Fifth Avenue (New York, N.Y.); Streets -- New York (State) -- New York
Of more serious aspect is Mr. James Lane Allen, whose tales of the
Kentucky Blue Grass Region I hope will be read as they deserve for many
generations to come. Rex Beach swings along musing perhaps on the
solitudes of Lake Hopatcong. Rupert Hughes studies the faces in the
Avenue throng with the hope of finding the inspiration for a title for
the projected novel that will be more eccentric, if possible, than the
title of the last. Jesse Lynch Williams and Arthur Train seek rest after
their perambulatory efforts in the luxurious seclusion of the University
Club at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street--the "Morgue" of the
flippant--where, from the windows, the former first saw My Lost Duchess,
and the latter discovered the possibilities of McAllister. A few years
ago in one of the business buildings that had broken into the
residential stretch below Fourteenth Street, was the office that F.
Marion Crawford always maintained for use during the occasional visits
he made to New York. The tall figure of the author of the Saracinesca
novels was a familiar sight on the Avenue of the late nineties and the
first years of the present century. But his stays were brief. The call
of the vineyard-covered mountains about Sorrento was too strong.
From time to time the Avenue has seen literary visitors whose appearance
could not be regarded as a temporary home coming. Twenty years have
passed since Rudyard Kipling paid us his last visit, and it was a very
different Fifth Avenue from the street of today that he knew. But even
then it was a part of the town that moved him to dreams of "heavenly
loot." There was, until a year or two ago at least, in an office at
Fourth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, an old cane-bottomed chair. Once it
had been in a room on the seventh story of a building at Fifth Avenue
and Twenty-first Street, and there it had been known as the Barrie
Chair, for in it the creator of Thrums had been wont to curl himself up,
and from its comfortable depths, peer through the window down at the
busy sidewalk below. In the church-going crowds of a Fifth Avenue Sunday
there are many who recall the sturdy figure of Dr. John Watson, the Ian
MacLaren of the "Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush" tales, who on several
occasions occupied a New York pulpit. The last time those who sat under
him saw a man apparently in the full vigour of rugged health. Yet a few
days later brought the news of his sudden death, far away from the
heather of his Scotland. The author of "The Beloved Vagabond" is no more
a stranger to the Avenue than he is to Bond Street, or the Rue de la
Paix; and Arnold Bennett has recorded impressions that are at once
disparaging and polite; and Jeffery Farnol used to trudge it,
impecunious and unknown, before "The Broad Highway" came to strike the
note of popular favour.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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