The ways of the hour

In one respect, there is a visible improvement in the goodly town of Manhattan, and that is in its architecture. Of its growth, there has never been any question, while many have disputed its pretension to improvement. A vast expansion of mediocrity, though useful and imposing, rarely satisfies either the judgment or the taste; those who possess these qualities, requiring a nearer approach to what is excellent, than can ever be found beneath the term just mentioned.

A town which is built of red bricks, that are faced with white marble, the whole garnished with green blinds, can never have but one outward sign—that of tawdry vulgarity. But this radical defect is slowly disappearing from the streets of Manhattan; and those who build, are getting to understand that architecture, like statuary, will not admit of strong contrasts in colours. Horace Walpole tells us of a certain old Lord Pembroke, who blackened the eyes of the gods and goddesses in the celebrated gallery at Wilton, and prided himself on the achievement, as if he had been another Phidias. There have been thousands of those who have laboured in the spirit of this Earl of Pembroke in the streets of all the American towns; but travelling, hints, books and example, are slowly effecting a change; and whole squares may now be seen in which the eye rests with satisfaction on blinds, facings and bricks, all brought to the same pleasing, sober, architectural tint. We regard this as the first step, in advance, that has been made in the right direction, so far as the outward aspect of the town is concerned, and look forward, with hope, to the day when Manhattan shall have banished its rag-fair finery altogether, and the place will become as remarkable for the chaste simplicity of its streets, as they have hitherto been for their marked want of taste.

With this great town, mottled as it is, in people as well as in hues, with its native population collected from all parts of this vast republic, and its European representatives amounting to scores of thousands, we shall have much to do in the succeeding pages. Our researches, however, will be bestowed more on things moral than on things physical; and we shall endeavour to carry the reader with us through scenes that, we regret to say, are far more characteristic than novel.

In one of the cross streets that communicate with Broadway, and below Canal, stands a dwelling that is obnoxious to all the charges of bad taste to which there has already been allusion, as well as to certain others that have not yet been named, at all. A quarter of a century since, or within the first twenty years of its own existence, the house in question would have been regarded as decidedly patrician, though it is now lost amid the thousands of similar abodes that have arisen since its own construction. There it stands, with its red bricks periodically painted redder; its marble facings, making a livery of red turned up with white; its green blinds, its high stoop, its half-buried and low basement, and all its neatness and comfort, notwithstanding its flagrant architectural sins. Into this building we now propose to enter, at the very early hour of eight in the morning.

The principal floor was divided, as usual, between a dining and a drawing-room, with large communicating doors. This was the stereotyped construction of all Manhattanese dwellings of any pretension, a quarter of a century since; and that of Mr. Thomas Dunscomb, the owner and occupant of the house in question, had been built in rigid conformity with the fashion of its day. ’Squire Dunscomb, as this gentleman was termed in all the adjacent country counties, where he was well known as a reliable and sound legal adviser; Mr. Thomas Dunscomb, as he was styled by various single ladies, who wondered he never married; or Tom Dunscomb, as he was familiarly called by a herd of unyoked youths, all of whom were turned of sixty, was a capital fellow in each of his many characters. As a lawyer, he was as near the top of the bar as a man can be, who never had any pretensions to be an orator, and whose longest effort seldom exceeded half an hour. Should the plan of placing eloquence in hobbles reach our own bar, his habit of condensing, his trick of getting multum in parvo, may yet bring him to the very summit; for he will have an immense advantage over those who, resembling a country buck at a town ball, need the whole field to cut their flourishes in. As a man of the world, he was well-bred, though a little cynical, very agreeable, most especially with the ladies, and quite familiar with all the better habits of the best-toned circles of the place. As a boon companion, Tom Dunscomb was an immense favourite, being particularly warm-hearted, and always ready for any extra eating or drinking. In addition to these leading qualities, Dunscomb was known to be rich, having inherited a very tolerable estate, as well as having added much to his means, by a large and lucrative practice. If to these circumstances we add that of a very prepossessing personal appearance, in which age was very green, the reader has all that is necessary for an introduction to one of our principal characters.

Though a bachelor, Mr. Dunscomb did not live alone. He had a nephew and a niece in his family, the orphan children of a sister who had now been dead many years. They bore the name of Wilmeter, which, in the family parlance, was almost always pronounced Wilmington. It was Jack Wilmington, and Sally Wilmington, at school, at home, and with all their intimates; though Mr. John Wilmeter and Miss Sarah Wilmeter were often spoken of in their little out-door world; it being rather an affectation of the times to prove, in this manner, that one retains some knowledge of the spelling-book. We shall write the name as it is written by the parties themselves, forewarning the reader that if he desire to pronounce it by the same family standard, he must take the unauthorized spelling as a guide. We own ourselves to a strong predilection for old familiar sounds, as well as old familiar faces.

At half-past 8, A. M., of a fine morning, late in May, when the roses were beginning to show their tints amid the verdure of the leaves, in Mr. Dunscomb’s yard, the three individuals just mentioned were at the breakfast-table of what it is the fashion of New York to term a dining-room. The windows were open, and a soft and fragrant air filled the apartment. We have said that Mr. Dunscomb was affluent, and he chose to enjoy his means, not à la Manhattan, in idle competition with the nouveaux riches, but in a more quiet and rational way. His father had occupied lots, ‘running through,’ as it is termed; building his house on one street and his stables on the other; leaving himself a space in the rear of the former, that was prodigious for a town so squeezed into parallelograms of twenty-five feet by a hundred. This open space was of the usual breadth, but it actually measured a hundred and fifty feet in length, an area that would have almost justified its being termed a ‘park,’ in the nomenclature of the town. This yard Sarah had caused to be well garnished with shrubbery, and, for its dimensions, it was really a sort of oasis, in that wilderness of bricks.