Apart from the stone water tower, few major
construction projects were under way but, as
usual, the layout of lower Manhattan was
undergoing constant change. Settlement of the
affairs of the late (29 years ago) property owner
Captain Robert Richard Randall finally drew
to a close when the U. S. Supreme Court cleared
his land title to the area around today’s
Washington Square. The original will, by the
way, had been drawn up by no other than
Alexander Hamilton. The freed funds will be
used to purchase land on Staten Island for
construction of Sailors’ Snug Harbor, a
retirement home for, “aged, decrepit, and
worn-out sailors”, and to provide for its
maintenance.
As for the Square itself, it had at one time
been a potter’s field, where the city’s poor
were buried in unmarked graves. Which
made it a handy repository for criminals
hanged on a nearby gibbet. But in New York,
real estate rules and over the last four years
the poor were reburied elsewhere and
expensive homes constructed around the
perimeter. New graveyards, especially for the
poor, will, of necessity have to be located away
from lower Manhattan as the Common Council
this year bans them from all land south of Canal
Street. Meanwhile street construction goes on
between 13th Street and Canal Street. Eleventh
Street is laid out except for the two-block section
between Broadway and the Bowery, construction
there blocked by the apple orchard of council
member Henry Brevoort, a buddy of Washington
Irving’s. The second incarnation of Grace Church
will rise on the site in 1843. Four blocks to the
south, on lower Third Avenue one of the city’s
many public markets will be laid out this year
and named for the previous owner of the land,
the late former governor and U. S. vice-president
Daniel D. Tompkins. More changes to the city’s
infrastructure are in the works this year as
incorporation papers are filed for the Manhattan
Gas Light Company, which will soon be
providing gas street lights for the new
neighborhoods.
Part of the impetus for the move of old money
further uptown is the deteriorating condition
of the area known as Five Points on the east
side of the city a few short blocks northeast of
City Hall. Here, where Park and Baxter streets
intersect and Anthony Street thrusts its way
into the crossing, buildings erected on formerly
filled-in swamp land, the old Collect Pond,
have begun to collapse in on themselves, driving
out all but the most destitute. And there are over
13,000 of these unfortunates, existing in streets
of flop houses and taverns, precursor of the
tenements of the Lower East Side and the Bowery
of future decades. Letters are beginning to appear
in the New York Sun, complaining that these
slums are not being demolished.
Across town (in today’s Triangle Below Canal
Street, or Tribeca neighborhood), sits St. John’s
Park, one of the city’s more exclusive
neighborhoods. Now, in 1830, the residents
have erected an iron replacement for the wooden
fence that had surrounded the park they all face.
As in a latter-day Gramercy Park, the gates are
kept locked, the property owners all having their
own keys. After the U. S. Civil War our budding
millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt will knock
down the fence, level the park’s greenery and
convert the area into a stable for new toys, the
iron steeds of his New York Central & Hudson
River Rail Road.
Broadcast on WXXI-FM / Simon Pontin's Salmagundi - April 2006
© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte
