Manhattan is the cultural center and lifeblood of the five boroughs: The world's financial and entertainment capital, with miles and miles of shopping, the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, the punks in the Village, the jazz of Harlem ... it's all here. But Manhattan also has acres and acres of untrodden forests, alleys dating back to the days of peg legged Dutchmen and tricorner-. hatted Tories, flocks of rusted lOO-year-old lampposts, abandoned subway stops, statues depicting unremembered heroes, relics of forgotten wars, remnants of post roads from the 1700s, and a Hollywood-style sidewalk of fame.
For its first 150 years or so, New York City was confined to the southern tip of Manhattan Island, and was originally a Dutch trading outpost featuring a fort, first called Fort Amsterdam and then British Fort George. The city blossomed as one of the world's great ports with the Hudson and East Rivers meeting at the Battery. Later, the depth of the bedrock allowed Manhattan to grow as high as its great architects could dream.
Construction of New York's City Hall was completed in 1812. Few thought the city would advance much farther north than where the Post Road to Boston branched from Broadway. North of City Hall, Manhattan was a collection of small towns, such as Bloomingdale, Harrnansville, and Yorktown. The year before City Hall opened, a blueprint called the Commissioners' Plan was approved, and drawn up by surveyor John Randel Ir., instituting the island's street grid system, and development gradually spread up town.
Deep within the bustling grid that begins at Houston Street and continues for more than 200 numbered streets uptown, amid the winding, rambling ·lanes of Greenwich Village, and even in the clean geometry of Midtown, there are places that evade detection.
In lower Manhattan, traces of the past can be found in its street names. Broad Street was the widest street in the area other than Broadway, and it got that way because tall-masted Dutch ships once sailed down the middle; the waterway was paved over in the 1700s, leaving an especially wide roadway. Old Slip, Peck Slip, and Market Slip were once waterways where ships "slipped" in to dock. Bridge Street crossed the Broad Street canal, while Wall Street commemorates a wall built of timber and earthwork by the Dutch in 1652 to keep marauding Brits and Indians out. Though the wall was dismantled in 1699, terra-cotta plaques depicting it can be seen in the Lexington Avenue Wall Street station serving the 4 and 5 trains.
Peter Minuit (1580-1638) is reputed to have purchased the whole of Manhattan Island in 1626 from the Lenape Indians for goods valued at 60 Dutch guilders. The actual transaction likely took place at Shokoropack Rock in today's Inwood Hill Park, almost as far removed from Peter Minuit Plaza as you can get and still be in Manhattan. Minuit served as New Netherland's third Director General for the next seven years after the deal took place.
2 Battery Park Control House Battery Park at State and Bridge Streets
The subway station at Bowling Green is among the more unusual in the city. It is the site of one of NYC's more unfortunate subway decor makeovers and the location of one of New York's last remaining aboveground station houses.Bowling Green Station opened on July 10, 1905. Its architects, George C. Heins and Christopher LaFarge, lined its coved (indented) walls with elaborate name tablets and lengthy, mosaic "tapestries." In 1978, the original designs were covered in oceans of burnt orange, a favorite color of subway renovators in the 1960s and 1970s.
Heins and LaFarge also designed Battery Park's two "control houses" in which fares were taken. One of them remains just south of Bowling Green at State and Bridge Streets. Upon entering it, note the word "Entrance" above the interior north doorway. Subways once had designated entrances and exits, and passengers were expected to use their respective passages in or out, hence the term "control house." The Battery Park Control House achieved official NYC landmark status in 1973.
Bowling Green Broadway and Whitehall Street
Bowling Green, where State Street meets Whitehall Street and Battery Place, is where Broadway begins. There's a continuous road beginning here that runs all the way north to Rensselaer County (north of the Bronx, the road is known as the Albany Post Road, after its original use for mail carriers), and if you include New York State Route 9, the road goes all the way to the Canadian border, just north of the town of Champ lain. Bowling Green was indeed used for lawn bowling, starting in 1732 when, by order of the city council, it became NYC's first public park. In the early 1770s, it was surrounded by an iron fence topped by crowns; a gilded statue of George III was erected in the center of the green. When the patriots declared independence in 1776, the statue was pulled down and, according to legend, melted down for ammunition. The fence, without its crowns, is still there.
4 James Leeson's Grave TrinityCemetery at Broadway and Wall Street
There's a curious set of symbols displayed on the top of lames Leeson's tombstone in Trinity Cemetery at Broadway and Wall Street. Leeson, who died in 1794, left behind an elaborate stone on which Masonic symbols such as a compass and hourglass are carved. At the top of the stone are a series of boxes and partly rendered boxes, some with one dot, some with two, and others blank. For over a century, the significance of these marks was debated. Was it a secret message or just ornamental filigree?
First, to find Leeson's grave: Look for the stone with the unusual markings at the top just to the left of Soldier's Monument in the north end of the cemetery just in front of Broadway.
In 1889, the Trinity Record (Trinity Church's newspaper of the period) announced that they had solved the mystery, and it was fairly easy to figure out. Simply set up three tic-tac-toe boards, nine squares each, and place the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I in the first, K, L, M, N, 0, P,leaving the last two squares blank. Then, place one dot on each letter in your first tic-tac-toe board, two in your second, and none in your third. (Count I and J as one square: in Colonial-era orthography, the two letters were the same.) Using this system, Leeson's final dispatch is spelled out quite clearly. The inscription says, "Remember Death."
The oldest stone in the cemetery is right up front-you can spot it through the fence from Broadway. Richard Churcher was only five when he passed away in 1681. He's recalled by a short, informally cut stone. A "reward" of sorts can be found on the back of the stone: a skull and crossbones, a popular motif on gravestones of the period. This was a burying ground even before the first Trinity Church was raised in 1696; the present Trinity was finished in 1846.
Federal Hall and the Map of Ohio
Nassau and Wall Streets
The Federal Hall National Memorial, at 26 Wall Street where it meets Broad and Nassau Streets across the way from the New York Stock Exchange, is an imposing Greek Revival building resembling the Parthenon in Athens. It takes its name from the old
Federal Hall, which served as New York City's first City Hall from 1701 until 1812. On April 30, 1789, George Washington took his oath as president just about where his imposing statue by John Quincy Adams Ward would be installed in 1883. The first Federal Hall gradually fell into disuse and disrepair, and it was sold and subsequently demolished in 1812. Thirty years later, in 1842, the U.S. Customs House was built on the spot. The building then became the second Federal Hall.
Intriguingly, there is a plaque on the Nassau Street end depicting the state of Ohio. With all the history that has occurred here since 1701 ... why Ohio? The plaque commemorates the Ohio Company of Associates, consisting of former Revolutionary War officers and Massachusetts soldiers that was formed in 1786 to plan the purchase and settlement of lands along the Ohio River.
The Bombs of Wall Street Wall and Broad Streets
On September 16, 1920, a bomb exploded in front of 23 Wall Street, the longtime offices of J.P. Morgan Ine., causing thirtythree deaths and 400 injuries.
When 23 Wall Street was constructed in 1913-14, the Morgan name was so wellknown that it was considered unnecessary to mark the building with it. The exterior of 23 Wall Street is pockmarked on the Wall Street side: these marks were produced by flying debris from the explosion, and they have since remained unrepaired.
Investigations centered on known Sicilian, Romanian, and Russian terrorist groups, but no sure leads developed and the FBI dropped the case in 1940. It is widely surmised that the blast was done by anarchic terrorists bent on destroying a building symbolic of American capitalism. The Bolsheviks had taken Russia by force two years earlier.
7 Broadway's Sidewalk Clock Broadway and Maiden Lane
One of Manhattan's most unique and beautiful monuments gets stepped on thousands of times each day.
William Barthman Iewelers store's sidewalk clock on Broadway and Maiden Lane was embedded there in 1899. It has been attacked by vandals and trodden on for years but it keeps on ticking (with the help of an electric motor). Barthman first set up shop in the financial district in 1884. An organization known as the Maiden Lane Historical Society set up a plaque at Barthrnan's in 1928 depicting what Broadway and Maiden Lane looked like that year. In 1946, the NYPD estimated that 51,000 people stepped on the clock each day between 11:00 AM and 2:00 PM.
8 City Hall Subway Station Located under CityHall Park
The world's most gorgeous ex-subway station is located at the south edge of the loop that turns Lexington Avenue IRT local 6
trains around to the south of the Brooklyn Bridge Station. It's been closed to the public since 1945, but can be seen by staying on the 6 local after the end of the line riding southbound as it loops around to enter the Brooklyn Bridge Station northbound, provided the conductor allows you to do so.
City Hall Station was designed by the architectural firm of Heins and LaParge, who built the subway's oldest stations back in the early 1900s. The construction included such features as arches, vaulted ceilings, and polychromatic tiles. Elegant chandeliers supply light and are supplemented by vaulted skylights of amethyst glass-which are still visible from City Hall Park, in a section of it now closed to the public. Arched stairways led from street level to the mezzanine, where tickets could be purchased. Tokens were never available at the City Hall Station since it was closed before tokens were adopted.
The wide turns a modern subway train has to take as it wends through City Hall Station make for large gaps between the platform and the cars. That, and the gradually declining use of the station, sealed the station's doom as an active subway stop in 1945. |
