Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [148]
New rural “seats” and country houses enabled the gentry to pursue refinement outside the city as well as in. The trendsetter here was Peter Warren, whose fame as commander of the fleet that took Louisbourg in 1745 had won him a promotion to viceadmiral, a knighthood, and a seat in Parliament. Sir Peter acquired several hundred acres of land at Greenwich, a mile or so above the city, and built a comfortable Georgian country house to which he and his family could flee during the hot, pestilential months of summer.
The Warrens soon had company. In 1750 Captain Thomas Clarke acquired a tract between what are now Eighth and Tenth Avenues, running north from 14th Street to roughly 29th Street. He called it Chelsea, after the London borough, and just below the present intersection of Ninth Avenue and 23rd Street he too built a fine Georgian home. In 1760 Abraham Mortier, commissary to His Majesty’s forces, leased an estate from Trinity Church called Richmond Hill—a promontory between the present King, Varick, Charlton, and MacDougal streets—where he wined and dined a host of dignitaries, including Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who until 1763 served as supreme British commander in America. Other gentlemen, too, developed a taste for refined country life—William Bayard, James Jauncy, and John Morin Scott among them—enough that by the mid-1760s there was an almost unbroken line of great estates up the west side of Manhattan.
Much the same thing occurred on the east side. South of the present Seward Park, just below the intersection of Division and Rutgers streets, lay the hundred-acre estate of the wealthy Rutgers family, whose money came from trade and brewing. Chief Justice and later Lieutenant Governor James De Lancey occupied 340 acres on what is today 120 blocks of the Lower East Side, running from the Bowery to the East River, and north from Division Street (so named because it separated his property from that of the Rutgers family), across Delancey, to Stanton. (Orchard Street was cut through the governor’s fine stand of fruit trees.) The Stuyvesants still held Director Pieter’s original estate, encompassing most of the land west of Fourth Avenue from 5th to roughly 20th streets. Gerardus Stuyvesant (the Director’s grandson) still lived in the old family house, while his two sons, Petrus and Nicholas, occupied more up-to-date mansions nearby; Petrus dubbed his Petersfield, and Nicholas’s was known as the Bowery.
Above the Stuyvesants lay John Watts’s Rose Hill (now 29th Street and Park Avenue) and, still further north, Inclenberg, the estate of John Murray, whose mansion stood on what is now Park Avenue between 36th and 37th streets (an area known today as Murray Hill). In the early 1760s James Beekman (cousin of Gerard G. Beekman and son of William) built Mount Pleasant, an elegant villa overlooking Turtle Bay on the East River, near the foot of what is now 50th Street. Further upriver lay the mansions of Schermerhorns, Rhinelanders, Lawrences, and others. On Harlem Heights, Colonel Roger Morris and his wife, Mary Philipse, were building Mount Morris, a beautiful Georgian showplace commanding a view down the length of Manhattan. Some gentlemen preferred the comparative isolation of Westchester or Long Island. Frederick Van Cortlandt built a substantial mansion in the Bronx in 1748. Cadwallader Golden located his country seat in Flushing. Philip Livingston erected his in Brooklyn Heights, while William Axtell went all the way out to Flatbush to build his Melrose Hall.
Although some of these estates grew crops for profit, their primary purpose—besides providing refuge from epidemics—was to serve as theaters of refinement. Many New York gentlemen, inspired by the rage for gardening and landscaping among English estate owners, surrounded their country homes with