USA > New York > New York City > History of New York city from the discovery to the present day, V. 2 > Part 6
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38
" In this city especially, it is of more importance to preserve the recollection of these things, since here the progress of continual alteration is so rapid, that a few years effect what in Europe is the work of centuries, and sweep away both the memory and the external vestiges of the generation that precedes us.
"I was forcibly struck with this last reflection, when not long since I took a walk with my friend, Mr. De Vielle- cour, during his last visit to New York, over what I recol- lected as the play-ground of myself and my companions in the time of my boyhood, and what Mr. De Viellecour remembered as the spot where his contemporaries at an early period used to shoot quails and woodcocks. We passed over a part of the city which in my time had been hills, hollows, marshes, and rivulets, without having observed anything to awaken in either of us a recollection of what the place was before the surface had been leveled and the houses erected, until, arriving at the corner of Charlton and Varick Streets, we came to an edifice utterly dissimilar to anything around it." It was a wooden build- ing of massive architecture, with a lofty portico supported by Ionic columns, the front walls decorated with pilasters of the same order, and its whole appearance distinguished by that Palladian character of rich though sober orna- ment, which indicated that it had been built about the middle of the last century. We both stopped involun- tarily, and at the same moment, before it.
""' If I did not see that house on a flat plain,' said Mr. De Viellecour, 'penned in by this little gravelly court- yard, and surrounded by these starveling catalpas and horse-chestnuts, I should say at once that it was a man- sion which I very well remember, where in my youth I passed many pleasant hours in the society of its hospita-
* RICHMOND HILL, formerly Burr's residence. See Appendix No. II.
441
HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY.
ble owner, and where, afterward, when I had the honor of representing my country in the Assembly, which then sat in New York, I had the pleasure of dining officially with Vice-President Adams. That house resembled this ex- actly ; but then it was upon a noble hill, several hundred feet in height, commanding a view of the river and of the Jersey shore. There was a fine, rich lawn around it, shaded by large and venerable oaks and lindens, and skirted on every side by a young but thrifty natural wood of an hundred acres or more.'
" Perceiving it to be a house of public entertainment, I proposed to Mr. Viellecour that we should enter it. We went into a spacious hall, with a small room on each side opening to more spacious apartments beyond. 'Yes,' said Mr. Viellecour, 'this is certainly the house I spoke of.' HIe immediately, with the air of a man accustomed to the building, opened a side-door on the right, and began to ascend a wide staircase with a heavy mahogany railing. It conducted us to a large room on the second story, with wide Venetian windows in front, and a door opening to a balcony under the portico. 'Yes,' said my friend, ' here was the dining room. There, in the center of the table, sat Vice-President Adams in full dress, with his bag and solitaire, his hair frizzed out each side of his face, as you see it in Stuart's older pictures of him. On his right sat Baron Steuben, our royalist republican disciplinarian gen- eral. On his left was Mr. Jefferson, who had just returned from France, conspicuous in his red waistcoat and breeches, the fashion of Versailles. Opposite sat Mrs. Adams, with her cheerful, intelligent face. She was placed between the courtly Count Du Moustiers, the French embassador, in his red-heeled shoes and ear-rings, and the grave, polite, and formally-bowing Mr. Van Birkel, the learned and able envoy of Holland. There, too, was Chancellor Living- ston, then still in the prime of life, so deaf as to make
56
مـ
-------.
---
442
HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY.
conversation with him difficult, yet so overflowing with wit, eloquence, and information, that while listening to him the difficulty was forgotten. The rest were members of Congress and of our Legislature, some of them no inconsiderable men.
" ' Being able to talk French-a rare accomplishment in America at that time-a place was assigned to me next the count. The dinner was served up after the fashion of that day, abundant, and, as was then thought, splendid. Du Moustiers, after taking a little soup, kept an empty plate before him, took now and then a crumb of bread into his mouth, and declined all the luxuries of the table that were pressed upon him, from the roast-beef down to the lobsters. We were all in perplexity to know how the count could dine, when at length his own body-cook, in a clean, white linen cap, a clean, white tablier before him, a brilliantly white damask serviette flung over his arm, and a warm pie of trufiles and game in his hand, came brust- ling eagerly through the crowd of waiters, and placed it before the count, who, reserving a moderate share to him- self, distributed the rest among his neighbors, of whom being one, I can attest to the truth of the story, and the excellence of the pâté. But come, let us go and look at the fine view from the balcony.'
" My friend stepped out at the door, and I followed him. The worthy old gentleman seemed much disappointed at finding the view he spoke of confined to the opposite side of Varick Street, built up with two-story brick houses, while a half-a-dozen ragged boys were playing marbles on the sidewalks. 'Well,' said he, 'the view is gone, that is clear enough ; but I cannot, for my part, understand how the house has got so much lower than formerly.'
" I explained to my friend the omnipotence of the Cor- poration, by which every high hill has been brought low, and every valley exalted, and by which I presumed this
443
HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY.
house had been abased to a level with its humbler neigh- hors, the hill on which it stood having been literally dug away from under it, and the house gently let down, with- out disturbing its furniture, by the mechanical genius and dexterity of some of our Eastern brethren.
"'This is wrong !' said the old gentleman; 'these New- Yorkers seem to take a pleasure in defacing the inonu- ments of the good old times, and of depriving themselves of all venerable and patriotic associations. This house should have been continued in its old situation, on its own original and proper eminence, where its very aspect would have suggested its history. It was built upward of seventy years ago by a gallant British officer, who had done good service to his native country and to this. Here Lord Amherst was entertained and held his head-quarters at the close of those successful American campaigns which, by the way, prevented half the State of New York from now being a part of Canada. Here were afterward suc- cessively the quarters of several of our American generals in the beginning of the Revolution, and again after the evacuation of the city. Here John Adams lived as Vice- President during the time that Congress sat in New York ; and here Aaron Burr, during the whole of his Vice-Presi- dency, kept up an elegant hospitality, and filled the room in which we stand with a splendid library, equally indica- tive of his taste and scholarship. The last considerable man that lived here was Counselor Benzon, afterward Gov- ernor of the Danish islands,-a man who, like you, Mr. Herbert, had traveled in every part of the world, knew everything, and talked all languages. I recollect dining here in company with thirteen gentlemen, none of whom I ever saw before, but all pleasant fellows, all men of edu. cation and some note-the Counselor, a Norwegian, I, the only American, the rest of every different nation in Europe, and no two of the same, and all of us talking bad French.
444
HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY.
"There are few old houses,' continued Mr. De Vielle- cour, 'with the sight of which my youth was familiar, that I find here now. Two or three, however, I still recog- nize. One of these is the house built by my friend, Chief- Justice Jay, in the lower part of Broadway, and now occu- pied as a boarding-house. It is, as you know, a large, square three-story house, of hewn stone, as substantially built within as without ; durable, spacious, and commodi- ous; and, like the principles of the builder, always useful and excellent, whether in or out of fashion.'
" ' I believe he did not reside there long ?' said I.
"' No; he soon afterward removed into the house built by the State for the Governors, and then to Albany, so that I saw little of him in that house beyond a mere morning visit or two. No remaining object brings him to my mind so strongly as the square pew in Trinity Church, about the center of the north side of the north aisle. It is now, like everything else in New York, changed. It is divided into several smaller pews, though still retaining, exter- nally, its original form. That pew was the scene of his regular, sober, unostentatious devotion, and I never look at it without a feeling of veneration. But, Mr. Herbert, can you tell me what is become of the house of my other old friend, Governor George Clinton, of Greenwich ?'
""' It is still in existence,' I answered, 'although in very great danger of shortly being let down, like the one in which we now are.'
""" When I was in the Assembly,' pursued Mr. De Viellecour, 'the Governor used to date his messages at Greenwich, near New York. Now, I suppose, the mansion is no longer neur, but in, New York.' .
" 'Not quite,' I replied, 'but doubtless will be, next year. In the meantime, the house looks as it did.'
"' I remember it well-a long, low, venerable, irregu- lar, white, cottage-like, brick-and-wood building, pleasant,
445
HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY.
notwithstanding, with a number of small, low rooms, and one very spacious parlor, delightfully situated on a steep bank, some fifty feet above the shore, on which the waves of the Hudson and the tides of the bay dashed and sported. There was a fine orchard, too, and a garden on the north ; but I suppose that if not gone, they are going, as they say in Pearl Street.'
" ' It is even so. Were you often there ?'
" 'Not often ; but I had there, too, divers official din- ners, and at one of them I recollect sitting next to old Melancthon Smith, a self-taught orator, the eloquent opposer of the adoption of the Federal Constitution, and the Patrick Henry of the New York Convention of 1788, who for weeks successfully resisted the powerful and dis- cursive logic of Hamilton, and the splendid rhetoric of Robert R. Livingston. On my other side, and near the Governor, sat Brissot de Warville, then on a visit to this country, whose history as a benevolent, philosophic specu- latist, an ardent though visionary republican, and one of the unfortunate leaders of the Gironde party in the French National Assembly, everybody knows.'
"' But you say nothing of the Governor himself.'
" ' Oh, surely you must have known him! If you did not, Trumbull's full-length of him in the City Hall here, taken forty years ago, and Ceracchi's bust, of about the same date, will give you an excellent idea of his appear- ance.'
" 'Oh, yes, his appearance was familiar to me, and I knew him personally, too; but when I was in his company I was too young to have much conversation with him ; and afterward, when he was last Governor, and during his Vice-Presidency, I was, you know, out of the country.'
"' His conversation and manners in private corre- sponded exactly with his public character and his looks. His person and face had a general resemblance to those
?
446
HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY.
of Washington ; but, though always dignified, and in old age venerable, he had not that air of heroic elevation which threw such majesty around the Father of the Republic. There was a similar resemblance in mind. If he had the calm grandeur of Washington's intellect, he had the same plain, practical, sound, wholesome common sense, the same unpretending but unerring sagacity as to men and meas- ures, the same directness of purpose and firmness of decis- ion. These qualities were exerted, as Governor during our Revolution, with such effect that the people never forgot it. and they witnessed their gratitude by confiding to him the government of this State for twenty-one years, and the second office in the Union for eight more. His behavior in society was plain but dignified, his conversation easy, shrewd, sensible, and commonly about matters of fact-the events of the Revolution, the politics of the day, the useful arts, and agriculture.
"' Is Hamilton's house still standing ?'
" 'Not that in which he labored as Secretary of the Treasury to restore the ruined credit of the nation, and reduce our finances and revenue laws to order and uni- formity-where he wrote the Federalist, and those admi- rable reports which now form the most luminous com- mentary upon our Constitution. That was in Wall Street ; it has been pulled down, and its site is occupied by the Mechanics' Bank. His last favorite residence was the Grange, his country-seat at Bloomingdale, which, when I last saw it, remained much as he left it.'
" Mr. Viellecour and myself ordered some refreshment. as a kind of apology for the freedoms we had taken with the old mansion. On leaving it, we walked down Green- wich Street, moralizing, as we went, on the changes which time was working, so much more visibly in this little corner of the world than in any other part of it which I had seen-where the flight of years seemed swifter than
447
HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY.
elsewhere, and to bring with it more striking moral les- sons. After an absence of thirty years from the great cities of Europe, I beheld, when I revisited them, the same aspect-venerable still, yet neither newer nor older than before -- the same order of streets, the same public build- ings, the same offices, hotels, and shops, the same names on the signs, and found my way through their intricacies, as if I had left them but yesterday. Here, on the other hand, when I returned after an absence of two years, everything was strange, new, and perplexing, and I lost my way in streets which had been laid out since I left the city.
" My companion often stopped to look at houses and sites of which he had some remembrance. 'There,' said he, pointing to a modest-looking two-story dwelling in one of the cross-streets, ' there died my good friend Mons. Albert, a minister of our French Protestant Church about twenty years ago, a very learned and eloquent divine, and the most modest man I ever knew. He was a native of Lau- sanne, a nephew of D'Yverdun, the friend of Gibbon, who figures in the correspondence and memoirs of the histo- rian. Mons. Albert was much in the society of Gibbon, and has related to me many anecdotes of his literary habits and conversation.'
"' I must not suffer you to monopolize all the recol- lections of the city,' said I to my friend. 'Observe, if you please, that house on the corner opposite the one to which you have directed my attention. There lived, for a time, my old acquaintance, Collies, a mathematician, a geographer, and a mechanician of no mean note. He was a kind of living antithesis, and I have often thought that nature made him expressly to illustrate that figure of rhetoric. He was a man of the most diminutive frame and the most gigantic conceptions, the humblest demeanor, and the boldest projects I ever knew. Forty years ago, his mind was teeming with plans of Western canals, steam-
$
448
HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY.
boats, railroads, and other public enterprises, which in more fortunate and judicious hands have since proved fruitful of wealth to the community, and of merited honor to those who carried them through. Poor Collies had neither capital to undertake them himself, plausibility to recommend them to others, nor public character and sta- tion to give weight and authority to his opinions. So he schemed and toiled and calculated all his life, and died at eighty, without having gained either wealth for himself, or gratitude from the public. The marine telegraphs in this port are a monument of his ingenuity, for he was the first man of the country who established a regular and intelligible system of ship signals.'
" My friend stopped at some of the shops to make inquiries concerning the ancient inmates. At length I heard him asking for Adonis. 'Pray,' said I, 'who is this modern Adonis for whom you are inquiring? Some smooth, rose-cheeked boy, doubtless, like him of Mount Libanus.'
" This Adonis, replied Mr. Viellecour, 'is neither a smooth nor rose-cheeked boy, being, in fact, a black old man, or rather gentleman, for a gentleman he is every inch of him, although a barber. I say is, for I hope he is still alive and well, although I have not seen him for some years. In this sneaking, fashion-conforming, selfish world, I hold in high honor any man who, for the sake of any principle, important or trifling, right or wrong, so it be without personal interest, will for years submit to incon- venience or ridicule. Adonis submitted to both, and for principle's sake.'
"'Principle's sake ! Upon what head ?'
"' Upon his own, sir, or upon Louis the Sixteenth's, just as you please. Adonis was an old French negro, whom the convulsions attendant in the West Indies upon the French revolution threw upon our shores, and who held
449
HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY.
in the utmost horror all Jacobinical and republican abom- inations. He had an instinctive sagacity as to what was genteel and becoming in manners and behavior, as well as in the cut of a gentleman's hair, or the curl of a lady's. HIo had attended to the progress of the French revolution with the greatest interest, and his feelings were excited to the highest pitch when he heard of the beheading of the French king and the banishment of the royal family. He then deliberately renounced the French nation and their canaille parvenue rulers, and, in testimony of the sin- cerity of his indignation and grief, took off his hat and vowed never to put it on again until the Bourbons should be restored to the throne. This vow he faithfully kept. For twenty-one years, through all weather, did he walk the streets of New York bare-headed, carrying his hat under his arm with the air of a courtier, filled with combs, scissors, and other implements of his trade, until his hair, which was of the deepest black when he first took it off, had become as white as snow. For my part, I confess I never saw him, on my occasional visits to the city, walk- ing to the houses of his customers without his hat, but I felt inclined to take off my own to him. Like all the rest of the world, I took it for granted that the loyal old negro would never wear his hat again. At length, in the
year 1814, the French armed schooner with the white flag flying, arrived in the port of New York, bring- ing the first intelligence of the return of the Bourbons to their throne and kingdom. Adonis would not believe the report that flew like wild-fire about the city. He would not trust the translations from the French gazettes that were read to him in the American papers by his custom- ers, but walked down to the Battery with the same old hat under his arm which he had carried there for twenty years, saw the white flag with his own eyes, heard the news in French from the mouth of the cook on board the
57
-
-
----
-----
450
HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY.
vessel, and then, waving his hat three times in the air, gave three huzzas, and replaced it on his head with as much heart-felt pride as Louis the Eighteenth could have done his crown.'
"I could not help smiling at the earnest gravity of the old gentleman's eulogy upon Adonis. 'I fear,' said I, ' that your chivalric coiffeur owes a little of his sentimental loyalty to your own admiration of everything generous and disinterested. When you are excited on this head, sir, you often remind me of what old Fuseli, in his ener- getic style, used to say of his great idol, Michael Angelo- "All that he touched was indiscriminately stamped with his own grandeur. A beggar rose from his hands the patriarch of poverty ; the very hump of his dwarf is im- pressed with dignity.' I suspect you have been uncon- sciously playing the Michael Angelo in lighting up such a halo of consecrated glory round the bare and time-hon- ored head of old Adonis. I am afraid I cannot do quite as much for another tonsorial artist of great celebrity who flourished here in our days, but whom, as at that time you were not much in the habit of coming to town, per- haps you do not remember. He made no claim to chiv- alry or romance-his sole ambition was to be witty and poetical ; and witty he certainly was, as well as the ve- hicle and conduit of innumerable good pleasantries of other people. I mean John Desborus Huggins.'
" 'Huggins-Huggins,' said Mr. De Viellecour. 'I knew a young lady of that name once; she is now Mrs. the fashionable milliner.'
"'Oh, yes; that incident of your life cannot easily lose its place in my memory.' But John Desborus Huggins was no relation of hers. He was of pure English blood, and had no kindred on this side of the Atlantic. At the beginning of this century, and for a dozen years after, he was the most fashionable, as well as the most accom-
451
HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY.
plished, artist in this city for heads, male or female. He had a shop in Broadway, a low wooden building, where now towers a tall brick pile, opposite the City Hotel. This was literally the head-quarters of fashion; and for- tune, as usual, followed in the train of fashion. But Hug- gins had a soul that scorned to confine its genius to the external decoration of his customers' heads. He panted after wider fame; he had cut Washington Irving's hair ; he had shaved Anacreon Moore, and Joel Barlow on his first return from France; from them, when he was here, he caught the strong contagion of authorship. One day he wrote a long advertisement, in which he ranged from his own shop in Broadway to high and bold satire upon those who held the helm of state at Washington, mim- icked Jefferson's style, and cracked some good-humored jokes upon Giles and Randolph. He carried it to the Evening Post. The editor, the late Mr. Coleman, you know, was a man of taste as well as a keen politician. He pruned off Huggins's exuberances, corrected his English, threw in a few pungent sarcasms of his own, and printed it.
"' It had forthwith a run through all the papers on the Federal side of the question in the United States, and as many of the others as could relish a good joke, though at the expense of their own party. The name of Huggins became known from Georgia to Maine. Huggins tried a second advertisement of the same sort-a third, a fourth, with equal success. His fame as a wit was now estab- lished, business flowed in upon him in full and unebbing tide. Wits and would-be wits, fashionables and would-be fashionables, thronged his shop; strangers from North and from South had their heads cropped and their chins scraped by him for the sake of saying, on their return home, that they had seen Huggins; whilst, during the party-giving season, he was under orders from the ladies every day and hour for three weeks ahead. But alas, unhappy man ! he
452 1 HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY.
had now a literary reputation to support, and his inven- tion, lively and sparkling as it had been at first, soon began to run dry. He was now obliged to tax his friends and patrons for literary assistance. Mr. Coleman was too deeply engaged in the daily discussion of grave topics to continue his help. In the kindness of my excellent friend, the late Anthony Bleecker, he found for a long time a never-failing resource. You were not much acquainted with Bleecker, I think, the most honorable, the most ami- able, and the most modest of human beings. Fraught with talent, taste, and literature, a wit and a poet, he rarely appeared in public as an author himself, while his careless generosity furnished the best part of their capital to dozens of literary adventurers, sometimes giving them style for their thoughts, and sometimes thoughts for their style. Bleecker was too kindly tempered for a partisan politician, and his contributions to Huggins were either good-natured pleasantries upon the fashions or frivolities of the day, or else classical imitations and spirited paro- dies in flowing and polished versification. Numerous other wits and witlings, when Bleecker grew tired of it, some of whom had neither his taste nor his nice sense of gentlemanly decorum, began to contribute, until at length Huggins found himself metamorphosed into the regular Pasquin of New York, on whom, as on a mutilated old statue of that name at Rome, every wag stuck his anony- mous epigram, joke, satire, or lampoon, whatever was unseemly in his eyes or unsavory in his nostrils in this good city. I believe he was useful, however. If his humanities had not been too much neglected in his youth to allow him to quote Latin, he might have asked with Horace-Ridentem dicere verum-"
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.