Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [239]
Municipal and state officials did their best to accommodate the federal government’s need for space and quiet deliberation. Congress complained that the ringing of bells at funerals disturbed its deliberations; local authorities obligingly banned the practice. The chief executive’s hemorrhoids flared up, and his doctors insisted that he stay in bed for six weeks; a chain was stretched across the street outside his residence to reduce the clatter of traffic. Additional renovations were required on Federal Hall; officials organized a lottery to raise seventy-five hundred pounds.1
There was even talk about turning lower Manhattan into the federal district envisioned in the Constitution, complete with government offices, residences, parks, and gardens; one plan designated Governors Island, just across the harbor, as the site for a presidential mansion. Eager to cooperate, the city demolished the old Anglo-Dutch fort on the Battery over the summer of 1789, uncovering, among other things, the coffin of Lord Bellomont and the cornerstone of the church erected during Willem Kieft’s regime a century and a half earlier. Once the fort was down, workmen began construction of a three-story brick building with ample quarters for all three branches of the government. When finished two years later, Government House, as it was called, commanded spectacular harbor views and an elegant waterfront promenade.
Provisions were dear and housing hard to come by, as ever, but New York’s cosmopolitan attractions made up for a good deal of discomfort. As wide-eyed St. George Tucker of Virginia recorded in his diary, the “hurly burly and bustle of a large town” held a unique fascination of its own. “You may stand in one place in this City and see as great a variety of faces, figures, and Characters as Hogarth or Le Sage (author of Gil Bias) ever drew.”
There were plenty of other things to do, however. Opposition to playhouses had receded again, and Lewis Hallam the younger had reopened the John Street Theater with a performance of Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, a sentimental comedy set in postwar New York. A new racetrack, the Maidenhead, was now operating just behind the old De Lancey mansion, and two new pleasure gardens had appeared: Brannon’s, near the southwest corner of present Spring and Hudson streets, and the United States, an establishment on Broadway once run by the widow Montayne. Much frequented by students from Columbia College, Brannon’s was renowned for its “curious shrubs and plants” and excellent ice cream; the United States pitched its advertisements to the “Fair Sex” and noted that “select companies or parties, can always have an apartment to themselves, if required.”
A “VORTEX OF FOLLY AND DISSIPATION”
But would the federal government stay? The selection of a permanent site for the national capital remained a topic of passionate controversy around the country, New York being a far from popular choice. Its raw juxtapositions of wealth and poverty, its preoccupation with commercial profit, its tolerance (even laxity) in matters of religion and morality, its raucous crowds—none of these recommended the city to the nation’s overwhelmingly rural and agricultural population. Leading the opposition were hardshell republicans who feared that New York’s “British” and “aristocratic” tendencies, to say nothing of its fleshpots, would sooner or later fatally corrupt the leaders of a free people. Everything they heard or saw over the next couple of years convinced them the end was already in sight.
Much would be made of Brissot’s observation that “if there is one city on the American continent which above all others displays English