Years ago there used to stand in front of the Dutch Church (a buildin’ which was afterwards used as the old Post-office, and has since given way to the erection of the Mutual Life Insurance Company building’) on Nassau Street, a poor devil of an old man who was known, from his generally wild and “uncanny” appearance, as “the ghost of the Old Dutch Church.” He tried to sell old coins, but seldom sold any. He was a wreck; and yet this poor old “ghost” had once been rich. His career had been wonderfully odd and somewhat romantic, and after undergoin’ all sorts of vicissitudes, adventures and experiences, he had been ruined at last by the very men who should have protected him. He had been robbed by the police of the city of New York.
There have been many iniquities perpetrated in the name of the law; but of all police outrages that which brought this poor old man to grief was perhaps the worst. It remains to this day in shameful record as emphatically “the crime of the police.”
The poor old “ghost’s” original family name was Bryant, and he was an American by birth and descent–a Yankee of Yankees, born and bred near that home of “culchaw” and beans, Boston.
His folks were well-to-do. He graduated at Harvard, and then traveled all over the world before he was twenty-four years of age.
He published a book of travels, wrote poetry, fell in love with a beautiful Italian girl he met at Rome, and brought her back to Boston as his bride. Everythin’ looked bright; but his wife’s beauty made him jealous. Perhaps she gave him cause for jealousy. But, anyway, domestic trouble arose, and he and his beautiful wife separated forever.
This ended the first of this man Bryant’s four different periods, or careers, or lives.
Then he removed himself down South to Charleston, S. C., where, renouncin’ love and devotin’ himself altogether to ambition, he became famous as a physician. But right in the midst of his fame and practice the war broke out, clouded his prospects, and ended the second period of his life.
Then he began his third life in the city of New York, comin’ to the metropolis a broken-down man, forty years of age, disappointed alike in affection and ambition, not old in years but fagged out, disheartened, in bad health, and very poor.
He had always had, all his life, a fondness for collectin’ coins, and this hobby was about all he had to start life in New York now, as he had no friends among whom to begin as a physician, no time to wait for patients, and nothin’ to live on while he was waitin’. So he, the traveled poet, the romantic lover, the successful doctor, now got a little stand on the sidewalk of the City Hall Park, about where the new Post-office stands today, and set up as a coin dealer and money changer in a small way.
He didn’t care about makin’ money–all he wanted or expected was to make a bare livin’–but he somehow prospered far beyond what he expected. His business got profitable, and as he spent a good deal less than he earned and invested his earnin’s shrewdly, he soon “got ahead.”
He purchased and sold a good deal of mutilated currency, buyin’ the latter at a discount, and gettin’ it redeemed at the United States Treasury for a full value.
He was especially lucky with his coins. He bought one old coin of the man who had it, and didn’t know its value, for twenty-five cents, and sold it within a month for nearly one hundred dollars. He bought another coin for seventy-five cents, and sendin’ it over to a museum in London, got a hundred and ten pounds for it, five hundred and fifty dollars. It don’t take many transactions of that kind to make a man rich.
But all the time he was growin’ rich the old coin dealer kept on seemin’ poor, dressed plainly, and sat on a camp-stool beside his little stand, in all weathers, ready for business.
Very few people ever saw him any way but this. But at night there was a restaurant in the Bowery where he dined pretty heartily after the day work of the day. Here he had one waiter, who waited on him regularly for over two years, and who got from him as “a tip” three dollars every month, and a suit of clothes every Christmas.
And there were two chosen friends, one of ‘em a secondhand bookseller and the other an artist, who knew from personal experience that this seedy, humble-lookin’ coin dealer of the City Hall Park was a man of elegant fancies, and had money enough to gratify his tastes. For these two friends used to dine with the coin dealer at his rooms every Sunday.
These rooms were as “odd” as everythin’ else connected with this man, and were as different from what they would naturally be taken to be, as was their tenant himself. They were located on the second floor of a very ordinary-lookin’ tenement house, of the second class, on Forsyth street. The entrance to ‘em was squalid and dark, utterly unpretentious and unattractive. There was nothin’ whatsoever on the outside of these rooms to indicate that they were at all different from the usual dingy, dirty tenement rooms.
But inside they were splendidly furnished. There were velvet carpetin’s, elegant bureaus, French clocks, valuable paintin’s, and all sorts of, as Mrs. Partington would say, “break a back and articles of virtue.”
There were musical instruments, too, though they were never played on, for fear of attractin’ attention, and in the midst of all his splendor the coin dealer did not dare to keep a servant lest he be betrayed. But he did his own washin’ and his own cookin’, and did both well, for he was very particular about both.
Every Sunday at noon his two friends called. Then their host set to work and cooked, and by five o’clock the three sat down to a fine dinner, the only weak point being the attendance, the guests havin’ to wait on ‘emselves. But this was an additional charm, as it added the flavor of Bohemianism to the feast.
For years the coin dealer lived his double life, poor and rich, humble and luxurious, without bein’ suspected or interfered with. This waiter at the restaurant kept mum as to what he knew or thought about his queer customer, and neither the bookseller or the artist breathed a word.
But a little, dark-haired, mean-faced, cock-eyed chap had for some time been on the track of the coin dealer, and had found out where he lived and that he was not altogether what he seemed. This cock-eyed chap had also tried one day to get an entrance into the coin dealer’s room, but had been fooled by the peculiar fastenin’s on the doors. On the outside of the outer door was a huge padlock and inside the door was a big bolt, two big locks and a big brass chain, allowin’ the door to open only a few inches at the most.
This cock-eyed chat got intimate with some policemen near the Dutch Church in Nassau street, in front of which the coin dealer had removed his street-stand after the new Post-office in City Hall Park had begun. This cock-eyed chap had also got acquainted with a stationary and led pencil dealer who did business near the site of this old Dutch Church.
One day one of the policemen, who had been talkin’ with the cock-eyed chap, got hintin’ mysteriously to the coin dealer about wantin’ some money from him, whereupon the coin dealer, alarmed and astonished, protested his poverty, at which protestation the policeman laughed.
And not long after this the policeman still further alarmed and astonished the coin dealer by arrestin’ him on a warrant procured by the cock-eyed chap, on the complaint of the lead pencil dealer, upon which warrant the coin dealer was hustled off to the Tombs more dead than alive. And when he got to the Tombs it turned out that this cock-eyed chap was a “detective” and that he had discovered that one of the lead pencil dealer’s clerks had stolen some stamps from his employer and had sold ‘em to the coin and curiosity dealer, who had been accordingly arrested for buyin’ stolen goods from minors, knowin’ them to be stolen.
The coin dealer protested his utter ignorance and innocence of the charge, but these protestations of his were laughed at by the court just as his protestation of poverty had been laughed at by the policeman, and he was locked up.
He was only locked up a little while, but this little while was quite long enough for all the purposes originally designed. For while he was locked up, his rooms in Forsyth Street were broken open and a large sum of money which had been concealed in ‘em was taken away. In short the coin dealer, while arrested on a trumped-up frivolous charge, had been robbed of some twenty-thousand dollars, the savin’s of many years, and it was to get a chance at those twenty-thousand dollars that the job of the arrest had been put up.
As soon as he was set free, no real evidence bein’ offered against him, the coin dealer rushed to his room, and found the locks broken. Then, in a wild frenzy, he rushed into his rooms and examined ‘em. On a mahogany cupboard he had kept a fancy tin trunk. In this trunk, seemin’ly a trifle of an ornament, he had hidden about five thousand dollars in gold and silver coins, packed in silk papers. These were all were gone.
In a bureau,with mirror and French clock on top, he had hidden away five thousand dollars more. These all had disappeared. Under the bed was a leather bag containin’ five thousand dollars more. This bag had vanished.
About five thousand dollars more had been hidden here and there among the furniture, but not a dollar of it was to be seen.
The coin dealer, when unjustly arrested, had been a rich man, comparatively; when set free, he was a poor man, positively. He was almost crazed. He wept, he prayed, he cursed, he cried; he tore what little hair he had; he beat his head against the wall; his sobs attracted the whole neighborhood; he was utterly broken down–or “broke up.”
But he never saw a dollar of his $20,000 again. Justice Bixby, Captain Irving, Superintendent Walling and Warden Quinn, of the Tombs, justly indignant that the machinery of the law should have been so foully used to aid so base a crime, did all they could, when too late, to aid the now beggared coin dealer to recover his money; but of course it was all in vain.
Before God and man there could be no reasonable doubt of the guilt of the cock-eyed man; but there was no proof of this to be offered. The poor devil of coin dealer had no money, time or hard to get proof, and so there was an end of it.
All that was left was a wreck of a poor old man, hauntin’ Nassau Street–”the ghost of the old Dutch Church.”
He is dead now; and there are crimes that the law cannot reach or punish. This “crime of the police” was one. But there is another world that sets this right–there is One above, who is shrewder even than the detectives and stronger even than the police.
[Editor’s notes: Among the Harry Hill columns, the one above on the robbery of Luther Bryant might be the most difficult to decipher. The above column’s overall tone; the account of the crime; and many details of Bryant’s life differ greatly from contemporary (October, 1874) newspaper accounts. Moreover, the biographical details offered both in this column and in 1874 newspapers leave both the identity and character of the victim in question. It can not be said with surety whether Luther C. Bryant was the man’s real name, or whether the losses he suffered were close to his claims. To give an idea of how wildly divergent the Harry Hill retelling is from contemporary accounts, consider this article from the New York Times:
There appears to be credible witnesses that suggest that Bryant had been recruiting young clerks of local businesses to bring him both cancelled foreign stamps and new, unused U.S. stamps, pilfered from their employers. The private detective suggests that Bryant had been an abortionist and a pornographer–a claim made by no other witness or authority.
Other newspapers stated that Bryant had claimed to be a brother of William Cullen Bryant, poet and editor of the New York Post. Luther claimed to have been born in Cummington, Massachusetts, to a father who was a physician, and to have attended Williams College. All that is true of William Cullen Bryant, but William Cullen Bryant denied that Luther C. Bryant was his brother. There were other Bryant families in Cummington, but none seems to have had a Luther.
No city directories exist for Burlington, Vermont in the 1830s-1840s; but there are no mentions of a Luther Bryant in newspapers. Similarly, the Charleston papers and 1859-1860 city directories have no one by that name. The first time the name appears is in an 1886 New York City directory, with occupation of physician.
In November, 1874, two low-level thieves were arrested after items from Bryant’s rooms were found in their possession; but the suspects denied knowledge of any large loot of coins or stamps. They also never revealed who had told them about Bryant’s riches. They were sent to State Prison. Officials suspected that the loot had been disposed of through John Grady, New York’s most notorious fence (prior to Marm Mandelbaum). Possibly, Grady might have even put up the job. A few Gold coins that Bryant had marked turned up at banks over the next few years.
The only clear fact about the case: a man calling himself Luther C. Bryant was robbed.
Bryant died in 1886, blind, in an almshouse–a year after the Harry Hill column said he was already dead.]
