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Source: - Artemus Ward
(CHARLES FARRAR BROWNE) A Biography and Bibliography BY DON C. SEITZ 1919 (Don
Carlos Seitz 1862-1935)
(original copyright expired)
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The long island
of Manhattan seems at every point in history to have staked a claim on the
horizon and built its boulevards and structures toward that point towards the
rising, setting or noonday New York City sun. And later upward to that very same star itself.
I would guess that around
the middle of the American Civil War, that Manhattan was headed toward that
turn in Broadway at Grace Church around Tenth Street and headed further uptown to
Union Square and uncharted points beyond, and toward those then great sheep meadows and cow
pastures of Central Park.
The literary
and artsy cognoscenti of the day, the then Bohemians of New York in a watered
down crowd, thinned out by the ranks of war, kept up the spirits and voice of
culture around the hub of Broadway and Bleecker Street and referenced below.
The spirit
or flavor of the moment, the "in" people of the moment, might have been best described by
a favorite of the Walt Whitman’s Pfaff cellar crowd Ada Clare defining a Bohemian as a:
"cosmopolite, with a general
sympathy for the fine arts, and for all things above and beyond convention".
http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/pfaffs/p23/
http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/pfaffs/p23/
“…The De Soto, a restaurant on Bleecker Street just
east of Broadway, was his favorite dining-place.
Here
there was usually a coterie of choice spirits to aid
in
enjoyment of the meal. One of these survives in the
person of George H. Story, the eminent artist, long
curator of paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, whose wife, Eunice Emerson Kimball, had been a
fellow-member with A. W. in the Thespian Club at
Norway, Maine, long before.
Dining here one day with Story, David Wambold,
the minstrel, Dan Bryant, and some others, one of
the unknown persisted in making some boresome,
child-
ish remarks in competition with the genuine wits.
He became a nuisance, but was silenced at last by
A. W., who took out his note-book and gravely
inquired,
"What is your age, sir?"
Mrs. Story was a relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
who had been a familiar figure in Waterford, and was
a sister of Charles P. and Hannibal I. Kimball, both
men of note in Norway when young and who later in
life had distinguished careers, the first as a great
manufacturer in Chicago and the second as the
recreator
of Atlanta, Georgia.
One night the Storys went to the show, sitting well
up front. Cracking a joke that elicited much applause,
Artemus explained, much to the confusion of the
lady,
that it was an old one, first used in Norway, Maine,
when he and "Eune Kimball played together in
the
Thespian Society!" …
[169]
- Artemus Ward (CHARLES FARRAR BROWNE) A Biography and Bibliography BY DON C. SEITZ 1919 - https://archive.org/stream/artemuswardchar00seituoft#page/169/mode/1up
http://archive.org/stream/artemuswardchar00seituoft/artemuswardchar00seituoft_djvu.txt
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