The Greatest Street in the World by Stephen Jenkins

Author:Stephen Jenkins [Jenkins, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Geschichte
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 2018-03-07T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER X. FROM UNION SQUARE

TO FORTY-SECOND STREET

AS before stated, the Bowery and Broadway were designed by the commission of 1807 to meet at the "tulip tree"; above this was the Bloomingdale road, into which the Bowery curved slightly from its route over that part of the present Fourth Avenue below Fourteenth Street. If the streets planned by the commission were cut through from east to west, there would be formed at this place a number of irregular blocks of inconvenient size and shape. To get out of this dilemma, the commission laid out at this point a small park where fresh air might be obtained when the city blocks should be built up. This park they called Union Place, because here was the union of the two principal thoroughfares of the island. In 1815, by act of the legislature, it became the public meeting-place, or commons, for the people of the city; but it was many years before it was used for anything else than for the shanties of the squatters who occupied the site. Like nearly all the public parks of the city, it had before 1815 been used as a potter's field. In 1832, the corporation determined to enlarge and regulate the place to its present area, from Fourteenth to Seventeenth streets and from Fourth Avenue to the extended north line of University Place. It was not until 1845, however, that with an expenditure of one hundred and sixteen thousand dollars, the park was put into shape and that the elegant mansions were erected which once surrounded the park, a few of which still remain as business places. Samuel B. Ruggles, one of the founders of the Bank of Commerce, was chiefly instrumental in developing as a fashionable part of the city this section as well as Gramercy Square.

In 1762, Elias Brevoort sold twenty-two acres of his farm, extending from the Bowery westward between the present Fourteenth and Sixteenth streets, to John Smith, from whose executors the farm passed in 1788 to Henry Spingler, a shop-keeper of New York, for nine hundred and fifty pounds. Spingler' s farmhouse stood within the limits of Union Square. Other farms as far as Twenty-third Street on the west side belonged to Thomas Burling, John Cowman, Isaac Clason, Sir Peter Warren, Isaac Varian, and Christian Milderberger. On the east side, were the two farms of Cornelius Williams and John Watts. At the comer of the present Seventeenth Street and the Bloomingdale Road was a square acre of ground belonging to the Manhattan Bank, acquired so it is supposed, as a sort of refuge for conducting business in case of being driven from the city by the yellow fever.

The hotel known as the Spingler House stood for many years on the west side of the square on the site now occupied by the Spingler building; on the south side, near University Place, was a fashionable restaurant called the Mai son Doree; on the southeast comer of Broadway and Fourteenth Street is the Hotel Churchill, formerly the Morton House, and originally the Union Place Hotel, established in 1850.

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