Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  Almost immediately, things went seriously wrong. Less than two years after the Manhattanville Houses opened, there had been so many robberies and rapes in the project that in September of 1962 battalions of tenants stayed up all night patrolling the lobbies of buildings that the Housing Authority hadn’t equipped with locks. (The Housing Authority had only 612 police officers to cover 1,575 buildings in 105 projects across the city; only five had been assigned to the Manhattanville Houses.) Terror-stricken tenants at the Grant Houses organized themselves in similar fashion.

  Only two days after tenants began pleading with the Housing Authority for more police protection, Anna Ayala, the twelve-year-old daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, was stabbed to death in her apartment in the Manhattanville Houses. The Housing Authority’s response was to assign six additional guards to the project and to install locks on the lobby doors.

  For the next thirty years, as crime enveloped the Grant and Manhattanville projects, tenants continued to beseech the Housing Authority for more protection. “The tenants are afraid to leave their apartments at night, and they are not safe in the afternoon either,” Janet Karlson, chair of the Manhattanville Improvement Association, told a reporter in 1968, after a resident was stabbed and robbed in an elevator in the Manhattanville Houses. “There is a pocketbook snatched, a person assaulted, or an apartment robbed virtually every day.”

  Still the violence continued: In 1980 twenty women reported being raped in the two projects. In 1994 the decomposed bodies of a mother and her three children were found stacked in a bathtub in the Manhattanville Houses. In 1997 a dispute between neighbors over noise resulted in a bombing that left a gaping hole in the façade of one of the Grant Houses’ towers. Amid drug trafficking, muggings, and shootings, an ongoing turf war between residents of the Manhattanville and Grant projects resulted, in 2011, in the senseless murder of eighteen-year-old Tayshana Murphy, a charismatic young basketball star nicknamed “Chicken.” Not for nothing did locals begin calling Manhattanville “Murderville.”

  In the meantime, Columbia was steadily taking over the opposite side of the street. In 2006 the university announced plans for a $7 billion expansion into Manhattanville along the west side of Broadway between 125th and 135th streets. Old warehouses and factories were leveled, and new buildings, including the Italian architect Renzo Piano’s sleek Jerome L. Greene Science Center, rose in their place. It was wholesale demolition, although no one called it “slum clearance.”

  TODAY, WALKING NORTH on Broadway as it dips in and out of Manhattanville is a disorienting experience. Morningside Gardens and the Manhattanville and Grant houses tower over the east side of the street, while the west side is lined with tenements, gas stations, warehouses, billboards, industrial buildings, and, at the southwest corner of Broadway and 125th Street, a McDonald’s sitting in the middle of a parking lot. The subway rattles back and forth overhead. The Boulevard-era mall running down the center of Broadway north of 59th Street doesn’t continue through the valley of Manhattanville, its shrubs, trees, and benches replaced by parked cars jammed chaotically into the spaces between the subway viaduct’s massive steel supports. The Henry Hudson Parkway is only a block to the west, and the intersection of Broadway and 125th Street is a catch basin of honking livery cabs, careering delivery trucks, and rumbling eighteen-wheelers.

  Almost nothing remains of the original village of Manhattanville except for a short surviving fragment of the Bloomingdale Road running between 125th and 133rd street, one block east of Broadway. Now known as “Old Broadway,” the narrow road isn’t much to see, its middle portion erased by construction of the Manhattanville Houses. Between 125th and 126th streets, Old Broadway cuts across a strip of neighborhood—tenements, churches, a synagogue, nail salons, botanicas, a police station, delicatessens, liquor stores—that somehow escaped the slum clearances of the 1950s. Just on the other side of 126th Street, squeezed between a playground and a swimming pool, is St. Mary’s Episcopal Church.

  A handsome Gothic Revival stone building designed by the firm of Carrère & Hastings, architects of the New York Public Library, the current St. Mary’s replaced the original church that Jacob Schieffelin built in 1826. Next to the church, set back from the street in a courtyard shaded by enormous trees, is a modest building of yellow clapboard, the church’s one-time rectory, which was built in 1851 and is the oldest building in the neighborhood.

  St. Mary’s remains a neighborhood anchor, a vibrant parish whose members pack lunches for the homeless, run a thrift store, organize concerts and movie nights, and cultivate an urban farm. On Sundays the church is crowded. Schieffelin himself is there, too. He and his wife Hannah and brother Jonathan are buried in a vault in an alcove near the church’s front door.

  MILE 10

  143RD STREET TO 165TH STREET

  CHAPTER 36

  THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

  AT 135TH STREET THE SUBWAY DISAPPEARS BACK INTO ITS tunnel beneath Broadway and the street climbs out of the valley of Manhattanville and becomes the Boulevard once more. Bisecting Hamilton Heights, a neighborhood that since the 1960s has had a large Dominican population, Broadway reasserts itself, drawing crowds of neighbors, men mostly, to benches along its central mall, which reappears between 135th and 169th streets, for games of checkers and dominoes. Students from the City College of New York nod to the men and trudge uphill from the subway station at Broadway and 137th Street on their way to the campus one block to the east, passing delis and bodegas and lunch spots crammed with neighborhood types. It is a hectic, vibrant community, and full of life.

  At the northeast corner of Broadway and 136th Street, just past a ramshackle fruit-and-vegetable stand where oranges, plantains, yams, and yucca roots are stacked up in piles and occasionally bounce into Broadway, a diagonal street—it was once actually called Diagonal Street—angles away from Broadway and continues north uphill to 144th Street. Today the street is called Hamilton Place and it is the longest surviving fragment of the Bloomingdale Road.

  If you were to travel back in time to 1800 and land near the Bloomingdale Road, a walk up its narrow, rutted path would have revealed farms and woods and then, at the crest of a hill, Jacob Schieffelin’s estate sweeping down to the Hudson River, his house facing the Bloomingdale Road on the line of present-day 143rd Street. It was an idyllic spot that was much admired by travelers passing along the road on their way between New York and Albany, and in 1800 Alexander Hamilton asked Schieffelin if he could buy it. Schieffelin said no, but offered Hamilton 15 adjoining acres on the other side of the road. Hamilton took it, and with his wife Elizabeth set about building what Hamilton called their “little retreat.”

  ELIZABETH, OR ELIZA, Schuyler was born in 1757 into a prominent New York family. Her father was Philip Schuyler, a Revolutionary War general, one-time commander of the Northern Army, and member of the Continental Congress. Both the Schuylers and the Van Cortlandts on Eliza’s paternal grandmother’s side were descendants of some of the first settlers of New Amsterdam. Even more impressive, her mother was Catherine van Rensselaer, and the Rensselaers were the New York family, tracing their origins back to Kiliaen van Rensselaer and the patroonship—a kind of Dutch fiefdom—that had been granted him by the Dutch West India Company in the 1620s and included most of what later became Albany. Eliza was also related to the Rensselaers by marriage: Her sister Peggy married Stephen van Rensselaer, the wealthy “last Patroon” and one of the largest landowners in the state.

  In 1779, in the thick of the war, Eliza, then twenty-three, visited relatives in New Jersey and there met Hamilton, a twenty-five-year-old aide to General George Washington and former King’s College student. They fell in love; Hamilton affectionately called her Betsey.

  Their backgrounds could not have been more different: Hamilton was an immigrant from the West Indies, the illegitimate son of a Scottish-born merchant. Eliza, meanwhile, grew up on 80 acres just south of Albany, in a brick Georgian-style mansion overlooking the Hudson River. Eliza and Ha
milton were married in that house, in 1780, Hamilton having obtained a hasty furlough from the battlefield.

  Following the Continental Army’s victory at Yorktown, where Hamilton led a brigade in the capture of a key redoubt, Hamilton retired from the army and rode to Albany and the Schuyler mansion, where Eliza and their new baby, Philip, awaited his return. After the eight-year-long war finally ended in 1783 with the evacuation of the British from New York, the Hamiltons settled in a house on Wall Street, within sight of Broadway and the burned-out shell of the first Trinity Church. Hamilton, who had been admitted to the New York bar while living in Albany, set up a flourishing legal practice specializing in the defense of Loyalists systemically abused in the wake of the British evacuation.

  In 1789, Hamilton was nominated as the nation’s first secretary of the treasury, and the following year the Hamiltons moved to Philadelphia, which had replaced New York as the temporary capital. In Philadelphia, Hamilton, while engaged in a brutal political feud with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, carried on an affair with one Maria Reynolds. Eliza’s good name was dragged through the mud, but somehow the marriage survived.

  In 1795, Hamilton resigned as treasury secretary, and he and Eliza returned to New York with their children. They lived first at 26 Broadway, on the curving east side of the street adjacent to Bowling Green—the huge Standard Oil Building covers the site today—then at 107 Liberty Street, a few blocks to the north, and later at 54 Cedar Street. As Hamilton toiled at his law practice, Eliza raised the children and shuttled between New York and her parents’ estate in Albany.

  In 1800, Hamilton turned forty-five and his nemesis Thomas Jefferson was elected president. His political influence fading, Hamilton decided, at long last, to build a permanent home for his family.

  SOON AFTER HAMILTON bought Schieffelin’s 15 acres on the Bloomingdale Road, he added adjacent parcels of 3 and 17 acres, enlarging the estate to 35 acres. The land extended from about present-day 140th Street to 146th Street, with the northern boundary at the junction of the Bloomingdale Road and the Kingsbridge Road, which connected the village of Harlem with upper Manhattan and the present-day Bronx. It was a convenient place to live for a lawyer with business and family in both New York, to the south, and Albany, to the north.

  Hamilton hired architect John McComb Jr. to design a house he nicknamed the Grange after his uncle’s plantation on the island of St. Croix and his grandfather’s ancestral home in Scotland. McComb, thirty-nine, was two years away from designing New York’s City Hall and was well known for his work designing “country seats” in the area, including, in 1799, the Archibald Gracie mansion overlooking the East River near present-day 88th Street. (Since 1942 the Gracie mansion, one of only three country houses from that period remaining in Manhattan, has been used as the city’s official mayoral residence.)

  Hamilton had been acquainted with McComb since at least as far back as the 1790s, when Hamilton, as treasury secretary, had hired McComb to design several lighthouses along the eastern seaboard. For the Grange, McComb furnished Hamilton with plans for a symmetrical house with restrained Classical details.

  Hamilton’s father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, weighed in from Albany on every facet of the project. “You have forgot to send me the plans of your intended house,” he chided Hamilton in the summer of 1800, before dispensing detailed advice on how to treat the house’s lumber: Soak and dry it carefully, Schuyler recommended, lest it shrink. Construction began in 1801, with Ezra Weeks serving as contractor.

  The house faced southwest, the Bloomingdale Road in the foreground and the Hudson River and the Palisades of New Jersey beyond. From the road, a driveway lined with boxwood hedges led to the house. The backyard, etched with creeks, had a barn, root house, henhouse, icehouse, milk house, and shed, and offered stunning views of the Harlem Plains and, in the distance, the turbulent waters of Hell Gate.

  McComb designed a house of two stories, painted yellow, with an ornate balustrade running around a low hip roof from which four chimneys, two of them fake to preserve the symmetry, protruded. The Grange’s second floor had three bedrooms that somehow accommodated Hamilton, Eliza, and their seven children. The kitchen, in the manner of the day, was in the basement. McComb designed the house’s first floor around two “Octagon Rooms,” as he called them, one a parlor and the other a formal dining room, that could be joined by opening three intervening doors. The Octagon Rooms had floor-to-ceiling triple-hung windows that flooded the interior with light, and pushed beyond the box-like envelope of the house, creating a sense of expansion. In summer, the top sashes of the windows could be pulled down to encourage cross-ventilation; alternatively, the two lower sashes could be raised, turning the windows into doors that provided access to verandahs on either side of the house.

  Hamilton indulged in agrarian fantasies and became obsessed with the placement of the Grange’s every tree, vine, and flower bed. He planted a circle of thirteen American sweet gum trees, meant to symbolize the thirteen states, in the front yard just outside his first-floor study, so he could enjoy their distinctive star-shaped leaves and brilliant red autumn foliage while he was toiling away on voluminous legal briefs.

  A few days after Christmas 1802, Hamilton wrote a letter to Philadelphia lawyer Richard Peters. “A disappointed politician you know is very apt to take refuge in a Garden,” he began. “Accordingly I have purchased about thirty acres nine miles from Town, have built a house, planted a garden, and entered upon some other simple improvements.” That part of the letter is famous and has been often quoted; lesser known is the heart of the letter, in which Hamilton hits up Peters for a couple of bushels of his best grass seed.

  Whenever Hamilton was away on business, he sent Eliza obsessive messages detailing tasks around the Grange that required her immediate attention. “Don’t forget to visit the Grange,” he wrote her in January of 1801. “From what I saw there it is very important the drains should be better regulated.”

  More instructions followed: Eliza must see to a new roof for the icehouse, Hamilton wrote, and oversee the planting of hemlocks along the garden fence (“I mean the side nearest the house,” he clarified). There were ditches to be dug, he reminded her, and cow dung (one wagonload) and black mold (two wagonloads) that must be spread immediately in the garden’s compost. “You see, I do not forget the Grange,” he joked.

  Once the Grange was finished, in 1802, Hamilton and Eliza finally had a home of their own, and Hamilton enjoyed a brief two years playing the part of the country squire. From his office on Stone Street to the Grange was a round trip of three hours by stagecoach, but he gamely made the trek four or five days a week. The hilltop Grange was exposed to the full force of wind and rain coming off the Hudson, and during thunderstorms the house “rocked like a cradle,” James Kent, chief justice of the New York Supreme Court, wrote after a visit in April of 1804. But Kent also wrote that he had never seen the mercurial Hamilton so “friendly and amiable.”

  ONLY THREE MONTHS after Kent’s visit, Hamilton was famously killed by Vice President Aaron Burr in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. Hamilton was $50,000 to $60,000 in debt at the time of his death. Ten days before his fateful meeting with Burr, Hamilton drew up a summary of the woeful state of his finances and appealed to the generosity of his wealthy father-in-law to provide for Eliza and the children. “[Schuyler] knows well all the nicety of my past conduct,” he wrote, conveniently forgetting his past marital infidelity. But Schuyler, as it turned out, wasn’t as wealthy as he appeared—he was, like Hamilton, in debt—and died only four months after Hamilton.

  Alexander and Eliza Hamilton’s Grange in its original bucolic location along the Bloomingdale Road.

  Hamilton had made out a will two days before he died. Rather than transfer the Grange’s title to Eliza, Hamilton left the house to three executors, Nathaniel Pendleton, Nicholas Fish, and Hamilton’s brother-in-law John B. Church, instructing them to auction off the house to cover his debts. “I pray God that something may rema
in for the maintenance and education of my dear wife and children,” he wrote.

  Hamilton figured the Grange was worth about $25,000. On April 8, 1805, it fetched $30,500 at auction, and Pendleton, Fish, Church bought it back and sold it to Eliza at half price. Even so, she had been left deeply in debt, and Hamilton’s friend and eulogist Gouverneur Morris solicited subscriptions for a fund to help her make ends meet. In 1816, Congress passed “An Act for the relief of Elizabeth Hamilton,” restoring to Eliza the military pension that Hamilton, as a Revolutionary War veteran, was entitled to but had turned down.

  Eliza wore widow’s black for the rest of her life and outlived her husband by fifty years. She devoted her life to charitable pursuits—she was the founder of the New York Orphan Society—and managed to hold onto the Grange until 1848, when she sold it and moved to Washington D.C. Although her stature grew over time, she never mingled in Washington’s fashionable circles. She died in 1854, at age ninety-seven, and was laid beside Hamilton in Trinity Churchyard. A grandson, Alexander Hamilton III, born a decade after Hamilton’s death, credited Eliza with teaching him to be a man and a citizen.

  ELIZA WAS GONE, but the Grange was just beginning a long and tortuous second act. After Eliza’s death her land was rented out as pasture for horses and then wound up in the hands of William H. De Forest, a real-estate speculator and importer of French silk. In 1887, De Forest subdivided what real-estate agents called the “Hamilton Grange” into 300 lots and put them up for auction. But when the hammer began falling, De Forest declared he was unhappy with the sales prices and abruptly halted the proceedings. Three months later De Forest went bankrupt, and the estate was divided among his creditors. Wall Street broker Amos Cotting became the owner of Hamilton and Eliza’s house on the hill.