MESSAGE
| DATE | 2005-08-08 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] One more article worth reading
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These were both from the New Yorker magazine
I find it interesting that they both mention uncovering an ancient ship
wreck from the 1600's in the Hudson, now where ground Zero is.
BUT MORE INTERESTING and frustrating is that nearly 2/3rd of a million
colonial and early artifacts from the 5 points area where stored in the
WTC prior to 9-11 and LOST. A who irreplaceable chapter of NYC history.
Ruben
Issue of 2002-09-16
Posted 2002-09-09
At the northeast corner of Vesey and Church Streets, across from the
graveyard of St. Paul's Chapel, there is a tiny, crowded deli called the
Stage Door. I went there recently to meet Joyce Gold, a guide who used
to lead a World Trade Center tour called "From Landfill to Landscape."
She had agreed to show me some of the historical remains of the area,
and after we picked up our coffee and squeezed past workers in orange
mesh vests and tourists in F.D.N.Y. caps to get to the street outside,
she led me up a flight of stairs to a large, hot room above the deli,
full of empty cafeteria tables and chairs. An entire windowed wall of
the room looked out on the sixteen-acre hole that had been the World
Trade Center.
When the Trade Center towers were destroyed, on September 11th, I
experienced, among many other emotions, a desire to know the history of
the site better, much the way one wishes one had known a distant but
beloved uncle better after he dies. A life has a beginning and a middle
as well as an end, and I suppose that I wanted to uncover that narrative
meaning. I had visited the World Trade Center only twice: once to
interview a city official; once to attend an awards party held at
Windows on the World. This was a distant uncle, indeed. The Twin Towers
existed for me, as for many people, I suspect, only as landmarks against
the sky, as familiar as the North Star, and as remote. The ground on
which the towers sat was just a subway stop, a busy pavement, a downtown
blur. Now that the airborne landmarks were gone, the ground was really
all that was left, and, as people argued about what would replace the
World Trade Center, I kept wondering what had been there before.
I wasn't even sure which streets were included and had to consult
several maps before I could draw a grid, five blocks by four blocks,
sixteen acres. The northern border was Vesey Street. South of Vesey, the
trade center had been built over Fulton, Dey, and Cortlandt Streets. The
southern border was Liberty Street. Church Street ran along the eastern
edge. To the west, the site covered Greenwich and Washington Streets and
ended at West Street.
>From the Stage Door's second-floor dining room, I could clearly see the
blank space that had once been crisscrossed by my grid. As Joyce Gold
described buildings and streets that no longer existed, tourists below
us struggled for a clear view of the site. They crowded up against
chain-link fences and shuffled along in the sun on plywood platforms.
Sitting in the secret, stuffy room with its unobstructed aerial vista
was sobering, moving, and, as with any Ground Zero gawking, almost
obscene: a sad, ironic inversion of Windows on the World.
After a while, the conversation turned to "The Iconography of Manhattan
Island, 1498-1909, Compiled from Original Sources and Illustrated by
Photo-Intaglio Reproductions of Important Maps Plans Views and Documents
In Public and Private Collections," an indispensable, comprehensive,
wildly idiosyncratic work that I had encountered at the New-York
Historical Society. "The 'Iconography' has always been my choice for my
only book on a desert island," Gold said. It was completed in 1928 by
Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, who had worked on it for nineteen years.
Stokes originally envisioned one volume devoted to important historical
moments. The record of New York's first three hundred years sprawled,
instead, into six volumes of land grants, Common Council meetings,
leases, legal challenges, hotel advertisements, funerals, fires, wars,
ferry crossings, firehouse openings, riots, and just about anything else
that happens in a great modern city.
In Volume I, where the early photo-intaglio views can be found, there
are prints of lower Manhattan as the Dutch first saw it: a pristine,
hilly, verdant land in which the native Munsees move effortlessly from
clamming and fishing to hunting and farming. Explorers and Dutch traders
described a cornucopia that is difficult even to imagine: sixfoot
lobsters, oysters a foot in diameter; seals and porpoises playing in the
North River, as the Hudson was then called; grapevines and cherry trees
scenting the air.
But as soon as I began to compare early maps to the grid I had drawn, I
saw that the sixteen acres I wanted to know better was not covered with
fragrant vines and fruit trees. More than half of it was covered by the
river. I erased West Street from my grid, I erased Washington Street.
Manhattan's seventeenth-century shoreline, and the story of the sixteen
acres, began at Greenwich Street.
In 1614, the Tijger, a Dutch trading ship, burned at anchor and sank in
the North River. Three centuries later, in 1916, workers were digging a
tunnel for the I.R.T. subway line. At the intersection of Greenwich and
Dey, twenty feet below ground, their shovels hit wood: the charred keel
and three charred ribs of a ship. The style of the ship was early Dutch,
and radiocarbon dating of the wood indicated that the vessel was built
some time between 1450 and 1610. There is no record of any other ship
going down in flames in the North River at that time, which suggests
that the Tijger, a trading vessel a world away from home, burned and
sank beneath the water where almost four hundred years later two
towering buildings devoted to world trade burned and sank to the ground.
The men on the Tijger landed to collect pelts, not to find religious
freedom or to impose religious conversion. New York, even in its
infancy, was a creature of trade. But in subsequent years politics and
competing Colonial interests also shaped the sixteen acres. There were
Indian settlements nearby, but none on the site, nor was it part of the
original Dutch trading post. The first direct mention of the area I was
able to find was a reference to a survey conducted in 1625, when the
corner was part of thirty-three acres set aside to grow food for the
colony of the Dutch West India Company. The earliest street map of New
Amsterdam, made in 1660, does not even extend that far north.
Offering leases and land grants as incentives, the Dutch attempted to
colonize Manhattan, and the acres on the North River were divided into
farms, or bouweries. Annetje Jansen, the daughter of New Amsterdam's
midwife, became the owner of one of the farms in 1636, when her husband
died. The British conquered New Amsterdam in 1664. In 1671, Annetje's
heirs sold the farm—which ran from Broadway to the river and from
today's Cortlandt Street to Fulton Street—to Colonel Francis Lovelace,
the royal governor of what was now called New York, and the Bouwery Farm
became the King's Farm. (One of Annetje's sons from her second marriage,
Cornelius Bogardus, did not join in the conveyance, and his line of
heirs unsuccessfully sued subsequent owners in 1750, 1760, 1807, and
again in 1830. In 1847 alone, Cornelius Brower lost nine such lawsuits.)
In 1697, the Crown leased the King's Farm to Trinity Church for "60
bushells of winter wheat" (a different currency than had been used
twenty-five years earlier, when part of the land was rented for six
hundred guilders' worth of wampum). But after Queen Anne came to the
throne, in 1702, and the King's Farm became the Queen's Farm, the new
royal governor, hoping to strengthen the position of the Anglicans in
the colony, convinced the Queen to give the land to Trinity. In 1705, a
patent was issued for "All those our Severall Closes, Peeces & Parcels
of Land, Meadows and Pastures formerly called ye Duke's Farm and ye
King's Farme and now known by the name of the Queens Farme with All &
Singular ye fences, inclosures, Iprovemts and Appurtenances whatsoever
thereunto belonging as ye same are now in ye Occupacon of and Enjoyed by
. . . any former Tennant, situate, lying and being on ye Island
Manhattans in ye City of New York aforesaid and Bounded on the East
Partly by the Broadway, Partly by the Common and Partly by ye Swamp and
on ye West by Hudsons River." The bouwery was reborn, yet again, this
time as the Church Farm.
On seventeenth-century maps of New York, the farm is clean and clear. To
the south, Colonial New York is crowded with streets, the shore with
piers and wharves. But Annetje's bouwery, no matter how many times it
changes its name, remains a remote piece of land bordered by swamps and
undeveloped waterfront. It was not until the eighteenth century, a time
of explosive growth and prosperity for New York, that the farm finally
began to grow—literally. As Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall
explain in "Unearthing Gotham," instead of building wooden piers, New
Yorkers usually built slips that extended out into the water, creating
little inlets where boats could moor. When the inlets began to silt up,
they were filled in, and the streets were extended, creating new slips.
Streets had begun to cross the Church Farm in the early eighteenth
century. Crown Street had been laid out before 1700, and it went as far
as the shoreline. But in 1794, when Crown Street was renamed Liberty
Street by the new nation, it reached a shoreline that had been pushed
far out into the Hudson River, beyond the natural slope to deep water,
allowing ships to dock instead of having to anchor offshore. Left behind
were brand-new chunks of prime waterfront real estate.
New York's landfill had begun in earnest in 1686, when Governor Dongan
issued a charter that granted the city the right to raise revenue by
selling "water lots." Buyers were able to build slips and create land
between the high- and low-water marks. In 1730, the city was given even
greater latitude: the Montgomerie Charter allowed the sale of land four
hundred feet out into the river, past the low-water mark. The following
year, the Common Council granted John Chambers "all the Ground under
Water in the Rear of his Said Lott from high water Mark to Low Water
Mark." For this he would pay an annual rent of six pence per foot of
shoreline. He was also required to construct "A Street of five and forty
foot in breadth at the foot of the Bank the Center of which Street to be
at high Water Mark, and also Another Street next and fronting Hudsons
River of thirty foot in breadth." The forty-five-foot-wide street became
Greenwich, the thirty-foot-wide one was Washington. In 1769, the Common
Council was petitioned by several citizens for a water lot extending two
hundred feet into the North River, from Dey's Dock "northward to the
corner of Bartly's Street"—Barclay Street. Cortlandt Street was laid out
between Broadway and the Hudson in 1733; Dey Street was levelled and
paved with stones in 1749. Fortunes were made in real estate.
In "New York City Cartmen 1667-1850," a history of the city's early
teamsters, Graham Russell Hodges cites records of cartmen hauling sand
and oyster shells to use as landfill on the Church Farm. Cantwell and
Wall quote a physician's observation of a less pristine fill in 1796:
"Carts were employed to collect such dirt and filth as all large and
populous cities furnish in abundance; and with materials of this
description [the area] was filled up, and to give greater salubrity to
the mass, there were occasionally added, dead horses, dogs, cats, hogs,
&c., &c."
During epidemics, builders were more careful to obey the laws requiring
clean fill. Epidemics also pushed New Yorkers north and west as they
escaped the crowded downtown. On the Lyne-Bradford Plan, a 1731 map,
there is nothing on the farm between Broadway and the riverbank except a
small, meandering road called Old Wind Mill Lane. In 1754, Greenwich and
Washington Streets show up on a map for the first time, along with
Church, Vesey, and Partition (now Fulton).
In a great banquet of landfill, the rural West Side expanded. Trinity
Church was prominent in the area's growth—the host, really, of the
real-estate feast. The church was granted water lots for West Street and
Washington Street in 1751; Partition Street was ceded by the church to
the city in 1761, as was Vesey Street. The latter, which according to
one source was once known as Moordt Kuyl Straat, because of a murder
that took place in a hollow where it met the river, had been named after
the first rector of Trinity, William Vesey.
The cartmen who hauled bricks and wood for the construction of the
Church Farm's new streets became its new tenants. Trinity did not sell
the land. As was the custom among the English gentry, it offered long
leases. Elizabeth Blackmar, in her fascinating real-estate history,
"Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850," describes the church's decision in 1734
"to lease out lotts of ground for any number of years not exceeding
forty." But even in 1752 the church was still marketing the farm as
"good pasture for cattle and horses." It was not until 1762 that the
property was surveyed and mapped, most of it divided into
twenty-by-hundred-foot lots. Trinity advertised two hundred of these
lots for twenty-one, forty-two, or sixty-three-year leases. By this
time, the opening of new streets and wharves had turned the area into a
more accessible and attractive neighborhood. Ads for Trinity leases
began to tout convenience for artisans. The farm was near Broadway, a
major thoroughfare; it was near the ferries and wharves of the Hudson,
it was near the Oswego Market. And the leases were cheap: between one
and four pounds a year, compared with ten to twenty pounds for leases
farther downtown. Carpenters, stonecutters, masons, grocers, butchers,
ropemakers—an entire population of artisans was able to lease the land
and build small wooden houses, which they could move with them when
their leases ran out. Trinity Church Farm became a working-class
neighborhood. Taverns, Hodges says, were the center of a culture in
which cartmen raced their carts each morning on the new, straight
streets and amused themselves with bullbaiting, gambling, and drinking.
The Church Farm just west of St. Paul's Chapel was also the site of the
city's red-light district, home to as many as five hundred prostitutes.
It was known as the Holy Ground. Convenient for the sailors and laborers
who worked on the wharves and docks to the west, the Holy Ground was
just a short stroll away for the students of King's College and for the
rich living in fine, new houses on Broadway and working near Wall
Street.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, the taverns had become
centers of revolutionary activity. And when the Revolution came, it
touched the area in a direct and devastating way. On September 21, 1776,
just a few weeks after the disastrous Battle of Brooklyn, when the
British took back Manhattan and George Washington and his troops barely
escaped obliteration, a fire started at the Fighting Cocks, a tavern
near Whitehall Slip, and swept uptown. The British suspected rebel arson
(one of the patriots they arrested and hanged was Nathan Hale), and
General Washington seems to have agreed. Watching the fire from Harlem
Heights, he said, "Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more
for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves." Edwin G. Burrows and
Mike Wallace, in "Gotham," their magisterial history of early New York,
quote a newspaper account of the confusion and the shouting, which,
"joined to the roaring of the flames, the crash of falling houses and
the widespread ruin . . . formed a scene of horror great beyond
description." The fire destroyed one-quarter of the city's buildings,
including five hundred houses and everything on the site of the future
World Trade Center.
On Evacuation Day, November 25, 1783, the British finally marched out,
leaving behind a ruined city. At about this time, the heirs of Annetje
Jans petitioned the legislature for return of the farm from Trinity
Church, which was closely associated with the defeated British. The
radical new legislature had a better idea—the State itself should sue
Trinity for the land. Patriotism was high, and real estate was valuable,
even real estate in ruins.
But New York was a city of practical merchants, Tory and patriot alike,
and ideas of land reform were soon forgotten in the rush of everyday
affairs. Trinity Church Farm remained Trinity Church Farm, and within a
few years the busy waterfront community was rebuilt. New York, the Duc
de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt wrote after visiting in 1797, had
"increased and beautified with unheard of quickness. . . . This quarter
of the city"—the burned section— "has been rebuilt since the peace, and
is now one of the handsomest parts in it." New York still had terrible
water, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt said, but "the new part of the city
built adjoining to Hudson's River, and parallel with its course, is
infinitely more handsome; the streets there being generally straight,
broad, intersecting each other at right angles, and the houses much
better built."
New York was back in business, rising up out of the wreckage of fire and
war and pestilence. New markets out West began to stimulate commercial
development of the waterfront on Manhattan's western shore. The rise in
rent and the price of land caused the working men, or mechanics, as they
were called, to subdivide their houses and rent out rooms. Carpenters,
laborers, sailors, some as young as fourteen, lived in the new boarding
houses, three or four to a room, and joined the cartmen at the taverns
for cockfighting, boxing, bearbaiting, drinking, and gambling. Some
taverns also served as the headquarters of stagecoaches, which connected
merchants with the rest of the East Coast. A tavern at 49 Cortlandt
Street, near Greenwich, was the site of one of the earliest meetings of
the Tammany Society (an anti-élitist political club that later became
the notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall), which gathered there in 1787 to
drink thirteen patriotic toasts.
The waterfront was booming, real estate was booming, and, just northeast
of the Church Farm, on Broadway, wealthy merchants built grand houses.
On one early rent roll, which the Trinity Church Archivist, Gwynedd
Cannan, brought to my attention, there are several columns, listing
names; lot numbers; the day the rent falls due; the amount owed; when it
was paid; and, at the end, arrears. The first name under the heading
"Fulton Street," written in the bookkeeper's even hand, is "Duncan
Phyfe," who owed fifteen dollars for Lot 35. On a map of the Church
Farm, Lot 35 is on the northwest corner of Fulton and Church, directly
across from the vestry office of St. Paul's. Phyfe's cabinetmaking
workshop, which at one time employed more than a hundred people, used
new, simplified, sequential techniques, a sort of proto-assembly line,
allowing him to employ lower-paid, semiskilled workers, many of whom
probably lived in nearby boarding houses. Some of his clients lived
nearby, too, like John Jacob Astor, whose big house, on Broadway and
Barclay, was one of many in the newly fashionable area.
In 1771, one of the most important markets in the city was built between
Partition and Vesey. In 1797, residents complained of "the number of
Hay-Boats landing collectively . . . discommoding the Market, and
Wood-Boats and other Vessels, which resort in great Numbers to said
Wharf and Bason." By 1812, the area was so busy that the Common Council
decided to build a new market on landfill where the Corporation Basin
had been. The Washington Market, as it was called, was bounded by
Washington, West, Partition, and Vesey Streets, and existed until 1883.
The opening of the Erie Canal, in the eighteen-twenties, created even
more activity on the waterfront, and the market grew. A fish market was
added. And on April 21, 1828, the same day the legislature passed a law
against duelling, the Common Council ordered a cupola to be erected.
The old Church Farm was now a frantic port. On the Ratzen Plan of
1766-67, we can already see that the ferry to Paulus Hook, New Jersey,
left from Cortlandt Street, at the bottom of the King's Wharf, which
stretched from Cortlandt to Dey Street. Rowboats and periaugers,
flat-bottomed sailboats, had been used from the time of Dutch rule to
carry wagons and livestock. But the age of the steam engine was
approaching. In "Over and Back," an astonishingly comprehensive history
of the New York ferryboat, Brian J. Cudahy describes the launching, in
1812, by Robert Fulton of the first commercial, steam-driven,
double-ended ferry. It ran between Cortlandt Street and Paulus Hook.
Fulton and his partner, Robert Livingston, had a monopoly on the
steamboat business in New York and they enforced it with unrelenting
vigor. Swift new steam ferries would push off from Cortlandt Street, but
the Vesey Street pier was still home to a competitor's old-fashioned
horse ferry, on which a team of draft animals was harnessed to a
treadmill that turned the paddlewheel. Eventually, the steamboat
monopoly was overturned by the Supreme Court, and, with the growth of
the railroad, steam ferries became an even more important link to the
rest of the country. In 1838, the New Jersey Railroad took over ferry
service between New Jersey and Cortlandt Street.
After more than a decade of frenzied growth, and in the midst of high
inflation (the cost of living went up sixty-six per cent in the first
two months of 1836 alone) and a burgeoning labor movement, a notice
appeared in the local papers: "Bread, Meat, Rent, Fuel! Their Prices
Must Come Down. The Voice of the people Shall Be heard, and Will
Prevail!" A meeting in City Hall Park was announced for "All Friends of
Humanity, determined to resist Monopolists and Extortioners." When the
huge rally adjourned, a mob, several hundred strong, stormed off to the
warehouse of Eli Hart & Co., at 175 Washington Street. The protesters,
according to the next day's Evening Post, "commenced violent proceedings
upon it and those who were in it," smashing doors and windows, and
throwing two hundred barrels of flour onto the street, along with a
thousand bushels of wheat. One month later, the Wall Street panic of
1837 hit New York.
The shape of what would become the World Trade Center site—indeed of all
lower Manhattan—did not change from around 1840 until the
nineteen-sixties, when landfill began on a whole new scale. The New York
City Street Directory for 1851 shows a neighborhood still catering to
the commercial waterfront. The Northern Hotel is at 113 West Street,
Henry Bicks runs a boarding house at 139-141 Liberty Street. Next door
is a stable; a cooper; Israel Reckhow, a pickle merchant; Bass Clark &
Dibble, grocers, and a tobacconist selling "segars." Washington Street,
too, is full of boarding houses, with their neighboring stables and
porterhouses. On a single block of Cortlandt, between Washington and
West, four hotels and six grocers are listed, along with the offices of
the Paterson Railroad, the New Jersey Railroad, and the Jersey City
ferry.
The Wall Street area, to the south, had become identified exclusively
with finance, and other businesses had migrated the few blocks north:
jewellers, engravers, tinsmiths; purveyors of dry goods, fancy goods,
and straw goods. The sixteen acres was home to Rauch & Co., pencil-case
makers; B. P. Crandall & Son, Hobby Horses; Edward Norris, naturalist;
Henry Gerker, curled hair; and John Lenning, huckster. "Israel Minor &
Co., druggist" is listed at 214 Fulton, just east of Greenwich, and the
store is still there in the background of an 1869 photograph of the
tracks of the first cable-operated elevated railroad in New York City.
Just down the block, at 193 Fulton Street, is a property that the
Directory lists as: "Duncan Phyfe, residence." Duncan Phyfe had moved to
the area when it was still Trinity Church Farm, just a few generations
after the Dutch settlers. Now the neighborhood was a completely
integrated part of the greatest modern city in the world.
When New York's ambitious landfill effort resumed, in 1966, neither
shells nor animal carcasses were dumped by cartmen into the Church
Farm's acres. To reach the bedrock necessary for the World Trade
Center's foundation, dirt was removed from the site and dumped into the
Hudson, pushing the shoreline out and making it possible to create
Battery Park City. From the Stage Door's dining room, I watched
bulldozers working in the large seeping pit ringed with charred,
abandoned buildings. They rolled down a slope that, for all I knew,
mirrored the rocky shore that had greeted the Tijger. Then I left the
deli and joined the tourists below, walking past what must have been the
Holy Ground, trying to picture the controversial plans for the site's
redevelopment. History has always struck me as improbable, as improbable
as the future, and certainly the history of these sixteen acres seemed
less like a comforting eulogy than like an unfinished story of a varied,
haphazard, ongoing life. I began to think about the title Stokes chose
for his gigantic encyclopedia of New York. Not "The History of Manhattan
Island" or "The Way We Lived Then" or any number of predictable,
reasonable titles that one could imagine for a history of the city but
"The Iconography of Manhattan Island." An icon, when it is not an
exquisite painting of an Eastern Orthodox saint, is generally understood
to be an important and enduring symbol. How wonderful that the icons of
I. N. Phelps Stokes are not only the grand and majestic images we
associate with memorials but also the documents of thousands of daily
events, disagreements, compromises, and mundane decisions—the shells and
sand that shaped New York City.
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