Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [309]
Sledding at the corner of Greenwich and Warren streets, 1809, by the Baroness Hyde de Neuville. In the one- and two-story frame buildings of this plebeian quarter it was still possible for artisans to maintain their traditional single family house-and-shop living arrangements. (© Museum of the City of New York)
One of the artisan communities within this zone lay just west of City Hall Park in the blocks bounded by Greenwich, Hudson, Warren, Murray, and Chambers streets. Chambers Street, for one, had been unpaved and largely uninhabited at the end of the Revolution. By 1800 the now cobbled thoroughfare was a neighborhood of independent proprietors, the kind of community no longer sustainable near the docks. Its seventy-six row houses, built on land leased from Trinity, were occupied by the representatives of twenty-five different trades: carpenters, joiners, coachmakers, carters, grocers, stonecutters, and others. These houses employed the neoclassical motifs of Federal architecture, like the residences of wealthy downtown merchants, but were smaller (often only eighteen feet wide) and more cheaply made (some entirely of wood). Signboards on or above their front doors made it clear, too, that their interiors were organized to suit the needs of domestic production. The family lived on the second floor. The first floor (in front) was given over to workbenches, tools, and storage space, along with (in the rear) a kitchen, spinning wheels, bins, and tubs. In the back yard, protected from ambulatory hogs by high fences, were the vegetable garden, fruit trees, privy, woodpile, cistern, smokehouse, and open fires over which the housewife boiled the wash.
The Chambers Street community proved short-lived, however. Merchants and professionals edging their way northward, away from downtown disease and disorder, bid up land prices. After 1806 Trinity demanded that its leaseholders put up only substantial brick houses, driving out small builders. By 1812 most of the artisanal home-and-workshops were gone, along with their occupants. Chambers Street had been gentrified.
Some dislocated building tradesmen, grocers, and cartmen headed farther upisland to Greenwich. The opening of Newgate Prison in 1797 and repeated infusions of fever refugees had transformed the rural hamlet into a booming village in need of their services. “The demand for houses at Greenwich,” noted a Boston paper in 1805, “is scarcely greater than the rapidity with which they are raised.” A Greenwich Market opened in 1808, just below Christopher Street, and quickly filled with wagons and carts. The Greenwich Hotel (1809), established on the prison’s doorstep, became the terminus for the stagecoach that rumbled back and forth from Federal Hall at least five times a day.
Other artisans headed across town to Bowery Village, the community that had grown up around Petrus Stuyvesant’s country house and chapel. Throughout the eighteenth century it had remained sparsely settled—a few houses plus blacksmith, wagon shop, general store, and tavern—partly from fear of highwaymen lurking in the Bayard woods. But now the developmentally minded Petrus Stuyvesant III laid out a street system on his ancestral property, squared with the points of the compass, and he donated land and construction funds for an Episcopal parish church. By 1807 St. Mark’s in the Bowery (completed in 1799 at what is now East 10th Street and Second Avenue) attracted as many as seventy worshipers in winter and two hundred in summer, reflecting the village’s new popularity as a fever refuge for city folk (the Manhattan Company erected a branch office there for banking during epidemics).
Because Bowery Village lay just outside the city limits, farmers could sell there without paying a market tax. Wagon stands soon flourished along 6th and 7th streets, along with a weigh scale for Westchester