Lafayette Square

“ It being desirable that the executive departments should be located in as close proximity as possible to each other, as well as to the Executive Mansion, it would seem to me that no better place for the construction of new buildings for them could be found than the blocks surrounding Lafayette Square on the east, north, and west, opposite the Treasury, the Executive Mansion, and the State, War, and Navy Departments, leaving the square itself undisturbed. ”

“ Union Square is reached at Fourteenth street. It is oval in form, with beautiful green turf, trees and walks, and contains a fine fountain in the centre, a colossal bronze statue of Washington on a granite pedestal, and statues of Hamilton and Lafayette. Along its northern [Pg 301] end is a wide plaza for military parades and popular assemblies. Union Square was once a fashionable residence quarter, but it is now occupied almost wholly by business. ”

“ A short distance below the bend all the stores were wholesale, now they are becoming solidly retail. Instead of buyers the people along the street are mostly shoppers. Down there were very few women; up here are very few men. This46 is especially noticeable when Union Square is reached, with cable-cars clanging around Dead Man's Curve in front of Lafayette's statue. Here, down Fourteenth Street, may be seen shops and shoppers of the most virulent type ”

“ The oldest and best finished public square is Portsmouth Square, commonly called the Plaza, on the west side of Kearny street, extending from Clay street to Washington street, and directly fronting the old City Hall. Besides these are Washington, Union, Columbia, Lobos, Alcatraz, Lafayette, Jefferson, Alta, Hamilton and Alamo Squares, with Yerba Buena, Buena Vista and Golden Gate Parks. ”

“ The fire began in the Lafayette Theater and took the entire block with it. Sparks jumped across the street and claimed Terpsichore Hall and several houses next door. A boy doesn’t forget a sight like that!
The crowd now gravitated around the towering flagpole at the river end of Jackson Market. If there was any place the residents of Lafayette City instinctively considered the center of town, this spot was it, under the 135 foot high flagpole. Although one block from the courthouse, it represented the heart of Lafayette out of pure sentiment. ”

“ In July of 1825 the people of Brooklyn were erecting an Apprentices' Free Library Building at the corner of Cranberry and Henry streets, later incorporated in the Brooklyn Institute, and they wished Lafayette to assist in laying the corner stone. He was brought to Brooklyn in great state, riding in a canary-colored coach drawn by four snow-white horses. The streets were crammed with people. Among them were many citizens and their wives, some old Revolutionary veterans, troops of Brooklyn children, and a number of negroes who had been freed by the recent New York Emancipation Acts. ”

“ While the court at Versailles and the city of Paris were very distinct, Paris being only a huge town near at hand, the distance between them was but fourteen miles, and it was quite possible for young men like Lafayette to go visiting, so to speak, in circles not their own. Lafayette's friend, the Comte de Ségur, has left a picture of life as the young men of their circle knew it. ”

“ At eight o’clock the officers and magistrates of New York and Brooklyn, with a number of citizens, visited General Lafayette, and invited him to lay the corner stone of a building for a mechanics’ library at Brooklyn. The general acceded with pleasure to the wishes of the magistrates, and proceeded to Brooklyn, where, assisted by some free masons of Long Island, he laid the corner stone of the edifice, in presence of a great concourse of citizens, arranged in front of whom the young mechanics loudly expressed their joy and gratitude ”

“ On the night of the 2d of October the king and queen visited the hall at Versailles where the Garde du Corps, the royal bodyguard, was giving a banquet. The diners sprang to their feet and drank toasts more fervent than discreet. In the course of the next two days rumor spread to Paris that they had trampled upon the Tricolor and substituted the white of the Bourbons. Out of the garrets and slums of the city the mob boiled toward the Hôtel de Ville, crying that a counter-revolution had been started and that the people were betrayed. Lafayette talked and harangued. ”

“ Let me confess at once that we are a bit supercilious in our attitude toward the sister Square far to our West, across the Alps of Broadway. Our Square was an established center of the social respectabilities when the foot of Fifth Avenue was still frequented by the occasional cow whose wanderings are responsible for the street-plan of Greenwich Village. Our Square remains true to the ancient and simple traditions, whereas Washington Square has grown long hair, smeared its fingers with paint and its lips with free verse, and gone into debt for its inconsiderable laundry bills. ”

“ An innumerable concourse of people on foot lined the side walks of the spacious street, where the procession was to be formed, the entrance to the city from Roxbury, and fortunately named WASHINGTON-STREET. The cavalcade then proceeded to the mansion of Governor Eustis, which is a short distance, within the town of Rosbury, and escorted General Lafayette and suite to the line, where the city authorities and others, who were to compose the procession, were in waiting to receive him. ”

“ Returning to New York by way of the Connecticut River and the Sound, he found again a series of dinners and [Pg 184] toasts, as well as a ball held in Castle Garden, the like of which, in splendor and display, had never before been thought of in this New World.
Lafayette left the festivity before it was ever in order to take the boat, at two in the morning, to go up the Hudson River. He arose at six to show his son and his secretary the place where André was captured. As soon as the fog lifted, he described, in the most enthusiastic manner, the Revolutionary events which he had seen. ”

“ All the streets run at right angles to one another, so that a short cut, the joy of the accomplished Londoner, is impossible. It is a chess-board on which the bishop’s move is unknown. Nothing diagonal can be done. The city is ruled like the page of a ledger, from top to bottom with streets, from side to side with avenues. It is all divided into squares. When you are first told this, a vision arises of the possibility of cutting across these squares from corner to corner. Not a bit of it: a square at Philadelphia means a solid block of houses, not an open space enclosed by buildings. ”

“ There is scarcely a plot of ground below Fourteenth Street without its story and its associations, its motley company of memories and spectres both good and bad, its imperishably adventurous savour of the past, imprisoned in the dry prose of registries and records. Let us just take a glance, a bird's-eye view as it were, of that region which we now know as Washington Square, as it was when the city of New York bought it for a Potter's Field. ”

“ Washington Square we suspect of playing at life; Our Square has a sufficiently hard time living it. We have little in common.
Nevertheless, it must be admitted that there are veritable humans, not wholly submerged in the crowd of self-conscious mummers who crowd the Occidental park-space, and it was at the house of one of these, a woman architect with a golden dream of rebuilding Greenwich Village, street by street, into something simple and beautiful and, in the larger sense urban, that the Bonnie Lassie, whose artistic deviations often take her far afield, met Barbran. ”

“ On Monday, the Cincinnati of the State of New-York gave a public dinner, in honor of "their old companion in arms," at which were also present several other persons of distinction, and the members of the City Council. This was the anniversary of the birth of Lafayette; and the circumstance increased the interesting associations of the interview. ”

“ It is one of the squares that have been; a quarter of the town that has gone down in the world, and taken to letting lodgings. Many of its first and second floors are let, furnished, to single gentlemen; and it takes boarders besides. It is a great resort of foreigners. The dark-complexioned men who wear large rings, and heavy watch-guards, and bushy whiskers, and who congregate under the Opera Colonnade, and about the box-office in the season, between four and five in the afternoon, when they give away the orders,—all live in Golden Square, or within a street of it. ”

“ Those streets between Union and Madison Squares are, for the most part, given over to boarding-houses and lodging-houses of dull respectability, and although they are not much traversed, they lie in lines that anyone might follow who would pass from Murray Hill to—say, for a fine old-fashioned quarter, Stuyvesant Square. ”

“ Dwelling on this thought, I also took the little jewelled dagger which Rosa had given to Sir Cyril Smart at the historic reception of my Cousin Sullivan's.
In the hall of the hotel I looked at the plan of Paris. Certainly Pantin seemed to be a very long way off. The route to it from the centre of the city—that is to say, the Place de l'Opéra—followed the Rue Lafayette, which is the longest straight thoroughfare in [242] Paris, and then the Rue d'Allemagne, which is a continuation, in the same direct line, of the Rue Lafayette. The suburb lay without the fortifications. ”

“ And let not those whose eyes have been accustomed to the aristocratic gravity of Grosvenor Square and Hanover Square, the dowager barrenness and frigidity of Fitzroy Square, or the gravel walks and garden seats of the Squares of Russell and Euston, suppose that the affections of Tim Linkinwater, or the inferior lovers of this particular locality, had been awakened and kept alive by any refreshing associations with leaves however dingy, or grass, however bare and thin. The City square has no inclosure, save the lamp-post in the middle, and no grass but the weeds which spring up round its base. ”

“ Three fine squares alone break the monotony of all these parallelograms of streets: Washington Square, Union Square, and Madison Square.
On the north, Central Park, with its fine avenues, its hillocks, its valleys, its lakes, and its magnificent terrace over the Hudson, is a very lovely pleasure ground. It is the only place where one can see trees, turf, and flowers. New York does not possess a single garden, public or private, if one excepts the three squares I named just now.
That which strikes the visitor to New York is not the city itself, but the feverish activity that reigns there. ”

“ At Twenty-third street, Broadway runs diagonally across Fifth avenue, touching the southwestern corner of Madison Square—not so very long since the most genteel locality in New York, but now, like Union Square, becoming occupied by hotels and business houses.
Fifth Avenue, the most splendid avenue in America, makes a beginning at Washington Square, a lovely public park embowered in trees, which was once Potters' Field, the pauper burying ground, and where one hundred thousand bodies lie buried. New York University and Dr. Hutton's Church face the square on the east. ”

“ There can be nothing in the world more charming than the way the Square receives its friends. Let it number amongst its guests a Duchess, that is no reason why it should scorn "Colonel Harry" or "Mouldy Jim," the singer of hymns. Scorn, indeed, cannot be found within its grey walls, soft grey, soft green, soft white and blue—in these colours is the Square's body clothed, no anger in its mild eyes, nor contempt anywhere at its heart.
The Square is proud, and is proud with reason, of its garden. It is not a large garden as London gardens go. It has in its centre a fountain. ”

“ How the window loungers of that clubland stretch of the seventies and eighties would have stared and rubbed their eyes had it been given to them to see the procession that throngs the sidewalks today!
The stretch of glories departed is quickly passed. The nine blocks are really eight, for it is at Twenty-second Street that the Flatiron begins, and the drab hives behind are forgotten as the vision of the Square strikes the eye. The Parisian, sipping an apéritif at the corner table of the Café de la Paix, believes himself to be occupying the exact centre of the universe. ”

“ Lafayette is too near New Orleans to give an efficient support to the theater.”
The earliest homes in Lafayette naturally were built on streets closest to the river. As early as 1842, the crusty editor of the Daily Picayune in New Orleans was rhapsodic over the beautiful cottages in Lafayette City with their handsome architecture and lovely gardens. The Lafayette Spectator, by 1850, was equally enthusiastic. “The City of Lafayette”, wrote John McMillin, “at no previous time could boast of so many valuable buildings in progress as at present. ”

“ It is quite conceivable and not at all discreditable that the wild work of Broadway and of Fifth Avenue should have led architects of sensibility to cast many longing, lingering looks behind at the decorum of the Bowling Green and Washington Square, and to sigh for a return of the times when the common street architecture of New York was sober and respectable, even if it was conventional and stupid. ”

“ Madison Square may be regarded as the social centre of modern New York. Far to the northward Fifth Avenue stretches, with its rows of palatial brownstone residences, and towards the north-northwest Broadway extends for two miles to Central Park, passing many hotels, theatres, and the tall "French flats" that have been devised for residences in the crowded city where the land surface is so scarce. ”