South of Wall Street

To say that romance resides in the old, the unusual, and the remote will do well enough for young people; for them it does so. When we are young, somewhere east of Suez is about as near as we think of looking for it; but as we grow older, supposing that we have not given up the search for it as unprofitable, we come more and more, I think, to seek it in the near, the present, and the familiar. And sometimes we discover it in the most unlikely places.

If you desire a taste of romantic isolation, for instance, you need to go no farther than to New York on a Sunday afternoon, preferably in midsummer, and stroll through the business district, from Fourteenth Street to the Battery. I do not believe that the Desert of Gobi is more desolate; certainly it is not so haunted by the ghosts of footsteps. Where yesterday thousands of eager creatures ran hither and thither as if their lives depended on their speed, to-day are miles and miles of empty streets, myriads of closed windows and locked doors. Not a horse or a motorcar, no roar of traffic, no murmur of voices, nothing. If you are alone, the noise of your heels embarrasses you, and it is with a feeling of relief that you emerge upon Broadway and the green of Trinity churchyard, where there are people, even on Sunday.

These reflections have brought to my mind one Sunday afternoon, in a midsummer many years ago, which I spent wandering about these streets in company with a figure of comedy who had delicately suggested that I accommodate him with a small loan. I had two hours to kill before train time, and was standing in the hot sunshine outside the Wall Street ferryhouse, debating whether to visit the Aquarium or to look at the shipping on the water-front, when this piece of decayed gentility, tipping his hat and leaning elegantly on his cane of yellow bamboo, made up my mind for me. Persons are much more interesting than places, or even fishes; and this person a complex of cast-off clothes, frayed sleeves, cuffs, and trouser-legs, dirty linen, cracked shoes, unshaven chin, and a nose and a breath which suggested that he was not an advocate of prohibition — wore gray suede gloves and carried a cane. After an instant of puritanical disapproval, I wanted only to be with him, to hear him talk, to listen to his somewhat alcoholic tones of voice, and to observe his somewhat beery elegance of manner.

I find it hard to believe that, after I had ‘accommodated’ him with ten cents, I spent nearly two hours in his company, promenading the environs of the Stock Exchange. It must be nearly twenty years ago. There are few trivial memories that remain brighter after such a lapse of time, and this memory has still the specious sharpness of line and color of some dreams. Perhaps it was a dream. Yet I remember clearly that I contributed ten cents to my companion’s support while we were standing in front of the ferry-house, and ten cents more while we were on Broad Street looking up at a window on the fifth floor of a building there, within which he assured me he had many times, in his high and palmy days, played poker after the Exchange had closed, his opponents being three financiers of international fame. On the corner of Maiden Lane and Broadway, too, just after he had disclosed to me some secrets concerning the SubTreasury, and had quoted a remark which Mr. Pierpont Morgan had once made to him, his mind evidently running upon finance, he made it very clear to me, but with considerable elegance of phrasing, that another addition of ten cents to my loan would render it possible for him, not only to obtain luncheon, but to fortify his spirits with a glass of beer. I expressed some doubt, I remember, that beer was his favorite tipple; and in a burst of confidence he admitted that he much preferred whiskey as a gentleman’s drink. Twenty cents more, he insinuated, would permit him to drink my health in his customary beverage, and, if I could see my way to a total loan of fifty cents, he would be under eternal obligations to me. While I debated this proposition in my mind, he pointed out the signs of several diamond merchants with whom he had formerly had dealings, and mentioned three prominent clubmen whom he had once been accustomed to address as Tom, Jim, and Roger. When I ended by giving him a halfdollar, he drew forth a shabby little notebook and a stub of pencil and made a careful note of the fictitious name and address I gave him, in order that he might send me a remittance as soon as he should be in a position to do so.

The completion of this sordid transaction gave such support to his somewhat unstable self-esteem that, while we sauntered westward toward the river, he confided to me several slightly scandalous love-affairs in which he had once been involved, with Mrs. X, Miss Y, Mrs. Z, and others, modestly hinting that I would recognize the names if, as a gentleman, he were not precluded from divulging them. His present attire might make these amours difficult to credit, — the cracks in his patentleather shoes were especially devastating to his susceptibilities, — but his embarrassments were only temporary: a turn of fortune, and he would — and so forth and so forth. Meanwhile, I watched the cracks in his shoes opening and shutting like hungry mouths as he walked, and caught side glimpses of the lining of his coat showing brown at the ends of his sleeves; and I saw his yellow cane swinging jauntily in a hand incased in a gray glove that was split at the seams.

It was a spectacle to pity; and yet I did not pity him at all, nor did I despise him or loathe him or condemn him. I simply enjoyed him. I have called him a figure of comedy; John Synge would have called him a playboy, and he had acted his part until he probably believed most of it. At any rate, he played it through to the end, and left me at the Lackawanna Ferry with an au revoir and a sporting salute of such buoyancy, that I stood in the darkness of the ferry-house and watched him airily crossing West Street until he disappeared.

I never saw him again, but in his flourishing and decline he was so typical of New York that he has become for me a kind of symbol of its mingled comedy, pathos, and romance. I think of him as still haunting the streets that he loved so much. Without him the district would seem, as it must to the eyes of most people, merely cold, hard, stony; but for me, because of him, the streets which we traversed in our itinerary can never be without some overtones.

I suppose that of all parts of the great city the last which most people would choose for its romantic associations is that lying south of Wall Street, and especially that east of Broadway. It is the point of the island, the site of the Dutch settlements, and its somewhat tortuous streets, as I remember them, — for I have not walked them for a long time, — are narrow, paved with cobbles, lined with drab and dusty warehouses and loft-buildings. Passing by, one thinks of rats and stray cats and dark hallways and steep bare stairs and unwashed windows and garrets hung with cobwebs. A place of strange smells and odd corners, but otherwise, to the unillusioned eye, commonplace enough.

For me, nevertheless, this is the best part of the city. Reason can suggest a dozen other places in the city more worthy of affection, but true love is said to be always irrational.

With that curious faculty that we all have of using certain unimportant and otherwise forgotten people as radiant points around which we assemble our associations, I never think of this district without calling to mind a certain boy, just as I never think of the Wall Street section to the west without recalling my impecunious acquaintance. This boy, a schoolmate, applied for a position to the same man twice within ten minutes, entering the front door of a building on Water Street and the rear door on Pearl Street. I came upon him as I went my rounds delivering bills in the neighborhood, — for I was an office-boy that summer, — and I can hear yet his puzzled questions concerning the geography of that building and his disgust over the impoliteness of the man, who had threatened to kick him out. We went to lunch together at Dennett’s, I remember, where Scripture texts still hung on the walls, offering subjects of easy witticism for the irreverent.

This boy felt no fascination in lower New York, but I was already under its spell. That was my second summer there, and I was to spend another some years later. At present I was employed in an office on Cliff Street — a long sombre office up a flight of twenty-one steps from the street, where the partners had desks quite family-fashion among their clerks, and where I, as the sultry weeks rolled along, occupied one high stool after another, taking the places of the men who left for their vacations.

Upstairs again was a vacant loft, the dustiest place I have ever seen. There was not the slightest doubt that it had never been swept since the Civil War; at least, so Malone, the head truckman, told me; but I knew better. It had been swept once when I was a very small boy, because, one glorious night, we — our family, I mean — had all come over from across the river and sat in this rat-and-bat-haunted eyrie to watch the illumination of the Brooklyn Bridge. What this ceremony celebrated I have not the slightest idea; but I can still see very plainly the cascades of yellow and red fire that fell from the roadway of the bridge into the river, and the fountains of rockets that spouted from the tops of the towers. It was with a sense of supreme daring that I had left the windows now and then, and the glare that filled the street, and had raced my brother to the rear wall and back, through the ghostly murk where lines of great chests made a roadway. These chests I later — in fact, during the two summers of my employment — ransacked for postagestamps, and made some rich discoveries; in particular, three one-shilling New South Wales, 1860, I think, with an error in the water-mark, and two old Madeiras, and some rare Civil-War revenues — enough, indeed, to set me up for a time in a very lucrative business.

Malone, another of my luminous points, I was associated with while I was acting as shipping-clerk in a kind of vault or cavern in the basement. Here, open to two of the winds of heaven, lay great orderly piles of sheet metal, boxes of tin, pigs of iron, all of which Malone and his mates threw about as if they had been pasteboard. At the front, in a corner, was my office, a cubicle containing a high walnut desk and stool, a dozen letter-files, some shelves of discount books, and a little pot-bellied stove which had to be lighted for a while some days, even in summer. On three sides the walls were all windows, through which I could watch the four Cyclops under my direction, of whom Malone could well have impersonated both Polyphemus and Vulcan, for he had only one eye and was lame. He was a terrifying object, but had the heart of a girl.

It was his custom every morning to lean in at my front window and pass the time of day and prattle guilelessly about me and himself and my family, and especially about the red ants, which it was the prime object of his life to exterminate in my office. I never saw any there, but they must have been there, for I was continually stepping over or on or into Malone’s cunningly devised saucers and boxes arranged as traps. These were always wet, and usually sticky.

After hearing him talk about these microscopic varmints, it was most impressive to watch him sling a box of tin on to his truck and to mark the play of his tremendous shoulder-muscles under his shirt. It was still more thrilling to watch him climb to his seat and guide the great big-footed horses, his pets, out of the cavern into the street, with a clang over the curb and a rattling roar over the cobbles. If his way was obstructed — and it usually was — by the trucks of our neighbors, there was no one who could hold his own with him in innuendo, persiflage, and threat; and the clerks upstairs used to hang out of the windows to hear him cast aspersions upon the birth, rearing, family, religion, appearance, and prospects of the offender. And this was the same man who used to let me ride across the bridge with him on his truck when I was a mere baby, and who used to bring baskets of cherries to ‘the firm’ in spring.

I felt very old as I shouted in my best voice to the truckmen, and handed out way-bills and received bills of lading at my little window with a sliding panel. My duties were not heavy and left me many hours to spend as I pleased. These I occupied in studying two books which I had unearthed, covered with dust, on a mantelshelf in the office upstairs. They were the History of the New York Police Department and the History of the Volunteer Firemen of New York. They were beyond all praise. I gloated over their archaic vignettes and woodcuts, depicting the violent and heroic deeds — hold-ups, raids, rescues, pistol duels, running fights — of men who all appeared to wear heavy black beards and to dress in unlimited quantities of clothes and who always assumed theatrical postures under the most trying circumstances.

I cannot remember where I ate my lunches, and therefore suppose that I ate them afoot, buying buns and apples and milk as I went. Life was too full to waste it indoors among a crowd of feeders. There was, however, a restaurant on Fulton Street, down near the ferry, where I ate now and then with a friend. It was conducted by a man appropriately named Treat. His prices were far beyond my pocket, but once or twice I managed to be invited to go, and his shortcake has remained an ideal toward which other restaurateurs can only struggle. Somewhere on the same street, too, near Broadway, there was a French restaurant of such magnificence that I never dreamed of entering. A sign announced that imported wines and cheeses were a specialty, and I remember how often I lingered near the door, to catch glimpses of the shadowy interior with its little lamps glowing like roses on the tables. ‘Imported Wines and Cheeses’ — the very sign suggested French mysteries of a somewhat forbidden character, such as I later came to associate with the names of Baudelaire and Verlaine.

When the real shipping-clerk returned, I continued my kaleidoscopic career upstairs, making entries in the day-book, squeezing letters in a letterpress, filling ink-wells, renewing pens, sharpening pencils, and, above all, running errands. It was the habit of the firm to hand me a hundred or so letters, circulars, and bills, and to tell me to deliver them. It was said in the most off-hand manner, as if the peregrination of a network of streets extending from Chinatown to Greenwich Village and thence south to Bowling Green, not three of which streets were known to me by name, was nothing worth mentioning. On the first, occasion I was gone most of the day, and on my return was asked with gentle irony whether I had enjoyed my vacation; but I soon reduced my task to a system, going first to the nearest drug-store and consulting the directory, and then to a policeman with whom I was on excellent terms, and procuring his advice. I was able by these means, before long, to deliver my missives so rapidly that I had time to loiter about Peck Slip and watch the sailors and the ships, or to linger over the window of a Chinese merchant or a ship-chandler.

My rambles were curiously circumscribed, probably because of restrictions imposed by the bills I carried. I never entered the Wall Street district except once, when a relative, who was on the Exchange, took me into the gallery to see the brokers smashing the hats of new members; and I very seldom went as far north as the City Hall. Most of the time I was bolting in and out of doors along Cliff, John, Water, Front, Fulton, and Pearl streets, climbing innumerable stairs, and exchanging the time of day with innumerable clerks whom I visualize as all wearing alpaca coats and carrying pens behind their ears.

There was an old-fashioned informality about these officers; for this was in the days before the Steel Trust sent most, of them out of business and modernized the rest. In those days we took life easily and never let business interfere too much with pleasure. The summer days flowed by gently. It was always cool in these lofty buildings of three stories. The windows were always open to the breezes from the Bay and the busy hum of the streets. There was no clatter of typewriters and addingmachines: only the scratch of pens and an occasional muffled-clang from the basement broke the stillness within doors. Over all was an air of quiet and dust. The antique high desks, the high stools, the black mantelpieces, the drab walls on which hung portraits of deceased partners, the bald heads of the book-keepers, all spoke of age.

I grew to know in which streets to expect certain smells — coffee, pitch, paint, and all the volatile essences of the drug district. Now and then, I found ten minutes to watch the gulls off the Battery, and the steamers and schooners coming up from the Lower Bay, and the immigrants flocking in from Castle Garden; and I may as well admit that, much as I loved the woods and fields of the country, I loved these drab streets teeming with life even better. No woodland alley could take my fancy more than the shady arcade of the Elevated, with its files of pillars converging to a point in the distance; and no green field could be more attractive than Battery Park, with its swarms of dirty children, its tramps, its foreign women, hatless and earringed, and its worldly-wise curs and sparrows picking up a precarious living from the crumbs which fell from lunch-boxes.

The city can cast such a spell upon those early habituated to its ugliness. We of the city-born cannot help it if a cat slinking at nightfall into an alley, ora tramp slouching on a park bench in the sun, are more interesting natural objects than a bison or a deer; if a dandelion growing in a gutter or a tuft of grass struggling t hrough a crack in the flagging sings more loudly of the coming of spring than the hepaticas and bloodroots and anemones of the open woods. It is not a matter of beauty, nor merely a matter of becoming habituated to ugliness. If poetry, as someone has said, is one’s childhood remembered in maturity, the appeal of the city to the city-born is poetry. It certainly is not rational; it may not even be comprehensible to the country-born; but it is very real.

The trouble is that I am doubtful as to how far the appeal of that Downtown which Henry James declined to visit is real, and how far it is due to the rose-colored lenses which, according to the poets, are peculiar to the eyeglasses of memory. I began these reminiscences with the idea that the commonplace is romantic to the adult and not to the boy, and I seem to have ended by proving just the opposite. Through the rosy glasses I see those streets suffused with the light of sentiment; but to the clear eyes of boyhood they were romantic. Whatever the truth may be, if I ever go back south of Wall Street, I must be sure to take my spectacles.