Part 6

It is one of those stores that contain everything--from anchor-chains to chewing-gum. There are bicycle sundries in the show-case and boneless bacon suspended from the old rafters, but the best thing in the place is a stream of running water. This is led down by a pipe from the side of the hill, acts as a refrigerator for a sort of bar in one corner of the store--for this establishment sells a greater variety of commodities than most department stores--and passes out into Long Island Sound in the rear.

The fact that they are in Greater New York does not seem to bother them much down in this happy valley, at least it hasn't changed their mode of life apparently. The last time we were there a well-tanned Long Islander was buying some duck loads; he said he was merely going out after a few snipe, but he ordered No. 5's.

"Have you a policeman out here?" we asked him.

"Oh, yes, but he doesn't come around very often."

"How often?"

"Oh, I generally catch a glimpse of him once a month or so," said the gunner. "But then, you see, these here city policemen have to be pretty careful, they're likely to get lost."

"Down near Bay Ridge," a man on the cracker-barrel put in as he stroked the store-cat, "one night a policeman got off his beat and floundered into the swamp, and if it hadn't been that some folks of the neighborhood rescued him, he'd have perished--of mosquitoes."

"We don't have any mosquitoes here on the north shore," put in the other, addressing us without blinking. He is probably the humorist of the neighborhood.

* * * * *

This is only one of the many pilgrimages that may be made in Greater New York, and shows only one sort of rurality. It is the great variety of unurban scenes that is the most impressive thing about this city. Here is another sort, seen along certain parts of Jamaica Bay:

Long, level sweeps of flat land, covered with tall, wild grass that the sea-breezes like to race across. The plain is intersected here and there with streams of tide-water. At rare intervals there are lonely little clumps of scrub-oaks, huddled close together for comfort. Away off in the distance the yellow sand-dunes loom up as big as mountains, and beyond is the deep, thrilling blue of the open sea, with sharp-cut horizon.

The sun comes up, the wonderful color tricks of the early morning are exhibited, and the morning flight of birds begins. The tide comes hurrying in, soon hiding the mud flats where the snipe were feeding. The breeze freshens up, and whitecaps, like specks, can be seen on the distant blue band of the ocean.... The sun gets hot. The tide turns. The estuaries begin to show their mud-banks again. The sun sinks lower; and distant inlets reflect it brilliantly. The birds come back, the breeze dies down, and the sun sets splendidly across the long, flat plain; another day has passed over this part of a so-called city and no man has been within a mile of the spot. The nearest sign of habitation is the lonely life-saving station away over there on the dunes, and, perhaps, a fisherman's shanty. Far out on the sky-line is the smoke of a home-coming steamer, whose approach has already been announced from Fire Island, forty miles down the coast.

Then, here is another sort: A rambling, stony road, occasionally passing comfortable old houses--historic houses in some cases--with trees and lawns in front, leading down to stone walls that abut the road. The double-porticoed house where Aaron Burr died is not far from here. An old-fashioned, stone-arched bridge, a church steeple around the bend, a cluster of trees, and under them, a blacksmith shop. Trudging up the hill is a little boy, who stares and sniffles, carrying a slate and geography in one hand, and leading a little sister by the other, who also sniffles and stares. This, too, is Greater New York, Borough of Richmond, better known as Staten Island. This borough has nearly all kinds of wild and tame rurality and suburbanity. Its farms need not be described.

III

Pointing out mere farms in the city becomes rather monotonous; they are too common. But there is one kind of farm in New York that is not at all common, that has never existed in any other city, so far as I know, in ancient or modern times. It is situated, oddly enough, in about the centre of the 317 square miles of New York--so well as the centre of a boot-shaped area can be located.

Cross Thirty-fourth Street Ferry to Long Island City, which really does not smell so bad as certain of our poets would have us believe; take the car marked "Steinway," and ride for fifteen or twenty minutes out through dreary city edge, past small, unpainted manufactories, squalid tenements, dirty backyards, and sad vacant lots that serve as the last resting-place for decayed trucks and overworked wagons. Soon after passing a tumble-down windmill, which looks like an historic old relic, on a hill-top, but which was built in 1867 and tumbled down only recently, the Steinway Silk Mills will be reached (they can be distinguished by the long, low wings of the building covered with windows like a hothouse). Leave the car here and strike off to the left, down the lane which will soon be an alley, and then a hundred yards or so from the highway will be seen the first of the odd, paper-covered houses of a colony of Chinese farmers who earn their living by tilling the soil of Greater New York.

At short distances are the other huts crouching at the foot of big trees, with queer gourds hanging out in front to dry, and large unusual crocks lying about, and huge baskets, and mattings--all clearly from China; they are as different from what could be bought on the neighboring avenue as the farm and farmers themselves are different from most Long Island farms and farmers. Out in the fields, which are tilled in the Oriental way, utilizing every inch of ground clean up to the fence, and laid out with even divisions at regular intervals, like rice-fields, the farmers themselves may be seen, working with Chinese implements, their pigtails tucked up under their straw hats, while the western world wags on in its own way all around them. This is less than five miles from the glass-covered parade-ground of the Waldorf-Astoria.

They have only three houses among them, that is, there are only three of these groups of rooms, made of old boards and boxes and covered with tar paper; but no one in the neighborhood seems to know just how many Chinamen live there. The same sleeping space would hold a score or more over in Pell Street.

Being Chinamen, they grow only Chinese produce, a peculiar kind of bean and some sort of salad, and those large, artistic shaped melons, seen only in China or Chinatown, which they call something that sounds like "moncha," and which, one of them told me, bring two cents a pound from the Chinese merchants and restaurateurs of Manhattan. For my part, I was very glad to learn of these farms, for I had always been perplexed to account for the fresh salads and green vegetables, of unmistakably Chinese origin, that can be found in season in New York's Chinatown. Under an old shed near by they have their market-wagon, in which, looking inscrutable, they drive their stuff to market through Long Island City, and by way of James Slip Ferry over to Chinatown; then back to the farm again, looking inscrutable. And on Sundays, for all we know, they leave the wagon behind and go to gamble their earnings away in Mott Street, or perhaps away over in some of the well-known places of Jersey City. Then back across the two ferries to farming on dreary Monday mornings.

IV

Even up in Manhattan there are still places astonishingly unlike what is expected of the crowded little island on which stands New York proper. There is Fort Washington with tall trees growing out of the Revolutionary breastworks, land, under their branches, a fine view up the Hudson to the mountains--a quiet, sequestered bit of public park which the public hasn't yet learned to treat as a park, though within sight of the crowds crossing the viaduct from the Grant Monument on Riverside. There are wild flowers up there every spring, and until quite recently so few people visited this spot for days at a time that there were sometimes woodcock and perhaps other game in the thickly wooded ravine by the railroad. Soon, however, the grass on the breastworks will be worn off entirely, and the aged deaf man who tends the river light on Jeffreys Hook will become sophisticated, if he is still alive.

It will take longer, however, for the regions to the north, beyond Washington Heights, down through Inwood and past Tubby Hook, to look like part of a city. And across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek from Manhattan Island, up through the winding roads of Riverdale to Mount St. Vincent, and so across the line to Yonkers, it is still wooded, comparatively secluded and country-like, even though so many of the fine country places thereabouts are being deserted. Over to the eastward, across Broadway, a peaceful road which does not look like a part of the same thoroughfare as the one with actors and sky-scrapers upon it, there are the still wilder stretches of Mosholu and Van Cortlandt Park, where, a year or two ago, large, well-painted signs on the trees used to say "Beware of the Buffaloes."

The open country sport of golf has had a good deal to do with making this rural park more generally appreciated. Golf has done for Van Cortlandt what the bicycle had done for the Bronx and Pelham Bay Parks. There are still natural, wild enough looking bits, off from the beaten paths, in all these parks, scenes that look delightfully dark and sylvan in the yearly thousands of amateur photographs--the camera does not show the German family approaching from the rear, or the egg-shells and broken beer-bottles behind the bushes--but beware of the police if you break a twig, or pick a blossom.

V

Those who enjoy the study of all the forms of nature except the highest can find plenty to sigh over in the way the city thrusts itself upon the country. But to those who think that the haunts and habits of the Man are not less worthy of observation than those of the Beaver and the Skunk, it is all rather interesting, and some of it not so deeply deplorable.

There are certain old country taverns, here and there, up toward Westchester, and down beyond Brooklyn and over on Staten Island--not only those which everybody knows, like the Hermitage in the Bronx and Garrisons over by the fort at Willets Point, but remote ones which have not yet been exploited in plays or books, and which still have a fine old flavor, with faded prints of Dexter and Maud S. and much earlier favorites in the bar-room. In some cases, to be sure, though still situated at a country cross-roads, with green fields all about, they are now used for Tammany head-quarters with pictures of the new candidate for sheriff in the old-fashioned windows--but most of them would have gone out of existence entirely after the death of the stage-coach, if it had not been for the approach of the city, and the side-whiskered New Yorkers of a previous generation who drove fast horses. If the ghosts of these men ever drive back to lament the good old days together, they must be somewhat surprised, possibly disappointed, to find these rural road-houses doing a better business than even in their day. The bicycle revived the road-house, and though the bicycle has since been abandoned by those who prefer fashion to exercise, the places that the wheel disclosed are not forgotten. They are visited now in automobiles.

There are all those historic country-houses within the city limits, well known, and in some cases restored, chiefly by reason of being within the city, like the Van Cortlandt house, now a part of the park, and the Jumel mansion standing over Manhattan Field, a house which gets into most historical novels of New York. Similarly Claremont Park has adopted the impressive Zabriskie mansion; and the old Lorillard house in the Bronx might have been torn down by this time but that it has been made into a park house and restaurant. Nearly all these are tableted by the "patriotic" societies, and made to feel their importance. The Bowne place in Flushing, a very old type of Long Island farm-house, was turned into a museum by the Bowne family itself--an excellent idea. The Quaker Meeting-house in Flushing, though not so old by twenty-five years as it is painted in the sign which says "Built in 1695," will probably be preserved as a museum too.

Another relic in that locality well worth keeping is the Duryea place, a striking old stone farm-house with a wide window on the second floor, now shut in with a wooden cover supported by a long brace-pole reaching to the ground. Out of this window, it is said, a cannon used to point. This was while the house was head-quarters for Hessian officers, during the long monotonous months when "the main army of the British army lay at Flushing from Whitestone to Jamaica;" and upon Flushing Heights there stood one of the tar-barrel beacons that reached from New York to Norwich Hill, near Oyster Bay. The British officers used to kill time by playing at Fives against the blank wall of the Quaker Meeting-house, or by riding over to Hempstead Plains to the fox-hunts--where the Meadowbrook Hunt Club rides to the hounds to-day. The common soldiers meanwhile stayed in Flushing and amused themselves, according to the same historian, by rolling cannon-balls about a course of nine holes. That was probably the nearest approach to the great game at that time in America, and it may have been played on the site of the present Flushing Golf Club.

These same soldiers also amused themselves in less innocent ways, so that the Quakers and other non-combatants in and about this notorious Tory centre used to hide their live stock indoors over night, to keep it from being made into meals by the British. That may account for the habit of the family occupying the Duryea place referred to; they keep their cow in a room at one end of the house. At any rate it is not necessary for New Yorkers to go to Ireland to see sights of that sort.

Those are a few of the historic country places that have come to town. There is a surprisingly large number of them, and even when they are not adopted and tableted by the D. A. R. or D. R., or S. R. or S. A. R., they are at least known to local fame, and are pointed out and made much of.

But the many abandoned country houses which are not especially historic or significant--except to certain old persons to whom they once meant home--goodly old places, no longer even near the country, but caught by the tide well within the city, that is the kind to be sorry for. Nobody pays much attention to them. A forlorn For Sale sign hangs out in front, weather-beaten and discouraged. The tall Colonial columns still try to stand up straight and to appear unconscious of the faded paint and broken windows, hoping that no one notices the tangle of weeds in the old-fashioned garden, where old-fashioned children used to play hide-and-seek among the box-paths, now overgrown or buried under tin cans.... Across the way, perhaps, there has already squatted an unabashed row of cheap, vulgar houses, impudent, staring little city homes, vividly painted, and all exactly alike, with highly ornamented wooden stoops below and zinc cornices above, like false-hair fronts. They look at times as though they were putting their heads together to gossip and smile about their odd, old neighbor that has such out-of-date fan-lights, that has no electric bell, no folding-beds, and not a bit of zinc cornicing.

Meanwhile the old house turns its gaze the other way, thinking of days gone by, patiently waiting the end--which will come soon enough.

Transcriber's Notes:

Simple typographical errors were corrected.

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

Page 8, first line: "manifestations of the spirit" could be "or".

End of Project Gutenberg's New York Sketches, by Jesse Lynch Williams