by O.O. McIntyre

Kentucky Post/November 10, 1928

New York, Nov. 10.—There is a clinging mustiness and rare charm about old Chelsea that is found in those hidden and half forgotten streets. A shabby gentility that asks least of all sympathy. The heart of Chelsea is on 19^th Street, near Ninth Avenue.

It seems fitting it was here Clement Moore wrote “T’was the Night Before Christmas.” Chelsea encompasses that air of tranquility. On 23^rd Street is a quaint row of tall plastered houses with high ceiled rooms set in fairly deep front yards—about the only yards left in town.

Each floor has its deep window in the French manner, with perhaps a balcony. Friendly dogs nap on stone steps and cats are coiled in that ease only cats achieve on window seats. This was once Chelsea’s Mayfair and is the locale for Edith Whaton’s “Age of Innocence.”

Chelsea has a few transplated foreign patches. Many residents are those whos families lived there before them and who were innured to wealth and social prestige. They are now relics of an opulent past with a Victoria halo—the last of the dwindling aristocrats.

In the dusk are lace-capped women at windows reading the Bible. Children are scrubbed clean and freshly frocked to play their games on the lawn. There are taffy pullings and apple bobbins and Christmas and Halloween are observed in old-time fashion. A few homes receive “paying guests” with a diffidence.

It has all become a little drab and the stranger rarely goes there. The once magnificent hotels are now family hospices redolent with a quaint antiquity. Still standing are the modest frame houses of Chelsea Cottage Row occupied by the survivors of the pleasant village once “two miles from town.”

Chelsea is one part of a hell-roaring city that has never progressed—the final oasis in the skyscraper madness. Old brick churches are there and in their yards the ancient, dolorous bells that used to ring to service the solemn Dutch traders.

Most New York parks—like Madison Square, City Hall, Washington and Bryant parks—were once potter’s fields. The exception is Gramercy Park, which also retains the glamour of almost forgotten days. It is the only private park left, its keys held by the privileged few. There is scarcely a house facing the square that has not been widely photographed or glorified in fiction. All have a heavy dignity that preserves the best architectural lines of the mid-nineteenth century.

Perhaps New York’s best-known breathing space outside of Central Park is Madison Square. Every ambitious painter has fasioned a “Madison Square at Night,” softened by snow and illuminated with the thousand flecks of light from myriad towering windows. Here hot gospelers mount soap boxes and moan for a world throttled by capitalism and sundry other injustices. Children love Madison Square for its electrically lighted Christmas trees. Then there is the glowing star—the “Eternal Light”—a tribute to the heroic sacrifices of gold-star mothers in the late war.

A little north of Madison Square is the well-known vine-clad edifice “The Little Church Around the Corner,” so-called by Joseph Jefferson when another church refused to bury an actor but recommended a little church around the comer. “All honor to that little church around the corner!” cried Jefferson— hence its best-known name. It is in reality The Church of the Transfiguration, and from here Lester Wallack, Don Boucicault and Edwin Booth were buried. It is a popular hymenal altar for stage folk, and the sidewalk outside is always sprinkled with rice.

 I have seen two policemen in uniform obviously intoxicated recently, and the way I scuttled up side streets whistling in apparent unconcern is my particular business. A policeman with a few drinks and a revolver is my idea of nothing to fool around with, what with Christmas coming on and so many other things to make the world a pleasant place in which to linger awhile.

ADD shooting pains in the neck: Those actors and actresses who make themselves conspicuous in cafes flitting from table to table and otherwise showing off.