A Long Walk in Old New York

NEW YORK — Con Edison, the utility company, used to post signs at its construction sites that said “Dig We Must.” The slogan was meant to excuse inconvenience, but it also captured the frenetic spirit of the Big Apple. The city’s always being blasted, jackhammered and rebuilt. It’s hard to believe there’s anything left of the past.

But as writer Kevin Baker discovered, a remarkable amount of old New York is still with us.

Baker, 40, is the author of “Dreamland” (HarperCollins), an entertaining new historical novel set in New York circa 1910. The story features real-life gangsters, Tammany bosses, labor organizers and Coney Island freaks, and it’s a vivid, sights-and-smells portrait of the period.

As he researched the book, Baker was amazed to find so many significant buildings, public spaces and other icons of the past still standing in lower Manhattan. He began exploring these sites on foot, then started taking friends along. Now his periodic walking tours have received enough word-of-mouth publicity to be something of an event among writers, history buffs and others who savor the fun of knocking around Gotham City. I joined him on a recent drizzly morning.

Note: We did a lot of walking, but the trip is easily broken up with stops for food or drink.

We started at Union Square, Broadway and 17th Street. A park since 1811, it has seen countless political and labor rallies over the years. Baker directed my eye to the northeast corner of the square, where sits the New York Film Academy and Union Square Theater. This building was the fourth and last Tammany Hall, dedicated in 1929. Tammany, today synonymous with big-city bossism and political corruption, faded in mid-century. But the power this Democratic machine once wielded was such that it was able to hold the 1868 Democratic National Convention in its building, then nearby on East 14th Street. Its presidential candidate, one Horatio Seymour, was crushed by Ulysses S. Grant, but Tammany still called the shots.

We walked a few blocks west to Fourth Avenue, then south to Cooper Union, still a fine (and free) engineering school, built in 1859 by one of the country’s truly remarkable entrepreneurs and philanthropists, Peter Cooper.

We walked west to Astor Place and across to Eighth Street, and continued to University Place. There, on the right side of the street, we walked through a gate into Washington Mews, a marvelously preserved early 19th century cobblestone lane lined with two- and three-story houses.

The end of the street brought us to Fifth Avenue. We took a left and walked through Washington Square Park, in the heart of Greenwich Village. It really was a village in the 1830s, to which people escaped from the squalor and cholera of the city, then much farther downtown.

We walked to the west side of the park and south a couple of blocks on MacDougal Street, one of the great Village thoroughfares, and stopped at Cafe Figaro, a classic coffeehouse.

We ambled back to Washington Square, taking a right along the park and a left on Greene Street. At the corner of Greene and Washington Place stands the building where the Triangle Shirtwaist fire claimed 146 lives in 15 minutes on the Saturday afternoon of March 25, 1911. The company was on the eighth, ninth and 10th floors. The city’s fire ladders only reached the sixth floor, and the owners kept the stairway doors locked. The disaster led to the passage of 56 reform bills, and the building is the site of an annual labor rally.

We walked over to Broadway and crossed onto Great Jones Street--that’s Baker’s favorite New York street name--to reach the Bowery.

Three blocks south on the Bowery we turned right on Prince Street for two blocks to Mott Street and Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Built in 1809, it was the seat of the Archdiocese of New York before the new St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue was finished in 1879.

Perhaps the most colorful leader of the old church was Archbishop John J. “Dagger John” Hughes, one tough prelate. When Catholic churches were being burned by anti-immigrant rioters in Philadelphia, Boston and other cities in 1844, Hughes organized his flock to guard their churches. He told the city fathers that if one Catholic church burned in New York, the city would be “another Moscow”--a reference to that city’s fiery welcome for Napoleon. Not a single church was harmed.

We walked south on Mott to Broome Street, took a left and walked about eight blocks to Orchard Street and one of the most unusual of New York’s museums. The Tenement Museum has a visitors center at 90 Orchard St. and an actual three-story, 1863 tenement building at 97 Orchard St.

The building was abandoned in 1935, when the landlord couldn’t meet Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s new law that every apartment have a bathroom. It stayed buttoned up for 50 years and was discovered intact in the mid-1980s. By finding relatives of residents and a couple of former residents, the museum staff has reassembled apartments as they existed at various times in the building’s history. “There’s nothing like it for understanding how the people lived,” said my guide, Baker, whose book’s heroine, Esther, lives in a tenement on Orchard Street.

We walked east to Essex Street, then south a block or two to Straus Square. Off the square are two buildings of note. The Seward Park branch of the New York Public Library is where thousands of Jewish immigrant children lined up around the block to get books. Across the street is the six-story building that housed the Jewish Daily Forward, which once sold almost 250,000 papers a day in Yiddish. Editor Abraham Cahan told his readers how to be good Americans and ran a “Gallery of Missing Men” to shame men who had abandoned their families.

We headed west on Division Street and walked through Chinatown, continuing west to Centre Street. We took a left and were soon at Federal Plaza and City Hall Park.

Baker pointed out the Tweed Courthouse, a pleasant Georgian edifice behind City Hall. Built by notorious Tammany boss William Darcy Tweed, the old New York County courthouse went up in 1862-70. The building was originally supposed to cost $250,000. Tweed brought it in for slightly more than $13 million, a staggering sum at the time, most of which was stolen from the project.

We walked south on Broadway along the west side of City Hall Park, stopping at the Woolworth Building to see the ornate lobby for which the building has been dubbed “the Cathedral of Commerce.” We continued to St. Paul’s Chapel, where George Washington worshiped on the day he became president, and Trinity Church, where Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton are buried.

We took a left on Wall Street and walked a block to Nassau Street. On the left is Federal Hall, the site of Washington’s swearing-in as the first president in 1789. Across Wall Street is the Morgan Guaranty Trust building, its granite face still pockmarked from an anarchist bombing in 1920. The apparent target, J.P. Morgan Jr., was in Europe. But 33 people were killed and 400 injured.

Now just a couple of blocks from the tip of the island, we finished our trip with a walk down Broad Street, stopping at Fraunces Tavern, where Washington bade farewell to his officers, then turning west to the U.S. Custom House and, across Battery Park, Castle Clinton. This former fort once was the city’s immigration intake station; now it’s mostly known as the place to buy boat tickets for the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

A 1980 Columbia University graduate, Baker says he’s a student of New York because “you ought to know about the place you live.” He says New York has had only two great mayors, DeWitt Clinton, in the early 1800s, and La Guardia, and he is not a particular fan of the incumbent, Rudolph Giuliani. But reflecting on the city’s rough past, he allows that New York today is safer and better managed than it ever was. Which, if nothing else, makes the walk more appealing.