Part 1

Transcriber’s Note: Italic text is enclosed in _underscores_. Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook.

_Of this book there have been printed three hundred copies from type and original wood blocks on French hand-made paper, and three copies on Roman parchment, by order of the Committee on Publications of The Grolier Club of the City of New York, November, Nineteen Hundred and Twelve_

THE WRITERS OF KNICKERBOCKER NEW YORK

THE WRITERS OF KNICKERBOCKER NEW YORK

BY HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE

ILLUSTRATIONS ENGRAVED BY WALWORTH STILSON

THE GROLIER CLUB OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK 1912

_Copyright, 1912, by The Grolier Club of the City of New York_

LIST OF WOODCUTS

DEVICE OF THE GROLIER CLUB Title-page

PAGE TAIL-PIECE viii

“From Bowling Green to Trinity Church.”

1 HEAD-BAND 3

“New York has grown by the process of destruction, and has become metropolitan through successive stages of self-effacement.”

2 TAIL-PIECE 28

“And there was a bridge on the Boston Post Road ... which bore the suggestive name of the Kissing-bridge.”

3 HEAD-BAND 29

“The old Government House.”

4 TAIL-PIECE 51

“The old-fashioned gentleman who was last seen on the Albany Post Road.”

5 HEAD-BAND 52

“Celebrated in the ‘Salmagundi’ papers as Cockloft Hall.”

6 TAIL-PIECE 67

“Sitting ... overlooking the river ... the old man delighted to recall the golden Knickerbocker age.”

7 HEAD-BAND 68

“Whose distinction was invariably expressed in a green or common, a Congregational spire, an academy, and rows of graceful elms.”

8 TAIL-PIECE 88

“Let it be taken from the top of Weehawk Hill, overlooking New York.”

9 HEAD-BAND 89

“In the back room of Wiley’s shop ... Dana met Cooper, Halleck, Brevoort.”

10 TAIL-PIECE 121

“Lines to a water-fowl.”

THE WRITERS OF KNICKERBOCKER NEW YORK

KNICKERBOCKER NEW YORK

In these days, when New York has become a metropolitan city with a population of four million souls, and the old city has shrunk politically into the Borough of Manhattan, it is not easy to recall the obliterated outlines of the Town which was satirized by the vivacious young men who wrote the “Salmagundi” papers. Unlike Rome, which has been rebuilt half a dozen times on its early site and largely out of its old materials, so that the city of to-day is a kind of palimpsest in stone, brick, and mortar, New York has grown by the process of destruction, and has become metropolitan through successive stages of self-effacement. Here and there one comes upon a building which has survived from the late colonial period, but no structure now standing bears witness to the taste or lack of taste of the Dutch settlers, and the streets preserve no traces of the old lanes and highways save an occasional name as misleading descriptively as the Bowery. Canal Street is as stolid a reminiscence of a water-channel as is the heavy warehouse frontage of Grub Street of the humorous or tragic traditions of literary Bohemia in the days of Mr. Pope and Dr. Johnson. New York has changed its form almost as often as, according to the physiologists, men change their bodies. It has kept certain characteristics which marked its youth and predicted the traits of its maturity; but its growth has been so great that the divergencies between the latest and the earliest city seem to be differences in kind rather than in degree.

The New York in which Washington Irving was born in April, 1783, was still in the possession of British troops, who withdrew six months later, leaving a half-ruined city behind them. The population had been reduced from twenty thousand to ten thousand; shipping had deserted the captive town, and the wharves were rotting from disuse; streets which had been opened before the war to afford room for growth were desolate and forlorn, with that overgrowth of straggling weeds which is the final evidence of neglect. Many public and private buildings which had been used for military purposes were falling in ruins. The great fire of September, 1776, had left a large part of the western side of the little city a mass of ruins; and Broadway from Bowling Green to Trinity Church was a dreary waste of blackened walls and heaps of rubbish. There was no money in the city treasury, and the once growing town was apparently blighted. Other cities had been more active in the struggle for independence; none had suffered more severely from the devastation of war.

“In June, 1787,” wrote Samuel Breck, “on my return from a residence of a few years in France, I arrived at that city [New York] and found it a neglected place, built chiefly of wood, and in a state of prostration and decay. A dozen vessels in port; Broadway, from Trinity Church, inclusive, down to the Battery, in ruins, owing to a fire that had occurred when the city was occupied by the enemy during the later part of the war--the ruined walls of the houses standing on both sides of the way testifying to the poverty of the place five years after the conflagration; for although the war had ceased during that period, and the enemy had departed, no attempt had been made to rebuild them. In short, there was silence and inactivity everywhere.” Mr. Breck was mistaken about the date of the fire, but his description of the desolate city was accurate.

In these depressing conditions, New York did not give itself up to gloomy misgivings; it had always been a cheerful, social community, and it was not long in recovering its prosperity and high spirits. Six years after the close of the war it was the Capital of the United States, the population had more than doubled, ships were in the harbor, grass no longer gave the streets a rustic aspect, and the tide of activity had reached the highest point in its history. There were nearly twenty-four thousand people living south of Reade Street on the west, and of Pike Street on the east; a swamp arrested the growth of the town along the East River. There were about twenty-four hundred slaves. The houses were mainly of English architecture, though peaked roofs and gable-ends to the streets recalled the good old days of Dutch dominion, when a canal ran through Broad Street and broad-sterned Dutch vessels lay at anchor in the centre of the town.

Politics ran high, and during elections language was used with far less restraint than at present. The first man sent to Congress from New York under the recently adopted national Constitution was Mr. John Lawrence, and a letter published in the “Daily Advertiser” in March, 1789, contains the following frank statement: “Of all the men who framed that monarchical, aristocratical, oligarchical, tyrannical, diabolical system of slavery, the New Constitution, _One Half_ were lawyers. Of the men who represented, or rather misrepresented, this city and county in the late convention of this State, to whose wicked arts we may safely attribute the adoption of that diabolical system, _seven_ out of the _nine_ were lawyers.... And what crowns the wickedness of these wicked lawyers is, that a great majority of them throughout the State are violently opposed to our GOOD and GREAT HEAD and never-failing friend of the city and city interests, the present GOVERNOR.

“Beware, beware, beware of Lawyers!”

Very pleasant things were said about the New York of 1789 when, at the end of a three months’ session of the United States Congress, it was announced that only one member had been ill. After commenting on its nearness to the ocean and the sweetening of its air by abundant verdure, a charming picture is evoked by the statement that the residents on the west side of Broadway are “saluted by fragrant odors from the apple orchards and buckwheat fields in blossom on the pleasant banks of the Jersey shore.”

The little city was already charged with extravagance and frivolity, and the details of these offences are not lacking. One reads of blue satin gowns with white satin petticoats, large Italian gauze handkerchiefs with satin border stripes worn about the neck, completed by a head-dress of “pouf of gauze in the form of a globe, the headpiece of which was made of white satin having a double wing, in large plaits, and trimmed with a large wreath of artificial roses.” There were shoes of blue satin adorned by rose-colored rosettes, and muffs of wolfskin with knots of scarlet ribbon. The gentlemen of the period were arrayed with equal splendor: bottle-green, pearl, scarlet, purple, mulberry, and garnet were among the colors of cloths advertised by a local tailor on Hanover Square; while waistcoats fairly glowed with brilliant hues and brocaded and spangled buttons. Beaver and castor hats were in vogue, and superior boots were made by Mr. Thomas Garner, of Pearl Street, whose proud claim to the patronage of the fashionable was that he had worked for the first nobility in England. It cost approximately seventy-five dollars to dress a lady’s hair every day in the year; and there were dentists who pulled the teeth of the poor _gratis_ between the hours of six and nine on the mornings of Monday and Thursday. The sociability and hospitality of the city made a deep impression on Noah Webster, who was also struck by the absence of affectation and of social snobbery.

Lectures appear to have been few in number and serious in theme; the city, which took its pleasures comfortably, took its opportunities of enlightenment sparingly and in a heroic temper. There appears to have been but one candidate on the lecture platform for public approval in this field during the winter of 1789, and he is described as “a man more than thirty years an Atheist.” The lecture was delivered at Aaron Aorson’s tavern, and tickets were to be had from the Aldermen!

The play enjoyed greater popular favor, but the John Street Theatre was without competition until 1798, when the Old Park Theatre was opened. During the season of 1789, William Dunlap put several home-made American dramas on the stage. He was the prolific author of forty-nine plays, which stand to the credit of his industry if not of his genius. These dramas were the premature births of the Genius of the American stage, and none of them survives. They were very faint prophecies of the interesting dramatic movement now in progress; but one of them, “Darby’s Return,” achieved the rare distinction of evoking a laugh from Washington--an occurrence so unusual that it stimulated a writer in the “Daily Advertiser” to report it in the most stately English: “Our Adored Ruler seemed to unbend and for the moment give himself to the pleasures arising from the gratifications of the two most noble organs of sense, the Eye and the Ear!”

The Musical Society gave an occasional recital, and there were subscription concerts under the management of local music-teachers. The young gentlemen at Columbia College were delivering Commencement orations “On the Progress and Causes of Civilization” and “On the Rising Glory of America.” There were nine publishers and booksellers in the city, and in the year of Irving’s birth one of them announced “The First American Novel” under the portentous title, “The Power of Sympathy; or, the Triumph of Nature.” The Society Library, disrupted by the war, was re-established, and a circulating library organized. William Dunlap, the playwright, painted portraits and, later, became one of the founders of the National Academy of Design. Mr. Edward Savage and Mr. Joseph Wright followed the same profession, and Washington sat for all three. The city was kept informed of events by five newspapers; a magazine had been born prematurely and expired after a brief and unimportant life. The journalistic style of the day was of an eloquence that is happily illustrated by a description of one of the barges which escorted Washington on his voyage across the bay to New York to attend his inauguration: “The voices of the ladies were as much superior to the flutes that played with the stroke of the oars in Cleopatra’s silken-corded barge, as the very superior and glorious water scene of New York bay exceeds the Cydnus in all its pride.”

The two-story house in which Irving was born, at No. 131 William Street, about half-way between Fulton and John Streets, was pulled down ten years before his death, and the house directly across the street, in which he spent his childhood, has shared its fate. The latter was larger and afforded greater facilities for boyish gymnastics. There were front and rear buildings with a narrow structure between which was hardly more than a passage, and it was from the sloping roof at the rear that Irving made his perilous descents when he set out to enjoy the forbidden pleasures of the John Street Theatre. George William Curtis tells a delightful story of a boy in Philadelphia, whose father, like the elder Irving, was of a very serious turn of mind, and who, by way of youthful reaction, secretly frequented the forbidden playhouse. “John,” said the father, “is this dreadful thing true that I hear of thee? Hast thou been to see the play-actress Frances Kemble?” “Yes, father.” “I hope thee has not been more than once, John.” “Yes, father,” was the honest if somewhat discouraging answer; “more than thirty times.”

The easy-going temper of the metropolis to which Irving was to give a lasting expression is still further indicated by the story that in order to escape the rigid requirements of his father’s Presbyterian faith the boy had himself confirmed in Trinity Church. His temper was genial and kindly, and the mingled sentiment and humor which were to give his books a quality American writing had so far lacked, made him a loiterer and an observer rather than an arduous and methodical student. New York was the gateway to the beautiful country of Dutch settlement and tradition on the banks of the Hudson, and the gun and fishing-rod were the instruments of exploration with which the boy who was to write “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” carried his discoveries into the heart of a region in which it was always afternoon. He had read “Orlando Furioso” and had played the knight with great fire and gallantry in the back yard on John Street; he had surreptitiously saved candle-ends and read the moving adventures of Sindbad and Robinson Crusoe in forbidden places and at improper hours, and the thirst for travel was on him. He wandered about the pier-heads when he should have been poring over textbooks, and watched lessening sails with eager desire to fare with them to the ends of the earth. He was, in a word, taking that course in romance, adventure, and dreaming which boys of his temperament and genius have elected from the beginning of time, to the sore but fortunate disappointment of their elders. His brothers went through Columbia College, but he went up the Hudson and discovered to the imagination the river which Hudson had discovered to the eye. Diedrich Knickerbocker was last seen, it will be remembered, by the passengers in the stage for Albany!

The literary temperament in Irving was not without the confirmation of the literary impulse, and while he was still in his teens he began to try his hand at social satire, a form of literature which is practised only by men of city breeding and interest. In the “Morning Chronicle,” of which his brother Peter was editor and proprietor, he published, in 1802, a series of short papers dealing with the fashions and foibles of the town after the manner of the “Spectator” and “Tatler,” and especially with the manners of the actors and their auditors. They were boyish performances, but they showed sensibility and humor, and a chivalrous attitude toward women. Irving’s health, which had been uncertain, was established by a residence of two years in Europe, where he saw countries and peoples with infinite zest not only in the picturesque Old World but in the range and variety of character, the broad contrasts, the mingled tragedy and comedy of life in a more highly organized society. “I am a young man and in Paris,” he wrote to a friend at home, and he was happy in a wholesome appetite for a more picturesque and vivid life than he had enjoyed in the little provincial city at the mouth of the Hudson. When he returned in 1806 it was to find a group of companions whose knowledge of the great world was less than his, but who were equally ready for work or for mischief in a little provincial city which had developed what may be called a town-consciousness.

It was still bounded on the north by Anthony and Hester Streets; Greenwich Village, a pleasant suburban village through which Christopher Street now passes, was a place of refuge from the plague for families fleeing from the city; the State prison was there, and there were faint streets budding in the adjacent farms. Broome Street had been laid out; Astor Place and Greenwich Street, Mr. Jarvis tells us, were lanes; the latter had attained the dignity of a fashionable drive, and opulent citizens drove out to Greenwich Village on pleasant afternoons, as to-day they motor to West Point or Peekskill! The seats of fashion were to be found on the Battery, which would have remained the most delightful locality for residence in New York if the people of the metropolis had not conceived a repugnance to living in near proximity to business quarters. Lower Broadway, Upper Pearl and Nassau Streets were of high respectability; and Broadway had been paved as far as the City Hall. Beyond lay charming country roads, occasional country houses to which the leading families retreated from the summer heat, and thrifty farms whose owners were happily ignorant of the enormous future values of their fields.

The American imagination, which has since built so many cities over night in the newer sections of the country, did not slumber, however, even in a city in which Dutch reluctance to move faster than the fact was so large a factor, and a map made by Mangin in 1803 carries the Boston Road far north through a network of supposititious streets that lay across the broad fields owned by Mr. Bayard, Mr. Rutgers, Mr. Lispenard, Mr. De Peyster, and other well-known citizens, and obliterates as by magic the Swamp; the Collect, or fresh-water pond; and the salt meadows of the earlier maps.

The Collect was not, however, so easily dealt with. It was a marsh lying across the island from Roosevelt Slip to the Hudson at what is now the foot of Canal Street. The focal point of this marsh was a pond which found an outlet through the Swamp where leather has had its shrine these many years, and whence the first Brooklyn Bridge takes its flight over the East River. The Swamp had been drained and the water from the pond flowed along the course of the present Canal Street; but the pond was still to be disposed of. It was very deep and it was proposed at one time to connect it with the two rivers by canals, which would have made New Amsterdam reminiscent of old Amsterdam; but it was finally filled in by leveling the high ground, and adventurous youths and maidens who had been accustomed, on pleasant afternoons, to venture into the country beyond the City Hall lost a convenient excuse for Sabbath-day excursions.

It is amusing to find a pleasure-garden bearing the Old World name of Ranelagh on the older maps; and Old Vauxhall, which stood originally at the corner of Warren and Greenwich Streets in a house built by Sir Peter Warren, was also a public garden, patterned after its famous original in London and kept by Sam Fraunces, at one time a steward in the employ of Washington, and whose connection with the old tavern which still stands ensures his name a local immortality. Later this pleasure-ground covered the section between Broadway and the Bowery of which the Astor Library was the centre. The chief cattle-market was on the Bowery somewhat south of the garden. There were various road-houses along the East River where oysters and turtles were cooked with great skill. Fishing and water parties in summer and sleighing parties in winter found the best of fare in these houses, with their pleasant grounds. It was the day of the old-fashioned chaise, and there was a bridge on the Boston Post Road at about Third Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street which bore the suggestive name of the Kissing-bridge. The exaction of this kind of toll appears to have been widely practised; not only bridges but gates and stiles were penalized for women. The Rev. Mr. Burnaby sagely observed that this custom was “curious, yet not displeasing.” New York had spread out since Irving’s birth, but it was still a neighborly little city, of a social turn and disposed to make easy terms with life.

In 1809 Thomas Paine had just died in Greenwich Village, at what is now No. 293 Bleecker Street, where he was often to be seen at the open window reading, with his book in close proximity to a decanter of what appeared to be brandy or rum. It is reported that two clergymen who visited him with the hope of changing his attitude toward Christianity were abruptly dismissed and the housekeeper received orders to bar the door against such visitors. “If God does not change his mind, I’m sure no human can,” was her sage comment, and the author of “The Age of Reason” was troubled no more.

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