by Pete Hamill
When I first started wandering on Lower Fifth Avenue, from Washington Square to about Thirteenth Street, I felt like a visitor to pre-Colombian Palenque. When I paused and looked, the architecture suggested a lost civilization. Unknowable. Gone.
I would always start at the arch, because the Avenue started its long journey uptown at the arch, and because it was a wonderful thing to look at. Once again, as with so many things I loved in Manhattan, it was designed by Stanford White. His world was now gone too, but it did not end as abruptly as his life. I knew the tale of the arch; it was in all the guidebooks and the biographies of White. How the first arch was made of wood in 1889 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington; and how some prominent citizens wanted it made permanent and were actually willing to pay for it; and how White then designed it for marble and hired Alexander Stirling Calder (father of the later modernist maker of mobiles) to make the “civilian” statue of Washington and Frederick MacMonnies to carve the relief work. Henry James hated it, describing it as “the lamentable little Arch of Triumph which bestrides these beginnings of Washington Square—lamentable because of its lonely and unsupported and unaffiliated state.”
But it was loved by others, evoked in a few fine paintings and many more bad ones, transformed in 1916 into a symbol of liberated bohemia when the painter John Sloan, the dadaist Marcel Duchamp, and three friends forced passage into an interior staircase, climbed to the top of the arch, cooked food in a bean pot, lit Japanese lanterns, fired cap pistols, launched balloons, and declared the independent republic of New Bohemia. The very correct residents of the square were not pleased. And though there is no evidence of cause and effect, that year, in distant London, Henry James became a British subject. The interior door of the arch was sealed. Life went on and so did the bohemian spirit. And I would look at the arch when young and make a connection to the arch in Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, and feel as if I owned them both.
Lower Fifth Avenue itself seemed oddly alien to me in those years and yet beautiful in some whispering, guarded way. Across the decades, I’ve gazed through the plate glass window of 2 Fifth Avenue at the small domed fountain rising from the buried Minetta Brook, where Dutchmen, Lenape Indians, and freed Africans once came to drink. Young Henry James, who lived a few blocks away on Washington Place, often visited his grandmother at number 18 Washington Square North and used it as the setting for his 1881 novel Washington Square. That building and several others were demolished in 1950 and replaced with this clumsy apartment house. The fountain remains as a liquid symbol of the invincible flow of time itself and the futility of the human desire for permanence. Flowing water is one of the hoariest of clichés for time, but here, still living in this glass cage, it seems perfect for the place; if all around it is ravaged by some natural or man-made calamity, the Minetta Brook will flow.
I was about fifteen when I first looked from this spot across the avenue at the Brevoort Hotel, rising five stories on the northeast corner of Eighth Street, all of it painted white, with elegant awnings for each window. Somehow (from newspaper stories or books) I had learned that beginning in 1854, when the hotel was opened, it had provided rooms for many writers and painters, along with businessmen and assorted transient peddlers of dreams and desires. The famous basement café, with its French menu, drew to its tables, at different times, Eugene O’Neill and Theodore Dreiser, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos and Isadora Duncan, and many others, including, on his rare trips to New York, Ernest Hemingway. I wanted to lunch there too and never did. I could never afford to stay at the Brevoort in those years, or in any other hotel, but I wanted to curl into one of its beds on a snowy January night with a girl who loved me. In 1952, I went away to the navy. When I came back, the white hotel was gone. By then, I had read Irwin Shaw’s splendid short story “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” and its first sentence would rise in my mind until I sought release by reading it still again: Fifth Avenue was shining in the sun when they left the Brevoort and started walking toward Washington Square. . . .
Those words and that story described Manhattan in a time I didn’t know, when many young New Yorkers were trembling fatalistically on the eve of the Second World War. The characters in Shaw’s story are aching with a need for permanence and the certainties of love while knowing that neither is possible. I knew that Shaw was from Brooklyn too, and thought I recognized in the story, buried between its lines, the same kind of wonder that I found in my own passages through Manhattan. Years later, when I knew Shaw, I asked him about Manhattan of that time: “Did you think it was Oz?” He pondered the question, then said, “Listen, it was more beautiful than Oz.” And paused. “And a hell of a lot more wonderful.”
Sometimes, charged with something like wonder, I would look at the Church of the Ascension on the northwest corner of Tenth Street, designed in 1841 by the same Richard Upjohn who did the final version of Trinity Church. It was the first church erected on Fifth Avenue, and the interior brims with warmth and mystery in the late-Episcopalian manner. But the church I saw wasn’t entirely the one Upjohn made. In the late 1880s it was redesigned by (of course) Stanford White, who added the stained glass windows and the mural of the Ascension, both by his friend John La Farge. Willa Cather, during her New York years, loved the church and the work of La Farge. But Henry James was even more enthusiastic, describing in 1905 his first view, one summer afternoon, of the interior of the church:
Wonderful enough, in New York, to find oneself, in a charming and considerably dim “old” church, hushed to admiration before a great religious picture; the sensation, for the moment, upset so all the facts . . . the important work of art itself, a thing of the highest distinction, spoke, as soon as one had taken it in, with that authority which makes the difference, ever afterwards, between the remembered and the forgotten quest.
Through the dense thicket of his prose, James was hesitant in his praise, because he was certain that the church would succumb to “the possibility of doom,” that it would be torn down, as had so many buildings he cherished, and replaced with a skyscraper. That is why, for James, the Church of the Ascension “upset so all the facts.” After two decades away from America, the facts of the new Manhattan had made James ache with unacceptable losses. His own stammering form of New York nostalgia permeates his report as he mourns those buildings of his childhood that had been replaced, for vulgar commercial reasons, by structures of inferior quality. The Church of the Ascension was beautiful; therefore, he reasoned, it must die. He hopes timidly that his fears for the future are misplaced. They were. A century later, the Church of the Ascension is still there, with its glorious windows and its masterful painting by John La Farge.
When I first saw them, so were many other buildings on Lower Fifth, living evidence of the New York past that was not my own. None were as easily entered as a church. All were objects of my own remembered quest. Their interiors, like those in Gramercy Park, were beyond knowing until I started reading Edith Wharton. Sometimes I would stand before 47 Fifth Avenue, the Salmagundi Club, on the east side of the street between Eleventh and Twelfth streets, my eyes taking in its full-length French doors, wide stoop, overhanging eaves. I came to know that La Farge and White were members, and William Merritt Chase (who had painted the landscapes of Brooklyn), and the master illustrators N. C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle, whose images of pirates and Treasure Island had filled my childhood. I would imagine these men in the final decades of the nineteenth century, well-dressed, mustached, all glowing from brandy and gaslight. They valued wit and irony. They were beyond envy or petty jealousies. They might enjoy practical jokes, the company of loose women, gossip about various upper-class fools, but they would never behave the way James Gordon Bennett Jr. did in sight of his fiancée’s fireplace. They were the boys from Trilby who had come home.
Or so I thought. And how I envied those fictional creatures of my imagination. As a young man, staring at 47 Fifth Avenue, I wanted to be part of th
e same kind of confraternity, without the tuxedoes or the gaslight. I wanted the company of others who had absurd dreams. I didn’t find that confraternity until the night I first walked into the city room of the New York Post.
Within a few years, the Knickerbockers had created on Fifth Avenue what by the time of the Civil War would be known as Old New York. There were branches of this mysterious region in Gramercy Park after 1845, and in enclaves to the east. But the Avenue was the capital. The memory of the simpler pleasures of downtown faded while a new sense of possession took hold and a new hope for permanence. St. John’s Park was forever behind them, and so was that much simpler Broadway. Their later nostalgias would include the way Lower Fifth was in the early years, when there were still houses standing without neighbors on Twelfth Street, and how the Avenue remained muddy in spring and how there were almost no gas lamps in the streets.
But there was space. The Fifth Avenue was one hundred feet wide, as were all avenues sketched in the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. The roadway was sixty feet wide, the sidewalks twenty. As the first houses were built, they adapted aspects of the houses on Fourth Street, today’s Washington Square South. Some were built in clusters, becoming the city’s first row houses, each of similar design, with front gardens in homage to the houses in London’s West End. The city fathers allowed the Fifth Avenue builders to take part of the twenty-foot sidewalks for their own gardens, usually filled with tough, colorful geraniums. Most houses were three or four stories high, with an entry to the basement underneath a stoop (and a backyard beyond). The stoops had handsome iron banisters. The servants, black or Irish, lived on the low-ceilinged top floors. There were outside privies, their functions disguised by trellises and bowers of flowers.
Life in these houses was comfortable but not always luxurious; the age of conspicuous ostentation did not arrive in Manhattan until the decade after the Civil War. Men came home for a leisurely dinner about two, the day’s main meal, and then made the return journey to the downtown countinghouses. Or they stayed home for a day and received their business associates in the new houses, with the young women safely out of sight. At night, they ate lightly and had tea. As time passed, and horse-drawn traffic clogged the streets, more dined downtown in the flourishing restaurants. Their women and children (usually tutored at home) dined together. Or the women visited with other women, or walked west to Broadway and examined the latest wares in the new shops. They all went “visiting” on New Year’s Day, following the old custom. As paving arrived on the streets, and the spaces between houses were filled, and trees sprouted from the sidewalks, the families also strolled together on Sunday afternoons. Here, five-year-old Edith Jones walked with her father long before she became Edith Wharton.
In their tight little world, privacy was all. The scandals of their lives were hidden behind veils of secrecy and discretion. Unmarried women suddenly departed for Europe, to return in a year. Some were seen leaving the home of Madame Restell, the city’s most notorious abortionist, but their names never appeared in the newspapers. Proposed new marriages were subjected to deep scrutiny, of bloodlines, social credentials, and bank accounts. The codes were precise. There were Things That Were Not Done. Cads were ostracized. For a long time, the public mood of the street was a combination of Presbyterian rigor and Episcopalian belief in redemption. A few older men and women surely yearned for the village of their lost downtown. But most seemed to believe that all of that was the past. This was the present, and also the future.
And so Fifth Avenue became the third major avenue in the emerging city. While Broadway was melding into a combination of commercial stores, fine hotels, and the best entertainment, and the Bowery was established as the main promenade of blue-collar Manhattan, Fifth Avenue became the street of social power.
The early notion of a powerful native aristocracy was gone—they would not rule democratic New York—but there were more indirect forms of power. The Knickerbockers set social rules that would last for decades, even if the most brutal cruelties could often be expressed, as in James, with a raised eyebrow. They insisted that wealth itself was not a virtue. It was all a question of property versus trade. Wealth derived from the ownership of property, they insisted, was far superior to wealth earned from trade. They were people with property—real estate, distant farmlands—and property was a sign of long residence, of bloodlines that antedated the Revolution, of comfortable, essentially passive security. Trade was grubby, vulgar, active. Trade was forever hungry and voracious. It destroyed all permanence. It devoured the old to make way for the new. Trade must be resisted. Tradesmen must be kept at an immunizing distance.
With their hard belief in property, the Knickerbockers tried to defend themselves from all change, from the arrival of so many immigrants, from municipal disorder. None was truly affected by the Astor Place riot, the draft riots, or the Orange riots of 1870-71 that took place near Eighth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, and cost the lives of almost seventy Irish Catholics and Protestants in a replay of the dreary religious struggles of the Old Country. For the Knickerbockers, the Old Country was made of the streets and abandoned homes of downtown Manhattan. They would not allow its disintegration to happen again. Or so they believed.
They had learned that social prestige and money were levers that could bring them better street lighting, better policing, early access to running water from the Croton Reservoir, and lush trees for their sidewalks. What politician could refuse an invitation to dinner behind the closed doors of Fifth Avenue? Their needs were expressed to the representatives of the masses around roaring fireplaces, all whispered urgings, probably maddeningly vague but still unmistakable. They did have friends, after all, that politicians needed: editors and publishers of newspapers, businessmen who could alert them to potential profits from the countinghouses of South Street, real estate speculators, stockbrokers. But there were certain things that must be understood. The first was simple: This was their part of the city. They wanted to stay here forever.
The mansions kept moving up Fifth Avenue, and so did the cobblestones for the horses, and the gardens and the churches. By 1850, the mansions had reached Twenty-third Street and were pushing toward distant Forty-second Street. None lasted. Lower Fifth remained reasonably stable, but the mansions and private residences beyond Fourteenth Street endured for a few decades and then were erased to make way for taller, more profitable office buildings (just as lower Broadway was giving way to loft buildings for the dry goods trade). After the Civil War, the velocity of change was extraordinary.
On the corner of Sixteenth Street, there once stood the Atheneum Club, where men from the brownstones gathered before going home, drinking too much, smoking too many cigars, making deals. In 1888, the club gave way to the present building, designed by Stanford White for Judge magazine, its ground floor now occupied by Emporio Armani. At Seventeenth Street stood the home of Ambrose Kingsland, a sperm oil merchant who became mayor. The office building that replaced it now houses a Banana Republic store. There at the corner of Eighteenth Street is the site of the old Chickering Hall, where Alexander Graham Bell in 1877 made the first telephone call to another state, neighboring New Jersey, and where Oscar Wilde and Matthew Arnold (among many others) did readings and lectures.
Across the street was the opulent mansion of a man named August Belmont, who was to change the character of Fifth Avenue above Fourteenth Street. He was an extraordinary New Yorker: born of Jewish parents in Germany in 1816, working as an unpaid office boy for the Rothschilds at thirteen, a confidential clerk at eighteen. In 1837, he was sent by the Rothschilds to Cuba to investigate financial possibilities. He never made it to Havana. He stopped in New York, saw the empty docks, and heard the moans on Wall Street caused by the great Panic of 1837. Some men’s miseries are always another man’s opportunity. The young man started August Belmont and Company, working closely with the Rothschilds in London, buying currency, notes, securities, and property at prices as low as 10 percent of their value before the
collapse. Within three years he was an important city banker, and rich. He became an American citizen, was active at the top levels of the Democratic Party, and by 1846, during the Mexican War, he was acting as a financial agent for the American government. In 1849, he got married. The bride was Caroline Slidell Perry, whose father, Commodore Matthew Perry, was a naval hero of the campaign to take California from Mexico (and who would open Japan to trade in 1854). The couple was married in the Church of the Ascension. Their children were raised as Episcopalians.
After a time in residence at a mansion on Twelfth Street and Fifth (and diplomatic service in Austria and the Hague), Belmont moved six blocks uptown into a new family mansion at 111 Fifth Avenue, the grandest yet seen on the Avenue. It was the first mansion in the city to have its own ballroom, capable of holding four hundred guests. Belmont loved good food and wine, and the house served both. He even owned his own red carpet, rather than renting one for special occasions from a caterer, and unrolled it to welcome his party guests. The house had its own art gallery, with paintings by Rosa Bonheur, Bouguereau, and Meissonier, and books that Belmont actually seemed to have read. He loved horse racing, soon had one of the finest stables in the nation, and his name lives on today through the Belmont Stakes, part of racing’s Triple Crown. It was first held in 1867 at Jerome Park in the Bronx.