Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  That kink in Broadway has become a wellspring of urban myths over the years, with countless variations involving a stubborn Dutch farmer deflecting Broadway from its path or a team of surveyors bending Broadway to avoid the demolition of a favorite tavern. The myths are all captivating, hinting at a rural landscape not quite destroyed by the modern city, but the real story about why Broadway bends at 10th Street is even more fascinating, since it originated in a forgotten collision of two deeply ingrained American obsessions: money and land.

  WHEN BROADWAY was extended over Lispenard’s Meadows and up to the Sandy Hill Road in the mid-1770s, the Bowery, just to the east, was the primary highway in and out of town, as it had been since Dutch settlers first laid out a series of farms, or “bouweries,” along the road in the early seventeenth century. The Bowery’s path, which remains unchanged today, curved to the northeast in order to avoid the Collect Pond, then curved gradually back to the center of the island. Broadway, meanwhile, was a straight line that came to a dead end at its junction with the Sandy Hill Road, which skirted around the base of an incline called Bowery Hill, part of a ridge of primordial dunes called the Sand Hills, or “Zandtberg” in Dutch, which ran from present-day Union Square to Greenwich Village. The Bowery was only accessible from Broadway by way of the Sandy Hill Road, which, since it skirted the bottom of Bowery Hill, was perpetually flooded. For travelers entering and leaving the city and with business on Broadway, it was all very muddy and inconvenient.

  By the 1790s it had become clear that Broadway and the Bowery should meet in some way, but it was not a simple proposition. The geometry was difficult to resolve, and in the end the city decided that the two streets should simply crash into each other.

  The first plan, conceived in 1797 by city surveyors Joseph-François Mangin (who went on to help design City Hall in 1802) and Casimir Goerck, called for Broadway to extend north in a straight line across the Bowery and continue until it met the Middle Road, a precursor of Fifth Avenue, near present-day 28th Street. That plan stalled when landowners refused to let the city cut Broadway through their properties. Surely it mattered that the landowners in question included a prominent judge, John Watts Jr., and the wealthy heirs of Nicholas Cruger, who, before his death in 1800, had been a well-respected local patriot, mentor to Alexander Hamilton, and perhaps New York’s most powerful merchant, a trader of lumber, sugar, rice, and slaves. When approached by the three members of the city’s road committee, Watts brushed them aside, declaring that he felt “no particular interest” in ceding even the rear portion of his land for a Broadway extension. Cruger’s heirs just as quickly rejected the idea. Thus spurned, the Common Council began exploring an alternate route, and in 1804 proposed that Broadway should bend at a 22-degree angle—the origin of that mysterious 10th Street jog—and then continue due north until it joined the Bowery in an acutely angled fork at present-day 16th Street.

  But in devising the new route, the city was forced to “treat”—negotiate—with a new set of landowners, most of whom owned property fronting on the west side of the Bowery and backing up to Minetta Water, a south-flowing freshwater creek that had its source near the present-day intersection of Sixth Avenue and 16th Street.

  In those days, eminent domain—the taking of private land for public purposes—was a power wielded by the city only as a last resort. The dominion over one’s land was a cherished, almost sacred right in those heady decades of Young America, and the city proceeded very cautiously when asking landowners to cede sections of their property for municipal use. The opening of new streets through Manhattan’s tangled maze of existing property lines was a particularly difficult endeavor. It was often more trouble than it was worth, which is one reason why the city expanded so slowly prior to the passage, in 1807, of state legislation governing development patterns in Manhattan, which ultimately led to the Commissioners’ Plan and its strict grid of streets and avenues. In the vexing matter of extending Broadway to the Bowery, the city came very close to giving up on the idea entirely, in which case the Bowery, not Broadway, may have ended up as Manhattan’s fabled Great White Way.

  New streets were considered improvements that generally increased property values, and so landowners were typically “assessed,” or taxed, in order to help the city defray the costs of the roadwork. Conversely, if the opening of a new road caused injury to buildings, fences, or trees on private land, the city awarded “damages” to reimburse the affected landowners. In some cases the city simultaneously extracted assessments and awarded damages to the same landowner, but the dollar amounts of both assessments and damage awards typically varied landowner to landowner, a disparity that often led to resentment, then grievances and petitions, and finally litigation and lengthy construction delays.

  The system of assessments and damages often had the effect of pitting neighbors against each other, but just as often brought them together as groups that collectively petitioned the Common Council for greater awards or alleviation of assessments. And so it happened that in the summer of 1804 a group of landowners headed by Henry Spingler came forward, petitioning the Common Council against running Broadway through their land. It was the beginning of a four-year-long legal stalemate.

  IN JANUARY OF 1805, the Common Council appointed John S. Hunn as the city’s new commissioner of streets. Hunn was assertive and opinionated, and within three months of taking office had obtained the consent of five of the nine landowners in Broadway’s intended path. But Spingler and three of his neighbors, David Dunham and the brothers Thomas and Samuel Burling, still refused to sign deeds of cession. The following August the nine landowners received awards of damages totaling $7,021.50 ($140,420 in today’s dollars) from the city, but Spingler, Dunham, and the Burlings still refused to budge.

  By the summer of 1807, buildings, fences, and trees still stood in Broadway’s intended path, and although Spingler had finally signed a deed of cession, both Dunham and the Burlings had neglected to remove various structures from the right-of-way, and Hunn’s patience was at an end. “Mr. Dunham still occupies his house standing on the Street,” Hunn fumed, “although long since paid for the ground and the expence [sic] of removal.”

  What to do when someone stands in the way of a street? The city did what it would probably do today: It called its lawyers. Richard Harison and Isaac A. van Hook, city counselors, advised the immediate removal of Dunham’s house and other obstructions, although they thought one final request might be in order.

  Then it was discovered that three of Spingler’s tenants were also seeking damages from the city (they were eventually awarded $451) while Spingler himself petitioned against an assessment of $209, which the city had levied on him to help defray the expense of removing Dunham’s and the Burlings’ buildings. Then Rachel Arden, another of Spingler’s neighbors, refused to sign a deed of cession unless the city released her from a $90 assessment. Hunn visited her house “three or four times . . .” he reported, “with the deeds for that purpose without finding her home.” (It’s easy to imagine Hunn pounding on the door while Arden hides behind the curtains.) It was beginning to look like the entire idea of extending Broadway was never going to happen.

  Then, on June 21, 1807, off the Virginia coast, the British warship Leopard, on a search mission for British deserters, opened fire on the American frigate Chesapeake, killing three seamen. The United States had been trying to maintain its neutrality, and trade with both the British and French, adversaries in the ongoing Napoleonic Wars. But the British in particular had been preying on American shipping and, even worse, impressing American seamen. The “Chesapeake-Leopard Affair” enraged the American public and was one catalyst that ultimately led to the War of 1812, but in 1807, President Thomas Jefferson shied away from all-out war in favor of economic sanctions. On December 22 of that year Jefferson signed the Embargo Act, which forbade all American exports. It was a drastic measure meant to bring Britain to its knees; instead, it prostrated the American economy.

  New York
had never seen as prosperous a year as 1807, when its exports reached a record high of $26,300,000—$526,000,000 in today’s dollars. But immediately upon passage of the Embargo Act, all port activity ground to a complete halt. Unemployed carpenters, shipwrights, sailmakers, caulkers, and cartmen wandered the streets, stranded seamen gathered in angry mobs in City Hall Park, and merchants, brokers, and auctioneers went bankrupt. And it was the dead of winter.

  With thousands of destitute workers in danger of starvation, Hunn recommended pushing ahead immediately with the opening of Broadway between Art Street (the former Sandy Hill Road) and the Bowery, even if in only a “temporary manner.” The extension of Broadway, which for so many years had been tied up in landowners’ petitions, had suddenly become vitally important. The Common Council’s road committee then consisted of Samuel Kip, Nicholas Fish (a Revolutionary War veteran and father of the future governor Hamilton Fish), merchant John Slidell (father of future U.S. Senator John Slidell Jr., of Louisiana), and they recommended extending Broadway to the Bowery “with as many hands as can be usefully employed therein.”

  And so, in the freezing cold early months of 1808, work finally began on the opening of Broadway to the Bowery.

  But even then, letters and petitions from angry landowners continued to arrive at City Hall. Spingler claimed that he had “misconceived” the terms of his deed of cession allowing Broadway to cut through his land, and requested that the deed be voided. And David Dunham’s house was still in the way, its kitchen extending into Broadway’s path. In February of 1808, Dunham came up with an alternative: Might the surveyors simply narrow Broadway as it approached his house, so that the kitchen could remain where it was? Fish, Slidell, and Kip confessed they were “at a loss” to even know how to respond, but a week later the Common Council ordered Dunham “to remove, forthwith, so much of his Kitchen as may encroach upon the public Street.”

  Then Spingler and six of his neighbors submitted a new petition to the city. This time they protested not the opening of Broadway—it was too late for that—but the amounts of their assessments. They were especially stung when they learned that the city planned to use their assessments to help pay for damages awarded to their neighbors, including Dunham and the Burlings, while ignoring damage done to their buildings, fences, and trees. The last of Spingler’s neighbors to sign the petition was a local fixture named Henry Brevoort.

  He was known as Henry Brevoort, Sr., to distinguish him from his son, the writer Henry Brevoort Jr. Brevoort Sr.’s father, who had died in 1798, had been known simply as Henry Brevoort and was the son of yet another Henry Brevoort, who had been known as “Henry Brevoort of the Bowery.” Henry Brevoort of the Bowery was the son of the original landowner John Hendricks Brevoort, who, in 1701, had acquired the first 41 acres of the farm, which eventually swelled in size to 86 acres. In 1760 half of the farm was sold to Spingler and the Burlings, and by 1808, when Broadway was cut through it, only 11 acres remained.

  Henry Brevoort was supposedly a country bumpkin who forced Broadway to change direction. In reality, he was a politically savvy landowner.

  Brevoort Sr. was sixty-one years old then and had become a well-known horticulturalist. “Brevoort’s Purple Washington” plum was, according to Robert Manning’s 1838 Book of Fruits, “of large size; form round, and nearly oval; skin dark blue, covered with a blue bloom; the flesh sweet and good,” although landscape architect and horticulturist Andrew Jackson Downing, in his 1845 treatise The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America, offered a dissenting opinion: “[The Brevoort Purple Washington] is a handsome and most productive plum, but appears to us to have been overpraised as regards its flavor, which is of second quality.” “Brevoort’s Morris” peach, meanwhile, pleased Downing greatly: “One of the richest and most delicious of American peaches,” he wrote, noting its “rich, sugary” taste.

  Brevoort Sr. was also a politician, having served three consecutive terms, from 1771 to 1774, as an assistant alderman on the Common Council. He was elected to a fourth term in 1802 and was sitting on the council when the city first proposed extending Broadway to the Bowery. In 1806, Brevoort was named one of twenty-seven inspectors appointed by the city to monitor polling in the fall elections, a position given only to well-connected, politically savvy residents. Brevoort, in other words, was at the very center of political life in the rapidly developing city.

  Yet somehow over the next century Brevoort became the lead character in the myth of the Broadway bend, an intransigent landowner standing up to the city and credited with causing the deflection of Broadway away from its straight-line path. The origins of the myth and all its variations arose from confusion over the nature of the 1808 Spingler petition that Brevoort signed and his later fight to stop the city from extending 11th Street from the Bowery to Broadway and through his house.

  The tussle over 11th Street began in 1815, well after Broadway had been opened through the Brevoort farm. In letter upon letter and brief upon brief, Brevoort Sr. and Jr. protested the opening of the street, and the matter became a drawn-out legal contest between city and state that took the next thirty-four years to resolve, by which time both Brevoort Sr. and Jr. were dead. Grace Church took up the cause, since the extension of 11th Street would have grazed the back corner of the church, and 11th Street between the Bowery and Broadway never was opened and remains closed today. Over time, the Brevoort family’s fight over 11th Street became confused with the origins of the Broadway bend at 10th Street.

  But that doesn’t fully explain how Brevoort, an astute politician and cultivator of fruit trees, should have become recast as the stubborn country bumpkin immortalized in Gideon J. Tucker’s 1892 poem:

  A merry old Dutchman was Uncle Brevoort,

  Who had not lived eighty odd years for naught;

  With abundant waist and laughing blue eye

  And nose of a color a trifle high,

  A gouty foot, and long silvery hair,

  And a forehead free as a child’s from care . . .

  He fought all their maps, and he fought their reports,

  Corporation, surveyors, commissioners, courts;

  He hired his lawyers, well learned in the law;

  The plans and the projects to fragments they tore.

  But Uncle Brevoort, ere the law suit expires,

  And calmly he sleeps at St. Mark’s with his sires.

  Washington Irving was on intimate terms with the Brevoort family, at one point lodging with Brevoort Jr. in a hotel on lower Broadway, and had made frequent visits to the Brevoort homestead during the time he was dreaming up Rip Van Winkle, an enduring archetype of old Dutch New York first introduced to the public in Irving’s The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, published in 1819. Over time, it seems, Brevoort Sr. was remembered less and less as a real person and more like Rip, a man impervious to progress and lost in time.

  In reality, Brevoort Sr. was a shrewd real-estate speculator who as early as 1807 had begun dividing his farm into building lots, in anticipation of Broadway’s extension through his land, selling four of the lots to John Jacob Astor, who was related by marriage. (Brevoort’s wife, Sarah Whetton, was the niece of Astor’s wife Sarah Todd.)

  Brevoort Sr. lived on what remained of the family farm for the rest of his life. Spry until the very end, he accompanied Brevoort Jr. on social rounds through the growing city, wondering, Brevoort Jr. wrote Irving, at the “novelties of the age.” At eighty-nine, Brevoort Sr. was still energetic enough to walk the two miles from his home to Wall Street so that his solicitor, Peter Jay, could draft his will, which Brevoort signed with a shaky hand. In his longevity, Brevoort became emblematic of a lost, rural age, someone who had lived long enough to see the invention of the steamship and the telegraph, yet lived his entire life on a farm on Broadway.

  In 1841, Brevoort stood on Broadway in a snowstorm to watch President William Henry Harrison’s funeral procession pass by. He died four months later at the Rip Van Winkle–like age of ninety-four, and Brevoort Jr. gave his
father’s prized long gun to Irving. When Philip Hone heard that the old man had finally died, he immediately began calculating how much the Brevoort farm was worth—half a million, Hone reckoned.

  Brevoort had left clear instructions in his will: The farm was to be divided among Brevoort Jr., his brother Elias, daughter Margaret, and Margaret’s husband James Renwick, and cut into building lots. There was no hint of sentimentality in the will, nothing about preserving the old homestead. Brevoort, far from the stubborn farmer standing in the way of progress, encouraged his children to sell or trade the land for the best price they could get. Brevoort, it turns out, was a thoroughly modern man.

  CHAPTER 12

  GRACE

  IN 1843, TWO YEARS AFTER HIS FATHER’S DEATH, HENRY Brevoort Jr. sold a large parcel of his father’s farm to Grace Church, which wanted to sell its old church on Rector Street, next door to Trinity Church, and move north along Broadway to the corner of 10th Street. (Grace made a nice profit on the deal, selling the old church for $65,000 while paying only $35,000—$1,093,000 in today’s dollars—for the Brevoort land.) Brevoort Jr.’s sister Margaret and her husband James Renwick, a well-known professor at Columbia College, had a twenty-four-year-old Columbia-educated son who was interested in engineering and architecture. Small wonder, then, that the commission for the new Grace Church went to James Renwick Jr.

  He went on to design St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Vassar College, and the Smithsonian Institution, among many other projects in a long and illustrious career, but in 1843, Renwick Jr. hadn’t yet opened a proper architecture office. If Renwick was known at all, it was for the Bowling Green fountain, which he had designed the year before and which had been widely condemned—a “monstrosity,” his former Columbia classmate George Templeton Strong called it.