In a recent post about walking in New York
I mentioned Gansevoort Street, the site of the new Whitney Museum of American
Art, and Horatio Street, where I discovered a whole row of well-preserved Greek
Revival houses, two of them dating from 1836.
But what about those names, “Gansevoort” and “Horatio”? Where did they come from? “Gansevoort” sounded Dutch to me. “Horatio” meant nothing at all, unless a
soldier of ancient Rome of whom I had a vague recollection – a super macho type
who alone defended a bridge against a whole army of enemies -- that seemed
irrelevant. So I started scratching
about and came up with a few stray facts.
Gansevoort Street got its name in 1837
from Fort Gansevoort, a fort built at the Hudson River end of the street between
1808 and 1812. So where did the fort,
long since demolished, get its name
from? From Peter Gansevoort (1749-1812),
a colonel in the Continental Army during the Revolution, who is best known for
successfully defending Fort Stanwix (near today’s Rome, New York) against a
British attack in 1777. And yes, he was
of Dutch extraction, in fact, from an aristocratic Dutch family in Albany.
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| Horatio Gates in 1782, looking quite composed two years after his famous ride. |
And Horatio Street? It too was named after a Revolutionary War
figure, General Horatio Gates, a retired British soldier who at the outbreak of
hostilities volunteered his services to George Washington. Having received credit for the British defeat at the battle of
Saratoga in 1777, even though Benedict Arnold and others did most of the
fighting, Gates suffered a disastrous defeat at the battle of Camden in South
Carolina in 1780. Following this debacle he then heroically covered 170 miles
on horseback in a strategic retreat.
Though controversial, Gates was evidently still esteemed enough to have
a street in Manhattan named for him, though why his first name was used isn’t
clear. (There were lots of streets to
name or rename in the 1790s, and only so many Revolutionary War heroes.)
I’ve always been a history buff and nosey,
and researching these priceless facts determined me to do a post onNew York City place names. So first of all how about the five boroughs? Here are the probable origins:
· Manhattan comes from Mannahatta, which in the language
of the Lenape, a native American people once living in the lower Hudson Valley
and adjacent regions, means “island of many hills.”
· The Bronx derives its name from Jonas Bronck, a
Swedish emigrant who came to the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1639,
acquired land, and became the first settler in what is now the Bronx. The area became known as Bronck’s land, and a
river there became known as Bronck’s River and in time gave its name to the
borough.
· Queens was named for Queen Catherine of Braganza, the
wife of Charles II of England, during whose reign the British grabbed New
Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it New York. Queen Catherine must have been a patient
woman to have tolerated her husband’s many dalliances.
· Brooklyn derived its name from the Dutch word breukelen, meaning “broken land.” A Dutch village in the area was named
Breukelen, after a town in Holland, and the English Anglicized this as
“Brooklyn.”
· Staten Island was discovered in 1609 by Henry Hudson,
who named it Staaten Eylandt after the Staten-Generaal, the Dutch parliament
that had financed his voyage to the New World.
Now let’s have a look at some other names
of places, and a glance too at their history.
The Battery, the park at the southern tip
of Manhattan, gets its name from the battery of cannon that the Dutch once
positioned there to defend New Amsterdam.
But when a British fleet showed up in 1664, the good burghers were hopelessly outnumbered and surrendered
without firing a shot. After the
thirteen colonies won their independence from Great Britain, the old fort was
demolished, but in the early 1800s, in anticipation of another war with Great
Britain, a circular fort was built on the site.
In time the new fort was named Fort Clinton after Governor De Witt
Clinton, but no British attack materialized, so once again the cannon remained
silent. Subsequently renamed Castle
Garden, the fort was transformed into a concert hall where the Swedish
coloratura Jenny Lind made her sensational American debut in 1850. From 1855 to 1890 the building served as the
federal immigration center of the East Coast, until superseded by Ellis Island. Next, from 1896 to 1941 the structure became
the New York Aquarium. Restored to its
original fortification appearance, today Castle Clinton – yes, the name too has
been restored -- is a national monument housing a database of information about
immigrants who came to this country in the nineteenth century.
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| The circular fort housing the New York Aquarium, much beloved in its time by New Yorkers. |
Governors Island, a 172-acre island in the
harbor off the southern tip of Manhattan, was called Nut Island by the Lenape
people, because hickory, oak, and chestnut trees grew there, a name that became
Noten Eylant among the Dutch, and Nutten Island when the British took
over. But then the colonial assembly of
New York reserved the island for the exclusive use of the royal governors, who
employed it at one time or another as a goat farm, a tobacco plantation, and a quarantine
station for arriving immigrants.
Officially named Governors Island in 1784 (minus an apostrophe, please
note), it served as a U.S. military post until 1966, and as a Coast Guard
installation from 1966 to 1996. For me
and for most New Yorkers, who viewed it from the Battery or the Staten Island
ferry, it was a bit of a mystery, so near and yet so far, and so unknown.
Then, in 2003, the federal government
transferred most of the island to the city and state of New York for the sum of
one dollar, on condition that the site be used for public benefit. To acquire such a big chunk of land right in
the heart of the city – and at such a bargain price – was a rare bit of good
luck that at once unleashed a storm of debate about what to do with it. Nothing ever happens in New York without
heated arguments and controversy, and plenty of both ensued.
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| A map of Governors Island today. Castle Williams is at the very top. |
Now open to the public on summer weekends,
the island is being developed to include parkland, an organic farm, a high
school, artist studios, and a New York University campus. Still standing is Castle Williams, a circular
fort built in 1807-1811 under the supervision of Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan
Williams, chief engineer of the Corps of Engineers, to protect the city from a
British naval attack that never came.
Looming silently on the northwest point of the island, the fort’s four
tiers of casements for cannon are clearly visible from the passing Staten
Island ferries. Having narrowly escaped
demolition in the past, the renovated fort is now administered by the National
Park Service and retains the name Castle Williams. And while its cannon, like those of its twin,
Castle Garden, never engaged an enemy in wartime, they weren’t a total waste of
taxpayers’ money, since word of them and other fortifications surely reached
the blockading British fleet and discouraged any plans for attack. (The Brits visited New Orleans instead.)
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| Castle Williams today. |
Bowling Green, a small teardrop-shaped park
just up a short distance on Broadway from the Battery, was used in Dutch times
as a cattle market and parade ground.
Under British rule it continued as a cattle and grain market, but in
1733 the Common Council leased the site to three neighboring landlords to create
a bowling green and park. From then on,
players rolled balls over its smooth green lawn in the time-honored game of
bowls, which dates back to the thirteenth century. In 1770 the British rulers erected on the
site a 4,000-pound gilded lead statue of King George the Third, who was shown heroically
in Roman garb, bigger than life, astride a prancing steed. As tension grew between the colonists and
their rulers, the statue became a magnet for protests, so a protective
cast-iron fence was built around it to shield it from vandalism.
In 1776, soon after the passage of the
Declaration of Independence, the local Sons of Liberty, some of them not quite
sober, rushed down Broadway to Bowling Green and toppled the statue – a
symbolic gesture that George Washington, being moderate by nature, disapproved
of, but that has often been commemorated, albeit inaccurstely, in works of
art. Minus the head, the lead statue was
then broken up and the pieces shipped off to a foundry in Connecticut to be
made into bullets for Washington’s troops.
In grim anticipation of the French Revolution of 1789, patriots planned
to parade the statue’s head around the city on a pike, but Loyalists recovered
it and sent it off to England. The fence
survived and still rings the park, minus the ornamental royal crowns topping
each post, which the patriots sawed off.
What then became of those ornaments is not known. The head turned up a year later in England in
the home of Lord Charles Townshend, a devoted servant and crony of His Majesty,
but it has not been seen since.
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| Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, Pulling Down the Statue of King george III, ca. 1859. A romanticized depiction of the event, with many errors. No women and children were present, and no Indians. And the king was actually shown in Roman garb. |
Today, instead of a heroic equestrian
statue, the park is graced by a splashing fountain and, at the tapering end of
the teardrop, by another bigger-than-life art work, Arturo Di Modica’s Charging Bull. The bronze sculpture, showing a bull on
its haunches, head lowered and ready to charge, was transferred there in 1989
after the police removed it from Wall Street, where the artist had installed it
without permission. Having heard it
hailed as a symbol of the city and Wall Street, tourists flock.
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| Bowling Green fountain today. MusikAnimal |
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| An artist's rendering of the wall in the time of Peter Stuyvesant, who is shown in the foreground. |
And street names? Wall Street was laid out on the site of a twelve-foot
wall that the Dutch built in the seventeenth century to shield New Amsterdam
from possible attacks by the native peoples, who had plenty of reasons to
attack. The British tore down the wall
in 1699, but the name “Wall Street” was already in use, designating a road that
ran across Manhattan next to the wall. Merchants and traders began gathering there to
buy and sell stocks and bonds, and in 1711 the Common Council made Wall Street
the city’s first official slave market for the sale and rental of enslaved
Africans and Indians. In
eighteenth-century New York one resident in five was an African American slave,
and the city’s slave market, at Wall and Pearl Streets on what was then the
East River waterfront, was second in size only to the one in Charleston, South
Carolina, and functioned until 1762. The
city profited, since for every transaction in the market – every time a human
being was bought or sold – the city collected a tax. Only in April of this year did New York City
finally agree to acknowledge the inconvenient fact of the slave market’s existence by
placing a historical marker near the site of the market.
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| The Castello plan of New Amsterdam, 1660. The wall is indicated on the far right. On the left is the Dutch fort, at the foot of the broad road that became Broadway. |
Canal Street, a major crosstown artery in
Lower Manhattan, occupies the site of a canal that was dug in the early
nineteenth century to drain the contaminated waters of the Collect Pond into
the Hudson River. Fed by an underground
spring, the Collect Pond had once been the city’s main source of water, but in
the eighteenth century the pond was polluted by tanneries, breweries, and
slaughterhouses that used the water and dumped waste into it. The pond was
filled in in 1811, and Canal Street was completed by 1820, following the path
of the canal, but the ground in the area was marshy and foul-smelling, causing
middle- and upper-class residents to leave, and the notorious slum known as the
Five Points to develop. In the late
nineteenth century the city bought up most of the Five Points tenements and
condemned them, and in this way eliminated the slum. Today Canal Street is a busy commercial
district with Chinese jewelry stores, outdoor vendors, and banks, and open
storefronts and unlicensed peddlers selling knickknacks and souvenirs, and
counterfeit DVDs, watches, sunglasses, perfumes, and designer handbags at low
prices.
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| The Broadway bridge over the canal, 1811. |
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| Canal Street today. Kamel15 |
Bleecker Street, which runs right by the building I live in, gets its name from the Bleecker family, who owned a farm in the area and deeded land to the city in 1808. In the 1830s and 1840s the street was lined with handsome Greek Revival houses and rivaled Bond Street for elegance and affluence, until dentists’ offices and other evidence of neighborhood decline appeared, and the wealthy residents, fearing the taint of commerce and the lower orders, moved farther uptown. By the 1870s the old houses had become boarding houses, brothels, and cheap restaurants, and the low rents of the area began attracting bohemians.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century Italian immigrants arrived in the city in large numbers, and many
settled in Greenwich Village tenements below Washington Square, giving the
whole neighborhood a distinctly Italian flavor.
That flavor is reflected in Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1954 opera The Saint of Bleecker Street, where a
young woman living in a Bleecker Street tenement receives the stigmata and is
hailed by the whole Italian community as a saint.
But change was coming. In hopes of stemming the flight of
middle-class residents to the suburbs, in the 1950s Washington Square Village,
a mammoth middle-class housing complex, was built on the north side of Bleecker
Street between Mercer Street and La Guardia Place, replacing working-class
housing and factories and lofts.
Composed of two huge apartment blocks on stilts, the complex was labeled
by the Village Voice “a prettily
painted chicken coop enlarged to monstrous size.” New York University acquired it in 1964 and
went on to build another huge complex just opposite, on the south side of
Bleecker. The university’s later efforts
to expand further in Greenwich Village have whipped up fiery opposition among the
otherwise genteel locals.
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| Washington Square Village. Some village! Padraic Ryan |
By the 1960s, when I first came to live in
the Village, middle-class professionals like myself were moving in, including a
significant gay population, and Bleecker Street was full of small shops and
reasonably priced restaurants that attracted big weekend crowds. The street’s re-gentrification, with the influx
of designer clothing stores in the early years of this century, was recorded in
post #105, “New York Mosaic: The Neighborhoods” (December 22, 2013). Bleecker Street from Bank Street to West 10th
Street is now trendy and (in the real-estate sense) “hot,” with soaring rents
that have driven out the shops and restaurants; Marc Jacobs and Ralph Lauren
and the like prevail. But other
stretches of Bleecker Street are still commercial in a less trendy way, with a
mix of shops and restaurants. And high above
Bleecker are rent-stabilized holdouts like me, contemptuous of the latest
trendy phase of the street, and confident that this phase too will in time
yield to another, hopefully with less catastrophic rents. Meanwhile we can console ourselves with the
Magnolia Bakery’s cupcakes, or watch others devouring them on our doorstep.
There’s no way this post could mention all
the interesting place names and their origin in the borough of Manhattan, much
less all those in the city of New York.
So I’ll settle for just one more, designating one of only two private
parks in the city.
Gramercy Park is a small fenced-in park
located between East 20th and 21st Streets, with
Lexington Avenue terminating at its northern boundary, and Irving Place
commencing at its southern boundary and running south to 14th
Street. The name “Gramercy” is an
Anglicization of the Dutch word crommessie,
meaning “crooked little knife,” which designated a brook that meandered
along what is now East 21st Street and emptied into the East River
at 18th Street.
In 1831 the developer Samuel Ruggles, a
pioneer in urban planning, bought what was known as Gramercy Farm from a
descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam. He then drained the swampy ground and laid
out the park, deeding its possession to the owners of the residential lots surrounding it. The
Panic of 1837 delayed construction of the houses surrounding the park until the
1840s, but by 1844 the park had been landscaped and its gate was locked, the
result being a planned neighborhood unique for its time. Later attempts to bisect the park so as to
connect Lexington Avenue with Irving Place failed, and the park survives today,
still elegantly fenced with four locked wrought-iron gates, open only to
residents of the buildings surrounding it.
In 1966 part of the neighborhood was designated a historic district, and
in 1988 the district’s boundaries were extended. Today it is a quiet, crime-free neighborhood,
predominantly white.
I have often visited the park, viewing its
wide graveled walks and disciplined greenery through the high grilled
fence. Usually no one was in it, but
occasionally I would see a solitary stroller, one of the privileged few allowed
to savor its charms from within. Since I
am not so privileged, the park qualifies for me as a forbidden garden (see post
#57), but I can’t say that I long for the treasures it guards, since it is not
a Garden of the Hesperides or Eden, harbors no fruit whose taste confers
immortality, no Tree of Knowledge or Life.
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| Gramercy Park today, with the Edwin Booth statue looming nobly in the center. Dmadeo |
What Gramercy Park does offer is a statue
of the famous Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth (whose brother killed Abraham
Lincoln), who once resided in a townhouse facing the park. Other features include the Fantasy Fountain,
a work in bronze by the sculptor Greg Wyatt that was installed in 1983, and a
commemorative fountain and plaque honoring Samuel Ruggles, the urban visionary
who also created Union Square. Some of
the original townhouses surrounding the park still stand, but many are gone, replaced
by apartment buildings, a synagogue, and a hotel. But the residents still get a new key to the
park every year, for which they pay $350, and a $1000 fee to replace a key they have lost. Those admitted
to its sacred precincts cannot drink alcohol, smoke, cycle, walk a dog, play
ball, toss Frisbees, or feed the birds and squirrels, since birdseed and
peanuts attract rats. Groups of more
than six are also forbidden, and one resident was reprimanded for eating a
sandwich on the grass. This may sound
like obsessive fussiness, and some residents complain that park rules banish any
kind of fun, but the rules and fussiness may also explain why the park looks so
tranquil and clean. I confess that I
like the idea of a private park visible to outsiders like myself, a sanctuary that
manages, in the midst of this turbulent city, to stay old-fashioned and greenly
genteel.
Do outsiders ever trespass in the
park? I’ve never heard of anyone jumping
the fence, but on two occasions in 2000 a member of the National Arts Club,
which faces the park and is entitled to keys, brought some minority
schoolchildren into the park without prior permission. On the first occasion Sharon Benenson, the
chairwoman of the Gramercy Park Trust, called
the police, who refused to expel the intruders; on the second occasion the
visitors left when Ms. Benenson ordered them out. A suit against the park’s administration was
then filed in Federal District Court by the parents and teachers involved,
alleging racial discrimination; according to the plaintiffs, Ms. Benenson, who
is white, said the visitors were “not our kind of kids.” The park administration denied any
discrimination, and Ms. Benenson called the charges “personally insulting,” and
described Aldon James, the National Arts Club president and a plaintiff in the
case, as “a sort of hairbrained nut.
He’s just determined to run Gramercy Park.” Which goes to show that tensions can fester
behind the seeming quaint tranquility of this most genteel and exclusive of
parks. The lawsuit was settled out of
court in 2003, with most of the children getting $36,000 each, and one as much
as $50,000: all in all, a rather tidy little profit for a brief intrusion into
a forbidden space. And the
administration has loosened up a little: jogging is now permitted in certain
graveled areas of the park.
Coming soon: Landmarks: Saving the Old from the New. And after that, my belated discovery of architectural cast iron and terra cotta.
© 2015 Clifford Browder
Coming soon: Landmarks: Saving the Old from the New. And after that, my belated discovery of architectural cast iron and terra cotta.
© 2015 Clifford Browder
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