NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1794-1795

1794

January

Governor George Clinton addresses the state legislature in Manhattan, urges strengthening defenses against the British. They vote £30,000 for fortifying New York City and £12,000 for the frontiers to the west and north.

Mar 22

The state legislature votes to extend the Mohawk Valley Road west from Fort Schuyler (Utica) to the Genesee River. The extension will be named the Main Genesee River Road.

May 27

Tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt is born near Stapleton, Staten Island, the fourth of nine children, to farmer Cornelius Vanderbilt and his wife Phoebe.

Sep 28                 

New York City tavern keeper James Leeson dies at the age of 38. He’s buried in Manhattan’s Trinity Cemetery. His tombstone will display Masonic symbols as well as a strange code, which will not be deciphered until 1889.

October

French lawyer, politician and epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, visiting New York City, leaves for a wild turkey shoot near Hartford, Connecticut.  While there he learns of a new soup invented by Boston tavern-keeper Jean Baptiste Gilbert Payplat dis Julien. They swap recipes, Brillat-Savarin teaches Julien his fondue method.

Nov 3                 

Journalist, New York Evening Post editor and romantic poet William Cullen Bryant is born in Cummington, Massachusetts, to doctor and later state legislator Peter Bryant and his wife Sarah Snell, Bryant.

City                       

Designer Duncan Phyfe begins manufacturing furniture.    **    Bellevue Hospital is created out of a pest house built to cope with the plague.    **     Journeymen printers form the Franklin Typographical Society, the city’s first permanent labor association.    **    John Jacob Astor travels to Europe in the fall, leaving his seven-months-pregnant wife Sarah behind.    **    Potter’s Field is laid out at the junction of Bloomingdale and Post roads, the future site of Madison Square.    **    Further attempts to sell the land in the former Collect Pond area again elicits no responses.    **    City surveyor Benjamin Taylor and others make proposals for supplying the city with water. Nothing is done.    **    Aaron Burr's wife Theodosia dies, leaving him with a daughter, also named Theodsia.    **    Colonel Marinus Willet, a prominent member of the Tammany Society and a war veteran, is sent south to invite Creek Indian half-breed chief Alexander McGillivray and some of his warriors to New York to meet Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox. The Society acts as host to the 29 Indians and a peace treaty is signed formally ceding the land between the Oconee and Ogeechee rivers to Georgia.    **    The Bridge Café open at Water and Dover streets. In modern times it is the city’s oldest existing restaurant.    **    Construction begins on the City Hotel (Tontine City Tavern), on the Broadway site of the demolished City Tavern.    **    The former Kennedy mansion, at 1 Broadway, built by Royal navy captain Archibald Kennedy, is sold by present owner, merchant and financier Nathaniel Prime, opens as the Washington Hotel.    **    The French begins using Bedloes Island as an isolation (quarantine) station.    **    Philadelphian John Bill Ricketts brings his circus company to perform at Broadway and Broome Street. The group will return to the city five times.   **    Peter Schermerhorn combines properties at Beekman Slip  (the future Schermerhorn Row and Fulton Street).    **    Future Manhattan businessman Ira Hawley is born in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

1795

January                 

Connecticut investor William Wadsworth drives three ox teams from New York City to Big Tree (Geneseo) escorting six families to settle there.

Jan 11                 

A daughter, Dorothea Astor, is born in New York City to John Jacob and Sarah Todd Astor.

Mar 14                 

John Jacob Astor writes to London pianoforte manufacturer Tschudi & Broadwood, orders an instrument to be shipped to his family back in New York.

Mar 24                 

State surveyor general Simeon De Witt acquires Benjamin Ellicott's certified map of his Pre-emption Line survey, by an act of the legislature.

Apr 9                 

The New York State Legislature passes “An act for the encouragement of schools". $50,000 annually is appropriated for the next five years, to establish and support common schools.

Apr 13                 

Publisher (Harper Brothers) and politician James Harper is born in Newtown, Queens, to farmer, carpenter and storekeeper Joseph Henry Harper and his wife Elizabeth Kolyer Harper.

May 12                 

Columbia College professor Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill addresses the Tammany Society of New York City on its designated anniversary, describes a highly imaginary history of Chief Tammany.

Sep 1                 

New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, Sr. is born in Newmill, Scotland to a prosperous Catholic family of French descent.

City

John Fitch experiments with a steam-driven craft using a screw propeller, on the Collect Pond.    **    Astor, back in the U. S. and finding himself short of funds, hurries off to Montréal, writes to Peter Smith at the settlement of Utica to obtain credit.    **    Yellow fever kills close to 750 people. Half the population leaves the city.    **   For the third time since 1788, a grand jury indicts the city for its filthy streets. Again nothing is done.    **    Further proposals for the city's water supply are made, and ignored.    **    Federalist flour merchant John Coles, having purchased rights to build a bridge across the lower Harlem River from a discouraged Lewis Morgan, is granted the right to build a stone dam at the site.    **    The Tammany Museum is sold to its director Gardiner Baker. He also purchases Daniel Bowen's New York and Philadelphia waxworks and Bowen's paintings by Robert Edge Pine.    **    The American Bank Note Company is founded.    **    Ferry service begins between Catherine Street in Manhattan and and the foot of Main Street in Brooklyn.    **    French exile Moreau de St. Mery passes through the city.    **     The City Hotel (Tontine City Tavern) on Broadway is completed; opens for business.

©  David Minor         Eagles Byte

The Importance of Being Sturdy

Dec 14, 2002

In 1882 a visitor in his late twenties stood with his head tilted back, near the northwest corner of Chicago's Grant Park, and surveyed the narrow structure thrusting skyward. A bemused sneer crept into his voice (it hadn't usually too far to travel) and he proclaimed it a "castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it." Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wilde had rendered his judgment. Perhaps the Irish visitor, author of the children's classic The Selfish Giant, might have found the structure of greater interest had he know of its reputed ghost. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Chicago had been jacked up out of the mud. Much of the fill used was gained by deepening the Chicago River, thus distancing citizens even further from the muck. Engineer Ellis Chesbrough had managed to make the drains empty properly, but the problem of waste disposal still remained. The city's water commissioners went for the cheapest solution (surprise, surprise) - just dump the raw sewage into the river. Much cheaper than dumping it into the lake, digging a sewage canal to flow the sludge to the Illinois River, or even, what sounds more like a 20th Century "green" plan, to pump it into reservoirs and turn it into manure. So off the odoriferous mess went, into Lake Michigan. Except for the portion that the city drew off of to provide its drinking water. And for making ice when the stockyards came along later on and added to the melange.

River water stank and could kill you, but off where the sun rose every morning was this huge lake. If you could get out past the floating slop hugging the shore you could find all the clean water you needed. In March of 1864, despite all those who said he couldn't pull it off, Chesbrough set out to bring potable (if not pure) water to thirsty citizens (nearly 110,000 of them in 1860). The first task was to build and sink a "crib" of iron and timber, two miles from shore, containing an iron cylinder that would be sunk 33 feet to the lake bottom and bore through another 31 feet into the lake bed. The upper portion was filled with stone ballast. Then other gangs of laborers and mules began tunneling toward the city, beneath the lake bed's surface. When they had finished Chicago had a two-mile long iron soda straw, five feet in diameter, lying on its side beneath its lake bed, one end at the crib out in the lake, the other end near Grant Park.

The final step was to build a pumphouse at the park end. Architect William W. Boyington designed a mock-Gothic structure to be built out of Joliet limestone. When completed it was topped by the 154-foot stone tower that so bemused Mr. Wilde. It contained a three-foot diameter iron pipe which, when partially filled with water, would act as a governor, modulating the water flow into the pumping station. Completed in 1869, Wilde's "monstrosity" and the building at its foot would be the only structures standing two years later when the O'Leary family stable - it i said - launched the Great Chicago Fire. Which brings us to our ghost.

Based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever, the legend has it that one municipal employee stayed behind when everyone else fled the lethal heat. In the manner of Nellie Swinging From the Bell and Casey at the Throttle, this anonymous hero kept the pumps running until the last minute, for firemen that had already lost their battle, then did the only thing possible and hanged himself before the flames reached him. A number of tourists down through the years swear they've seen a hanging figure through an upper window. Guess you'll have to go and look for yourself.

Script 295

© 2002 David Minor / Eagles Byte

NAPOLEONIC COMPLEX

Script No, 480, September 16, 2006

© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte­

Back in June of this year [2006] the U. S. Interstate highway system celebrated its 50th anniversary. When it was built back in the 1950s one of the justifications for the immense project was national security. (It was named the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways). Rapid troop movement within the country would be facilitated.

Another set of projects under way 150 years earlier had a similar goal. Napoleon Bonaparte was the multi-tasker par excellence. To help solidify his sphere of influence over France and much of Italy he would have to be able to move his forces quickly to anticipated trouble spots - no plans for Moscow yet - and the biggest bottlenecks were the passes through the French and Italian Alps. He knew that from experience. So, in addition to his many other projects - defensive works in Belgium, Italy and Poland, the harbor at Cherbourg, a canal connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea (that one didn’t work out, then), and the beautification of Paris - the Corsican corporal undertook a roads project of his own.

The plan was to construct a broad carriage road along an alpine route that would penetrate the mountains between Switzerland and Italy at Simplon, and the French pass at Mont Cenis. The first or eastern would allow penetration close to the region around Milan and the more western would allow quick access to Turin.

Construction accounts and records are not readily available, but French engineers and road builders, working between the years 1803 and 1811, somehow managed to pull it off. On the outer fringes of the route Bonaparte had crews pushing roads through marshes and forests in north-eastern France and west-central Germany. In a time when most of the work was done by crude machines and brute strength the builders bridged ravines in the mountains and chopped passes through until carriages (and cannon, of course) could be sent rapidly back and forth between borders. It might take fifty winding miles of zig-zagging road to cover a crow’s flight of thirty and, although the eighteen-foot-width permitted three carriages to travel side-by-side, there were many sections where it took sixteen mules to pull them up and down the nearly perpendicular roadway. In the winter it was necessary to attach runners to the carriage wheels.

Several times a year the hands-on French dictator would make an inspection tour of the various projects he was pushing through western Europe. He’d stop at each work site and subject his project managers to a rigorous and minute examination of their progress, until he was fully satisfied with the work.

Back in 1804, the same year he became emperor, he wrote, "Men are only as large as the monuments they leave." He actually left several smaller ones - a hospice and barracks at Cenis and a triumphal arch (never completed) near Milan. Lord Byron had his own view of the engineering feat and perhaps, in an oblique dig, of its creator. “The Simplon is magnificent in its nature and its art – both God and Man have done wonders – to say nothing of the Devil – who must certainly have had a hand (or a hoof) in some of the rocks and ravines through and over which the works are carried.”