Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [94]
Standing on the west side of Broadway between Crown (Liberty) and Little Prince (Cedar), just north of Trinity Church, the King’s Arms quickly became the unofficial headquarters of English New York. Municipal and provincial officials, merchants, and officers from the fort thronged the barroom, some milling about on foot, others occupying small curtained booths to sip coffee or dine in comfort and privacy. Committees of both the provincial assembly and Common Council routinely convened in its spacious upstairs meeting-rooms, whose windows and balconies afforded sweeping views of the river and harbor below. As early as 1699, Hutchins may have allowed his establishment to be used for theatrical performances, now considered very chic in London.1
(The New York Society Library)
In these same years, the Common Council decided to replace the Dutch Stadhuis, half a century old now, with a proper City Hall at the intersection of Wall and Broad streets. (The parcel was donated by Abraham De Peyster, who had bought up many of the Dongan lots on Wall Street.) Completed in 1700 at a cost of some three thousand pounds, the new building was as much a symbol of the anglicization of New York as Trinity Church, Bradford’s printshop, or the King’s Arms. Facing down Broad, still the city’s premier commercial thoroughfare, it held rooms for the Common Council, the Assembly, the Mayor’s Court (also known as the Court of Common Pleas), the new Supreme Court of Judicature, and, in the basement, the municipal jail. After 1716 “a publick Clock” of local manufacture embellished the tower.
Yet another vestige of New Amsterdam was erased when colonial authorities demolished the old city wall, erected almost half a century earlier to keep out the English. In 1694 the Common Council had asked to have the wall removed, citing the “Incroachment of Buildings” on those parts of the palisade “Along the Wall Street” that hadn’t already been turned into firewood. The last of it finally came down in 1699, just in time for the stones from its bastions to be incorporated into the foundation of the new City Hall—a symbolic touch that would have been lost on no one.
The wall’s removal didn’t cause an immediate surge of building north of Wall Street, however, for the Dongan Charter had given all vacant land on Manhattan to the municipal corporation, which proved quite unwilling to part with any of its endowment. The resulting shortage of building plots, along with the attractions of living and working next to the Town Dock, would keep New Yorkers tethered to lower Manhattan for many years to come. In 1695 the built-up part of town covered no more than an eighth of a square mile, and most new construction took place below what is now Fulton Street. In 1704, when there were around 750 houses for the city’s five-thousand-odd inhabitants, Sarah Kemble Knight, a visitor from Boston, pronounced it “well compacted.” And crowded: as one harried colonial official complained to the Board of Trade only a few years earlier, he had been unable to find a place to live. “I have eight in family and know not yet where to fix them, houses are so scarce and dear, and lodgings worst in this place.”
Scarce and dear, but increasingly solid: most houses in New York were now built of stone or brick—the latter, Knight reported, “are of divers Coulers and laid in Checkers, being glazed [they] look very agreeable.” Aesthetics aside, the new building materials greatly reduced the menace of fire. So did the municipality’s relentless attention to fire prevention. In 1691 Direck Vandenburg, the mason who would direct Trinity’s construction, headed a committee that regularly examined chimneys and fireplaces; in 1697 the Common Council shifted that responsibility to inspectors in each ward who checked every house weekly. The city’s sixteen wells were put also put under ward supervision, and as many as fifteen more would be drilled in the middle of Manhattan streets by 1720, with residents covering the expense. In addition, new Common Council regulations required residents to