A tour around New York, and My summer acre; being the recreations of MrFelix Oldboy . of changes caused by an-nexation. To my young mind the Bowery was al-ways associated with the excitement of the venerablebut lively institution known as Bulls Head. I canrecall that institution as it existed on Third Avenue,where a bank stands as a monument to its name, andthe lep-ends that I have heard in connection with the A TOUR AROUND NEW YORK 129 old Bulls Head Tavern are legion. From the time ofour Dutch ancestors until modern monopoly sweptthe business into the New Jersey abattoir, New Yorkdid not kno
A tour around New York, and My summer acre; being the recreations of MrFelix Oldboy . of changes caused by an-nexation. To my young mind the Bowery was al-ways associated with the excitement of the venerablebut lively institution known as Bulls Head. I canrecall that institution as it existed on Third Avenue,where a bank stands as a monument to its name, andthe lep-ends that I have heard in connection with the A TOUR AROUND NEW YORK 129 old Bulls Head Tavern are legion. From the time ofour Dutch ancestors until modern monopoly sweptthe business into the New Jersey abattoir, New Yorkdid not know how to exist without its cattle market,and when it disappeared one of the liveliest featuresof the citys trade was blotted out. The Bowery Theatre was erected on the site of theBulls Head Tavern in 1826, the Mayor laying the cor-ner-stone. One of my correspondents writes of thistheatre that it was burned to the ground in the sum-mer of 1828, at an early hour of the evening. Whenits huge columns fell it shook the whole city fromcentre to circumference, as I well remember. Alarms. AN OLD GOOSENECK ENGINE of fire were frequent even then, sometimes reachingfive hundred in a year. The firemen worked well(and, it must be admitted, they fought well, too), buttheir methods were not sufficient to check such firesas the burning of the Park Theatre and the Bowerymade. When the Park Theatre burned, the site wasabandoned as a place of amusement, but the BoweryTheatre rose again from its ashes, and kept its oldfeatures unchanged for half a 130 A TOUR AROUND NEW YORK The street itself has always been a great place for shows. One of my earliest memories of the Boweryis standing in front of a brilliantly painted canvas onthat thoroughfare, not far from Chatham Square, star-ing in open-eyed wonder at the pictures of a calf withtwo heads, warranted to move two ways at the sametime, and a pig of enormous proportions. This is acharacteristic of the street to this day. Then, too,there wa
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectnewyorknybuildingsst
