American Eden

by Victoria Johnson

  Hone went home and struggled to record in his journal what he had seen that night. “I am fatigued in body, disturbed in mind, and my fancy filled with images of horror which my pen is inadequate to describe.” It was, Hone thought, “the most awful calamity which has ever visited these United States.” Hosack now faced a calamity of his own. Since retiring from his medical practice, he had supported his large family partly through investments of Magdalena’s money. Hosack now owned stock in at least nine insurance companies, which were swamped with claims in the days after the fire. “The fire . . . has singed almost everybody,” Washington Irving wrote his brother. Irving himself saw $3,000 of his own investments evaporate because of the fire, but Hosack’s losses were on another scale entirely. The newspapers reported that of his $200,000 in insurance stock (more than $5 million today), he had lost all but $20,000. Even his daughter’s dowry, not yet transferred to her new husband, was slashed away.

  Less than forty-eight hours after the fire, on the morning of Friday, December 18, Hosack arose and went down to his study to sort through his business affairs. As he sat there working, the air around him was thick and smoky, and he felt a little short of breath. He ate his breakfast and ordered his wagon be brought around so he could take care of an errand in town. Putting on his overcoat, he started for the front door but abruptly sat down on a sofa. He assured his family that he would be fine in a moment. Then he fell over.

  Out in the city, Philip Hone was just leaving for a walk with Alexander Hosack. The two men had made plans to survey the destruction together. Before they got far, they encountered a mutual friend who told them Hosack had just collapsed in a fit of apoplexy—a stroke. The men rushed to Chambers Street, where they found Hosack lying on a sofa in the same room where they had all gathered to celebrate the newlyweds two days earlier. He was paralyzed. He seemed unable to see or hear, and he could no longer speak.

  The day after Hosack’s stroke, while he lay semiconscious at home, many of his friends and fellow citizens gathered just across Chambers Street at City Hall to organize the rebuilding of the destroyed district. It was exactly the kind of civic project Hosack would have loved to lead, had he been well. Instead, John Francis and some of his other former medical students hovered over his makeshift sickbed as bulletins about his dangerous situation were rushed to newspaper offices from New Hampshire to South Carolina. After a few more days, Hosack rallied. On December 22, his condition visibly improved over the course of the day, and he tried to speak once or twice.

  He died at eleven that night. The news ran the next day in the New York papers and began making its way to other cities. “A great man in the profession has fallen,” announced the New York Daily Advertiser. “It is impossible that the death of such a man could occur in this community without producing a sensation, even at a moment when the mind of every citizen is absorbed with the awful dispensation with which we have been so recently visited,” the Evening Star wrote. “There have been few men so extensively known in our own country and by the professional world abroad, as Dr. Hosack.”

  On Christmas Eve, local nurseryman Michael Floy Jr. noted in his diary that his beautiful scarlet camellia was finally in bloom. This was Floy’s Camellia hosackia, named a decade earlier for the man who had done so much for the city’s nurserymen through the New-York Horticultural Society. Hosack’s funeral was held the next day at Grace Church. “Christmas Day, but not by any means a merry Christmas,” Philip Hone wrote in his diary. Hosack’s sprawling circle of family and friends jammed the church for the service. One of his former students broke down in sobs as he tried to read the eulogy. Among the pallbearers who bore the coffin out of the church were Edward Livingston, the painter John Trumbull, and Morgan Lewis—the former governor of New York who had championed the Elgin Botanic Garden three decades earlier. John Francis noted afterward that Hosack’s “remains were followed to the grave by the eminent of every profession and by the humble in life whom his art had relieved.” Hosack was buried in the New York Marble Cemetery on Second Street.*

  The American writer Freeman Hunt reflected on what it meant to lose Hosack. “As a physician and man of science, his name was universally honoured as the first; as a citizen, his many virtues and excellences of character have made a deep impression upon the hearts of thousands.” Hosack’s death, Hunt wrote, had “left a blank in the scientific and social world.” And of Hosack’s work at Hyde Park, Hunt noted that his “extensive and practical knowledge” of horticulture, “connected with wealth and a refined taste, has rendered his garden second to none in the union.” Second to none—it was a lovely piece of praise that could have doubled as a gentle obituary for Elgin. Six months after Hosack died, Magdalena and the children put the Hyde Park estate up for sale. John Jacob Astor soon bought it for his daughter.† Hosack’s greenhouse and hothouse plants were put on sale at a shop in New York City.

  Days after Hosack’s death, the painter Thomas Cole published an essay celebrating the beauty of the Hudson River Valley—and sounding the alarm for future generations about the destruction of American landscapes. “We are still in Eden,” Cole wrote. “The wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.” In 1825, the inventor John Stevens—one of Hosack’s patients—had built and tested the first American steam locomotive at Hoboken; when Hosack died a decade later, the rural world of old New York was starting to fall away before the oncoming steam train. Tracks were laid along the river’s edge through Hosack’s former estate, and his friend Washington Irving, who had done his own part to romanticize these landscapes, moved out of his bedroom overlooking the Hudson to a dark little room on the other side of his villa. “If the Garden of Eden were now on earth, they would not hesitate to run a railroad through it.”

  AND WHAT OF ELGIN?

  Hosack was still alive when, in 1834, Columbia’s latest tenant farmer on the property, William Shaw, sold many of the remaining trees, shrubs, and plants at a seed shop on Liberty Street. Meanwhile, at the Bloomingdale asylum in northern Manhattan, patients strolled among trees and shrubs that Columbia had stripped from the garden site twenty years earlier, and they also enjoyed a conservatory on the grounds that contained some of Hosack’s exotic specimens. By the 1840s, the city was laying out cross streets through the old Elgin land from Fifth Avenue to Sixth Avenue. Forty-Seventh Street now bordered it on the south, Fifty-First Street on the north. Forty-Eighth and Forty-Ninth ran through Hosack’s former fields of grain and past the pond where he had raised aquatic plants. Fiftieth Street was laid down across the top of Hosack’s hill, running right past the spot where his conservatory had stood. Despite these changes, the area remained bucolic into the second half of the nineteenth century. In the 1850s, when Catholic officials were deciding on a site for the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral, they chose Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth and Fifty-First Streets in part because it fronted the peaceful old fields of Elgin.

  Columbia College finally abandoned the packed southern tip of Manhattan. In 1857, the college moved into a building one block to the southeast of its Elgin property, at Forty-Ninth Street and Madison Avenue. The same year that Columbia moved uptown, it demolished the century-old College Hall at Park Place, where Hosack, Clinton, and Hamilton had all studied and Hosack had taught for years. As for the Elgin land, after decades of paying taxes and assessments on it, the college trustees finally concluded that, with the city spreading up the island, they could now turn a profit from it. They sold off sixteen lots in 1857 and began slicing up the rest for lease to developers. New generations of immigrant laborers built townhouses and apartment buildings where their forebears, working for Hosack, had once rolled out garden paths and planted flowerbeds. By 1870, all of the Elgin land, now divided into more than two hundred separate lots, was blanketed with buildings. As the eastern edge of Central Park became the most desirable frontage in Manhattan, one Vanderbilt after another built American palaces along Fifth Avenue to the north of Elgin, and other wealthy New Yorkers joined them in t
he area. In the 1880s, Andrew Carnegie bought a townhouse on the northern side of Hosack’s old land and gave it to his bride as a wedding present. Columbia, meanwhile, used its profits from the Elgin leases to help turn itself into a world-class university, creating new graduate faculties (including a law school) and taking over the independent College of Physicians and Surgeons—which Hosack had helped found—to form the medical school for which Columbia is still known today. As it expanded, Columbia outgrew its Forty-Ninth Street campus, and in 1892, the trustees bought the insane-asylum property on the beautiful northern heights of Manhattan. There, overlooking the Hudson at 116th Street, the eminent architectural firm McKim, Mead and White designed a large new campus for Columbia. In 1893, Columbia authorities consulted the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (as well as his son Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.) about their plans for the grounds. Olmsted pointed out that some of the trees now thriving on the Mall in Central Park had been brought from the countryside north of Manhattan. He recommended they transplant the mature trees on the property—some of which had come from Elgin—to spots where they would ornament the new buildings. The focal point of the campus was a domed library whose front steps were flanked by two English yews that had been among the trees and shrubs moved from Elgin to the asylum grounds in the 1820s. The yews, which Olmsted reportedly pronounced the “oldest and finest” in North America, survived until 1914—one century after the state had turned Elgin over to Columbia.

  It was not long after this that Hosack’s old Elgin land caught the attention of the Metropolitan Opera. The Met’s nineteenth-century opera house at the corner of Broadway and Thirty-Ninth Street was feeling cramped and antiquated to both its performers and its stockholders. Among the opera’s stockholders, John D. Rockefeller Jr. took a particular interest in the matter of a new opera house. He had grown up on Fifty-Fourth Street, three blocks directly north of the old Elgin site, and he was still living there in the 1920s with his own family. The neighborhood was now punctuated by speakeasies and a rattling elevated train that ran along Sixth Avenue. Rockefeller began dreaming of creating a monumental complex of cultural and commercial buildings, with a new opera house at its heart. In the fall of 1928, as Rockefeller’s representatives were negotiating with Columbia for the Elgin property, President Nicholas Murray Butler sent Rockefeller a cordial note saying that he wanted to tell Rockefeller in person about the history of the land. “That history reads like a romance.”

  Hosack’s old Elgin yews flanking the steps to Columbia’s new library in 1897

  Columbia agreed to lease the Rockefellers eleven acres for more than $3 million a year. The United States hurtled into the Great Depression nine months after the deal was signed. Plans for a new opera house were abandoned, but Rockefeller decided to go ahead with a revised version of his center, which would eventually include a different kind of theater: Radio City Music Hall. In 1931, construction officially began on the largest private building project the country had ever seen. Men desperate for jobs swarmed the site. They razed tenement buildings and carted away the earth in which Hosack had planted his seeds. They hauled in blocks of Indiana limestone and dangled at lunchtime from beams in the sky. By the end of the decade, they had built fourteen buildings, all centered on a sunken skating rink. The tallest one, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, shot seventy stories into the air.

  On November 1, 1939, in the lobby of the new building at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-Eighth Street, Rockefeller pulled on a pair of workman’s gloves and drove in the ceremonial last rivet of Rockefeller Center while three hundred people watched. Via a radio broadcast, the sharp rhythm of the pneumatic hammer reverberated into homes from New York to California. Rockefeller’s son Nelson next gave a brief speech praising his father’s perseverance in the face of economic catastrophe, and then he introduced President Butler of Columbia to talk about the land. “Probably no other piece of land on Manhattan Island, and few other pieces of land anywhere in this Western World, have had so few owners over a period of three hundred years,” Butler told the audience, noting that it was thanks in part to a visionary American doctor that they were all gathered here.

  The former Elgin land, looking from Fifth Avenue toward 30 Rockefeller Plaza

  Radio City Music Hall was built over the footprint of Hosack’s conservatory.

  In 1985, the Rockefeller Group finally purchased the land on which their buildings had stood since the 1930s. Columbia received $400 million in the deal. Fifteen years later, the Rockefellers and their partners sold Rockefeller Center to a consortium of developers for nearly $2 billion. On one of the low walls lining the Channel Gardens, facing toward the old Middle Road, hangs a plaque that is easily overlooked in the crush of tourists from around the world.

  In memory of David Hosack

  1769–1835

  Botanist, physician, man of science and citizen of the world On this site he developed the famous Elgin Botanic Garden.

  * Hosack’s remains were later transplanted, along with those of many other people, to Trinity Church’s uptown cemetery, located by the Hudson River at 153rd Street. According to the headstones in the Hosack family plot, Hosack is buried there with his second wife, Mary, and their son David Hosack Jr. Nearby are their three daughters—Mary, Eliza, and Emily—and another of their six sons, Nathaniel Pendleton Hosack. In 1831, Nathaniel, named for Hamilton’s second in the duel, had married a granddaughter of Angelica Schuyler Church, Hamilton’s beloved sister-in-law.

  † Hosack’s former mansion burned down in the 1840s, and a new one was built. In the 1890s, Frederick W. Vanderbilt, a grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, bought the estate and hired the firm of McKim, Mead and White to design a larger mansion. Today the Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site is run by the National Park Service, and although the Vanderbilts made alterations to the grounds, the sweeping views and the curved drives of Hosack’s era are intact. Some of the surviving trees are believed to have been planted by André Parmentier.

  A youthful-looking Hosack in 1815, when he was in his mid-forties, by the painter Thomas Sully. Hosack chose to be portrayed with a bust of his most cherished mentor, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush.

  In the 1820s, a British botanist, David Douglas, named a genus of wildflowers native to the United States for Hosack, calling it Hosackia. Douglas considered Hosack the Sir Joseph Banks of America because of his decades of devotion to botany.

  This 1798 view of Manhattan Island looks southwest from the countryside north of New York City. Hosack drove past this bucolic spot each time he went up to the botanical garden. Today it is a busy intersection in SoHo.

  An undated view up Broadway from a few blocks north of David and Mary Hosack’s townhouse, with the allée of Lombardy poplars stretching into the distance. (Just out of sight beyond them, slightly to the east, is the location pictured above.) The grand new City Hall was completed in 1812 and is still in use today. When Charles Willson Peale visited the city in 1817, he conceded to Hosack that New York had finally eclipsed Philadelphia as the most impressive city in the United States.

  Eliza Hamilton was about thirty years old and had been married to Alexander Hamilton for seven years when she sat for this portrait by Ralph Earl in 1787.

  This portrait of Alexander Hamilton was done after his death by John Trumbull, who had earlier painted Hamilton from life. Likely commissioned by David Hosack around 1806, it eventually passed into the possession of Hosack’s daughter-in-law Sophia Church Hosack.

  The Grange as it appears today, seen through the branches of a young sweetgum. Hamilton occasionally stopped at the Elgin Botanic Garden on his way up to the Grange, consulting with his friend Hosack about his horticultural plans.

  Rembrandt Peale, one of Charles Willson Peale’s many talented children, painted this portrait of Vice President Thomas Jefferson in 1800, shortly before he succeeded John Adams as president.

  Charles Willson Peale set this 1822 self-portrait in his celebrated Philadelphia museum of art a
nd natural history. Peale’s portraits of famous contemporaries line the gallery, while the giant mastodon skeleton that made Hosack jealous is partially visible beyond the curtain.

  William Bartram inherited his father John Bartram’s love of botany as well as the family’s famous garden and nursery outside Philadelphia. This 1808 portrait painted from life by Charles Willson Peale conveys William Bartram’s sweet, shy demeanor.

  This portrait of Hosack’s friend Sir Joseph Banks depicts him as a dashing young botanical explorer in the early 1770s, shortly after his return from a long ocean voyage with Captain Cook.

  James Edward Smith (pictured here in 1793) welcomed Hosack to the Linnean Society of London, of which Smith was the founding president. Hosack spent many hours in 1793 and 1794 studying the botanical collections of Carl Linnaeus at the Linnean Society.

  Hosack studied with Dr. Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia in the 1790s and stayed close with him through visits and letters until the latter’s death in 1813. Hosack commissioned Thomas Sully to paint a portrait of Rush in 1812 and suggested to Sully that Rush be pictured with the Pennsylvania Hospital in the distance. By the time he sat for Sully, Rush had practiced medicine and taught at the hospital for thirty years.

  Aaron Burr in 1802, when he was vice president of the United States. This portrait by John Vanderlyn was painted eight years after the death of Burr’s adored wife, Theodosia, and two years before his duel with Hamilton.