Brooklyn Historical Society

The Legacy of Jane Jacobs
Thursday, March 16, 6:30 pm
$10 / $5 for BHS Members
 

In 1960 Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities sent shockwaves through the architecture and planning worlds. Join us as New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante talks to Matt Tyrnauer, director and producer of the acclaimed documentary Citizen Jane: Battle For the City, Robert Hammond, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Friends of the High Line, and Dr. Samuel Zipp, Associate Professor of American and Urban Studies at Brown University and co-editor of Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs, about Jacobs’ extraordinary impact on the urban landscape.

NEW YORK CITY: 1804-1808

1804

July

Aaron Burr departs from Manhattan, travels to Albany. He will soon move on to Amboy, New Jersey, and then further south.

Jul 12

Alexander Hamilton, mortally wounded yesterday in his duel with Aaron Burr in Weehawken, New Jersey, is brought to Manhattan where he dies at the home of his banker friend Robert Bayard near today's Greenwich Village.

Oct 18

Future lawyer Eugene Kateltas is born to a wealthy and respected family in Manhattan.

New York City

Wealthy merchant Jonas Wood builds a house at 314 Washington Street.    **    John Jacob Astor purchases a plot of land at 133 LaGrange Terrace (Colonade Row).    **    Young ship's mate Dennison Wood, working on a vessel bringing sugar to the city, marries 17-year-old Lydia McKildo.    **    The approximate date Connecticut shoemaker Benjamin de Forest comes to Manhattan and opens a shop - Benjamin de Forest and Company - in the harbor area at 31 Peck Slip.

1805

New York City
Construction begins on the Commandant's House at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on the East River, in the Vinegar Hill neighborhood. It will be completed next year.

1806

New York City

Population: 60,000.

1807

Apr 3

A New York City act is issued under the title Remarks of the Commissioners for Laying Out Street and Roads in the City of New York.

New York City

The Orphan Asylum Society of New-York is founded by Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton (wife of Alexander), the city's first private orphanage, at West End Avenue and 73rd and 74th streets.    

1808

Apr 25

Brooklyn municipal official and U.S. Representative James Samuel Thomas (S.T.) Stranahan is born in Peterboro, New York, to Samuel Stranahan and his wife Lynda Josselyn Stranahan.    

May 28

Minstrel show producer Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice is born in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Aug 8

Merchant and real estate operator Henry Evelyn "E." Pierrepont is born in Brooklyn to Hezekiah B. Pierrepont and his wife Anna M. Constable Pierrepont.

New York City

Grace Church is organized at Broadway and Rector Street.    **    Visiting free Ethiopian seamen and African-American parishioners, protesting racially restricted seating, leave the First Baptist Church at Broadway and West 79th Street. Next year they will found the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the third oldest Baptist Church in America.

©  2015 David Minor Eagles Byte

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1798

1798

January

The New Theatre - designed by French architect Marc Isambard Brunel and brothers Joseph-François and Charles Mangin and later known as the Park Theatre - opens at 23 Park Row.

Jan 13

Lower Manhattan's 1767 John Street Theatre closes. Part-owner Lewis Hallam, Jr.  Hallam sells it for £115 to neighboring grain and hay store. The acting company moves to the New Theatre.

February

Isaac Mann, Jr., Stillwater, New York, supplier of logs to New York City for its water system pipes during the Colles project, petitions the city for payment of the balance due. Records cannot be found for the contract and the council suggests Mann sue for his money.

Mar 2

A correspondent for the New York Gazette & General Advertiser estimates that the average cost of Tea Water is $15 per family, suggests an annual tax to raise money for a public waterworks. Nothing will come of the suggestion.

May

John Beddoe, his wife Catherine, and his cousin David Morse arrive in New York City from England, set out for the Finger Lakes region.

May 13

Manhattan's  original Rutgers Presbyterian Church, built on ground donated by Colonel Henry Rutgers, at what would become Henry Street at the intersection of Rutgers Street, is dedicated.

July

Surveyor Melancton Smith dies of yellow fever in New York City, the first death in a summer-long epidemic in the city that will claim 2,086 lives. As the summer passes coffins will be sold on street corners.

Jul 2

Westchester County, New York, doctor Joseph Browne, Aaron Burr's brother-in-law, writes that the health of a city depends more on the quality of its water than any other comestibles. He proposes supplying New York City from the Bronx River.

August

Yellow fever has claimed close to 100 New York City lives by the early part of the month. A carpenter sends around a wagon loaded with coffins to be sold in the streets.    **    New York's City Council appoint a temporary health committee to aid the indigent though the epidemic. They will spend $5,000 over the next three months.

September

1,000 New Yorkers die of yellow fever, including the family of doctor Alexander Anderson. He will later turn to engraving.

Sep 1

U.S. Military Academy superintendent Richard Delafield is born in Manhattan.

Sep 2

New York doctor Elihu Smith writes that new cases of yellow fever are dwindling, due to the small number of people remaining in the city.

Sep 13

63 New Yorkers die of yellow fever, including the father of a future mayor, 17-year-old Philip Hone.

Sep 17

Doctor Elihu Smith contracts yellow fever.

Sep 18

Hone's mother dies of yellow fever.

Sep 19

Elihu Smith dies of the fever.

October

New York's yellow fever death toll tops 400.    **    New York City museum owner Gardiner Baker dies in Boston in his mid-thirties. His Tammany Museum collection is sold.

November

Over 2000 New Yorkers are now dead from yellow fever. Colder weather ends the epidemic.

Nov 15

John Jacob Astor advertises in the New York Gazette and General Advertiser that he has 24 cannons and other military supplies for sale.

December

Nicholas Roosevelt revives his proposals for supplying water to New York City. Judge William Cooper proposes a plan to lay water pipes there.

Dec 17

A New York City committee chosen to evaluate water supply proposals - John Bogert, John B. Coles, Jacob de la Montagnie, and Gabriel Furman - reports that the Bronx River is the best source, but that a few alterations need to made to Joseph Browne's plans.

City

Population: 4,000 households.    **    A residence is built at 207 Front Street.    **    John Stevens conducts steamboat experiments on Collect Pond for the third year in a row.    **    Three health commissioners requested by the city and appointed under the state "Act to provide against infectious and pestilential Diseases" are empowered to enforce the city's health regulations. Dr. Richard Bayley is named head of the Health Office.    **    Coles' bridge across the Harlem River is completed but his mill works at the site is still unfinished.   **    The Tammany Society moves from its usual Barden's Tavern meeting spot at Broadway near Bowling Green to new quarters at Brom Martling's Tavern at Nassau and Spruce. The new place is nicknamed the Wigwam.    **    The state legislature recognizes The Corporation for the Relief of Widows and Children of Clergymen of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the State of New York as a separate entity from a three-state umbrella organization.   **    The United Insurance Company and the New-York Insurance Company for Maritime Insurance are chartered.    **    Upstate land speculator James Wadsworth arrives, back from a stay in England.    **    The city orders a survey of the area along the Bronx River, with an eye to eventually obtaining a drinking water supply from its waters.    **    The Bank of New York establishes a branch on eight lots in Greenwich Village. The street where the lots are located will become Bank Street.    **    The city begins grading and paving South Street. Structures along it are built back from the wharves to accommodate the bowsprits of ships moored along the docks.    **    This year - after the fort in lower Manhattan was torn down in 1790 - the need for new fortifications leads to guns being placed in temporary fortifications close to Government House. 

Brooklyn

Shipbuilder John Jackson and his yard on East River’s Wallabout Bay - the future U. S. Navy Yard - build the 28-gun frigate John Adams for the Navy.

Technology

John Stevens conducts steamboat experiments on New York City’s Collect Pond for the third year in a row.

Ireland 

Irish insurgents are defeated by the British at the Battle of Vinegar Hill, in County Wexford. Many of the former will emigrate to the U. S. , and settle in a Brooklyn neighborhood that will become known as Vinegar Hill.

© 2013    David Minor / Eagles Byte

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1797

Feb 1

Former politician and New York mayor James Duane, 63, dies in New York City. He will be buried at Duanesburg, New York’s Christ Church.

April

Aaron Burr is elected to the New York State Assembly, the first of two terms. He moves into a manor house at Manhattan’s Richmond Hill (at Charlton and Varick). His daughter Theodosia will act as the property’s hostess.

May

Seven bidders, including Joseph Newton, Benjamin Taylor, Nicholas Roosevelt and Christopher Colles have responded to the New York City council's request earlier in the year for contractors to supply water to the city. Newton and Taylor exhibit a model of their proposed plant in front of City Hall and charge a 50¢ fee to view it. No action is taken on any of the plans.    **    Merchant and former British loyalist Charles Ward Apthorpe dies. Congressional delegate Hugh Williamson buys out nine of Althorpe’s children at a forced sale of their family home to recover a $1500 mortgage. Legal battles over ownership will last for more than a century.

June

The New York City council orders that the tanyard of  John R. Livingston (Chancellor Livingston's cousin) and other yards on Collect Pond be fenced in.

Jul 15

Five-year-old St. Claire Pollack falls off a Hudson River cliff at the future West 126th Street. His father George will bury the boy near the site of the accident and erect a marble monument dedicated to “an amiable child”. The site will later become part of Riverside Park.

September

The daily (except Sundays) Commercial Advertiser newspaper – an outgrowth of Noah Webster’s 1793 American Minerva - begins publication under its new name, with George F. Hopkins as editor.

Oct 6                 

Pickering passes word back to Liston after checking with collector of the port of New York Joshua Sands, that Jacob Astor is a fur trader and transports only enough gunpowder for his own business purposes. In reality Astor is now dealing in firearms.

Nov 28        

Newgate, New York's first state prison, opens on four-acres of ground on Greenwich Street in the Village of Greenwich.

December         

Young Washington Irving studies Latin at Jonathan Fiske’s New York City school.

City

 The city becomes the permanent seat of the state legislature (for the time being).    **    Front Street is extended between Beekman Slip (Fulton Street) and Crane's Wharf (Beekman Street).    **    John Fitch and John Stevens both experiment with steam-powered vessels on the Collect Pond for the second year in a row.    **    Philomath (almanac maker) Andrew Beers relocates to Albany.    **    Ferry service is launched between Manhattan and the Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn, near today’s Grand Street.    **    The Potter’s Field at Post and Bloomingdale roads is moved to the future Washington Square site, acquired this year by the city as a communal graveyard for yellow fever. Hangings will also be held in the park. A United States Arsenal will be built on part of the original graveyard’s cleared land.    **    Teacher Benjamin Romaine retires. His young pupil Washington Irving studies at a seminary run by theater authority Josiah Henderson.    **    Exiled French visitor La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt visits the city, comments favorably on the pump water.    **    Cornerstones are laid for the Bank of New York and a branch of the Bank of the United States, on Wall Street.    **    City surveyor Benjmin Taylor and engraver John Roberts prepare a plan of the city.    **    Philip Freneau begins publishing the periodical Time Piece.    **    John Joseph Holland paints a watercolor of Broad Street.    **    Yellow fever kills several dozen people.    **    Mr. and Mrs. John Barker Church return to the city after a sojourn in his native England, take up residence at 52 Broadway, near the Alexander Hamiltons.    **    Trinity Church sells its land in the future Tribeca neighborhood to the city. It will become Duane Park.    **    The city overtakes Philadelphia in the value of exports.    **    When the city’s second almshouse, on the site of the modern City Hall Park, is completed, to the rear of the original 1736 almshouse, the first is demolished.    **    A Methodist-Episcopal Church is built at Barley Street (Duane Street, after 1809).    **    Greenwich Street and Washington Street, built on shoreline landfill, are completed. Front Street is laid out between Beekman Wharf at Fulton Street and Crane Wharf at Beekman Street.    **    Scottish immigrant Isabella Marshll Graham founds the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children.

© 2013    David Minor / Eagles Byte

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1796

February        

English actor Joseph Jefferson makes his New York City debut in The Provoked Husband.    **    New York City's council solicits bids for a municipal water system, receives two. Nothing is done.

Mar 26                 

Matthew Clarkson, Thomas Eddy, John Murray, Jr., Isaac Sloatenburgh, and John Watts, are authorized by the state of New York to build a state prison on newly-acquired property on Greenwich Street in New York City, to be known as Newgate.

November

The New York City owner of a Barclay Street building destroyed by fire this month starts a public subscription drive for financial aid in recouping his losses.

December        

A warehouse fire in lower Manhattan spreads northward from Wall Street, destroying close to 70 buildings between there and Maiden Lane, and costing $1,000,000. Water from the Tea Pump is used in fighting the blaze.    **    New York City's council once again solicits bids for a municipal water system, receives two (one from Westchester doctor Joseph Browne), both of which die in committee.

Dec 6                 

Leather dresser William Thomson, son-in-law of the Hardenbrook family, who took over the Collect property in lower Manhattan a few days ago, advertises in the New York Minerva promoting his tea water pump business on the property and countering some bad publicity.

City

Some black members of the John Street Church ask Bishop Francis Asbury to conduct separate services for them. He creates the African Chapel  (later the Zion A. M. E. Church) under the jurisdiction of the Methodist Episcopal Church.    **    The council rejects a state offer to purchase the site of the former Colles Water Works for a prison, turns the land into a dump for street waste.    **    Yellow fever kills several dozen people.    **    John Fitch tests his screw-propeller steamboat on New York City's Collect

 Pond. Passengers include Robert Fulton, Chancellor R. Livingston, passenger and inventor Nicholas Roosevelt, and young John Hutchings, who acts as steersman. John Stevens also experiments with steam on the pond.    **    The city attempts to get property owners around The Collect to agree to a canal to drain the pond. Nothing happens.    **    A steeple is added to St. Paul's Chapel.    **    The approximate date Benjamin Davis erects the Broadway House tavern on Broadway at Grand Street.     **    James Blackwell erects a clapboard farmhouse on Blackwell’s Island (formerly Varckens Eylandt, or Hog Island; later Welfare, then Roosevelt Island).    **    John Rogers buys four acres of the former Warren estate in lower Manhattan. The property will become the site of the first house to be built on Washington Square North (No. 20) in 1828 and 1829.

©  2013         David Minor         Eagles Byte

NEW YORK CITY TIMELINE - 1791

 1791

Jan 5

The 14th New York State Legislature, having assembled a quorum on its second day, begins sitting at the second City Hall at the north End of Broad Street.

Feb 7

The legislature re-apportions the state Senate and Assembly districts.

Feb 12

Inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper is born in New York to Newburgh, New York Methodist hat maker John Cooper and his wife.

Mar 24

The 14th New York State Legislature concludes its 14th session.

Jun 9                 

Playwright-composer John Howard Payne is born in New York City.

Oct 14

The Old American Company drama group out of Philadelphia performs the tragedy The Gamester and a farce called The Mock Doctor or, the Dumb Lady Cured in a John Street Theater.

Dec 17                 

Manhattan's first one-way street is created.

City

The city begins a ten-year project to fill in the Collect Pond, a source of drinking water, after pollution makes it unfit to drink. It purchases all land claims previously granted to the Rutgers family.    **    Trinity Church, rebuilt in 1788, is consecrated by Bishop Provost.    **    New Jersey express coaches travel to New York City and back at the rate of twenty a week, mostly on commercial travel.    **    The city suffers a relatively mild outbreak of yellow fever, although close to 100 died in the Peck Slip area.    **   A tontine organized by Lewis Morris to fund a toll drawbridge across the lower Harlem River fails to raise enough money.    **    The Tammany Society has over 300 members.    **    Andrew S. Norwood goes into business in Manhattan as a merchant.    **    Brig owner Joseph Rose and his family move from their Georgian-style homer at 273 Water Street to Pearl Street, leaving the former property to his son.    **    Merchant Benjamin Seixes builds a double house at 76 Broad Street.    **    The city establishes the Northern Dispensary for treatment of the poor, in Greenwich Village.    **    The Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts and Manufactures is founded. It will move to Albany in 1797.    **    Only 4% of the city’s households – mostly elite merchants -are owners of stock.    **    The 1784 Bank of New York receives a corporate charter. It currently has 190 shareholders    **    The city is divided into seven wards.    **    Free black future dry cleaner Thomas L. Jennings is born to Joseph Jennings and Marry Baker.

©  2013    David Minor / Eagles Byte

PASSING THE TORCH

(Continued from November 23, 2011)

Every incoming New York City mayor takes the reins of a different beast than that of his predecessor. As state legislator and canal supporter Walter Bowne prepared to take over from William Paulding at the end of 1829 the city was in its usual state of flux. Street names were changing, usually piecemeal - part of Herring Street became Bleecker, part of Arden became Morton, part of Reason Street (named for Thomas Paine's ”The Age of Reason”) became Barrow.

Structures were springing up on streets old and new. On the north side of the new Washington Square, construction began on architect Martin Thompson's row of Greek Revival townhouses. Thompson, by the way, along with Ithiel Town and Andrew J. Davis, all with offices in the Merchants Exchange building, constituted the entire architectural profession in the city. Over on Macdougal Street, between West 3rd and 4th streets, a row of townhouses in the older Federal style was being built for a real estate investor, a man in his early seventies who'd had few other careers before this - vice-president of the United States for one - man named Aaron Burr. It was a healthy market. Buildings on the better, older streets brought good prices. A two-story house and lot at 17 Broadway, sold for $19,000. The Bowling Green Post Office sits on the site in our own time. But, begin looking over on nearby Hanover Square today and you could find a 625 square foot two-room apartment for a mere $299,000. Plus a $900 per month maintenance fee. Adaptive reuse is not a new concept in our own time. Over near City Hall, the New Gaol building, built in 1755, was converted in 1829 into a hall of records.

All the changes were not architectural and geographical. Among the new institutions springing up were two banks - the National Bank in the City of New York, and the Seamen's Bank for Savings in the City of New York (they didn't believe in short, punchy names back then). The New York City Temperance Society was founded as was the Workingmen's Party of New York. The latter would only last two years, replaced two years later by the General Trades Union, a confederation of the city's smaller labor organizations, which by 1836 would conduct nearly 40 work stoppages. Fire was always a major concern in this city with only a primitive water system. Since 1816 firefighters had been exempted from military and jury duty after serving in their departments for ten years. 1829 saw the required term lowered to seven years; in 1847 it would be reduced to five.

Two newspapers were founded to help New Yorkers keep track of all these changes. Mordecai M Noah, who we met in 1827 founding the Niagara frontier Jewish state of Ararat, was here now, and founded the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, which would later merge with the New York World. He signed on editor James Gordon Bennett. Senior, that is. Junior would make an even bigger name for himself here, in the business later on. The Morning Herald and the Evening Journal also joined the city's media mix. (Make that medium mix).

Many foreign sections of the city's papers probably carried the recent news of a fellow countryman of James Stuart's by the name of William Hare and his friend William Burke. We'll check out their connection with 1829 New York next time.

© 2005 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Singer Castle - St. Lawrence River

(c) 2003 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

New York's Flatiron Building

© 2010 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Grand Central Terminal

© 2008 David Minor / Eagles Byte