New York Ghosts

It does not seem too outrageous to suggest that ghosts range about Manhattan streets. It takes a few years of living and a bit of walking to recognize them, but they are there and they are mostly friendly or at least benign. In part, this is because the street configurations remain much the same from century to century, even south of Wall Street where there is less grid and more hunting trail discernible.

Paradoxically, areas like Hanover Square that have been completely altered often seem to most aggressively insist on their past identities. At Hanover Square, one knows the exact location of John Peter Zenger's journal, the New York Weekly, even though all traces of the building disappeared two centuries ago. It was at the square's southwest corner a short distance from India House, which stands at the southeast.

Zenger's journal was important not because it was unbiased but because it was invariably opposed to the governing elites that controlled the city, even when one could make good arguments for their being right. His trial, in 1735 under the system of English justice and while the city was still under British control, set the precedent for freedom of the press and the First Amendment that would be included in the Constitution. The trial was held on the site of what is today Federal Hall Memorial at Wall and William Streets. The Stamp Act Congress met here in 1765 to protest England's imposition of taxes upon the colonies. After the Revolution, the Continental Congress met here in 1787 to pass the Northwest Ordinance, which established the procedure by which territories became states.

The first Congress of the United States convened at the site in 1788 and approved the Bill of Rights, no doubt encouraged by Zenger's ghost, and George Washington was inaugurated here on the spot where his statue presently stands. The building now at Wall and William is the old Sub-Treasury Building, the forerunner of the Federal Reserve. This building, whose front face is pure Doric but which has an oculus in its roof like Rome's Pantheon, was built in 1842 and was intended to be the city's Customs House. This is the reason that an enormous safe dominates the west wall of the building, immediately to the right of its entrance.

Stand on the platform that supports the statue of Washington. Its height is that of the balcony from which our first president addressed a just-born nation in 1789. One can only imagine the hope that reigned at the intersection of Broad, Wall, and William Streets. One feels something of that hope even more than two centuries later, perhaps even more profoundly in uncertain times. Our kindly ghosts seem present, encouraging and urging us not to forsake this great experiment called America.

Time, Taxation, and the Custom House

The Custom House, just south of Bowling Green, is a microcosm of New York City history. It stands on the site of the Dutch governor's mansion and is directly across from the site of Fort Amsterdam, the stronghold of the Dutch city. It is also a mere stone's throw from Peter Minuit Park, site of Munuit's "purchase" of Manhattan from the nomadic Native American tribe that hunted there. It is in no way an exaggeration to say that the Custom House is at the heart of the embryonic city.

The Alexander Hamilton Custom House, as it is officially called, was completed in 1902 by Cass Gilbert, the brilliant architect who would design the Woolworth Building (1913). More to the point, the Custom House is palatial, internally and externally. This reflects the emphasis on Federal revenue from maritime commerce. It was there, rather than internally through income taxation, that the United States dervived its operating capital.

As early as the 1950s, New York docks were beginning to disappear, first from the East, then from the Hudson River. It is curious that the Civil War propelled New York City to the nation's major port while the years following the Second World War marked its decline. Whatever sea traffic enters the Port of New York in the early twenty-first century enters through Elizabeth, New Jersey and the West Side docks, if they exist at all, are home to amusement malls, like the South Street Seaport or Chelsea Piers, or museums such as the Intrepid Air, Sea, and Space exhibition.

The Custom House has been home to the Museum of the American Indian since 1998. From the location of Minuit's purchase, to the Dutch governor's mansion, to the revenue-producing agent of the early twentieth century, back to a celebration of the Native American inhabitants of Manhattan and America, the site is a living example of the gyres of time.

Romance and the Brooklyn Bridge

Another of the many paradoxes that inform New York City history is the romance that is synonymous with the Brooklyn Bridge. Certainly, its grace is undeniable and neither the Manhattan nor the Williamsburg Bridges can equal it. On the other hand, though, the practical justification for a bridge cheek by jowl next to the Fulton Ferry was to increase passenger traffic between the two cities and hasten Brooklyn’s amalgamation in 1898 into what New York’s late-1960s mayor John Lindsay would call the ungovernable monolith of Greater New York (primarily because he could not govern it).

From the perspective of a New Yorker writing in the early years of the twenty-first century, the random pattern of events seems perfect and planned. The 1850s brought massive Irish immigration to New York. Many of those who came through the Castle Garden immigration station down at the Battery necessarily lived in the city of Brooklyn. Many of those living on teeming Mulberry Street worked in the city of Brooklyn. Officials of both cities recognized the obvious need for easier communication between Brooklyn and Manhattan; hence, the commission they granted the German immigrant John Augustus Roebling in 1861 to conduct preliminary surveys on the feasibility of a suspension bridge over the East River at or near Fulton Street.

Roebling thus starts his work even as Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux begin to design Central Park and eliminate by force of law the shanty-town that unemployed Irish immigrants had established for themselves at Lookout Rock, just inside the 59th Street entrance to the park. The Civil War gave some unwanted employment to many Irish immigrants, as Union soldiers, since most could not afford the $300 they needed to purchase a surrogate. Forced military service via a draft lottery spawned the draft riots in 1863.

After 1870, immigration resumes with a vengeance. Italians join the Irish as a second massive wave. They, too, reside in the overcrowded Lower East Side community which comes to be called Little Italy, and they also walk the Brooklyn Bridge to work in the Brooklyn shipyards or on its waterfront. Is it any wonder, then, that St. John’s College takes on the name resigned by a Bronx Jesuit institution that started calling itself Fordham? Is it so surprising that when Emily Roebling, widow of John Augustus’s son George Washington Roebling, finishes the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, the little Roman Catholic Brooklyn college on Lewis Avenue has three hundred young Irish and Italian men on its register?

These young Brooklynites would raise their families in Brooklyn; they would become professionals and implicitly challenge the status quo ante bellum. They might, on special occasions, even have $0.75 or $1.50 to attend (admittedly in the upper reaches of the house), a performance of the Metropolitan Opera Company, whose great yellow-brick building, designed by Joseph Cleveland Cady, had risen at Broadway and 39th Street in the very year P.T. Barnum marched his elephant herd across the just opened Brooklyn Bridge to prove its strength. A century and a quarter later, it appears that Barnum was right, about the bridge and about New York.

St. Paul's, Trinity, and Old St. Peter's

The expected contrast one might legitimately make is between Trinity, the always comparatively opulent church at Broadway and Wall Street and St. Paul's Chapel at Broadway and Fulton. The churches are at either end of a royal charter dating from the end of the eighteenth century. They originally enclosed the King's College campus, the institution that presently bears the name Columbia University but retains the crown as its crest.

St. Paul's was intended as Trinity's "chapel of ease," a country church corresponding to St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London. Indeed, it is of the same era: 1722-1726 being the dates of construction for St. Martin's, 1766 with the steeple added in 1796 for St. Paul's. St. Paul's was the church George Washington attended immediately following the conclusion of the Revolution in 1783 and after he became President in 1789. Like St. Martin's, London, which it resembles, it was a country church at the very fringe of the city, its front on Chapel, now Church Street, its back turned to Broadway.

Less obvious, but in certain ways more intriguing, is the relationship of St. Paul's and its Anglican tradition to St. Peter's, the first Roman Catholic congregation in New York. The first building on St. Peter's site at Barclay and Church Streets appeared in 1785. The date is important. The Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War had just ended. Trinity Church was itself in the process of constructing its second building at Wall Street, the first having been destroyed in the great fire of 1776. The Trinity congregation was also intent on overcoming the Tory associations it had had during the British occupation of the city. It therefore gave a lease on the square of land at the fringe of its original land grant to the first Roman Catholic congregation in New York.

As a public relations move, it was brilliant. It quelled resistance to the reconstruction of Trinity and quickly established the Episcopal identity of the Trinity congregation as one distinct from the Anglican. Even so, it was only with the second St. Peter's building, constructed in 1836, that Roman Catholic St. Peter's moved architectually away from the appearance of a British chapel of ease. The present building is pure Greek Revival, a perfect Ionic temple, though its interior still recalls an eightenth-century English country church.

The African Burial Ground

It is difficult to imagine away the tall buildings and traffic noise that dominate Duane Street and the fragment of the African Burial Ground that is memorialized by raised grass plots and a marble monument. The "Negro Burial Ground," as early nineteenth-century maps designate it, actually extends from Reade Street north beyond Duane and east as far as Foley Square.

In a sense, its existence was one of New York's most closely kept secrets. New York historians and city planners always knew it was there, though prospective real estate developers, even after they had learned it existed, preferred to forget it. In 1992, excavations for the Federal office building that straddles the site revealed the burials, hundreds of them, and their numbers made it difficult for the authorities to forget. Surprise of surprises, New York survived without another Federal office building and, though it took almost sixteen years, gained a monument as moving and distinctive the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., whose design it echoes.

Here is a little known fact about the location. One approaching the African Burial Ground from the corner of Chambers and Elk Streets at the Surrogates Court building and walking downhill across Reade is walking along the execution track used to send slaves convicted of a capital crime to their deaths. The place of execution was on the island of Little Collect Pond, just at the western edge of Foley Square and half a block from the African Burial Ground Monument. Until Collect Pond was drained in 1829, the swampy surroundings held tanneries, a brewery, a ghetto of freed and escaped slaves, and a poor ground for their burial.

The remarkable thing is the dignified pride with which they were buried: all facing east to the rising sun and to Africa; all with bits of jewelery, stones, or beads that marked their particular region of that continent. When one most despairs of humanity, it is worth remembering the extent to which we live in hope, even after death.

The Rhinelander Sugar House

Hidden away behind the Municipal Building is an inconspicuous monument to an atrocity, the Rhinelander Sugar House massacre. During the Revolutionary War, while the city was under the occupation of English troops, the Sons of Liberty conducted a campaign to intimidate Tory residents and harass the occupying army. Some of this was almost playful, such as the erection of "Liberty Poles," stolen pinewood masts furtively set up in public places. Once such place was in northeastern City Hall Park, then simply called the Common, where the statue of Nathan Hale presently stands. This would have been less than five hundred feet from where the Redcoats were bivouacked.

Often, though, the actions of the Sons of Liberty more closely resembled what we might nowadays call terrorism. Homes and businesses belonging to British sympathizers were destroyed by fire in the middle of the night, and in 1776 an enormous fire spread north from Pearl as far as Vesey Street engulfing the first Trinity Church on Wall Street and threatening St. Paul's Chapel.

New York was, however, a city that generally supported England and its Royalist citizens demanded that the occupying army take strong measures against the Sons of Liberty. Makeshift prisons appeared in various places of the city, among them the commandeered Rhinelander Sugar House, a warehouse for the storage of Caribbean sugar that stood at Duane and Rose Streets until 1896. The prisoners in the sugar house were allowed to starve. Indeed, during the English occupation of New York City from 1776 to 1783, it is estimated that 11,000 revolutionists died in such prisons.

When the sugar house was demolished, a loft called the Rhinelander Building replaced it. Several of the sugar house prison windows were incorporated into the loft building, which itself was demolished in 1968 at the construction of One Police Plaza, the central New York City police headquarters . One section of the sugar house wall was transported to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and re-erected near the Van Cortlandt mansion. A single window and its surrounding brickwork was incorporated into a small monument just behind the subway arcade of the Municipal Building.

In its time the Rhinelander Sugar House became a symbol of atrocity. It would not be an exaggeration to consider it the Abu Ghraib of its era. Passersby continually reported seeing ghostly shadows in the windows of the old sugar house. One thinks of things like this in times like these.

Thomas Dongan's Swamp

Thomas Dongan, the Irish Catholic and Royalist also known as the Second Earl of Limerick, was provincial governor of New York from 1684-1688. He is remarkable for two things; he permitted Catholics to enter the royal colony when he called New York's first legislative assembly, which issued the colony's Charter of Liberties, and he cut a road through the Common on its east side, in effect creating the street presently known as Park Row. He thus anticipated, and hastened the city's development to the north and east.

The Common was considerably wider than it is today. It splayed out beyond Broadway on the west and petered out on the east into a swamp that connected with the Collect Pond, which began at Foley Square and stretched northeast. Today, Dongan's farmer's road feeds traffic into Centre Street one-way north past the Municipal Building.

One would like to think Dongan's religious toleration grew out of egalitarian Englightenment principles. One would like to think his addition of a northeast road grew from his wise foresight of the city's development. The reality is somewhat more prosaic, as it all too often is. By tolerating Catholics, Dongan brought the first wave of cheap immigrant labor into New York. In truth, he had little in common with the Irish Catholics whose toleration he championed except that he was born in Ireland. Dongan was a thoroughgoing Irish aristocrat and a Royalist during the English Civil War. His best friend was James, the Duke of York, and (coincidentally?) the road the Irish laborers Dongan brought into the city constructed also facilitated access to Dongan's own farm.

Dongan also held two Long Island townships by royal patent, East Hampton and Southampton. The patents that established the municipal governing procedures that these towns employ today grew directly from the so-called Dongan Patents.