Wouter Van Twiller, who succeeded Peter Minuit as director-general of the Dutch settlement in 1633 (Minuit “bought” Manhattan from the natives in 1626), was not a very diligent leader of the colony but he did do well for himself in the new world. Taking advantage of the great distance separating him from his bosses in Europe, he appropriated for his personal use two hundred acres of land in Noortwyck that Minuit had mapped out as a future company farm. Van Twiller turned it into a tobacco plantation he named Bossen Bouwerie (Farm in the Woods). His farmhouse is thought to have been the first built in the area. Late in the 1630s he transferred two parcels of the plantation to Jan Van Rotterdam and Francis Lastley; the lane that ran between their farms would eventually come to be known as Christopher Street, the oldest street in the area.
So fair claim can be made for Van Twiller, Van Rotterdam, and Lastley as the first European residents of what later became Greenwich Village. They weren’t there alone. A native settlement called Sapponckanican lay near the intersection of today’s Gansevoort and Washington Streets. Gansevoort Street is believed to be laid out along the native trail to the settlement, which was evidently abandoned in the 1660s, though for the rest of the century European settlers continued to use the name Sapponckanican for their own hamlet that grew up on the spot.
In 1644 the first black residents moved into the area, when New Amsterdam granted some of its slaves their “half-freedom” to grow food for themselves and for the colonists on mostly tiny parcels of land between today’s Houston and Christopher Streets. Among them, the former slaves Domingo Anthony, who farmed a plot at the southwest corner of today’s Washington Square Park, and Paul d’Angola, who worked a lot between Minetta Lane and Thompson Street. A lane that followed the banks of the Minetta Brook and connected the farms was called the Negroes’ Causeway in colonial times. It is today’s Minetta Street.
Other so-called free negro lots were drizzled throughout present-day Chinatown, Soho, and the East Village. The Dutch were not acting out of altruism or good fellowship. Spread across the island, the black farms were intended to act as a defensive barrier and buffer zone between the town and the Lenape, the area’s native population, who had been roused to fury by Willem Kieft, New Netherland’s director-general from 1638 to 1647. Hardheaded, tyrannical, and bloody-minded, Kieft had angered the natives by trying to levy taxes against them. Violence ensued. Kieft decided stern punishment was the only way to bring the unruly natives in line. In February 1643 he led raids on two of their villages, one north of the town (near the eastern end of the present Grand Street) and one across the river in New Jersey. Kieft and his cohort massacred some 120 men, women, and children, triumphantly dragging mutilated bodies and severed heads back to town. “Young children, some of them snatched from their mothers, were cut in pieces before the eyes of their parents, and the pieces were thrown into the fire or into the water,” a shocked townsman reported. “Other babes were bound on planks and then cut through, stabbed and miserably massacred so that it would break a heart of stone.” The atrocities ignited a disastrous war that flared from New Jersey to Long Island. A few thousand natives died, many outlying farms were burned and abandoned, and New Amsterdam was brought close to ruin by the time the conflict ended. Kieft was recalled and Peter Stuyvesant was brought in to restore order and rebuild.
In 1664 British warships sailed up to New Amsterdam and took it from Stuyvesant without a shot fired, renaming it New York. (The Dutch took it back in 1673 and renamed it New Orange but relinquished it again, and for good, in a year.) At first, English colonial law continued to allow black freemen to own land, and free blacks purchased sometimes significant parcels of land through the seventeenth century. Meanwhile, the English gradually tightened the reins on black slaves, requiring them to carry passes, levying heavy punishments on escaped slaves and anyone harboring them, and establishing, in 1702, the office of a Common Whipper of Slaves. A new slave market opened on Wall Street in 1711. The following year, a group of up to fifty black men and women “carrying guns, swords, knives, and hatchets” staged a rebellion, setting fire to a building on Maiden Lane (then on the outskirts of the city), killing or wounding some fifteen whites who rushed to put it out, including a few of their masters. Of those captured, “twenty were hanged and three burned at the stake. One, a pregnant woman, had her execution postponed” until after she gave birth. The incident was an excuse for a harsh new “Act for preventing Suppressing and punishing the Conspiracy and Insurrection of Negroes and other Slaves.” This included a new prohibition against free blacks, mulattoes, or natives owning “any Houses, Lands, Tenements or Hereditaries.” As a result, by the Revolutionary War most of the former Negro lots in Greenwich Village were in white hands.
UNDER THE ENGLISH, COLONIAL NEW YORK DEVELOPED FROM A frontier trading post into a port city. By 1700 its population was around five thousand, ten times that of 1640. It had expanded north almost to Fulton Street, packing in hundreds of new buildings on streets that were being paved with cobblestones. The decrepit defensive battlement at Wall Street was pulled down to make way for northward growth, although there wasn’t much at first. The stone Great Dock was constructed on the East River in 1675, landfill widened the tip of the island all around, and stone bulkheads protected the new shoreline, which soon bristled with wharfs. The city grew and prospered through the first half of the 1700s, powered by shipping, riding boom markets in commodities such as sugar and slaves. By 1740 one in five New Yorkers was a slave. The city’s numbers also swelled with new immigrants: Germans, Irish and Scots, many of them indentured (in effect, white slaves), and Jews.
The war of independence brought seven years of dislocation and disaster. Occupied by the British in 1776, the city was set alight, likely by Patriot saboteurs. After the British withdrawal on November 25, 1783, the burned-out zone west of Broadway was cleared for new construction. Wharfs that had deteriorated during the occupation were rebuilt, shipyards bloomed. Existing streets were paved and graded, new ones laid out. A flood tide of new immigrants brought the population to more than 120,000 by 1820.
For all its growth and busyness, however, the city was still packed tightly into a very small area at the tip of Manhattan. You could easily walk anywhere, as long as you minded the odd open sewer trench or the filled-in swamp where the ground was soft and still settling. A new housing development proposed in 1806 for up near the canal that ran west from the Collect Pond to the Hudson—filled in a decade later to form Canal Street—failed because nobody wanted to live “so far out of town.” In his Reminiscences of New York by an Octogenarian published in 1896, the civil engineer Charles Haynes Haswell remembered that “As late as 1820 I, in company with an elder relative, occasionally practised pistol-shooting at a target on a fence on the south side in this open and unfrequented street.” He also remembered hunting snipe on Lispenard’s Meadow, south of the present Broome Street. When the new City Hall opened in 1812, three sides of the exterior were marble, but the north face was cheaper brownstone because there wasn’t much of anyone north of Chambers Street to impress.
Still, some New Yorkers could already envision a much larger city. In 1811 the Commissioners of Streets and Roads in the City of New York published a map that planned for the Manhattan of the future. The commissioners’ plan, sometimes referred to as the Randel Plan for its chief engineer and surveyor, showed a rectilinear grid of numbered east-west streets and numbered and lettered north-south avenues imposing machinelike order from Houston Street all the way up to 155th Street. As with so much else in New York City’s history, real estate interests had top priority in the commissioners’ thoughts. In the report published with the map, they noted that “one of the first objects which claimed their attention was the form and manner in which the business should be conducted; that is to say, whether they should confine themselves to rectilinear and rectangular streets, or whether they should adopt some of those supposed improvements by circles, ovals, and stars, which certainly embellish a plan, whatever may be
their effect as to convenience and utility.” (This is surely a disparaging reference to Pierre L’Enfant’s more fanciful and, to this day, traffic-bedeviling plan for the new District of Columbia.) “In considering that subject they could not but bear in mind that a city is to be composed principally of the habitations of men, and that straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in. The effect of these plain and simple reflections was decisive.”
From the day it was published the plan drew harsh criticism. Where were the utilitarian back alleys, the monotony-relieving plazas, the breathtaking hilltop vistas that befit a great city? “These are men who would have cut down the seven hills of Rome,” one New Yorker griped in 1818. He was not far off; much of the once hilly island would be flattened as the grid marched inexorably uptown. In 1893 a Harper’s Monthly writer complained:
The magnificent opportunity which was given to the Commissioners to create a beautiful city simply was wasted and thrown away. Having to deal with a region well wooded, broken by hills, and diversified by watercourses—where the very contours of the land suggested curving roads, and its unequal surface reservations for beauty’s sake alone—these worthy men decided that the forests should be cut away, the hills levelled, the hollows filled in, the streams buried; and upon the flat surface thus created they clapped down a ruler and completed their Boeotian [i.e., dull-witted] programme by creating a city in which all was right angles and straight lines.
The writer summed up the plan as “a mere grind of money making in stupid commonplace ways.”
One small area on the map bucked the precision-tooled order. Just above Houston Street on the Hudson flank of the island lay a maze of crooked, angled streets, a small eruption of eccentricity and disorder: the former Bossen Bouwerie, now called Greenwich Village.
2
A Magnet for Misfits
POOR TOM PAINE, THERE HE LIES;
NOBODY LAUGHS AND NOBODY CRIES;
WHERE HE HAS GONE OR HOW HE FARES,
NOBODY KNOWS AND NOBODY CARES!
—Nursery rhyme
EDGAR ALLAN POE IS DEAD. HE DIED IN BALTIMORE THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY. THIS ANNOUNCEMENT WILL STARTLE MANY, BUT FEW WILL BE GRIEVED BY IT.
—Rufus Wilmot Griswold
WHILE THE TOWN CROWDED INTO THE SOUTHERN TIP OF Manhattan was going through all its growth, changes, and catastrophes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the area that became Greenwich Village remained quiet, bucolic countryside, remote from the bustle and turmoil though not entirely isolated. In the 1650s “the few houses at Sappokanican” are mentioned in settlement records, an early indication that a small hamlet had grown up on Van Twiller’s land. It’s mentioned again thirty years later, when Jasper Danckaerts, a member of the Dutch Protestant sect called Labadists, came to the new world to scout out a location for a Labadist colony. In his journal entries for September 1679, he records setting out by foot to explore Manhattan, walking out of town on “the Broadway.” On the way out of town along Broadway he passed “many habitations of negroes, mulattoes and whites.” He found the island dotted with farms and small hamlets, both Dutch and English. Three hours’ walk brought him up to the New Harlem settlement, where he spent the night in the home of the local schout or sheriff. “This house was constantly filled with people, all the time drinking, for the most part . . . execrable rum.” He had also “the best cider we have tasted.” Heading back down toward New York the next day, passing through large orchards where the peaches lay on the ground in such profusion that even the hogs had eaten their fill, he and his local guide Gerrit crossed the island and “came to the North River, which we followed a little within the woods,” to the hamlet whose name he recorded as Sappokanikke. “Gerrit having a sister and friends there we rested ourselves, and drank some good beer, which refreshed us.” Around the time of Danckaerts’s visit, a Dutchman named Yellis de Mandeville, who lived near the village of Greenwijck on Long Island, bought some of Wouter Van Twiller’s old Bossen Bouwerie and apparently named it Greenwijck. By the 1720s this had been anglicized to Greenwich. Because the settlements outside the city were called villages, Greenwich came to be known as Greenwich Village.
The farmland of Greenwich continued to be parceled out and developed in the 1700s. Small clusters of buildings sprouted at the crossings of country lanes and along the Minetta. Early in the century, the Crown gave Trinity Church two very large parcels of land that ran up the west side of the island all the way from the city to Christopher Street, forming Trinity Church farm. East of it lay the Elbert Herring and Thomas Ludlow farms. In the 1740s Sir Peter Warren—whose home in the city was burned in a supposed Negro uprising in 1741—assembled a large estate running from the Hudson to around today’s Sixth Avenue, and from Christopher Street up past Twenty-first Street. The Irish-born Warren cut one of the most gallant figures in colonial New York. He’d already demonstrated his daring and courage as a young captain in the British navy when he was posted to New York in 1728, where high society received him with all the honors and flirtations due a dashing officer. In 1744 he was appointed commodore of a squadron of British warships that preyed on French and Spanish booty off the Leeward Islands, taking two dozen prizes in just four months. Under the British naval system the commander shared the spoils with the Crown, so Warren became very rich, as well as earning an admiralty and a knighthood. He also married into one of New York’s wealthiest families, the De Lanceys.
Warren was evidently the first rich man from the city to build a country place in Greenwich, a fine home to which he and his family could escape during the heat and stink of summer in the crowded city. On his death in 1752 Warren’s estate was parceled out among three daughters, one of whom married the earl of Abingdon, namesake of the Village’s Abingdon Square at Eighth Avenue between West Twelfth and Bleecker Streets. Another married a Colonel William Skinner, and Christopher Street was known for some time as Skinner Road. This land later fell to Charles Christopher Amos, and the three parallel east-west roads through it were named Charles, Amos, and Christopher Streets. Amos was later renamed West Tenth Street.
Other wealthy New Yorkers followed Warren’s lead, so that “by the mid-1760s there was an almost unbroken line of great estates up the west side of Manhattan.” It was lush countryside even then, and there was still good fishing in the Minetta Brook and plenty of small game to shoot. Haswell, in Reminiscences, records childhood memories of seeing men striding up Broadway and Greenwich Street with their guns on their shoulders and their dogs alongside, “on the way to the suburbs for the shooting of woodcock, English snipe, and rabbits.” Captain Thomas Clark, a veteran of the French and Indian War, established a large estate just north of Warren’s in an area that still bears the name he gave it, Chelsea. Abraham Mortier leased a part of the Trinity Church farm called Richmond Hill, near today’s Varick Street. He built a mansion on top of the promontory with a view of the Hudson. George Washington made it his headquarters at the start of the war; it’s said that Martha enjoyed carriage rides up the Fitzroy Road, which ran north near today’s Eighth Avenue, to the Chelsea and Bloomingdale estates (north of Chelsea in what became Hell’s Kitchen). Abigail Adams, who moved there with her husband, John, when he became vice president in 1789, described the still rustic setting in a letter to her sister Elizabeth Shaw.
The house in which we reside is situated upon a hill, the avenue to which is interspersed with forest trees, under which a shrubbery rather too luxuriant and wild has taken shelter . . . In front of the house, the noble Hudson rolls his majestic waves, bearing upon its bosom innumerable small vessels, which are constantly forwarding the rich products of the neighbouring soil to the busy hand of a more extensive commerce . . . On the right hand [uptown], an extensive plain presents us with a view of fields covered with verdure, and pastures full of cattle. On the left [downtown], the city opens upon us, intercepted only by clumps of trees, and some rising ground, which serves to heighten the beauty of the scene,
by appearing to conceal a part. In the background, is a large flower-garden, enclosed with a hedge and some very handsome trees. On one side of it, a grove of pines and oaks fit for contemplation.
The Adamses hosted dinners at Richmond Hill that were long remembered for their elegance and opulence, at which Thomas Jefferson, foreign ambassadors, and local toffs feasted on lavish repasts of game and truffle pies, roast beef, lobster, and pâté. In the late 1790s Aaron Burr took over the house as his country retreat. It was from Richmond Hill that he left for his fatal duel with Alexander Hamilton in Weehawken, New Jersey, on the morning of July 11, 1804. Returning to Richmond Hill later that day, he wrote to Hamilton’s doctor, “Mr. Burr’s respectful compliments. He requests Dr. Hosack to inform him of the present state of General H. and the hopes which are entertained for his recovery.” Hamilton died the next afternoon and Burr fled to avoid a murder rap.
After that Richmond Hill’s glory faded. By the 1820s the city was growing up around it. John Jacob Astor, who’d bought the property from Burr, had the house rolled on logs downhill to the southeast corner of Charlton and Varick Streets, then leveled the hill and laid out streets lined with modest row houses—now expensive historic homes on Charlton, King, and Van Dam Streets. The mansion, falling into dilapidation at its new location, housed the Richmond Hill Theatre and Miss Nelson’s Theatre in the 1830s (50 cents for box seats, 25 cents for the pit) and a stable before it was torn down in 1849. A block of brick houses rose up on the site. In 1913, when the city widened Varick Street as part of the Seventh Avenue extension, these were torn down as well, and what was believed to be the foundation of the old house was uncovered.
The Village Page 2
