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By Root 7920 0

arrivals. In 1820 he had Aaron Burr’s old Richmond Hill mansion rolled downhill on logs to a site on the corner of Charlton and Varick streets. In 1822, to lend tone to the neighborhood, he reopened it as a “public house, with a Music Room, Reading Room, newspapers, gardens, wines, liquores, etc.” He then leveled the hill, opened streets Burr had previously charted, and sold or leased lots to carpenters and masons, who erected row after row of houses on speculation. By the mid-twenties this once remote neighborhood was full of people, and Astor had multiplied his initial investment many times over.

Astor’s prescience seemed about to be rewarded again in the village of Greenwich, where he had been amassing real estate ever since 1805, until planned development touched off a vigorous backlash, led by a most unlikely agitator. Clement Clarke Moore was a conservative Knickerbocker whose father had been Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of New York for thirty-five years. Clement too was deeply involved in church affairs, and a classical scholar as well. He was also proprietor of Chelsea, the largest estate in the area, which consisted mainly of open countryside. When the city, obedient to the commissioners’ 1811 grid plan, thrust Ninth Avenue through the middle of his property in 1818, Moore penned an indignant pamphlet. Addressing his fellow “Proprietors of Real Estate,” he decried urban development as a destructive conspiracy by patronage-hungry and politically well connected “cartmen, carpenters, masons, pavers and all their host of attendant laborers.” More galling still, the city was taxing Moore to pay for this and other street openings, in effect compelling him “to become a capitalist for the public”—a tyranny “no monarch in Europe would dare to exercise.”

The Common Council backed down in 1818, agreeing not to extend the grid into the area west of Sixth Avenue from Houston Street up to 14th—a corner of Manhattan still famed for the eccentric and baffling pattern of its streets. Two years later the victorious Moore helped Trinity organize a parish church on Hudson Street. Its name—St. Luke’s in the Fields—evoked the pastoral nature of the area and, by association with the physician-apostle, Greenwich’s role as haven for the multitudes fleeing disease in the city. It proved all too apt a name.

In 1822 yellow fever again broke out in New York, this time on the stylish streets west of Broadway and near the Battery, supposedly the healthiest part of town. The municipal government declared everything below City Hall an “infected district” and established a picket-fence barricade along Chambers Street. Thousands of residents fled north. “From daybreak till night one line of carts, containing boxes, merchandise, and effects, were seen moving towards Greenwich Village,” one paper reported. The city pitched tents for refugees, and carpenters hastily erected hundreds of wooden houses.

Although many refugees went home when the fever broke, enough stayed on that local builders had their hands full trying to keep up with the demand for housing. St. Luke’s trustees had carpenter James Wells flank the church with brick row houses, which it maintained as rental property, while Hudson Street filled with residences equipped with such middle-class conveniences as brass grates for burning the new anthracite coal, brick cisterns with pumps, and servants’ apartments. Smaller houses went up on other streets to accommodate a burgeoning number of artisans, especially the carpenters, masons, painters, and stonecutters employed in the booming construction trades. Christopher Street was paved and its sidewalks flagged by 1825, and the blocks around Newgate Prison became so residential that no one complained when the state shut it down in 1829 (having just opened a new facility, Sing Sing, up the river at Ossining).

North of 14th Street, meanwhile, even Clement Clark Moore had begun to play the landlord, carving out lots along Ninth Avenue and promoting them to genteel purchasers. To provide a community anchor, Moore gave the Episcopal diocese