Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [296]
As early as 1786 a notice in one of the local papers called lower Broadway “the center of residence in the fashionable world,” and over the next decade it would be lined with four-story Federal-style mansions occupied by Jays, Gracies, Delafields, Macombs, Lawrences, and Varicks. (Hamiltons, Morrises, and Hoffmans lived close by on Whitehall, Beaver, and lower Greenwich streets.) “There is not in any city in the world a finer street than Broadway,” La Rochefoucauld proclaimed in the mid-nineties. “From its elevated situation, its position on the river, and the elegance of the buildings, it is naturally the place of residence of the most opulent inhabitants.”
The “opulent inhabitants” hadn’t entirely escaped their less affluent fellow citizens, for members of other classes lived on adjacent streets, virtually next door. Greenwich Street, for instance, was home to numerous artisans and shopkeepers as well as a small population of free blacks. Petty crime was a recurring problem, and by the turn of the century weekend crowds of working people converged on the Battery. There, as Washington Irving observed condescendingly, “the gay apprentice sported his Sunday coat, and the laborious mechanic, relieved from the dirt and drudgery of the week, poured his weekly tale of love into the half-averted ear of the sentimental chambermaid.” Newspapers deplored the parties of naked boys and young men who could always be seen swimming off the Battery in hot weather—an offense against refined sensibilities that the Common Council struggled for years to eradicate. Far more disturbing was the neighborhood’s vulnerability to disease. In 1799 Elizabeth Bleecker, who lived on lower Broadway, was shocked when a black man dying of yellow fever “came up our alley and laid himself down on the ground.”
In the early nineteenth century, Bowling Green was a center of fashionable society in the city. The fence encircling the little park still stands. (© Museum of the City of New York)
These plebeian intrusions didn’t precipitate another patrician exodus, but some merchants, professionals, and prosperous master artisans did begin to drift a bit farther north, searching for houses that (as one builder advertised in 1803) were “in so healthy and airy a situation as to render retirement to the country unnecessary during the summer.” Streets running west to the river were popular—Vesey, Barclay, Park Place, and Murray—especially where they fronted open spaces like the campus of Columbia College. Broadway north from Cortlandt Street attracted the likes of John Jacob Astor, who settled on Broadway in 1803, along with assorted Kings, Rutherfords, and Roosevelts. After 1806, when Trinity began requiring its tenants to build with brick rather than wood, genteel housing reached as far as Chambers Street, on the north side of the Park where City Hall was under construction. Indeed it was widely assumed, as the Common Council asserted, that “the Elegance and situation of this Building” would so increase the value of nearby real estate that it was destined to be “the center of the wealth and population of this City.”
When the Englishman John Lambert passed through New York in 1807, the milelong stretch of Broadway from Bowling Green to the Park was firmly established as the axis of respectable society. At the lower end of the street, rich merchants and lawyers and brokers lived side by side in rows of “lofty and well built” town houses. Above them ranged block after block of “large commodious shops of every description . . . book stores, print-shops, music-shops, jewelers, and silversmiths; hatters, linen-drapers, milliners, pastry-cooks, coachmakers, hotels, and coffee-houses.” From eleven to three every day, Lambert remarked approvingly, the whole of Broadway from Bowling Green to the Park was the “genteel lounge” of New York, “as much crowded as the Bond-street of London” with strolling ladies and gentlemen turned out in the latest European fashions.
Few wealthy residents as yet