New York]

THE BOWERY.

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is nearly parallel, and quite close, but the constituencies of the two streets are separated by vast ethical spaces. Here the coarser Bohemianism of the great metropolis enjoys its merry life, while the inevitable tides of industry flow up and down the mile-length of the avenue. The name of this street commemorates the Bouwerie, the country estate of Petrus Stuyvesant, Governor and Captain-General of New Netherland from 1647 until 1664, which covered all this part of the city, and was dominated by a great and commodious mansion of old Netherlandish architecture. His house was built of small

yellow bricks, imported from Holland, and here the doughty old governor doffed his heavy armour, and "enjoyed the repose of agricultural pursuits within sight of the smoke of the city, which curled over the tree-tops." Thirty negro slaves and many white workmen were employed in his gardens and fields, what time this gallant Frisian gentleman governed the colony, in the name of their High Mightinesses the States-General. His city and official mansion was Whitehall, near the Battery, a handsome structure of hewn stone, surrounded by velvety lawns and odoriferous gardens. Stuyvesant was buried in the family vault, in a little church upon his farm; and a hundred and thirty years later the now venerable Episcopal Church of St. Mark was erected upon the same site. St. Mark's is near the head of the Bowery, and contains also the tombs

of Colonel Slaughter, British Governor of New York in 1691, and Daniel D. Tompkins, Governor of the State from 1807 to 1817.

The first fire company in the city was organised in 1658, when there were a thousand inhabitants, largely negro slaves; when pavements of cobble-stones were first introduced; when the best building-lots sold for £10, and the best houses rented for £20 a year. The "Rattle Watch" numbered eight men, who were equipped with 250 fire-buckets and a set of hooks and ladders, brought over from Holland under Stuyvesant's order. Up to a comparatively recent period, the Fire Department was composed of a great number of volunteer companies, so filled with esprit du corps that the intensest rivalries existed between them, which often constrained the members to indulge in terrific pell-mell fights with each other, company against company, even in the presence of raging conflagrations. Nevertheless, they were to the last degree prompt and daring, and would return to their "machines" with bleeding heads and gashed faces, to do heroic service against the fire. In 1861 a regiment of a thousand of these reckless lads, called the "Fire Zouaves," and arrayed in their favourite costume of red shirts and black trousers, volunteered against the Southern rebels, and did very valiant service. The figure of "Mose," the typical fireman, in red and black, with oiled locks, a tall black hat canted on one side, and a cigar rakishly cocked upward from one corner of his mouth, was a favourite subject with New York caricaturists and character-sketchers, before the middle of the present century. Thackeray had the keenest desire to meet one of these dare-devils, and when Mose was pointed out to him, in the regular uniform of the order, leaning against a Bowery lamp-post, the genial old Briton went up to him and said, "My friend, I want to go to Broadway," as if inquiring the route. To whom the fireman growled out, over his mangled cigar, looking down upon him the while, "Well, sonny, yer can go there, if yer'll be good," with a plentiful interlarding of ingenious oaths. Within the last decade or two, this picturesque feature of metropolitan life has vanished, giving place to a smaller but more highly disciplined fire brigade, equipped with powerful steam-engines, and summoned to the place of danger by telegraphs to each engine-house. The Fire Department employs 850 men, with 600 fire-alarm boxes, 42 steam fire-engines, and 18 hook-and-ladder trucks, the total cost being £250,000 a year. The firemen are very daring, prompt, and efficient, but the construction of the city is such that great and costly conflagrations are of frequent occurrence. The police force is composed of 3,000 men, of wide variety as to efficiency. There are thirty precincts, each of which has its police-rendezvous and prison. The suburban wards are patrolled by mounted officers; and the harbour police are tinually cruising about the waters adjacent to the city, watching for river-pirates and other desperadoes. When riots assume dangerous proportions, large bodies of militia are quickly concentrated on the points of peril.

Another picturesque feature of the Bowery is its beer-gardens, on the plan of those in the larger German cities, and patronised by the same class and race. Multitudes of Teutonic citizens and their fraus gather here nightly, to listen to good music, quaff vast beakers of lager-beer, and smoke endless pipes. The glaring of hundreds of lights, the rushing hither and thither of waiters bearing armfuls of glasses, the roar of the harsh German tongue, the crash of the instrumental music, combine to make up a scene and

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THE ASTOR LIBRARY.

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sound full of interest and excitement. Within a few years, lager-beer has become the favourite beverage of New Yorkers, as well as of most of the urban communities in the Northern States; and the breweries, which produce 3,000,000 barrels of malt liquor yearly, are among the most conspicuous buildings of the city. There are several very large and handsome beer-gardens in the American quarter, with frescoed halls, orchestral music, and other interesting and respectable accompaniments. The old Bowery Theatre, where Forrest, Quin, Rice, Hackett, the elder Booth, Celeste, and Charlotte Cushman used to play, has fallen in grade as the Bowery has fallen, although it has been made an annere of an adjacent beer-garden, and German plays have replaced the wild melodramas so beloved by the Bowery Boys of yore. Dickens describes this region of New York very graphically, in the sixth chapter of his "American Notes;" but great improvements have certainly been made since he wrote. The last sanguinary battle between the rival aggregations of ruffians, the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys, occurred on the night of July 4th, 1857, when the former were aided by the women in the houses and the latter were in alliance with the police. Eleven persons were killed and 200 wounded during the night.

Between the Bowery and the broad parade-ground of Tompkins Square is the Seventeenth Ward, where over a hundred thousand people dwell on a space of about a half-mile square, crowded into tenement houses, and living lives of toil and suffering. Incipient communism has frequently broken out in this district, as might well be expected, and the police have had serious skirmishes with the discontented workmen. These are the districts which foreign tourists are not taken to see, and which optimistic writers ignore. Nevertheless, they are a vast factor in the problems of life and government in New York.

The literary quarter of the city is near Broadway, well up towards Union Square. The vicinity of Bond Street has, of late years, become the Paternoster Row of America, where several of the large publishing firms have their head-quarters, issuing millions of books annually, and scattering them broadcast over the States. The printing and publishing house of the Harpers still remains in Franklin Square, in the lower part of the city.

The great Astor Library is in this quarter, in Lafayette Place, and owes its origin to the generosity of John Jacob Astor, a German, who landed in New York when but twenty years old, and devoted his life to the fur-trade with the Indians of the far North-west. He bequeathed a fortune of many million dollars; and his heirs have since still further enriched the great library which he founded. The building is large and airy, in the Romanesque architecture, and contains nearly 200,000 volumes, including many rare old books and literary curiosities, Greek and Latin MSS., and black-letter books. Like the British Museum Library, it is used mainly by scholars and men of letters, as a treasure-house from which to draw material for literary work. No books are allowed to go out. The building and its contents cost more than £200,000, and large additions have been made by the present head of the Astor family. The interior is separated into two divisions, the Hall of Sciences and the Hall of Histories, whose titles indicate the nature of their contents.

The Mercantile Library, in the same vicinity, is of a more popular order, circulating its 184,000 volumes among a great army of subscribers. It occupies the building which was formerly known as the Astor Place Opera House, where the terrible Forrest

Macready riots occurred, in 1849, when the militia of the city were forced to fire upon the people, entailing a sad ioss of life. The Apprentices' Library, in Sixteenth Street, contains nearly 60,000 volumes, and is supported by the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, for the use of young hand-workers of both sexes. It is now sixty years old and in a highly flourishing condition. The New York Society Library, in University Place, pertains to a private corporation. It dates from the year 1754, and contains about 70,000 volumes. The Bible House, at the end of Astor Place, is an immense six-storey

building belonging to the American Bible Society, and serving as the domicile of several powerful religious organisations. Six hundred operatives are engaged here, and more than a dozen religious papers are published hence. The Bible Society has received nearly £3,500,000 during the past sixty years, and 36,000,000 Bibles, Testaments, and other books, in no less than thirty-five languages, have been thrown off from its busy presses. Opposite to the Bible House is the Cooper Union, a brown-stone building covering an entire square, and commemorating the generous philanthropy of Peter Cooper, a wealthy iron-manufacturer, who still lives, at the age of ninety, to enjoy the gratitude of the people. The Union contains great libraries, reading-rooms, and halls, where courses of lectures and practical instruction in various studies are given entirely free to the people.

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UNION SQUARE.

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The American Geographical Society and the American Institute are also quartered in this building.

A little way to the westward is Washington Square, a park of nearly ten acres, laid out on the site of the old Potter's Field, where over 100,000 human bodies are buried. The University of the City of New York, a building of white marble, in English collegiate architecture, occupies part of one side of the square, and has a venerable antiquity of fifty years, and a roll of nearly six hundred students. The Union Theological Seminary is in the vicinity, and is a famous school where Presbyterian youth are prepared for the office of the ministry, in one of the ugliest buildings in New York. The library consists of 35,000 volumes, with countless pamphlets and valuable MSS. and incunabula.

On the eastward, near St. Mark's-in-the-Bowerie, stands the yellow sandstone building owned by the New York Historical Society, and containing a great number of rare curiosities, the Abbott Collection of Egyptian antiquities (1,100 pieces), the Lenox Collection of Assyrian sculptures, and a picture-gallery of over 600 paintings. If the pictures be all genuine and authentic (which they probably are not), this collection may make some show of competing with many European galleries, for it contains compositions attributed to Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Murillo, Velasquez, Guido, Cimabue, Leonardo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and almost every other painter famous in the history of British and Continental art. There are also fifty-seven pieces of valuable statuary; and the society's library contains 64,000 volumes, chiefly Americana and local histories.

Union Square is on the line of Broadway, and is a very pleasant miniature park of three acres or so, with green trees and grass, and surrounded by broad plazas, over which tower immense hotels, and the head-quarters of the great sewing-machine companies. This locality, now so brilliant and active, was anciently known as The Forks, and in 1831 the city council voted to lay it out like the Place Vendôme. Fifteen years later, it was the fashionable residence quarter; but the march of trade up town has driven out the old patrician families, and left the square to the use of the money-changers. The colossal equestrian statue of General Washington is one of the finest works of art in the city; and on the other side of the square stands a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln; while a statue of Lafayette, designed by Bartholdi, adorns a contiguous corner. The park is oval in form, with a murmuring fountain in the centre, surrounded by scores of lamps, and many seats for the accommodation of the people. The permanent population is composed of a large and noisy colony of English sparrows, very tame and audacious, who were imported for the purpose of ridding the trees of worms. The wide plaza at the upper end has become a favourite locality for military reviews and great out-door meetings of the people.

Not far from Union Square are two verdant little parks, Stuyvesant and Gramercy, which are surrounded by the residences of some of the oldest and most honoured families of the city, bearing names which are household words in America. St. George's Church— a great Gothic building of brown-stone, with twin spires 245 feet high, and withal the citadel of the Low-Church Episcopalians of New York-fronts on Stuyvesant Square. All Souls Unitarian Church is located in this district, and presents a somewhat singular