was more meagre, more
uniform, far more picturesquely simple. There were wooden houses,
squat and irregular, and there were brick houses, low and solid; there
were no great towering structures to make one crane the neck to see
the top. It was a city where provinciality stared out at every corner,
a city which has been swept so entirely away that what is left of it
lingers only in odd nooks and corners and back streets where even the
oldest New Yorker has lost sight of it, and where visitors spend many
hours seeking out old-time curiosities in the byways of the
metropolis.

[Illustration: Museum at the north end of the Park

1825]

The larger buildings of those days, the ones to catch the eye of a
stranger, are all memories now, and it is a difficult matter to say
even where they stood with any degree of certainty. There was Masonic
Hall in Broadway and Pearl Street, with its great chamber in imitation
of the Chapel of Henry VIII., that was quite the pride of the town,
and indeed looked upon as the most elegant reception-room in detail
and appointment to be found in America. Close by, on the other side of
the way, was Contoit's Garden, a delightful resort, where could be had
the finest of ices and cakes. Farther on the Apollo dancing-rooms were
a Mecca for the youth of the town. Opposite the lower end of City
Hall Park was Scudder's, the first museum in the city, the forerunner
of Barnum's, filled to overflowing with curiosities of earth and sea
and air. Across the way, on the opposite side of the park, was the
Park Theatre with its broad white front and its record as the chief
playhouse of the city, although there were hosts of admirers and
patrons of the Old Bowery, and of the National in Leonard Street, and
of the Olympic in Broadway, where Mitchell was established as a great
favorite. Out beyond the city was Niblo's Garden, newly established
and a real rural retreat; near to it, over on the Bowery Road, was the
old Vauxhall, fast losing caste as a place of outdoor amusement. In
Nassau Street the Middle Dutch Church still stood, its silvery bell
sounding over the city in which Sunday was a day set apart for
religious observance and had not come to be a day of merrymaking.

[Illustration: THE APOLLO ROOMS IN 1830.]

[Illustration: Niblo's Garden]

It had come to be very near the end of the Knickerbocker days in this
quiet city where brimstone matches and india-rubber overshoes had just
been introduced,--indeed,