USA > New York > New York City > The Memorial History of the City of New York: From Its First Settlement to the Year 1892, Volume III > Part 62
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THE VANDERBILT RESIDENCES.
president of Union College, knew something of architecture when, having been invited to admire a quite costly new church, he asked (pointing to the wooden corbels overhead) : "And what do those repre- sent ?" "Oh, nothing," was the answer. "Then," he replied, "why are they there ?" Artistically, they were simply a permanent and un- sightly blot. The copious ornamentation by Hiram of the temple in Jerusalem was beautiful,-lilies, lions, oxen, pomegranates, and palm- trees, with cedar-wood and fir-wood and gold of Parvaim and Ophir,- because it all meant something, and was in place. Our own later
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HISTORY OF NEW-YORK
architects have profited greatly by a better and more critical study of fine old models,-Norman, Lombard, and Italian,-of the principles in- volved in each, and the reasons for this and that. The leading ones are comparatively, or quite, young men. And with their own progress has been connected a better education of the people through travel and observation abroad, a greater apprecia- tion of and demand for the beautiful. This, with grow- ing wealth, private and corporate, has changed our city. The massiveness and beauty in mold- ing and tracery which were once confined to cathe- drals and princely palaces, may now NEW-YORK BAY, BATTERY PARK, AND GOVERNOR'S ISLAND. be found even in pri- vate residences. It would seem, at first, as if to design a doorway were a very simple thing, without much scope for artistic effect. Yet it is part of one larger whole. Let any one trace a series of doorways from Dutch plainness, the half-door and stoop, in colonial times, through periods of uniformity and general ugliness, down to the finer specimens of these latest years, and the difference will appear.
Nevertheless, as usual, necessity has principally caused the recent great change in our city, just as in England climate required the use of glass in her cathedral windows, which her architects speedily turned into a means - of adornment. The great cost of land in the lower business districts set our architects to work, the problem being, in general, economy of space in favor of business uses and a good rental. Hence the many-storied office-buildings, in which the inge- nuity displayed may justly be called American. Strong they must be, but without the encroachment of masses of masonry upon valuable floor-space, especially in the lower stories. Hence the scientific device of iron and steel in a skeleton framework infolded by the concealing and protecting masonry. Of what avail, however, the offices, high in
1 Edward Cooper was born in New-York city, October 26, 1824, attended the public schools and Columbia College, and thereafter spent some time in foreign travel. Upon his return, he became, with his brother-in-law. Abram S. Hewitt, a partner in the firm of Cooper, Hewitt & Co., whose senior
member was his father, Peter Cooper, the philan- thropist. He has been a prominent Democrat, and was mayor from 1879 to 1881. At the time of the Tweed Ring's power. he was one of the committee of Seventy whose efforts completed its overthrow. EDITOR
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NEW-YORK DURING THE LAST FOURTEEN YEARS
the air, without that other truly American product, the " passenger elevator"-that rapid-transit contrivance indoors, without which much of the present life of the city would come to a standstill, as if stricken with heart-failure! It has made possible those lofty and elegant apartment-houses which, during the decade, have become such a feature up town, as have the office-buildings down-town. What an enrichment in the way of living, if one can do so, to have your own apartments complete and ample upon a single floor; in a building really fire-proof, as are a few of them, with stone and con- crete and iron; where the fifth floor or the tenth is as accessible as the first, and vastly more desirable; where, above roofs and street noises,
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HIGH BRIDGE AND WASHINGTON BRIDGE.
the resident can look off upon distant shores or the bay, and down, at evening, upon a thousand lights of the city; where, if he so chooses, he can turn the key, deposit it in the office, and go to Europe without a care ;- in a word, to delegate to others the usual annoyances and cares of city housekeeping,-the cooperative plan, as applied to living, in its perfection ! With many gradations, it is true, from the crowded and unwholesome tenement-house of three or four stories, and an in- tervening variety of apartment-houses more or less desirable, yet such is the nature or tendency and extent of the present and most recent development in building. Not, however, that change has confined itself to these high structures. The old uniformity in residences, whole blocks alike,-the "brownstone fronts," for instance, of certain
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HISTORY OF NEW-YORK
sections and a somewhat earlier period,-has given place to an opposite diversity in style. If at times sensational or excessive-an advertise- ment (and what efforts and exhibitions of genius are advertisements nowadays!), it at least indicates the drift of thought and desire in the direction of supposed beauty. But, given a lot of eighteen or twenty feet front in a block more or less complete, to build thereon the usual three or four stories in height; to make a house roomy, attrac- tive, and accoutred with conveniences within, whilst without it is individual in style and yet coherent and beautiful; to do this with the windows and doorway and bow-windows and roof-line as the ex- tent of his scope in the way of diversity, surely it is a problem to test an architect ! "Picturesque " he may make it,-Egyptian, eclectic, or something else,-but probably at the expense, as is so often seen, of distortion somewhere. Having broken the shackles of uniformity, and in such a period of rapid city development, we are to expect ex- travaganzas from freer thought in architecture, as in other things.
The subject is too large to admit of detail. We close it with one more reference. It is to the present up-town movement of institu- tions which might have been expected to remain located for at least a lifetime. We may compare it to the flight of some larger birds northward for greater facilities in nesting. There are those still liv- ing who have seen one church (Rev. Dr. John Hall's) remove from Cedar street, from Duane street, and from Nineteenth to Fifty-fifth street, and another cross the city from Rutgers street to Madison Avenue, and again recently to a spot far up the Boulevard; who have trodden the classic halls of old Columbia in College Place, two miles from its present location in Forty-ninth street; and who saw the New-York University erected on Washington Square. In that university building, as a part of its history, Professor Samuel F. B. Morse painted, and experimented upon the telegraph till by his al- phabet he made of a wire a new highway of thought and mutual com- munication. Years ago the writer met him in Paris. Representatives of European governments were there in session to decide upon some suitable acknowledgment in money of its usefulness to them. After several propositions, made and rejected, he himself proposed -simply one year's saving to them resulting from its use! They took a fort- night to investigate, and then said it was impossible; no government could do it, the amount was so large. Finally, they decided upon 400,000 francs ($80,000). "I never expect to die rich," said the pro- fessor; "at home they keep me so constantly in law"; nor, in fact, as the result of a lawsuit by his company, was he permitted to retain the whole of that foreign douceur. Other distinguished men have also had a place in that building, such as Chancellor Theodore Fre- linghuysen, Chancellor Howard Crosby, the late Professor John W.
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NEW-YORK DURING THE LAST FOURTEEN YEARS
Draper, and Professor Tayler Lewis1-the latter a scholar as pro- found as he was various in his knowledge; an expert in many lan- guages; a poet, a skilled musician; a mathematician capable of original problems; versed in jurisprudence and public questions; a theologian, an eminent Bible student and commentator; a writer keen,
CATHEDRAL OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE.2
forceful, versatile, whose pen seldom slept; in short, abler than a specialist, a foremost product of American scholarship.
But, forsaking the seat of an honorable history, the university, and likewise Columbia, have yielded to removal. The latter comprehends in too scanty quarters its growing School of Mines. As showing the trend and development of thought, this most conservative institu-
1 At the time of his death, May 11, 1877, a pro- fessor in Union College, Schenectady, N. Y. 2 The corner stone of the cathedral was laid on December 27, 1892, St. John the Evangelist's day, with solemn and impressive ceremonies, and in the presence of many notable ecclesiastical and other dignitaries, the Bishop of Albany delivering
the sermon on the occasion. One Hundred and Tenth street, which forms the principal approach to the cathedral, is undergoing widening, and will be called Cathedral Parkway ; it will unite Cen- tral, Morningside, and Riverside parks in one con- tinuous and unsurpassed driveway. EDITOR.
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HISTORY OF NEW-YORK
tion has lately, in a conservative way, opened its facilities of learning to the " higher education" of woman. It contemplates greater ex- pansion and advancement, for which it certainly has the means. The history of its revenues is itself an illustration of the march of build- ing and its results. It is this: Early in the century Union College (Schenectady) was deriving a revenue from a so-called "literary fund," the product of State lotteries. These had not at the time the ill repute which time and experience of their evil have fastened upon them. Dr. Nott, the president, an inventor (whose hall stove was formerly in every house), contrived a scheme intended to secure the most perfect fairness-never in use, since one model was burned with the patent office, and the remaining one he later on gray, destroyed. But these lotteries and a State "fund" were jealously regarded as giving Union an unfair advantage over Columbia (King's) College. Therefore (1816), Rev. Dr. Mason, its provost, was sent to Albany in its behalf. Fortu- nately, the Dr. Hosack botanical garden in New-York, which the State had bought, was not proving useful property; and, as fortunately in the end, this piece of property Dr. Mason was induced to accept, leaving to Union College the lotteries. Comprising about twenty acres, it lay between the present Fifth and Sixth avenues, and be- tween Forty-seventh and Fifty-first streets,-for Columbia the germ of its present wealth.
Our city may almost be called fluid. Even its largest buildings yield to waves of motion. They go up and come down, and are carried to great distances. Both of these institutions will soon be found more finely located, miles away : Columbia, upon Morningside Heights, and the University at University Heights. The New-York Historical Society has secured a new up-town site; St. Luke's Hospi- tal is going, having selected a Bloomingdale location; the Leake and Watts Asylum (One Hundred and Tenth street) has already gone. Elbow-room, chest-expansion room, is the general necessity imposed upon them by activity and the pressure from behind. Upon the site of the Leake and Watts Asylum, at a cost of $850,000 for the ground, has already been begun the Episcopal cathedral of St. John the Di- vine,-to be, when finished, five hundred and twenty feet in length; to cost, it is estimated, about ten millions, and requiring a great in- come to maintain. The bishop's church, it is, in idea, the building of a reservoir which shall concentrate within itself the energies and purposes of the Episcopal system, and dispense them with greater
1 William R. Grace was born in Ireland, came to New-York when a lad of fourteen, became a mer- chant's clerk, and later started in the commission and shipping business on his own account. He has been a successful and prosperous merchant, and is now the head of the firm of William R.
Grace & Co., which is engaged in the South American trade. Mr. Grace, who is a Democrat, occupied the mayor's chair in 1881 - 82, filling the position with judgment and discretion ; in 1884 he was again elected to the same office, serving for the years 1885 - 86. EDITOR
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NEW-YORK DURING THE LAST FOURTEEN YEARS
power. It is an advance of ideas within that church, for which no previous decade was ready or could control the means. As a build- ing, it may be taken as a specimen of what our architects are capable. Its designers (Heins and La Farge) are young men. They have made it the round-arched Gothic, but not as servile copyists. On the con- trary, whilst obedient to the laws inherent in the Gothic, they have exercised a freedom required by the purposes of its interior; and in deference to cli- mate-our own icy and variable climate, which disintegrates even stone - they have thrown the protecting shelter of the roof over the to usually exposed fly-
ing buttresses. In addition to a ground elevation above the river of about one hundred feet, the dome and its spire will reach a height of four hundred and fifty feet.
THE BOWERY, NORTH FROM GRAND STREET.
But (passing from the cathedral and its thus far undeveloped purposes), on the other hand, the great Methodist Book Concern, recently built, is a center of widely radiating influences-perhaps quite the denominational hub. And, in token of present progress, the old system of a single minister in each church is yielding to newer necessities and develop- ment. Each church is becoming more of a center, in its way, whose outspreading tentacles are mission buildings, and efforts direct upon the growing and needy community. Development, expansion,-it is everywhere; seen in great stores and multiplying factories. Even our immense post-office, first occupied in 1877, has outgrown itself and is querulous for more room. Will the time ever come, in a near or remote future, when New-York may be called built? Or will it continue to pull down, in order to enlarge its habitations and its places of industry ?
With greater brevity we may refer to what has been and is both cause and effect of the preceding,-viz., better means of transit. But one lingering relic survives of the old omnipresent omnibus. It is the Fifth Avenue line of stages,-a survivor, but without the dash,
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HISTORY OF NEW-YORK
the wide-awake pursuit of a fare, the skill in meandering through crowds, which characterized the old keenly competing lines; a sur- vivor, not as a "moving creature that hath life," but as it were one of the "creeping things" mentioned in Genesis. The system is out of date for our hurrying multitudes. It is not so, thus far, however, with the horse as a locomotive for the street-car. To judge of his place in the city, one has only to recall the effects of a "tie-up," or the serious epizootic within the decade; dur- ing the latter of which business was interrupt- ed and sermons were preached on the reli- gious aspects of such a visitation,- a visitation more widely felt in its results than would have been cases of cholera oc- curring here and there! And what an industry the horse has created- what with his own short life in service (about four years), the grain and hay consumed, and the army of men depen- dent upon him ! But horse-flesh and muscle must now, in turn, yield ELECTRIC SUBWAY MAN-HOLE. to the traction company and the cable as, for long distances and speed, a better competitor with the "elevated," which also belongs to this period, having been opened for service in 1878.' The quicker the transit, the larger the volume of travel for both. The telephone has not interfered with the tele- graph, nor that, nor both of them, with the mail service. Each creates a new necessity for the other. Certainly all this is progress, and to be noted as a feature of the day. The very removal of the huge horse-
1 Charles T. Harvey, now of Nyack, N. J., was unquestionably the originator of the elevated road, the first of its kind in the world's history. In 1867 he exhibited his models and plans to the State Senate, and was authorized to complete them. By later and various processes his rights were nullified. But the Senate and House have
several times sustained his claims, the last time by bill of March 10, 1892. Yet after twenty-five years of efforts to obtain justice, whilst others have been reaping the rich fruits of his ideas, Mr. Harvey has received no remuneration whatever. The plans at first contemplated a cable-road in- stead of one run by steam.
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NEW-YORK DURING THE LAST FOURTEEN YEARS
car stable, with its malodorousness, what a difference it will make to immense parcels of property! Nor, since it relates to rapid transit should another happy change be omitted. The unsightly poles loaded with telephone, telegraph, and electric-light wires have to a great extent disappeared from the streets- a very important riddance, es- pecially in case of fires. It is probable, however, that few know the amount of labor, care, and cost required to subway city wires; begin- ning, first of all, with the hard, concrete trench, three or five feet
WASHINGTON BUILDING AND PRODUCE EXCHANGE.
deep, along which are to run, from man-hole to man-hole (two hundred and fifty feet), a series of prepared iron pipes or "ducts" in isolated tiers, secured in concrete, immovable, and topped with creosoted planks-this whole "conduit" being made capable of withstanding, in safety, a pressure of five hundred pounds to the square inch; and then, to complete the system, must be added the roomy and conve- nient iron or brick man-holes, out of which are fed into the different iron ducts the many-wired cables which are to traverse the conduit. A cable of one hundred telephone wires can pass through a single duct, which may be, perhaps, two and a half or three inches in diam- eter. The capacity of all the ducts-say twenty in number-may readily be seen: surely an improvement to have safely underground, in solitary confinement as it were, those dangerous "volts" which a high wind or an accidental crossing of the wires might render mur- derous,-has made so indeed to more than one unfortunate lineman!
In 1888 occurred a (happily) rare event which, for a few days, ren- dered locomotion of any kind almost impossible. Our contrivances
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HISTORY OF NEW-YORK
cannot outwit or secure us against nature and Providence. It was merely a fall of snow and a wind - the so-called "blizzard." But with wires down, and streets blocked against traffic and travel, there were those who were cut off from even the necessaries of life. It was a "boycott" on a great scale, which perforce deprived dealers of their trade, and families of their milk and coal and food. Strangely enough, there was a child born during that tremendous night of the storm, which finished its little career during the most fearful electrical
IA GTDAC
DIA
WASHINGTON MEMORIAL ARCH.
phenomena, lasting nearly all night, in August, 1892. On the other hand - as among its melancholy results, through a cold then caught - the blizzard of 1888 caused the death of a brilliant man; one who had once had prominence and power in both the State and the nation; one to whom President Grant had offered the chief-justiceship; and who, at the time of his death, had a great law practice in the city - ex-Senator Roscoe Conkling. These circumstances give him a place in this history. A distinguished senator of the after war times has
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NEW-YORK DURING THE LAST FOURTEEN YEARS
said that in the Senate of that day there were a dozen who might be ranked with the traditional orators of England. The number alone is striking. America has had not a few such orators scattered along her history. Mr. Conkling was one of that dozen; not a Web-' ster nor a Clay, but in the debates always a commanding figure, essen- tially an orator; whose great memory made all his resources at once available; whose command of language, strong, striking, and pun- gent, was something marvelous; whose voice, form, and manner were fine and imposing; yet who sometimes spoiled his effect, even in sar- casm, by a superabundant rhetoric, a style too showy, ornate, and merely oratorical - he could not resist it, it was the style of the man. A striking and conspicuous personality always and everywhere, in the law-courts as much as in the senate, a man of acknowledged abil- ities, not yet old, his death, owing to a persistent attempt to stem the blizzard, made the storm notably disastrous.1
Our appliances for locomotion are not yet perfect, not beyond the recurrence of "blocks" and other accidents. Put together the accidents upon the elevated, in the Fourth Avenue tunnel, and elsewhere within the city limits during the few years past, and they are many. Iron and steel and machinery are themselves fallible; and, then, who shall guarantee the switchman or the engineer? How long can a switch- man's brain endure the monotony of switching, coupled with the re- sponsibility and strain of always doing it right? It may here be mentioned that years ago President Franklin Pierce was passing over the Boston and Maine Railroad, on his way to Washington to be in- augurated. An accident occurred, and his son was killed. It was at a switch over which many trains passed, and tended by a faithful and experienced man who had been there for years. That night that man went to bed and dreamed that he had set the switch wrong; in a dazed condition rushed down and turned it wrong; and in five minutes the express-train bearing the president came along! In his fright he ran away, and of course was held responsible and ruined. Some time afterward, the writer asked a night switchman on the New-York Cen- tral how long he had been at that switch-it was thirteen years; how many trains passed over it at night-the number was very large; and then, if he ever dreamed of switches? His answer was that his wife said so- he was always talking in his sleep of trains and switches. In a word, his brain was telling him to move on to some other switch. Were a minister to repeat the ten commandments thirty or forty times a day for thirteen years, with no other employ- ment and a penalty for doing it wrong, his mind would in time
1 President Fillmore once said that if Clay, Cal- houn, and Webster could only have agreed which should come first, they might all have been presi- dent. Perhaps it might have been so with Mr.
Conkling and some other statesmen, could they have composed their antagonisms. Such things may pull down climbing ambition just when it reaches for the topmost apple.
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HISTORY OF NEW-YORK
grow confused, his memory fail to grip the smooth-worn phrase. K is not always carelessness - though a jury may say so - that causes an accident (and some poor man's ruin), but the steady strain on the. hand and eye and brain too long continued. Switchmen have no: vacations to break the circuit of their ideas, and keep them from mentally muddling the switches. Thus far, without attempting detail, we have had in view the material side of New-York. would be impossible, in the limits of a single chapter, to give full specifications of the development in that direction. We pass to matters and things representing, not the actually necessary or the strictly useful, but the ideal. We refer to events whose object was 7 commemorative, and to things in- tended to express ideas. The ad- vance in such things over the past has been marked, and the growth and expansion not all one-sided. It has been almost a new era. In a spectacular form we have been cultivating ideas-cultivating pa- triotism and the artistic. We have found in our history something to celebrate, and worthy of celebra-" tion, besides the Fourth of July. The statue of Liberty, erected in COLUMBUS MONUMENT. 1886, stands in our harbor, the em- bodiment of an idea as grand as the statue itself-that, after thes trial of a hundred years, here is indeed liberty. Its broad and mas -. sive foundations, with the material of its colossal form, indicate per- manency ; whilst, to all who come honestly-come, perhaps, with a sigh of relief-to our shores, its torch is an invitation and a wel- come; honestly and with good purpose, for liberty, as represented in that grand and noble form, is not anarchy, not lawlessness, not merely the individual will and pleasure: it is draped in robes of de- corum and law. Will it ever become a mere memento of what has been ? It represents, it cannot defend or secure, liberty. Will it ever represent a failure? That depends upon the people, who must first ostracize the virtues which make it not an ideal in bronze, but
CENTENA NIAL CELEBRATION AT NEW YORK
THE UNITED STATES OF
ERICA
APRIL 1889 OF THE
AS FIRST PRESIDENT OF
INAUGURATION OF GEORGE WASHINGTON
THE
UNITED STATES AMEIUCA 1759
18.89
THUSIDENT CAORLE WASHINGTON
PRESIDENT BENJAMIN HAFTIGSON QT INDIANA
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