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THE VANDERBILTS.

The construction of the white marble Stewart palace was the first serious innovation made upon the rich brownstone fronts of Fifth Avenue, the possession of which was a necessary adjunct to social standing in New York before the Civil War. The material, quarried generally in Connecticut, was in such extensive use that it gave a distinctive coloring to New York, its sombreness and uniformity of architecture making most of the residential streets corridors of gloom. For years, as a local authority described it, "our new houses and blocks were all turned out from the same moulds, and apparently congealed from the same coffee-colored liquid." The builders, since the war, have made large inroads with other materials, thus giving more individuality to the finer buildings of later construction. To the eastward, Fourth Avenue is tunnelled for several blocks under Murray Hill, to carry street railways up to the Grand Central Station at Forty-second Street, the open spaces above, giving the tunnel light and air, being surrounded by pleasant little parks, so that the widened street, called Park Avenue, is an attractive residential region, the view being closed to the northward by the louvre domes of the Vanderbilt railway station.

Continuing out Fifth Avenue, the "Old Brick Church" of the Presbyterians, built solid and substantial, with a tall spire, stands about on the most elevated portion of Murray Hill, the congregation dating from 1767. A short distance beyond, at Thirty-ninth Street, is the finest club-house in New York, the elaborate brick and brownstone Union League Club, its spacious windows disclosing the luxurious apartments within. Just above is the historic Vanderbilt house, where the old Commodore lived--a wide, brownstone dwelling, having alongside a carriage entrance into a small courtyard. The Vanderbilt fortunes, the greatest accumulated, represent the financially expansive facilities of modern New York as manipulated by corporation management and the Stock Exchange. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, born on Staten Island in 1794, in 1817, at the age of twenty-three, owned a few small vessels, and estimated his wealth at 00. He became a steamboat captain, and went into the transportation business between New York and Philadelphia, afterwards broadening his operations, and in 1848 owning most of the profitable steamboat lines leading from New York. When the California emigration fever began, he started ocean steamers in connection with the transit across the Isthmus of Panama. This business grew, and at the height of his steamship career the Commodore owned sixty-six vessels. The finest, named the Vanderbilt, which cost him 0,000, he gave the Government for a war vessel, to chase the rebel privateers. As American vessel-owning became unprofitable, he determined to abandon it and devote himself to railway management, having already bought largely of railway stocks. When he thus changed, he estimated his fortune at ,000,000. He got control of various railroads leading east, north and west from New York, buying the shares at low prices, his excellent methods improving their earning powers, so that their value greatly enhanced. The greatest of these corporations was the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad. When the Commodore died his estate was estimated at ,000,000, left almost wholly to his son William H. Vanderbilt. When the latter died it had reached 0,000,000, bequeathed chiefly to his two eldest sons, Cornelius, who died in 1899, and William K. Vanderbilt. The family are now housed in a row of palaces farther out the avenue near Central Park, and there are fabulous estimates of their colossal fortunes, which are the greatest in America, and probably in the world.

Upon the west side of Fifth Avenue the New York Public Library is being erected on the site of the old Croton Reservoir, which occupied the summit of Murray Hill, and behind it is the pretty little Bryant Park, extending to Sixth Avenue. This Library comes from the consolidation of the Astor and Lenox Libraries, augmented by the Samuel J. Tilden Trust Fund, amounting to about ,500,000. North of this, Forty-second Street crosses the city, having the Grand Central Station of the Vanderbilt lines opposite Fourth Avenue, the only railway station in New York, though other roads are expecting to come in by tunnels under the rivers. At Forty-third Street and Fifth Avenue is the finest American synagogue, the Jewish Temple Emanu-El, a magnificent specimen of Saracenic architecture, the interior being rich in Oriental decoration. Creeping plants tastefully overrun the lower portions of its two great towers. There are numerous fine churches on this portion of the avenue, two of which are rather more famous than the others. When the old Dutch Governor Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island from the Indians, he founded an orthodox Dutch church in 1628. This church is now a costly brownstone structure in Decorated Gothic at the corner of Forty-eighth Street, having a crocketed spire two hundred and seventy feet high. Its inscription tells us it is the "Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of the City of New York, organized under Peter Minuit, Director General of the New Netherlands, in 1628, chartered by William, King of England, 1696." The present church was built in 1872. Occupying the entire block at Fiftieth Street is the magnificent white marble Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Patrick, in Decorated Gothic, with two spires rising three hundred and thirty-two feet. This noble church much resembles the great Cathedral at Cologne, particularly in the interior. Behind it, fronting on Madison Avenue, is the Archbishop's white marble residence, and adjacent is the old building of Columbia College, the original King's College of New York, founded in 1754 by a fund started from the proceeds of various lotteries, which then raised ,215. It now has new buildings elsewhere.

In the neighborhood of these churches there must not be overlooked, in this part of Fifth Avenue, the residence of Helen Gould, a square-built house with an elaborate portico, at the corner of Fifty-seventh Street. This was originally the home of one of the most extraordinary men ever developed in New York--Jay Gould. He was an orphan boy in Northeastern Pennsylvania, who became a clerk in a country store, a surveyor and map-maker, and finally was employed in a tannery, and to sell its leather first took him to New York. Finally he removed there, and soon became a leading Wall Street stock operator. Nobody ever made such daring ventures; he became the "great bear" on the market, wrecking, pulling down, ruining; controlling newspapers, courts, legislatures, and being even accused of trying to bribe a President. Then, as he acquired wealth, he became an extensive investor in railways and telegraphs, and died, leaving a fortune estimated at ,000,000. He is buried in a magnificent mausoleum, a miniature of the Pantheon, in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the northern suburbs, and his daughter Helen is trying, by her beneficent charities, to make the best use she can of the share of the money she inherited. Westward from Fifty-first Street are the famous Vanderbilt palaces where most of the sons and daughters of William H. Vanderbilt reside, five grand residences which cost ,000,000 to build and furnish. Standing among them is the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, said to be the largest and wealthiest in the world of this denomination, where the late pastor, Dr. John Hall, is described as preaching to 0,000,000 every Sunday. This is the most splendid portion of Fifth Avenue, with grand residences all about, and as Central Park is approached, there are also enormous apartment-houses and huge hotels. The avenue reaches the Park at Fifty-ninth Street, and for two miles its grand buildings face that attractive pleasure-ground. At Seventieth Street is the Lenox Library, the benefaction of James Lenox, and at Eighty-second Street the Metropolitan Museum of Art, containing some of the finest collections in the world, and patterned largely after the British Museum. Its treasures of art and science, antiquities and museums, are valued at ,000,000, and it has an elaborate building fronting on Fifth Avenue, within the Park.

CENTRAL PARK.

New York is very proud of its great pleasure-ground, the Central Park, upon which has been lavished all that art and money could accomplish. This Park is a parallelogram in the centre of Manhattan Island, a half-mile wide and two and a half miles long, covering eight hundred and forty-three acres, though nearly one-fourth of this space is occupied by the Croton water reservoirs. The original surface was either marsh or rock, very rough, and with topography generally the reverse of that needed for a park. It took prodigious labor and an enormous outlay to overcome the difficulties, but skillful engineering and landscape gardening have made the most of the unsightly surface, so that it has become one of the handsomest parks in the world, its beauties increasing as the growing trees mature. Entering at the "Scholar's Gate" from Fifth Avenue, the road within the Park leads by a gently winding course past vista views and pretty lakes to the Mall, or general promenade. Here, on pleasant days, thousands gather to listen to the music. To the westward are broad green surfaces giving a tranquil landscape, and looking northward through the avenue of elms upon the Mall, a little gray stone tower called the Observatory closes the view far away over another pretty lake. At the end of the Mall a terrace is crossed bordering this lake, the ground sloping to its edges. Here a fountain plashes on one side, and on the other is the concert ground, overlooked by the Pergola, a shaded Gallery. Across the lake, on the Observatory side, is the Ramble, a rocky, forest-covered slope with paths winding through it, and on the highest point a massive Belvedere. There are a menagerie and an aviary, and the children have playgrounds and varied amusements. Beyond this enchanting region the road winds past statues and ever-changing beauties of garden and landscape, and comes out in a space alongside the smaller reservoir, where stands Cleopatra's Needle, brought from Egypt and set up near the Museum of Art. Then the road passes alongside the larger reservoir, with barely enough room to get through between it and Fifth Avenue, though both are admirably masked. The northern portion of the Park has greater natural attractions and less ornamentation, the land ascending to a fine lookout on the western side, where there is a grand view over the Harlem River, displaying the tall arches of the "High Bridge" bringing the Croton Aqueduct across, and the tower alongside, which makes a high level reservoir. The expanding city, however, is extending its buildings over large surfaces north and west of the Park.

One Hundred and Tenth Street is the northern boundary of Central Park. Upon the western side of the Park, in Manhattan Square, is being gradually constructed the American Museum of Natural History, with elaborate buildings and collections already exceeding ,000,000 in value. Near the northwestern corner of the Park, extending to One Hundred and Twenty-third Street, is the long and narrow Morningside Park, a high elevation held by massive retaining walls on the hill-slope, and ascended by flights of steps. Morningside Avenue, its western boundary, has at One Hundred and Twelfth Street what will be the largest ecclesiastical edifice in the United States, the new Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, of which the corner-stone was laid in 1892, and building slowly progresses. The splendid St. Luke's Hospital adjoins to the northward, while to the northwest, on an elevated site overlooking the Hudson River, are the fine new buildings of Columbia College in an enclosure of about twenty acres. This great University has buildings and collections valued at ,000,000, an endowment of ,000,000, and is attended by about two thousand students. Farther westward, upon the high ground at the edge of the Hudson River, stretches the stately Riverside Park for about three miles, making a magnificent drive, along which many handsome residences are being constructed. Near its northern end is the tomb of General Grant, a white granite mausoleum ninety feet square and surmounted by a cupola, which was finished in 1897 and cost 0,000. The interior arrangement is like Napoleon's tomb in Paris, the body, contained in a red porphyry sarcophagus, being placed in an open crypt below the centre of the dome. Beyond Central Park, the broad public roads known as the Boulevards traverse the island northward, and many elaborate structures are being erected along them.

SPUYTEN DUYVEL AND CROTON.

The narrow and elevated northern prolongation of Manhattan is the picturesque district of Washington Heights. Here is the attractive Trinity Church Cemetery, laid out on the battlefield of Harlem Heights, a hotly contested Revolutionary conflict, fought on September 16, 1776, and some distance northward, on the highest point of the island, elevated two hundred and sixty feet above the Hudson River, there are still seen the remains of Fort Washington, which was bravely but unsuccessfully defended against British attacks in the following November, and had to be abandoned. Across the Harlem River is the ancient suburb of Morrisania. Here was Washington's headquarters during those conflicts, and here lived Lewis Morris, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and his half-brother, Gouverneur Morris, a noted New York statesman, who bore a striking resemblance to General Washington. The historic old house at Morrisania was afterwards acquired by Madame Jumel, and when Aaron Burr, in his old age and poverty, met this wealthy widow, he courted and married her in 1833, he being then seventy-eight years old. Here they lived for a brief period "during the days of his octogenarian love," as the annalist has it, but soon quarrelled and separated. The house is now preserved as a Revolutionary Museum. Not far away was the Grange, the home of Alexander Hamilton, who planted there a group of thirteen trees named after the thirteen original States of the Union, in which all flourished, as we are credibly informed, excepting the "South Carolina tree," which persisted in growing up very crooked. Upon the top of Washington Heights and the precipitous slopes of the Spuyten Duyvel and Harlem there are many fine villas, and down in the bottom of the gorge the New York Central Railroad seeks its route out to the Hudson River bank. The historic old King's Bridge spans the Harlem, deep down in the valley, while all along the river is the fine new drive, the "Speedway," upon which the New Yorkers display the qualities of their fastest horses.

The splendid Washington Bridge, built of steel at a cost of ,700,000, carries one of the Boulevards across the Harlem at a height of one hundred and fifty feet; but the great landmark is the High Bridge which brings the Croton Aqueduct over, its tall granite piers and graceful arches displaying singular beauty from every point of view. This aqueduct is forty miles long, and has been well described as "a structure worthy of the Roman Empire." It originally cost ,500,000, subsequent improvements absorbing millions more. The Croton River, coming down through Westchester County, falls into the Hudson about twenty-five miles above the city, and its headwaters are dammed, making artificial lakes gathering the supply. The Aqueduct was finished in 1842, and, going through tunnels and rock-cuttings, has a cross-section of about fifty-four feet and an inclination of one foot to the mile, or thirty-three feet in the distance to the Harlem River. About one hundred and fifteen millions of gallons go through it daily, moving at the rate of a mile and a half per hour. Three huge pipes carry the water across the High Bridge at one hundred and sixteen feet elevation. There are eight arches in the river crossing, their openings being eighty feet wide and one hundred feet high, to allow the passage of vessels, and seven narrower arches of fifty feet span on the banks. At the New York end of this picturesque bridge is the tall tower, rising two hundred and sixty-five feet, which has water pumped into its surmounting tank to supply the highest parts of the island. New York, however, long since outgrew the capacity of this famous aqueduct, so that a new one of much greater size was tunnelled underground and finished in 1890, which is fourteen feet high, and bored at an average depth of one hundred and fifty feet below the surface, and is carried three hundred feet under the Harlem River bed, its estimated daily capacity being three hundred millions of gallons. The receiving reservoirs in Central Park hold over a thousand millions of gallons. An imposing gate-house at One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street admits this supply into the northern city mains. The great Quaker Bridge dam across the Croton is two hundred and seventy-seven feet high and thirteen hundred and fifty feet long, making the most enormous artificial reservoir in the world, holding forty thousand millions of gallons. It has cost New York over ,000,000 to thus insure an ample water supply, free of all risk from drought.

THE BRONX AND THE NEW PARKS.

Across Harlem River, to the north and east, is the attractive region of the Bronx, much of the surface being yet in its primitive condition as maintained in the old estates that have come down from the early days of the Knickerbockers. Here are being laid out several new and large parks. Van Cortlandt Park, near the Hudson, about four miles north of the High Bridge, covers about eleven hundred acres, Pelham Bay Park, on the shore of Long Island Sound, nine miles from the Harlem, seventeen hundred and fifty acres, and the Bronx Park, between them, six hundred and fifty acres. These three great pleasure-grounds are being gradually developed, and the plan is to connect them with magnificent tree-lined avenues six hundred feet wide. The western verge of Van Cortlandt Park finely overlooks the Hudson, and it is intended largely for military uses, with parade-grounds and rifle-ranges. It has an attractive lake; and the quaint old mansion where lived the Van Cortlandts, whose successive generations owned the estate, built in 1748, is preserved as a Museum of Colonial Relics. To the eastward, a shallow and almost aimless little stream, flowing from above White Plains down to Long Island Sound, with many pools and rapids, and occasionally broadening into mirror-like lakes, was long the eastern boundary of New York City. This is the Bronx River, coming through a green, well-watered and shaded valley, a half to three-quarters of a mile wide, and a considerable part of this bewitching region makes the Bronx Park,

"Where gentle Bronx, clear, winding, flows The shadowy banks between; Where blossomed bell or wilding rose Adorns the brightest green."

The wildness and seclusion of this place, its natural charms and romantic character, make one almost believe that New York cannot possibly be near such an attractive wilderness. Nature seems to have especially designed it for a park, and art cannot improve it. Huge rocks and giant trees flourish here, among them the Delancey pine, one hundred and fifty feet high and straight as an arrow, standing in a prominent position and having a huge branch reaching upward upon one side, with interlacing boughs, making it appear not unlike a gigantic harp. The Delanceys once owned the place. A "balanced boulder" is nearby, weighing hundreds of tons, yet very easily rocked. The Bronx in one portion flows deep down between high, rocky walls, where the thin-armed white birches wave their slender limbs a hundred feet above the water. Here was an early home of the Lorillards, now a Museum and large Botanical Garden. Here are also the grounds of the New York Zoological Society, the animals roaming in extensive enclosures, where they are placed, as far as possible, in their native surroundings.

The peninsula of Throgg's Neck is the northern headland at the entrance of East River into Long Island Sound. Beyond this, the waters deeply indent the New York shore, and there is thrust out the green peninsula of Pelham Neck. This is some distance beyond the Bronx. Eastchester Bay is on the southern side of the neck; Pelham Bay beyond it; and immediately in front City Island, reached by a long drawbridge. To the north is Hunter's Island, connected by another bridge. Hunter's Island and more than two square miles of the hills and meadows adjacent on the mainland make the new park of Pelham Bay. Various old mansions scattered over this domain were the homes of the Hunters, Lorillards and other prominent families. The island belonged to many generations of Hunters, and near the bridge a large gateway has "Hunter's Island" carved on one of the marble gate-posts. Years ago another wealthy man bought the island, and these words offending him, he brought a marble-mason out from New York, who chiselled them off, and carved instead the words "Higgins's Island." But after Higgins had his day and was gathered unto his fathers, the next owner, revering rather the antiquity of the place, had "Higgins" eliminated and "Hunter's Island" restored, though the gate-post became quite thin under this treatment. On the western edge of Pelham Bay Park is Hutchinson's River, flowing down into Eastchester Bay, and recalling the days of the Salem witchcraft. Poor Anne Hutchinson fled here to escape burning as a witch, and on City Island built a hut on a little cape still called Anne Hook. She lived there peacefully for a year, harming nobody and declining every invitation to stir from her humble abode. One day a young girl went to visit Anne, but found the hut in ashes, and before the door lay the poor woman, where she had been tomahawked and scalped by the Indians. No one has built a house on Anne Hook since, and many have been the tales told of ghostly Indian revels on bleak and rainy nights around the site of the burning hut. On the mainland were Indian villages, and here have been found relics, and in 1899 there was exhumed the skeleton of an Indian warrior.

EAST RIVER AND HELL GATE.

The Harlem River, flowing into the East River, divides Manhattan from Ward's Island, and this, with Randall's Island to the north and Blackwell's Island to the south, forms the group of "East River Islands" upon which are the penal and charitable institutions of the great city. The chief of these are on Blackwell's Island, a long, narrow strip stretching nearly two miles in the centre of East River, and barely more than two hundred yards wide. It covers one hundred and twenty acres, and has the penitentiary, almshouses, workhouses and hospitals, the spacious buildings being of granite quarried there by the convicts. Over on the New York City shore is the extensive Bellevue Hospital. In cases of vagrancy and minor crimes, the offender is said to be "sent up to the Island." Ward's Island has a surface of two hundred acres, and here are the Lunatic Asylum and Emigrant Hospital. Randall's Island has the institutions for children and idiots, while upon Hart's Island, out in Long Island Sound, are industrial schools and the pauper cemetery. The buildings are all upon a most elaborate scale, and it costs over ,000,000 for their annual maintenance. A steamboat ride along East River, with these extensive establishments and their well-kept grounds passing in review, is a most interesting suburban excursion.

THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE.

The growth of population on Long Island has caused various new bridges and tunnels to be projected for crossing East River. One new bridge is to cross at Blackwell's Island, with a pier on the island. Another now nearly completed, and estimated to cost ,000,000, crosses from Grand Street to Broadway in Brooklyn. The Long Island Railroad is arranging to bore a tunnel under East River, to be operated by electricity, to bring its trains into New York. The East River being the locality for most of the foreign shipping, the bridges are at high elevations, the great Brooklyn Bridge, which crosses from City Hall Park, being one hundred and thirty-five feet above the water. Its massive piers are among the tallest structures about New York, rising two hundred and sixty-eight feet. This, the largest suspension bridge in the world, was begun in 1870 and opened for traffic in 1885. The piers stand upon caissons sunk into the rocky bed of the river, which is forty-five feet below the surface on the Brooklyn side and ninety feet below on the New York side. Their towers carry four sixteen-inch wire cables that sustain the bridge, which is built eighty-five feet wide, giving ample accommodation for two railways, two wagon roads also carrying electric cars, and a wide raised footway in the centre. The bridge cost nearly ,000,000, the distance between the piers is about sixteen hundred feet, and its entire length between the anchorages of the cables is three thousand four hundred and seventy-five feet. The cable anchorages are enormous masses, each containing about thirty-five thousand cubic yards of solid masonry. The whole length of the bridge and its elaborate approaches is considerably over a mile. Its projector was John A. Roebling, who died during the early work, and its builder, his son Washington Roebling, who caught the dreaded "caisson disease" while superintending labor under water, and for years afterward an invalid, watched the progress of the later work from his chamber window on Brooklyn Heights nearby. The bridge has carried an enormous traffic, taxing its capacity to the utmost, and its passengers average over a million a week. The view from its raised footway is one of the most superb sights of New York, disclosing both cities, and the extensive wharves and commerce of East River, the Navy Yard just above, and for miles over the surrounding region and down through the harbor to the distant blue hills of Staten Island.

THE CITY OF CHURCHES.

The Borough of Brooklyn, which has grown from the overflow of New York, whose people are said to go over there "chiefly to sleep or be buried," is popularly known as the "City of Churches." A large portion of the working population of the metropolis, as well as the merchants and business men, make it their home and dormitory, while there are beautiful cemeteries in the suburbs peopled largely by dead New Yorkers. Greenwood, overlooking New York harbor from Gowanus Heights in South Brooklyn, is regarded as one of the finest American cemeteries. In no other city can be found such an aggregation of churches, developed in a past generation, and under the ministry of a regiment of distinguished clergymen, then led by Beecher and Storrs, so that the popular title was well bestowed. Brooklyn is entirely the growth of the nineteenth century, a growth due to the inability of New York to spread, excepting far northward. It stretches several miles along East River and three or four miles inland, and grows rapidly. When the century began, however, it was hard work to find three thousand people there, and, strangely enough, they had to cross over to New York to go to church. Just about the time old Peter Minuit was buying Manhattan from the Indians, a band of Walloons first settled in Brooklyn. Their descendants drove cows across East River to Governor's Island to graze, the Buttermilk Channel between them being then shallow enough for fording, though it is now scoured out deep enough to float the largest vessels, the docks located where the cows then crossed now accommodating an enormous commerce. At first a little ferry from Fulton Street to Peck Slip, New York, accommodated the straggling village, and it has grown into more than a dozen steam ferries of the largest capacity, which will carry daily a half-million people across at one cent apiece, this fleet of packet-boats being the greatest transporters of humanity in the world.

The Indians called the region around Wallabout Bay, and Gowanus Mercychawick, meaning "the sandy place." When the Walloons came along, they began settling on the shores of the bay, which they called Waal-bogt, afterwards gradually changed to its present name of Wallabout. In 1646 the town was organized by Governor Kieft as Breuckelen, he appointing Jan Eversen Bout and Huyck Aertsen as "schepens" or superintendents to preserve the peace and regulate the community. During the Revolution the British prison-ships were moored in the Wallabout, and it is estimated that eleven thousand five hundred Americans, chiefly seamen, died upon them, the shores of the bay being full of dead men's bones, which the tides for many years washed out from the sand. In 1808 these bones were finally collected and put in a vault near the Navy Yard, which had been established on the bay. This is the chief naval station of the United States, covering about eighty-eight acres, including all the available space. There is attached a large naval hospital, while between the two is the immense Wallabout Market, covering forty-five acres, the largest in Brooklyn, its buildings being brick structures in the old Dutch style.

Clinton Street leaves Fulton a little beyond Orange, and passes southward through Brooklyn Heights, being the chief street of the fashionable district. Embowered in trees, handsome churches and residences border it, and Pierrepont, Remsen, Montague and other noted streets extend at right angles from it to the edge of the bluff, where the Heights fall sharply off to the river. Here, at seventy feet elevation, and overlooking the lower level of buildings and piers at the water's edge, are the terraces where the finest residences are located, having a magnificent outlook upon the harbor and New York City beyond. The ships land their cargoes within almost a stone's throw of the palaces. In this district there are several large apartment-houses and various clubs, a statue of Alexander Hamilton adorning the front of the Hamilton Club at Remsen and Clinton Streets. Upon Remsen Street is another noted building, the Congregational "Church of the Pilgrims," a spacious graystone edifice with towers, its most prominent tower and spire being a commanding landmark for vessels sailing up New York Bay. There is let into the outer wall of this church, about six feet above the pavement, a small piece of the original "Plymouth Rock" whereon the Pilgrims in 1620 landed in Massachusetts Bay--a dark, rough-hewn fragment, projecting with irregular surface a few inches from the wall. As an author, lecturer and preacher, the veteran pastor for over a half-century, Dr. Richard Salter Storrs, acquired wide renown. Upon Clinton Street is the elegant Pointed Gothic brownstone St. Ann's Episcopal Church, famous for its choir, and on Montague Street the Holy Trinity Church, its spire rising two hundred and seventy-five feet. But almost everywhere are churches, there being about five hundred in Brooklyn. The noted Pratt Institute is one of the best known charities of the city, founded and endowed by Charles Pratt, an oil prince, as a technical school, its spacious and well-equipped buildings caring for thirty-four hundred students. The object of this noble institution is "to promote manual and industrial education, and to inculcate habits of industry and thrift."

GREENWOOD CEMETERY AND PROSPECT PARK.

A border of tombs almost surrounds Brooklyn, for in the suburbs are the great cemeteries which are the burial-places of both cities. In lovely situations upon the surrounding hills are Greenwood, Cypress Hills, Evergreen, Holy Cross, Calvary, Mount Olivet, The Citizens' Union, Washington and other cemeteries, occupying many hundreds of acres. Of these, the noted Greenwood is the chief, covering some four hundred acres on Gowanus Heights, south of the city. This is a high ridge dividing Brooklyn from the lowlands on the south side of Long Island, and it has elevations giving charming views. The route to it crosses various railroads leading to Coney Island, which is the ultimate objective point of most Brooklyn lines of transit. A neat lawn-bordered road leads up to the magnificent cemetery entrance on Fifth Avenue, an elaborate and much ornamental brownstone structure rising into a central pinnacle over a hundred feet high. This entrance covers two fine gateways, with representations of Gospel scenes, the principal being the Raising of Lazarus and the Resurrection. The grounds display great beauty, the ridgy, rounded hills spreading in all directions, the surface being an alternation of hills and vales, vaults terracing the hillsides, with elaborate mausoleums above and frequent little lakes nestling in the pleasant valleys. Vast sums have been expended on some of the grander tombs, which are upon a scale of great magnificence. The attractive rural names of the walks and avenues, the delicious flowers and foliage, the balmy air, the lakes, valleys and points of beautiful outlook giving grand views over New York Bay and the surrounding country, make Greenwood a park as well as a cemetery, and it is generally admitted to be without a peer. Many costly pantheons and chapels cover the remains of well-known people, and one mausoleum is a large marble church. A three-sided monument of peculiar construction standing on a knoll marks the resting-place of Samuel F. B. Morse, the telegrapher. Horace Greeley's tomb has his bust in bronze on a pedestal. A colossal statue surmounts the grave of the great De Witt Clinton, the Governor of New York who built the Erie Canal and thus secured the commercial supremacy of the city. The romantic career of Lola Montez ended in Greenwood. Commodore Garrison, who was at one time Vanderbilt's rival in steamship management, is interred in a mosque. The tomb of the Steinways is a large granite building. A magnificent marble canopy crowns the Scribner tomb, having beneath it an angel of mercy. There is an appropriate monument to Roger Williams. Here are also buried Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing-machine, Peter Cooper, Henry Ward Beecher, James Gordon Bennett, Henry George and others of fame. The Firemen, the Pilots and the New York Volunteers all have grand monuments, the statue sentinels of the latter overlooking the bay. Among these magnificent sepulchres, probably the most magnificent is that of Charlotte Canda, an heiress, who died in early youth, her fortune being expended upon her tomb.

There is a high lookout upon the eastern border of this attractive place, where the flat land at the base of the ridge spreads for miles away to the sea. The Coney Island hotels, by the ocean side, are dim in the distance, and far over the water the Navesink Highlands close the view beyond Sandy Hook. The many railroads leading to Coney Island can be traced out, as on a map, across the level land. Over on the western side of the cemetery is another lookout, having a broad view of Brooklyn and the harbor, extending to the hills of Staten Island and the distant Jersey lowlands beyond. This is the verge of Gowanus Heights, with the busy commerce of the port spread at its base. It is this magnificent scene which the marble sentinels overlook who are guarding the Volunteers' Monument erected by the city of New York.

CONEY ISLAND.

"Who better than I? in chowder or pie, Baked, roasted, raw or fried? I hold the key to society, And am always welcome inside."

The long and narrow Coney Island sand-strip may be divided into four distinctive sections--a succession of villages chiefly composed of restaurants, lodging-houses and hotels, built along the edge of the beach, and usually on a single road behind it. In the past generation the rougher classes best knew its western end or Norton's Point, a resort of long standing. The middle of the island is a locality of higher grade--West Brighton Beach. Here great iron piers project into the ocean, being availed of for steamboat landings, restaurants and amusement places, while beneath are bathing establishments. Electricity and fireworks are used extensively to add to the attractions, and there is also a tall Observatory. The broad Ocean Parkway, coming down from Prospect Park and Brooklyn, terminates at West Brighton Beach. East of this is a partially vacant, semi-marshy space, beyond which is Brighton Beach, there being a roadway and elevated railroad connecting them. Brighton is the third section, and about a half-mile farther east is the fourth and most exclusive section--Manhattan Beach. Here are the more elaborate and costly Coney Island hotels. In all this district the power of the ocean is shown in the effect of great storms, which wash away roads, railways and buildings, and shift enormous amounts of the sands from one locality, piling them up in front of another. Huge hotels have had to be moved, in some cases bodily, a thousand feet back inland from the ocean front, to save them, and immense bulkheads constructed for protection; but sometimes the waves play havoc with these. Very much of the money spent by the visitors has to be devoted to saving the place and preventing the wreck of the great buildings. But this does not worry the visitors so much as it does the landlords. On a hot day the vast crowds arriving on the trains are poured into the hotels, and swarm out upon the grounds fronting them, where the bands play. Here the orchestras give concerts to enormous audiences. The piazzas are filled with supper-parties, the music amphitheatres are crowded, and thousands saunter over the lawns. As evening advances, the blaze of electric illumination and brilliancy of fireworks are added, and the music, bustling crowds and general hilarity give the air of a splendid festival. The bathing establishments are crowded, and many go into the surf under the brilliant illumination. Not a tree will grow, so that the view over the sea is unobstructed, and out in front is the pathway of ocean commerce into New York harbor, with the twinkling, guiding lights of Sandy Hook and its attendant lightships beyond. What a guardian to the mariner is the lighthouse:

"'Tis like a patient, faithful soul That, having reached its saintly goal, And seeing others far astray In storms of darkness and dismay, Shines out o'er life's tempestuous sea, A beacon to some sheltered lee,-- The haven of eternity."

The tall Observatory, on its airy steel framework, rises three hundred feet to overlook the wonderful scene. When the top is reached, the first impression made is by the dissonant clangor of the many bands of music below, heard with singular clearness and much more intensity of sound than on the ground. This discord ascends from all sorts of structures, generally having flat pitch-and-gravel roofs, forming a variegated carpet far below. Coney Island stretches along the ocean's edge, with the lines of foaming surf slowly rolling in. To the eastward, at Brighton and Manhattan Beaches, it bends backward like a bow, with semicircular indentations where the sea has made its inroads. To the westward, the curve of the beach is reversed, and the extreme point of the island ends in a knob having a distinctive hook bent back on the northern side. Behind the long and narrow strip of sand there are patches of grass, and much marsh and meadow, spreading away to the northward, and meandering through the marsh can be traced the crooked little tidal creek and series of lagoons separating Coney from the mainland. Far away northward runs the broad tree-bordered Ocean Parkway, with the hills of Prospect Park and the tombs and foliage of Greenwood Cemetery hiding Brooklyn, and closing the view at the distant horizon. Various railways stretch in the same direction, some crossing the bogs on extended trestle-bridges. Many carriages are moving and thousands of people walking about in the streets and open spaces beneath us, while upon the ocean side the piers extend out in front, with their steamboats sailing to or from the Narrows to the northward, around the knob and hook at Norton's Point. Far south over the water are the distant Navesink Highlands behind Sandy Hook and the low adjacent New Jersey Coast, gradually blending into the Staten Island hills to the westward. Around from the south to the east is the broad and limitless expanse of ocean, where, in the words of Heinrich Heine:

"The cloudlets are lazily sailing O'er the blue Atlantic sea."

Far to the eastward, seen across the broad Jamaica Bay, are more low sandy beaches, each with its popular resort, though all pale before the crowning glories of Coney Island. There is Rockaway, with its iron pier and railway connecting with the mainland to the northeast, also Arverne and Edgemere, the distant cottage-studded Long Beach, and the hazy sand-beaches of Far Rockaway. And as we gaze over this wondrous scene down by the water side, the freshening wind gives a pleasant foretaste of old ocean, and recalls the invocation of Barry Cornwall:

"The sea! the sea! the open sea! The blue, the fresh, the ever free! Without a mark, without a bound, It runneth the earth's wide regions round.

"I'm on the sea! I'm on the sea! I am where I would ever be, With the blue above, and the blue below, And silence wheresoe'er I go.

"I never was on the dull tame shore, But I loved the great sea more and more."

THE ENVIRONMENT OF LONG ISLAND SOUND.

THE ENVIRONMENT OF LONG ISLAND SOUND.

The Isle of Nassau -- Captain Adraien Blok -- Roodt Eylandt -- Block Island -- Great South Bay -- Great South Beach -- Jamaica Bay -- Hempstead Bay -- Fire Island and its Lighthouse -- Shinnecock -- Quogue-East Hampton -- Lyman Beecher -- John Howard Payne -- Garden City -- Jericho -- Elias Hicks -- Flushing Bay -- Throgg's Neck -- Willett's Point -- Little Neck Bay -- Great Neck -- Sands Point -- Harbor Hill -- William Cullen Bryant -- Oyster Bay -- Lloyds' Neck -- Nathan Hale -- Ronkonkoma Lake -- The Wampum Makers -- Mamaroneck -- Byram River -- The Wooden-Nutmeg State -- Brother Jonathan -- Greenwich -- Old Put's Hill -- Stamford -- Colonel Abraham Davenport -- The Dark Day -- Norwalk -- Sasco Swamp -- Fairfield -- Pequannock River -- Bridgeport -- Phineas T. Barnum -- Joyce Heth -- General Tom Thumb -- Jenny Lind -- Old Stratford -- Milford -- New Haven -- Quinnepiack -- John Davenport -- Yale College -- Killingworth -- Elihu Yale -- Steamboat Fulton -- East and West Rocks -- The Regicides -- Wallingford -- James Hillhouse -- Savin Rock -- Saybrook Point -- Guilford -- Connecticut River -- The Sachem's Head -- Thimble Islands -- Saybrook Platform -- Old Saybrook -- Thames River -- New London -- Groton -- Silas Deane -- Fort Hill -- Pequot Hill -- Defeat of the Pequots -- Pawcatuck -- Stonington -- Watch Hill Point -- Westerly -- Orient Point -- Plum Island -- Plum Gut -- Shelter Island -- The Gull Islands -- The Horse Race -- Fisher's Island -- Gardiner's Island -- Lyon Gardiner -- Captain Kidd and his Buried Treasures -- Sag Harbor -- Montauk Indians -- Money Pond -- Fort Pond Bay -- Montauk Point and its Lighthouse -- Ultima Thule -- Isle of Manisees -- Block Islanders -- Whittier -- Palatine Wreck.

THE ISLE OF NASSAU.

The first white man who sailed upon Long Island Sound was the bluff old Dutch navigator, Captain Adraien Blok. Desirous of adventure and spoil, he built upon the shore of the Battery, in 1614, the first ship ever constructed at New York, a blunt-pointed Dutch sloop-yacht of sixteen tons, which he named the "Onrest." The four little huts he had upon the shore to house his builders and crew were among the first structures of the early Manhattan colony. Fitting her out, he braved the terrors of the Hell Gate passage and started on a voyage of discovery on Long Island Sound, which he explored throughout. He found the mouth of the principal river of New England, the Connecticut, and coasting around Point Judith, entered Narragansett Bay, and cast anchor before an island with such conspicuously red-clay shores that he called it Roodt Eylandt, or the Red Island, on which Newport now stands. Then he ventured out to sea and found the bluff shores of Block Island, to which he gave his own name. Sated with exploration and loaded with spoil exchanged with the Indians, he then returned to New York and told of his wonderful adventures. His was the first vessel, manned by white men, known to have sailed upon the "Mediterranean of America," as Long Island Sound is popularly called. This grand inland sea is generally from twenty to thirty miles wide, and is enclosed by Long Island, the ancient Isle of Nassau of the Dutch, stretching for one hundred and thirty miles eastward from New York harbor, and being likened to a fish lying upon the water. It has a generally bluff northern shore along the Sound, and the southern coast, which is low and level almost to the eastern extremity, lies nearly due east and west, the island finally breaking into a chain of narrow peninsulas and islands facing the rising sun. The southern border is a continuous line of broad lagoons, separated from the Atlantic by long and narrow sand-bars. The chief lagoon is the Great South Bay, eighty miles long, fronted by the curious formation of the Great South Beach, stretching its entire length, and from one to five miles wide. Upon the outer beaches, and within the lagoons, are a succession of noted seashore resorts. Eastward, beyond Jamaica Bay and Rockaway, is Long Beach, and behind it Hempstead Bay. Then come Jones' Beach and Oak Island, with Massapequa, Amityville and Lindenhurst behind them. Then we are at Babylon and Bayshore, with the Great South Bay fronted by Fire Island, and beyond it the long sand-strip of the Great South Beach. The famous lighthouse of Fire Island, the guiding beacon to New York, one hundred and sixty-eight feet high, is flanked by summer hotels, and its flashing electric light of twenty-three million candlepower is the most powerful on the Atlantic Coast. The Great South Bay spreads far eastward past Patchogue to Moriches, and then comes Quogue and the Hamptons, where the level land rises into the Shinnecock hills. At the eastern extremity are Amagansett and Montauk. It is a long coast, fringed with lights to point the mariner's way into New York harbor.

THE NORTHERN LONG ISLAND SHORE.

The steamboat entering Long Island Sound from New York, after passing Hell Gate and crossing Flushing Bay, emerges from the strait of East River between Throgg's Neck and Whitestone. Upon the end of Throgg's Neck, the jutting point has the graystone ramparts and surmounting earthworks of its ancient guardian, Fort Schuyler. Thrust forward from the Long Island shore, as if to meet it, is the protruding headland of Willett's Point, the Government torpedo station. Here also is an old stone fort down by the waterside, with the extensive ramparts of a modern fort on the bluff above. These are the defensive works commanding the approach to New York from Long Island Sound. In the neighboring havens are favorite anchorages for yachts. Beyond are the expansive waters of the Sound, and far off southward, thrust into the land, are the deep recesses of Little Neck Bay, made famous by its clams, and protected to the eastward by the curiously bifurcated peninsula of Great Neck. The northern Long Island shore is very irregular, and rises into hills. Bold peninsulas and deep bays form it, the surface being corrugated into hillocks and valleys, and penetrated by narrow, shallow harbors. The waves of the Sound have eroded the shores into steep and often precipitous bluffs of gravel, sometimes rising a hundred feet above the water, where narrow beaches, strewn with boulders, border them. At Sands Point is a great peninsula protruding in high sandy bluffs, and behind it is the highest mountain on Long Island, Harbor Hill, rising three hundred and fifty feet above the village of Roslyn, at the head of the deeply indented Hempstead Harbor, where lived at his home of Cedarmere, for many years, William Cullen Bryant, who now sleeps in the little cemetery.

ENTERING NEW ENGLAND.

Coming out of New York on the northern shore of Long Island Sound, the land is found to be profusely sprinkled with outcropping rocks, a development so universal that to one place the Indians gave the name of Mamaroneck, meaning "the place of rolling-stones." These rocks are gathered into piles for fences, which cross the surface in all directions, and it requires serious effort to till the stony land. About twenty-five miles from New York is the Byram River, the Connecticut boundary, the old saying being that New England stretches "from Quoddy Head to Byram River." This original Yankee land, though the smallest section of the United States, has made the deepest impress upon the American character. They have not enjoyed the agricultural advantages of other sections, the bleak climate, poor soil and lavish distribution of rocks and sterility making farming hard work with meagre results, so that the chief Yankee energy has been devoted to the development of manufactures, literature, commerce and the fisheries; this wonderful race who have had to practically live by their wits having admirably succeeded. Crossing Byram River brings us into the "Land of Steady Habits," Connecticut, the "Wooden-Nutmeg State," the special home of "Yankee Notions," which gave the country the original personation of "Brother Jonathan" in Governor Jonathan Trumbull, who was so useful to General Washington. Consulting him in many emergencies, Washington was wont to remark, "Let us hear what Brother Jonathan says," a phrase finally popularly adopted by making him the national impersonation.

Connecticut has the great Puritan College of the country--Yale--ruled by the Congregationalists. It has varied manufactures, to which its abundant water-powers contribute, and in which nearly all its people are engaged, its methods being largely the inventions of its own sons, of whom three are prominent--Eli Whitney of the cotton-gin, Samuel Colt of the revolver, and Charles Goodyear of india-rubber fame. When De Tocqueville was in America, he was much impressed by the development of the inventive genius, education and political force of the State, which he described as a little yellow spot on the map, and at a dinner he proposed a toast, saying, in his quaint, broken English: "And now for my grand sentiment: Connect-de-coot--de leetle yellow spot dat make de clock-peddler, de school-master and de Senator; de first give you time, de second tell you what to do with him, and de third make your law and civilization." Connecticut gets more patents proportionately than any other State, one to eight hundred inhabitants being annually granted; it makes clocks for all the world, and leads in india-rubber and elastic goods, in hardware and myriads of "Yankee notions," besides being well in the front for sewing-machines, arms and war material. It is named after the chief New England river, and its rugged surface is diversified by long ridges of hills and deep valleys, running generally from north to south, being the prolongation of mountain ranges and intervales that are beyond the northern border. The picturesque Housatonic comes from the Massachusetts Berkshire hills down through the western counties; the centre is crossed by the Connecticut Valley, which has great fertility and beautiful scenery, while in the eastern section the Quinnebaug River makes a deep valley, and, flowing into the Thames, seeks the Sound at New London. These many hills make many streams, all having water-powers, around which cluster numerous busy factories.

The southwestern town of Connecticut is Greenwich, and in front Greenwich Point is thrust out into the Sound, while, as the Yankee land is entered by railway, on a high hill stands the Puritan outpost, seen from afar--a stately graystone Congregational Church with its tall spire. The ancient Greenwich village was built on the hillside at Horse Neck, and it was here, in 1779, that General Putnam swiftly galloped down the rude rocky stairway leading from the old church, to get away from the British dragoons, on what has since been known as "Old Put's Hill," and they were too much astonished either to chase or shoot him. Beyond is Stamford, a busy factory town, where lived in the eighteenth century Colonel Abraham Davenport, described as "a man of stern integrity and generous benevolence." He was a legislator, and when, on May 19, 1780, the memorable "Dark Day" came in New England, some one, fearing it was the day of judgment, proposed that the House adjourn. Davenport opposed it, saying, "The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty; I wish therefore that candles may be brought." This scene has been immortalized by Whittier. The town of Norwalk is beyond, another nest of busy mills, spreading upward on the hill-slopes from the Sound. The original settlers bought from the Indians in 1640 a tract extending "one day's north walk" from the Sound, and hence the name. Fine oysters are gathered in the spacious bay, and the people make shoes and hats, locks and door-knobs. On the lowlands to the eastward the Pequot Indian nation, once ruling all this part of New England, the name meaning "the destroyers," was finally overpowered in 1637 by the Colonial troops in the Sasco Swamp, now a cultivated farm, with almost the only highly fertile land seen in the immediate region. Most of the Pequots were captured and sold as slaves in the West Indies. Beyond is tranquil Fairfield, embowered in trees and introduced by a rubber-factory, its green-bordered streets lined with cottages, and church-spires rising among the groves, while along the shore it has the finest beach on Long Island Sound.

BRIDGEPORT, OLD STRATFORD AND MILFORD.

Pequannock, the "dark river" of the Indians, flows out of the hills to an inlet of the Sound, where the enormous mills of the active city of Bridgeport have gathered a population of over fifty thousand people, in a hive containing some of the world's greatest establishments for constructing sewing-machines and firearms, building carriages, and making cutlery, corsets and soaps, while other goods also occupy attention. The grand Seaside Park esplanade overlooks the harbor, and towards the north the city stretches up the slopes into Golden Hill, named from its glittering mica deposits, where magnificent streets display splendid buildings. When the Pequots were exterminated in 1637, colonists founded this town, gradually crowding the Paugusset Indians, who owned the land, into a small reservation on Golden Hill. The great establishments to-day are the Wheeler and Wilson and Howe Sewing-Machine Works, Sharp's Rifle Factory and the Union Metallic Cartridge Company; and Bridgeport is also the headquarters of the chief American circus. The stately and high-towered mansion of Waldemere fronts the park, and was the home of Bridgeport's best-known townsman, the veteran showman, Phineas T. Barnum. Born in Connecticut, at Bethel, in 1810, he died at Bridgeport in 1891. He first developed the financial advantages of amusing the public, and possibly humbugging them on a grand scale, and by working upon his oft-quoted theory that "the people liked to be humbugged," twice amassed a large fortune. In early life he wandered over the country earning a precarious livelihood in various occupations, and in Philadelphia in 1834 began his career as a showman. He bought for 00 a colored slave-woman, Joyce Heth, represented to be the nurse of George Washington and one hundred and sixty-one years old. From her exhibition his receipts reached 00 a week, and she died the next year. In 1842 he began exhibiting Charles S. Stratton, "General Tom Thumb," a native of Bridgeport, born in 1832, whose size and growth were as usual until his seventh month, when he had a stature of twenty-eight inches, and ceased to grow. Barnum exhibited him in the United States, France and England, and attracted world-wide notoriety. Barnum started the American fashion of paying extravagant sums to opera-singers, in 1849 engaging Jenny Lind to sing at one hundred and fifty concerts in America for 00 a night, the gross receipts of a nine months' tour being 2,000. He subsequently had his fortune swept away through endorsing ,000,000 notes for a manufacturing establishment that went down in the panic of 1857. His fortunes were revived, however; he had museums in the leading cities, and in his later life had the "Greatest Show on Earth," which set out every spring from Bridgeport. Tom Thumb in 1863 married Lavinia Warren of Middleboro', Massachusetts, a dwarf like himself, and he died in 1882.

To the eastward a short distance, and in sharp contrast with active Bridgeport, is quiet old Stratford, with Stratford Point protruding in front into the Sound, at the entrance of the stately and placid Housatonic, which comes down through the meadowland just beyond the village. Here there are neither watering-place hotel nor busy factory to disturb the ancient order of things, encumber the greensward, or encroach upon the sleepy and comfortable houses, where one may dream away in the twilight, under the shade of grand trees that are even older than the town. Stratford is much the same now as when settled by a Puritan colony from Massachusetts in 1639, the leader and pastor being Adam Blackman, whom Cotton Mather called "a Nazarite purer than snow and whiter than milk." Across the patches of marshland, adjoining the Housatonic, is Milford, its half-mile-long stretch of village green neatly enclosed, and its houses upon the bank of the silvery Wap-o-wang, back of which spread the wide streets lined by rows of overarching elms. A colony from Milford in England settled here in 1639 and soon crowded the Indians off the land, establishing the primitive church, which was the usual beginning of New England settlements. Then, true to the American instinct, they proceeded to hold a convention, the result being the adoption of the following platform:

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