Part 2

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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

II

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