A History Lover's Guide to New York City

In 1811, the city fathers decided that the demands of doing business in New York dictated more efficient street patterns. They proposed the outline of the city to come: streets would form a grid with twelve broad avenues running the length of the island and numbered streets running across it. Part of the plan was to level the many hills for which the Lenape had named the island. The 1811 street plan went no higher than 155^th Street. It was inconceivable to the city fathers that the town’s development would ever extend beyond that boundary.

The only exception to this angular progression of blocks is the slight undulation of Broadway. As Route 9, the street runs all the way from Lower Manhattan to the New York State border with Canada. In time, a few of the numbered avenues would earn names: 4^th Avenue became Park Avenue and 6^th Avenue became Avenue of the Americas. Central Park West is the extension of 8^th Avenue as it borders the park.

It was in this early nineteenth-century period that New York earned two nicknames. The same man, American author Washington Irving, gave both nicknames to the town. Irving referred to New York as “Gotham” in an 1807 publication. Gotham was a mythical English village full of crazy people. New Yorkers appreciated the humor; the name stuck.

Two years later, in an ironical history of New York, Washington Irving decided to poke fun at the town’s Dutch forefathers. In early nineteenth-century New York, many of New York’s most prominent citizens were of Dutch descent. This included the Roosevelts, the Schmerhorns, the Van Cortlandts, the Beekmans and the Van Renssalaaers. Irving used a pseudonym, Diedrich Knickerbocker, when he published the 1809 book The History of New York. In the Dutch language, knicker is “to nod” and boeken is the word for “books.” Irving was deriding those of Dutch descent for falling asleep over their books, casting doubt on their intellect.

Father Knickerbocker became a popular figure in New York lore. Soon, all New Yorkers were known as “knickerbockers.” The city’s professional basketball team, founded in 1946, is called the New York Knicks. Washington Irving lived at 3 Wall Street. The Irving Trust Building at 1 Wall Street, today the Bank of New York, took its name from Irving’s residence on that site.

Water as much as land has been a contributing factor to New York’s growth. Of the five boroughs of New York, four are islands or part of islands. The only borough connected to mainland New York State is the Bronx. Staten Island and Manhattan are islands. Queens and Brooklyn are part of Long Island. These islands form one of the great natural harbors in the world, facilitating trade and commerce. Into this harbor flows the Hudson River to the west and the East River to the east. Technically, though, the East River is not a river. It is actually a salt water tidal strait.

In the nineteenth century, New York governor DeWitt Clinton envisioned connecting this harbor with the American agricultural Midwest by building a canal from the Hudson River at Albany, New York, to Lake Erie at Buffalo, New York. Governor Clinton turned the first shovel of dirt for the Erie Canal on July 4, 1817. Construction of the canal was expensive and difficult. Ridicule met the governor’s project. The canal became known as Clinton’s Ditch. That is, until it opened. Connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes via the Hudson River, the Erie Canal had an enormous impact. New York grew to be the largest commercial port and city in the United States.

New technology took advantage of the waterways. In 1807, Robert Fulton’s steamboat the Clermont made its first run on the Hudson River from New York City to Albany, generating excitement and opportunity. The steamboat vastly improved water transportation, which no longer had to depend on the vagaries of the wind. For both passengers and goods, it was a major step forward.

Growing trade and industrialization in New York City led to a push and pull between residential neighborhoods and commercial areas. The very wealthy continuously moved up the city grid in an attempt to put themselves beyond the geographic reach of industry and of the poor. However, factories and stores soon overran even the finest neighborhoods. To escape the crowding of unconstrained development, those who could afford to would abandon one area of New York for another farther uptown.

When Washington Square became a park in 1826, it attracted the fashionable. As the century progressed, it was no longer as chic, but its elegant buildings drew to it the literati and the bohemians who gave Greenwich Village the special character it still retains. Novelists Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser; playwright Edward Albee; poets Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Masefield and E.E. Cummings; and painters including Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent are among those who have lived in Greenwich Village.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the New York upper classes sought out real estate around four Squares on the east side of Lower Manhattan: Union Square, Gramercy Park, Madison Square and Stuyvesant Square.

Union Square opened in 1839. Union Square is so named because two main roads, Broadway and an earlier version of 4^th Avenue, came together here. The neighborhood around the park attracted lovely residential homes in the 1840s and ’50s. However, after the Civil War, the area became more commercial, and those who could afford it moved. Stuyvesant Square and Gramercy Park also opened as parks in the 1830s with a similar waxing and waning of the neighborhood’s exclusive character.

Madison Square, named for President James Madison (1809–17), opened as a park in 1847. New York honored Madison with the park name because he wrote the Bill of Rights while he was serving in the first United States Congress in New York City. Madison Square, in turn, gave its name to Madison Square Garden, which once occupied a nearby site before moving uptown.

Eventually, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, 5^th Avenue became the artery of choice for the chic as the wealthy moved to the Upper East Side in New York City. Today, this process in Manhattan is in reverse, with upscale condominiums reclaiming buildings once used for commercial purposes. This is occurring in Manhattan in Tribeca, Soho, the Meatpacking District, Chelsea and, more recently, in the Bowery.

Tribeca, as a name for the area south of Canal Street, north of Chambers Street, east of West Street and west of Broadway, dates to the 1970s. Seeing the success of Soho as a neighborhood brand, artists in this area used the term “TriBeCa” or “Triangle below Canal.” After World War II, as industry left New York City for less expensive locations in the American South or overseas, large commercial buildings went empty and deteriorated. This area had been home to the once thriving textile business in New York City. It was, in many cases, artists who recognized that these spaces would make great places to live and work at a reasonable cost. Tribeca remains a very trendy area today, with many artists and actors as residents.

Soho is the area of New York bounded by Canal, East and West Houston, Crosby and West Broadway—an area south of Houston Street. Realtors coined the term in the 1970s to delineate a part of the city that had been recently rediscovered by artists. This district of warehouses, active from 1850 to 1950 but then abandoned and in disrepair, offered lofts that were low in rent and large in space that could accommodate giant canvases. Many of the buildings in this area are beautiful cast-iron structures, such as those on Greene and Prince Streets, that today offer elegant shopping and upscale housing.

The Meatpacking District includes the neighborhood from Gansevoort Street to West 14^th Street, east of the Hudson River to Hudson Street. A commercial area since the mid-nineteenth century, in the twentieth century, there were more than two hundred slaughterhouses in this part of New York. As with other commercial and industrial districts in the city, the changing times of the post–World War II era took a toll on these businesses. The meat, poultry and food production companies moved out of New York, and the buildings fell empty. The slaughterhouses are long gone, replaced by high-end boutiques and condominiums.

One way to appreciate the Meatpacking District is to view it from the High Line that runs through this area, as described in Chapter 12. This neighborhood still retains the feel of warehouses and large commercial establishments that are often only a few stories high. The streets are wide to facilitate trucks and commerce. Today, the buildings house the stores of couturiers such as Diane von Furstenberg, Stella McCartney and Christian Louboutin. The new Whitney Museum on Gansevoort Street provides an exciting addition to the neighborhood.

In the mid-eighteenth century, Thomas Clark named the house and land he purchased in Manhattan “Chelsea” after the English home of Sir Thomas More, the Catholic saint and sixteenth-century counselor to King Henry VIII of England, who had him beheaded. Chelsea passed to Clark’s grandson Clement Clarke Moore, whose wealth was based on its development as a prime residential area. While living here, Clement Clarke Moore wrote the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” which originated our image of Santa Claus. By the end of the nineteenth century, the proximity of Chelsea to the large piers of the Hudson River pushed the neighborhood toward industrialization. It became a neighborhood of factories and warehouses. In the 1980s and ’90s, the art community moved into Chelsea because of its many big lofts and low rents. Today, there are hundreds of art galleries in Chelsea that exhibit the well-known and the up-and-coming. Fashion stores, restaurants and modern housing make this a desirable area for New Yorkers and visitors. Chelsea has retained its eclectic feel with a vibrant and diverse population. Chelsea is the area of Manhattan from 8^th to 10^th Avenues and from 19^th to 23^rd Streets.

In the seventeenth century, the Bowery—whose name is taken from the Dutch word bouwerij, or farm—was a productive agricultural area. It evolved into a respectable residential area in the early eighteenth century. But by the mid-nineteenth century, the Bowery had become an area of gangs, flophouses and drugs. The Bowery is the neighborhood from Canal Street north to 4^th Street and Allen Street to Little Italy. There is also a main thoroughfare within this area named the Bowery. The neighborhood has recently been undergoing a major renaissance with art museums taking the lead.

In the twenty-first century, New York City continues its evolution in new and exciting ways. There is an ongoing tension between great change and, since the 1970s, an increased sensitivity to the preservation of the past.

YOUR GUIDE TO HISTORY

Images

Grace Church Houses. Courtesy of James Maher.

The visitor center is on Schermerhorn Row. The Titanic Memorial Lighthouse stands at the entrance to the Seaport area. A port for seagoing ships has existed in this area since the seventeenth century. With its cobblestone streets and old buildings now preserved as part of the South Street Seaport Museum, this historic district recalls the earlier era and the bold growth of the nineteenth century. It was from here that Robert Fulton started his ferry service to Brooklyn and that international ships brought goods into New York and the United States. Particularly with the construction of the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825, the port became dominant on the East Coast of the United States. Today, the port of New York, which includes the New Jersey waterfront, is the third busiest in the United States after Los Angeles and Long Beach, California.

The Street of Ships is part of the South Street Seaport Museum. Docked at Pier 16 in South Street Seaport, the Ambrose, built in 1907, was a floating lighthouse used to guide shipping from the Atlantic Ocean into New York Bay. The United States Coast Guard donated the lighship Ambrose to the South Street Seaport Museum in 1968. It is a favorite of visitors. The Lettie G. Howard is a remarkable 1893 North Atlantic Ocean fishing schooner, a kind of boat that was once common but is now rare. Even at its advanced age of more than 120 years, the Lettie B. Howard is reluctant to retire. It is now a sailing school vessel teaching the fine art of sailing to future generations. Also still at work is the W.O. Decker, a 1930 wooden tugboat used when any of the museum’s fleet of ships is moved. The four-masted barque the Peking, the 1885 wrought-iron cargo sailing ship the Wavertree and the nineteenth-century schooner the Pioneer complete the fleet here at South Street. In appropriate weather, the Pioneer takes passengers for a sail around New York Harbor. The Ambrose and the Lettie G. Howard are each designated as National Historic Landmarks.

The Schermerhorn Row Galleries include exhibits on the history and commercial significance of the port of New York, “Monarchs of the Sea: Celebrating the Ocean Liner Era” and maritime paintings and artifacts. Bowne and Company Stationers at 211 Water Street in South Street Seaport is a nineteenth-century print shop that continues to function as it once did, re-creating old books, documents and paper products that are for sale. The Walter Lord and Port Life and Melville Library Galleries at 209 and 213 Water Street in the South Street Seaport display a large model of the Queen Mary ocean liner of Cunard fame and rotating exhibits on the life of the port and other maritime topics.

One of the best ways to appreciate the fact that Manhattan is an island is to take a water tour around it. Circle Line Cruises, Gray Line New York, the Water Taxi and Manhattan by Sail are commercial entities that offer options for water tours around the island or into New York Harbor.

4 South Street at the Whitehall Ferry Terminal • Lower Manhattan
1 Bay Street at the St. George Ferry Terminal • Staten Island
212-639-9675 • www.siferry.com • Free

Departures are twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The five-mile, twenty-five-minute ride on the ferry to Staten Island is free. Though most of the seventy thousand passengers who make the trip daily do so for work, visitors to New York can take advantage of this offering as one of the best ways to see the city skyline. The ferry also offers a good look at the Statue of Liberty.

This is a charming historic district of narrow, winding streets, reminiscent of the way early New York looked under Dutch rule. The buildings are mid-nineteenth century, replacing older structures that burned in the Great Fire of 1835. Stone Street was one of the first in New Amsterdam to be paved with stone, hence its name. Today, it is a lively area of restaurants, bars and coffeehouses with the added advantage that some of the streets are closed to vehicular traffic, allowing for pleasant outdoor dining in good weather.

This 9.75-acre park and marble arch of triumph honor George Washington. In the eighteenth century, public executions occurred on this site. In the nineteenth century, it became a military parade ground and then, in 1827, a public park. Its conversion to a park led it to become a fashionable address for the wealthy, who built Greek Revival–style homes along its perimeter. Some of these houses still remain. A temporary wooden arch was erected in 1889 to celebrate the centennial of George Washington’s New York City inauguration as president. It proved so popular that the city commissioned architect Stanford White to design a permanent marble arch. At 73.5 feet high, the arch has served as the centerpiece of the park since 1895. Among the statues scattered around the park are two of George Washington: a 1916 statue by Hermon MacNeil and a 1918 statue by Alexander Stirling Calder.

53 Christopher Street • Manhattan/Greenwich Village
212-488-2705 • www.thestonewallinnnyc.com • Fee

The Stonewall Inn is a gay bar that is recognized as the birthplace of the modern LGBT movement. A gay establishment since the mid-1960s, it was the site of frequent police raids at a time when it was illegal for members of the same sex to dance together. Arrests would occur, but the bar would quickly resume business. Then on June 28, 1969, the police raid met with serious resistance from patrons frustrated by years of intolerance and harassment. Resistance turned to rioting that continued into the next few days. In the aftermath of the violence, gay rights groups began to form across the country and attitudes toward gays began to change. It is a National Historic Landmark.

This is the oldest public non-sectarian cemetery in New York City dating to 1830. The very small cemetery holds the remains of more than two thousand people buried here mostly during the 1830 to 1870 timeframe. Public tours are possible but very limited in terms of dates, times and weather conditions.

57–74 East 2^nd Street between 1^st and 2^nd Avenues • Manhattan/East Village
www.nyc.mc.org

Confusing as it maybe, the second nonsectarian cemetery in New York City is close to the first with a very similar name. It was founded shortly after the New York Marble Cemetery. There is no public entrance, but it is possible to peer through the iron gates to see the green final resting place of nineteenth-century New Yorkers.

29 East 4^th Street • Manhattan/East Village
212-777-1089 • www.merchantshouse.org • Admission Fee

This 1832 Federal-style brick exterior home with a Greek Revival–style interior was built in 1832 by Joseph Brewster in what was a fashionable area of New York City. This is the only preserved nineteenth-century New York City home with furnishings open to the public. Seabury Tredwell, a retired hardware business owner, bought the home in 1835. The Tredwell family remained in the house for the next one hundred years even as the neighborhood became increasingly commercial. The Tredwell family purportedly haunts the Merchant House. Gertrude Tredwell, who was born and died in the house, may tease visitors with her ghostly presence. In October, the museum offers ghost tours so that visitors can see for themselves. Lectures and other tours—some designed for children—are also offered. This site is a National Historic Landmark.

800 to 804 Broadway at 10^th Street • Manhattan/East Village
212-254-2000 • www.gracechurchnyc.org • Donation

Grace Church is an active Episcopal church with regular services and activities. Its origins date to the early nineteenth century, when it was the church of the well-to-do in a mostly Protestant, Episcopal city of English heritage. The church has been in its current location since 1846, when the congregation and the building moved to what was then an extremely fashionable residential area. This French Gothic–style masterpiece is the work of architect James Renwick Jr. It was this church that enhanced his reputation and won him further commissions such as St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City and the Smithsonian Institution Castle in Washington, D.C. The exterior marble, the spire and the stained-glass windows make Grace Church, a National Historic Landmark, worth the visit.

Over the years, Union Square has gained a reputation as a gathering place—sometimes for protests. It was the site of the first Labor Day Parade that occurred on September 5, 1882, when ten thousand workers marched up Broadway to Union Square. The name Union Square, however, refers to the fact that it is located at a convergence, or union, of streets, not to its place in the history of the American labor movement. More recently, it became a place to gather after the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Those seeking loved ones who were missing posted photographs and messages in Union Square.

The James Fountain in the middle of Union Square is a popular meeting place. Named in honor of its donor, Daniel James, it is the work of sculptor Adolf Donndorf. There is a statue of George Washington on horseback by Henry Kirke Brown that depicts Washington’s return to New York City on Evacuation Day, November 25, 1783. Henry Kirke Brown also designed the statue of Abraham Lincoln that stands in the park. The statue of the Marquis de LaFayette by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, who also created the Statue of Liberty, was dedicated on July 4, 1876, as part of the Centennial Celebration in New York. The site is a National Historic Landmark.

Madison Square Park opened to the public in 1847. It was named for our fourth president, James Madison (1809–17). Madison holds a particular significance for New York City, as it was here that he wrote the Bill of Rights to the Constitution while he was serving in the First United States Congress. There is a tall stump of an oak tree that grew in the park. The tree came to the park as a seedling from Montpelier, the home of James Madison in Orange, Virginia. In 1872, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux redesigned the park you visit today. Among the many statues in the park is one of President Chester Arthur by George Bissell. Arthur was the only other American president inaugurated in New York City after the 1789 George Washington inauguration. New Yorker Chester Arthur took the oath of office in 1881 after the assassination of President James Garfield. The Madison Square Park Conservancy that maintains the park has a regular and lively program of activities and performances for the public. The first public Christmas tree in the United States was here in Madison Square Park in 1912. The tradition continues each December with a tree illumination.

Peter Gerard Stuyvesant, the great-great-grandson of the original Peter Stuyvesant, who was the director general of New Netherlands, gave part of his farmland to New York City to serve as this park in 1836. There is a statue by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney of the original Peter Stuyvesant in the park.

East 20^th to 21^st Streets, Park Avenue to 3^rd Avenue • Manhattan/Gramercy

Created in 1832, this is the only private park in Manhattan. A fence with a locked gate encloses its two landscaped acres. Only residents in the immediate neighborhood have a key to the gate. In the middle of the park is an Edmond T. Quinn statue of the famed American nineteenth-century Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth. He was the brother of John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Edwin Booth purchased the mansion on Gramercy Park that he donated to the Players Club, which he also founded. The Players Club continues today as a private social club in one of the beautiful houses around the park.

Fort Washington Park, Hudson River Greenway • Manhattan/Washington Heights
212-628-2345 • www.historichousetrust.org • Free

Open house tours are offered once a month from June through October by the Urban Park Rangers. While no longer a functioning lighthouse, the Jeffrey’s Hook Light—its official name—was reconstructed here in 1921 from a lighthouse that had stood at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, to help guide ships through a treacherous stretch of the Hudson River. When the George Washington Bridge opened in 1931, the bridge’s bright lights lit the river and overshadowed the lighthouse. The lighthouse was almost sold, but public support for this sentimental favorite kept it in place for all to enjoy. The New York City Department of Parks & Recreation owns the Little Red Lighthouse.

The Fulton Ferry Landing Pier in Brooklyn Bridge Park is at the site of the first Brooklyn-to-Manhattan ferry service that began in 1642. The ferries used wind power. Depending on the weather, the ride could go quickly or not, depositing customers at varying points on either side of the East River. In 1814, Robert Fulton’s steamship service began operations, offering shorter commute times with great certainty of arriving predictably at the desired location. After the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883, ferry service between Manhattan and Brooklyn went into a long decline. An East River Ferry and the New York Water Taxi continue to depart today from Brooklyn Bridge Park, where the Fulton Ferry Landing Pier is located.

Brooklyn Bridge Park is an eighty-five-acre park in Brooklyn on the East River with promenades along the water that offer glorious views of the New York skyline, grassy areas to relax, six piers with various sporting activities, playgrounds, a barge with musical performances, a theater in a nineteenth-century tobacco warehouse and a 1922 carousel named Jane’s Carousel, in honor of Jane and David Walentas, who donated it to the park. There are history tours of the Brooklyn waterfront offered on the website. There is also information on the ferries and water taxis that depart from Brooklyn Bridge Park. For theater performances at St. Ann’s Warehouse, visit the website www.stannswarehouse.org. For information on the carousel, which has forty-eight horses, two chariots and a glass pavilion that permits it to operate throughout the year, visit the website www.janescarousel.com.

Tours are offered after Sunday service. This Congregational Church, founded in 1847, was used as an Underground Railroad site to help escaping African American slaves move to the safety of the North. Henry Ward Beecher, an ardent abolitionist, was the minister. His sermons attracted such large crowds that when the original church burned in 1849, a new, larger church was built to accommodate the growing congregation. Henry Ward Beecher was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Frederick Douglass spoke here, and Abraham Lincoln worshipped here. A plaque marks the pew where Lincoln sat. The site is a National Historic Landmark.

West 249^th Street • The Bronx
718-549-3200 • www.wavehill.org • Admission Fee

Built in 1843 by William Lewis Morris, the home today serves as an exhibit space for the arts and for performances. It is noted for its gardens, which overlook the Hudson River.

The famed poet Edgar Allan Poe lived in this 1812 farmhouse from 1846 to 1849, when he died in mysterious circumstances in Baltimore, Maryland. While here, Poe wrote many works, including the poem “Annabel Lee.” The house is a National Historic Landmark.

Images

The Frick Collection. Courtesy of James Maher.