chapter 9

I looked at Kate and she was grinning; then I turned to look south, down the long familiar length of Fifth Avenue, and once more the faintness touched me. Everyone has seen in actuality or on film the splendid glittering length of Fifth Avenue, the wide wide street solidly lined with incredible towers of metal, glass, and soaring stone: the sparkling Corning Glass Building, its acres of glass walls rising forever; the enormous aluminum-sided Tishman Building; the great stone masses of Rockefeller Center; weather-worn St. Patrick's Cathedral, its twin spires submerged down among the huge buildings which dwarf it. And the sparkling stores: Saks, Tiffany's, Jensen's; and the big, old soiled-white library at the corner of Forty-second Street, its stone lions flanking the wide steps of its main entrance. They must be the most famous seventeen blocks of the world, and beyond them even farther down the length of that astonishing street, the unbelievable height of the Empire State Building at Thirty-fourth Street, if the air should happen to be miraculously clear enough to see it. That was the picture—asphalt and stone and sky—touching towers of metal and glass—that was in my mind instinctively as I turned to look down the length of that street. Gone. All gone! This street was tiny! Narrow! Cobbled! A tree-lined residential street! Mouths open, we stood staring at rows of brownstone houses, at others of brick and stone, at trees, and even patches of fenced snow-covered lawn before the houses. And all down the length of that quiet street, the highest structures I could see were the thin spires of churches, nothing above them but gray winter sky. Coming toward us, rattling on the cobbles of the bare patches of this strange little Fifth Avenue, was another horse-drawn bus, the only moving vehicle, at the moment, in several blocks. Kate was gripping my arm, whispering. "The Plaza Hotel is gone!" She pointed, and I turned to stare across Fifty-ninth Street to where the Plaza ought to be; instead there was only empty space as though the hotel had been wiped from the scene. We had to stop thinking this way: It hadn't disappeared; it wasn't yet built. But the plaza itself, the little square directly beside Fifth Avenue across the street from the park—it was there, with a fountain at its center, turned off now for the winter. I nudged Kate: "Look. The hack line!" There they stood waiting, the familiar line of half a dozen horse-drawn hacks along the Fifty-ninth Street curb beside the park, where they've been ever since.
We heard the sound, and swung around: The little wooden bus was stopped at the curb beside us, its lantern smudged, and as we walked toward it I caught the sharp stink of oil. The door was at the back, just over a jutting wooden step, and as I opened it for Kate I glanced ahead at the driver, but he was only a motionless, blanket-wrapped figure high on an outside seat at the front, under a heavy umbrella. I followed Kate in, heard reins slap the horses' rumps, the bus jerked forward and we pulled out from the curb. On the following page is a sketch I made from memory of the moment we began rattling down Fifth Avenue on the winter afternoon of January 23, 1882. Inside, two benches ran the short length of the bus under the windows, and Kate sat down beside the rear door while I walked to the tin box up front labeled FARE 5￠. I found two nickels, dropped them in, and noticed the hole in the roof through which the driver could look to see that I did. And then we sat—there were no other passengers—heads swiveling, trying to see both sides of this alien little street at once. Half meaning it, I said, "This isn't Fifth Avenue, it can't be," and Kate pointed. Sliding past the window opposite us was a tiny curb-side streetlamp, four horizontal strips of painted glass forming a shallow boxlike frame around it, and the painted legend on the panel facing us said 5TH AVENUE. Kate was pulling my coat sleeve, and when I turned she gestured with her chin at the view behind us. "The Seventies, on the East Side," she said, and I nodded. It was true: The block we were jogging through now looked precisely like some of the tree-lined streets of the East Seventies in modern New York; a row of tall, dignified three-and four-story houses that said money, and I knew that different though it seemed this was Fifth Avenue. Between Fifty-eighth and Fifty-seventh streets, in fact, on the east side of Fifth, the houses were all of white marble and looked spectacular; and the entire block on the west side of Fifth was filled with a brick-and-gray-stone chateau.
A gong sounded, not loud, just the touch of a clapper, and I turned and saw the source: a darkgreen-enameled light wagon just turning off Fifty-fifth Street ahead into Fifth Avenue, then heading south. Almost immediately it swung to the right into a driveway crossing the sidewalk and a strip of snow-covered lawn, and we could see the driver in profile now. He had a heavy mustache and wore a dark-blue cap with a straight absolutely flat peak, and on the side of the wagon I saw the brass gong I'd heard, ST. LUKE'S HOSPITAL, said the gold-leaf lettering along the green side-panel, and the wagon stopped in the curving driveway. The building—we could see it now— was utterly strange, big and with a long wing stretching down Fifty-fifth: the hospital. Trundling toward him, we watched the driver tying his leather reins to the dashboard, then saw him climb down—first a foot on top of the wheel, the other foot next onto the brass hubcap, then a hop to the ground. Now a second man, mustached and wearing an ankle-length white coat, came out to meet him at the back of the wagon. The bus windows were open an inch, and we could hear the sudden chain-rattle as the tail gate was lowered; then we watched the two of them slide a wood-andcanvas stretcher out the back. As we passed the hospital, a bearded man lay on the stretcher, motionless, staring straight up at the sky, a dark blanket tucked neatly under his chin. Turning to look back, we saw them carry him quickly up the stone steps and inside, and as we rattled over the cobbles past the big stone building he'd disappeared into, I sat glancing up at its tall, lean, round-topped windows. It was a strange sight to me, a hospital here on Fifth Avenue, and I thought of the man on the stretcher about to be attended by long-skirted nurses and bearded doctors. Quietly, so the driver couldn't hear, I said so to Kate, then she leaned close to murmur, "Doctors and nurses who've never heard the words penicillin, antibiotics, or sulfa." I couldn't remember if Martin Lastvogel had ever mentioned this, and I wondered if, in this hospital, they even had anesthetics. In a window of a house on the southwest corner of Fifth and Fifty-third Street, I saw a sign reading ALLEN DODSWORTH'S SCHOOL FOR DANCING, then two old friends slid past ourwindows. First, on the southwest corner of Fifty-second Street: one of the Vanderbilt mansions. I could barely remember, as a child on a visit to New York, standing with my father for half an hour watching as the old building was slowly smashed down to make room for the Crowell-Collier Building. It was old, stained, dirty, worn out; now here it stood in its youth, a shining chateau of clean white limestone. Across the street from it was the Catholic Orphan Asylum, and then in the block beyond I caught a glimpse of a really old friend. We sat grinning as we approached it, and Kate whispered, "I'm so glad, so relieved, to see it." I nodded. "Just looking at it," I said, "I'm almost converted to Catholicism." Because there it was, an old friend, St. Pat's good gray cathedral, looking immense, higher by far than anything else near it, but unaltered—no, it was changed, somehow: What was different? I pressed my face to the glass to look out and up, and the twin spires were—not gone, of course; they weren't yet built. We were passing directly before it now, the gray cathedral completely filling the windowpane, our own reflections swaying ghosts before it. The sight of it was so utterly familiar that it suddenly seemed as though the Fifth Avenue I knew had to exist, and I turned my head to look back up the street toward Central Park. But once more I felt the shock of it: I was staring up miles of bare-branched shade trees and houses, church spires rising to the sky high above them. I swung around to look forward—we were passing something utterly alien called the Buckingham Hotel, just across Fiftieth Street from St. Pat's—and saw still more miles of elegant residences stretching unbrokenly, apparently, to the Battery. I realized that we'd stopped and that the door was opening. A man climbed in, dropped his fare in the tin box, and sat down across the aisle with a casual uninterested glance at us. Then he crossed his knees and turned sideways to stare out the window as the reins slapped and we started up again. And I sat watching him from the corner of my eye, tense, excited, almost frightened at my first really close look at a living human being of the year 1882. In some ways the sight of that ordinary man whom I never saw again is the most intensely felt experience of my life. There he sat, staring absently out the window, in an odd high-crowned black derby hat, a worn black short-length overcoat, his green-and-white-striped shirt collarless and fastened at the neck with a brass stud; a man of about sixty, clean-shaven. I know it sounds absurd, but the color of the man's face, just across the tiny aisle, was fascinating: This was no motionless brown-and-white face in an ancient photograph. As I watched, the pink tongue touched the chapped lips, the eyes blinked, and just beyond him the background of brick and stone houses slid past. I can see it yet, that face against the slow-moving background, and hear the unending hard rattle of the iron-tired wheels on packed snow and bare cobbles. It was the kind of face I'd studied in the old sepia photographs, but this hair, under the curling hat brim, was black streaked with gray; his eyes were a sharp blue; his ears, nose, and freshly shaved chin were red from the winter chill; his lined forehead pale white. There was nothing remarkable about him; he looked tired, looked sad, looked bored. But he was alive and seemed healthy enough, still full-strengthed and vigorous, perhaps with years yet to live—and I turned to Kate, my mouth nearly touching her ear, to murmur, "When he was a boy, Andrew Jackson was President. He can remember a United States that was—Jesus!—still mostly unexplored wilderness." There he sat, aliving breathing man with those memories in his head, and I sat staring at the slight risings and fallings of his chest in wonder. The Rev. and Mrs. C.H. Gardner's Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies and Gentlemen moved past our windows near the corner of Forty-ninth; at 603 Fifth, said the polished brass plate on its brown-stone front. Then just past Forty-eighth, Kate whispered, "There it is: five-eighty-nine!" I didn't understand, and she hissed, "Carmody's house!" and I swung around in my seat to look. It wonderful: big, beautifully proportioned brownstone mansion with a marvelouslyornatebr(was) onzefencearo(a) und it and the tiny patches of lawn. We stared as it slid past our window, and I was baffled; I felt almost certain I'd seen it before. It seemed astonishingly familiar, then I remembered; it looked like the big brownstone James Flood mansion surviving on Nob Hill in twentieth-century San Francisco, even to the bronze fence, and I wondered if the same architect hadn't done them both. We were nearly past it, staring back at it, wondering if Andrew Carmody—alive now, years before he was to shoot himself in Gillis, Montana—was somewhere inside it. The cross streets slipped by—Forty-ninth, Forty-eighth, Forty-seventh, Forty-sixth—all strange unfamiliar identical streets of uninterrupted row after row of high-stooped brownstones precisely like blocks still existing on the West Side. As we'd moved down toward the thick of the city, the street became more and more alive. There they were now, moving along the walks, crossing the street—the people. And I looked out at them, at first with awe, then with delight; at the bearded, cane-swinging men in tall shiny silk hats, fur caps like mine, high-crowned derbies like the man's across the aisle, and—younger men—in very shallow low-crowned derbies. Almost all of them wore ankle-length great coats or topcoats, half the men seemed to wear pince-nez glasses, and when the older men, the silk-hatted men, passed an acquaintance, each touched his hat brim in salute with the head of his cane. The women were wearing head scarfs or hats ribbon-tied under the chin; wearing short, tight-waisted cutaway winter coats, or capes or brooch-pinned shawls; some carried muffs and some wore gloves; all wore button shoes darting out from and disappearing under long skirts. There—well, there they were, the people of the stiff old woodcuts, only... these moved. The swaying coats and dresses there on the walks and crossing the street before and behind us were of new-dyed cloth—maroon, bottle-green, blue, strong brown, unfaded blacks—and I saw the shimmer of light and shadow in the appearing and disappearing long folds. And the leather and rubber they walked in pressed into and marked the slush of the street crossings; and their breaths puffed out into the winter air, momentarily visible. And through the trembling, rattling glass panes of the bus we heard their living voices, and heard a girl laugh aloud. Looking out at their winter-flushed faces, I felt like shouting for joy. Within two blocks half a dozen people had climbed into the bus; one of the pince-nezed top-hatted men, several others, and then, somewhere along in the Forties we pulled to the curb, and a woman got on, walking past us to the fare box, her long skirt brushing our legs. She wore a flower-trimmed felt hat, a plain black coat, a long pale-green scarf around her neck, and the hem of her dress, just below her coat, was deep purple. She was a woman in her thirties, and my firstimpression as she walked down the narrow aisle past us was that she was beautiful. Hut then her coin rattled into the fare box, she turned back, and—Kate and I sat directly beside the door at the rear—she sat down up ahead. This is a drawing I've made from memory. Now I saw her face clearly and glanced quickly away so that I wouldn't offend her, because her face was scarred with dozens of pitted cavities, and I remembered that smallpox was almost commonplace still. No one else paid her the least attention. We passed the Windsor Hotel, the Sherwood, and then something called Ye Olde Willow Cottage, according to old-English sign running the width of the building just over the doorway:awoodencoloni(an) al-looking building with shutters, a wide veranda, and a short flight of wooden steps, like a country store. In front of it a big tree grew out of the pavement, pedestrians walking around it, and if Ye Olde Willow Cottage didn't date from colonial times, it sure looked it. Right next door, on this astonishing Fifth Avenue, stood Henry Tyson's Fifth Avenue Market, apparently a butchershop because I caught a glimpse of skinned carcasses hanging in rows. Street traffic had grown heavier. We were passing carriages now; and a light delivery wagon, enameled deep purple and lettered Moquin in gold script, cut around us. As I watched it, Kate touched my arm, and I turned. She was frowning, shaking her head. "Si, I've had enough. I'm seeing too much. I'd like to ... just retreat somewhere and close my eyes." "I know: I know what you mean." I stood up, stooping to look ahead. I knew we must be approaching Forty-second Street and I was unconsciously looking for the landmark that would confirm it, the main library on the west corner just across Forty-second. Again a moment of utter disbelief, because of course it wasn't there. Where it should have been stood what looked like the base of an enormous pyramid: tall blank walls slanting inward, running clear down to Forty-firstStreet on Fifth, and west on Forty-second out of sight. Martin had briefed me with pictures, and I knew what this was: the Croton Reservoir. But it was one more bewildering sight in a city completely familiar to me and now terribly different. The bus was edging toward the curb, I beckoned to Kate, and we got off directly in front of a two-wheeled hansom cab parked just short of the corner. I opened the cab door and helped Kate in. Settling down beside her, I glanced at her, and her head was back, her eyes closed. The driver sat in the rear on a high seat where he could look over the top, and now I heard a sound overhead, and looked up to see a panel slide back and reveal a small open square in the roof. Framed in it a moment later, I saw one eye, half of the other, a nose red with cold, and the beginnings of a large and drooping mustache. "The main post office," I said; then I got out my watch, pressed the stud, and the lid sprang back to reveal the face. It was nearly five. "Can you do it in half an hour?" "I don't know," he said disgustedly, and clucked at his horse, snapping the reins. We pulled out into the street. "The way traffic is nowadays, it gets worse every day, you never know anymore. We'll try it; straight down Fifth to the square shouldn't be too bad yet, this time of day. Then over to Broadway, and miss the damned El; pardon me, ma'am." My head was back, too, my eyes closed; I'd seen enough for the moment, almost more than I could take. But as the roof panel slid shut I was smiling; however different, New York wasn't really changed.