Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [212]
Washington’s Triumphal Entry, 1788. Washington and his retinue on Broadway, passing St. Paul’s Church. (© Museum of the City of New York)
That same evening, Governor Clinton hosted a grand public banquet at Fraunces Tavern for Washington and his officers. Thirteen toasts were drunk, concluding with “May the Remembrance of this DAY be a Lesson to Princes.” More banquets followed over the next week, all marked by “good humour, hilarity and mirth.” Clinton’s dinner for the French ambassador at Cape’s Tavern drew 120 guests who consumed 135 bottles of madeira, thirty-six bottles of port, sixty bottles of English beer, and thirty bowls of punch; they also broke sixty wine glasses and eight cut-glass decanters. Bowling Green was the site of a huge display of fireworks on December 2. Spectators saw a “Balloon of Serpents,” a “Yew Tree of brilliant fire,” and an “Illuminated Pyramid, with Archemedian Screws, a Globe and vertical Sun,” climaxed by “Fame, descending” and the launching of a hundred rockets. Printer James Rivington, who had just stripped the British arms from the masthead of his Gazette, said the show that night “exceeded every former Exhibition in the United States.”
On the morning of December 4, Washington bade farewell to his officers in another gathering at Fraunces Tavern. After a brief toast, marked by “extreme sensibility on both sides,” he embraced each of those present in turn. “In every eye was the tear of dignified sensibility and not a word was articulated to interrupt the eloquent silence and the tenderness of the scene.” Escorted by a column of infantry, the Father of His Country walked silently to the foot of Whitehall Street, where a barge waited to take him across to Paulus Hook on the New Jersey shore.
PART THREE
MERCANTILE TOWN (1783-1843)
The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. (I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
17
Phoenix
As Washington made his way back to Mount Vernon, New Yorkers got down to the business of rebuilding a city that seven years of enemy occupation and two calamitous fires had reduced to a shambles. In the burned-over district east of Broadway, the spectral shell of Trinity Church loomed menacingly over block after rubble-choked block where, as William Alexander Duer recalled, the skeletal walls of gutted buildings “cast their grim shadows upon the pavement, imparting an unearthly aspect to the street.” Many private residences were unfit for human use. James Duane returned on Evacuation Day and found two of his houses looking “as if they had been inhabited by savages or wild beasts.” Churches and public buildings, commandeered for service as stables or hospitals or barracks, stood in desperate need of repair. Many streets, stripped bare of trees, were obstructed by trenches, redoubts, and other fortifications. Garbage and refuse lay everywhere. Wharves and warehouses had crumbled from years of neglect. The merchant fleet had all but vanished.
Vanished too were the Caribbean markets on which New York’s prosperity had hinged for the better part of a century. British orders in council of July and December 1783 opened the British Isles to American trade but banned American meat, fish, and dairy products from the British West Indies and restricted trade in all other goods to British ships—a tremendous blow to the livelihood of every merchant and artisan in town, not to mention