Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  The eighty-five-year-old house was nothing if not forlorn, a curious remnant from another era adrift in a sea of vacant lots. In the 1880s it was painted a shade of olive green and rented to a family named Foley. A reporter from the Evening World noticed a goat roaming the yard, a clothesline hung with undergarments, and the sound of a piano coming through the open windows. The original carriage drive lined with boxwood hedges still wound around the house, and all thirteen of Hamilton’s sweet gum trees, enclosed in a brown picket fence, remained in the front yard outside the room that had once been Hamilton’s study. The trees were tall but spindly; Hamilton, not much of a horticulturalist as it turned out, had planted them too close together.

  The Grange, stranded on a fragment of its original grounds, sat at a 30-degree angle to 143rd Street, which was scheduled to open through the property that fall. The back corner of the house intruded slightly into the path of the planned street, and its foundations had been compromised by the roadwork. The Grange, it seemed, faced certain demolition.

  Then St. Luke’s Episcopal Church moved from Hudson Street, in Greenwich Village, to Harlem. Isaac H. Tuthill, St. Luke’s pastor, came upon the Grange while scouting for building sites and contacted Cotting about donating the house to the church for use as a temporary chapel. Cotting agreed, on the condition that Tuthill build the new St. Luke’s in the neighborhood. (Cotting no doubt figured that the presence of a fine new church like St. Luke’s would increase property values in the area.) In early 1889 the Grange was gingerly picked up, moved 400 feet south to the corner of Convent Avenue and 141st Street, swiveled so that one of its sides faced Convent Avenue, and placed on a new basement next to the site where the new St. Luke’s would be built. (The new church, a magnificent Romanesque brownstone building, was completed in 1892.)

  The Grange’s original basement stayed behind on 143rd Street, along with Hamilton’s sweet gum trees. Marooned in the middle of the block between 142nd and 143rd streets, the trees languished, and by 1904, when three generations of Hamilton’s descendants—his grandsons Colonel John C. L. Hamilton and Major General Alexander Hamilton III, great-grandson Rev. Alexander Hamilton IV, and, looking bored out of his mind, great-great-grandson Alexander Hamilton V—gathered on 143rd Street to observe the 200th anniversary of Hamilton’s death, only seven dead trunks remained. The last trunk was cut down in December of 1908.

  Two police officers and a dog pose next to Hamilton’s prized sweet gum trees, ca. 1890. In the background is the Grange, on a new foundation, and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, then under construction.

  In 1924, a six-story brick apartment block was built right up to the property line on the Grange’s north side, originally the house’s rear façade. With St. Luke’s front portico projecting just slightly in front of the Grange along Convent Avenue, the old house was effectively trapped. That same year the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, through a $100,000 gift from J. P. Morgan and George F. Baker Jr., took over the Grange, and beginning in 1933 operated the house as a museum. But it gradually went to seed.

  THROUGH LONG YEARS of degradation there remained a persistent idea that the Grange should be moved to a more appropriate location. In 1950 the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, apparently believing that New York landmarks were interchangeable, suggested to Robert Moses that the Grange might be moved to Riverside Drive near 125th Street as a replacement for the historic Claremont Inn, which was slated for demolition. Nothing came of that idea, or of a plan in 1955 to move the Grange a few blocks south to St. Nicholas Terrace and 130th Street, on the campus of City College.

  In 1962, President John F. Kennedy signed a congressional act designating the house as the Hamilton Grange National Monument and placing it, at least in theory, under the supervision of the National Park Service. But the law stipulated that the house could only be restored if it was moved to a better site, and when that didn’t happen, the house continued to decay.

  Landscape painter and author Eric Sloane, who had grown up around the corner from the Grange but hadn’t been aware of its history, rediscovered the house in 1967 and became friends with its caretaker, Raleigh Henry Daniels, who had become an expert on Hamiltoniana, always referred politely to Hamilton as “the General,” and by the time Sloane came on the scene was desperately driving nails into the Grange’s rotting planks and beams in an ongoing effort to keep it upright. The Grange was in miserable condition. During thunderstorms, Daniels, who lived in the basement, listened to the house creaking, snapping, and groaning, just as James Kent had 163 years earlier.

  “The Grange is a sad house,” Daniels told Sloane. “The sadness seems to have a special meaning; perhaps I am the only one aware of that. It is as if the General wants to say something across the years, and there is no one else to listen.”

  FOR THE NEXT forty years the Grange remained wedged between St. Luke’s on its south side and the apartment building on its north side. The house had been fixed up to a degree, and staffed by courteous park rangers giving tours to school groups and occasional history buffs. There were periodic rumors that the Grange might be moved to a more appropriate site but, as before, nothing happened. Finally, in 2006, the National Park Service announced that the Grange would be hoisted up and repositioned around the corner in St. Nicholas Park, on land that had once encompassed the southernmost corner of Hamilton’s estate.

  Moving the Grange was decidedly tricky: Since St. Luke’s portico jutted in front of the house, and the apartment building squeezed it on the other side, there was no room to maneuver, and it had long been assumed that if the house was ever moved it would have to be sawed in half. Enter the Wolfe House and Building Movers of Bernville, Pennsylvania, experts in moving historic buildings. Led by Jamin, Mark, Nathan, and Nevin Buckingham, four brothers who dressed in the modest clothing of the German Baptist Brethren, the Wolfe movers used hydraulic jacks to lift the 298-ton Grange inch-by-inch, like a Buick getting an oil change, while inserting small, rectangular wood cribbing—7,000 blocks by project’s end—beneath the house’s foundation. Slowly but surely, over a period of weeks, the house rose high above the street, as the cribwork below it got taller. Soon it resembled a house atop a giant Lincoln Logs set.

  Once the Grange had cleared the church portico, a second wood-block tower was built in the middle of Convent Avenue. Steel beams were laid from one tower to the other, like a bridge, and on May 26, 2008, the Grange was pushed on rollers along the beams from the first to the second tower. There it perched for another week or so, 35 feet above Convent Avenue, its forgotten front façade, hidden since 1889 behind the church, revealed to all. Then, block-by-block, the tower was taken down from beneath the house until the Grange rested on rubber-tired dollies in the middle of the street. The house was braced on the inside and two miles of chains were wrapped around it.

  Early in the morning of Saturday, June 7, the Buckingham brothers commandeered a remote control device mounted to the dollies and drove the Grange, ever so slowly and gingerly, down the hillside of 141st Street to St. Nicholas Park, where a new foundation and basement awaited. It was a journey of only 500 feet but took over three hours—journalist David W. Dunlap, covering the story for the New York Times, calculated the Grange’s speed at .04 miles an hour.

  The Grange having safely arrived in the park, locals from the neighborhood, along with the house movers and their children, City College students and professors, preservationists, reporters, and politicians enjoyed a picnic on the woody hillside behind the house’s new basement. There was a profound sense of accomplishment, that the right thing had been done, and done well, and that the Grange had finally found a home.

  IT IS THE NATURE of things in New York that very little lasts. In 1926 the New York Times, in speculating on the city’s tendency toward perpetual change, predicted that while City Hall, the New York Public Library, Grand Central Station, and Penn Station (wrong about that one) were sure to survive the test of time, everything else in town “may
be regarded as fluid.”

  Even some of the things that do last don’t necessarily remain fixed in the same location. The Grange, built securely on a hilltop nine miles north of the city, moved not once but twice, each time leaving its basement behind, like a hermit crab trading in its old shell. Even the Bloomingdale Road, once so critical to New York’s commerce and social networks, disappeared, leaving only a few short fragments and barely discernible traces behind.

  Today the Grange has been restored to the tune of $8 million. Knowledgeable, friendly park rangers, besieged on occasion by fans of the Broadway musical Hamilton, guide visitors through the Grange’s first-floor rooms. (There were 682 visitors in February of 2015, the month Hamilton opened quietly at the Public Theater. During the following October, by which time the show had moved to Broadway and become the most talked-about musical in years, 6,735 visitors filed through the once-lonely house.)

  The Grange, neglected for so many years, now seems rooted in its new site and reassuringly permanent, but it’s unwise to bet against change. If it was improbable that Eliza Hamilton should have outlived her husband by fifty years, or that the Grange, a fragile wooden house, should have outlasted the World Trade Center, it’s equally unlikely that the positions of both the Grange and Broadway will remain fixed for eternity. Two hundred years from now, Broadway itself might have shifted course once again or even disappeared altogether. The row houses, tenements, and churches that rose up around Hamilton’s former estate might be gone too, and the Grange might have moved again. Maybe someday it will even be returned to its original hilltop overlooking the Hudson, and eventually surrounded by nothing but fields and woods.

  CHAPTER 37

  NECROPOLIS

  ALEXANDER HAMILTON’S DEATH—SHOT TO DEATH BY THE sitting vice president of the United States!—was nothing if not unique. Most New Yorkers in Hamilton’s day died more commonplace deaths: of “dropsy” (edema), colic, dyspepsia, croup, measles, small pox, yellow fever, scarlet fever, typhoid fever, cholera, pneumonia, heart disease, cancer, consumption (tuberculosis), or whooping cough. They drowned, fell down wells or off roofs, were kicked by horses, run over by wagons, drays, and carts, were killed in fires, killed each other, or killed themselves. Thousands upon thousands of children never made it past their first year.

  Hamilton was buried in Trinity Churchyard, in a grave just inside the south fence. Burials had begun there in 1681, seventeen years before the first version of Trinity Church was built, and when Hamilton went into the ground in 1804, the cemetery was already stuffed with thousands upon thousands of Sarahs, Samuels, Deborahs, Ruths, Ezekiels, Hannahs, and Isaacs. In 1808, tourist John Lambert noted that the churchyard was already “crowded with the dead.”

  “One would think there was a scarcity of land in America, by seeing such large pieces of ground in one of the finest streets of New York occupied by the dead,” he wrote. “[The] continual view of such a crowd of white and brown tomb-stones and monuments which is exhibited in the Broadway, must at the sickly season of the year tend very much to depress the spirits.”

  The “sickly season” was in the late summer and fall, when annual epidemics visited the city and carried off men, women, and children. Yellow fever killed over 4,000 New Yorkers in seasonal epidemics between 1702 and 1805—2,086 died in the particularly dreadful 1798 epidemic—but its causes were poorly understood. Medical experts blamed noxious air (“miasmas”) and figured the disease came from swamps, dirty streets and buildings, immigrants—the Irish were often blamed for the scourge—and cemeteries. (It wasn’t until 1900 that physician Walter Reed discovered that mosquitoes, not bad air or the Irish, spread the virus.) In January of 1806, two years before Lambert’s visit and a few months after yet another yellow fever epidemic befell the city in the fall of 1805, the city’s Board of Health recommended prohibiting all burials in the city.

  That rather drastic recommendation wasn’t followed, and by the 1820s Trinity Churchyard, though it encompassed less than 2 acres, held thousands of corpses. Another yellow fever epidemic arrived in the fall of 1822, and in 1823 the Common Council voted to ban the digging of new graves south of Grand Street. (Existing family vaults were exempted, which meant that the wealthy continued to be buried in the lower sections of the city while many of the city’s poor went into potters’ fields north of town—Washington Square, Madison Square, and Bryant Park all began as potters’ fields. Subsequent laws extended the line northward until by 1859 no burials were allowed below 86th Street.)

  In 1838 Green-Wood Cemetery, 300 acres of rolling hills with stunning views, was founded in Brooklyn, inspiring Trinity to begin planning its own rural cemetery. In 1842, Trinity purchased 24 acres of hilly, rocky land along the Hudson River from box manufacturer Richard F. Carman, who was then developing a village called Carmansville along Tenth Avenue between 142nd and 158th streets. The new Trinity Cemetery spanned from Tenth Avenue to the river between 153rd and 155th streets, which hadn’t yet opened. James Renwick Jr., then just embarking on the design of Grace Church on lower Broadway, was hired to design the grounds. The first burials took place in 1843.

  The views from Trinity Cemetery of the Hudson River and New Jersey Palisades beyond were breathtaking, and as soon as the cemetery opened, steamboat companies began offering daily trips upriver to see it. “A more desirable excursion for schools cannot be found than a visit to the Cemetery,” noted one 1845 advertisement in the New York Herald.

  It was an idyllic, quiet, contemplative spot, but in 1871, less than thirty years after it was laid out, Trinity Cemetery was cut in two by the opening of the Boulevard, which divided the cemetery into east and west sections of roughly equal proportions and left outcroppings of sparkling grey schist jutting high above the street on either side. As soon as the road was opened, Trinity hired Calvert Vaux to design a pedestrian suspension bridge across the breach, linking the cemetery’s two sections. Vaux’s jaunty little span, like a Brooklyn Bridge in miniature, didn’t last: It was torn down in 1911 to make way for the new Church of the Intercession at the southeast corner of Broadway and 155th Street, and ever since then visitors interested in seeing both parts of the cemetery have had to leave and cross over Broadway at street level.

  TIME HAS NOT HEALED the incision. Winding, bucolic pathways still end abruptly at the cut, the edges of which remain fresh and jagged above streams of traffic below. But the cemetery, especially its hilly western section, is dotted with maples, oaks, and honey locusts of girths not usually associated with present-day Manhattan. The wide Hudson seemingly within spitting distance, the cemetery is one of the very few remaining places in Manhattan where it is still possible to visualize a time when most of the island was rural.

  Trinity Cemetery also presents a kind of reunion of prominent nineteenth-century New Yorkers; an ingathering of long-dead merchants, politicians, real-estate developers, physicians, lawyers, actors, poets, painters, and their wives and children, all huddled together and minding their own business in a village of granite vaults and worn grave markers. You almost want to interrogate them a bit, now that they’re all stuck in one place and unlikely to run away; to ask shipbuilder Robert Bowne Minturn how it felt to watch the Flying Cloud unfurl its sails for the first time in 1851; to get a sense from Eliza Jumel of what it was like to be married to the likes of Aaron Burr; to ask John Augustus Shea, an Irish immigrant who died in 1845, to recite a few lines from his poem “The Ocean.”

  How humbling to one with a heart and a soul,

  To look on thy greatness and list to thy roll,

  And to think how that heart in cold ashes shall be,

  While the voice of eternity rises from thee.

  Clement Clarke Moore would no doubt be interested to know that people still recite his poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Samuel B. Ruggles, his marker faded to illegibility, would probably be astonished to find that Union Square is populated by everyone from hip-hop dancers and Hare Krishnas to hedge-fund managers. Richard F. Carman would probably b
e dismayed to learn that only the nerdiest of New York historians can still locate Carmansville on a city map.

  There are thirty-seven members of the Astor family buried in vaults along the westernmost hillside of Trinity Cemetery. They include the original John Jacob Astor, who died in 1848 and was temporarily interred at St. Thomas’s Church, at Broadway and Houston Street, before his remains were moved uptown, and his great-grandson John Jacob Astor IV, the science-fiction-writing “Jack,” whose frozen body was fished out of the Atlantic after the Titanic disappeared beneath him in 1912. Two questions for the Astors: What do you think of the view? And isn’t it strange to have spent your lifetimes buying and selling land, only to have become land yourselves?

  CHAPTER 38

  MINNIE’S LAND

  THE REMAINS OF JOHN JAMES AUDUBON LIE IN TRINITY Cemetery beneath an ornate stone crucifix carved with birds (including a vulture), cougars, bison, deer, and bears, along a winding path to the rear of the Church of the Intercession. A relief of Audubon’s ruggedly handsome face encircled with long, flowing locks—he was always vain about his hair—protrudes from the monument’s base.

  Audubon was born in 1785 on his wealthy father’s plantation in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), the bastard son of his father’s mistress. He immigrated to New York in 1803 in the midst of that year’s yellow fever epidemic, fell ill, and was nursed back to health by Quakers, who also taught him English. He traveled to a farm his father owned in Pennsylvania, and there fell in love with seventeen-year-old Lucy Bakewell. He was nineteen.