1876 (4 page)

I suppose to the native New Yorker so many newcomers must be disturbing, particularly when there is not much work for them since the panic of ’73, obliging them to turn to—what else? crime. But for the old New Yorkers with money this constant supply of cheap labour must be a singular joy. One can hire an excellent cook for eighteen dollars a month; a lady’s maid for twelve dollars. Emma and I have been debating whether or not to indulge her in a lady’s maid. Apparently we are the only occupants of a suite in the Fifth Avenue Hotel without personal servants.

The drive from the pier to the hotel was—well, Rip Van Winkle-ish. I have run out of epithets; and must remember not to use to death that hackneyed image.

I asked the driver to take us through Washington Square Park and then up the celebrated Fifth Avenue.

“You will doubtless find the avenue much changed.” John’s politeness is pleasing, but his gift for saying only the obvious makes him something less than the perfect companion. As a son-in-law, however, he has possibilities.

The law office of the Apgar Brothers in Chambers Street is prosperous. But I was not heartened to learn last summer in Paris that there are nine brothers and that our John is but the third son of the third brother. I think Emma regards him much as I do, but then we usually see things in exactly the same way—so much so that we seldom need to speak our thoughts, particularly on such a delicate subject as the right husband for her.

“Properly speaking, there was no Fifth Avenue in my day. A few brave souls were building houses north of the Parade Ground, as we called Washington Square. But they were thought eccentric, unduly fearful of the summer cholera, of smallpox in the lower island.” I spoke without interest in what I was saying; looked this way and that; could hardly take it all in.

A white sun made vivid each detail of this new city, but gave no warmth. Beside me, Emma shivered beneath the fur rug, as enthralled as I.

Everywhere crowds of vehicles—carts, barouches, victorias, brightly painted horsecars, not to mention other and more sinister kinds of transport: when we crossed Sixth Avenue at Cornelia Street, I gasped and Emma gave a cry, as a train of cars drawn by a steam engine hurtled with deafening sound
over
our heads at thirty miles an hour!

The horses shied, whinnied; the driver swore. Like a dark rain, ashes fell from the elevated railway above our heads. Emma’s cheek was smudged. Happily, we were not set afire by the bright coals that erupted from the steam engine, falling like miniature comets to the dark avenue below.

Then the cars were gone. The nervous horses were persuaded to cross the avenue and enter the quiet precinct of Washington Square Park.

“My God!” Emma put handkerchief to cheek; did not care to refine her language for Mr. John Day Apgar, who was more thrilled than not by our adventure.

“I’m sorry. I ought to have warned you. There’s really nothing like it in the world, is there?”

“I’m happy to say, no, there is not.” Emma’s colour was now high; she looked uncommonly youthful—the sudden fright, the cold wind.

I did not repeat my now constant and, even to me, interminable refrain: How things have changed. Yet in my time (was ever any time mine?) Sixth Avenue was just a name to describe a country road that crossed isolated farms and thick marshes, where my father once took me duck shooting.

As we turned into Washington Park, I vowed I would not again make any reference to the way things were—except in print for money. More to the point, it is always difficult to discern whether or not one entertains or bores the young, since their politeness requires them to appear at all times attentive. I should know. In my youth I made my way in the world by using the old without conscience. Is there retribution awaiting me now? In the guise of some young listener smiling his betrayal as I maunder on.

I must stop this. Not dwell so much upon the past. The present is too exciting, and the small time left me must be well used to re-make Emma’s fortune. At this instant I feel that nothing can stop us
if
I do not perish first of the heat.

Heat billows from the pipes, from the burning coals in the grate of the marble fireplace. I have tried and failed to open the parlour window. I positively gasp for air. But I am in my dressing gown and do not want to call a servant. Emma sleeps in her room.

Two bedrooms, parlour, and—remarkably—a private bath all for thirty dollars a day. Three meals are included, of course, whilst a fourth, supper, can be had for an additional two dollars and fifty cents. Yet even at this rate we will be penniless in three months. But the gamble is worth it. This hotel is the city’s grandest; everyone of importance can be seen in the lobby, the reception rooms, the bars. So this must be our El Dorado, to be mined with care.

Curious, my pulse rate has almost doubled at the thought of money and its absence!

I have just taken an opiate, a powerful laudanum mixed for me in Paris. So now, sleepily, I write rather as one dreams, not knowing what is real or not.

Washington Square Park is as handsome, in its way, as London’s Green Park, with comfortable houses side by side, as neat and as unimaginative as a row of new American novels. In fact, the monotony of the architecture in the city’s better sections takes some getting used to. But many of the newer buildings are in a different, more grandiose and—let me admit it—for
me
, more pleasing style.

We left Washington Park and began the ascent of Fifth Avenue, a pleasant boulevard not so wide or grand as the Champs-
É
lys
é
es but pleasing enough, with tall ailanthus trees at regular intervals. Again, however, the avenue is lined for the most part with those sombre houses of dullest brownstone.

“Do
all
your houses look alike?” Emma was less than enchanted by fabled Fifth Avenue.

“They are dreadful, aren’t they?” John’s year in Paris had made him critical of what, I seem to recall in the early days of our acquaintance, he once boasted of. “You’d never recognize New York now,” he would say to me. “It’s every bit as fine as Paris.”

“But things
are
changing uptown,” he added.

“Not that your houses aren’t ... appealing.” Emma smiled at him. “And obviously comfortable.”

“Oh, they’re that. This part”—John indicated the section between Washington Square Park and Madison Square at Twenty-third Street—“is where the old families live.”

“Like the Apgars?” Emma was mischievous.

John blushed; his long face is rather like that of one of those llamas from the highlands of Peru. “Well, we’re not old in the city. We’re from Philadelphia, actually. The Brothers didn’t move to New York until just before I was born.”

“But you live in this quarter?”

“Right along there.” John pointed east, to Tenth Street. “That’s my father’s house. I’m staying there while looking for a place of my own—of course.”

Since the conversation was now verging on the indelicate, I changed the subject, asked him about certain landmarks of my youth. No, he had never heard of the City Hotel; so that once-famous center of the town has obviously been long since razed. I told him that it was the Fifth Avenue Hotel of its time.

“I thought the Astor House was.”

As I heard the name I had a sudden
crise
of memory ... a bright sultry summer afternoon when the walls of the Astor House were going up and a block of stone fell into the street, nearly killing a passer-by. Now the Astor House, once the leading hostelry of the city, “isn’t what it used to be. Convenient for business people but too far downtown for the fashionables.”

Today the center of the city is Madison Square and I must say its showiness provides a certain relief after the dull mile of Fifth Avenue brownstones we had driven so slowly past. I duly note that today’s uptown traffic is every bit as bad as it used to be on lower Broadway.

One enters the square at the point where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue, and immediately the eye is taken with the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a six-storey white marble palace that occupies the entire block between Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets. The half-colonnaded marble façade faces onto the gardens of Madison Square, and very pretty they must be in summer, though now the bare trees are like so many iron forks standing on end against a steel sky.

But ... always the “but” in dealing with things American. Between the hotel and the park at the center of Madison Square, the avenue is wide and without much style. Half-hearted attempts have been made at paving certain sections. Asphalt, Belgian block, cobblestones succeed one another without design whilst everywhere, at irregular intervals, tall telegraph poles with their connecting wires dominate the vista just as the messages those copper wires are constantly transmitting define and govern this raw world: buy cotton, sell gold, make money. Well, I am hardly one to be condescending. Why else am I here?

John assured us that above Madison Square, as far north as Fifty-second Street, European-style mansions are going up. “While way up at Fifty-seventh Street, Mrs. Mary Mason Jones has built herself a French villa. Most extraordinary sight! Just sitting there all by itself in the wilderness with nothing around it except a few saloons and squatters’ huts, and the goats.”

Despite stern laws the goats are everywhere; they even invade the elegant premises of Madison Square. Emma was enthralled by the sight of a policeman attacking a half dozen dingy goats at the north end of the square, where they had taken up residence in front of a building in the process of renovation: the newest restaurant of the Delmonico family, soon to open.

We were met just outside the front door by a director of the hotel, a cousin of the late Mr. Paran Stevens, whose widow is known for her Sunday-night evenings, to which everyone goes save the most staid of the gentry like Mrs. Mary Mason Jones. I don’t know why, but I do enjoy writing that name.

The opiate is beginning to take effect. I yawn. Am drowsy. Note that the heart now beats more and more slowly whilst the little drum in my head has slowed its thudding.

The Stevenses’ cousin was most flattering: “A great honour, sir. To receive you and the beautiful Princess.”

With much ceremony, we were led into the hotel lobby, a vast room crowded with tall palms and fat green rubber plants—a jungle contained by marble walls and red damask hangings and filled with the infernal smell of cigar smoke, of burning anthracite, of the heavy perfumes worn by the many ladies (not all, I should think, properly attended) who made their promenade either in pairs together or on the arm of a gentleman—recently met? The fact that I can no longer tell a prostitute from a fine lady is the first sign that I have been away for a very long time. As a boy, I always
knew
.

I registered us at the desk; pleasantly aware that we were the center of much attention. Obviously, I am better known than the overcoats have led me to believe. Also, the fact that I am accompanied by a bonafide princess is stimulating. Americans care desperately for titles, for any sign of distinction. In fact, since the War Between the States, I have not met a single American of a certain age who does not insist upon being addressed as Colonel or Commodore. Invariably I promote them; address them as General, as Admiral; they preen and do not correct me.

The Stevenses’ cousin ... but I forget: he, too, is titled. The
Colonel
said that he would like personally to escort us to our suite on the sixth floor. “We shall take,” he said, “the perpendicular railway.”

I assumed that this was some sort of nonsense phrase and thought nothing of it as we made our regal progress across the central lobby. Many of the gentlemen bowed respectfully to the director; he is a handsome man, heavily bearded as almost everyone is nowadays except me. I continue to wear only side whiskers despite the fact that having exchanged the blond silken hair of youth for the white wiry bristle of old age, I resemble uncannily the late President Van Buren.

Halfway across the lobby, a puffy bewhiskered man of fifty, elaborately got up, with perfumed (and dyed?) whiskers, bowed low to Emma and me.

“
Princesse
, allow me to introduce myself. We met at the christening of the
prince imp
é
rial
.”

The voice was Southern with a most peculiar overtone of British; the French was frightful but confident.

Emma was gracious; I, too. He told us his name; neither listened to it. Then he was gone. The Colonel, who had been talking to a huge man with a diamond stickpin, turned; his eyebrows arched at the retreating figure. “You know him?”

Emma chose to be mischievous. “Paris. The christening of the
prince imp
é
rial
.”

“Oh, yes.” I could not tell if the Colonel was impressed or not. In any case, we were at that instant stopped by a nervous young man; with a sidelong glance at the disapproving Colonel, he pressed his card upon me. “I’m from Ritzman’s, sir. We’d like to do you, sir. And the Princess, too, sir. If we may, sir.” He took to his heels.

Emma was amused. “What will Mr. Ritzman want to do to us?”

“To photograph you.” The Colonel had stopped before a mysterious grilled gate that seemed to be locked. We stopped, too.

“They have a store, across the square. Ritzman photographs everyone of importance.”

“But what,” asked Emma, “does he do with the pictures?”

“Sells them. Great demand for portraits of a princess like yourself ... and a celebrated author,” he added quickly as the grilled gate was flung open to reveal a small panelled chamber containing a uniformed man gravely fiddling with mysterious wheels and levers. At the Colonel’s insistence we entered the closet. The door shut behind us and
we rose into the air
.

Emma is delighted, but I confess to a certain giddiness, not so much going up as when, in obedience to the law of gravity, the thing comes down and one’s stomach seems not to keep up with the rest of the falling body.

Our suite is large and nicely furnished, with flowers everywhere—so many, in fact, that between the overheating and the odor of the tuberoses I had had a headache most of the evening. The private bathroom is indeed a luxury unknown in Europe’s hotels, and rare in New York.