Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [462]
One such pieced-together block of land covered roughly the area between 19th and 22nd streets and Third and Fourth avenues, with the former Gramercy Farm as its twenty-two acre core. The terrain—swampy in spots, hilly in others—was traversed by the spring-fed Crommessie Vly, which over the years had gouged out a gully almost forty feet deep on its way to the East River at 18th Street. In the early 1830s Ruggles undertook a mammoth landscaping job that eventually required moving approximately a million horsecart loads of earth, at a cost of $180,000.
At the center of his rearranged domain, Ruggles laid out Gramercy Square. Inspired by the example of Trinity’s St. John’s Park, he deeded the square collectively to the owners of the sixty surrounding plots he had platted out. Ruggles sought taxexempt status for the private park, and the Board of Aldermen agreed (in 1832), expecting that it would soon be surrounded by valuable (and taxable) properties. They were right. By 1833, when the square was fenced in, most of the lots had been sold, despite their distance from town. Actual housing construction, however, would be delayed until the 1840s.
To enhance access to Gramercy Square, Ruggles prevailed on the state legislature to insert a new north-south artery between Third and Fourth avenues. He named the northern extension Lexington Avenue, for the famous battle, and the southern strip Irving Place, honoring Washington Irving, though the writer never lived there. Irving Place served another function for Ruggles, as it led to his second mammoth enterprise, Union Square.
Union Place, as it was known until Ruggles got it changed to Union Square, was situated, as the name implied, at a junction of many roads. Left open by decree of the grid commissioners, it remained in the early 1830s a collection of vacant lots—apart from some shacks and a potter’s field. In 1832 Ruggles obtained a fifty-year lease on most of the area between 15th and 19th streets, then got the city to approve opening Fourth Avenue north of 17th Street. In 1834 he convinced the Board of Aldermen to enclose, regulate, and grade the square (with much of the cost assessed to the Ruggles-owned land between there and Gramercy Park). Finally, Ruggles built curbs and sidewalks along the new streets. Then he sold most of his leases and, in 1839, built a four-story house for himself on the square’s east side, into which he moved from his Bond Street quarters. In time Ruggles would be surrounded by affluent neighbors, but, as at Gramercy Square, actual construction would await the next decade.
Due west of Gramercy Park, on Manhattan’s Hudson River side, another grand project was afoot on the domain of Father Christmas, Clement Clarke Moore. Once his resistance to lower Manhattan’s northward sprawl proved futile, Moore had decided to make the best of things and systematically developed Chelsea as a fashionable quarter, anchored by the green grounds of the General Theological Seminary. Working with James N. Wells, the Hudson Street carpenter who had developed Trinity’s St. Luke’s property, Moore laid out streets. Again, smoothing out Manhattan’s cragginess took heroic efforts: Eighth Avenue had to be beveled down by six to twelve feet to reach the required grade. By 1832, his friend John Pintard noted, Chelsea was laid out with streets “where, but a few years ago, all was open country.” Soon Moore was leasing lots, with restrictive covenants to guarantee the proper tone.
Laborers excavating Union Square, engraving by James Smillie, c. 1831. The leveling of Manhattan’s original terrain for real estate developers