island, the narrowing ridge offers an appreciable obstacle to the equal diffusion of population. Interspersed with the clusters of suburban villas at Fort Washington, Audubon Park, and elsewhere, are still a few ancient houses, and before the projection of the Riverside Drive there were enough of these to give a character of its own to the quarter. The more modern of the suburban villas, however, which are now in course of gradual replacement by the lines of brown-stone fronts we know so well, and even by "French flats," are not of a kind to require a memorial before they go hence, or to evoke the tributary tear after they are gone. It is an old saying that the last fashion but one is always the most ridiculous of fashions, and these villas, being neither old enough to be venerable nor new enough to possess what the play-bills call "contemporaneous human interest," are altogether superfluous. When it is said that they were mostly built between 1850 and 1870, it need not be added that they have no intrinsic interest to keep them alive. The trail of the mansard is over them all.
On the eastern and more populous side of the island there are still eddies in the tide of population; and along the shore of the East River may still be seen some of the houses which were built for country-seats, and to which, well within living memory, their owners took sloop at Coenties Slip on Saturday morning to spend Sunday in rustic seclusion. No reader of Knickerbocker can have forgotten the adventurous voyage of Oloffe Van Kortlandt from Communipaw to Hell Gate, nor "the savage solitude which extended over those happy regions where now are reared the stately towers of the Joneses, the Schermerhorns, and the Rhinelanders," nor yet "the bluff well known to modern mariners by the name of Grade's Point, from the fair castle which, like an elephant, it carries upon its back." Knickerbocker's New York of 1809, being a relic of the world before Watt, is really more distant from us of 1884 than it was from the seventeenth-century world he was describing, and it is a sort of Schliemann find to come upon actual houses celebrated in our comic Odyssey. The "stately towers" are a figure of speech, the nearest approach to the same being a belvedere, now somewhat crazy with age and neglect, that bestrides the gambrel roof of the Schermerhorn mansion, fated to a not distant demolition, for it stands in the way of the extension to the river of East Eighty-third Street. Nevertheless this is the classical mansion, and just below it is the Jones mansion, and Grade's Point still carries Gracie's Castle on its back, and just under the castle is the ruin of a round-house, which tradition declares to have been built of Holland bricks to command the ferry just south of it, which connected Yorkville with "the pleasant coast of Sundswick," as it was in Irving's youth, but changed in his time to Astoria, in honor of John Jacob. Built of Holland bricks the ruin evidently was; but the present writer promulgates the rest of the tradition "with all reserves." Local tradition is not a very safe guide in these things. The Jones mansion, for example, is persistently described in the neighborhood as "the old Jauncey Place,"—a name which, although it no longer appears in the New York directory, survived until within a few years as that of Jauncey Court in Wall Street, now effaced by commercial palaces. James Jauncey was a lawyer somewhat active and conspicuous in colonial politics just before the outbreak of the Revolution, and he was a member of the Committee of Fifty-One appointed in 1774 "to correspond with the neighboring provinces" about the mode of resistance that should be offered to the Stamp Act. At that time, however, he had an estate—as old maps inform us—on the west side of the island, not far from Fourteenth Street, and it is very certain that he did not, and that the Joneses did, build this house on the East River. Architectural evidence shows the house to be very nearly coeval with Gracie's Castle. It has the same square plan, the same four-hipped and decked roof partly concealed by a trellised railing at
