On the centre building of the row which faces bowling Green Park on the south there is a tablet bearing the words:

THE SITE OF FORT AMSTERDAM,

BUILT IN 1626.

WITHIN THE FORTIFICATIONS

WAS ERECTED THE FIRST

SUBSTANTIAL CHURCH EDIFICE

ON THE ISLAND OF MANHATTAN.

IN 1787 THE FORT

WAS DEMOLISHED

AND THE GOVERNMENT HOUSE

BUILT UPON THIS SITE

This was the starting-point of the settlement which gradually became New York. In 1614 a stockade, called Fort Manhattan, was built as a temporary place of shelter for representatives of the United New Netherland Co., which had been formed to trade with the Indians. This company was replaced by the Dutch West India Co., with chartered rights to trade on the American coast, and the first step towards the forming of a permanent settlement was the building of Fort Amsterdam on the site of the stockade.

In 1664 New Amsterdam passed into British possession and became New York, while Fort Amsterdam became Fort James. Under Queen Anne it was Fort George, remaining so until demolished in 1787.

On the Fort's site was built the Government House, intended for Washington and the Presidents who should follow him. But none ever occupied it as the seat of government was removed to Philadelphia before the house was completed. After 1801 it became an office building, and was was demolished in 1815 to make room for the present structures.

The tiny patch of grass at the starting-point of Broadway, now called Bowling Green Park, was originally the centre of sports for colonists, and has been the scene of many stirring events. The iron railing which now surrounds it was set up in 1771, having been imported from England to enclose a lead equestrian statue of King George III. On the posts of the fence were representations of heads of members of the Royal family. In 1776, during the Revolution, the statue was dragged down and molded into bullets, and where the iron heads were knocked from the posts the fracture can still be seen.

When the English took possession of the city, in 1664, the Fort being regarded as useless, it was decided to build a Battery to protect the newly acquired possession. Thus the idea of the Battery was conceived, although the work was not actually carried out until 1684.

Beyond the Fort there was a fringe of land with the water reaching to a point within a line drawn from Water and Whitehall Streets to Greenwich Street. Sixty years after the Battery was built fifty guns were added, it having been lightly armed up to that time.

The Battery was demolished about the same time as the Fort. The land on which it stood became a small park, retaining the name of the Battery, and was gradually added to until it became the Battery Park of to-day.

A small island, two hundred feet off the Battery, to which it was connected by a drawbridge, was fortified in 1811 and called Fort Clinton. The armament was twenty-eight 32-pounders, none of which was ever fired at an enemy. In 1822 the island was ceded back to the city by the Federal Government—when the military headquarters were transferred to Governor's Island—and became a place of amusement under the name of Castle Garden. It was the first real home of opera in America. General Lafayette was received there in 1824, and there Samuel F.B. Morse first demonstrated the possibility of controlling an electric current in 1835. Jenny Lind, under the management of P.T. Barnum, appeared there in 1850. In 1855 it became a depot for the reception of immigrants; in 1890 the offices were removed to Ellis Island, and in 1896, after many postponements, Castle Garden was opened as a public aquarium.

State Street, facing the Battery, during the latter part of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century, was the fashionable quarter of the city, and on it were the homes of the wealthy. Several of the old houses still survive. No. 7, now a home for immigrant Irish girls, was the most conspicuous on the street, and is in about its original state. At No. 9 lived John Morton, called the "rebel banker" by the British, because he loaned large sums to the Continental Congress. His son, General Jacob Morton, occupied the mansion after his marriage in 1791, and commanded the militia. Long after he became too infirm to actually command, from the balcony of his home he reviewed on the Battery parade grounds the Tompkins Blues and the Light Guards. The veterans of these commands, by legislative enactment in 1868, were incorporated as the "Old Guard."

On the building at 4 and 6 Pearl Street, corner State Street, is a tablet which reads:

16361897

ON THIS SITE STOOD THE "STADHUIS"

OF NEW AMSTERDAM——ERECTED 1636

THIS TABLET IS PLACED HERE IN LOVING MEMORY

OF THE FIRST DUTCH SETTLERS BY THE

HOLLAND DAMES OF THE NEW

NETHERLANDS AND THE

KNIGHTS OF THE LEGION OF THE CROWN

LAVINIA

KONIGIN

It was set up October 7, 1897, and marks the supposed site of the first City Hall. What is claimed by most authorities to be the real site is at Pearl Street, opposite Coenties Slip.

Whitehall Street was one of the earliest thoroughfares of the city, and was originally the open space left on the land side of the Fort.

Beaver Street was first called the Beaver's Path. It was a ditch, on either side of which was a path. When houses were built along these paths they were improved by a rough pavement. At the end of the Beaver's Path, close to where Broad Street is now, was a swamp, which, before the pavements were made, had been reclaimed and was known as the Sheep Pasture.

Marketfield Street, whose length is less than a block, opens into Broad Street at No. 72, a few feet from Beaver Street. This is one of the lost thoroughfares of the city. Almost as old as the city itself, it once extended past the Fort and continued to the river in what is now Battery Place. It was then called Petticoat Lane. The first French Huguenot church was built on it in 1688. Now the Produce Exchange cuts the street off short and covers the site of the church.

Through Broad Street, when the town was New Amsterdam, a narrow, ill-smelling inlet extended to about the present Beaver Street, then narrowed to a ditch close to Wall Street. The water-front was then at Pearl Street. Several bridges crossed the inlet, the largest at the point where Stone Street is. Another gave Bridge Street its name. In 1660 the ways on either side were paved, and soon became a market-place for citizens who traded with farmers for their products, and with the Indians who navigated the inlet in their canoes. The locality has ever since been a centre of exchange. When the inlet was finally filled in it left the present "Broad" Street.

Where Beaver Street crosses this thoroughfare, on the northwest corner, is a tablet:

TO COMMEMORATE THE GALLANT AND PATRIOTIC

ACT OF MARINUS WILLETT IN HERE SEIZING

JUNE 6, 1775, FROM THE BRITISH FORCES THE

MUSKETS WITH WHICH HE ARMED HIS

TROOPS. THIS TABLET IS ERECTED BY

THE SOCIETY OF THE SONS OF THE

REVOLUTION, NEW YORK, NOV. 12, 1892

On one side of the tablet is a bas-relief of the scene showing the patriots stopping the ammunition wagons.

Fraunces' Tavern, standing at the southeast corner of Broad and Pearl Streets, is much the same outwardly as it was when built in 1700, except that it has two added stories. Etienne De Lancey, a Huguenot nobleman, built it as his homestead and occupied it for a quarter of a century. It became a tavern under the direction of Samuel Fraunces in 1762. It was Washington's headquarters in 1776, and in 1783 he delivered there his farewell address to his generals.

Pearl Street was one of the two early roads leading from the Fort. It lay along the water front, and extended to a ferry where Peck Slip is now. The road afterwards became Great Queen Street, and was lined with shops of store-keepers who sought the Long Island trade. The other road in time became Broadway.

On a building at 73 Pearl Street, facing Coenties Slip, is a tablet which reads:

THE SITE OF THE

FIRST DUTCH HOUSE OF ENTERTAINMENT

ON THE ISLAND OF MANHATTAN

LATER THE SITE OF THE OLD "STADT HUYS"

OR CITY HALL

THIS TABLET IS PLACED HERE BY

THE HOLLAND SOCIETY OF NEW YORK

SEPTEMBER, 1890

This is the site of the first City Hall of New Amsterdam, built 1642. It stood by the waterside, for beyond Water Street all the land has been reclaimed. There was a court room and a prison in the building. Before it, where the pillars of the elevated road are now, was a cage and a whipping-post. There was also the public "Well of William Cox."

Beside the house ran a lane. It is there yet, still called Coenties Lane as in the days of old. But it is no longer green. Now it is narrow, paved, and almost lost between tall buildings.

Opposite Coenties Lane is Coenties Slip, which was an inlet in the days of the Stadt Huys. The land about was owned by Conraet Ten Eyck, who was nicknamed Coentje. This in time became Coonchy and was finally vulgarized to "Quincy." The filling in of this waterway began in 1835 and the slip is now buried beneath Jeanette Park. The filled-in slip accounts for the width of the street. For the same reason there is considerable width at Wall, Maiden Lane and other streets leading to the water front.

At 81 Pearl Street, close by Coenties Slip, the first printing-press was set up by William Bradford, after he was appointed Public Printer in 1693. A tablet marks the site, with the inscription:

ON THIS SITE

WILLIAM BRADFORD

APPOINTED

PUBLIC PRINTER

APRIL 10, A.D. 1693

ESTABLISHED THE FIRST

PRINTING PRESS

IN THE

COLONY OF NEW YORK

ERECTED BY THE

NEW YORK

HISTORICAL SOCIETY

APRIL 10, A.D. 1893

IN COMMEMORATION OF

THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY

OF THE INTRODUCTION

OF PRINTING IN

NEW YORK

Across the way, on a warehouse at 88 Pearl Street, is a marble tablet of unique design, to commemorate the great fire of 1835, which started in Merchant Street, burned for nineteen hours, extended over fifty acres and consumed 402 buildings.

Directly through the block from this point is Cuyler's Alley, a narrow way between the houses running off Water Street. Although it is a hundred years old the only incident connected with its existence that has crept into the city's history, is a murder. In 1823, a Boston merchant was waylaid and murdered for his money, and was dragged through this street for final disposition in the river, but the murderer made so much noise in his work that the constable heard him and came upon the abandoned corpse.

Through a pretty garden at the back of the Stadt Huys, Stone Street was reached. It was the first street to be laid with cobble-stones (1657), and so came by its name, which originally had been Brouwer Street.

Delmonico's establishment at Beaver and William Streets is on the site of the second of the Delmonico restaurants. (See Fulton and William Streets.)

Exchange Place took its name from the Merchants' Exchange, which was completed in William Street, fronting on Wall, in 1827 (the present Custom House). Before that date it had been called Garden Street. From Hanover to Broad Street was a famous place for boys to coast in winter, and the grade was called "Flat and Barrack Hill." Scarcely more than an alley now, the street was even narrower once and was given its present width in 1832.

Wall Street came by its name naturally, for it was a walled street once. When war broke out between England and Holland in 1653, Governor Peter Stuyvesant built the wall along the line of the present street, from river to river. His object was to form a barrier that should enclose the city. It was a wall of wood, twelve feet high, with a sloping breastwork inside. After the wall was removed in 1699, the street came to be a chief business thoroughfare.

A new City Hall, to replace the Stadt Huys, was built in 1699, at Nassau Street, on the site of the present Sub-Treasury building. In front of the building was the cage for criminals, stocks and whipping-post. When independence was declared, this building was converted into a capitol and was called Federal Hall. The Declaration of Independence was read from the steps in 1776. President Washington was inaugurated there in 1789. The wide strip of pavement on the west side of Nassau Street at Wall Street bears evidence of the former existence of Federal Hall. The latter extended across to the western house line of the present Nassau Street, and so closed the thoroughfare that a passage-way led around the building to Nassau Street. When the Sub-Treasury was built in 1836, on the site of Federal Hall, Nassau Street was opened to Wall, and the little passage-way was left to form the wide pavement of to-day.

Alexander Hamilton, in 1789, lived in a house on the south side of Wall Street at Broad. His slayer, Aaron Burr, then lived back of Federal Hall in Nassau Street.

The Custom House at William Street and Wall was completed in 1842. At this same corner once stood a statue of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. In 1776, during the Revolution, the statue was pulled down by British soldiers, the head cut off and the remainder dragged in the mud. The people petitioned the Assembly in 1766 to erect the statue to Pitt, as a recognition of his zealous defence of the American colonies and his efforts in securing the repeal of the Stamp Act. At the same time provision was made for the erection of the equestrian statue of George III in Bowling Green. The statue of Pitt was of marble, and was erected in 1770.

The Tontine Building at the northwest corner of Wall and Water Streets marks the site of the Tontine Coffee House, a celebrated house for the interchange of goods and of ideas, and a political centre. It was a prominent institution in the city, resorted to by the wealthy and influential. The building was erected in 1794, and conducted by the Tontine Society of two hundred and three members, each holding a $200 share. Under their plan all property was to revert to seven survivors of the original subscribers. The division was made in 1876.

Close to where the coffee house was built later, a market was set up in the middle of Wall Street in 1709, and being the public market for the sale of corn and meal was called the "Meal Market." Cut meat was not sold there until 1740. In 1731 this market became the only public place for the sale and hiring of slaves.

Trinity Church has stood at the head of Wall Street since 1697. Before 1779 the street was filled with tall trees, but during the intensely cold winter of that year most of them were cut down and used for kindling.

The ferry wharf has been at the foot of the street since 1694, when the water came up as far as Pearl Street. It was here that Washington landed, coming from Elizabethport after his journey from Virginia, April 23, 1789, to be inaugurated.

The United States Hotel, Fulton, between Water and Pearl Streets, was built in 1823 as Holt's Hotel. It was the headquarters for captains of whaling ships and merchants. A semaphore, or marine telegraph, was on the cupola, the windmill-like arms of which served to indicate the arrival of vessels.

On the building at the northeast corner of Nassau and Cedar Streets is a tablet reading:

HERE STOOD

THE MIDDLE DUTCH CHURCH

DEDICATED A.D. 1729

MADE A BRITISH MILITARY PRISON 1776

RESTORED 1790

OCCUPIED AS THE UNITED STATES POST-OFFICE

1845-1875

TAKEN DOWN 1882

This church was a notable place of worship; the last in the city to represent strict simplicity of religious service as contrasted with modern ease and elegance. The post-office occupied the building until its removal to the structure it now occupies. The second home of the Middle Dutch Church was in Lafayette Place.

Nassau Street was opened in 1696, when Teunis de Kay was given the right to make a cartway from the wall to the commons (now City Hall Park). At first the street was known as Pie Woman's Lane.

Where Maiden Lane is there was once a narrow stream or spring water, which flowed from about the present Nassau Street. Women went there to wash their clothing, so that it came to be called the Virgin's Path, and from that the Maiden's Lane. A blacksmith having set up a shop at the edge of the stream near the river, the locality took the name of Smit's V'lei, or the Smith's Valley, afterwards shortened to the V'lei, and then readily corrupted to "Fly." It was natural, then, when a market was built on the Maiden's Lane, from Pearl to South Streets, to call it the Fly Market. This was pulled down in 1823.

On Gold Street, northwest corner of Platt Street, is a wedge-shaped house of curious appearance. It is best seen from the Platt Street side. When this street was opened in 1834 by Jacob S. Platt, who owned much of the neighboring land and wanted a street of his own, the house was large and square and had been a tavern for a great many years. The new street cut the house to its present strange shape, and it came to be called the "Jack-knife."

Golden Hill, celebrated since the time of the Dutch, is still to be seen in the high ground around Cliff and Gold Streets. Pearl street near John shows a sweeping curve where it circled around the hill's base, and the same sort of curve is seen in Maiden Lane on the south and Fulton Street on the north. The first blood of the Revolution was shed on this hill in January, 1770, after the British soldiers had cut down a liberty pole set up by the Liberty Boys. The fight occurred on open ground back of an inn which still stands at 122 William Street, and is commemorated in a tablet on the wall of a building at the corner of John and William Streets. It reads:

"GOLDEN HILL"

HERE, JAN. 18, 1770

THE FIGHT TOOK PLACE BETWEEN THE

"SONS OF LIBERTY" AND THE

BRITISH REGULARS, 16TH FOOT

FIRST BLOODSHED IN THE

WAR OF THE REVOLUTION

The inn is much the same as in early days, except that many buildings crowd about it now, and modern paint has made it hideous to antiquarian eyes.

On the east side of William Street, a few doors south of Fulton, John Delmonico opened a dingy little bake shop in 1823, acted as chef and waiter, and built up the name and business which to-day is synonymous with good eating. In 1832 he removed to 23 William Street. Burned out there in 1835, he soon opened on a larger scale with his brother at William and Beaver Streets, on which site is still an establishment under the Delmonico name. In time he set up various places—at Chambers Street and Broadway; Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue; Twenty-sixth Street and Broadway, and finally at Forty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue.

John Street Church, between Nassau and William Streets, was the first Methodist Church in America. In 1767 it was organized in a loft at 120 William Street, then locally known as Horse and Cart Street. In 1768 the church was built in John Street. It was rebuilt in 1817 and again in 1841. John Street perpetuates the name of John Harpendingh, who owned most of the land thereabout.

At what is now 17, 19 and 21 John Street, in 1767 was built the old John Street Theatre, a wooden structure, painted red, standing sixty feet back from the street and reached by a covered way. An arcade through the house at No. 17 still bears evidence of the theatre. The house was closed in 1774, when the Continental Congress recommended suspension of amusements. Throughout the Revolutionary War, however, performances were given, the places of the players being filled by British officers. Washington frequently attended the performances at this theatre after he became President. The house was torn down in 1798.

The site of the Shakespeare Tavern is marked by a tablet at the southwest corner of Nassau and Fulton Streets. The words of the tablet are:

ON THIS SITE IN THE

OLD SHAKESPEARE TAVERN

WAS ORGANIZED

THE SEVENTH REGIMENT

NATIONAL GUARD, S.N.Y.

AUG. 25, 1824

This tavern, low, old-fashioned, built of small yellow bricks with dormer windows in the roof, was constructed before the Revolution. In 1808 it was bought by Thomas Hodgkinson, an actor, and was henceforth a meeting-place for Thespians. It was resorted to—in contrast to the business men guests of the Tontine Coffee House—by the wits of the day, the poets and the writers. In 1824 Hodgkinson died, and the house was kept up for a time by his son-in-law, Mr. Stoneall.

At the southwest corner of Beekman and Nassau Streets was built, in 1830, the first home of the Mercantile Library, called Clinton Hall. In 1820 the first steps were taken by the merchants of the city to establish a reading room for their clerks. The library was opened the following year with 700 volumes. In 1823 the association was incorporated. It was located first in a building in Nassau Street, but in 1826 was moved to Cliff Street, and in 1830 occupied its new building in Beekman Street. De Witt Clinton, Governor of the State, had presented a History of England as the first volume for the library. The new building was called Clinton Hall in his honor. In 1850, the building being crowded, the Astor Place Opera House was bought for $250,000, and remodeled in 1854 into the second Clinton Hall. The third building of that name is now on the site at the head of Lafayette Place.

The St. George Building, on the north side of Beekman Street, just west of Cliff Street, stands on the site of St. George's Episcopal Church, a stately stone structure which was erected in 1811. In 1814 it was burned; in 1816 rebuilt, and in 1845 removed to Rutherford Place and Sixteenth Street, where it still is. Next to the St. George Building is the tall shot-tower which may be so prominently seen from the windows of tall buildings in the lower part of the city, but is so difficult to find when search is made for it.

Barnum's Museum, opened in 1842, was on the site of the St. Paul Building, at Broadway and Ann Street. There P.T. Barnum brought out Tom Thumb, the Woolly Horse and many other curiosities that became celebrated. On the stage of a dingy little amphitheatre in the house many actors played who afterwards won national recognition.

The original Park Theatre was built in 1798, and stood on Park Row, between Ann and Beekman Streets, facing what was then City Hall Park and what is now the Post Office. It was 200 feet from Ann Street, and extended back to the alley which has ever since been called Theatre Alley. John Howard Payne, author of "Home, Sweet Home," appeared there for the first time on any stage, in 1809, as the "Young American Roscius." In 1842 a ball in honor of Charles Dickens was given there. Many noted actors played at this theatre, which was the most important in the city at that period. It was rebuilt in 1820 and burned in 1848.

At the junction of Park Row and Nassau Street, where the Times Building is, the Brick Presbyterian Church was erected in 1768. There was a small burying-ground within the shadow of its walls, and green fields stretched from it in all directions. It was sold in 1854, and a new church was built at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street.

Within a few steps of where the statue of Benjamin Franklin is in Printing House Square, Jacob Leisler was hanged in his own garden in 1691, the city's first martyr to constitutional liberty. A wealthy merchant, after James III fled and William III ascended the throne, Leisler was called by the Committee of Safety to act as Governor. He assembled a Continental Congress, whose deliberations were cut short by the arrival of Col. Henry Sloughter as Governor. Enemies of Leisler decided on his death. The new Governor refused to sign the warrant, but being made drunk signed it unknowingly and Leisler was hanged and his body buried at the foot of the scaffold. A few years later, a royal proclamation wiped the taint of treason from Leisler's memory and his body was removed to a more honored resting-place.

The walls of the Sun building at Park Row and Frankfort Street, are those of the first permanent home of Tammany Hall. Besides the hall it contained the second leading hotel in the city, where board was $7 a week. Tammany Hall, organized in 1789 by William Mooney, an upholsterer, occupied quarters in Borden's tavern in lower Broadway. In 1798 it removed to Martling's tavern, at the southeast corner of Nassau and Spruce, until its permanent home was erected in 1811.

There is a tablet on the wall of the south corridor of the post-office building, which bears the inscription:

ON THE COMMON OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK,

NEAR WHERE THIS BUILDING NOW STANDS, THERE

STOOD FROM 1766 TO 1776 A LIBERTY POLE

ERECTED TO COMMEMORATE THE REPEAL OF THE

STAMP ACT. IT WAS REPEATEDLY DESTROYED BY

THE VIOLENCE OF THE TORIES AND AS REPEATEDLY

REPLACED BY THE SONS OF LIBERTY, WHO ORGANIZED

A CONSTANT WATCH AND GUARD. IN ITS

DEFENCE THE FIRST MARTYR BLOOD OF THE AMERICAN

REVOLUTION WAS SHED ON JAN. 18, 1770.

The cutting down of this pole led to the battle of Golden Hill.

The post-office building was erected on a portion of the City Hall Park. This park, like all of the Island of Manhattan, was a wilderness a few hundred years ago. By 1661, where the park is there was a clearing in which cattle were herded. In time the clearing was called The Fields; later The Commons. On The Commons, in Dutch colonial days, criminals were executed. Still later a Potter's Field occupied what is now the upper end of the Park; above it, and extending over the present Chambers Street was a negro burying-ground. On these commons, in 1735, a poor-house was built, the site of which is covered by the present City Hall. From time to time other buildings were erected.

The new Jail was finished in 1763, and, having undergone but few alterations, is now known as the Hall of Records. It was a military prison during the Revolution, and afterwards a Debtors' Prison. In 1830 it became the Register's Office. It was long considered the most beautiful building in the city, being patterned after the temple of Diana of Ephesus.

The Bridewell, or City Prison, was built on The Commons in 1775, close by Broadway, on a line with the Debtors' Prison. It was torn down in 1838.

The present City Hall was finished in 1812. About that time The Commons were fenced in and became a park, taking in besides the present space, that now occupied by the post-office building. The constructors of the City Hall deemed it unnecessary to use marble for the rear wall as they had for the sides and front, and built this wall of freestone, it being then almost inconceivable that traffic could ever extend so far up-town as to permit a view of the rear of the building. The most noted spot in the City Hall is the Governor's Room, an apartment originally intended for the use of the Governor when in the city. In time it became the municipal portrait gallery, and a reception room for the distinguished guests of the city. The bodies of Abraham Lincoln and of John Howard Payne lay in state in this room. With it is also associated the visit of Lafayette when he returned to this country in 1824 and made the room his reception headquarters. The room was also the scene of the celebration after the capture of the "GuerriÈre" by the "Constitution"; the reception to Commodore Perry after his Lake Erie victory; the celebration in connection with the laying of the Atlantic cable; and at the completion of the Erie Canal. It contains a large gilt punch-bowl, showing scenes in New York a hundred years ago. This was presented to the city by General Jacob Morton, Secretary of the Committee of Defense, at the opening of the City Hall.

At the western end of the front wall of City Hall is a tablet reading:

NEAR THIS SPOT IN THE PRESENCE OF

GEN. GEORGE WASHINGTON

THE DECLARATION OF

INDEPENDENCE

WAS READ AND PUBLISHED

TO THE

AMERICAN ARMY

JULY 9TH, 1776

Other buildings erected in the Park were The Rotunda, 1816, on the site of the brown stone building afterwards occupied by the Court of General Sessions, where works of art were exhibited; and the New York Institute on the site of the Court House, occupied in 1817 by the American, or Scudder's Museum, the first in the city. The Chambers Street Bank, the first bank for savings in the city, opened in the basement of the Institute building in 1818. In 1841 Philip Hone was president of this bank. It afterwards moved to the north side of Bleecker Street, between Broadway and Crosby, and became the Bleecker Street Bank. Now it is at Twenty-second Street and Fourth Avenue, and is called The Bank for Savings.

The statue of Nathan Hale was erected in City Hall Park by the Sons of the Revolution. Some authorities still insist that the Martyr Spy was hanged in this park. Until 1821 there were fences of wooden pickets about the park. In that year iron railings, which had been imported from England, were set up, with four marble pillars at the southern entrance. The next year trees were set out within the enclosure, and just within the railing were planted a number of rose-bushes which had been supplied by two ladies who had an eye to landscape gardening. Frosts and vandals did not allow the bushes more than a year of life. Four granite balls, said to have been dug from the ruins of Troy, were placed on the pillars at the southern entrance, May 8, 1827. They were given to the city by Captain John B. Nicholson, U.S.N.

The building 39 and 41 Chambers Street, opposite the Court House, stands on the site of the pretty little Palmo Opera House, built in 1844 for the production of Italian opera, by F. Palmo, the wealthy proprietor of the CafÉ des Mille Colonnes on Broadway at Duane Street. He lost his fortune in the operatic venture and became a bartender. In 1848 the house became Burton's Theatre. About 1800, this site was occupied by the First Reformed Presbyterian Church, a frame building which was replaced by a brick structure in 1818. The church was moved to Prince and Marion Streets in 1834.

At No. 11 Reade Street is a dingy little house, now covered with signs and given over to half a dozen small business concerns, about which hover memories of Aaron Burr. It was here he had a law office in 1832, and here when he was seventy-eight years old he first met Mme. Jumel whom he afterwards married. The house is to be torn down to make way for new municipal buildings.

At Rose and Duane Streets stands the Rhinelander building, and on the Rose Street side close by the main entrance is a small grated window. This is the last trace of a sugar-house, which, during the Revolutionary War, was used as a British military prison. The building was not demolished until 1892, and the window, retaining its original position in the old house, was built into the new.

Where the Tombs prison stands was once the Collect, or Fresh Water Pond. This deep body of water took up, approximately, the space between the present Baxter, Elm, Canal and Pearl Streets. When the Island of Manhattan was first inhabited, a swamp stretched in a wide belt across it from where Roosevelt Slip is now to the end of Canal Street on the west side. The Collect was the centre of this stretch, with a stream called the Wreck Brook flowing from it across a marsh to the East River. At a time near the close of the eighteenth century a drain was cut from the Collect to the North River, on a line with the present Canal Street. With the progress of the city to the north, the pond was drained, and the swamp made into firm ground. In 1816, the Corporation Yards occupied the block of Elm, Centre, Leonard and Franklin Streets, on the ground which had filled in the pond. The Tombs, or City Prison, was built on this block in 1838.

The Five Points still exists where Worth, Baxter and Park Streets intersect, but it is no longer the centre of a community of crime that gained international notoriety. It was once the gathering-point for criminals and degraded persons of both sexes and of all nationalities, a rookery for thieves and murderers. Its history began more than a century and a half ago. During the so-called Negro Insurrection of 1741, when many negroes were hanged, the severest punishment was the burning at the stake of fourteen negroes in this locality.

One of the five "Points" is now formed by a pleasant park which a few years ago took the place of the last remnant of the old-time locality. In no single block of the city was there ever such a record for crime as in this old "Mulberry Bend" block. Set low in a hollow, it was a refuge for the outcasts of the city and of half a dozen countries. The slum took its name, as the park does now, from Mulberry Street, which on one side of it makes a deep and sudden bend. In this slum block the houses were three deep in places, with scarcely the suggestion of a courtyard between them. Narrow alleys, hardly wide enough to permit the passage of a man, led between houses to beer cellars, stables and time-blackened, tumbledown tenements. Obscure ways honeycombed the entire block—ways that led beneath houses, over low sheds, through fragments of wall—ways that were known only to the thief and the tramp. There "Bottle Alley," "Bandit's Roost" and "Rag-picker's Row" were the scenes of many wild fights, and many a time the ready stiletto ended the lives of men, or the heavy club dashed out brains.

The Five Points House of Industry's work was begun in 1850, and has been successful in ameliorating the moral and physical condition of the people of the vicinity. The institution devoted to this work stands on the site of the "Old Brewery," the most notorious criminal resort of the locality.

At Mott and Park Streets is now the Church of the Transfiguration (Catholic). On a hill, the suggestion of which is still to be seen in steep Park Street, the Zion Lutheran Church was erected in 1797. In 1810 it was changed to Zion Episcopal Church. It was burned in 1815; rebuilt 1819, and sold in 1853 to the Church of the Transfiguration, which has occupied it since. This last church had previously been in Chambers Street, and before that it had occupied several quarters. It was founded in 1827, and is the fourth oldest church in the diocese. Zion Episcopal Church moved in 1853 to Thirty-eighth Street and Madison Avenue, and in 1891 consolidated with St. Timothy's Church at No. 332 West Fifty-seventh Street. The Madison Avenue building was sold to the South (Reformed) Dutch Church.

Chatham Square has been the open space it is now ever since the time when a few houses clustered about Fort Amsterdam. The road that stretched the length of the island in 1647 formed the only connecting link between the fort and six large bouweries or farms on the east side.

The bouwerie settlers in the early days were harassed by Indians, and spent as much time defending themselves and skurrying off to the protection of the Fort as they did in improving the land. The earliest settlement in the direction of these bouweries, which had even a suggestion of permanency, was on a hill which had once been an Indian outlook, close by the present Chatham Square. Emanuel de Groot, a giant negro, with ten superannuated slaves, were permitted to settle here upon agreeing to pay each a fat hog and 22½ bushels of grain a year, their children to remain slaves.

North of this settlement stretched a primeval forest through which cattle wandered and were lost. Then the future Chatham Square was fenced in as a place of protection for the cattle.

The lane leading from this enclosure to the outlying bouweries, during the Revolution was used for the passage of both armies. At that period the highway changed from the Bouwerie Lane of the Dutch to the English Bowery Road. In 1807 it became "The Bowery."

The earliest "Kissing Bridge" was over a small creek, on the Post Road, close by the present Chatham Square. Travelers who left the city by this road parted with their friends on this bridge, it being the custom to accompany the traveler thus far from the city on his way.

What is now Park Row, from City Hall Park to Chatham Square, was for many years called Chatham Street, in honor of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. In 1886 the aldermen of the city changed the name to Park Row, and in so doing seemed to stamp approval of an event just one hundred years before which had stirred American manhood to acts of valor. This was the dragging down by British soldiers in 1776 of a statue of the Earl of Chatham which had stood in Wall Street.

The most celebrated pump in the city was the Tea Water Pump, on Chatham Street (now Park Row) near Queen (now Pearl) Street. The water was supplied from the Collect and was considered of the rarest quality for the making of tea. Up to 1789 it was the chief water-works of the city, and the water was carted about the city in casks and sold from carts.

Within a few steps of the Bowery, on the north side of Pell Street, in a frame house, Charlotte Temple died. The heroine of Mrs. Rowson's "Tale of Truth," whose sorrowful life was held up as a moral lesson a generation ago, had lived first in a house on what is now the south side of Astor Place close to Fourth Avenue. Her tomb is in Trinity churchyard.

The Bull's Head Tavern was built on the site of the present Thalia Theatre, formerly the Bowery Theatre, just above Chatham Square, some years before 1763. It was frequented by drovers and butchers, and was the most popular tavern of its kind in the city for many years. Washington and his staff occupied it on the day the British evacuated the city in 1783. It was pulled down in 1826, making way for the Bowery Theatre.

The Bowery Theatre was opened in 1826, and during the course or its existence was the home of broad melodrama, that had such a large following that the theatre obtained a national reputation. Many celebrated actors appeared in the house. It was burned in 1828, rebuilt and burned again in 1836, again in 1838, in 1845 and in 1848.

New Bowery Street was opened from the south side of Chatham Square in 1856. The street carried away a part of a Jewish burying-ground, a portion of which, crowded between tenement-houses and shut off from the street by a wall and iron fence, is still to be seen a few steps from Chatham Square. The first synagogue of the Jews was in Mill Street (now South William). The graveyard mentioned was the first one used by this congregation, and was opened in 1681, so far from the city that it did not seem probable that the latter could ever reach it. Early in the nineteenth century the graveyard was moved to a site which is now Sixth Avenue and Eleventh Street.

The Franklin House was the first Cherry Hill place of residence of George Washington in the city, when he became President in 1789. It stood at the corner of Franklin Square (then St. George Square) and Cherry Street. A portion of the East River Bridge structure rests on the site. Pearl Street, passing the house, was a main thoroughfare in those days. The house was built in 1770 by Walter Franklin, an importing merchant. It was torn down in 1856. The site is marked by a tablet on the Bridge abutment, which reads:

THE FIRST

PRESIDENTIAL MANSION

NO. 1 CHERRY STREET

OCCUPIED BY

GEORGE WASHINGTON

FROM APRIL 23, 1789

TO FEBRUARY 23, 1790

ERECTED BY THE

MARY WASHINGTON COLONIAL CHAPTER, D.A.R.

APRIL 30, 1899

At No. 7 Cherry Street gas was first introduced into the city in 1825. This is the Cherry Hill district, sadly deteriorated from the merry days of its infancy. Its name is still preserved in Cherry Street, which is hemmed in by tenement-houses which the Italian population crowd in almost inconceivable numbers. At the top of the hill, where these Italians drag out a crowded existence, Richard Sackett, an Englishman, established a pleasure garden beyond the city in 1670, and because its chief attraction was an orchard of cherry trees, called it the Cherry Garden—a name that has since clung to the locality.