Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [366]
Yet for all its charms, lower Broadway was losing its exclusivity in these years. Clerks, shopkeepers, and laborers trod its excellent trottoir on their way to and from work. Pigs wandered over from all-too-near poor neighborhoods. Commerce and the business district expanded rapidly northward. Old private homes were converted to boardinghouses for young merchants, clerks, and out-of-towners. The growing number of shops, hotels, restaurants, and theaters produced, said the Mirror, a “confused assemblage,” mixing people of high and low degree.
More and more wealthy residents thus began a long, reluctant march uptown in search of more hospitable enclaves. One destination was Hudson Square, also known as St. John’s Park, which had been opened by Trinity twenty years earlier but had failed to attract residents. In 1827, however, the vestry decided to sell rather than lease lots and deeded the square itself to purchasers. They poured in by the score, threw up a tall iron fence around the square, and landscaped it with catalpas, cottonwoods, horse chestnuts, silver birches, flowerbeds, and gravel paths. The neighborhood for blocks around soon bristled with Hamiltons, Schuylers, Delafields, Tappans, and other prominent families whose elegant brick town houses afforded refuge from the sweaty commotion of the city below. Nothing else in New York so closely approximated the beauty and exclusiveness of the great squares of London’s West End. It was, according to one contemporary report, “the fairest interior portion of this city.”
Battery Park, 1830. A field of fashionable bonnets and top hats, well-behaved children, carefully maintained grounds—everything in this scene of the Battery conveys its continuing prominence as a hub of respectable New York. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
A second destination for rich urban refugees lay even further uptown, where Broadway sliced through Bleecker, Bond, Great Jones, and East 4th streets, just below John Jacob Astor’s Vauxhall Gardens. Building sites on this northern frontier of the city were ample enough for patrician-sized dwellings with commodious yards, gardens, and stables; one guidebook announced that they “may vie, for beauty and taste, with European palaces.” Arguably the most desirable addresses lay along Bond Street, where Jonas Minturn built the first house in 1820. Its white marble facade set the pattern for the expensive three-and four-story residences that stretched the length of the street, from Broadway to the Bowery, by the mid-thirties.
Bond Street’s principal rival was the wide nine-block sweep of Bleecker Street from the Bowery to Sixth Avenue, and in 1828 the portion of Bleecker between Mercer and Greene streets became the site of New York’s first experiment with terraces—grand residential blockfronts of the kind seen in the most fashionable London neighborhoods. Christened LeRoy Place in honor of the Knickerbocker merchant Jacob LeRoy, its Federal-style row houses sold for a hefty twelve thousand dollars. But LeRoy Place was promptly eclipsed by the resplendent La Grange Terrace, completed in 1833 on the west side of Lafayette Place (itself opened by the canny Astor only half a dozen years earlier). Also known as Colonnade Row, for its magisterial procession of two-story Corinthian columns, La Grange Terrace consisted of nine residences that sold for as much as thirty thousand dollars apiece. They were reportedly “the most imposing and magnificent in the city.”
St. John’s Chapel and Hudson Square, from the New York Mirror, April n, 1829. This genteel bastionbounded by Hudson, Varick, Ericsson, and Laight streets— fell abruptly