HALF MOON SERIES PAPERS ON HISTORIC ^ NEW YORKj6 ^ ^ jfc ^ EDITED BY MAUD WILDER GOODVIN ALICE CARRINGTON ROYCE RUTH PUTNAM "XTbe ifourteen /Bbiles IRounb ' aifreb Blabop flDaaon and flDar? fIDurbocb fDaeon ON SALE AT G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS AND AT BRENTANO'S WHERE SUBSCRIPTIONS ^ ^ ^ WILL BE RECEIVED ISSUED MONTHLY price ^cn Cents One S>ollar a ^eac . MISS SPENCERS Boarding and Day School for Girls preparatory?, BcaDcmtc, anJ) Collcgc^spreparatorp Coursce No more than eight pupils constitute any class 6 WEST 48th STREET, with Annex XHE VELTIN SCHOOL ^ FOR GIRLS ^ ^ FIRE-PROOF ^ IX^ ^ SCHOOL BUILDING College preparation x6o AND 162 WEST 74th STREET MRS. LESLIE MORGAN'S ^ 3Boart)inG anJ) S)ap Scbool ^ for Girls 13 and 15 WEST 86th STREET NEW YORK CITY < < < < kindergartek, through college preparatory Home and Chaperonage THE ANNIE BROWN SCHOOL JSoarMno ant) Ba^ Scbool tor Girls Primary, Preparatory, Academic, and Musical Departments. Preparation for College. Special Courses. 71 1-7 13-7 15-7 17 Fifth Avenue : : Mrs. FRANCES FISHER WOOD Resident Principal Zhc Itnicfterbocfser prcsB^ 'new lOovl SEYMOUR DURST i83 Half Moon Series Published in the Interest of the New York City History Club. ^'THE FOURTEEN MILES ROUND." MARY MURDOCH MASON. N December 12, 1789, which was one V-y hundred and three years after the char- ter of Governor Dongan had declared New York to be "an ancient citie," but was the first year of the United States of America, Franklin Square was quiet and majestic, as befitted the court-end of town. When the first President took a house there, there were complaints that it was too far out of the city; yet thirty-seven years before, William Walton had built there the finest house in the Colo- nies. There were eight windows across each upper story of its spacious front. Two stately doorways opened upon the Square. The Volume I. Number VI. BY ALFRED BISHOP MASON AND Copyright, i8q7, by Maud Wilder Goodwin. i84 **Ubc fourteen /DUes IRounC)" Zbc ifranhUn grounds behind the house sloped greenly to the East River. The great merchant was known as '* Boss" Walton, the first recorded instance in our history of that bad eminence. His entertainments were so magnificent, his wines so rare, his silver so superb, that when the Stamp Tax was opposed in Parliament on the ground of the poverty of the colonists, the feasts at the Walton House were cited as proofs of colonial wealth. Near it, at the northwest corner of Frank- lin Square and Cherry Street, whence one of the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge now springs, stood its rival, the Franklin House, which Washington occupied from April 23, 1789, when the first President of the United States arrived in New York. The house, built 'n 1770. was a mansion of the solid colonial type. In a slight central projection which ran from ground to roof, a wide door opened into a broad hall. Two other doors, also opening upon Cherry Street, were probably added later. The second story was amply lighted by five windows on the Cherry Street front, and as many on Franklin Square, the sashes filled with the small square panes characteristic of that time. The third story repeated the sec- ond. Above it was a balustrade, behind which wprp thp fivf Hnrmpr winHnwQ of thp low attic. Washington walked thither from the foot of Wall Street, between shouting thou- . . . _ ._ . **Ube jfourteen /©ties IRount)" 185 sands. There is a pretty story that, on that day, Washington Irving's parents held him above the heads of the crowd, and prayed the Presi- dent that the boy might bear his name, and were rejoiced by his prompt permission. But the scene of the pretty story is laid on Broad- way, which was untouched by the proces- sion; and Irving was born April 3, 1783. Charles Dudley Warner gives a variant of this tale : When the first President was in New- York, he says, a Scotch maid-servant of the family one day followed the hero into a shop and presented the lad to him. "Please, your honor," said Lizzie all aglow, "here 's a bairn was named after you." And the grave Vir- ginian placed his hand on the boy's head and gave him his blessing. But did the President go shopping ? A list of the residences of public officials in 1789 begins v/ith "George Washington, Es- quire, President of the United States and Com- mander of the Army and Navy thereof when in actual service : No. 3 Cherry Street." Frank- lin Square was then St. George's Square, just as Broadway, from Vesey Street, north, was Great George Street. When business pushed northward, the Franklin House became a music-store and a bank in turn. Then it fell to baser uses. It was torn down in 1856. The only bit of it known to exist is the Presi- dent's chair of the New York Historical So- ton ttving i86 ''JLbc fourteen {fbxice Ti^ounO' (n 1789 ciety, which is made of wood taken from the old house. The Walton House, built eighteen years before the Franklin House, survived it for twenty-five. It became a tenement, and stood in its shame until 1881. These are but two of the notable houses of Cherry Street. At No. 27 the first American flag of the pres- ent style was made, in 1818, "by Mrs. Reid in her drawing-room." In 1823, at No. 7, then the home of Samuel Leggett, president of the New York Gas Light Company, illumin- ating gas was first used in this country. A few blocks eastward, at the corner of Jefferson Street, stood the stately mansion of Colonel Rutgers, where Lafayette was entertained with splendor in 1824, and where (perhaps) a man who shared Washington's heart with La- fayette, was hung in 1776. Three points in New York compete for the honor of the hang- ing of Nathan Hale, — the Rutgers Place, the Commons, and Beekman Hill at the foot of East 51st Street. The last fragment of the Rutgers mansion disappeared in 1875. New York was a dull and dirty little town in 1789. It was a city without a bathroom, without a furnace, with bedrooms which in winter lay within the Arctic Zone, with no ice during the torrid summers, without an omni- bus, without a moustache, without a match, without a latch-key. Of every hundred in- habitants, seven were slaves. There were Ube Jfourteen /iDiles 1Roun^ " 187 about twenty-three hundred slaves in 1790, two hundred and fifty in 1820, and none when the sun rose on July 4, 1827, the Empire State s "emancipation day." The streets were nar- row, — how narrow may be judged from the fact that both Wall and Liberty, from Broad- way to Nassau, were widened in 1790 to their present petty dimensions. Pearl was so nar- row that sidewalks were forbidden. A State law provided that people going north must always make way for those coming south. In May, 1788, the Grand Jury had reported the streets "to be dirty and many of them im- passable." Pigs were the only scavengers. They ran at large in the streets of New York until within the memory of many men now living. Most of the garbage was thrown into the streets. A little of it went to the river at night in tubs on the heads of slaves. On December 19, 1789, the Daily Advertiser appealed to the High Constable, who was supposed to do thoroughly what the pigs did in part, in this moving fashion : "Awake, THOU SLEEPER, let US have clean streets in this our peaceful seat of the happiest empire in the universe. That so our national rulers and their supporters may with convenience and decency celebrate a merry Christmas and happy New Year." All wood delivered at store or house ( there was no coal ) was sawed and split on the street, after delivery. Street-lamps had Strcetfl Ii i88 ''TLbc Jfourtecn /BMles IRoimO " been introduced in 1762 ; but they were few and poor, apt to go out, often left unlighted. In 1789, a citizen asked for relief, because, as not a lamp was burning, he had walked into a pump on Nassau Street, near the Mayor's house ; and on December 31, 1778, the fire- men formally complained that they had been greatly hindered at a recent fire because most of the lamps had gone out. There were too many trees for health, The penalty for planting a tree south of Catherine Street, except in front of churches or public buildings, was a fine of jC^- The city water- works consisted chiefly of the Tea-Water Pump on Chatham Street ( now Park Row ) near Queen ( now Pearl ). Water drawn from it was said to make better tea than that from any of the minor pumps or private wells. The water came from the Collect, where the public washed its dirty linen. Highway robbery was common. The newspapers claimed that all the footpads came from Philadelphia. This was a spiteful saying by the little town against the big. In this year of 1789, Tammany Hall was founded by William Mooney, an upholsterer. Its objects were announced to be *'the smile of charity, the chain of friendship, the flame of liberty, and in general, whatever may tend to perprtuate the love of freedom and the politi- cal advantage of the country." Its officers were to be native-born Americans, but natu- 189 ralized citizens could become members. It was then, and for many years afterwards, a thoroughly respectable society. George Will- iam Curtis, in one of his earlier novels, speaks of a man's being a sachem of Tammany as a proof of his high standing. It was both non- partisan and non-predatory. The city post- office had just been moved from 8 Wall Street, near the ferry, to 62 Broadway, at the corner of Liberty, and there was public complaint that the postmaster had not chosen ''some more central place." The post-office receipts for the three months ending January 5, 1790, were $1,067.08 : for the three months ending January i, 1897, they were $2, 1 12,675.07. On January i, 1790, the service to Philadelphia was increased to five mails per week : Jan- uary I, 1897, the Philadelphia mails were ninety-six per week. There were then only seventy-f-ve post-offices in the whole country : now there are seventy thousand, five hundred and sixty-two. The southernmost was Sa- vannah. The postage there from New York was thirty-three cents. There was but one theatre in the city until 1 798. It stood on John Street, near Broadway. Founded in 1767, it was closed in 1774 at the suggestion of the Continental Congress, and stayed shut until the British occupation, when it was re-opened as the Theatre Royal. In n^5f against much violent opposition, its Po0tal Service 1897 '^Ubc fourteen /Dtles 'Roim& " Ubc tlbeatre players presented "moral lectures," which were really more or less moral plays. This thin disguise was soon dropped. In 1789, tickets were sold at the box-office and at Gaines's bookstore in Hanover Square, the Sign of the Bible. The season extended this year from April 14th to December 15th. There was a " Last Night" December 9th, a "Positively Last Night" on the nth, and really a last night on the 15th. During the season, sixty-one performances were an- nounced, among them those of the School for Scandal, She Stoops to Conquer, Richard III, Merry IVives of IV/ndsor, and The Tempest. Washington attended on May nth, June 5th, November 24th, and November 30th. On November 24th he noted in his diary that he had invited "Mrs. Adams, lady of the Vice-President, General Schuyler and lady," etc. On this occasion the play was The Clandestine Marriage. It is reported by an awe-struck reporter that the President act- ually laughed. His contemporaries, in trying to make him more than human, made an imaginary prig out of a very real man. When- ever he entered his box, the orchestra played the President's March, composed by its leader, Pfyles, first performed at Trenton on the tri- umphal journey from Mount Vernon to New York, and known to every American since Judge Hopkinson wrote his verses to this air. ''Zbc jfourteen /iDiles IRounb'^ 191 in 1 80 1, as Haily Columbia ! The little city contented itself with one public lecture during 1789. It was delivered at Aaron Aorson's tavern, on the Divinity of Jesus Christ, "by a man more than thirty years an Atheist"; and all the aldermen sold tickets for it at twenty- five cents apiece. There were not half a dozen private carriages and not one rubber shoe in town, — facts which explain Washington's diary for November 29, 1789 : " Being very snowy, not a single person appeared at the Levee." Clothes were too costly to be lightly risked. Merchants tempted their feminine cus- tomers with amens, cordurets, camblets, calli- mancos, casserillias, durants, duffils, dowlas, fearnaughts, florentines, honey-comb thick- setts, hairbines, lutestrings, moreens, osna- burgs, platillas, rattinetts, romalls, ribdelures, shalloons, taboreens, tammies, ticklenburgs, velverets c^nd weldbores. Tailors offered men, as fashionable colors, bat's wing, mouse's ear, and drake's head. One dame of high degree wore a pierrot of gray Indian taffeta with dark gray stripes; two collars (one white, one yel- low), both trimmed with blue silk ; a yellow corset (called " shapes ") with large blue cross- stripes; and a white satin hat with a large wreath of artificial roses. A well-known man was clad in a scarlet coat, white silk waistcoat embroidered with colored flowers, black satin breeches with paste knee-buckles, white silk ifasbions able S>re60 192 **Ubc fourteen Hbilcs •Koun^ " TIbc S)rlx)e aJeccmber 12tb stockings, low shoes with large silver buckles, and "a small cocked hat on the upper part of his powdered hair, leaving the curls at his ears displayed." He carried a gold-headed cane and gold snuff-box, and is rather an agree- able bit of color against the gray background of the New York of 1789. On this December morning the door of the Franklin House opened, a liveried servant stood on either side, and the President of the United States, with Mrs. Washington and her two grandchildren, entered his coach. It was globular, canary-colored, with cupids and nymphs disporting themselves upon its panels, with six hordes drawing it, sometimes with liveried outriders trotting before it, and with a couple of mounted officers following behind it. The family party was a tulip-bed of bright hues, the President not the least gorgeous flower of the four. He had a weakness for velvet, and purple satin was irresistible to him. As the coachman let the impatient horses start, the party passed along that part of Pearl Street, then called Queen Street, which had "grand buildings, four to six stories high," saw Golden Hill on John Street, where the first blood of the Revolution was shed, two months before the Boston Massacre and five years before Lexington, and turned westward on Wall Street. This was the fashionable promenade, "more elegant" than Broadway, **Zloc fourteen mice IRount)" 193 though that was also much favored of fashion, chiefly for driving, fronn the Battery even as far north as St. Paul's, where the sidewalk and the name of the street both ended. They passed the residence of General John Lamb, first Collector of the Port, who, to the day of his death, kept open house for every soldier of the Revolution, and never forgave a Tory. Up and down William Street, then called Smith, where it crossed Wall, they looked to right and left upon the dry-goods shops where the feminine half of New York's thirty thou- sand people bought garments equally strange to their great-grand-daughters in shape and stuff, in color and name. On the corner of Wall and Broad Streets dwelt Alexander Hamilton. A few doors away, on Nassau Street, was his rival and slayer, Aaron Burr, who lived up — and down — to the code of his time. Hi V house was hidden by Federal Hall, — a structure on arches, built in 1699 as a city hall, converted at a cost of $32,000 (raised by private subscription) into a Capitol, and given by the city to the nation when the nation was born. It has left one permanent trace on the map of the city, the jog in the sidewalk at the northwest corner of Wall and Nassau Streets. The building extended from the east line of the present assay office to the west line of Nassau Street. This jog is the place then left for a passage around it. The architect who Street 194 ''TLbc Jfourteen /iDiles IRounO " federal 1812 transformed the building was Major Peter Charles L'Enfant, who designed the City of Washington and the medal of the Order of the Cincinnati. The Common Council voted to pay him by giving him ten acres of land where the Third Avenue and Sixty-eighth Street now are ; but he declined the trifling gift, probably for the same reason which led the Lutheran Church, years afterwards, to re- fuse a donation of six acres on Canal Street, near Broadway. The Church records say the land was "not worth fencing." Federal Hall was sold in 1812 ( to be torn down ) for $42^. In 1790 and 1791, the city repaid the private subscriptions and recouped its own expendi- tures by a special tax of $32,000 and two lotteries which produced as much more. The drawing of the first lottery went on for thirty days, and of the second for twenty-three, so that the ticket-holders had plenty of excite- ment for their money. Nassau Street was opened in 1696, when the city granted Teunis de Kay's petition for leave to make a cartway through *'the street that runs by the pie-woman's, leading to the commons," and gave him much of the land along it for his labor. Federal Hall looked down Broad Street, past the corner of the present Exchange Place, where the first ex- change was established in March, 1670. The merchants met every Friday morning, between **Ubc ffourteen /IDtles IRounD'' 195 eleven and twelve, "at the bridge which crossed the ditch at Broad Street " ; and Gover- nor Lovelace bade the Mayor see to it that during that hour boys should not coast down the hill from Broadway and make havoc with mercantile legs and feelings. Farther south was the mansion whence Philip Livingston was buried in 1749, when all the houses in the block were thrown open, and when each of the eight bearers was given gloves, scarf, handkerchief, a mourning ring, and a monkey- spoon. Still farther south was and is the old home of Etienne de Lancey, then and now Fraunces Tavern, then kept by " Black Sam " Fraunce or Fraunces ( authorities differ, and Black Sam himself probably did not know), where Washington had his headquarters in 1776, and where, in 1783, his famous farewell to his generals etched itself into history. As the carriage turned from Wall Street into Broadway, the children on the front seat may have caught a glimpse of the Bowling Green, the heart of old New York, the centre of pop- ular sports and popular riots since New Am- sterdam was born. The iron railings now about it surrounded it then. They were im- ported from England in 1771, and they pro- tected a noble lead statue of King George 111. on his horse. Said a stout-hearted merchant in 1776, ''The British shall have melted ma- jesty fired at them," whereupon a respect- (Breen 196 ''Zbc fourteen /IDilcB ^Roun^ " aburcb able mob tore down the statue, which was melted into bullets, and duly fired at the King's soldiers. The rails are said to have had above them the heads of other members of the royal family, which were knocked off when Geor- gius Rex was knocked down ; and it is further said that "evidences of the fracture are yet visible." Seekers after these evidences should carry to Bowling Green sharp eyes, plenty of faith, and a fund of historic imagination. The mob of 1776, like Tam O'Shanter's witch, tore out the horse's tail. It is now one of the treasures in the almost unknown collection of the Historical Society. The ruins of Trinity frowned upon the Presidential party; but masons and carpenters were hard at work there upon the new build- ing, the immediate predecessor of the present one. It was consecrated in 1790, and pro- vided the President with a canopied pew, which he occupied from February, 1791, when he left Franklin Square for the McComb man- sion at 39 Broadway, and St. Paul's for Trinity. The McComb mansion, some sixty feet broad and four stories high, with grounds running back to the North River (the shore-line was where Greenwich Street now crouches under the elevated railroad) was rented to him for $2,500. One of the forgotten graves in Trin- ity churchyard is that of Mrs. Clarke, wife of Lieutenant-Governor George Clarke. She died 1 *'Ubc fourteen ^iles IRounD" 197 in 1740, an embodiment of Raskin's phrase: " Lady means ' bread-giver ' or "loaf-giver.'" Her gracious memory is embalmed in the records of the corporation, which voted, that, as it was "a. pleasure to her in life to feed the hungry, a loaf of bread should be given to every poor person who would receive it," — a bit of heartfelt simplicity which sounds better than the preamble of a bumptious little law passed by the same body in 1732, creating the first free school: "Whereas, the youth of this colony are found by manifold experi- ence to be not inferior in their natural geniuses to the youth of any other country in the world, therefore," etc. Just beyond Trinity, where the Boreel Build- ing (115 Broadway) now stands, was the fa- mous City Tavern, once the James de Lancey residence, with its shady grounds sloping to the Hudson, and its broad piazzas crowded with people to see the President pass by. Here the merchants of New York met, Octo- ber 31, 177^, and put two hundred bold signatures at the foot of a non-importation agreement, — New York's ringing reply to the Stamp Act. Here was the favorite lounging place of the British officers during the Revolu- tion, partly because good liquor was to be had, and partly because pretty women were to be seen on "the Mali," the sidewalk in front of Trinity. It must have been a small TZbc Cits Uavcrn 1775 i9« ''Ubc jFourteen /HMles IRounC)" society which strutted its brief day then and there; for even in 1789, when the town, after being half ruined by the Revolution, had doubled its population and its house-rents, only three hundred persons were "in soci- ety." It took a hundred years to add a hun- dred men and women to the list. In the City Hotel, built on this site in 1793, Washington Irving was welcomed back to America at a great dinner in 1832. The President drove by the Market-house in Broadway, opposite Liberty Street, the up- town market, forty-two by twenty-five feet, where the aristocrats, living on the west side of Broadway, went every morning and filled the baskets carried by their black slaves. Dr. John Bard, the leading physician of the time, in a paper extolling the healthfulness of the city, wrote of the people "on the west side of the Broadway " as enjoying " fragrant odours from the apple-orchards and buck- wheat fields in bloom on the pleasant banks of the Jersey shore in view of their delightful dwellings." Dr. Bard's son, meanwhile, had had Washington as a much-suffering patient for several weeks that summer. He seems to have been generally repaired at the same time; for John Greenwood, dentist, of 56 William Street, made him a full set of "sea-horse teeth, ' and told somebody, who told every- body else, that the great man had but a single **Uloc ifourteen /IDiles 1Roun^ " 199 tooth of his own. It was a hard summer. In one week there had been twenty deaths from heat (equal to eleven hundred deaths for the present population). A newspaper saga- ciously said, "Raw rum has been found ex- ceedingly pernicious in this extreme heat." There was certainly plenty of choice in the way of drink. The President's table was sup- plied (through his steward, Sam Fraunces) with madeira, claret, champagne, sherry, ar- rack, spirits, brandy, cordials, porter, beer, and cider. There seems to have been little indecorous intoxication. Haswell, in his Remi- niscences of an Octogenarian, says that as late as 1816 "American whiskey was not known as a general drink, and mint-juleps were only heard of as a mixture said to be taken by people in the Southern States as a preventive against malaria." But Dayton, in his delight- ful Last Days of Knickerbocker Life in New York, describes the "substantial citizens" of 1830 as sitting on the flat roof of Rabineau's swimming-bath, by the Battery, every after- noon, enjoying their mint-juleps and sherry- cobblers. Haswell returns to the charge, and says that in 1823 "American whiskey was wholly unknown north of Baltimore." At the calaboose on the common, the city maintained an official who whipped a servant, whether free or slave, for his master, and charged one shilling for a thorough job. It Summer 200 ''Zbc Jfourtecu /IDiles IRounC) " Sorts Qigbti was a cruel age, — as cruel to petty criminals as we have been to our pauper insane, up to two years ago. Master Custis and Miss Custis may have peeped out of the front seat of their grandfather's carriage at sundry persons branded T on the left cheek near the nose, in token of conviction for petty thievery. Only a few years before, Mrs. Johanna Young *'and another lady," convicted of grand larceny, were paraded around town in a cart, then stripped to the waist and given thirty-nine lashes apiece in public, then banished, — whereupon they went to Philadelphia. Above St. Paul's, Broadway was no place for pleasure-driving in 1789. So the Wash- ington carriage turned down Park Row, then Chatham Row, with the green fields of **the Commons" on their left, disfigured by neither the Mullett nightmare of to-day 's post-office, nor the Tweed memory of to-day 's court- house. Instead, there were the jail ; the calaboose or bridewell; the gallows, covered by a Chinese kiosk, in order that the hang- ings might not pain the passers-by (there were eleven capital crimes then), the pillory, stocks, and whipping-post in a little group of trees ; and the new almshouse. The first poor-house was built on the Commons in 1734, at which time also the minutes of the Council show that "a. convenient place, or whipping-post," was provided for incorrigible **Ubc jFourteen fl&iles IRounC)'' 201 persons. In 1678, the year of the famous Bolting Act, under which the city throve mightily at the expense of the province, it is recorded that "ministers were scarce and religions many, but there were no beggars in New York and all the poor were cared for." In 1795, the poor-house had six hundred and seventy-two inmates, not counting the yellow- fever cases. The jail on the Commons, built about 1760, was the finest public edifice of its day. It was a torture-chamber for patriot pri- soners during the Revolution. Thereafter, as a debtor's prison, it became the most popular public edifice of its day; for from January 2d to December 3d of 1788, eleven hundred and sixty-two persons, one out of every twenty- five citizens, were jailed there for debt. Even in our day, when it is used as the Hall of Records, is neglected and dingy, and is said to have recorded within it all the smells of the Island from the Dutch days down, it is still beautiful. It has a right to be, for it is a re- production in miniature of the great fane of Diana of Ephesus. On November 26th the President had given fifty guineas to the Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors. The prisoners published a card of thanks. The Society thereupon announced that this was all wrong, because it had agreed not to tell who gave the money. Such secrets are better kept in New York to-day. Any one who has Ube debtors' |pci0on 202 ''XEbe fourteen /MMles IRount)" Ubc Collect to do with our charities knows how m;iny people here "do good by stealth. " Now the carriage rolls on, past the Collect, or Fresh Water Pond, recommended for a water-supply in 1790, but rejected as being too far from town, where the Indians left shell-mounds after their clam and oyster feasts ; where New York used to skate ; where Fitz Greene Halleck s father saved the Duke of Clarence, afterwards William IV., from drown- ing when that gay midshipman was visiting Admiral Digby, quartered in a "rebel man- sion" on Hanover Square ; where John Fitch exhibitedthe first practicable steamboat in 1 796 ; where the Tombs now stands, it rolled up the Bowery Lane, — to the right the three Stuy- vesant houses and the famous old Governor's pear-orchard, whereof men of to-day have seen the last tree, at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street ; to the left, in the distance, the gentle slope of Rich- mond Hill, where Varick Street now crosses Charlton in poverty-stricken flatness and ugli- ness. The Richmond Hill mansion was a centre of history. It was built by Abraham Mortier, paymaster of his Majesty's forces in America, about 1760. In 1789, Vice-President Adams lived there. His delightful wife wrote of it : "In natural beauty it might vie with the most delicious spot I ever saw. It is a mile and a half distant from the city of New i . . ''JLbc fourteen jflDtles •KounC) ' 203 York. . . . Upon my right hand are fields beautifully variegated with grass and grain. . . . Upon my left the city opens to view, intercepted here and there by rising ground and an ancient oak. . . . Venerable oaks and broken ground covered with shrubs surround us, giving a natural beauty to the spot which is truly enchanting. A lovely variety of birds serenade me morning and evening, rejoicing in their liberty and secu- rity." Here, in 1776, after the victorious defeat on Long Island, Washington had his peri- patetic headquarters for several days. Here, Nathan Hale was sent out on the mission which ended in his trial in the greenhouse of the Beekman mansion at the foot of East 51st Street, in his ignominious death at dawn on the gallows, and in his statue in City Hall Park, looking calmly down upon the roar of Broadway. Here, Aaron Burr, also Vice-Presi- dent of the United States, lived. From Rich- mond Hill, in the early morning of July 11, 1804, he started for Weehawken to kill Alex- ander Hamilton, and here he returned to break- fast, that deed done and himself undone. Hamilton started that morning from his coun- try-seat, The Grange," still standing near One Hundred and Forty-fifth Street, opposite the group of thirteen gum-trees which he planted as a symbol of the thirteen States. When Burr fled from the city, a bankrupt, his cred- 1R^cbmon^ •bin i 2C4 x:bc pottcc'e itors seized his sixty-two-year leasehold estate in Richmond Hill, and John Jacob Astor paid $2^,000 for it. The house stood a hundred feet above the present level, but a tiny bit of its ancient garden still survives. A bit of the house itself survived until 1849. In this December of 1789, Washington may have pointed out in the distance, to his wife and the children, the meadow which the city had just decided to buy for a potter's field ; which became six years afterwards, under the stress of yellow-fever, a burial-place for rich and poor alike and which thereafter became Washington Square. It and Union Square and Madison Square and Bryant Park were all potter's fields in turn, and all thus saved as open spaces to become centres of fashion in turn. South of Union Square, on the old Bowery, now Fourth Avenue, the coach passed the famous estate "Minto," owned by a baron whose many names ended with Poelnitz. Washington had already visited it in May, and had ordered sent to Mount Vernon one of Poelnitz's numerous inventions, a horse- hoe for weeding vegetables. " Minto " was advertised for sale in 1789 as about two miles from the city, with a great variety of the choicest fruit-trees and flowering shrubs and with the richest soil on Manhattan Island. It afterwards became the Randell Farm, and now belongs to the Sailors' Snug Harbor. The **Ubc fourteen /iDUes IRount) '' 205 rich soil still continues to produce. Ground- rents grow all over it in abundance. The statue of Washington in Union Square stands about where New York, delivered at last from its British garrison, welcomed its de- liverer November 25, 1785. He had slept the night before at the Van Cortlandt Manor- house, built in 1748, still standing in strength and beauty at the southern end of Van Cort- landt Park. At what is now the northeast corner of Broadway and Twenty-third Street, the old Boston road left the Bloomingdale road, and ran northeast across Madison Square. The car- riage turned to the right, and was soon round- ing the eastern slopes of Murray Hill. At what is now Thirty-sixth Street and Park Avenue stood "Inclenberg," the country-seat of Robert Murray, the birthplace of his son Lind- ley Murray, the house where Mrs. Murray 's wit and Mr. Murray 's wine saved Putnam 's army from destruction. It was September 15, 1776. The Americans, retreating from Long Island, were marching northward to Bleecker Street, when the victorious English, marching westward, reached " Inclenberg." They had the ragged Continentals in a trap. But while they tarried at Mrs. Murray 's table, Aaron Burr led Putnam 's weary troops by leafy lanes, hid- den from the ships-of-war on the Hudson and the men of war on Murray Hill, safely to Broad- Ynclenbera 1776 2o6 ^'TLbc jfourteeu mWcQ IRoimC) " Zbc jBeeliman /Daneion way and Forty-third Street, where Washing- ton met them, galloping down from his head- quarters at the Apthorpe house. The Murray house was burned in 183^, sixteen years be- fore the destruction of the then oldest house on the Island, — The Kip mansion, at the corner of Second Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street. It was built in 165s by Jacob Kip, and torn down in 185 1 by some unknown person who should have known better, and, if he had, would have been better known himself. In Washington's time this region was called Kipsborough. Now, on his peaceful journey, the President passed the Beekman mansion, and must have felt the shadow of Hale's death upon his soul, for Hale was his friend as well as his aide. He was accused of sacrificing Andre to Hale's memory, but Andre's gibbet casts no shadow across Washington *s fame. Andre started from the Beekman house on the journey after glory which led him to the gallows. The roof that sheltered him then survived him nearly a century, — until 1874. Another roof-tree of that time still stands near by. At the foot of East 6ist Street, in a wilderness of gas-works and stone-yards and tenement-houses and garbage-dumps, is the fine old stone residence of Colonel William S. Smith, who built the house about 1770, who married the only daughter of John *'Ubc fourteen /IDUes IRounD'' 207 Adams, and who ruined himself by specula- ting in East River property a century too soon. A mile beyond, at Seventy-seventh Street, was the Kissing Bridge, where the President, who was ever a stickler for the rigid observance of laws and customs, must have preserved his reputation by kissing Mrs. Washington and by making Master Custis permit his sister to kiss him. (Janvier declares that the original Kiss- ing Bridge was in Chatham Street, and quotes the Rev. Mr. Burnaby's journal of 1740 as say- ing that here "it is customary, before passing beyond, to salute the lady who is your com- panion," — a custom which was ''curious, yet not displeasing.") A few rods farther the carriage turns to the west, plunges down and up some leafy hillsides through McGowan's Pass, and reaches the Bloomingdale road, passing north of the Apthorpe house, which stood ur4il 1892 at (about) Ninety-first Street. Washington dined there September 21, 1776, and supped that night at the deserted house of Colonel Roger Morris, Tory, and husband of Mary Philipse, who listened to Washington's wooing in 1770 at the Philipse manor-house, now the beautiful City Hall of Yonkers, and perhaps said him nay. The Morris house, confiscated after the Revolution, bought by John JiKob Astor, sold by him to Stephen Jumel, whose eccentric widow married Aaron Burr and speedily thrust him out of her Zbc 208 ''XTbe ifourteeu /HMles IRounO " Xlbe "1Roun&" home and dropped his name, still stands on Harlem Heights. Lord Howe, on the evening of that September day, fixed his headquarters at the Apthorpe house, and ate the supper cooked for the Rebel general. The last appearance of the Apthorpe mansion in history was on July 12, 1870, when the Orangemen held a picnic there, and after- wards fought the battle of the Boyne over again in the streets of New York. Southward on Bloomingdale road, through a park-like region studded with villas, the carriage rolled homeward to the vicinity of Twenty-third Street, and so down the Bowery to Franklin Square and Cherry Street, in time for the four o'clock dinner. That evening the President wrote in his note- book that he ''exercised with Mrs. Washing- ton and the children in the coach between breakfast and dinner,— went the fourteen miles round." 1baIf:=fTDoon Series papera on Ibietoiic IRew ^ » ^ ^ » {fbmb Milder (3ooC)w(n mice Cavtimton IRoi^ce IRutb iputnam price per number » = 10 cts. ©earls subscription * * $1.00 poetaae prepato Bmong tbe subjects of tbe papers will be tbe following : (now ready, march 31, 1897) I. ^Tbe ?taDt Ibuss of View BmsterDanu By Alice Morse Earle. II. Icing's College* By John Pine. III. Bnnetje 5an3' yarm. By Ruth Putnam. IV. mall street. By Oswald Garrison Villard. V. (Sovernor's fslanO. By Blanche Wilder Bellamy. to be followed by : ^Cbe fourteen /iBiles "KounD. By Alfred Bishop Mason and Mary Murdoch Mason. ® IDHmells anO HClater Courses. By George E. Waring, Jr. ©ID (3reenwicb. By Elizabeth Bisland. ^be ^Sowers. By Edward Ringwood Hewitt and Mary Ashley Hewitt. ^'inances of ©ID IWew l^orft. By C. Dana Durand. etc., etc. Books and Their Makers During the Middle Ages A Study of the Conditions of the Production and Diatribu* tioa of Literature from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. By GEO. HAVEN PUTNAM, A.M. Author of " Authors and Their Public in Ancient Tini'?s," " Th.; Question of Copyright," etc., etc. In two volumes, sold separately. 8 , gilt tops, each . . $2.50 Volume I. 476-1600. PART I. — BOOKS IN MANUSCRIPT. I.— The Making of Books in the Monasteries. Introductory. — Cassiodorus and S. Benedict. — The E.irlicr Monkish Scrilies. — The Ecclcsi.istical Schools and the Clerics a.s Scribes. — Terms Used for Scribe Work.—S. Columba, the Apostle to C.Tiedonia. — Nuns as Scribes. — Monkish Chroniclers,— The Work of the Scriptorium. — The Influence of the Scriptorium. — The Literary Monks of England.— The Earlier Monastery Schools. — The Bene- dictines of tne Continent. — The Libraries of the Monasteries and their Arrangfr- menls for the Exchange of Books. II.— Some Libraries of the Manuscript Period. III. — The Making of Books in the Early Universities. IV. — The Book-Trade in the Manuscript Period, Italy. — Books in Spain, — The Manuscript Trade in France. — Manuscript Dealers in Germany. PART IL— THK F.ARMRR PRINTED DOOKS. I. — The Renaissance as the Forerunner of the Printing-Press. II.— The Invention of Printing and the Work of the First Printers of Holland and Germany. III. — The Printer-Publishers of Italy. Volume II. 1500-1709. IV. — The Printer-Publishers of France, v.— The Later Esticnnes and Casaubon. VI.— Caxton and the Introduction of Printing into England. VII.— The Kobergers of Nuremberg. VIII.— Froben of Basel. IX. — Erasmus and his Books. X,— Luther as an Author. XL— Plantin of Antwerp. XII.— The Elzevirs of Leyden and Amsterdam. XIII. — Italy : Privileges and Censorship. XIV. — Germany : Privileges and Book-Trade Regulations. XV. — France : Privileges, Censorship, and Legislation. XVI.— England : Privileges, Censorship, and Legislation. XVII. — Conclusion : The Development of the Conception of Literary Property. G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS New York : 29 West 23d St. London : 24 Bedford St., Strand The City History Club of New Yoric The City History Club aims to awaken a general interest in the history and traditions of New York, believing that such interest is one of the surest guarantees of civic improvement. Its work is car- ried on through three channels : 1. — A Normal Class 2. — Popular Classes 3. — Public Lectures For further information, conditions of member- ship, etc., address Secretary City History Club, II West 50th Street, New York. . The Editors of — - — THE HALF-MOON SERIES having extended the compass of the monographs be- yond the size originally planned for, and having adopted for them a more costly form, find themselves compelled to make an advance in the price to new subscribers. On and after March 25, 1897, price of single numbers (including those already issued at the lower price) will be 10 cents, and the yearly subscription price $1. %♦ All subscriptions must begin with the first number. The value of the papers has already been attested by the favorable reception accorded to them, and it is in- tended to maintain in the future issues the standard of historic interest and of literary quality. OPINIONS OP THE PRESS. 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