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

SAVE OUR SEAPORT - Deep Trouble

For later, more encouraging news, see the more recent Downtown Express article at
http://www.downtownexpress.com/2013/07/10/seaport-museums-new-leader-helped-save-its-old-ships/

If you have been reading the New York Times or the Downtown Express, you already know that the South Street Seaport Museum is again in deep trouble.

We’re facing the departure of the Museum Of The City Of New York as stewards of the SSSM in just over a week!

Save Our Seaport has scheduled an emergency meeting to discuss and plan our next move, next Tuesday, July 2nd, 6:30pm, in the main dining room at St. Margaret’s, 49 Fulton St. (Map). Please join us.

If you’re lost or need more information, our phone line will be active — (347)6-PIER16 — or email us at saveourseaport@gmail.com

Script No, 456, April 1, 2006

Full Steam Ahead

“The situation is most convenient, in a charming spot in the country, with the finest walks conceivable at our door, and it is in our power at any time to be in the heart of New York in twenty minutes.”

Last April we left James Stuart and his wife, our Scots travelers, in mid-December of 1829, moving from their boarding house in New Rochelle, New York; as it was closing for the winter. While they made their plans for upcoming travels they had settled temporarily in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Their boarding house is run by a Mr. and Mrs. Van Boskerck, a couple in their sixties, who live there with their two maiden daughters, who actually manage the business. Only one other boarder is in residence at the time. Leaving the operations to his daughters, Mr. Van Boskerck makes several trips a week over to Manhattan to drum up trade. Stuart will be paying a number of visits to the city as well. They most likely made their commutes on a steam ferry owned by elderly inventor and Revolutionary War veteran Colonel John Stevens, rather than aboard a rival vessel belonging to young Staten Island native Cornelius Vanderbilt. At the close of the revolution Stevens bought extensive land along three miles of lower Hudson River property confiscated from the estate of Loyalist William Bayard. Over the past ten years he’s begun making improvements to the property. The stretch of marshy New Jersey land had cost Stevens today’s equivalent of $90,000 (which will buy you almost a fifth of a condominium there today) and he’d chosen to name the site Hoboken, after the Dutch name Hoebuck, or High Bluff. Today it’s the site of the Stevens Institute of Technology.

It was at one end of this property that the Van Boskerck house stood, so his loyalties would have been to his neighbor’s fleet of steam vessels. In addition to four steamboats making runs between New York and Albany, Stevens and his four sons operate a number of other boats between here and Manhattan and to Philadelphia, as well as stagecoaches across much of New Jersey. In the upcoming year Vanderbilt will become an increasingly large thorn in the sides of the five Stevenses, decreasing his fares to the point of unprofitability, eventually forcing them to buy him out at a cost of $100,000 plus ten annual payments of $5,000. The Commodore didn’t mess around.

Both Stuart and Van Boskerck had an easy commute. An eight minute walk to the Stevens dock down by the water, where the family manufactured their own vessels, and a ten-minute crossing in one of the four ferries, all of which can accommodate entire stagecoaches, which the passengers needn’t get out of. You have your choice of two landing sites, the foots of Barclay and Canal streets. All of this for a whopping sixpence sterling (only threepence during the summer months).

The Stevens family has other sources of income besides their basic transportation business. Spaces on the boats are rented out to concessionaires, who sell, “liquor, fruit, confectionaries, &c.” They also lease out their own hotel here on the New Jersey side. They charge pedestrians nothing for the privilege of strolling along public walks they laid out along the river. They do all right what with all those three- and sixpence fares to get there, thank you.

© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte

BOOK REVIEW:MAD-HOUSE

Anyone who’s ever done genealogical research is familiar with the term “stone wall” – a point beyond which you’re unable to travel back, blocked by the unknown. Or the unrecorded.

New York State, as with many another locations, is home to several specialized stone walls. Family researchers whose forbearers lived in areas around Rochester, Albany or Seneca Lake may lose track of their ancestors, especially those less well-off  - such as the impoverished or homeless. Especially those who might have had mental problems. Hopefully most reading this won’t have ancestors falling under the latter category. But . . .

You never know.

Michael T. Keene, author of two previous books – “Folklore and Legends of Rochester, The Mystery of Hoodoo Corner” and of “Murder, Mayhem and Madness: 150 years of Crime and Punishment in Western New York” has just released his similarly-themed third work – “Mad-House: The Hidden History of Insane Asylums in 19th Century New York”.

Beginning with the history of mental institutions, dating back as early as 792 AD in Baghdad, and covering the changing attitudes and treatments for dealing with psychiatric episodes in men and women, he tells of influential people – familiar and little-known - such as William Tuke, Dorothea Dix, Thomas Story Kirkbridge, Elizabeth Cochrane, Dr. Amarah Brigham, and Gerit Smith. (You may know Cochrane better under her pen name – you can Google her). Then there’s the Austrian immigrant named Lawrence, who lies in the Ovid-area mass grave at Willard Asylum for the Insane, along with the uncountable persons he physically placed there.

Covering different parts of the state and of New York City, Keene tells of institutions such as the latter’s Belle Vue, the Blackwell Island Lunatic Asylum and the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum (on the site of today’s Columbia University). Elsewhere around the state he treats of institutions – all defunct or transformed into other types of facilities – at Monroe County, Cattaraugus County, Utica, Syracuse, Binghamton, Poughkeepsie, Buffalo, Middletown, and Mattewan.

Willard Asylum, in the Finger Lakes region, would probably prove most frustrating to those seeking missing persons in their family’s past.

Keene begins the asylum’s chapter in “Mad-House” with the appearance on October 13, 1869 of a Mary Rote, arriving by steamboat on the nearby shore of Seneca Lake. Chained by the wrists and jostled along by armed guards, the “deformed and demented” Rote became the first inmate of the Asylum for the Chronic Insane. It has been speculated that Mary Rote may not have been the woman’s real name. Even if untrue, any Rotes out there today may hit the brick wall already mentioned. If so, they are not alone.

When the facility shut down in 1995 the nearby graveyard contained 5,775 graves. Most do not have markers identifying the deceased. Most have only been marked with a number and even these are often nearly impossible to physically locate. Keene closes this mournful chapter with, “May God have mercy on their souls”.

HEADLINERS

While the above may bring to mind the old Cole Porter Kiss Me, Kate lyric phrase “. . . the world forgetting, by the world forgot . . .” a few other inhabitants of asylums were very much in the forefront of the media of their time.

On June 26, 1906 the front page headline of the New York American, one of the many illustrations in Mad-House, read “HARRY THAW KILLS STANFORD WHITE ON ROOF GARDEN!. The case will be somewhat familiar to readers who saw the1955 Richard Flesicher film The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing which starred Farley Granger as Harry Kendall Thaw, Ray Milland as architect Stanford White, and  Joann Collins as Evelyn Nesbitt (the aforementioned Girl). A search of the New York Times archives turns up the following subsequent headlines (among many, many others – imagine what the so-called Yellow Press or sensationalist newspapers of the time reported along the way):

         MURDERER’S’ ROW GETS HARRY THAW – June 27, 1906

         INSANITY IN THAW’S FAMILY – February 7, 1907

         HARRY THAW BACK IN STATE ASYLUM – AUGUST 19, 1909 (referring to Mattewan State Hospital for the Criminal Insane, one of the featured institutions in Mad-House).

         Somehow the Times seemed to have missed out on the story in 1913 when, as Keene reports, with Thaw, “. . . reputedly just walking out of the hospital and getting into a hired car that took him  across the border to Canada.” He was soon extradited, ending up back in Mattewan, until a 1915 sanity trial declared him sane and he was released.

The Times did not miss out on the February 23, 1947 story:

         Harry L. (stet) THAW, 76, IS DEAD IN FLORIDA; Coronary Thrombosis Fatal to Former ‘Playboy’ . . .”.

The book also includes the accounts of undercover reporters, such as the already mentioned Elizabeth Cochrane and of Julius Chambers, both who had themselves committed in order to come up with exposés of the many horrors of residency in the state’s numerous Mad-Houses.

Author Michael T. Keene will keep you turning pages throughout these fascinating accounts.

        

Anyone wishing to purchase Mad-House or learn about Keene’s other books, may contact him through his website:

www.ad-hoc-productions.com/buy.html

He mentions “For those who are not comfortable with using PayPal and who wish to purchase the book directly from me, can do so by either sending me an email or by calling toll-free. My email address and phone number are listed on my website.”

It's a Wrap II

Continued from Crooked Lake Review blog

Script No. 418, July 2, 2005

 We'll begin our final 1829 visit to the New York City area over in Brooklyn. There was some talk in town of building a bridge back to Manhattan this year, but the talk was decades ahead of the technology and nothing came of the idea. A less ambitious plan did throw a causeway over the creek that separated an island noted for its rabbits, or conies, from the mainland. The men behind the plan added a small hotel, the Coney Island House, for wealthy visitors, but it would be many years yet before the average New York worker could head to Coney for a day's outing.

And the workers were getting antsy. A recent recession set large companies looking for ways to improve profits, one of the most popular being to increase the work day from ten hours to eleven. With no increase in pay, of course. A Committee of Fifty was formed to deal with this and other issues. By autumn some members of Tammany had joined reformers like Frances Wright and Thomas Skidmore, and given birth to the Workingmen's Party. Out of a protest meeting came a call to elect "men who, from their own sufferings, know how to feel for ours, and who, from consanguinity of feeling, will be disposed to do all they can to afford a remedy." Also under attack was inherited wealth, chartered monopolies and debtors' prisons. On November 7th carpenter Ebenezer Ford, president of the carpenter's union was the first labor leader voted into public office when he was elected to the New York State Assembly. The following month brought forth a proclamation, The Working Men's Declaration of Independence, with a rather familiar-sounding message: "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one class of a community to assert their natural and unalienable rights in opposition to other classes of their fellow men..." Several decades later other, female, activists would start their own declaration in a similar fashion. Lines were being drawn.

Speaking of women, one select group was leaving town. Progress had been made on the new Sing Sing prison up the Hudson, so it was now feasible to house women there as well as men. The final population of Newgate Prison was shipped "up the river" and the land in the future Greenwich Village neighborhood was sold off, opening the future neighborhood to development.

If you weren't protesting, changing cells, or watching the 1829 version of beach bunnies out at Coney, you could still find ways to occupy your time. Several residents were moving from one stage of life to the next. Young Herman Melville entered Columbia Grammar School, to learn his letters (he'll perform well, we think). And Nathan Beers opened this home to wedding guests as he hosted his niece Charity Hallett's wedding to 19-year-old shopkeeper Phineas Barnum.

Young painters Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand had help found the National Academy of Design back in 1826 and this year they teamed up with editor/poet William Cullen Bryant (who had lectured at the Academy) to form The Sketch Club. Out of these modest beginnings would come the Hudson River School of painting. Meetings of the club weren't always on new methods of applying paint to canvas though. Satirical debates were a popular form of entertainment at the time. On March 13th Cole emceed a solemn discussion. On the combustibility of peanut shells. On that note -  Goodbye, 1829.

© 2005 David Minor / Eagles Byte

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

EASTERN NEW YORK TIMELINE - 1792

1792

January

George Gardner and James Hill buy Lansingburgh, New York’s Tiffany Recorder  from Silvester Tiffany, begin publishing it as the Lansingburgh Recorder.

Jan 9                 

Newly-arrived Scottish land agent Charles Williamson is sworn in as a U. S. citizen, in Philadelphia.

Jan 10

Great Tract No. 4 - 450,000 acres of the 1787 Macomb Great Purchase of New York lands in Antwerp and Jefferson counties, Great Tract No. 5  and 6 (26,250 acres and 74,400 acres) in Jefferson Lewis, Oswego and Herkimer counties) and the remainder of the Great Purchase lands (1,368,300 acres), is sold to Donald McCormick.

Feb 14                 

The Albany Library is incorporated.

Apr 29                          

Brewer and college founder Matthew Vassar is born in East Dereham, England, to farmers and religious dissenters James and Ann Bennett Vassar.

Mar 7                 

The Saratoga County town of Milton is formed from the Town of Ballston.

Mar 14                 

New York State authorizes a loan of $500,000, to be apportioned amongst it's twenty counties.

Mar 30                 

The Western Inland Lock Navigation Company is incorporated by General Philip Schuyler and merchant Elkanah Watson, to build a three-mile Little Falls, New York, canal and another linking the Mohawk River with Wood Creek. Financier Robert Morris will soon be brought on board.    **    New York's Northern Inland Lock Navigation Company is organized, for the purpose of building a canal between the Hudson River and Lake Champlain. Work will begin on it but it will never be completed.

Apr 10                 

The Town of Fairfield is established in Warren County.    **    The Delaware County town of Colchester is formed from Middletown.    **    Otsego County’s Town of Unadilla is formed from the Town of Otsego.

August                 

Lansingburgh publisher Silvester Tiffany takes on William W. Wands as a partner, forming the firm of Tiffany and Wands.

December

Wands takes over the operation of­ Tiffany and Wands.

Dec 18                 

The Boylston Tract, 817,155 acres of the 1787 Macomb Great Purchase of New York lands in Jefferson, Lewis, and Oswego counties, comprising 13 towns, is sold to Samuel Ward.

Dec 29                 

The 25,335-acre fifteenth Chenango Township is granted to Leonard M. Cutting.

State

Cortland is founded.    **    John Wells is admitted to the New York Supreme Court.    **    George Clinton defeats John Jay to become governor. 585 Cooperstown residents vote for Jay. Judge William Cooper feels that there would have been many more but that a number of people were off looking for a child lost in the woods near the Burlington neighborhood.  Irregularities in voting are used as an excuse to discount the votes from Otsego, Clinton and Tioga counties. The Board of Canvassers reject all protests.    **    A group of French settlers move into the future site of Chenango County's village of Greene. Most move on when their title to the land is later invalidated.    **    The approximate date Matthew Aldgate and his sons settle the Essex County town of Chesterfield.    **    Enoch Stowell and Jonathan Bates of Vermont pioneer the Madison County town of Lebanon.    **     Speculator Alexander Macomb buys 4,000,000 acres of Adirondacks land.    **    Gideon Tripp's Van Rennselaer Manor farm is leased out after a survey is run.    **     Senator Nicholas Gilman discovers Saratoga's Congress Spring.    **     Four-year-old Samuel Griffin dies in Cooperstown - the oldest known grave in Christ Churchyard.    **    A store opens at Ferry and Front streets in Schenectady (Arthur’s Market in 2000).    **    Vermont trapper Nathaniel “Nat” Foster settles in the future Adirondack town of Salisbury.   **    Canadian lumbermen from Montréál arrive at the future site of Massena to build a dam and mill on the Grasse River.    **     This year and next Massachusetts officially transfers 3,600,000 acres of its Hartford Convention lands to the Boston Ten Town tracts - in Broome and Tioga counties - to settlers.    **    Nathaniel W. Howell, after conducting an academy in Montgomery, leaves to study law.    ** A Northern Inland Navigation Company is formed to construct waterways, but fails to raise sufficient funds.    **     D. Ingraham travels from Boston to Albany, then proceeds to set out across New York to Niagara, via Schenectady, Whitestown, Clinton, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Geneva, the Jemima Wilkinson settlement, Canandaigua, the Genesee River, and ending up at Fort Niagara, then crossing over to visit the planned future site of  the British fort.

Oneida County

Barnabas Mitchell starts a settlement at Port Woodhull, in the town of Remsen. George A. Smith begins the settlement of Staceys Basin, in the town of Verona.   **    Settler Francis Van der Kemp reports seeing a pike in Oneida Lake three-feet-six-inches in length as well as two catfish weighing ten and twenty-four pounds.

©  2013    David Minor / Eagles Byte