I met old Mark Taylor the other day and had a chat with him. I am always glad to meet and chat with Mark, for he is ahead of me in some respects. He is not only “thirty years in Gotham,” but he represents seventy years in Gotham, and remembers sixty years quite well.
Mark and a friend of his, called Sibley, used to go shootin’ for birds regularly where the Fifth Avenue Hotel now stands. Mark remembers distinctly shootin’ a splendid lot of birds one mornin’ standin’ on the site of the present Madison Square Theatre. And once Sibley fell over a rock and hurt himself pretty seriously, right about where there is now the St. James Hotel.
Mark and Sibley were fond of playin’ cricket, and belonged to a cricket club which used to play in some open fields where Parker’s restaurant stands now.
A little after this time Niblo’s saloon got to be a great resort, just a little out of town. Mrs. Niblo was a very nice and hospitable lady, very cordial and popular, a great help to her husband. She used to invite on Sundays her and her husband’s personal friends to come and take a little dinner or supper at the Garden. Old Col. Stetson, of the old Astor, was one of Niblo’s friends, and Mrs. Niblo used to send a private ‘bus to bring Stetson from the Astor House to the Garden.
With an eye to business seats could be bought in this private ‘bus, and strangers used to avail ‘emselves of the opportunity.
Once on one of his visits to Mr. and Mrs. Niblo, Col. Stetson brought his friend, the great Daniel Webster, along with him. They all had a pleasant time, and after dinner the “private ‘bus” took Webster, Stetson and Niblo a drive out of town, just around the Forty-second street reservoir, which was in those days what the Central Park is to-day.
In those days what is now Third avenue was a great place for trottin’. It was a wide, open road, and afforded a splendid opportunity for a trial of speed, which opportunity was freely availed of by the b’hoys. “Cato’s” was then a swell resort like the “road houses” of to-day, and a favorite way of killin’ time was by resortin’ to the “sweatin’ board.” What is now Union Square was then a mere collection of sand and stones, and here and there a house, about as “settled” then as some of the annexed district is now. The story goes that one of the Placides was out for a tramp one day, and wanderin’ on and feelin’ rather tired, stopped and got the two most refreshing drinks he ever partook of in all his life at a little farm house located on about what is to-day Broadway and Fourteenth street. He got a coolin’ draught from an old well on the place, and was then given a drink of milk, fresh from the cow which he saw nibblin’ the grass under a tree, where fifty years afterwards actors and managers from all parts of the country congregated on the crowded sidewalk in the very heart of a great city.
Mark Taylor used to be a great frequenter of Castle Garden in the good old times. He also attended all the old American Institute fairs that were held therein, and which were very popular institutions. He remembers one “invention” at one of these fairies perfectly. He had cause to remember it. He will never be able to forget it. It was a sausage cutter, and while Mark was foolin’ with it, it cut off one of his fingers, and came near makin’ sausage meat of his whole hand.
There was a Chinese junk, a real Chinese junk this time, that reached Castle Garden dock once, and stayed there for some time. The whole of New York got excited about this junk, and Mark says that he and another boy formed a plan to get aboard of the junk, at the last minute, just before she sailed, and be carried off to China, or thrown into the sea, which would have been more likely. But the other boy somehow didn’t care about goin’ to China alone.
There was a glorious promenade on the balcony at old Castle Garden facin’ the sea. There the young men, who are old men now, used to stroll on moonlit nights with the young girls who are now grandmothers. Mark courted on that balcony the woman who made him a good wife for twenty years, and has been sleepin’ her last sleep for nearly twenty years more.
Mark used to frequent the Bowery a great deal in old times–the Bowery is one of the few things in New York which hasn’t changed in its general character very much. It has always been a bustlin’, busy, crowded, go ahead, free and easy, democratic thoroughfare, and it always will be, I suppose.
Years and years ago there were any number of what were called “rafflin’ shops” on the Bowery. These were decidedly “peculiar.” They were places where people pretended to raffle for poultry, but where all sorts of gamblin’ were carried on.
There would be a lot of turkeys, most of them not worth rafflin’ for, most of the poultry very ancient and tough indeed, hangin’ all around a long, bare room, along which extended a deal table. Under the poultry and all alongside the table the patrons of the place would meet and buy “chances,” and of course lose their money. One man called Wallston was in the habit of visiting one of the “rafflin’ shops” on the Bowery, near Hester street, every Saturday night, and lost the greater part of his week’s salary there regularly. One particular Saturday night, when he had lost more than usual, he got drunk, and in his spree seized hold of the turkeys lyin’ around. With the poultry in his hand he made a raid on the man who kept the place, banged him over the head with his own bony, not boned, turkey, and before he could be stopped had “cleared the place” of the poultry, throwing the turkey out of the window into the street.
About the same time the “rafflin’ shops” were in vogue, “the upstairs drinkin’ saloons” flourished all along the Bowery. The “upstairs” saloons were quite a line of institutions in ‘emselves. One of ‘em, on the Bowery, near Grand, was known as “The Widow’s,” and was a very odd affair, decidedly “odd,” as none of its customers were ever known to “get even” with “the widow” who kept the establishment.
“The Widow’s” was entered or reached by a narrow and rather dirty pair of stairs, which had been worn by constant use quite slippery. On this account the staircase was generally spoken of among the patrons of the place as “the slip.” Entering the saloon there was to be seen a big room with rude sportin’ pictures hangin’ all round the walls.
In the middle of this big room was a round deal table with a few sportin’ prints and books on it to give the place a kind of “literary” look, or rather “letter-ary,” for the prints and books were always heaped together in confusion, among the bottles and glasses, on the table. For it was a cast-iron rule at “The Widow’s” that no one should be allowed the use of “the readin’ room,” as the table and the space around it was styled, unless he ordered somethin’ to drink and paid for it, too, as soon as he ordered it. “No trust,” C. O. D. bein’ a cardinal maxim at “The Widow’s.”
One of the “features” of the place was a lot of caricatures which were hung around the bar in the corner of the room. These caricatures were on the style of those which were afterwards so popular at Jerry Thomas’s saloon, and burlesqued all the prominent people of the city. They had been executed by a clever, dissipated devil, who had cut his throat in a fit of delirium tremens. He had died in debt to “The Widow’s,” and the establishment had managed to get hold of these caricatures for its debt. They formed one of the principal attractions of the place and did a great deal more good to “The Widow’s” than they ever had done to the poor fellow who executed ‘em.
Over the bar presided a rather fine-lookin’ woman, who was “the widow” herself. She was born in Brooklyn of good family, so the gossip went, but had always shown an inclination for “fast life.” She ran off and married a gambler called Raikes, and when he died went into business for herself in New York, openin’ “a den” and making money. Finally she hit on the idea of startin’ “The Widow’s,” and was reputed to be worth over a hundred thousand dollars, though all the fixtures at “The Widow’s” would have been dear at a thousand.
The widow always made it a rule to have two or three admirers and play one of ‘em off against the others, keeping all in doubt as to which was the favored mortal, but chargin’ them all about alike–that is, chargin’ each one of ‘em about all he could or would stand.
Her real favorite was generally supposed to be a big chap with whiskers, who looked very fierce and was said to be an uptown West Side swell in disguise. This big chap was supposed to be desperately in love with “the widow,” and he caused no end of stir among the widow’s other admirers, but he was really a billiard sharp whom “the widow” paid, boarded and kept in liquors and cigars just to keep her best customers jealous, the widow findin’ that jealousy generally made ‘em thirsty and was altogether profitable.
The “widow” had been in her day an acquaintance of another woman who was at one time the most noted adventuress in old New York–a woman as famous fifty years ago as Josephine Mansfield was ten years ago. I mean Kate Hastings. For twenty years and more Kate Hastings was almost a New York institution. Among her earliest friends was Aaron Burr. She was just enterin’ life as Burr was leavin’ it, but the two understood and liked each other from the first. Burr said a few weeks before he died that the finest woman in America was Kate Hastings, and Kate Hastings, till the day of her death, said she never met a gentleman to equal Colonel Burr.
Kate was always interested in politics and was a great friend of all the prominent politicians of her time. One of the Vice-Presidents is said to have taken her advice on several occasions, and on these occasions her advice is said to have been well worth takin’. Like Lola Montez, she had a turn for “public affairs.”
At first Kate affected a great deal of style and considered “the sports” as hardly up to her mark, but as she got older she settled down to hard pan, associated with anybody and everybody who spent money and finally became the prime favorite of the sportin’ class.
Kate was very fond of pluck and strength in men and had a high idea of the prize ring. All the noted pugilists used to visit her and bring their friends with ‘em. This would make matters often very lively.
Once a runaway female slave, called Alice Laurens, took shelter with Kate, tellin’ her story and puttin’ herself at her mercy. Kate wasn’t an abolitionist–not a bit of it–but she had a good heart at bottom, and sheltered the poor slave for several weeks, and then paid her expenses to Canada. In her flush times Kate also subscribed liberally to charities, and the charities were not a bit above acceptin’ her money.
In the course of time Kate opened a sort of private gamblin’ house where the play was even heavier than at the regular “hells.”
Kate herself was very lucky at cards. She always won; and one Congressman noticin’ this fact, “packed” her for two or three years and shared her winnin’s.
There was this one good thin’ about this woman–she had any quantity of faults, but she seldom lied; she never cheated. Her word, when she was herself, could be depended upon, and when she played cards she played on the square.
Once a member of a fashionable club was detected by her cheatin’ at cards. She made him, under threat of exposure, return his winnin’s, and then gave him the sack, never allowing him to enter her establishment again.
For years Kate handled large sums of money, but she was wasteful and reckless. She kept late hours, slept little and drank a great deal. No purse and no person can stand this sort of thing forever, and so she went down hill.
She got old, and faded and jaded, and worn out, and poor, and played out, and the lower down she got the more desperate she drank and gambled.
One night in Winter, the story goes, she bet everythin’ she had in the world against ten thousand dollars and lost. Within forty-eight hours she had surrendered everythin’ and left New York a pauper.
It is not known exactly either when or where or how she died. Some said by suicide, some from drink, others from exposure. Just as likely as not it was from all three.
At any rate, Kate Hastings, one of the brightest, boldest, gayest, smartest and most popular women that ever lived in New York, died outside of it in abject misery and want. Fast life is a mistake.
Editor’s notes: In the paragraph above about Third Avenue, “sweatin’ board” refers to a gambling game, most often three-card monte. A sentence later, the “annexed district” at the time this column was written would have referred to the section of the Bronx west of the Bronx River, which earlier had not been part of New York (City) County.
The Chinese junk Keying was moored at Castle Garden between July and September, 1847. It was a venture of a former British officer in China, who intended to exhibit it and other Chinese artifacts in England. It was sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, and reached St. Helena, where problems arose with pay to the crew and the terms of their contract. Instead of sailing to England, it was decided to take the Keying to New York, and exhibit it there to raise funds.
The story of the Keying has many aspects, not the least of which is the fact that many Americans believed it to be a hoax–manufactured locally by huckster promoters, like P. T. Barnum. In fact, Barnum was operating a “Chinese Museum” adjunct to his American Museum in New York during the summer that the ship was docked in New York. Erroneous newspaper reports that the Chinese junk had arrived in Boston and at Falmouth, England–while it was still docked at the Battery–added to suspicions that it was a fraud.
“The Widow’s” was a bordello of the 1840s, mentioned in George G. Foster’s 1850 title, New York by Gaslight. Foster had this to say:
“We will be a little desultory to-night, and make a kind of flying excursion through various and somewhat opposite scenes. The first pieces at the theaters are just out; and as we pass up Broadway the smack of billiard-balls and the sharp crack of the pistols from the Irving Rooms remind us that we are in the neighborhood of another establishment of which very little is generally known, but which is very well worth a passing look. Many similar ones exist in the city, and they are all so nearly alike that one will serve as a type of the whole.
“Ascending a very unsumptuous staircase, we enter a large room which, at first view, appears to be the reading-room of some third-rate club, whose subscription is seventy-five cents a week, tobacco and pipes included. A round wooden center table, covered with dog-eared newspaper files, and surrounded by common-looking arm-chairs, is embellished by the presence of some half-a-dozen men in mouse-skin moustaches and Chatham-street bernous, the sleeves of which have the exact shape, grace and curvature of Yankee boiled-pudding-bags. Every man is furnished with his glass of hot toddy or whisky punch, and carries a cigar desperately clipped between his teeth and elevated at an angle of forty-five degrees,—like the telescope on the side-walk pointed at the full moon. The walls of the room are hung with those not very elevated specimens of the fine arts known as colored lithographs, exhibiting the female bust and form in every possible and impossible attitude. On the mantel is a string of those inevitable caricatures of Garbeille, representing Mr. Bennett in the act of writing a revolutionary leader for the Herald; Mr. La Forest clapping a prima donna, forgetful of his beautiful wife; Signor Benedetti opening his mouth and shutting his eyes, as he appears in his “tremendous and unparalleled act” (see the circus bills) of Madre mia! Mr. White, with a pen almost as long as himself, and a pair of the most exquisitely conceited epaulette-puckers on the shoulders of his comme il faut opera-coat; and a few more of the same sort. In one corner is a counter over which leans a piratical-looking fellow with a big moustache, talking earnestly with a buxom, rather good-looking woman on the other side. That is “The Widow” -these are her upper-ten customers, bucks of the blunt, lads of spirit, young men about town, fancy coves, who spend hundreds nightly at the oyster-cellars, the gambling-houses, and other worse places of the town, which their prudent papas have laboriously earned and scraped together by wielding the goose and press-board, or by carefully watching the fluctuations in the pork-market. These young bloods think it just the thing-in fact, “dem foine” to stop and patronise “the widow” on their way from the theater to their other nightly haunts: and although their pretty sisters sit pensively at home in their gorgeously upholstered barn-parlors in Fishmonger Place, and would give their little fingers for somebody to speak to, yet these “nice young men” would consider it altogether too “slow” for their use to spend an evening decently at home among virtuous and accomplished women, when there are such places as “the widow’s” and “Cinderella’s” to go to.
“These up-stairs drinking-saloons are a peculiar feature in New York dissipation, and seem to be used mainly as seminaries of dissipation, and primary schools of debauchery. The coarse-featured, badly-painted woman who tends the bar is of course a prostitute, and has set up this as a sort of decoy-house.”
Foster names “The Widow’s” caricaturist as Philippe Garbeille, a noted sculptor who had a studio in New Orleans.
Several newspapers ran reports in December, 1855, that Kate Hastings had died in a Charity Hospital in Paris, France. She had left New York in 1849 to go to California, but returned to New York and married a German tailor. The pair went to Europe, where he deserted her after running through her money.]
