Part 5 (2/2)
West Point Cadets.
United States Regulars.
New York National Guard and Naval Militia.
National Guard of other States.
Union and Confederate Veterans.
Veterans of the Spanish War.
When the head of the procession reached Thirty-fourth Street, the sailors from the Admiral's flags.h.i.+p halted and drew up along the side of the Avenue. The Admiral left his carriage and entered the reviewing stand at Madison Square. Admiral Sampson was on his right. Admiral Schley on his left. Surrounding them were officers of both branches of the service. For four hours Admiral Dewey stood there, acknowledging the salutes and saluting the flag. The following day, October 1st, saw the great naval parade through the waters of the Hudson River.
A decade pa.s.sed, and then came the Hudson-Fulton celebration of September 25--October 9, 1909. Of chief importance to the Avenue was the civic procession of September 28th, when the floats, depicting a great number of historical events, moved down the Avenue to Was.h.i.+ngton Square.
On the east side of the thoroughfare, from Fortieth to Forty-second Street, opposite the Public Library, there had been erected a Court of Honour. Against the stately pillars of the Court, the procession moved swiftly by. Every nation that went into the ”melting pot” was represented, with the harped green flag of Ireland at the head of the long column. Following the Ancient Order of Hibernians and other Irish societies came the Italian organizations, then Poles, English, Dutch, French, Scotch, Bohemian, Hungarian, and Syrian.
It was the nation's history of four hundred years that pa.s.sed in effigy on the floats. Pocahontas again interceded with her father Powhatan for the life of Captain John Smith. Balboa caught sight of the waters of the Pacific. The tea was dumped into Boston Harbour. The Minute Men stood fast on the Common. Mad Anthony Wayne stormed Stony Point. Molly Stark's husband said, ”There are the red-coats. We must beat them today, or Molly Stark's a widow!” Cornwallis surrendered his sword at Yorktown.
Somebody in the Mexican War said, ”Give them a little more grape, General Bragg!” and Dewey said: ”You may fire when you're ready, Gridley!”
In some of these events of the later years the writer had a personal share. From a seventh-story window at Twenty-first Street he looked down on the procession in honour of Admiral Dewey. From a vantage point at Thirty-fifth Street he witnessed the pa.s.sing of floats in the Hudson-Fulton celebration. But there was one day on the Avenue, perhaps the greatest and most inspiring of them all, in which he did not share.
That was the day that saw the visit of the Allied Commissions, the day of the coming of a Marshal of France. About the time that the guns on the wars.h.i.+ps and land batteries at Hampton Roads were thundering out their message of welcome to the distinguished guests, the writer in company with six other Americans who had been with the Commission for Relief in Belgium was entering French territory, after a never-to-be-forgotten journey through Germany. How such of us who claimed New York as our own thrilled as we pictured three thousand miles away the city's greeting to the grave, silent man whose cool genius had hurled back the Teuton hordes at the very gates of Paris! How we built up on the limited descriptions that had been cabled across the Atlantic!
We saw the sweep of the procession up the Avenue, the thousands upon thousands of flags, the densely packed throngs lining the sidewalks, the eager faces in the windows of the tall buildings, and in the motor-car, for which all eyes were searching, the smiling, saluting Marshal.
”About now,” said one of us, ”he should be pa.s.sing Madison Square.”
”I can see the people on the sidewalks and crowding the windows and the housetops,” said another.
”And I,” said a third, ”can hear the roar that goes up from the Avenue when the people catch sight of him.”
”When he hears that roar,” said a fourth, ”he will recall the guns of the Marne as gentle zephyrs.”
To that last statement and sentiment we all proudly agreed. For despite the three thousand miles of intervening ocean it was our New York and our Fifth Avenue.
CHAPTER VII
_Some Avenue Clubs in the Early Days_
Some Avenue Clubs in the Early Days--The Invention of the Club--Cato or Dr. Johnson?--The Judgment of Thackeray--The Union--The Prolific Diedrich Knickerbocker--Omens of 1836--The Century--Its Descent from the Sketch and the Column--Old-Time Austerity--Leaders of the Talk--The Lotos--The Union League--The Manhattan--The First of the College Clubs--The Columbia Yacht--The New York Athletic--Rise and Fall of the Traveller's--The Arcadian.
”Presuming that my dear Bobby would scarcely consider himself to be an accomplished man about town until he had obtained an entrance into a respectable club, I am happy to inform you that you are this day elected a member of the 'Polyanthus,' having been proposed by my friend, Lord Viscount Colchic.u.m, and seconded by your affectionate uncle. I have settled with Mr. Stiff, the worthy secretary, the preliminary pecuniary arrangements regarding the entrance fee and the first annual subscription--the ensuing payments I shall leave to my worthy nephew.
You were elected, sir, with but two black-b.a.l.l.s; and every other man who was put up for ballot had four, with the exception of Tom Harico, who had more black b.a.l.l.s than white. Do not, however, be puffed up by this victory, and fancy yourself more popular than other men. Indeed, I don't mind telling you (but of course I do not wish it to go any farther) that Captain Slyboots and I, having suspicions of the meeting, popped a couple of adverse b.a.l.l.s into the other candidates' boxes; so that, at least, you should, in case of mishap, not be unaccompanied in ill-fortune.”--Thackeray's ”Mr. Brown the Elder takes Mr. Brown the Younger to a Club.”
Very likely there are a few thousand New Yorkers, who like the present writer, not having considered the subject very deeply, have held to the vague idea that the club was an invention of a certain Dr. Samuel Johnson. Also that it came about in some such way as this. The Doctor had grown weary of bullying the patient Boswell, and browbeating the acquaintance met by chance in Fleet Street or the Strand did not entirely satisfy him. So one day, storming out of the Ches.h.i.+re Cheese, after roundly abusing the larkpie of which he had consumed an enormous quant.i.ty, he founded the first club, with the object of gathering together a number of his fellow-mortals in one place, and upon them pouring out the vials of his pompous and splenetic wrath.
One day, however, the ”De Senectute” that had been long forgotten was recalled by a pa.s.sage in Mr. James W. Alexander's ”History of the University Club of New York.” There it was pointed out, that as far back as 200 B.C., Cicero represented Cato as saying: ”To begin with, I have always remained a member of a 'Club.' Clubs, as you know, were established in my _quaestors.h.i.+p_ on the reception of the Magna Mater from Ida. So _I used to dine at their feast_ with members of my club--on the whole with moderation.” But, except as a point of historical interest, whether stern Cato or voluble Johnson was the inventor does not matter greatly to the New York club member who is airing his weekly grievance by drawing up a pet.i.tion, or writing a scorching letter a day to the House Committee.
If you will listen to the Manhattanite of the older generation, you are likely to derive the impression that club life in New York is a matter of the last half-century at most. He is rather inclined to fleer at any pretension to American club life of earlier date. In one sense he is right. The club as we know it now is essentially a British inst.i.tution modelled on British lines. More and more is the British idea being carried to the extreme, until we are a.s.sociating club life with the vast club-house of s.p.a.cious lounges and marble swimming pools, and a cuisine rivalling that of one of the great new hotels. The Fifth Avenue club of half a century ago had little magnificence as we now understand the word. It was a simpler and more limited hospitality that was offered to the friend or the distinguished stranger from overseas. Yet that hospitality must have had a rare flavour and atmosphere. There must have been something about it that went far to make up for mere material deficiencies, if we are to credit the verdicts of those who were in a position to compare American club life with club life in England and on the Continent. Thackeray was as fine a judge of the matter as any man who ever strutted through St. James's Park and scowled back at the Barnes Newcomeses and Captain Heavysideses in the club windows along Pall Mall, and there was what he said and wrote about the Century.
It was in the middle of the sixth decade of the last century that the clubs began to find their way into Fifth Avenue. One of the first was the Union Club. Writing of that organization in 1906, M. Charles Huard, in ”New York comme je l'ai vu,” volunteered the puzzling information that it was ”_fonde en 1836 par les descendants de Knickerbocker, le plus vieux donc des grand clubs de New York_.” If the Frenchman was to be taken literally he apparently regarded the offspring of Was.h.i.+ngton Irving's creation as an exceedingly prolific race. The Union, in 1855, moved from Broadway near Fourth Street into a house on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-first Street. That home, which the Union occupied until fifteen or twenty years ago, was described as ”a superb structure which cost three hundred thousand dollars.” It was the first building erected in the city solely for club purposes. Almost to the day of its demolition, although the neighbourhood about it was changing rapidly, the old house wore an aspect of dignity. To the corner the habitues of other years seldom come today. Instead, at the noon hour, the sidewalks swarm with foreign faces and there is excited babble in an alien tongue. The cloak and suit firm of Potash and Perlmutter is as much at home here now as it was in its East Broadway--or was it Division Street?--loft when the present century was coming into being.
There is an old volume, bearing the date 1871, called ”The Clubs of New York.” The author was a Francis Gerry Fairfield, and the chapters that make up the book were originally contributed to the columns of the ”Home Journal.” There is a perceptible smile on Mr. Fairfield's face as he writes of the town of thirty years before. To the present generation that smile is irresistibly funny. He recalls the year 1836, when the Union was founded as one of meteorological oddities. ”Tradition preserves the record of the season under the designation of the cold summer. Weird auroras did not forbear to lift themselves in mountains of fire along the north, even in July; and more than once the canopy-aurora hung like a mock sun in the very centre of the heavens. People predicted strange things; but the strange things did not happen. The hyena of pestilence, the wolf of want, and the red death of war were conjured, but emerged not, nevertheless, from the vasty deep supposed by Shakespeare to be inhabited by their spirits.” But Mr. Fairfield disclaims any suggestion that ”the gestation of the Union Club, then in progress, had any material influence in the evolution of these omens, or that the weather was affected by the parturition of the great social event.” With the metropolitan sophistication of 1871 he pats 1836 on the head as a year when New York was a bit of a village, of rather more than three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. Houston, then North Street, Bleecker, and Bond Streets were particularly uptown, and thoroughfares of fas.h.i.+on and aristocracy. The old regime was still in its glory; and real counts, in plaid pantaloons, were sensational occurrences to be petted, set up as lions, and finally entrapped into matrimony, just by way of improving the blood of the first families. He tells of ”the little white-faced hotel now termed the Tremont” as having been kept by a real count, expatriated for political reasons, but afterwards restored to t.i.tles and estates. There are those of the Year of Grace 1918 who recall the ”little white-faced Tremont.” But its soul has long since pa.s.sed to t'other side of Styx.
From the day when the Union first opened its doors at No. 1 Bond Street, it was one of the wealthiest and most exclusive of New York clubs. The names of its organizers are names a.s.sociated with the history of the city. Ogden Hoffman, whom Mr. Fairfield describes as ”a bald-headed, dreamy-eyed man, in his day the star of the New York Bar, both for fervid eloquence and profound learning”; Philip Hone, he of the immortal ”Diary”; Thomas P. Oakley, Samuel Jones, Beverly Robinson, W.B.
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