Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  Audubon had always loved birds and had always loved drawing, and in Pennsylvania he experimented with drawing birds from life, procuring his specimens by shooting them. He devised armatures to hold their limp bodies, piercing their lifeless carcasses with sharpened wires fixed to a wooden plank. At the time, almost none of the thousands of American bird species had been documented, and when ornithologists did find new specimens, they stuffed them into rigid, lifeless poses. Audubon, a romantic through and through, wanted to capture the spirit and movement of birds, the exuberance of the mockingbird “pour[ing] forth his melody, full of exultation,” the “ethereal motions” of the hummingbird, “so rapid and so light,” and the silent flight of the great horned owl, “gliding on extended pinions across the river, sailing over one hill and then another, or suddenly sweeping downwards, and again rising in the air like a moving shadow, now distinctly seen, and again mingling with the somber shades of the surrounding woods, fading into obscurity.” Audubon was positively Byronic when it came to owls.

  For the rest of his life Audubon traveled back and forth to Europe, through the American South and West, up into the wilds of Canada, and down to Central and South America in search of birds and business. As his renown grew, he glossed over the particulars of his French upbringing, and despite his French accent was esteemed as more authentically American than just about anyone else—Daniel Boone with a gun in one hand and pencils and paper in the other. When the New York Herald asked him to describe his nationality, Audubon deflected the question with a joke: “I am part Frenchman, part American, part Spanish, and a bit of the Louisiana alligator.”

  AUDUBON AND LUCY married in 1808 and moved first to Louisville, Kentucky, and then to Cincinnati, where Audubon worked for a while as a taxidermist, and then to New Orleans. Around 1820, Audubon conceived of a gigantic project that was to consume much of the rest of his life, force lengthy separations from Lucy, and expend all the energy of his two sons. In 1826, Audubon took a portfolio of drawings to a printer in Edinburgh, who etched and colored the first plates of what was to become Audubon’s life’s work, The Birds of America.

  It is among the most astounding books ever published. Printed in installments between 1826 and 1839 and sold by subscription, The Birds of America was published as an oversized “double elephant” folio measuring almost 40 by 30 inches. The book was expensive, issued as “numbers” of five unbound prints and ultimately bound into four volumes of one hundred plates each, which ended up costing a total of almost $1,000—about $25,000 in today’s dollars—and Audubon had some difficulty in securing subscribers. But those who saw the pages as they were produced were enthralled. Today it’s difficult to understand, in this era of telephoto lenses and National Geographic, what it must have been like to see for the first time, in life-size prints colored by hand, a golden eagle, an ivory-billed woodpecker, an auk, a flamingo, or a painted bunting.

  Despite his French accent, John James Audubon came to be seen as more authentically American than just about anyone else—an artistic Daniel Boone.

  Audubon’s birds were fully realized characters, and so vividly rendered they seemed about to fly off the page. Audubon often captured his subjects in mid-song, or mid-kill—there are a lot of bloody rabbit carcasses in his work—and there was something of Audubon himself in the wood thrushes, phoebes, kingfishers, whooping cranes, and herons that posed on each page. “His bird pictures reflect his own temperament, not to say his nationality;” John Burroughs wrote in a 1902 biography, “the birds are very demonstrative, even theatrical and melodramatic at times.” Philip Hone inspected The Birds of America in the Library of Congress and pronounced it the “most splendid book ever published.”

  Hone entertained Audubon in his Broadway mansion in the spring of 1833 and found him “an interesting man . . . modest in his deportment, possessing general intelligence, an acute mind, and great enthusiasm.” Audubon became a celebrity in New York, where he was treated as a wonder of nature. “Audubon, the great naturalist . . . is one of the finest looking middle-aged men we ever saw,” the New York Herald raved in 1837. “He has a large half Roman, half Grecian nose—a fine high forehead—a beautifully turned chin—and a profusion of iron grey hair, ‘Streaming like a meteor in the troubled sky.’ . . . His head is a study—his broad muscular shoulders like Apollo’s—and his eye as bright as an eagle’s.”

  The press found in the gregarious naturalist an irresistible subject, and Audubon, a tireless and constant promoter of himself and his work, was more than happy to give interviews. When, in 1837, Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett ran into Audubon on a steamship delivering passengers to the Liverpool-bound packet ship England anchored at Sandy Hook, Audubon offered Bennett a drink while cheerfully promoting The Birds of America, which, Audubon made sure to mention, was available for sale at William A. Colman’s bookstore at 205 Broadway.

  Audubon also told Bennett that he felt most at home in the woods, and New York City might seem like a strange choice of residence for such a restless outdoorsman. But New York had people with deep pockets, and it had fast packet ships, and so was much closer to his business contacts in England and France than was Louisiana or Kentucky, and Audubon became a familiar sight in Broadway’s shops, museums, lecture halls, and bookstores.

  A smaller “imperial octavo” edition of The Birds of America was published between 1839 and 1844 and was immensely popular—volunteer firemen presented a copy to Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” upon her much-anticipated arrival in New York in 1850—and the edition earned $36,000 for Audubon and family, enough to buy 15 acres of land north of town near Carmansville.

  He called the rural retreat Minnie’s Land in Lucy’s honor—“Minnie” being a Scottish term of endearment for “mother”—and built a wood-frame, two-story clapboard house with porches across the front and back. Completed in 1842, Audubon’s house, which bore a striking resemblance to Alexander Hamilton’s Grange just a mile to the south, faced east, its back to the river, near what is today the intersection of 155th Street and Riverside Drive.

  Children playing baseball at Minnie’s Land, 1865.

  Audubon’s two sons, Victor and John Woodhouse, built houses for their own families close to the river on either side of their parents’ house, and for a while the Audubon family lived in a kind of naturalist’s Noah’s Ark overrun with the otters, martens, muskrats, elk, and buffalo that, improbably, Audubon kept as pets. Minnie’s Land was remote—the only way to get there was by stagecoach from the city or by walking or riding up the Kingsbridge Road—but the Audubons never lacked for visitors. Samuel F. B. Morse visited sometime in the 1840s and hooked up New York’s first telegraph in Audubon’s basement laundry room, the wires snaking out a window and running across the Hudson to New Jersey.

  Around 1845 journalist Parke Godwin hiked up to Minnie’s Land for a visit. Turning onto a “rustic road” that ran west to the river between woods and fields of grain, Godwin passed loitering cattle eating grass along the roadside and heard only the buzz of insects and songs of birds. His walk soon brought him to a “secluded house . . . unpretending in its architecture, and beautifully embowered amid elms and oaks. Several graceful fawns, and a noble elk, were stalking in the shade of the trees, apparently unconscious of the presence of a few dogs, and not caring for the numerous turkeys, geese, and other domestic animals that gabbled and screamed around them.”

  Shown into a ground-floor studio crammed with easels, drawing supplies, stuffed birds, the skin of a panther, and “promiscuously” scattered drawings of mice, orioles, and woodpeckers, Godwin waited for the great man to make his entrance.

  “How kind it is [of you] to come see me; and how wise, too, to leave that crazy city!” Audubon announced, striding into the room and warmly shaking Godwin’s hand. “Do you know how I wonder that men can consent to swelter and fret their lives away amid those hot bricks and pestilent vapors, when the woods and fields are all so near? It would kill me soon to be confined in such a prison-
house; and when I am forced to make an occasional visit there, it fills me with loathing and sadness. Ah! How often when I have been abroad on the mountains has my heart risen in grateful praise to God that it was not my destiny to waste and pine among those noisome congregations of the city.”

  AUDUBON’S FIRST YEARS at Minnie’s Land were full of vigorous activity: In 1843 he went on an expedition up the Missouri River, hunting for specimens for The Viviparous Quadrupeds of America, the rather awkward follow-up to The Birds of America—somehow Audubon’s depictions of badgers, squirrels, otters, and prairie dogs didn’t have the verve of his paintings of birds—then returned to Minnie’s Land full of energy. But dementia gradually took over. Unable to remember family members or friends, eating as many as eleven meals a day because he couldn’t keep track of when he had last eaten, Audubon sat in troubled silence, his mind, a friend wrote after a visit, “all in ruins.” He died, at age sixty-five, on January 27, 1851, and was laid to rest in Trinity Cemetery, just a few minutes’ walk from his house.

  AUDUBON’S DEATH LEFT Lucy heavily in debt. To make ends meet, she sold off parcels of the estate and started a small school in her second-floor bedroom. In 1851, the Hudson River Railroad began running along the river edge from New York to Peekskill. A station, the second stop on the way out of town, was built at 152nd Street, only 600 feet south of Minnie’s Land. The station was a godsend for the Audubons, who reconstituted Minnie’s Land as a suburb called Audubon Park and sold building lots to a small coterie of wealthy merchants who commuted on the railroad to downtown offices. Audubon Park grew into a small community of perhaps a dozen rambling Victorian houses scattered in the woods around Minnie’s Land, united by a winding dirt road and closed to the public by a large wooden gate, painted white, near the present-day intersection of Broadway and 156th Street.

  At first, the residents of Audubon Park happily subscribed to the Audubon ethos, living in seclusion among the hemlocks, hickories, oaks, chestnuts, dogwoods, and pines, with no lawns or fences between their houses. It was a tightly knit community. George Bird Grinnell, son of a prominent downtown merchant and later one of the founders of the Audubon Society, recalled evenings when John Woodhouse Audubon would step off his porch and holler over to the Grinnell house, about a hundred yards away, “If you have nothing to do,” he’d yell, “I’ll come up and play you a game of billiards.”

  Grinnell remembered sylvan days of fishing for eels and catching crabs in the tidal pond between the river edge and a causeway over which the railroad ran, watching the sky darken with flocks of migrating passenger pigeons, and playing among wooden boxes of bird skins and unsold stacks of Audubon’s Ornithological Biography stored in the loft of John’s barn. He recalled Aubudon’s house as “worn and shabby from the tramping and play of a multitude of children,” a magical house full of paintings and antlers of elk and deer festooned with guns, shot pouches, and powder flasks.

  Eventually fences went up between Audubon Park’s houses, and lawns and flower beds replaced the brambles. Victor died in 1860, after an accident; John followed two years later. Their father’s house was offered for rent: An 1861 advertisement in the Herald mentioned that the house enjoyed 230 feet of river frontage and was free of mosquitos and “fever and ague.” Lucy, always in financial straits, sold Audubon’s prints to the New-York Historical Society and his original copper engraving plates for scrap. She moved back to Louisville in 1873 and died there the following year.

  WHEN THE SUBWAY was extended to 157th Street in the fall of 1904, it effectively destroyed Audubon Park. By 1909, Grinnell’s father, who had earlier acquired title to most of Audubon Park—except for the three surviving Audubon houses—had sold the land to developers, who built apartment houses on new streets that were cut through the property.

  Shortly after the subway opened, wealthy scholar and philanthropist Archer Milton Huntington bought part of Audubon Park and began building Audubon Terrace, an Acropolis-like, interconnected campus of institutions designed in the Beaux-Arts style on the west side of Broadway between 155th and 156th streets, just steps away from Audubon’s house. In 1905, Huntington broke ground on the Hispanic Society of America, which was followed over the next two decades by the American Numismatic Society, the American Geographical Society, the Museum of the American Indian, the Church of Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  The three Audubon houses hung on for years afterward, even as every other trace of Audubon Park disappeared. In 1897, Riverside Drive was extended north from 125th Street, dooming the remaining houses along the river. Even then, somehow, Audubon’s house survived, abandoned on a fragment of land between the New York Central railroad tracks and Riverside Drive’s high stone abutment where it curved inland at 155th Street.

  “If there is such a thing as communication between this and the spirit world it must be a trial of trials for Audubon to see his former estate shorn, first, of its beauty, then of its size, and now hemmed in by a fortlike buttress at the back, the only six-track railroad in America on the front, and a row of garages in the small remaining strip not already occupied,” the New York Tribune reported in 1917. “A more forlorn, desolate and dispiriting section is not to be found in the city, nor within a day’s walk of the city, than the old home in which the greatest ornithologist of all time lived during the zenith of his career.”

  The house disappeared without ceremony in 1931.

  MILE 11

  165TH STREET TO 179TH STREET

  CHAPTER 39

  THE HEIGHTS

  FOR SOMEONE WHO SPENT LESS THAN TWO MONTHS THERE, George Washington cast a long shadow on upper Manhattan. Washington Heights, Fort Washington Avenue, the George Washington Bridge, Fort Washington Presbyterian Church, Washington Car Service: Walking along Broadway’s eleventh mile, there’s no escaping the old guy.

  Washington arrived in upper Manhattan on September 14, 1776, having evacuated New York following the disastrous Battle of Brooklyn, and set up headquarters in Roger Morris’s mansion on a hill 120 yards east of the Kingsbridge Road. (Today the house, lovingly restored, overlooks present-day Edgecombe Avenue between 160th and 161st streets, a couple of blocks east of Broadway.) It was from the Morris house that Washington watched the Great Fire of 1776 engulf the city on September 21.

  Washington’s troops took up defensive positions south and north of Fort Washington, a pentagonal earthwork built the previous month on Manhattan’s highest hill, some 265 feet above the Hudson River, near the present-day intersection of Fort Washington Avenue and 183rd Street.

  All the effort put into building the fort, plus Fort Lee across the river in New Jersey, was for naught: On November 16, 1776, Fort Washington fell to an overwhelming force of British regulars and Hessian mercenaries, who renamed it Fort Knyphausen in honor of Hessian commander Wilhelm von Knyphausen. Washington had already fled across the river to New Jersey. The British occupied Manhattan for the duration of the war, and after the war Fort Washington and the various trenches, breastworks, and redoubts that surrounded it were left to gradually decay. As John Randel Jr. hiked through upper Manhattan some forty years later, surveying the island for the Commissioners’ Plan, he stumbled across their remnants.

  “All the redoubts and forts . . . consisted of embankments of earth,” Randel wrote in 1864, “some of which remained standing, from 6 to 8 feet in height, and the outlines of the ruins of others remained pretty well defined upon the ground, when I surveyed them in the years 1819, 1820.” The forts appear in Randel’s “Farm Maps” as ghostly forms amid fields and woods. In 1881, the Magazine of American History reported that the ruins of Fort Washington were still there, though “hardly visible.”

  Randel was a meticulous surveyor, and realized the strictly orthogonal Commissioners’ Plan grid he marked out below 155th Street wouldn’t work in the hills and valleys of upper Manhattan. Two-dimensional grids simply don’t fit cleanly onto three-dimensional forms unless they’re allowed to bend and wa
rp, but Randel’s employers, commissioners Gouverneur Morris, Simeon De Witt, and John Rutherfurd, made it plain that they weren’t interested in continuing the street grid past 155th Street anyway. They thought it “improbable” that the land north of 155th Street would be developed for “centuries to come.”

  They had a point: Upper Manhattan is an extremely narrow spit of land, barely three-quarters of a mile across at 166th Street, and steep, the land west of Broadway falling away drastically toward the Hudson River. But that didn’t stop city and state officials and real-estate speculators from trying to continue the grid into upper Manhattan. An attempt in 1851 came to nothing, but in 1860 the state legislature appointed a commission to study the matter, even as it acknowledged that the whole idea of trying to continue the grid was probably “impracticable . . . ruinous to land owners, and injurious to the interests of the city.”

  The 1860 commissioners—president James C. Willett, vice president Henry H. Elliott, John A. Haven, Isaac P. Martin, Isaac Dyckman, Charles M. Connolly, and John F. Seaman—were all owners of real estate in Washington Heights who had built ostentatious mansions there and stood to profit from the area’s further development. They envisioned “Fort Washington Park” as a planned community along the lines of Audubon Park, only much larger and wealthier, with a winding boulevard following the natural contours of the land between the Kingsbridge Road and the river. There would be no attempt to level the ground or superimpose a grid, and the Kingsbridge Road would be widened and planted with trees. Newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett, who had just built an opulent mansion practically on top of the remains of Fort Washington, actively promoted the commission’s work in the New York Herald.