The Lantern: an 1890s downtown writers club

The Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s. The Bohemian crowd at Pfaff’s in the 1850s.

New York writers have always organized formal and informal clubs where they could share their wit and their work—over alcohol, of course.

The Lantern Club was one of these. Now just a footnote in the city’s literary history, the Lantern (sometimes called the Lanthorn) was founded in 1893. Its headquarters, an old house on William Street near the newspaper offices of Park Row, was fashioned to resemble a ship cabin.

Prominent members included Stephen Crane (left, in 1899), the young, struggling author of Bowery tale Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt occasionally dropped by.

Crane and his cohorts didn’t just sit around and booze. They actually shared their work during regular literary banquets held every Saturday evening.

“Each week at the banquet, one of the members read a short story he had written,” writes Stanley Wertheim in A Stephan Crane Encyclopedia.

“Only negative criticism was permitted, and ‘the highest tribute that a story could receive was complete silence.'”

Stephen Crane died in 1900 of tuberculosis at age 29. When the Lantern bit the dust, however, is a mystery.

Two famous writers meet in Washington Square

Imagine two celebrities today greeting each other on a Greenwich Village street, then sitting on a park bench together just shooting the breeze, apparently unrecognized.

That’s what happened one day in September 1887, when Mark Twain took the train from his Connecticut home to New York to meet Robert Louis Stevenson, the popular writer of Treasure Island.

“The Scottish-born Stevenson was staying near the square at a hotel on Tenth Street and University Place,” writes Emily Kies Folpe in the wonderful It Happened in Washington Square.

Stevenson, suffering from tuberculosis, was passing through the city on his way to an upstate sanitarium.

“The two famous writers strolled down to the park and, following Stevenson’s doctor’s orders to take in the sun every day, settled down on a sunny bench to enjoy a good talk.”

So what did they discuss? According to the website of the Hotel Albert (now a co-op), where Stevenson likely stayed on 10th Street:

“The two men settled comfortably into a sunny part of the northwest corner of the park and spent the next five hours telling stories to one another, ‘regardless of wives, lunch and doctors, from 10 a.m….until 3 in the afternoon.'”

Twain moved to the Village in 1900 and spend the rest of his life as a New Yorker. Stevenson died at 44, seven years after his park meetup with Twain.