Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [463]
Way across town, where the high, dry land west of Second Avenue tumbled down into marshes that ran on to the East River, the Stuyvesant family took the lead, albeit reluctantly, in developing Tompkins Square. For quite some time, they and other swamplords (including Pells, Fishes, and Astors) had refused to underwrite the mammoth job of draining and filling their boggy empire. At one point they threatened to dump the property back on the city as not worth improving. Thus prodded, and having taken note of the “depressed.state of property in this part of the city,” the municipal authorities allocated sixty-two thousand dollars of taxpayers’ money to compensate the landowners (in particular, the Stuyvesant family) and set aside another twenty-two thousand to transform the muddy flat into a park. Opened in 1834, Tompkins Square was surrounded the following year with an ornamental cast-iron fence, then studded with shade trees. This upgrade immediately lofted the value of all the swamplords’ nearby holdings, and boosters predicted a brilliant and genteel future for the neighborhood.
The city supported the Stuyvesant and Ruggles developments so handsomely largely because it was running out of money. As expenses for infrastructure and poor relief soared, traditional revenues had failed to keep up. For over a century the municipal corporation’s treasury had relied mainly on rental income from its own property (water lots, wharves, common lands) and on license and franchise fees. By the 1820s, with these sources no longer generating sufficient revenues to cover expanding costs, city officials relied more on property taxes.
Previously, property (especially “farmland”) had been taxed lightly or not at all, one reason eighteenth-century merchants had regarded it as such a good investment. But as land values catapulted, the city began to demand a portion of the profits, and total assessments leapt from just over two hundred thousand dollars in 1830 to over $1.1 million in 1837. With their fiscal fate now tied to the value of private holdings, aldermen adopted a policy of aggressively enhancing the value of private property, in the name of promoting the public good.
Street openings were central to this strategy. The municipality’s Street Committee steadily expanded its building program, and in 1835, responding to numerous complaints about limited access north of 14th Street, it decided to open all grid-plotted thoroughfares up to 42nd Street. Ignoring the grid designers’ egalitarian inclinations, however, it began subsidizing creation of elite neighborhoods. Partly this was simply a matter of sanctioning exceptions in street design, like the creation of residential squares—elements that enhanced a location’s status and raised its values. Occasionally this entailed actively constructing new spaces with public money, as at Washington Square, which now completed a thirty-year transformation from ugly duckling to civic swan.
Originally sodden marshlands, the area had been drained in the 1790s and become a graveyard for paupers and fever victims, receiving more than twenty-two thousand bodies over the next two decades. It also served occasionally as execution ground, with prisoners carted up Christopher Street from Newgate Prison and hanged from an elm before jeering crowds (the resident gravedigger doubling as hangman). After the yellow fever epidemic of 1823, with Greenwich booming just to the west and Bond Street burgeoning just to the east, the city barred further burials and routed new corpses north to what is today Bryant Park. In 1826 the city purchased additional land here (paying a hefty seventy-eight thousand dollars) and created the Washington Parade-Ground, a setting for militia exercises. It opened to