Valentine's manual of old New York 1924

(New York :  Valentine's Manual Inc.,  1924, c1923.)

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FORTY YEARS ON TWENTY-THIRD STREET

By Henry Irving Dodge

Just what does forty years on Twenty-third Street
mean ? It means something qtiite different from what
forty years on Vesey Street, or what forty years on
Grand Street would mean. Why ? Because every promi-
nent section of the City has a history all its own—dis-
tinct—Bowling (jreen, Wall .Street, The Swamp—old
leather district near Brooklyn Bridge; Cherry Hill, f ra-
grant from a snowstorm of blossoms, where the old ship
owners used to sit on their front piazzas and watch their
matchless clippers, just home from India, swinging at
anchor in the East River—Clierry HiII, since passed into
the hands of the Italians and Greeks; the Bowery, for-
merly the "Bouwerie," a long line of rose bowers, gentle-
men's gardens, since turned into a long line of saloons
and dives, and again into a line of cheap lodging houses,
each a history of shifting human sands, each a demon-
stration of the inevitable, the inscrtitable ojieration of the
economic law.

Twenty-third Street is the Middle Ages of New York
history, neither very old nor very new, destined for a time
to be the hub of the wheel of historic activities.

Social life bloomed, bloomed gorgeously, on Twenty-
third Street, and departed. Great concerns, promjDted
by the exigencies of trade, came and went. In Twenty-
third Street the sands of social and business life shifted,
shifted, shifted. But whether its metier be social, intel-
lectual, or commercial, the words "Twenty-third Street"
always carry the conviction of importance.

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