Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [310]
Farther down the Bowery Road, just above Chatham Square, the city’s meatprocessing industry expanded outward from the Bull’s Head Tavern, abattoir, and stockyards, owned since 1785 by Henry Astor. In the early 1800s, as additional butchers herded into the area, slaughterhouses multiplied along Chrystie and Elizabeth streets. With them came a profusion of new taverns—the Gotham Inn, the Duck and Frying Pan, the Pig and Whistle, the Crown and Thistle—and in 1801 the New Circus in the Bowery, whose bill included bullbaiting and bearbaiting. Chatham Square itself featured a horse market, a livery stable (headquarters for the Boston stagecoaches), Hendrick Doyer’s distillery (at the present Doyers Street), a watch house, and blocks of stores and workshops.
Chatham Square, in turn, bordered the former Rutgers estate, now the Seventh Ward. Colonel Henry Rutgers, grandson of Harmanus the Second, who remained in residence at the family mansion on the East River, cut up and leased out much of his land on a long-term basis. Strict building covenants required each leaseholder to erect a “workmanlike brick building.” This drew merchants and professionals to the high ground along East Broadway, Rutgers, and Monroe streets. But Rutgers’s terms were reasonable enough, and the area close enough to the Corlear’s Hook shipyards, that his property attracted shipwrights, coopers, chandlers, joiners, sailmakers, and ropemakers as well.
From the shipyards, it was but a short ferry ride to two other outposts of the old artisanal world. In Brooklyn Village, at the foot of the Old Ferry Road (now Fulton Street), lay a clustering of houses, taverns, stables, and shanties, through which the country road straggled on and out through Bedford Corners toward Jamaica. Just to Brooklyn Village’s right—from an arriving horse-ferry passenger’s perspective—rose the bluff generally known as Clover Hill, studded still with farms, orchards, gardens, and pastures.
To its left, a little way up the East River shore, lay the “City of Olympia,” founded by Comfort and Joshua Sands back in the mid-eighties. Since 1795 it had been accessible directly, via the “New” or Catherine Street Ferry that docked at Main Street. This artery, which wandered toward an inland connection with the Old Ferry Road, was lined with wood-frame buildings that housed ex-Manhattanites and settlers from Connecticut (a big contingent of whom had come down after yellow fever devastated New London in the late nineties). Slightly further upriver, between Olympia and Wallabout Bay, shipbuilder-turned-developer John Jackson had laid out yet a third village. Having sold most of his holdings to the government, the savvy promoter now began advertising his remaining lots, on the Navy Yard’s western border, as Vinegar Hill. His intention was to attract fugitives from the ill-fated Irish rebellion, the climactic battle of which had occurred at a place of the same name in 1798.
Between 1790 and 1810 the population of Brooklyn township nearly tripled, rising from sixteen hundred to just over forty-four hundred—a rate of growth only slightly below that of New York City proper—and the influx of Yankees, Irish, Manhattanites, and freed slaves from Kings and Queens counties engulfed the area’s old Dutch inhabitants. The bulk of the town’s residents lived within Brooklyn Village, a thriving artisanal community whose growth was marked by the purchase of its first Town Bell in 1796 (it hung in a cupola on top of Buckbee’s Hay Scales on Fulton Street), by the advent of its first newspaper, the Long Island