and the hardware store, full of nails and pocket-knives,
and old Mr. Jacobs, the tailor, who sat cross-legged
on a wide table in a room down four stone steps from
the sidewalk, and the grog-shops--more's the pity--
one on every corner save Kling's.

Hardly a trace is now left of any one of them, so
sudden and overwhelming has been the march of
modern progress. Even the little Peter Cooper House,
picked up bodily by that worthy philanthropist and
set down here nearly a hundred years ago, is gone,
and so are the row of musty, red-bricked houses at the
lower end of this Little City in Itself. And so are
the tenants of this musty old row, shady locksmiths
with a tendency toward skeleton keys; ingenious
upholsterers who indulged in paper-hanging on the sly;
shoemakers who did half-soling and heeling, their
day's work set to dry on the window-sill, not to mention
those addicted to the use of the piano, banjo,
or harp, as well as the wig and dress makers who
lightened the general gloom.

And with the disappearance of these old landmarks--
and it all took place within less than ten years--there
disappeared, also, the old family life of "The Avenue,"
in which each home shared in the good-fellowship of
the whole, all of them contributing to that sane and
sustaining stratum, if we did but know it, of our civic
structure--facts that but few New Yorkers either recognize
or value.