In and Around the Bowery Theatre

This post builds on The Bowery & Chatham Square, heading up a few blocks to where the Manhattan Bridge comes into Canal Street.  The Bull’s Head tavern dominated the area as the unofficial headquarters of the cattle market from the Colonial days of the 1750s up until 1825, when society elites set their sights on transforming the area and building an upscale theatre in the cattle yard of the Bull's Head. This post will poke around the area, recount some of the rich, dynamic history of the Bowery theatre, and see what’s left from yesteryear. 

Below is the area we’re looking at.  The curved yellow line (#1), was the subject of the earlier post; this post looks at area #2.  Together, they make up the eastern border of “traditional” Chinatown. Just for reference, City Hall Park is outlined in green; Five Points’ exact location (and the original streets that actually made the “five points”) looks like a partial asterisk; and the straight green line shows Division Street, the boundary between the Delancey and Rutgers farms.  Everything was incredibly close.



Early geography goes a long way in explaining why these areas developed the way they did.  Here’s the Viele map with the same landmarks identified…



City Hall Park fits snugly on a patch of high ground; Five Points was a noisome area of stinking, sinking landfill built over the Collect Pond; and Chatham Square was the first solid ground one encountered leaving downtown on the Boston Post Road.  You can absolutely see and feel the different terrains walking the area today!

At the Bowery and Canal Street today, it’s impossible to get a feeling for how this area once related to the Lower East Side.  It’d always been a major north-south conduit, but the opening of the Manhattan Bridge in 1909 obliterated its eastern approach and flipped its orientation, becoming an east-west thoroughfare and a Long Island-New Jersey link.  

At this historic corner today, the bronze-topped Republic National Bank (1924, Clarence Brazer) is in a very sorry spot to be appreciated, and many architectural guides ignore it.  This is a good picture only because the photographer (the New York Daily Photo) is standing on a no-man’s land of traffic islands. (See the Woolworth Building to the left? It’s across from City Hall.)


Courtesy of New York Daily Photo

Likewise, the Manhattan Bridge Arch and Colonnade (1915, Carrere and Hastings) might be an impressive monumental work…somewhere else.  Like the bank across the street, you can’t see it until you’re upon it; no long street vistas provide the distance needed to appreciate it.  The orange pylons permanently accessorizing it don’t help either.  The Confucius Plaza apartments at the right (1976, Horowitz & Chun) has a unique curve that is identifiable from many blocks around.



To see their relative positions, this is looking east along Canal Street to the Manhattan Bridge entrance.  The Bowery crosses in front. Making a right turn and hugging the corner…



…the Bowery Theatre stood from 1826 until 1929 where Jing Fong is now, the tan building with the red lettering; an excellent restaurant for dim sum which we’ll come back to in a bit.



But from the 1750s until 1825, the block above was the last stop where, according to Gotham, “upstate drovers like Daniel Drew were herding an estimated two hundred thousand head of cattle across King’s Bridge each year and making their way, accompanied by hordes of pigs, horses, and bleating spring lambs, down Manhattan to Henry Astor’s Bull’s Head tavern and adjacent abattoirs.”



New York was unique, for a coastal city, in having a thriving cattle market, and no other place in Manhattan resembled more the “wild west” (still decades away) than Chatham Square in the early 1800s—and the anchor was the Bull’s Head tavern.  George Washington, the tavern’s most famous patron, stopped here on Evacuation Day, 1784.
 
The theatre would actually occupy the site of the cattleyards, to the left.  The tavern itself would, according to Kenneth Dunshee’s As You Pass By, become “the New York Hotel and still later was occupied by the Atlantic Garden.”

The idea of erecting an upscale theatre at this spot was a curious one. Even with respectable residences and markets, and stores like Lord and Taylor and Brooks Brothers nearby, the immediate area around the Bull’s Head had always been working class.  Since 1732 the main theatre in town had been the Park, just down the road and across from City Hall.  According to Mark Caldwell's New York Nights, “the half-dozen blocks that separated the Park and the Bowery Theatres, short in distance, crossed the city’s social and economic Maginot Line, and the upper strata of the town soon rebelled at the prospect of evenings at the Bowery.”

But the elite consortium that sought to transform the area around Chatham Square (which included Henry Astor himself, the owner of the Bull’s Head) had its mind on uptown when making their plans for the theatre. Terry Miller’s Greenwich Village and How it Got That Way explains what had been going on a half mile up the Bowery during the twenty years leading up to the purchase of the Bull’s Head:

In 1804 [John Jacob] Astor took over a large tract above Great Jones Street, which he opened as Vauxhall Gardens, an early version of Central Park but run as a business for profit. It acted as a magnet drawing the rich to the area, prompting them to construct their splendid new homes on Great Jones Street. When property values peaked in 1826 Astor closed most of Vauxhall Gardens to sell of the land for development.  He ran a broad road through the center of the property, three blocks without a cross street, and named his creation Lafayette Place.

Vauxhall (the yellow trapezoid below) had a splendid situation with gentle sloping hills and views of the East River; it’s now the west side of today’s Cooper Square.  Lafayette Place (the green line) opened the same year the investors purchased the Bull’s Head. For reference, Washington Square and Fifth Avenue are shown in red.

As you can see, following the Bowery (blue line), Daniel Drew’s 200,000 head of cattle stampeding along the Bowery would have been quite a disturbance for the upper crust to endure outside their front doors.   The cattle market would relocate to around 26th Street, just east of the future Madison Square and well to the north of the wealthy enclave.



This was the picture for the Bowery Theatre I used for the post The Story Behind the Lower East Side.  That was a mistake—this is not what the Bowery looked like when it opened in 1826; and it’s even a poor representation of what it looked like later on.  (Sorry to even include it here, but I wanted to set the record straight.)



This was Ithiel Town’s 1826 building, in the Greek Revival Style he was noted for, his first New York commission.  The theatre was first named the “New York Theatre,” as the title reads.
 


For a compelling comparison, here is Ithiel Town and Jackson Davis’ still standing Federal Hall National Monument (1833-42) on Wall Street; same architect, same period. The similarities include Doric columns, pediment, and a frieze with triglyphs and metopes. Triglyphs are the three close vertical lines; metopes are the empty square spaces between them. Together they mimic, in marble, the look of wood cross beams, the original building material of the Greeks.  This is pure, simple Greek Revival—it looks like a Greek temple.
 


Here it is labeled “The First Bowery Theatre,”  though this building would never carry that name.



In fact, over its 103 year life, the theatre would have four different names, and three different looks, changes that often coincided with one of the buildings many fires. The theater would burn in 1828, 1836, 1838, 1845, 1913 and (for a final time) in 1929.  Two things might have contributed to the uncanny number of fires: 1. It was the first theatre to have gas-lit lamps, and in fact, for this reason theatre fires in general were not uncommon.  But, 2. The Bowery Boys’ headquarters were just next door, and as a gang they had rivals (most famously the Dead Rabbits), and the theatre, with which they had a close association, was solidly on their turf.  In 1829 the theatre hosted the first annual Volunteer Fire Department's ball, and the Fire Department was to the Bowery Boys what Tammany Hall was to the Democrats—their informal home.

Reconstruction following the fire of 1828 brought a new look and name—now, officially, the Bowery Theatre. This, incidentally, explains the wildly divergent numbers often reported for the theatre’s capacity—from 3,000 to 4,000; the new theatre increased capacity from 3,000 to 3,500.  But increased capacity only put more pressure on management to draw crowds, especially the well-heeled for whom the theatre was built. To make sales, management added shows with mass appeal, including melodrama, horse shows and novelty acts. 

Here was the new look of the 1828, now, Bowery Theatre.  Towards the end of the post we’ll see that two of the buildings in this image are still standing!



And at one point were the headquarters of the Bowery Boys.



The Bull’s Head tavern was located here, and was a hotel at this time. There are a lot of similarities, and it may be the Bull’s Head tavern re-modeled, but there are discrepancies…



…the next two images are the old Bull’s Head from the NYPL digital collection.  The gable roof, fenestration and central doorway match the hotel in the image above, but there are two more dormers and two additional entrances on the later building.  Also, the chimneys match, but only in one picture, not both.   




The Bowery Theatre hosted all the fads and franchises in popular entertainment, good or bad, over the next 50 years: minstrelsy, Mose the fireman, circuses, Buffalo Bill-style Westerns, “variety” shows, and Vaudeville, with nights of Shakespeare sprinkled in—even when the upper classes sought their Shakespeare elsewhere.  Later, with each successive immigrant group the theatre would re-format to provide fare for its local audience…German, Yiddish, Italian, and Chinese.

And if not the actual birthplace, the Bowery Theatre was an early venue for many theatre forms and stage acts. While on the road out west in the 1830s, Thomas “Daddy” Rice reportedly encountered an elderly stable hand and slave named Jim Crow whose dance, language, and even clothing he mimicked (or, by today’s sensibilities, more likely mocked).  His act became a regular at the Bowery Theatre in 1832. “Ethiopian delineators” (white men in blackface) had been part of circus acts and stage shows since the 1820s, but with Rice’s “Jump Jim Crow,” minstrelsy would sweep the nation in the 1840s.  And the minstrel show was one of the longest-lived forms of entertainment, from the 1840s until the early 1900s.  To put it in perspective, around the year 2030 Rock and Roll will have been around as long as minstrelsy was popular theatre.

According to Dunshee, the 1836 fire “totally destroyed” the theatre “in less than thirty minutes.”  If so, this was likely its last major facelift.



The depression of 1837 hit theaters hard, and in 1842 Charles Dickens observed that “there are three principal theatres in New York.  Two of them, the Park and the Bowery, are large, elegant, and handsome buildings, and are, I am grieve to write, generally deserted.”  James Gordon Bennett Junior’s Herald regularly attacked the theater in these years.  In general, characters and acts had become so hackneyed and predictable that audience members often yelled out the next lines.

Luc Sante writes in Low Life that during the 1840s “theater managers left off programming their houses as if they were still addressing the mixed and at least partly educated audiences of the 1820s and earlier, and instead began consciously catering to the immigrant mechanics [working class men] who were their actual patrons.”  Basically he says, wit and repartee were replaced with elaborate sets and spectacle to appeal to the "common man," a trend that had begun in the 1830s. Now earthquakes, volcanoes and flooding the stage for pirate “aqua-dramas” became standard fare. 

In 1848 a new character would make his debut that would rock the theater world for the next decade because, simply, so much of the audience recognized itself.  Mose the fireman was the typical Bowery B’hoy, and though he did not debut at the Bowery Theatre, the Bowery would host its share of performances where Mose, in his stove pipe hat and soap locks, rescued women and children and saved naive New York tourists from ne’er do wells.  Mose was one of our earliest “All-American” avatars. 



His likely fans, apparently getting a scolding…



Entertainment wasn’t the stratified industry it is today; up until the mid-1800s, rich or poor, bankers, merchants, pimps, and prostitutes, all went to see Shakespeare, and for a long time, in the same theatres.  Theatre was the melting pot’s melting pot, and standards for decorum were nonexistent.  It would be impossible today to imagine the Metropolitan Opera’s upper balconies overflowing with yelling, hissing rabble rousers bouncing lamb chop bones off the hats of white-gloved ladies, but this was early theatre, before movies, sports, and bowling night.  When the Astor Opera House opened up in 1847, around the corner from Astor’s Lafayette Place, it would, with the help of its location and its program, send a warning shot across the bow of society at large: the upper class would have its own theatre.

Edwin Forrest had been a fixture at the Bowery Theatre from early on, and history remembers him best as one of the two protagonist-catalysts, along with William Macready, to ignite the Astor Place Riots of May 10-11, 1849, when both actors reprised the role of Macbeth at different theatres across town. The Bowery Theatre wasn't one of them.

Forrest was beloved by the Bowery B’hoys and the working class for his “Americanized” interpretation of Shakespearean characters.  Macready played his Shakespeare very traditional, and very “British.”  Macready was playing the Astor Opera House, and the confusion as to which theatre Forrest was playing may stem from the fact that both the Bowery and the Broadway Theatres (a short-lived venue at 326 Broadway from 1847-1859) had opening nights for Macbeth on May 7, 1849. But according to the Internet Broadway Database, Edwin Forrest was at the Broadway Theatre when he fanned the flames of animosity that instigated crowds to surround the Astor Opera House and its elite attendees, ultimately leading to dozens dead and scores wounded.

This image appeared in Harper’s Monthly in 1871.  In 1853 the Second and Third Avenue Railroads were opened, merging at the Bowery and Chatham Square. The Atlantic Garden, which opened in 1858, is just north of the Bowery Theatre. The massive beer hall was a favorite of the German community that had been settling the area since 1848.



The NYPL Digital Collection doesn’t give a year for this image.  The marquee between the center columns could possibly say “Studley,” and J.B. Studley played Buffalo Bill Cody to rave reviews in 1871. The placard behind the lamppost to the left reads in heavy letters, “Macbeth” and “Othello.” You can make out the sign for the “Atlantic Garden” next door.  There’s also a man reading the lamppost at the curb, he must have been reading for a while since he’s not blurry.  


NYPL Digital Collection, Robert N. Dennis

After the Civil War, the Mose franchise had run its course and Westerns and "variety," including minstrelsy, still with over-the-top sets, were the fashion.

From the New York Times, September 30, 1874.   


The theatre would change hands a number of times and was renamed the Thalia in 1879. According to Valentine’s Manual, “German plays and operas were the main attractions until 1888, when Amberg subleased the house to H.R. Jacobs for a year. A company of Hebrew actors gave performances in their own tongue at the Thalia during the season 1889-90.  Then it was closed for a year, and during the season 1891-92 it was open for performance in German.”

A New York Times article from 1910 recounts the demographic changes to the area and how the Thalia and the Atlantic Garden, now under the same ownership, responded to the new realities. (The article didn't reproduce clearly, so I typed it out.) 

Atlantic Garden Changes Its Ways: Famous Old Bowery Resort Turned Into a Yiddish Vaudeville Theatre

Dwellers, of the Bowery paused and rubbed their eyes yesterday when they passed Atlantic Garden, for the front of the famous old resort, which has stood almost unchanged on its site just below Canal Street since before the Civil War, was plastered over with billboards in Yiddish announcing a Hebrew variety programme.

The old Atlantic Garden that William Kramer established in 1858 is a thing of the past. Kramer died some time ago and his two sons are now in charge. "There is the sentimental side of it, of course," said William Kramer Jr., "but from a business standpoint there was nothing else to do. The German and Irish population that formerly supported us has moved far away from the Bowery, and we must adapt ourselves to the changed conditions."

The Atlantic Garden is a large hall which extends from 50 Bowery back to Elizabeth Street. In the front is a barroom and in the rear a concert hall with stage where vaudeville performances went on while patrons ate and drank at the tables. In 1858, when it was first opened, it was the centre of what was the popular section for the better class of Germans. To the east was the district where the Irish centered.   

The new resort became very popular and it was customary, particularly among the Germans, to take their families there in the evening and enjoy the music, which was a special feature, and the "variety"--which was at that time a conspicuous novelty. It was the only place of its kind and gradually became famous. Owing to its proximity to the theatres of that time it was not without its patronage by well-known people, for the Bowery was not then so far removed from the centre of things.  

Mr. Kramer took advantage of the new form of entertainment, at that time known as "variety," and the forerunner of the present vaudeville craze.  One of the specialties was "teams" of negro performers. At the time negroes were none too plentiful in New York, and their appearance was looked on as something of a novelty.  In 1884 Charles Eschert came to the Atlantic as musical director and brought with him the first "ladies' orchestra."  He has been the leader there ever since, and the "ladies' orchestra" has been kept up.     

 In 1879 Mr. Kramer changed the Thalia [Bowery] theatre, which he had come into control of several years previously, into a Yiddish playhouse.  It was the general opinion along the Bowery that he was foolhardy since there did not seem to them to be enough possible patronage for a theatre of that kind there. The Thalia adjoins Atlantic Garden. But the latter, after the heyday of its fame had passed, began to find itself deserted as its patrons moved away.

Of late years the proprietors have made concessions to the march of events by adding moving pictures to their programme; but this was not enough to stem the tide, and William Kramer Jr. and his brother Albert decided recently that the day of the Atlantic Garden, under this old policy, had passed.

Here's the street in 18871867, now the Thalia with the Atlantic Garden next door. Whether German, Irish, German-Irish, German-Jew, Eastern European-Jew, or in English or Yiddish, the five enormous American flags flying out front must have made whomever was in attendance feel distinctly American.



Exterior of the Atlantic Garden beer hall (1870s?)…



Interior, 1871…



Here it is "about 1880," from Valentine’s Manual.
 


Probably the sorriest “then and now” picture I will ever post, here is the site of the Bull’s Head tavern and the Atlantic Garden today…astoundingly sad. 



That much was sacrificed in the name of modernization is clear from the image below.  Entire lives were lived knowing only this mode of overhead in-your-face transportation—from about 1880 until the 1940s when the last elevated tracks came down. The Chatham Square hub, says Lawrence Stelter in By the El, was "the junction of the 2nd and 3rd Avenue lines, [and] until 1942 the station had eight active tracks, four platforms and two levels.” From atop the el only the upper portion of the theatre is visible. Notice there are at least eight Federal-era, dormer windows still standing! I'm not sure the year of this image, but it must be earlier than 1910 as the Atlantic Garden is not yet Yiddish.

 J. Clarence Davis Collection, Museum of the City of New York

The Internet Broadway Database gives an terse summation of the theatre’s history, and details its final years…

Built as the New York, audiences stayed away, perhaps due to its proximity to the dangerous Five Points area. Renamed the Bowery, it flourished even as the neighborhood became a slum. Presented varied popular fare through the years, including spectacle, variety, melodrama, Italian vaudeville (c. 1915), and Chinese theatre (1920s). Burned down (and rebuilt) five times: 1828, 1836, 1838, 1845, and 1923--until a June 5, 1929 fire closed the theatre for good [as Fay’s Bowery Theatre].

Here it is towards the very end, about 1928 (the NY County Courthouse went up in 1927--the lighter colored building in the back, and a fire in 1929 would be the end of the theatre). Notice so many of the dormer windows have already disappeared since the last picture! The next image zooms in…



By 1928 the Atlantic Garden had become a photo studio, and notice there are only two dormer windows left.



Here is the same stretch of road today…If you eat a Jing Fong, the entrance is on Elizabeth Street and you have to take an escalator up a few flights. But sitting in Jing Fong, you’re in the space of the upper tiers of the old Bowery Theatre.



 And 150 years ago this is what you would have seen...



...if you're sitting here today. This would have been in the air above the actors' heads looking out over the audience (Jing Fong is on the third floor).

 Photo by Lauren Klein Carton

And the two dormer-window buildings to the far left, 40-42 Bowery, were once the headquarters of the Bowery Boys. Bowery historian Eric Ferrara says a “fierce surprise raid by the Dead Rabbits on this location on July 4, 1857, sparked the infamous, bloody, two-day-long Police Riots.”





And these are the same buildings from the earlier image.



The Bowery Boy’s headquarters next to the Bowery Theatre…today a beauty salon next to dim sum.
 


There’s actually an even older building in the image that’s still standing, the Edward Mooney house from 1789!  It’s over to the left with the slanted roof at the entrance to Pell Street, and Old Chinatown…



Even its younger neighbors are all still standing…see the sloped roof of the Mooney house?




The Mooney house was from a time wealthy and poor lived nearby, and business was transacted if not in your house, near to where you lived. It makes sense that Mooney was a wholesaler in the meat market. Surely he would have done business at the Bull's Head tavern--they were contemporary structures, overlapping some 35 years! He picked up the property at the auction of the Delancey estate after the Revolution. According to the explorechinatown.com, “it became a tavern in the 1820's, a store and hotel in the early 20th century, then a pool parlor, a restaurant and a Chinese club, and today is a bank.” Here was his nearby neighbor...

The Story Behind the Lower East Side

This look at the Lower East Side will be done over three posts. This first post will use old maps to  reconstruct the area from Colonial days, and look at how the Lower East Side developed initially, before the days of New York’s iconic immigration. The next post will go to street level, looking at what’s left of the Federal-Georgian style buildings, row houses, and the evolution of the tenement, all from different bygone eras. The final post will go way back, using old drawings and sketches, and the Viele map, to locate long-gone estates, farms and mansions on the grid today.
 
The Lower East Side has everything that makes a neighborhood maddeningly, quintessentially Manhattan—streets at inexplicable angles, buildings from every period, and borders that, depending on if you’re 25, 55, or 105, shift 5 or 15 blocks.  Here, though, is what most can agree is the indisputable core of the Lower East Side.



Across nearly every running foot of the green line above is a neighborhood that can be persuasively argued to be part of the Lower East Side—Alphabet City, the East Village, Little Italy, “traditional” Chinatown, not to mention ghost neighborhoods like Kleindeutschland and Five Points, among others. The boundaries of the area are: Houston Street to the north, the Bowery to the west, and Chatham Square and Catherine Street to the south (actually, the southern border runs along the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage, across the Al Smith Houses from Catherine Street, Robert F. Wagner Sr. Place—but who knew there was such a street). 

Just to lay it all on the table, purists will insist that everything in the blue boundary is the Lower East Side.  It’s no use arguing with these people.



First, let’s look at a century of advancement in transportation and how the Lower East Side has—literally—been pushed off to the side.  The Bowery (the green curved line above) was once the main road in and out of town when impassable marshland extended across TriBeCa from Broadway to the Hudson River. (To read more about that, go to: The Truth about Broadway—and Manhattan’s Water Border).  Today, however, it’s far easier to navigate the west side of lower Manhattan than the east side.  You’ve probably been to Chelsea, the West Village and TriBeCa far more often than the Lower East Side—here’s why.

The next two images are basically the same, showing the main uptown-downtown avenues, the second map labels them.  An arrowhead at both ends of a yellow line indicates a two-way street; one arrowhead is a one-way street.  Where two arrowheads come face-to-face indicates “no through traffic.” What’s amazing is that the West Village is notorious for its crazy street patterns, and car traffic cuts through easily.  It’s a different story on the east side.



The west side avenues 6, 7, 8 and 9 feed directly into Church, Varick, Hudson and Greenwich Streets—drivers would actually have to look at the street signs to realize they’re on a different street. On the east side, though, you have to make a half dozen turns to make your way into lower Manhattan (or travel uptown).  As well, avenues 11 and 12 feed into the the West Side Highway (which becomes West Street below 14th Street). The FDR Drive is its own road, with three exits in the LES: Houston, Grand, and South Street. 



It’s the same for the subways.  It looks as if there are plenty of subway lines running through the LES below…



But most are just passing through. Here are the actual subway stops. 



Most people know there’s much public housing in the area, but blocks of housing developments actually form a virtual wall around the district (of course, plenty of people live in that “wall”).



And lastly, there are the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges that have turned so much of the Lower East Side into a landing pad.  It’s incredible to think about, but the bridge approaches weren’t even planned until the bridges were near completion.  The Williamsburg Bridge opened in 1903, and helped (along with the elevated trains that led up to Harlem) de-populate a severely over-populated Lower East Side, especially for the Orthodox Jews who could walk over the bridge on Sabbath (and Williamsburg has a large Jewish population as a result today).  The Manhattan Bridge opened in 1909. 

The Lower East Side is much more extensive than the 6-8 block cluster of clubs and cafes located within a short walk of the subway stops.  A five minute walk from the heart of the district towards the shore leads to a neighborhood that has a completely different look and feel.  Between the clubby noir Lower East Side of tenements and the wall of massive apartment buildings along the shore, are a few one-and-two-story high “main street” strips of pharmacies, delis, beauty saloons and locksmiths.  It actually feels like outlying areas of Brooklyn and Queens.

This disjointed  “indisputable core” of the LES is the combination of two fossil farms that can be seen clearly in the street patterns today: the Delancey and Rutgers estates.  (Technically, it's just Lancey, since the name is de Lancey, but Lancey alone looks weird). Both estates bordered the Bowery, and each had a main road: Grand Street on the Delancey estate, and Love Lane on the Rutgers estate. 

Below is the Montresor map of 1766.  According to Stokes, there are many inaccuracies on this map, it was done for the British after the Stamp Act Riots of 1765, and in secret, so only certain features were important—like roads, not farms.  I’m using it to show Grand Street, which the British called the “Road to Crown Point,” which was what the British called Corlears Hook, the land feature that gives Manhattan its distinctive bulge.  That road, which would be named Grand Street a few years later, bisected the Delancey estate and traversed one of the city’s highest hills, Mount Pitt (aka Jones Hill).  Another road, Love Lane ran across the northern stretch of the Rutgers farm.  The next map zooms in on the area.

  Stokes, Vol 1, p. 339

The Road to Crown Point (Grand Street) was the keystone for the Delancey grid; Love Lane (approximating the future East Broadway) would set the pattern of the Rutgers grid.  The short road coming off the Bowery at Chatham Square, Division Street, was the boundary agreed to in 1765 (and still exists as a street today). 



Here are Grand Street and East Broadway today—the two main roads of the 1700s.  The three bridges in the image, from bottom to top, are: the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges.



Let’s look at all three grids, including the city’s main grid.  All three have the same working logic: make the best possible use of land to coordinate direct routes from the shore to the main roads.  Delancey had extensive frontage on the Bowery, and his “cross streets” come off the curved Bowery at near right angles and lead directly to the shore. Rutgers, however, had extensive shoreline frontage along Cherry Street, and his property just barely touched the Bowery. His streets come up from shore and head to where his property accessed the Bowery.  

The Commissioner’s Plan of 1811, which begins the main grid of the city at Houston Street (the small wedge at the top), is at a slight tilt to the Delancey grid, but actually uses the same logic.  The city’s cross streets connect river-to-river, and each block is wide enough to accommodate two wharves, on either side of a street.  Avenues are closer together at the shore than they are in the middle of the island.  The city anticipated lots of cross town traffic, and movement of goods inland, from shore, and then up and down wide avenues. 
 


Here it is without paint.  I zoomed out because the grids are so distinctive you can still see them clearly from so far away, and it also gives an appreciation for just how large the area is.



The Rutgers and Delanceys weren’t just literally on opposite sides of the fence.  During the Revolution, the Delanceys were staunch loyalists, while Henry Rutgers hosted meetings for the Sons of Liberty on his farm.  (And in still another great moment in history, the father and grandfather of James de Lancey and Henry Rutgers were on different sides of the seditious-libel trial of Peter Zenger trial in 1735.  James de Lancey was the royalist judge who heard the case; Harmanus Rutgers sat on the grand jury.)

Both families had long histories in New York.  Stephen de Lancey came to New York in 1685, after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes (which had been issued by Henry IV of France in 1598 to give some protections to the Protestants (Huguenots) after thousands had been slaughtered in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. It’s amazing when you can go back so far—to think we have Delancey Street because of medieval religious wars!)

Anyway, Huguenots (and Stephen de Lancey was one) no longer felt safe in France and many came here; New Rochelle was a result of this migration.  Stephen married into the van Cortlandt family (today’s park namesake), and his home was the original Fraunces Tavern, where Washington gave his historic farewell address to his generals (the building there now is a reproduction, it's faithful to the period architecture, but not the original building).  Stephen’s son, Lieutenant Governor James de Lancey, was New York’s Supreme Court Justice under the British.  His son, also James, “gridded” and leased out the property on the Lower East Side.  Delancey had loose standards and leased out his land to artisans and craftsmen as well as to investors who turned around and sublet.  But Delancey would be a Lower East Side landlord for a very short time before the Revolution.  After the revolution, he lost his land and the Delancey clan, along with a boatload of other Tories, were re-located by the British to New Brunswick (Canada, not New Jersey; but in another weird coincidence that's where Rutgers College University is). According to Stokes,

A law passed by the legislature of New York on May 19, 1784, provided for the speedy sale of confiscated and forfeited estates, and under it many sales were effected. The large city estate of James De Lancey, lying in the district bounded by the Bowery, Rivington Street, Division Street, and the East River, was sold, and De Lancey himself was attainted.

A mix bag of folks bought up the Delancey properties, but fully half were purchased by New York’s rich established families, and many of the artisans had to move out, unable to afford the higher rents imposed.

Harmanus Rutgers (and his brother Anthony, from the previous post referred to above) were descendents of a wealthy brewing family that had come to New Amsterdam in 1636. Originally to Ft. Orange (Albany), they moved to New York in 1690.  Harmanus (Henry’s grandfather) purchased 56 acres of Lower East Side land around 1728, and the original farmhouse was just off the Bowery.  In 1751 a larger mansion was built farther in on the property, closer to the East River. Harmanus’s son, also named Henry, inherited the LES land in 1753. He was the father of the Revolutionary War Colonel, and namesake of Rutgers University.  And while Henry Rutgers (Jr.) was a great philanthropist, when Queen’s College was renamed for him in 1825 the Board of Trustees was probably hoping for a larger bequeath than the $5,000 he left the school when he died in 1830. He had no children and his nephew, William Crosby, inherited the bulk of the estate.

Unlike James de Lancey, Rutgers preferred long-term leases and he let his land with “restrictive covenants” that required buildings of more substantial material than what was allowed to be built on the Delancey grounds.  In effect, Rutgers exercised his own zoning.

From the Rutgers University Libraries:

An important method of controlling development was to require compliance with specified conditions. In May 1826, for example, Rutgers leased a lot to the mason Thompson Price. The lease stipulated that Price "build and erect a good substantial and workmanlike brick dwelling house not less than forty feet in depth, and not less than two stories in height, on the front of the said … premises, and so as to cover the whole front; but at no period of the term … shall there be more than one dwelling house." He also required his permission for leaseholders to sell their leases and reserved to himself first option to buy. Thus Rutgers was not only complying with state law regarding use of building materials that guarded against the ever-present danger from fire, he also maintained control over density of development and related quality-of-life issues. Uncontrolled development resulted in situations such as that at Corlears Hook, an impoverished neighborhood where in 1819 one building reportedly housed 103 people.

Rutgers Street, today running north-south mid-way through the grid, was the division between more substantial brick buildings (to the east side), and a mix of wooden and brick structures (to the west side); Cherry Street was the boundary between homes and stores, along the shore.  Rutgers attracted a more stately class of tenants, including merchants, professionals, and those related to the shipbuilding industry, in addition to the artisans and craftsmen who sublet from the many owners of the (now former) Delancey properties. 



Here’s the Ratzen Plan, 1766, before much was built, showing the farmland much more accurately than the Montresor map. The Delancey farm actually had an irregular northern boundary.  The next map zoom’s in…



The Delancey Streets were already laid out by 1766 with a great central square.  The “mansion plot” had previously belonged to freed slaves, Anthony Congo and Bastiaen in 1647,  granted to them by Director-General Kieft of the Dutch West India Company (the city leader was as much a CEO as a politician).  There will be more about this dastardly Director in the final post. 

Orchard and Grand Streets retain their names today and originally were interrupted, ending in the middle of the sides of the square.  It’s possible there was an orchard in the “Great Square,” but looking at the map it seems more likely that Orchard Street was named for the orchard on the mansion plot, from which the street extends south.  Another colonial judge, Thomas Jones, had an estate on the hilltop of Mount Pitt (aka Jones Hill).  We’ll look for his house in the third post of this series.  You can see Rutgers original house near the Bowery, and the one that was constructed later, closer to Corlears Hook.  We’ll also go looking for these in the third post.



From Lamb’s History of the City New York, showing the Delancey estate at the time of the Revolution.  The northern boundary of the property did not neatly follow a future street.  What’s most ironic is the open space.  The Great Square (or Delancey’s Square on this map) is about the most tenement-congested four-square-block area on the Lower East Side today, and is now surrounded by much open space and parks where tenements have been torn down.





The first map below shows the north-south streets (and they’re pretty close to the compass orientation).  In blue, Delancey’s original names for the streets are shown first (when applicable), some retained their original names.  Two roads (Allen and Ludlow) were added later, shown in black, and crossed through the square on either side of Orchard Street.



A nifty way to remember the streets is to use the actual square, and history itself!  First, visualize the square and remember that Grand and Orchard Street cross in the middle. Between the Bowery and the western edge of the square Delancey laid out three streets: First, Second and Third.  In 1817 they were re-named for heroes from the War of 1812:  Chrystie, Forsythe and Eldridge, in that order.  To remember the order, think “CaFE.”  (It is the Lower East Side after all.) The streets on the opposite side of the square retain their original names: Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk—all English counties, and in alphabetical order.  The two roads that were later laid out on either side of Orchard Street, Allen and Ludlow (also war of 1812 heroes), both have two Ls in their names—they came Later.  There are many more streets after Suffolk, in fact Arundel (another English county), was renamed Clinton. But if you’re going out on the Lower East Side, you’re likely going to one of those streets.

I don’t have a trick for remembering the east-west streets.  The lower square’s road was originally named Eagle Street, and changed to Hester, the daughter of Jacob Leisler of Leisler Rebellion fame.  Below Hester was Pump Street, eventually linked to and renamed Canal; and below that was Fischers Street, renamed Bayard.  The top of the square was Bullock, renamed Broome Street (the first alderman after the British evacuation), followed by Delancey, Rivington (a publisher of a pro-British paper during the Revolution but secretly spying for George Washington), and Stanton (a foreman on the Delancey estate).  There’s nothing consistent with the names of these streets to remember them, though they are in alphabetical order above Broome.   



A very cool map from a great old book, A Tour Around New York, by Felix Oldboy of the area in 1782, during the Revolution, when the British had been occupying New York for six years!  Delancey Square has gotten quite a work over and is now a defensive wall along the high ground of Grand Street. But General Charles Lee, a soon-to-be American, had spent months preparing New York’s defenses against the British before George Washington arrived so much of the wall may have already been in place by the time the British took control of New York. 





We'll see the map again in another post but it's so cool I thought I'd show it here.

The 1820s were the apex for the social elite on the Lower East Side. We’d fought the “second Revolution” in the War of 1812, and with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, New York was on a road from which it would never look back.  Beloved George Washington had passed away in 1799, but the Marquis de La Fayette, who helped win the Revolution and was nearly as much beloved as Wasington, returned to New York City in 1824 to one of the grandest receptions the city’s ever known.  He was feted at Colonel Rutgers’ mansion when this part of town, along with the Battery and Bond Street, was among the most genteel of high society. The Mount Pitt Circus operated at Grand Street and East Broadway from 1826-1829. Corlears Hook, nonetheless, remained a raunchy, overpopulated red light area. Unlike today, back then you could almost throw a rock from where the wealthiest and poorest people lived. 

The commercial center was still in lower Manhattan on Pearl Street, and the movement of progress was initially not up Broadway, but up the Bowery. Brooks Brothers opened at the corner of Cherry and Catherine Streets in 1818…



And in 1826 Lord and Taylor opened their first store at 47 Catherine Street.  The picture below was obviously taken long after that; Lord and Taylor continued to occupy their buildings even after opening additional branches uptown, and they stayed at this location until 1866.  The signs out front say “selling off.”  The “department store” didn’t exist in the early 1800s, and they were “dry goods” stores, or sometimes called a “store and loft.” Brooks Brothers was probably a combination dry-goods store and tailor.



Here’s what Valentine’s Manual of Old New York, 1921 says about Lord and Taylor and Catherine Street, circa 1820s…

 

Further development would take place in the vicinity of the Bowery, a part of town on the upswing. In 1825, the Bull’s Head Tavern, located where the Manhattan Bridge meets Canal Street today (and a 5-minute walk from the Catherine Street location above) was still part of the cattle market whose tanners and butchers had so polluted the Collect Pond since the 1700s, now filled in for about 10 years. Now the area was changing. Of the Bull’s Head Tavern, Gotham says,

Some of [their] customers, bolstered by gentry families filtering in from the lower wards, wanted to transform the Bowery into a more genteel neighborhood.  taking aim at the stink, the endless whinnying, lowing and grunting, and the occasional steer running amok and goring passers-by, they set about driving the Bull’s Head from the area. In the mid-1820s, an association of socially prominent businessmen bought out Henry Astor [John Jacob’s brother] and dismantled his enterprise….[I]n place of the old tavern, the consortium set about erecting Ithiel Town’s splendid Greek Revival playhouse—the New York (soon to be Bowery) Theater.

(added 3/6/2011)
The above image was a later version of the Bowery Theater.  Ithiel Town's Bowery Theater, originally called the New York Theater, looked like this...

Here are those locations today: (1) Brooks Brothers, 1818; (2) Lord & Taylor, 1826; (3) the Bowery Theater, 1826; and (4) Rutgers’ mansion where he received Lafayette in 1824. 



Below are West Broadway, Broadway, and East Broadway.  West Broadway was named in 1899, and a popular explanation for its name was to trick people into using an alternate route other than the very congested Broadway.  The same logic is often used to describe the origin of East Broadway.  But East Broadway was named in 1831, and besides the fact there is no way that that route could have served as an alternate to Broadway, in the early 1800s it was an east Broadway, which then barely extended past today’s City Hall.   Throughout most of the 1800s, both streets were popular commercial centers.  Along with Grand Street they were, in fact, the original “Ladies Mile,” the name of the historic shopping district stretching from 14th to 23rd Streets, between Fifth and 6th Avenues. 



History often paints immigration in broad strokes: the Irish came with the potato famines of 1845-1849; the Germans came after the Central European revolutions in 1848; the Chinese came at the end of the Gold Rush and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, after rampant discrimination out west in the 1870s; the Italians came following natural disasters and economic depression in southern Italy in the 1870s; and the Russian, Polish and Eastern Europeans, mostly Jewish, came as a result of pogroms and rampant discrimination starting in the 1880s.  All true; but one might think New York had little immigration until the mid-1840s.

Between 1820 and 1840, the population of Manhattan grew from 123,000 to over 310,000.  Mostly English, German (including German Jews) and Irish came to the new country for their own reasons, poverty being the most common.  Two things would bring the Irish in huge numbers before the potato famines. They were a huge part of the labor force that built the Erie Canal between 1817 and when it opened in 1825.  Also in 1817, the Black Ball Line began running packet ships between Liverpool and New York.  What was different and significant about this operation was that they sailed on a regular schedule, no longer waiting for a full load before disembarking, and in “Priceline fashion,” it would’ve been better to fill a spot at a reduced fare than have no fare at all. 

Many Germans who fought as mercenaries on behalf of the British stayed on after the Revolution, and some were joined by family (this was how John Jacob Astor came to New York, following his brother Henry who, according to Kenneth Dunshee's As You Pass By, came over as a Hessian soldier). 

The Russian, Polish and Eastern European Jewish history with which the Lower East Side is closely associated is in some respects an easier history to wrap one’s mind around than the immigrant history that immediately preceded the area.  The period from the 1880s until 1924 (when the wall on immigration went up) has its unifying threads of a people in similar situations, beliefs and on trajectories through history.  Understanding the area between the 1840s and 1880s, however, can be like trying to unstir a cup of coffee.

Immigration had changed the area drastically when the following article was written for the New York Times in 1872—ten years before the waves of immigration that would come to define the area today.  Titled: Old Houses: The Mansion of Hendrick Rutgers




Notice the author doesn't complain of Italians, they haven't arrived yet. And the Jews the author talks about are mostly German Jews, not yet the Russian, Polish and Eastern European Jews who are not due for another 10 years.  In 1872 there are some Chinese nearby, on the other side of the Bowery but, like the Irish, they will for the most part be dispersed throughout the city in jobs as domestic servants.  By the mid 1850s Kleindeutschland would take root with German-Jewish shops along Chrystie, Forsythe and Eldridge Streets, from Division to Grand. Germans, Hungarians and others would group together by language and culture (basically, city of origin).  The author of the above article is in part describing original Kleindeutschland, which will simultaneously shift uptown and expand, transforming Avenue B into a German Broadway, and settling Yorkville further uptown by reach of the elevated train, as it's displaced by the masses arriving from Russia, Poland and Eastern Europe.

As the crescendo of immigration rises, Lord and Taylor, not knowing its breadth of depth, opens a branch store at Grand and Chrystie in 1853 (and remains open until 1902).  As early as 1860 though, they sense the changes, and not so much a reaction to immigration as an awareness that Broadway is now “the place to be,” they open another branch at the corner of Broadway on Grand Street, nine blocks west.  Brooks Brothers would move directly to Broadway and Grand in 1857. 

The E. S. Ridley Department Store building survives today on Grand Street and Orchard Street, right in the middle of Delancey’s old square and in the midst of blocks choked with tenements. Ridley opened 1849, just before the German “wave.”  In 1862, a horse drawn railroad line connected Grand Street with ferry terminals allowing shoppers from Brooklyn to easily shop Grand Street, creating an east-west shopping district that was Broadway’s closest rival.  Ridley’s expanded to take up the entire block in 1883, just at the start of Eastern European and Russian “waves.”  

Between the 1880s and 1920s, Italian and Eastern European immigration had the effect of turning previous immigrations almost into historical footnotes.  Ridley’s would leave in 1901, followed by Lord and Taylor in 1902. (though thier flagship store had moved on long before).   “By 1894,” according to Gerard Wolfe, “the population reached an astonishing 986 people per acre—one-and-a-half times that of Bombay, India!”

From Valentines Manual of Old New York, 1921, speaking about East Broadway from the 1850s up to the 1880s...





 





What’s incredible is how an area that saw so much change so quickly, can re-double the amount of change and in half the time. But that’s the story of New York. 



The single most salient fact that illuminates the Lower East Side's most important role in history as an incubator for so many immigrant groups is that four world-renowned, multimillion-dollar, global, ethnic self-help groups started within a 5-10 minute walk of one another (though technically some are across the border from the area under discussion, and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association started in San Francisco the year before.)