city wall to the bay, becoming first an artery of trade, and then a
centre of fashionable life, as Broad Street, which took its place, has
since been a centre of commercial activity. It was directly opposite
Broad Street, in Wall, that the foundations of the new City Hall were
laid in 1699, the sale of the Stadt Huys helping to defray the cost of
the more pretentious structure. The arms of the English Governor, Lord
Bellomont, were blazoned on its walls; but two years later the marshal
was called upon to remove and destroy them. When New York became the
seat of the national government, the ninety-year-old City Hall, partly
reconstructed and lavishly decorated, became the meeting-place of
Congress. The most memorable day in its history was the 30th of April,
1789, when, attended by Chancellor Livingston and the committees of
Senators and Representatives, standing upon its balcony in the presence
of a great concourse, not merely of New Yorkers, but of Americans from
all the colonies, gathered together from far and near, George Washington
took the oath of office as first President of the United States. Where
the Capitol then stood now stands the Sub-Treasury, with Ward’s bronze
Washington looking gravely down from its steps upon the feverish turmoil
of Wall Street.
The oldest existing municipal building in New York is the Hall of
Records, in City Hall Park, whose contents are erelong to be housed in a
spacious, fire-proof edifice. It dates from the middle of the eighteenth
century. Its site formed a part of the Common, and it stood appropriately
convenient to the gallows, for it was originally a jail—the first
building on the island ever designed exclusively for the detention of
law-breakers. In popular parlance, as in practical use, it soon became
the Debtors’ Prison. When the British occupied the town during the
Revolution, it was turned to account as their principal military prison,
being known as The Provost, in reference to the title of the brutal
Cunningham, who was charged with the custody of American prisoners of
war—amongst others, “that d—d rebel, Ethan Allen.” The building was a
debtors’ jail again from 1787 to 1830; on the completion of alterations
projected at the latter date, it became, in 1835, the Register’s office,
and as such will probably see the close of the nineteenth century.
[Illustration: ST. PAUL’S CHURCH.]
[Illustration: CITY HALL.]
Vastly more attractive to the eye than this treasury of real-estate
records, and not wholly lacking in historic interest, is the adjacent
City Hall. This really handsome building, in the style of the Italian
Renaissance, was begun in 1803, and completed nine years later. The
likelihood of the city’s extending beyond it seemed too slight to
warrant lavishing upon its back the white marble which adds so much
to the dignity and grace of its façade; the rear wall was accordingly
constructed of a cheaper stone. In the “Governor’s room” on the
second floor, used for official receptions, are the desk on which
Washington wrote his first message to Congress, the chair in which he
was inaugurated as President, and the chairs used by the first federal
Congress.
In the same neighborhood, just beyond the lower extremity of the
old Common, now City Hall Park, stands St. Paul’s Chapel, Trinity
parish—an edifice much older than the parish church, which for the past
half-century, like its successive parent buildings, has stood farther
down Broadway, opposing its bulk to the westward progress of Wall Street.
Fenced off by iron palings, and bordered on each side by a strip of
graveyard, the chapel turns a picturesque and perhaps scornful back upon
the “topless towers” of Broadway—little dreamt of when its foundations
were laid in 1766, or three-and-twenty years later, when President
Washington attended service there on the day of his first inauguration.
These heaven-aspiring structures were only beginning to turn the street
into a canyon when the first President’s successor in office sat in the
same pew on the same day a century later (April 30, 1889).
Private houses of historic interest abounded not many years ago, notable
among them the country-seat called Richmond Hill, near the long since
absorbed village of Greenwich—a stately dwelling, identified with many
familiar names. John Adams lived there during a part of his first term
as Vice-President, and Aaron Burr started thence on that fateful July
morning in 1804 that saw the death of Hamilton at his hand, and the end
of his own political career. Of equal note was the house on Murray Hill,
where Mrs. Murray detained the British commander at lunch while the
American troops, under Putnam, made their escape from the island in 1776.
[Illustration: GRANT’S TOMB, RIVERSIDE DRIVE.]
The so-called Jumel Mansion, built for Washington’s whilom flame,
Miss Mary Philippse, by her successful suitor, Col. Roger Morris, and
afterwards occupied by Washington as his headquarters, became in turn the
property of the nation (Morris having been a royalist), of John Jacob
Astor, and of Stephen Jumel, whose erratic widow married Aaron Burr, but
soon tired of him, turned him out of doors and dropped his name. From
its coign of vantage on Harlem Heights at 169th Street, this dignified
colonial dwelling still looks down upon the Harlem River and across to
Long Island Sound. And at the foot of East 61st Street is yet to be
seen—vine-covered, and embowered in trees and shrubs—the substantial
stone residence of Col. William Smith, who married the daughter of
President Adams, and ruined himself by speculating in east-side real
estate. But the scarcity of such relics, and their glaring incongruity
with their surroundings, emphasize the divergence between the old New
York and that which is termed the Greater.
In the hall of Cooper Institute, Abraham Lincoln made that great speech
which first fully revealed him to the people of the Eastern States;
and hither he was brought, to lie in state in the City Hall, when a
martyr’s death had disclosed his greatness still more clearly to all his
countrymen.
Here have lived, for longer or shorter periods, sundry Presidents of
the United States, from Washington to Cleveland; the city has been the
permanent or occasional home of statesmen such as Jay and Livingston,
Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris; of political agitators such
as Aaron Burr and “Commonsense” Paine, and political leaders like
DeWitt Clinton and Samuel J. Tilden; of authors such as Washington
Irving, whose burlesque local history marked him out as the father of
American light literature, Fenimore Cooper, the most popular of American
romance-writers, and Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, most individual
of American poets. Here, for longer or shorter periods, have lived
and labored Curtis, and Bayard Taylor, and Stoddard, and Stedman, and
Aldrich, and Howells, and that greatest of poets among journalists
and journalists among poets, William Cullen Bryant, editor of _The
Evening Post_ and one of the founders of the Century Club; and Horace
Greeley, founder of _The Tribune_, and most famous of American editors
since Benjamin Franklin. As a resident of Brooklyn, and editor of a
metropolitan religious weekly, the best-known preacher of the century,
Henry Ward Beecher, was virtually a citizen of New York. In the annals of
invention, the names of four New Yorkers stand out conspicuously—Fulton
and Ericsson and Edison and Morse. And of all the free-booters that ever
terrorized the sea, none has left a more awful and enduring fame than a
once respectable resident of Liberty Street, renowned in song and story
for two centuries as Captain Kidd.
The hospitality of New York and her people is proverbial. Every
distinguished visitor to America for more than a century past has been
entertained here, officially or informally. Among the city’s guests
have been William IV. of England, while yet a sailor prince; Lafayette,
Louis Kossuth, the Prince of Wales, the Grand Duke Alexis, the Emperor
of Brazil, the Princess Eulalia, the Duke of Veragua, Li Hung Chang and
the Marquis Ito. Almost all the greatest preachers, orators, players,
singers, and instrumental performers of the nineteenth century have added
to their fame or wealth by facing New York audiences; and among the great
writers who have visited us have been Dickens, Thackeray, and Kipling.
While New York is easily first among the cities of the New World in
commercial importance, it is not on material bases only that her
supremacy rests. No community throughout the world responds more
generously to every appeal for sympathy or help, whether the call be
local, national or foreign. Her interest is keen in educational work of
every kind. Columbia University—one of the oldest of local institutions,
and more than local in its aims and fame and influence—has of late,
through the liberality of her sons and other citizens, been housed in a
manner commensurate with her requirements and aspirations; and so also
has the less venerable but justly honored New York University. And the
past few years have seen Barnard College for women and the Teachers
College (both allied with Columbia) emerge from the chrysalis state into
forms of beauty and power. The public-school system, moreover,—thanks
to a recent brief respite from Tammany control,—is in better condition
to-day than at any previous period of Tammany administration.
Of American literary activity, despite Boston’s ancient and deserved
prestige, it cannot be denied that New York is to-day the centre, as
it is the centre of the publishing trade, in books and periodicals.
Boston, with her splendid Public Library, has set an example which
the metropolis has been slow to follow; but the consolidation of the
Astor, Lenox and Tilden collections, and their prospective housing in a
magnificent and admirably situated building, has gone far to remove the
reproach incurred during long years of public indifference to popular
needs. The venerable Society Library, the modern and many-branched Free
Circulating Library and kindred institutions have helped to create and
in part to meet the demand which the Public Library in its new home may
reasonably be expected to satisfy. Equally important in their way are
those half-social, half-educational essays toward the solution of some
of the problems of the slums—the University Settlement of men and the
College Settlement of women. As a further indication that New York is not
wholly given over to the worship of Mammon, it may be mentioned that the
Greek Club, with its fortnightly meetings for the reading and discussion
of the classics, has been for more than three decades the only circle of
its kind in existence.
[Illustration: WASHINGTON ARCH.]
In art, the invaluable treasures of the Metropolitan Museum foster
the love of what is enduringly beautiful in sculpture, painting,
architecture, etc.; while the schools of this museum and of the National
Academy of Design and the Society of American Artists, to say nothing of
the more utilitarian classes of Cooper Institute and the School of Artist
Artisans, afford instruction in art of such a sort as to render foreign
study no longer indispensable, albeit no less attractive than of old.
Of music, vocal and instrumental, such feasts are spread before the local
amateur as can be matched for quality and abundance in no other city at
home or abroad, and while this is not true of the drama also, as the
Comédie Française has never come hither in a body, it is yet a fact that
nearly all that is best is seen, sooner or later, on the New York stage.
By what rapid strides the city is moving forward in some directions,
while halting lamentably in others, needs not to be pointed out. There
is expert testimony to the effect that in public morality it has at
least held its own during the past half-century; we trust it may some
day work out its salvation in things political, and cease to be the mild
milch cow of thirsty demagogues. It can never vie in picturesqueness and
historic interest with its European peers in population and importance,
nor atone by its singularly fortunate situation for its poverty in
little parks and its richness in rough-paved, right-angled and treeless
streets and avenues; yet it may some day rival even Paris in the absolute
beauty of its public and private buildings and historic monuments. A
brave beginning has been made, in the Washington Arch, the Madison
Square Garden, the Columbia and the New York University buildings, the
Washington, Hale and Farragut statues and certain churches, club-houses
and private dwellings. And in the Cathedral of St. John, the Public
Library, the Academy of Design and the Botanical and Zoölogical gardens,
a further stride will be made erelong in the only directions in which
æsthetic leadership seems possible.
[Illustration]
BROOKLYN
THE TOWN ON FREEDOM’S BATTLE-FIELD
BY HARRINGTON PUTNAM
The earliest Dutch settlements within the present borough limits are not
so old as the first hamlets on Manhattan. More than a score of years
after the houses and forts of New Amsterdam looked out across the East
River, the forest-crested heights of the west end of Long Island remained
in undisturbed Indian occupation.
The Dutch settlers were deterred, rather than attracted, by this
magnificent stretch of green woodlands extending along the high shore.
The Holland people were not accustomed to timber clearing and therefore
sought access to the island by the smoother meadow-lands of Gowanus,
and afterwards to the north where the sloping grasslands about the
Waalboght invited the settler to essay gardening without too much
preparation with the axe. The early Long Island farmers advanced on the
territory of Brooklyn by flank attacks, seeking to turn the wings of the
extended forest, rather than boldly to engage in the struggle with the
densely wooded heights in front. These pioneers were thrifty, energetic
Hollanders and Huguenots whose farms soon required regular communication
with Manhattan. In 1642 a public ferry was established between the
present foot of Fulton Street and a landing in Peck’s Slip. The houses
clustered about this Long Island landing constituted a little settlement
called The Ferry.
[Illustration: VIEW IN BROOKLYN IN THE OLDEN TIMES.]
As the Indians were dispossessed from their maize-fields, the colonists
found sites for a small village a mile or so inland. The modern visitor
who comes up Fulton Street should stop about the corner of Hoyt and
Smith Streets to locate this settlement and picture a primitive hamlet
of small one-story frame cottages, sometimes surrounded by palisades
for protection against attacks. The open lands were of small extent,
with forest to the east and west, and streams running south into a wide
morass, where is now Gowanus Canal. Undoubtedly the undrained land of
this settlement, receiving copious moisture from the surrounding forests,
contained many a marsh and fen like the homelands of Holland. So the
settlers called it the brookland, or Breuckelen, after an ancient village
of that name on the river Vecht in the Province of Utrecht. The records
of old Breuckelen are traced by local antiquarians of Utrecht to the time
of Tacitus. In its variant forms, Bracola, Broccke, Brocckede, Broicklede
and Brocklandia, it describes a moist meadow-land. Or, as a Dutch writer
declares, the town on the Vecht was called Breuckelen from the marshes
(_a paludibus_). Its beautiful gardens and quaint castles, as the
emigrants had beheld them when starting out from home, perhaps remained
in the imagination of the Long Island settlers as an ideal of what their
western home should some day become.
Just as Utrecht and Amersfoort are near-by towns to Breuckelen in
the Lowlands, so New Utrecht towards the south—near the present Fort
Hamilton—and Amersfoort (Flatlands) attested the determination of these
Netherlanders to preserve the associations of their origin between the
Rhine and the Zuyder Zee.
[Illustration: DENYSE’S FERRY.
THE FIRST PLACE AT WHICH THE BRITISH AND HESSIANS LANDED ON LONG ISLAND,
AUGUST 22, 1776. NOW FORT HAMILTON.]
The life of these hard-working settlers was not all hardship. Their
low houses with projecting roofs were strong and comfortable; the wide
spacious fireplaces gave warmth to a generous hospitality that laid on
the board wild turkeys and Gowanus oysters and other good eatables,
followed after the repast by the long clay pipes, which, when over, left
the weary toiler to be ushered to his night’s rest in a partitioned-off
bunk or _betste_. But these material comforts were not all the results
realized by the efforts of the first pioneers. These Dutch settlers were
zealous for religion, liberty, and good schools; and from the first were
not deficient in a commendable zeal for the public welfare.
Under the form of Colonial government the burghers were invited to
submit all difficulties to the Governor and council, who were fond of
the exercise of a strong, minute, and careful paternalism. The country
folk were not expected to intrude on the authorities their own ideas of
liberty, but merely to obey loyally what good, old, obstinate, arbitrary
Governor Stuyvesant should command. Yet even when he had spoken with the
official concurrence of his council, the eager spirits in Breuckelen
would often cavil, and boldly presume to come over to Manhattan to stir
up criticism and public remonstrance. So they were honored with a special
order. The folk of Breuckelen, Amersfoort and Midwout (Flatbush) in 1653
were directed to forbid their residents from attending political meetings
in New Amsterdam.
At this time the civic virtues were enforced in Breuckelen, and the good
of the village put before the preference of a private citizen to retire
from public office. The Governor would not allow any one to decline to
serve in an official capacity. The schepen-elect of Breuckelen proposed
not to continue in office for another term. He even said he would sooner
go back to Holland than remain burdened by the duties of schepen. The
Governor quickly took him at his word. The Sheriff was formally required
to notify him of this order of the Governor which stated with remarkable
clearness the obligation of good townsmen to the public and the penalty
for its neglect:
“If you will not accept to serve as schepen for the welfare of
the Village of Breuckelen, with others, your fellow residents,
then you must prepare yourself to sail in the ship _King
Solomon_ for Holland, agreeably to your utterance.”
No further refusals to hold office appear to have embarrassed the council.
The colonists of Breuckelen were specially solicitous for a meeting-house
and domine. They insisted that they should have good measure in
discourses and that if the services should be abbreviated by the
preacher, then on their side no tithes should be forthcoming. The
first meeting-house was begun in 1654 at Midwout (Flatbush). Soon they
worshipped in the partly roofed building. After much difficulty and
repeated applications to the Council it had been arranged that the Rev.
Mr. Polhemus should have his morning discourse at Flatbush, with his
evening service alternately at Midwout and in Breuckelen.
Governor Stuyvesant may have fancied that he had composed the difficulty.
Next winter, however, the Governor was presented with a further
remonstrance against the cutting-short of these alternating evening
devotions. They thus complained of this brief and scanty service:
“Every fortnight on Sundays he comes here, only in the
afternoon for a quarter of an hour, when he only gives us a
prayer in lieu of sermon, by which we can receive very little
instruction; while often, while one supposes the prayer or
sermon (whichever name might be preferred for it) is beginning,
then it is actually at an end, by which he contributes very
little to the edification of his congregation.”
To modern ears, this seems a strange grievance for legislation.
Governor Stuyvesant, however, admonished the Breuckelen folk to pay their
full tithes. Doubtless he privately reminded Mr. Polhemus of his duties
and obligations to give his people full service.
In three years they obtained a domine of their own. The Rev. Henricus
Selyns, a learned and devout young clergyman of a prominent Amsterdam
family came to Breuckelen in 1660. At first his parishioners worshipped
in a barn, but a meeting-house was soon erected. His spiritual labors
and influence were successful, and the four years of Mr. Selyns’s
ministrations were affectionately remembered. Compelled to return to
Holland by the last illness of his father, he came to America and settled
in New York eighteen years later. His warm admiration for Cotton Mather
is attested by a graceful Latin poem appended to the later editions of
the _Magnalia_.
Breuckelen was equally fortunate in a schoolmaster—Carel de Beauvois—a
cultured French Protestant from Leyden, who was appointed in Breuckelen
in 1661. Besides his duties, in the church, of precentor and Scripture
reader, it was stipulated that:
“He shall properly, diligently, and industriously attend to the
school, instill in the minds of the young the fear of the Lord,
and set them a good example; to open the school with prayer
and close with a Psalm, also to exercise the scholars in the
questions in the _groat regulen_ of the Rev. pious and learned
father Do. Johannes Megapolensis, Minister of the gospel in N.
Amsterdam.”
Here was a hamlet of but thirty-one families who were not satisfied until
they could listen to the ablest preaching of the day, and were also
favored with superior educational facilities.
Meanwhile the Dutch order was changing. The neighboring village of
Gravesend was being settled by the English. From Connecticut came
Quakers, who sowed the seeds of non-conformity and inculcated a new and
strange doctrine, that taxes should not be levied to maintain the clergy,
a principle especially attractive to those whose tithes were paid with a
grudging hand.
[Illustration: BUSHWICK TOWN-HOUSE AND CHURCH, 1800.]
At the end of the Dutch régime there were four or five little scattered
hamlets within the present borough. The Wallabout had the larger French
and Huguenot population. Eastward the English settlers were coming into
farming competition with their Dutch neighbors.
There was no great alarm or disappointment manifested on Long Island when
on a morning in August, 1664, a British fleet was found to have assembled
in the Narrows. Colonial militia under the British flag from New England
came through the Sound and encamped on the Breuckelen shore. On September
8, 1664, New Amsterdam yielded, and Governor Nicolls raised the flag
of Great Britain on the fort. Then New Amsterdam became New York; Long
Island and Staten Island, and probably part of Westchester County, were
made an English “shire,” and Breuckelen, after some changes of spelling,
was known as “Brooklyn in the West Riding of Yorkshire.”
This settlement of Dutch and Huguenots, maintained under the Colonial
government of New Amsterdam, in the score of years before the British
conquest had acquired a distinctive character. Contrary to a prevalent
opinion, these first Dutch settlements, in a sound and vigorous sense,
were essentially democratic. In the absence of class privileges—the
spirit to refer all questions to the supreme consideration of the general
welfare; to subordinate individual claims to the rights and advantage of
the public—Breuckelen and Vliessingen (Flushing) compared favorably in
civic life with contemporary villages in New England. As Holland had been
dyked against the sea by close, unremitting, and intimate co-operation—a
spirit further developed in the protracted struggle for independence—so
the smaller Dutch colonies in New York, while they kept their
agricultural character, retained a collective rather than an individual
ideal, which tended to exclude none from equal social opportunities. They
never had to struggle with the incubus of a modified feudalism, which,
though inevitably breaking up, was leaving its impress of regard for rank
and class privilege in the American colonies of British origin.
Colonial life under British rule was marked by more rigid laws as the
communities grew. The careful protection of common-lands was strictly
attended to, especially the town forests of Brooklyn against the
encroachment of those who would surreptitiously cut away the timber.
Trustees of the common woodlands were appointed; but in the year 1702
these lands were equitably divided and all allotted to each householder
in Brooklyn to insure their better protection.