The New Yorker, September 16, 2002 P. 46
At the northeast corner of Vesey and Church Streets, across from the graveyard of St. Paul’s Chapel, there is a tiny, crowded deli called the Stage Door. I went there recently to meet Joyce Gold, a guide who used to lead a World Trade Center tour called “From Landfill to Landscape.” She had agreed to show me some of the historical remains of the area, and after we picked up our coffee and squeezed past workers in orange mesh vests and tourists in F.D.N.Y. caps to get to the street outside, she led me up a flight of stairs to a large, hot room above the deli, full of empty cafeteria tables and chairs. An entire windowed wall of the room looked out on the sixteen-acre hole that had been the World Trade Center.
When the Trade Center towers were destroyed, on September 11th, I experienced, among many other emotions, a desire to know the history of the site better, much the way one wishes one had known a distant but beloved uncle better after he dies. A life has a beginning and a middle as well as an end, and I suppose that I wanted to uncover that narrative meaning. I had visited the World Trade Center only twice: once to interview a city official; once to attend an awards party held at Windows on the World. This was a distant uncle, indeed. The Twin Towers existed for me, as for many people, I suspect, only as landmarks against the sky, as familiar as the North Star, and as remote. The ground on which the towers sat was just a subway stop, a busy pavement, a downtown blur. Now that the airborne landmarks were gone, the ground was really all that was left, and, as people argued about what would replace the World Trade Center, I kept wondering what had been there before.
I wasn’t even sure which streets were included and had to consult several maps before I could draw a grid, five blocks by four blocks, sixteen acres. The northern border was Vesey Street. South of Vesey, the trade center had been built over Fulton, Dey, and Cortlandt Streets. The southern border was Liberty Street. Church Street ran along the eastern edge. To the west, the site covered Greenwich and Washington Streets and ended at West Street.
From the Stage Door’s second-floor dining room, I could clearly see the blank space that had once been crisscrossed by my grid. As Joyce Gold described buildings and streets that no longer existed, tourists below us struggled for a clear view of the site. They crowded up against chain-link fences and shuffled along in the sun on plywood platforms. Sitting in the secret, stuffy room with its unobstructed aerial vista was sobering, moving, and, as with any Ground Zero gawking, almost obscene: a sad, ironic inversion of Windows on the World.
After a while, the conversation turned to “The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909, Compiled from Original Sources and Illustrated by Photo-Intaglio Reproductions of Important Maps Plans Views and Documents In Public and Private Collections,” an indispensable, comprehensive, wildly idiosyncratic work that I had encountered at the New-York Historical Society. “The ‘Iconography’ has always been my choice for my only book on a desert island,” Gold said. It was completed in 1928 by Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, who had worked on it for nineteen years. Stokes originally envisioned one volume devoted to important historical moments. The record of New York’s first three hundred years sprawled, instead, into six volumes of land grants, Common Council meetings, leases, legal challenges, hotel advertisements, funerals, fires, wars, ferry crossings, firehouse openings, riots, and just about anything else that happens in a great modern city.
In Volume I, where the early photo-intaglio views can be found, there are prints of lower Manhattan as the Dutch first saw it: a pristine, hilly, verdant land in which the native Munsees move effortlessly from clamming and fishing to hunting and farming. Explorers and Dutch traders described a cornucopia that is difficult even to imagine: sixfoot lobsters, oysters a foot in diameter; seals and porpoises playing in the North River, as the Hudson was then called; grapevines and cherry trees scenting the air.
But as soon as I began to compare early maps to the grid I had drawn, I saw that the sixteen acres I wanted to know better was not covered with fragrant vines and fruit trees. More than half of it was covered by the river. I erased West Street from my grid, I erased Washington Street. Manhattan’s seventeenth-century shoreline, and the story of the sixteen acres, began at Greenwich Street.
In 1614, the Tijger_,_ a Dutch trading ship, burned at anchor and sank in the North River. Three centuries later, in 1916, workers were digging a tunnel for the I.R.T. subway line. At the intersection of Greenwich and Dey, twenty feet below ground, their shovels hit wood: the charred keel and three charred ribs of a ship. The style of the ship was early Dutch, and radiocarbon dating of the wood indicated that the vessel was built some time between 1450 and 1610. There is no record of any other ship going down in flames in the North River at that time, which suggests that the Tijger, a trading vessel a world away from home, burned and sank beneath the water where almost four hundred years later two towering buildings devoted to world trade burned and sank to the ground.
The men on the Tijger landed to collect pelts, not to find religious freedom or to impose religious conversion. New York, even in its infancy, was a creature of trade. But in subsequent years politics and competing Colonial interests also shaped the sixteen acres. There were Indian settlements nearby, but none on the site, nor was it part of the original Dutch trading post. The first direct mention of the area I was able to find was a reference to a survey conducted in 1625, when the corner was part of thirty-three acres set aside to grow food for the colony of the Dutch West India Company. The earliest street map of New Amsterdam, made in 1660, does not even extend that far north.
Offering leases and land grants as incentives, the Dutch attempted to colonize Manhattan, and the acres on the North River were divided into farms, or bouweries. Annetje Jansen, the daughter of New Amsterdam’s midwife, became the owner of one of the farms in 1636, when her husband died. The British conquered New Amsterdam in 1664. In 1671, Annetje’s heirs sold the farm—which ran from Broadway to the river and from today’s Cortlandt Street to Fulton Street—to Colonel Francis Lovelace, the royal governor of what was now called New York, and the Bouwery Farm became the King’s Farm. (One of Annetje’s sons from her second marriage, Cornelius Bogardus, did not join in the conveyance, and his line of heirs unsuccessfully sued subsequent owners in 1750, 1760, 1807, and again in 1830. In 1847 alone, Cornelius Brower lost nine such lawsuits.)
In 1697, the Crown leased the King’s Farm to Trinity Church for “60 bushells of winter wheat” (a different currency than had been used twenty-five years earlier, when part of the land was rented for six hundred guilders’ worth of wampum). But after Queen Anne came to the throne, in 1702, and the King’s Farm became the Queen’s Farm, the new royal governor, hoping to strengthen the position of the Anglicans in the colony, convinced the Queen to give the land to Trinity. In 1705, a patent was issued for “All those our Severall Closes, Peeces & Parcels of Land, Meadows and Pastures formerly called ye Duke’s Farm and ye King’s Farme and now known by the name of the Queens Farme with All & Singular ye fences, inclosures, Iprovemts and Appurtenances whatsoever thereunto belonging as ye same are now in ye Occupacon of and Enjoyed by . . . any former Tennant, situate, lying and being on ye Island Manhattans in ye City of New York aforesaid and Bounded on the East Partly by the Broadway, Partly by the Common and Partly by ye Swamp and on ye West by Hudsons River.” The bouwery was reborn, yet again, this time as the Church Farm.
On seventeenth-century maps of New York, the farm is clean and clear. To the south, Colonial New York is crowded with streets, the shore with piers and wharves. But Annetje’s bouwery, no matter how many times it changes its name, remains a remote piece of land bordered by swamps and undeveloped waterfront. It was not until the eighteenth century, a time of explosive growth and prosperity for New York, that the farm finally began to grow—literally. As Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall explain in “Unearthing Gotham,” instead of building wooden piers, New Yorkers usually built slips that extended out into the water, creating little inlets where boats could moor. When the inlets began to silt up, they were filled in, and the streets were extended, creating new slips. Streets had begun to cross the Church Farm in the early eighteenth century. Crown Street had been laid out before 1700, and it went as far as the shoreline. But in 1794, when Crown Street was renamed Liberty Street by the new nation, it reached a shoreline that had been pushed far out into the Hudson River, beyond the natural slope to deep water, allowing ships to dock instead of having to anchor offshore. Left behind were brand-new chunks of prime waterfront real estate.
New York’s landfill had begun in earnest in 1686, when Governor Dongan issued a charter that granted the city the right to raise revenue by selling “water lots.” Buyers were able to build slips and create land between the high- and low-water marks. In 1730, the city was given even greater latitude: the Montgomerie Charter allowed the sale of land four hundred feet out into the river, past the low-water mark. The following year, the Common Council granted John Chambers “all the Ground under Water in the Rear of his Said Lott from high water Mark to Low Water Mark.” For this he would pay an annual rent of six pence per foot of shoreline. He was also required to construct “A Street of five and forty foot in breadth at the foot of the Bank the Center of which Street to be at high Water Mark, and also Another Street next and fronting Hudsons River of thirty foot in breadth.” The forty-five-foot-wide street became Greenwich, the thirty-foot-wide one was Washington. In 1769, the Common Council was petitioned by several citizens for a water lot extending two hundred feet into the North River, from Dey’s Dock “northward to the corner of Bartly’s Street”—Barclay Street. Cortlandt Street was laid out between Broadway and the Hudson in 1733; Dey Street was levelled and paved with stones in 1749. Fortunes were made in real estate.
In “New York City Cartmen 1667-1850,” a history of the city’s early teamsters, Graham Russell Hodges cites records of cartmen hauling sand and oyster shells to use as landfill on the Church Farm. Cantwell and Wall quote a physician’s observation of a less pristine fill in 1796: “Carts were employed to collect such dirt and filth as all large and populous cities furnish in abundance; and with materials of this description [the area] was filled up, and to give greater salubrity to the mass, there were occasionally added, dead horses, dogs, cats, hogs, &c., &c.”
During epidemics, builders were more careful to obey the laws requiring clean fill. Epidemics also pushed New Yorkers north and west as they escaped the crowded downtown. On the Lyne-Bradford Plan, a 1731 map, there is nothing on the farm between Broadway and the riverbank except a small, meandering road called Old Wind Mill Lane. In 1754, Greenwich and Washington Streets show up on a map for the first time, along with Church, Vesey, and Partition (now Fulton).
In a great banquet of landfill, the rural West Side expanded. Trinity Church was prominent in the area’s growth—the host, really, of the real-estate feast. The church was granted water lots for West Street and Washington Street in 1751; Partition Street was ceded by the church to the city in 1761, as was Vesey Street. The latter, which according to one source was once known as Moordt Kuyl Straat, because of a murder that took place in a hollow where it met the river, had been named after the first rector of Trinity, William Vesey.
The cartmen who hauled bricks and wood for the construction of the Church Farm’s new streets became its new tenants. Trinity did not sell the land. As was the custom among the English gentry, it offered long leases. Elizabeth Blackmar, in her fascinating real-estate history, “Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850,” describes the church’s decision in 1734 “to lease out lotts of ground for any number of years not exceeding forty.” But even in 1752 the church was still marketing the farm as “good pasture for cattle and horses.” It was not until 1762 that the property was surveyed and mapped, most of it divided into twenty-by-hundred-foot lots. Trinity advertised two hundred of these lots for twenty-one, forty-two, or sixty-three-year leases. By this time, the opening of new streets and wharves had turned the area into a more accessible and attractive neighborhood. Ads for Trinity leases began to tout convenience for artisans. The farm was near Broadway, a major thoroughfare; it was near the ferries and wharves of the Hudson, it was near the Oswego Market. And the leases were cheap: between one and four pounds a year, compared with ten to twenty pounds for leases farther downtown. Carpenters, stonecutters, masons, grocers, butchers, ropemakers—an entire population of artisans was able to lease the land and build small wooden houses, which they could move with them when their leases ran out. Trinity Church Farm became a working-class neighborhood. Taverns, Hodges says, were the center of a culture in which cartmen raced their carts each morning on the new, straight streets and amused themselves with bullbaiting, gambling, and drinking.
The Church Farm just west of St. Paul’s Chapel was also the site of the city’s red-light district, home to as many as five hundred prostitutes. It was known as the Holy Ground. Convenient for the sailors and laborers who worked on the wharves and docks to the west, the Holy Ground was just a short stroll away for the students of King’s College and for the rich living in fine, new houses on Broadway and working near Wall Street.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, the taverns had become centers of revolutionary activity. And when the Revolution came, it touched the area in a direct and devastating way. On September 21, 1776, just a few weeks after the disastrous Battle of Brooklyn, when the British took back Manhattan and George Washington and his troops barely escaped obliteration, a fire started at the Fighting Cocks, a tavern near Whitehall Slip, and swept uptown. The British suspected rebel arson (one of the patriots they arrested and hanged was Nathan Hale), and General Washington seems to have agreed. Watching the fire from Harlem Heights, he said, “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.” Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, in “Gotham,” their magisterial history of early New York, quote a newspaper account of the confusion and the shouting, which, “joined to the roaring of the flames, the crash of falling houses and the widespread ruin . . . formed a scene of horror great beyond description.” The fire destroyed one-quarter of the city’s buildings, including five hundred houses and everything on the site of the future World Trade Center.
On Evacuation Day, November 25, 1783, the British finally marched out, leaving behind a ruined city. At about this time, the heirs of Annetje Jans petitioned the legislature for return of the farm from Trinity Church, which was closely associated with the defeated British. The radical new legislature had a better idea—the State itself should sue Trinity for the land. Patriotism was high, and real estate was valuable, even real estate in ruins.
But New York was a city of practical merchants, Tory and patriot alike, and ideas of land reform were soon forgotten in the rush of everyday affairs. Trinity Church Farm remained Trinity Church Farm, and within a few years the busy waterfront community was rebuilt. New York, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt wrote after visiting in 1797, had “increased and beautified with unheard of quickness. . . . This quarter of the city”—the burned section— “has been rebuilt since the peace, and is now one of the handsomest parts in it.” New York still had terrible water, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt said, but “the new part of the city built adjoining to Hudson’s River, and parallel with its course, is infinitely more handsome; the streets there being generally straight, broad, intersecting each other at right angles, and the houses much better built.”
New York was back in business, rising up out of the wreckage of fire and war and pestilence. New markets out West began to stimulate commercial development of the waterfront on Manhattan’s western shore. The rise in rent and the price of land caused the working men, or mechanics, as they were called, to subdivide their houses and rent out rooms. Carpenters, laborers, sailors, some as young as fourteen, lived in the new boarding houses, three or four to a room, and joined the cartmen at the taverns for cockfighting, boxing, bearbaiting, drinking, and gambling. Some taverns also served as the headquarters of stagecoaches, which connected merchants with the rest of the East Coast. A tavern at 49 Cortlandt Street, near Greenwich, was the site of one of the earliest meetings of the Tammany Society (an anti-élitist political club that later became the notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall), which gathered there in 1787 to drink thirteen patriotic toasts.
The waterfront was booming, real estate was booming, and, just northeast of the Church Farm, on Broadway, wealthy merchants built grand houses. On one early rent roll, which the Trinity Church Archivist, Gwynedd Cannan, brought to my attention, there are several columns, listing names; lot numbers; the day the rent falls due; the amount owed; when it was paid; and, at the end, arrears. The first name under the heading “Fulton Street,” written in the bookkeeper’s even hand, is “Duncan Phyfe,” who owed fifteen dollars for Lot 35. On a map of the Church Farm, Lot 35 is on the northwest corner of Fulton and Church, directly across from the vestry office of St. Paul’s. Phyfe’s cabinetmaking workshop, which at one time employed more than a hundred people, used new, simplified, sequential techniques, a sort of proto-assembly line, allowing him to employ lower-paid, semiskilled workers, many of whom probably lived in nearby boarding houses. Some of his clients lived nearby, too, like John Jacob Astor, whose big house, on Broadway and Barclay, was one of many in the newly fashionable area.
In 1771, one of the most important markets in the city was built between Partition and Vesey. In 1797, residents complained of “the number of Hay-Boats landing collectively . . . discommoding the Market, and Wood-Boats and other Vessels, which resort in great Numbers to said Wharf and Bason.” By 1812, the area was so busy that the Common Council decided to build a new market on landfill where the Corporation Basin had been. The Washington Market, as it was called, was bounded by Washington, West, Partition, and Vesey Streets, and existed until 1883. The opening of the Erie Canal, in the eighteen-twenties, created even more activity on the waterfront, and the market grew. A fish market was added. And on April 21, 1828, the same day the legislature passed a law against duelling, the Common Council ordered a cupola to be erected.
The old Church Farm was now a frantic port. On the Ratzen Plan of 1766-67, we can already see that the ferry to Paulus Hook, New Jersey, left from Cortlandt Street, at the bottom of the King’s Wharf, which stretched from Cortlandt to Dey Street. Rowboats and periaugers, flat-bottomed sailboats, had been used from the time of Dutch rule to carry wagons and livestock. But the age of the steam engine was approaching. In “Over and Back,” an astonishingly comprehensive history of the New York ferryboat, Brian J. Cudahy describes the launching, in 1812, by Robert Fulton of the first commercial, steam-driven, double-ended ferry. It ran between Cortlandt Street and Paulus Hook. Fulton and his partner, Robert Livingston, had a monopoly on the steamboat business in New York and they enforced it with unrelenting vigor. Swift new steam ferries would push off from Cortlandt Street, but the Vesey Street pier was still home to a competitor’s old-fashioned horse ferry, on which a team of draft animals was harnessed to a treadmill that turned the paddlewheel. Eventually, the steamboat monopoly was overturned by the Supreme Court, and, with the growth of the railroad, steam ferries became an even more important link to the rest of the country. In 1838, the New Jersey Railroad took over ferry service between New Jersey and Cortlandt Street.
After more than a decade of frenzied growth, and in the midst of high inflation (the cost of living went up sixty-six per cent in the first two months of 1836 alone) and a burgeoning labor movement, a notice appeared in the local papers: “Bread, Meat, Rent, Fuel! Their Prices Must Come Down. The Voice of the people Shall Be heard, and Will Prevail!” A meeting in City Hall Park was announced for “All Friends of Humanity, determined to resist Monopolists and Extortioners.” When the huge rally adjourned, a mob, several hundred strong, stormed off to the warehouse of Eli Hart & Co., at 175 Washington Street. The protesters, according to the next day’s Evening Post, “commenced violent proceedings upon it and those who were in it,” smashing doors and windows, and throwing two hundred barrels of flour onto the street, along with a thousand bushels of wheat. One month later, the Wall Street panic of 1837 hit New York.
The shape of what would become the World Trade Center site—indeed of all lower Manhattan—did not change from around 1840 until the nineteen-sixties, when landfill began on a whole new scale. The New York City Street Directory for 1851 shows a neighborhood still catering to the commercial waterfront. The Northern Hotel is at 113 West Street, Henry Bicks runs a boarding house at 139-141 Liberty Street. Next door is a stable; a cooper; Israel Reckhow, a pickle merchant; Bass Clark & Dibble, grocers, and a tobacconist selling “segars.” Washington Street, too, is full of boarding houses, with their neighboring stables and porterhouses. On a single block of Cortlandt, between Washington and West, four hotels and six grocers are listed, along with the offices of the Paterson Railroad, the New Jersey Railroad, and the Jersey City ferry.
The Wall Street area, to the south, had become identified exclusively with finance, and other businesses had migrated the few blocks north: jewellers, engravers, tinsmiths; purveyors of dry goods, fancy goods, and straw goods. The sixteen acres was home to Rauch & Co., pencil-case makers; B. P. Crandall & Son, Hobby Horses; Edward Norris, naturalist; Henry Gerker, curled hair; and John Lenning, huckster. “Israel Minor & Co., druggist” is listed at 214 Fulton, just east of Greenwich, and the store is still there in the background of an 1869 photograph of the tracks of the first cable-operated elevated railroad in New York City. Just down the block, at 193 Fulton Street, is a property that the Directory lists as: “Duncan Phyfe, residence.” Duncan Phyfe had moved to the area when it was still Trinity Church Farm, just a few generations after the Dutch settlers. Now the neighborhood was a completely integrated part of the greatest modern city in the world.
When New York’s ambitious landfill effort resumed, in 1966, neither shells nor animal carcasses were dumped by cartmen into the Church Farm’s acres. To reach the bedrock necessary for the World Trade Center’s foundation, dirt was removed from the site and dumped into the Hudson, pushing the shoreline out and making it possible to create Battery Park City. From the Stage Door’s dining room, I watched bulldozers working in the large seeping pit ringed with charred, abandoned buildings. They rolled down a slope that, for all I knew, mirrored the rocky shore that had greeted the Tijger. Then I left the deli and joined the tourists below, walking past what must have been the Holy Ground, trying to picture the controversial plans for the site’s redevelopment. History has always struck me as improbable, as improbable as the future, and certainly the history of these sixteen acres seemed less like a comforting eulogy than like an unfinished story of a varied, haphazard, ongoing life. I began to think about the title Stokes chose for his gigantic encyclopedia of New York. Not “The History of Manhattan Island” or “The Way We Lived Then” or any number of predictable, reasonable titles that one could imagine for a history of the city but “The Iconography of Manhattan Island.” An icon, when it is not an exquisite painting of an Eastern Orthodox saint, is generally understood to be an important and enduring symbol. How wonderful that the icons of I. N. Phelps Stokes are not only the grand and majestic images we associate with memorials but also the documents of thousands of daily events, disagreements, compromises, and mundane decisions—the shells and sand that shaped New York City. ♦
