Nooks and Corners of Old New York Part 3

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 munic.i.p.al 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Tombs]

[Sidenote: The Tombs Prison]

[Sidenote: The Collect]

Where the Tombs prison stands was once the Collect, or Fresh Water Pond.

This deep body of water took up, approximately, the s.p.a.ce between the present Baxter, Elm, Ca.n.a.l 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 Ca.n.a.l 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 Ca.n.a.l 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 s.e.xes 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 pa.s.sage 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 inst.i.tution devoted to this work stands on the site of the "Old Brewery," the most notorious criminal resort of the locality.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Park St. with Church of the Transfiguration]

[Sidenote: An Ancient Church]

At Mott and Park Streets is now the Church of the Transfiguration (Catholic). On a hill, the suggestion of which is still to be seen in steep Park Street, the Zion Lutheran Church was erected in 1797. In 1810 it was changed to Zion Episcopal Church. It was burned in 1815; rebuilt 1819, and sold in 1853 to the Church of the Transfiguration, which has occupied it since. This last church had previously been in Chambers Street, and before that it had occupied several quarters. It was founded in 1827, and is the fourth oldest church in the diocese.

Zion Episcopal Church moved in 1853 to Thirty-eighth Street and Madison Avenue, and in 1891 consolidated with St. Timothy's Church at No. 332 West Fifty-seventh Street. The Madison Avenue building was sold to the South (Reformed) Dutch Church.

[Sidenote: Chatham Square]

Chatham Square has been the open s.p.a.ce it is now ever since the time when a few houses cl.u.s.tered 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 hara.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage 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.

Was.h.i.+ngton 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: Was.h.i.+ngton's Home on Cherry Hill]

The Franklin House was the first Cherry Hill place of residence of George Was.h.i.+ngton 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, pa.s.sing 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 WAs.h.i.+NGTON FROM APRIL 23, 1789 TO FEBRUARY 23, 1790 ERECTED BY THE MARY WAs.h.i.+NGTON 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

II

[Ill.u.s.tration: Hudson & Watts Sts.]

II