Chapter 1, 1686-1869

For much of the period between the seventeenth century and the years immediately following the Civil War, the blocks that later composed Forty-second Street were either occupied by a few families, or not at all. Business and the dwellings of colonial-era settlers huddled at the south end of Manhattan Island near the docks that welcomed immigrants and provided opportunities for trade. Only in the three decades before 1870 do we find livelier activity in what is now midtown, spurred by improvements in transportation and by the need to house large numbers of newcomers to the city.

Our sources for early information are both documents and maps. An early written document related to Forty-second Street, the Dongan Charter of 1686, was issued under the direction of the British who had taken Manhattan Island from the Dutch in 1664. It granted to the City of New York as common lands the “waste and vacant” area between Second and Seventh Avenues, and about Twenty-third Street to Ninetieth Streets. (Hilary Ballon et. al., Greatest Grid, p. 17). The rest was privately owned. Early maps show streams merging into a larger one called Great Kills that wound its way around the far west side’s Reed Valley until it joined a bay of the Hudson River, at what is now Forty-second Street.

(Fig.1, 1811 Commissioners’ plan, Library of Congress, hereafter LoC G3804.N4:2M3 1811.B7 Public domain)

By 1840, the bay was called Lumber Basin but was known as Norton’s Cove in the 1850s

(Parsons Co. West 42nd Street Manufactured Gas Plant Site History. Report Prepared for Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Liverpool NY, Parsons, 2002, p. 5-1). A geologist, Issachar Cozzens, Jr., author of A Geological History of Manhattan or New York Island, published in 1843, (New York, W. E. Dean, p. 35) described the site as a salt marsh that had recently been filled in, helping to form Tenth Avenue. (See also: Paul Cohen, Robert T. Augustyn, Manhattan in Maps, 1527-2014, New York: Rizzoli, 2014.)

The land west of Broadway descending to the river was more fertile than land farther east. Cattle grazed in the meadows. Edible fish and waterfowl were found where ferry boats now depart for New Jersey. The Dongan charter of 1686, confirmed in 1730, granted title to the city of the tideway along the Hudson River, to about four hundred feet west of the present Eleventh Avenue. Nevertheless, most of it remained under water until a century later when Twelfth Avenue was created on landfill. The river, and water in an irregular course, deterred the early sparse development on the far west side of what became Forty-second Street.

(Fig. 2. Enlarged view of water course on west side. Map: Late 19^th century. Courtesy Mark Tomasko Collection.)

There was little early development there because the area of today’s Forty-second Street was miles away from the population center at the southern end of the island. Dutch families including the van Brughs owned property in what is now west midtown, but they did not build on the land as far as we know, and later sold the property to people of German and British origin. There was, however, a hamlet of apparently impermanent houses erected sometime after the diagonal Bloomingdale Road was begun in the eighteenth century’s first decade. Formerly a Lumbee pathway and now part of Broadway, the road extended between today’s Twenty-third and One hundred-fifteenth Streets after 1708. (NYT 9 21 1902, p. 28)

A stream on the east side had two branches, one between Lexington and Third Avenues and running southeast, while the other branch went north of Forty-second Street. (NYT 11 12 1883 p. 8) The eastern shore at today’s Forty-second Street was below a bluff of gneiss. There, members of the colonial Bayard--- Dutch despite their originally French name---and Cutting families acquired property, starting in the eighteenth century. Francis Bayard Winthrop, a descendant, maintained a summer villa into the nineteenth century, where Tudor City’s apartment houses stand today.

The city leased the granted land during most of the eighteenth century. Leaseholders could expect to grow crops; Geroge Washington rallied his troops in a cornfield just north of Forty-second Street in the early fall of 1776. After Americans achieved independence, city surveyor Casimir Goerk prepared a subdivision plan in 1796, whereupon the city government sold many lots to reduce the municipal debt incurred during the Revolution. The city prudently retained some territory on which municipal facilities could be built, the site of the first distributing reservoir being the most important. The City also bought the adjacent site, now Bryant Park, in 1822, after which that open space could be used as a public square at the north end of the city. (Frank Bergen, Historical Guide to the City of New York, New York, Frederick S Stokes Co., 1909, p. 117) On the west side of the island, land including the present Times Square belonged to John Morin Scott (1730-84), a city alderman, owner of a weekly journal, a founding member of the Sons of Liberty, and later a brigadier general in the New York militia that fought the British. On the far east side, descendants of Francis Bayard Winthrop farmed the land.

In 1807, the heirs of John Leake ---who had obtained land by 1792---and of his niece, Martha Burrage Norton, sold seventy acres on the west side to John Jacob Astor and William Cutting (1773-1820). The former was a newly rich fur merchant, the latter a member of the same early colonial Bayard family that owned land on the east and far west sides. The lots ran diagonally to today’s streets, having a more accurate compass-directed orientation than our present street plan has. Forty-third to Fiftieth Streets, Broadway to the Hudson River was not enough land for Astor, who had acquired property to Forty-second Street. He then went after farmland up to Forty-sixth Street between Broadway and the river; the terrain had been inherited by Medcef Eden in 1797.

(New-York Historical Society, Astor papers, Box Oversize Small folder Astor Family Papers (Y-Astor Family Papers] Deeds and Leases D-G may have sale records in material devoted to Eden Farm in Subseries I.6: Delano Family to Eden Farm, 1803-1911 in Box 6 folders 8-11 and Subseries Eden Farm, 1803-1911 in Container 1 Container 2 Box 7 folders 1-9. In the Oversize Documents Subseries I.35 1758-1840). John Leake Norton and Sarah Norton deeded 42nd St to the City for $10.)

Demonstrating his shrewd business practices, Astor acquired a one-third interest in an outstanding mortgage on the farm. He foreclosed, and by 1803 took over for $25,000 land that multiplied in value; a century later, it was valued at $20 million when his descendants still owned the sites of three hundred houses on the former farmland, and the land under two hotels. (Thegreatestgrid.mcny.org/greatest-grid/john-jacob-astor/98 accessed 11 26 17) Astor and several other landowners had wisely advised their heirs to lease but not sell the land. They understood its future potential and the likelihood of increased rent from increasingly occupied land.

In the first four decades of the nineteenth century, there was only limited development north of Fourteenth Street, as transportation to the business center downtown entailed slow travel on irregular paths. Few people could or wanted to travel more than two miles to work over those surfaces. The Map of Farms (1815) prepared by John Randel, showed only two buildings on what became Forty-second Street in the extensive area owned by John Leake (and Sarah) Norton and Robert Burrage Norton, Martha’s sons. These small buildings stood between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, in what became the street’s later roadway; a visitor to the farm recalled a large and handsome house elsewhere on the Norton property. A path known as Leake’s Tour crossed the property diagonally. Either that site or another one was purchased by the city in 1825 for $10 as a right-of-way to open Forty-second Street. In that year, the Norton Estate, and Forty-second Street overall, was divided into lots, heralding a more dynamic future for the area. The lots were valued in the hundreds of dollars at the time. (Activities Oct. 1925, pp 3-4, 8. 42d St, Property Owners and Merchants Association, Inc. Special Bulletin, p. 128)

Development depended in part on accessibility. There were as yet no horsecar services as far north as Forty-second Street, and anyone who did not own a horse and probably also a wagon would not have wanted to move uptown. Street grading and then paving would have helped, but this was not accomplished for decades. The Common Council of the City of New York was empowered to decide the elevation of each street, but the commission that made the decision for one street was disbanded before a group assembled to decide about the grade of the next street. Issachar Cozzens, Jr. in his Geological History of Manhattan or New York Island of 1843 described the effort to grade the land despite the rocks, especially on the west side. Between Tenth Avenue and the Hudson River, granite created problems for builders. (ibid.,,p. 11). Gneiss threaded through Manhattan from south to north. Workmen had to wield pickaxes to remove fourteen-foot-deep beds of diluvium (also called hard-pan), a claylike cement surrounding gravel that underlay the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, where there were also unusually large boulders. (ibid., pp.18, .25). Not until 1853 was Fifth Avenue scheduled for regulating and paving between Forty-second and Forty-ninth Streets (NYT 2 12 1853, p. 8). Discussions about various types of granite blocks and cobblestones on Forty-second street itself went on into the mid-1860s

The Commissioners’ plan of 1811 had already presaged the end of farming on Manhattan Island. The city fathers apparently thought that property development would be better than agriculture for municipal finances, the building industry, property owners, and newcomers who would need housing. The lots 100.5 feet deep, and often 20 to 25 feet wide, would likely be especially valuable on Forty-second Street because the roadway was wider than the usual sixty feet. The exceptional width of about one hundred feet resulted from the Post Road, later Broadway, diagonally intersecting the avenues between Fourteenth and Seventy-second Streets. The commissioners solved the aesthetic and property problems caused by the irregular intersections of Broadway, the north-south avenues, and the east-west streets by including them within a broader east-west street; that gave these streets their exceptional width---and later, the bus routes and subway stations---at Fourteenth, Twenty-third, Thirty-fourth, and Forty-second Streets, Columbus Circle, Sixty-sixth and Seventy-second Streets, after which Broadway runs parallel to other avenues. The exceptional widths expanded at times in response to traffic density.

Randel’s maps show that west of Bloomingdale Road, the eastern limit of the Norton property, there was almost no development save for a house or farm building on the south block near Seventh Avenue. A pond formed by a north-south river just east of the road extended from the south block into the present Forty-second Street roadway. The landowners all had origins in northwestern Europe. From Bloomingdale Road to Sixth Avenue, the land belonged to Arthur Kinder, a businessman. South and east of his property, the Corporation of New York retained the land on both sides of Forty-second Street. Small houses faced each other across Fifth Avenue just north of the intersection with Forty-second Street; beside the eastern one, Randel engraved the name Pike. On what became the north block running east of Fifth Avenue, Isaac Burr owned land almost to Fourth, the present Park Avenue, while Jotham Post, Jr. and his brother Joel-- a slippery investor and grandfather of the later nineteenth century architect George B. Post-- had by then erected a building on the south block on a lot that ended a few feet east of Burr’s. Jotham Post, Jr. trained as a doctor, imported pharmaceutical products, dealt in real estate, and served in city, state, and federal government bodies. (NYT 7 8 1947, p. 22). A strip of land belonging to George Warner bordered another strip owned by the heirs of Michael Evener, on whose land stood two small houses close to each other almost at Fourth Avenue—one on the south block and one in what was soon to become Forty-second Street. A Mr. Kay owned an adjacent strip to the east. Land belonging to Thomas Buchanan stretched at this point to the Eastern Post Road, the now-vanished artery that joined Third Avenue at about the present Forty-fifth Street. Samuel Kip’s heirs owned the triangle of land leading to that intersection on the south side of Forty-second Street, and on the north block to the property of the heirs of Casper Smith who owned additional land east of Third Avenue. From there to the East River, heirs of Francis R. Winthrop retained his property on which stood two buildings, one of them in the middle of what would become the roadway. In sum, only a few houses stood along Forty-second Street, either near the intersection with avenues or in the later roadway.

Although Forty-second Street was officially designated and named on September 8, 1825, (42nd Streett Property Owners & Merchants’ Association, op cit., July 25, p. 2) it evidently lacked wide appeal. The lots were not officially opened for development until 1835 (Burroughs & Wallace, Gotham, p. 579) when Forty-second Street became the city’s northern boundary for a while. On the Plan of New York published by 1840, Forty-second Street is shown almost devoid of houses.

(Fig. 3: Plan of New York, S. Stiles engraver, Edward Walker publisher, 1840.NYPL image ID 1260987 https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-fcbe-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 Public domain)

Two faced each other diagonally across Seventh Avenue, another stood just east of Fifth, and a third was far to the east at First Avenue (see also: Ballon et al., Greatest Grid, p. 123). Madison and Lexington Avenues were created in 1836 but were rural paths. The aforementioned stream, running northwest from Kip’s Bay, crossed Forty-second Street between the present Third and Park Avenues, where the water petered out. The map made in 1844 by Daniel Ewen, a chartered surveyor, shows the areas reserved for the city and those available for development. (66 John St. block 1258 lots 13ff). Other than heirs, members of the property-owning classes shunned the far east side of the street until the nineteenth century was well advanced. Indicating the low value given to midtown land, an orphanage established in 1836 by Quaker women for African-American children could manage to erect its first purpose-built home in 1842-43 on Fifth Avenue between Forty-third and Forty-fourth Streets; white rioters opposed to the Civil War draft burned it down in 1863.

(FIG. 4. Colored Orphan Asylum, 1847 Photo Museum of the City of New York 34.166.27 Public domain)

(The Colored Orphan Asylum, also the Colored Half Orphan Asylum housed children with one living parent who could not care for them. The founders were Anna Shotwell and Mary Lindley Murray. Encyclopedia of New York City, s.v. Colored Orphan Asylum). P.S 116 on East 33rd Street is named for Ms. Murray’s ancestor of the same name who delayed British officers during the Revolutionary War. No orphan died during the riot. In the background is the distributing reservoir, discussed below)

Other rioters attacked the west end of Forty-second street where the buildings formed part of the ferry complex serving Weehawken, New Jersey. They burned what they could but apparently did not murder anyone in the process.

(FIG, 5. Rioters burning the Weehawken Ferry. NYPL Image ID 422141 https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-2860-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 Public domain)

Another indicator of the status of the Forty-second street area is the use of 128 building lots constituting the present Bryant Park as a potter’s field between 1823 and 1842. (Valentine’s Manual 1917-18, p. 203); the price of the land was then $8449.

Nevertheless, prescient people foresaw development. We have already seen that in October 1825, a member of the Norton family ceded land to the City including Forty-second Street, from Ninth Avenue westward for the purpose of creating the public road authorized in the previous month. The City then divided the street’s borders into lots, although two years later the farms and wooden buildings were still there. (Henderson, Story of 42nd Street, p. 17). A measure passed in the state legislature allowed the City to force occupants of the Common Land to trade land with the City so that the streets could be platted. Opening streets officially could increase construction and property tax revenue. City leaders realized that they needed property taxes because the previous way of financing government had relied on leasing municipal facilities such as docks. Those urban elements no longer sufficed to pay for the needs of a much larger municipality which had doubled in population between 1800 and 1820, then almost doubled again by 1830. (http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/new-york-city-population/ accessed 11 23 19)

Among the changes of the late 1820s was an omnibus service begun in lower Manhattan between 1827 and 1829 by Abraham Brower. Three or four horses pulled his twelve-seater vehicles; thirty other services supplemented it by 1852, although not all reached Forty-second Street and none extended north of it.

(Henderson Story of 42 Street, p. 17 says double tracks for streetcars were installed in 1836 up to Fifty-seventh Street; actual service may not have reached that far north.)

By 1830, John Jacob Astor had left the China trade--which included dealing in opium--in order to focus on the more constructive potential of real estate investment. His son, William Backhouse Astor, directed some of his father’s enterprises which rapidly increased, leading to house lot sales in the area. The City’s decision in 1831 to study seriously the provision of clean water shows that the government envisioned future growth, to which the almost-finished Erie Canal and railroads soon contributed dramatically. A charter approved by the state legislature in 1830 specified that railroads had to be located between Third and Ninth Avenues to avoid competition with ferries, so it is clear that legislators anticipated the need to transport an increasing population efficiently. (Schlichting, Grand Central Terminal, 2001, p. 12 re 1848)

Another significant event occurred in 1831. Investors led by John Mason, a dry goods merchant who helped to establish the Chemical Bank, obtained a charter from New York State for the New York and Harlem Railroad. Mason owned land in northern Manhattan that the railroad would make accessible---potentially for sale and development. The originally horse-drawn trains ran on tracks embedded in the street’s surface--- at first for less than a mile in 1832 but soon extended. Trains were later powered by steam.

The noise, soot, and gases emitted by steam trains aroused futile opposition when in 1832 the railroad company asked to extend its tracks south of Twenty-third Street through the Bowery (NYT 7 2 1853, p.4). Under public pressure, especially from wealthy homeowners, the railroad agreed in 1833 to bury its trains in a tunnel from Thirty-second to Forty-second Streets instead of letting them spout steam in an open cut through Murray Hill. This operation, begun by cutting through rock in 1834 (Roberts, Grand Central, pp, 25-29), was completed in three years. The rest of the tracks remained at grade level, interrupting crosstown traffic, spewing smoke, and creating unwelcome noise. The Harlem Railroad built a maintenance barn at Forty-second Street---necessary, but hardly a public amenity. The maintenance facility expanded to Forty-eighth Street, including car and locomotive houses, premises for horses and cattle, coaling stations, a blacksmith shop, and a small depot for passengers (Belle & Leighton, Grand Central, p. 32. C. Gray, “Streetscapes,” NYT 6 21 1998, p. XI5). This was the distant ancestor of the present Grand Central Terminal.

(https://www.bisnow.com/new-york/news/office/rfr-evicted-chrysler-building-cooper-union-127816?utm_source=outbound_pub_5&utm_campaign=outbound_issue_83519&utm_content=outbound_link_8&utm_medium=email accessed 1 31 2025)

After a railroad engine exploded in 1834, the City required horse traction below Twenty-seventh Street (Ballon et al., Greatest Grid, p.184) where the population was denser. By 1837, the railroad, powered by horse and by steam, ran from City Hall along Fourth Avenue to the Harlem River. (Barr, Building the Skyline, p. 252). Since there was little development north of lower Manhattan by the 1830s, it may have seemed reasonable to allow a private business to control a major north-south artery in the center of the island, although it is likely that political corruption and official indolence helped the railroad to do as it liked. One goal of this railroad, like that of many others and later subway sponsors, was to stimulate productive investment on this little-developed uptown land, even if the sites might turn out to be noisy or polluted.

In 1835, the City opened all the grid-platted streets to Forty-second street. Work on newly-available sites began in 1837, but it took a few years to be realized. (Ballon et al., Greatest Grid, p. 45) Individual lots such as one owned by the long-established Remsen family were sold to more recent arrivals such as Patrick Treacy, in 1841. The richer, more ambitious Astors built moderately-priced brownstone-fronted brick row houses in the mid-1840s between Broadway and Ninth Avenues. (66 John St.; Burroughs & Wallace, Gotham, p. 787) The Goelet family that bought land for a century starting in the 1840s, became wealthy in part because of their acquisitions along the street. (NYT 3 2 2004, p.XI1) Nearly all the recorded names of property owners who sold, mortgaged, or bought property on Forty-second Street during the 1840s were northwest European, overwhelmingly British---Jenkins, Woodruff, Sturges, Ruggles, Mortimer-- with the occasional Kelly and the Huguenot Goelet family. In 1841, when property assessments were first recorded, the land and improvements between Lexington and Sixth Avenues were valued at $43,200. (NYT 1 4 1931, p. RE 15)

Decisions about the grading and elevation of each street were made by the Common Council, but the actual grading through terrain of clay, gravel, and boulders as much as fourteen feet deep (Wikipedia s.v. Commissioners’. Plan.) affected the speed of development in the area. Bloomingdale Road, the diagonal artery that had been subordinated at first to the grid plan of 1811, was restored up to Forty-third Street, and expanded across Spuyten Duyvil Creek by 1865, its various sections all being renamed Broadway in 1899. The railroad had already in 1840 gained approval from the state legislature to bridge the Harlem River that divides Manhattan Island from the American mainland. Assessed land values between Sixth and Lexington Avenues were $43,000 in 1841. (NYT 5 28 1930, p. 13)

To serve some of the migrants to the area, Holy Cross church for German Catholics opened with a Franciscan pastor in September 1840 between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Its small timber building burned down in 1847 but was replaced when the energetic immigrant Archbishop John Hughes (1797-1864), laid the cornerstone of a new church in 1852. The Dripps map of 1854 showed only scant development nearby, principally between Seventh and Ninth Avenues, in the form of individual small buildings. (It is no wonder that the Colored Orphanage could be built in an area that held little interest for entrepreneurs.) Although the intended parishioners were farmers, farms had yielded to considerably more housing by the time that the Perris map of 1857-62 appeared.

(These maps are on line at the New York Public Library with color coding of wooden or masonry buildings and additional information in word and image, e.g. for the Perris map of 1857-62 Image ID 1268373 https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-bf94-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 . For the church: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3804n.ct00405/?r=0.265,0.185,0.177,0.119,0. http://www.christinthecity.nyc/history accessed 7 28 2019.

The Perris map of 1857-62 on plate 81does not yet show Madison Avenue north of Forty-second and the state of building can be understood as sparse and simple, with wooden structures surviving among others of brick.

(FIG.6 Perris map, 1857-62, vol.6, plate 81, Fourth to Sixth Avenues, north side of Forty-second Street, NYPL Image ID 1268364, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-bf87-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99)

A chapel of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Ascension, known as the Chapel of the Shepherd’s Flock stood at 330 West Forty-third Street but the congregation moved to 249-253 West Forty-third between 1865 and 1939, although it is shown incorrectly on various maps as fronting on Forty-second. Services may have been held inside three adjacent remodeled houses that retained their exterior appearance.

(https://www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org/sites/default/files/Inventory%20of%20Manhattan%20Records%2C%20Episcopal%20Archives%20of%20St_%20John.pdf for the Episcopal chapel)

Development principally west of Sixth Avenue but below Forty-second Street occurred by 1855, as we see from a large lithograph of that year by John Bachmann showing Manhattan from the Latting Tower (the artist’s high perch) south to the tip of the island.

(FIG.7 View to lower Manhattan from Latting Tower. John Bachmann.1855, courtesy NYU. Reservoir and Crystal Palace are in the foreground. Public domain. For the tower, see below.).

The distributing reservoir and the Crystal Palace shown between Fifth and Sixth Avenues warrant further discussion below. There was otherwise little to see on the street---a small house to the east, a small and apparently short-lived furnace directly on Forty-second opposite the reservoir and row houses to the west of it. There was little built north of the Colored Orphanage.

Apart from the houses, there was the Broadway Hotel on the trapezoidal block between Broadway and Seventh Avenue after the middle of the decade. That construction evidently occurred in the later 1850s, because the Perris map of 1854 shows only one tiny wooden building on the south side of the street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, wooden houses and only two of masonry between Seventh and Ninth, with gaps around them. Three masonry row houses or shops-and-housing groups were erected on Ninth to Tenth Avenues, where one might not have expected that higher class of building.

To ensure further growth, clean water was the most essential requirement. Water had also to produce steam to fuel the railroad north of the Twenty-third and later, north of Thirty-fourth Streets. New Yorkers had been using rain barrels, cisterns, wells, the contaminated Collect Pond, and whatever feeble provisions were made by the Manhattan Company which showed more interest in its bank than in its ostensible goal of building water pipes. Cholera in 1832 resulting from contaminated water, and a terrifying fire in December 1835 that bankrupted nearly every insurance company (Martha J Lamb, History of the City of New York, New York, A. S. Barnes & Co., 1880, vol. 2 pp. 725-6) showed why a clean and abundant water supply had to be assured.

The requirements for a reservoir system included a watershed with pure, odorless water located in woodlands because shade and humidity enhance the environment and minimize evaporation. The watershed had to have enough rain and snow to renew the supply and allow for drought years. The water had to lie in a valley so that the water could be impounded, but the valley had to be at an elevation higher than the city’s in order to have water flow downward without pumps. An official report promised that water from the Croton River watershed near Ossining, New York, would be inexhaustible, so by early 1835, the Common Council took control of water matters from the Manhattan Company

(Burroughs & Wallace, Gotham pp. 361, 594; Luc Sante, “An Account of Human Costs,” Places Journal No. 2020, accessed 11 22 2020. https://placesjournal.org/article’reservoir-and-accoount-of-human-costs).

The Croton water lay far enough from the city to assure its purity but near enough to make construction reasonable over a distance of forty-one and one-half miles. Lakes and ponds in the watershed could also be put to use, if necessary. The Croton River Lake, five miles long, covered four hundred acres, and the dam at the Croton River was forty feet high. A commemorative plaque, now lost, recorded the essential history:

“The Law authorizing the construction of the work passed May 2, 1834. Stephen Allen, William W. Fox, Saul Alley, Charles Dusenberry, and Benjamin M Brown were appointed Commissioners. During the year 1834, two surveys were made---one by David B Douglass and the other by John Martineau. In April, 1835, a majority of the Electors of the City voted in favour of constructing the Aqueduct. On the 7^th May following, the Common Council instructed the Commissioners to proceed with the work. David B. Douglass was employed as Chief Engineer until October, 1836, when he was succeeded by John B. Jervis. In March, 1837, Benjamin M. Brown resigned and was succeeded by Thomas T Woodruff. In March, 1840, the before mentioned Commissioners were succeeded by Samuel Stevens, John I. Ward, Zebedee Ring, Benjamin Birdsall and Samuel R. Childs. The work was commenced in May, 1837. On the 22^nd June 1842, the Aqueduct was so far completed that it received the Water from the Croton River Lake; on the 17^th, the Water entered the Receiving Reservoir and was admitted into this [Distributing] Reservoir on the succeeding 4^th of July.”

The cost of the facilities in Manhattan and upstate was nine million dollars in mid-nineteenth-century currency. (I thank Charles Warren for a photograph of the plaque)

The water traveled from its source via iron pipes encased in brick. It arrived by 1848 over the High Bridge linking Manhattan to the Bronx on the mainland--a structure that increased the water pressure. Water was directed to a receiving reservoir in what is now Central Park’s Great Lawn---the present reservoir came later---and then to the twenty-million-gallon Croton Aqueduct Department Distributing Reservoir at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue.

(FIGS. 8 and 9. Croton Distributing Reservoir. Left NYPL b19806373, public domain. Right: NYPL b.11524053, public domain)

The terrain rose slightly there, easing the subsequent dispersal of the water. Pipes between six and thirty-six inches in diameter carried water to various neighborhoods, serving the wealthy more abundantly than the poor.

The Distributing Reservoir covered 420 square feet. Containing the water required immensely thick walls---thirty-eight feet thick at street level and on average about forty-five feet high. They were made of granite, with natural cement from upstate New York that was first produced commercially in 1835. Wait Associates, Inc., at 51 East Forty-second Street were the sole distributors of this material which was praised for durability and resistance to weather and chemicals, and for performing well under water and in masonry mortar. (NYT 10 23 1955, p. R4). Parts of the reservoir’s foundation wall, built in 1837-42, are still visible in the New York Public Library’s south court. The thick walls seemed built for the ages, but improved supply systems required draining the structure in 1897 and replacing it by a reservoir of knowledge: the great Library.

The thickness of the walls allowed for a seventeen-foot-wide promenade at the top about fifty feet above the street, reached by a stone staircase. An iron railing protected strollers. The walkway became a fashionable place to see and be seen. The battered walls and trapezoidal doors at the base evoked something vaguely akin to pylons in front of ancient Egyptian temples. Egyptian forms symbolized a desire for eternal duration, but the city grew too rapidly for that. In late November 1849, Walt Whitman accurately predicted growth in the city and burgeoning construction around the reservoir ( Jackson & Dunbar, Empire City, pp 207-8) but no one at the time, however prescient, imagined a population large enough to require new aqueducts or even a later reservoir.

(For old photographs and views of the foundations in place in the Library’s south court, see https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/midtown-was-once-home-reservoir-moonlight-dancing-water by Jen Carlson, written and posted 12/9/2020. For extensive information, see Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000, chapter 9, pp. 185-217 with information also on supplementary aqueducts of the 18909s, 1917, 1926, 1937-1965; and a sewer system began in 1850.)

With useful infrastructure in place, the city could develop quickly. The Aldermen approved a sewer at Fortieth Street between Third and Lexington Avenues in 1852, and another on Third Avenue in 1853 (NYT 6 12 1852, 1853, s. v. Ophthalmic Hospital). New banks supplemented existing ones; the new ones included the Irish-focused Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, established in 1843 and incorporated in 1850 with 265 depositors---a number enlarged later by those refugees from the potato famine who prospered enough to have bank accounts. Less respectable were McBenvelt’s Tavern and similar establishments. The Hudson River Railroad opened on Eleventh Avenue in 1849, crossing Forty-second Street at grade level where guards had to protect pedestrians, horses, and domestic animals. The railroad line had the potential to promote development uptown on the west side, just as the Harlem Railroad had on the east side, although until landfill was created, there was not much land to develop west of Eleventh Avenue. Cornelius Vanderbilt began in 1853 to gain control of the east side railroad which was to run to Forty-second Street, and a year later bought a controlling interest in the Hudson River Railroad, before buying stock in the New York Central line. These acquisitions were to have a major effect on Forty-second Street by the end of the next decade. (T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon, New York, Knopf, 2009, passim; for rail lines in place or planned, see NYT 7 2 1853, p. 4)

By 1852, it was possible to ride on some kind of public vehicle from the Battery to Forty-second Street (NYT 8 19, 1852, p. 2) because service was initiated in anticipation of the Crystal Palace exhibition.

The first of the horse-drawn rail lines was chartered in that year for a trajectory between Chambers Street north of City Hall Park and Forty-second Street. Newspapers’ wood engravings depicted masses of people congregating near the Sixth Avenue Railroad stop and showed them crowded into the cars. Half the price of omnibuses, smoother because iron rails were embedded in the street surfaces, faster because of the smooth rails, and able to carry more passengers because of reduced friction, the carriages on rails, called horse cars, were nevertheless not always preferred because they attracted poorer patrons. An article in the New York Herald in 1862 characterized the rail cars as suitable for those who were not “cleanly and respectable.” The advantage to the railroad carriage owner was that more people could be pulled along with only one horse. Users paid the fare in a slot at the end of the car. Being novel and convenient, the vehicles brought many “cleanly” visitors to the Crystal Palace exhibition and the Latting Observatory across the street.

(Fig. 10 Crystal Palace, Gildemeister & Carstensen, designers. Latting Observatory, William Naugle, designer, approached by omnibuses. 1853, Capewell & Kimmel, publisher. LC-DIG-pga-03602 William Pate, printer, published by Capewell & Kimmel, 1853 Public domain.).

The omnibus, also called a stage coach, offered the other principal possibility for reaching the Crystal Palace, being a regularly scheduled vehicle with fixed rates that one paid upon leaving. The seats were arranged crosswise, later lengthwise, and were uncomfortable. (NYT 7 8 1853, p. 4; 5 26 1901, p. 16) Four omnibus lines reached Forty-second Street at the time of the Exhibition. Competition with the horse cars on rails forced omnibus owners to lower their fares. Hackneys –hired wooden carriages---were other possible means of access, along with the Harlem Railroad line for people coming from the north, while the wealthy came in private carriages.

Not all omnibus and horse car owners seemed eager at first to extend service all the way to Forty-second Street. A reporter for the New York Daily Times pointed out that if the Eighth, Fourth, and Third Avenue lines stopped several blocks away as they had been doing, passengers would see “a desert of rocks and untamed lots, with goats feeding at random” before they reached the exhibition building and the short-lived Latting Observatory across Forty-second Street.

The fair itself was a marvel of technology, excitement, commercialism, and enjoyment. A not-really-entire world’s assemblage of products and delights under an enormous glass roof rose in nine months and opened in July 1853. True, this was some weeks later than originally anticipated, disappointing those who had come to the city for the promised inauguration. (Scientific American 8, June 1853: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-york-crystal-palace-1853-06-04/ also New York Daily Times 7 15, 1853, p. 1) The building lasted only until October 1858 when a fire destroyed it in less than a half hour. Elaborate fire controls and pumps from the water supply system were of no avail, nor were the cast iron and glass materials of the building, because the floors were made of wood that fueled the flames, and even more lumber was stored near the Forty-second Street entrance. Once the fire spread to a gas chandelier, and then to paints and oils on the upper floor, the collapse of the dome was inevitable and quick. (NYT 7 22 1853, p. 8; 10 6 1858, p. 4.)

New York’s Crystal Palace took as its inspiration and architectural model the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, erected by greenhouse builder Joseph Paxton in London in 1851. The name was related to its construction in iron and glass. The exhibition in New York bore the slightly abbreviated title: Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations. Like its predecessor, it was meant to advertise domestic and some imported products to an ever-increasing population. The promoters were businessmen and politicians, including P.T. Barnum who became the second president of the Crystal Palace Association in 1854. Support came from many quarters, including the American Institute, an association of leaders of commerce, finance, agriculture and other useful fields. It held an annual fair showing American achievements in science and technology and placed its yearly exhibits in the Crystal Palace.

To design the far smaller building in New York, the sponsors engaged two recent immigrants, Georg Carstensen, an entrepreneur who had helped to develop the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen in the 1840s, and Karl Gildemeister (known in New York as Charles), an architect who had immigrated from Bremen following the 1848 revolution. Neither of these men remained long in New York after the Crystal Palace was built. Edmund Hurry was the consulting architect. Engineer Christian Edward Detmold, another German immigrant, supervised construction, while Horatio Allen, who had been principal assistant engineer of the Croton Aqueduct, was the consulting engineer. (NYT 7 5 1887, obituary; Burrows, The Finest Building in America, and Dictionary of American Biography.)

The fair in New York opened after serious delays with an address by the President of the United States, Franklin Pierce; his more consequential actions were less benign, especially those related to slavery. But oppressed people did not attend the fair, except perhaps as servants accompanying their employers. The Exhibition was a spectacle aimed at the white middle and upper classes who could pay the transportation and admission fees --at one point, ten-dollar season tickets, fifty-cent adult and twenty-five cent children’s day tickets--- and who could eventually purchase the goods displayed in a setting unprecedented in the United States. It is not certain that African-Americans were even allowed inside. As of 1854, they were prohibited from riding in public omnibuses, and the Crystal Palace was over three miles on foot from City Hall. In 1855, although an African-American teacher, Elizabeth Jennings Graham, won a financial judgment against the Third Avenue railcar company, a respected minister, James W.C. Pennington, lost another discrimination suit. Racial exclusion on vehicles was finally ruled impermissible in 1865 by the Board of Police Commissioners after Ellen Anderson, widow of a black Union soldier, sued the police for having dragged her out of an Eighth Avenue car.

(NYT 11 13 2005, p. XIV3; Museum of the City of New York 20.100.2479; Amy Hill Hearth, Streetcar to Justice: How Elizabeth. Jennings Won the Right to Ride in New York, New York, Harper Collins, 2018, p. 116; Kyle G Volk, Moral Minorities & the Making of American Democracy, New York, Oxford University Press, 2014 pp.165-66); Jerry Mikorenda, America’s First Freedom Rider, Guilford, CT, Rowan & Littlefield, 2020, chaps. VII, VIII)

The exhibition building was conspicuously seventy-six feet tall, topped by a central dome reaching 108 feet in height that gave it a strong visual presence beside the massive reservoir walls. People entered on broad Forty-second Street; goods entered on Fortieth. (NYT 7 20 1953, p. 4.). The plan was that of a Greek cross with the intersection shaped as a spacious octagon surmounted by a dome one hundred feet in diameter. Porches projected at the front and side entrances. Turrets bearing American flags marked the corners and the top of the dome. Inside the building were works of art as well as varied products including clocks, photographic prints, machinery pertinent to fabric and clothing manufacturing as well as early domestic sewing machines, farm equipment, telegraphic apparatus, sugar refining machines, firearms, furniture, and steam engines. There was also a captive crocodile.

(Fig. 11. Interior, from Benjamin Silliman & C.R.Goodrich, eds. World of Science, Art, and Industry Illustrated from Examples in the New York Exhibition 1853-54, New York, Putnam, 1854. Public domain)

To suggest a cultural purpose for what was primarily a commercial facility, the displays also included sculpture and painting, notably Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave, which had been at the London fair--while African slavery still existed in the United States. In order to protect the objects on display, and to mitigate the summer heat, colored translucent enamel coated some of the plate glass panels. The dome was sheathed in tin, which reduced the heat inside; two rings of windows pierced the cladding, producing a design then seen as oriental, at a time when people in western Europe and North America regarded the world east of Vienna as exotic. The iron framework was primarily creamy off-white, embellished with primary colors. Scissors-shaped staircases led to spacious balconies where more goods attracted visitors. A wing added late in the construction period accommodated large machinery. Under the dome, a large equestrian statue of George Washington provided a patriotic focal point.

Over a million admission fees did not enable the sponsors to turn a profit. They lost three hundred thousand dollars, although they were able to lease the premises during the few years that remained before the destructive fire.

The other sight on the north side of Forty-second Street opposite the reservoir acquainted New Yorkers with new technology. This was the Latting Observatory, a timber structure braced with iron, built in 1853-54.

(Fig. 12. Latting Observatory tower and building at the base. Architect: William Naugle 1853. Image at NYPL. From A Visitor’s Companion. Crystal Palace Supplement to the Illustrated-News No.30, vol. II cover. Public domain)

The entrepreneur was an inventor named Waring Latting; his architect was William Naugle. It is often said that there was an early steam-powered safety elevator designed by Elisha Otis to carry visitors either two stories or up to the top, but the lift was never installed. From an annex at the base filled with shops and an ice cream parlor, visitors could climb winding stairs to one of three viewing platforms. The best one was at the top of what was then the tallest structure in the city, affording views to Long Island, Staten Island, New Jersey, and of course, the rest of Manhattan with church spires and increasing numbers of buildings, ships on the East and Hudson rivers, railroads on the east and west sides, and the High Bridge that carried water to the reservoirs. The owner installed telescopes shortly after the opening, enhancing the appeal of the unprecedented views. A forerunner and inspiration to the Eiffel Tower, the Observatory lasted-- though truncated by 75 feet in 1855-- only until 1856 when a fire spread from West Forty-third Street. It had been acquired in 1854 by the Hydeville Marble Works, apparently for use in dropping molten lead into water to make shotgun bullets, and it was that company’s owners, rather than Latting himself, who suffered the financial loss of about $100,000.

(NYT 9 1 1856, p. 8; Burrows The Finest Building in America, p.68-75; Daytonian in New York 2018/11/the-lost-latting-observatory-2nd.html accessed 10 14 2019)

It is hard today to imagine the site of the present State College of Optometry being used as a shot tower, although at 262 feet, the College building is only twenty-two feet taller than the structure as Hydeville remodeled it. (The College building was originally Aeolian Hall.)

The city’s ever-growing population density encouraged those who could afford to move northward on Manhattan Island to do so during the 1850s and 1860s. Merchants, skilled craftsmen, and members of the professions occupied houses south of the railroad and the blocks flanking Fifth Avenue, shunning the paths of steam trains and of busy riverfronts full of ships and workshops, slaughterhouses, and probably sailors, saloons, and prostitutes. But welcome growth did not occur everywhere. Some of the existing scattered development on Forty-second Street itself was unwelcome and threatening to a future increase in property values. Shanties are indicated on the Perris map of 1854 on the present site of Pershing Square opposite what is now Grand Central Terminal. Wooden buildings with considerable open space between them appear in the 1857-62 map. although those humble buildings had only a short life ahead. A factory with smoke emerging from the factory or furnace stood opposite the reservoir, also for a short time, but visible in Bachmann’s lithograph.

Farther east, a colony of poor Irish--and, for a while, German--families arose near Forty-second Street from east of Third Avenue to the river; it was known as Dutch Hill from the name of Francis Winthrop’s house at what became Forty-first Street, or Goat Hill, the latter name reflecting the presence of domestic animals among the mud and board buildings. Some of these structures are recorded as scattered yellow squares that denoted wooden buildings on the William Perris map of New York in 1859, the year in which keeping pigs became illegal south of Eighty-sixth Street.

(Fig. 13 2^nd Avenue % 42^nd St. 1863, looking north. Courtesy Francis McLaughlin. Public domain. Image originally in Valentine’s Manual.)

The men on Dutch Hill were often quarrymen, their wives and children rag-pickers. What was referred to later as a “podrida of frame buildings covering an area of about 75 by 100-feet on the northwest corner” of Third Avenue was at first a roadhouse, then a barroom, then the starting point for staged vehicles, and then a hangout for corrupt political ward workers. From about 1856, there were liquor stores on three of the four corners—the fourth housing a grocery store that had a barroom annex, “like almost every other grocery of that period.” This was the corner where draft rioters assembled in July of 1863 (NYT 5 7 1888, p .8) during the Civil War, as poor Irish immigrants could not buy their way out of military service. The men from Dutch Hill on the east side may have left other rioters to burn down the rectilinear utilitarian Weehawken Ferry depot at the west end of Forty-second Street. (See above, Fig. 5)

A truckman named James Corcoran organized the squatters on Dutch Hill to build a more permanent shanty community. Its members took directions from his headquarters known as Corcoran’s Roost. A substantial Irish population lived east of Fourth Avenue into the 1880s, although many Irish residents were displaced by about 1870. Another center of Irish residence was located on West Forty-second Street west of Eighth Avenue, with saloons in that area catering to working-class patrons.

(Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2014; Wikipedia. s.v. Jimmy Corcoran, accessed 1 14 2019).)

Reformers who hoped to ameliorate Dutch Hill’s squalid conditions produced a few studies, with little result. A map created by Egbert L. Viele and his colleagues in 1854-55 for the Citizens’ Association’s Record of Sanitary Inquiry recording land occupation shows buildings at or near the corners of Second and Third Avenues, and scattered shanties on the hill that extended to Forty-fourth Street. It took a decade for an estimated several thousand squatters to be evicted from the area. Not that the neighborhood improved greatly: noxious industries including slaughterhouses came to occupy East Riverfront land below the bluff along First Avenue. At least some sewers were being installed; by 1853, there was one on Third Avenue extending to the Ophthalmic Hospital at Sixty-first Street.

(Slsughterhouses: NYT 12 18 1865, p. 2. Not all the new buildings appear on the Dripps Plan of NYC 1868 though the site is designated. Turtle Bay was filled in 1868. Paula Young Lee, ed., Meat, Modernity & the Rise of the Slaughterhouse (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies), Durham NH, University of New Hampshire Press, 2008.)

Some social improvement was nevertheless close at hand, in the form of the former Ward School 36, replaced and renamed school 27 erected between Second and Third Avenues. In late December 1861, the Board of Education authorized the school officers of the Nineteenth Ward to buy three lots on Forty-second Street east of Third Avenue for $7500 or less in order to build a primary schoolhouse; schools were not yet built by a central board of education. Ward leaders would likely have been eager to offer their idea of improvement to the children remaining in Corcoran’s Roost. On the Perris map of 1852-54 there was only an ample empty lot at the site but the Perris (1857-62) and Dripps (1868) maps agree in showing the building as being approximately I–shaped extending southward into the block, with light courts on the east and west.

(Fig. 14. Dripps plan, 1868, detail showing Ward School, later P.S. 27 Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, NYPL. Public domain.)

In 1858, the average number of (white) pupils per class in the decrepit predecessor school #36 was 40, well under the average for a ward school. The Annual Report of the City Superintendent on December 31, 1863, to the Board of Education noted that the school then had about six hundred pupils, but only about a third of them attended each year, supervised by just six teachers. In 1864, the heating apparatus failed, and a report considered the building to be a “death trap to the attendants” (NYT 10 2, 1864, p. 3). Attendance and safety were among the problems that motivated the construction of a new school, safer and more appealing.

The façade of School 27 was illustrated in the Board’s annual report for 1861, published in 1862. The building, intended for 1400 students but not occupied until 1865, was evidently the work of someone with training in design; he seems to have been responsible for other schools of the decade from his position at the superintendence of School Buildings. The boxlike entrance side had four stories and five bays. A pediment embellished with dentils crowned the central three bays, and the middle bay had doubled windows. Doors led inside in the second and fourth bays, opening in the rusticated lower floor made of polished brownstone. The upper part of the façade was made of pressed brick, crowned by a galvanized and sanded iron cornice finished to imitate brownstone. The side bay windows opened at a distance from the central ones, and all the windows had lintels above and below. The written description offered in the report made clear that the staircases at the front and rear were fireproof.

(Fig. 15. Ward School 27 though here still called 36. Annual Report of the Board of Education of the City and Country of New York, 1862. Public domain)

The first floor was given over to play areas, yards for ventilation, and toilets. The second had a large central “reception room” with a gallery, evidently akin to an auditorium. It had a teachers’ room, and four classrooms. The third was entirely filled with classrooms, while the fourth was like the second except that the gallery was replaced by two classrooms.

(21st Annual Report of the Board of Education of the City and County of New York for the Year Ending December 31, 1862 New York, C.S. Westcott & Co., Printers, 1863, 9 pages re: Primary School No. 36. I am grateful to Mr. Brian Ferree and Ms. Julia Robbins at the New York City archives for images of these pages.)

By 1867, it also housed an evening school for males; (NYT 9 17 1867, p. 5) The Bromley map of 1879 shows a slightly different plan, reflecting an enlargement with a broader rear wing. The school was described in 1874 as “one of the most commodious in the City…attended by nearly one thousand children” (NYT 10 6 1876, p. 8) The primary division was on the ground floor, the female grammar department on the second, and the male grammar department on the third and fourth, a description suggesting that families were more intent upon educating boys than girls. “Declamations” were offered at important occasions in German as well as English. (NYT 7 3 1874, p. 2) Instruction itself may have been in both German and English, something not uncommon before the First World War. (The Times reported on addresses being given in both languages, 7 3 1874, p. 2).

The city’s public schools were the resort of those who had no choice. Few others wanted to live or raise children near the East River’s noxious industries. Probably the residents of the far west end had equally little choice of residence. For white children, Primary School 17 was provided at 252 West, perhaps around 1860; it no longer appears on the Bromley map of 1879, but detailed accounts of school building are recorded in the Annual Reports of the Board of Education, sometimes in conflict with the maps.

By March 23, 1881, the New York Times reported that the ceilings at P.S. 17 were dilapidated, the roof leaked, and the whole building was poorly ventilated and drained. (NYT 3 23 1881, p. 8). It was replaced between 1883 and 1896 by a school on West Forty-seventh Street; Ward School 28 on West Fortieth Street, built in 1861, may have been used in the interim. At a reunion in 1932, former pupils reminisced about horse-car trolleys, chasing goats at Forty-second Street and Broadway, and cutting classes on warm days to dive into the Hudson. (NYT 1 29 1932, p. 19.) African-American children were educated separately (NYT 7 3 1858, p. 8), in successors to the African Free Schools. In midtown, they attended Colored School 3 on West Forty-first Street, a smaller tile-roofed three-story building with triplet Gothic windows, built in 1868 probably to a model school proposal of 1860.

(The location of public schools is confusing. Valentine’s Manual for 1864 lists schools by ward and address, even including names of teachers and janitors, but the list does not agree with school names and locations on maps. Moreover, as with P.S. 36 alias 27, naming could be inconsistent. The Manual lists Ward School 28 on Twenty-third Street and Second Avenue. Ward School 27 is listed at Thirty-seventh Street near Tenth Avenue instead of on Forty-second. A Colored School shown on the Galt-Hoy bird’s eye view in 1879 on West Forty-second Street is absent from Valentine’s earlier list. In 1864 there was one Colored Primary School and six other Colored Schools. For plans of Primary School 36, see www.boe_76190 to 76195-BOE (Board of Education online images). Board of Education image boe72012. Colored School 4, opened in 1860 and the lone survivor, was under threat of demolition; NYT 10 9 2022 RE pp. 1,8.)

As for animal rather than human concerns, the west side had its own slaughterhouses on several blocks south of Forty-second Street, with attendant cattle-driving---illegal but occasional on wide Forty-second if no officers of the law were looking. (Burroughs & Wallace, Gotham, p. 748;). Butchering was the subject of an article in the New York Times about “The Meats of New York,” published on February 26, 1853. A year later, the Board of Aldermen discussed cattle driving (Common Council Proceedings, Board of Aldermen. Wed, 3 11 1864). and banned the practice in 1855 south of Forty-second Street---at least in the daytime when residents might notice and complain. (Burroughs & Wallace, Gotham p. 786). The ordnances had little effect, for abuses continued into the 1870s (NYT 7 11 1870, p. 8, 11 9 1871, p. 5) As late as 1883, a certain Mrs. White, who lived in a small, white-painted wooden house at Lexington Avenue and Forty-third street, kept a herd of goats. (Schoomaker p.11) People who reminisced later about the neighborhood regarded an old lady with milk-giving goats as endearing but people felt otherwise about herds of cattle and butchering

In the 1850s, then, while some development occurred, especially on the west side, it was still sporadic. Both the far west side along the Eleventh Avenue railroad right of way, and the east side route along Fourth Avenue were blighted by the noxious steam emitted from locomotives. After much procrastination, in 1859 the City succeeded in prohibiting steam trains from operating south of Forty-second Street (Schlichting, Grand Central Terminal, p. 8), as polite residential development had by then reached the area; in the 1850s, Twenty-third Street, an earlier border for steam engines, was well developed by prosperous residents whose outraged voices had finally become audible to public officials. Nevertheless, the soot and noise near the locomotive house and service buildings deterred development on parts of Forty-second Street, as did the presence of the remaining squatters on Dutch Hill.

Even with access to the area, the block just east of the reservoir was almost empty. John Bachmann’s lithographic view of 1855 shows a good many brick and multi-story buildings on the west side south of the reservoir and Crystal Palace. The northwest corner of Fifth Avenue had only a small three-story house and a small two-story building close to it. A protective wall and the yard of a small factory farther west did little to fill the block (See above, Fig. 7)

Only in the mid-1850s did the lone house on the east side yield to commercial development. In 1856, just after Bachmann produced his lithograph, a building with multiple dwellings called “House of Mansions” opened across Fifth Avenue from the reservoir, but when potential tenants hesitated to move there, the building became Rutgers Female College from 1860 to 1882. This institution, originally a finishing school, developed an academic curriculum at a time when higher education was hardly available to young women in the city.

(Fig. 16. House of Mansions, later Rutgers Female Institute and College, Fifth Ave looking north from 41^st Street. Photo NYPL 5192888 https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/42ca9da0-4cb4-0132-129b-58d385a7b928 Public domain. See a view from 42^nd Street looking south in https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/rutgers-female-institute-nyc/ ) A. J.. Davis, architect. The Montagnie Ward, then Levi Morton house (see below) appears at the north corner of 42d Street in fig. 18)

The architecture, by A. J. Davis, was clearly intended to be inviting and distinctive. It echoed British attempts of about 1800 at building something Gothic, an idea characterized at the time by an irregular silhouette and battlemented rooflines. The result was cheerful and naïve, with bay windows and balconies occasionally lurching out from the stuccoed façades, and a strip of garden set off from the avenue by a stone parapet supporting a low metal fence. It remained for some time the principal high-class building east of the reservoir.

At the far west end, landfill to form a continuous Eleventh Avenue eventually created full blocks between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues and the dock projections into the Hudson River. The Viele map of 1865 shows the initial added rectangular construction. On the filled-in south block, title to the land was cleared in 1854 and the owner, Charles Edgar Appleby (1824-1913), a self-made man, had the wits to buy a great part of the infill along the Hudson from Thirty-fourth to Fifty-ninth Street. Builders eager to dump excavated material helped Appleby to create the blocks from Eleventh to Twelfth Avenues. On the Hudson shore, between 1859 and 1902, stood the ferry dock operated by the Weehawken Ferry Company to 1872 (NYT 6 7 1856, p. 8; 3 13 1870, p.5) despite the earlier depredations during the draft riots of 1863; after 1872, the New York Central Railroad gained ownership. Appleby sold the south block in 1860 to the Metropolitan Gas Light Company.

(https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20141109/REAL_ESTATE/141109883/a-dynasty-cashes-out-of-nyc-for-the-next-100-years-at-least accessed 12 8 2019).

By 1863, the gas company had completed construction of four large cylindrical gasholders at the east end of the south block between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues, along with an adjacent retort house. Contracts were being concluded for other facilities, including a pier stretching into the Hudson River. The Dripps map of 1867 shows several additional structures including a purifying house, alias the Dry Lime House, that prepared gas for storage in the gasholders. The map also showed a pier to which barges or lighters transported coal from ships, and small buildings in the future line of Twelfth Avenue.

(Fig., 17. Dripps plan, 1868 far west end of 42^nd Street. Courtesy Mark Tomasko. Public domain)

For reasons now obscure, the Metropolitan Gas Light Company also bought land between Broadway and Seventh Avenues from the heirs of Benjamin I. Hart, property owners in the area by 1865 to at least 1969. (66 John St, block 994 lot 33 [33-37]); Hart himself, a Canadian-born businessman, had moved to the city in 1855. (Dictionary of Canadian Biography s.v. Benjamin Hart)

The Harts and Applebys were not the only long-time landowners; the Sturges family, for instance, retained 216 West Forty-second Street from 1848 to the 1960s, if not later, and the Norris family held 226 East Forty-second Street (66 John St., block 1013, & block 1315 3rd to 2nd 1870) until 1920. By 1868, the west end of the north side had the terminus of the 42^nd and Grand Street Ferry and brick railroad stables erected in 1864, (NYT 6 13 1886, p. 1) but most of the block was empty. The Perris map of 1857-62 showed scattered brick or stone-fronted buildings elsewhere along the street, of which thirteen stood in the middle of the westernmost north block-- evidently the creation of a single entrepreneur.

.

(Fig. 18. Perris & Browne map. 1857-62. NYPL image 1268262 10-12 Avenues, north side of 42^nd Street at bottom. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division. Public domain.)

It is logical that the west end of the north side failed to flourish as a residential hub. The gas company stored used lime outdoors pending its use as fertilizer, and although the sales were regular, the temporary stench deterred further domestic development. Burning coal stored in the yard “smoked like a huge lime-kiln” (NYT 11 10 1865, p. 8. See also 1868: 7 11, p. 8, and in 1869, 2 19, p. 8; 2 21 p 8; 3 5 p.4; for an explosion, see 12 25 1871, p. 2) A distillery on Eleventh Avenue was another undesirable neighbor. Most of the block toward Tenth was empty on both sides except for Campbell & Co.’s brownstone-fronted brick wallpaper factory built in 1867 at 524-520 West, and a row of masonry-fronted houses, called 1-15 Morris Place after its sponsor, Peter Morris. It had small yards in front, which, with the masonry fronts, suggested that it was meant for the middle class. (NYT 7 27 1862, p. 6) By 1884, the factory had become a preeminent producer of wallpaper and had gradually bought lots on both sides of the north block, embellishing eight stories of building with a forty-foot clock tower. At that time, Campbell’s employed 350 workers and produced over two million eight-yard rolls each year. Customers in the 1880s entered a showroom with full length plate-glass windows, and found inside carved oak and walnut woodwork, tapestries, and decorations of Japanese paper. This success followed the invention of copper cylinder presses that could print up to twelve colors at once. (NYT 8 7 1884, p. 5)

The next eastward block was better occupied with masonry-fronted houses in a row before a two-lot packing house interrupted residential development. A factory at 407-409 West was home to the J.H. and C.S. Odell Church Organ company, founded in 1859. It occupied an unadorned four-story brick building with shops on the ground floor, including one that sold tobacco products under a sign that said Segars, a common spelling at the time. Modest as the building appeared, it was busy inside, having built over five hundred pipe organs at that location before the company moved to Westchester County. (http://www.odellorgans.com/new-page/about )

(Fig.19. Odell Organ factory. Photo:http//odellorgan.com/new-page/about Public domain)

North-south avenues were developed primarily by masonry-fronted buildings up to twenty to twenty-five feet wide but east-west street development languished. Whether on avenues or streets, some buildings had commercial premises on the ground floor or were converted to commercial use.

Between Ninth and Eighth Avenues stood the Academy and the Roman Catholic church of the Holy Cross, acknowledging the possibility of future population growth by replacing the burnt first church. The church owed its reconstruction to Archbishop Hughes, who initiated St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1858. The first Holy Cross was built to provide for farmers in the area, although by the time the cornerstone of its replacement was laid in 1852, most farms had disappeared in favor of houses and industrial buildings. The latter included at least two meat-packing establishments. Boats from New Jersey brought the animals to the Manhattan shore before they met their fate.

Approximately fifteen thousand dollars, raised by weekly subscription, financed the first rebuilding of the church, completed in 1854, but the funds did not suffice to build fourteen other churches that the archbishop planned for the city-wide Roman Catholic population of about 200,000 (Burroughs & Wallace, Gotham p 748). After this Holy Cross church on the west side burned in 1867, a new and sturdier building for 1800 people arose to the design of Henry Engelbert, holding its first services in 1870.

(Fig., 20. Holy Cross church façade. Henry Engelbertm 1868-70 Photo: Author .2023)

It was ninety-five feet deep and eighty-five feet wide. Contemporaries described the style of architecture as “of the renaissance order”--although it was more or less Romanesque--perhaps because the building had a dome. Theis & Prueg, marble fabricators, conveniently at hand on East Forty-second Street, created the altar and railings. Mayer & Company of Munich, one of the century’s most prominent designers and fabricators of religious stained glass, made eight chancel windows. A balcony, raised on marbleized wooden columns, was given a carved face with gilded mahogany panels. By the time that the building was finished, the Roman Catholic population in the city had risen dramatically, in no small part because of immigration resulting from the earlier Irish potato famine. While the pious immigrants contributed their pennies to build St. Patrick’s Cathedral, they needed parish churches in which to worship, so diocesan funds were made available for rebuilding Holy Cross. The cost was estimated at approximately $100,000. A rectory was constructed in 1885 to the design of Lawrence J. O’Connor. Later, the windows in the clerestory, and circular ones in the transept were designed and executed by the Tiffany studios, who also installed the St John window in the baptistry and designed mosaics in the sanctuary and at the base of the cupola which the firm painted and stenciled.

(Callas & Randolph, Inside 42nd Street, p.56)

The Academy was an outgrowth of the archbishop’s plan to build Catholic schools where children would not face Protestant indoctrination or have to hear the King James Bible that was read in public school assemblies until the Supreme Court denied the practice in 1963. (The Catholic Church in the United States of America, New York, Catholic Editing Company,1914, p. 330) The Academy was neither part of a plan for parish schools nor related only to Holy Cross. Instead, it was a day and boarding school for one hundred girls established by the Sisters of Charity in 1858. That young ladies were expected to come to this sparsely populated and semi-industrial area suggests that the nuns needed inexpensive land but also shows that religious officials saw some potential for polite development in what was then uptown. The school probably occupied a site that was advertised in 1829 as having a house with 25 rooms, a good well with a pump in the cellar, located on high ground one hundred feet from Eighth Avenue. Its amenities included a view of the Hudson River--then called the North River--and a garden planted for spring vegetables. The school was certainly in a four-story building with 18-inch-thick brick walls. Since the instruction had much to do with machine and hand sewing, embroidery, and millinery, the students were put to work making red and blue uniforms for a military regiment. (Ken Bloom, Broadway:Its History, People & Places:an Encyclopedia, New York, Taylor & Francis, 2004, p. xiii; NYT 5 5 1985, p 125.)

Eighth to Seventh Avenues had more developed lots with plenty of houses, some masonry-fronted and others wooden, with various types of roofs and coping. Interspersed among the houses near the west end of the block was an Old Ladies’ Home, probably the same institution named on the Dripps map as the Asylum for both men and women.

(Fig. 21: Dripps plan, 1868. NYPL Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, public domain)

The Ladies’ Union Aid Society operated a four-story Methodist-Episcopal residence officially called the Asylum for the Aged and Infirm. Its population gradually increased from thirty in 1858 to about seventy a decade later, and in 1869 the charity purchased an adjacent house to accommodate the increase and to admit male residents, some accompanied by wives. (NYT 6 9 1856, p. 4; 1 3 1863, p. 2; 1 12, 1869, p. 12; 4 3 1869, p. 10; 6 14 1869, p. 2;1 4 1870, p. 2. Henderson, Story of 42nd St. illustrates it on p. 17) The members of the Forty-second Street Presbyterian church at 233 West had worshipped in a building of 1854 at 139 West after the Presbytery of New York organized the congregation in 1846 but it moved west in 1862. The church appeared on the Perris Fire Insurance Map of 1857-62 as a small building set far back to the north on its lot. As enlarged in 1862, the church was asymmetrical and stone-faced with a large round-arched traceried Gothic window above a triple entrance. A wing extended at the left and a flat-topped tower rose in four stages at the right. Inside, a Jardine company organ rose above a gallery. The German Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Luke bought the building in 1875 for $45,000. (https://nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/FortysecondStPres.html)

Large livery stable owners favored the vicinity. Some of the buildings were destroyed in a fire in mid-June of 1860 along with a liquor store below the three-story house of an alderman, and a grocery store in a two-story building with a back house. (NYT 6 15 1860, p. 8)

East of Seventh Avenue, despite some gaps, some blocks were more fully developed, except for corner lots on the south side. The latter would have been suitable for larger buildings such as hotels or institutions, but as yet there was little demand for hotels. The Broadway, on the corner at that street, sufficed for visitors’ traffic for a while. The promise of better railway service may have encouraged development of more hotels but most were small until the 1860s. . The increase in development was spotty, however, and no one would have described the street as consistently built up.

Not much building took place between Seventh and Fifth Avenues until a decade or so later. A photograph of the Crystal Palace exhibition building in 1857, attributed to Victor Prevost,

(Fig. 22: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/337488565806057126/public domain)

shows wooden shacks on the southwest corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street. An account of a fire in July,1861 records the destruction of 250 feet of property, including a barroom at the corner of Sixth Avenue, small shops below apartments, a shoemaker, a laundry, several more liquor stores, a confectionery, and a grocery. All were owned by Samuel V. Hoffman, who had built them on a ten-year lease when the Crystal Palace went up; the fire was attributed to three suspected arsonists. That the population had increased but not greatly is suggested by the small size of a public school shown on the Dripps plan of 1868 at the northeast corner of Sixth Avenue and Broadway, hardly more than the size of a house. It disappeared quickly, if in fact it ever opened, since at least two larger elementary schools were available nearby, north and south of Forty-second Street. At one corner of Sixth Avenue, however, was a shop with a life span into the 1940s, at least: H. Hicks & Son established its fruit, soda, and restaurant company in 1863. (NYT 1 20 1946, p. 127)

If it is puzzling that the north block, facing the Reservoir and the open space to its west, was not more elegantly developed than it was, the reasons may have to do with the desolate state of the open space until some shrubbery and trees were planted in 1868 (NYT 7 12 1868, p. 4). While the Crystal Palace had raised real estate values nearby (NYT 3 27 1857, p. 3), the exhibition building site lay empty before the fair and after the fatal fire. The reservoir wall was a formidable visual obstacle. Moreover, it was evident by 1860 that a second source of water was needed, since the existing system built to send out approximately 75 million gallons a day was distributing up to 105 million gallons. (Martin Melosi, Precious Commodity, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011 for proposals to demolish and replace it: NYT 1 27 1878, p. 2; 3 6 1880, p. 5) No decision had yet been made about a new source. In view of the uncertainties, only eleven wooden buildings, apparently Hoffman’s, stood on this very long block, followed by a gap in building, then by chemical works.

But the block could boast at least one genteel building, a chapel of the Rutgers Female Academy, used temporarily by members of the West Presbyterian church around 1860 and used also for occasional public lectures. (NYT 1 13 1867, p. 5). Church members built a chapel of their own in 1862 to the design of George F Babb and Nathaniel G. Foster. The Presbyterians then bought the site and built a new church, called West Presbyterian on the Rutgers chapel site. This was a brick and stone building in the boldly colored High Victorian taste, erected in 1862-65 and designed by Jacob Wrey Mould (1825-86), a British immigrant who had worked on the Crystal Palaces of both London and New York. It survived until 1911.

(Fig. 23. West Presbyterian Church. 1862-65. Jacob Wrey Mould. Photo from Valentine’s Manual, 1922. Public domain. For a plan and interior view, see Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians vol 28, 1969, p. 49)

The site was seventy-three feet wide on Forty-second Street and 200 feet long from south to north, although the church was not as long as the lot. It accommodated twelve hundred people on the principal floor and in three galleries held on thin iron supports.

The church had a prominent but shallow porch leading to a flat-ended sanctuary lit by large Gothic traceried side windows and round-arched windows behind the altar as well as a skylight in the nave roof. Portions of a grand pointed arch spanned the galleries, while a lower Gothic arch framed the raised pulpit and presbytery. Organ pipes decorated the ends of the galleries, and a row of low arches and square plaques, the latter perhaps of glazed terra cotta, clad the upper walls of the chancel. Despite the Gothic window tracery, the building’s exterior arches were all round in the Romanesque manner, revealing the freedom taken by nineteenth century designers when they used historic styles. A tower with a sharply pointed spire rose just west of the porch, and a broader, lower projection at the eastern edge of the site probably accommodated church offices and other functional spaces. The church had at first little effect on its surroundings, since there were empty lots on either side, but a photograph of 1876 shows solid row houses to the west of it and five-story buildings to the east.

The lot at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue was bare, the colonial-era building having been demolished. That lot marked the crossing of the former Steuben Street with Fifth Avenue, which met at angles because the earlier east-west street reflected compass points while the 1811 grid plan did not. The corner lot was therefore considerably wider than the lots to its north along Fifth Avenue and more expensive to buy.

Across Fifth Avenue, after a house owned by the Montagnie Ward family at the northeast corner there was a gap in development before some wooden buildings adjoined the railroad depot’s stables, storage, car house and maintenance facilities. By the early twentieth century when this photograph was taken, the area had developed and the building had been enlarged for commercial use.

(Fig 24. Montagnie Ward House, later Levi Morton house, later Hotel Meurice and Seymour Real Estare office, northeast corner of 42^nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Photo: The New York Historical, Baltes Billboard photo collection. Public domain. The house itself extended for three stories originally, and for five windows along Forty-second Street.)

On the south side, the House of Mansions that became the Rutgers Female Academy lent some elegance to the Fifth Avenue front, but the northern end rear extension bordered open space created by yards of the row houses on Forty-first Street. East of the Academy rose masonry-fronted buildings including the charitable Union Home at number 20, followed by large empty spaces on either side of Madison Avenue. In 1858, the Harlem Railroad proposed to lay a double track on Fourth and Madison Avenues (NYT 2 2 1858, p. 1; 4 l9 1859, p. 4; 3 7 1860 ,p. 4). Wooden buildings and the shoeing shop for the railroad’s horses did nothing to entice residents to the area. Neither did the locomotive house and frame buildings or the open lots between Fourth and Lexington Avenues.

Because the railroad proposed to build a more appealing depot structure, entrepreneurs Theodore Weston and James W. Pinchot realized that the area would attract more people who might be persuaded to shop before boarding the train or upon arrival. The railroads would reliably bring fresh produce daily from suppliers in the countryside. Consequently, these men planned the “first-class” Croton Market from the spring of 1869 onward, at the corner of Forty-second Street and Fourth Avenue. Architect Carl Pfeiffer designed it with 150 feet frontage on both Forty-second and Forty-third Streets. Including about 30,000 square feet and 156 market stalls, the building proposed such new features as a “mammoth refrigerator” 140 feet long for meat vendors, providing each butcher with a large wooden icebox. A fishmonger would draw customers with a fountain and a basin of goldfish. Good ventilation and light were to be assured by a roof of polychromed open timberwork and three 120-foot-long skylights. Hydrants would allow the building to be washed easily. Ladies could shop from their carriages in a wide center aisle. At the Forty-second street end, a second floor, 150 x 40 feet, with a mansard roof might be rented for public events, a restaurant, or whatever the traffic would bear (NYT 4 10 1869, p. 7; 6 27 1869, p. 8). Despite the appeal of these plans, they proved too grandiose to realize. Moreover, there was not yet sufficient population nearby to make it successful.

Not many land-holders developed property farther east, where house-sized lots hosted scattered masonry-fronted and simple wooden buildings, and where a brewery on the north side at number 111 emitted unpleasant odors. Another brewery, located on the Eastern Post Road at 145-147 East, supplied James Murtaugh’s tavern. (NYT 1 4 1931, p. RE15; Bromley map). At least one group of houses on the south block had skylights in the center to provide some ventilation to the interior. The Lutheran church of St. Luke at the southeast corner of Second Avenue occupied only one house-sized lot which explains its need to move west in 1875 when the local population increased. The Second Avenue Railroad Depot took up about a third of the northern block front, leaving much of the rest of the block empty, as was almost all of the north side from First Avenue to the river. A blacksmith serving the nearby shipyard, and a pen holder factory were the principal signs of life there.

The 1860s saw more consequential changes, particularly to the area around the inter-city railroad depot, which Cornelius Vanderbilt proposed to remodel after he consolidated several lines. In 1860, the city created a Department of Buildings after collaborating with officials from the Fire Department, American Institute of Architects, and the Mechanics’ and Tradesmen’s Society to replace the previous system of supervision primarily by fire wardens. (A History of Real Estate, Building, and Architecture in New York City during the last quarter of a century, New York, Real Estate Record and Guide, 1898, pp. 288-289.) From 1860 onward, families conveyed the lots on the west side of the Lexington Avenue block to the New York and Harlem Railroad Company. (66 John St. Block 1280) In 1864, Vanderbilt also bought the New York Central railroad, and consolidated it five years later with the Hudson River Railroad to form the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, a precursor of the much larger New York Central Railroad.^[15] These and smaller later purchases led to the construction of a proper station building, although an account of it belongs to the following chapters.

Occupants of houses in Murray Hill spent much time in the 1850s and later trying to get the railroad to move the steam train terminus to Forty-second Street from the north side of Madison Square. (New York Daily Times s.v. Railroad 1853-1858, esp. 9. 14 1858 p. 4.) The homeowners’ goal was to avoid having pollution-emitting trains pass their houses. The only amenity that the railroads offered to the city was the planting of grasses in grates above the open railway cut between Thirty-fourth and Fortieth streets; this later prompted the change of the street’s name to Park Avenue.

As the city’s population increased, those who could afford to leave the densely crowded downtown did so, using the trains, horsecars, and omnibuses that gradually increased service to the area even after the Crystal Palace and Latting Observatory disappeared. It was likely in anticipation of even greater movement that on Easter Sunday, 1865, the fervent young Reverend Stephen H. Tyng, Jr. opened an Episcopal chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and Forty-second Street, designed by Jacob Wrey Mould.

(Fig/ 25 Holy Trinity chapel, Jacob Wrey Mould, 1865, photo from Valentine’s Manual, Public domain.)

Set behind a fence and small garden, this was a modest building, designed as a low-rise structure of discrete parts forming an irregular skyline and suggesting a vernacular church in England. The materials were blue and Ohio yellow stone, brick laid in black mortar, and slate for the roof. It was not yet the far grander replacement for it that rose on the site from 1870 to 1874 when the need for an important Episcopal Church presence was confirmed.

Notices record other Protestant churches and benevolent institutions on Forty-Second Street, joining the aforementioned Presbyterian building. The Central Baptist church was founded as the Bloomingdale Baptist church in 1841.

(Fig. 26. Central Baptist church at left. Bruce Free Library, then St. Louis Academy (part). Photo The NewYork Historical, Robert L. Bracklow photographer. Public domain.)

Central’s cornerstone was laid in September 1862 at 220 West, with the collaboration of Volk & Co, masons, and D. Grinstead, a carpenter who completed work in 1863. It was almost 99 feet long and 61 feet wide, two stories high, with a basement of just over eleven feet to accommodate the Sabbath school and lectures. Its auditorium, 35 ½ feet high, accommodated a thousand people. Most of the structure was brick, but the façade was of Dorchester stone, a gray-green sandstone. A stable at the eastern corner lot and a marble works at numbers 29 and 31 did not enhance the reverential aspect of the neighborhood, but our photograph shows the later Bruce Free Library and an academy. The farthest western blocks were apparently left to the Roman Catholics, cared for by Holy Cross and a later parish close by.

Prominent families such as the Gerrys, Livingstons, Verplancks and Goelets owned lots on the north block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Some had been early investors in the area. (66 John St Block 1258). The family of Levi P. Morton, Vice-President of the United States (1889-92), owned lot l on the block from Fifth to Madison Avenues from 1871, having bought it from pharmaceuticals merchant Montagnie Ward and his wife, Susan, who had been the year-old building’s first buyer in 1861 (see above, Fig. 26.)

At number 45 West rose the Harmonie Social Club of New York. completed in 1867 to the design of Henry Fernbach (1829-83) who was likely a member. The club was organized in 1852 for families of German Jewish origin when co-religionists resigned from the Union League Club after a prominent Jew was refused membership. They then joined the Gesellschaft Harmonie, as the participants called it until 1894. Musical performances, banquets, and balls were frequent in the club’s concert hall, along with family-centered events that were uncommon in the gentlemen’s clubs of the era. There were even parlors and dressing rooms for women.

(H. Horatio Joyce, “Disharmony in the Clubhouse,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 78 #4, 2019, p. 424. The club’s records are at the New York Historical Society; for the building, see Subseries 1: General Minutes, Container 1 vols 1, 3.)

(Fig. 27. Harmonie Club, 1867, Henry Fernbach, from King’s Handbook, 1893, public domain.)

While Fernbach’s design for the Central Synagogue farther uptown on Lexington Avenue was a partly orientalist stylistic hybrid inspired by Berlin’s largest synagogue, the secular club building was designed as a dignified neo-Renaissance palazzo with a Second Empire mansard roof. After 1868 the club’s members prayed in their own eclectic orientalist Temple Emanu-El at Forty-third Street and Fifth Avenue designed by the Jewish-born architect, Leopold Eidlitz. They accepted an identification of Judaism and Jews with the near east, an idea then in vogue in Europe, but they socialized in buildings akin to those of the English-speaking majority. In 1897-98, architects Herts and Tallant remodeled the Harmonie’s interior. They altered the lower parts of the exterior and added a women’s annex at the east with a vestibule and reading areas below a dining room. A conservatory occupied the third floor. This work was intended to revise the main building from its family character into a men’s club like others in the city. (Joyce op cit., pp.428-9) The architect, Henry Beaumont Herts, may also have been a member of the club.

(Fig. 28. Harmonie Club as remodeled in 1897-98 by Henry Beaumont Herts. Postcard image by J. Koehler. Public domain)

As plans for the railroad depot became known to the public, a consequence was the planning of new hotels. A new and large one was announced in 1867 and finished a year later. At the southeast corner of the major intersection where Broadway approaches Seventh Avenue, stood the five-story seventy-foot-tall Second Empire style St. Cloud Hotel built apparently to the design of Richard Morris Hunt on land belonging to John Jacob Astor. The owner, Willetts D. James, Esq., ordered a red brick building with white stone trim, considered the “modern French style” of architecture.

(Fig. 29, St. Cloud Hotel, 1868, from Valentine’s Manual, courtesy Mark Tomasko. Public domain.)

When completed in 1868, the St. Cloud boasted an elevator, steam heat, and hot and cold water. Amenities supplementing the 130 suites of chestnut-paneled rooms included dining halls, a barroom, a reading room, and “elegant” furniture. (NYT 8 5 1867, p. 8; 5 4 1868, p. 1) Stern et al, New York 1880 p. 42, p. 1033 note 65). Even if its ornaments were as “uncouth” as the critic Montgomery Schuyler said they were, they probably didn’t bother the everyday patrons of the grocery store that faced the hotel or the telegraph office on the west side.

(Schuyler, critic for “Buildings on Broadway,” New York World 9 24 1871, p.3; ibid., l1 16 1871, p. 3; Delia Cobb, Storied Bars of New York, New York, W.W. Norton: Countryman Press, 2017 pp. 179ff.; https://www.geographicguide.com/united-states/nyc/antique/hotels/knickerbocker/st-cloud-hotel.htm.)

By the 1860s, there was considerable development along much of Forty-second Street, reflecting the need for building in a city that had seen its population increase from about 600,000 in 1850 to almost three times that number by 1870. By this time, too, businesses and residences occupied different districts, because businesses needed banks, a post office, shipping services, and other auxiliary facilities near them. Prosperous homeowners who did not want to be surrounded by commerce, or who were bought out, moved to residential areas usually toward the center of the island, where shops catered to domestic and personal needs. The working class occupied tenements that were located nearer the island’s edges, where hospitals, factories, and slaughterhouses dumped refuse into the rivers.

From the far west side with gasworks near the river and a railroad facility, past irregular groups of row houses and tenements on both sides of the street, there were still many undeveloped sites, but they would soon be filled in with facilities for commerce, even if some commercial premises had tenements above them. Most of the buildings ranged in width from fifteen to twenty-five feet, reflecting a combination of pricing, length of beams, and the market.

During the years framing the Civil War, some developers even built row houses east of Third Avenue, displacing the remaining denizens of Corcoran’s Roost. A developer, S. S. Stevens obtained sites between Second and First Avenues in 1869 or early 1870 and had architects Philip Hubert ad James Pirsson make plans for nineteen single-family officially first-class row houses, fifteen on Forty-second and four on Forty-first Street. Each had an English basement below three stories faced in tan Ohio stone, a tin roof, a galvanized iron cornice with dentils and brackets, a triangular pediment over the entrance, and sturdy cast iron stoop railings A builder named D. Wooding completed them in 1871. (LPC Designation Report Tudor City, p. 11, p. 13, notes 6, 7, photo of East 42 nd Street ). Not long afterward, those buildings lost their middle-class character because of the noxious industries that lined the East River. Homeowners rich enough to have housing options would have abhorred the occasional driving of animals from the railroad depot to riverfront slaughterhouses, even if those animal parades were officially prohibited below Forty-second Street after 1868. (Brooklyn Daily Eagle 6 22 68 p 3: https://bklyn.newspapers.com/search/results/?date=1868-06-22&keyword=cattle.) The lots closest to the river, where there were wooden sheds and very modest buildings as late as the 1920s, did not enhance land values nearby. Moreover, the presence of trains on Fourth Avenue (and then elevated trains on Second and Third Avenues after 1878) added noise, smoke, and soot to the area. Soon, the row houses became rooming houses, brothels, and tenements. Four survive, later upgraded, on Forty-first and Forty-third Streets, but Forty-second itself later became too developed and too expensive for single residences. Recognizing and encouraging this development, the City hired contractors to regulate and grade the roadbed from Second Avenue to the East River and a few years later, stone pavement was added there and between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. (NYT 7 16 1865, p. 7; 9 26 1868, p..2; 2 16 1869, p. 2)

At the East River’s edge stood the country’s first and largest lead-pencil factory, established by John Eberhard Faber in 1866. There had been a short-lived pen-holder factory on the site, and the enterprising German-American family replaced it, building a larger facility. It burned down six years later, at which point the company moved across the East River where it remained until its relocation to Pennsylvania in 1956. The owners surely realized that employees might not want to return to a site directly south of the city’s principal slaughterhouses.

Change in the street’s century and a half had been dramatic, but not as dramatic as it was to become in the next decades, when many residences yielded to commercial builders.