior, with Ionic pillars of marble and a fanlight at the arched entrance, lU THE NEW YORK that preserve unobtrusively, in tlie midst of a city that is being constantly rebuilt, the pure beauty of Colonial dwellings, lived the Ferrols. There Felix had a welcome home in the bright early days before the catastrophe that marked his first step on the downward path. The wretched days of Felix's life with Emma were passed in a flat-house on Second Avenue below Fourteenth Street. The exact building that the author had in mind may be found on the east side of the avenue between Eleventh and Twelfth Streets. The saloon on Fourteenth Street near Third Avenue which Felix patro- nised was one associated with the name of a former heavy-weight prize fighter. Mrs. Snatt's boarding-house, where Felix went to live after the death of Emma, was on the north side of Thirteenth Street, between Second and Third Avenues. Three or four years ago the particu- lar house, with a number of others, was torn down to make way for the back of a large the- atre which fronts on Fourteenth Street. The trail of Predestined, as will be indicated in the later papers in this series, led to other parts of the city, notably the old French Quarter which OF THE NOVELISTS • 145 used to be in the neighbourliood of Twenty- seventh Street, just west of Sixth Avenue, and to a certain apartment in "West Thirty-second Street, which was drawn from a studio once occupied by the artist Harrison Fisher. CHAPTER VI Mr. Davis and His Van Bibber — Stevenson's Velvet Jacket— The Fourteenth Street of "The Exiles." About two years ago the late Mr. Eichard Harding Davis and the writer, in the former's home near Mount Kisco, New York, were talk- ing of the New York literary atmosphere of the 'nineties of the last century. "Those days in my case," Mr. Davis said, "were what I call the velvet jacket days of our literary activity. Do you remember the velvet jacket of Eobert Louis Stevenson?" The writer confessed that it was a little before his time, that he could not claim personal acquaintance, but that it was familiar enough through the old portraits. "We had our own men then, Mr. Howells, Mr. Aldrich, Mr, Stockton, and the rest," Mr. Davis went on, "but Stevenson was the magnetic, the dominat- ing, literary figure. Just as he himself had played the 'sedulous ape' to others, so it was the fashion of young writers of five and twenty years ago to imitate him. He came to us and 146 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS 147 he brought with him his velvet jacket. It was a famous jacket, and became a kind of oriflamme of the literary calling. " " Something, like Bal- zac's white monk's robe in the eighteen for- ties ? " was the suggestion. * * Only Stevenson 's jacket was destined to become the father of an illustrious line of jackets. We were young then, and we had other ideals. The day of com- mercialism had not yet come. We did not think and talk of how much a story earned for us. It was enough that we had a story in Harper's, or Scribner's. With elation we told our friends about it and they read it and liked it or criti- cised it. Sometimes we insisted in reading it to them ourselves. But in that method danger lurked. A great many of the stories of those days could be traced to the velvet jacket. The young man sitting down at his writing table to construct a masterpiece had his pen, his pad, his bottle of ink. Also sometimes an idea. But to achieve the proper method of inspiration, to rouse himself to heights of creative frenzy, he needed the jacket — ^just like that of R. L. S. Sacrifices were made in Bohemia in those days for that jacket, privations were endured. I 148 THE NEW YOEK never would wear one. My attitude in the mat- ter was regarded as a fatal eccentricity. It placed me forever beyond the pale." Perhaps all this is in the nature of a digression. But to the writer it seems to have the flavour of the old days, when the world was young, and, when in Mr. Davis's case, his Cortlandt Van Bibber was in the making. Some one once cruelly yet cleverly summed up Van Bibber as "the office boy's idea of a gentleman," and in this estimate there was, perhaps, a certain measure of truth. Yet, as a matter of fact, in the beginning Van Bibber was hardly a real character at all or even meant as such. He was simply a very cor- rectly dressed and well manipulated dummy with the right sort of bowing acquaintance on Fifth Avenue and membership in the proper clubs — just the sort of figure that Mr. Davis needed for the expression of the curious whim that might enter his head. He enabled the au- thor to give a point and to work out a solution to all the little "What Would You Do In That Event" problems of everyday life. Mr. Davis sees two young persons whom he suspects of being a runaway couple, dining in a restaurant OF THE NOVELISTS 149 near Washington Square ; he promptly turns it into fictioii by introducing Van Bibber as a mouthpiece of his own ideas of propriety; to act as Best Man and to steer off the pursuing elder brother of the groom in the direction of Chicago. He notices a beggar who has re- peated the same story of starvation to two or three kindly disposed persons; Van Bibber is brought along as the agent of the proper sort of punishment. He perceives in Delmonico 's a servant of dignified bearing holding a table for a master and a master's guests. How does that servant feel? Is not his soul alive to some sen- sations of mortification and envy? Van Bib- ber's man comes to solve the problem as Mr. Davis sees it. He muses over the effect an anonymous letter would have upon certain per- sons. Van Bibber shall try the experiment. Whenever there is a bully to be thrashed, a burglar to be shown the way to a better or wor- thier life, or a pair of little wan-faced East Side children to be delighted with the joys of the swan boats of Central Park, it is in reality Mr. Davis who is distributing figuratively the re- wards and the punishments, with Van Bibber 150 THE NEW YOEK as only the puppet answering obediently to the dexterously pulled strings. That was the Van Bibber of yesterday. "Where are you, oh, Van Bibber of to-day? You have come to forty years and more and may you be as fundamen- tally fine in your maturity as you were in the callower days! Perhaps the manner in which you bearded Carruthers in his apartment and lectured him on a father's duty to a daughter was a trifle unfortunate. But beneath you were youth, and generosity, and chivalry, and the spirit of noblesse oblige! The writer likes to think of you to-day as doing your share in the struggle for the world's liberty; helping to hold the line in Flanders with the same indomitable spirit that, in former years and in kindlier strife, spurred you to stand like a rock in re- sponse to the thrilling call of ' ' Hold 'em ! Hold 'em for Old Nassau!"; or perhaps, daring shell and shrapnel as the driver in the American Am- bulance Corps, swift and efficient in the per- formance of your duty, but not ashamed to drop a manly tear at the sight of sorrow and suffer- ing. If Mr. Davis still claimed you in the great and terrible days that began in August, 1914, n to CO o 3 3§2 z o to z 5 o a " c SI w K n. ty e: o. Z t;^ , (-. H a m < < a 1 Bi t/i T '^ fTl U z n z ^ °s uj M o o! ." > ffl « Z < z S Pi £ < ■5 CQ S S^ h tb n ?^ S m z n Z to -5 r w 35 CO < to IS Z ^ 04 OF THE NOVELISTS 151 it was unquestionably upon some such mission that you were sent. But wherever you are, Van Bibber, Van! — Cortlandt, old boyl (too many years has our friendship endured to permit of anything like formality) Ho — no, not that, but * ' Here 's to you ! ' ', and ' * Sante ! ' ' and, well, con- sider the sentiment also expressed in Flemish, Walloon, Italian, Servian, Eussian, and Japa- nese. Although neutral, there is no reason why one should be a positive fanatic in one's neu- trality. Eichard Harding Davis struck his highest, best and most human note when telling of men and women lonely and homesick in other lands. The nostalgia had been strong upon him. It had been treasured in his memory, and at times the balm of spring air, some subtle odour of perfume or flower, a picture, a line in a book or a letter, brought over him with remarkable vividness the same sensations of strange, over- whelming loneliness that he had felt some time in the years gone by when he was knocking about somewhere a few thousand jniles away from the lights of Broadway and the tall tower of the Madison Square Garden. This note 152 THE NEW YOEK dominated all his work in whicli he found his background in other lands. He used it very ef- fectively a number of times, and yet it never seemed to grow stale. It was a nostalgia that comes upon strong men, never maudlin, never weakly sentimental, but a great yearning home- sickness, that eJEpresses itself feelingly, simply, colloquially. Near the end of The Exiles, Hol- combe, the New York assistant district-attor- ney, leaving Tangiers, asked Meakin, the police commissioner who had been indicted for black- mailing gambling houses, if he could do some- thing for him at home. In the latter 's reply we have what is as powerful and as sincere a bit of writing as Mr. Davis ever did. "I'll tell you what you can do for me, Holcombe. Some night I wish you would go down to Fourteenth Street, some night this spring, when the boys are sit- ting out on the steps in front of the Hall, and just take a drink for me at Ed Lally's; just for luck. That's what I'd like to do. I don't know nothing bet- ter than Fourteenth Street of a summer evening, with all the people crowding into Pastor's on one side of the Hall and the Third Avenue L cars running by on the other. That's a gay sight, ain't it now? "With all the girls coming in and out of Theiss's, and the sidewalks Crowded. One of them warm nights when OF THE NOVELISTS 153 they have to have the windows open, and you can hear the music in at Pastor's and the audience clapping their hands. That's great, isn't it?" Well, he laughed and he shook his head, "I'll be back there some day, won't I?" he said wistfully, "and hear it for myself." Turning from Meakin to the versatile Van Bibber, we find at the corner of Nintb Street and University Place the French restaurant (Hotel Martin) from which he started out as ' ' Best Man. ' ' The tables at which Van Bibber and the runaway couple were dining are in the one-story addition that runs along Ninth Street. On the steps running down from the hotel en- trance to the sidewalk of University Place Van Bibber met the groom's elder brother, and promptly sent him off to Chicago. Later he wished it had been Jersey City. A block to the west, at the northwest corner of Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, is the house in which Van Bibber came upon his penitent burglar. CHAPTER VII Purlieus of Greenmch Village — The Pie Houses of "The Man Hunt"— West Tenth Street. BuNNEE coined a striking phrase when he spoke of the "bourgeois conservatisna of Greenwich Village." But that was written many years ago before the invasion of the old American ward by the foreign element had really begun, and when a few minutes' walk from the tall clock tower of Jefferson Market whisked one back to the atmosphere and conditions of the early half of the century. The sight of that tall clock tower filled the soul of Chad {Colonel Carter of Carter sville) with unutterable bitter- ness. Brander Matthews, in one of his Manhat- tan, Vignettes, spoke of John Suydam noting the "high roof and lofty terrace above all the yawn- ing baskets of vegetables and the pendent tur- keys." In "Aunt Eliza's Triumph" Mr. Townsend took us to Greenwich Village, Aunt Eliza living in a house on Bank Street. In the changing city to-day there are few 154 A BEMNANT OF THE GBEENWICH VILLAGE THAT WAS. THE OLD STtroiO HOUSES FACING SHERIDAN FABK. THESE HOUSES WERE NOS. 90 AND 92. WO. 90 WAS FOEMEBLT THE HOME OF JULES GUEEIN, CHIEF OF COLOUR OF THE FACIFIC-FANAMA EXPOSITION 165 156 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS more curious corners than that which the reader will find by going down into Greenwich Village half a dozen blocks southwest of the Jefferson Market Police Court. Just where Barrow Street and Commerce Street join there is a lit- tle cluster of sinister looking houses of very unusual construction. Years ago Arthur Train found them in one of his city rambles. The buildings and the sordid neighbourhood were laid away in his memory and brought into use when he wrote The Man Hunt. In that tale he introduced a kind of Thieves' Court, a resort of yeggmen, into which the hero ventured at night in his city wide search for the missing man. In the tale the cab turned into the little street, "A few gnarled and distorted , trees, whose trunks burst out of the concrete pavement, raised their dust-laden branches, prehensile and unnatural, into the starlight. A hundred feet from where the street began it turned sharply to the left, forming a right angle, and debouched again into another thoroughfare. Had one of the ends been closed it would have formed a natural cul- de-sac — an appendix to one of the great canals of the city. A rickety gas lamp leaned danger- THE "pie houses" OF GKEENWICH VILLAGE. JUST WHEBE BARROW AND COMMERCE STREETS JOIN THERE IS A LITTLE CLUSTER OF HOUSES OF VERY UNUSUAL CONSTRUCTION. ARTHUR TRAIN MADE USE OF THIS CURIOUS BIT OF LOCAL COLOUR IN "the man hunt." OF THESE HOUSES HE ■WEOTE: "STRANGELY ENOUGH, WHEN THE STREET TURNED THE HOUSE TURNED, TOO, SO THAT HALF ITS FRONT FACED EAST AND HALF NORTH. THE NATURAL INFERENCE WAS THAT THE INSIDE OF THE HOUSE WAS SHAPED LIKE A PIECE OF PIE, WITH ITS PARTIALLY BITTEN END ABUTTING ON THE CORNER" 157 158 THE NEW YOKK ously toward a flight of high wooden steps in the angle of the street. Strangely enough, when the street turned the house turned, too, so that half its front faced north and half east. The natural inference was that the inside of the house was shaped like a piece of pie, with its partially bitten point abutting on the corner," The Man Hunt, written a number of years ago, purported to deal with events of the year 1915, a time of great war. With certain exceptions that strange corner in Greenwich Village re- mains as Mr. Train described it. The gnarled trees have gone, and from an old inhabitant the writer learned that they were cut down six or seven years ago. A house of red brick, three stories high, with a stoop of some ten steps, and long, French win- dows on the first floor, in "that red gash of crosstown brick" — West Tenth Street — that was the setting for the greater part of James Oppen- heim's The Nine-Tenths, the story of a news- paper for the uplifting of the masses. West Tenth Street has always been a favourite ave- nue of invasion for the novelist entering Green- wich Village, and at that curious comer where OF THE NOVELISTS 159 West Tenth and West Fourtli Streets cross eacli other at right angles he is almost certain to stop and point out a paradox. Also in Greenwich Village he invariably contrasts the chaste re- spectability, the general air of detachment and hushed life of the other days with the slovenli- ness and dust, the squahd poverty of the pres- ent. To the Village Oppenheim 's ' ' Joe ' ' Blaine went with the purpose of making a neighbour- hood out of a chaos, of organising the jumble of scattered, polyglot lives. It was a new world to him. "So the whole city was but a conglom- eration of nests of worlds, woven together by a few needs and the day's work, worlds as yet undiscovered in every direction, huge tracts of peoples of all races leading strange and unas- similated lives." CHAPTER VIII rrom Poe to Porter — ^Abingdon Square — ^Variek Street —Sheridan Park— The Wall of "The Last Leaf." It is a far cry from ' ' The Fall of the House of Usher" to the twisted streets of Greenwich Vil- lage as they are reflected in the pages of the novelists of the last decade and a half. Yet, in passing, it may again be recorded that at the very gateway by which the village is entered, in Sixth Avenue close by Waverly Place, Edgar Allan Poe once lived, and there wrote that ex- traordinary tale. Also, that at another time, when he was in his twenty-eighth year, he in- habited, with Virginia, his child wife, a modest wooden house that was numbered 113 Carmine Street. It was within a few steps of the grave- yard of St. John's, and in the year 1837 Poe had a habit of wandering through the quiet, restful place. A quiet, restful place no more. But even more quiet and restful. than it was in the fourth decade of the last century it was when Thomas Payne inhabited it. Then the 160 NEW TOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 161 Village of Greenwicli lay far beyond the city, separated from it in the summer by a mile of marshy and nntilled land, in winter by a dreary COSMOPOLITAN NEW YOEK. A LONDON SLUM waste with a single road leading across a snow- bound way. But the century and more that separates us from the Greenwich Village of Tom Payne seems not a whit longer than the twenty years 162 THE NEW YOEK of 0. Henry's "The Thing's the Play," a tale which revolves about a house near Abingdon Square. "On the ground floor there has been for twenty-five years a little store where toys and notions and stationery are sold." One night twenty years ago there was a wedding in the rooms above the store. The Widow Mayo owned the house and store. Her daughter Helen was married to Frank Barrie. John De- laney was best man. The ceremony was fol- lowed by a misunderstood situation, which sent both men out somewhere into the unknown and left the bride of a moment alone with her twenty solitary years. There are plenty of houses near Abingdon Square where on tiie ground floor toys and notions and stationery are sold, but the writer confesses that he has been able to find none which seems exactly suited to the setting of the tale. Nearby is Varick Street, which plays a part in the same author's "The Unknown Quantity. " " Eagged, poverty- haunted Varick Street," 0. Henry called it. There was the bakery of Thomas Boyne, and there, in a squalid brick tenement, Dan Kin- solving, in company with Kenwitz, found the OF THE NOVELISTS 163 daughter of the man his father had ruined. There, too, — ^in the red brick district, — was "The Furnished Room," probably the most pa- thetic of all the stories that 0. Henry penned, — the young man invading the great city in a search for his lost love, sensing her presence in the room that the landlady has shown, detecting the faint odour of mignonette. To the end shy and almost suspicious of the stranger who was not the casual stranger, the acquaintance scraped in a mood on a bench in Madison Square, or Sheridan Park, or at some comer of "that thoroughfare which parallels and parodies Broadway," Sidney Porter was, of all men, one of the most difficult of approach. There was a little circle of his intimates, con- sisting of such men as Richard Duffy, Oilman Hall, Robert H. Davis, H. Peyton Steger, Rob- ert Rudd Whiting and a few more, to whom he was accessible at any time of the night or day. But even these men knew that it was out of the question to arrange formally a meeting between 0. Henry and some one who wanted to know him ; knew that at the first hint the quarry would take fright and disappear. So the encounter 164 THE NEW YOEK had to have every appearance of mere chance. Into Porter's rooms on Irving Place the friend would drop, apparently for a word or two of business. With him there would be a stranger, whom the friend had chanced to pick up on the way. Nine times out of ten the friend would not introduce the other two. But after a few minutes ' talk, and in response to a prearranged signal, the stranger would remark that he had stumbled on a joint near the Bowery, or on upper Broadway where there was a cocktail mixer who had tended bar in forty-seven cities of the United States. Before he had finished Porter had reached for his hat. The friend was forgotten, and arm in arm stranger and story- spinner sallied forth into the night. The bait thrown out was not always a cock- tail mixer and his experiences. **The most picturesque bit of rear tenement that remains in New York. " " That was the hint that I used when the nod came" one man who had found 0. Henry in the way suggested told the writer. "And in three minutes we were in the street. I led him down Irving Place to Fourteenth, to Sixth Avenue, past the Jefferson Market Police OF THE NOVELISTS 165 Court, into Greenwich Village, past Sheridan Park, and down Grove Street to the very end. There, between the front houses, Nos. 10 and 12, there is an opening. Beyond the opening is a triangle, in the middle of which is a tall tele- graph pole, and at the back there are three three-story brick houses, the front windows of which look out diagonally at a wall on which leaves are growing. 'There is a story there,' said Porter, *a story that suggests an episode in Murger's Vie de Boheme, where the grisette, at night, waters the flowers to keep them alive. The lifetime of the flowers, you remember, was to be the lifetime of that transient love.' He wrote that story, I am sure, in 'The Last Leaf,' and when I see that bare, dreary yard, and the blank wall of the house twenty feet away, and the old ivy vine, I recall the pathetic tale of Sue and Joanna and the masterpiece that old Behrman painted at the cost of his life." CHAPTER IX The Trail of "Max Fargus"— The House of the Tin Sailor — Shysters' Row — ^A Mythical Part of Irving Place — The Course of Empire — 68 Clinton Place. Nine or ten years ago, wlieii the mood of Honore de Balzac was strong upon him, Owen Johnson wrote Max Fargus, a novel which made no marked stir, which was not the most cheerful reading, but which, by virtue of its grim power and straightforwardness of nar- rative, has won a place on that shelf made up of the books which are never very widely read, but are never quite forgotten. Above all it is of importance in this book because it was New York as not one novel of a thousand is New York. It was the expression of a period in the author's development when his writing hand was moving in the sweeping shadow of CcBsar. Birotteau, and the second part of Lost Illusions, and the brief but unforgettable Gohseck. Bal- zac had searched Paris frantically until he had found the name "Z. Marcas." Owen Johnson 166 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS 167 prowled doggedly about New York until he had found a definite setting of the scene for eveiy episode of Max Fargus. A mere street or neighbourhood was not enough. In that street THE JEFFEESON JiABKET POLICE COTJBT. OWEN JOHNSON'S "MAX FABQUS" or neighbourhood there had to be the right house. That house had to have the proper age and architecture. The tale opened in the "House of the Tin Sailor" on one of the side 168 THE NEW YORK streets east of Second Avenue near Stuyvesant Square. "A third of tlie way down the block, on the north side, there projected above a door- way the figure of a tin sailor, balancing two pad- dles which the breeze caused to revolve." The house is still there, but the sailor and his pad- dle are gone — were gone when the author of the novel and the chronicler of these pages to- gether sought the home of Sheila Fargus one day last June. Even more vivid in the matter of detail were the law offices of Bofinger and GroU, the latter character, by the way, drawn directly from a lawyer known by name to every reader of a New York newspaper. Almost unchanged to-day these offices may be found at the gateway enter- ing Greenwich Village. Go down to the Jeffer- son Market Police Court, the tall tower of which, in the bygone days, used so to perturb the soul of the old darkey Chad of F. Hopkinson Smith's Colonel Carter of Carter sville. Con- fronting the barred windows of the prison an- nex, from Sixth to Seventh Avenues, runs a short row of dingy, undersized houses, given over to the lawyers who practise in and about OF THE NOVELISTS 169 the Court, Ten years ago the lawyers were forced to dispute their foothold with half a dozen small shops. The shops have dwindled, but the lawyers still hold their own and batten upon the unfortunate. In the row the oflSces of Hyman GroU and Alonzo Bofinger were the most pretentious and immaculate. The glass front sparkled. The gilt announcement ar- rested the eye. There GroU spun his webs, and Bofinger builded cunningly but to his own ulti- mate undoing. From West Tenth Street the trail of Max Fargus led down to "Washington Square, for it was on a bench at the northeast corner of that Square that Max Fargus was to meet Sheila Vaughn. Bofinger, hot upon the scent, dodged southward from his office amid the filth of Sixth Avenue. "The Square suddenly discovered it- self, that smiling barrier which interposes itself between the horrors of Third Street and the thoughtless royal avenue which digs its roots here and stretches upward to flower like a royal palm in the luxuriance of Central Park." At the period of the story the Square had not yet fallen before the vandal march of business, 170 THE NEW YOEK though already the invaders showed their men- acing front ahove the roofs. From the Square the lawyer trailed Sheila to her home; first northward along the avenue, then eastward on Twelfth Street. At this point Mr. Johnson was guilty of a most astonishing blunder. He speaks of the pursuit leading from Twelfth Street north along Irving Place to Fourteenth Street. Of course Irving Place does not run below the northern side of Fourteenth Street. The trail beyond that point led westward to Sixth Avenue, northward a dozen blocks, then westward again, until the woman, thinking she had shaken off any possible inquisitive follower, entered the boarding-house for improvident ac- tors near Seventh Avenue. Bofinger had found out what he wanted to know. Edgar Fawcett, in the story of A New York Family, pointed out the significant fact that all the great capitals of history, after many hesi- tant swerves and recoils, have taken a steadfast western course. This feature, however, is probably less true of our own than of any other metropolis of modern times. Chelsea and Greenwich Village were thriving populated OF THE NOVELISTS 171 communities when the eastern portion of the city of the same latitude was farm and swamp land. Mr. Fawcett's work was an excellent OW FOUETEENTH STBEET, VEET NEAHLT OPPOSITE THE SOTJTHEEN END OP IBVING PLACE, IS A BBSTATJ- BANT NOTED FOE ITS MUSIC AND ITS BEEE. IT HAS APPB^EED SEVEBAL TIMES IN THE FICTION DEAL- ING WITH l^EW YOEK LIFE. FOB EXAMPLE, FEAN- CES HODGSON BUBNETT USED IT IN "THE SHUTTLE," THAT VEET WIDELT BEAD NOVEL OF INTERNATIONAL MABBIAGE OF SEVEN OE EIGHT YEAES AGO. THEEE THE IBEEPEESSIBLE G. SELDEN, VTHOSE AMEEICAN SLANG HAD SO ASTONISHED AND PUZZLED ENGLISH- MEN, DINED IN STATE WITH HIS CBONIES AFTEB THE BUBOPEAN TEIP WHICH STAETED HIM ON THE BOAD TO COMMEECIAL SUCCESS illustration of the element that has been so often lacking in the local colour of the New York of fiction. He was strenuous, indomitably per- 172 THE NEW YOEK sistent, undoubtedly sincere. His descriptions were apparently laboriously and conscientiously wrought. But tbey were too often unconvinc- ing. Much is to be said of his treatment of quaint corners of suburban New York, of Brooklyn, of Greenpoint, of Hoboken. One of the houses of the picturesque Colonnade Eow in Lafayette Place was the home of Mrs. Eussell Leroy, described in A Hopeless Case. The old church at the southern end of Lafayette Place mentioned in the novel was St. Bartholomew's. The dwelling houses on the east side of the street disappeared years ago. Moving west- ward again, passing Grace Church, which Mr. Fawcett described as "looming up a tall and stately sentinel at the upper end of Broadway," and the St. Denis Hotel, where Basil and Isabel March (W. D. Ho wells 's A Hazard of New Fortunes) stayed during their invasions of New York, we find in West Tenth Strqet, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the home of Spencer Delaplaine, the husband of Olivia Delaplaine in Mr. Fawcett 's novel of that name. Two blocks away, at the Brevoort, lived Clinton Wain- wright, Mr. Fawcett 's "Gentleman of Leisure." OF THE NOVELISTS 173 One of Mr. Faweett's most vigorous descrip- tions occurred where, in this book, he contrasted lower Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. Di- rectly across the street from the Brevoort, on the east side of the avenue, is No, 68 Clinton Place, interesting as being not only the scene, but the raison d'etre, of Thomas Janvier's A Temporary Deadlock. In one of the Fifth Ave- nue houses near, here lived the Huntingdons of Edgar Faweett's A Hopeless Case. CHAPTEE X Crawford's New York — Old Second Avenue — Tompkins Square — The' House of "The Last Meeting" — Colonel Car- ter's Home. F. Maeion Cbawfokd belonged to a race of novelists — a race whose influence seems to be dominating the lighter literature of the early half of the twentieth century — ^who are untram- melled by circumstance of mere creed or speech ; who turn to their work with a recognition of the great fundamental principle that human nature is everywhere pretty much the same ; that love, hatred, avarice, jealousy, make romance equally in Madagascar and Maine. The story-tellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote of soils other than their own for the purpose of giving their extravagances the appearance of reality and verisimilitude. They sat down to their writing tables in much the same spirit as Tartarin started for Algiers. The Spain of Le Sage and Beaumarchais was as strange, as de- lightful, and as unreal as the Country of the 174 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 175 Lilliputians or the Brobdingnagians. Thack- eray in all his more important stories took his men and women at some time in the narrative to Paris or Weimar or Eome, but it was to the British society of these places that he intro- duced us — a society which carried with it its usages, its prejudices — ^its Lares and Penates. Among the story spinners of our day Mr. Davis, invading the shores of the Mediterranean and imaginary South American republics for local colour, had to take with him a few men and women out of Mr. Gibson's sketch book to estab- lish himself soundly; and Mr. Anthony Hope needed an Englishman to carry him through Euritania. Even Mr. Kipling, so persistently hailed as the trumpeter of world-wide litera- ture, has confined himself almost entirely to English-speaking people. His tales of native life are exotic. Mr. Crawford was more typi- cally the pioneer. So distinctly was he a cos- mopolitan, that his New York stories in no way compared with the splendid Saracinesca series ; in the former he failed to make us feel the vast- ness, the complexity of the metropolitan life that was behind his men and women. In find- 176 THE NEW YORK ing a home for the Lauderdales, Mr. Crawford ohviously made use of the vine-covered resi- dence of Mr. Eichard Watson Gilder, to which he had been a frequent visitor, on the north side of Clinton Place, a few doors east of Fifth Avenue. He spoke of Clinton Place never having been a fashionable thoroughfare, al- though it once lay in a fashionable neighbour- hood. Farther east on Clinton Place, in "an odd, old structure tenanted by Bohemians," lived Paul Hathaway {The Midge). Again taking up Mr. Crawford's New York, the sec- ond house of old Colonnade Eow, opposite where the Astor Library used to be, was the home of Walter Crowdie and his wife Hester. A little garden, surrounded by an iron railing, separated the house from the street. These white houses, with their tall pillars and deep balconies, were among the most interesting and picturesque relies of the older New York. John Ealston and Katharine Lauderdale, on their spring day walk strolled up Stuyvesant Street and passed St. Mark's Church and on to Tompkins Square, with its broad walks and hordes of screaming children — Julian Ealph & E4 ?* 1 H li) ^ s tn o « u Z CO a e>^ t3 U n H P Z o < s f" < H ^ w < n s 03 Q 05 Z 3 Z P < n IS 6! ° < . OS Bi OF THE NOVELISTS 177 wrote of these in People We Pass — and beyond across the lettered avenues to the timber yard at the water's edge. On Avenue B was the canary bird shop of Andreas Stoffel, of Mr. Janvier's An Idyll of the East Side. Claire Twining, in Edgar Fawcett's An Am- bitious Woman, noted the "wide, airy expanse of the Square lighted with innumerable lamps" on her wild flight from Slocumb after the out- break of fire in Niblo's Theatre. In that story Mr, Fawcett referred to the time when Tomp- kins Square was a "dark horror to all decent citizens living near it." By day set aside as a parade ground for the city militia, which paraded there scarcely twice a year, its lamp- less lapse of earth was by night at least four acres of brooding gloom, and he who ventured to cross it stood the risk of thieving assault, if nothing more harmful. The Grosvenors lived in a big, dingy mansion on Second Avenue, near Stuyvesant and Euth- erf ord Squares, which neighbourhood Mr. Faw- cett characterised as "one of the few frag- ments that have been left uninvaded by the merciless spirit of change." Near by, in a 178 THE NEW YOEK little red brick house, dwelt Mrs. Montgomery, of Henry James's Washington Square; and Bunner told us how at night the strong wind used to blow the music of St, George's bells half across the city to the Midge's ears. "It was as though Stuyvesant Square snugly locked up for the night sent a midnight message of re- proach to the broader and more democratic ground, whose hard walks knew no rest from echoing footsteps in light or dark." Farther down, near the avenue's southern extremity, on the northwest corner of Second Street was the large, red brick house where Ernest Neu- man went to live under an assumed name after his release from the Tombs Prison, where he had been on trial for the murder of his be- trothed, as described in Henry Harland's As It Was Written. The Karons of the same writer's Mrs. Peixada lived between Sixth and Seventh Streets, and across the way was the pawnshop of Bernard Peixada, "a brick house, although the bricks were concealed by a coat of dark grey stucco that blotches here and there had made almost black." The pawnbroking establishment was on the ground floor, and the ' OF THE NOVELISTS 179 broad windows in front were protected, like those of a Jail, by heavy iron bars. In these windows were musical instruments, hpusehold ornaments, kitchen utensils, firearms, tarnished uniforms, women's faded gewgaws and finery, and behind these, darkness, mystery and gloom. The three upper stories were hermetically sealed and wore a sinister and ill-omened aspect. There has not been for years a struc- ture in the neighbourhood even remotely sug- gestive of this shop. At the corner of Eighteenth Street and Fifth Avenue was the house of Uncle Larry Laugh- ton (Brander Matthews 's The Last Meeting), where the Full Score Club met the evening that Frederick Olyphant was "shanghaied" by the man with the Black Heart. The original of Laurence Laughton was Laurence Hutton, and the house in question was the home of Pro- fessor Matthews 's father. The scene of the dinner in The Last Meeting was the library, to which was transferred, for the purposes of the story, Laurence Hutton 's famous collection of death masks. The quarters occupied by Colonel Carter of 180 THE NEW YOEK Cartersville during that period of Ms life wlien he was in New York trying to interest the J'. ^ J ■^^ -K THE HOME F. HOPKINSON SMITH FOUND FOB COLONEL CAHTER agents of English syndicates in the railroad scheme, the consummation of which would have OF THE NOVELISTS 181 given many of the very first Virginian families easy access to the Atlantic Coast, were de- scribed by F. Hopkinson Smith as being in "an old-fashioned, partly furnished, two-story house, nearly a century old, which crouched down behind the larger and more modern dwelling fronting on the street," designated in the book as Bedford Place. The spot was within a stone's throw of the tall clock tower of the Jef- ferson Market. The street entrance to this curious abode was marked by a swinging wooden gate, opening into a narrow tunnel, which dodged under the front house. "It was an uncanny sort of passageway, mouldy and wet from a long neglected leak overhead, and lighted at night by a rusty lantern with dingy glass sides." Bedford Place was West Tenth Street, and over the swinging wooden gate was the number— "581/2." When the Tile Club of glorious memory flourished, and made merry ashore and afloat, this quaint bit of local colour existed in its entirety. Most of it, however, was destroyed when Mr. Maitland Armstrong, SHEINE OF TESTEEDAY. THE OLD PASSAGE LEADING FBOM THE STREET TO THE FRAME STRUCTURE IN THE REAR IN ■WHICH THE TILE CLUB HAD ITS HEADQUARTERS, AND IN WHICH THE LATE F. HOPKINSON SMITH, BY WHOM THE ABOVE SKETCH WAS DRAWN, FOUND A NEW YORK HOME FOB COLONEL GEORGE FAIRFAX CARTER OF CAB- TEBSVILLE, FAIRFAX COUNTY, VIRGINIA. IN THIS TUN- NEL THE COLONEL ENGAGED IN PISTOL PBACTICE IN PBEPABATION FOB THE EXPECTED DUEL WITH THE BROKER, KLUTCHEM, WHO HAD SPOKEN IN TERMS OP DISPARAGEMENT OF THE PROPOSED AIR LINE RAILWAY THAT WAS TO GIVE SOME OP THE VERY FIRST FAMILIES OF VIRGINIA EASY ACCESS TO THE ATLANTIC SEABOARD, THE PASSAGE, BEARING THE NUMBER 58%, WAS ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF WEST TENTH STREET ABOUT ONE HUN- DRED YARDS EAST OF SIXTH AVENUE AND ALMOST DIRECTLY OPPOSITE THE OLD STUDIO BUILDING. IT DISAPPEARED SOME TWENTY YEARS AGO WHEN THE FRONT BUILDING, NUMBER 58, WAS REMODELLED 182 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 183 The entrance and the eastern half of the white frame structure in the rear, where the Colonel had his home, remain intact. The swinging wooden gate whence "Chad" swooped down upon the complacent shopkeepers of the quar- ter was for years a familiar landmark of the neighbourhood. It opened into the tunnel directly under the stoop of No. 58 as it exists to-day. To the west of the gate the steps curved up to the door of the front house. Peering through the iron gate in front, one may see part of the dark, uncanny tunnel where the Colonel indulged in pistol practice prepara- tory to his expected meeting with the broker Klutchem. The garden where Fitz and the Major took refuge while "Chad" held the lighted candle as a mark for Carter's skill was then between the two houses. Few traces of it remain, for the extension built in the rear of No. 58 covers the greater part of the ground. Those who witnessed the stage presentation of Colonel Carter of Cartersville will doubtless re- member that the scene of one act was laid in the Colonel's dining-room. When the play was in preparation Mr. Smith piloted the scenic artist 184 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS through the old building, with the result that the long room made familiar to theatregoers as the scene of the Virginian Don Quixote's exploits was an exact reproduction of the original cham- ber. In the rear may be found the little door opening into the hall and the fourteen little white wooden steps by which Carter and his friends mounted to the upper story of the struc- ture, where from one of the west windows "Chad," looking out into the night, saw the tall, illuminated tower of "de jail" looming up omi- nous and mysterious. A few hundred yards away, on Sixth Avenue, was the cellar saloon patronised by Carter and his Virginian friends. Mr. Smith recognised three dominant types in American life. From Colonel Carter of Car- tersville, in which he attempted to portray the old Southern chivalry so rapidly passing away, he passed in Tom Grogan to the study of the ubiquitous Irish-American type. Caleb West completed the trilogy with a picture of the sturdy life sprung from the New England soil. PAET lY The Heaet of New Aeabia CHAPTER I The Outstanding Figures — Robert Burns's Ayrshire — The France of "Quentin Durward" — What California Meant to Kipling — Thunder in the Catskills. The American traveller to — ^let us say — ^the counties of Ayrshire and Dumfrieshire, North Britain, may or may not find there the impres- sion of the Scotland that was. That is some- thing which depends entirely upon the indi- vidual. To one the air will be "fuU of ballad notes, borne out of long ago." He will men- tally have reconstructed the old Eoman wall which protected ancient Britain from the dep- redations of Pict and Scot. He will have had a vision of the Centurion watching on the ram- parts outlined against the sky. He will have seen the Legions in camp. Winding stream and stately hill will suggest the old clan feuds. The border will bring to him with a particular vividness all the history of two thousand years. Another wiU not venture far afield, preferring to peruse ten days old American newspapers in 187 188 THE NEW YORK tlie seclusion of the reading room of the King's Arms in the High Street of Ayr. But let his weariness be ever so great, his longing for the sight of the Glasgow boat that is to bear him homeward ever so keen, he cannot evade the imprint that has been left on town, street, and countl-y lane by the men and women of the verse of Eobert Burns. If, in the most prosaic spirit in the world, he ventures forth to purchase cer- tain trifles of wearing apparel, his steps almost certainly will lead past the tavern of Tam o' Shanter. Two or three miles to the south stands AUoway Kirk, and beyond the "banks and braes o' Bonny Doon." Ten miles east- ward is Mauchline, with its Poosie Nancy's Tavern of the Jolly Beggars. It matters not if the soul be attuned to nothing other than stocks or soap. He may succeed in ignoring all the history of the land, but he cannot escape taking away with him something of the impression that Burns left on the country and people of whom he sang. To the end of his days that American will retain something of Highland Mary, and "The Cotter's Saturday Night" and Bonny Jean, who was not so bonny after aU, OF THE NOVELISTS 189 and the strange ride of Tarn o' Shanter, and "a man's a man for a' that." Formal history is easily forgotten: that his- tory which soaks into the mind through its association with the famous characters of fic- tion or verse is not. Most of us have read something of the condition of England after the Norman Conquest and of that France which crafty Louis XI welded into a nation. But most of us, if quite honest, would he ready to confess that the impressions that have endured are those which have come to us through the pages of Ivanhoe and of Quentin Durward. It is with the eyes of Wamba the Jester that we have seen most keenly the pageantry of the lists of Ashby de la Zouche and the burly figure of Richard of the Lion Heart ; with the eyes of the young Scottish archer that we have seen the horrors of the Castle of Loches and the cunning and superstition of Louis. One hun- dred works by learned historians could give no more graphic picture of the life of the Europe of the middle ages than that which Charles Reade flung before his readers in The Cloister and the Hearth. Though he played ducks and 190 THE NEW YOEK drakes with history, where can a more vivid and lasting impression of the Paris of the Va- lois kings, of Louis XIII, and the Wars of the Fronde be derived than from the pages of the genial Dumas? If Thackeray had continued Macaulay's History of England, and written of the age of Queen Anne, as he once intended to do, how many of us would have retained a livelier knowledge of that period than those of us have retained who possess a sound knowl- edge of Henry Esmond? Is the acquaintance of the average American of the last generation or this with the Red Skins of the eiighteenth century based upon the volumes of Parkman or upon Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales? As it is with history, it is with cities and streets. To Eudyard Kipling at the time of his first visit to the United States, California was not a State, nor a people, nor a civilisation. It was the background of the stories of Bret Harte ; the scene of Eoaring Camp, Eed Gulch, and Sandy Bar. Salem may have given birth to illustrious men and women, but in thinking of it we see first of all the figures of Hester OF THE NOVELISTS 191 Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. Go up along the Hudson Eiver to Sleepy Hollow and is not your first thought of Ichabod Crane and the headless horseman? What does the roll of thunder in the Catskill Mountains suggest more quickly than the twenty years' sleep of Eip Van "Winkle, and the ghostly men of Henrik Hudson at their game of bowls? You are visiting the Charter House in London. Is there one of the long generations of pensioners there who had actual existence that means nearly so much to you as Colonel "Tom" Newcome, who an- swered "Adsum" when his name was called, and stood in th^ presence of his Master? You are visiting, in Paris, the cemetery of the Pere Lachaise. Whose tomb would you rather be shown, that of Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean, if it had a tangible existence, or that of Bossuet? If, in happier days, you were on your way to the Eiviera, perhaps to the fascinating wicked- ness of the gaming tables at Monte Carlo, being rushed along at eighty kilometres an hour by the Cote d'Asur, and the station lights showed you the word "Tarascon," would not your first thought be of the immortal Tartarin returning 192 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS from his Algerian exploits followed by his faithful camel? And as it is with cities so is it with the streets of cities, and when, perhaps a quarter of a century hence, we shall have a national literature comparable or perhaps superior to the literature of older lands we shall, in New York, or Boston, or Philadelphia, or San Francisco, or Chicago, or New Orleans, be able to point to innumerable Maison Vau- quers distinctive settings of the scene of endur- ing works of fiction. For now and in the future as in the past, the men and women of the world of make-believe will stand out clearly and vividly, while those who have had actual existence will seem somehow impalpable, ready to vanish like a mist. CHAPTER II The Story of "The Bread Line"— Identifying the Char- acters—Publication Offices of "The Whole Tamily." New Yobk 's nightly bread line at the corner of Tenth Street and Broadway has been made familiar to readers all over the land in a dozen stories by 0. Henry. But the bread line has its individual novel some years before William Sidney Porter found his way out of the south and west to the hospitable noises and odours of Jayville, near Tarrytown. That was the book by Albert Bigelow Paine, who later be- came the biographer of Mark Twain. It was the story of the attempt of four Bohemians, two writers and two artists, to establish a weekly paper, which in the tale is known as the Whole Family. The four men have knocked about a good deal in the literary and journal- istic life of New York, their daily work had brought them into contact with publishers and editors, and they have evolved a scheme for a weekly which they believe is certain of popular- 193 194 THE NEW YOEK ity and financial success. This scheme is broached for the first time as the four are sit- ting round a table in a restaurant not far from Washington Square. It is New Year's Eve. Barrifield, one of the two writers, in his soft, drawly, delightful voice unfolds the idea, point- ing out its novelty and arguing its certainty of success. Just before midnight they leave the dinner table, and in high spirits cross to Broad- way and move northward toward Grace Church. At Tenth Street they stop to watch the familiar, pathetic spectacle — the Bread Line — that line of waiting, hungry men, each of whom receives every night at twelve o'clock a cup of coffee and a loaf of bread. This is the logical beginning of the story. Its logical end comes a year later, when, having lost every- thing in the venture on which they had builded such extravagant hopes, they come upon one another on the same corner, driven there by hunger, and waiting their turns. Quite as interesting as the tale itself is the story of how The Bread Line came to be writ- ten. The experiences upon which it was based were actual experiences of the year 1897. It OF THE NOVELISTS 195 is all true, or nearly true. The four most prominent men of the book are Barrifield and Perny, the writers; and Van Born and Living- stone, the artists. The initial letter of the names gives the clue to the real originals. Barrifield is Irving Bacheller; Perny is Albert Bigelow Paine ; Van Born and Livingstone are respectively Frank Verbeck and Orson Lowell. The stout, middle-aged man named Capers, who describes to Perny the art of transforming an autumn poem into a Christmas poem, and of changing "the golden rod like a plumed warder closing the gates of summer" of Sep- tember, to the "chrysanthemum, a royal god- dess at the gates of fall" of November, was the late E. K. Munkittrick, an inheritance of the New York Ledger school of letters, and one of the brightest and most amiable of the lighter verse makers of yesterday. The original of Bates, the dissolute advertising man, had a real existence. Frisbie, was Louis Klopsch, the founder of the Christian Herald, in the book called The Voice of Light. The Eev. Monte Banks was the Eev. T, DeWitt Talmage. 196 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS ' Truth. The Woman's Monthly was the Ladies' Home Journal. The Youth's Friend was the Youth's Companion. The Road to Fortune was Success. The Whole Family, the paper about which the plot revolves, was in reality Youth and Home, of which the first issue bore the date November 6, 1897. The publication offices of the journal were at 127 Fifth Avenue, where Verbeck, Hamilton King, and Paine had a suite of rooms on the top floor. As Paine was to be the editor, it was decided to have the publica- tion office there, and thereby save rent. 127 Fifth Avenue then had a flight of steps from the pavement to the first floor above the base- ment. That has been changed now, but other- wise the appearance of the building is the same as it was nineteen years ago. In connection with the correspondence between Mr. Truman Livingstone and Miss Dorothy Castle and their subsequent marriage, it may be said that there was a real "Dorothy" and that since October 20, 1898, there has been a Mrs. Orson Lowell. CHAPTEE III The Maison de Shine — The Original of the Actor's Board- ing House in the Helen Van Campen Stories — Following Vaudeville to Its Lair. More than eight years ago there appeared from the pen of Helen Van Oampen a volume of short stories entitled At the Actor's Board- ing House. These tales were of a very unusual quality. "Mrs. De Shine's boarding-house was a microcosm which becomes just as real to us as the Maison Tellier, or the Pension Vauquer," said one critic of the time. "We come to know the blondined ladies washing out their stockings in the wash bowl, or fighting for first place at table, where they are served with ham and eggs and 'cawfy.' We seem to have met the gentlemen who are 'standing off' Mrs. De Shine for an overdue board bill and curry- ing favour with her by petting her wheezy poo- dle, Fido. There is pathos here, and there is humour, and Helen Van Campen has done for one section of New York what was done years ago for another section by Messrs. Harrigan 197 »^^ ^^/>^ ALTHOUGH IN HELEN VAN CAMPEN'S "AT THE ACTOE'S BOAKDING-HOITSE" THE "maison de shine" was pictured as being in ibving place, in eeal- itt the house which inspired the stories was on the north side of fourteenth street, between third and second avenues. it was there, unchanged, three or four tears ago, but has now disap- PEARED 198 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 199 and Hart, of whom Mr. Howells wrote with sympathetic appreciation. No one before has given us so realistic a picture of the existence which centres around Irving Place — the loves, the jealousies, the makeshifts, and the miseries of the vaudeville performers who make up a little world in themselves." In At the Actor's Boar ding-House and The Maison de Shine, the subsequent book dealing with materially the same people, the boarding- house was represented as being on Irving Place. As a matter of fact the original Pen- sion de Shine was situated on the north side of Fourteenth Street, between Second and Third Avenues. When Mrs. Van Campen be- gan newspaper work in New York she noticed that vaudeville invariably proceeded down- town, on arriving "on Broadway." The vaudeville people spoke much of that noted thoroughfare, but apparently dwelt in a hum- bler neighbourhood. So the writer followed vaudeville to its lair, and found, at East Fourteenth Street, the sketch team who "worked" for "thirty a week and cakes" and, in just as great numbers, the "single act" or 200 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS other turn, "who worked 'steadily at $150 to $200 a week." ''They all lived alike," says Mrs. Van Campen. "Seven a week it cost — and seven seemed plenty, upon investigation. I stayed two weeks. During the second week, the landlady, in tears, requested me to depart. I asked the reason of her inhospitable words. 'Last night at dinner,' said she, with visible agitation, 'Berther come in, and ast you four distinct times, "Will you have steak?" An' I stood there makin' signs, an' makin' 'em again. But it didn't have no effect. Mebbe it'll please you to know that I went an' paid sixty cents for sirloin steak — because I ain't a fool, an' I see you didn't like the grub; but kin I on seven a week give them people better? Well, it's just makin' me sick to watch you, an' I got to ast you to leave. It's better so.' I met the landlady a few months ago. She wore at least a million dollars worth of dia- monds, and a golden 'front' of great beauty. 'I see you ain't doin' a thing to old Fourteenth Street,' she said affably; 'well, we all got our games, I s'pose — but it does seem as if people 'd ruther read about Fifth Avenoo. I would.' " IRVING PLACE LOOKING SOUTH FROM GRAMERCY PARK. THIS IS THE HEART OF O. HENRY LAND. PORTER PENETRATED EVERY CORNER OF "LITTLE OLD BAGDAD ON THE SUBWAY," BUT ABOUT HERE WERE THE SCENES OF THE STORIES NEAREST TO HIS HEART. TWO BLOCKS AND A HALF FROM THE POINT FROM WHICH THIS PHOTOGRAPH WAS TAKEN WAS NO. 55, WHERE PORTER ONCE LIVED. ALMOST ACROSS THE STREET WAS THE SALOON OF "THE LOST BLEND," AND JUST ROUND THE CORNER THE "OLD MUNICH" OF "THE HALBERDIER OF THE LITTLE RHEINSCHLOSS" CHAPTER IV Lower Second Avenue Again — Stuyvesant Square — "The xTortune Hunter"— St. Mark's Place— "Felix O'Day." Once upon a time lower Second Avenue cher- ished seriously the idea of rivalling Fifth Ave- nue as a lane of aristocracy. Most of the stately mansions of other days have gone, but here and there is a structure or a part of a structure attesting the old ambition. Then, too, are Stuyvesant Square and Rutherford Square still maintaining their pride and dignity in the face of the army of invasion. To that portion of the city David Graham Phillips staked a claim with The Fortune Hunter, a novel which, in itself of no marked significance, was exceed- ingly vital as a reflection of a certain phase of metropolitan life. The character from whom the book took its name, the rascally Feuerstein, lived in a boarding-house on Sixteenth Street just beyond the eastern gates of Stuyvesant Square. The house is definitely described and is easy of identification. When the fates were 201 202 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS kind and lie found some unsuspecting acquaint- ance who could be inveigled into paying for his dinner he dined at the Cafe Boulevard on lower Second Avenue. On the benches of Tompkins Square he made love to many of the women upon whoia he deigned to practise his arts of fascination. To his well deserved end he came in the back room of a saloon on East Sixth Street two hundred feet from Second Avenue. While we are in the neighbourhood let us turn to another and more recent book, F. Hop- kinson Smith's Felix O'Day. There, with that characteristic touch of familiar affection, the author plays about St. Mark's Place, the church, and the old graveyard. "Here and there," he tells us, "in the whir of the great city a restful breathing spot is found, its stretch of grass dotted with moss-covered tombs grouped around a low pitched church. At cer- tain hours the sound of bells is heard and the low rhythm of the organ throbbing through the aisles. Then lines of quietly dressed wor- shippers stroll along the bordered walks, the children's hands clasped in their mothers', the IN •'THE FORTUNE HUNTEE" DAVID GBAHAM PHILLIPS STAKED A VERY DEFINITE CLAIU TO A SECTION OF THE CITY, THAT LYING TO THE EAST AND SOUTH OP LOWER SECOND AVENUE. ABOUT THESE STREETS THE AD- VENTURER FEUERSTEIN ROAMED, DINING IN THE OLD CAPS: BOULEVARD, AT SOME ONE else's EXPENSE, MAKING LOVE IN TOM- KINS SQUARE, FLASHING HIS TEETH ACROSS THE COUNTER OP BEAUNER'S DELICATESSEN SHOP IN AVENUE A, AND COMING TO HIS END IN THE BACK BOOM OF A SALOON ON SIXTH STREET, NEAE SECOND AVENUE. THE BOAEDINQ HOUSE IN WHICH HE LIVED WAS VERY MINUTELY DESCRIBED AND MAY EASILY BE IDENTIFIED. IT WAS ON SIX- TEENTH STREET IN THE BLOCK JUST BE- YOND THE EASTEEN GATES OF STUYVBSAKT SQUASE 203 204 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS arched vestibuled door closing upon them. Most of these oases, like Trinity, St. Paul's, and St. Mark's, differ but little — the same low pitched church, the same slender spire, the same stretch of green with its scattered grave- stones. And, outside, the same old demon of hurry, defied and hurled back by a lifted hand armed with the cross." To the eyes of F. Hopkinson Smith, of these three breathing places, St. Mark's was a little greener in the early spring, less dusty in the summer heat, less bare and uninviting in the winter snow. Also it is the most restful of them all. Out of its shade and sunshine run queer side streets, with still queerer houses, rising two stories and an attic, each with a dormer and huge chimney. "Dried-up old aristocrats, these, living on the smallest of pensions, taking toll of notaries public, shyster lawyers, pedlars of steel pens, die-cutters, and dismal real-estate agents in dismal offices boasting a desk, two chairs, and a map." CHAPTEE V The Heart of 0, Henry Land — Where Porter Lived-— The Hotel America — Old Munich and the Little Khein- schloss. In the course of this rambling pilgrimage the name of Sidney Porter has appeared, and will very likely continue to appear, two or three times to one mention of any other one writer. This is due not only to the high esteem in which, the pilgrim holds the work of that singular and gifted man, but also to the fact that the dozen volumes containing the work of 0. Henry con- stitute a kind of convenient bank upon which the pilgrim is able to draw in the many mo- ments of emergency. Perfect frankness is a weapon with whicb to forestall criticism, and so, to express the matter very bluntly, when- ever the writer finds himself in a street or a neighbourhood about which there is little ap- parent to say, he turns to The Four Million, or The Trimmed Lamp, or The Voice of the City, or Whirligigs, or Strictly Business, and in one 205 206 THE NEW YOEK of these books is able to find the rescuing al- lusion or descriptive line. Tbe remote trails, Bedloe's Island, the Battery, the Bowery, to the south; Harlem, Hellgate, and Hell's Kitchen, to the north; stand for service. But it is with a quickening glow and an enthusiasm that is genuine that he plunges garrulously into the subject of what may be called the heart of 0. Henry land. On the west side of Irving Place, between Seventeenth and Eighteeiith Streets, there is a dingy, four-story, brownstone house. The shutters are up. The windows of the upper stories stare down at the passer-by with a kind of hurt blindness. It is as if the structure itself was conscious of a speedy demise, of a swiftly coming demolition. Next year, next month, next week, to-morrow, perhaps, it will be gone, with a towering skyscraper springing up on the site. The number of the building is 55. There, in the front room on the second floor, Sidney Porter lived in the days when he was learning to read the heart of the Big City of Razzle Dazzle. And as he was always con- stitutionally opposed to anything that involved OF THE NOVELISTS 207 arduous physical exercise, the quintessence of O. Henry land lies within a circle of half a mile radius, with number 55 as the centre. Within that circle may be found the hotels of the Span- ish American New York stories, the Old Munich of "The Halberdier of the Little Ehein- schloss," Chubb 's Third Avenue Eestaurant, the Gramercy Park which is so conspicuous in his city tales of aristocratic flavour, the par- ticular saloon which served as the background for "The Lost Blend," the bench — ^which could be confounded with no other bench in the world — ^which Stuffy Pete, one of "Two Thaiiksgiv- ing Day Gentlemen," regarded as personal property, and those other benches in the other square, six blocks to the north, where disconso- late Caliphs, shorn of their power, sat brooding over the judgments of Allah, where fifth wheels rolled along asphalted pavements, and Jinns came obedient to the rubbing of the lamp. To Mr. Eobert Eudd Whiting, with whom he had been associated in the early days when he first began to contribute to the columns of 'Ainslee's Magazine, Sidney Porter once ex- tended an invitation to a luncheon. It was to 208 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS be a Spanisli American luncheon in the course of which 0. Henry was .to make his guest fa- miliar with certain flavours and dishes that he himself had learned to like or at least to endure in the days of his exile in the lands of the Lotus Eaters. The two men at the time were cross- ing Union Square. "Come with me," said 0. Henry, "I will show you the real place. Over at M 's (mentioning a restaurant in a street to the south) you may see the Sefiors, the Cap- itans, the Majors, the Colonels. But if you would sit with the Generalissimos, the Impera- tors, the truly exalted of those countries of Central and South America, accept my guiding hand." And from the square they turned into Fifteenth Street and found, on the south side, some seventy-five yards east of Fourth Avenue the Hotel America, with its patronage of vola- tile Latins, who, if they were not actually plan- ning revolution and the overthrow of some un- stable government, at least had all the appear- ance of arch conspirators. It was the atmos- phere which went to the making of "The Gold That Glitters," which, if you remember, began at the very point at which the invitation was FRONTING ON lEVING PLACE IS THE SALOON OF O. HENRY'S "THE LOST BLEND." IT WAS HEBE THAT THE ADVENTUBEES TOILED TO FIND AGAIN THE PEOPEB INGREDIENTS FOB THE MOST WON- DEBFUL DBINK IN THE WOELD, A BEVEBAGE THAT HAD MOVED NICABAGUA TO RAISE THE DUTY ON CIGARETTES, AND TO CONTEMPLATE A DECLARA- TION OP WAB AGAINST THE UNITED STATES AND OBEAT BBITAIN 209 210 THE NEW YORK extended, "where Broadway skirts the corner of the square presided over by George the Veracious." In serial form the articles that make up this volume ran in the Bookman. In the issue of that magazine for June, 1914, there ap- peared an 0. Henry symposium. Ten lists representing ten opinions as to the ten stories that had made the most lasting impression were printed. One of the few tales that appeared on several of the lists was "The Halberdier of the Little Eheinschloss. " The Bierhalle and restaurant called Old Munich was the one of which Porter said that long ago it was the re- sort of interesting Bohemians, but that now "only artists and musicians and literary folk frequent it." For many years, the tale informs us, the customers of Old Munich have accepted the place as a faithful copy from the ancient German town. The big hall, with its smoky rafters, rows of imported steins, por- trait of Goethe, and verses painted on the walls — ^translated into German from the original of the Cincinnati poets — seems atmospherically correct wheii viewed through the bottom of a OF THE NOVELISTS 211 glass. Then, the proprietors added the room above, called it the Little Eheinschloss, and built in a stairway. Up there was an imitation stone parapet, ivy covered, and the walls painted to represent depth and distance, with the Ehine winding at the base of the vineyarded slopes, and the Castle of Ehrenbreitstein loom- ing directly opposite the entrance. To Old Munich came the young man with the wrecked good clothes and the hungry look, to assume the armour of the ancient halberdier, aiid, on a certain eventful evening, to be confiscated to serve menially at the banquet board. Into many parts of the city had the present pilgrim ventured in his search for the back- ground that would best fit the very definite description of the Old Munich of the tale. For a time the hunt seemed vain. But one day he spoke to Mr. Gilman Hall on the subject. The latter laughed. "Do I know the real Old Munich? Very well, indeed. I dined there often with Porter. No wonder you have not found it. You have been looking too far to the north, to the south, to the west. Don't you realise that Porter would never have walked 212 THE NEW YOEK that far if he could have helped it? The only time I ever persuaded him afoot as far as the Eiverside Drive and Seventy-second Street he stopped, and asked with an injured air, if we THE INTERIOR OP "OLD MUNICH" OF O. HENRY'S "THE HALBER- DIER OF THE LITTLE RHEINSGHLOSS." "THE BIG HAIL, WITH ITS SMOKY RAFTERS, ROWS OF IMPOBTED STEINS, PORTRAIT OF GOETHE, AND VERSES PAINTED ON THE WALLS — TRANS- LATED INTO GERMAN FROM THE ORIGINAL OF THE CINCIN- NATI POETS" OF THE NOVELISTS 213 had not yet passed Peekskill. Here is number 55. Why not try just round the corner V So fifty feet to the south, and a short block to the east, and the setting of the tale was found. Formerly "old man Brockmann," who defied the threatened suit, was the proprietor. There can be no indiscretion in identifying him as the Muschenheim of the old Arena in West Thirty- first Street and of the Hotel Astor. Since his time Old Munich has been known both as Scheffel Hall and as Allaire's. It is at the northwest corner of Third Avenue and Seven- teenth Street. There is a natural free hand swing to certain parts of the 0. Henry descrip- tion, but even without the corroboration of those who knew personally of Porter's associ- ations with the place, one glance at the long raftered room is enough to stamp it as the place where the waiter known simply as Number Eighteen witnessed the comedy of the hot soup tureen and the blistered hands, and William Deering finished the three months of earning his own living without once being discharged for incompetence. CHAPTER VI Once More in Washington Square-^"The Last of the Knickerbockers" — ^Waverly Place — St. George's — "The Boule Cabinet" — The Marathon — ^No. 13 Washington Square — Rupert Court. The spell of the old city was strong on the late Herman Knickerhocker Viele when he wrote the charming and whimsical The Last of the Knickerhockers, and the tale revolves inti- mately about the streets adjacent to Washing- ton Square. The principal setting of the scene was the Buggies mansion on Kenilworth Place, which had gone the way of so many of the aris- tocratic New York mansions of another age and become a boarding-house. But even in its fallen estate it was inhabited by old aristocrats, among them Alida Van Wandeleer and her mother, with ancestors buried in St. Mark's Churchyard. For the Kenilworth Place of the story read Waverly Place. The parlour win- dows of the house looked out on the street across the railings of ?ca. iron balcony, wherein 214 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS 215 the sinewy tentacles of an old wistaria vine were interwoven and interlaced. There was a street lamp directly in front, and often at dusk, before the shades were drawn, a rectangle of yellow light was thrown on either wall within, with the pattern of Nottingham lace curtains and the moving silhouettes of leaves. The book dealt with what was called the "below Fourteenth Street colony." Near the Euggles mansion was the Cafe Chianti, where they had music and charged only fifty cents, including wine. The Cafe Chianti was in what had been grandfather's old house. When Alida and her godmother went to call on old Mrs. Van der Weiff, "the old lady who lived so excessively upstairs, and opened the front door by machin- ery," they proceeded from Waverly Place east- ward to University Place; then north past the French Hotel, the old furniture shop that had seen so much better days, and the library whose subscription list is history itself. At Four- teenth Street they avoided Dead Man's Curve by a diagonal course across Union Square. To the older woman every step of the way called up a memory. At Irving Place she had an 216 THE] NEW YOKK anecdote for every corner; at St, George's a romance for every house. "Ah, the good old people and the good old days, when the Eden gates stood wide open as those of Stuyvesant Park!" The Last of the Knickerbockers was one of the few really "atmospheric" society novels of New York ever written, hitting off the days of two or three decades ago, when the last of the old families were giving way socially to the new millionaires, the kind who knew "no- body very much yet." Just millionaires, and wandering dukes, and people they crossed the ocean with; of whom Alida doubted "if they could have given anything very big without the Waldorf register." After Princeton Burton Egbert Stevenson went to New York to work on the Tribune for a time and while there gathered a knowledge of the city of which he made much use in The Holladay Case, The Marathon Mystery, and The Boule Cabinet. In the first named book the address of the Cafe Jourdain, where Frances Holladay was imprisoned, was given definitely as number 54 West Houston Street. That house has been torn down and on the site OF THE NOVELISTS 217 is tiie new home of the New York Telephone Company. The principal scenes of The Boule Cabinet were laid in the old house still standing at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street — a two story and basement square brick dwelling with a yard at the side — ''that plot of ground next door" to which Vantine makes reference. Incidentally that house was the one where Mr. Davis's Van Bib- ber found his burglar. It was there that the boule cabinet was taken and there that the sub- sequent tragedies took place. While on the subject it may be well to venture briefly into streets which are legitimately in the province of another chapter. In The Marathon Mystery Lester's home was given as the Marathon Apartment House, which was supposed to be directly opposite the Tenderloin Police Station on West Thirtieth Street. When The Mara- thon Mystery was written the station was on the north side of the street and the opposite side occupied by a row of dwellings. The au- thor placed the apartment purposely where no apartment was and invented a name for it, be- cause he wished to avoid trouble with a real 218 THE NEW YOEK place on account of the extraordinary events that were to happen there. Lester continued to live at The Marathon in the subsequent stories, The Bonile Cabinet and The Gloved Hand. Apropos of this the author was caught napping, for in 1908 the Tenderloin Station was transferred to a new building on the other side of the street, on the exact site of the sup- posed Marathon. Across Washington Square Bohemia and Proletaire gaze enviously at Belgravia, partly obscured by the waving branches of the trees and the white arch. That line of stately dwell- ings is a sturdy bulwark which has been resist- ing invasion for years and seems destined to continue to resist for many years to come. Long ago Henry James set the fashion by plac- ing the scene of one of his novels there. That example has been followed by the men and women of the newer generation until the mere mention of the heroes and heroines of all the fiction dealing with New York who have in- habited these structures of red and white would assume formidable proportions. For example, it was only a year or two ago that Leroy Scott -tk IN THE OLD-TIME NOVELS OF NEW YORK LIFE VISITING ENGLISHMEN IN- VARIABLY STOPPED AT THE BREVOORT. IN ITS NEW GUISE THE HOTEL, WHICH STANDS AT THE NORTHEAST CORNER OF FIFTH AVENUE AND EIGHTH STREET, FORMERLY BETTER KNOWN AS CLINTON PLACE, HAS NOT LOST ITS POPULARITY AS A BACKGROUND FOR FICTION. IT PLAYED A PART IN BASIL KING'S "THE INNER SHRINE" AND MARIE VAN SAANEN ALGl'S "THE BLIND WHO SEE" OF THE NOVELISTS 219 wrote No. 13 Washington Square. Of course there is no number 13, the exact spot where such a number should stand being in the middle of Fifth Avenue as it sweeps northward from the Arch. The exact house that Mr. Scott had in mind was number 17, but he took the precau- tion of changing the number to one that did not exist and also of moving the house across Fifth Avenue so that its real entrance opened upon Washington Mews, for the reason that Mrs. De Peyster, the grande dame of the novel, still maintained a carriage. In another of these houses dwelt, in the full flood days of his material prosperity, Arthur Train's Artemas Quibble. That particular house is now a studio building. Next door perhaps was the home of Eobert Walmsley who married the Matterhorn in the person of a certain Miss Alicia Van Something-or-Other, and yielded weakly to the spell of his early environment; all of which 0. Henry chronicled in "The Defeat of the City." A dozen memories of other Porter heroes and heroines might easily be found in the neigh- bourhood. Allusion has been made to Washington 220 THE NEW YOEK Mews. This street and the corresponding one to the west, known as Macdougal Alley, are two of the quaintest relics of the older New York. They are familiar to tens of thousands. But how many New Yorkers are familiar with Eu- pert Court, also in the immediate neighbour- hood, which plays a conspicuous part in George Bronson-Howard's recently issued God's Man? Here in his own words is Mr. Bronson-How- ard's description of the court, of how to find it, and of how he himself discovered it. "Walk down Eighth Street from Macdougal toward Sixth Avenue. You will find a little archway on the north side, and a dry gutter. I discov- ered it when the gutter was wet and I was in a hurry. It was before I could afford cabs, and my silk hat went several feet toward the south. Thus I found that the alleyway opened into a court containing several trees and a number of window-boxes. A complete square of a court with only one outlet — ^the way I came. I was told it had been an inn-yard. It is now oc- cupied exclusively by Nubians, Senegambians, and Ethiops. A previous book, a romance. An Enemy to Society, had the house of the dominie OF THE NOVELISTS 221 on "West Sixth Street — a former parsonage be- come a thieves' rookery — ^the original is just ofE Sixth Avenue, going west. The Hotel Tip- pecanoe in God's Man was the Hotel Tyler on West Thirty-fifth Street transferred south to Lafayette Street. The Tyler became the Stur- tevant, and was before that the notorious Ti- voli. During fifteen years of New York off and on, I always lived in Greenwich Village." CHAPTEE VII Gramercy Park — The Home of the Von der Euyslings — "The Alternative" — Clubs on the North and Clubs on the South. If there is one corner of the city which more than any other has received the patronage of the modern novelist of New York life it is un- questionably Gramercy Park, There is hardly a house fronting the square which has not served as a home for some of the men and women of recent fiction ; hardly a club in which half a dozen heroes have not been in the habit of entering with the easy swing of old member- ship. Here again is 0. Henry predominant. AH about the private park with its locked gates are the severe mansions of his aristocrats. A house facing the west side of the park was un- questionably the home of the Von der Euys- lings. That illustrious family had dwelt there for many years. In fact, in a spirit of obvious awe, 0. Henry imparted the information that the Von der Euyslings had received the first 222 THE COSMOPOLITAN CITY, VENICE 223 224 THE NEW YOEK key ever made to Gramercy Park. In "The Marry Montli of May" we learn tliat near the Park old Mr. Coulson had a house, the gout, half a million dollars, a daughter, and a house- keeper. It was the daughter who thought to chill her father's springtime ardour by the in- troduction of a thousand pounds of ice into the basement. It was the housekeeper that thwarted the scheme with the result that the old millionaire uttered his deferred proposal, while Miss Van Meeker Constantia Coulson ran away with the iceman. At No. 1 Gramercy Park lived Nan Primrose of Thomas Dixon's The Root of Evil, a selec- tion of residence probably due to the fact that the author at one time had his own home in the house. No. 2 was used by F. Hopkinson Smith as the residence of Mrs. Leroy in Caleb West. It was there that Caleb's wife found a refuge after her flight with Lally. The Princeton Club on the north side at the corner of Twenty-first Street and Lexington Avenue (the old Stanford White house) was the background of many scenes of George Barr McCutcheon's The Alternative, and was also U [I] OF THE NOVELISTS 225 used by Edgar Saltus in The Truth About Tristrem Varich. The adjacent house to the west was the home of Colonel John Gaunt of the house on grameect paek, noeth, used bt beandeb matthews in "heb letter to his second wife" and by owen johnson in "ar- ROWS OF THE almighty" Owen Johnson's Arrows of the Almighty when Gaunt came to live in New York after his wife lost her mind, and also the scene of the story "Her Letter to His Second Wife" in Brander 226 THE NEW YOEK Matthews 's Vistas of New York. Fifty years ago that house belonged to George T. Strong. Mrs. Strong was a daughter of Samuel B. Bug- gies, the founder of Gramercy Park and Union Square. Gramercy was derived from "Crow marcy" meaning "Crooked brook." There is a slab to Samuel B. Euggles in the sidewalk on the west side of the park. Directly across the square to the south is another club closely as- sociated with Owen Johnson's stories "Murder in Any Degree" and "One Hundred in the Dark." There, as of yore, foregather Quinny, "gaunt as a friar of the Middle Ages," and "the genial Steingal, with the black-rimmed glasses, the military moustaches, and the closely cropped beard," and De Golyer, with his epigrams, his incisive mode of speech, and his military click of the heels. Nor, in touching upon the club land that lines the southern side of the Square should the Siwash Club of George Fitch's stories be ig- nored. It was there that Siwash men in New York, far from the beloved campus somewhere in the Middle West, foregathered to discuss about the big fireplace the great team of OF THE NOVELISTS 227 Naughty Six and the various exploits of Ole Skjarsen. For a Siwash man there were few formalities about joining that club. It was simply a case of "Ten Dollars please and sign here." CHAPTEE VIII The Heart of New Arabia — The City as the Artists See It — The Bed Line — Madison Square — ^Union Square- Stuffy Pete's Bench. When we come to a consideration of that part of the trail which shall be designated as ' ' Tea, Tango, and Toper Land" there will be digres- sion in the shape of a chapter or two on the New York of the Playwrights, for many an act of melodrama or comedy has had a city setting quite as definite as the setting of a novel or short tale. So while we are in New Arabia a few words should be said of the artists whose work has been most intimately associated with New York, for many of them have found direct inspiration in the swaying trees of the great squares, the mingling of lights and shadows, and the vast edifices that hedge them in. For example, who has better interpreted the spirit of springtime in "Washington Square than Wil- liam J. Glackens ? In one page he tells a story that three thousand words of descriptive writ- 228 NEW YOKK OF THE NOVELISTS 229 ing can merely suggest. You see tlie Washing- ton Arch and the aristocratic north side of the Square beyond, the Fifth Avenue stage with its load of sightseers on top, motor cars, pri- vate carriages, deep sea-going hacks, pedes- trians, policemen, nurse maids and their charges, perambulating lovers, bicyclists, dogs, cats, and above all, children of all ages and social conditions — in a word, nearly every ele- ment of the city's complex life. And every one of the hundreds of figures reflecting late April sunshine. To Joseph Pennell the incredible, fairy land qualities of New York have appealed as insistently as they did to 0. Henry. To him the mountains of buildings are "mighty cliffs, glittering with golden stars in the magic and mystery of the night." "The city," he has written, "is finer than anything in any world that ever existed, finer than Claude ever imag- ined or Turner ever dreamed. Piling up higher and higher before you, it reminds one of San Ginuguano of the Beautiful Towers in Tuscany, only here are not eleven, but eleven times eleven, not low, brick piles, but noble palaces, crowned with gold, with green, with 230 THE NEW YOEK rose; and over them the waving, fluttering plume of steam, the emblem of New York." And to the names of Glackens and Pennell caa be added a dozen others, those of men who had expressed a city mood or staked a claim to a quarter. In a magazine article by Mr. Louis Baury the various messages which Manhattan conveyed to the various artists were very clearly set forth. To Everett Shinn, the city said: "I suffer"; to Colin Campbell Cooper: "I sing"; to Joseph Pennell: "I work"; to Vernon Howe Bailey: "I soar"; to John Ed- ward Jackson: "I must strive"; to Childe Hassam: "I dream." According to the impoverished painter, Sher- rard Plumer, picked out of the Bed Line to suit the whim of Carson Chalmers, as told in "A Madison Square Arabian Night," New York is as full of cheap Haroun Al Easchids as Bag- dad is of fleas. The men in the Bed Line have come to know them, and there is a Union rate by which the certain stock stories of distress are narrated in accordance with the quantity and quality of the largesse bestowed, Chal- mers, being a munificent giver, was rewarded ACROSS THE SQUARE AND THROUGH THE WHITE ARCH BOHEMIA AND PROLETAIRE GAZE CURIOUSLY AND ENVIOUSLY AT EELGRAVIA OF THE NOVELISTS 231 with the simple and curious truth, the story of that strange and unfortunate gift which made every one of Plumer's portraits show the true inner soul of the subject. In a dozen other tales Porter showed the Bed Liners stamping their freezing feet and the preacher stand- ing on a pine box exhorting his transient and shifting audience. In the Bed Line were Walter Smuythe and the discharged coachman, Thomas McQuade, the night that the red motor , car humming up Fifth Avenue lost its extra tire as narrated in "The Fifth WheeL" It was on a bench of the Square that the millionaire Pilkins found the penniless young eloping couple Marcus Clayton of Eoanoke County, Virginia, and Eva Bedford of Bedford County, of the same State. It was perhaps on the same bench that Soapy sat meditating just what violation of the law would insure his deporta- tion to the hospitable purlieus of Blackwell's Island, which was his Palm Beach and Eiviera for the winter months. It was nearby at least that Prince Michael, of the Electorate of Valle Luna, known otherwise as Dopey Mike, looked up at the clock in the Metropolitan Tower and 232 THE NEW YORK gave sage advice and consolation to the young man who was waiting to learn his fate as told in ' ' The Caliph, Cupid, and the Clock. ' ' While the auto with the white body and the red run- ning gear was waiting near the corner of Twenty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue, Parken- stacker made the acquaintance of the girl in grey and listened to the strange story born in the pages of Eobert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights. Over on the sidewalk just in front of the Flatiron building Sam Folwell and Cal Harkness, the Cumberland feudists, shook hands "Squaring the Circle." In following the trail of 0. Henry's men and women through Madison Square you have the choice of many benches. This is not the case when Union Square is introduced in the story of "Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen." The writer tells you that when Stuffy Pete went to the Square to await the coming of the tall, thin old gentleman dressed in black and wearing the old-fashioned kind of glasses that won't stay on the nose — ^the old gentleman who had been Stuffy 's host every Thanksgiving Day for nine years — ^he "took his seat on the OF THE NOVELISTS 233 third bench to the right as you enter Union Square from the east, at the walk opposite the fountain." Across XJnion Square Hastings Beauchamp Moreley sauntered with a pitying look at the hundreds that lolled upon the park benches in "The Assessor of Success." One evening in the Square Murray and the dis- missed police captain Marony were sitting side by side trying to think of schemes to repair their fallen fortunes. When opportunity came both acted "According to their Lights." The captain was reduced to the point where, to use his own words, he would "marry the Empress of China for one bowl of chop suey, commit murder for a plate of beef stew, steal a wafer from a waif, or be a Mormon for a bowl of chowder." But his code of honour he still re- tained. He would not "squeaL" PAET Y Tea, Tango, and Toper Land CHAPTEE I The Inns of Ketioii— Mine Host of Yesterday— The Trenchermen Beyond the Magic Door — A Little Dinner in the Land of Make Believe. In the course of this rambling pilgrimage the reader will be asked to step into an astonishing number of hostelries, inns, refectories, restau- rants, lobster palaces, or whatever is the poeti- cal or practical name to be applied to those establishments of varying degrees of elegance to which the heroes and heroines of fiction re- sort, ostensibly for food or drink, but in reality to give the author himself a convenient and congenial background. Mine Host himself has become a less prominent figure than he was in the novels of an earlier generation. We no longer see him on the threshold, rubbing his hands, scraping his effusive welcome to the travellers, protesting the quality of his cuisine, service, and beds, then perhaps slipping away to an adjoining room to drop the mask of pre- tended friendliness, to drug the wine, or to pre- 237 238 THE NEW YORK pare the ingenious descending bed that drops unsuspicious victims into dungeon or oubliette. No. M. Terre, who kept the famous tavern in the New Street of the Little Fields — ^where the bouillabaisse came from — ^has become a corpo- ration, and the Maypole Inn, if it were standing to-day, would very probably have been taken over by the Great Western Railway, with the result to the traveller, of more substance and less romance. Already, in earlier chapters, we have heard much of the rattling of knives and forks and dishes. We have lunched at Wasserbauer's with Potash and Perlmutter, at Pontin's with Artemas Qjuibble and his partner; we have in- vaded the near Bohemia of Maria's, Bene- detto's, Solari's, and kindred restaurants in th6 neighbourhood of Washington Square. But in the city to the south eating and drinking were incidental. Crossing the threshold of Tea, Tango, and Toper Land, eating and drinking seemed at times, deriving impressions from the novelists, to be life's main objects. It is a riot of Rathskeller, a tumult of terrapin, to drop into a form of expression imitative of 0. OF THE NOVELISTS 239 Henry. But, after all, why not? What scenes in fiction cling more persistently in the memory than those that deal with the satisfying of man's appetite? "Who ever heard of a dys- peptic hero? Are not your favourites beyond the Magic Door all good trenchermen? Think of the groaning board of Cedric, the Boar of Eotherwood, the good cheer he placed before the Templar and the Prior — ^the fowls, deer, goats, and hares, the huge loaves and cakes of bread, and the confections made of fruits and honey I Or of the hospitality extended by Friar Tuck to the Black Knight in Sherwood Forest I When Dickens wanted to place the final seal of happiness upon his characters he gathered them round the table, and there is no doubt whatever that Old Scrooge, reformed by the visit of the Fairies, became somewhat of a glutton, whose chief delight in his declining years was to dine and wine his new found cro- nies at certain delectable London inns noted for their haunches of venison and saddles of mut- ton. Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d'Artagnan were as proficient with their knives and forks — is that an anachronism? — as they were with 240 THE NEW YORK their rapiers ; and in the course of Les Trois Mousquetaires, Vingt Ans Apres, and Le Vi- comte de Bragellone, you will find two dinners to every duel. So in imagination the pilgrim is gathering together about the board a certain company, and confident in the resources of the city which is so close to his heart, leaves the selection of the viands and beverages to the discretion of the maitre d 'hotel of the Lafa- yette, or the Waldorf, or the Knickerbocker, or the Beaux- Arts, or Sherry's, or Delmonico's, or the Vanderbilt, or the Biltmore, or any other establishment that happens to be associated with the New York novel of the moment. The dinner, as originally planned, was to have been of some thirty odd covers, with a heroine to the right and left of the host, and a heroine before every second plate down the table. But who, in that case, would there have been to preside at the other end of the long board? For certainly most of those men and women of the Magic Land of Make Believe would feel just a little out of place, if seated, partie carre fashion, round a dozen little tables. So perhaps, after all, it is better to make the OF THE NOVELISTS 241 dinner strictly a stag affair, — ^in which, case a club private dining-room replaces the more pretentious hostelry, — and to cancel the invi- tations that had been addressed to Mrs. Eaw- don Crawley (Curzon Street, W.), The Duchess of Towers, Mrs. Arthur Clenham (nee Little Dorrit), Beatrix Esmond, Valerie Marneffe, Thomas Newcome O o Zagloba D'Artagnan O o George Warrington Cheeiyble, Cadet o o Colonel Carter Manin Dooley o o Squire Alworth; QiiCM the Jester o o John Oakhunt Scrooge o o JeS Peters Rip Van Winlde o o Checrvble. Aini Fiiwo Adams o o Tartaria Friar Tuck o o Colonel Starbottle 1 Foithos o o o The Black Knight The Pilgrim 242 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS Mrs. Eiever, Mrs. Olive Newcome (nee Ethel Newcome), Madame Svengali, Eugenie Gran- det, Jane Eyre, Mrs. Hauksbee, and the rest. In which event the gathering at the table will be somewhat as shown in the diagram on the preceding page. CHAPTEE II Doubling on the Trail— "The King in Yellow"— The Blind Alleys of New York— London Terrace. Although this chapter purports to deal with those regions of the city proper to Tea, Tango, and Toper Land, which may roughly he de- scrihed as covering all of the central thor- oughfares of the Borough of Manhattan from Madison Square north to Harlem, the Pilgrim, in accordance with intimations thrown out in the course of previous chapters, is taking the liberty of retracing his steps. So behold him once again in the neighbourhood of Washing- ton Square, once again delving into the jungle of streets that constitute Greenwich Village. It was about twenty years ago that Kobert W. Chambers staked his first New York claim with The King in Yellow. That tale dealt with the Square, the Square of other days, when Mr. Chambers himself was living at No. 60 South, when the old University building was there, and the huge, ugly, square mountains of steel 243 244 THE NEW YORK and concrete were not, and when in "West Third Street, one block to the south, a certain kind of wickedness flaunted itself as brazen as in the "crib alleys" of New Orleans, or in the old San Isidro of Havana. Had McAndrew, the dour Scotch engineer of Kipling's poem, found his way along the narrow thoroughfare from lower Sixth Avenue to Sullivan Street, where the Elevated, overhead, partly hid worldly iniquity from the light of heaven, there might have been a line added to Tears when I raked the ports wi' pride to fill my cup o' wrong — Judge not, Lord, my steps aside at Gay Street in Hong-Kong ! Blot out the wastrel hours of mine in sin when I abode — Jane Harrigan's an* Number Nine, The Keddick an' Grant Boad ! No wonder the spectacle of the old Square con- jured up in the story-teller's mind the picture of a vast lethal chamber where, under munici- pal supervision, the utterly weary and the hopelessly broken might pass to easy rest. A book not easily forgotten, The King in Yellow. In poiat of sheer terror equalling Poe's "The CRAMERCY PARK, SOUTH. HERE WERE THE SIWASH CLUB OF THE GEORGE FITCH STORIES AND THE CLUB WHICH SERVED AS A BACKGROUND FOR OWEN JOHN- SON'S "ONE, HUNDRED IN THE DARK," AND "MURDER IN ANY DEGREE" WASHINGTON SQUARE NORTH, PEOPLED BY THE GHOSTS OF COUNTLESS ARISTO- CRATS OF NEW YORK FICTION. A STURDY BULWARK THAT SEEMS DESTINED TO REPEL THE INVADERS FOR YEARS TO COME. TO ESTABLISH THE RIGHT OF A HERO OR HEROINE TO A PLACE IN THE "SOCIAL REGISTER" IT IS NECESSARY ONLY TO CLAIM A RESIDENCE HERE OF THE NOVELISTS 245 Fall of the House of Uslier" or De Maupas- sant's "Le Horla." The memory of it still haunts after all the years. The, apartment house in The King in Yellow known as The Monastery was in reality The Benedick, intimately known to generations of New York bachelors. It also appeared in Mr. Chambers's Outsiders. Then there was the story "The Whisper." The scene of that was laid in "West Third Street in the palmy days alluded to when the thoroughfare answered shamelessly to the name of "Profligate's Lane." Between Macdougal Street and Greene Street was a dive known as "Billy the Oysterman's." The dominating fig^ire of the establishment was not the proprietor himself, but his cat, "Eed," introduced in the tale. Billy used to boast of "Bed" as the only cross- eyed cat in New York. In "The Whisper" a murder has been committed. A Chinaman has been arrested. In the small hours of the morn- ing there is a conference of the newspaper men who have been assigned to the case at Billy the Oysterman's. They are discussing the crime. A Great Dane dog that had belonged to the 246 THE NEW YOEK murdered girl enters and stretclies himself in his usual place. One of the reporters gives THE OPENINQ THEOUGH WHICH THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN MBLLIKEN PLACE BEACH THE OUTSIDE WOBLD. SO SMALL IS IT THAT ITS DENIZENS MUST SEEK THE EOOFTOPS TO SEE THE JEPFEESON MABKET TOWEB. expression to his theory. At a certain point in the narrative, and at the mention of a name, OF THE NOVELISTS 247 the dog manifests a strange interest. The re- porter perceives it. He leans over and whis- "betond the gate lies milliken place, a tint telangle shut off fbom the sight if not fbom the sound of the city's tumult." bobebt w. ohambebs's "the case OF MB. HELMEB" pers something in the dog's ear, then turns to the door. The dog rises and follows him out. As a rule the impasse, or blind alleys is 248 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS rather rare in New York. But here and there may be found one as quaint as any that appear in the London novels of Dickens or the Paris novels of Daudet. For example, from the northwest comer of Washington Square walk north two blocks to Eighth Street, west to Sixth Avenue, incidentally passing, if you are taking the southern side of the street, the opening that leads into Clinton Court, north to Tenth Street, and then cross under the Elevated at a slight diagonal. Between two brick structures front- ing the Avenue there is a gap of perhaps five feet and a wooden gate. Beyond that gate lies Milliken Place, a tiny triangle shut off from the sight if not from the sound of the city's tumult. High above looms the clock tower of the Jefferson Market Police Court. But so small is Milliken Place, so shut in by the sur- rounding buildings, that its denizens, unless they seek the world without, have to climb to the rooftops for a glimpse of the tower. Mr. Chambers made use of Milliken Place in ''The Case of Mr. Helmer." It was there that the sculptor Helmer had his studio. On the north side of West Twenty-third Street, between W H H S ^ s 249 250 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS Ninth and Tenth Avenues, is a line of houses built far back from the pavement, with protect- ing gardens extending in front. This is known as London Terrace. Practically unchanged, it is a reminder of the days when Chelsea, which long ago ceased to have an identity, was really a village. In one of the Terrace houses Robert W. Chambers found a home for Ailsa Paige, the heroine of his Civil "War novel of that name. In the broad street in front of Ailsa 's house a regiment of Zouaves, departing for the front, receives its colours. CHAPTEE ni The Later Eobert "W. Chambers— The Plaza and the Park — The Patroon and the Pyramid — "lole." The Eobert W. Chambers of the later books, so far as the Borough of Manhattan is con- cerned, is essentially associated with the vast expanse of city which comes under the head of Tea, Tango, and Toper Land — in a word the great hotels, clubs, and theatres, the sweep of Fifth Avenue from Murray Hill to the Plaza, and beyond along the east side of the Park, the Park itself, and the structures that line the Eiverside Drive. This is the social New York which he has attempted to interpret in half a score of successful novels. Stretching, in part, even south of Murray Hill is the "magic coun- try of brilliant show windows, which, like an enchanted city by itself, sparkles from Madison Square to the Plaza between Fourth Avenue and Broadway." In this world other heroines besides Geraldine Seagrave of The Danger Mark were lured by spectacular charities from 2S1 252 THE NEW YORK "the Plaza to Sherry's, and from Sherry's to the St. Regis." Here the Chambers men- about-town dropped into the Holland House for cocktails, or for gossip foregathered in the Patroon Club, which is as obviously the Knick- erbocker Club at the corner of Thirty-second Street and Fifth Avenue as the Pyramid Club of the novels is the Century Association at 7 West Forty-third Street. Here are the studios of the fashionable painters as depicted in The Common Law. 'i But in these days it behooves the novelist to proceed with discretion, lest he bring upon him- self the odious charge of writing a clef. So while hotel, and restaurant, and theatre, and club may be regarded as legitimate settings of the scene, the question of a private residence is always a ticklish one. "You would think," said Mr. Chambers, "that there would be safety in a vacant lot. That there would be perfect security in finding a corner of unoccu- pied ground at, let us say. Fifth Avenue and Ninety-fifth Street, and there building on paper a structure that, in architecture and decora- tion, would be an expression of your hero and OF THE NOVELISTS 253 heroine, or an expression of their forebears. But even in that direction danger may lurk." A point which he illustrated by a story that shall not be told here. Through the Park there are countless strolls by the men and women of Mr. Chambers's book. In one novel it will be The Mall that is introduced, in a second the Bridle Path, in a third the Eamble, in a fourth the "Wistaria Arbour that lies to the south and west of The Mall. This taking his heroes and heroines so often through the Park is a reflec- tion of the novelist's own love and his inherited love for it. Keen as his delight has been in Paris 's Bois de Boulogne, and London's Ee- gent's Park, it is the Central Park of his own New York that lies nearest to his heart. Here, in a nutshell, is a survey of the Eobert W. Chambers' New York as it is reflected in certain of his novels and short stories. "The Princess Zim-bam-Zim" touches Madison Square, "West Twenty-seventh Street, and the Pennsylvania Eailroad Station. ''The Story of Valdez" is laid in the galleries of the Ameri- can Art Association on Madison Square South. TJie Green Mouse introduces Central Park and 254 THE NEW YORK a building that is identified as number 1008 Fifth Avenue. The house and back yard of number 161 East Sixty-fourth Street are the settings of "In Heaven and Earth." The Tree of Heaven deals with lower Fifth Avenue and St. Patrick's Cathedral, and "The Tree of Dreams" with certain model tenement build- ings on the East Side. In "Out of the Depths" there is a scene at the old Calumet Club on Fifth Avenue. East Eiver Park plays a part in "An Overdose." In Central Park and along Fifth Avenue are the scenes of The Tracer of Lost Persons. "The Case of Mr. Carden" deals definitely with the Eamble in Central Park. In The Adventures of a Modest Man, The Green Mouse, "A Matter of Inter- est," and "Diana's Choice" there are scenes in Oyster Bay, South Oyster Bay, Jamaica, and along the Bronx Eiver. But these stories will come up for discussion later, as they belong to the division of the volume called "The City Beyond." There was one book by Mr. Chambers — ^inci- dentally the scene of it was placed definitely at the southwest corner of Madison Avenue and s H £s OF THE NOVELISTS 255 Seventieth Street, where there was no house nor was there likely to be one for the reason that the land was the property of the Lenox Library — that was the subject of wide contro- versy at the time of its appearance, because its bero was generally accepted as being modelled apon a very much exploited personality. That book was lole. "How furious So and So will be when he reads it," said people, referring to the supposed victim of the lampoon. So and So was quick to recognise the resemblance. But the emotion aroused was neither anger nor annoyance, but sheer, unadulterated delight, to which he gave free expression in a letter to the novelist. The book had served to turn in his direction a great deal more of the warm limelight in which he so loved to bask. Yet, very curiously, it was not the Sage of that town in northwestern New York that Mr. Chambers had in his mind at all when he wrote Idle. The model was not even an American model. It was French. Over in Paris, Aristide Bruant, long-haired, bull-throated, gesticulating, was declaiming his verses from the tops of cafe tables. In him were embodied all the physical 256 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS characteristics needed for the character. Fur- thermore, at Bruant's heels followed a score of satellites, for at that particular time Paris was full of those idle, thundering fakers. What induced Mr. Chambers to mix his hero up with the slab furniture business — ^the touch that was supposed to sweep away the last ves- tige of doubt — ^was merely his own intense aversion to slab furniture. CHAPTER IV The Berkeley— Old Debnonico's— The Manhattan Club- Poverty Flat. Of recent years Madison Square seems to have an influence over the novelists of New York something akin to that so long wielded by the trees and asphalt of Washington Square. There is in the turmoil, the light, the rush of the former something very typical of New York life. The tall tower of the Garden yes- terday looming high over the adjacent struc- tures, but to-day dwarfed by its big brother of the Metropolitan Building, has afforded our writers an inspiration, which they occasionally use with singular felicity. The tower is one of the staple subjects of conversation of Mr. Davis's heroes and heroines when they happen to be in South America or Tangier — or on board steamers in the South Atlantic — any place sufficiently distant from New York. The hero of one of Brander Matthews 's Vignettes of Manhattan, the failure in life, pointed out of 258 THE NEW YOEK Delmpnieo's windows — ^when Delmonico's was at Twenty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue — and confessed to his friend of the old college days that he would die out of sight of that tower. BEOBQE BABB MC CUTCHEON FOUND A NEW YOBK BESIDENCE FOB MONTY BBEWSTEB Many of the old landmarks that have passed away in recent years were linked with the Square's associations in earlier fiction. Long before the idea of the huge garden was ever OF THE NOVELISTS 259 conceived the old Brunswick served as the scene of many of the episodes of Mr. Fawcett's novels. On Fifth Avenue, a little below the Square, in the heart of what was until a few years ago the publishing district, and what is now the realm of Potash and Perlmutter, lived the Satterthwaites of his Olivia Delaplaine. Across the city, at Twenty-sixth Street and the East Eiver, Hamilton Knox (J. L. Wil- liams's "The Cub Reporter and the King of Spain") used to dangle his feet over the water and watch the incoming ferryboats while wait- ing for Morgue news. There has been among college men, especially among Princeton men, considerable speculation as to the identity of Hamilton Knox. Hamilton Knox was drawn from Frank Morse, the Princeton half-back of the 1893 Eleven. Two blocks to the north, on the southeast corner of the avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, is the "Berkeley Flats," described by Eichard Harding Davis in Her First Appearance. It was here that the irrepressible Van Bibber brought the little girl whose acquaintance he had made two hours before in the theatre 260 THE NEW YOEK green-room. The apartment of Carruthers must have been in one of the upper stories of the building, for Mr. Davis speaks of Van Bib- ber looking out through the window and down upon the lights of Madison Square and the boats in the East Kiver. This story was writ- ten by Mr. Davis in Twenty-eighth Street, only a stone's throw from the "Berkeley," and the illustrations which accompanied the story were drawn from one of the "Berkeley" apart- ments. Eeturning to Madison Square, the Garden Theatre was introduced in one of Brander Matthews 's Vignettes of Manhattan. It was there that John Stone, the naval officer, and Clay Magruder, the cowboy, saw. Patience the night before the burning of the hotel where they were staying. The "Apollo" Hotel men- tioned in so many of Professor Matthews 's sketches and stories of New York life was drawn from the Belvidere Hotel, at Eighteenth Street and Fourth Avenue. At Number 5 East Twenty-ninth Street is the Church of the Transfiguration, better known as "The Little Church Around the Corner." It was there that Van Bibber, acting as "Best Man," sent OF THE NOVELISTS 261 tte young eloping couple whom lie had found dining on the Terrace at the Hotel Martin. Brander Matthews calls it "The Little Church Down the Street," and makes it the scene and the raison d'etre of his most characteristic tale — the story of the actor's funeral, with its blood-red climax, the bearers passing stolidly down the aisle unconsciously heedless of "the dry-eyed mother of the dead man's unborn child." The curious arched entrance at the street gate was erected in after years and was of course not mentioned by Professor Matthews in his graphic description of the church. Cross- ing the avenue, we find, at the corner of Thirty- fourth Street, the building of the Knickerbocker Trust Company. Once, on the site, stood the old Stewart mansion, which in its later years was the home of the Manhattan Club. It was there that was held the meeting which resulted in the nomination of the Honourable Peter Stir- ling for the governorship of New York. On the north side of Thirty-third Street, a few doors west of Sixth Avenue, was formerly the Cayuga Flat which, under the name of "Poverty Flat," figured in many of James L. the house of biohaed harding davis's "vera the medium" was on the south side op west thiety-fitth street, near sixth avenue and directly opposite the qabrice theatre. this neighboubhood has undergone a remarkable trans- formation in the course of the past ten tears 262 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 263 Ford's short, satiric studies of New York life. In the Cayuga took place "A Dinner in Pov- erty Flat," and it was the scene of many of the exploits of the amiable Police Captain Fatwal- let. The hero of Eichard Harding Davis's "A Walk Up the Avenue" having broken with his fiancee, approaching the hill at Thirtieth Street was filled with satisfaction at the thought of his new-found freedom. At Thirty-second Street this satisfaction was changed to discon- tent. By the time he was passing the Eeser- voir at Forty-second Street — ^which made way for the Public Library— he had made up his mind that he would always remain a bachelor. The sight of the tall white towers of the Ca- thedral at Fiftieth Street looming up before him made him think with a great, wistful sadness of his meeting her some time in the far distant future. At the entrance to the Park came re- morse, meeting and reconciliation. CHAPTER V "The Avenue"— The Old Curiosity Shop of "Felix O'Day" — The Suicide of a Street. Imagine a man had inherited New York, who from early childhood to boyhood, and from boyhood to manhood, had seen its amazing growth, returning to it to-day after a continu- ous absence of fifteen or twenty years. Pic- ture him on the deck of a steamer coming through the Inner Bay, staring at the altered sky-line, being whirled northward from the landing pier through a labyrinth of streets in a taxicab, and finally, having found a tempo- rary home in one of the new hotels in the neigh- bourhood of Forty-second Street, starting out on foot to survey a city that would be at once a stranger and an old friend. Of all the trans- formations that would meet his eyes, the one that would probably seem to him the most mar- vellous, the one most likely to move him to say : "Mere man cannot have wrought all this. Surely, here is where Aladdin rubbed the Won- 264 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 265 derful Lamp," would be that wMch has changed the old Fourth Avenue to the new. "The Avenue" it used to be to its denizens of a decade ago, just as the parallel thoroughfare two blocks to the west is "The Avenue" to those of naore aristocratic tastes and associa- tions. But whether it be regarded as the lane of the mediaeval solitude of yesterday, or the lane of the silent and terrible mountains of to- day, it can be traversed best, within the com- pass of these articles, in the company of the amiable shades of F. Hopkinson Smith and of William Sidney Porter. In the writing of Felix O'Day the creator of Colonel Carter avowedly attempted a novel of New York life that was to have something of the flavour of Dickens. For direct inspiration he went to mouldy stones and broken pave- ments. The task took him to many corners of the city, to the old Studio Building on West Tenth Street, to Gramercy Park, where "the almanac goes to pieces and everything is ahead of time," to Dover Street, that short cut along the abutment of the great bridge, with its nar- row, uneven sidewalk, and its shambling hovels 266 THE NEW YOEK and warehouses, to St. Mark's Place, and to Greenwich Village. But the picture that re- mains longest in the naind is that of "The Ave- nue," between Madison Square and the tunnel, which was "a little city in itself." In this city- lived Bundleton, the grocer ; Heffern, the dairy- man; Porterfield, the butcher; Codman, the fishmonger; Pestler, the apothecary; Jarvis, the spectacle man; Sanderson, the florist; Dig- well, the undertaker; Jacobs, the tailor, and above all Otto Kling of the old curiosity shop in which Felix O'Day found occupation. But they are all gone now. To quote Mr. Smith's words : Hardly a trace is now left of any of them, so sudden and overwhelming has been the march of modem progress. Even the little Peter Cooper house, picked up bodily by that worthy philanthropist and set down here nearly a hundred years ago, is gone, and so are the row of musty, red-bricked houses at the lower end of this Little City in Itself. And so are the tenants of this musty old row, shady locksmiths with a tend- ency toward skeleton keys ; ingenious upholsterers who indulged in paper-hanging on the sly ; shoemakers who did half -soling and heeling, their day's work set to dry on the window-sill, not to mention those addicted to the use of the piano, banjo, or harp, as well as the a Bmm m £ wl^. • BBS »m ■ i B IB U -•■ OF THE NOVELISTS 267 wig and dress makers who lightened the general gloom. And with the disappearance of these old landmarks — and it all took place within less than ten years — ^there disappeared, also, the old family life of "The Ave- nue," in which each home shared in the good-fellow- ship of the whole, all of them contributing to that sane and sustaining stratum, if we did but know it, of our civic structure — facts that but few New Yorkers either recognise or value. The shop of Otto Kling was very definitely described and placed. When O'Day, leaving the theatre district, walked eastward along Thirtieth Street, he saw, when reaching Fourth Avenue, a lighted window, a wide, corner win- dow filled with battered furniture, ill assorted china, and dented brass — one of those popular morgues that house the remains of decayed re- spectability. On a card propped against a broken pitcher was printed: "Choice Articles Bought and Sold— Advances Made." The number of the building was 445. The visitor to this section of the city to-day will find many antique shops similar to that of Otto Kling; but he will not find Kling 's. Six or seven years ago the building that stood at the north- east comer of Fourth Avenue and Thirtieth 268 THE NEW YOEK Street was demolished. With it went several other buildings that stretched along the avenue half way to Thirty-first Street. On the site was erected a tall modern structure, covering the numbers from 443 to 449. That building happens to be the building of the publishing house which gives its imprint to this book. To all practical purposes these lines of description are being written on the exact spot of the labours of Felix O'Day, of Otto Kling, and of his daughter Masie. Then there was the Fourth Avenue of yester- day that has been preserved, for coming gen- erations let us hope, in the stories of 0. Henry. Partly because it was convenient to his various domiciles in New York, and partly because of its quaint picturesqueness, Porter adored it. In half a dozen tales he played whimsically upon its contrasts. Perhaps it would seem at its best through the medium of "A Bird of Bagdad." There it was pictured as a street that the city seemed to have forgotten in its growth, a street, bom and bred in the Bowery, staggering northward full of good resolutions. At Fourteenth Street "it struts for a brief mo- OF THE NOVELISTS 269 ment proudly in the glare of the museums and cheap theatres. It may yet become a fit mate for its high-bom sister boulevard to the west, or its roaring, polyglot, broadwaisted cousin to the east." Then it passes what 0. Henry in "The Gold That Glittered" called "the square presided over by George the Veracious," and comes to the silent and terrible mountains, buildings square as forts, high as the clouds, shutting out the sky, where thousands of slaves bend over desks all day. Next it glides into a mediaevEil solitude. On each side are the shops devoted to antiques. "Men in rusting armour stand in the windows and menace the hurrying cars with raised, rusty iron bumpers, hauberks and helms, blunderbusses, Cromwellian breast- plates, matchlocks, creeses, and the swords and daggers of an army of dead and gone gallants gleam dully in the ghostly light." This medi- aeval solitude forebodes an early demise. What street could live enclosed by these mortuary relics and trod by these spectral citizens? "Not Fourth Avenue. Not after the tinsel but enlivening glory of the Little Bialto — ^not after the echoing drum beats of Union Square, 270 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS There need be no tears, ladies and gentlemen. 'Tis but the suicide of a street. With a shriek "WITH A CRASH AND A SHBIEK FOURTH AVENUE DIVES HBIADLONG INTO THE TUNNEL AT THIKTY-FOUETH STBEET AND IS NEVER SEEN AGAIN." O. henry's "a BIRD OF BAGDAD" and a crash Fourth Avenue dives headlong into the tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street and is never seen again." CHAPTEE VI Concerning the Town of the Playwright — ^"The Charity BaU"— "The Old Homestead"— Clyde Fitch's New York. Aleeadt in these pages has been told the story of the care with which the late F. Hopkinson Smith, when the stage presentation of Colonel Carter of Cartersville was in the making, piloted the scenic artist through the old, ripkety wooden structure ia the rear of number 58 West Tenth Street, in order that theatregoers might see the Colonel's dining-room just as the author had seen it when he was writing the story. Which suggests that there is a New York of the playwright, just as definite, even if more limited in scope, as the New York of the novelist. As a small boy the Pilgrim first saw The Old Homestead. It was, he thinks, at the Fourteenth Street theatre of other days. Very little of the plot remains in the memory, if there ever was any plot to speak of, but sharp and clear stands out that picture of Grace Church, and again he hears the notes of 271 272 THE NEW YORK tlie organ, and sees the ligHted windows and the iron palings, and the pedestrians on Broad- way passing across the stage in the falling snow. It must have been Christmas Eve, for a scene like this on the stage is always Christ- mas Eve, unless it be Thanksgiving Day night in front of the church in a New England vil- lage. Then, to revert again to personal remi- niscence, there were the impressionable teen years, when the old Lyceum Theatre on Fourth Avenue was a source of never failing joy. The world was young then, and the ladies of the stage were houris to be worshipped ardently but bashfully across the footlights. What a long line of plays the present Pilgrim wit- nessed there ! How many of them there were that reflected the New York of the period! Who that saw them can have forgotten The Charity Ball, or Merry Gotham, or The Moth and the Flame, or The Woman in the Case, or Captain Jinks of thei Horse Marines? The first act of the last named piece showed the New York landing dock of the Cunard Line. It was a very different scene from the dock in the Chelsea Piers of to-day, for the action of OF THE NOVELISTS 273 the play was supposed to take place in the early seventies. In the background was the grey river, with Hoboken in the distance, and the great house on the hill. Then in the sec- ond and third acts the actions shifted to a par- lour in the Brevoort House as it was in the heyday of its aristocratic prosperity. In The, Woman in the Case there was an act in the visitors' room of the Tombs Prison, and an- other in a flat in West Fifty-second Street. It was the drawing-room of a New York residence that served as the background for the trag- ically ending first act of The Moth and the Flame, and it was at the altar of a New York church that the moth and the flame came to a final parting of the ways. Other plays by Clyde Fitch, such as The Climbers, The Truth, The City, The Girl with the Green Eyes, and The Stubbornness of Geraldine probably came later, but they were all, in part at least, dis- tinctly of New York. And Fitch was merely one of a number. The same may be said of a score of playwrights who have been busy in the last two decades providing amusement for American theatregoers. THE COSMOPOLITAN CITY, LONDON 274 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 275 But of the older plays there was none that, to the memory of the Pilgrim, suggested and reflected the city more than The Charity Ball, which was the joint work of David Belasco and of Henry C. DeMille, First there was the scene in the chancel of Grace Church. The great scene was staged in an angle of the stair- case of the Metropolitan Opera House on the night of the ball. It was placed there because Mr. Daniel Frohman, who was the producing manager, felt that there was only one title to be used. It was not a matter of choice, but of expediency. "The Charity Ball," said Mr. Frohman, discussing that play reminiscently a few weeks ago, *'was what the play had to be called. Everybody in New York knew about it, throughout the country everywhere people had heard of it. The play was strong enough to stand by itself, but to insure success before the audience some means had to be found of justifying the use of the title. The scene itself naturally fitted a private house. But for The Charity Ball we had to introduce the old Metro- politan Opera House where the ball took place. Finally, we hit upon that angle of the landing 276 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS where crowds do not linger, where the princi- pal characters might meet and the action pro- ceed logically without interruption." CHAPTER VII The Department Store in Fiction — Montague Glass — Edna Terber— Samuel Merwin's "The Honey Bee"— The Shop Girls of 0. Henry. When, in the course of the Eougon-Macquart novels, Emile Zola reached the department store as a phase reflecting Parisian life, read- ers were divided in their opinions as to the exact model from which Au Bonheur des Dames had been drawn. Furthermore there seemed to be no agreement as to the particular section of the city in which it was situated, some find- ing the original in the Bon Marche far over on the left bank of the Seine, while others identi- fied it with one or another of the great shops about the boulevards near the Opera. So, when, in New York fiction, you come to a ref- erence to the "Biggest Store" you are usually at a loss as to whether one is meant that is on lower Sixth Avenue, or on Thirty-fourth Street, or in the fashionable part of Fifth Ave- 277 278 THE NEW YOEK nue, or over on the East Side. But wherever it may be, while we are on the way there, it may not be amiss to stop for a brief moment in the wholesale clothing district, which, of recent years, has been moving uptown, and now cen- tres about Fifth Avenue and Twentieth Street. There, first of all, will be found the familiar figures of Montague Glass's Abe Potash and Mawruss Perlmutter, for it was purely for ephemeral purposes of the stage that the part- ners allowed the firm to be incorporated by Wall Street promoters, with the resulting dis- aster, and the beginning of business life anew in the old quarters on East Broadway. An- other familiar figure of the hour that bears kin- ship to Mr. Glass's heroes is Edna Ferber's Emma McChesney. Concerning the scenes of Emma's New York business activities Miss Ferber writes: "I cannot imagine your mak- ing a pilgrimage to the wholesale skirt district. Still if you chance to be down that way looking for Abe and Mawruss you might drop in on Emma. She's in that neighbourhood." And so also is the New York of Fanny Hurst's Just Around the Corner — the city of the working OF THE NOVELISTS 279 girl, of Childs's restaurants and department stores. Two recent novels touching tlie department store are F. Hopkinson Smith's Felix O'Bay and Mrs. A. M. Williamson's The Shop Girl. In the former book was Eosenthal's, the large store on Third Avenue where Lady Barbara found employment and from which she took the lace mantilla that was afterwards stolen by Dalton. The heroine of The Shop Girl, a book which Mrs. "Williamson says that she enjoyed more than any other book she ever wrote, was drawn from two models. One was a girl of a very good family who sought employment in a spirit of independence and found it at Grim- bel's; and the other was a typical New York shop girl. The atmosphere for the life of her heroine after working hours Mrs. William- son found in the neighbourhood of Columbus Circle. Then there was a recent novel, which, while practically all the action took place in Paris, was, in the person of its heroine, the very em- bodiment of the atmosphere of the big New York department stores. That was Mr. Sam- 280 THE NEW YORK uel Merwin's The Honey Bee. If you would see the establishment which served in part as the model for the one in Mr. Merwin's story you can find it on the west side of Fifth Ave- nue between Thirty-eighth and Thirty-ninth Streets. But it was such only in part. In its physical aspect that was the place that the author had in mind. But for the inner work- ings, for the system and organisation, Mr. Mer- win drew upon his knowledge of a large depart- ment store in Boston. It happens that the general manager of the Boston store is a life long friend and a fraternity brother of the author. There have been occasions when the manager has called upon Mr. Merwin for sug- gestions when a line of reading of an especial nature was thought necessary to distract the mind of some hard-worked employe. The manager is one of the characters in The Honey Bee, and, with the establishment, was trans- ferred from Boston to New York for the pur- pose of the story. But again across every counter of the New York department store is the shadow of 0. OF THE NOVELISTS 281 Henry. ''Shop girls," lie says of Nancy of ''The Trimmed Lamp"; "no such persons ex- ist. There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But why turn their occupation into an adjective? Let us he fair. We do not refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as 'marriage girls.' " Go down to Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street and you will find Sieber-Mason's, the scene of "The Ferry of Unfulfilment," whence a thousand girls flowed along the sidewalk, making naviga- tion dangerous to men. Discharged from ' ' The Biggest Store," Hetty Pepper made her way to her home high up in the Vallambrosa Apart- ments, there to find romance and adventure as related in "The Third Ingredient." Madame Beaumont, who in everyday life answered to the name of Mamie Siviter ("Transients in Arcadia"), having lived her annual glorious week in the Hotel Lotus, went hack to her place behind the hosiery counter at Casey's Mam- moth Store. In a dozen more of the tales the atmosphere is reflected. A saleslady in the gents' gloves, Masie of "A Lickpenny Lover," 282 THE NEW YOBK was one of the three thousand girls in the "Biggest Store." Perhaps of all the stories in which 0. Henry touched upon this phase of metropolitan life "A Lickpenny Lover" is the one best remembered. It was behind the counter that Irving Carter, painter, million- aire, traveller, poet, and automobilist found Masie, and finding her, strangely lost his heart. By persistent wooing he at length reached the flimsy, fluttering, little soul of the shop girl that existed somewhere deep down in her lovely bosom. And having found that he poured out his story, and painted his picture of a future before them — of lands far beyond the seas, of shores where summer is eternal, of far away cities with lovely palaces and towers full of beautiful pictures and statues, of the gon- dolas of Venice, the elephants and temples of India, the camel trains and chariot races in Persia, and the gardens of Japan. But Masie, listening to the story, grew suddenly cold and left him. The next day at the "Biggest Store" her chum waylaid her and asked about her "swell friend." "Him," was the retort. OF THE NOVELISTS 283 "0, he's a cheap guy. He ain't in it no more. What do you suppose he wanted me to do ? He wanted me to marry him and go to Coney Island for a wedding tour." CHAPTEE Vm The Shifting Scene— Hotels of the Great "White Way— The Zig Zag Trail — The Metropolitan Opera House — The Old Grand Central. There has come into fashion in the last few years a kind of novel of New York life which aims to reflect and interpret the restlessness of that life by a constant and intentional shifting of the scene. For example, there is Eupert Hughes's What Will People Say? which dealt with the very rich and the luxurious side of the city and which took up the beginning of the dance mania in April, 1913, and ended early in 1914. The opening paragraph showed Fifth Avenue at flood tide. To the eyes of Lieuten- ant Forbes, just home from the Philippines, it was a strange sight. He had not seen the Ave- nue since the pathetic old horse coaches were changed to the terrific motor stages. Forbes 's first glimpse, according to the key supplied by Mr. Hughes, was at the crossing either at Thirty-fourth Street, or at Forty-second Street. 284 286 286 THE NEW YOEK Then, by way of illustration of this kind of novel, take the first hundred pages of the book. In the course of a few hundred words we are at the Enslees' home at Fiftieth Street and Fifth Avenue, and a little later, at Fifty-first Street there is a description of the "affable grey cathedral." By page eight we have seen Fifty-seventh Street, Broadway, and the Eiver- side Drive. Page thirteen brings in the Knick- erbocker Hotel at which Forbes is stopping. Longacre Square steps into view on page fif- teen, with the Times Building standing aloft, a huddled giraffe of a building. At page eighteen the reader has been taken to a theatre which is identified as the Eltinge Theatre. The peacock rivalling cafe of page twenty-five is Murray's, which is soon left so that Eeisen- weber's with its "great sign in vertical electric letters," may be presented on page thirty-five, the Cafe des Beaux Arts and Bustanoby's on page thirty-eight, and on page thirty-nine the Cafe de Ninive, in reality the Cafe de 1 'Opera, later Martin 's, and now torn down. By the time page sixty-three is reached Forbes has begun to investigate Central Park, strolling through the OF THE NOVELISTS 287 Zoo, and from an arch which Mr. Hughes iden- tifies as the bridge near the Seventh Avenue entrance, pausing to watch a cavalcade of pupils from a riding school. On page sixty- seven we have the Army and Navy Club, and the Knickerbocker Cafe, and on page sixty- eight the Fifth Avenue Bank at Forty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, and Sherry's. On page seventy-one back to the barroom of the Knickerbocker for gin rickeys and a study of Maxfield Parrish's fresco of "King Cole." Bustanoby's again at page seventy-four and at page ninety-six the beginning of an elabo- rate description of the Metropolitan Opera House. In the same way one might go through Louis Joseph Vance's Joan Thursday, or Eex Beach's The Auction Block, George Bronsoh- Howard's God's Man, or Owen Johnson's The Sixty-First Second, or The Salamander, or Making Money. In God's Man the Curate's, Canary's, Griff ony's, and Sydenham's of fic- tion, are the Rector's, Sherry's, Tiffany's, and the Cafe de Paris of fact. These names also figured in the same author's Pages from the Book of Broadway. Every one of the tales 288 THE NEW YOEK that made up that book had for the protagonist some conspicuous character along the Great White Way. For example, in "The Purple Phantasm," the lead was the late Paul Arm- strong, under the name of Potter Playfair. Zigzag goes the trail, of an afternoon along the stretch of Fifth Avenue, or through the winding paths of the Park; by night into the lane where the lights are brightest, and the hum of life swells into a tumult. "Is New York a large city?" asks a demure Haitian maiden of her American lover in a recent story by Mr. Eichard Harding Davis. "No. It is a large electric light sign" is the sapient reply. So, dazzled by the light the Pilgrim takes the liberty of passing from scene to scene, from allusion to allusion, without any pretence of sequence or order. You are at Broadway and Thirtieth Street before Wallack's Theatre, or what once was Wallack's Theatre. There you have the definite background that Booth Tarkington put into Harlequin and Pantomime, and the scene of Jesse Lynch Williams's "The Comedy of a Playwright. ' ' You are four blocks to the north, at the point where Sixth Avenue, Broadway, and P K S S 2 a o S ^ a g u OF THE NOVELISTS 289 Thirty-fourth Street cross one another. If they did not so cross, and if a man wearing a red necktie, and answering to the name of Kelly, had not there engineered a traffic block that, to use his own words, "would have made William A. Brady die of envy," how could Sidney Porter have written what is perhaps the 0. Henriest of all his stories, "Mammon and the Archer"? At Broadway and Twenty-sixth Street was once Delmonico's. Then the restaurant became Martin's. In the latter incarnation it played a part in Arthur Train's The Man Hunt. There Ealston, the newly appointed Assistant Secre- tary of the Navy, in his search for Steadman at the behest of Ellen Ferguson, finds his way through the revolving doors, makes the ac- quaintance of Florence Davenport, and knocks out the bully Sullivan. Incidentally Ealston 's search came to an end in Farrer's gambling house, which was placed on Forty-fifth Street, near Broadway. Back to the theatre district, and you are in the haunts of the hero of George Barr McCutcheon's Little What's His Name. At the Metropolitan Opera House, and you have the choice of Marion Crawford's The Prima 290 THE NEW TOEK Donna, W. J. Henderson's The Soul of a Tenor, Brander Matthews 's The Action and the Word, Thomas Dixon's The Root of Evil, and half a score more. The spirit of the Fifth Avenue shops plays a strong part in David Graham Phillips's The Husband's Story. Henrietta Hastings and Sophy Baker, living in the nearby Holland House, enjoyed an orgy of shopping. The dressmaking establishment in the same author's Old Wives for New was drawn from Mrs. Osborne's place on Fifth Avenue about Thirty-sixth Street. The "Waldorf-Astoria was described by Brander Matthews in "Under an April Sky," of Vistas of New York. On the south side of Fortieth Street, almost in the mid- dle of the block between Sixth and Seventh Ave- nues, you will find the fortune-telling den of Countess Casanova of Harry Leon Wilson's Bunker Bean. On Forty-second Street you will get glimpses of Harvey J. O'Higgins's Detective Barney — The Dummy of the stage version. For the Hotel Harlem read the Hotel Manhat- tan, and for the Beaumont, the Belmont. At the southwest corner of Lexington Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street is the little restaurant OF THE NOVELISTS 291 where Dodo (Owen Johnson's The Salamander) used to go to dine in her hours of poverty. It served purposes not only of economy but of con- venience because the boarding-house in which Dodo and her, sister salamanders lived was at the northwest corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street, nearly opposite the Seville Hotel. But when the admirer of early days ap- peared upon the scene, in order to avoid compli- cations, she hurried him away to dine at the Prince George Hotel. Julie M. Lippmann's Martha-hy-the-Day opened at the corner of Broadway and Thirty-third Street. The Cen- tury Association at number 7 West Forty-third Street, has been called by many names in the course of the fiction dealing with New York life, but never save in love and reverence. All hail to the spirit of the Centurions! As the Cen- tury, pure and simple, it appeared in F, Hop- kinson Smith's Peter. It was Peter's favourite club. But those were the days when the club was still in its Fifteenth Street home, not more than a stone's throw from Peter's own quarters. Some of the men of the Century you will find at the University Club at Fifth Avenue and Fifty- 292 THE NEW YOEK fourth Street, and at tlie University you can get in touch with the characters of Arthur Train's McAllister and His Double, — Peter the doorman is Peter the Doorman still — and through the windows pick out on the Fifth Avenue pavement the girl who best fits your idea of the heroine of Jesse Lynch Williams's My Lost Duchess. At the Grand Central Station a stop of some duration is imperative, for across the hall of the old building, which was torn down four or five years ago, flit the ghosts of a score of the men and women of the city's fiction. In The Exiles, a tale of Tangier, Eichard Harding Davis drew a picture of Fourteenth Street of a summer's evening that is not easily forgotten. In Sol- diers of Fortune, his hero and heroine, lean- ing over the rail of a steamer somewhere in the South Atlantic Ocean, pretended that the glow upon the horizon was the reflection of the lights along the Eumson Eoad. But nowhere has Mr. Davis produced the thrill of the city more ef- fectively than where, in Captain Macklin, he showed Eoyal, returned from the tempestuous adventure that had made him for a brief period Vice-President of Honduras, peering into the OF THE NOVELISTS 293 ticket office window in the old Grand Central Station and asking for a ticket to Dobbs Ferry. In that request, so commonplace to the ears of the alpaca-coated man behind the barred win- dow, was summed up all the joy of home coming, all the reaction from the hunted days in tropical jungle and fever-laden swamps. CHAPTER IX "The House of Mirth" and Others— Bryant Park— Stan- field's — Stewart Edward White and 127 Madison Avenue. Also in that waiting room of the old Grand Central the reader has his first glimpse of Miss Lily Bart {The House of Mirth). It was there that Mrs. Wharton's heroine, who had missed her train to Ehinebeck, met Selden, and visited his bachelor apartment for tea, a perfectly in- nocent venture that had consequences and mis- interpretations. The Benedick was where Sel- den lived, but the Benedick is not easy of posi- tive identification. From the station they turned into Madison Avenue and strolled north- ward. The walk was not a long one. Selden 's street was probably about Forty-ninth or Fif- tieth. Miss Bart noted the new brick and lime- stone house fronts, fantastically varied in obedience to the American craving for novelty, but fresh and inviting with their awnings and flower-boxes. The Benedick had a marble porch and pseudo-Georgian fagade, and from 294 NEW YOKK OF THE NOVELISTS 295 Seidell's apartment, which was on the top floor, a little balcony protruded. That is the environ- ment in which we first meet Lily Bart. The time comes when we see her in another. Dis- illusionment and disappointment have come upon her. She is at Fifth Avenue and Forty- first Street, and she feels that she can walk no farther, and she remembers that in Bryant Park there are seats where she may rest. "The mel- ancholy pleasure ground was almost deserted when she entered it, and she sank down on an empty bench in the glare of an electric street lamp. . . . Night had now closed in and the roar of traffic in Forty-second Street was dying out. As complete darkness fell on the Square the lingering occupants of the benches rose and dispersed; but now and then a stray figure, hurrying homeward, struck across the path where Lily sat, looming black for a moment in the white circle of electric light." The play is nearly done. The moment is at hand for the ringing down of the curtain on the tragedy of Lily Bart. The sensational life of the New York under- world was the theme of Arthur Stringer's The 296 THE NEW YOEK Wire Tappers, and its sequel Phantom Wires. A house which figures in both those stories was Stanfield's gambling house, in reality Canfield's, next door to Delmonico's. Much of the same author's The Hand of Peril, which was pub- lished last spring, was laid in New York. There is mention of the Union Club ; a fight in a taxi-cab takes place beside the drinking fountain in Central Park between the Sheep-Pasture and The Mall; the original of the little millinery- shop of the tale may be found on the south side of Forty-seventh Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues; and the "Squab dump" known as the "Alambo," just off Longacre Square was plainly a well-known hotel-home of chorus girls just round the corner from The Palace. An even later book by Mr. Stringer, The Prairie Wife, is laid in part in New York, and a rather important scene takes place in the Delia Robbia room of the Vanderbilt Hotel. In Stewart Edward White's The Claim Jump- ers four youths were shown holding a discus- sion in a fifth-story sitting-room of a New York boarding-house. The sitting-room was large and square, and in the wildest disorder. Easels OF THE NOVELISTS 297 and artist's materials thrust back to the wall sufficiently advertised the art student, and per- haps explained the untidiness. The original of that house, which also played a part in Mr. White's Gold, was at number 127 Madison Ave- nue, between Thirtieth and Thirty-first Streets. The old structure has been torn down and an unromantic office building occupies the site. The house in which Mr. White's heroes dwelt was situated between a church and an apartment house, and was therefore known as Purgatory. It was kept by a Swiss named Karl. "A num- ber of us," writes the author, "had the whole top floor. Ira Eemsen, my brother Gilbert, Eec- tor Fox, Stanley McGraw, and some other more transient members. Naturally I turned to the old quarters at number 129 as a background for these New York scenes in Gold and The Claim Jumpers." CHAPTER X New Bohemias — ^Westover Court — Teagan's Arcade — The House of a Million Intrigues. Two or three years ago an architect of talent and imagination looked upon certain ugly and sordid brick buildings hard by Longacre Square and saw possibilities. "Give me a free hand," he said to the representatives of the great estate that owned the property, "and at a cost that will not be excessive I will convert all this into a bachelor apartment that will reproduce a bit of the London that we like best to think about, the London of the Inner Temple or of the Albany." He achieved all that he had promised. But, un- wisely, he did not stop there. Looking upon his work he found it good, and was moved to write about it. With a fine rhetorical flourish he painted his "Westover Court" as another Al- bany, a quiet and almost remote living place for men who desire to be in the heart of the busy life and the amusement centres of the metropolis. Then, of the Albany that runs from Vigo Street 298 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 299 to Piccadilly he went on rashly to say: ** Among those who lived there were Lord Byron, Lord Macanlay, Thackeray, and Glad- stone. Conan Doyle naturally had no more fit- ting residence for Sherlock Holmes." Of course it was E. W. Hornung's EafiBes, and not Sherlock Holmes, with whom the Albany is asso- ciated, and countless drab London squares lie between Piccadilly and Holmes's rooms in Up- per Baker Street. But for all that the atmos- phere that the architect sought is in Westover Court, and upon that atmosphere Owen John- son drew for one of his most vivid pictures of the city in Making Money. Bojo and March had left the Great White Way behind them and turned down a squalid side street with tenements in the dark distances. Before two green pillars they stopped, and through a long, irregular monastic hall flooded with mellow lights and sudden arches, found their way into an oasis of quiet and green things. "Ali Baba Court" is what Marsh called it in his enthusiasm. In the heart of the noisiest, vilest, most brutal strug- gle of the city lay this little bit of the Old World, 300 THE NEW YOEK decked in green plots, with vine-covered fountain and a stone Cupid perched on tiptoe, and above a group of dream trees filling the lucent yellow and green en- closure with a miraculous foliage. Lights blazed in a score of windows above them, while at four mediaeval entrances, of curved doorways under sloping green aprons, the suffused glow of iron lanterns seemed like distant signals lost in a fog. AboVe the low roofs high against the blue-black sky the giant city came peeping down upon them from the regimented globes of fire on the Astor roof. A milky flag drifted lazily across an aigrette of steam. To the right, the top of the Times Tower, divorced from all the ugliness at its feet, rose like an historic campanile played about by timid stars. Over the roof-tops the hum of the city, never stilled, turned like a great wheel, incessantly, with faint, detached sounds pleasantly audible; a bell; a truck moving like a shrieking shell; the impertinent honk of taxis ; urchins on wheels ; the shattering rush of distant iron bodies tearing through the air ; an extra cried on a shriller note ; the ever-recurring pipe of a police whistle compelling order in the confusion; fog horns from the river, and underneath something more elusive and confused, the churning of great human masses passing and repassing. It is to a building, or a jumble of buildings, far different, but not less curious, that Mr. Jobn- son turns in the introductory chapter of a later novel, The Woman Gives. At that intersection OF THE NOVELISTS 301 of Broadway and Columbus Avenue where the grumbling subway and the roaring Elevated meet at Lincoln Square stands what Mr. Jobn- ONE OP THE EXITS THAT LEAD OVEB THE BOOP TOPS IN "THE CASTLE OF A MILLION INTBIGUES" son calls "Teagan's Arcade," but what the Pil- grim prefers to think of as "The Castle of a Million Intrigues." It covers a block, bisected by an arcade, and rising six capacious stories in 302 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS the form of an enormous H, Without, the Square, a charming place of contending human tides, where "the Italians had installed their fruit shops and their groceries ; the French their florists and delicatessen shops; the Jews their clothing bazaars; the Germans their jewellers and their shoe stores; the Irish their saloons and restaurants." Within mystery— mystery in the dimness of the passageways, in the countless exits which lead through tunnels or over roof top bridges to adjoining structures, in the glazed doors on which are read strange names and stranger occupations. "It was a place," writes the author, "where no questions were asked and no advice permitted; where, if you found a man wandering in the long draughty corridors, you piloted him to his room and put him to bed and did not seek to reform him in the morning. This was its etiquette." The backyard of a new Bohemia, "Teagan's Arcade. " " The Castle of a Million Intrigues. ' ' PAET VI ?HE City Remote and the City Beyond CHAPTER I Some Suburbs of Fiction — Southward Bound — The Lon- don of Esmond — The Environs of Paris. Theeb is tlie season of the year when the com- posite heroine of the latest novel of New York life bearing the imprint of the Robert W. Cham- bers-Richard Harding Davis-Rex Beach-Gou- verneur Morris-Owen Johnson-Rupert Hughes Company is busy superintending the packing of many trunks. What is going inside those trunks is a matter between the heroine and her maid, and is a subject which no man will have the temerity to attempt to discuss. The com- posite hero is sending his man out to Ardsley, or Apawamis, for the clubs that have been left in the locker room or in the care of Fergus McDivot, or whatever may be the name of the resident professional. In the course of the next few days there will be much telephoning, telegraphing, and cabling — for reservations by the Seaboard Air Line or the Atlantic Coast Line to Palm Beach, for deck staterooms on the 305 306 THE NEW YORK Saratoga or some one of the boats of the United Fruit, for accommodations at the Sevilla or Inglaterra of Havana, the Colonial of Nassau, or the Princess or Hamilton of Bermuda. Then the hour will come when the chill damp-, ness of the New York February will be left behind, and the flirtation and intrigue of the world of make-believe will be transported from pahn garden to palm grove, from Fifth Avenue and Broadway to the Prado and Malecon, or to the man made jungle that lies between Lake Worth and the ocean, or to the shores of the Bay of Biscayne, or to the winding, limestone roads of the Bermudas. Of course we must not lose sight entirely of another type of New York hero, personified, for example, in "Soapy" of 0. Henry's "The Cop and the An- them." Very likely several weeks have al- ready passed since "Soapy" was moodily con- templating the brightly lighted plate glass win- dows and the inviting restaurants of the City of Too Many Caliphs, meditating upon just what violation of the law would insure his de- portation to the hospitable purlieus of Black- well's Island, which was his Palm Beach and OF THE NOVELISTS 307 Eiviera for the winter months. Or of another heroine, Maggie, who works behind the hosiery counter in "The Biggest Store," and whose southern horizon ends at the lake which sepa- rates Asbury Park from Ocean Grove. But the days will pass swiftly. The sun that looks down impartially upon the bay, the Bat- tery, the Bowery, and Broadway, will wax warmer. April will see the Hne of bric-a-brac- laden, Victrola-record-laden, parasol-laden, golf- club-laden motor cars belonging to the Cham- bers-Davis-Beach-Morris-Johnson-Hughes Com- pany hero and heroine rolling along the Bos- ton Post Eoad, or over the Queensborough Bridge, or up the Weehawken grade. This will be the advance guard of the migration to the city beyond. The great estates of fiction, whether they happen to be in the Bernardsville region of New Jersey, or at Tuxedo, or Green- wich, or on Long Island, or capping tall hills that look down upon the Hudson River, will be rolling wide their gates. The stay at home reader will no longer be obliged to send his im- agination a thousand miles southward in pur- suit of the ladies and gentlemen of his particu- 308 THE NEW YOEK lar favourite novel of the fleeting moment. Once more the tea parties and week end parties of romance will be near at hand. The outdoor life in its fullest development may be regarded as something belonging es- sentially to our own generation ; but the suburb is as old as fiction itself. To confine attention to those books and authors which have been most frequently introduced for purposes of al- lusion in the course of this ramble. Before Ol- iver Twist was introduced to the foul alleys about Great Saffron Hill and to Fagin's den he had passed through Barnet, that suburb to the north of London, and there made the ac- quaintance of the Artful Dodger. The mem- bers of the Pickwick Club were much less at home in Fleet Street or Cornhill than they were in certain delightful inns and fields of the en- virons. Barnaby Budge is less a tale of the city itself than it is of the May-pole Tavern. What Thackerayan can forget the little dinners that the Marquis of Steyne was in the habit of giving at Greenwich, or the evening there when George Warrington scored Sir Barnes New- come, and the latter changed his opinion of the OF THE NOVELISTS 309 Vicomte de Florae when lie learned that the Frenchman might call himself the Prince of Montcontour if he so wished? The London of Henry Esmond is the heart of the city to-day. But in the last years of Queen Anne it was as much a suburb as Eoslyn is in its relation to Manhattan. The duelling ground where Frank Esmond fell by the sword of the ill-omened Mo- hun entailed a journey from the city proper to the city beyond. The first line of the long se- ries of novels dealing with the musketeers of Dumas introduced a suburb, and throughout the length of The Three Musketeers, Twenty Tears After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne, the old Paris of tortuous streets is subordinate to its environs. In every direction, through every city gate, Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D'Artagnan urged their horses. It was to a monastery at Noisy that D'Artagnan, hunting for Aramis, trailed Bazin; it was to St. Ger- main that he conveyed the boy king and the Queen mother in the stormy days of the Fronde. It was in the anteroom of the palace at Ver- sailles that he waited on the whim of the king grown to manhood ; it was at Eueil that, in com- 310 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS pany with Porthos, he stumbled upon the treas- ure catacombs of Mazarin. And no less active than those iron horsemen in the penetration of the outlying districts of Lutetia was the hero of the earlier Valois series, the incomparable Chicot. No matter what his individual period or what the time of which he writes, the Pari- sian novelist has always heard the call of the green fields that lie beyond the fortifications. For him the springtime Seine winds invitingly by St. Cloud, Malmaison, and Boujival. Take Maupassant. The river was in his blood, and that passion was reflected in countless tales of its moods, its currents, its gaieties, and its en- nuis. There is a whole book given over to these adventures beyond the wall, Les Diman- ches d'un Bourgeois de Paris. Baudet's Sap- pho is regarded as a tale of Paris streets and studios, but the greater scenes are played out at Chaville in the little house near the railway station where Jean Gaussin and Fanny Le Grand lived in close proximity to the Hettemas, and in the forest of Bas-Meudon, CHAPTER n The "Water Side — Jabez BuUtongue of Locust Valley — On a North River Pier— DeWitt Clinton Park. While one of the motor cars to whicli allusion has been made in a previous chapter is waiting before the ferry house at West Forty-second Street and the North Eiver, preparatory to its climb of the Weehawken slope and its journey to Normandy Hill in Morristown, from the in- coming boat lurches a character from the pages of 0. Henry. His attire — ^but for the detail let that be left to the pen of Porter. Suffice to say that it is bucolic in the extreme, and that in the carpet bag in his hand there is a large sum of money. He invites every danger, he courts every pitfall. But the wolves of the city will have none of him, or his wealth. His dress proclaims his rustic simplicity a little too loudly. The roll of bills that he flaunts before the eyes of strangers must be counterfeit. Perhaps he is an agent of Mulberry Street in disguise. At that the make-up is much too 311 312 THE NEW YOEK thick to be artistic. In the course of a day's wandering he sees a great light. The home- spun is discarded and there appears a new- comer, dressed, to the superficial eye at least, like any one of several hundred thousand New Yorkers. But with that transformation van- ishes the security that had been born of sus- picion. So no more of the misadventures of Jabez BuUtongue of Locust Valley, Ulster County, who invaded Little Old NoisyviUe-on-the-Hud- son with his corduroys, his wisp of hay, and the nine hundred and fifty dollars that had been his share of grandmother's farm. Doubtless in- vestigation would discover the originals of "Bunco Harry" and of the particular side street groggery where Jabez left his valise for safe-keeping. In a former chapter of the book there was allusion to the saloon of "The Lost Blend," an establishment identified from with- out as one at the corner of Irving Place and Eighteenth Street. For final corroboration the Pilgrim recently ventured within. There, on the sober side of the bar, was, to the life, the white jacketed attendant of the tale. And, like the hero of "The Lost Blend," he answered to OF THE NOVELISTS 313 the name of "Con." "Do I remember Mr. Porter? Surest thing you know. He told me he had put me into some of his stories. But I ain't never read none of them yet." Later the 0. Henry trail will lead to Coney Island ; but so far as Manhattan is concerned it ends along the water front. In Cabbages and Kings that trail first appeared. There was a picture of two men sitting on a stringer of a North Eiver pier while a steamer from the tropics was unloading bananas and oranges. One of the men was 'Day, who had formerly been with the Colum- bia Detective Agency. In a moment of depres- sion and confidence he told his companion of the mistake that had brought him to his unen- viable condition, and incidentally cleared up for the reader the mystery that throughout the book had obscured the marriage of Frank Goodwin and the lady known in Coralio as Isa- bel Guilbert. At the old Iron Steamboat landing at Twenty- second Street and the North Eiver, a landing which ceased to exist only a few years ago, Tobin ("Tobin's Palm") left the Coney Island boat on which, in the course of an hour's travel, he had encountered so many astonishing ad- 314 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS ventures. At Twenty-second Street and Nintli Avenue, where lie stopped to gaze at tlie moon over the Elevated Eailroad, lie fell in with the crooked-nosed man, a meeting that had been mysteriously foreseen by Madame Zozo, the wonderful palmist of the Nile, in her enchanted chicken coop at Dreamland or Luna Park. Over one of the several West Twenty-third Street ferries, bound for the Eocky Mountains ("The Memoirs of a Yellow Dog"), travel the long down trodden but now insurgent husband and the runaway canine, the latter joyfully an- swering to the name of "Pete," instead of the cloying "Lovey." In "Vanity and Some Sa- bles" there was specific mention of DeWitt Clinton Park, which will be found at Fifty-sec- ond Street and the North Eiver. The park was a haunt of Kid Brady and the stove pipe gang. "The Stove Pipe sub-district," O. Henry in-, forms us, "is a narrow and natural extension of the familiar district known as Hell's Kitchen. The Stove Pipe strip of town runs along Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues on the river, and bends a hard and sooty elbow around little, homeless DeWitt Clinton Park." Q 9 ?^ o J H W < o u O H 3! O s < a 3 < o < H 04 z 3 a X H O d 1X4 o Q ^ o a u < < < ta f ffi < Z bj a H •?• < < Oh z < < 5 Q Z ■J g CO O V, (0 u CLi O ^ Q o < g O CO Z [1) 1^ o •i^ < O H < id ttT n > z O -f >■ < s g ^ J z; < a s S H s «• ^ a z u s>£ CI <« s o z o z 3 S 1 a S y g o CHAPTER III Roads to the North— Yorkville — ^A House in Fifty-fourth Street — St. John's Cathedral and Momingside Park — No Man's Land — The Polo Grounds and Manhattan Field — Dobbs Ferry. In diverse ways in the trail lead the roads to the north. There are other allusions before we leave the Island of Manhattan at Spuyten Duy- vil to follow the Hudson, or cross into West- chester, or wind along the waters of Long Island Sound. At the corner of Lexington Avenue and Eighty-first Street there is a modem apart- ment house. In the year 1868 the site was oc- cupied by a shanty on a stony hill. It was in that shanty that the parents of Joe Blaine of James Oppenheim's The Nine Tenths went to live. The health of his father, a Civil War veteran, made a home in the country a neces- sity, and in that remote land his mother felt that they were making a clearing in the western wilderness. There Joe was born in 1872, and in his boyhood, he saw Yorkville spring up, "a 315 316 THE NEW YORK rubber stamp neighbourbood, of which each street was a brownstone duplicate of the next. ' ' The years passed, and still Eighty-first Street continued to play its part in Joe's life. In a brownstone boarding-house west of Lexington Avenue he and his mother went to live. Then came the night when in company with Myra Craig he witnessed the terrible fire in the loft building in Eighty-second Street near Second Avenue, the fire which swept away his printery. Some forty blocks farther north, in an apart- ment over a drug store at the corner of Lenox Avenue and One Hundred and Eighteenth Street, was the real home of Abe and Eosie Potash, of Mr. Montague Glass's stories. In the play that home was placed in Lexington Avenue. A New York house had much to do with the writing of Mr. Allen's A Heroine in Bronze. The man who has interpreted so vividly the moods of the Kentucky fields, whose birthday has been made a holiday for the school children of the Blue Grass State, has also, of recent years, come to a very intimate knowledge of the city of his adoption. One day, in the course of OF THE NOVELISTS 317 a walk down Fifth Avenue and into the adjoin- ing side streets, he came upon a house that sug- gested' a story. The house was on West Fifty- fourth Street, nearly opposite the University Club. Again and again Mr. Allen returned to study it, and with every visit the projected tale grew in his brain. At this period, curiously enough, the fact that some material family in- habited the house, meant nothing to him. That was unimportant and unessential. He was in that mood of creation that had moved Balzac curtly to dismiss discussion of certain Pari- sians of his time with the remark, "But let us talk of people who really exist, I want to tell you about my Caesar Birotteau and the perfume he has just invented. ' ' In the course of time A Heroine in Bronze was finished. Then came the reaction. The author looked upon the house and saw it as an habitation; no longer merely as a part of his story. Perhaps it would be wise to find out who was its owner; who were its inmates. Chance, or, call it the Imp of the Perverse if you will, might have guided his hand. Something in the story might parallel too closely episodes or situations in the 318 THE NEW YOEK lives of those who dwelt in the house. For the first time Mr. Allen learned that the residence was the home of John D. Eockefeller. Turn to the West. Mr. Allen's new story, A Cathedral Singer, introduces the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, "standing there on a high rock under the northern sky above the long wash of the untroubled sea, above the wash of the troubled waves of men"; St. Luke's Hos- pital, "cathedral of our rains, of our sufferings, and of our dust, near the cathedral of our souls. ' ' Across the block to the south is situated a shed-like two-story building with dormer-windows and a crumpled, three-sided roof, the studios of the Na- tional Academy of Design, and under that low, brittle skylight youth toils over the shapes and colours of the earth's visible vanishing paradise in the shadow of the cathedral which promises an unseen, an eternal one. At the rear of the cathedral, across the roadway, stands a low stone wall. Beyond the wall the earth sinks down a precipice to a green valley bottom far below. Out here is a rugged slope of rock and ver- dure and forest growth which brings upon the scene an ancient presence, nature — ^nature, the Elysian Fields of the art school, the potter's field of the hos- pital, the harvest field of the church. ! A , 1 mkmmmim^ K B rSm w^^BJ/^^^^^S^^jiBts^^^^ ^ .,^^'^^^H K !«3Si ^fi-.^ ''"^^F'^AJ^iK'jJIlSP ■ * T 1 w '"'^■'■' 1^ L - b. THE FERRY AT WEST FORTY-SECOND STREET. 0. HENRY'S "THE POET AND THE PEASANT" DE WITT CLINTON PARK. O. HENRY'S "VANITY AND SOME SABLES" OF THE NOVELISTS 319 Past the foot of this strip of nature, which fronts the dawn and is called Morningside Park, a thorough- fare stretches northward and southward, level and wide and smooth. Over it the two opposite-moving streams of the city 's traffic and travel rush headlong. Beyond this thoroughfare an embankment of houses shoves its mass before the eyes, and behind the em- bankment the city stretches across flats where human beings are as thick as river reeds. Thus within close reach humanity is here; the cathedral, the hospital, the art school, a broad high- way along which, with their hearthfires flickering un- der their tents of stone, camp fire's restless, light- hearted, heavy-hearted Gipsies. But before Morningside is reached, by turn- ing into one of the side streets of the west eighties you can find the actual structure that mo'^^ed Will Irwin to the writing of The House of Mystery. In one of the nineties, between West End Avenue and Eiverside Drive, is the typical "box stoop" house, which suggested to Sinclair Lewis in The Trail of the Hawk the striking clan contrast between this quarter and the rest of the city. This section has been de- scribed as a kind of "No-Man's Land," in which the inhabitants may be regarded neither as old New Yorkers, nor as the frankly emanci- OF THE NOVELISTS 319 Past the foot of this strip of nature, which fronts the dawn and is called Morningside Park, a thorough- fare stretches northward and southward, level and wide and smooth. Over it the two opposite-moving streams of the city's traffic and travel rush headlong. Beyond this thoroughfare an embankment of houses shoves its mass before the eyes, and behind the em- bankment the city stretches across flats where human beings are as thick as river reeds. Thus within close reach humanity is here; the cathedral, the hospital, the art school, a broad high- way along which, with their hearthfires flickering un- der their tents of stone, camp fire's restless, light- hearted, heavy-hearted Gipsies. But before Morningside is reached, by turn- ing into one of the side streets of the west eighties you can find the actual structure that moved Will Irwin to the writing of The House of Mystery. In one of the nineties, between West End Avenue and Eiverside Drive, is the typical "box stoop" house, which suggested to Sinclair Lewis in The Trail of the Hawk the striking clan contrast between this quarter and the rest of the city. This section has been de- scribed as a kind of "No-Man's Land," in which the inhabitants may be regarded neither as old New Yorkers, nor as the frankly emanci- 320 THE NEW YOEK pated citizens of Harlem. West End Avenue has been called a social Alsatia, not a swash- buckling, roaring, Bohemian Alsatia like that depicted by Sir Walter Scott, but rather a smug Alsatia into which families have crept as a place of refuge against the time when they will really belong. Beyond is a vast district which is the Bloomsbury or the Clapham Junction, and where the people are the petites gens of New York. But on to the north. In the shadow of the old Jumel Mansion, itself rich in associations with fiction as well as history, are the Polo Grounds, and the tattered vacant lot that was once known as Manhattan Field. Twenty years ago many a short-story writer turned to the latter for a brief description of the annual Yale-Princeton football game that was then held there, and the coaching parade that pre- ceded it. At the Polo Grounds stop for a mo- ment with Harry Leon Wilson's "Bunker Bean" on that eventful afternoon, when, for two hours, while Giants and Pirates clashed in diamond strife, there was no longer a Bean, a Breede, and a Flapper, but "three merged souls OF THE NOVELISTS 321 in three volatile bodies, three voices that blended in cheers or execration." Farther to the north, keeping along the city's western side, is Fort Washington Park, introduced in En- pert Hughes's Empty Pockets. Beyond are what Kipling once called "the Hudson's un- kempt banks." But we shall follow that trail only so far as Dobbs Ferry, and that far for the purpose of a word about the house asso- ciated with Richard Harding Davis's Royal Macklin and his cousin Beatrice. It was the house in which was bound up so much of Royal's boyhood, and the house to which he returned after the months of storm, and stress, and fever in Honduras. It was there, behind the cur- tains drawn against the wintry sky, he read La- guerre's cablegram, and in vision saw the swarming harbour of Marseilles, the swagger- ing Turcos in their scarlet breeches, and from every ship's mast the tri-colour of France. And with that vision he forgot home ties and the affection of those nearest to him. His was the roving, soldier-of-fortune blood of the Macklins, and he had heard the call. CHAPTEE IV The Cosmopolitan City — Beekman Place— The Terrace — Recalling Henry Harland — Reproducing the Old World. On the city's eastern brink, overlooking Black- well's Island and Hunter's Point, is Beekman Place, which the late Henry Harland discov- ered some twenty years ago, and used in the au- tobiographical Grandison Mather, and in As It Was Written, The Yoke of the Thorah, Mrs. Peixada, and the other tales written under the pen name of Sidney Luska. At the time Mr. Harland was living in Beek- man Place, writing novels there, and also work- ing in the Surrogate's office. This double la- bour imposed upon him a rigorous routine, which he carried out with a self abnegation and energy of a Balzac. It was his habit to go to bed immediately after dinner, to rise at two o'clock in the morning, and, fortified with strong coffee, with a wet towel bound around his head, to write undisturbed until it was time for breakfast, after which he started for his daily work downtown. The first of his works 322 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 323 thus produced was As It Was Written, the story of a Jewish musician, splendidly tragic in its conception and scheme. The first scene BEEKMAN PLACE. GEOBQE BBONSON- HOWAED'S "god's man" of As It Was Written was laid at the Fifty-first Street end of the Terrace. It was there that Ernest Neuman first found Veronika, one night when the moon had risen, a huge red disc out of the mist and smoke across the river. From 324 THE NEW YORK the Terrace at this point a long flight of white stone steps leads down almost to the water's edge. In Mrs. Peixada Mr. Harland gave us a long and graphic description of Beekman Place. He spoke of this unpretentious chocolate-col- oured thoroughfare, running north and south for two blocks from Forty-ninth to Fifty-first Street as being in striking contrast to the rest of hot and dusty New York. In the book Mrs. Peixada 's home was identified as Number 46; the apartment occupied by Arthur Eipley and Julian Hetzel being in the top floor of Number 43. In reality no such numbers exist. But Number 46 was spoken of as a corner house, and the links of circumstantial evidence scat- tered through the book are convincing enough to leave little doubt as to its identity. From the balcony of the house occupied by Mrs. Piex- ada the characters of this story looked down upon the busy river, where the tugs and Sound steamers kept up a continual puffing and whis- tling. Mr. Harland saw a beautiful mother-of- pearl tint in the water, and heard the band around the corner grinding out selections from Trovatore. Veronika and her uncle Tiluski lived in the topmost story of the white apart- OF THE NOVELISTS 325 ment house on Fifty-first Street, near Second Avenue. It was there that Neuman murdered his betrothed. Recently George Bronson-Howard has been PBOVINCIAL FKANCE re-discovering Beekman Place, and finding in it a background for some of the scenes of God's Man. He enriches it with an additional "c," calling it Beeckman Place, and adorning it with a little square that is not there, a little imagi- 326 THE NEW YOEK nary centre square of elm trees surrounded by an iron railing. But there is the river, with its red and green lights at night, and the back- yards running down to the water, with landing stages to hook up a boat. And in Beeckman Place, in the tale, is the house of a retired rig- ging maker, a Londoner, who liked to believe that he was in Wapping Old Stairs, his birth- place — and who, by a little play of the imagina- tion, could see the East India Docks, and the wharves of Eotherhithe and the murky waters of the Thames winding their way towards Graves End. For in the great city there are corners, streets, structures that reflect the cosmopoli- tanism of New York's human ingredients. Even complete neighbourhoods that might have been transplanted from Old World cities may here and there be found. There is a legend of a Frenchman, suffering from nostalgie du pays, who, on the occasional days of fog, was in the habit of pacing to and fro the length of the Madison Square Garden Arcade that runs along Twenty-sixth Street and Madison Ave- nue. In fancy he was walking in the Eue de Rivoli. Under one of the arches of the Wil- OF THE NOVELISTS 327 liamsburg Bridge there is a bit of old Spain. No corner of Havana, of Caracas, or of Mexico City has more the flavour of Seville. Go up to a comparatively modern West Side block in the ITALY fifties and you will find the long, vine-covered building shadowed by a beautiful Gtothic tower. It is a transplanted section of the older Lon- don. Though rather over decorated and em- bellished with too many carvings, much of the 328 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 329 new architecture of upper Broadway and on the Eiverside Drive aims to reproduce the ef- fect of the modern Lutetia in the streets about the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs de Mars. In one of the forties, not far from Fifth Ave- nue, there is a building modelled on a palace of the Grand Canal of Venice. On the Drive Provincial France is seen in a reproduction of the Chateau de Chenonceau, framed by beauti- ful lawns, overlooking the Hudson. The Ital- ian spirit has been reflected in certain buildings to be found in the neighbourhood of Gramercy Park. Several corners in this section might be set down in the residential parts of Milan without disturbing the picture. On upper West End Avenue complete blocks of houses hold an effect of Antwerp. The Nqw York of . squatter occupancy is now nearly a thing of the past, but even to-day one may find an occasional hut on a rock which suggests southwestern Ire- land; while in the western part of Greenwich Village, close to the water front, there is a nar- row lane, without sidewalks and paved with rough stones, which to the eye has every aspect of an alley way in London's Whitechapel. CHAPTER V More Eoads to the North — ^Laguerre's — Pelham Bay — The Boston Post Eoad — White Plains — ^Pound Ridge — "Keeping up with Lizzie" — Sleepy Hollow. In the early days of his career as a writing man the late F. Hopkinson Smith discovered Laguerre's, "that most delightful of French inns," on the banks of the Bronx, and told of its quaint old world atmosphere in the tales which made up A Day at Laguerre's and Other Stories. He went back to it again at the very end of his life, in the last novel that he wrote, the novel which did not appear in book form un- til several months after the author's death. The reader who sees the old inn as it is to-day must remember that Felix O'Day is a book of the New York of ten years ago. To La- guerre's, for a delightful day's outing, the two old painters of the Studio Building took Felix and Masie. It was a familiar haunt to them; there they often lunched and painted, and on the occasion in question, Sam, being a familiar on 330 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 331 the premises, first pre-empted a summer house covered with vines, already tinged by the touches of autumn's fingers, and then insisted in a loud voice on chairs and table cloths. When he was writing Felix O'Day Mr. Smith, though still in his full vigour and activity, was well on into his eighth decade. In his descrip- tion of this old inn he was drawing upon mem- ory. His earlier pictures, embodied in A Bay at Laguerre's were almost always based on living impressions, notes jotted down of an evening after June hours spent with special cronies on the banks of the winding, narrow Bronx. Then — about 1890 — from the windows of the passing railway trains one could see the "tall trees trailing their branches in the still stream — ^hardly a dozen yards wide — the white ducks paddling together, and the queer, punts drawn upon the shelving shore or tied to soggy, patched-up landing stairs." Alighting from the train at Williamsbridge, crossing the water, passing the tapestry factory, a short walk took one to the home of Henri Lemaire, the original FranQois Laguerre. Like Laguerre in the story, Lemaire was a maker of passe partouts. 332 THE NEW YOEK He was living until a few years ago, and had a shop somewhere on Sixth Avenue. A quarter of a century since Laguerre's was unique in its mouldiness and charm. But now everything is changed. No more are the paddling ducks. The old house and the punts have gone to de- cay, the stream has lost its quaintness. Out of respect to the romance of yesterday the home- ward bound commuter or New Eochelle, or Greenwich, or Stamford passing the station at Williamsbridge should keep his eyes on his eve- ning paper. Sic tratusitl From Laguerre's find the way somehow over to the Boston Post Eoad, preferably pursuing the trail to the southeast for a brief glimpse at what little remains of Poe's cottage at Ford- ham, and then passing the Zoological Gardens and coming to the turn at Pelham Parkway. It was somewhere along here that the young man with the white hair driving his car overtook the boy scout of the Eichard Harding Davis story, a chance meeting fraught with world-wide re- sults. Somewhere in the same neighbourhood, though probably on one of the thoroughfares leading to the west, was the sinister road house OF THE NOVELISTS 333 that played a part in the same author's "The Frame-Up." Crossing thef broad stone bridge near the city limits the waters of the bay are seen dancing in the sunshine. They conjure up memories of a tale by Gouverneur Morris called, if the Pilgrim is not mistaken, "A Per- fect Gentleman of Pelham Bay." A little far- ther along the Post Eoad, on the left hand side, is a road house which was used by George Barr McCutcheon in The Hollow of Her Hand. It was a stopping place for certain of the charac- ters on the journey between New York and "Southlook." The original of "Southlook" was the Sara Eandall estate on the South be- tween Port Chester and Greenwich. The name "Southlook" came from the fact that Mr. Mc- Cutcheon, at the time of the writing of The Hollow of Her Hand was living in a place known as "Westlook" at Kennebunkport, Maine. Incidentally Booth Tarkington has since spent two or three summers at "West-, look." From Greenwich go back into the Eidges that lie partly in New York and partly in Connecticut and you will find the scenes of Eobert W. Chambers's The Hidden Children. 334 THE NEW TOEK The exact ridge is not Long Eidge, or High Eidge, but Pound Eidge, As Mr. Chambers is a historian as well as a novelist, everything in the tale has been made as accurate as care could make it. The scene is the scene of Carleton's Eaid in the Eevolutionary War when the British burned the town and Major Lockwood's house. In most instances the names used are those of the actual persons of the period. The Hidden Children deals not only with the ridges, but also with Bedford, Northcastle, and Stamford. It touches also White Plains, where, by the way, there was laid a court room scene in Gertrude Atherton's Patience Sparhawh and Her Times. Occasionally, in the course of the writing his account of these rambles, the Pilgrim has been hampered rather than helped by those novelists whose trails he has tried to follow. A certain house, or city street, or suburban lane, has been identified as the scene of some particular tale or episode. The author, approached for cor- roboration, has conceded the shrewdness of the guess. "But," he has at times gone on to say, "perhaps it would be better not to put that down in print. So and so might not like it, or OF THE NOVELISTS 335 it might get me in trouble at the Trellis Club, or with the Grramercy Park Association, or the Greenwich Village Association." So before saying a word to Mr. Irving Bacheller about the particular town of that author's Keeping Up with Li'ssie and Charge It, the Pilgrim jotted down his guess, basing his deductions on the pages of the printed book. That, he pointed out to Mr. Bacheller, relieved him of any pos- sible charge of indiscretion or violation of con- fidence. The people of Pointview were the peo- ple of any Connecticut shore town in the mat- ters of speech and deportment. As for the human nature of the story, that is pretty much the same every^v^here. So the Pilgrim a little belligerently suggests that Pointview is Eiver- side, Connecticut, or a town very close to it. Chesterville is unquestionably Port Chester, New York, and the Byron Bridge of the tale the Byram Bridge over which the Boston Post Eoad crosses from the Middle States into New Eng- land. No portion of New York or its environments has been more sympathetically and tenderly treated than in Washington Irving 's Legend of 336 THE NEW TOEK Sleepy Hollow. Following the post road to the north from Tarrytown one may from the count- less associations of stone and wood readily re- evoke the quaint figure of Ichabod Crane astride his horse Gunpowder in the wild flight from the Galloping Hessian. The little valley among high hills and the small brook gliding through it remain much the same as in the days when Irv- ing was living at Sunnyside. The old church where Ichabod instructed Katrina Van Tassel in psahnody is still to be seen surrounded by locust trees and lofty elms from among which "its decent whitewashed walls shine modestly forth, like Christian purity beaming through the shades of retirement. A gentle slope descends from it to a silver sheet of water, bordered by high trees, between which peeps may be caught at the blue hills of the Hudson. ' ' This church was built in the seventeenth century. From the surroundiaig churchyard the Headless Horse- man was said to issue nightly. Ichabod 's fright began when passing the tree by which Major Andr6 was captured. His experience with the Headless Horseman began^ at the bridge, about two hundred yards farther on. THE TRAVELLER BY THE TRAINS OF THE NEW YORK, NEW HAVEN AND HARTFORD RAILWAY PASSING THE STATION AT WILLIAMSBRIDCE, CAN CATCH A GLIMPSE THROUGH THE TREES OF A RAPIDLY DECAYING FRAME HOUSE ON THE BANKS OF THE WINDING, NARROW BRONX. ONCE UPON A TIME IT WAS LAGUERRE'S, CHARACTERISED BY F. HOP- KINSON SMITH AS THE "MOST DELIGHTFUL OF FRENCH INNS IN THE QUAINTEST OF FRENCH SETTLEMENTS" OF THE NOVELISTS 337 It was not until the old church had been reached that the Headless Horseman, rising in his stir- rups, hurled the pumpkin which laid the fleeing schoolmaster low. The old Mott homestead, believed to have been the home of Katrina Van Tassel, was destroyed twenty years ago. The schoolhouse in which Ichabod Crane taught and which was harassed by Brom Bones and his wild cronies has also passed away. Near by may be found the ruins of the haunted hill of Geof- frey Crayon's Chronicles. CHAPTER VI Harlem Heights — The Neutral Ground — Scenes of "Chim- mie Fadden"— The Country of "The Spy." In one of tlie sketches of Made in France, wMcli was a collection of short tales from Gruy de Mau- passant told with a United States twist, the late Henry Cuyler Bunner described one of those quaint old frame houses with great gar- dens which, until ten or a dozen years ago, were to be found here and there throughout the up- per West Side. It was in the garden that the hero of the tale came upon the strange old couple pirouetting through their ghostly dance. As to the actual situation of the house and gar- den there was very little said positively. It was somewhere west of Central Park, rather far up, and with this as guide the reader who knew this part of the city in those days, before the sweep- ing invasion of the real estate agent, the archi- tect and the mason, swept away the traces of the island's earlier history, may make such selec- tion as suits his taste. Whatever the selection may be, the reader will not have to journey far to find the scenes of Professor Brander Mat- 33S NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS 339 thews 's Tom Paulding, wMcli were laid about what is now the Eiverside Drive. The open- ing chapter of the book treated of West Ninety- third Street, and years after it was written the author took up his residence in this street, and lives near there at the present day. Among the parts of New York which have been ignored in fiction Harlem is strikingly prominent. Perhaps this is in a measure due to the swiftness of its growth and the constant changes in its architectural aspect and social conditions from year to year. The ubiquitous Mr. Fawcett occasionally alluded to it, Mrs. Anna Katharine Green used it as the back- ground of one or two of her sensations, but it wholly lacks the charm of maturity which ap- peals to the literary temperament, and has, justly or unjustly, been regarded as dull and commonplace. Moving up the Heights, we come to the Jumel mansion, frequented by so many of the great personages of our national history, and one of the reputed places of con- cealment of Fenimore Cooper's Harvey Birch. Beneath the Heights to the northwest stretches the broad expanse of the Hudson as the Spy and Captain Wharton saw it during their flights 340 THE NEW YOEK , from the Virginian troopers. To the north the broken fragments of the Highlands, throwing up their lofty heads above masses of fog that hung over the water, and by which the course of the river could be traced into the bosom of hiUs whose conical summits were grouping together, one behind another, in that disorder which might be supposed to have succeeded their gi- gantic but fruitless efforts to stop the progress of the flood, and emerging from these confused piles the river, as if rejoicing at its release from the struggle, expanding into a wide bay, which was ornamented into a few fertile and low points that jutted humbly into its broad basin." Near by were the scenes of Janice Meredith when Mr. Paul Leicester Ford, car- ried his narrative from Middle New Jersey to the northern end of Manhattan Island ; whisking the characters of the book to Harlem Heights, and showing us Washington at a time when the colonial cause was beginning to look dark and hopeless. A group of horsemen on a slight eminence of ground were watching the move- ments of the British men of war, and the dis- comfiture of the raw American recruits. Later the action shifted to the Eoger Morris house. OF THE NOVELISTS 341 where WasMngton had his headquarters and Mr. Meredith and his daughter were brought to answer to a charge of conveying to the British vastly important information as to the lack of powder in the American army. The country at the northern end of Manhat- ten Island and beyond the Harlem was in a measure the inspiration of Fenimore Cooper's The Spy. Every crag and valley was the scene of one of the skirmishes between partisans of the rival causes in the Eevolutionary period; every road knew the wanderings of Harvey Birch. The opening pages of the book find General Washington, under the name of Harper, pursuing his way through one of the numerous little valleys of Westchester, which became after the occupation of New York by the British army common ground until the end of the war. The towns in the southern part of the country near the Harlem Eiver were, for the most part, under English dominion, while those of northern Westchester were in sympa- thy with the Eevolutionary cause. "The Lo- custs," the home of the Whartons, which was a meeting place for the officers of King George's army, stood on the side of a hill overlooking 342 THE NEW YORK the distant waters of Long Island Sound, the scene of Water Witch. "The Locusts" down to present times has been occupied by descend- ants of the family that Cooper, when living at Closet Hall — the home of the Littlepage family in Satanstoe — ^was in the habit of visiting on his little journeys inland. The appearance of this house, which played so important a part in The Spy, had changed but little since the time when Cooper knew it. All the country to the north of the Harlem, stretching from the Hudson to the Sound, is rich with associations of Cooper's first great historical novel. Near by at " The Four Corners" is the site where stood the building from which Harvey Birch escaped disguised in Betty Flanagan's clothes. The village of Four Comers was a cluster of small and dilapidated houses at a spot where two roads intersected at right angles. The hilly country between Spuy- ten Duyvil and Yonkers was the scene of the flight and wanderings of the pedlar and Cap- tain Wharton, after the escape from the farm- house in which the English ofiScer was impris- oned awaiting execution, and from which he was rescued by Harvey's strategy. The cave in which they took refuge when pursued by the OF THE NOVELISTS 343 troop of American horse was in the Washington rocks at Park Hill. Turning from the fiction which finds its back- ground in the last years of the eighteenth cen- tury to fiction which very distinctively belongs to the closing years of the- nineteenth century, a few miles from "The Locusts" was the house which was the scene of the exploits, belligerent and amorous, of Edward "W. Townsend's Chim- mie Fadden. The little Bowery boy, it will be remembered, after his reclamation by Miss Fannie was taken as footman to the country residence of "His Whiskers." It was there that he entered polite society, and wooed and won "De Duchess." The original of the coun- try home of "His Whiskers" was the residence of Mr. Gillig, ex-Commodore of the Larchmont Yacht Club, at Larchmont, overlooking the Sound. To this great house the author of CHim- mie Fadden had been a frequent visitor. Fifty or a hundred feet away from the northern end of the house is the stable to which "His Whisk- ers" was in the habit of taking Chames when- ever he deemed that the young man was in need of more vigorous redemption than Miss Fan- nie 's instruction could supply. CHAPTEE VII Greenpoint and Edgar Taweett — F. Hopkinson Smith's "Tom Grogan" — Over the River — Columbia Heights and "The Harbour"— The Brooklyn Water Front. In An Ambitious Woman Edgar Fawcett gave us a description of an outlying portion of New York strikingly adequate in its scope and con- viction. Of Greenpoint he said that its sover- eign dreariness still remains. He dwelt at length on its melancholy, its ugliness, its torpor, its neglect. To him it always had a certain ''goblin hideousness keenly picturesque." When writing An Ambitious Woman he went time and time again to Greenpoint to study its conditions and atmosphere — to get all its tragic- comic suggestiveness well in memory. The background of the story — the black, loamy meadow and the sodden bridge and the little inky creek, and the iris-necked flock of pigeons and the dull, dirty smoke from the factories- was all very real to him. The Twinings lived in a three-story wooden 344 , NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS 345 house of di, yellowish drab colour, with trellised piazza, Corinthian pillars and high basement windows, in one of the retired side streets of Greenpoint. A few such houses were to be found until recent years, but the book offers no evidence that the author had in mind any par- ticular structure. Claire Twining before the encounter with Josie, which marked such a crisis in her life, was standing on a little hill which overlooked the lights of the city. This hill from which Mr. Fawcett described his heroine as "watching the wrinkled river, drab and tremulous, the boats and beyond the church spires of New York," was probably Pottery HiU, which was razed about twenty-five years ago. Crossing two rivers and the city between we find at Hoboken the little green park de- scribed in the same author's A Daughter of Silence. This book was a favourite novel of the late Colonel Ingersoll. In this park, which may be seen from the river, Guy Arbuthnot and Brenda first met. The opening pages of F. Hopkinson Smith's Tom Grogan dealt with the work about the Lighthouse Department and the Government 346 , THE NEW YOEK dock at St. George, Staten Island. Babcock, building tbe sea wall, came upon Tom Grogah in the depot yard with its coal docks and ma- chine shops. Over the hill in Stapleton, thinly disguised in the story as Eockville, was Tom Grogan's house and stables. The house, a plain, square frame dwelling, with front and rear verandas, protected by the arching branches of a big sycamore-tree and surrounded by a small garden filled with flaming dahlias and chrysanthemums, was, until a few years ago, occupied by the daughter and son-in-law of the original of the character, who herself lived in a hous^ of recent erection only a stone's throw distant. Directly in the rear of this house could be found the stables, the stable yard and the pump and horse trough, all of which played a conspicuous part in the tale. It was while in the larger of the two stables that Tom was struck down by the hammer in the hand of Dan McGaw, and through the window at the side came the hght by which she saw his face before the blow fell. The long room in which Judge Bowker gave the decision which settled finally the question of the award of the OF THE NOVELISTS 347 contract, and allowed Tom Grogan the right to use her husband's signature in carrying on her business, was not, as might be supposed, in the Town Hall proper, but in a room directly over the Stapleton Post-Office. Across the square was a one-story frame structure, which was the original of O'Leary's saloon, where McGaw and Crimmins hatched their plots against Tom. The experiences which went to make this book were gathered during Mr. Smith's coimection with the Government Lighthouse Department as contractor. It was then that he came in contact with Mrs. Bridget Morgan, stevedore, the orig- inal Tom Grogan. Then there is the New York that lies "over the river." That, however, has been a com- paratively neglected phase. In fiction it has ho such significance as has the "Surrey Side of the Thames" or the "rive gauche." Whatever of his books may be preferred by the reader, it will usually be found that among the bits of London of which Dickens wrote there is none that has exercised a greater and more holding a charm than the debtor's prison of the Marshalsea. To the normal well-dressed Lon- 348 THE NEW YOEK doner residing, let us say, somewhere in Ham- mersmith or the neighbourhood of St. John's Wood, the vast region "over the river" means something a little mysterious and weird. Blot out that part of Paris which lies "over the river," and the loss to literature would be in- finitely more far reaching. There are the streets trod by Messieurs Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D'Artagnan, the scenes of one-half of what is greatest in the Comedie Humaine, of Jean Valjean's skulking pilgrimages, of the light loves, the fourberies, the poignant suffer- ings of Murger 's men and women. The Thames and the Seine! Both are pregnant with liter- ary significance. We have two rivers ; but our novelists seem to find no inspiration in studying them by light or dark; our poets don't pipe their little lays over their darkness, their mys- tery, their tragedy, their treachery, their silence. For the "over the river" in New York fiction we must rely on the future. Yet not far from the river on the Brooklyn side, near to the Sands Street gate of the Navy Yard, is a series of little alleys quite as dirty, as pic- turesque, as rich in suggestion as the alleys of o:f the novelists 349 Dickens's London. Again might be pointed out Fort Lee and the Sound side of Staten Island, with the looming chimneys of Constable Hook. Years ago, in one of those juvenile publications then the source of endless delight, appeared serially a story of which the mise-en-scene was on board a canal-boat which lay at anchor in the Bay of Gowanus. Gowanus ! There is one reader at least to whom the sight or sound of that word still thrills and charms — ^by whom that early impression of darkness and gloom shall never be forgotten. The old Wall Street Ferry was more con- venient. But it is gone. So some day cross by the Fulton Street Perry, and, from the Brook- lyn end, follow the street that, running south- ward, parallels the water front. Under foot rough cobblestones, and here and there a sea of mud. To the right great warehouses. Every hundred feet or so long tunnels, most of them arched, through which one catches glimpses of the waters of the East Eiver. On the left smaller warehouses, of a drab colour, the kind of warehouses that one finds on the banks of the Thames. Then a saloon or two, more smaller 350 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS 351 warehouses, and tlien a kind of battlement, ris- ing sheer, crested with a garden. For a time the street seems a street not only without an end or a turning, but without intercepting streets. You reach a point where, looking ahead and looking behind as far as the eye can see, there is no perceptible break in the walls that hem it in. It is as if you were to go on forever with no escape save by the retracing of the footsteps. Finally, when you come to the point where it is possible to climb to the heights above, you do so by means of a series of steps that lead up to Montague Terrace. It was this strange neighbourhood, this con- trast between the sordid street below and the splendid residences above, that stood out with particular vividness in Ernest Poole's The Harbour. This pilgrimage is in no sense criti- cal, yet there can be no harm in pointing out the enduring merits of that book — that is of the first half of the book — especially as it reflects as few other novels of New York have done a pass- ing phase of the city's life and manners. And the strange part of it is that to Ernest Poole these scenes to which he laid so definite a claim 352 THE NEW YOEK came to him, not througli inheritance, but by rea- son of a chance discovery. The story of the book is that of a boy to whose eyes the world THE GAEDENS LOOKING TOWARD THE IN- NEB BAY. ERNEST POOLE'S "THE harboub" unfolds in the form of New York harbour as it is seen from that part of Brooklyn known as Columbia Heights. Ever since he could re- OF THE NOVELISTS 353 member he had looked down from the back win- dows of his home upon a harbour that to him was strange and terrible. He was glad that the house itself was up so high. Its front was on a sedate old street, and within it everything felt safe. But from the porch at the back of our house you went three steps down to a long, narrow garden — at least the garden seemed long to me — and you walked to the end of the garden and peered through the ivy- covered bars of the fence, as I had done when I was so little that I could barely walk alone, you had the first mighty thrill of your life. For you found that through a hole in the ivy you could see a shivery dis- tance straight down through the air to a street below. You found that the two iron posts, one at either end of the fence, were warm when you touched them, had holes in the top, had smoke coming out — ^were chim- neys! And slowly it dawned upon your mind that this garden of yours was nothing at all but the roof of a grey old building — ^which your nurse told you vaguely had been a "warehouse" long ago when the waters of the harbour had come 'way in to the street below. The old "wharves" had been down there, she said. What was a "wharf"? It was a "dock," she told me. And she said that a family of "dockers" lived in the building under our garden. They were all that was left in it now but "old junk." Who was 354 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS Old Junk, a man or a woman? And what in the world were Dockers? The composite Eichard Harding Davis hero is invariably afflicted with homesickness when in lands remote, and with the wanderlust when he is at home. In the Hotel Continental or the Hotel Villa de France in Tangier he yearns for certain odonrs and noises of Fourteenth Street, just as Stanley Ortheris yearned for the sight, and sounds, and smells of the Tottenham Court Eoad. Listening to the band playing on the Alameda of some Spanish-American city he dreams of the lights of the Eumson Eoad, or the Hudson as it appears from a house on the top of a hill in Dobbs Ferry. But once back again among the lights of Broadway his thoughts are all of Mediterranean ports and waving palm trees. MeWilliams summed up the Davis hero at the end of Soldiers of For- tv/ne. "There were three of us," he said to Clay, "and one got shot, and one got married, and the third — ? You will grow fat. Clay, and live on Fifth Avenue and wear a high silk hat, and some day when you're sitting in your club 35S 356 THE NEW YOEK you'll read a paragraph in a newspaper witli a queer Spanish date-line to it, and this will all come back to you — this heat, and the pahns, and the fever, and the days when you lived on plan- tains and we watched our trestles grow out across the canons, and you'll be willing to give your hand to sleep in a hammock again, and to feel the sweat running down your back, and you'll want to chuck your gun up against your chin and shoot into a line of men and the police- men won't let you, and your wife won't let you. That's what you're giving up. There it is. Take a good look at it. You'll never see it again." So, too, after Honduranian adventure, Eoyal Macklin returns to New York, determined to settle down to a useful and monotonous exist- ence. He will become Schwartz and Carboy's Mr. Macklin. Perhaps, in time, he may rise to the importance of calling the local conductors by their familiar names. "Bill, what was the matter with the 8.13 this morning?" But one day he crosses the East Eiver for a visit to the 'Navy Yard, and returning in the winter eve- ning, makes his way along the Brooklyn water OF THE NOVELISTS 357 front, twinkling with thousands of lights. Over the wharves the names of strange and beautiful ports mocked at him from the sheds of the steamship lines. "Bahia, Eio de Janeiro, and the Eiver Plata," "Guayaquil, Callao, and Santiago," "Cape Town, Dustan, and Lorenzo Marquez." At one wharf a steamer of the Eed D line, just in from La Guayra, is making fast, and Macklin quickly creeps on board. For half an hour, talking Spanish to the captain, smelling the cargo, and sipping Jamaica rum, he is under the Southern Cross, and New York is three thousand miles astern. CHAPTER Vni The City of Joys, Tawdry and Sublime — The Statue of Liberty — The Old Coney Transformed — Blinker Finds His Brothers. "Sb no longer saw a rabble, but his brothers seeking the ideal." These words, in which 0. Henry described the emotions of one Alex- ander Blinker, millionaire owner of certain New York tenement property known as "Brick- dust Eow," when, in the company of Florence, who trimmed hats in a millinery shop, he found the soul of the joys, tawdry, tinsel, yet sublime of Coney Island, might well be the epitaph on WilHam Sidney Porter's tomb. It matters not what your station in life may be ; or how varied your experiences may have been in the pursuit of adventure and pleasure. Some day, in the warm summer sunshine, make that journey in the company of Masie, of **A Lickpenny Lover," or of Dennis Carnahan, of "The Greater Coney," or of Tobin, of "Tobin's Palm," and like Blinker, learn a lesson and see 358 NEW YORK OF THE NOVELISTS 359 a light. From the end of a long pier you cross the gang plank, mount to an upper deck, and seize two camp stools. The boat slides away from her moorings, past the Battery, and out across the Upper Bay. The air is rent by the rival clamour of instrumental music and the voice of the waiter soliciting orders for drinks. To the left is Governor 's Island, and to the right the Statue of Liberty. The latter you have contemplated, unmoved, a score of times. But see it now as 0. Henry saw it in "The Lady Higher Up," no longer a mere symbol, but a woman, human and humanly envious, passing the time of day with her neighbour, Diana, of the Madison Square Tower. Made by a Dago and presented to the American people on behalf of the French Government for the purpose of welcoming Irish immigrants into the Dutch city of New York, Miss Liberty has acquired a fine Hibernian brogue, a brogue that for the mo- ' ment is hoarsened on account of the peanut hulls left in her throat by the last boat-load of tour- ists from Marietta, Ohio. Hers is a lonesome life, she complains, not to be compared with that of Miss Diana, who has the best job for a statue 360 THE NEW YOEK in the whole town with the Cat Show and the Horse Show, and the military tournaments when the privates "look grand as generals and the generals try to look grand as floor- walkers," and the Sportsman's Show, and above all, the French Ball, "where the original Cohens and the Robert Emmett Sangerbund Society dance the Highland fling with one another." The Narrows are passed, there is a pleasur- able chop to the sea, and soon the boat is made fast beneath the great towers and revolving wheels of the Island. It was on the new Coney that has risen, "like a Phoenix bird" that Den- nis Camahan expatiated ironically. "The old Bowery, where they used to take your tintype by force, and give you knockout drops before having your palm read, is now called the Wall Street of the Island. The wienerwurst stands are required by law to keep a news ticker in them; and the doughnuts are examined every four years by a retired steamboat inspector. The nigger man's head that was used by the old patrons to throw baseballs at is now illegal; and by order of the Police Commissioner the image of a man driving an automobile has been sub- OF THE NOVELISTS 361 stituted. The reprehensible and degrading re- sorts that disgraced old Coney are said to be wiped out. The wiping-out process consists of raising the price from ten cents to twenty-five cents, and having a blonde named Mandie to sell tickets instead of Micky, the Bowery Bite." Something of the flavours of strange cities and seas is there. Else how could Masie, of "A Lickpenny Lover" have interpreted the words of Irving Carter as she did? Shores where summer is eternal and the waves are always rippling, grand and lovely palaces and towers full of beautiful pictures and statues, streets of water, elephants of India, temples of the Hin- doos and Brahmins, gardens of Japan, camel trains and chariot races of Persia, were in the promise that he held out. And Masie thought she understood. "A cheap guy, who wanted me to marry him and go down to Coney Island for a wedding tour." Like Alexander Blinker consider the temples, pagodas, and kiosks of popularised delights. Be trampled, hustled and crowded by hoi polloi. Be bumped by basket parties and have your clothes candied by sticky children. Swallow 362 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS the cheap cigar smoke blown into your face by insolent youth. Listen to the publicity gen- tlemen with megaphones, and the hideous blare of a thousand bands. Mingle with the mob, the multitude, the proletariat shrieking, struggling, hurrying, panting, hurling itself in incontinent frenzy, with unabashed abandon, into the ridiculous sham palaces of trumpery and tinsel pleasures. Then see Coney aright — ^no longer a mass of vulgarians seeking gross joys, but a hundred thousand true idealists. Perceive that though counterfeit and false are the garish joys of those spangled temples, deep under the gilt surface they offer saving and apposite balm and satisfaction to the restless human heart. Find here at least the husk of Romance, the empty but shining casque of Chivalry, the breath-catching though safe-guarded dip and flight of Adventure, the magic carpet that trans- ports you to the realms of Fairyland. See no longer a rabble, but your brothers seeking the ideal. MRS. LIBERTY. "MADE BY A DAGO AND PRESENTED TO THE AMERICAN' PEOPLE ON BEHALF OF THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT FOR THE PURPOSE OF WELCOM- ING IRISH IMMIGRANTS INTO THE DUTCH CITY OF NEW YORK." 0. HENRY'S "THE LADY HIGHER UP" CHAPTER IX The New Jersey Trail — The Atlantic Highlands — Days of the Revolution — The Bumson Boad — The Country of the "Pig People" — Gothic Towers and Stately Elms. This Pilgrimage has touched the shores of the Hudson, the old Boston Post Eoad, Westches- ter, and Long Island. But no discussion of the City Beyond would be complete that did not in- clude New Jersey. "The joke State" it has been called by its detractors. But a certain King George the Third did not find it so, nor the Hessian mercenaries loaned for the crushing of infant liberties. The War of the Revolution, fomented in New England, was fought out across the breast of New Jersey. Cambridge has her Oak, but Princeton and Trenton had their battles, battles that did so much to turn the tide. Through all the vital years there were the two armies facing each other ; the forces of King George in Staten Island and the Jersey lowlands, the Continentals in the hills of the Blue Ridge range. And what history records, is reflected in the historical novels. There are 363 364 THE NEW YORK Weir Mitcliell's Mugh Wynne, and Paul Lei- cester Ford's Janice Meredith, and K. N. Stephen's Philip Winwood, and M, Imlay Tay- lor's A Yankee Volunteer, and J. 0. Kaler's Across the Delaware, and J. A. Altsheler's In Hostile Red. Among the juveniles may be men- tioned James Barnes's For King or Country, and G. A. Henty's True to the Old Flag, and E. T. Tomlinson's Washington's Young Aids, and In the Camp of Cornwallis. Of the Atlantic Highlands J. Fenimore Cooper wrote in Water Witch, and about these Highlands were scenes of a rousing old tale of years ago, Admiral Porter's Allan Dare and Robert le Diahle. To New Jersey the reader must go for the backgrounds of Rudder Grange and other of Frank R. Stockton's stories. From the great hotels of Lakewood venture a few miles into the strange country of the "pig people" which was described by Herman Knick- erbocker Viele in Myra of the Pines. To the eastward is Point Pleasant, the Pleasantville of Charles Belmont Davis's In Another Moment. For the Natasqua River of the tale read the Manasquan. Northward are the lights along ^he ocean drive at Long Branch and up the OF THE NOVELISTS 365 Eumson Eoad, which Robert Clay pointed out in vision to Hope Langham in Richard Harding Davis's Soldiers of Fortune. Where the Lincoln Highway runs through the town of Lawrenceville, on the right side of the road going towards Philadelphia, there is a sign reading "The Jigger Shop" which attracts the immediate attention of a great many American boys. For it was the scene of sundry exploits of "Dink" Stover, and "Doc" MacNooder, and "The Tennessee Shad" and "Flash" Condit, and "Snorky" Green, and "The Prodigious Hickey," and a score more of the ingenuous youths of Owen Johnson's tales of life at the Lawrenceville school, John C. Green Founda- tion. It was there the "Hungry" Smeed es- tablished his "Great Pancake Record" that was to go down imperishably to decades of school- boys when touchdowns and home runs should be only tinkling sounds. A step across the road, and we are on the pleasant walks that wind past WoodhuU and Dickinson and the other houses out to the athletic field where Stover and "Tough" McCarty fought shoulder to shoulder, and in the shadow of thfe goal posts flung back the onset of the foe. Then there is a university 366 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS town, and a campus of Gothic towers and stately elms, clustering about a long building which was once the largest and most imposing in the West- em Hemisphere. That building was there in the pre-revolutionary period in which Booth Tarkington laid his Cherry, that whimsical, fan- tastic tale of the erudite, Mr. Sudgeberry, and the ribbons of Miss Sylvia Gray. It was in the heart and mind of Harkless, of The Gentleman from Indiana, as he sat on a fence rail and looked back over the seven years of unfulfil- ment. It was one of the bright memories of Felix Piers, of Stephen French Whitman's Pre- destined. It stood for days in the life of the hero of Ernest Poole's The Harbour, it has stood for days in the lives of heroes of stories of Jesse Lynch Williams, of James Barnes, and of a score more. To the loyal it means the tro- phied past and a limitless future. And when in dust these walls are laid With reverence and awe Another throng shall breathe our song. In praise — THE END