Project Gutenberg's Nooks and Corners of Old New York, by Charles Hemstreet
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Title: Nooks and Corners of Old New York
Author: Charles Hemstreet
Illustrator: E. C. Peixotto
Release Date: May 25, 2012 [EBook #39789]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOOKS AND CORNERS OF OLD NEW YORK ***
Produced by Annie R. McGuire. This book was produced from
scanned images of public domain material from the Internet
Archive.
_Nooks & Corners_
_of_
Old New York
By
Charles Hemftreet
_Illustrated_
_By_
E. C. Peixotto
New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
MDCCCCV
COPYRIGHT, 1899
BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK
_INTRODUCTORY NOTE_
The points of interest referred to in this book are to be found in the
lower part of the Island of Manhattan.
Settlements having early been made in widely separated parts of the
island, streets were laid out from each settlement as they were needed
without regard to the city as a whole; with the result that as the city
grew the streets lengthened and those of the various sections met at
every conceivable angle. This resulted in a tangle detrimental to the
city's interests, and in 1807 a Commission was appointed to devise a
City Plan that should protect the interests of the _whole_ community.
A glance at a city map will show the confusion of streets at the lower
end of the island and the regularity brought about under the City Plan
above Houston Street on the east, and Fourteenth Street on the west
side.
The plan adopted by the Commission absolutely disregarded the natural
topography of the island, and resulted in a city of straight lines and
right angles.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
No. 7 State Street 6
Fraunces' Tavern 11
The "Jack Knife," Gold and Platt Streets 23
Golden Hill Inn 24
Cell in the Prison under the Hall of Records 35
Statue of Nathan Hale, City Hall Park 38
No. 11 Reade Street, where Aaron Burr had an office 40
The Tombs 41
Park Street, with Church of the Transfiguration 44
Hudson and Watts Streets 55
Grave of Charlotte Temple 62
Tomb of Alexander Hamilton 66
Washington's Pew, St. Paul's Chapel 76
Montgomery's Tomb 77
A House of Other Days 79
"Murderers' Row" 97
Old Houses, Wiehawken Street 112
Looking South from Minetta Lane 114
Old Theological Seminary, Chelsea Square 126
Church of Sea and Land 135
Bone Alley 139
Milestone on the Bowery 143
Entrance to Marble Cemetery 152
College of the City of New York 186
Gate of Old House of Refuge 188
The Little Church Around the Corner 192
Milestone on Third Avenue 204
NOOKS AND CORNERS
OF OLD NEW YORK
I
[Sidenote: Fort Amsterdam]
On the centre building of the row which faces bowling Green Park on the
south there is a tablet bearing the words:
THE SITE OF FORT AMSTERDAM,
BUILT IN 1626.
WITHIN THE FORTIFICATIONS
WAS ERECTED THE FIRST
SUBSTANTIAL CHURCH EDIFICE
ON THE ISLAND OF MANHATTAN.
IN 1787 THE FORT
WAS DEMOLISHED
AND THE GOVERNMENT HOUSE
BUILT UPON THIS SITE
[Sidenote: Dutch West India Co.]
This was the starting-point of the settlement which gradually became New
York. In 1614 a stockade, called Fort Manhattan, was built as a
temporary place of shelter for representatives of the United New
Netherland Co., which had been formed to trade with the Indians. This
company was replaced by the Dutch West India Co., with chartered rights
to trade on the American coast, and the first step towards the forming
of a permanent settlement was the building of Fort Amsterdam on the site
of the stockade.
In 1664 New Amsterdam passed into British possession and became New
York, while Fort Amsterdam became Fort James. Under Queen Anne it was
Fort George, remaining so until demolished in 1787.
On the Fort's site was built the Government House, intended for
Washington and the Presidents who should follow him. But none ever
occupied it as the seat of government was removed to Philadelphia before
the house was completed. After 1801 it became an office building, and
was demolished in 1815 to make room for the present structures.
[Sidenote: Bowling Green]
The tiny patch of grass at the starting-point of Broadway, now called
Bowling Green Park, was originally the centre of sports for colonists,
and has been the scene of many stirring events. The iron railing which
now surrounds it was set up in 1771, having been imported from England
to enclose a lead equestrian statue of King George III. On the posts of
the fence were representations of heads of members of the Royal family.
In 1776, during the Revolution, the statue was dragged down and molded
into bullets, and where the iron heads were knocked from the posts the
fracture can still be seen.
[Sidenote: The Battery]
When the English took possession of the city, in 1664, the Fort being
regarded as useless, it was decided to build a Battery to protect the
newly acquired possession. Thus the idea of the Battery was conceived,
although the work was not actually carried out until 1684.
Beyond the Fort there was a fringe of land with the water reaching to a
point within a line drawn from Water and Whitehall Streets to Greenwich
Street. Sixty years after the Battery was built fifty guns were added,
it having been lightly armed up to that time.
The Battery was demolished about the same time as the Fort. The land on
which it stood became a small park, retaining the name of the Battery,
and was gradually added to until it became the Battery Park of to-day.
[Sidenote: Castle Garden]
A small island, two hundred feet off the Battery, to which it was
connected by a drawbridge, was fortified in 1811 and called Fort
Clinton. The armament was twenty-eight 32-pounders, none of which was
ever fired at an enemy. In 1822 the island was ceded back to the city by
the Federal Government--when the military headquarters were transferred
to Governor's Island--and became a place of amusement under the name of
Castle Garden. It was the first real home of opera in America. General
Lafayette was received there in 1824, and there Samuel F. B. Morse first
demonstrated the possibility of controlling an electric current in 1835.
Jenny Lind, under the management of P. T. Barnum, appeared there in
1850. In 1855 it became a depot for the reception of immigrants; in 1890
the offices were removed to Ellis Island, and in 1896, after many
postponements, Castle Garden was opened as a public aquarium.
[Illustration: No. 7 State Street]
[Sidenote: State Street]
State Street, facing the Battery, during the latter part of the
eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century, was the
fashionable quarter of the city, and on it were the homes of the
wealthy. Several of the old houses still survive. No. 7, now a home for
immigrant Irish girls, was the most conspicuous on the street, and is in
about its original state. At No. 9 lived John Morton, called the "rebel
banker" by the British, because he loaned large sums to the Continental
Congress. His son, General Jacob Morton, occupied the mansion after his
marriage in 1791, and commanded the militia. Long after he became too
infirm to actually command, from the balcony of his home he reviewed on
the Battery parade grounds the Tompkins Blues and the Light Guards. The
veterans of these commands, by legislative enactment in 1868, were
incorporated as the "Old Guard."
[Sidenote: The "Stadhuis"]
On the building at 4 and 6 Pearl Street, corner State Street, is a
tablet which reads:
1636 1897
ON THIS SITE STOOD THE "STADHUIS"
OF NEW AMSTERDAM----ERECTED 1636
THIS TABLET IS PLACED HERE IN LOVING MEMORY
OF THE FIRST DUTCH SETTLERS BY THE
HOLLAND DAMES OF THE NEW
NETHERLANDS AND THE
KNIGHTS OF THE LEGION OF THE CROWN
LAVINIA
KONIGIN
It was set up October 7, 1897, and marks the supposed site of the first
City Hall. What is claimed by most authorities to be the real site is
at Pearl Street, opposite Coenties Slip.
Whitehall Street was one of the earliest thoroughfares of the city, and
was originally the open space left on the land side of the Fort.
[Sidenote: The Beaver's Path]
Beaver Street was first called the Beaver's Path. It was a ditch, on
either side of which was a path. When houses were built along these
paths they were improved by a rough pavement. At the end of the Beaver's
Path, close to where Broad Street is now, was a swamp, which, before the
pavements were made, had been reclaimed and was known as the Sheep
Pasture.
[Sidenote: Petticoat Lane]
Marketfield Street, whose length is less than a block, opens into Broad
Street at No. 72, a few feet from Beaver Street. This is one of the
lost thoroughfares of the city. Almost as old as the city itself, it
once extended past the Fort and continued to the river in what is now
Battery Place. It was then called Petticoat Lane. The first French
Huguenot church was built on it in 1688. Now the Produce Exchange cuts
the street off short and covers the site of the church.
[Sidenote: Broad Street]
Through Broad Street, when the town was New Amsterdam, a narrow,
ill-smelling inlet extended to about the present Beaver Street, then
narrowed to a ditch close to Wall Street. The water-front was then at
Pearl Street. Several bridges crossed the inlet, the largest at the
point where Stone Street is. Another gave Bridge Street its name. In
1660 the ways on either side were paved, and soon became a market-place
for citizens who traded with farmers for their products, and with the
Indians who navigated the inlet in their canoes. The locality has ever
since been a centre of exchange. When the inlet was finally filled in it
left the present "Broad" Street.
Where Beaver Street crosses this thoroughfare, on the northwest corner,
is a tablet:
TO COMMEMORATE THE GALLANT AND PATRIOTIC
ACT OF MARINUS WILLETT IN HERE SEIZING
JUNE 6, 1775, FROM THE BRITISH FORCES THE
MUSKETS WITH WHICH HE ARMED HIS
TROOPS. THIS TABLET IS ERECTED BY
THE SOCIETY OF THE SONS OF THE
REVOLUTION, NEW YORK, NOV. 12, 1892
On one side of the tablet is a bas-relief of the scene showing the
patriots stopping the ammunition wagons.
[Illustration: Fraunces' Tavern]
[Sidenote: Fraunces' Tavern]
Fraunces' Tavern, standing at the southeast corner of Broad and Pearl
Streets, is much the same outwardly as it was when built in 1700, except
that it has two added stories. Etienne De Lancey, a Huguenot nobleman,
built it as his homestead and occupied it for a quarter of a century. It
became a tavern under the direction of Samuel Fraunces in 1762. It was
Washington's headquarters in 1776, and in 1783 he delivered there his
farewell address to his generals.
[Sidenote: Pearl Street]
Pearl Street was one of the two early roads leading from the Fort. It
lay along the water front, and extended to a ferry where Peck Slip is
now. The road afterwards became Great Queen Street, and was lined with
shops of store-keepers who sought the Long Island trade. The other road
in time became Broadway.
On a building at 73 Pearl Street, facing Coenties Slip, is a tablet
which reads:
THE SITE OF THE
FIRST DUTCH HOUSE OF ENTERTAINMENT
ON THE ISLAND OF MANHATTAN
LATER THE SITE OF THE OLD "STADT HUYS"
OR CITY HALL
THIS TABLET IS PLACED HERE BY
THE HOLLAND SOCIETY OF NEW YORK
SEPTEMBER, 1890
[Sidenote: The First City Hall]
This is the site of the first City Hall of New Amsterdam, built 1642. It
stood by the waterside, for beyond Water Street all the land has been
reclaimed. There was a court room and a prison in the building. Before
it, where the pillars of the elevated road are now, was a cage and a
whipping-post. There was also the public "Well of William Cox."
Beside the house ran a lane. It is there yet, still called Coenties Lane
as in the days of old. But it is no longer green. Now it is narrow,
paved, and almost lost between tall buildings.
Opposite Coenties Lane is Coenties Slip, which was an inlet in the days
of the Stadt Huys. The land about was owned by Conraet Ten Eyck, who was
nicknamed Coentje. This in time became Coonchy and was finally
vulgarized to "Quincy." The filling in of this waterway began in 1835
and the slip is now buried beneath Jeanette Park. The filled-in slip
accounts for the width of the street. For the same reason there is
considerable width at Wall, Maiden Lane and other streets leading to the
water front.
[Sidenote: First Printing Press in the Colony]
At 81 Pearl Street, close by Coenties Slip, the first printing-press was
set up by William Bradford, after he was appointed Public Printer in
1693. A tablet marks the site, with the inscription:
ON THIS SITE
WILLIAM BRADFORD
APPOINTED
PUBLIC PRINTER
APRIL 10, A. D. 1693
ESTABLISHED THE FIRST
PRINTING PRESS
IN THE
COLONY OF NEW YORK
ERECTED BY THE
NEW YORK
HISTORICAL SOCIETY
APRIL 10, A. D. 1893
IN COMMEMORATION OF
THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE INTRODUCTION
OF PRINTING IN
NEW YORK
[Sidenote: Fire of 1835]
Across the way, on a warehouse at 88 Pearl Street, is a marble tablet of
unique design, to commemorate the great fire of 1835, which started in
Merchant Street, burned for nineteen hours, extended over fifty acres
and consumed 402 buildings.
Directly through the block from this point is Cuyler's Alley, a narrow
way between the houses running off Water Street. Although it is a
hundred years old the only incident connected with its existence that
has crept into the city's history, is a murder. In 1823, a Boston
merchant was waylaid and murdered for his money, and was dragged through
this street for final disposition in the river, but the murderer made so
much noise in his work that the constable heard him and came upon the
abandoned corpse.
[Sidenote: Stone Street]
Through a pretty garden at the back of the Stadt Huys, Stone Street was
reached. It was the first street to be laid with cobble-stones (1657),
and so came by its name, which originally had been Brouwer Street.
Delmonico's establishment at Beaver and William Streets is on the site
of the second of the Delmonico restaurants. (See Fulton and William
Streets.)
[Sidenote: Flat and Barrack Hill]
Exchange Place took its name from the Merchants' Exchange, which was
completed in William Street, fronting on Wall, in 1827 (the present
Custom House). Before that date it had been called Garden Street. From
Hanover to Broad Street was a famous place for boys to coast in winter,
and the grade was called "Flat and Barrack Hill." Scarcely more than an
alley now, the street was even narrower once and was given its present
width in 1832.
[Sidenote: Wall Street]
Wall Street came by its name naturally, for it was a walled street once.
When war broke out between England and Holland in 1653, Governor Peter
Stuyvesant built the wall along the line of the present street, from
river to river. His object was to form a barrier that should enclose
the city. It was a wall of wood, twelve feet high, with a sloping
breastwork inside. After the wall was removed in 1699, the street came
to be a chief business thoroughfare.
[Sidenote: Federal Hall]
A new City Hall, to replace the Stadt Huys, was built in 1699, at Nassau
Street, on the site of the present Sub-Treasury building. In front of
the building was the cage for criminals, stocks and whipping-post. When
independence was declared, this building was converted into a capitol
and was called Federal Hall. The Declaration of Independence was read
from the steps in 1776. President Washington was inaugurated there in
1789. The wide strip of pavement on the west side of Nassau Street at
Wall Street bears evidence of the former existence of Federal Hall. The
latter extended across to the western house line of the present Nassau
Street, and so closed the thoroughfare that a passage-way led around the
building to Nassau Street. When the Sub-Treasury was built in 1836, on
the site of Federal Hall, Nassau Street was opened to Wall, and the
little passage-way was left to form the wide pavement of to-day.
[Sidenote: Where Alexander Hamilton Lived]
Alexander Hamilton, in 1789, lived in a house on the south side of Wall
Street at Broad. His slayer, Aaron Burr, then lived back of Federal Hall
in Nassau Street.
The Custom House at William Street and Wall was completed in 1842. At
this same corner once stood a statue of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham.
In 1776, during the Revolution, the statue was pulled down by British
soldiers, the head cut off and the remainder dragged in the mud. The
people petitioned the Assembly in 1766 to erect the statue to Pitt, as
a recognition of his zealous defence of the American colonies and his
efforts in securing the repeal of the Stamp Act. At the same time
provision was made for the erection of the equestrian statue of George
III in Bowling Green. The statue of Pitt was of marble, and was erected
in 1770.
[Sidenote: Tontine Coffee House]
The Tontine Building at the northwest corner of Wall and Water Streets
marks the site of the Tontine Coffee House, a celebrated house for the
interchange of goods and of ideas, and a political centre. It was a
prominent institution in the city, resorted to by the wealthy and
influential. The building was erected in 1794, and conducted by the
Tontine Society of two hundred and three members, each holding a $200
share. Under their plan all property was to revert to seven survivors of
the original subscribers. The division was made in 1876.
[Sidenote: Meal Market]
Close to where the coffee house was built later, a market was set up in
the middle of Wall Street in 1709, and being the public market for the
sale of corn and meal was called the "Meal Market." Cut meat was not
sold there until 1740. In 1731 this market became the only public place
for the sale and hiring of slaves.
Trinity Church has stood at the head of Wall Street since 1697. Before
1779 the street was filled with tall trees, but during the intensely
cold winter of that year most of them were cut down and used for
kindling.
The ferry wharf has been at the foot of the street since 1694, when the
water came up as far as Pearl Street. It was here that Washington
landed, coming from Elizabethport after his journey from Virginia, April
23, 1789, to be inaugurated.
The United States Hotel, Fulton, between Water and Pearl Streets, was
built in 1823 as Holt's Hotel. It was the headquarters for captains of
whaling ships and merchants. A semaphore, or marine telegraph, was on
the cupola, the windmill-like arms of which served to indicate the
arrival of vessels.
[Sidenote: Middle Dutch Church]
On the building at the northeast corner of Nassau and Cedar Streets is a
tablet reading:
HERE STOOD
THE MIDDLE DUTCH CHURCH
DEDICATED A. D. 1729
MADE A BRITISH MILITARY PRISON 1776
RESTORED 1790
OCCUPIED AS THE UNITED STATES POST-OFFICE
1845-1875
TAKEN DOWN 1882
This church was a notable place of worship; the last in the city to
represent strict simplicity of religious service as contrasted with
modern ease and elegance. The post-office occupied the building until
its removal to the structure it now occupies. The second home of the
Middle Dutch Church was in Lafayette Place.
[Sidenote: Pie Woman's Lane]
Nassau Street was opened in 1696, when Teunis de Kay was given the right
to make a cartway from the wall to the commons (now City Hall Park). At
first the street was known as Pie Woman's Lane.
[Sidenote: The Maiden's Lane]
Where Maiden Lane is there was once a narrow stream or spring water,
which flowed from about the present Nassau Street. Women went there to
wash their clothing, so that it came to be called the Virgin's Path, and
from that the Maiden's Lane. A blacksmith having set up a shop at the
edge of the stream near the river, the locality took the name of Smit's
V'lei, or the Smith's Valley, afterwards shortened to the V'lei, and
then readily corrupted to "Fly." It was natural, then, when a market
was built on the Maiden's Lane, from Pearl to South Streets, to call it
the Fly Market. This was pulled down in 1823.
[Illustration: The Jack Knife, Gold & Platt Sts.]
[Sidenote: The Jack-Knife]
On Gold Street, northwest corner of Platt Street, is a wedge-shaped
house of curious appearance. It is best seen from the Platt Street side.
When this street was opened in 1834 by Jacob S. Platt, who owned much of
the neighboring land and wanted a street of his own, the house was large
and square and had been a tavern for a great many years. The new street
cut the house to its present strange shape, and it came to be called the
"Jack-knife."
[Illustration: Golden Hill Inn]
[Sidenote: Golden Hill]
Golden Hill, celebrated since the time of the Dutch, is still to be
seen in the high ground around Cliff and Gold Streets. Pearl street near
John shows a sweeping curve where it circled around the hill's base, and
the same sort of curve is seen in Maiden Lane on the south and Fulton
Street on the north. The first blood of the Revolution was shed on this
hill in January, 1770, after the British soldiers had cut down a liberty
pole set up by the Liberty Boys. The fight occurred on open ground back
of an inn which still stands at 122 William Street, and is commemorated
in a tablet on the wall of a building at the corner of John and William
Streets. It reads:
"GOLDEN HILL"
HERE, JAN. 18, 1770
THE FIGHT TOOK PLACE BETWEEN THE
"SONS OF LIBERTY" AND THE
BRITISH REGULARS, 16TH FOOT
FIRST BLOODSHED IN THE
WAR OF THE REVOLUTION
The inn is much the same as in early days, except that many buildings
crowd about it now, and modern paint has made it hideous to antiquarian
eyes.
[Sidenote: Delmonico's]
On the east side of William Street, a few doors south of Fulton, John
Delmonico opened a dingy little bake shop in 1823, acted as chef and
waiter, and built up the name and business which to-day is synonymous
with good eating. In 1832 he removed to 23 William Street. Burned out
there in 1835, he soon opened on a larger scale with his brother at
William and Beaver Streets, on which site is still an establishment
under the Delmonico name. In time he set up various places--at Chambers
Street and Broadway; Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue; Twenty-sixth
Street and Broadway, and finally at Forty-fourth Street and Fifth
Avenue.
[Sidenote: John Street Church]
John Street Church, between Nassau and William Streets, was the first
Methodist Church in America. In 1767 it was organized in a loft at 120
William Street, then locally known as Horse and Cart Street. In 1768 the
church was built in John Street. It was rebuilt in 1817 and again in
1841. John Street perpetuates the name of John Harpendingh, who owned
most of the land thereabout.
[Sidenote: John Street Theatre]
At what is now 17, 19 and 21 John Street, in 1767 was built the old John
Street Theatre, a wooden structure, painted red, standing sixty feet
back from the street and reached by a covered way. An arcade through the
house at No. 17 still bears evidence of the theatre. The house was
closed in 1774, when the Continental Congress recommended suspension of
amusements. Throughout the Revolutionary War, however, performances were
given, the places of the players being filled by British officers.
Washington frequently attended the performances at this theatre after he
became President. The house was torn down in 1798.
The site of the Shakespeare Tavern is marked by a tablet at the
southwest corner of Nassau and Fulton Streets. The words of the tablet
are:
ON THIS SITE IN THE
OLD SHAKESPEARE TAVERN
WAS ORGANIZED
THE SEVENTH REGIMENT
NATIONAL GUARD, S. N. Y.
AUG. 25, 1824
[Sidenote: Shakespeare Tavern]
This tavern, low, old-fashioned, built of small yellow bricks with
dormer windows in the roof, was constructed before the Revolution. In
1808 it was bought by Thomas Hodgkinson, an actor, and was henceforth a
meeting-place for Thespians. It was resorted to--in contrast to the
business men guests of the Tontine Coffee House--by the wits of the day,
the poets and the writers. In 1824 Hodgkinson died, and the house was
kept up for a time by his son-in-law, Mr. Stoneall.
[Sidenote: First Clinton Hall]
At the southwest corner of Beekman and Nassau Streets was built, in
1830, the first home of the Mercantile Library, called Clinton Hall. In
1820 the first steps were taken by the merchants of the city to
establish a reading room for their clerks. The library was opened the
following year with 700 volumes. In 1823 the association was
incorporated. It was located first in a building in Nassau Street, but
in 1826 was moved to Cliff Street, and in 1830 occupied its new building
in Beekman Street. De Witt Clinton, Governor of the State, had presented
a History of England as the first volume for the library. The new
building was called Clinton Hall in his honor. In 1850, the building
being crowded, the Astor Place Opera House was bought for $250,000, and
remodeled in 1854 into the second Clinton Hall. The third building of
that name is now on the site at the head of Lafayette Place.
[Sidenote: St. George's Church]
The St. George Building, on the north side of Beekman Street, just west
of Cliff Street, stands on the site of St. George's Episcopal Church, a
stately stone structure which was erected in 1811. In 1814 it was
burned; in 1816 rebuilt, and in 1845 removed to Rutherford Place and
Sixteenth Street, where it still is. Next to the St. George Building is
the tall shot-tower which may be so prominently seen from the windows of
tall buildings in the lower part of the city, but is so difficult to
find when search is made for it.
[Sidenote: Barnum's Museum]
Barnum's Museum, opened in 1842, was on the site of the St. Paul
Building, at Broadway and Ann Street. There P. T. Barnum brought out Tom
Thumb, the Woolly Horse and many other curiosities that became
celebrated. On the stage of a dingy little amphitheatre in the house
many actors played who afterwards won national recognition.
[Sidenote: Original Park Theatre]
The original Park Theatre was built in 1798, and stood on Park Row,
between Ann and Beekman Streets, facing what was then City Hall Park and
what is now the Post Office. It was 200 feet from Ann Street, and
extended back to the alley which has ever since been called Theatre
Alley. John Howard Payne, author of "Home, Sweet Home," appeared there
for the first time on any stage, in 1809, as the "Young American
Roscius." In 1842 a ball in honor of Charles Dickens was given there.
Many noted actors played at this theatre, which was the most important
in the city at that period. It was rebuilt in 1820 and burned in 1848.
[Sidenote: First Brick Presbyterian Church]
At the junction of Park Row and Nassau Street, where the _Times_
Building is, the Brick Presbyterian Church was erected in 1768. There
was a small burying-ground within the shadow of its walls, and green
fields stretched from it in all directions. It was sold in 1854, and a
new church was built at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street.
[Sidenote: Where Leisler Was Hanged]
Within a few steps of where the statue of Benjamin Franklin is in
Printing House Square, Jacob Leisler was hanged in his own garden in
1691, the city's first martyr to constitutional liberty. A wealthy
merchant, after James III fled and William III ascended the throne,
Leisler was called by the Committee of Safety to act as Governor. He
assembled a Continental Congress, whose deliberations were cut short by
the arrival of Col. Henry Sloughter as Governor. Enemies of Leisler
decided on his death. The new Governor refused to sign the warrant, but
being made drunk signed it unknowingly and Leisler was hanged and his
body buried at the foot of the scaffold. A few years later, a royal
proclamation wiped the taint of treason from Leisler's memory and his
body was removed to a more honored resting-place.
[Sidenote: Tammany Hall]
The walls of the _Sun_ building at Park Row and Frankfort Street, are
those of the first permanent home of Tammany Hall. Besides the hall it
contained the second leading hotel in the city, where board was $7 a
week. Tammany Hall, organized in 1789 by William Mooney, an upholsterer,
occupied quarters in Borden's tavern in lower Broadway. In 1798 it
removed to Martling's tavern, at the southeast corner of Nassau and
Spruce, until its permanent home was erected in 1811.
[Sidenote: A Liberty Pole]
There is a tablet on the wall of the south corridor of the post-office
building, which bears the inscription:
ON THE COMMON OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK,
NEAR WHERE THIS BUILDING NOW STANDS, THERE
STOOD FROM 1766 TO 1776 A LIBERTY POLE
ERECTED TO COMMEMORATE THE REPEAL OF THE
STAMP ACT. IT WAS REPEATEDLY DESTROYED BY
THE VIOLENCE OF THE TORIES AND AS REPEATEDLY
REPLACED BY THE SONS OF LIBERTY, WHO ORGANIZED
A CONSTANT WATCH AND GUARD. IN ITS
DEFENCE THE FIRST MARTYR BLOOD OF THE AMERICAN
REVOLUTION WAS SHED ON JAN. 18, 1770.
The cutting down of this pole led to the battle of Golden Hill.
[Sidenote: City Hall Park]
[Sidenote: Potter's Field In City Hall Park]
The post-office building was erected on a portion of the City Hall Park.
This park, like all of the Island of Manhattan, was a wilderness a few
hundred years ago. By 1661, where the park is there was a clearing in
which cattle were herded. In time the clearing was called The Fields;
later The Commons. On The Commons, in Dutch colonial days, criminals
were executed. Still later a Potter's Field occupied what is now the
upper end of the Park; above it, and extending over the present Chambers
Street was a negro burying-ground. On these commons, in 1735, a
poor-house was built, the site of which is covered by the present City
Hall. From time to time other buildings were erected.
[Illustration: Cell in the Prison under the Hall of Records]
The new Jail was finished in 1763, and, having undergone but few
alterations, is now known as the Hall of Records. It was a military
prison during the Revolution, and afterwards a Debtors' Prison. In 1830
it became the Register's Office. It was long considered the most
beautiful building in the city, being patterned after the temple of
Diana of Ephesus.
The Bridewell, or City Prison, was built on The Commons in 1775, close
by Broadway, on a line with the Debtors' Prison. It was torn down in
1838.
[Sidenote: Third City Hall]
[Sidenote: Governor's Room]
The present City Hall was finished in 1812. About that time The Commons
were fenced in and became a park, taking in besides the present space,
that now occupied by the post-office building. The constructors of the
City Hall deemed it unnecessary to use marble for the rear wall as they
had for the sides and front, and built this wall of freestone, it being
then almost inconceivable that traffic could ever extend so far up-town
as to permit a view of the rear of the building. The most noted spot in
the City Hall is the Governor's Room, an apartment originally intended
for the use of the Governor when in the city. In time it became the
municipal portrait gallery, and a reception room for the distinguished
guests of the city. The bodies of Abraham Lincoln and of John Howard
Payne lay in state in this room. With it is also associated the visit of
Lafayette when he returned to this country in 1824 and made the room his
reception headquarters. The room was also the scene of the celebration
after the capture of the "Guerrière" by the "Constitution"; the
reception to Commodore Perry after his Lake Erie victory; the
celebration in connection with the laying of the Atlantic cable; and at
the completion of the Erie Canal. It contains a large gilt punch-bowl,
showing scenes in New York a hundred years ago. This was presented to
the city by General Jacob Morton, Secretary of the Committee of
Defense, at the opening of the City Hall.
At the western end of the front wall of City Hall is a tablet reading:
NEAR THIS SPOT IN THE PRESENCE OF
GEN. GEORGE WASHINGTON
THE DECLARATION OF
INDEPENDENCE
WAS READ AND PUBLISHED
TO THE
AMERICAN ARMY
JULY 9TH, 1776
[Sidenote: First Savings Bank]
Other buildings erected in the Park were The Rotunda, 1816, on the site
of the brown stone building afterwards occupied by the Court of General
Sessions, where works of art were exhibited; and the New York Institute
on the site of the Court House, occupied in 1817 by the American, or
Scudder's Museum, the first in the city. The Chambers Street Bank, the
first bank for savings in the city, opened in the basement of the
Institute building in 1818. In 1841 Philip Hone was president of this
bank. It afterwards moved to the north side of Bleecker Street, between
Broadway and Crosby, and became the Bleecker Street Bank. Now it is at
Twenty-second Street and Fourth Avenue, and is called The Bank for
Savings.
[Illustration: Statue of NATHAN HALE City Hall Park]
[Sidenote: Fences of City Hall Park]
The statue of Nathan Hale was erected in City Hall Park by the Sons of
the Revolution. Some authorities still insist that the Martyr Spy was
hanged in this park. Until 1821 there were fences of wooden pickets
about the park. In that year iron railings, which had been imported from
England, were set up, with four marble pillars at the southern entrance.
The next year trees were set out within the enclosure, and just within
the railing were planted a number of rose-bushes which had been supplied
by two ladies who had an eye to landscape gardening. Frosts and vandals
did not allow the bushes more than a year of life. Four granite balls,
said to have been dug from the ruins of Troy, were placed on the pillars
at the southern entrance, May 8, 1827. They were given to the city by
Captain John B. Nicholson, U. S. N.
The building 39 and 41 Chambers Street, opposite the Court House, stands
on the site of the pretty little Palmo Opera House, built in 1844 for
the production of Italian opera, by F. Palmo, the wealthy proprietor of
the Café des Mille Colonnes on Broadway at Duane Street. He lost his
fortune in the operatic venture and became a bartender. In 1848 the
house became Burton's Theatre. About 1800, this site was occupied by
the First Reformed Presbyterian Church, a frame building which was
replaced by a brick structure in 1818. The church was moved to Prince
and Marion Streets in 1834.
[Illustration: No. 11 Reade St. where Aaron Burr had an office....]
[Sidenote: Office of Aaron Burr]
At No. 11 Reade Street is a dingy little house, now covered with signs
and given over to half a dozen small business concerns, about which
hover memories of Aaron Burr. It was here he had a law office in 1832,
and here when he was seventy-eight years old he first met Mme. Jumel
whom he afterwards married. The house is to be torn down to make way for
new municipal buildings.
[Sidenote: An Historic Window]
At Rose and Duane Streets stands the Rhinelander building, and on the
Rose Street side close by the main entrance is a small grated window.
This is the last trace of a sugar-house, which, during the
Revolutionary War, was used as a British military prison. The building
was not demolished until 1892, and the window, retaining its original
position in the old house, was built into the new.
[Illustration: The Tombs]
[Sidenote: The Tombs Prison]
[Sidenote: The Collect]
Where the Tombs prison stands was once the Collect, or Fresh Water Pond.
This deep body of water took up, approximately, the space between the
present Baxter, Elm, Canal and Pearl Streets. When the Island of
Manhattan was first inhabited, a swamp stretched in a wide belt across
it from where Roosevelt Slip is now to the end of Canal Street on the
west side. The Collect was the centre of this stretch, with a stream
called the Wreck Brook flowing from it across a marsh to the East River.
At a time near the close of the eighteenth century a drain was cut from
the Collect to the North River, on a line with the present Canal Street.
With the progress of the city to the north, the pond was drained, and
the swamp made into firm ground. In 1816, the Corporation Yards occupied
the block of Elm, Centre, Leonard and Franklin Streets, on the ground
which had filled in the pond. The Tombs, or City Prison, was built on
this block in 1838.
[Sidenote: The Five Points]
The Five Points still exists where Worth, Baxter and Park Streets
intersect, but it is no longer the centre of a community of crime that
gained international notoriety. It was once the gathering-point for
criminals and degraded persons of both sexes and of all nationalities, a
rookery for thieves and murderers. Its history began more than a century
and a half ago. During the so-called Negro Insurrection of 1741, when
many negroes were hanged, the severest punishment was the burning at
the stake of fourteen negroes in this locality.
[Sidenote: Mulberry Bend Slum]
One of the five "Points" is now formed by a pleasant park which a few
years ago took the place of the last remnant of the old-time locality.
In no single block of the city was there ever such a record for crime as
in this old "Mulberry Bend" block. Set low in a hollow, it was a refuge
for the outcasts of the city and of half a dozen countries. The slum
took its name, as the park does now, from Mulberry Street, which on one
side of it makes a deep and sudden bend. In this slum block the houses
were three deep in places, with scarcely the suggestion of a courtyard
between them. Narrow alleys, hardly wide enough to permit the passage of
a man, led between houses to beer cellars, stables and time-blackened,
tumbledown tenements. Obscure ways honeycombed the entire block--ways
that led beneath houses, over low sheds, through fragments of
wall--ways that were known only to the thief and the tramp. There
"Bottle Alley," "Bandit's Roost" and "Rag-picker's Row" were the scenes
of many wild fights, and many a time the ready stiletto ended the lives
of men, or the heavy club dashed out brains.
The Five Points House of Industry's work was begun in 1850, and has been
successful in ameliorating the moral and physical condition of the
people of the vicinity. The institution devoted to this work stands on
the site of the "Old Brewery," the most notorious criminal resort of the
locality.
[Illustration: Park St. with Church of the Transfiguration]
[Sidenote: An Ancient Church]
At Mott and Park Streets is now the Church of the Transfiguration
(Catholic). On a hill, the suggestion of which is still to be seen in
steep Park Street, the Zion Lutheran Church was erected in 1797. In
1810 it was changed to Zion Episcopal Church. It was burned in 1815;
rebuilt 1819, and sold in 1853 to the Church of the Transfiguration,
which has occupied it since. This last church had previously been in
Chambers Street, and before that it had occupied several quarters. It
was founded in 1827, and is the fourth oldest church in the diocese.
Zion Episcopal Church moved in 1853 to Thirty-eighth Street and Madison
Avenue, and in 1891 consolidated with St. Timothy's Church at No. 332
West Fifty-seventh Street. The Madison Avenue building was sold to the
South (Reformed) Dutch Church.
[Sidenote: Chatham Square]
Chatham Square has been the open space it is now ever since the time
when a few houses clustered about Fort Amsterdam. The road that
stretched the length of the island in 1647 formed the only connecting
link between the fort and six large bouweries or farms on the east
side.
The bouwerie settlers in the early days were harassed by Indians, and
spent as much time defending themselves and skurrying off to the
protection of the Fort as they did in improving the land. The earliest
settlement in the direction of these bouweries, which had even a
suggestion of permanency, was on a hill which had once been an Indian
outlook, close by the present Chatham Square. Emanuel de Groot, a giant
negro, with ten superannuated slaves, were permitted to settle here upon
agreeing to pay each a fat hog and 22-1/2 bushels of grain a year, their
children to remain slaves.
North of this settlement stretched a primeval forest through which
cattle wandered and were lost. Then the future Chatham Square was fenced
in as a place of protection for the cattle.
[Sidenote: Bouwerie Lane]
The lane leading from this enclosure to the outlying bouweries, during
the Revolution was used for the passage of both armies. At that period
the highway changed from the Bouwerie Lane of the Dutch to the English
Bowery Road. In 1807 it became "The Bowery."
[Sidenote: Kissing Bridge]
The earliest "Kissing Bridge" was over a small creek, on the Post Road,
close by the present Chatham Square. Travelers who left the city by this
road parted with their friends on this bridge, it being the custom to
accompany the traveler thus far from the city on his way.
What is now Park Row, from City Hall Park to Chatham Square, was for
many years called Chatham Street, in honor of William Pitt, Earl of
Chatham. In 1886 the aldermen of the city changed the name to Park Row,
and in so doing seemed to stamp approval of an event just one hundred
years before which had stirred American manhood to acts of valor. This
was the dragging down by British soldiers in 1776 of a statue of the
Earl of Chatham which had stood in Wall Street.
[Sidenote: Tea Water Pump]
The most celebrated pump in the city was the Tea Water Pump, on Chatham
Street (now Park Row) near Queen (now Pearl) Street. The water was
supplied from the Collect and was considered of the rarest quality for
the making of tea. Up to 1789 it was the chief water-works of the city,
and the water was carted about the city in casks and sold from carts.
[Sidenote: Home of Charlotte Temple]
Within a few steps of the Bowery, on the north side of Pell Street, in a
frame house, Charlotte Temple died. The heroine of Mrs. Rowson's "Tale
of Truth," whose sorrowful life was held up as a moral lesson a
generation ago, had lived first in a house on what is now the south side
of Astor Place close to Fourth Avenue. Her tomb is in Trinity
churchyard.
[Sidenote: Bull's Head Tavern]
The Bull's Head Tavern was built on the site of the present Thalia
Theatre, formerly the Bowery Theatre, just above Chatham Square, some
years before 1763. It was frequented by drovers and butchers, and was
the most popular tavern of its kind in the city for many years.
Washington and his staff occupied it on the day the British evacuated
the city in 1783. It was pulled down in 1826, making way for the Bowery
Theatre.
[Sidenote: First Bowery Theatre]
The Bowery Theatre was opened in 1826, and during the course or its
existence was the home of broad melodrama, that had such a large
following that the theatre obtained a national reputation. Many
celebrated actors appeared in the house. It was burned in 1828, rebuilt
and burned again in 1836, again in 1838, in 1845 and in 1848.
New Bowery Street was opened from the south side of Chatham Square in
1856. The street carried away a part of a Jewish burying-ground, a
portion of which, crowded between tenement-houses and shut off from the
street by a wall and iron fence, is still to be seen a few steps from
Chatham Square. The first synagogue of the Jews was in Mill Street (now
South William). The graveyard mentioned was the first one used by this
congregation, and was opened in 1681, so far from the city that it did
not seem probable that the latter could ever reach it. Early in the
nineteenth century the graveyard was moved to a site which is now Sixth
Avenue and Eleventh Street.
[Sidenote: Washington's Home on Cherry Hill]
The Franklin House was the first Cherry Hill place of residence of
George Washington in the city, when he became President in 1789. It
stood at the corner of Franklin Square (then St. George Square) and
Cherry Street. A portion of the East River Bridge structure rests on the
site. Pearl Street, passing the house, was a main thoroughfare in those
days. The house was built in 1770 by Walter Franklin, an importing
merchant. It was torn down in 1856. The site is marked by a tablet on
the Bridge abutment, which reads:
THE FIRST
PRESIDENTIAL MANSION
NO. 1 CHERRY STREET
OCCUPIED BY
GEORGE WASHINGTON
FROM APRIL 23, 1789
TO FEBRUARY 23, 1790
ERECTED BY THE
MARY WASHINGTON COLONIAL CHAPTER, D.A.R.
APRIL 30, 1899
At No. 7 Cherry Street gas was first introduced into the city in 1825.
This is the Cherry Hill district, sadly deteriorated from the merry
days of its infancy. Its name is still preserved in Cherry Street, which
is hemmed in by tenement-houses which the Italian population crowd in
almost inconceivable numbers. At the top of the hill, where these
Italians drag out a crowded existence, Richard Sackett, an Englishman,
established a pleasure garden beyond the city in 1670, and because its
chief attraction was an orchard of cherry trees, called it the Cherry
Garden--a name that has since clung to the locality.
[Illustration]
II
[Illustration: Hudson & Watts Sts.]
II
[Sidenote: The Origin of Broadway]
From New Amsterdam, which centered about the Fort, the only road which
led through the island branched out from Bowling Green. It took the line
of what is now Broadway, and during a period of one hundred years was
the only road which extended the length of the island.
That Broadway, beyond St. Paul's Chapel, ever became a greatly traveled
thoroughfare, was due more to accident than design, for to all
appearances the road which turned to the east was to be the main artery
for the city's travel, and all calculations were made to that end.
Broadway really ended at St. Paul's.
[Sidenote: The First Graveyard]
Morris Street was called Beaver Lane before the name was changed in
1829. On this street, near Broadway, the first graveyard of the city was
situated. It was removed and the ground sold at auction in 1676, when a
plot was acquired opposite Wall Street. This last was used in
conjunction with Trinity Church until city interment was prohibited.
[Sidenote: The First House Built]
On the office building at 41 Broadway there is fixed a tablet which
bears the inscription:
THIS TABLET MARKS THE SITE OF THE
FIRST HABITATIONS OF WHITE MEN
ON THE ISLAND OF MANHATTAN
ADRIAN BLOCK
COMMANDER OF THE "TIGER"
ERECTED HERE FOUR HOUSES OR HUTS
AFTER HIS VESSEL WAS BURNED
NOVEMBER, 1613
HE BUILT THE RESTLESS, THE FIRST VESSEL
MADE BY EUROPEANS IN THIS COUNTRY
THE RESTLESS WAS LAUNCHED
IN THE SPRING OF 1614
Adrian Block was one of the earliest fur traders to visit the island
after Henry Hudson returned to Holland with the news of his discovery.
The "Tiger" took fire in the night while anchored in the bay, and Block
and his crew reached the shore with difficulty. They were the only white
men on the island. Immediately they set about building a new vessel,
which was named the "Restless."
Next door, at No. 39, President Washington lived in the Macomb's
Mansion, moving there from the Franklin House in 1790. Subsequently the
house became a hotel.
[Sidenote: Tin Pot Alley]
There is a rift in the walls between the tall buildings at No. 55
Broadway, near Rector Street, a cemented way that is neither alley nor
street. It was a green lane before New Amsterdam became New York, and
for a hundred years has been called Tin Pot Alley. With the growth of
the city the little lane came near being crowded out, and the name, not
being of proper dignity, would be forgotten but for a terra cotta tablet
fixed in a building at its entrance. This was placed there by Rev.
Morgan Dix, the pastor of Trinity Church.
At the southwest corner of Broadway and Rector Street, where a
sky-scraper is now, Grace Church once stood with a graveyard about it.
The church was completed in 1808, and was there until 1846, when the
present structure was erected at Broadway and Tenth Street. Upon the
Rector Street site, the Trinity Lutheran Church, a log structure, was
built in 1671. It was rebuilt in 1741, and was burned in the great fire
of 1776.
[Sidenote: Trinity Churchyard]
Trinity churchyard is part of a large tract of land, granted to the
Trinity Corporation in 1705, that was once the Queen's Farm.
[Sidenote: Annetje Jans's Farm]
In 1635 there were a number of bouweries or farms above the Fort. The
nearest--one extending about to where Warren Street is--was set apart
for the Dutch West India Company, and called the Company's Farm. Above
this was another, bounded approximately by what are now Warren and
Charlton Streets, west of Broadway. This last was given by the company,
in 1635, to Roelof Jansz (contraction of Jannsen), a Dutch colonist. He
died the following year, and the farm became the property of his wife,
Annetje Jans. (In the feminine, the z being omitted, the form became
Jans.) The farm was sold to Francis Lovelace, the English Governor, in
1670, and he added it to the company's farm, and it became thereafter
the Duke's Farm. In 1674 it became the King's Farm. When Queen Anne
began her reign it became the Queen's Farm, and it was she who granted
it to Trinity, making it the Church Farm.
In 1731, which was sixty-one years after the Annetje Jans's farm was
sold to Governor Lovelace, the descendants of Annetje Jans for the first
time decided that they had yet some interest in the farm, and made an
unsuccessful protest. From time to time since protests in the form of
lawsuits have been made, but no court has sustained the claims.
The city's growth was retarded by church ownership of land, as no one
wanted to build on leasehold property. It was not until the greater part
of available land on the east side of the island was built upon that the
church property was made use of on the only terms it could be had. Not
until 1803 were the streets from Warren to Canal laid out.
Trinity Church was built in 1697. For years before, however, there had
been a burying-ground beyond the city and the city's wall that became
the Trinity graveyard of to-day. The waving grass extended to a bold
bluff overlooking Hudson River, which was about where Greenwich Street
now is. Through the bluff a street was cut, its passage being still
plainly to be seen in the high wall on the Trinity Place side of the
graveyard.
[Sidenote: Oldest Grave In Trinity Churchyard]
The oldest grave of which there is a record is in the northern section
of the churchyard, on the left of the first path. It is that of a child,
and is marked with a sandstone slab, with a skull, cross-bones and
winged hour-glass cut in relief on the back, the inscription on the
front reading:
W. C.
HEAR . LYES . THE . BODY
OF . RICHARD . CHVRCH
ER . SON . OF . WILLIA
M . CHVRCHER . WHO .
DIED . THE . 5 OF . APRIL
1681 . OF . AGE 5 YEARS
AND . 5 . MONTHS
The records tell nothing of the Churcher family.
Within a few feet of this stone is another that countless eyes have
looked at through the iron fence from Broadway, which says:
HA, SYDNEY, SYDNEY!
LYEST THOU HERE?
I HERE LYE,
'TIL TIME IS FLOWN
TO ITS EXTREMITY.
It is the grave of a merchant--once an officer of the British
army--Sydney Breese, who wrote his epitaph and directed that it be
placed on his tombstone. He died in 1767.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: Grave of Charlotte Temple]
On the opposite side of the path, nearer to Broadway, is a marble slab
lying flat on the ground and each year sinking deeper into the earth.
It was placed there by one of the sextons of Trinity more than a century
ago, in memory of Charlotte Temple.
Close by the porch of the north entrance to the church is the stone that
marks the grave of William Bradford, who set up the first printing-press
in the colony and was printer to the Colonial Government for fifty
years. He was ninety-two years old when he died in 1752. The original
stone was crumbling to decay when, in 1863, the Vestry of Trinity Church
replaced it by the present stone, renewing the original inscription (see
page 14).
[Sidenote: Martyr's Monument]
The tall freestone Gothic shaft, the only monumental pile in the
northern section of the churchyard, serves to commemorate the unknown
dead of the Revolution. Trinity Church with all its records, together
with a large section of the western part of the city, was burned in
1776 when the British army occupied the city. During the next seven
years the only burials in the graveyard were the American prisoners from
the Provost Jail in The Commons and the other crowded prisons of the
city, who were interred at night and without ceremony. No record was
kept of who the dead were.
[Sidenote: A Churchyard Cryptograph]
Close to the Martyrs' Monument is a stone so near the fence that its
inscription can be read from Broadway:
HERE LIES
DEPOSITED THE BODY OF
JAMES LEESON,
WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE ON
THE 28TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER, 1794,
AGED 38 YEARS.
And above the inscription are cut these curious characters:
[Illustration]
It is a cryptograph, but a simple one, familiar to school children. In
its solution three diagrams are drawn and lettered thus:
[Illustration]
The lines which enclose the letters are separated from the design, and
each section used instead of the letters. For example, the letters A, B,
C, become:
[Illustration]
The second series begins with K, because the I sign is also used for J.
The letters of the three series are distinguished by dots; one dot being
placed with the lines of the first series; two dots with the second, but
none with the third. If this be tried, any one can readily decipher the
meaning of the cryptograph, and read "REMEMBER DEATH."
Close to the north door of the church are interred the remains of Lady
Cornbury, who could call England's Queen Anne cousin. She was the wife
of Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, who was Governor of New York in 1702. He
was a grandson of the Earl of Clarendon, Prime Minister of Charles II;
and son of that Earl of Clarendon who was brother-in-law of James II. So
Lady Cornbury was first cousin of Queen Anne. She was Baroness of
Clifton in her own right, and a gracious lady. She died in 1706.
[Illustration: Tomb of Alexander Hamilton]
[Sidenote: Alexander Hamilton's Tomb]
The tomb of Alexander Hamilton, patriot, soldier and statesman, stands
conspicuously in the southern half of the churchyard, about forty feet
from Broadway and ten feet from the iron railing on Rector Street.
In the same part of the churchyard are interred the remains of Philip,
eldest son of Alexander Hamilton. The son in 1801 fell in a duel with
George L. Eacker, a young lawyer, when the two disagreed over a
political matter. Three years later Eacker died and was buried in St.
Paul's churchyard, and the same year Alexander Hamilton fell before the
duelling pistol of Aaron Burr.
[Sidenote: Last Friend Of Aaron Burr]
Close by Hamilton's tomb, a slab almost buried in the earth bears the
inscription "Matthew L. Davis' Sepulchre." Strange that this "last
friend that Aaron Burr possessed on earth" should rest in death so close
to his friend's great enemy. He went to the Jersey shore in a row-boat
with Burr on the day the duel was fought with Hamilton, and stood not
far away with Dr. Hosack to await the outcome. He was imprisoned for
refusing to testify before the Coroner. Afterwards he wrote a life of
Burr. He was a merchant, with a store at 49 Stone Street, and was highly
respected.
[Sidenote: Tomb of Capt. James Lawrence]
Within a few steps of Broadway, at the southern entrance to the church,
is the tomb of Captain James Lawrence, U. S. N., who was killed on board
the frigate Chesapeake during the engagement with H. B. M. frigate
"Shannon." His dying words, "Don't give up the ship!" are now known to
every school-boy. The handsome mausoleum close by the church door, and
the surrounding eight cannon, first attract the eye. These cannon,
selected from arms captured from the English in the War of 1812, are
buried deep, according to the directions of the Vestry of Trinity, in
order that the national insignia, and the inscription telling of the
place and time of capture, might be hidden and no evidence of triumph
paraded in that place--where all are equal, where peace reigns and
enmity is unknown. The monument was erected August 22, 1844. Before that
the remains of Captain Lawrence had been interred in the southwest
corner of the churchyard, beneath a shaft of white marble. This first
resting-place was selected in September, 1813, when the body was brought
to the city and interred, after being carried in funeral procession from
the Battery.
"D. Contant" is the inscription on the first vault at the south
entrance, one of the first victims of the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes to be buried in the city. There are many Huguenot memorials in
the churchyard, the oddest being a tombstone with a Latin inscription
telling that Withamus de Marisco, who died in 1765, was "most noble on
the side of his father's mother."
[Sidenote: Cresap, the Indian Fighter]
At the rear of the church, to the north, is a small headstone:
IN MEMORY OF
MICHAEL CRESAP
FIRST CAPTAIN OF THE
RIFLE BATTALIONS
AND SON OF COLONEL THOMAS CRESAP
WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE
OCT. 18, A. D. 1775.
His father had been a friend and neighbor of Washington in Virginia, and
he himself was a brilliant Indian fighter on the frontier of his native
State. It was the men under his command who, unordered, exterminated the
family of Logan, the Indian chief, "the friend of the white man." Many a
boy, who in school declaimed, unthinkingly, "Who is there to mourn for
Logan? Not one!" grown to manhood, cannot but look with interest on the
grave of Logan's foe. Tradition has been kind to Cresap's memory,
insisting that his heart broke over the accusation of responsibility
for the death of Logan's family.
There is another slab, close by the grave of Captain Cresap, which
tells:
"HERE LIETH YE BODY OF SUSANNAH
NEAN, WIFE OF ELIAS NEAN, BORN
IN YE CITY OF ROCHELLE, IN FRANCE,
IN YE YEAR 1660, WHO DEPARTED
THIS LIFE 25 DAY OF DECEMBER,
1720, AGE 60 YEARS." "HERE LIETH
ENTERRED YE BODY OF ELIAS NEAN,
CATECHIST IN NEW YORK, BORN IN
SOUBISE, IN YE PROVINCE OF CAENTONGE
IN FRANCE IN YE YEAR 1662,
WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE 8 DAY OF
SEPTEMBER 1722 AGED 60 YEARS."
"THIS INSCRIPTION WAS RESTORED BY
ORDER OF THEIR DESCENDANT OF THE
6TH GENERATION, ELIZABETH CHAMPLIN
PERRY, WIDOW OF THE LATE
COM'R O. H. PERRY, OF THE U. S.
NAVY, MAY, ANNO DOMINI, 1846."
But the stone does not tell that the Huguenot refugee was for many
years a vestryman of Trinity Church, and that among his descendants are
the Belmonts and a dozen distinguished families. Before coming to
America, Elias Nean was condemned to the galleys in France because he
refused to renounce the reformed religion.
[Sidenote: Where Gov De Lancy Was buried]
Beneath the middle aisle in the church lie the bones of the eldest son
of Stephen (Etienne) De Lancey--James De Lancey. He was Chief Justice of
the Colony of New York in 1733, and Lieutenant-Governor in 1753. He died
suddenly in 1760 at his country house which was at the present northwest
corner of Delancey and Chrystie Streets. A lane led from the house to
the Bowery.
[Sidenote: Home of The De Lanceys]
Thames Street is as narrow now as it was one hundred and fifty years
ago, when it was a carriageway that led to the stables of Etienne De
Lancey. The Huguenot nobleman left his Broad Street house for the new
home he had built at Broadway and Cedar Street in 1730. In 1741,
at his death, it became the property of his son, James, the
Lieutenant-Governor. It was the most imposing house in the town,
elegantly decorated, encircled by broad balconies, with an uninterrupted
garden extending to the river at the back.
After the death of Lieutenant-Governor De Lancey in 1760, the house
became a hotel, and was known under many names. It was a favorite place
for British officers during the Revolution, and in 1789 was the scene of
the first "inauguration ball" in honor of President Washington.
The house was torn down in 1793. In 1806 the City Hotel was erected on
its site and became the most fashionable in town. It was removed in 1850
and a line of shops set up. In 1889 the present buildings were erected.
A tablet on the building at 113 Broadway, corner of Cedar Street, marks
the site, reading:
THE SITE OF
LIEUT. GOVE. DE LANCEY'S HOUSE,
LATER THE CITY HOTEL.
IT WAS HERE THAT THE NON-IMPORTATION
AGREEMENT, IN OPPOSITION TO THE STAMP
ACT, WAS SIGNED, OCT. 15TH, 1766. THE
TAVERN HAD MANY PROPRIETORS BY WHOSE
NAMES IT WAS SUCCESSIVELY CALLED. IT
WAS ALSO KNOWN AS THE PROVINCE ARMS, THE
CITY ARMS AND BURNS COFFEE HOUSE OR TAVERN.
Opposite Liberty (then Crown) Street, in the centre of Broadway, there
stood in 1789 a detached building 42 x 25 feet. It was the "up-town
market," patronized by the wealthy, who did their own marketing in those
days, their black slaves carrying the purchases home.
[Sidenote: Washington Market]
Washington Market, at the foot of Fulton Street, was built in 1833. The
water washed the western side of it then, and ships sailed to it to
deliver their freight. Since then the water has been crowded back year
by year with the growing demand for land. In its early days it was
variously called Country Market, Fish Market and Exterior Market.
[Sidenote: St. Paul's Chapel]
At the outskirts of the city, in a field that the same year had been
sown with wheat, the cornerstone of St. Paul's Chapel was laid on May
14, 1764. The church was opened two years later, and the steeple added
in 1794. It fronted the river which came up then as far as to where
Greenwich Street is now, and a grassy lawn sloped down to a beach of
pebbles. During the days of English occupancy, Major André, Lord Howe
and Sir Guy Carleton worshipped there. Another who attended services
there was the English midshipman who afterwards became William IV.
[Illustration: Washington Pew St. Paul's Chapel]
[Sidenote: The Washington Pew in St. Paul's]
President Washington, on the day of his inauguration, marched at the
head of the representative men of the new nation to attend service in
St. Paul's, and thereafter attended regularly. The pew he occupied has
been preserved and is still to be seen next the north wall, midway
between the chancel and the vestry room. Directly opposite is the pew
occupied at the same period by Governor George Clinton.
Back of the chancel is the monument to Major-General Richard Montgomery,
who fell before Quebec in 1775, crying, "Men of New York, you will not
fail to follow where your general leads!" Congress decided on the
monument, and Benjamin Franklin bought it in France for 300 guineas. A
privateer bringing it to this country was captured by a British gunboat,
which in turn was taken, and the monument, arriving safe here, was set
in place. The body was removed from its first resting-place in Quebec,
and interred close beside the monument in 1818.
In the burying-ground, which has been beside the church since it was
built, are the monuments of men whose names are associated with the
city's history: Dr. William James Macneven, who raised chemistry to a
science; Thomas Addis Emmet, an eminent jurist and brother of Robert
Emmet; Christopher Collis, who established the first water works in the
city, and who first conceived the idea of constructing the Erie Canal;
and a host of others.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Actor Cooke's Grave]
The tomb of George Frederick Cooke, the tragedian, is conspicuous in the
centre of the yard, facing the main door of the church. Cooke was born
in England in 1756, and died in New York in 1812. Early in life he was a
printer's apprentice. By 1800 he had taken high rank among tragic
actors.
The grave of George L. Eacker, who killed the eldest son of Alexander
Hamilton in a duel, is near the Vesey Street railing.
[Sidenote: Astor House]
The Astor House, occupying the Broadway block between Vesey and Barclay
Streets, was opened in 1836 by Boyden, a hotel keeper of Boston. This
site had been part of the Church Farm, and as early as 1729, when there
were only a few scattered farm houses on the island above what is now
Liberty Street, there was a farm house on the Astor House site; and from
there extended, on the Broadway line, a rope-walk. Prior to the erection
of the hotel in 1830, the site for the most part had been occupied by
the homes of John Jacob Astor, John G. Coster and David Lydig. On a
part of the site, at 221 Broadway, in 1817, M. Paff, popularly known as
"Old Paff," kept a bric-à-brac store. He dealt especially in paintings,
having the reputation of buying worthless and old ones and "restoring"
them into masterpieces. His was the noted curiosity-shop of the period.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: A House of Other Days]
Where Vesey and Greenwich Streets and West Broadway come together is a
low, rough-hewn rock house. It has been used as a shoe store since the
early part of the century. On its roof is a monster boot bearing the
date of 1832, which took part in the Croton water parade and a dozen
other celebrations. In pre-revolutionary days, when the ground where the
building stands was all Hudson River, and the water extended as far as
the present Greenwich Street, according to tradition, this was a
lighthouse. There have been many changes in the outward appearance, but
the foundation of solid rock is the same as when the waters swept around
it.
[Sidenote: The Road To Greenwich]
Greenwich Street follows the line of a road which led from the city to
Greenwich Village. This road was on the waterside. It was called
Greenwich Road. South of Canal Street, west of Broadway, was a marshy
tract known as Lispenard's Meadows. Over this swamp Greenwich Road
crossed on a raised causeway. When the weather was bad for any length of
time, the road became heavy and in places was covered by the strong
tide from the river. At such times travel took an inland route, along
the Post Road (now the Bowery) and by Obelisk Lane (now Astor Place and
Greenwich Avenue).
[Sidenote: St. Peter's Church]
St. Peter's Church, at the southeast corner of Barclay and Church
Streets, the home of the oldest Roman Catholic congregation in the city,
was built in 1786, and rebuilt in 1838. The congregation was formed in
1783, although mass was celebrated in private houses before that for the
few scattered Catholic families.
[Sidenote: Columbia College]
The two blocks included between Barclay and Murray Streets, West
Broadway and Church Street, were occupied until 1857 by the buildings
and grounds of Columbia College. That part of the Queen's Farm lying
west of Broadway between the present Barclay and Murray Streets--a
strip of land then in the outskirts of the city--in 1754 was given to
the governors of King's College. During the Revolution the college
suspended exercises, resuming in 1784 as Columbia College under an act
passed by the Legislature of the State. In 1814, in consideration of
lands before granted to the college which had been ceded to New
Hampshire in settlement of the boundary, the college was granted by the
State a tract of farming land known as the Hosack Botanical Garden. This
is the twenty acres lying between Forty-seventh and Forty-ninth Streets,
Fifth and Sixth Avenues. At that time the city extended but little above
the City Hall Park, and this land was unprofitable and for many years of
considerable expense to the college. By 1839 the city had crept past the
college and the locality being built up the college grounds were cramped
between the limits of two blocks. In 1854, Park Place was opened
through the grounds of the college from Church Street to West Broadway
(then called College Place). Until about 1816 the section of Park Place
west of the college grounds was called Robinson Street. In 1857 the
college was moved to Madison Avenue, between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth
Streets, and in 1890 it was re-organized on a university basis.
[Sidenote: Chapel Place]
West Broadway was originally a lane which wound from far away Canal
Street to the Chapel of Columbia College, and was called Chapel Place.
Later it became College Place. In 1892 the street was widened south of
Chambers Street, in order to relieve the great traffic from the north,
and extended through the block from Barclay to Greenwich Street.
Evidence of the former existence of the old street can be seen in the
pillars of the elevated road on the west side of West Broadway at Murray
Street, for these pillars, once on the sidewalk, are now several feet
from it in the street.
[Sidenote: Bowling Green Garden And First Vauxhall]
In the vicinity of what is now Greenwich and Warren Streets, the Bowling
Green Garden was established in the early part of the eighteenth
century. It was a primitive forest, for there were no streets above
Crown (now Liberty) Street on the west side, and none above Frankfort on
the east. The land on which the Garden stood was a leasehold on the
Church Farm. The place was given the name of the Vauxhall Garden before
the middle of the same century, and for forty years thereafter was a
fashionable resort and sought to be a copy of the Vauxhall in London.
There was dancing and music, and groves dimly lighted where visitors
could stroll, and where they might sit at tables and eat. By the time
the city stretched past the locality, all that was left of the resort
was what would now be called a low saloon, and its pretty garden had
been sold for building lots. The second Vauxhall was off the Bowery,
south of Astor Place.
[Sidenote: A. T. Stewart's Store]
The Stewart Building, on the east side of Broadway, between Chambers and
Reade Streets, has undergone few external changes since it was the dry
goods store of Alexander T. Stewart. On this site stood Washington Hall,
which was erected in 1809. It was a hotel of the first class, and
contained the fashionable ball room and banqueting-hall of the city. The
building was destroyed by fire July 5, 1844. The next year Stewart,
having purchased the site from the heirs of John G. Coster, began the
construction of his store. Stewart came from Ireland in 1823, at the age
of twenty. For a time after his arrival he was an assistant teacher in a
public school. He opened a small dry goods store, and was successful.
The Broadway store was opened in 1846. Four years later Stewart
extended his building so that it reached Reade Street. All along
Broadway by this year business houses were taking the place of
residences. The Stewart residence at the northwest corner of
Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, was, at the time it was built,
considered the finest house in America. Mr. Stewart died in 1876,
leaving a fortune of fifty millions. His body was afterwards stolen from
St. Mark's Churchyard at Tenth Street and Second Avenue.
At Broadway and Duane Street, roasted chestnuts were first sold in the
street. A Frenchman stationed himself at this corner in 1828, and sold
chestnuts there for so many years that he came to be reckoned as a
living landmark.
At the same corner was the popular Café des Mille Colonnes, the
proprietor of which, F. Palmo, afterwards built and conducted Palmo's
Opera House in Chambers Street.
[Sidenote: First Sewing Machine]
In a store window on Broadway, close to Duane Street, the first
sewing-machine was exhibited. A young woman sat in the window to exhibit
the working of the invention to passers-by. It was regarded as an
impracticable toy, and was looked at daily by many persons who
considered it a curiosity unworthy of serious attention.
[Sidenote: Masonic Hall]
At Nos. 314 and 316 Broadway, on the east side of the street just south
of Pearl Street, stood Masonic Hall, the cornerstone of which was laid
June 24, 1826. It looked imposing among the structures of the street,
over which it towered, and was of the Gothic style of architecture.
While it was in course of erection, William Morgan published his book
which claimed to reveal the secrets of masonry. His mysterious
disappearance followed, and shortly after, the rise of the anti-Masonic
party and popular excitement put masonry under such a ban that the house
was sold by the Order, and the name of the building was changed to
Gothic Hall. On the second floor was a room looked upon as the most
elegant in the United States: an imitation of the Chapel of Henry VIII,
it was of Gothic architecture, furnished in richness of detail and
appropriateness of design, and was one hundred feet long, fifty wide and
twenty-five high. In it were held public gatherings of social and
political nature.
[Sidenote: New York Hospital]
The two blocks now enclosed by Duane, Worth, Broadway and Church
Streets, were occupied by the buildings and grounds of the New York
Hospital. Thomas Street was afterwards cut through the grounds. As the
City Hospital, the institution had been projected before the War of the
Revolution. The building was completed about 1775. During the war it
was used as a barrack. In 1791 it was opened for the admission of
patients. On the lawn, which extended to Broadway, various societies
gathered on occasions of annual parades and celebrations. The hospital
buildings were in the centre of the big enclosure. At the northern end
of the lawn, the present corner of Broadway and Worth Street, was the
New Jerusalem Church.
[Sidenote: Riley's Fifth Ward Hotel]
On the corner of West Broadway and Franklin Street was Riley's Fifth
Ward Hotel, which was a celebrated place in its day. It was the
prototype of the modern elaborately fitted saloon, but was then a place
of instruction and a moral resort. In a large room, reached by wide
stairs from the street, were objects of interest and art in glass
cases--pictures of statesmen, uniforms of the soldiers of all nations,
Indian war implements, famous belongings of celebrated men, as well as
such simple curiosities as a two-headed calf. On Franklin Street,
before Riley's door, was a marble statue minus a head, one arm and
sundry other parts. It was all that remained of the statue of the Earl
of Chatham, William Pitt, which had stood in Wall Street until dragged
down by British soldiers. For twenty-five years the battered wreck had
lain in the corporation yard, until found and honored with a place
before his door by Riley. At the latter's death the Historical Society
took the remains of the statue, and it is in its rooms yet.
The passage of Washington through the island is commemorated by a tablet
on a warehouse at 255 West Street, near Laight, which is inscribed:
TO MARK THE LANDING PLACE OF
GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON,
JUNE 25, 1775,
ON HIS WAY TO CAMBRIDGE
TO COMMAND
THE AMERICAN ARMY.
[Sidenote: St. John's Church]
St. John's Church of Trinity Parish, in Varick Street close to Beach,
was built in 1807. When the church was finished St. John's Park,
occupying the entire block opposite--between Varick and Hudson, Laight
and Beach Streets--was established for the exclusive use of residents
whose houses faced it. Before it was established, the place had been a
sandy beach that stretched to the river. The locality became the most
fashionable of the city in 1825. By 1850 there had begun a gradual
decline, for persons of wealth were moving up-town, and it degenerated
to a tenement-house level after 1869, when the park disappeared beneath
the foundations of the big freight depot which now occupies the site.
Around the corner from the church, a block away in Beach Street, is a
tiny park, one of the last remnants of the Annetje Jans Farm. The bit of
farm is carefully guarded now, much more so than was the entire
beautiful tract. It forms a triangle and is fenced in by an iron
railing, with one gate, that is fast barred and never opened. There is
one struggling tree, wrapped close in winter with burlap, but it seems
to feel its loneliness and does not thrive.
[Sidenote: The Red Fort]
From the centre of St. John's Park on the west, Hubert Street extends to
the river. This street, now given over to manufacturers, was, in 1824,
the chief promenade of the city next to the Battery Walk. It led
directly to the Red Fort at the river. The fort was some distance from
the shore. It was built early in the century, was round and of brick,
and a bridge led to it. It was never of any practical use, but, like
Castle Garden, was used as a pleasure resort.
[Sidenote: Lispenard's Meadows]
[Sidenote: Cows on Broadway]
Early in the eighteenth century, Anthony Rutgers held under lease from
Trinity a section of the Church Farm which took in the Dominie's
Bouwerie, a property lying between where Broadway is and the Hudson
River. The southern and northern lines were approximately the present
Reade and Canal Streets. It was a wild spot, remaining in a primitive
condition--part marsh, part swamp--covered with dwarf trees and tangled
underbrush. Cattle wandered into this region and were lost. It was a
dangerous place, too, for men who wandered into it. To live near it was
unhealthy, because of the foul gases which abounded. It seemed to be a
worthless tract. About the year 1730, Anthony Rutgers suggested to the
King in Council that he would have this land drained and made wholesome
and useful provided it was given to him. His argument was so strong and
sensible that the land--seventy acres, now in the business section of
the city--was given him and he improved it. At the northern edge of the
improved waste lived Leonard Lispenard, in a farm house which was then
in a northern suburb of the city, bounded by what is Hudson, Canal and
Vestry Streets. Lispenard married the daughter of Rutgers, and the land
falling to him it became Lispenard's Meadows. In Lispenard's time
Broadway ended where White Street is now and a set of bars closed the
thoroughfare against cows that wandered along it. The one bit of the
meadows that remains is the tiny park at the foot of Canal Street on the
west side. Anthony Rutgers' homestead was close by what is Broadway and
Thomas Street. After his death in 1750 it became a public house, and,
with the surrounding grounds, was called Ranelagh Garden, a popular
place in its time.
[Sidenote: Canal Street]
On a line with the present Canal Street, a stream ran from the Fresh
Water Pond to the Hudson River, at the upper edge of Lispenard's
Meadows. A project, widely and favorably considered in 1825, but which
came to nothing, advocated the extension of Canal Street, as a canal,
from river to river. The street took its name naturally from the little
stream which was called a canal. When the street was filled in and
improved, the stream was continued through a sewer leading from Centre
Street. The locality at the foot of the street has received the local
title of "Suicide Slip" because of the number of persons in recent years
who have ended their lives by jumping into Hudson River at that point.
In Broadway, between Grand and Howard Streets, in 1819, West's circus
was opened. In 1827 this was converted into a theatre called the
Broadway. Later it was occupied by Tattersall's horse market.
[Sidenote: Original Olympic Theatre]
Next door to Tattersall's, at No. 444 Broadway, the original Olympic
Theatre was built in 1837. W. R. Blake and Henry E. Willard built and
managed the house. It was quite small and their aim had been to present
plays of a high order of merit by an exceptionally good company. The
latter included besides Blake, Mrs. Maeder and George Barrett. After a
few months of struggle against unprofitable business, prices were
lowered. Little success was met with, the performances being of too
artistic a nature to be popular, and Blake gave up the effort and the
house. In December, 1839, Wm. Mitchell leased the house and gave
performances at low prices.
At No. 453 Broadway, between Grand and Howard Streets, in 1844 John
Littlefield, a corn doctor, set up a place, designating himself as a
chiropodist--an occupation before unknown under that title.
At No. 485 Broadway, near Broome Street, Brougham's Lyceum was built in
1850, and opened in December with an "occasional rigmarole" and a farce.
In 1852 the house was opened, September 8, as Wallack's Lyceum, having
been acquired by James W. Wallack. Wallack ended his career as an actor
in this house. In 1861 he removed to his new theatre, corner Thirteenth
Street and Broadway. Still later the Lyceum was called the Broadway
Theatre.
[Illustration]
"Murderers' Row" has its start where Watts Street ends at Sullivan,
midway of the block between Grand and Broome Streets. It could not be
identified by its name, for it is not a "row" at all, merely an
ill-smelling alley, an arcade extending through a block of battered
tenements. After running half its course through the block, the alley
is broken by an intersecting space between houses--a space that is taken
up by push carts, barrels, tumbledown wooden balconies and lines of
drying clothes. "Murderers' Row" is celebrated in police annals as a
crime centre. But the evil doers were driven out long years ago and the
houses given over to Italians. These people are excessively poor, and
have such a hard struggle for life as to have no desire to regard the
laws of the Health Board. Constant complaints are made that the houses
are hovels and the alley a breeding-place for disease.
[Sidenote: Greenwich Village]
Greenwich Village sprang from the oldest known settlement on the Island
of Manhattan. It was an Indian village, clustering about the site of the
present West Washington Market, at the foot of Gansevoort Street, when
Hendrick Hudson reached the island, in 1609.
The region was a fertile one, and its natural drainage afforded it
sanitary advantages which even to this day make it a desirable place of
residence. There was abundance of wild fowl and the waters were alive
with half a hundred varieties of fish. There were sand hills, sometimes
rising to a height of a hundred feet, while to the south was a marsh
tenanted by wild fowl and crossed by a brook flowing from the north. It
was this Manetta brook which was to mark the boundary of Greenwich
Village when Governor Kieft set aside the land as a bouwerie for the
Dutch West India Company. The brook arose about where Twenty-first
Street now crosses Fifth Avenue, flowed to the southwest edge of Union
Square, thence to Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street, across where
Washington Square is, along the line of Minetta Street, and then to
Hudson River, between Houston and Charlton Streets.
[Sidenote: Sir Peter Warren]
The interests of the little settlement were greatly advanced in 1744,
when Sir Peter Warren, later the hero of Louisburg, married Susannah De
Lancey and went to live there, purchasing three hundred acres of land.
Epidemics in the city from time to time drove many persons to Greenwich
as a place of refuge. But it remained for the fatal yellow-fever
epidemic of 1822, when 384 persons died in the city, to make Greenwich a
thriving suburb instead of a struggling village. Twenty thousand persons
fled the city, the greater number settling in Greenwich. Banks, public
offices, stores of every sort were hurriedly opened, and whole blocks of
buildings sprang up in a few days. Streets were left where lanes had
been, and corn-fields were transformed into business and dwelling
blocks.
[Sidenote: Evolution of Greenwich Streets]
The sudden influx of people and consequent trade into the village
brought about the immediate need for street improvements. Existing
streets were lengthened, footpaths and alleys were widened, but all was
done without any regard to regularity. The result was the jumble of
streets still to be met with in that region, where the thoroughfares are
often short and often end in a cul-de-sac.
In time the streets of the City Plan crept up to those of Greenwich
Village, and the village was swallowed up by the city. But it was not
swallowed up so completely but that the irregular lines of the village
streets are plainly to be seen on any city map.
Near where Spring Street crosses Hudson there was established, about
1765, Brannan's Garden, on the northern edge of Lispenard's Meadows. It
was like the modern road-house. Greenwich Road was close to it, and
pleasure-seekers, who thronged the road on the way from the city to
Greenwich Village, were the chief guests of the house.
[Sidenote: Duane Street Church]
Crowded close between dwellings on the east side of Hudson Street, fifty
feet south of Spring, is the Duane M. E. Church, a quaint-looking
structure, half church, half business building. This is the successor of
the North Church, the North River Church and the Duane Street Church,
founded in 1797, which, before it moved to Hudson Street, in 1863, was
in Barley (now Duane) Street, between Hudson and Greenwich Streets.
In Spring Street, near Varick, is the Spring Street Presbyterian Church,
which was built in 1825. Before its erection the "old" Spring Street
Presbyterian Church stood on the site, having been built in 1811.
[Sidenote: Richmond Hill]
Although the leveling vandalism of a great city has removed every trace
of Richmond Hill, the block encircled by Macdougal, Charlton, Varick
and Vandam Streets, is crowded thick with memories of men and events of
a past generation.
Long before there was a thought of the city getting beyond the wall that
hemmed in a few scattering houses, and when the Indian settlement, which
afterwards became Greenwich Village, kept close to the water's edge, a
line of low sand hills called the Zandtberg, stretched their curved way
from where now Eighth Street crosses Broadway, ending where Varick
Street meets Vandam. At the base of the hill to the north was Manetta
Creek.
The final elevation became known as Richmond Hill, and that, with a
considerable tract of land, was purchased by Abraham Mortier,
commissioner of the forces of George III. of England. In 1760 he built
his home on the hill and called it also Richmond Hill.
[Sidenote: Burr's Pond]
The house was occupied by General Washington as his headquarters in
1776, and by Vice-President Adams in 1788. Aaron Burr obtained it in
1797, entertained lavishly there, improved the grounds, constructed an
artificial lake long known as Burr's Pond, and set up a beautiful
entrance gateway at what is now Macdougal and Spring Streets, which he
passed through in 1804 when he went to fight his duel with Alexander
Hamilton.
Burr gave up the house in 1807, and, the hill being cut away in the
opening of streets in 1817, the house was lowered and rested on the
north side of Charlton Street just east of Varick. It became a theatre
later and remained such until it was torn down in 1849. A quiet row of
brick houses occupies the site now.
[Sidenote: St. John's Burying Ground]
What is now a pleasant little park enclosed by Hudson, Leroy and
Clarkson Streets, was part of a plot set aside for a graveyard when St.
John's Chapel was built. It was called St. John's Burying-Ground. Its
early limits extended to Carmine Street on one side and to Morton Street
on the other. Under the law burials ceased there about 1850. There were
10,000 burials in the grounds, which, unlike the other Trinity
graveyards, came to be neglected. The tombstones crumbled to decay, the
weeds grew rank about them and the trees remained untrimmed and
neglected.
About 1890 property owners in the vicinity began steps to have the
burying-ground made into a park. Conservative Trinity resisted the
project until the city won a victory in the courts and the property was
bought. Relatives of the dead were notified and some of the bodies were
removed. In September, 1897, the actual work of transforming the
graveyard into a park was begun. Laborers with crowbars knocked over
the tombstones that still remained and putting the fragments in a pit at
the eastern end of the grounds covered them with earth to make a
play-spot for children.
[Sidenote: Bedford Street Church]
At Morton and Bedford Streets is the Bedford Street M. E. Church. The
original structure was built in 1810 in a green pasture. Beside it was a
quiet graveyard, reduced somewhat in 1830 when the church was enlarged,
and wiped out when the land became valuable and the present structure
was set up in 1840. The church was built for the first congregation of
Methodists in Greenwich Village, formed in 1808 at the house of Samuel
Walgrove at the north side of Morton Street close to Bleecker.
[Sidenote: Where Thomas Paine Lived And Died]
Thomas Paine--famous for his connection with the American and French
revolutions, but chiefly for his works, "The Age of Reason," favoring
Deism against Atheism and Christianity; and "Common Sense," maintaining
the cause of the American colonies--died in Greenwich Village June 8,
1809, having retired there in 1802.
The final years of his life were passed in a small house in Herring (now
Bleecker) Street. On the site is a double tenement numbered No. 293
Bleecker Street, southeast corner Barrow. This last named street was not
opened until shortly after Paine's death. It was first called Reason
Street, a compliment to the author of "The Age of Reason." This was
corrupted to Raisin Street. In 1828 it was given its present name.
Shortly before his death Paine moved to a frame building set in the
centre of a nearby field. Grove Street now passes over the site which is
between Bleecker and West Fourth Streets, the back of the building
having been where No. 59 Grove Street is now.
About the time that Barrow Street was opened Grove Street was cut
through. It was called Cozine Street, then Columbia, then Burrows, and
finally, in 1829, was changed to Grove. When the street was widened in
1836, the house in which Paine had died, until then left standing, was
demolished.
[Sidenote: Admiral Warren and His Family]
The homestead of Admiral Sir Peter Warren occupied the ground now taken
up in the solidly built block bounded by Charles, Fourth, Bleecker and
Perry Streets. The house was built in 1744, in the midst of green
fields, and for more than a century it was the most important dwelling
in Greenwich. Admiral Warren of the British Navy was, next to the
Governor, the most important person in the Province. His house was the
favorite resort of social and influential New York. The Admiral's
influence and popularity had a marked effect on the village, which, by
his coming, was given an impetus that made it a thriving place.
Of the three daughters of Admiral Warren, Charlotte, the eldest, married
Willoughby, Earl of Abingdon; the second, Ann, married Charles Fitzroy,
afterwards Baron Southampton, and Susannah, the youngest, married
William Skinner, a Colonel of Foot. These marriages had their effect
also on Greenwich Village, serving to continue the prosperity of the
place. Roads which led through the district, of which the Warren family
controlled a great part, were named in honor of the different family
branches. The only name now surviving is that of Abingdon Square.
In the later years of his life, Sir Peter Warren represented the City of
Westminster in Parliament. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
[Sidenote: State Prison]
In 1796 the State Prison was built on about four acres of ground,
surrounded by high walls, and taking in the territory now enclosed by
Washington, West, Christopher and Perry Streets. The site is now, for
the most part, occupied by a brewery, but traces of the prison walls are
yet to be seen in those of the brewery. There was a wharf at the foot of
Christopher Street. In 1826 the prison was purchased by the Corporation
of the State. The construction of a new State Prison had begun at Sing
Sing in 1825. In 1828 the male prisoners were transferred to Sing Sing,
and the female prisoners the next year.
[Sidenote: Convict Labor]
The yard of the early prison extended down to the river, there were
fields about and a wide stretch of beach. It was here that the first
system of prison manufactures was organized. A convict named Noah
Gardner, who was a shoemaker, induced the prison officials to permit him
the use of his tools. In a short time he had trained most of the
convicts into a skilled body of shoemakers.
The gathering together of a number of convicts in a workroom was at
first productive of some disorder, owing to the difficulty of keeping
them under proper discipline under the new conditions. In 1799 came the
first riot. The keepers fired upon and killed several convicts. There
was another revolt in 1803.
Gardner had been found guilty of forgery, but was reprieved on the
gallows through the influence of the Society of Friends, of which he was
a member, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Because of his services in
organizing the prison work, he was liberated after serving seven years.
Becoming then a shoe manufacturer, he was successful for several years,
when he absconded, taking with him a pretty Quakeress, and was never
heard of again.
[Illustration: Old Houses Wiehawken St.]
[Sidenote: Quaint Houses in Wiehawken Street]
Although the prison has been swept away, an idea of its locality can be
had from the low buildings at the west side of nearby Wiehawken Street.
These buildings have stood for more than a hundred years, having been
erected before the prison.
That part of Greenwich Village that was transformed from fields into a
town in a few days, during the yellow fever scare of 1822, centered at
the point where West Eleventh Street crosses West Fourth Street. At this
juncture was a cornfield on which, in two days, a hotel capable of
accommodating three hundred guests was built. At the same time a
hundred other houses sprang up, as if by magic, on all sides.
[Sidenote: Bank Street]
Bank Street was named in 1799. The year previous a clerk in the Bank of
New York on Wall Street was one of the earliest victims of yellow fever,
and the officials decided to take precautions in case of the bank being
quarantined at a future time. Eight lots were purchased on a then
nameless lane in Greenwich Village. The bank was erected there, and gave
the lane the name of Bank Street.
[Sidenote: Washington Square]
Washington Square was once a Potter's Field. A meadow was purchased by
the city for this purpose in 1789, and the pauper graveyard was
established about where the Washington Arch is now.
[Illustration: Looking South from Minetta Lane]
Manetta Creek, coming from the north, flowed to the west of the arch
site, crossed to what is now the western portion of the Square, ran
through the present Minetta Street and on to the river. In 1795, during
a yellow fever epidemic, the field was used as a common graveyard. In
1797 the pauper graveyard which had been in the present Madison Square,
was abandoned in favor of this one. There was a gallows on the ground
and criminals were executed and interred on the spot as late as 1822.
In 1823 the Potter's Field was abandoned and removed to the present
Bryant Park at Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue. In 1827, three and
one half acres of ground were added to the plot and the present
Washington Square was opened.
[Sidenote: Obelisk Lane]
Past the pauper graveyard ran an inland road to Greenwich Village. This
extended from the Post Road (now the Bowery) at the present Astor Place
near Cooper Union, continued in a direct line to about the position of
the Washington Arch, and from that point to the present Eighth Avenue
just above Fifteenth Street. This road, established through the fields
in 1768, was called Greenwich Lane. It was also known as Monument Lane
and Obelisk Lane. A small section of it still exists in Astor Place from
Bowery to Broadway. A larger section is Greenwich Avenue from Eighth to
Fourteenth Streets. Monument Lane took its name from a monument at
Fifteenth Street where the road ended, which had been erected to the
memory of General Wolfe, the hero of Quebec. The monument disappeared
in a mysterious way during the British occupation. It is thought to have
been destroyed by soldiers.
[Sidenote: Graveyard In a Side Street]
A few feet east of Sixth Avenue, on the south side of Eleventh Street,
is a brick wall and railing, behind which can be seen several battered
tombstones in a triangular plot of ground. This is all that is left of a
Jewish graveyard established almost a century ago.
Milligan's Lane was the continuation of Amos (now West Tenth) Street,
from Greenwich Avenue to Twelfth Street where it joined the Union Road.
This lane struck the line of Sixth Avenue where Eleventh Street is now.
At the southwest corner of this junction the course of the lane can be
seen yet in the peculiar angle of the side wall of a building there, and
in a similar angle of other houses near by. Close by this corner the
second graveyard of Shearith Israel Synagogue was established early in
this century. It took the place of the Beth Haim, or Place of Rest, down
town, a remnant of which is to be seen in New Bowery off Chatham Square.
[Sidenote: Milligan's Lane]
The Eleventh Street graveyard, established in the midst of green fields,
fronted on Milligan's Lane and extended back 110 feet. When Eleventh
Street was cut through under the conditions of the City Plan, in 1830,
it passed directly through the graveyard, cutting it away so that only
the tiny portion now there was left. At that time a new place of burial
was opened in Twenty-first Street west of Sixth Avenue.
[Sidenote: Union Road]
At a point just behind the house numbered 23 Eleventh Street, midway of
the block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, Union Road had its
starting-point. It was a short road, forming a direct communicating line
between Skinner and Southampton Roads. Skinner Road, running from
Hudson River along the line of the present Christopher Street, ended
where Union Road began; and Union Road met Southampton at what is now
the corner of Fifteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. This point was also
the junction of Southampton and Great Kiln Roads.
Evidences of the Union Road are still to be seen in Twelfth Street, at
the projecting angle of the houses numbered 43 and 45. It was just at
this point that Milligan's Lane ended. On Thirteenth Street, the course
of Union Road is shown by the slanting wall of a big business building,
numbered 36.
[Sidenote: First Presbyterian Church]
In Twelfth Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, is the First
Reformed Presbyterian Church. The congregation was started as a praying
society in 1790 at the house of John Agnew at No. 9 Peck Slip. In 1798
the congregation worshipped in a school house in Cedar Street. They
soon after built their first church at Nos. 39 and 41 Chambers Street,
where the American News Company building is now. It was a frame
building, and was succeeded in 1818 by a brick building on the same
site. In 1834 a new church was erected at Prince and Marion Streets. The
foundation for the present church was laid in 1848, and the church
occupied it in the following year.
[Sidenote: Society Library]
The New York Society Library, at 107 University Place, near Fourteenth
Street, claims to be the oldest institution of its kind in America. It
is certainly the most interesting in historical associations, richness
of old literature and art works. It is the direct outcome of the library
established in 1700, with quarters in the City Hall, in Wall Street, by
Richard, Earl of Bellomont, the Governor of New York.
In 1754 an association was incorporated for carrying on a library, and
their collection, added to the library already in existence, was called
the City Library. The Board of Trustees consisted of the most prominent
men in the city. In 1772 a charter was granted by George III, under the
name of the New York Society Library.
During the Revolutionary War the books became spoil for British
soldiers. Many were destroyed and many sold. After the war the remains
of the library were gathered from various parts of the city and again
collected in the City Hall. In 1784 the members of the Federal Congress
deliberated in the library rooms. In 1795 the library was moved to
Nassau Street, opposite the Middle Dutch Church; in 1836 to Chambers
Street; in 1841 to Broadway and Leonard Street; in 1853 to the Bible
House, and in 1856 to the present building.
[Sidenote: Great Kiln Road]
At the point that is now Seventh Avenue and Fifteenth Street, then
intersected by the Union Road, the Great Kiln Road ended. Its
continuation was called Southampton Road. From that point it continued
to Nineteenth Street, east of Sixth Avenue, and then parallel with Sixth
Avenue to Love Lane, the present Twenty-first Street.
The line of this road, where it joined the Great Kiln Road, is still
clearly shown in the oblique side wall of the house at the northwest
corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifteenth Street. Here, also, it has a
marked effect on the east wall of St. Joseph's Home for the Aged. The
first-mentioned house, with the cutting through of the streets, has been
left one of those queer triangular buildings, with full front and
running to a point in the rear.
[Sidenote: Weavers' Row]
When the road reached what is now Sixteenth Street, a third of a block
east of Seventh Avenue, it passed through the block in a sweeping curve
to the present corner of Seventeenth Street and Sixth Avenue. The
evidence of its passage is still to be seen in the tiny wooden houses
buried in the centre of the block, which are remnants of a row called
Paisley Place, or Weavers' Row. This row was built during the
yellow-fever agitation of 1822, and was occupied by Scotch weavers who
operated their hand machines there.
The road took its name from Sir Peter Warren's second daughter, who
married Charles Fitzroy, who later became the Baron Southampton.
[Sidenote: Graveyard Behind a Store]
In Twenty-first Street, a little west of Sixth Avenue, is the unused
though not uncared-for graveyard of the Shearith Israel Synagogue. The
graveyard cannot be seen from the street, but from the rear windows of a
nearby dry-goods store a glimpse can be had of the ivy-covered
receiving-vault and the time-grayed tombstones.
When this "Place of Rest" was established the locality was all green
fields. The graveyard had been forced from further down town by the
cutting through of Eleventh Street in 1830. Interments were made in this
spot until 1852, when the cemetery was removed to Cypress Hills, L. I.,
the Common Council having in that year prohibited burials within the
city limits. But though there were no burials, the congregation have
persistently refused to sell this plot, just as they have the earlier
plots, the remains of which are off Chatham Square and in Eleventh
Street, near Sixth Avenue.
[Sidenote: Love Lane]
Abingdon Road in the latter years of its existence was commonly called
Love Lane, and more than a century ago followed close on the line of the
present Twenty-first Street from what is now Broadway to Eighth Avenue.
It was the northern limit of a tract of land given by the city to
Admiral Sir Peter Warren in recognition of his services at the capture
of Louisburg.
From this road, when the Warren estate was divided among the daughters
of the Admiral, two roads, the Southampton and the Warren, were opened
through this upper part of the estate.
The name Love Lane was given to the road in the latter part of the
eighteenth century, and was retained until it was swallowed up in
Twenty-first Street. This last was ordered opened in 1827, but was not
actually opened until some years later. There is no record to show where
the name came from. The generally accepted idea is that being a quiet
and little traveled spot, it was looked upon as a lane where happy
couples might drive, far from the city, and amid green fields and
stately trees confide the story of their loves. It was the longest drive
from the town, by way of the Post Road, Bloomingdale Road and so across
the west to Southampton, Great Kiln roads, through Greenwich Village
and by the river road back to town.
The road originally took its name from the oldest daughter of Admiral
Warren, who married the Earl of Abingdon.
There are still traces of Love Lane in Twenty-first Street. The two
houses numbered 25 and 27 stood on the road. The houses 51, 53 and 55,
small and odd appearing, are more closely identified with the lane. When
built, these houses were conspicuous and alone, at the junction where
Southampton Road from Greenwich Village ran into Love Lane. They are
thought to have been a single house serving as a tavern.
Close by, at the northeast corner of Twenty-first Street and Sixth
Avenue, the house with the gable roof is one that also stood on the old
road, though built at a later date than the three next to it.
The road ended for many years about on the line with the present Eighth
Avenue, where it ran into the Fitzroy Road. Some years previous to the
laying out of the streets under the City Plan in 1811, Love Lane was
continued to Hudson River. Before it reached the river it was crossed, a
little east of Seventh Avenue, by the Warren Road, although there is no
trace of the crossing now.
[Sidenote: Chelsea Village]
[Illustration: Old Theological Seminary Chelsea Square]
Although Chelsea Village was long ago swallowed up by the city, and its
boundaries blotted out by the rectangular lines of the plan under which
the streets were mapped out in 1811, there is still a suggestion of it
in the green lawns and gray buildings of the General Theological
Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, which occupies the block
between Twentieth and Twenty-first Streets, Ninth and Tenth Avenues.
Chelsea got its name in 1750, when Captain Thomas Clarke, an old
soldier, gave the name to his country seat, in remembrance of the
English home for invalided soldiers. It was between two and three miles
from the city, a stretch of country land along the Hudson River with not
another house anywhere near it. The house stood, as streets are now, at
the south side of Twenty-third Street, about two hundred feet west of
Ninth Avenue, on a hill that sloped to the river. The captain had hoped
to die in his retreat, but his home was burned to the ground during his
severe illness, and he died in the home of his nearest neighbor. Soon
after his death the house was rebuilt by his widow, Mrs. Mollie Clarke.
The latter dying in 1802, a portion of the estate with the house went to
Bishop Benjamin Moore, who had married Mrs. Clarke's daughter, Charity.
It passed from him in 1813 to his son, Clement C. Moore. The latter
reconstructed the house, and it stood until 1850.
Clement C. Moore's estate was included within the present lines of
Eighth Avenue, Nineteenth to Twenty-fourth Streets and Hudson River.
These are approximately the bounds of Chelsea Village which grew up
around the old Chelsea homestead. It came to be a thriving village,
conveniently reached by the road to Greenwich and then by Fitzroy Road;
or by the Bowery Road, Bloomingdale, and then along Love Lane.
[Sidenote: London Terrace]
In 1831 the streets were cut through and the village thereafter grew up
on the projected lines of the City Plan. It was for this reason that
Chelsea, when the city reached it, was merged into it so perfectly that
there is not an imperfect street line to tell where the village had
been and where the city joined it. There are houses of the old village
still standing; notably those still called the Chelsea Cottages in
Twenty-fourth Street west of Ninth Avenue, and the row called the London
Terrace in Twenty-third Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.
The block on which the General Theological Seminary stands was given to
the institution by Clement C. Moore, and was long called Chelsea Square.
The cornerstone of the East Building was laid in 1825, and of the West
Building, which still stands, in 1835.
It was this Clement C. Moore, living quietly in the village that had
grown up around him, who wrote the child's poem which will be remembered
longer than its writer--"'Twas the Night before Christmas."
[Illustration]
III
III
[Sidenote: Oliver Street Baptist Church]
The Oliver Street Baptist Church was built on the northwest corner of
Oliver and Henry Streets in 1795. It was rebuilt in 1800, and again in
1819. Later it was burned, and finally restored in 1843. The structure
is now occupied by the Mariners' Temple, and the record of its burning
is to be seen on a marble tablet on the front wall.
Oliver Street--that is, the two blocks from Chatham Square to Madison
Street--was called Fayette Street before the name was changed to Oliver
in 1825.
James Street was once St. James Street. The change was made prior to
1816.
Mariners' Church, at 46 Catherine Street, was erected in 1854, on the
southeast corner of Madison Street. Prior to that, and as far back as
1819, it had been at 76 Roosevelt Street.
[Sidenote: Madison Street]
Banker Street having become a byword, because of the objectionable
character of its inhabitants, the name was changed to Madison Street in
1826.
Between Jefferson and Clinton Streets, and south of Henry, was a pond,
the only bit of water which, in early days, emptied into the East River
between what afterward became Roosevelt Street and Houston Street. A wet
meadow, rather than a distinct stream, extended from this pond to the
river as an outlet. This became later the region of shipyards.
[Illustration: Church of Sea & Land]
[Sidenote: Where Nathan Hale Was Hanged]
On what is now Cherry Street, between Clinton and Jefferson Streets, was
the house of Col. Henry Rutgers, the Revolutionary patriot, and his farm
extended from that point in all directions. On a tree of this farm
Nathan Hale, the martyr spy of the Revolution, was hanged, September 22,
1776. On this same farm the Church of the Sea and Land, still standing
with its three-foot walls, at Market and Henry Streets, was built in
1817.
In 1828, at the corner of Henry and Scammel Streets, was erected All
Saints' Church (Episcopal). It still stands, now hemmed in by
dwelling-houses. It is a low rock structure. A bit of green, a stunted
tree and some shrubs still struggle through the bricks at the rear of
the church, and can be seen through a tall iron railing from narrow
Scammel Street. In 1825 the church occupied a chapel on Grand Street at
the corner of Columbia.
[Sidenote: First Tenement House]
The first house designed especially for many tenants was built in 1833,
in Water Street just east of Jackson, on which site is now included
Corlears Hook Park. It was four stories in height, and arranged for one
family on each floor. It was built by Thomas Price, and owned by James
P. Allaire, whose noted engine works were close by in Cherry Street,
between Walnut (now Jackson) and Corlears Street.
Where Grand and Pitt Streets cross is the top of a hill formerly known
as Mount Pitt. On this hill the building occupied by the Mount Pitt
Circus was built in 1826. It was burned in 1828.
At Grand, corner of Ridge Street, is the St. Mary's Church (Catholic),
which was built in 1833, a rough stone structure with brick front and
back. In 1826 it was in Sheriff, between Broome and Delancey Streets. It
had the first Roman Catholic bell in the city. In 1831 the church was
burned by a burglar, and the new structure was built in Grand Street.
Actual work on the pier for the new East River Bridge, at the foot of
Delancey Street, was begun in the spring of 1897.
[Sidenote: Manhattan Island]
Much confusion has arisen, and still exists, in the designation of the
territory under the names of Manhattan Island and Island of Manhattan.
The two islands a hundred years ago were widely different bodies. They
are joined now.
Manhattan Island was the name given to a little knoll of land which lay
within the limits of what is now Third, Houston and Lewis Streets and
the East River. At high tide the place was a veritable island. There
seems to be still a suggestion of it in the low buildings which occupy
the ground of the former island. About the ancient boundary, as though
closing it in, are tall tenements and factory buildings. On the grounds
of this old island the first recreation pier was built, in 1897, at the
foot of Third Street.
The Island of Manhattan has always been the name applied to the land
occupied by the old City of New York, now the Borough of Manhattan.
In the heart of the block surrounded by Rivington, Stanton, Goerck and
Mangin Streets, there is still to be seen the remains of a
slanting-roofed market, closed in by the houses which have been built
about it. It was set up in 1827, and named Manhattan Market after the
nearby island.
[Illustration: Bone Alley]
[Sidenote: Bone Alley]
Work on the Hamilton Fish Park was begun in 1896, in the space bounded
by Stanton, Houston, Pitt and Sheriff Streets, then divided into two
blocks by Willett Street. This was a congested, tenement-house vicinity,
where misery and poverty pervaded most of the dingy dwellings. In wiping
out the two solidly built-up blocks, Bone Alley, well known in police
history for a generation, was effaced. On the west side of Willett
Street, midway of the block, Bone Alley had its start and extended sixty
feet into the block--a twenty-five-foot space between tall tenements,
running plump into a row of houses extending horizontal with it. When
these houses were erected they each had long gardens, which were built
upon when the land became too valuable to be spared for flower-beds or
breathing-spots. In time they became the homes of rag-and bone-pickers,
and thus the alley which led to them got its name, which it kept even
after the rag-pickers and the law-breakers who succeeded them had been
driven away by the police.
There was, forty years ago, a well of good, drinkable water at the point
where Rivington and Columbia Streets now cross.
[Sidenote: "Mother Mandelbaum"]
The little frame house at the northwest corner or Rivington and Clinton
Streets was the home of "Mother" Frederica Mandelbaum for many years,
until she was driven from the city in 1884. This "Queen of the Crooks,"
receiver of stolen goods and friend of all the criminal class,
compelled, in a sense, the admiration of the police, who for years
battled in vain to outwit her cleverness. When the play, "The Two
Orphans," was first produced, Mrs. Wilkins, as the "Frochard," copied
the character of "Mother" Mandelbaum and gave a representation of the
woman that all who knew the original recognized. Other plays were
written, and also many stories, having her as a central figure. She died
at Hamilton, Ontario, in 1894.
At the crossing of Rivington and Suffolk Streets was the source of
Stuyvesant's Creek. From there, as the streets exist now, it crossed
Stanton Street, near Clinton; Houston, at Sheriff; Second, near Houston;
then wound around to the north of Manhattan Island, and emptied into the
East River at Third Street.
[Sidenote: Allen Street Memorial Church]
In Rivington Street, between Ludlow and Orchard, is the Allen Street
Memorial Church (M. E.), built in 1888. The original Church, which was
built in 1810, is two blocks away, in Allen Street, between Delancey and
Rivington Streets. It was rebuilt in 1836, and when the new Rivington
Street structure was erected the old house was sold to a Jewish
congregation, who still occupy it as a synagogue.
In Grand Street, between Essex and Ludlow Streets, the Essex Market was
built in 1818. The court next to it, in Essex Street, was built in 1856.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: Mile Stone On the Bowery]
On the Bowery, opposite Rivington Street, is a milestone (one of three
that yet remain) which formerly marked the distance from the City Hall,
in Wall Street, on the Post Road. The land to the east of the Bowery
belonged to James De Lancey, who was Chief Justice of the Colony in
1733, and in 1753 became Lieutenant-Governor. A lane led from the
Bowery, close by the milestone, to his country house, which was at the
present northwest corner of Delancey and Chrystie Streets. It was in
this house that he died suddenly in 1760. James De Lancey was the eldest
son of Etienne (Stephen) De Lancey, who built the house which afterwards
was known as Fraunces' Tavern, and which still stands at Broad and Pearl
Streets. He later built the homestead at Broadway and Cedar Street.
Originally the name was "de Lanci." It became "de Lancy" in the
seventeenth century, and was Anglicized in the eighteenth century to "De
Lancey."
Where Grand Street crosses Mulberry was, until 1802, the family
burial-vault of the Bayard family, it having been the custom of early
settlers to bury their dead near their homesteads. The locality was
called Bunker Hill.
[Sidenote: St. Patrick's Church]
St. Patrick's Church, enclosed now by the high wall at Mott and Prince
Streets, was completed in 1815, the cornerstone having been laid in
1809. It was surrounded by meadows and great primitive trees. This
region was so wild that in 1820 a fox was killed in the churchyard. In
1866 the interior of the church was destroyed by fire. It was at once
reconstructed in its present form. Amongst others buried in the vaults
are "Boss" John Kelly, Vicar-General Starr and Bishop Connelly, first
resident bishop of New York.
At Prince and Marion Streets, northwest corner, the house in which
President James Monroe lived while in the city still stands.
[Sidenote: An Unsolved Crime]
The St. Nicholas Hotel was at Broadway and Spring Street, and on the
ground floor John Anderson kept a tobacco store, to which the attention
of the entire country was directed in July, 1842, because of the murder
of Mary Rogers. This tragedy gave Edgar Allan Poe material for his
story "The Mystery of Marie Roget," into which he introduced every
detail of the actual happening. Mary Rogers was a saleswoman in the
tobacco store, and being young and pretty she attracted considerable
attention. She disappeared one July day, and, soon after, her body was
found drowned near the Sibyl's Cave at Hoboken. The deepest mystery
surrounded her evident murder, and much interest was taken in attempts
at a solution, but it remained an unsolved crime.
On the east side of Broadway, between Prince and Houston Streets, on
July 4, 1828, William Niblo opened his Garden, Hotel and Theatre, to be
known for many years thereafter as Niblo's Garden. Prior to that, he had
kept the Bank Coffee House, at William and Pine Streets.
[Sidenote: Niblo's Garden]
The Metropolitan Hotel was built in Niblo's Garden, on the corner that
is now Broadway and Prince Street, in 1852, at a cost of a million
dollars. The theatre in the hotel building was called Niblo's Garden.
The building was demolished in 1894, and a business block was put up on
the site.
Across the street from Niblo's, on Broadway, in a modest brick house,
lived, at one time, James Fenimore Cooper, the novelist.
At No. 624 Broadway, between Houston and Bleecker Streets, was Laura
Keene's theatre. On March 1, 1858, Polly Marshall made her first
appearance on any stage at that theatre. Later it became the Olympic
Theatre.
At Broadway and Bleecker Streets, a well was drilled, in 1832, which was
four hundred and forty-eight feet deep, and which yielded forty-four
thousand gallons of water a day.
[Sidenote: Tripler Hall]
Tripler Hall was at No. 677 Broadway, near Bond Street. Adelina Patti
appeared there on September 22, 1852, when ten years old, giving
evidence of her future greatness. She sang there for some time, usually
accompanied by the boy violinist, Paul Julien.
Tripler Hall had been renamed the Metropolitan Hall, when it was
destroyed by fire in 1854. Lafarge House, which stood next it, was also
burned. The house was rebuilt on the site, and opened in September,
1854, under the name of the New York Theatre and Metropolitan Opera
House.
Rachel the great was first seen in America at this house, September 3,
1855. Later the house became the Winter Garden.
[Sidenote: First Marble-Fronted Houses]
The first marble-fronted houses in the city were built on Broadway,
opposite Bond Street, in 1825. They were called the Marble Houses, and
attracted much attention. Being far out of the city, excursions were
made to view them. Afterwards they became the Tremont House, and are
still in use as a hotel.
A pipe for a well was sunk in Broadway, opposite Bond Street, in April,
1827, it being thought that enough water for the supply of the immediate
neighborhood could be obtained therefrom. The water was not found,
however.
[Sidenote: Burdell Murder]
No. 31 Bond Street was the scene of a celebrated murder. The house is
torn down now, but it was identical with the one which now stands at No.
29. On January 3, 1857, Dr. Harvey Burdell, a dentist, was literally
butchered there, being stabbed fifteen times. A portion of the house had
been occupied by a widow named Cunningham, and her two daughters. After
the murder, Mrs. Cunningham claimed a widow's share of the Doctor's
estate, on the ground that she had been married to him some months
before. This claim started an investigation, which resulted in Mrs.
Cunningham's being suspected of the crime, arrested, tried and
acquitted. Soon after her acquittal, she attempted to secure control of
the entire Burdell estate, by claiming that she had given birth to an
heir to the property. The scheme failed, for the physician through whom
she obtained a new-born child from Bellevue Hospital, disclosed the plot
to District Attorney A. Oakey Hall. The woman and her daughters left the
city suddenly, and were not heard of again. The mystery of the murder
was never solved.
The part of Houston Street east of the Bowery was, prior to November,
1833, called North Street. At the time the change in names was made the
street was raised. Between Broadway and the Bowery had been a wet tract
of land many feet below the grade. In 1844 the street was extended from
Lewis Street to the East River.
The Bleecker Street Bank, which was just east of Broadway, on the north
side of Bleecker Street, was moved in October, 1897, to Twenty-first
Street and Fourth Avenue, and called The Bank for Savings. It had
originally been in the New York Institute Building in City Hall Park.
[Illustration: Entrance to Marble Cemetery]
[Sidenote: Marble Cemetery]
In the heart of the block inclosed by the Bowery, Second Avenue, Second
and Third Streets, is a hidden graveyard. It is the New York Marble
Cemetery, and so completely has it been forgotten that its name no
longer appears in the City Directory. On four sides it is hemmed about
by tenements and business buildings, so that one could walk past it for
a lifetime without knowing that it was there. On the Second Avenue side,
the entrance is formed by a narrow passage between houses, which is
closed by an iron gateway. But the gate is always locked, and at the
opposite end of the passage is another gate of wood set in a brick
wall, so high that nothing but the tops of trees can be seen beyond it.
From the upper rear windows of the neighboring tenements a view of the
place can be had. It is a wild spot, four hundred feet by one hundred,
covered by a tangled growth of bushes and weeds, crossed by neglected
paths, and enclosed by a wall seventeen feet high. There is no sign of a
tombstone. In the southwest corner is a deadhouse of rough hewn stone.
On the south wall the names of vault owners are chiseled. Among these
were some of the best known New Yorkers fifty years ago. The records of
the city show that this land was owned by Henry Eckford and Marion, his
wife. They deeded it to Anthony Dey and George W. Strong when the
cemetery corporation was organized, July 30, 1830. There were one
hundred and fifty-six vaults, and fifteen hundred persons were buried
there. This cemetery is forgotten almost as completely as its own dead,
and its memories do not molest the dwellers in the surrounding tenements
who overlook it from their rear windows, and use it as a sort of
dumping-ground for all useless things that can readily be thrown into
it.
[Sidenote: The Second Marble Cemetery]
There is another Marble Cemetery which historians sometimes confuse with
this hidden graveyard, namely, one on Second Street, between First and
Second Avenues. Some of the larger merchants of the city bought the
ground in 1832, and created the New York City Marble Cemetery. Among the
original owners was Robert Lenox. When he died, in 1839, his body was
placed in a vault of the First Presbyterian Church at 16 Wall Street.
When that church was removed to Fifth Avenue and Twelfth Street the
remains of Lenox with others were removed to this Marble Cemetery. The
body of President James Monroe was first interred here, but was removed
in 1859 to Virginia. Thomas Addis Emmet, the famous jurist, is also
buried here. One of the most conspicuous monuments in St. Paul's
churchyard, the shaft at the right of the church, was erected to the
memory of Emmet. A large column on the other side of the church
preserves the memory of another man whose body does not lie in the
churchyard, for William James Macneven was interred in the
burying-ground of the Riker family at Bowery Bay, L. I.
In Second Street, between Avenue A and First Avenue, stood a Methodist
church, and beside it a graveyard, until 1840; when the building was
turned into a public school. There were fifteen hundred bodies in the
yard, but they were not removed to Evergreen Cemetery until 1860. Only
fifteen bodies were claimed by relatives. One man who applied for his
father's body refused that offered him, claiming that the skull was too
small, and that some mistake had been made in disinterment.
Second Street Methodist Episcopal Church, between Avenues C and D, was
built in 1832, the congregation having previously worshipped in private
houses in the vicinity. At one time this was the most prominent and
wealthiest church on the eastern side of the city.
[Sidenote: Bouwerie Village]
The Bouwerie Village was another of the little settlements--once a busy
spot, but now so effaced that every outline of its existence is blotted
out. It centred about the site of the present St. Mark's Church, Second
Avenue and Tenth Street. In 1651, when Peter Stuyvesant, the last of
the Dutch Governors, had ruled four years, he purchased the Great
Bouwerie, a tract of land extending two miles along the river north of
what is now Grand Street, taking in a section of the present Bowery and
Third Avenue. As there was, from time to time, trouble with the Indians,
the Governor ordered the dwellers on his bouwerie, as well as those on
adjoining bouweries, to form a village and gather there for mutual
protection at the first sign of an outbreak. Very soon the settlement
included a blacksmith's shop, a tavern and a dozen houses. In this way
the Bouwerie Village was started. Peter Stuyvesant in time built a
chapel, and in it Hermanus Van Hoboken, the schoolmaster, after whom the
city of Hoboken is named, preached. Years after the founding of the
village, when New Amsterdam had become New York, and when the old
Governor had returned from Holland, where he had, before the
States-General, fought for vindication in so readily giving up the
province to the English, Stuyvesant returned to end his days in the
Bouwerie Village. He died there at the age of eighty, and was buried in
the graveyard of the Bouwerie Church. St. Mark's Church, at Tenth Street
and Second Avenue, stands on the site of the old church, and a memorial
stone to Peter Stuyvesant is still to be seen under the porch. It reads:
[Sidenote: Grave of Peter Stuyvesant]
IN THIS VAULT LIES BURIED
PETRUS STUYVESANT,
LATE CAPTAIN-GENERAL AND GOVERNOR IN CHIEF
OF AMSTERDAM IN NEW NETHERLAND
NOW CALLED NEW YORK
AND THE DUTCH WEST INDIES, DIED IN A. D. 1671/2
AGED 80 YEARS.
When Judith, the widow of Peter Stuyvesant, died, in 1692, she left the
church in which the old Governor had worshipped to the Dutch Reformed
Church. A condition was that the Stuyvesant vault should be forever
protected. By 1793 the church had fallen into decay. Then another Peter
Stuyvesant, great-grandson of the Dutch Governor, who was a vestryman of
Trinity Church, gave the site and surrounding lots, together with
$2,000, and the Trinity Corporation added $12,500, and erected the
present St. Mark's Church. The cornerstone was laid in 1795 and the
building completed in 1799. It had no steeple until 1829, when that
portion was added. In 1858 the porch was added. In the churchyard were
buried the remains of Mayor Philip Hone and of Governor Daniel D.
Tompkins. It was here that the body of Alexander T. Stewart rested until
stolen. Close by the church was the mansion of Governor Stuyvesant. It
was an imposing structure for those days, built of tiny bricks brought
from Holland. A fire destroyed the house at the time of the Revolution.
When Peter Stuyvesant returned from Holland he brought with him a pear
tree, which he planted in a garden near his Bouwerie Village house. This
tree flourished for more than two hundred years. At Thirteenth Street
and Third Avenue, on the house at the northeast corner, is a tablet
inscribed:
ON THIS CORNER GREW
PETRUS STUYVESANT'S PEAR TREE
* * * * *
RECALLED TO HOLLAND IN 1664,
ON HIS RETURN
HE BROUGHT THE PEAR TREE
AND PLANTED IT
AS HIS MEMORIAL,
"BY WHICH," SAID HE, "MY NAME
MAY BE REMEMBERED."
THE PEAR TREE FLOURISHED
AND BORE FRUIT FOR OVER
TWO HUNDRED YEARS.
THIS TABLET IS PLACED HERE BY
THE HOLLAND SOCIETY
OF NEW YORK
SEPTEMBER, 1890.
[Sidenote: First Sunday School]
In 1785 half a dozen persons in the First Bouwerie Village, then
scattering to the school east from the site of Cooper Union, met at the
"Two Mile Stone"--so called from being two miles from Federal Hall--in
the upper room of John Coutant's house, on the site where Cooper
Institute stands now. The room was used as a shoe store during the week.
Here, on Sundays, ministers from the John Street Church instructed
converts. Peter Cooper, who was a member of the church, a few years
later conceived the idea of connecting the school with the church. The
organization was perfected, and he was chosen Superintendent of this,
the first Sunday School of New York.
[Sidenote: Bowery Village Church]
The quarters becoming cramped, in 1795 the congregation moved to a
two-story building a block away, on Nicholas William Street. This
street, long since blotted out, extended from what is now Fourth Avenue
and Seventh Street, across the Cooper Institute site and part of the
adjoining block, to Eighth (now St. Mark's Place), midway of the block
between Third and Second Avenues. The street was named after Nicholas
William Stuyvesant. When the old John Street Church was taken down, in
1817, the timber from it was used to erect a church next to the Sunday
School (called the Academy). This church was called the Bowery Village
Church. In 1830, the Bowery Village Church having been wiped out by the
advancing streets of the City Plan, Nicholas William Street went with
it, and a church was then established a short distance to the east, on
the line of what is now Seventh Street, north side, and this became the
Seventh Street Church. In 1837 persons living near by who objected to
the church revivals presented the trustees with two lots, nearer Third
Avenue. There a new church was built, which still stands.
[Sidenote: Second Vauxhall Garden]
Vauxhall Garden occupied (according to the present designation of the
streets) the space south of Astor Place, between Fourth Avenue and
Broadway, to the line of Fifth Street. Fourth Avenue was then Bowery
Road, and the main entrance to the Garden was on that side, opposite the
present Sixth Street. At Broadway the Garden narrowed down to a V shape.
On this ground, for many years, John Sperry, a Swiss, cultivated fruits
and flowers, and when he had grown old he sold his estate, in 1799, to
John Jacob Astor. The latter leased it to a Frenchman named Delacroix,
who had previously conducted the Vauxhall Garden on the Bayard Estate,
close by the present Warren and Greenwich Streets. During the next eight
years Delacroix transformed his newly-acquired possession into a
pleasure garden, by erecting a small theatre and summer-house, and by
setting out tables and seats under the trees on the grounds, and booths
with benches around the inside close up to the high board fence that
enclosed the Garden. He called the place Vauxhall, thereby causing some
confusion to historians, who often confound this Garden with the earlier
one of the same name. This last Vauxhall was situated a mile out of town
on the Bowery Road. It was an attractive retreat, and the tableaux were
so fine, the ballets so ingenius and the singing of such excellence,
that the resort became immensely popular, and remained so continuously
until the Garden was swept out of existence in 1855. Admission to the
grounds was free, and to the theatre two shillings. In its last years it
was a favorite place for the holding of large public meetings.
[Sidenote: Cooper Union]
Cooper Union, at the upper end of the Bowery, was built in 1854. Peter
Cooper, merchant and philanthropist, made the object of his life the
establishment of an institution designed especially to give the working
classes opportunity for self-education better than the existing
institutions afforded. His store was on the site of the present
building, which he founded. By a deed executed in 1859 the institution,
with its incomes, he devoted to the instruction and improvement of the
people of the United States forever. The institution has been taxed to
its full capacity since its inception. From time to time it has been
enriched by gifts from Mr. Cooper's heirs and friends. The statue of
Peter Cooper, in the little park in front of the building, was unveiled
May 28th, 1897. It is the work of Augustus St. Gaudens, once a pupil in
the Institute.
On a part of the site of Cooper Union, at the east side of what was then
the Bowery, and what is now Fourth Avenue, stood a house which was said
to have been haunted. It was demolished to make way for Cooper Union.
No permanent tenant, it is said, had occupied it for sixty years. It was
a peaked-roofed brick structure, two stories high.
The house of Peter Cooper was on the site of the present Bible House, at
Eighth Street and Third Avenue. He removed in 1820 to Twenty-eighth
Street and Fourth Avenue, and his dwelling may still be seen there.
[Sidenote: Astor Place]
Astor Place is part of old Greenwich Lane, which led from the Bowery
Lane past the pauper cemetery, where Washington Square is now, over the
sand hills where University Place now is, and took the line of the
present Greenwich Avenue. This was also called Monument Lane, because of
a monument to the memory of General Wolfe erected on the spot where the
road ended, at the junction of Eighth Avenue and Fifteenth Street.
Astor Place, as far as Fifth Avenue, was called Art Street when it was
changed from a road to a street. The continuation of Astor Place to the
east, now Stuyvesant Street, was originally Stuyvesant Road, and
extended to the river at about Fifteenth Street. It was also called Art
when it became a street. On the south side of this thoroughfare, just
west of Fourth Avenue, Charlotte Temple lived in a small stone house.
At the head of Lafayette Place, fronting on Astor Place, is a building
used at this time as a German Theatre. It was built for Dr. Schroeder,
once the favorite preacher of the city, of whom it was said that if
anyone desired to know where Schroeder preached, he had only to follow
the crowds on Sunday. But he became dissatisfied and left Trinity for a
church of his own. He very soon gave up this church, and for a time the
building was occupied by St. Ann's Roman Catholic congregation.
Afterward it became a theatre and failed to succeed.
The ground at the junction of Astor Place and Eighth Street was made a
public square in 1836. In the midst of it may now be seen a statue of
Samuel S. Cox.
[Sidenote: Scene of Forrest-Macready Riots]
Astor Place Opera House, at the junction of Eighth Street and Astor
Place, where Clinton Hall stands now, was built in 1847. It was a
handsome theatre for those days, and contained eighteen hundred seats.
It was opened on November 22nd with "Ernani." On May 7th, 1849, at this
house occurred the first of the Macready riots. The bitter jealousy
existing between William Charles Macready, the English actor, and Edwin
Forrest, which had assumed the proportions of an international quarrel,
so far as the two actors and their friends were concerned, was the
cause. The admirers of Forrest sought, on this night, to prevent the
performance of "Macbeth," and a riot ensued in which no particular
damage was done. On May 10th, in response to a petition signed by many
prominent citizens, Macready again sought to play "Macbeth." An effort
was made to keep all Forrest sympathizers from the house. Many, however,
gained admission, and the performance was again frustrated. The
ringleaders were arrested. A great crowd blocked Astor Place, and an
assault upon the theatre was attempted. Macready escaped by a rear door.
The Seventh Regiment and a troop of cavalry cleared Eighth Street and
reached Astor Place. The mob resisted. The Riot Act was read. That
producing no effect, and the assault upon the building and the soldiers
defending it becoming more violent each moment, the mob was fired upon.
Three volleys were fired. Thirty-four persons were killed and some
hundred injured. Over one hundred soldiers and many policemen were also
hurt.
On August 30th, 1852, the name of the house was changed to the New York
Theatre, under the direction of Charles R. Thorne. In a month's time he
gave up the venture and Frank Chanfrau took it up. He also abandoned it
after a few weeks.
[Sidenote: Clinton Hall]
In 1854 the Opera House was reconstructed and occupied by the Mercantile
Library. It was given the name of Clinton Hall, which had been the name
of the library's first home in Beekman Street. This building in time
gave way to the present Clinton Hall on the same site.
[Sidenote: Lafayette Place]
Lafayette Place was opened through the Vauxhall Garden in 1826.
The Astor Library, in Lafayette Place, was completed in 1853, and was
opened in 1854. The site cost $25,000.
The Middle Dutch Reformed Church was built in Lafayette Place in 1839,
at the northwest corner of Fourth Street after its removal from Nassau
and Cedar Streets. A new church was built at Seventh Street and Second
Avenue in 1844. In the Lafayette Place building was a bell which had
been cast in Holland in 1731, and which had first been used when the
church was in Nassau Street. It was the gift of Abraham de Peyster, and
now hangs in the Reformed Church at Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth
Street.
Next to this church, for many years, lived Madam Canda, who kept the
most fashionable school for ladies of a generation ago. Her beautiful
daughter was dashed from a carriage, and killed on her eighteenth
birthday--the age at which she was to make her début into society. The
entire city mourned her loss.
[Sidenote: La Grange Terrace]
Soon after Lafayette Place was opened, La Grange Terrace was built. It
was named after General Lafayette's home in France. The row is still
prominent on the west side of the thoroughfare, and is known as
Colonnade Row. A riot occurred at the time it was built, the masons of
the city being aroused because the stone used in the structure was cut
by the prisoners in Sing Sing prison.
John Jacob Astor lived on this street. He died March 29th, 1848, and was
buried from the home of his son, William B. Astor, just south of the
library building.
[Sidenote: Sailors' Snug Harbor]
A line drawn through Astor Place and continued to the Washington Arch in
Washington Square, through Fifth Avenue to the neighborhood of Tenth
Street, with Fourth Avenue as an eastern boundary, would roughly enclose
what used to be the Eliot estate in the latter part of the eighteenth
century. It was a farm of about twenty-one acres in 1790, when it was
purchased for five thousand pounds from "Baron" Poelnitz, by Captain
Robert Richard Randall, who had been a ship-master and a merchant.
Randall dying in 1801, bequeathed the farm for the founding of an asylum
for superannuated sailors, together with the mansion house in which he
had lived. The house stood, approximately, at the present northwest
corner of Ninth Street and Broadway. It was the intention of Captain
Randall that the Sailors' Snug Harbor should be built on the property,
and the farming land used to raise all vegetables, fruit and grain
necessary for the inmates. There were long years of litigation, however,
for relatives contested the will. When the case was settled in 1831, the
trustees had decided to lease the land, and to purchase the Staten
Island property where the Asylum is now located. The estate, at the
time of Captain Randall's death, yielded an annual income of $4,000. At
present the income is about $400,000 a year. It is conceded that the
property would have increased more rapidly in value had it been sold
outright, instead of becoming leasehold property in perpetuity.
Many efforts have been made to cut through Eleventh Street from Fourth
Avenue to Broadway. The first was in 1830, when the street was open on
the lines of the City Plan. Hendrick Brevoort, whose farm adjoined the
Sailors' Snug Harbor property, had a homestead directly in the line of
the proposed street, between Fourth Avenue and Broadway. He resisted the
attempted encroachment on his home so successfully that the street was
not opened through that block. He was again similarly successful in
1849, when an ordinance was passed for the removal of his house and the
opening of the street.
[Sidenote: Grace Church]
Grace Church, at Tenth Street and Broadway, was completed in 1846.
Previous to that date it had been on the southwest corner of Broadway
and Rector Street, opposite Trinity Church.
There is a reason for the sudden bend in Broadway at Tenth Street, close
by Grace Church. The Bowery Lane, which is now Fourth Avenue, curved in
passing through what is now Union Square until, at the line of the
present Seventeenth Street it turned and took a direct course north and
was from thereon called the Bloomingdale Road. This road to Bloomingdale
was opened long before Broadway, and it was in order to let the latter
connect as directly as possible with the straight road north that the
direction of Broadway was changed about 1806 by the Tenth Street bend
and a junction effected with the other road at the Seventeenth Street
line.
At Thirteenth Street and Fourth Avenue there was constructed in 1834 a
tank which was intended to furnish water for extinguishing fires. It had
a capacity of 230,000 gallons, and was one hundred feet above tide
water. Water was forced into it by a 12-horse power engine from a well
and conducting galleries at the present Tenth Street and Sixth Avenue,
on the site of the Jefferson Market Prison.
[Sidenote: Wallack's Theatre]
In 1861 James W. Wallack moved from Wallack's Lyceum at Broome Street,
and occupied the new Wallack's, now the Star Theatre, at Thirteenth
Street and Broadway. His last appearance was when he made a little
speech at the close of the season of 1862. He died in 1864.
[Sidenote: Union Square]
Union Square was provided for in the City Plan, under the name of Union
Place. The Commissioners decided that the Place was necessary, as an
opening for fresh air would be needed when the city should be built up.
Furthermore, the union of so many roads intersecting at that point
required space for convenience; and if the roads were continued without
interruption the land would be divided into such small portions as to be
valueless for building purposes.
The fountain in the square was operated for the first time in 1842, on
the occasion of the great Croton Water celebration.
The bronze equestrian statue of Washington was erected in the square
close by where the citizens had received the Commander of the Army when
he entered the city on Evacuation Day, November 25, 1783. The statue is
the work of Henry K. Brown. The dedication occurred on July 4, 1856,
and was an imposing ceremony. Rev. George W. Bethune delivered an
oration, and there was a military parade.
[Sidenote: Academy of Music]
The Academy of Music, at Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, was built
in 1854 by a number of citizens who desired a permanent home for opera.
On October 2nd of that year, Hackett took his company, headed by Grisi
and Matio, there, the weather being too cold to continue the season at
Castle Garden. The building was burned in 1866 and rebuilt in 1868.
In Third Avenue, between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets, is an old
milestone which marked the third mile from Federal Hall on the Post
Road.
The Friends' Meeting House, at East Sixteenth Street and Rutherford
Place, has existed since 1860. In 1775 it was in Pearl Street, near
Franklin Square. In 1824 it was taken down and rebuilt in 1826 in Rose
Street, near Pearl.
[Sidenote: St. George's Church]
St. George's (Episcopal) Church, at Rutherford Place and Sixteenth
Street, was built in 1845. The church was organized in 1752, and before
occupying the present site was in Beekman Street.
Early in the century a stream of water ran from Stuyvesant's Pond, close
by what is now Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue, to First Avenue and
Nineteenth Street, having an outlet into the East River at about
Sixteenth Street. In winter this furnished an excellent skating-ground.
[Sidenote: Gramercy Park]
Gramercy Park, at Twentieth and Twenty-first Streets and Lexington
Avenue, was originally part of the Gramercy Farm. In 1831 it was given
by Samuel B. Ruggles to be used exclusively by the owners of lots
fronting on it. It was laid out and improved in 1840. In the pavement,
in front of the park gate on the west side, is a stone bearing this
inscription:
GRAMERCY PARK
FOUNDED BY
SAMUEL B. RUGGLES
1831
COMMEMORATED BY THIS TABLET
IMBEDDED IN
THE GRAMERCY FARM BY
JOHN RUGGLES STRONG.
1875.
[Sidenote: Madison Square]
There was no evidence during the last part of the eighteenth century
that the town would ever creep up to and beyond the point where
Twenty-third Street crosses Broadway. This point was the junction of the
Post Road to Boston and the Bloomingdale Road. The latter was the
fashionable out-of-town driveway, and it followed the course that
Broadway and the Boulevard take now. The Post Road extended to the
northeast. At this point, in 1794, a Potter's Field was established.
There were many complaints at its being located there, where pauper
funerals clashed with the vehicles of the well-to-do, and there was much
rejoicing three years later, when the burying-ground was removed to the
spot that is now Washington Square.
[Sidenote: Arsenal in Madison Square]
In 1797 was built, where the burying-ground had been, an arsenal which
extended from Twenty-fourth Street and over the site of the Worth
Monument.
In the City Plan, completed in 1811, provision was made for a
parade-ground to extend from Twenty-third to Thirty-fourth Streets, and
Seventh to Third Avenue. The Commissioners decided that such a space was
needed for military exercises, and where, in case of necessity, there
could be assembled a force to defend the city. In 1814, the limits of
the parade-ground were reduced to the space between Twenty-third and
Thirty-first Streets, Sixth and Fourth Avenues, and given the name of
Madison Square.
[Sidenote: House of Refuge]
The Arsenal in Madison Square was turned into a House of Refuge in 1824,
and opened January 1, 1825. This was the result of the work of an
association of citizens who formed a society to improve the condition of
juvenile delinquents. The House of Refuge was burned in 1839, and
another institution built at the foot of Twenty-third Street the same
year. A portion of the old outer wall of this last structure is still to
be seen on the north side of Twenty-third Street, between First Avenue
and Avenue A.
In 1845, at the suggestion of Mayor James Harper, Madison Square was
reduced to its present limits and laid out as a public park. Up to this
time a stream of water had crossed the square, fed by springs in the
district about Sixth Avenue, between Twenty-first and Twenty-seventh
Streets. It spread out into a pond in Madison Square, and emptied into
the East River at Seventeenth Street. It was suggested that a street be
created over its bed from Madison Avenue to the river. This was not
carried out, and the stream was simply buried.
[Sidenote: Post Road]
The road which branched out of the Bloomingdale Road at Twenty-third
Street, sometimes called the Boston Post Road, sometimes the Post Road,
sometimes the Boston Turnpike, ran across the present Madison Square,
striking Fourth Avenue at Twenty-ninth Street; went through Kipsborough
which hugged the river between Thirty-third and Thirty-seventh Streets,
swept past Turtle Bay at Forty-seventh Street and the East River,
crossed Second Avenue at Fifty-second Street, recrossed at Sixty-third
Street, reached the Third Avenue line at Sixty-fifth Street, and at
Seventy-seventh Street crossed a small stream over the Kissing Bridge.
Then proceeded irregularly on this line to One Hundred and Thirtieth
Street, where it struck the bridge over the Harlem River at Third
Avenue. The road was closed in 1839.
The monument to Major-General William J. Worth, standing to the west of
Madison Square, was dedicated November 25, 1857. General Worth was the
main support of General Scott in the campaign of Mexico. His body was
first interred in Greenwood Cemetery. On November 23rd the remains were
taken to City Hall, where they lay in state for two days, then were
taken, under military escort, and deposited beside the monument.
[Sidenote: Fifth Avenue Hotel]
For twenty years, or more, prior to 1853, the site of the present Fifth
Avenue Hotel, at Twenty-third Street and Broadway, was occupied by a
frame cottage with a peaked roof, and covered veranda reached by a
flight of wooden stairs. This was the inn of Corporal Thompson, and a
favorite stopping-place on the Bloomingdale Road. An enclosed lot,
extending as far as the present Twenty-fourth Street, was used at
certain times of the year for cattle exhibitions. In 1853 the cottage
made way for Franconi's Hippodrome, a brick structure, two stories high,
enclosing an open space two hundred and twenty-five feet in diameter.
The performances given here were considered of great merit and received
with much favor. In 1856 the Hippodrome was removed, and in 1858 the
present Fifth Avenue Hotel was opened.
The Madison Square Presbyterian Church, at Madison Avenue and
Twenty-fourth Street, was commenced in 1853, the earlier church of the
congregation having been in Broome Street. It was opened December, 1854,
with Rev. Dr. William Adams as pastor.
[Illustration: College of the City of New York]
[Sidenote: College of City of New York]
At the southeast corner of Twenty-third Street and Lexington Avenue, the
College of the City of New York has stood since 1848, the opening
exercises having taken place in 1849. In 1847 the Legislature passed an
Act authorizing the establishment of a free academy for the benefit of
pupils who had been educated in the public schools of this city. The
name Free Academy was given to the institution, and under that name it
was incorporated. It had the power to confer degrees and diplomas. In
1866 the name was changed to its present title, and all the privileges
and powers of a college were conferred upon it. In 1882 the college was
thrown open to all young men, whether educated in the public schools of
this city or not. In 1898 ground was set aside in the northern part of
the city, overlooking the Hudson River, for the erection of modern
buildings suitable to meet the growth of the college.
[Illustration: Gate of Old House of Refuge]
[Sidenote: Old House of Refuge Wall]
The House of Refuge in Madison Square was, after the fire in 1839,
rebuilt on the block bounded by Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets,
First Avenue and the East River. It was surrounded by a high wall, a
section of which is still standing on the north side of Twenty-third
Street, between First Avenue and Avenue A. The river at that time
extended west to beyond the Avenue A line. The old gateway is there
yet, and is used now as the entrance to a coal-yard. Some of the barred
windows of the wall can still be seen. In 1854 the inmates were removed
to Randall's Island, and were placed in charge of the State.
[Sidenote: Bellevue Hospital]
Bellevue Hospital has occupied its present site; at the foot of East
Twenty-sixth Street, since about 1810. The hospital really had its
beginning in 1736, in the buildings of the Public Work-house and House
of Correction in City Hall Park. There were six beds there, in charge of
the medical officer, Dr. John Van Beuren. About the beginning of the
nineteenth century, yellow fever patients were sent to a building known
as Belle Vue, on the Belle Vue Farm, close by the present hospital
buildings. In about 1810 it was decided to establish a new almshouse,
penitentiary and hospital on the Belle Vue Farm. Work on this was
completed in 1816. The almshouse building was three stories high,
surmounted by a cupola, and having a north and south wing each one
hundred feet long. This original structure stands to-day, and is part of
the present hospital building, other branches having been added to it
from time to time. The water line, at that time, was within half a block
of where First Avenue is now.
In 1848 the Almshouse section of the institution was transferred to
Blackwell's Island. The ambulance service was started in 1869, and was
the first service of its kind in the world.
[Sidenote: Bull's Head Village]
Bull's Head Village was located in the district now included within
Twenty-third and Twenty-seventh Streets, Fourth and Second Avenues. It
became a centre of importance in 1826, when the old Bull's Head Tavern
was moved from its early home on the Bowery, near Bayard Street, to the
point which is now marked by Twenty-sixth Street and Third Avenue. It
continued to be the headquarters of drovers and stockmen. As at that
time there was no bank north of the City Hall Park, the Bull's Head
Tavern served as inn, bank and general business emporium for the
locality. For more than twenty years this district was the great cattle
market of the city. As business increased, stores and business houses
were erected, until, toward the year 1850, the cattle mart, which was
the source of all business, was crowded out. It was moved up-town to the
neighborhood of Forty-second Street; later to Ninety-fourth Street, and
in the early 80's to the Jersey shore. The most celebrated person
connected with the management of the Bull's Head Tavern was Daniel Drew.
He afterwards operated in Wall Street, became a director of the New York
and Erie Railroad upon its completion in 1851, and accumulated a fortune
by speculation.
[Sidenote: Peter Cooper's House]
At Twenty-eighth Street and Fourth Avenue, on the southeast corner, the
house numbered 399-401, stands the old "Cooper Mansion," in which Peter
Cooper lived. It was formerly on the site where the Bible House is now,
at the corner of Eighth Street and Fourth Avenue. Peter Cooper himself
superintended the removal of the house in 1820, and directed its
establishment on the new site so that it should be reconstructed in a
manner that should absolutely preserve its original form. Now it
presents an insignificant appearance crowded about by modern structures,
and it is occupied by a restaurant.
This corner of Twenty-eighth Street and Fourth Avenue was directly on
the line of the Boston Post Road. Just at that point the Middle Road ran
from it, and extended in a direct line to Fifth Avenue and Forty-second
Street.
[Illustration: The Little Church around the Corner]
[Sidenote: Little Church Around the Corner]
The Little Church Around the Corner, a low, rambling structure,
seemingly all angles and corners, is on the north side of Twenty-ninth
Street, midway of the block between Fifth and Madison Avenues. It is
the Episcopal Church of The Transfiguration. Its picturesque title was
bestowed upon it in 1871, when Joseph Holland, an English actor, the
father of E. M. and Joseph Holland, the players known to the present
generation, died. Joseph Jefferson, when arranging for the funeral, went
to a church which stood then at Madison Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street,
to arrange for the services. The minister said that his congregation
would object to an actor being buried from their church, adding: "But
there is a little church around the corner where they have such
funerals." Mr. Jefferson, astonished that such petty and unjust
distinctions should be persisted in even in the face of death,
exclaimed: "All honor to that Little Church Around the Corner!" From
that time until the present day, "The Little Church Around the Corner"
has been the religious refuge of theatrical folk. For twenty-six years
of that time, and until his death, the Rev. Dr. George H. Houghton, who
conducted the services over the remains of actor Holland, was the firm
friend of the people of the stage in times of trouble, of sickness and
of death.
[Sidenote: Lich Gate]
The lich gate at the entrance of the church is unique in this country,
and is considered the most elaborate now in existence anywhere. It was
erected in 1895, at a cost of $4,000.
The congregation worshipped first in a house at No. 48 East
Twenty-fourth Street, in 1850. The present building was opened in 1856.
Lester Wallack was buried from this church, as were Dion Boucicault,
Edwin Booth, and a host of others. In the church is a memorial window to
the memory of Edwin Booth, which was unveiled in 1898. It represents a
mediæval histrionic student, his gaze fixed on a mask in his hand. Below
the figure is the favorite quotation of Booth, from "Henry II": "As
one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing; a man that fortune's
buffets and rewards has taken with equal thanks." And the further
inscription: "To the glory of God and in loving memory of Edwin Booth
this window has been placed here by 'The Players.'"
At Lexington Avenue and Thirtieth Street is the First Moravian Church,
which has occupied the building since 1869. This congregation was
established in 1749. In 1751 their first church was built at No. 108
Fair (now Fulton) Street. In 1829 a second house was erected on the same
site. In 1849 a new building was erected at the southwest corner of
Houston and Mott Streets. This property was sold in 1865, and the
congregation then worshipped in the Medical College Hall, at the
northwest corner of Twenty-third Street and Fourth Avenue, until the
purchase of the present building from the Episcopalians. It was erected
by the Baptists in 1825.
[Sidenote: Brick Presbyterian Church]
At Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street is the Brick Presbyterian
Church, which stood at the junction of Park Row and Nassau Street until
1858, when the present structure was erected. The locality was a very
different one then, and the square quaintness of the church looks out of
place amid its present modern surroundings. There is an air of solitude
about it, as though it mourned faithfully for the green fields that shed
peace and quietness about its walls when it was first built there.
It is related of William C. H. Waddell, who, in 1845, built a residence
on the same site, that when he went to look at the plot, with a view to
purchase, his wife waited for him near by, under the shade of an apple
tree. The ground there was high above the city grade.
[Sidenote: Bryant Park]
The ground between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, Fortieth and Forty-second
Streets, now occupied by Bryant Park and the old reservoir, was
purchased by the city in 1822, and in 1823 a Potter's Field was
established there, the one in Washington Square having been abandoned in
its favor. The reservoir, of Egyptian architecture, was finished in
1842. Its cost was about $500,000. On July 5th water was introduced into
it through the new Croton aqueduct, with appropriate ceremonies. The
water is brought from the Croton lakes, forty-five miles above the city,
through conduits of solid masonry. The first conduit, which was begun in
1835, is carried across the Harlem River through the High Bridge, which
was erected especially to accommodate it. At the time the reservoir was
put in use the locality was at the northern limits of the city. On
Sundays and holidays people went on journeys to the reservoir, and from
the promenades at the top of the structure had a good view from river to
river, and of the city to the south. The reservoir has not been in use
for many years.
The park was called Reservoir Square until 1884, when the name was
changed to Bryant Park.
[Sidenote: A World's Fair]
On July 4, 1853, a World's Fair, in imitation of the Crystal Palace,
near London, was opened in Reservoir Square, when President Pierce made
an address. The fair was intended to set forth the products of the
world, but it attracted but little attention outside the city. It was
opened as a permanent exposition on May 14, 1854, but proved a failure.
One of the attractions was a tower 280 feet high, which stood just north
of the present line of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. In August,
1856, it was burned, and as a great pillar of flame it attracted more
attention than ever before. The exposition buildings and their contents
were in the hands of a receiver when they were destroyed by fire October
5, 1858.
Bryant Park has been selected as the site for the future home of the
consolidated Tilden, Astor and Lenox Libraries.
[Sidenote: Murray Hill]
Murray Hill derives its name from the possessions of Robert Murray,
whose house, Inclenberg, stood at the corner of what is now Thirty-sixth
Street and Park Avenue, on a farm which lay between the present
Thirty-third and Thirty-seventh Streets, Bloomingdale Road (now
Broadway) and the Boston Post Road (the present Third Avenue). The house
was destroyed by fire in 1834. On September 15, 1776, after the defeat
on Long Island, the Americans were marching northward from the lower end
of the island, when the British, marching toward the west, reached the
Murray House. There the officers were well entertained by the Murrays,
who, at the same time, managed to get word to the American Army: the
latter hurried on and joined Washington at about Forty-third Street and
Broadway, before the English suspected that they were anywhere within
reach.
The Murray Farm extended down to Kip's Bay at Thirty-sixth Street. The
Kip mansion was the oldest house on the Island of Manhattan when it was
torn down in 1851. Where it stood, at the crossing of Thirty-fifth
Street and Second Avenue, there is now not a trace. Jacob Kip built the
house in 1655, of brick which he imported from Holland. The locality
between the Murray Hill Farm and the river, that is, east of what is now
Third Avenue between Thirty-third and Thirty-seventh Streets, was called
Kipsborough in Revolutionary times.
[Sidenote: Turtle Bay]
The British forces landed, on the day of the stop at the Murray House,
in Turtle Bay, that portion of the East River between Forty-sixth and
Forty-seventh Streets. It was a safe harbor and a convenient one.
Overlooking the bay, on a great bluff at the present Forty-first Street,
was the summer home of Francis Bayard Winthrop. He owned the Turtle Bay
Farm. The bluff is there yet, and subsequent cutting through of the
streets has left it in appearance like a small mountain peak. Winthrop's
house is gone, and in its place is Corcoran's Roost, far up on the
height, whose grim wall of stone on the Fortieth Street side at First
Avenue became in modern times the trysting-place for members of the "Rag
Gang."
[Sidenote: The Elgin Garden]
Forty-seventh and Forty-ninth Streets, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues,
enclose the tract formerly known as the Elgin Garden. This was a
botanical garden founded by David Hosack, M. D., in 1801, when he was
Professor of Botany in Columbia College. In 1814 the land was purchased
by the State from Dr. Hosack and given to Columbia College, in
consideration of lands which had been owned by the College but ceded to
New Hampshire after the settlement of the boundary dispute. The ground
is still owned by Columbia University.
The block east of Madison Avenue, between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth
Streets, was occupied in 1857 by Columbia College, when the latter moved
from its down-town site at Church and Murray Streets. The College
occupied the building which had been erected in 1817 by the founders of
the Institute for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb--the first asylum
for mutes in the United States. The original intention had been to erect
the college buildings on a portion of the Elgin Garden property, but
the expense involved was found to be too great. The asylum property,
consisting of twenty lots and the buildings, was purchased in 1856.
Subsequently the remainder of the block was also bought up.
[Sidenote: St. Patrick's Cathedral]
At Fiftieth Street and Fifth Avenue is St. Patrick's Cathedral, the
cornerstone of which was laid in 1858. The entire block on which it
stands was, the preceding year, given to the Roman Catholics for a
nominal sum--one dollar--by the city.
The Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum in the adjoining block, on Fifth
Avenue, between Fifty-first and Fifty-second Streets, was organized in
1825, but not incorporated until 1852, when the present buildings were
erected.
[Illustration: Milestone 3rd Ave. near 47th St.]
[Sidenote: Four Mile Stone]
There is still standing, in Third Avenue, just above Fifty-seventh
Street, a milestone. It was once on the Post Road, four miles from
Federal Hall in Wall Street.
Close by Fiftieth Street and Third Avenue, a Potter's Field was
established about 1835. Near it was a spring of exceptionally pure
water. This water was carried away in carts and supplied to the city.
Even after the introduction of Croton water the water from this spring
commanded a price of two cents a pail from many who were strongly
prejudiced against water that had been supplied through pipes.
[Sidenote: Beekman House]
Memories of Nathan Hale, the Martyr Spy of the Revolution, hover about
the neighborhood of Fifty-first Street and First Avenue. The Beekman
House stood just west of the Avenue, between Fifty-first and
Fifty-second Streets, on the site where Grammar School No. 135 is now.
It was in a room of this house that Major André slept, and in the
morning passed out to dishonor; and it was in a greenhouse on these
grounds that Nathan Hale passed the last of his nights upon earth. The
house was built in 1763 by a descendant of the William Beekman who came
from Holland in 1647 with Peter Stuyvesant. During the Revolution it was
the headquarters of General Charles Clinton and Sir William Howe. It
stood until 1874, by which time it had degenerated into a crumbling
tenement, and was demolished when it threatened to fall of natural
decay.
[Sidenote: An Old Shot Tower]
A very few steps from the East River, at Fifty-third Street, stands an
old brick shot tower; a lonely and neglected sentinel now, but still
proudly looking skyward and bearing witness to its former usefulness. It
was built in 1821 by a Mr. Youle. On October 9th it was nearing
completion when it collapsed. It was at once rebuilt, and, as has been
said, still stands. In 1827 Mr. Youle advertised the sale of the lots
near the tower, and designated the location as being "close by the Old
Post Road near the four mile stone."
[Sidenote: The De Voor Farm]
Within half a dozen steps of the old tower, in the same lumber yard, is
a house said to be the oldest in the city. It is of Dutch architecture,
with sloping roof and a wide porch. The cutting through and grading of
Fifty-third Street have forced it higher above the ground than its
builders intended it to be. The outer walls, in part, have been boarded
over, and some "modern improvements" have made it somewhat unsightly;
but inside, no vandal's art has been sufficient to hide its solid oak
beams and its stone foundations that have withstood the shocks of time
successfully. It was a farm-house, and its site was the Spring Valley
Farm of the Revolution. It is thought to have been built by some member
of the De Voor family, who, after 1677, had a grant of sixty acres of
land along the river, and gave their name to a mill-stream long since
forgotten, save for allusion in the pages of history.
A block away in Fifty-fourth Street, between First Avenue and the river,
is another Dutch house, though doubtless of much later origin. It stands
back from the street and has become part of a brewery, being literally
surrounded by buildings.
[Sidenote: Central Park]
The first suggestion of a Central Park was made in the fall of 1850,
when Andrew J. Downing, writing to the _Horticulturist_, advocated the
establishment of a large park because of the lack of recreation-grounds
in the city. On April 5, 1851, Mayor Ambrose C. Kingsland, in a special
message to the Common Council, suggested the necessity for the new park,
pointing out the limited extent and inadequacy of the existing ones. The
Common Council, approving of the idea, asked the Legislature for
authority to secure the necessary land. The ground suggested for the new
park was the property known as "Jones' Woods," which lay between
Sixty-sixth and Seventy-fifth Streets, Third Avenue and the East River.
At an extra session of the Legislature in July, 1851, an Act known as
the "Jones' Woods Park Bill" was passed, under which the city was given
the right to acquire the land. The passage of this Act opened a
discussion as to whether there was no other location better adapted for
a public park than Jones' Woods. In August a committee was appointed by
the Board of Aldermen to examine the proposed plot and others. This
committee reported in favor of what they considered a more central site,
namely, the ground lying between Fifty-ninth and One Hundred and Sixth
Streets, Fifth and Eighth Avenues. On July 23, 1853, the Legislature
passed an Act giving authority for the acquirement of the land,
afterward occupied by Central Park, to Commissioners appointed by the
Supreme Court. The previous Jones' Woods Act was repealed. These
Commissioners awarded for damages $5,169,369.69, and for benefits
$1,657,590.00, which report was confirmed by the court in February,
1856.
In May, 1856, the Common Council appointed a commission which took
charge of the work of construction. On this commission were William C.
Bryant, Washington Irving and George Bancroft. In 1857, however, a new
Board was appointed by the Legislature, because of the inactivity of the
first one. Under the new Board, in April of the year in which they were
appointed, the designs of Calvert Vaux and Frederick L. Olmsted were
accepted and actual work was begun.
The plans for the improvement of the park, which have been consistently
adhered to, were based upon the natural configuration of the land. As
nearly as possible the hills, valleys and streams were preserved
undisturbed. Trees, shrubs and vines were arranged with a view to an
harmonious blending of size, shape and color--all that would attract the
eye and make the park as beautiful in every detail as in its entirety.
The year 1857 was one of much distress to the poor, and work on the park
being well under way, the Common Council created employment for many
laborers by putting them to work grading the new park.
The original limits were extended from One Hundred and Sixth to One
Hundred and Tenth Street in 1859.
As it exists to-day, Central Park contains eight hundred and sixty-two
acres, of which one hundred and eighty-five and one-quarter are water.
It is two and a half miles long and half a mile wide. Five hundred
thousand trees have been set out since the acquisition of the land.
There are nine miles of carriageway, five and a half miles of
bridle-path, twenty-eight and one half miles of walk, thirty buildings,
forty-eight bridges, tunnels and archways, and out-of-door seats for ten
thousand persons. It is assessed at $87,000,000 and worth twice that
amount. More than $14,000,000 have been spent on improvements.
[Illustration]
INDEX
INDEX
Abingdon, Earl of, 109, 125
Abingdon Road, 123, 124
Abingdon Square, 109
Academy of Music, 178
All Saints' Church, 136
Allen Street Memorial Church, 142
American Museum, 37
André, Major, 205
Aquarium, Public, 5
Arsenal in Madison Square, 182
Art Street, 167
Astor House, 78
Astor, John Jacob, 163, 172
Astor Library, 170, 171
Astor Place, 172
Astor Place Opera House, 168, 169, 170
Astor, William B., 172
Bank Coffee House, 146
Bank Street, 113
Banker Street, 134
Bank for Savings, The, 38, 151
Barnum, P. T., 5, 30
Barnum's Museum, 30
Barrow Street, 108
Battery, 4
Battery Park, 4
Battery Place, 9
Bayard Family Vault, 144
Beaver Lane, 56
Beaver's Path, 8
Beaver Street, 8, 9, 10
Bedford Street M. E. Church, 106
Beekman House, 205
Belle Vue Farm, 189
Bellevue Hospital, 188, 189, 190
Bible House, 166, 191
Bleecker Street Bank, 151
Block, Adrian, 56, 57
Bloomingdale Road, 124, 128, 175, 180, 185, 199
Bond Street, 149
Bone Alley, 139, 140
Booth, Edwin, 194
Boston Post Road, 183, 192, 199
Boston Turnpike, 183
Boulevard, 181
Bouwerie Lane, 46
Bouwerie Village, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161
Bowery, The, 47
Bowery Lane, 166, 175
Bowery Road, 47, 128, 163, 164
Bowery Theatre, 49
Bowery Village Church, 162
Bowling Green, 3, 55
Bowling Green Garden, 84
Bradford, William, 14
Grave of, 63
Brannan's Garden, 101
Breese, Sydney, grave of, 62
Brevoort, Hendrick, 174
Brick Presbyterian Church, 31, 196
Bridewell, 35
Bridge Street, 9
Broad Street, 9, 10
Broadway, 12, 55, 175, 180, 181
Broadway Theatre, 97
Brougham's Lyceum, 97
Brouwer Street, 15
Bryant Park, 114, 197, 198, 199
Bull's Head Tavern, 49, 190
Bull's Head Village, 190, 191
Bunker Hill, 144
Burdell Murder, The, 149, 150
Burr, Aaron, home of, 18, 104
Office of, 40
Last Friend of, 67
Burton's Theatre, 39
Café des Mille Colonnes, 39, 86
Canal Street, 41, 42, 94, 95
Canda, Madam, 171
Castle Garden, 5, 178
Cedar Street, 21
Cemetery, New York City Marble, 154, 155
Cemetery, New York Marble, 151, 152, 153, 154
Central Park, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211
Chambers Street, 34
Chambers Street Bank, 37
Chanfrau, Frank, 170
Chapel Place, 83
Chatham, Earl of, 18, 47, 90
Chatham Square, 45, 46
Chatham Street, 47
Chelsea Cottages, 129
Chelsea Village, 126, 127, 128, 129
Cherry Hill, 51, 52
Cherry Street, 51
Church, All Saints', 136
" Allen Street Memorial, 142
" Bedford Street Memorial, 106
" Bowery Village, 162
" Brick Presbyterian, 31, 196
" Dr. Schroeder's, 167
" Duane M. E., 102
" First French Huguenot, 9
" First Moravian, 195
" First Presbyterian, 154
" First Reformed Presbyterian, 40, 118
" Friends' Meeting House, 178
" Grace, 58, 175
" John Street, 26, 161, 162
" Little, Around the Corner, 192, 193, 194, 195
" Madison Square Presbyterian, 186
" Mariners', 133, 134
" Dutch Middle Reformed, 21, 22, 171
" New Jerusalem, 89
" Oliver Street Baptist, 133
" St. Ann's, 167
" St. George's, 29, 179
" St. John's, 91
" St. Mark's, 86, 156, 157, 158, 159
" St. Mary's, 137
" St. Patrick's, 144, 145
" St. Patrick's Cathedral, 203
" St. Paul's, 75, 76, 77, 78
" St. Peter's, 81
" Sea and Land, of, 135
" Second Street Methodist, 156
" Spring Street Presbyterian, 102
" Transfiguration, of the (Episcopal), 192, 193, 194, 195
" Transfiguration, of the (Catholic), 44, 45
" Trinity, 20, 56, 58, 60, 61
Church Farm, 59
Churchyard, St. Paul's, 155
" Trinity, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72
Churcher, Richard, Grave of, 61
City Hall, 35
City Hall (first) Site of, 7, 8, 12
City Hall in Wall Street, 17
City Hall Park, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39
City Hospital, 88, 89
City Hotel, 73, 74
City Library, 120
City Prison in City Hall Park, 35
Clarke, Capt. Thomas, 127
Cliff Street, 24
Clinton, Gen. Charles, 205
Clinton Hall, 28, 168, 169
Coenties Lane, 13
Coenties Slip, 12, 13
Collect, The, 41
College of the City of New York, 186, 187
College Place, 83
Collis, Christopher, Tomb of, 77
Colonnade Row, 172
Columbia College, 81, 82, 83, 202
Commons, The, 34
Company's Farm, 59
Cooke, George Frederick, Grave of, 77, 78
Cooper, James Fenimore, House of, 147
Cooper Mansion, 191
Cooper, Peter, 164, 165, 166
House of, 191, 192
Statue of, 165
Cooper Union, 161, 164, 165
Corcoran's Roost, 201
Cornbury, Lady, 66
Corlears Hook Park, 136
Country Market, 75
Coutant, John, House of, 161
Cox, Samuel S., Statue of, 168
Cresap, Michael, Grave of, 70
Croton Water Celebration, 177, 197
Cryptograph in Trinity Churchyard, 64, 65, 66
Crystal Palace, 198
Custom House, 16, 18
Cuyler's Alley, 15
Debtors' Prison, 34, 35
Delacroix, 163
De Lancey, Etienne, 10, 72, 73, 74
De Lancey, James, 72, 73, 143, 144
De Lancey, Susannah, 100
Delmonico's, 16, 25
De Voor House, 207
Dickens, Charles, 31
Drew, Daniel, 191
Duane M. E. Church, 102
Duke's Farm, 59
Dutch West India Company, 2
Eacker, George, Grave of, 78
East River Bridge (second), 137
Eleventh Street, 174
Elgin Garden, 201, 202, 203
Eliot Estate, 172
Emmet, Thomas Addis, 77, 155
Essex Market, 143
Exterior Market, 75
Fayette Street, 133
Federal Hall, 17, 18
Fields, The, 34
Fifth Avenue Hotel, 185
Fire of 1835, 14
First French Huguenot Church, 9
First Graveyard, 56
First House Built, 56
First Moravian Church, 195
First Presbyterian Church, 154
First Prison Labor, 110
First Reformed Presbyterian Church, 40, 118
First Savings Bank, 37
First Sunday School, 161
First Tenement House, 136
Fish, Hamilton, Park, 139
Fish Market, 75
Fitzroy Road, 126, 128
Five Points, 42, 43
Five Points House of Industry, 44
"Flat and Barrack Hill", 16
Fly Market, 23
Forrest, Edwin, 168, 169
Forrest-Macready Riots, 168, 169, 170
Fort Amsterdam, 1, 2
Fort Clinton, 4
Fort George, 2
Fort James, 2
Fort Manhattan, 2
Fountain in Union Square, 177
Franconi's Hippodrome, 185
Franklin House, 50
Franklin Square, 51
Fraunces' Tavern, 10, 11
Free Academy, 186, 187
Fresh Water Pond, 41
Friends' Meeting House, 178
Fulton Street, 20
Garden, Bowling Green, 84
" Brannan's, 101
" Castle, 5, 178
" Elgin, 201, 202, 203
" Niblo's, 146, 147
" Ranelagh, 94
" Vauxhall (first), 84, 163
" Vauxhall (last), 163, 164, 170
" Winter, 148
Garden Street, 16
Gardner, Noah, 110, 111
General Theological Seminary, 126, 127, 129
George III, Statue of, 3, 19
Gold Street, 23
Golden Hill, 23
Golden Hill, Battle of, 24
Golden Hill Inn, 24, 25
Government House, 1, 2
Governor's Room, City Hall, 36
Grace Church, 58, 175
Gramercy Park, 179
Graveyard, Jewish, 50, 116, 117, 122, 123
" Paupers', 34, 114, 115, 181, 197, 204
" St. John's, 105
" St. Paul's, 155
" Trinity, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68
" New York City Marble, 154, 155
" New York Marble, 151, 152, 153, 154
Great Bouwerie, 157
Great Kiln Road, 118, 121, 122, 125
Great Queen Street, 12
Greenwich Avenue, 116
" Lane, 116, 166
" Road, 80, 81
" Street, 80, 81
" Village, 98, 99, 100, 101
Grove Street, 108
Hale, Nathan, 38, 135, 204
Hall of Records, 34
Hamilton, Alexander, Grave of, 66
Hamilton, Alexander, Home of, 18
Hamilton, Philip, 67
Haunted House, 165, 166
Holland, Joseph, 193
Holt's Hotel, 21
Hone, Philip, 159
Horse and Cart Street, 26
Hosack Botanical Garden, 82
Hosack, David, 202
Hotel, Astor, 78
" City, 73, 74
" Fifth Avenue, 185
" Holt's, 21
" Metropolitan, 147
" Riley's Fifth Ward, 89, 90
" St. Nicholas, 145
" Tremont, 149
" United States, 20
Houghton, Rev. Dr. George H., 194
House of Aaron Burr, 18, 104
House, First, of White Men, 56
House of James Fenimore Cooper, 147
House of Peter Cooper, 191, 192
House of John Coutant, 161
House of the De Lanceys, 10, 72, 73, 74
House of Alexander Hamilton, 18
House of Thomas Paine, 107, 108
House of President Monroe, 145
House of Refuge, 182
House of Charlotte Temple, 48, 167
House of Francis Bayard Winthrop, 201
Houston Street, 150
Howe, Sir William, 205
Huguenot Memorials in Trinity Churchyard, 69, 71
Inclenberg, 199
Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, 202
Island of Manhattan, 138
"Jack-knife," The, 23
Jail in City Hall Park, 34
James Street, 133
Jans' Farm, 59, 60
Jeanette Park, 13
Jefferson, Joseph, 193
Jewish Graveyard in New Bowery, 50
Jewish Graveyard in Eleventh Street, 116, 117
Jewish Graveyard in Twenty-first Street, 117, 122, 123
John Street, 26
John Street Church, 26, 161, 162
John Street Theatre, 26
Jones' Woods,208
Jumel, Mme., 40
Keene, Laura, Theatre of, 147
King's College, 82
King's Farm, 59
Kip's Bay, 200
Kip, Jacob, 200
Kipsborough, 183, 200
Kissing Bridge, 47, 184
Lawrence, Capt., Grave of, 68
Lafarge House, 148
Lafayette, General, 172
Lafayette Place, 167, 170, 171, 172
La Grange Terrace, 172
Leeson, James, Grave of, 64
Leisler, Jacob, Where Hanged, 31, 32
Lich Gate of Little Church Around the Corner, 194
Light Guards, 7
Lind, Jenny, 5
Lispenard's Meadows, 80, 93, 94, 95
Little Church Around the Corner, 192, 193, 194, 195
Logan, the Friend of the White Man, 70
London Terrace, 129
Love Lane, 121, 124, 125, 126, 128
Macneven, William James, 77, 155
Macomb's Mansion, 57
Macready-Forrest Riots, 168, 169, 170
Macready, William Charles, 168, 169
Madison Square, 182, 183
Madison Square Presbyterian Church, 186
Madison Street, 134
Maiden Lane, 13, 22
Mandelbaum, "Mother", 141, 142
Manetta Brook, 99
Manetta Creek, 113, 114
Manhattan Island, 137, 138, 142
Manhattan Market, 139
Marble Houses on Broadway, 148, 149
Mariners' Church, 133, 134
Mariners' Temple, 133
Market, Country, 75
" Essex, 143
" Exterior, 75
" Fish, 75
" Fly, 23
" Manhattan, 139
" Meal, 20
" Uptown, 74
" Washington, 74
Marketfield Street, 8
Martyrs' Monument, 63, 64
Masonic Hall, 87, 88
Meal Market, 20
Medical College Hall, 195
Mercantile Library, 28, 29, 170
Merchants' Exchange, 16
Metropolitan Hall, 148
Metropolitan Hotel, 147
Middle Dutch Reformed Church, 21, 22, 171
Middle Road, 192
Mile Stone, 143, 178, 204
Military Prison Window, 41
Milligan's Lane, 117, 118
Minetta Street, 99, 113, 114
Monroe, President James, 145, 155
Montgomery, General, 76
Monument Lane, 115, 166
Moore, Bishop Benjamin, 127, 128
Moore, Clement C., 128, 129
Morris Street, 56
Morse, Samuel F. B., 5
Morton, General Jacob, 7, 37
Morton, John, 6
Mount Pitt, 137
Mount Pitt Circus, 137
Mulberry Bend, 43
Murder of Dr. Burdell, 149, 150
Murder of Mary Rogers, 145, 146
Murderers' Row, 97
Murray Family, 199, 200, 201
Murray Farm, 200
Murray Hill, 199, 200
Nassau Street, 17, 18, 21, 22
Nean, Elias, Grave of, 71
Nean, Susannah, Grave of, 71
Negro Insurrection, 42
New Jerusalem Church, 89
New York City Marble Cemetery, 154, 155
New York Hospital, 88, 89
New York Institute, 37
New York Marble Cemetery, 151, 152, 153, 154
New York Society Library, 119, 120
New York Theatre, 170
New York Theatre and Metropolitan Opera House, 148
Niblo's Garden, 146, 147
Niblo's Theatre, 146
Nicholas William Street, 161
North Street, 150, 151
Obelisk Lane, 115
"Old Brewery", 44
Oldest Grave in Trinity Churchyard, 61
Old Guard, 7
Oliver Street, 133
Oliver Street Baptist Church, 133
Orphan Asylum, Roman Catholic, 203
Olympic Theatre, 96, 147
Paine, Thomas, Home of, 107, 108
Paisley Place, 122
Palmo Opera House, 39, 87
Parade-Ground, 181
Park, Battery, 4
" Bryant, 114, 197, 198, 199
" Central, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211
" City Hall, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39
" Corlears Hook, 136
" Gramercy, 179
" Hamilton Fish, 139
" Jeanette, 13
" St. John's, 91, 92
Park Row, 47
Park Theatre (first), 30
Patti, Adelina, 148
Payne, John Howard, 36
Pauper Graveyard, 34, 114, 115, 181, 197, 204
Pearl Street, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14
Peck Slip, 12
Petticoat Lane, 8, 9
Pie Woman's Lane, 22
Pitt, William, Statue of, 18, 47, 90
Platt Street, 23
Poelnitz, "Baron", 173
Poor House in City Hall Park, 34
Post Office, 21, 33
Post Road, 47, 124, 125, 180, 181, 182, 204
Potter's Field, Bryant Park, 114, 197
Potter's Field, City Hall Park, 34
Potter's Field, Madison Square, 181
Potter's Field, Third Avenue, 204
Potter's Field, Washington Square, 114, 115
Printing-Press, First in Colony, 13
Prison Manufactures, 110
Prison Riots, 111
Prison, State, 109, 110, 111, 112
Queen's Farm, 59, 81
Rachel, the Actress, 148
"Rag Gang", 201
Randall, Robert Richard, 173, 174
Ranelagh Garden, 94
Red Fort, 92
Reservoir Square, 198
Revolutionary House, 79
Revolutionary War, First Blood of, 24
Richmond Hill, 103, 104, 105
Riley's Fifth Ward Hotel, 89, 90
Road, Abingdon, 123
" Boston Post, 183, 192, 199
" Bowery, 47, 128, 163, 164
" Fitzroy, 126, 128
" Great Kiln, 118, 121, 122
" Greenwich, 80, 81
" Middle, 192
" Post, 47, 124, 125, 180, 181, 182, 204
" Skinner, 117
" Southampton, 117, 120, 125
" Union, 117, 118, 119, 120
" Warren, 126
Rogers, Mary, Murder of, 145, 146
Rotunda in City Hall Park, 37
Ruggles, Samuel B., 180
Rutgers, Anthony, 92, 93, 94
Rutgers, Col. Henry, 135
Rutgers Farm, 135
Sailors' Snug Harbor, 173, 174
St. Ann's Church, 167
St. Gaudens, Augustus, 165
St. George's Church, 29, 179
St. George Square, 51
St. James Street, 133
St. John's Burying-Ground, 105
St. John's Church, 91
St. John's Park, 91, 92
St. Mark's Church, 86, 156, 158, 159
St. Mary's Church, 137
St. Nicholas Hotel, 145
St. Patrick's Cathedral, 203
St. Patrick's Church, 144, 145
St. Paul's Chapel, 75, 76, 77, 78
St. Paul's Churchyard, 155
St. Peter's Church, 81
Savings Bank, the First, 37
Schroeder, Rev. Dr., 167
Scudder's Museum, 37
Second East River Bridge, 137
Second Street Methodist Church, 156
Sewing Machine Exhibited, 87
Shakespeare Tavern, 27, 28
Shearith Israel Graveyard, 50, 116, 122
Sheep Pasture, 8
Shot Tower, 206
Shipyards, 134
Skinner Road, 117
Smit's V'lei, 22
Southampton, Baron, 109, 122
Southampton Road, 117, 120, 125
Sperry, John, 163
Spring Street Presbyterian Church, 102
Spring Valley Farm, 207
Stadhuis Site, 7
Stadt Huys, 12, 15
State Prison, 109, 110, 111, 112
State Street, 5, 6
Stewart, Alexander T., 85, 86, 159
Stewart Mansion, 86
Stone Street, 15
Stuyvesant's Creek, 142
Stuyvesant's Pear Tree, 160
Stuyvesant, Peter, 16, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160
Stuyvesant's Pond, 179
Stuyvesant Street, 167
Sub-Treasury Building, 18
"Suicide Slip", 95
Sunday School, the First, 161
Tammany Hall, 32, 33
Tattersall's, 95, 96
Tea Water Pump, 48
Temple, Charlotte, Tomb of, 62, 63
Temple, Charlotte, Home of, 48, 167
Tenement House, the First, 136
Ten Eyck, Conraet, 13
Tompkins, Daniel D., 159
Thames Street, 72
Theatre Alley, 31
Theatre, Academy of Music, 178
" Astor Place Opera House, 168, 169, 170
Theatre, Bowery, 49
" Broadway, 97
" Brougham's, 97
" Burton's, 39
" Laura Keene's, 147
" John Street, 26
" Metropolitan Hall, 148
" New York, 170
" New York Theatre and Metropolitan Opera House, 148
" Niblo's, 146
" Olympic, 96, 147
" Palmo's, 39, 87
" Park, 30
" Tripler Hall, 148
" Wallack's, 97, 176
" Winter Garden, 148
Thompson's Inn, Corporal, 185
Thorne, Charles R., 170
Tilden, Astor and Lenox Libraries, 199
Tin Pot Alley, 57, 58
Tombs, 41
Tompkins Blues, 7
Tontine Coffee House, 19
Tontine Society, 19
Tremont House, 149
Trinity Church, 20, 56, 58, 60, 61
Trinity Churchyard, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70,
71, 72
Tripler Hall, 148
Turtle Bay, 184, 201
Turtle Bay Farm, 201
Twenty-first Street, 124
Union Place, 177
Union Road, 117, 118, 119, 120
Union Square, 175, 177
United New Netherland Company, 2
United States Hotel, 20
Uptown Market, 74
Van Hoboken, Hermanus, 157
Vauxhall Garden (first), 84, 163
Vauxhall Garden (last), 163, 164, 170
Virgin's Path, 22
Wall, City's, 16
Wall Street, 9, 13, 16, 17, 19, 20
Wall Street, Trees in, 20
Wallack, James W., 176
Wallack's Lyceum, 97, 176
Warren, Ann, 109
Warren, Charlotte, 109
Warren Road, 126
Warren, Sir Peter, 100, 108, 109, 124
Warren, Susannah, 109
Washington Inaugurated, 17
Washington Inauguration Ball, 73
Washington's Broadway Home, 57
Washington Hall, 85
Washington's Headquarters, 11
Washington's Headquarters at Richmond Hill, 104
Washington's Home in Franklin House, 50
Washington's Pew in St. Paul's Chapel, 76
Washington Market, 74
Washington Statue in Union Square, 177
Washington Tablet, 37, 90
Washington Square, 113, 115, 172, 181, 197
Water Tank, 176
Weavers' Row, 122
Well in Broadway, 149
Well in Rivington Street, 141
Well of William Cox, 13
West Broadway, 83
West's Circus, 95
West India Co., 2
Whitehall Street, 8
Wiehawken Street, 112
William Street, 16
Window of Military Prison, 40
Winter Garden, 148
Winthrop, Francis Bayard, 201
Wolfe, Gen., Statue of, 115
World's Fair Grounds, 198
Worth Monument, 184, 185
Wreck Brook, 41
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