“From this crossing place I followed a well-beaten path leading from the city to the then village of Greenwich, passing over open and partly fenced lots and fields, not at that time under cultivation, and remote from any dwelling-house now remembered by me except Colonel Aaron Burr’s former country-seat, on elevated ground, called Richmond Hill, which was about one hundred or one hundred and fifty yards west of this path, and was then occupied as a place of refreshment for gentlemen taking a drive from the city.”

In 1820, if I am not mistaken, the levelling (and lowering) process was complete.  Richmond Hill’s sad old windows looked no longer down upon a beautiful country world, but out on swiftly growing city blocks.  In 1831, a few art-loving souls tried to found a high-class theatre in the old house,—­the Richmond Hill Theatre.  Among them was Lorenzo Daponte, who had been exiled from Venice, and wrote witty satirical verse.

The little group of sincere idealists wanted this theatre to be a real home of high art, and a prize was offered for the best “poetical address on the occasion,”—­that is, the opening of the theatre.  The judges and contestants sat in one of the historic reception rooms that had seen such august guests as Washington and Burr, Adams and Hamilton, Talleyrand and Louis Philippe.

Our good friend General Wetmore can tell us of this at first hand for he was one of those present.

“It was,” he says, “an afternoon to be remembered.  As the long twilight deepened into evening, the shadows of departed hosts and long-forgotten guests seemed to hover ’round the dilapidated halls and the dismantled chambers.”

The winner of the prize was Fitz-Greene Halleck; and it was not at all a bad poem, though too long to quote here.

The theatre was never a brilliant success.  To be sure, such sterling actors as Mr. and Mrs. John Barnes and the Hilsons played there, and during a short season of Italian opera, in which Daponte was enthusiastically interested, Adelaide Pedrotti was the prima donna.  And one of New York’s first “opera idols” sang there—­Luciano Fornasari, generally acclaimed by New York ladies as the handsomest man who had ever been in the city!  For a wonder, he wasn’t a tenor, only a basso, but they adored him just the same.

Somehow it grows hard to write of Richmond Hill—­a hill no longer, but a shabby playhouse, which was not even successful.  The art-loving impresarios spent the little money they had very speedily and there was no more Richmond Hill Theatre.

Then a circus put up there—­yes, a circus—­in the same house which had made even sensible Mrs. Adams dream dreams, and where Theo Burr had entertained her Indian Chief!  In 1842, it was the headquarters of a menagerie, pure and simple.

In 1849—­thank God—­its nightmare of desecration was over.  It was pulled down, and they built red-brick houses on its grave and left its ancient memories to sleep in peace.