Communipaw, the lower end of Jersey City, is opposite the Battery, and
above it the Jersey City front on the Hudson River is occupied for
miles by railway terminals, making a succession of piers, ferry-houses
and grain elevators. Originally Jersey City was the sandy peninsula of
Paulus Hook, a tongue of flat farming land stretching down between the
Hudson River and Newark Bay. The termination of this peninsula is
Communipaw, long a sleepy village, originally granted to a Dutch West
India Company Director--Michael Pauw. He was proud of this domain, of
which he was the patroon, so he called it Pavonia or Communipauw, the
"Commune of Pauw." His Dutch garrison massacred the Indians in the
neighborhood, and soon afterwards, in retaliation, they exterminated
all the Dutch but one family. At Jersey City there come out to the
Hudson River all the great Trunk Line railways from the West, with the
single exception of the New York Central Railroad. In the Revolution,
the site of the present Pennsylvania Railroad Terminal Station was a
British fortification, which was partly stormed and captured, with a
number of prisoners, in 1779, by Major Henry Lee. Jersey City is
entirely a growth of the nineteenth century, at the beginning of which
it had a population of only thirteen persons, living in a single
house. It now has two hundred and fifty thousand, and is replete with
important manufacturing establishments, its expansion having come from
the overflow of New York and the wonderful development of its railway
system. While spreading over much surface, yet it presents little
attraction beyond the enormous railway terminals and factories. The
traveller rarely stops there, but rushes through to get into or out of
New York. To the northward is Hoboken, with sixty thousand people,
including many Germans, and it has large silk factories. Here, in
strange contrast with the commercial aspect of everything around, the
river front rises in a bluff shore, crowned by a grove of trees and
running up into a low mound, whereon is the "Stevens Castle." This was
the home of Edwin A. Stevens one of the projectors of the Camden and
Amboy Railroad. He endowed the Stevens Institute of Technology at
Hoboken, and spent his declining years and much of his railway
fortune in building the "Stevens Battery," a noted warship, for New
York harbor defense, which he bequeathed his native State of New
Jersey, and that Commonwealth shortly afterwards sold it to be broken
up for old iron. Beyond is the village of Weehawken, with the Elysian
Fields, where Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in the duel of
1804, then a pleasant rural resort, but now largely absorbed by
railway terminals. This duel arose from political quarrels, and at the
first fire Hamilton received a wound from which he died the next day.
Behind Jersey City rises the long rocky ridge of Bergen Hill, through
which all but one of the railways cut their routes by tunnels or deep
fissures, and its outcroppings above Weehawken come forward to the
Hudson River bank in the grand escarpment of the Palisades. These
remarkable columnar formations of trap rock extend for twenty miles
along the western shore of the river, and in part appear to be built
up of basalt. To connect the various railways terminating at Jersey
City with New York, a tunnel is being constructed under the Hudson
River; and two others, and also a gigantic bridge, are projected.
I have already referred to Staten Island, which is the western border
of New York harbor, where its pleasant hill-slopes add so much to the
scenic beauty. The narrow "Kills," stretching for nearly twenty miles
down to Perth Amboy, make its western boundary, separating the
island, which is the Borough of Richmond in Greater New York, from New
Jersey, to which by right it is said to belong. It covers about sixty
square miles, with its diversified hill-slopes rising in some places
to an elevation of over four hundred feet, and has probably seventy
thousand population. It is shaped something like a leaf, hung, as it
were, upon the long projecting peninsula between Newark Bay and New
York harbor, the Kill von Kull stretching westward to divide it from
this peninsula, which at that part is the town and port of Bayonne,
running off into Bergen Point at the lower end of Bergen Hill. It was
from Bergen Point that General Washington in 1787 was rowed in a barge
to New York, to be inaugurated the first President of the United
States. From Elizabethport, on the western side of Newark Bay, the
Arthur Kill stretches, a narrow strait, far southward, broadening
somewhat into Staten Island Sound, and debouching at Perth Amboy into
the western end of Raritan Bay. Perth Amboy was the terminus of the
original line of the Camden and Amboy Railroad. It was the capital of
the Colonial Province of New Jersey two centuries ago, and its
eligible position at the confluence of Staten Island Sound and the
Raritan River and Bay, the point of union of the various interior
water ways, made it at that early period very ambitious. In fact,
"Perthtown, or Ompoge on Ambo" (the Indian name for the point, which
meant "round and hollow"), then rivalled New York in commercial
importance. Its name came from the Earl of Perth, one of the grantees
of lands in East Jersey. Early travellers flocked thither, praising
its merits; and even William Penn was persuaded to go over and look at
it, oracularly declaring, "I have never seen such before in my life,"
whatever that might have meant. But New York, with its great harbor,
ultimately overshadowed Amboy, and it has since dropped out, even as a
way-station on the route between the two leading cities. It has about
fifteen thousand inhabitants, and its trade chiefly consists in
shipping coal and fire-clay, brought out by the railroads.
The loyal Jerseyman will never forgive New York for having captured
Staten Island. After the English came to New York in 1664, under the
grant of King Charles II. to the Duke of York of all the country from
Canada down to Virginia, the Duke granted to Berkeley and Carteret the
portion lying between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers. This grant
grieved the New Yorkers, for they said it gave away the best lands
around their harbor, so they tried to get it all back, and managed to
capture Staten Island. Some sharp fellow invented the fiction, on
which they resolutely insisted, that the Arthur Kill was really the
Hudson River; and, taking possession, they never gave it up. A legal
contest was fought for over one hundred and fifty years, and it was
not until 1833 that a treaty between the two States declared the
Kills to be their boundary. Staten Island is about sixteen miles long,
and from its eastern slopes has a noble outlook over the Lower New
York Bay towards the ocean. Fine beaches line these coasts, which rise
sharply into hills inland, and most of the eligible sites are crowned
with villas. It was at Stapleton, on Staten Island, that Commodore
Cornelius Vanderbilt, the head of the great family, was born in 1794,
and he laid the foundation of his great fortune, at the age of sixteen
years, by sailing a ferryboat to New York, six miles away. Upon a
plateau in the centre of the island is the village of New Dorp, the
original settlement of the Vanderbilts, a farm of about four hundred
acres. Here the Commodore came in his youth, and here his son, William
H. Vanderbilt, was born and lived for many years, an agricultural
laborer for his father. Here also is a little Moravian church they
attended, and upon a terraced hill behind it, the highest part of the
island, is the spacious gray granite mausoleum, within which rest the
two great millionaires, father and son, with some of their children.
In the old churchyard are the graves of many other Vanderbilts and
their collaterals. At Port Richmond, over on the Kill, the most
considerable town on the island, and formerly the county-seat, is the
house, now a hotel, in which Aaron Burr died in 1836.