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Broadway A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles
A walk through Broadway revives recollection; makes life flow backward for the hour; lifts the curtain from scenes of the past; recreates feelings often pleasant, oftener painful,—all ghosts of the dead years that shimmer through our darkened memory.
—JUNIUS HENRI BROWNE, 1869
CONTENTS
“ASortofGeographicalVivisection”:ANoteonStructure
Preface
MILE 1
BOWLING GREEN TO CITY HALL PARK
1. SOARING THINGS
2. MUD AND FIRE
3. PROMENADE
4. FIRE AND PROGRESS
5. BARNUM
6. TRAFFIC
MILE 2
CITY HALL PARK TO HOUSTON STREET
7. ACROSS THE MEADOWS
8. “A GLANCE AT NEW YORK”
9. MILLIONAIRES AND MURDERERS
10. “BROADWAY IS NEVER FINISHED”
MILE 3
HOUSTON STREET TO UNION SQUARE
11. THE BEND
12. GRACE
13. UNION
14. THE RIALTO
15. INCENDIARY SPEECH
MILE 4
UNION SQUARE TO HERALD SQUARE
16. LADIES’ MILE
17. THE “MERRY CHAIR WAR”
18. THE FREAK BUILDING
19. THE “LIGHT CURE”
MILE 5
HERALD SQUARE TO COLUMBUS CIRCLE
20. GREAT WHITE WAY
21. EDEN
22. TIMES SQUARE TYPES
23. BROADWAY GHOSTS
MILE 6
COLUMBUS CIRCLE TO 79TH STREET
24. THE BOULEVARD
25. “DOWN THERE”
26. CHICKENS ON THE ROOF
27. HARSENVILLE
MILE 7
79TH STREET TO 106TH STREET
28. THE RAVEN OF SPECULATION
29. BOOMTOWN
30. HOMETOWN
MILE 8 106TH STREET TO 122ND STREET
31. ASYLUM
32. ACROPOLIS
33. GOD’S SKYSCRAPERS
MILE 9 122ND STREET TO 143RD STREET
34. “HONEST TO GOODNESS SLUM LAND”
35. MURDERVILLE
MILE 10 143RD STREET TO 165TH STREET
36. THE HOUSE ON THE HILL
37. NECROPOLIS
38. MINNIE’S LAND
MILE 11 165TH STREET TO 179TH STREET
39. THE HEIGHTS
40. HILLTOPPERS
41. THE FOURTH REICH
42. THE BRIDGE
43. THE CUT
MILE 12
179TH STREET TO DYCKMAN STREET
44. MR. BILLINGS
45. MR. MOLENAOR
46. MR. BARNARD
MILE 13
DYCKMAN STREET TO 228TH STREET
47. LIFE AND DEATH IN INWOOD
48. THE LAST FARM
49. INDIAN TRAIL
50. WHERE DOES THIS ROAD END?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
IllustrationCredits
Index
“A SORT OF GEOGRAPHICAL VIVISECTION”
A NOTE ON STRUCTURE
“T
HE BEST WAY OF FINDING OUT THE INSIDE OF AN ORANGE is by cutting it through the middle,” William Henry Rideing wrote in Harper’sNewMonthlyMagazinein December of 1877, “and if, in a sort of geographical vivisection, a scalpel should be drawn down the middle of New York, it would fall into the channel formed by Broadway.”
This book takes up Rideing’s suggestion and not only flays Manhattan south to north along its most vital street but also examines Broadway mile-by-mile from Bowling Green to Marble Hill. Exactly where one of those miles ends and another begins is, it turns out, an inexact science. Milestones set up to measure Manhattan’s length in 1769 were famously inaccurate, compressing the distance between the miles so that the island became over fourteen miles long. Adjustments were made and new series of milestones erected, each time with similar miscalculations. Measurements became standardized when John Randel Jr., the remarkably scrupulous surveyor of the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, spaced the city’s grid of streets so that twenty blocks equaled one mile.
But it doesn’t always pay to be so precise, and Broadway’s miles are often best measured according to matters of personal routine: the distance from home to the subway; from your favorite coffee shop to your favorite park; from the Flatiron Building to the Times
Building; from the Ansonia to the Apthorp. In the 1840s, lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong was in the habit of walking up Broadway from his Wall Street office to his sweetheart’s home on Union Square, a distance that he measured not in miles but in how many cigars (four) he could smoke along the way.
Today, measurements taken by a GPS device, the odometer in a car, or Google Maps will each give slightly different mile demarcations. For our purposes, it seemed best to embrace imprecision—to push and pull the miles a bit—for the sake of the story.
PREFACE
BROADWAY BEGAN IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY as a muddy path running through the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam and out the settlement’s back door, where it dissolved in the farms that lay north of town. Over the next two hundred years the farms gradually disappeared and Broadway grew in length, absorbing older roads in the process, until it had become New York City’s “Path of Progress,” its legendary traffic and unrelenting commotion, lively public squares, and impressive mansions, hotels, stores, theaters, and churches providing ample evidence of American virtue and industry. Walt Whitman was just one of many poets to compare Broadway to a river a “mighty ever-flowing land-river” in Whitmanspeak—flowing through the heart of America’s great metropolis.
“Broadway represents the national life,” journalist Junius Henri Browne wrote soon after the Civil War. In order to see America, he suggested, all that was required was a station point along Broadway. “Take your stand there,” Browne advised, “and Maine, and Louisiana, the Carolinas, and California, Boston, and Chicago, pass before you.”
In 1896, illustrator Valerian Gribayedoff, a Russian immigrant, described Broadway as “a kind of animated mirror, looking back at you with its myriad faces in the same mood in which you regard it.” By the end of the nineteenth century, Broadway’s mirror had reflected, along with millions of merchants, bankers, politicians, pickpockets, preachers, and prostitutes, the faces of George and Martha Washington, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, Alexander and Elizabeth Hamilton, Lafayette, John Jacob Astor, Edgar Allan Poe, P. T. Barnum, John James Audubon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret
Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Henry James, Emma Goldman, Stephen Crane, and even (supposedly but not quite) the exiled Louis Philippe I, king of the French.
During the twentieth century, Broadway became a state of mind as much as a street, a ribbon of light that song-and-dance man George M. Cohan celebrated as the most American of American places. And yet Broadway has always had a pronounced dark side, and the dark side grew proportionally with the street until the Great White Way became emblematic of a certain social carelessness, even dissolution, a “street of broken dreams” beset by crime, loneliness, and urban decay. In 1930, playwright William Anthony McGuire’s famous declaration—“Broadway’s a great street when you’re going up. When you’re going down take Sixth Avenue”—needed no further explanation.
More recently Broadway has been spruced up and lined with pricey cafes, family-friendly theaters, and festive pedestrian plazas. Most people experience Broadway in fragments—a shopping trip to Herald Square, a cup of coffee near Union Square six months later, a stroll down the West Side the following year, a hike up the stairs from Broadway to Fort Tryon Park five years after that—but those who walk its entire length in one day-long jaunt, from Bowling Green all the way up to Marble Hill, are often surprised to find that Broadway is the one thread that keeps the city stitched together in time and space. This story, a south-to-north journey up one famous street, follows that thread back into America’s deep memory.
MILE 1
BOWLING GREEN TO CITY HALL PARK
CHAPTER
1
SOARING THINGS
IT HAPPENED FOR THE FIRST TIME NOT ON BROADWAY BUT on Wall Street. It was a rainy, overcast afternoon, October 28, 1886, and a group of revelers—army veterans, firemen, and a contingent of Columbia and City College students—peeled off onto Wall Street from Broadway, where they had been marching in a parade celebrating the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. They were in high spirits and making noise. Office workers heard the commotion and as a practical joke began dumping used ticker tape from their windows onto the street below. “Every window,” the NewYorkTimes reported the next day, “appeared to be a paper mill spouting out squirming lines of tape.”
Ticker-tape parades didn’t really become a Broadway tradition until 1899, when Admiral George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay, was welcomed back to the city at the end of the Spanish-American War. But Broadway processions were hardly a new idea: There had been celebrations, military parades, and funerals up and down Broadway since at least as far back as the Colonial era. Many of those parades, long forgotten, were nothing if not ambitious: An 1825 parade marking completion of the Erie Canal began and ended at the Battery and took in not only Broadway but also the Bowery and Greenwich, Canal, Grand, Broome, and Pearl streets, a tour of cheer and hoopla that took five hours to complete.
In 1842 a parade inaugurating the Croton Aqueduct wound its way from the Battery up Broadway two and a half miles to Union Square, then turned around and headed south down the Bowery, detoured to the east along Grand Street, and returned along East Broadway and Chatham Street (present-day Park Row) to City Hall Park. Fully 15,000 people marched in the parade while 200,000 spectators, “crowded to suffocation,” the NewYorkTribunereported, watched from the sidewalks—at a time when the city’s population was less than 400,000. The mass of people and festive floats took over two hours to pass a single spot along the route. The parade was so long—six miles in total—that by the time John Aspinwall Hadden, a young soldier marching at the head of the parade, completed the circuit and returned to City Hall Park, the tail end of the procession was still visible slowly making its way up Broadway.
The 1858 “Cable Carnival” celebrating the first successful connection of the Atlantic Cable included as its centerpiece a Broadway parade hailing Cyrus W. Field, a wealthy local paper merchant and the driving force behind the cable project, as a conquering hero. As Field was trundled up Broadway, he was accompanied by the crew of the steam frigate Niagara, one of two ships that had unspooled the cable across the ocean. They carried a scale model of the ship and marched just behind a wagon loaded with a huge coil of the cable itself. Then came the inevitable aldermen, policemen, firemen, and representatives of trade societies that were part of every Broadway parade, plus 2,000 laborers then occupied in the construction of Central Park, their hats festooned with sprigs of evergreen.
Thousands of people watched from rooftops and balconies along the parade route, hoping for a glimpse of the renowned Field; one balcony collapsed under the weight of spectators. It took six hours for the procession to make its way from Bowling Green to a reception at the Crystal Palace at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, where Field said he was overwhelmed by the “vast crowd testifying their sympathy and approval; praises without stint and friends without number!” He was hailed as “Cyrus the Great,” “Gallant Cyrus,” and the “Columbus of America.”
Cyrus W. Field in 1858, following his Atlantic Cable triumph.
Broadway gave itself over to cable mania. The famous Broadway jewelers Tiffany & Company struck a commemorative gold coin in
Field’s honor and bought miles of leftover cable from Field and cut it into short strands to sell as souvenirs. A musical production, Love andLightning,ortheTelegraphCable,was performed at Laura Keene’s Theatre, on Broadway near Bleecker Street. A special service was held at Trinity Church. Archbishop John J. Hughes buried a written tribute to Field in the cornerstone of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, then under construction on Fifth Avenue. The “Atlantic Telegraph Polka” briefly became a dance craze.
That evening the city’s Common Council gave a banquet in Field’s honor at the swank Metropolitan Hotel at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street, with a dinner menu featuring turtle soup, lobster, salmon, oysters on the half shell, stewed terrapin, wild duck with olives, lamb tenderloin, broiled English snipe, and chartreuse of partridge with Madeira sauce. The table was ornamented with ice sculptures approximating the shapes of Queen Victoria, President James Buchanan, and Field himself. The celebration continued into the night, with a second procession down Broadway by torchlight. There were illuminations, fireworks, and strings of colored lanterns, lending Broadway “a carnivalesque appearance which it is almost impossible to describe,” one reporter for the NewYorkHeraldraved.
The “Cable Carnival” procession passes up Broadway.
In the late nineteenth century Fifth Avenue began to vie with Broadway as the city’s uptown parade route, and Broadway parades became truncated, typically encompassing only the street’s first mile between Bowling Green and City Hall Park. But as Broadway parades got shorter in length, the advent of ticker tape gave them a thrilling new vertical dimension. Between 1900 and 1970 the city was absolutely besotted with ticker tape: Over those seventy years, through two world wars and the Great Depression, ticker tape rained down on Broadway, cascading from windows high above the street and gathering in drifts along the curbs. (Budget cutbacks and the general urban malaise of the 1970s and ’80s turned ticker-tape parades—the ticker tape replaced with shredded sheets of 8½-by11-inch paper—into exceedingly rare events.)
But during its golden era, if someone was famous, even temporarily, they had a good chance of entering the city through a
storm of paper. Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, Jesse Owens, Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy were obvious choices for adulation, but throngs also assembled in Broadway to cheer Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan, Prince Gustav Adolf of Sweden, President-elect Júlio Prestes de Albuquerque of Brazil, and German airship designer Hugo Eckener. (Einstein insisted on an impromptu detour from Broadway to the Lower East Side, where Jewish immigrants greeted him with something approaching euphoria. “New York has been kind, most kind,” he told reporters the next day. “Your city’s landscape is not the landscape of a town. It is more like the landscape of a mountain in its impressiveness.”)
Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, was honored with a parade in 1926; two weeks later so was Amelia Corson, the secondwoman to swim the Channel.
The ticker-tape parade was the unlikely byproduct of a contraption invented in 1863 by Edward A. Calahan and improved upon by Thomas Edison. By the 1880s the stock ticker, an intricate brass machine about the size of a modern-day coffeemaker, was a fixture in virtually every office along Broadway. Each machine, resolutely ticking the day away, churned out continuous paper ribbons of stock quotes upon which fortunes were won and lost, but the tape itself was worthless the moment it was read. Office wastepaper bins constantly overflowed with the stuff, and it was only a matter of time before someone decided to hurl it from a window. Whoever was the first to throw it on that fateful day in 1886—the Timesblamed “imps of office boys”—probably justified it later by saying something like “but it was just sittingthere.”
Of course, ticker-tape parades required launching pads for the projectiles—the higher the better, really—so that the ticker tape unfurled in long streams as it soared downward. And so ticker-tape parades never would have happened without the advent of tall buildings, and tall buildings never would have been possible without elevators and steel.
THERE HAD BEEN a few buildings of seven or even eight stories on Broadway as early as the 1850s, but heights were limited because load-bearing masonry walls had to thicken with each additional floor. By law, a ten-story building required walls 6 to 7 feet thick at ground level, a restriction that severely reduced the size and value of ground-floor rental spaces, which became as dark as dungeons. And building heights were limited to the number of stairs a tenant or customer was willing to climb. Elevators existed, but weren’t generally trusted. That changed at the 1853 New York World’s Fair, when inventor Elisha Otis dramatically unveiled a new safety device that acted as a brake in the event a supporting cable of an elevator car failed. Otis demonstrated his invention by riding a platform high up into the rafters of the Crystal Palace and then ordering the supporting ropes cut. The brakes caught the platform, Otis removed his top hat and took a bow, and contractors began installing the Otis safety elevator in buildings.
The following year English engineer Henry Bessemer developed a technique for forcing oxygen through molten pig iron to remove carbon and other impurities, creating, for the first time, consistently strong steel. The “Bessemer process” allowed for the eventual mass production of steel beams and columns, substantially lowering the cost of steel construction. In New York, where Manhattan’s narrowness made land scarce, the idea that offices might be stacked one upon the other promised a real-estate revolution. On Broadway, first iron (wrought and cast) and then steel construction transformed the street into a vertiginous canyon.
Among the first to dream of Broadway as a vertical landscape was none other than Cyrus W. Field, who, in the summer of 1881, acquired the decaying Washington Hotel (originally the historic eighteenth-century Archibald Kennedy house) at the foot of Broadway, tore it down, and began building one of the street’s earliest tall office buildings that employed an interior frame—iron in this case—for its structural support.
Twenty-three years after he had sutured America to Europe through the Atlantic Cable, Field, at sixty-one, was no longer “Cyrus the Great.” As the maligned president of the New York Elevated
Railroad Company, he was regularly flayed in the press, his once sterling reputation sullied by questionable dealings with financiers Jay Gould and Russell Sage. The RealEstateRecord&Builders’ Guidelabeled Field not merely a “crank” but a crank “with no moral sense”—quite an about-face for someone who had once been among the most popular men in America. Field’s late-career foray into construction was, in essence, a comeback attempt a chance, even, at redemption.
It was called the Washington Building or the Field Building, and its address, No. 1 Broadway, seemed to promise great things. Field invited six architects to submit renderings and, with input from his wife Mary, selected Edward Hale Kendall’s design as the competition winner.
Kendall’s submission was a nine-story mass of brownstone and brick in the then-fashionable Queen Anne style, with entries at two corners accessed by cascading stairs guarded by iron dragons. The Washington Building was completed in 1882, but Field couldn’t stop fussing with it. Perhaps he had been goaded into a kind of architectural arms race when the Produce Exchange, a massive palazzo in maroon brick designed by the great architect George B. Post, began rising at No. 2 Broadway, just across the street, or maybe he just wanted the extra square footage, but Field ordered Kendall to add two more floors and then, in 1886, two more, pushing the overall height to 258 feet—only 2 feet shy of the Tribune Building on Park Row, then the world’s tallest building. Kendall crowned the finished building with a steeply pitched roof reminiscent of a Swiss chalet, with projecting turrets, balconies, bay windows, and, at the very top, a cylindrical tower enclosed in glass that jutted like a lighthouse high above the roof. Accessed by a winding stair, the tower functioned as an observation deck and, with its unobstructed views of the harbor, quickly became a tourist attraction. Visitors arriving in the city were often so eager to climb to the top of Field’s building they went there as soon as their ships docked—even before checking into their hotels. Field himself ascended to his roof as often as he could.
“If I had the time I could spend all day gazing out on that beautiful scene,” he remarked wistfully in January of 1887, five months before he lost his entire fortune because of the machinations of Gould and Sage, who dumped their stock in the Manhattan Railway Company just after Field had bought 70,000 shares at a margin of 80 percent, driving down the price and forcing Field to sell the stocks back to Gould for a fraction of their original price.
Field kept to himself what he thought about when he gazed from the Washington Building roof out over the harbor, but no doubt he considered the passage of time and the twists and turns that had brought him in his autumn years to a rooftop at the point where Broadway begins. As he watched ships steaming through the Narrows, ferries plying the rivers, and families of weeping immigrants arriving at the Battery and embracing loved ones, perhaps Field’s mind wandered back to that morning in 1858 when he had processed up Broadway past thousands of smiling people shouting his name.
ON
A HOT AUGUST MORNING in 1893, French novelist Paul Bourget arrived in New York from Southampton after seven days at sea. “Leaning over the ship’s rail on the side toward New York,” he wrote, “I succeed in distinguishing a mass of diminutive houses, an ocean of low buildings, from the midst of which rise, like cliff-bound islets, brick buildings, so daringly colossal that, even at this distance, their height overpowers my vision. I count the stories above the level of the roofs; one had ten, another twelve.” He called New York’s emerging skyline “gigantic, colossal, enormous,” and an “apparition.” During his first week in the city he went to the top of the Equitable Building at the corner of Broadway and Pine Street and was overwhelmed by its “hum of life” and the thousands of people coming and going. He called the Equitable a “gigantic palace” and a “human beehive” and began to wonder if New Yorkers were even human.
Cyrus W. Field’s Washington Building (far left) in 1900.
“At what time of day do they die here?” he wondered. “At what time do they love? At what time do they think? At what time, indeed, are they men, nothing but men . . . and not machines for locomotion?”
PEOPLE HAD BEGUN calling the tallest of the new buildings “SkyScrapers.” The Chicago architect Louis Sullivan insisted that they should inspire architects to do their very best work: A skyscraper, Sullivan wrote in 1896, “must be every inch a proud and soaring thing.”
By then it was becoming possible to trace the path of Broadway from far out in the harbor, just by following the profiles of its skyscrapers. Field’s Washington Building was still clearly visible from the decks of incoming ships, but it had been superseded in height
and stature by the Bowling Green Offices, Empire Building, Home Life Insurance Building, Union Trust Building, Manhattan Life Building, American Surety Company Building, and St. Paul Building— a march of progress in glass and steel that was to culminate, in 1913, with construction of the wondrously Gothic Woolworth Building on Broadway opposite City Hall Park.
Today the Woolworth Building still presides over Broadway, its creamy terra-cotta quoins, brackets, and finials catching the first rays of the morning sun as it rises over the park, but many of those early skyscrapers that Bourget found so heroic proved to be, like most buildings in New York, surprisingly ephemeral: The pioneering Tower Building, the first skyscraper with a steel “skeleton” that supported its exterior walls as well as its interior floors, was demolished in 1914; Post’s majestic Produce Exchange was torn down in 1957, followed the next year by his Tower-of-Pisa-like (minus the lean) St. Paul Building. Even the mighty Singer Building succumbed to the wrecking ball, in 1968. The Washington Building, which in 1921 had been stripped of its terra-cotta ornaments, covered with limestone, and renamed the International Merchant Marine Company Building, is still there at the foot of Broadway, although today the view from its roof is very different than it was in Field’s day. But the street that begins at its front door is very much the same as it was four hundred years ago. As the buildings along its edges have come and gone, Broadway itself has remained, virtually identical in its width, shape, and trajectory to the muddy path that was first surveyed there in the early seventeenth century.
CHAPTER
2
MUD AND FIRE
BROADWAY WAS AMONG THE VERY FIRST STREETS—MAYBE the first path of any kind—laid out after the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam was established at the southernmost tip of Manhattan in 1624. Broadway may have been the work of surveyor Cryn Fredericksz, who was sent over shortly after the first boatload of settlers—mostly desperate Wallonian refugees—arrived. The Dutch West India Company, a hugely powerful business consortium—think Walmart with its own navy—planned New Amsterdam as the centerpiece of the larger New Netherland colony, and provided Fredericksz with plans that described a network of straight streets within a fortified perimeter.
For reasons that remain lost to time, Fredericksz’s orthogonal plan was never carried out. Instead, New Amsterdam grew up around concentric streets that resembled an incomplete version of the Grachtengordel, the remarkable system of canals the Dutch had recently completed in the center of Amsterdam. New Amsterdam’s version of the Grachtengordel was somewhat less than remarkable, but included a coherent system of streets that originated from the East River front, where ships anchored, and radiated in ever-larger quarter-circles across the island’s toe. The westernmost street was called the Heere Straat (Gentlemen’s, or Lord’s, Street) or Brede Wegh (Broad Way) and ran along the Hudson River edge, following a primordial ridge of sand and gravel. In 1653, New Amsterdam’s
director-general, Peter Stuyvesant, built a wall across the northern boundary of the settlement as a defense against possible British invasion from the north, with a path called the Cingel running along the inside. The Brede Wegh began in an open space in front of Fort Amsterdam, passed through the settlement and out the main gate in the wall, and continued to the Commons, New Amsterdam’s communally owned pasture located half a mile north of town.
The Brede Wegh was, as advertised, broad—80 feet wide—but also short, coming to an abrupt dead end at the Commons. The street’s generous width allowed for the daily passage of the colony’s livestock from town to the Commons and back, and as houses and taverns were built along it, the Brede Wegh gradually became New Amsterdam’s main street.
When the long-feared British invasion finally came in 1664, Stuyvesant’s wall was of no help. Freezing colonists had already pilfered many of its wide oak boards for firewood, and the British could have simply walked throughit, as the local Lenape Indians were in the habit of doing. Instead, they took the colony simply by anchoring a frigate off Fort Amsterdam and threatening Stuyvesant with wholesale slaughter. Stuyvesant reluctantly surrendered and retired to his estate north of town. New Amsterdam became New York, the Cingel became Wall Street, and the Brede Wegh became the Broad Way.
THE BROAD WAY—the name was gradually combined into one word and eventually lost its definite article—was unpaved, poorly maintained, and muddy. Hogs foraged in the middle of the street, heedless of oncoming wagons. Gangs of Caribbean pirates infested the taverns clustered around the rechristened Fort James at the foot of the street. The remains of Stuyvesant’s wall were torn down in 1699, and in the early eighteenth century the city began extending along Broadway north of Wall Street.
Beginning in 1673, a group of tanners and shoemakers bought up the old Cornelius van Tienhoven farm between Wall Street and the Commons, and in 1696 partitioned the land into streets and
building lots. It was known as the “Shoemakers’ Land,” and when coupled with the development of the neighboring Jan Jansen Damen farm, added some 53 acres of urban fabric to a city that, in its entirety, consisted of only about 200 acres of developed land. In 1719 a ropewalk—a long, narrow rope factory—was added to the north end of Broadway, where the street terminated at the Commons, and soon the entire east side of the street was thriving as a commercial and industrial center.
Broadway’s west side, meanwhile, remained almost completely undeveloped, as everything north of Wall Street had been given over to the 200-acre “Queen’s Farm”—the property of Queen Anne. Trinity Church, the Anglican parish built in 1698 at the T where Wall Street ended at Broadway, became the wealthiest landowner in New York, when, in 1705, Anne gave her farm to the church. For many years afterward, Trinity chose not to develop its land, and it wasn’t until the 1790s that Broadway’s west side, the former farm subdivided into streets and building lots by then, caught up to the bustling activity on the other side of the street.
But that initial difference between Broadway’s two sides—wealthy Trinity on one side and tradesmen and manufacturers on the other— evolved into a cultural divide that resonated, as we shall see, into the nineteenth century and colored generations of New Yorkers’ perception of the street.
IN 1733 A FEW wealthy families who had built mansions at the foot of Broadway convinced the city’s Common Council to let them close a cattle market that had occupied the open space in front of Fort James and replace it with an enclosed green for private games of ninepins. Soon wealthy merchants and ship captains built fine houses surrounding what became known as Bowling Green or the “Parade.” They included Archibald Kennedy, who in 1760 built a wide, two-story mansion at the corner of Broadway and State Street facing Bowling Green, its rear lawn sloping down to the Hudson River. The house was in the prevailing Georgian mode; symmetrical, with Classical details on the inside and a front façade dominated by
a Palladian window on the second floor. Its address, No. 1 Broadway, was the most coveted in the city. When Kennedy died in 1763, the house passed to his son Archibald Jr., a captain in the Royal Navy. Other wealthy residents built houses on Broadway until the street, which linked Fort George (formerly Fort James), Trinity Church, and the Commons, where British soldiers were housed in barracks, became a kind of linear allegory of royal power. But Broadway also included the shops and houses of less wealthy artisans and tradesmen and featured two well-known taverns— George Burns’s, 115 Broadway, and Abraham de la Montagne’s, opposite the Commons—that became centers of revolutionary activities, and as the city edged closer to the events of 1776, Broadway became a corridor of protest.
IN 1765, PARLIAMENT passed the Stamp Act, the first tax levied directly on American colonists, who generally viewed the act, which required the use of specially stamped paper imported from England for everything from newspapers to playing cards, as an egregious imposition, “unconstitutional and oppressive.” The first shipment of stamped paper arrived in the city on October 24. When a crowd of protestors refused to let the ship dock and unload its cargo, Lieutenant-Governor Cadwallader Colden slipped the shipment into Fort George at night.
On October 31, a group of prominent merchants gathered at Burns’s tavern to draft a nonimportation agreement that bound them to a boycott of British goods. The act took effect the next day, and by seven o’clock in the evening a large group of protestors had gathered on the Commons. A “moveable Gallows” was erected, the NewYorkPost-Boyreported, and Colden, “whose public Conduct . . . has unhappily drawn upon himself the general Resentment of his Country,” was hung in effigy. The dummy held a piece of stamped paper and was outfitted with a drum on its back, while at its side hung a likeness of Satan, the “Deceiver of Mankind.” A second group of torch-wielding protestors paraded its own Colden effigy through the streets to Fort George, where they broke into
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“I did say so, and I meant to say so. You know that you lie when you say I had anything to do with blowing up the boat.”
“Do you tell me I lie?”
“I do; I tell you so with all my might,” I persisted, boldly.
“We’ll see about this,” said Colonel Wimpleton, furiously. “Mrs. Penniman, your boy is impudent—impudent to me, and to my son.”
“You accuse him of something he didn’t do, and won’t hear what he has to say,” replied my mother, meekly.
“Accuse him of what he didn’t do! Didn’t he say he had hold of the string? Wolf had the pistol, too, and that proves the truth of what Waddie said. How came you by the pistol?” demanded the magnate, turning fiercely to me.
“I took it away from Waddie when he threatened to shoot me with it, and after he had fired one ball at me.”
“Do you want to make it out that my boy intended to murder you? Once more, will you confess to me, or will you have it proved before a justice?”
“I don’t care where you prove it; but I shall not confess what I didn’t do.”
“My son speaks the truth, Mrs. Penniman, though he may be a little wild sometimes.”
“There isn’t a bigger liar in town,” said I, very imprudently.
“Do you hear that, marm?” snapped the colonel. “Didn’t my son confess that he had a hand in the mischief? Doesn’t that show that he is a truthful boy? Wolf is violent and abusive. I have done what I could for your family, Mrs. Penniman.”
“I know you have, Mr. Wimpleton, and we are all very grateful to you,” replied my trembling mother.
“I should think you were! You permit this young rascal to insult and abuse me and my son. He calls me a rascal, and my son a liar. Is that his gratitude?” continued the much-abused great man. “You will hear from me again, Mrs. Penniman.”
“And you will hear from me again, Wolf Penniman. I don’t allow any fellow to call me a liar,” added Waddie, bristling up like a bantam rooster.
“You permit this young cub to insult and abuse me,” persisted the magnate, as he bolted out of the front door, followed by his hopeful,
who could not help shaking his fist at me as he went out.
“What have you done, Wolf?” exclaimed my mother, when they had gone.
“I have spoken the truth, like a man,” I replied, though I trembled for the consequences of my bold speech to the great man.
“He will discharge your father; and, now the money is gone, he will turn us out of house and home,” added my mother, beginning to cry again.
“I can’t help it. I have only told the truth, and I am not going to cower before that man and that boy any longer.”
I took my cap and left the house.
CHAPTER XI.
BETTER THOUGHTS AND DEEDS.
Ileft the house more to conceal my own emotions than for any other reason. I had been imprudent. My father was not only dependent upon Colonel Wimpleton for the excellent situation he held, which had enabled him to live well, to give me a good education, and to save money to buy his place, though there was a mortgage on the little estate that would expire in a few days; so far as liberality in financial matters was concerned, no one could find any fault with the magnate of Centreport.
I was accused of a crime—not merely of a piece of mischief, as the colonel was pleased to regard it, but of a crime whose penalty was imprisonment. By merely admitting the truth of the charge, I could escape all disagreeable consequences, and retain for my father and myself the favor of the mighty man in whose smile we had prospered and grown rich. Doubtless, in the worldly sense, I had been very imprudent. It would have been safer for me not to deny the accusation, and not to resent the hard names applied to me.
As a matter of policy, I had always permitted Waddie to have his own way in his dealings with me. If he ordered me to do anything, I did it. If he called me names, I did not retort upon him. It galled me sorely to permit the puppy to ride over me in this manner; to be insulted, kicked, and cuffed at his royal pleasure; but while it was simply a sacrifice of personal pride, or even of self-respect, it did not so much matter. When, however, Waddie and his father wished to brand me as a criminal, and to browbeat me because I would not confess myself guilty of a deed in which I had no hand, my nature revolted. In my indignation, I had made use of some expressions which I had better not have used, and which I should not have used if I had not been suffering under the weight of that sad day’s trials.
I did not care for myself under the displeasure of the mighty man. My mother was a timid woman, and the cloud of misfortunes which was rising over us filled her with dismay. The displeasure of Colonel
Wimpleton, the loss of the money, and above all the fear that my father would return to his old habits, were terrors enough for one day, and I wept for her. But what could I do? To confess myself guilty of a crime when I was innocent was the greatest wrong I could do to her and to myself. I would not do that, whatever else I did; and there was no other way to win back the favor of the colonel.
After I had cooled off, I returned to the house, and found my mother more calm than I expected. She had resumed her work; but she looked very sad and troubled. My two sisters had gone to the village, and as yet knew nothing of the misfortunes that were settling down upon our house.
“Wolfert, I am sorry you were so rash,” said my mother, as I seated myself in the kitchen.
“I am sorry myself; but I don’t think it would have made any difference with the colonel if I had been as gentle as a lamb,” I replied.
“Perhaps it would.”
“The colonel wished me to take upon my shoulders the blame, or part of it, of blowing up the canal boat. Nothing less than that would have satisfied them. You can’t wonder that I was mad, after what you heard him say to me. I have eaten dirt before the colonel and his son for years, and I don’t think we have made anything by it; but whether we have or not, I won’t be called a villain and a scoundrel, or confess a thing I didn’t do.”
“Mr. Wimpleton is a very powerful man in Centreport,” added my mother, shaking her head in deprecation of any rash steps.
“I know he is, mother; and I will do anything I can to please him, except sell my own soul; and he hasn’t got money enough to buy that. I’m not going to put my nose into the dirt for him.”
“He may ruin us, Wolfert.”
“What can he do?”
“He can discharge your father.”
“Father can get as much wages in another place as he can here. Perhaps he will be wanted on the Ruoara, now Christy has run away.”
“But his house is here, and he meant to stay in Centreport. Besides, Mr. Wimpleton can turn us out of the house if we don’t pay
the money, which will be due in a few days.”
“I hope Mr. Mortimer will catch Christy, and get the money. If he don’t, there is a man in town who offered thirty-five hundred dollars for the place; and that is more than it cost, and father won’t lose anything.”
“You don’t know Mr. Wimpleton, Wolfert. He is a terrible man when he is offended. If the place were sold at auction, as it would be, he has influence enough to prevent any one from bidding on it; and your father might lose every cent he has left in the world.”
“What would you have me do, mother?” I asked, rising from my chair, considerably excited. “Shall I say that I helped Waddie blow up the canal boat?”
“No, certainly not, Wolfert, unless you did help him.”
“Do you think I did, mother?”
“No, I can’t think so, after what you have said.”
“I had nothing more to do with it than you had.”
“But you can be a little more gentle with him.”
“And let him browbeat and bully me as much as he pleases? I think, mother, if I stand up squarely for my own rights, he will respect me all the more. For my own part, I am about tired of Centreport, for all the people bow down and toady to Colonel Wimpleton. If he takes snuff, everybody sneezes. All the fellows treat Waddie as though he was a prince of the blood. I have been ashamed and disgusted with myself a hundred times after I have let him bully me and put his foot on my neck. I have been tempted to thrash him, a dozen times, for his impudence; and if I didn’t do so, it was not because I didn’t want to.”
“You must try to have a Christian spirit, Wolfert,” said the mother, mildly.
“I do try to have a Christian spirit, mother. I haven’t anything against Waddie or his father. If I could do a kindness to either one of them this minute, I would do it. But I don’t think a fellow must be a milksop in order to be a Christian. I don’t think the gospel requires me to be a toady, or even to submit to injustice when I can help myself. I don’t ask to be revenged, or anything of that sort; I only desire to keep my head out of the dirt. I am going to try to be a man, whatever happens to me.”
“If you will only be a Christian, Wolfert, I can ask no more.”
“I will try to be; but do you think yourself, mother, that I ought to stand still and allow myself to be kicked?”
“You must not provoke your enemies.”
“I will not, if I can help it; but I think it is pretty hard to keep still when you are called a rascal and a villain. If you think I ought to confess that I helped blow up the canal boat when I did not, I will”—
I was going to say I would do it, but the words choked me, and I could not utter them.
“I don’t wish you to say so, Wolfert.”
“Then I am satisfied; and I will try to be gentle while they abuse me.”
At this moment Waddie Wimpleton bolted into the room, without taking the trouble to announce himself beforehand.
“My father says you must come up and see him at once,” said the scion in his usual bullying and offensive tone.
“Where is he?” I asked, as quietly as I could speak, under the influence of my good mother’s lesson.
“At the house. Where do you suppose he is?” pouted Waddie. “And he says, if you don’t come, he’ll send a constable after you.”
“What does he want of me?”
“None of your business what he wants. All you’ve got to do is to go.”
“If I conclude to go, I will be there in a few moments,” I added.
“If you conclude to go!” exclaimed Waddie. “Well, that is cool! Do you mean to say you won’t go?”
“No, I don’t mean to say that.”
“Well, I want to know whether you are going or not,” demanded the scion.
“Shall I go, mother?” I asked, appealing to her.
“I think you had better go, Wolfert.”
“Then I will go.”
“You had better,” continued Waddie, who could not help bullying even after his point was gained.
The gentlemanly young man left the house, and my mother admonished me again not to be saucy, and to return good for evil. I hoped I should be able to do so. If I failed, it would not be for the
want of a good intention. I walked up the road towards the mansion of the great man, thinking what I should say, and how I could best defend myself from the charge which was again to be urged against me. The situation looked very hopeless to me as I jumped over the fence in the grove, through which there was a path which led to the house of the colonel.
“Here he is,” said Waddie, accompanying the remark with a yell not unlike an Indian war-whoop.
I halted and turned around. Behind me stood the scion of the great house of Centreport, with a club in his hand, and attended by half a dozen of the meanest fellows of the Institute, armed in like manner. They had been concealed behind the fence; and of course I instantly concluded that the colonel’s message was a mere trick to decoy me into the grove.
“Do you wish to see me?” I asked as coolly as I could; and the circumstances under which we appeared to meet were not favorable to a frigid demeanor.
“Yes, I want to see you,” replied Waddie, moving up to me, and flourishing his stick. “You must settle my account before you see my governor.”
“What do you want of me?” I demanded, as I edged up to a big tree, which would protect me from an assault in the rear.
“You told my father I was the biggest liar in town,” blustered Waddie. “I’m going to give you the biggest licking for it you ever had in your life.”
“Go in, Waddie!” shouted Sam Peppers. “We’ll stand by, and see fair play.”
“Are you ready to take your licking?” bullied Waddie, who did not seem to be quite ready to commence the operation.
“No, I am not,” I answered, quietly; and I never spoke truer words in my life.
“You called me the biggest liar in town—didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Have you anything to say about it?”
“I have,” I replied, still moved by the gentle words of gospel wisdom which my mother had spoken to me.
“If you have, say it quick.”
“I was angry when I spoke the words, and I am sorry for uttering them.”
“Ha, ha! humph!” yelled the half-dozen ruffians in concert.
“Get down on your knees and beg my pardon, then,” said Waddie.
“No, I will not do that,” I replied, firmly.
CHAPTER XII.
WOLF’S FORTRESS.
Under the influence of the better thoughts which my good mother had suggested to me, I was willing to do better deeds. I was ready to apologize; I had done so, but I could not go down upon my knees before such a fellow as Waddie Wimpleton, or any fellow, for that matter. It was hard enough for me to say I was sorry; and I had done so for my mother’s sake, rather than my own.
“I don’t think you are very sorry for what you said,” sneered Waddie.
“I am sorry enough to apologize. I really regret that I made use of any hard expressions,” I replied.
“Then get down on your knees, and beg my pardon, as I tell you,” persisted Waddie, flourishing his stick. “If you do, I’ll let you off on part of the punishment.”
“I apologized because I had done wrong, and not because I was afraid of the punishment,” I added, still schooling my tongue to gentle speech.
“Humph!” exclaimed the scion; and my remark was based on a philosophy so subtle that he could not comprehend it.
“Go in! Go in! Give it to him!” shouted the supporting ruffians. “He’s fooling you, Waddie.”
“If you are not going to do what I tell you, look out for the consequences,” blustered the young gentleman, who still seemed to have some doubts in regard to the prudence of his present conduct.
“Waddie Wimpleton,” said I.
“Well, what do you want now?” demanded he, dropping his weapon again.
“If you strike me with that stick, you must look out for consequences. I shall defend myself as well as I know how.”
Waddie glanced at his companions.
“Hit him! What are you waiting for?” cried his friends; and I have always observed, in such cases, that it is easier to give advice than
to strike the blow
Mr. Waddie had placed himself in a position which he could not well evacuate. He evidently had no heart for the encounter which he foresaw must take place if he struck me, and perhaps he had not entire confidence in the character of the support which he was to receive. At any rate he could not help realizing that the first blows of the battle were likely to be dealt upon his own head.
“You called me a liar,” said he, working up his courage again by a new recital of his wrongs.
“I did, and apologized for it,” I replied.
“Go down on your knees, then, and say you are sorry.”
“I will not.”
“Then mind your eye,” continued Waddie, as with a sudden spring he hit me on the arm, which I had raised to ward off the blow.
I did mind my eye, and I minded his, too; for, before he could bring up his supports, I leaped upon him. Though he was of my own size and age, he was only a baby in my hands. I grasped his stick, wrenched and twisted it a few times, and then threw him over backwards into a pool of soft mud, which I had chosen to flank my position and save me from an attack in the rear. He was half buried in the soft compound of black mud and decayed leaves which filled the hole, and his good clothes suffered severely from the effects of his disaster.
The moment the conflict commenced the supports moved up; but, before they could come into action, I had overthrown my assailant, and stood against the tree with the club in my hand. When Waddie went over backwards, a new duty seemed to be suggested to his backers; and, instead of turning on me, they proceeded to help their principal out of his uncomfortable position. Encouraged and thoroughly waked up by my victory, I think I could have thrashed the whole party; but I had not wholly escaped the influence of my mother’s teachings, and was disposed to act strictly in self-defence.
The quagmire into which Waddie had fallen was near the bank of the brook which meandered through the grove, and which had been bridged in several places, as well to add to the convenience of passers-by, as to increase the picturesque beauty of the place. I deemed it best to retreat to one of these bridges, which was not
more than three feet wide, and which would enable me to defend myself from an assault to the best advantage.
“Humph! you cowards!” snarled Waddie, as his companions lifted him out of the slough, and he spit out the mud and water which filled his mouth. “Why didn’t you stand by me, as you promised?”
“We expected you to make a better fight than that,” replied one of them; and it was doubtful to me whether they could assign any good reason why they had not stood by him.
“I did the best I could, and you did not come near me. I’m in a pretty pickle,” sputtered Waddie, as he glanced at his soiled garments.
“We’ll give it to him yet,” said one of the party, as he glanced at me securely posted on the bridge.
“Where is he?” asked Waddie.
I was pointed out to him, and the sight of me inflamed all his zeal again.
“Come on, fellows; and stand by me this time, I wish I had my revolver here.”
I was very glad he had not that formidable weapon about him, though I don’t think he could have hit me if he had fired at me; but he sometimes struck the mark by accident. Waddie took a club from the hand of one of his supporters, and rushed towards the bridge. Though he was not a master of strategy, he could not help seeing that I was well posted, and he halted suddenly before he reached the brook.
“We must drive him from the bridge, where we can have fair play,” said Waddie.
I did not just then see how this was to be done; but I was soon able to perceive his plan. The scion led his forces to a position on the brook above me, and, taking some stones from the shallow stream, began to pelt me with a vigor which soon rendered my place untenable. Several of the missiles hit me, though I was not much hurt by them. Under these circumstances, I was helpless for defensive purposes, for I had nothing with which to return the fire. It was useless for me to stand there, and be peppered with stones. I concluded to retreat in good order, and brought myself off without any material damage.
WOLF’S FORTRESS.—Page
133.
The only safe line by which I could retire was in the direction of the mansion of Colonel Wimpleton. I crossed the brook farther down, and came to a rustic summer house, on the bank of the stream. It was built on a high foundation, to afford a prospect of the lake, and the only admission was through the door, which was reached by a long flight of steps. I immediately took possession of this structure, assured that I could defend the door, while its walls would protect me from the missiles of my assailants.
Waddie led his forces up to my fortress, and surveyed the situation. They attempted to drive me out with stones; but they fell harmless upon the building. The besiegers consulted together, and decided to make an assault on the works. I was entirely willing they should do so, for I could knock them over with the club as fast as they came up, having all the advantage of position. Ben Pinkerton volunteered to lead the forlorn hope, and advanced with
considerable boldness to the attack. I gave him a gentle rap on the head as he appeared at the door, and he fell back, unable to reach me with his stick, as I stood so much higher than he.
“Better keep back,” I remonstrated with him. “If there are any broken heads, they will be yours.”
Dick Bayard then attempted to climb up the railing of the stairs, so as to be on a level with me; but I knocked his fingers with my stick, and he desisted. It was plain to them, after this trial, that a direct assault was not practicable, and they retired to the ground below Another consultation followed in the ranks of the enemy; and by this time Waddie’s friends were quite as much interested in the affair as he was himself.
“I wish I had my revolver,” said the scion. “Hold on! I will go to the house and get it; you stay here, and don’t let him come down.”
“Oh, no! We don’t want any pistol,” protested Ben Pinkerton. “You mustn’t shoot him!”
“Why not? I would shoot him as quick as I would a cat. I wouldn’t kill him, of course; but I would make him come down, and give us fair play on the ground,” added Waddie.
Fair play! Seven of them, armed with clubs, against one! That was Waddie’s idea of fair play.
“No; we don’t want any pistols,” persisted Ben. “Some one might get hurt, and then we should be in a bad scrape.”
“What are you going to do?” demanded the young gentleman. “Are you going to let him stay up there and crow over us? I’m wet through, and I don’t want to stay here all day. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll set the summer house on fire. That will bring him down.”
This was a brilliant idea of Waddie, and I was afraid he would put it into operation, for he was reckless enough to do anything.
“That won’t do,” replied the prudent Pinkerton. “We don’t want to get into any scrape.”
“No; don’t set it on fire,” added Dick Bayard; and so said all of them but Waddie; for probably they foresaw that they would have to bear all the blame of the deed.
“I don’t want to stay here all day,” fretted Waddie.
“Put it through by daylight!” I ventured to suggest, as I sat on the upper step, listening to the interview.
“He is laughing at us,” said the scion, angrily “Let him laugh; he is safe,” replied Ben. “I’ll tell you what we can do.”
“Well, what?” asked Waddie, as he cast a discontented glance at me.
“Let us camp out here to-night,” continued Ben.
“Camp out!” repeated several of the party, not fully comprehending the idea of the fertile Pinkerton’s brilliant mind.
“Starve him out, I mean,” explained Ben. “We will stay here and keep him a close prisoner till he is willing to come down and take his licking like a man.”
Stupid as this plan seemed to me, it was promptly adopted. But the enemy retired out of hearing to complete the arrangement, though they were near enough to fall upon me if I attempted to escape. I did not consider myself a match for the whole of them on the ground, and I had expected to be terribly mauled, as I should have been if my wits had not served me well.
Presently I saw Waddie leave the party, and walk towards his father’s house. I concluded that he had gone to change his clothes, for his plight was as disagreeable as it could be. His companions took position near the foot of the steps, with the clubs in their hands, ready to receive me if I attempted to evacuate my fortress. I was quite comfortable, and rather curious to know what they intended to do.
I waited an hour for the return of Waddie, during which time I studied the structure in which I was a prisoner, and its surroundings, in order to prepare myself for action when it should be necessary. It was plain to me that the scion was taking more time than was needed to change his clothes. I thought something had happened at the house; and in this impression I was soon confirmed by the appearance of Colonel Wimpleton, attended by two men.
CHAPTER XIII.
CAPTAIN SYNDERS.
There were not many men in Centreport who were not either the toadies or the employees of Colonel Wimpleton. He was an absolute monarch in the place, and his will was law, to all intents and purposes, though of course he did not operate with all as he did with me. Ordinarily, and especially when not opposed, he was a very gentlemanly man, affable to his equals,—if he had any equals in town,—and condescending to his inferiors.
I was not quite willing to believe that Waddie had called upon his father for aid. It was more probable that the scion’s dirty plight had attracted the attention of his parents, and called forth an explanation. But it was all the same to me, since Colonel Wimpleton was coming with efficient aid to capture and reduce me to proper subjection. It was no common enemy with whom I was called upon to contend, but the mighty man of Centreport, whose will none dared to oppose.
As the party approached, I saw that one of the men was Captain Synders, the ex-skipper of a canal boat, who had been promoted to the honors and dignities of a constable. I was somewhat appalled when I considered his official position, for he was armed with authority, and it would be hardly safe for me to offer any resistance to him. The coming of Colonel Wimpleton nipped in the bud the scheme of the bullies to camp out around me, and I was rather glad to have the case settled without any unnecessary delay.
The summer house, which was a poor imitation of an Indian pagoda, mounted on piles, had a door, with a window in each of its octagonal faces. On the other side of the brook was a large tree, whose branches partially shaded the building. During my study of the situation, I had arranged a plan by which my escape could be effected at a favorable moment. I could pass out at one of the windows, and climb to the roof of the pagoda, from which the overhanging branches of the trees would afford me the means of reaching the ground. The only difficulty in my way was, that my
besiegers would be able to reach the foot of the tree before I could, and thus cut off my retreat. But the summer house was located near the lake, and the brook at this point was wide and deep, so that it could not be crossed except on the bridge, which was several rods distant. My line of retreat would be available only when the besiegers were off their guard, or were not in a situation to pursue instantly.
When Colonel Wimpleton appeared, Waddie’s six brave companions retired from the ground, fearful, perhaps, of getting into a scrape. I saw them move off a short distance, and halt to observe the proceedings. The great man and his associates devoted their whole attention to me, and did not heed the students. They came directly to the foot of the stairs, while I sat at the head of them. I had made a movement to retire when the valiant six retreated; but I saw that the attempt would only throw me into the hands of the reënforcements.
“Come down, you villain!” called Colonel Wimpleton, as he halted at the foot of the stairs.
To this summons to surrender I made no reply.
“What do you mean by knocking my son over into the mud?” he added, angrily.
“He began it upon me, sir,” I replied. “He brought up half a dozen fellows to lick me, and struck me with a club.”
“He served you right. I told you to come down.”
“I know you did, sir.”
“Are you coming down?”
“Not just yet.”
“Go up and bring him down, Synders,” said the colonel to the officer.
“I’ll bring him down,” replied the zealous constable.
But he did not.
I sprang to my feet, leaped out upon the trimmings of the pagoda, and vaulted to the roof almost in the twinkling of an eye—at any rate, before Captain Synders reached the inside of the summer house. The constable looked out of the window at my elevated position. He was too clumsy to follow me, and I felt that I was perfectly safe. From the roof I saw that the branches of the tree were more favorable to my descent than I had supposed, and I found that I could climb into
another tree on the same side of the brook as the pagoda. I jumped into the branches of this tree, and began to move down. I found that my gymnastic practice at the Institute, where I had excelled in this department, was of great service to me, and I was quite sure that no man could follow me.
Perching myself on a branch, I paused to examine the situation again. Captain Synders sent the man who had come with him, and who was one of the gardeners, to the foot of the tree to intercept my retreat. I did not purpose to go down that way, but intended, at the right time, to return to the roof of the pagoda, and descend on the other side of the brook. My movement in this direction was only a feint. The colonel expected, doubtless, that I would drop down into the arms of the gardener, and that the chase would be immediately ended; but, seated on the branch, I kept still, and said nothing.
“Are you going down, you scoundrel?” roared the colonel, when he found the plan did not work.
“No, sir, not yet.”
“You are on my grounds, and I will have you arrested as a trespasser,” foamed the colonel.
“You sent for me, sir, and I came at your request.”
“Who sent for you?”
“You did, sir; ask Waddie; he was your messenger.”
“I didn’t send for you.”
“Waddie came to my house, and said you wanted to see me.”
“I want to see you now, at any rate.”
“Here I am, sir.”
“You shall be punished for knocking my son over into the mud.”
“I would like to talk this matter over coolly, Colonel Wimpleton,” I continued, taking an easy position in the tree, “I apologized to Waddie for calling him a liar, and I am sorry I was saucy to you.”
“Humph! Come down from that tree, then. If you make a clean breast of it, I will let you off easy.”
“I don’t think I’m to blame for anything except being saucy,” I replied; and I did not think I was much to blame for that, after he had called me a villain and a scoundrel, and other hard names; still it was returning evil for evil.
