26

CHURCH-YARD NUISANCE.

Street (the Cornhill of New York), right facing which is a very handsome building with a spire, surrounded by a burying-ground (!) It is the principal Episcopal church. The interior is fitted up

in excellent taste. I remarked that most of the pews were furnished with long-handled fans, of feathers or other light material, indicating, plainly enough, the heats of the climate, and the annoyance of insects. I was not sorry to find a temporary breathing-place here, out of the hurry-scurry of the Broadway and Wall-Street, where the driving, jostling, and elbowing, must be very annoying to those not accustomed to large towns. What an anxious, unhappy, bilious-looking race they seemed to benot even one "comfortable," much less happy, face among them all! Add to this the crashing noises of rapid omnibuses, flying in all directions, and carts, (for even they are driven as fast as are coaches with us), and we have a jumble of sights and sounds easy to understand, but hard to describe. The most crowded parts of London can scarce be compared with it. Wall-street forms a right angle with the Broadway, and leads, in a straight line, to the East River, where lie the ships engaged in the foreign trade there almost all the considerable vessels are congregated; and so numerous are they, and so closely packed together-six and eight deep -that it is generally some days before a ship can get a berth at all. When ours did come up, I had to pass over I know not how many decks of others, before I could reach her. Wall-street is the centre

:

THE EXCHANGE-CONFLAGRATIONS.

27

of all the considerable business of New York. Here are clustered together the Custom House, several banks, most of the money changers (a formidable band), the insurance offices, ship-brokers, agents, &c., and the counting-houses of the most opulent merchants. In the centre of all this stands (or rather stood) the Exchange, which was a very handsome building, and seemingly well suited to its purposes. The body of it was a lofty hall (not a court with arcades) and the post-office close behind, with passages leading from the Exchange into it.

Such

an arrangement must have been convenient to the merchants, in a mart where foreign arrivals take place from hour to hour. In front and at the back the building itself was divided into a lower and upper floor, in which were many commodious rooms for the transaction of business. In the centre of the hall had been placed a rather fine statue of a great statesman and excellent man, the federalist, Colonel Hamilton, who was shot in a murderous duel by Aaron Burr. In a country so bare of works' of art, the destruction of such an ornament was almost a national loss. Of course you will remember, that in a few months from the time I visited the place, this Exchange, and "all that it inherited," most of Wall-street, every smaller street leading therefrom to a great distance around, including banks, wholesale stores, &c.-in short, the very core of this great city's heart-all was reduced to formless heaps of ruins in a few hours. Never, perhaps, were the magazines more full of the richest of

28

THE GREAT FIRE IN NEW YORK.

merchandize than at the time of this event-December 1835. The cold (I remember it too well) was so intense that not a drop of water was to be obtained; all that the sufferers had to do, in the end, was to look on, and let the devouring flames have it all their own way. At first, quantities of goods were removed to a distance from the first seat of the conflagration, into churches and other places; but these supposed places of safety soon caught fire also all the while a scene of plunder was going on, seldom seen in a civilized country. But more of this elsewhere.

Only a few days before my arrival, some scores of buildings had been burnt down in the same quarter, including sundry newspaper and other large printing establishments, &c., with one or two churches; several individuals, too, lost their lives. It was the greatest fire (to a smaller extent they are of nightly occurrence, and usually thought little about) that had taken place-so they told me-for some time; they were fated to have a greater soon, the most extensively destructive of our times, excepting indeed the unparalleled one of Moscow. I saw the labourers digging at the smouldering ruins in search of bodies, the flames every now and then bursting out. I have long thought the continual recurrence of fires on land, and wrecks at sea, an anomaly in a state of advanced civilization. These houses had been run up to a great height (the confined groundplan of this part of the city in some measure obliging them to this,) and of only one brick

THEY ORDER THINGS BETTER IN FRANCE.

29

thickness; once fairly in combustion, it was plain they could hardly keep together for an hour. Whole sides of walls had come down bodily; and I remarked there was scarcely any plaster between the bricks. Verily, thought I, they of the "Saxon blood," which the Americans are really proud to think they have in their veins-these same Saxons of both hemispheres are behind the Gauls in the useful art of preserving life and estate from the chances of total destruction by accidental fire. During a good many years' residence in Paris, to my certain knowledge there was not one private-dwelling burnt. Some few fires, to a trifling extent, did take place in floors of houses, and to these portions they were all confined. Of theatres I speak not every where they are "trebly hazardous." The "tyrannical" French Government takes care that play-houses shall always be isolated from other buildings. This part of New York was, soon after I saw it, rebuilt exactly as it had stood before, (!) Burnt again, to a ten times greater extent, the same system has again been followed. If the Americans are great innovators in some things, it is not in the routine of house-building. I know not whether the upper floor of their Exchange was one continuous corridor, divided by wooden partitions. Well may the doomed chimes ring out, like a felon's penitential psalm, "There's nae luck aboot the hoose." How could there be any?

Returning to the Broadway-which a stranger naturally threads his way to as a point of departure or return-I walked up, through a range of shops

30

AMERICAN THEATRES.

and hotels as well appointed as most in London, to an open space of irregular shape, called the Park, which interrupts the line of the Broadway houses, to the right. In the centre it is laid out into grass plots and gravel walks, with a few trees, the whole surrounded by a railing. On the upper side is the City Hall, perhaps as fine a building as any in America; excepting the Capitol at Washington, which last, however, puts a Londoner provokingly in mind of our Bedlam. The City Hall is outwardly handsome, and in its interior commodious-in short, a neat affair altogether. Let us not pass without mention the famous Park Theatre, though it have nothing remarkable outside; still less Tammany Hall, the kind of "Crown and Anchor Tavern" of New York. It is principally used for public meetings. One Sunday night, seeing it lighted up, I entered it, and found a man holding forth against the Christian revelation. The men and women auditors (all respectably dressed) sat apart from each other; and in a corner was a band of instrumental performers to wind up the affair. Deism set to music! Hard by the Park, but not in sight, is the Bowery (or national) Theatre, devoted to fostering "native talent," which, God wot, stands much in want of such succour. But the Park is the highest priced, and most fashionable theatre. No distinguished individual, or family of any pretensions to gentility, is ever seen at the Bowery in New York, or the Walnut-street theatre of Philadelphia; which last similarly sets up a hopeless rivalry of the English