Part 4

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.

"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.

[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.