The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  To this day, in the Irish section of the Village, you can still hear an alternative version of this history, a legend that savors of Irish class warfare. In this telling, the regular folks who lived around Richmond Hill didn’t like it that high and mighty types literally looked down on them from their big house at the top of the hill. And so they not only tore the house down, they flattened the hill.

  A NEON SIGN HANGING FROM THE WALL OF THE TOWN HOUSE AT 59 Grove Street advertises the presence of Marie’s Crisis Cafe, the small piano bar in the basement. Lower down on the wall, a plaque from 1923 explains that a contemporary of the Washingtons, Adamses, and Burr died there in 1809. The name “Crisis” is in his honor. The “Marie” is for Marie Dumont, the original owner.

  Thomas Paine didn’t die in the current building but in a wood-frame house that stood on the spot before it. In 1809 Greenwich was still largely the countryside Abigail Adams had described twenty years earlier, with large estates, farms, and some small hamlets stitched together by the meandering lanes and paths that would become the Village’s famously confusing knot of streets. Paine didn’t do much in the Village except die there. As often happens to revolutionaries when their revolutions are won, he died impoverished and largely unloved by the nation he’d helped to create, his radical ideas having made him an unwanted outsider. Which is why it’s fitting that he chose to end his days where he did.

  Paine had arrived in Philadelphia from England in 1774, just in time to help light the spark of the American Revolution. He was in his late thirties, a man of restless intelligence who had not yet found his footing in the world. He’d followed his Quaker father into the corset-making business for a while, gone to sea, taught English, and importantly worked as a tax collector, where he saw firsthand the “numerous and various distresses” taxation imposed on the poor. He was also an amateur scientist and inventor, which led to his meeting Ben Franklin in London. With encouragement and a letter of introduction from Franklin, he left England for the American colonies, where he plunged straight into the independence movement. His Common Sense, the most influential pamphlet of its time, appeared in January 1776. It quickly sold an unthinkable one hundred thousand copies and was universally discussed and argued. William Blake cheered Paine as the man who could “overthrow all the armies of Europe with a single pamphlet.” The Declaration of Independence came that July. Paine enlisted in the militia the following month and began writing The Crisis, his series of pamphlets written to rally support for the war. (“These are the times that try men’s souls . . .”)

  When the war was won in 1783, however, his influence waned. Temperamentally unsuited to bureaucratic life, he held and lost a few minor positions in the new government. In 1787 he left for England and France. He was in Paris to rejoice when the revolution began in 1789. Back in England in 1791, he wrote his hot-tempered Rights of Man as a retort to “the nonsense, for it deserves no better name” of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke, fearing that the violence of the French revolt might ignite similar actions in England, argued that a people had no right to depose their hereditary monarch.

  “All hereditary government is in its nature tyranny,” Paine thundered back. “To inherit a government, is to inherit the people, as if they were flocks and herds.” The British Crown banished him for treason. He went back to France, where he was promptly invited to join the National Convention—and promptly imprisoned (gently, under house arrest in a former palace) for speaking out against Louis’s execution. “Kill the King,” he’d argued, “but not the man.”

  He worked on The Age of Reason during his ten months’ confinement. “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of,” he declares at the outset. “My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches . . . appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” This won him no new friends back in God-fearing America, where he returned, sixty-five years old and in fragile health, in 1802. “When President Thomas Jefferson invited Paine to the White House, one Federalist newspaper vilified him as ‘irreligious, depraved, unworthy to associate with the President of the United States.’ ”

  For his service to the new nation he’d been given a small, formerly Tory-owned farm in New Rochelle, but his neighbors despised him and possibly plotted to do him bodily harm. His health failing, in 1806 he moved to the city, where a friend, the painter John Wesley Jarvis, put him up in his home on Church Street. In 1808 Paine moved out to a house on Herring (now Bleecker) Street, then asked an old friend, a Madame Bonneville, to look after him. She rented for him the house at what’s now 59 Grove Street and had the old man carried to it in an armchair. He died in a back room within a month, on June 8, 1809. Few noticed that a hero of the Revolution had passed. One of his few obituaries ran in the New-York Evening Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton and other Federalists for whom the post-Revolution Paine had been an irritant. According to the Post he’d “lived long, did some good and much harm.” He was interred on his farm, with fewer than ten people in attendance.

  The indignities didn’t end there. In 1819 William Cobbett, a British radical and journalist, exhumed Paine’s corpse and took it to England, where he intended a proper memorial. He was refused permission and stored the remains in his attic. It’s said that after Cobbett’s death in 1835 his son sold Paine’s remains, piecemeal—a hand here, the jawbone there—to fans in England and France.

  PAINE DIED IN OLD, COUNTRY GREENWICH, BUT A PLAGUE, A PRISON, and a potter’s field would soon help transform the village into a city.

  All the hectic rebuilding in lower Manhattan after the Revolutionary War; the imperfect filling of former swampland and bog and waterfront; the increasing difficulties of drawing fresh water from overtaxed springs and streams; the metastasis of commercial activities into residential streets; the inadequate provisions for sewage and garbage disposal; and the huge influx of people into what was still a very small space combined to make New York in the last decades of the 1700s and first of the 1800s a noisy, stinky, soggy, overcrowded, often filthy hive of activity. Not surprisingly, deadly epidemics of smallpox, cholera, and yellow fever periodically broke out. A committee of citizens charged with determining the cause of the outbreaks cited the city’s “deep damp cellars, sunken yards, unfinished water lots, public slips containing filth and stagnant water, burials in the city, narrow and filthy streets, the inducement to intemperance offered by more than a thousand tippling-houses, and the want of an adequate supply of pure and wholesome water.”

  Successive waves of yellow fever drove many New Yorkers to summertime residences in the countryside. Washington Irving, who made Sleepy Hollow and other Hudson River towns famous, was a Manhattanite who made his first trip up the river as a teenager when his parents sent him out of the city to escape a yellow fever epidemic in the summer of 1798. Many others escaped to the nearer countryside of Greenwich, a refuge from pestilence with its former swampland drained and its air fresh.

  It was the especially virulent epidemic in the summer of 1822 that prompted the relocation not only of residents but of businesses and government offices to Greenwich, “which place,” Haswell writes in Reminiscences, “became the scene of hurried building operations on a large scale.” A local preacher spoke of seeing corn growing at the corner of today’s West Eleventh and Fourth Streets on a Saturday morning, and on the same spot, the very next day, a rough-hewn building “capable of accommodating three hundred boarders. Stores of rough boards were [also] constructed in a day.” In one week in 1822 “the Custom House, the Post Office, the Banks, the Newspapers located themselves in the village or in the upper part of Broadway, where they were free from the impending danger,” and these places “almost instantaneously became the seat of the immense business usually carried on in the great metropolis.” The new buildings were t
hrown up along Greenwich’s existing paths and lanes, making permanent the Village’s jumbled street plan. The name of today’s Bank Street derives from this period.

  Some people returned to the city that fall, when the epidemic had passed, but others stayed. Brick row houses popped up all through the 1820s along the lines of Astor’s development at the south end of Greenwich and along the north-south thoroughfares of Hudson and Greenwich Streets and Sixth Avenue. In 1825 the Commercial Advertiser noted that “Greenwich is no longer a country village. Such has been the growth of our city that the building of one block more will connect the two places; and in three years’ time, at the rate building has been everywhere erected during the last season, Greenwich will be known only as a part of the city, and the suburbs will be beyond them.” Between 1825 and 1835 the population of the Village doubled. It doubled again by 1850. New York grew and flowed around it and was so built up below Fourteenth Street by the 1850s that young New Yorkers scoffed at the idea that Greenwich Village had ever been a true, separate village.

  NEWGATE PRISON OPENED IN 1797 AT THE FOOT OF CHRISTOPHER Street on what was then the waterfront at Greenwich Street. Greenwich was still far enough out of town in the 1790s to be considered the perfect site for such a facility, making Newgate the first penitentiary to which criminals from the city were sent “up the river” and predating Sing Sing by three decades. Newgate was a progressive institution aimed, under the influence of the city’s Quakers, at reforming convicts by teaching them trades like weaving, cobbling, and blacksmithing. Its security was so lax, however, that frequent riots and escapes forced it to close after Sing Sing opened to replace it in 1826. Jacob Lorillard, of the tobacco Lorillards, bought the buildings and converted them into a sanatorium and spa. The area had filled in during the prison’s thirty years. The Greenwich Hotel was built nearby and tradesmen spread along Christopher Street. Greenwich Market on the south side of Christopher Street flourished from the 1810s into the 1830s; Christopher Street is still unusually wide past Greenwich Street because the horse-drawn wagons that used the market needed the room to maneuver. It closed in the mid-1830s when the new Jefferson Market, over at what’s now Sixth Avenue and West Tenth Street, siphoned off its business. By 1820 a stagecoach was running between Christopher Street and the Financial District five times a day, helping to knit the city and Village together.

  Christopher Street was the site of another very important development for both the Village and the city in 1807, when Robert Fulton’s steamboat—originally simply called the Steamboat, later renamed Clermont—set out from the Christopher slip for Albany. A couple of thousand New Yorkers came out from the city to watch the launch, many expecting to see “Fulton’s Folly” blow up. Fulton, a Pennsylvania-born inventor who’d previously experimented with submarines, was not, as legend often states, the inventor of the world’s first steamboat. Inventors in the United States and France had successfully built versions some twenty years earlier. But the idea was still new and risible in New York, and several of Fulton’s investors provided funding only under cover of anonymity to avoid being mocked by their friends. Local rivermen, who rightly saw steam power as a threat to their livelihoods, “accidentally” rammed their sloops into the Steamboat hoping to damage or sink it. But Fulton’s ungainly, flat-bottomed, paddle-wheeled box survived, and steamboat service between Manhattan and upriver cities and towns was soon a booming business. Steamboats also took over the ferry services between Manhattan and New Jersey on the Hudson side. On the East River, Old Fulton Street still leads up into Brooklyn Heights from the Fulton Ferry landing in the neighborhood now known as Dumbo. Walt Whitman would often ride the steam ferry from this Brooklyn landing over to Manhattan, and he wrote one of his best poems about it, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

  TWENTY-FOUR YEARS BEFORE THE PLAGUE SPURRED THE DEVELOPMENT of the western Village, it populated the eastern side of the Village, Washington Square in particular. During the epidemic of 1798, when a young Washington Irving was being spirited up the Hudson, the city sought a place far enough out of town to bury the glut of its dead. City government chose a swampy patch on the eastern side of Greenwich, which already hosted a few church graves. Over the next thirty years this soggy ground served as “our Golgotha,” as one doctor called it, a potter’s field for paupers and plague victims. Apparently duelists also used the land, and a wooden gallows for executions was sited roughly where the fountain is today. (The so-called Hangman’s Elm or Hanging Tree, the three-hundred-year-old English elm in the northwest corner of the park, was never used for this purpose.) The last hanging from the gallows was that of Rose Butler, a black nineteen-year-old convicted in 1820 of arson after a fire in her master’s house. Arson was a crime of gravest public concern in a city that had suffered several disastrous conflagrations. Since the slave revolts of 1712 and 1741, whenever anyone black was implicated in a fire, old fears of a Negro conspiracy were awakened. Thus Butler’s conviction was relatively ensured, as was her death sentence. An enormous crowd gathered in the Square to watch it carried out.

  By 1826 the ground was too crowded with corpses to take any more. The city created a new potter’s field uptown near today’s Bryant Park and converted the old one into the Washington Military Parade Ground. Opened on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Square’s inauguration was celebrated with “a great public barbecue for which two roasted oxen and two hundred hams were prepared.” The wheels of cannons on parade sometimes broke through the ground and into the old grave pits, revealing corpses in yellow shrouds, which had designated them as fever victims.

  Nevertheless, the Square was so popular a public space that people began to build grand homes along its perimeter. Commercial buildings were quickly taking over lower Manhattan, making life increasingly uncivilized for the resident burghers and patricians. Around Wall Street and lower Broadway, tall buildings—five stories was the equivalent of a skyscraper then—reared up and overshadowed their homes. Seeking sunlight and fresh air, some moved across the East River to the brand-new suburb Brooklyn Heights, advertised to Manhattan’s gentry in the 1820s as “the nearest country retreat.” (Fulton’s East River ferry service, launched in 1814, made it an easy commute.)

  Others moved up to Washington Square. In the 1830s they lined the north side of the Square with fine brick row houses, including the Row, the block of Greek Revival town houses that still stands between Fifth Avenue and University Place. Some of the city’s richest and oldest families lived there, including the Rhinelanders, Delanos, Coopers (as in Cooper Union on Astor Place), and Goulds, with staffs of up to sixteen chambermaids, butlers, footmen, cooks. In Washington Square, Henry James has Dr. Sloper move up to one of these homes from downtown in 1835. “[T]his portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable,” he writes from half a century’s remove. “It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honorable look.” James was born on Washington Place, which runs east from the Square, in 1843, but his family moved to Europe when he was still an infant. When they returned in 1847 he grew up on West Fourteenth Street near Fifth Avenue, though he spent many hours at his grandmother’s home at 19 Washington Square North.

  In 1832, the fledgling University of the City of New York (later New York University), founded a year earlier as “a nonsectarian training ground for the mercantile elite,” went deeply into debt buying up properties on the east side of the Square for its first permanent building, a handsome Gothic hall “evocative of Oxford and Cambridge.” Beginning an NYU tradition that continues into the twenty-first century, the construction of the building was fraught with controversy. Bitter faculty, teaching in temporary quarters downtown, often went unpaid. Parts of the building expanded across property lines, causing legal problems. To cut construction costs, the university and the building’s contractor arranged to use marble cut by prisoners at Sing Sing’s quarry up the Hudso
n. This enraged local stonecutters, who attacked the contractor’s office on Broadway in what came to be known as the Stonecutters Riot of 1834.

  The streets on the south side of the Square were built up as well. A long block of what’s now Washington Square South was lined with large, marble-front row houses for the burghers, advertised “To Capitalists” in the New York Gazette. More modest brick and wood-frame houses went up along Amity Street, now West Third Street. In the 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe lived, briefly, in two of them and enjoyed, briefly, the peak of his popular success while there.

  From the start, Poe’s life reads like one of his stories, a tale of constant wanderings, struggles, and self-defeat. He was born to poor traveling actors in Boston in 1809, roughly ten years ahead of Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, and Baudelaire. His parents separated, then died of tuberculosis within days of each other. The wealthy Allans of Richmond, Virginia, took him in when he was two but never legally adopted him. They took him to England when he was six, returning to Richmond five years later. Poe grew up a melancholic loner; his first known poem, written when he was fifteen, begins “Last night, with many cares & toils oppress’d, / Weary, I laid me on a couch to rest.” Despite his desperate desire to please and impress John Allan, his foster father never approved of him; Allan would die in 1834 without leaving Edgar a penny. To be fair, Edgar made it difficult. He entered the new University of Virginia at seventeen, ran up an enormous gambling debt, and was forced to drop out when Allan wouldn’t cover it. He left for Baltimore, enlisted in the army, and meanwhile self-published Tamerlane and Other Poems, the first of several books he’d publish himself at great cost with no appreciable returns in sales or critical esteem. He attended West Point in 1830, was bored, and got himself court-martialed in 1831.