On Ninth Street, just west of the Charles De Rhams house, which was formerly the Henry Brevoort house, are the two or three buildings that in bygone days made up the Hotel Griffou.  There, twenty years or so ago, the late Thomas A. Janvier lived and studied the queer Latin-American types that went into his stories of the Efferanti family.  There also William Dean Howells frequently dined, and the late Edmund Clarence Stedman and Richard Watson Gilder went from time to time.  Then the older and more dignified men drifted away, and the tables in the dining room rang with the laughter and high talk of a younger group, known as the “Griffou Push.”  Brave dreams were there, and limitless ambitions, and some achievement.  But in many cases Pallida mors came knocking all too soon, and those who lived sought other environments, and the “Push” was no more, and the little hotel became a memory of yesterday.

There were literary associations about the old Studio Building in Tenth Street long before the “Old Masters” of New York went there to work, and Carmencita came to dance in Chase’s studio.  In the big brown structure Henry T. Tuckerman once lived, and kept his library, and wrote “The Criterion,” and the “Book of the Artists,” and entertained his friends of the world of letters; and there Fitzjames O’Brien, the genial Fitz, the “gipsy of letters,” the author of “The Diamond Lens,” visited him.  Almost across the street, in a little rear wooden house that was to serve as the New York home of F. Hopkinson Smith’s Colonel Carter of Cartersville, was at one time the quarters of the Tile Club, where, in the golden days, men ceased to be known by the stiff and formal names used in more ceremonious surroundings, and became instead the Owl, or the Griffin, or the Pagan, or the Chestnut, or the Puritan, or the O’Donoghue, or the Bone, or the Grasshopper, or the Marine, or the Terrapin, or the Gaul, or the Bulgarian, or Briareus, or Sirius, or Cadmius, or Polyphemus.

A little off the Avenue, on East Twentieth Street, was the home of the Cary sisters, Alice and Phoebe; and to the unpretentious little brick dwelling of Sunday evenings repaired Stoddard, and Whittier, and Aldrich, and Ripley, and Herman Melville, and Mary L. Booth, who afterwards became Mrs. Lamb, and wrote the “History of New York,” and Samuel G. Goodrich, the famous “Peter Parley,” and Alice Haven, popular writer of juvenile tales, and Justin McCarthy, and James Parton, husband of “Fanny Fern,” himself one of these rare scribes of his age whose writing can be genuinely enjoyed by readers of the present generation, and occasionally, grim old Horace Greeley, who, if, as he said, in the course of forty years had never been able to get a day off to go “a-fishing,” managed, now and then, to find an evening of leisure in which to divert himself with the pleasant, bookish talk at No. 53.  A salon as “was a salon”—­that of the Cary girls.  With the vast, unwieldy city of today in mind we wonder