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By Root 7554 0

trouble raising the necessary funds—the Common Council alone contributed twelve hundred pounds—and work proceeded so swiftly that the new building was ready the following year. Known as the Royal Exchange, it had an arcaded ground floor suitable for an open-air marketplace. Upstairs was a large hall with twenty-foot ceilings, ideal for balls, dinners, and concerts. Several smaller adjacent rooms provided space for more intimate gatherings or meetings. One would sometimes be used by the Common Council; another would be leased for use as the Exchange Coffee House, which was for many years the best place in town to get news of distant ports and the preferred location for privateers to auction off prizes.

Taverns often had plenty of space, but their association with drunkenness, cursing, fighting, and other plebeian vices disqualified them as milieux for polite recreations. Alert tavern keepers responded with inducements calculated to attract a wealthier, more decorous clientele. They cleaned up, laid on decent food, improved service, and even relocated in better neighborhoods; more and more of them advertised “long rooms” decorated like genteel parlors, only spacious enough for an assembly or recital of music. Samuel Fraunces, a West Indian of mixed French and African descent, had opened his first New York tavern, the Mason’s Arms, on upper Broadway near the almshouse—not a name or a location with which an ambitious man could rest content. In 1763 Fraunces moved down to the old De Lancey mansion on the corner of Broad and Pearl, still one of the handsomest buildings in town and the perfect location for a tavern where ladies and gentlemen would feel at ease. Its very name was a step up: the Queen’s Head, presumably in honor of Charlotte, wife of King George III. For two decades the Queen’s Head would be recognized as the premier establishment of its kind in the city.

The enterprising Fraunces also had a hand in bringing “pleasure gardens” to New York. Several had opened during the 1740s and 1750s, though only two remained: Spring Garden, situated at the northeast corner of Broadway and Ann Street, and Catiemuts Garden, located on the brow of a small hill of the same name about where the Boston Post Road (Park Row) now crosses Chambers Street—the same hill, some residents remembered, where the “Negroes were Burnt.” In 1765 Fraunces opened Vauxhall Garden on a prominence overlooking the Hudson near the present junction of Greenwich and Warren streets. Its attractions included a wax museum, Italian fireworks, and afternoon teas. That same year, a rival opened Ranelagh near the corner of Church and Thomas streets, advertising band concerts on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

No public space in New York attracted higher concentrations of the refined, however, than Trinity Church. Of all the city’s religious bodies, Judge Thomas Jones later recalled, Trinity enjoyed “the most influence, and greatest opulence. To this Church, the Governor, the Lieutenant-Governor, most of his Majesty’s Council, many members of the General Assembly, all the officers of Government, with a numerous train of rich and affluent merchants, [and] landholders, belonged.” During the 1740s and 1750s its parishioners began renovations to Trinity’s now cramped and aging building (including the purchase of its first organ) that were aimed at creating an environment more hospitable to their genteel brand of Christianity. What they had in mind reflected the legacy of the renowned Christopher Wren and his students, who had utilized principles and themes of classical Roman architecture—strict symmetry, geometric proportions, temple-front porticos—to create buildings perfectly attuned to the ambitions and self-confidence of the propertied classes in Georgian Britain (whence the term “Georgian” architecture). Trinity paid homage to the link between this neoclassicism and gentility as early as 1752, when it erected St. George’s Chapel on Chapel (Beekman) Street for the convenience of members living on the east side of town. St. George’s columned portico, balustrades, gracefully