Charles Hemstreet

“ Long before there was a thought of the city getting beyond the wall that hemmed in a few scattering houses, and when the Indian settlement, which afterwards became Greenwich Village, kept close to the water's edge, a line of low sand hills called the Zandtberg, stretched their curved way from where now Eighth Street crosses Broadway, ending where Varick Street meets Vandam. ”

“ The village might have been thousands of miles away from New York for all the likeness it bore to it.
On a dusty and rarely travelled lane, that led from the village towards the city, lived a man who had won the hearts of Americans by writing Common Sense, but who lived to reap their hatred by writing The Age of Reason, a deistic argument against Christianity. In the quiet village his house was pointed out as the abode of a friendless man, and when they spoke of him the villagers whispered the dread name—Tom Paine. ”

“ CHAPTER XXXI THE FIRST PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES
Rebuilding a city and forming a new nation is such a great task that you can readily believe it was not accomplished without some difficulty. The colonies were free from the rule of the English King, but it was necessary for them to learn to govern themselves.
Each of the new States now had its own government. It was thought by many that there should be some powerful central government to control all the States. So after a great deal of deliberation a convention was held in Philadelphia over which George Washington presided. ”

“ Forgetting for a moment these old-time surroundings of the house by the forest edge, turn to the building itself, and imagine at the window a man sitting. He has long hair and clear blue eyes. He is painting at a small easel and working in quite a wonderful manner, for he is ambidextrous. He stops in his work and looks over the trees towards the Hudson. If that ever-moving river recalls to him his past life, John James Audubon, ornithologist, is reviewing a strange and adventurous career in many countries, full of losses, of suffering, of changes, of perils. ”

“ This same month General William Howe, commander of the British army, had landed on Staten Island, with his brother, Admiral Howe of the British navy, and with the soldiers and sailors of their commands, made up a fine, well-drilled army of 35,000 men, who had come to fight a force of 20,000 recruits; men not at all well-versed in war, and nearly half of whom were ill and not able to be on duty.
But Washington calmly watched the British on Staten Island, and the British ships, more than 400 of them, in the bay, and was not at all dismayed. ”

“ Just off busy Shaftesbury Avenue in Wardour Street is the square brick church of St. Anne's, seeming for all the world to be passing a contented old age. Well up from the street, behind a wall and an old iron fence, there is about it still a remnant of green sward but hemmed in by asphalt spaces that have engulfed the few tombstones. One tablet tells that William Hazlitt, painter and critic, was buried here in 1830; another how Theodore, King of Corsica, found a last resting place in 1756 beside the church near which the last years of his life had been spent in poverty. ”

“ At the time that Cooper lived in New York there walked along Broadway, between Canal Street and the Chapel of St. Paul's, on almost every pleasant afternoon, a man who in appearance was a veritable Hamlet. His garb was a customary suit of solemn black, and his eyes sought the ground as he moved with pensive step. This was McDonald Clarke, whose eccentric appearance and acts and whose melancholy verses gave him the name of The Mad Poet. ”

“ In New York there was one man who did everything that man could do to convince others that the central government was the best thing for the good of the new nation. His name was Alexander Hamilton. He was a young man who had been, ever since he was a boy, a friend of George Washington; who had lived in Washington's family and had fought as an officer side by side with Washington, and was a man of much power and deep learning. ”

“ A clock without a face, set in a church steeple, is the strange detail of the church of St. Vedast in Foster Lane opposite the Post Office, east. No other church in London has its like. It has all the works of a regular clock, but there are no dials, a bell proclaiming the hours.
Near the northeast corner of St. Paul's Cathedral at the top of Ludgate Hill, once stood the Cross of St. Paul, where for centuries before the present cathedral was built sermons were preached, heretics were made to recant and witches to confess. The pulpit was destroyed by order of Parliament in 1643. ”

“ Though the streets are to-day much changed from those which the poet walked alone save for the company of his Muse, you can walk them even now, until you come to a thoroughfare noticeable because it is so short and winding, tucked away at the edge of the city's business section. And if you do walk into Stone Street, you must of necessity come to a bend from which both ends of the street curve out of sight, while you stand in a kind of huge well, closed in by iron-shuttered warehouses. Here in this bend you are standing on what was the garden of Jacob Steendam's checker-fronted house. ”