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    Historical Cities-New York City
    Historical Cities-New York City
    Historical Cities-New York City
    Ebook301 pages5 hours

    Historical Cities-New York City

    By Lyn Wilkerson

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    About this ebook

    This edition of the series explores the boroughs of New York City: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Over 600 historical sites are described within, based on the WPA 1939 Guide to New York City. Along with historical text of each site, borough histories, reference maps, and GPS Coordinates are included. Travelers and residents alike will find enjoyment and education.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLyn Wilkerson
    Release dateOct 8, 2010
    ISBN9781452413730
    Historical Cities-New York City
    Author

    Lyn Wilkerson

    Caddo Publications USA was created in 2000 to encourage the exploration of America’s history by the typical automotive traveler. The intent of Caddo Publications USA is to provide support to both national and local historical organizations as historical guides are developed in various digital and traditional print formats. Using the American Guide series of the 1930’s and 40’s as our inspiration, we began to develop historical travel guides for the U.S. in the 1990’s.

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      Historical Cities-New York City - Lyn Wilkerson

      Table of Contents

      New York City’s General History

      Manhattan:

      Lower Manhattan

      Lower East Side and Greenwich Village

      Middle East and West Sides

      Upper East and West Sides

      Yorkville

      Central Park West

      Morningside Heights, Manhattanville, and Washington Heights

      The Harlems

      New York Harbor and East River Islands

      Brooklyn

      Governors Island

      Staten Island

      Queens

      Bronx

      GPS Coordinates For Listed Historic Sites

      Endnotes

      New York City’s General History

      The miracle of its upsurge since the turn of the present century makes it a dynamic expression of American civilization. In that sense New York is America. Two events were of decisive importance in this development: the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, and the creation, under State charter, of Greater New York in 1898. The former established the commercial supremacy of New York—a position thenceforth never threatened—over the rival ports of Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and made the city the great gateway for European immigration. The creation of Greater New York brought into the city's jurisdiction not only areas as densely settled as lower Brooklyn, but also forests, farms, and marshes—a huge area for further expansion.

      The first substantial settlement on the island of Manhattan was made in 1625. After a fort was built there, the families at Fort Orange were moved down temporarily to enjoy its protection. The settlement on Manhattan Island was designated as the city of New Amsterdam and

      given burgher government in 1653.

      The Dutch West India Company, in common with other early trading and colonizing groups, looked upon its colony as a source of dividends. It bound the settlers by contracts that prohibited trade, change of residence, and the transfer of property; and it imposed heavy taxes, including taxes on imports, that discouraged enterprise, aroused antagonism, and insured minimum returns. It shirked all obligations of a social character, throwing on the Dutch Reformed Church the burden of education and care of the sick and the poor. This shortsighted policy, aggravated by the greed and ineptness of its officials in the Colony, brought the company to virtual bankruptcy.

      In 1664, when Colonel Richard Nicolls at the head of a British fleet demanded the surrender of New Amsterdam, Director General Stuyvesant found himself with little support and was obliged to capitulate. The Province and the principal settlement were renamed New York, Beverwyck became Albany, and Wiltwyck, Kingston. In 1673, the Dutch recaptured the Colony, but in 1674 it was restored by treaty to the English, who promptly resumed their sway.

      The terms of surrender in 1664 were highly favorable to the Dutch. Land titles were confirmed, including that of Rensselaerswyck; toleration was granted to the Dutch Reformed and other Protestant churches. Transition to English political institutions was slow; in the Albany district and along the wharves of New York City the Dutch language persisted for generations. In 1686 charters were granted to the

      cities of New York and Albany.

      The forced abdication of James II and the accession of William and Mary (1688-1689) brought discontent to the surface. Following the lead of New England, Jacob Leisler, with strong support from the common people, seized power in New York City and governed, though in Albany his authority was at first not recognized. After the arrival of Governor Sloughter in 1691, Leisler and his chief lieutenant, Jacob Milborne, were hanged for treason; but their names were later cleared in England, and for a generation the memory of Leisler served as a symbol for the discontented.

      On July 9th, 1776, the Provincial Congress of New York, meeting at White Plains, ratified the Declaration of Independence, and on the next day named itself ' the Convention of the Representatives of the State of New York.' The first State constitution was adopted and proclaimed in Kingston on April 20th, 1777. In the southern part of the State, Howe drove Washington from Long Island and Manhattan

      and followed him northward. After the Battle of White Plains, Howe captured Fort Washington. Thereafter the scene of the campaign shifted to New Jersey. The British held New York City until the end of the war.

      The years 1778 and 1779 saw a deadlock between Washington, defending West Point, and Sir Henry Clinton, holding New York City, neither strong enough to attack the other. Following the surrender of Cornwallis, Washington made his headquarters at Newburgh until after the peace was signed. Here he rejected a crown offered him by a military faction, and here he prevented an uprising by the disgruntled Army. In the intervals he found time to make a tour of the battlefields in the upper Hudson and Mohawk Valleys and to invest in New York real estate. On May 6th, 1783, he met with the British commander to plan the evacuation of New York; on November 25 he marched into the city.

      The final act of the drama in which a unified Nation was molded was the adoption of the Federal Constitution. In New York the sharp conflict between the faction led by George Clinton, opposed to ratification, and the faction led by Alexander Hamilton, in favor of it, reflected the clash of interests between tenants and their manorial lords, between workers and their employers, and between the agricultural back country, which preferred State autonomy, and the city with its dominant commercial interest, which desired a strong central government to support commerce and provide a sound currency. The campaign for election of delegates to the ratifying convention was the occasion of the writing of the Federalist papers by Hamilton, Jay, and Madison. Two thirds of the delegates, elected by universal free male suffrage, were committed to vote against the Constitution; but the Federalists were aided by the march of events. The convention met in Poughkeepsie in June 1788. After New Hampshire ratified as the ninth State, and Virginia as the tenth, the fear of losing the lucrative trade with the other States, of the possible secession of the southern New York counties, and of having land claims in the present State of Vermont invalidated by the Federal Government, swung the convention over to ratification. The final vote, after more than a month of bitter debate, was 30 to 27. Four delegates, including George Clinton, failed to vote.

      The commerce of the central and western parts of the State followed the natural waterways to

      market—down the Delaware to Philadelphia, down the Susquehanna to Baltimore, and down the St. Lawrence to Montreal. Farsighted leaders like De Witt Clinton saw that a canal connecting the Hudson with the Great Lakes would provide relief for the western farmer and, by deflecting the commerce of the area down the Hudson, would make the State an economic unit and raise New York City to commercial pre-eminence. But when the bill authorizing construction of the Erie Canal was up for passage in 1817, the representatives of the city in the legislature, uninterested in' upstate' improvements, voted against it as one man. The bill, however, was passed, the canal was dug, and the stream of commerce thus stimulated became the decisive factor in determining the rapid growth of New York City. Before the canal was opened in 1825, the cost of hauling a ton of freight from Buffalo to New York City was $120; on the canal it was reduced to $14.

      The railroads, extending their lines in the years following the completion of the canal, hastened the process of change; the Erie reached Lake Erie at Dunkirk in the fifties, supplying the Southern Tier with modern transportation for its products to New York City.

      In the Civil War period industrial capitalism was introduced, with machine production, absentee ownership, corporate management, and the wage laborer. The railroads brought the raw materials to the industrial centers and carried away the finished products; the canals declined in importance, and many an inland port, once bustling and prosperous, became a sleepy milk station and a Saturday-afternoon shopping center for farmers. The factories attracted young people from the country, and the cities grew rapidly at the expense of the rural areas. Later, as the heavy industries moved closer to the sources of raw materials, New York State turned to the manufacture of intermediate products and consumers' goods. The State gained new industries resulting from scientific advance, especially the production of radio equipment, electrical supplies, chemicals, and airplanes. New York City became the center of the Nation's banking, finance, and wholesale and retail merchandising; and Wall Street became the barometer, and to a growing extent the control center, of the Nation's business. The city developed into the greatest seaport in the world.

      Urbanization and industrialization created problems that became the political issues of the post-Civil War period. In the late 1870’s, bad harvests in Ireland drove thousands of Irish to New York. In the eighties began a stream of immigration, ending only with the First World War, that brought new racial elements in large numbers to the State—Italians, Poles, Russians, and others, all from southern and eastern Europe—and that created new problems in economics and citizenship. The growing city needed workers to lay streets, sidewalks, and sewers and to construct water, light, power, and rapid transit systems. Politicians in control of political machines were able, in granting contracts and franchises,

      to enrich themselves by betraying the public interest to the contractor. Through the boss, Big Business controlled politics. The temptation of proffered graft was too strong to be universally resisted by elected representatives. Tilden achieved national renown, and all but won the Presidency, as a result of his exposure of the Tweed Ring and the Canal Ring. Conditions reached such a pass that a reputation

      for honesty and steadiness in local administration was sufficient, as in the case of Grover Cleveland, to place a public figure in the White House. Charles Evans Hughes first attracted wide public attention as a result of his investigations into gas and electricity rates and the financial practices

      of insurance companies.

      As it extended the sphere of its activities, the State government expanded into an uncoordinated mass of bureaus and departments without centralized responsibility; and reorganization became another issue. The political conflict was complicated by opposition between the metropolis and the upstate area and by the demand for city home rule. The present system of representation, adopted in 1894, prevents New York City, though containing more than half of the population of the State, from securing a majority in the legislature. In 1927, largely as the result of the efforts of Governor Alfred E. Smith, all administrative functions were consolidated in a small number of departments, with final responsibility in the hands of the governor; in 1929 the executive budget system was instituted, with responsibility again vested in the governor. Since 1938, the governor is elected for a term of four years. On November 8th, 1938, Governor Herbert H. Lehman was re-elected to serve the first four-year term in the history of the State.

      Lower Manhattan

      Prior to the completion of the Erie Canal, the story of Lower Manhattan was largely that of the whole city. In contrast to Boston, Philadelphia, and other Colonial settlements, New Amsterdam, belonging to the Dutch West India Company, was founded in 1626 mainly for commercial reasons. As time passed, the little trading post became the market place and financial capital of the rapidly expanding colony. Almost from the first, commercial establishments began a ceaseless march northward, encroaching upon steadily retreating residential districts. The Wall Street stockade, built in 1653 by the Dutch at the town’s northern limit, was removed by the British in 1699. By 1771, the city, with 22,000 residents, extended to Grand Street, and after the American Revolution the movement northward reached Greenwich Village, accelerated by the yellow fever epidemics at the turn of the century.

      Under English rule, following New Amsterdam’s surrender in 1664, two great steps toward freedom were taken here. A free press was assured in 1735 as a result of the trial of John Peter Zenger, editor of the New York Weekly Journal, and liberty of worship was firmly established early in the eighteenth century.

      The history of New York during the Revolution is less notable than that of Boston and other large towns, since the British occupied Manhattan for almost the entire duration of the war. Early in the conflict, however, liberty poles had been erected in the Common (now City Hall Park), and the lead statue of King George III in Bowling Green had been melted into bullets for the Colonists’ cause. After the Revolution, New York (the city still consisted of the lower part of the island) boasted of being the first capital of the United States of America. Though suffering temporary setbacks, New York, like several other major American cities, grew rapidly in the next fifty years. In 1792, an embryonic stock exchange was modestly inaugurated under a Wall Street tree. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the expansion of the West began the process which soon made New York the market place and banker of half a continent, and the primary gateway to Europe. By 1830, the population was 202,859; by 1860, the rising tide of immigration, which was to sweep the city in successive waves for another half-century, had helped to raise the total to 813,669. After the Civil War, the Erie Canal lost much of its importance, but by this time New York, with its superb harbor formation, had already attracted a tremendous foreign commerce, and it now became also a railroad center, with many of its freight terminals located across the Hudson.

      The more spectacular side of nineteenth-century New York history is associated with Lower Manhattan. As early as the 1830’s, Tammany Hall had discovered the advantages to be derived for itself from the vote of the unassimilated immigrant, and City Hall became the pawn of a group of men whose main object was to deplete the public treasury. The infamous operations of the Tweed Ring in the 1860’s and early 1870’s, and of other early Tammany politicians, belongs to the past of this older part of the city. Following the Civil War, Wall Street, only a few short blocks south of City Hall, began its more ambitious career as financial controller of the nation.

      The history of Lower Manhattan has, however, another side. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Newspaper Row was situated on Park Row. Here, James Gordon Bennett, Joseph Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst fought their sensational battles. Lincoln Steffens discoursed on political corruption, and Richard Harding Davis and O. Henry spun their tales—O. Henry finding in this exciting, chaotic, sordid section of the city much material for the stories of Baghdad on the Subway.

      With increasing rapidity, the residential areas receded northward. About the 1850’s, aristocratic St. John’s Park began to yield to commerce, and the well-to-do were to be found only in the purlieus of Lower Manhattan, around Greenwich Village. By the time the First World War was declared, only a small number of the city’s more prosperous residents remained below Fourteenth Street, chiefly in mansions around Washington Square and lower Fifth Avenue.

      Beginning in the 1880’s, Greenwich Village was occupied by the Irish and African-Americans, and later by Italians. At approximately the same time, the Germans and Irish of the Lower East Side were supplanted by Italians, Russians, Poles, and to an even greater extent by Eastern European Jews, who despite poverty, filth, and overcrowding retained their native gaiety and hope. The settlement of an increasing number of artists and painters in the 1910’s gave Greenwich Village national prominence as an artistic and literary center.

      Except for the East Side and Greenwich Village, lower Manhattan is now almost entirely devoted to commerce and finance. In the Wall Street district, skyscrapers multiplied rapidly after 1900 until building was halted by the stock market crash of 1929. Park Row is no longer Newspaper Row, but an adjunct to the commercial district. Old landmarks were erased by the postwar building boom; and a solid wall of giant structures, almost unbroken from the Battery to Fourteenth Street, hides the busy traffic of the Hudson River.

      Points of Interest:

      (1) Fraunces Tavern (Pearl Street and Broad Street)

      This structure was built in 1719 as a residence by Etienne de Lancey, a wealthy Huguenot. A merchant firm of de Lancey's grandson remodeled the building for use as a store and warehouse in 1757. It was sold in 1762 to Samuel Fraunces, a West Indian of French and African blood, who opened it as the Queen's Head Tavern. In 1783, George Washington bade farewell to his officers here.

      (2) Battery Place (West of State Street)

      Battery Place was once a much wider street and was known by its Dutch name, Marcktveldt; later this was anglicized to Marketfield. This thoroughfare was the site of New Amsterdam’s first cattle market.

      (3) Battery Park (Battery Place and State Street)

      It was on this original rocky finger of land that the first Dutch colonists built their huts and a simple breastwork—later called Fort Amsterdam. In 1626, Peter Minuit, governor of the new settlement, bought the island from the Manhattoes for cloth and fripperies worth about twenty four (gold standard) dollars. Administered by the Dutch West India Company, New Amsterdam was the scene of frequent disputes between its inhabitants and its governors. Englishmen, Jews, and other colonists, traders, and adventurers from many lands, had, however, settled there among the Dutch by 1664, when a British war fleet appeared to demand the surrender of the town to the Duke of York, who had received from his brother, Charles II, a grant embracing the present state of New York, the islands off the New England coast, and part of the present state of Maine. Despite the efforts of Director Peter Stuyvesant, the burghers refused to defend New Amsterdam, and the English flag was run up without opposition. It remained there until the American Revolution, except for one year, during which the armed naval forces of the Dutch Republic retook it and undertook to carry on under Dutch rule; the settlement was returned to England under a treaty made in the Old World.

      (4) Statue of Giovanni Da Verrazano (Battery Park)

      This Florentine navigator is said to have entered the harbor in 1524.

      (5) State Street (Between Battery Place and South Street)

      Bordering Battery Park on the east, State Street was the town’s most fashionable thoroughfare until the beginning of the 1800’s, when the wealthy residents began moving uptown. Here were the homes of the merchant princes, known as the Peep-o’-Day Boys, because they arose at dawn to peer across the harbor at Staten Island where signal staffs flashed news of ships sighted beyond the Narrows.

      (6) Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton Shrine (7 State Street)

      This residence is believed to have been built according to plans drawn by John McComb, one of the architects of the present City Hall.

      (7) South Ferry Building (Whitehall Street and South Street)

      This is where once stood the houses of Peter Stuyvesant and Robert Fulton, the inventor.

      (8) Custom House (Bowling Green, between State Street and Broadway)

      Designed by Cass Gilbert, this structure was completed in 1907 at a cost of seven million dollars, including the price of the land. The Custom House occupies the site of Fort Amsterdam, whose four bastions, corresponding to the points of the compass, commanded both the North and East rivers. The fort, including a governor’s house built for Peter Stuyvesant, was demolished in 1790. On its site a mansion, known as the Government House, was erected. At the time, ambitious

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