Part 9

The Stadt Huys, originally built as an inn, to relieve Director Kieft of the burden of overmuch entertaining, dated back to the same year as the Dutch Reformed Church in the fortified enclosure. The organization of the old church is still maintained, and the functions of the city government have been performed in successive buildings to the present day; but the picturesque old government house—fifty feet square, three stories high in the walls and two in the attic, with windows in the gable of its crow-stepped roof,—that should have been cherished as a most interesting relic of the city’s earliest period, lasted but a little way into the present century, having then been used for over a hundred years for commercial purposes.

[Illustration: STAINED-GLASS WINDOW IN “BOWLING GREEN OFFICES.”

SHOWING GREEN ABOUT 1760.]

Chief among the few other survivals from the early days, and antedating all of them, is Bowling Green. This oldest bit of park land in the city dates from the Dutch occupation. It lay immediately in front of the Fort, and no building has ever stood upon its diminutive, oblong site. The relatively old row of buildings (Steamship Row) which overlooks it from the south will ere long be replaced by a Custom House worthy of the second port of entry in the world. This will occupy the site of the old government house, which once served the purpose for which the new building is designed. In 1771, it was found advisable to enclose the Green with an iron fence. Bereft of the crowns that surmounted the posts, the fence still surrounds it, though the equestrian statue of George III., which it was put up to protect, vanished in 1776. In the excitement that followed the reading of the Declaration of Independence, in that year, the crowd marched down Broadway from the Common, and tumbled the King from his pedestal. The leaden carcass was shipped to Connecticut, where the wife and daughter of Governor Wolcott cannily converted it into rebel bullets. An indignity similar in degree though different in kind was offered to America’s eloquent Parliamentary advocate, William Pitt, whose marble effigy at Wall and William Streets was decapitated during the Revolution by the Tories, and left standing for years as a mere “disturber of traffic.”

[Illustration: GOVERNMENT HOUSE.]

The house at No. 1 Broadway, looking eastward over the lower end of Bowling Green, built in 1760 by Colonel Kennedy, afterward Earl of Cassilis, and occupied in turn by the American leaders, including Washington, and by the English, including Cornwallis, Howe and Sir Henry Clinton, was the scene of Major André’s last interview with the British commander before his fatal journey to West Point. And in another house in Broadway overlooking the Green, Benedict Arnold had his quarters after his flight and the exposure of his infamous plot. Mention of the gallant young British officer, André, naturally suggests the name and fate of Nathan Hale, whose heroism is commemorated by a noble statue by MacMonnies, which faces Broadway from the lower corner of City Hall Park, not far from the spot where the American spy was hanged from an apple-tree. The Beekman “Mansion,” overlooking the East River near what is now Fifty-first Street, the scene of Hale’s trial and condemnation, survived till 1874; the Kennedy House, identified with André’s memory, lasted eight years longer.

[Illustration: FEDERAL HALL.]

A picturesque feature of the old town was the canal that ran from the city wall to the bay, becoming first an artery of trade, and then a centre of fashionable life, as Broad Street, which took its place, has since been a centre of commercial activity. It was directly opposite Broad Street, in Wall, that the foundations of the new City Hall were laid in 1699, the sale of the Stadt Huys helping to defray the cost of the more pretentious structure. The arms of the English Governor, Lord Bellomont, were blazoned on its walls; but two years later the marshal was called upon to remove and destroy them. When New York became the seat of the national government, the ninety-year-old City Hall, partly reconstructed and lavishly decorated, became the meeting-place of Congress. The most memorable day in its history was the 30th of April, 1789, when, attended by Chancellor Livingston and the committees of Senators and Representatives, standing upon its balcony in the presence of a great concourse, not merely of New Yorkers, but of Americans from all the colonies, gathered together from far and near, George Washington took the oath of office as first President of the United States. Where the Capitol then stood now stands the Sub-Treasury, with Ward’s bronze Washington looking gravely down from its steps upon the feverish turmoil of Wall Street.

The oldest existing municipal building in New York is the Hall of Records, in City Hall Park, whose contents are erelong to be housed in a spacious, fire-proof edifice. It dates from the middle of the eighteenth century. Its site formed a part of the Common, and it stood appropriately convenient to the gallows, for it was originally a jail—the first building on the island ever designed exclusively for the detention of law-breakers. In popular parlance, as in practical use, it soon became the Debtors’ Prison. When the British occupied the town during the Revolution, it was turned to account as their principal military prison, being known as The Provost, in reference to the title of the brutal Cunningham, who was charged with the custody of American prisoners of war—amongst others, “that d—d rebel, Ethan Allen.” The building was a debtors’ jail again from 1787 to 1830; on the completion of alterations projected at the latter date, it became, in 1835, the Register’s office, and as such will probably see the close of the nineteenth century.

[Illustration: ST. PAUL’S CHURCH.]

[Illustration: CITY HALL.]

Vastly more attractive to the eye than this treasury of real-estate records, and not wholly lacking in historic interest, is the adjacent City Hall. This really handsome building, in the style of the Italian Renaissance, was begun in 1803, and completed nine years later. The likelihood of the city’s extending beyond it seemed too slight to warrant lavishing upon its back the white marble which adds so much to the dignity and grace of its façade; the rear wall was accordingly constructed of a cheaper stone. In the “Governor’s room” on the second floor, used for official receptions, are the desk on which Washington wrote his first message to Congress, the chair in which he was inaugurated as President, and the chairs used by the first federal Congress.

In the same neighborhood, just beyond the lower extremity of the old Common, now City Hall Park, stands St. Paul’s Chapel, Trinity parish—an edifice much older than the parish church, which for the past half-century, like its successive parent buildings, has stood farther down Broadway, opposing its bulk to the westward progress of Wall Street. Fenced off by iron palings, and bordered on each side by a strip of graveyard, the chapel turns a picturesque and perhaps scornful back upon the “topless towers” of Broadway—little dreamt of when its foundations were laid in 1766, or three-and-twenty years later, when President Washington attended service there on the day of his first inauguration. These heaven-aspiring structures were only beginning to turn the street into a canyon when the first President’s successor in office sat in the same pew on the same day a century later (April 30, 1889).

Private houses of historic interest abounded not many years ago, notable among them the country-seat called Richmond Hill, near the long since absorbed village of Greenwich—a stately dwelling, identified with many familiar names. John Adams lived there during a part of his first term as Vice-President, and Aaron Burr started thence on that fateful July morning in 1804 that saw the death of Hamilton at his hand, and the end of his own political career. Of equal note was the house on Murray Hill, where Mrs. Murray detained the British commander at lunch while the American troops, under Putnam, made their escape from the island in 1776.

[Illustration: GRANT’S TOMB, RIVERSIDE DRIVE.]

The so-called Jumel Mansion, built for Washington’s whilom flame, Miss Mary Philippse, by her successful suitor, Col. Roger Morris, and afterwards occupied by Washington as his headquarters, became in turn the property of the nation (Morris having been a royalist), of John Jacob Astor, and of Stephen Jumel, whose erratic widow married Aaron Burr, but soon tired of him, turned him out of doors and dropped his name. From its coign of vantage on Harlem Heights at 169th Street, this dignified colonial dwelling still looks down upon the Harlem River and across to Long Island Sound. And at the foot of East 61st Street is yet to be seen—vine-covered, and embowered in trees and shrubs—the substantial stone residence of Col. William Smith, who married the daughter of President Adams, and ruined himself by speculating in east-side real estate. But the scarcity of such relics, and their glaring incongruity with their surroundings, emphasize the divergence between the old New York and that which is termed the Greater.

In the hall of Cooper Institute, Abraham Lincoln made that great speech which first fully revealed him to the people of the Eastern States; and hither he was brought, to lie in state in the City Hall, when a martyr’s death had disclosed his greatness still more clearly to all his countrymen.

Here have lived, for longer or shorter periods, sundry Presidents of the United States, from Washington to Cleveland; the city has been the permanent or occasional home of statesmen such as Jay and Livingston, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris; of political agitators such as Aaron Burr and “Commonsense” Paine, and political leaders like DeWitt Clinton and Samuel J. Tilden; of authors such as Washington Irving, whose burlesque local history marked him out as the father of American light literature, Fenimore Cooper, the most popular of American romance-writers, and Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, most individual of American poets. Here, for longer or shorter periods, have lived and labored Curtis, and Bayard Taylor, and Stoddard, and Stedman, and Aldrich, and Howells, and that greatest of poets among journalists and journalists among poets, William Cullen Bryant, editor of _The Evening Post_ and one of the founders of the Century Club; and Horace Greeley, founder of _The Tribune_, and most famous of American editors since Benjamin Franklin. As a resident of Brooklyn, and editor of a metropolitan religious weekly, the best-known preacher of the century, Henry Ward Beecher, was virtually a citizen of New York. In the annals of invention, the names of four New Yorkers stand out conspicuously—Fulton and Ericsson and Edison and Morse. And of all the free-booters that ever terrorized the sea, none has left a more awful and enduring fame than a once respectable resident of Liberty Street, renowned in song and story for two centuries as Captain Kidd.

The hospitality of New York and her people is proverbial. Every distinguished visitor to America for more than a century past has been entertained here, officially or informally. Among the city’s guests have been William IV. of England, while yet a sailor prince; Lafayette, Louis Kossuth, the Prince of Wales, the Grand Duke Alexis, the Emperor of Brazil, the Princess Eulalia, the Duke of Veragua, Li Hung Chang and the Marquis Ito. Almost all the greatest preachers, orators, players, singers, and instrumental performers of the nineteenth century have added to their fame or wealth by facing New York audiences; and among the great writers who have visited us have been Dickens, Thackeray, and Kipling.

While New York is easily first among the cities of the New World in commercial importance, it is not on material bases only that her supremacy rests. No community throughout the world responds more generously to every appeal for sympathy or help, whether the call be local, national or foreign. Her interest is keen in educational work of every kind. Columbia University—one of the oldest of local institutions, and more than local in its aims and fame and influence—has of late, through the liberality of her sons and other citizens, been housed in a manner commensurate with her requirements and aspirations; and so also has the less venerable but justly honored New York University. And the past few years have seen Barnard College for women and the Teachers College (both allied with Columbia) emerge from the chrysalis state into forms of beauty and power. The public-school system, moreover,—thanks to a recent brief respite from Tammany control,—is in better condition to-day than at any previous period of Tammany administration.

Of American literary activity, despite Boston’s ancient and deserved prestige, it cannot be denied that New York is to-day the centre, as it is the centre of the publishing trade, in books and periodicals. Boston, with her splendid Public Library, has set an example which the metropolis has been slow to follow; but the consolidation of the Astor, Lenox and Tilden collections, and their prospective housing in a magnificent and admirably situated building, has gone far to remove the reproach incurred during long years of public indifference to popular needs. The venerable Society Library, the modern and many-branched Free Circulating Library and kindred institutions have helped to create and in part to meet the demand which the Public Library in its new home may reasonably be expected to satisfy. Equally important in their way are those half-social, half-educational essays toward the solution of some of the problems of the slums—the University Settlement of men and the College Settlement of women. As a further indication that New York is not wholly given over to the worship of Mammon, it may be mentioned that the Greek Club, with its fortnightly meetings for the reading and discussion of the classics, has been for more than three decades the only circle of its kind in existence.

[Illustration: WASHINGTON ARCH.]

In art, the invaluable treasures of the Metropolitan Museum foster the love of what is enduringly beautiful in sculpture, painting, architecture, etc.; while the schools of this museum and of the National Academy of Design and the Society of American Artists, to say nothing of the more utilitarian classes of Cooper Institute and the School of Artist Artisans, afford instruction in art of such a sort as to render foreign study no longer indispensable, albeit no less attractive than of old.

Of music, vocal and instrumental, such feasts are spread before the local amateur as can be matched for quality and abundance in no other city at home or abroad, and while this is not true of the drama also, as the Comédie Française has never come hither in a body, it is yet a fact that nearly all that is best is seen, sooner or later, on the New York stage.

By what rapid strides the city is moving forward in some directions, while halting lamentably in others, needs not to be pointed out. There is expert testimony to the effect that in public morality it has at least held its own during the past half-century; we trust it may some day work out its salvation in things political, and cease to be the mild milch cow of thirsty demagogues. It can never vie in picturesqueness and historic interest with its European peers in population and importance, nor atone by its singularly fortunate situation for its poverty in little parks and its richness in rough-paved, right-angled and treeless streets and avenues; yet it may some day rival even Paris in the absolute beauty of its public and private buildings and historic monuments. A brave beginning has been made, in the Washington Arch, the Madison Square Garden, the Columbia and the New York University buildings, the Washington, Hale and Farragut statues and certain churches, club-houses and private dwellings. And in the Cathedral of St. John, the Public Library, the Academy of Design and the Botanical and Zoölogical gardens, a further stride will be made erelong in the only directions in which æsthetic leadership seems possible.

[Illustration]

BROOKLYN

THE TOWN ON FREEDOM’S BATTLE-FIELD

BY HARRINGTON PUTNAM

The earliest Dutch settlements within the present borough limits are not so old as the first hamlets on Manhattan. More than a score of years after the houses and forts of New Amsterdam looked out across the East River, the forest-crested heights of the west end of Long Island remained in undisturbed Indian occupation.

The Dutch settlers were deterred, rather than attracted, by this magnificent stretch of green woodlands extending along the high shore. The Holland people were not accustomed to timber clearing and therefore sought access to the island by the smoother meadow-lands of Gowanus, and afterwards to the north where the sloping grasslands about the Waalboght invited the settler to essay gardening without too much preparation with the axe. The early Long Island farmers advanced on the territory of Brooklyn by flank attacks, seeking to turn the wings of the extended forest, rather than boldly to engage in the struggle with the densely wooded heights in front. These pioneers were thrifty, energetic Hollanders and Huguenots whose farms soon required regular communication with Manhattan. In 1642 a public ferry was established between the present foot of Fulton Street and a landing in Peck’s Slip. The houses clustered about this Long Island landing constituted a little settlement called The Ferry.

[Illustration: VIEW IN BROOKLYN IN THE OLDEN TIMES.]

As the Indians were dispossessed from their maize-fields, the colonists found sites for a small village a mile or so inland. The modern visitor who comes up Fulton Street should stop about the corner of Hoyt and Smith Streets to locate this settlement and picture a primitive hamlet of small one-story frame cottages, sometimes surrounded by palisades for protection against attacks. The open lands were of small extent, with forest to the east and west, and streams running south into a wide morass, where is now Gowanus Canal. Undoubtedly the undrained land of this settlement, receiving copious moisture from the surrounding forests, contained many a marsh and fen like the homelands of Holland. So the settlers called it the brookland, or Breuckelen, after an ancient village of that name on the river Vecht in the Province of Utrecht. The records of old Breuckelen are traced by local antiquarians of Utrecht to the time of Tacitus. In its variant forms, Bracola, Broccke, Brocckede, Broicklede and Brocklandia, it describes a moist meadow-land. Or, as a Dutch writer declares, the town on the Vecht was called Breuckelen from the marshes (_a paludibus_). Its beautiful gardens and quaint castles, as the emigrants had beheld them when starting out from home, perhaps remained in the imagination of the Long Island settlers as an ideal of what their western home should some day become.

Just as Utrecht and Amersfoort are near-by towns to Breuckelen in the Lowlands, so New Utrecht towards the south—near the present Fort Hamilton—and Amersfoort (Flatlands) attested the determination of these Netherlanders to preserve the associations of their origin between the Rhine and the Zuyder Zee.

[Illustration: DENYSE’S FERRY.

THE FIRST PLACE AT WHICH THE BRITISH AND HESSIANS LANDED ON LONG ISLAND, AUGUST 22, 1776. NOW FORT HAMILTON.]

The life of these hard-working settlers was not all hardship. Their low houses with projecting roofs were strong and comfortable; the wide spacious fireplaces gave warmth to a generous hospitality that laid on the board wild turkeys and Gowanus oysters and other good eatables, followed after the repast by the long clay pipes, which, when over, left the weary toiler to be ushered to his night’s rest in a partitioned-off bunk or _betste_. But these material comforts were not all the results realized by the efforts of the first pioneers. These Dutch settlers were zealous for religion, liberty, and good schools; and from the first were not deficient in a commendable zeal for the public welfare.

Under the form of Colonial government the burghers were invited to submit all difficulties to the Governor and council, who were fond of the exercise of a strong, minute, and careful paternalism. The country folk were not expected to intrude on the authorities their own ideas of liberty, but merely to obey loyally what good, old, obstinate, arbitrary Governor Stuyvesant should command. Yet even when he had spoken with the official concurrence of his council, the eager spirits in Breuckelen would often cavil, and boldly presume to come over to Manhattan to stir up criticism and public remonstrance. So they were honored with a special order. The folk of Breuckelen, Amersfoort and Midwout (Flatbush) in 1653 were directed to forbid their residents from attending political meetings in New Amsterdam.

At this time the civic virtues were enforced in Breuckelen, and the good of the village put before the preference of a private citizen to retire from public office. The Governor would not allow any one to decline to serve in an official capacity. The schepen-elect of Breuckelen proposed not to continue in office for another term. He even said he would sooner go back to Holland than remain burdened by the duties of schepen. The Governor quickly took him at his word. The Sheriff was formally required to notify him of this order of the Governor which stated with remarkable clearness the obligation of good townsmen to the public and the penalty for its neglect:

“If you will not accept to serve as schepen for the welfare of the Village of Breuckelen, with others, your fellow residents, then you must prepare yourself to sail in the ship _King Solomon_ for Holland, agreeably to your utterance.”

No further refusals to hold office appear to have embarrassed the council.

The colonists of Breuckelen were specially solicitous for a meeting-house and domine. They insisted that they should have good measure in discourses and that if the services should be abbreviated by the preacher, then on their side no tithes should be forthcoming. The first meeting-house was begun in 1654 at Midwout (Flatbush). Soon they worshipped in the partly roofed building. After much difficulty and repeated applications to the Council it had been arranged that the Rev. Mr. Polhemus should have his morning discourse at Flatbush, with his evening service alternately at Midwout and in Breuckelen.

Governor Stuyvesant may have fancied that he had composed the difficulty. Next winter, however, the Governor was presented with a further remonstrance against the cutting-short of these alternating evening devotions. They thus complained of this brief and scanty service:

“Every fortnight on Sundays he comes here, only in the afternoon for a quarter of an hour, when he only gives us a prayer in lieu of sermon, by which we can receive very little instruction; while often, while one supposes the prayer or sermon (whichever name might be preferred for it) is beginning, then it is actually at an end, by which he contributes very little to the edification of his congregation.”

To modern ears, this seems a strange grievance for legislation.

Governor Stuyvesant, however, admonished the Breuckelen folk to pay their full tithes. Doubtless he privately reminded Mr. Polhemus of his duties and obligations to give his people full service.

In three years they obtained a domine of their own. The Rev. Henricus Selyns, a learned and devout young clergyman of a prominent Amsterdam family came to Breuckelen in 1660. At first his parishioners worshipped in a barn, but a meeting-house was soon erected. His spiritual labors and influence were successful, and the four years of Mr. Selyns’s ministrations were affectionately remembered. Compelled to return to Holland by the last illness of his father, he came to America and settled in New York eighteen years later. His warm admiration for Cotton Mather is attested by a graceful Latin poem appended to the later editions of the _Magnalia_.