Part 8 (1/2)

Herman Melville was invited to the Twentieth Street house at the time when he was at work on his _Battle Pieces_, and could look back on years of adventure by land and by sea, and on the hards.h.i.+ps that had supplied him with the material from which to write so much that was odd and interesting. At one of these Sunday-night receptions, at which Alice Cary introduced him first, Melville told the company, and told it far better than he had ever written anything (at least so one of his hearers has recorded), the story of that life of trial and adventure. He began at the beginning, telling of his boyhood in New York, of his s.h.i.+pping as a common sailor, and of his youthful wanderings in London and Liverpool. In true sailor fas.h.i.+on, and with picturesque detail, he spun the tale of his eighteen months' cruise to the sperm fisheries in the Pacific, and held his hearers' close attention while he related the coa.r.s.e brutality of his captain, who had forced him to desert at the Marquesas Islands. Then he traced his wanderings with his one companion through the trackless forest on the island of Nukahiva and of his capture by the Typee cannibals. He related how there was little hope in his heart that he could ever escape, but that he still held tight to life and his courage did not desert him; how with the thought of death before him by night and by day he yet hourly studied the strange life about him and garnered those facts and fancies which he afterwards used to such advantage in his successful _Typee_. It was a thrilling tale to listen to, in strange contrast to his humdrum later life when he was an employee of the New York Custom House. When you go to see the home of the Cary sisters, walk on a few blocks to East Twenty-sixth Street, and there see the house numbered 104. On this site stood Melville's house, where he lived for many years and where, when he had come to be an old man, he died.

Mary L. Booth was another visitor to the home of the Cary sisters, and with them she talked over a great many details of her _History of the City of New York_, which she was at that time energetically engaged upon. And there this future editor of _Harper's Bazar_ met Martha J.

Lamb when Mrs. Lamb came to the city from Chicago. A talk between the two had much to do with directing Mrs. Lamb's thought into historical lines, and led to her publis.h.i.+ng, some seventeen years later, her _History of New York_, and to her a.s.suming, in 1883, the editors.h.i.+p of the _Magazine of American History_. Mary L. Booth used to tell very amusingly how she had once met Samuel G. Goodrich, then famous as ”Peter Parley,” at the little house in Twentieth Street, and how disappointed she had been in listening to his talk and not finding it as impressive as it should have been as coming from the author and editor of more than one hundred and fifty volumes. This incident occurred within a year or two of ”Peter Parley's” death.

That popular writer of juvenile tales, Alice Haven, was also a visitor of the Cary sisters. Her early life had been spent in Philadelphia, where she had been married to J.C. Neal, but after his death she had removed to New York and made her home there. She was very much interested in the work of St. Luke's Hospital, which was not a great distance away, and often came to talk with Phoebe Cary about that inst.i.tution. Miss Cary herself was interested in it because of her regard for its founder, Dr. William Augustus Muhlenberg, who had written a hymn that was a great favorite of hers, _I Would Not Live Alway_. Dr. Muhlenberg was the rector of the Church of the Holy Communion, and in 1846 on St. Luke's Day after his sermon he suggested to his congregation that of the collection that was about to be taken half should be put aside as the commencement of a fund which should be used to found an inst.i.tution for the care of the sick poor. The fund started that day with thirty dollars, and that was the beginning of St. Luke's Hospital. It was not a great while before the actual hospital work was begun in a building at 330 Sixth Avenue, near Twentieth Street, and there had a home until the completion of that at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, where it remained until those quarters were outgrown, and in 1896 it removed to the new buildings on Cathedral Heights.

Chapter XII

Some of the Writers of To-Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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