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MY family took up their residence at 92 Congress Street, Brooklyn, which my elder brothers and two sisters, our pioneers, had prepared for us, and though handicapped as we were by our small knowledge of English, we younger children began our studies at the De Graw Street Public School in the September following our arrival. Eight months later, on the first day of May, 1867, we moved to Manhattan.

It was a very simple New York to which we came. In domestic economy, portières were unknown, rugs a rarity; ingrain carpets, costing about sixty cents a yard, were the usual floor coverings; when the walls were papered, it was with the cheapest material; the only bathtubs were of zinc, and one to a house was the almost universal rule. Our home was No. 1121 Second Avenue, corner of Fifty-ninth Street—a three-storey, high-stoop brownstone house, rows of which were then being erected. It still stands there, the high stoop removed from it; stores are in the basements; the district has deteriorated to one of cheap tenements and small retail businesses. But in those days there was an effort to make Upper Second Avenue one of the chief residential streets of the city. The householders were mostly well-to-do Germans—people who had prospered on the Lower East Side and had outgrown their quarters there. The monotony of the thoroughfare was relieved only by the old-fashioned horse car that rumbled by every four or five minutes. Like the letter carriers of that period, neither the drivers nor the conductors wore uniforms. The line ended at Sixty-fourth Street where the truck-gardens began. On our way to Sunday School, at Thirty-ninth Street near Seventh Avenue, we would make a short-cut across the site where the first Grand Central Station was being erected.