the fashionable quarter.
Meantime, where now thousands of emigrants daily disembark, and the
offices of ocean steamships indicate the facility and frequency of
Transatlantic travel, the Indian chiefs smoked the pipe of peace with
the victorious colonists under the shadow of Fort Amsterdam, and the
latter held fairs there, or gathered, for defence and pastime, round the
little oasis of the metropolitan desert where carmen now read "The Sun."
No. 1 was the Kennedy House, subsequently the tavern of Mrs.
Koch,--whose Dutch husband was an officer in the Indian wars,--and was
successively the head-quarters of Clinton, Cornwallis, and Washington,
and at last the Prime Mansion; and farther up was Mrs. Ryckman's
boarding-house,--genial sojourn of Irving, and the scene of his early
pen-craft and youthful companionships, when "New York was more handy,
and everybody knew everybody, and there was more good-fellowship and
ease of manners." Those were the days of ropewalks and "selectmen," of
stage-coaches and oil-lamps. The Yankee invasion had scarcely superseded
the Knickerbocker element. The Free Academy was undreamed of; and the
City Hotel assemblies were the embryo Fifth Avenue balls. An old
Directory or a volume of Valentine's Manual, compared with the latest
Metropolitan Guide-Book and Trow's last issue, will best illustrate the
difference between Broadway then and now.

But it is not so much the more substantial memorials as the "dissolving
views" that give its peculiar character to the street. Entered at the
lower extremity by the newly-arrived European, on a rainy morning, the
first impression is the reverse of grand or winsome. The squalor of the
docks and the want of altitude in the buildings, combined with the
bustle and hubbub, strike the eye as repulsive; but as the scene grows
familiar and is watched under the various aspects produced by different
seasons, weather, and hours of the day, it becomes more and more
significant and attractive. Indeed, there is probably no street in the
world subject to such violent contrasts. It is one thing on a brilliant
and cool October day and another in July. White cravats and black coats
mark "Anniversary week"; broad brims and drab, the "Yearly Meeting" of
the Friends; the "moving day" of the householders, the "opening day" of
the milliners, Christmas and New Year's, sleighing-time and spring,
early morning and midnight, the Sabbath and week-days, a cold spell and
the "heated term,"