Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [1197]
2. The final indignity may well have been the survival of so many street names originally chosen by De Lancey when he staked out the area for development prior to the Revolution. These include, besides Delancey Street itself, Rivington Street (named for the sometime Tory printer), James and Oliver streets (named for the onetime governor’s sons, both ardent Tories), Stanton Street (named after George Stanton, the De Lanceys’ agent), and Grand Street (which was to have run through a Great Square).
1. In 1785 and again in 1792 Congress established the decimal “dollar” as the basic monetary unit of the United States. New York State officially switched to the dollar in 1797, and the Common Council of New York City seems to have followed suit shortly thereafter. Merchants and shopkeepers, however, continued to use pounds, shillings, and pence alongside “federal money” well into the nineteenth century, at an exchange rate of eight shillings per dollar (thus city shoppers were accustomed to seeing the price of a book, for example, expressed as either 3/ or 37½ cents.) Foreign coins remained legal tender in the United States until 1857.
2. Or maybe not. There are no eyewitness accounts of this famous incident other than Jefferson’s—two versions of which came to light many years after the fact. Hamilton and Madison left no mention of any such deal, and the linkage of assumption and residence is at least open to question: for many members of Congress, as indeed for Hamilton himself, the really tough issue was whether to fund at 6 percent or 4 percent, not where the capital would be. Everybody, on the other hand, knew that some kind of understanding had resolved the crisis—if not the one described by Jefferson—and that getting the capital out of New York was somehow a part of it.
1. Rowson’s plot allegedly draws upon the affair between a certain Charlotte Stanley and John Montresor, the author’s cousin and a Royal Engineer stationed in New York during the Revolution (he is still remembered for an exquisitely detailed 1775 map of the city). During the rebuilding of Trinity Church in the mid-1840s, Charlotte Stanley’s tombstone was somehow reinscribed “Charlotte Temple.” As such, it became a shrine for the novel’s many readers and one of New York’s premier tourist attractions. Year after year weeping pilgrims strewed the site with flowers and other testimonials to their devotion. They were still doing so, according to one report, as late as 1905. Local historians, meanwhile, battled furiously over the exact site of Charlotte’s death, though everyone agreed it must have been in the vicinity of Chatham Square, perhaps on the lower Bowery. The crumbling Walton House, supposedly where Rowson’s pregnant heroine made a dramatic final appeal for help, gained a similar renown. When it burned in 1853, hundreds of distraught townsfolk gathered at the scene to mourn the loss.
1. Yet even in these terms, New York’s new spatial arrangements were hardly flawless. Though longitudinal traffic would perforce be heavy on a long and narrow island, the grid provided two and a half times more latitudinal streets than it did north-south avenues. The absence of major diagonals—apart from Broadway, which the commissioners had originally intended to eliminate—forced cartmen and coaches to zig and zag around squared-off blocks, colliding at intersections that invited gridlock. Nor, as was customary, had the commissioners provided service alleys through the center of blocks: this maximized salable land but impeded access to it.
1. Cheap docks kept wharfage rates down, enhancing the port’s competitiveness. They wore out quickly, however, and their narrow little basins, clogged with filth, became breeding grounds for disease. They were thus a far cry from the great enclosed stone piers of London—the West India Docks (1800-1806), London Docks (1800—5), East India