Wolfe, Theodore Frelinghuysen.
Literary haunts & homes; American authors.
Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1899.
p. 84-86
In Thirty-seventh Street west of Fifth Avenue lately stood the brownstone
dwelling which was the home of the graceful poet Anne Lynch,--Mrs. Botta,--whose
parlors were during four decades opened regularly for brillant receptions
to the kindred guilds of letters and arts, at which were welcomed many
most illustrious in those pursuits in Europe and America; here the most
of her "Handbook of Universal Literature" was compiled. The palatial edifice
No. 7 West Forty-third street has been since 1891, the abode of the Century
Club, of which Bryant, who died its honored president, was chief founder
and leading spirit. A sumptuous family hotel in the next street has been
for the past two years the winter home of the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox,
who has here written most of her latest, longest, and brightest poem, "Three
Women," which she regards as the most important work of her life. The present
habitation of the Lotos Club is a handsome brownstone building in Fifth
Avenue below Forty-sixth Street, where eminent visitors like Warner, Stedman,
Gilder, Howells, Clemens, Dean Hole, Conan Doyle, "Anthony Hope" Hawkins,
etc., have sat at the guests' table. An ample, ivy-mantled mansion of brick
in Fifty-first Street just out of Fifth Avenue is the New York residence
of that bestower of libraries, the author of "Triumphant Democracy," etc.,
Andrew Carnegie. Edmund C. Stedman, during some of his most prosperous
and productive years, occupied the brownstone house 71 West Fifty-fourth
Street, and made it a centre and focus of lettered culture and refinement:
a large room just under the roof and remote from ordinary distracting influences
wsa the workshop whence he gave out some of his best work in poetry and
criticism, including "Poets of America." Upon an upper floor of the Carnegie
Building, at Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, the Authors Club--organized
by de Kay, Gilder, Brooks, Stedman, Eggleston, Hutton, and Matthews, and
now embracing many of the most noted authors and journalists of Manhattan
and its dependencies--has a pleasant suite of rooms, where it holds its
delightfully informal gatherings and entertains literary lions. At the
next corner, Fifty-eighth Street, Mary Mapes Dodge resides in a large apartment-house.
The St. Albans, in the same thoroughfare, was for six years the city home
of Mrs. Wilcox, who here wrote "Poems of Pleasure," "How Salvator
Won," "Men, Women, and Emotions," and poems and sketches for other volumes.