most to
the day of its demolition, although the neighbourhood about it was
changing rapidly, the old house wore an aspect of dignity. To the corner
the habitues of other years seldom come today. Instead, at the noon
hour, the sidewalks swarm with foreign faces and there is excited babble
in an alien tongue. The cloak and suit firm of Potash and Perlmutter is
as much at home here now as it was in its East Broadway--or was it
Division Street?--loft when the present century was coming into being.

There is an old volume, bearing the date 1871, called "The Clubs of New
York." The author was a Francis Gerry Fairfield, and the chapters that
make up the book were originally contributed to the columns of the "Home
Journal." There is a perceptible smile on Mr. Fairfield's face as he
writes of the town of thirty years before. To the present generation
that smile is irresistibly funny. He recalls the year 1836, when the
Union was founded as one of meteorological oddities. "Tradition
preserves the record of the season under the designation of the cold
summer. Weird auroras did not forbear to lift themselves in mountains of
fire along the north, even in July; and more than once the canopy-aurora
hung like a mock sun in the very centre of the heavens. People predicted
strange things; but the strange things did not happen. The hyena of
pestilence, the wolf of want, and the red death of war were conjured,
but emerged not, nevertheless, from the vasty deep supposed by
Shakespeare to be inhabited by their spirits." But Mr. Fairfield
disclaims any suggestion that "the gestation of the Union Club, then in
progress, had any material influence in the evolution of these omens, or
that the weather was affected by the parturition of the great social
event." With the metropolitan sophistication of 1871 he pats 1836 on the
head as a year when New York was a bit of a village, of rather more than
three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. Houston, then North
Street, Bleecker, and Bond Streets were particularly uptown, and
thoroughfares of fashion and aristocracy. The old regime was still in
its glory; and real counts, in plaid pantaloons, were sensational
occurrences to be petted, set up as lions, and finally entrapped into
matrimony, just by way of improving the blood of the first families. He
tells of "the little white-faced hotel now termed the Tremont" as having
been kept by a real count, expatriated for political reasons, but
afterwards res