VALENTINE'S MANUAL
 

A MEMORY OF OLD HARLEM

By Laura Dayton Fessenden

I am going to talk about a New York Sunday (a Sab¬
bath day, not a soda water confection).

When I was a little girl, in 1867-1868, the upper part
of Manhattan Island, on the west or Hudson River side
and north of 59th Street, was suburban.

There was one line of street cars that penetrated
''through the quiet" at stated intervals (but never on
schedule time) to the jingling of not unmusical harness
bells. The route was up Eighth Avenue, and Eighth
Avenue skirted the west side of Central Park, as it does
to-day, and Central Park was in 1867 a comparatively
new city acquisition.

There was also once in every two or three hours (I
think it was from six in the morning until six at night)
a stage line that followed the windings of the Bloom-
ingdale Road (now Broadway) through Bloomingdale,
Manhattanville, Carmansville and on to Washington
Heights.

It might be interesting to mention en passant that the
people who used these street cars and stages were mostly
known to one another, not perhaps personally, but as
belonging to the same country-side neighborhood.

As an instance of this fact, I recall a tall, dark, sallow
man, who always wore a cloak and who was a tea mer¬
chant. He was a brother of Susan B. Anthony and, as
Miss Anthony was then considered to be a young woman
of startlingly progressive ideas, we children gazed upon
her brother with interest.

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