THE NEW YORK
OF THE NOVELISTS
'THE BIG CANONS OF THE MONEY GRUBBING TRIBE" BY DAY
THE NEW YORK
OF THE NOVELISTS
BY
ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1917
COPYRIGHT, 1915
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1916
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INO
TO
THE '94 SPIRIT
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION xix
PART I
THE CANONS OP THE MONEY GRUBBERS
CHAPTEB PAGE
I When the Town was Young The City of
Irving, Cooper, Poe, and Their Contemporaries 3
II The Battery Bowling Green Old Wall Street
Bunner's New York Jacob Dolph's House 9
III Other Trails of Yesterday Janvier Warner
Crawford Mrs. Barr Admiral Porter . . 16
IV Gateways of Invasion Approaching the Sky-
lineKipling's "Dimbula" 0. Henry's
"Little Old Bagdad on the Subway" ... 21
V The Big Canons of the Money Grubbing Tribe
The Office of Carteret and Carteret Wilton
Sargent: American Muldoon, A New York
Horse 30
VI Edwin Lefevre's Wall Street "The Woman and
Her Bonds" 36
VII Some Men of the Street The Lane of the Ticker
"The Golden Flood" "Sampson Rock of
Wall Street" Lefevre and Frank Norris . . 41
VIII Park Row in Fiction The Old Time Figures-
Journalistic Bohemia Jesse Lynch Williams
David Graham Phillips Stephen Whitman
Edward W. Townsend 47
IX The Five Points and Chimmie Fadden . 53
CONTENTS
PART II
THE MYSTERIOUS EAST SIDE
OHAPTEB PAGE
I The Trail of Potash and Perlmutter Wasser-
bauer's Cafe Henry D. Feldman The Lis-
penard Street Loft ........ 61
II The Origin of the Tales The Vernacular of the
Cloak and Suit Business Selling by the Gross 64
III Police Headquarters and Criminal Court The
Firm of Shaw and Shimmel Arthur Train's
Artemas Quibble Pontin's Restaurant . . 69
IV "Case's" and "The Big Barracks" Scenes of
Stories by R. H. Davis and Julian Ralph . . 74
V The Search for the Mysterious East Side The
London of Dickens and the Paris of Sue and
Balzac 77
VI Tales of Mean Streets Batavia Street The
Jolly Albanians Washington's Cherry Street
Home Doyer Street Allen Street ... 80
VII Tales of Mean Streets Orchard Street The
Bowery The Straw Cellar McTurk's
Monkey Hill 86
VIII The Ghetto Sidney Rosenfeld Abraham
Cahan The Kosciuszko Bank James Oppen-
heim East Broadway Division Street Nor-
folk Street 95
IX Tales of Mean Streets Henry Street Grand
Street Mulberry Street Chinatown Helen
Van Campen The Slums of Stephen Crane . 100
X The East Side of 0. Henry the Cafe Maginnis
The Blue Light Drug Store Dutch Mike's
Saloon No. 12 Avenue C . .108
CONTENTS
PART III
THE REMNANTS OP BOHEMIA
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Hunt for Bohemia The Paris Latin Quar-
ter Finding the New York Maison Vauquer . 115
II The Old-Time Haunts The Grand Vatel The
Taverne Alsaeienne PfafFs 120
III Washington Square Henry James Brander
Matthews The Midge As Bunner Saw the
Square 124
IV The Garibaldi Brasserie Pigault The Casa
Napoleon of the Thomas A. Janvier Stories . 132
V The Square of Phillips and Whitman The
Boarding House of "The Great God Success"
How Phillips Began as a Novelist The
Trail of "Predestined" 139
VI Mr. Davis and his Van Bibber Stevenson's
Velvet Jacket The Fourteenth Street of "The
Exiles" 146
VII Purlieus of Greenwich Village The Pie Houses
of "The Man Hunt" West Tenth Street . . 154
VIII From Poe to Porter Abingdon Square Varick
Street Sheridan Park The Wall of "The
Last Leaf" 160
IX The Trail of "Max Fargus" The House of the
Tin Sailor Shysters' Row A Mythical Part
of Irving Place The Course of Empire 68
Clinton Place 166
X Crawford's New York Old Second Avenue
Tompkins Square The House of "The Last
Meeting" Colonel Carter's Home .... 174
CONTENTS
PART IV
THE HEART OF NEW ARABIA
OHAPTEB PAGE
I The Outstanding Figures Robert Burns's Ayr-
shireThe France of "Quentin Durward"
What California Meant to Kipling Thunder
in the Catskills 187
II The Story of "The Bread Line" Identifying
the Characters Publication Offices of "The
Whole Family" 193
III The Maison de Shine The Original of the
Actor's Boarding House in the Helen Van
Campen Stories Following Vaudeville to Its
Lair 197
IV Lower Second Avenue Again Stuyvesant
Square "The Fortune Hunter" St. Mark's
Place "Felix O'Day" 201
V The Heart of 0. Henry Land Where Porter
Lived The Hotel America Old Munich and
the Little Rheinschloss 205
VI Once More in Washington Square "The Last of
the Knickerbockers" Waverly Place St.
George's "The Boule Cabinet" The Mara-
thon No. 13 Washington Square Rupert
Court 214
VII Gramercy Park The Home of the Von der
Ruyslings "The Alternative" Clubs on the
North and Clubs on the South 222
VHI The Heart of New Arabia The City as the
Artists See It The Bed Line Madison
Square Union Square Stuffy Pete's Bench 228
CONTENTS
PART V
TEA, TANGO, AND TOPER LAND
OHAPTEB PAGE
I The Inns of Fiction Mine Host of Yesterday
The Trenchermen Beyond the Magic Door A
Little Dinner in the Land of Make-Believe . 237
II Doubling on the Trail "The King in Yellow"
The Blind Alleys of New York London
Terrace 243
III The Later Robert W. Chambers The Plaza and
the Park The Patroon and the Pyramid
"lole" 251
IV The Berkeley Old Delmonico's The Manhat-
tan Club Poverty Flat 257
V "The Avenue" The Old Curiosity Shop of
"Felix O'Day" The Suicide of a Street . . 264
VI Concerning the Town of the Playwright "The
Charity Ball" "The Old Homestead" Clyde
Fitch's New York 271
VII The Department Store in Fiction Montague
Glass Edna Ferber Samuel Merwin's "The
Honey Bee" The Shop Girls of 0. Henry . 277
VIII The Shifting Scene Hotels of the Great White
Way The Zig Zag Trail The Metropolitan
Opera House The Old Grand Central . . 284
IX "The House of Mirth" and Others Bryant
Park "Stanfield's" Stewart Edward White
and 127 Madison Avenue 294
X New Bohemias Westover Court Teagan's Ar-
cadeThe House of a Million Intrigues . . 298
CONTENTS
PART VI
THE CITY REMOTE AND THE CITY BEYOND
CHAPTER PAGE
I Some Suburbs of Fiction Southward Bound
The London of Esmond The Environs of
Paris 305
II The Water Side Jabez Bulltongue of Locust
Valley On a North River Pier DeWitt
Clinton Park 311
III Roads to the North Yorkville A House in
Fifty-fourth Street St. John's Cathedral and
Morningside Park No Man's Land The
Polo Grounds and Manhattan Field Dobbs
Ferry 315
IV The Cosmopolitan City Beekman Place The
Terrace Recalling Henry Harland Repro-
ducing The Old World 322
V More Roads to the North Laguerre's Pelham
Bay The Boston Post Road White Plains-
Pound Ridge "Keeping Up with Lizzie"
Sleepy Hollow 330
VI Harlem Heights The Neutral Ground Scenes
of "Chimmie Fadden" The Country of "The
Spy" 338
VII Greenpoint and Edgar Fawcett F. Hopkinson
Smith's "Tom Grogan" Over the River-
Columbia Heights and "The Harbour" The
Brooklyn Water Front . . . . . . .344
VIII The City of Joys, Tawdry and Sublime The
Statue of Liberty The Old Coney Trans-
formedBlinker Finds His Brothers . . .358
IX The New Jersey Trail The Atlantic Highlands
Days of the Revolution The Rumson Road
The Country of the "Pig People" Gothic
Towers and Stately Elms 363
ILLUSTRATIONS
"The Big Canons of the Money Grubbing
Tribe," by Day Frontispiece
FACING
PAGE
Entering the Great Canons of the Money Grubbing
Tribe 16
Monkey Hill, in "Eben Holden" .34
New Street, the Street of the Derelicts 46
The Old Slip Police Station 46
Trail of Potash and Perlmutter 56
"The Cafe of the Jolly Albanians," Cherry Street . . 78
The Dark Alley 78
Batavia Street 78
The "Big Barracks" Tenement in Forsythe Street . . 88
Pontin's Restaurant in Franklin Street 96
The Bend 96
The Blue Light Drug Store 104
Norfolk Street 104
Greenwich Village 110
House Belonging to Mrs. Osborn, facing Rutherford
Square 130
On Washington Square South, between Sullivan and
Macdougal Streets 130
Colonnade Row, in Lafayette Place, opposite the old
Astor Library 142
xiii
xiv ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
The Home of the Ferrols, of Stephen French Whitman's
"Predestined" 150
Opposite the Jefferson Market Police Court is a Short
Row of Dingy Houses 150
Where Van Bibber Found the Runaway Couple . . 176
Captain Peter's Home Washington Square . . . 176
Chrysalis College Theodore Winthrop T s "Cecil
Dreeme" 192
Irving Place Looking South from Gramercy Park . . 200
In the Old-time Novels of New York Life Visiting
Englishmen invariably stopped at the Brevoort . . 218
The Princeton Club of New York 224:
Old St. George's on Rutherford Square 224
Across the Square and through the White Arch Bo-
hemia and Proletaire Gaze Curiously and Enviously
at Belgravia 230
Gramercy Park, South. Here was the Siwash Club of
the George Fitch Stories 244
Washington Square North, Peopled by the Ghosts of
Countless Aristocrats of New York Fiction . . . 244
The Type of Antique Shop at Fourth Avenue and
Thirtieth Street 254
The Studio of Harrison Fisher, in West Thirty-second
Street 254
The Melancholy Pleasure Ground of Bryant Park . 266
The Waiting Room of the Old Grand Central Station . 280
The House in Fifty-fourth Street Out of which Grew
James Lane Allen's "A Heroine in Bronze" . . . 288
The Part of the City Associated with Owen Johnson's
"The Sixty-first Second" 288
The Aristocratic Sweep of Fifth Avenue Overlooking
the Park . 296
ILLUSTRATIONS xv
FACING
PAGE
The Office of Daniel Frobman at the Top, of the
Lyceum Theatre Building 308
Columbus Circle. All about Here are the "Lobster
Palaces" of the Tea, Tango and Toper Land of New
York Fiction 314
The Ferry at West Forty-second Street. 0. Henry's
"The Poet and the Peasant" 318
De Witt Clinton Park. O. Henry's "Vanity and Some
Sables" 318
Glimpse through the Trees of Laguerre's "Most De-
lightful of French Inns in the Quaintest of French
Settlements" 336
The City of Joys, Tawdry and Sublime 342
The Light House at Barnegat. F. Hopkinson Smith's
"The Tides of Barnegat" 358
Mrs. Liberty. "Made by a Dago and Presented to the
American People on Behalf of the French Govern-
ment" .362
ILLUSTRATIONS
In the Text
PAGE
A Passing Gateway of Invasion 22
In Washington Street in the Curious Little Syrian
Colony 28
The Street Ten Years Ago 38
One of the Most Sinister of all the Sinister Corners of
the Five Point District 54
The Newgate of New York 70
The Old Restaurant of the Grand Vatel, on West
Houston Street 121
A Temporary New York Home of Hurstwood . . . 128
A la Ville de Rouen 133
A Remnant of the Greenwich Village that Was . . 155
The "Pie Houses" of Greenwich Village . . . .157
Cosmopolitan New York. A London Slum . . . 161
The Jefferson Market Police Court 167
On Fourteenth Street very nearly Opposite the South-
ern End of Irving Place 171
The Home F. Hopkinson Smith Found for Colonel
Carter 180
A Shrine of Yesterday 182
The "Maison de Shine" 198
In "The Fortune Hunter" David Graham Phillips
staked a very definite claim to a Section of the City 203
Fronting on Irving Place Is the Saloon of 0. Henry's
"The Lost Blend" 209
xvii
xviii ILLUSTKATIONS
PAGE
The Interior of "Old Munich" 212
The Cosmopolitan City, Venice 223
The House on Gramercy Park, North, Used in "Her
Letter to His Second Wife" 225
A Little Dinner in the Land of Make Believe . . .241
The Opening Through which the People who Live in
Milliken Place Reach the Outside World .... 246
"Beyond the Gate Lies Milliken Place" 247
On the North Side of West Twenty-third Street,
between Ninth and Tenth Avenues 249
George Barr McCutcheon Found a New York Residence
for Monty Brewster 258
The House of Richard Harding Davis's "Vera the
Medium" 262
"With a Crash and a Shriek Fourth Avenue Dives
Headlong into the Tunnel" 270
The Cosmopolitan City, London . . . . . . . 274
The Cosmopolitan City, Paris 285
One of the Exits that Leads Over the Roof Tops in
"The Castle of a Million Intrigues" 301
Beekman Place, George Bronson-Howard's "God's
Man" 323
Provincial France 325
Italy 327
The Cosmopolitanism of New York Ireland . . .328
The Gardens from Montague Terrace. Ernest Poole's
"The Harbour" 350
The Gardens Looking Toward the Inner Bay. Ernest
Poole's "The Harbour" 352
Pierrepont Place. Ernest Poole's "The Harbour" . 355
INTRODUCTION
Seventeen years ago the writer of this vol-
ume, with a note book under one arm and a
camera under the other, was engaged in roam-
ing through the streets of New York and its
suburbs, following the trails of such men and
women of fiction as the novelist, until that time,
had been considerate enough to provide. It
was a task undertaken with a very genuine lik-
ing and enthusiasm and there should be no
reticence in recalling its direct inspiration. In
previous visits to London the writer had had
many pleasant hours in following the footsteps
of Thackeray and Dickens, paying his respects
to the house in Curzon Street where the Eaw-
don Crawleys lived on nothing a year, the home
of the Sedleys, near Eussell Square, or wan-
dering down the High Street of the Borough
of Southwark, and turning down Angel Court
in search of the few remaining stones of the
xix
xx INTRODUCTION
old Marshalsea Prison of Little Dorrit. When
it was a matter of Dickens and Thackeray the
task was easy enough. In various places
"rambles" with the former had been printed,
and there was Mr. William H. Eideing's Thack-
eray's London, a subject which has in later
years been more amply handled by Mr. Lewis
Melville, and pictorially by the late F. Hopkin-
son Smith. But when it was a case of the
dwelling of Eobert Louis Stevenson's Mr.
Hyde, or the Upper Baker Street rooms shared
by Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, or the
Gunnison Street of Kipling's "The Eecord of
Badalia Herodsfoot," the writer was thrown
upon his own resources. In those cases there
were new trails to be blazed. So also in Paris
were new trails to be blazed when the writer
started out in the hunt' for this or that street
or domicile associated with some chapter of
Balzac's La Comedie Humaine, or to follow the
knightly rambles in the Seventeenth Century
Lutetia of the immortal four of the elder Du-
mas, or to take up with the relentlessness of
Javert the pursuit of Jean Valjean in his flight
from the home near the southern barriers of
INTRODUCTION xxi
the city skirting the Latin Quarter, across the
river, to the refuge he finally found in the Con-
vent of the Little Picpus. For at that time the
late Benjamin Ellis Martin's The Stones of
Paris had not yet been printed. These ram-
bles abroad led to the rambles at home. Why
should not some one, was the inevitable thought,
try to do for some great American city what
had been done for the London of Dickens and
Thackeray? Of course there were no really
great dominant figures, but the trail of the
novelist in bulk was sure to be worth while.
That New York was the city chosen was due to
the fact that it was the city that offered the
most, and the city best known and most easily
accessible to the writer. The papers written
in the summer of 1899 under the title of New
York in Fiction appeared serially in the fol-
lowing autumn, and later in a volume which
has long been out of print. That they did
something, that they did a great deal toward
stimulating the cult of local colour the writer
does not hesitate to affirm. Though little more
than seventeen years have passed the New
York of the novelists to-day offers fully three
xxii INTRODUCTION
times as much as it did then. Hence this new
pilgrimage, in which the writer has attempted
to show the rapidly changing city, both as it
appeared then, and as it is seen now by the nov-
elists of the new generation.
PART I
THE CANONS OP THE MONEY GRUBBERS
THE NEW YORK OF THE
NOVELISTS
CHAPTER I
When the Town Was Young The City of Irving, Cooper,
Poe, and Their Contemporaries.
POBE over the old prints and maps. Turn the
pages of the old diaries. A little imagination
and there comes into being the city that was,
the restful, sedate, Knickerbockerish town, that
knew the genial Irving, and the irascible
Cooper, and the saturnine Poe, and Paulding,
and Halleck, and Drake, and McDonald Clarke,
the "Mad Poet," and a score more. How re-
mote it seems from the tumultuous New York
of to-day. Here is a small section of the city
map of 1827. The very names of the streets
Herring Street, Eaisin Street, Burrows
Street have passed into oblivion. To the
east of Broadway, on a line with St. Paul's
Chapel, there stretches to-day a region that is
known, and has for many years been known,
3
4 THE NEW YORK
as "the Swamp. " It smells atrociously of
leather. When Washington Irving was a
youth, back in the last years of the eighteenth
century, there was in the neighbourhood a hill
known as Golden Hill. It was a very beautiful
place, so the chroniclers tell us, and upon the
hilltop was an inn that had been much fre-
quented by the patriots in the Eevolutionary
days. The lane that climbed over the grain
covered hill is there yet. It is now William
Street. In a house on the side of Golden Hill
Irving was born in 1783, and in this region he
spent his boyhood. In the nearby Ann Street
he went to school, and later was a law clerk.
There he did his first writing, the sketches
signed "Jonathan Oldstyle," and with his
brother William and James K. Paulding laid
the foundations of the Salmagundi. There also
he wrote most of the Knickerbocker History of
New York. In 1815 Irving left New York for
seventeen years of European wandering. He
had known a town of one hundred thousand in-
habitants. He returned to find a city of twice
that size. The Coffee House at Broadway and
Thames Street that he remembered had been
OF THE NOVELISTS 5
replaced by the City Hotel. The changed ap-
pearance of the streets puzzled him ; the houses
seemed amazingly tall. He went to live down
near the Battery, at number 3 Bridge Street,
with his brother Ebenezer, who had been the
Captain Greatheart of " Cockloft Hall." Far
out in the country, overlooking the East Eiver
at what is now Eighty-eighth Street the site
of the present East Eiver Park was the home
of Irving 's friend, John Jacob Astor. There
Irving stayed as a guest; there he wrote As-
toria, and there he met Captain Bonneville
and his friends. At the corner of Seventeenth
Street and Irving Place to-day is the house,
now the home of the Authors' League of Amer-
ica, so frequently associated with Irving 's name.
An old, three story brick house painted white,
with a long sheltered balcony overhanging the
sidewalk, and a bay window looking north and
west to Union Square. To this house of his
nephew, John T. Irving, came the travelled old
writer for short visits to town in the late forties.
Here he wrote portions of Oliver Goldsmith,
and of The Life of Mahomet, and arranged the
notes of the Life of Washington. It is Wash-
6 THE NEW YOKE
ington living's last New York home, since the
passing of his birthplace on Golden Hill, the
family "hive" hard by the Battery, and the
rooms he occupied in Colonnade Eow in Lafa-
yette Place.
The City Hotel, which Irving found on his
return from Europe in 1832, was a favourite
haunt of the author of the "Leatherstocking
Tales." There Cooper organised the Bread
and Cheese Club, which met in a building at the
corner of Broadway and Eeade Street, and
which derived its name from Cooper's idea of
having candidates balloted for with bread and
cheese, a bit of bread favouring election, and
cheese deciding against it. But Cooper's home
life in New York centred about the then fash-
ionable district of St. John's Park in lower
Greenwich Village. In 1821 he was living in
Beach Street. The success of The Spy, his
second novel, had made him a conspicuous man.
From Beach Street he moved to 345 Greenwich
Street where he began the "Leatherstocking
Tales. ' ' There he wrote The Pioneers and The
Last of the Mohicans, respectively the fourth
and second books chronologically of the series.
OF THE NOVELISTS 7
In 1825 Cooper went to Europe, returning in
1832. His first New York home after his re-
turn was in Bleecker Street, two blocks west of
Broadway. He did not remain there long but
moved to a house on Broadway at Prince Street
that later gave way to Niblo's Garden. Thence
he moved to the house in St. Mark's Place
where he wrote Homeward Bound and began
the struggle with his critics that so embittered
his later days. That was Cooper's last New
York home. From there he went to Coopers-
town.
The name of Poe, like the name of Cooper, is
associated with old St. John's. The author of
"The Eaven" drew inspiration from wander-
ing through the graveyard. In 1837 he lived
near by in a little wooden house that was num-
bered 113 Carmine Street. He was then
twenty-seven years old and had just resigned
the editorship of the Southern Literary Mes-
senger. From Carmine Street Poe and his
child wife, Virginia, moved to a house in Sixth
Avenue, near Waverly Place. There was writ-
ten ' ' The Fall of the House of Usher. ' ' There
were some years of absence from New York,
8 NEW YOEK OF THE NOVELISTS
and then, in 1844, Poe returned to the city to
work on the Evening Mirror and to live in what
was then Bloomingdale Village, in a house on
a high bluff which corresponds to one of the
present Eighties between Broadway and West
End Avenue. In this home were written t ' The
Raven" and "The Imp of the Perverse."
Then he left the Mirror for the Broadway Jour-
nal, and for greater convenience went to live in
Amity Street, which afterwards became West
Third Street. The next step, taken in 1846,
was the move to the Fordham Cottage. There
the child wife died, and there for two years Poe
continued to live lonely and almost alone. In
the summer of 1849 he left Fordham. He was
dead before the year's close.
CHAPTER II
The Battery Bowling Green Old Wall Street Bun-
ner's New York Jacob Dolph's House.
OF that city of the poets and novelists of the
first half of the century there is but little trace.
The quaint homes of the people of Irving 's
Knickerbocker History of New York belong to
the irrevocable past; the Broadway of which
Paulding, Halleck, Willis, Drake and Clarke,
the "mad poet," sung is very different from the
Broadway of the year 1916. We can find traces
of the Fordham Cottage of Edgar Allan and
Virginia Poe, and follow Cooper's Harvey
Birch through rapidly changing Westchester,
but the New York of brick and stone belongs
essentially to the work of the younger literary
generation.
In the name of Henry Cuyler Bunner is a link
connecting the remote past and the present.
Among the men who seem so thoroughly enam-
oured of the city's history and traditions as to
have been strongly moved by its rush and tur-
9
10 THE NEW YORK
moil and perplexity, Bunner is unique. He
once wrote somewhere:
Why do I love New York, my dear ?
I know not. Were my father here
And his and HIS the three and I
Might, perhaps, make you some reply.
His affection for the old town was very pro-
found and sincere. He felt very keenly the sig-
nificance of the phrase, " little old New York"
a phrase which, though applied to a city that
was not so very old, and was certainly not little,
was none the less sincere and sympathetic. In
his books he made us feel how much he would
have liked to see the old beaux with their bell-
crown hats ogling the crinolined ladies on lower
Broadway of a spring or a summer afternoon.
How he pored over the old chronicles in the
hope of seeing the ghosts of old vanities and
follies and wickednesses rise up out of their
graves and dance, smirk and gibber again!
Bunner seemed to be equally at home in the
old town, in Greenwich village and about Wash-
ington Square. In one of his later poems he
told us of "The Red Box at Vesey Street," and
its part in the human comedy of New York life.
OF THE NOVELISTS 11
The scenes of The Midge will be described in
another chapter; the houses and streets of the
first part of The Story of a New York House
belong to old New York. The house in which
Jacob Dolph the elder lived during the first
years of the century, and from the pillared bal-
cony of which his family and friends looked
out and down on the glinting waters of the
bay, is one of the few noble structures that are
left to us of the older city. Bunner's choice is
easily understood. Even now the Mission of
Our Lady of the Eosary, a home for Irish im-
migrant girls, No. 7 State Street, despite the
incongruity of the neighbouring edifices, im-