Part 3 (1/2)
The frontispiece of the book shows the Stewart Mansion at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, and by contrast, the Old Brewery at the Five Points. Before the Mission was opened the Five Points was a dangerous locality, the resort of burglars, thieves, and desperadoes, with dark, underground chambers, where murderers often hid, where policemen seldom went, and never unarmed. A good citizen going through the neighbourhood after dark was sure to be a.s.saulted, beaten, and probably robbed. Nightly the air was filled with the sound of brawling. Wretchedness, drunkenness, and suffering stalked abroad. There were such rookeries as Cow Bay and Murderer's Alley, the latter of which continued to exist, though its sinister glory had long since departed, until fifteen or twenty years ago. The lodging houses of the section were underground, without ventilation, without windows, overrun with rats and vermin.
For diversion the miserable denizens of the quarter sought the near-by Bowery, with its brilliantly lighted drinking dens, its concert halls, where negro minstrelsy was featured, and its theatres where the plays were immoral comedies or melodramas glorifying the exploits of picturesque criminals. News-boys, street-sweepers, rag-pickers, begging girls filled the galleries of these places of amus.e.m.e.nt. Here is the clerical visitor's description of the thoroughfare that was then the second princ.i.p.al street of the city: ”Leaving the City Hall about six o'clock on Sunday night, and walking through Chatham Square to the Bowery, one would not believe that New York had any claim to be a Christian city, or that the Sabbath had any friends. The shops are open, and trade is brisk. Abandoned females go in swarms, and crowd the sidewalk. Their dress, manner, and language indicate that depravity can go no lower. Young men known as Irish-Americans, who wear as a badge long frock-coats, crowd the corners of the streets, and insult the pa.s.ser-by. Women from the windows arrest attention by loud calls to the men on the sidewalk, and jibes, profanity, and bad words pa.s.s between the parties. Sunday theatres, concert-saloons, and places of amus.e.m.e.nt are in full blast. The Italians and Irish shout out their joy from the rooms they occupy. The click of the billiard ball, and the booming of the ten-pin alley, are distinctly heard. Before night, victims watched for will be secured; men heated with liquor, or drugged, will be robbed, and many curious and bold explorers in this locality will curse the hour in which they resolved to spend a Sunday in the Bowery.”
To find adventure and danger the rural visitor did not have to seek out the Bowery and the adjacent streets to the east and west. Adroit rogues were everywhere. Bland gentlemen introduced themselves to unwary strangers. Instead of the mining stock or the sick engineer's story of our more enlightened and refined age, these pleasant urbanites resorted to the cruder weapon of blackmail. The art was reduced to a system.
Terrible warnings were conveyed to the innocent country-side by the chronicler in such sub-heads as ”A Widower Blackmailed,” ”A Minister Falls among Thieves,” ”Blackmailers at a Wedding,” ”A Bride Called On.”
Darkly the investigator painted the gambling evil of the New York of the sixties. The dens of chance were in aristocratic neighbourhoods and superbly appointed. Heavy blinds or curtains, kept drawn all day, hid the inmates from prying eyes. Within, rosewood doors, deep carpets, and mirrors of magnificent dimensions. The dinner table spread with silver and gold plate, costly chinaware, and gla.s.s of exquisite cut: the viands embracing the luxuries of the season and the wines of the choicest.
”None but men who behave like gentlemen are allowed the entree of the rooms” is the nave comment. ”Play runs on by the hour, and not a word spoken save the low words of the parties who conduct the game. But for the implements of gaming there is little to distinguish the room from a first-cla.s.s club-house. Gentlemen well known on 'change' and in public life, merchants of a high grade, whose names adorn charitable and benevolent a.s.sociations, are seen in these rooms, reading and talking.
Some drink only a gla.s.s of wine, walk about, and look on the play with apparently but little curiosity. The great gamblers, besides those of the professional ring, are men accustomed to the excitement of the Stock Board. They gamble all day in Wall and Broad Streets, and all night on Broadway. To one not accustomed to such a sight, it is rather startling to see men whose names stand high in church and state, who are well dressed and leaders of fas.h.i.+on, in these notable saloons, as if they were at home.” Conspicuous among the keepers of the gambling h.e.l.ls was John Morrissey, who had begun life as the proprietor of a low drinking den in Troy, and as a step in the march of prosperity, had fought Heenan, the Benicia Boy, for the champions.h.i.+p of Canada. He was a personality of the city of the sixties. The author of the curious volume thought it necessary to tell of his career as he told of the career of A.T. Stewart, and Henry Ward Beecher, and the particular Astor of the day, and the particular Vanderbilt, Fernando Wood, and Leonard W.
Jerome, and George Law, and James Gordon Bennett, the elder, and Daniel Drew, and General Halpin, and half a dozen more of the town's celebrities.
The Franconi Hippodrome on the Fifth Avenue Hotel site had become a memory, but far downtown Barnum's Museum was flouris.h.i.+ng, with the doors open from sunrise till ten at night. Early visitors from the country inspected the gallery of curiosities before sitting down to breakfast.
The great showman was living in a brown-stone house on Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Thirty-ninth Street. He was approaching his sixtieth year, and had retired from active life, although he still held the controlling interest in the Museum. A.T. Stewart was living in the white stone home he had erected at Thirty-fourth Street. James Gordon Bennett's city residence was on the Avenue at Thirty-eighth Street. In fact, with a few notable exceptions who still clung to their downtown homes, such as the Astors and the Vanderbilts, all the great money kings of the decade were gathering in the upper stretches of the ripening thoroughfare. But the descendants of the Patroons held to the sweep from Was.h.i.+ngton Square to Fourteenth Street, or to lower Second Avenue, which, to the eyes of its ”set,” embracing a number of old-school families of Colonial ancestry, was the ”Faubourg St. Germain” of New York.
In every other memoir touching on the New York of the sixties will be found an allusion to the Flora McFlimseys. For example, Mr. W.D.
Howells, in ”Literary Friends and Acquaintances,” told of his first visit to the city at the time of the Civil War. After Clinton Place was pa.s.sed, he wrote: ”Commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kind dwelt unmolested in the brown-stone stretches of Fifth Avenue.” There are two poems linked with the story of New York. They are Edmund Clarence Stedman's ”The Diamond Wedding,” and ”Nothing to Wear,”
and the William Allen Butler verses, beginning:
”Miss Flora McFlimsey, of Madison Square Has made three separate journeys to Paris.
And her father a.s.sures me, each time she was there, That she and her friend Mrs. Harris (Not the lady whose name is so famous in history, But plain Mrs. H., without romance or mystery) Spent six consecutive weeks, without stopping, In one continuous round of shopping--”
were the very spirit of the Fifth Avenue of that day. Butler wrote the poem in 1857, in a house in Fourteenth Street, within a stone's throw of the Avenue. After finis.h.i.+ng it, and reading it to his wife, he took it one evening to No. 20 Clinton Place, to try it on his friend, Evart A.
Duyckinck. Not only did the verses themselves have a Fifth Avenue inspiration and origin, but the woman who later claimed that she had written the nine first lines and thirty of the concluding lines, told in her story that she had dropped the ma.n.u.script while pa.s.sing through a crowd at Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. It was a famous case in its day, and the claimant found supporters, just as the absurd Tichborne Claimant found supporters. But Butler's right to ”Nothing to Wear” was fully substantiated. Horace Greeley made the controversy the subject of a vigorous editorial in the ”Tribune,” and ”Harper's Weekly,” in which the poem had originally appeared, pointed out that although the verses were published in February, the spurious claim was not put forward until July. Writing of ”Nothing to Wear” forty years later, W.D. Howells said:
”For the student of our literature 'Nothing to Wear' has the interest and value of satire in which our society life came to its full consciousness for the first time. To be sure there had been the studies of New York called 'The Potiphar Papers,'
in which Curtis had painted the foolish and unlovely face of our fas.h.i.+onable life, but with always an eye on other methods and other models; and 'Nothing to Wear' came with the authority and the appeal of something quite indigenous in matter and manner. It came winged, and equipped to fly wide and to fly far, as only verse can, with a message for the grand-children of 'Flora McFlimsey,' which it delivers today in perfectly intelligible terms.
”It does not indeed find her posterity in Madison Square. That quarter has long since been delivered over to hotels and shops and offices, and the fas.h.i.+on that once abode there has fled to upper Fifth Avenue, to the discordant variety of handsome residences which overlook the Park. But it finds her descendants quite one with her in spirit, and as little clothed to their lasting satisfaction.”
The nuptials that Edmund Clarence Stedman satirized in ”The Diamond Wedding” united Miss Frances Amelia Bartlett and the Marquis Don Estaban de Santa Cruz de Oviedo, and were held in October, 1859, under the direction of ”the fat and famous Brown, s.e.xton of Grace Church.” Miss Bartlett, a tall and willowy blonde, still in her teens, was the daughter of a retired lieutenant in the United States Navy. The Bartlett home was in West Fourteenth Street, a few doors from the Avenue. The groom, many years the bride's senior, and of strikingly unprepossessing appearance, was a Cuban of great wealth. The wedding was the talk of the town, and Stedman, then a young man of twenty-six, satirized the ill-mating in a poem that appeared first in the New York ”Tribune.” The poem began:
”I need not tell, How it befell; (Since Jenkins has told the story Over and over and over again, And covered himself with glory!) How it befell, one summer's day, The King of the Cubans pa.s.sed that way, King January's his name, they say, And fell in love with the Princess May, The reigning belle of Manhattan.
Nor how he began to smirk and sue, And dress as lovers who come to woo, Or as Max Maretzek or Jullien do, When they sit, full bloomed, in the ladies' view, And flourish the wondrous baton.
”He wasn't one of your Polish n.o.bles, Whose presence their country somehow troubles, And so our cities receive them; Nor one of your make-believe Spanish grandees, Who ply our daughters with lies and candies, Until the poor girls believe them.
No, he was no such charlatan, Count de Hoboken Flash-in-the-pan.
Full of Gasconade and bravado, But a regular, rich Don Rataplan, Santa Claus de la Muscavado, Senor Grandissimo Bastinado.
His was the rental of half Havana, And all Matanzas; and Santa Anna--”
Famous as the wedding had been, the verses became more so. They were copied into the weekly and tri-weekly issues of the ”Tribune,” and into the evening papers. Stedman, in later years, told of being startled by a huge signboard in front of the then young Brentano's, opposite the New York Hotel, at the corner of Broadway and Waverly Place, reading: ”Read Stedman's great poem on the Diamond Wedding in this evening's 'Express'!” The father of the bride, infuriated by the unpleasant publicity, challenged the poet to a duel, which never took place. Years later Stedman and the woman he had lampooned met and became the best of friends.
CHAPTER V
_Fourteenth to Madison Square_
Stretches of the Avenue--Fourteenth to Madison Square--From Brevoort to Spingler--The Story of Sir Peter Warren--The First City Hospital--The Paternoster Row of New-York--Former Homes and Birthplaces--Lower Fifth Avenue Residents in the Fifties--Blocks of Departed Glories--The Centre of the Universe--Madison Square in Colonial Days--Franconi's Hippodrome--The Opening of the Fifth Avenue Hotel--A Thanksgiving Day of the Nineties--Monuments of the Square--The Garden, the Presbyterian Church, and the Metropolitan Tower--The Face of the Clock.