Part 9

The most joyously celebrated event in the annals of Manhattan was the city’s evacuation by the British at the close of the war. On the day that this occurred, November 25, 1783, General Washington arrived in town and dined at Fraunces’s Tavern; and hither he repaired again, ten days later, on the eve of his departure for Annapolis, to bid farewell to his officers. In this same building, and in the same Long Room, the first meeting of the New York Chamber of Commerce had been held, in 1768, fifteen years before any similar association was organized in Great Britain. This hostelry had, indeed, been the fashionable rendezvous of New Yorkers since 1762, when the shop at the southeast corner of Broad and Pearl Streets was converted to still more public uses by Samuel Fraunces (“Black Tom”), who in later years was to become the first President’s steward. At the beginning it was known as the Queen’s Head Tavern, its sign bearing a portrait of Queen Charlotte. Enlarged, and otherwise altered, but not improved, Fraunces’s Tavern is still, as it has always been, a public-house, though fashion has long since deserted it. It would be most deplorable if the march of improvement (in whose name, as in Liberty’s, so many offences are committed) should ever be allowed to obliterate this most aged and interesting relic of old New York.

The war of 1812 was by no means popular with the representative merchants of New York, despite the fact that the enforcement of England’s pretended right of search had acted almost as a blockade of the port for some years before the outbreak of hostilities. It had been a common occurrence for merchantmen in the lower bay to be stopped by a shot across their bows, and searched for possible British subjects among their crews. But when war came the fighting spirit was aroused, and many a privateer was fitted out to prey upon the enemy’s merchant marine. Rich prizes were taken, and desperate engagements were fought between the crews of brigs and schooners from New York and British men-of-war’s men who interfered with their privateering practices. A few years earlier (1807), Fulton had demonstrated on the Hudson the practicability of steam navigation; and now he built in New York, under Congressional direction, a steam frigate, iron-clad and heavily armed. This formidable craft might have been depended upon to raise the British blockade, had it not been raised still more effectually by a declaration of peace. The city did not suffer in this second war with England as it had suffered in the first. Instead of waiting for years, as before, to recuperate, it entered at once upon a period of unprecedented growth. The return of peace stimulated immigration, and local prosperity was vastly augmented by the opening in 1825 of the Erie Canal.

Until 1822, the mayor was appointed by a State council, presided over by the Governor; thereafter, until 1834, he was chosen by the municipal council; since then he has been elected by the people. But democratic rule was not always found to work satisfactorily, and in 1857 the control of local affairs was largely delegated to the legislature. This precaution proved of comparatively little value, however, and the Tweed ring of local office-holders found little difficulty in running things as they wished and robbing the tax-payers of millions upon millions. The charter of the city recently created by the amalgamation of New York, Brooklyn, etc., professed to restore home rule, in large measure; but so much of the supposed boon as it confers may be withdrawn at any time by State legislation, and bills withdrawing it piecemeal are, in fact, introduced at every session of the legislature.

When secession threatened, in 1861, the Democratic city of New York was the least friendly of Northern communities in its attitude toward the federal government. The common council, indeed, rapturously applauded the mayor’s formal suggestion that the city itself secede. But the first overt act of hostility at the South showed that, beneath this surface sympathy with the secessionists, the great mass of earnest citizens were ardent in adherence to the Union. Life and treasure were poured out more than abundantly. The Seventh Regiment—the “crack” militia organization of the city, if not of the nation—hurried off to Washington to guard the capital from surprise; and tens of thousands of volunteers followed to the front. No one city contributed more to the national cause. In fact the city’s contributions were too liberal for her own good; for the consequent dearth of able-bodied honest men at home left the community a prey to the enemies of society, and regiment after regiment had to be called back to restore order. The worst outbreaks were the so-called draft riots, caused by the enforced enlistment of troops; in these uprisings, negroes were the special object of the mob’s hostility.

The first few huts in New Amsterdam were huddled together beneath the sheltering walls of the Fort. There was but one general direction in which the hamlet could extend; yet it was long before the northward movement filled with shops and houses the space between the Fort and the line of Wall Street, and for several years thereafter the great Wall marked the boundary of the village. The Revolution found the border pushed forward to the edge of the Common, where the post-office stands to-day. The chief outlet from this point lay eastward, through what is now Park Row to the Bowery, and thence through the outlying farms to Westchester County, Connecticut and Boston.

On the west side there was another outlet, skirting the Hudson River and extending to the little village of Greenwich; and the occasional outbreak of yellow fever in New York made this a popular resort. The influx of twenty thousand refugees during one of these scares, early in the present century, completely changed the character of this village, and although most of the newcomers returned to the lower end of the island, Greenwich had practically become, by 1830, an integral part of the city. The northward spread via Greenwich Street, the Bowery and Broadway continued, till Yorkville and Harlem on the east and Manhattanville and Bloomingdale on the west were absorbed by the growing city. In 1874 the Harlem was crossed, and New York ceased to be an island; in 1895 still further accessions were made in Westchester County. But the crowning event in the expansion of the city was the legislation by which, on January 1, 1898, Brooklyn and the outlying towns and villages on Long Island, and all of Staten Island, were brought within the limits of New York—an act that raised the population at a stroke from less than 1,900,000 to near 3,400,000, and incidentally brought almost half the people of the State under the immediate rule of Tammany Hall.

A word should be said as to the Society, named in honor of Tamanend, an Indian chief who signed one of the treaties by which William Penn acquired the site of the city of Philadelphia. One of many societies of the same name, organized for social and political purposes toward the close of the eighteenth century, it reflected, to a certain extent, a spirit which had prevailed among the younger officers of the Revolution who had felt the force of Rousseau’s idealization of primitive man. Its first meeting was held on “St. Tammany’s day” (May 12), 1789. In membership it was allied with the Sons of Liberty and the Sons of 1776, and it has always professed “intense Americanism,” so far as that phrase is synonymous with Anglophobia. At first its ranks were recruited from among the small merchants, retailers and mechanics of the city; and by coming into close touch with the mass of immigrants that form so large a proportion of the population, giving the newcomers employment in some cases, in others charitable aid, instructing the alien voter as to his political rights and privileges, and directing him in their exercise, it has built up an enormous voting machine, insufficient to defeat a united opposition, but almost invariably so fortunate in local contests as to find its opponents divided. While nominally Democratic in national affairs, Tammany has never scrupled to oppose the Democratic party in the pursuit of its own immediate end—the control of local offices and revenues. This powerful machine has now for several years been dominated by an illiterate immigrant.

Comparatively recent as were the beginnings of the city, hardly a trace of the original village remains. Not a single building has come down to us from the Dutch period. It was to have been expected that something would survive the flight of less than three centuries. A happy chance might easily have preserved the stone “temple” erected within the walls of the Fort in 1652, or the slightly older warehouse, or some one of the many curious little stone or brick houses in which the burly burghers of the seventeenth century smoked their long pipes by the chimney-side, while their wives plied the spinning-wheel, their daughters spread the board, and their children, in padded breeches, played about the sanded floor.

The Stadt Huys, originally built as an inn, to relieve Director Kieft of the burden of overmuch entertaining, dated back to the same year as the Dutch Reformed Church in the fortified enclosure. The organization of the old church is still maintained, and the functions of the city government have been performed in successive buildings to the present day; but the picturesque old government house—fifty feet square, three stories high in the walls and two in the attic, with windows in the gable of its crow-stepped roof,—that should have been cherished as a most interesting relic of the city’s earliest period, lasted but a little way into the present century, having then been used for over a hundred years for commercial purposes.

Chief among the few other survivals from the early days, and antedating all of them, is Bowling Green. This oldest bit of park land in the city dates from the Dutch occupation. It lay immediately in front of the Fort, and no building has ever stood upon its diminutive, oblong site. The relatively old row of buildings (Steamship Row) which overlooks it from the south will ere long be replaced by a Custom House worthy of the second port of entry in the world. This will occupy the site of the old government house, which once served the purpose for which the new building is designed. In 1771, it was found advisable to enclose the Green with an iron fence. Bereft of the crowns that surmounted the posts, the fence still surrounds it, though the equestrian statue of George III., which it was put up to protect, vanished in 1776. In the excitement that followed the reading of the Declaration of Independence, in that year, the crowd marched down Broadway from the Common, and tumbled the King from his pedestal. The leaden carcass was shipped to Connecticut, where the wife and daughter of Governor Wolcott cannily converted it into rebel bullets. An indignity similar in degree though different in kind was offered to America’s eloquent Parliamentary advocate, William Pitt, whose marble effigy at Wall and William Streets was decapitated during the Revolution by the Tories, and left standing for years as a mere “disturber of traffic.”

The house at No. 1 Broadway, looking eastward over the lower end of Bowling Green, built in 1760 by Colonel Kennedy, afterward Earl of Cassilis, and occupied in turn by the American leaders, including Washington, and by the English, including Cornwallis, Howe and Sir Henry Clinton, was the scene of Major André’s last interview with the British commander before his fatal journey to West Point. And in another house in Broadway overlooking the Green, Benedict Arnold had his quarters after his flight and the exposure of his infamous plot. Mention of the gallant young British officer, André, naturally suggests the name and fate of Nathan Hale, whose heroism is commemorated by a noble statue by MacMonnies, which faces Broadway from the lower corner of City Hall Park, not far from the spot where the American spy was hanged from an apple-tree. The Beekman “Mansion,” overlooking the East River near what is now Fifty-first Street, the scene of Hale’s trial and condemnation, survived till 1874; the Kennedy House, identified with André’s memory, lasted eight years longer.

A picturesque feature of the old town was the canal that ran from the city wall to the bay, becoming first an artery of trade, and then a centre of fashionable life, as Broad Street, which took its place, has since been a centre of commercial activity. It was directly opposite Broad Street, in Wall, that the foundations of the new City Hall were laid in 1699, the sale of the Stadt Huys helping to defray the cost of the more pretentious structure. The arms of the English Governor, Lord Bellomont, were blazoned on its walls; but two years later the marshal was called upon to remove and destroy them. When New York became the seat of the national government, the ninety-year-old City Hall, partly reconstructed and lavishly decorated, became the meeting-place of Congress. The most memorable day in its history was the 30th of April, 1789, when, attended by Chancellor Livingston and the committees of Senators and Representatives, standing upon its balcony in the presence of a great concourse, not merely of New Yorkers, but of Americans from all the colonies, gathered together from far and near, George Washington took the oath of office as first President of the United States. Where the Capitol then stood now stands the Sub-Treasury, with Ward’s bronze Washington looking gravely down from its steps upon the feverish turmoil of Wall Street.

The oldest existing municipal building in New York is the Hall of Records, in City Hall Park, whose contents are erelong to be housed in a spacious, fire-proof edifice. It dates from the middle of the eighteenth century. Its site formed a part of the Common, and it stood appropriately convenient to the gallows, for it was originally a jail—the first building on the island ever designed exclusively for the detention of law-breakers. In popular parlance, as in practical use, it soon became the Debtors’ Prison. When the British occupied the town during the Revolution, it was turned to account as their principal military prison, being known as The Provost, in reference to the title of the brutal Cunningham, who was charged with the custody of American prisoners of war—amongst others, “that d—d rebel, Ethan Allen.” The building was a debtors’ jail again from 1787 to 1830; on the completion of alterations projected at the latter date, it became, in 1835, the Register’s office, and as such will probably see the close of the nineteenth century.

Vastly more attractive to the eye than this treasury of real-estate records, and not wholly lacking in historic interest, is the adjacent City Hall. This really handsome building, in the style of the Italian Renaissance, was begun in 1803, and completed nine years later. The likelihood of the city’s extending beyond it seemed too slight to warrant lavishing upon its back the white marble which adds so much to the dignity and grace of its façade; the rear wall was accordingly constructed of a cheaper stone. In the “Governor’s room” on the second floor, used for official receptions, are the desk on which Washington wrote his first message to Congress, the chair in which he was inaugurated as President, and the chairs used by the first federal Congress.

In the same neighborhood, just beyond the lower extremity of the old Common, now City Hall Park, stands St. Paul’s Chapel, Trinity parish—an edifice much older than the parish church, which for the past half-century, like its successive parent buildings, has stood farther down Broadway, opposing its bulk to the westward progress of Wall Street. Fenced off by iron palings, and bordered on each side by a strip of graveyard, the chapel turns a picturesque and perhaps scornful back upon the “topless towers” of Broadway—little dreamt of when its foundations were laid in 1766, or three-and-twenty years later, when President Washington attended service there on the day of his first inauguration. These heaven-aspiring structures were only beginning to turn the street into a canyon when the first President’s successor in office sat in the same pew on the same day a century later (April 30, 1889).

Private houses of historic interest abounded not many years ago, notable among them the country-seat called Richmond Hill, near the long since absorbed village of Greenwich—a stately dwelling, identified with many familiar names. John Adams lived there during a part of his first term as Vice-President, and Aaron Burr started thence on that fateful July morning in 1804 that saw the death of Hamilton at his hand, and the end of his own political career. Of equal note was the house on Murray Hill, where Mrs. Murray detained the British commander at lunch while the American troops, under Putnam, made their escape from the island in 1776.

The so-called Jumel Mansion, built for Washington’s whilom flame, Miss Mary Philippse, by her successful suitor, Col. Roger Morris, and afterwards occupied by Washington as his headquarters, became in turn the property of the nation (Morris having been a royalist), of John Jacob Astor, and of Stephen Jumel, whose erratic widow married Aaron Burr, but soon tired of him, turned him out of doors and dropped his name. From its coign of vantage on Harlem Heights at 169th Street, this dignified colonial dwelling still looks down upon the Harlem River and across to Long Island Sound. And at the foot of East 61st Street is yet to be seen—vine-covered, and embowered in trees and shrubs—the substantial stone residence of Col. William Smith, who married the daughter of President Adams, and ruined himself by speculating in east-side real estate. But the scarcity of such relics, and their glaring incongruity with their surroundings, emphasize the divergence between the old New York and that which is termed the Greater.

In the hall of Cooper Institute, Abraham Lincoln made that great speech which first fully revealed him to the people of the Eastern States; and hither he was brought, to lie in state in the City Hall, when a martyr’s death had disclosed his greatness still more clearly to all his countrymen.

Here have lived, for longer or shorter periods, sundry Presidents of the United States, from Washington to Cleveland; the city has been the permanent or occasional home of statesmen such as Jay and Livingston, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris; of political agitators such as Aaron Burr and “Commonsense” Paine, and political leaders like DeWitt Clinton and Samuel J. Tilden; of authors such as Washington Irving, whose burlesque local history marked him out as the father of American light literature, Fenimore Cooper, the most popular of American romance-writers, and Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, most individual of American poets. Here, for longer or shorter periods, have lived and labored Curtis, and Bayard Taylor, and Stoddard, and Stedman, and Aldrich, and Howells, and that greatest of poets among journalists and journalists among poets, William Cullen Bryant, editor of _The Evening Post_ and one of the founders of the Century Club; and Horace Greeley, founder of _The Tribune_, and most famous of American editors since Benjamin Franklin. As a resident of Brooklyn, and editor of a metropolitan religious weekly, the best-known preacher of the century, Henry Ward Beecher, was virtually a citizen of New York. In the annals of invention, the names of four New Yorkers stand out conspicuously—Fulton and Ericsson and Edison and Morse. And of all the free-booters that ever terrorized the sea, none has left a more awful and enduring fame than a once respectable resident of Liberty Street, renowned in song and story for two centuries as Captain Kidd.

The hospitality of New York and her people is proverbial. Every distinguished visitor to America for more than a century past has been entertained here, officially or informally. Among the city’s guests have been William IV. of England, while yet a sailor prince; Lafayette, Louis Kossuth, the Prince of Wales, the Grand Duke Alexis, the Emperor of Brazil, the Princess Eulalia, the Duke of Veragua, Li Hung Chang and the Marquis Ito. Almost all the greatest preachers, orators, players, singers, and instrumental performers of the nineteenth century have added to their fame or wealth by facing New York audiences; and among the great writers who have visited us have been Dickens, Thackeray, and Kipling.

While New York is easily first among the cities of the New World in commercial importance, it is not on material bases only that her supremacy rests. No community throughout the world responds more generously to every appeal for sympathy or help, whether the call be local, national or foreign. Her interest is keen in educational work of every kind. Columbia University—one of the oldest of local institutions, and more than local in its aims and fame and influence—has of late, through the liberality of her sons and other citizens, been housed in a manner commensurate with her requirements and aspirations; and so also has the less venerable but justly honored New York University. And the past few years have seen Barnard College for women and the Teachers College (both allied with Columbia) emerge from the chrysalis state into forms of beauty and power. The public-school system, moreover,—thanks to a recent brief respite from Tammany control,—is in better condition to-day than at any previous period of Tammany administration.

Of American literary activity, despite Boston’s ancient and deserved prestige, it cannot be denied that New York is to-day the centre, as it is the centre of the publishing trade, in books and periodicals. Boston, with her splendid Public Library, has set an example which the metropolis has been slow to follow; but the consolidation of the Astor, Lenox and Tilden collections, and their prospective housing in a magnificent and admirably situated building, has gone far to remove the reproach incurred during long years of public indifference to popular needs. The venerable Society Library, the modern and many-branched Free Circulating Library and kindred institutions have helped to create and in part to meet the demand which the Public Library in its new home may reasonably be expected to satisfy. Equally important in their way are those half-social, half-educational essays toward the solution of some of the problems of the slums—the University Settlement of men and the College Settlement of women. As a further indication that New York is not wholly given over to the worship of Mammon, it may be mentioned that the Greek Club, with its fortnightly meetings for the reading and discussion of the classics, has been for more than three decades the only circle of its kind in existence.

In art, the invaluable treasures of the Metropolitan Museum foster the love of what is enduringly beautiful in sculpture, painting, architecture, etc.; while the schools of this museum and of the National Academy of Design and the Society of American Artists, to say nothing of the more utilitarian classes of Cooper Institute and the School of Artist Artisans, afford instruction in art of such a sort as to render foreign study no longer indispensable, albeit no less attractive than of old.