Page:When the movies were young - Arvidson - 1925.djvu/19

 UST off Union Square, New York City, there is a stately old brownstone house on which future generations some day may place a tablet to commemorate the place where David W. Griffith and Mary Pickford were first associated with moving pictures.

Here has dwelt romance of many colors. A bird of brilliant plumage, so the story goes, first lived in this broad-spreading five-story old brownstone that still stands on Fourteenth Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway, vibrant with life and the ambitions and endeavors of its present occupants.

Although brownstone Manhattan had seen the end of peaceful Dutch ways and the beginning of the present scrambling in the great school of human activity, the first resident of 11 East Fourteenth Street paid no heed—went his independent way. No short-waisted, long and narrow-skirted black frock-coat for him, but a bright blue affair, gold braided and gold buttoned. He was said to be the last man in old Manhattan to put powder in his hair.

As he grew older, they say his style of dressing became more fantastic, further and further back he went in