A Comprehensive Guide to the Five Boroughs of the Metropolis Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Richmond Prepared by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration in New York City (1939)

Preface

This volume is a detailed description of the communities and points of interest in all the five boroughs of New York City. It attempts, also, to indicate the human character of the city, to point out the evidence of achievements and shortcomings, urban glamor as well as urban sordidness. It is intended to give both the permanent resident and the visitor an intimate, accurate knowledge of the metropolis.

The New York City Guide is the companion volume to New York Panorama and is sponsored and published under the same auspices. The two are planned to complement one another. New York Panorama draws a large-scale interpretation of the city's life and history; the New York City Guide describes the component portions of the city.

The Guide represents a collective effort of employees of the Federal Writers' Project. They have been assisted by the suggestions and criticism of many distinguished authorities. The risk of error and omission always considerable in a work of this nature, despite every precaution is slightly increased by the fact that responsible authorities sometimes disagree. More serious is the problem of keeping pace, in print, with a dynamic metropolis that overnight replaces a century-old institution with a new triumph in modernity.

Thanks must be given to the hundreds of consultants and experts who generously contributed their advice. We are especially indebted to the Weyhe Gallery and the individual artists for permission to reproduce many prints, and to the Federal Art Project for photographs, prints, and art work. We are grateful, also, for the editorial assistance of the national office of the Federal Writers' Project, and of Harry L. Shaw, Jr., former Director of the Federal Writers' Project in New York City.

The opinions expressed in this book are the opinions of the writers and the editors and are not necessarily shared by the consultants, by the sponsors of the volume, or by the Works Progress Administration.

Plan of the Guide

Under General Information is given practical information about the city and its services : transportation lines to and from New York ; motor routes ; traffic rules ; street arrangement ; transit lines ; hotel and rooming house accommodations ; restaurants; amusements; sightseeing; boat trips, etc. A map showing the principal shopping centers in Manhattan is included. A calendar of Annual Events follows. The subway and elevated systems are shown on a pocket map inside the back cover, and an outline map of the City of New York will be found on pages 6-7.

Each of the five boroughs is treated individually. Manhattan has been divided into five Sections, starting at the Battery and working generally north : Lower Manhattan, Middle and Upper East Side, Middle West Side, The Harlems, Upper West Side and Northern Manhattan. Preceding the description of each Section are given the area of the Section and the sta tions of transit lines that serve it. The Section introduction sketches the historical background and gives the contemporary description. The Sections are divided into Localities, which are described, under commonly used names, in a general south to north order. A map showing the outlines of Sections and Localities appears on pages 54-55. Transit facilities within each Locality may be readily found by reference to the directions preceding the Section introduction. In general, transit lines follow principal streets, and the names of the lines indicate their routes. Where contiguous Locali ties merge so subtly that precise definition of them is impracticable, arbi trary boundaries have been established. Points of special interest in each Locality are dealt with in order again south to north with the conditions under which they may be visited.

A number of Major Points of Interest have been singled out for separate treatment. This list is not exhaustive; rather it is representative of the many widely known institutions and buildings in Manhattan. Cross refer ence to these points is made in the stories of the Localities in which they are situated.

Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Richmond (Staten Island) boroughs are taken up in that order. An introductory essay considers each borough as a whole and traces its history ; a map indicating all the communities and main highways within the borough is included. The borough is then split into large Sections for point-by-point description. Transportation directions, boundaries, and a detailed map accompany each Sectional description. Neighborhoods and points of interest follow an order generally away from Manhattan. Hours, fees, and other terms of admission are given for points of interest that are open to visitors. Many old houses in the outlying neighborhoods are privately owned and occupied, but if such a home, or a factory, or an institution, is regularly open for inspection, that fact is noted.

The harbor, the rivers, and their islands have been grouped in one Section. The islands at the western end of Long Island Sound, however, are described with the East Bronx.

Manhattan
Introduction 49
Facts About Manhattan 52
LOWER MANHATTAN
Introduction 57
Battery and Whitehall District 60
West Street and North (Hudson) River Water Front 68
Lower West Side 73
South Street 80
Wall Street District 84
City Hall District 94
Chinatown 104
Lower East Side 108
Greenwich Village 124

MIDDLE WEST SIDE
Introduction
Chelsea
Hell's Kitchen and Vicinity
Garment Center and Vicinity
Times Square District

MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE
Introduction
Gashouse District
Stuyvesant Square District
Gramercy Park District
Union Square District
Madison Square District
Kip's Bay and Turtle Bay
Murray Hill
Fifth Avenue Shopping District
Grand Central District
Beekman Place and Sutton Place
Central Park South, The Plaza, and Fifty-seventh Street
Upper Fifth, Madison, and Park Avenues
Yorkville

THE HARLEMS
Introduction
Negro Harlem
Spanish Harlem
Italian Harlem

UPPER WEST SIDE AND NORTHERN MANHATTAN
Introduction
Central Park West District
Riverside Drive
Morningside Heights and Manhattanville
Washington Heights
Inwood
Marble Hill

Brooklyn
Introduction
Downtown Brooklyn
North Brooklyn
West Brooklyn
Middle Brooklyn
East Brooklyn

The Bronx
Introduction
West Bronx
Middle Bronx
East Bronx
Queens
Introduction
North Queens
Middle Queens
South Queens
Richmond
Introduction
East and South Richmond
North and West Richmond

NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR 1939

New York City, chartered in 1898, consists of five boroughs, each also a county: Manhattan (New York County), the Bronx (Bronx County), Brooklyn (Kings County), Queens (Queens County), and Richmond, or Staten Island (Richmond County). Manhattan, the original New York City, founded 1626, is an island; population 1,684,543, area 22.20 square miles. Brooklyn (settled 1636), on Long Island, was formerly an independent city; population 2,798,093, area 80.95 square miles. The Bronx (settled 1641) is on the mainland north of Manhattan; population 1,499,090, area 41.41 square miles. Queens (settled about 1635) is on Long Island; population 1,346,659, area 121.12 square miles. Richmond (settled about 1638) is in the southwest corner of New York Bay; population 176,683, area 57.15 square miles.

The metropolitan area of New York City is the district within a radius of approximately 40 miles of City Hall and includes parts of New Jersey, Westchester County (N.Y.), Connecticut, and Long Island (see map on page 17). The population of the area in 1930 was nearly 11,000,000.

The city is governed by a mayor and a city council, the latter elected by a system of proportional representation. A president, with certain local duties and powers, heads each of the five boroughs. The county affairs of the various boroughs are conducted independently of the municipal government.

TRANSPORTATION

There are four types of urban transit in New York City: subways, elevated railways (els), busses, and surface cars. The fare is 50 on all lines, except the Fifth Avenue Coach Co. (io0) and certain routes in outlying parts of the city. Subways link all the boroughs except Staten Island, which is accessible only by the municipal ferry (5$). Three el lines serve Manhattan and the Bronx, and five serve Brooklyn and parts of Queens; all points in Queens are also reached by the Long Island Railroad. In Manhattan, surface lines, mostly bus, are the chief means of cross-town travel.

Staten Island has a bus system and a railway, the Staten Island Rapid Transit Co. (see map on page 599), both with terminals at the St. George Ferry. The Hudson and Manhattan Railroad (Hudson Tubes) is a rapid transit service between New York and Newark, N. J.

YACHT AND BOAT BASINS

Anchorages, marinas, and landing stages are available for pleasure craft.

ANCHORAGES. About 40 anchorages in port of New York. For permits and information apply to Captain of the Port, Barge Office, Battery Park. LANDING STAGES. PIER 9, foot of Wall St., East River; PIER A, Battery Park, Hudson River. For information apply to Department of Docks, New York City. MARINAS. 26TH ST., East River; j^rn ST., 96TH ST., and ENGLEWOOD, N. J., Hudson River; JACKSON'S CREEK BOAT BASIN, Flushing Bay, Queens, Long Island Sound. For information apply to General Superintendent, Department of Parks, New York City; for New Jersey marinas apply to Palisades Interstate Park Commission, 80 Centre St.

Manhattan

Manhattan

THE liner steams through the Narrows (the Normandie, Queen Mary, Bremen; the dozen greatest ships of the world, sailing from Liverpool, Southampton, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Havre, Genoa, head for that narrow strip of water and steam dexterously through it, turn precisely toward the slender island toward the north). Out of an early morning fog come brooding, ghostly calls. A dark blotch appears, takes form an anchored tramp: coffee from Brazil, rubber from Sumatra, bananas from Costa Rica and slowly disappears; another liner is suddenly moving alongside, also steaming northward, and then dissolves into the white nothing. Invisible ferries scuttle, tooting, across the harbor.

The Limited, bearing a sight-seeing family (there are 115,000 of them daily from Waco, Mobile, Los Angeles, Kansas City), the literary genius of Aurora High School, the prettiest actress in the Burlington dramatic club, a farm boy hoping to start for Wall Street, and a mechanic with an idea, pounds across the state of New Jersey. They cross the meadows, see far off the great wall of the city and dive into the darkness beneath Jersey City and the Hudson River. Or perhaps the train comes from Winnipeg, Gary, Erie, and follows the Hudson toward its mouth or crosses the Hell Gate from New England.

In the city, night workers, their footsteps sharp, irregular on the quiet streets, return home. A water wagon rolls by. Bands are still playing in half a dozen night clubs. In the Upper East Side, in the Upper West Side, in the Gashouse and Hell's Kitchen, in Chelsea and Greenwich Village, the faint and broken ringing of alarm clocks comes to the empty street. Another day, another dollar. Don't forget to tell the laundryman not to starch my shirts! Slowly the air between the buildings fills with light.

The crowd increases with the light, a black moving mass, workbound; a million pale faces; a clicking of heels that swells to one sustained roll of thunder. The roar of the city shoots up to encompass it. A rivet overhead pierces the sultry sky; another shakes the earth. He took me to the Paradise. He's been to college. We came home in a taxi. The voice is lost in the rumble of an elevated train jammed with work-going clerks gazing at a woman leaning out of the window at 124th Street.

The morning sun picks out an apartment house, a cigar store, streams through the dusty windows of a loft. The racket swells with the light. These shoes are killing me, she said, taking the cover off the typewriter. Main Central is up to jorty-six. Did you read about the earthquake? Looms, shears, jackhammers, trolley cars, voices, add to the din. And in the quieter streets the hawker with the pushcart moves slowly by. Badabadabada O Gee! Hawkers of vegetables, plants, fruit. Badabadabada O Gee!

In half a million rooming-house rooms the call penetrates ill-fitting windows. The boy who came to be a writer is waked in his mid-town room and dresses for his shift on the elevator. In Chelsea the girl who came to be an actress launders her stockings. The boy who was going to Wall Street sprawls on his bed, wincing as each cry cuts into his dream of the smell of fresh hay and warm milk. A deep blast rises, drowning the sound of hawkers, children, automobiles. The Conte di Savoia steams up the river; wine from Capri, olive oil from Spain, figs and dates from North Africa.

Shouting screaming kids fill the streets, playing baseball, football, hopscotch, jump-rope, dodging swift-moving trucks and taxis. Down Fifth Avenue marches a May Day parade sixty thousand strong. Solidarity forever, solidarity forever, the portentous tramp, tramp of regimented feet; slogans called, banners flying. Up lower Broadway an open car moves slowly through the yelling throng and on its pulled-back hood, laughing, waving into the snowstorm that flutters thickly downward from high-up windows, sits a returned aviator, explorer, movie actor, champion chess player, the first man to walk the length of Manhattan backwards.

The late afternoon sunshine glitters on windshields, chauffeurs' caps, on Parisian gowns, Chinese ivories, ebony from Africa, Mexican pottery, and furs from Siberia. Driving back from Southampton in the fall we used to sit up in front with the chauffeur. Aunt Helen had a staircase in her house that cost fifteen thousand dollars. He died right in the middle of the depression. Smells of cooking fill the corridors. The lights go on in a loft on a side street, in an office on the thirty-fourth floor of the Empire State Building, along the streets and the bridges. The tugs are riding with port and starboard lights.

The sun leaves the highest of the city's buildings. There are no steamship blasts but loud now are the hoarse pipings of tugs, the yap of ferries with homeward-bound crowds. I've worked overtime three nights in a row. Two martinis. Did you see the way he looked at me when I put on my hat and walked out? The light burns out at the foot of 23d Street, 22d Street, 2ist, 2Oth, ipth . . .

The light leaves the flat roofs of the ghetto along the river. Here is the greatest city of the Jews. Here, all unconscious of exoticism, thousands of persons celebrate bar mitzvah, sit shiva for their dead. Streets littered with papers, bags of garbage shooting out of windows, lines of pushcarts selling food, neckties, pictures, bric-a-brac.

East Side, West Side, all around the town, boys and girls together hanging around shop doors; whispering, giggling in tenement hallways, in courtyards smelling of backhouses. The world's most populous Italian city outside of Italy spends the sultry night on doorsteps, standing, sprawling on sidewalks of broken cement. So with the world's third Irish city. The world's Negro metropolis is the most crowded of all. Home has scarcely room to hang one's hat, which instead is hung in churches, club rooms, rent parties. And in the Upper West Side fifty thousand families will be reading the newspaper by the sitting room table; fifty thousand Upper East Side families will be finishing a quiet game of bridge or sitting at the library table; and among the thousand already asleep on the Lower East Side will be a large number of old timers who have never seen Broadway.

With final blast, quivering over the harbor, a liner moves out of its docks; southern cotton for Liverpool, northwestern wheat for Bordeaux, Kansas City hides for Brazil, Virginia tobacco, Massachusetts shoes, Chicago canned meats, lumber from the Pacific Coast.

The ship moves along the path of a thousand living steamers, past the ghosts of ten thousand sailing vessels and steamships; vessels that brought the Dutch, the English and their goods, Negro slaves, West Indian rum, British textiles, Australian wool, German machinery.

Night draws to a close. Bands are still playing behind the closed doors of half a dozen night clubs. The river wind lifts yesterday's paper the length of a block. A water wagon rolls by. A solitary taxi tracks the wet paving. Goodnight darling, goodnight, goodnight.

A blast from the far-off Narrows whispers through the dead streets; spruce from Norway, asbestos from South Africa, German, Austrian, Polish, Italian refugees.

FACTS ABOUT MANHATTAN

It's a tight little island, 12 l/ 2 miles at its longest, 2 l/ 2 at its widest, covering 14,211 acres, rising from its surrounding rivers to a height of about 268 feet near Fort Tryon Park, and standing at about latitude 40 N., longitude 73 W. 1,688,769 persons were listed as living here in 1938. 217,976,370 commuters in 1936 traveled into and out of town by way of Manhattan's 20 bridges, 18 tunnels, and 17 ferries, while an average of 115,000 noncommuting visitors are said to pour into town daily through the great railway terminals. For the accommodation of these visitors there are 326 hotels which have a total assessed valuation of $47979350.

Transportation within Manhattan is furnished by rapid transit systems of subways and elevated lines (owned by the city but operated both municipally and privately), which in the year ending June 30, 1938, carried 1,038,499,269 passengers; by street surface railways, which in the same year carried 70,936,650 passengers; by busses carrying 312,426,522 and by the 6,893 taxicabs licensed to operate in the borough in 1938.

Two districts, the first lying between the Battery and City Hall, the second bounded by Twenty-third and Fiftieth Streets and lying approximately between Ninth and Park Avenues, contain a high percentage of blocks in which a population of more than 5,000 work during the day. It was estimated in 1936 that 62.6 per cent of Manhattan's land was used for residential purposes and 22.9 per cent for nonresidential. Nearly all the remainder, 14.25 per cent, is given over to parks, of which there are 93 with a combined area of 2,303.897 acres.

In 1937, 24,550 Manhattanites were born, 29,441 couples were married, and 25,228 died. The number of church members was estimated as 853,972. The foreign-born white population was set at 641,618 in 1930. In 1927 there were 465,000 Jewish residents, or 25.71 per cent of the total population. Negroes in 1930 numbered 224,670; Italians, 117,740; Free State Irish, 86,548; Russians, 69,685; Germans, 69,111; Poles, 59,120. These were the principal race and language groups in Manhattan. The borough lost 170,821 of its residents between 1930 and 1938, and this shifting of population represents a trend that is likely to continue as a result of the development of cheap transportation to the suburbs. Though realtors have been shaking their heads, Manhattan land was assessed at $3,962,738,145 in 1938. The largest rental group of tenants, 36.5 per cent, paid from $30 to $59 a month in 1936, while 20.7 per cent paid $19 a month or less and 18.6 per cent, $60 or more. In 1937, 297 new buildings were erected at an estimated total cost of $60,775,^50.

297,446,059 shares of stock, worth $1,859,525,825, changed hands at the New York Stock Exchange in the year 1938. Retail trade amounting to $1,462,499,000 was carried on in 41,233 stores in 1935. 18,694 manufacturing establishments in 1935, employing throughout the year an average of 288,036 workers and paying them $359,893,432 in wages, added $1,322,533,066 to the worth of materials which had already cost them $1,110,223,156. Manhattan docks received a large percentage of the 3,547 vessels of a net tonnage of 20,291,204 which entered the port of New York in the year ending June 30, 19^8, while a proportionate share of the $650,252,600 in gold and silver and $1,160,726,960 in merchandise imported, and of the exports amounting to $50,780,694 in gold and silver and the $1,238,331,380 in merchandise was handled here.

In 1937 there were 231 homicides in the borough. In 1936, 78 were convicted of homicide; 274, felonious assault; 485, burglary; 422, robbery; 493, grand larceny; 94, forgery; 8, arson, and 76, rape. Fire Department engines and trucks in 1937 went shrieking to 9,042 fires and kept the losses down to $2,647,970. Seventy-three hospitals looked after the islands' sick and incapacitated. The home relief case load as of October 22, 1938, was 68,121. 243,899 students were enrolled in various public institutions of learning, of whom 126,375 attended elementary school; 39,284, junior high school; 55,231, high school; and 23,009, vocational schools.

Of the city's water supply gushing down from 22 reservoirs, Manhattan and the Bronx consumed in 1937 545,400,000 gallons a day. 2,794,445,326 kilowatt hours of electricity and 20,530,875,700 cubic feet of gas were used in Manhattan in 1937, and in 1938, 897,579 telephones were in active operation.

The 40 to 50 legitimate theaters in Manhattan are patronized yearly by about 8,500,000. It is reported that 218 motion-picture houses were doing business as of April, 1937, and 1938 saw something like 300 night clubs in more or less continuous operation. Twenty-nine museums and a zoological garden furnish educational recreation for the more serious-minded, and 73 art galleries were listed in December, 1938.

OUTLINE MAP

MANHATTAN LOCALITIES AND SECTIONS

SECTION BOUNDARIES

LOCALITY BOUNDARIES

LOWER MANHATTAN

Battery and Whitehall District

West St. and North (Hudson) River Water Front

Chinatown
Lower East Side
Greenwich Village

Lower West Side

South Street

Wall Street District

City Hall District MIDDLE WEST SIDE

Chelsea

Hell's Kitchen and Vicinity

Garment Center and Vicinity

Times Square District MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

Gashouse District

Stuyvesant Square District

Gramercy Park District

Union Square District

Madison Square District

Kip's Bay and Turtle Bay

Murray Hill

Fifth Avenue Shopping District

Grand Central District

Beekman Place and Sutton Place

Central Park South, the Plaza, and Fiftyseventh Street

Upper Fifth, Madison, and Park Avenues

Yorkville

THE HARLEMS
Negro Harlem
Spanish Harlem
Italian Harlem

UPPER WEST SIDE AND NORTHERN MANHATTAN

Central Park West District
Riverside Drive
Morningside Heights and Manhattanville
Washington Heights
Inwood
Marble Hill

"It is as beautiful a land as one can hope to tread upon," said Henry Hudson.

Lower Manhattan

BATTERY AND WHITEHALL DISTRICT
WEST STREET AND NORTH (HUDSON)
RIVER WATER FRONT LOWER WEST SIDE
SOUTH STREET WALL STREET DISTRICT
CITY HALL DISTRICT CHINATOWN
LOWER EAST SIDE GREENWICH VILLAGE

Area: Battery on the south to i4th St. on the north; Hudson River to East River. Map on pages 54-55 Principal north-south streets: Broadway, West St., Hudson St., Varick St. (and 7th Ave.), 6th Ave., Chrystie St. (and 2d Ave.), Allen St. (and ist Ave.). Principal cross streets: Fulton St., Chambers St. (and New Chambers St.), Canal St., Broome St. (and Delancey St.), Houston St., and i4th St.

Transportation: IRT Broadway-yth Ave. subway (local), South Ferry to i4th St. stations; IRT Lexington Ave. subway (local), Bowling Green to i4th St. stations; BMT subway (local), Whitehall St. to Union Square stations; 8th Ave. (Independent) Grand Concourse or Washington Heights subway, Broadway-Nassau St. to 1 4th St. stations; 8th Ave. (Independent) Queens-Church Ave. subway, East Broadway to i4th St. stations; 2d, 3d, or 9th Ave. el, South Ferry to i4th St. stations; busses on all principal north-south and cross streets except West St., Fulton St., and Broome St.

THE FLAT lower end of Manhattan, between the Battery and Fourteenth Street, is the oldest section of the city and the richest in historical associations. Today it has become a commercial, financial, and industrial center where steamship docks crowd one another, and ferries, subways, elevated lines, bridges, and traffic arteries converge and spread fanwise, distributing people and merchandise to every section of the Nation.

In the extreme south is the Battery and Whitehall district, in whose skyscrapers, overlooking the Goddess of Liberty and the ships that pass out to sea, are concentrated the executive offices of transatlantic lines, of exporters and importers, and of consular representatives of foreign nations. West Street, fronting the Hudson River, and edged with busy docks, is the main highway for the city's incoming and outgoing supplies. On the Lower West Side are the produce markets, the dark streets of Manhattan's Syrian colony, and numerous warehouses interspersed with tenements.

Broadway, the nation's foremost thoroughfare, starts at the Battery and bisects lower Manhattan. Below Chambers Street it reflects the varied character of the downtown neighborhood ; then it becomes a street of bare lofts and garment factories, whose aspect has changed little in half a century. East of Broadway, above the Battery, the tall buildings of the financial district surround Wall Street ; skirting them to the east is South Street, the city's maritime center in the days of sailing ships where now railroad and freight barges are warped into dock by puffing tugs, and the smell from anchored fishing boats drifts inland.

City Hall Park and Foley Square, with their municipal, State, and Federal buildings, lie to the north of Wall Street; and beyond is little, crowded Chinatown. The Bowery, sinister street of lurid fiction and drama, starts below the eastern edge of Chinatown and runs northward beneath the rumbling elevated. Stretching approximately from Broadway to the East River and north to Fourteenth Street is the Lower East Side, crowded slum area of many nationalities, but noted chiefly for its concentrated Jewish population. Greenwich Village, with meandering streets, tenements, and charming old houses, marks the northwest terminus of lower Manhattan.

Prior to the completion of the Erie Canal, the story of Lower Manhattan was largely that of the whole city. In contrast to Boston, Philadelphia, and other Colonial settlements, New Amsterdam, belonging to the Dutch West India Company, was founded in 1626 mainly for commercial reasons. As time passed, the little trading post became the market place and financial capital of the rapidly expanding colony. Almost from the first, commercial establishments began a ceaseless march northward, encroaching upon steadily retreating residential districts. The Wall Street stockade, built in 1653 by the Dutch at the town's northern limit, was removed by the British in 1699; by I 77 I tne c ity> w * tn 22,000 population, extended to Grand Street; and after the Revolution the movement northward reached Greenwich Village, accelerated by the yellow fever epidemics at the turn of the century.

Under English rule, following New Amsterdam's surrender in 1664, two great steps toward freedom were taken here. A free press was assured in 1735 as a result of the trial of John Peter Zenger, editor of the NewYork Weekly Journal, and liberty of worship was firmly established early in the eighteenth century.

The history of New York during the Revolution is less notable than that of Boston and other large towns, since the British occupied Manhattan for almost the entire duration of the war. Early in the conflict, however, liberty poles had been erected on the Common (now City Hall Park), and the lead statue of George III in Bowling Green had been melted into bullets for the Colonists' cause. After the Revolution, New York (the city still consisted of the lower part of the island) boasted of being the first capital of the United States of America. Though suffering temporary setbacks, New York, like several other major American cities, grew rapidly in the next fifty years. In 1792 an embryonic stock exchange was modestly inaugurated under a Wall Street tree. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the expansion of the West began the process which soon made New York the market place and banker of half a continent, and the primary gateway to Europe. By 1830 the population was 202,589; by 1860 the rising tide of immigration, which was to sweep the city in successive waves for another half-century, had helped to raise the total to 813,669. After the Civil War the Erie Canal lost much of its importance, but by this time New York, with its superb harbor formation, had already attracted a tremendous foreign commerce, and it now became also a railroad center, with many of its freight terminals located across the Hudson.

The more spectacular side of nineteenth-century New York history is associated with lower Manhattan. As early as the i83o's Tammany Hall had discovered the advantages to be derived for itself from the vote of the unassimilated immigrant, and City Hall became the pawn of a group of men whose main object was to deplete the public treasury. The infamous operations of the Tweed Ring in the i86o's and early 1 870*5, and of other early Tammany politicians, belongs to the past of this older part of the city. Following the Civil War, Wall Street, only a few short blocks south of City Hall, began its more ambitious career as financial controller of the nation.

The history of Lower Manhattan has, however, another side. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries "Newspaper Row" was situated on Park Row. Here James Gordon Bennett, Joseph Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst fought their sensational battles. Lincoln Steffens discoursed on political corruption, and Richard Harding Davis and O. Henry spun their tales O. Henry finding in this exciting, chaotic, sordid section of the city much material for the stories of "Baghdad on the Subway."

With increasing rapidity, the residential areas receded northward. About the 1850*5 aristocratic St. John's Park began to yield to commerce, and the well-to-do were to be found only in the purlieus of Lower Manhattan, around Greenwich Village. By the time the World War was declared, only a small number of the city's more prosperous residents remained below Fourteenth Street, chiefly in mansions around Washington Square and lower Fifth Avenue.

Beginning in the i88o's Greenwich Village was occupied by the Irish and Negroes, and later by Italians. At approximately the same time, the Germans and Irish of the Lower East Side were supplanted by Italians, Russians, Poles, and to an even greater extent by East European Jews, who, despite poverty, filth, and overcrowding retained their native gaiety and hope. Today, a change is appearing in the Lower East Side; though it is still a slum area, the old "lung" blocks are slowly giving way before widened avenues and new apartment houses.

The settlement there of an increasing number of artists and painters in the 1910*5 gave Greenwich Village national prominence as an artistic and literary center.

Except for the East Side and Greenwich Village, lower Manhattan is now almost entirely devoted to commerce and finance. In the Wall Street district skyscrapers multiplied rapidly after the turn of the century until building was halted by the stock market crash of 1929. Park Row is no longer Newspaper Row, but an adjunct to the commercial district. Old landmarks were erased by the postwar building boom ; and a solid wall of giant structures, almost unbroken from the Battery to Fourteenth Street, hides the busy traffic of the Hudson River.

BATTERY AND WHITEHALL DISTRICT

Area: South of Battery Place, Beaver St., and Old Slip. Map on page 63.

The Battery, threshold of Manhattan, spreads in a decided arc along the North River shore at the southernmost extremity of the island, where East and North rivers empty their sediment into the Upper Bay. West Street (see page 68), rumbling with the trucks that serve almost a hundred North River docks, extends northward from the Battery. Massive blocks of office buildings and the structure that carries the final stretch of the Ninth Avenue el fill the rest of the northward view until, at the northeast corner of the park, Bowling Green opens out in an irregular plaza; from here Broadway cuts a clean northbound way through the towering stonework of the lower island. Squared ponderously against Bowling Green, south, is the U.S. Custom House. North, nearest the river, is the Whitehall Building. The name "Battery" derives from a British fort built along the river in 1693.

The curve of the present el on the park's east border and Pearl Street, extending east, mark the original shore line. The rest of the area is filled-in land. Beyond the el structure are State Street and the conglomerate skyscraper contours that mount toward Broad and Wall Streets. At the southeast corner of the park opens the great plaza of South Ferry, where all forms of Manhattan's transportation subway, el, ferry, bus, and taxi have a compact major terminus, and where the heavy traffic artery, South Street (see page 80), opens out opposite, bordering the docks to the east.

The BATTERY is as attractive to water gazers now as when Herman Melville wrote of "Men fixed in ocean reveries. . . . Landsmen: of week days pent up in lathe and plaster tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite."

But the park is more than a Sunday and holiday attraction ; it is a welcome breathing space in an area dominated by marine commerce. From the sea wall that bounds its twenty-one acres can be viewed the busy traffic of the North River liners, tugs with tows of barges and scows, lowriding Diesel cargo boats from the Barge Canal, passenger steamers of the Hudson lines, and ferries plying cross-river and cross-harbor from the row of terminal rail and marine docks on the Jersey shore. Only one railroad has entry for its freight into Manhattan by land; the bulk of the railroad freight must be transshipped by tug and barge.

Southwest appears the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe Island (see page 411), and beyond it is Ellis Island and the great immigrant station (see page 415). Five miles down the bay rise the abrupt hills of Staten Island. South by southeast lies Governors Island (see page 413), military reservation, with Castle Williams, twin fort to Castle Clinton the present Aquarium standing grimed and grim on its highest headland. Between Staten Island and Brooklyn is the Narrows, the strait connecting the Upper Bay with the Lower Bay and the sea. Plans for a suspension bridge, between the Battery and Hamilton Avenue, Brooklyn, were approved by the City Council early in 1939. The estimate of the cost was $41,200,000.

Central in popular attraction as well as in prominence among the buildings of Battery Park is the Aquarium (see page 307), set close beside the river. At one time it served as an immigration station.

Some immigrants are still landed at the Battery after examination at Ellis Island. A Government (Department of Labor) ferry disembarks them at the BARGE OFFICE, at the southeast extremity of the park. A second ferry, operated by the Army, plies between the Barge Office and Governors Island. From Colonial times to the Civil War a barge served as transport between the office and the island, and it was this circumstance that gave the office its name. The original Barge Office was a charming Colonial structure surmounted by a tall cupola from which a beacon shone at night. The present building is an exceptionally interesting work in the style of the Venetian Renaissance, and it is one of the few buildings in Manhattan with a street arcade. The Barge Office building contains branch offices of the Customs Service, Coast Guard, and Immigration Service. Here, too, ship-news reporters gather to meet incoming liners, for it is from the Barge Office that Customs cutters leave to meet those ships that heave to at Quarantine for sanitary inspection on entering the port. A TABLET at the western end of the building bears the names of radio operators lost at sea.

Southeast of the Barge Office is the bow-roofed, painted building of the SOUTH FERRY TERMINAL, its upper deck invaded by the el structure. From here, powerful steam ferries carry trucks, pleasure cars, and passengers to St. George, Staten Island, in about twenty minutes (see page 410).

At the north end of the park is PIER A, second oldest structure on the water front, occupied by the Department of Docks and the Police Department's Harbor Precinct. A clock tower at the edge of the pier is a memorial to soldiers and sailors killed in the World War. The clock sounds the signals for the watches kept on shipboard, and also shows the time by dial. Adjacent is a boat basin where police boats are tied beside pleasure craft. At the end of the sea wall is the two-story city FIREBOAT STATION, its tower overlooking the harbor. This is the headquarters for a fleet of ten fireboats protecting about 771 miles of New York and New Jersey waterfront. The i3O-foot Fire Fighter, powerful enough to throw a stream over George Washington Bridge, is berthed beside the building.

Midway along the sea wall is a squat building used as a TICKET OFFICE for excursion boats. Craft bound for the Jersey side of the Lower Bay and steamboats fo/ Coney Island leave from this point. The Battery boatmaster, Peter (Buck) McNeill, who has his office here, keeps a sharp watch for would-be suicides to whom this is a favorite spot.

BATTERY

AND WHITEHALL DISTRICT

KEY TO BATTERY AND WHITEHALL DISTRICT MAP

1. Whitehall Building U.S. Weather Bureau

2. Department of Docks Police Harbor Precinct

3. Fireboat Station

4. Aquarium

5. Statue of Giovanni da Verrazano

6. Statue of John Ericsson

7. Flagpole (Evacuation Day)

8. Oyster Pasty Battery Cannon

9. Barge Office

10. South Ferry Terminal Staten Island Ferry Slip

11. South Ferry Building

12. Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary

13. U.S. Army Building

14. U.S. Custom House

15. Statue of Abraham de Peyster

16. Cunard Building

17. Standard Oil Building

18. New York Produce Exchange

19. Fraunces Tavern

20. Site of First Tavern and City

Hall in New York

21. Site of the First Printing Press

It was on the original rocky finger of land that the first Dutch colonists built their huts and a simple breastwork later called Fort Amsterdam. In 1626 Peter Minuit, governor of the new settlement, "bought" the island from the Manhattoes for cloth and fripperies worth about twentyfour (gold standard) dollars. Administered by the Dutch West India Company, New Amsterdam was the scene of frequent disputes between its inhabitants and its governors. Englishmen, Jews, and other colonists, traders, and adventurers from many lands, had, however, settled there among the Dutch by 1664, when a British war fleet appeared to demand the surrender of the town to the Duke of York, who had received from his brother, Charles II, a grant embracing the present state of New York, the islands off the New England coast, and part of the present state of Maine. Despite the efforts of Director Peter Stuyvesant, the burghers refused to defend New Amsterdam, and the English flag was run up without opposition. It remained there until the Revolution, except for one year, during which the armed naval forces of the Dutch Republic retook it and undertook to carry on under Dutch rule; the settlement was returned to England under a treaty made in the Old World.

Names, plaques, and statues in the park recall the early history of the Battery. A bronze STATUE OF GIOVANNI DA VERRAZANO, Florentine navigator who is said to have entered the harbor in 1524, stands in the park. On a granite FLAGSTAFF base, Minuit is shown making his deal with the natives. A CANNON believed to have been part of the armament of the Oyster Pasty Battery (1695-1783) has been preserved. A FLAGPOLE commemorates the one greased on Evacuation Day, November 25, 1783, to prevent the hauling down of the British flag by the American troops. And a bronze FIGURE OF JOHN ERICCSON honors the memory of the designer of the Monitor, first turreted battleship, and the screw propeller. The street bordering the park on the north is Battery Place.

From the Battery, streets wind their way in erratic angles. Colonial brick, nineteenth-century sandstone, and modern steel- skeletoned office buildings stand side by side. Clerks, maritime employees, Custom House officials, stenographers, sailors on shore leave, Army and Navy men, South Street lodging house indigents, commuters to Staten Island and Brooklyn, and tourists move along together.

The sea dominates this virile neighborhood. Sou'westers, sea boots, pea jackets, and dungarees are displayed in the shop windows along the side streets. Model ocean liners and colorful posters advertise offices of the great STEAMSHIP AGENCIES along Broadway, while sandwich men mutely call attention to passport photo studios.

State Street, bordering Battery Park on the east, was the town's most fashionable thoroughfare until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the wealthy residents began moving uptown. Here were the homes of the merchant princes, known as the "Peep-o'-Day Boys," because they arose at dawn to peer across the harbor at Staten Island where signal staffs flashed news of ships sighted beyond the Narrows. One residence, No. 7, between Pearl and Whitehall Streets, survives, almost merged with the contemporary drabness of neighboring buildings under the winding el. Its tall white columns and delicate ironwork balcony still suggest the opulence of another day. The interior, with its fine old hand-carved mantelpieces, may be seen by permission of the Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary, which for many years has maintained the dwelling as a HOME FOR IMMIGRANT GIRLS. The house, it is believed, was built according to plans drawn by John McComb, one of the architects of the present City Hall. On the site of the South Ferry Building near by, at i State Street, once stood the homes of Peter Stuyvesant and Robert Fulton, the inventor. Opposite the main entrance of the South Ferry Building, is the U.S. ARMY BUILDING, 39 Whitehall Street. This red-brick structure with a two-story granite foundation, conservatively built in 1886 in the style of a generation earlier, houses many Army departments of the New York district, such as the recruiting, information, and pictorial services, and an engineers' unit.

Facing Bowling Green, between State and Whitehall Streets, is the CUSTOM HOUSE, in which are the offices of the Collector of Customs of the Port of New York, and the headquarters of Custom Collection District No. 10 (which embraces the sub-ports of Albany, Newark, and Perth Amboy). Other offices in the building are those of the Comptroller of Customs, the Surveyor of Customs, the Collector of Internal Revenue for the Second New York District, the Coast Guard, the Tariff Commission, the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office, the Bureau of Statistics of the Department of Commerce, and Station P of the New York Post Office.

The building, somewhat ponderous in its neoclassic treatment, was designed by Cass Gilbert. It was completed in 1907 at a cost of more than seven million dollars, including the price of the land. Seven stories high, the masonry is Maine granite, heavily embellished with dolphins, tridents, and other nautical symbols. On pedestals advancing from the front of the building are four heroic sculptured groups by Daniel Chester French, representing Asia, America, Africa, and Europe. Across the sixth story are twelve statues dedicated to commercial centers of the world: Greece and Rome, by F. E. Elwell; Phoenicia, by F. W. Ruckstull; Genoa, by Augustus Lukeman; Venice and Spain, by F. M. L. Tonetti; Holland and Portugal, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens ; Denmark, by Johannes Gellert ; Germany, by Albert Jaegers ; England and France, by Charles Grafly. A cartouche by Karl Bitter, on the seventh floor, depicts two winged figures bearing the shield of the United States. Ten paintings by Elmer E. Garnsey, representing world ports as they appeared in 1674 when the Dutch flag last floated over Fort Amsterdam, are on the walls of the reception room in the main corridor.

The Custom House occupies the site of Fort Amsterdam, whose four bastions, corresponding to the points of the compass, commanded both the North and East rivers. The fort, including a governor's house built for Peter Stuyvesant, was demolished in 1790. On its site a mansion, known as the Government House, was erected. At the time, ambitious New Yorkers, hoping their city would become the nation's capital, intended the mansion for the President's home. It was used by Governors Clinton and Jay, and later did service as a customhouse until destroyed by fire in 1815.

In Colonial days Battery Place, which bounds Battery Park on the north, was a much wider street and was known by its Dutch name, Marcktveldt; later this was anglicized to Marketfield. This thoroughfare was the site of New Amsterdam's first cattle market. The WHITEHALL BUILDING at No. 17, which occupies the entire block between West and Washington Streets, comprises two buildings. The original twenty-story edifice, facing the park, was built in 1900; a thirty-two-story addition was completed in 1910. Many leading shipping companies and a number of consulates have their offices in this building. Above these is the office of the U.S. WEATHER BUREAU, with an instrument shed on the roof.

Standing at the foot of the deep sunless canyon of lower Broadway is BOWLING GREEN, probably the city's oldest public park. Here, according to the legend, astute Peter Minuit made the bargain that gave Manhattan to the white man. In 1638-47 this oval spot was part of the hog and cattle market of Marcktveldt. Later, it served as a parade ground for the Dutch militia. The English fenced off the plot and in 1732 leased it to three citizens for use as a private bowling ground. The rent was set at one peppercorn a year. During the Revolution, the royal crowns ornamenting the fence pickets disappeared. A bronze STATUE OF ABRAHAM DE PEYSTER, merchant and one-time mayor of the city (1691-5), by George Bissell, has stood here since 1896.

East of Bowling Green is the dark red-brick and terra-cotta building of the NEW YORK PRODUCE EXCHANGE erected in 1881-2 from plans by George B. Post. The design of the exterior bearing walls is derived from that of a Roman aqueduct: the arched openings, arranged in long orderly lines, double in number as they rise. Inside, the produce brokers busy themselves trading and watching the quotation boards from the floor. The boards display Chicago, Winnipeg, Minneapolis, Duluth, St. Louis, and Kansas City grain prices, and New York and New Orleans cotton prices as well as those of foreign markets. The Produce Exchange is the oldest incorporated exchange in the country, having been chartered in 1862 by special act of the State Legislature. Its trading floor is the largest in the world, measuring 220 feet long, 144 feet wide, and 60 feet to the skylight.

The STANDARD OIL BUILDING, 26 Broadway, incorporates two structures of different age and height. It is surmounted by a massive pyramidal tower, once one of the most imposing of the New York sky line. A bust of the first John D. Rockefeller by Jo Davidson is on the left side of the corridor. Crowds swarming through the building and along the street in the daytime are in the main unaware of its existence, but at night the lighting of the marble gives the bust a strange appearance, and people passing through the now deserted region often stop before the entrance and gaze curiously inside.

The CUNARD BUILDING, at 25 Broadway, is still one of the city's most luxurious structures. Its interior, with its vast domed hall, is decorated with murals by Ezra Winter, depicting the voyages of Leif Ericson, Sebastian Cabot, Christopher Columbus, and Sir Francis Drake.

Beaver Street, east of Bowling Green, is lined with commercial and maritime houses, and restaurants. The original Delmonico's, which eventually moved to Madison Square, is part of the neighborhood's tradition. At the end of Beaver Street is Pearl Street, so named because of the sea shells found there in the days when the East River almost reached this street. The inlet, filled in more than a hundred years ago, was known as Coenties Slip, a corruption of the Dutch nickname Coentje, a combination of the given names of Conraet and Antje Ten Eyck, whose home was near by. At the head of the slip, on what is now the northwest corner of Pearl Street and Coenties Alley, Governer Kieft, tired of playing host to traders in his own home, built in 1641 the Stadt-Herberg, or City Tavern, a five-story stone structure with an unobstructed view of the East River. Twelve years later, when the community rose to the dignity of a municipality, New York's first hostelry was converted into the Stadt Huys, or City Hall. A TABLET high on the wall of 73 Pearl Street marks the site of the building, demolished in 1790. Near by at No. 81 another TABLET marks the site where William Bradford established in 1693 the first printing press in New York, "At the sign of the Bible." A quaintly carved female figure is set above the street in the building at No. 88 over a TABLET commemorating the great fire of 1835 which destroyed most of the buildings of Coenties Slip. The blaze, which raged for nineteen hours, destroyed 650 buildings with a loss of twenty million dollars. Ten years later a fire in the same neighborhood destroyed 345 buildings and caused property damage amounting to six million dollars. '

At the corner of Pearl and Broad Streets is FRAUNCES TAVERN, one of Manhattan's most cherished landmarks and a notable restoration of early Georgian Colonial work. The relatively square proportions, regular window spacing, brickwork, white portico, hipped roof with its light balustrade, and the interior paneling, are all characteristic of the style, but Dutch influence is echoed in the shape of the dormers, which differ from the gabled English type. It was erected in 1719 as a residence by Etienne de Lancey, a wealthy Huguenot. The merchant firm of his grandson Oliver (De Lancey, Robinson, and Company) turned it into a store and warehouse in 1757. The building was bought in 1762 by Samuel Fraunces, a West Indian of French and Negro blood, who opened it as the Queen's Head Tavern. Washington bade farewell to his officers in 1783, in the tavern's Long Room, faithfully restored in 1907 by the Sons of the Revolution (not to be confused with the Sons of the American Revolution). A museum, exhibiting Revolutionary relics, is 01 the third floor, and on the fourth is a small historical library with paintings by John Ward Dunsmore. (Open daily except Sunday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; admission free.) Headquarters of the Sons of the Revolution occupy much of the building; a restaurant patronized by Wall Street bankers and shipping and business men is on the ground floor.

WEST STREET AND NORTH (HUDSON) RIVER WATER FRONT

Area: Battery Place to y2d St. along North River. Maps on pages 75, 127, and 149.

Although the western rim of Manhattan is but a small segment of New York's far-flung port, along it is concentrated the largest aggregate of marine enterprises in the world. Glaciers of freight and cargo move across this strip of North (Hudson) River water front. It is the domain of the super-liner, but it is shared also by the freighter, the river boat, the ferry, and the soot-faced tug. Great trunk line railroads from the hinterland, barred from the city by the Hudson, transship their passengers to ferries at the Jersey railheads and their freight cars to scows. In consequence, the railroads use nearly as many North River piers as the steamship lines.

The broad highway, West Street and its continuations, which skirts the North River from Battery Place to Fifty-ninth Street, is, during the day, a surging mass of back-firing, horn-blowing, gear-grinding trucks and taxis. All other water-front sounds are submerged in the cacophony of the daily avalanche of freight and passengers in transit. Ships and shipping are not visible along much of West Street. South of Twenty-third Street, the river is walled by an almost unbroken line of bulkhead sheds and dock structures. North of Twenty-third, an occasional open spot in the bulkhead permits a glimpse of the Hudson and the Jersey shore beyond. Opposite the piers, along the entire length of the highway, nearly every block houses its quota of cheap lunchrooms, tawdry saloons and waterfront haberdasheries catering to the thousands of polyglot seamen who haunt the "front." Men "on the beach" (out of employment) usually make their headquarters in barrooms, which are frequented mainly by employees of lines leasing piers in their vicinity.

In Revolutionary days what is now West Street was under water. About 1811 the bank was extended and raised to allow the building of docks. A number of water grants, or permanent leases, were given at nominal rentals to individuals and corporations who later profited greatly when the city reclaimed the property. Not until 1870, however, did this western water front come into considerable use, and it was 1890 before West Street displaced South Street as the main gateway for water-borne traffic. Today it is worth $470,000 an acre, with a pier value of $1,500 per linear foot, and is the most lucrative water-front property in the world.

Passenger lines use many North River terminals. Transatlantic, South American, West Indian, and intercoastal ships dock north of Fourteenth Street, while the terminals of the coastwise and Long Island Sound lines are scattered between this point and the Battery. The most notable exception is the "Great White Fleet" of the United Fruit Company, whose steamers, engaged in the West Indian fruit and passenger trade, are berthed at the famous "banana docks," Piers 2, 3, 7, and 9, near the foot of West Street.

In this section, water-front shipping operates literally in the shadow of Manhattan's downtown sky line. Opposite the United Fruit terminal, two red-brick structures, the thirty-seven-story DOWNTOWN ATHLETIC CLUB at 1 8 West Street and the thirty-one-story OFFICE BUILDING ad joining it at No. 21, both designed by Starrett and Van Vleck, contribute peaks to the architectural sierra. Their modern appearance is accentuated by the more conventional aspect of the near-by Whitehall Building (see page 66). Not far to the north, somewhat more modest heights are reached by the NEW YORK POST and WEST STREET BUILDINGS. The former, a seventeen-story structure of buff -colored brick at 75 West Street, houses the daily paper which was founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1 80 1. The twenty-three-story West Street Building, at No. 90, was designed by Cass Gilbert and completed in 1905. Its elaborate pinnacles, decorative chimneys and gables disclose the late French Gothic influence.

Just north of the West Street Building, a pedestrian footbridge provides safe passage from the foot of Liberty Street to the ferry terminal of the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Between this point and Fortysecond Street, the railroads maintain eleven ferry services to Jersey City, Hoboken, and Weehawken. These are used by more than sixty million passengers, and between ten and eleven million vehicles, annually.

In the block between Liberty and Cortlandt Streets, at 107 West Street, is the WATCH MUSEUM of Fred W. Jensen and Son, managed by three generations of the Jensen family. Its collection contains timepieces of every known variety, the most intricate being a mechanism that splits seconds and records the passing minutes, hours, days of the week and month, and phases of the moon.

In 1807, Robert Fulton's Clermont cast off from a pier at Cortlandt Street and steamed up the Hudson to Albany, demonstrating the practicability of steamship transportation.

The NEW YORK TELEPHONE COMPANY SKYSCRAPER at No. 140 is an unusually successful attempt to obtain the maximum spatial benefits under the restrictions of the zoning law. Designed in 1926 by Ralph Walker of the office of McKenzie, Voorhees, and Gmelin, it is the largest telephone building in the world, thirty-two stories high and covering an area of 52,000 square feet. Despite difficulties raised by its irregularshaped site, the building masses are exceptionally well related, endowing the structure with a silhouette of great strength. The exterior, of buff brick and limestone with a granite base, is enriched by ornamental flowers and elephant heads. This building is the headquarters for the largest of the component companies of the Bell Telephone System, serving New York State and part of Connecticut.

From the World-Telegram Building, between Barclay Street and Park Place, to the great Pennsylvania Railroad pier for perishable freight, between Hubert and Watts Streets, West Street bounds the Washington Market (see page 74). At 260 West Street stood the Phoenix Foundry where Captain John Ericsson in the late 1830*5 constructed America's first iron sailing boats and steamships with screw propellers. Opposite Duane Street, the ramps of the newest extension of the WEST SIDE (Elevated) HIGHWAY slope into West Street. A 35O-foot parabolic bridge over the wide intersection at Canal Street links this segment with the fourand-one-half-mile elevated roadway that follows the water front to the Henry Hudson Parkway (see page 284) at Seventy-second Street. This magnificent express drive, which provides the motorist with an unexcelled view of the Jersey water front, the mid-town sky line, and the liners berthed along the North River, leads by means of Canal Street ramps directly to the Holland Tunnel (see page 19). Eventually the highway will be extended south, curving around the Battery and South Street to the East River Drive.

ST. JOHN'S PARK FREIGHT TERMINAL, a three-story structure covering three city blocks between Charlton and Clarkson Streets, marks the southern terminus of the New York Central's West Side line. The terminal, which was opened in 1934, is the principal delivery station for dairy freight in the city.

In a group of buildings which occupy the block around 463 West Street and a portion of the adjoining block are consolidated the RESEARCH LABORATORIES OF THE BELL TELEPHONE SYSTEM. Here scientists have made many contributions to the telephone and to allied means of communication, such as sound films, picture transmitters, and public address systems. To visit these laboratories special permission must be obtained.

GANSEVOORT MARKET, or "Farmers' Market," as it is generally known, occupies the block between Gansevoort and Little West Twelfth Streets. Farmers from Long Island, Staten Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut bring their produce here at night for sale under supervision of the Department of Public Markets. Activities begin at 4 A.M. Farmers in overalls and mud-caked shoes stand in trucks, shouting their wares. Commission merchants, pushcart vendors, and restaurant buyers trudge warily from one stand to another, digging arms into baskets of fruits or vegetables to ascertain quality. Trucks move continually in and out among the piled crates of tomatoes, beans, cabbages, lettuce, and other greens in the street. Hungry derelicts wander about in the hope of picking up a stray vegetable dropped from some truck, while patient nuns wait to receive leftover, unsalable goods for distribution among the destitute. The market closes at 10 A.M. and is not open Sundays or holidays.

In a wharf at the foot of Gansevoort Street, Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, once served as customs inspector. Across West Street is the WEST WASHINGTON MARKET, comprising ten quaint red-brick buildings which house a live poultry market patronized mostly by kosher butchers. Since poultry requires ample heat in winter, every stall is equipped with a furnace, so that each roof adds more than a dozen chimneys to its picturesque architecture.

From this point to Twenty-second Street, Eleventh Avenue (as the water-front street is here called) skirts the weather-beaten CHELSEA PIERS designed by Warren and Wetmore. These nine great docks, built by the city between 1902 arid 1907 for the transatlantic ships of that period, serve such lines as the United States, Grace, Cunard White Star, Panama Pacific, and American Merchant, and are among the busiest on the river. SEAMEN'S HOUSE, an eight-story Y.M.C.A. building at the corner of Twentieth Street and Eleventh Avenue, furnishes up-to-date living and recreational facilities for more than 250 sailors.

Because of the heavy concentration of shipping at the Chelsea Piers, this area has been a strategic sector in the industrial conflicts that break out periodically between maritime labor and shipowners. During the 1936-7 strike, when rank and file seamen tied up the ships in their struggle for a better agreement, Eleventh Avenue was the scene of frequent clashes between pickets and scabs, "goon squads" (thugs) and defense squads, strikers and police. The NATIONAL MARITIME UNION OF AMERICA, established after the termination of the strike, has its headquarters at 126 Eleventh Avenue.

Unlike their sea-going brothers, the port's "dock-wallopers" (longshoremen), thousands of whom live in slum areas adjoining West Street, have been quiet in recent years, although they steadily oppose the hiring system, called the "shape-up," whereby the boss stevedore selects his working force several times daily from crowds of longshoremen massed before the dock gates.

At Twenty-second Street the North River shore line bends sharply westward. The highway is called Thirteenth Avenue from this point to Thirtieth Street, whence it extends northward to Fifty-ninth Street as Twelfth Avenue. Not far beyond the great Twenty-third Street ferry terminal, in the block between Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Streets, the STARRETT LEHIGH BUILDING dominates the water front. The building, erected in 1931, represents an effort to solve the problem of freight distribution in a congested metropolis. It comprises a huge railroad yard, loading platforms for trucks and trailers, and facilities for the storage, repacking, redistribution, manufacturing, and display of goods. Although the first three floors and central portion are steel- frame in construction, the rest of the building follows a cantilevered concrete design. The great horizontal bands of concrete floor, brkk parapet, and continuous windows sweep majestically to meet the service portion, which rises, framed in steel, near the center of the block. The building has unusual power and constitutes an important step in the development of contemporary architecture. The architects were Russell G. and Walter M. Cory.

The railroads have burrowed deeply into the water front between Twenty-fifth and Seventy- second Streets, pre-empting most of the piers and nearly all the property opposite. The New York Central's THIRTIETH STREET YARD straddles ten city blocks, and its SIXTIETH STREET YARD, thirteen blocks, constituting two of the largest privately owned areas in the city. The latter is the main receiving, classification, and departure yard for the only all-rail freight line on Manhattan Island. Both yards were being arranged in 1939 to provide for building construction over the tracks (see page 157 ).

Sandwiched among this welter of railroad sidings are the piers of the Hudson River lines and the terminals of many of the world's greatest liners. The new TRANSATLANTIC DOCKS of the Cunard White Star, French, Hapag Lloyd, Italian, Swedish American, and Furness Bermuda lines extend from Forty-fourth to Fifty-seventh Street, and were especially designed to handle luxurious ships like the Queen Mary, Normandie, Europa, Rex, and other greyhounds of the Atlantic. Piers 88, 90, and 92, each of which is 1,100 feet long, make this terminal the largest in the world.

LOWER WEST SIDE

Area: Battery Place on the south to Spring St. on the north; from West St. east to Trinity Place, Church St., and Broadway (Franklin to Spring St.). Maps on pages 75 and 127.

Though this district has a few modern skyscrapers with impressive marble fagades, the character of the neighborhood is derived from produce sheds, crates, smells of fruit and fish of Washington Market, and the amazing variety of retail shops selling radios, pets, garden seeds, fireworks, sporting goods, shoes, textiles, and church supplies. There is an endless flow of traffic through the streets, whose buildings, grimy with age, reveal their pre-Civil War glory in carved lintels, arched doorways, and ornate cornices.

Five streets Washington, Greenwich, Hudson, West Broadway, and Church form the main north and south thoroughfares, but the narrow, transverse streets leading to the Hudson River carry the burden of the traffic, much of which heads for New Jersey through the ferries at the end of Chambers, Barclay, Cortlandt, and Liberty Streets, or via the Holland Tunnel. Beneath the streets roar the subways and above them hurtles the Ninth Avenue el, which creates an atmosphere like Milton's "darkness made visible."

Tunnels, railroads, ferryboats, subways, and road traffic have made this section one of the most important transit centers. Close to the river and harbor, it is also easily accessible to all parts of the city, making it a natural site for the largest fruit and produce market in the world. Location, too, accounts for the flourishing retail trade: New Jersey commuters returning home after a day's work in the city often find it practicable to buy their necessities here.

The markets inject a rude vitality into the district. While most of the city sleeps, WASHINGTON MARKET, north of Fulton Street and spreading to many side streets between West and Greenwich Streets, reaches the peak of its activity. Perishable products must be distributed quickly; in this concentrated market they pass from jobbers to wholesalers and retailers. Streets free of daytime traffic are taken over by trucks of dealers and farmers. Freight cars discharge their burdens; produce is moved, stored, stacked, boxed, and crated. A weird spatter of lights provides illumination, and in the glow truck drivers, farmers, tally-keepers, and inspectors work at a swift pace. In winter the streets are lined with bonfires around which the men warm themselves.

The name Washington Market is used to designate the entire wholesale produce section and the city-owned RETAIL MARKET, a block-square building between Washington, West, Fulton, and Vesey Streets. The Bear Market, established in 1812, was the predecessor of the original Washington Market. The latter, built in 1833, was also known as Country Market, Fish Market, and Exterior Market. The present Retail Market building was reconstructed in 1914. Its interior is split into stalls that are leased. An entrancing array of food is offered including caviar from Siberia, Gorgonzola cheese from Italy, hams from Flanders, sardines from Norway, English partridge, native quail, squabs, wild ducks, and pheasants; also fresh swordfish, frogs' legs, brook trout, pompanos, red snappers, codfish tongues and cheeks, bluefish cheeks, and venison and bear steaks.

In the vicinity of Cortlandt and Greenwich Streets, two blocks east and south of Washington Market, is the retail radio district. Seed and pet shops, largely patronized by suburban commuters, are south of Barclay

LISPENARD

LOWER WEST SIDE WEST STREET

KEY

(Also see maps on pages 127 and 149)

1. United Fruit Company Piers

2. Syrian Quarter

3. Downtown Athletic Club

4. 21 West Street Office Building

5. New York Post Building

6. Recreation Training School

7. Planters

8. West Street Building

9. Church of St. Nicholas

10. Watch Museum

11. Retail Radio District

12. Hudson Terminal

13. Washington Retail Market

14. Washington Wholesale Produce

Market

15. New York Telephone Company

Building

16. Ecclesiastical Supply Stores

17. Federal Office Building

18. St. Peter's Church

19. Fireworks Stores

20. Sporting Goods Shops

21. Seed and Pet Shops

22. World-Telegram Building

23. West Side Highway

24. Cosmopolitan Hotel

25. Western Union Telegraph

Building

26. New York Mercantile Exchange

27. Long Distance Building

28. Site of the Phoenix Foundry Street, on West Broadway and Greenwich Street. Barclay Street has a number of ecclesiastical supply stores, originally attracted there because of the presence in the neighborhood of old St. Peter's Church.

Dealers in fireworks who also stage the pyrotechnic spectacles Niagara Falls, Flying Eagles, Pyramids of Fire, and the like for carnivals and celebrations throughout the country and in South America, have stores near Church Street and Park Place. Their factories are in New Jersey, and the proximity to the ferries has been a factor in the location of the business here since the i88o's. On the south side of Chambers Street between Broadway and West Broadway, are many sporting goods shops. Wholesale grocery houses line Greenwich Street near Beach Street.

The trading center for the 7,500,000 cases of eggs and 3,500,000 tubs of butter which New Yorkers consume each year is the NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE at Hudson and Harrison Streets. Prices are based upon daily receipts and open market conditions. The dairy and poultry commission houses are near Reade Street and a little farther north are huge warehouses from which emanate a pungent aroma of coffee, tea, and spices.

Not far away from the Exchange, in the vicinity of Church, Reade, and Duane Streets, is the shoe jobbing center, and east of West Broadway from Thomas to Franklin Streets, the wholesale textile market.

In the market section, comprising a world of its own, is the SYRIAN QUARTER, established in the late i88o's at the foot of Washington Street from Battery Place to Rector Street. A sprinkling of Turks, Armenians, Arabs, and Greeks also live here. Although the fez has given way to the snap-brim, and the narghile has been abandoned for cigarettes, the coffee houses and the tobacco and confectionery shops of the Levantines still remain.

Using the same methods and types of implements as native Syrian bakers, the confectioners make delicious sweets such as baclawa (chopped walnuts or pistachios, wrapped in forty layers of baked dough of gauzelike thinness flavored with goat's milk butter and drenched in honey), knafie (twisted hank of fried dough with a core of chopped pistachios flavored as baclawa), sweet-sour apricot paste sprinkled with pistachios, strings of walnuts dipped in grape syrup, and "Syrian delight" scented with attar of roses. Restaurants feature shish kebab (spit-broiled lamb) and rice cooked in salted vine leaves, and furnish narghiles upon request. Other neighborhood stores sell graceful earthen water jars; brass, silver, and pewter trays; tables inlaid with mother of pearl; brass lamp shades fringed with variegated beads, and Syrian silks of rainbow hues.

LOWER MANHATTAN SEEN BENEATH BROOKLYN BRIDGE

THE BATTERY, 1679

THE BATTERY, 1939

LINER NIEUW AMSTERDAM IN THE HUDSON

EAST RIVER DOCKS BELOW BROOKLYN BRIDGE

SOUTH STREET PIER AND WALL STREET TOWERS

FRONT STREET

OLDEST HOUSE IN MANHATTAN, II PECK SLIP

NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE, BROAD AND WALL STREETS

NUMBER ONE WALL STREET AND STATUE OF JOHN WATTS

WALL STREET CANYON

The tiny CHURCH OF ST. NICHOLAS (Greek Orthodox), at 155 Cedar Street, between Washington and West Streets, was built in 1820. Each January 6, on the Day of Epiphany, the chapel observes the colorful ceremony of the Rescue of the Cross but not as in the old days, when a small wooden crucifix was thrown into the harbor from the Battery landing to be rescued by the most agile Greek youth. The waters proving too cold, the custom was changed in 1937, and now the cross may be drawn ashore by a white ribbon attached to it.

Near the Syrian Quarter stands the RECREATION TRAINING SCHOOL at 107 Washington Street. Organized in 1936 under the direction of the WPA, it gives instruction in more than one hundred courses, and has an enrollment of about twelve hundred.

Greenwich Street, as Greenwich Road, skirted the shore of the Hudson until about the nineteenth century when the river was pushed back by dumping fill. Now heavily walled with merchandising warehouses, it is cast into shadow by the Ninth Avenue el, New York's first elevated rapid transit system.

A relic of the old days, the PLANTERS, at Albany and Greenwich Streets, was established as a hotel in 1833. It closed when the Civil War broke out, but after being remodeled in 1922 was opened as a restaurant. In its heyday the hotel was patronized by Southern planters, its location I being convenient to the Perth Amboy ferry, and thus to the Washington Post Road and the railroads connecting with the South. Near by, at 113 Greenwich Street, is the rear entrance to the New York Curb Exchange Building (see page 86).

The twin twenty-two-story structures connected by a bridge at 30 and 50 Church Street, were among the first skyscrapers. Designed by Clinton and Russell, these red tapestry-brick buildings were erected in 1908 at a cost of $12,000,000. Their name, the HUDSON TERMINAL, derives from the downtown station of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad (the Hudson Tubes) underneath the buildings. The station is connected by way of tunnels with BMT and IRT subways. A block north, on the east side of Church Street, is the graveyard of St. Paul's Chapel (see page 98), a subsidiary of Trinity Parish.

The imposing FEDERAL OFFICE BUILDING, a $7,697,000 structure of limestone, occupies the block from Church Street to West Broadway, and from Vesey to Barclay Street. Cross and Cross, and Pennington, Lewis, and Mills, associate architects, designed the heavy fifteen-story structure, a pretentious example of the "classic-without-columns" style of some recent public buildings. It houses branches of the New York Post Office, the Foreign and Domestic Commerce Bureau of the Department of Commerce, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Treasury Department.

Hemmed in by modern business structures, ST. PETER'S, on the southeast corner of Barclay and Church Streets, is the oldest Roman Catholic church building in Manhattan. The edifice was erected in 1786, three years after the congregation was organized, and was rebuilt in 1838. Steps lead to the six massive columns supporting a pediment in whose center stands a figure of St. Peter holding the keys of heaven and hell.

Old Columbia College, founded in 1754 as King's College (see page 383), stood until 1857 between Barclay and Murray Streets, and West Broadway and Church Street. West Broadway, then Chapel Place, was a wandering lane which led from Canal Street to the college chapel.

During the early eighteenth century, the vicinity of Greenwich and Warren Streets was the site of Vauxhall Garden. A reproduction of a contemporary London resort, it flourished about forty years, and was the rendezvous of most fashionable Colonials.

The COSMOPOLITAN HOTEL, at Chambers Street and West Broadway, the oldest hotel in the city, was opened in 1850 as the Gerard House, drawing steady patronage from near-by steamship piers and the first Grand Central Terminal, then across the street. Among the patrons were bearded 'Frisco gold miners who staggered into the lobby after a trip around the Horn, dumped their gold-dust, went out to the barber, and came back "unrecognizably clean." The hotel survives, a ramshackle building, with stores crowding its entrance, and an incongruous neon sign flashing from its fagade.

Many buildings on the block between Church Street and Broadway, and Thomas and Worth Streets represent the florid architectural style of the post-Civil War period when decorative feats, structurally impossible in stone, were accomplished in cast iron. These white buildings were erected by Griffith Thomas in 1869 for the flourishing textile trade, in which many of the town's wealthiest citizens were engaged.

This block was the first site (17731870) of the New York Hospital (see page 246). One of the great riots in the city occurred here in 1788 when a mob stormed the hospital to attack medical students and doctors who, it was claimed, had used for dissection the cadavers of "respectable people, even young women of whom they made an indecent exposure." The militia, summoned by the governor and mayor, removed the students to a near-by jail for safekeeping, and when the crowd gathered in front of the prison, the troops fired, killing five and wounding scores.

The WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH BUILDING, at 60 Hudson Street, rises twenty- four stories high in thirteen shades of brick, like a huge red rock projecting out of the city; Voorhees, Gmelin, and Walker were the architects. The LONG DISTANCE BUILDING of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 32 Sixth Avenue, near Walker Street, designed by the same firm, is the world's largest communication center and the junction point of many important telephone trunk routes. It has direct circuits to important cities and radio telephone circuits to points in every part of the world. All private wires from New York to other cities, whether telephone, telegraph, or teletypewriter, lead through the building, which is also the main control point for the great radio broadcast series. The land west of Broadway to the river, between Fulton and Christopher Streets, was once known as the Queen's Farm. In 1705 Queen Anne granted it to Trinity Church. Since 1731 descendants and alleged descendants of Annetje Jans, an early owner of the farm, have sued Trinity, either for the return of the land or for pecuniary compensation. William Rhinelander in 1794 obtained ninety-nine-year leases of a large part of Trinity land; the Common Council in 1797 augmented these holdings by granting him all rights to the water front adjoining his property. With the rapid northward expansion of the city in the nineteenth century, the area became the site of large commercial structures and yielded millions in rent annually to the Rhinelander family.

For many years Trinity land was ignored by builders because of its leasehold status, and not until the Lower East Side of Manhattan had been built up did they turn to this section. In 1803 the streets from Warren to Canal were laid out. Four years later, St. John's Church, a chapel of Trinity parish, was erected on Varick Street near Beach, and St. John's Park, named for the chapel, was set up on the block bounded; by Varick, Hudson, Laight, and Beach Streets. The park was open only to residents of the houses facing it. From 1825-50 this district was the home of the city's wealthy aristocrats. When the plebeian population encroached upon it the wealthy moved northward. The park was razed in 1869 to make way for the freight terminal of the Hudson River Railroad which later was merged with the New York Central Railroad; in 1936 the terminal was moved to West Houston and West Streets.

Canal Street, named for and following the course of a stream that ran from Collect Pond (the site of the present Foley Square district) to | the Hudson, is the main traffic artery connecting New Jersey and Long Island by way of the Holland Tunnel and the Manhattan Bridge.

The HOLLAND TUNNEL, named for its chief engineer, Clifford M. Holland, begins at Watts Street, between Hudson and Varick Streets, a block north of Canal, and bores underneath the Hudson River to Twelfth Street, Jersey City, New Jersey (toll: passenger cars 50$). A spacious and impressive plaza leads to a narrow tunnel entrance, whose dingy masonry lacks the exciting quality of the glistening interior. The tunnel is made of cast iron lined with concrete and the side walls are inset with white vitreous tiles, with markers at -quarter-mile points. East- and westbound tubes are separate, each two lanes wide, together carrying a traffic of 12,000,000 cars a year. (The exit of the eastbound traffic tube is on Canal Street.) Catwalks in each tube are paced by guards who keep vehicles at the required speed of thirty miles an hour. The tunnel was constructed by the states of New York and New Jersey at a cost of fifty million dollars. Work was begun on October 12, 1920, and the tunnel opened on November 13, 1927. It is operated by the Port of New York Authority.

Old SPRING STREET PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, founded in 1811, stands at Varick and Spring Streets. In 1834, a mob spurred by prominent politicians, almost destroyed the original frame building because Dr. Henry G. Ludlow, the pastor, was a firm advocate of abolition. Two years later, the present brick structure was erected.

The firearms firm of FRANCIS BANNERMAN AND SONS, still active at 501 Broadway, near Broome Street, was founded in 1865 by a former naval officer in the Civil War. It has a remarkable collection of military arms and war relics. (Open Monday to Friday 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday 8:30 a.m. to 12 m.; admission free.) Chronological arrangements of the exhibits lucidly indicate the stages in the development of modern lethal weapons. Prized possessions include such objects as the headquarters flag of Major General "Light Horse" Harry Lee, famous Revolutionary cavalry leader and father of General Robert E. Lee; a doublebarreled flintlock shotgun that belonged to Napoleon I, and the guidon of the Seventh U. S. Cavalry used in the battle of Little Big Horn (General Custer's last stand).

SOUTH STREET

Area: South Ferry to Corlears Hook along the East River. Map on page 91.

The bowsprit of many a clipper Baltimore, California, McKay and Liverpool packet once jutted over South Street, now visited by ungainly scows, fishing smacks, lighters, and car floats from Long Island and Jersey City. This famous "street o' ships," a two-mile stretch of bumpy stones skirting the East River from the Battery to Corlears Hook, is historically associated with New York's development as a great port; though today but few ocean-going craft breast the piers that once berthed whole fleets of gallant windjammers. The Lightnings and Comets and Flying Clouds of a later day, requiring deeper water, steam up the broad fairway of the North (Hudson) River, leaving South Street to the traffic of the ten-ton truck. Viewed, from the piers near the Battery end of South Street, the East River bridges Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg form a superimposed pattern of steel and stone, like a photograph from a camera that was jarred during exposure. Across the river, on a bluff overlooking the plebeian harbor activities, are the staid residences of Brooklyn Heights, for more than a century the center of wealthy conservative society.

The rumble of speeding trucks, the blasts from near-by steam shovels, and the intermittent whistles from passing river traffic join in crescendos of dissonance. Sailors in pea jackets and dungarees, workmen in overalls, neat office clerks and shabby drifters throng the highway. On mild sunny days the drifters sit along the docks with their "junk bags," share cigarette butts, and stare endlessly into the water. In winter they cluster in little groups about small bonfires; many sleep at night in doorways with newspapers for covering. Others join the homeless men who sleep in the MUNICIPAL LODGING HOUSE, ANNEX No. 2, in the old ferry shed at the foot of Whitehall Street, which can accommodate about 1,200 nightly.

The majority of the piers along South Street are leased or owned by railroad companies. Pier 4, at the foot of Broad Street, marks approximately the site of the first dock built by the Dutch on Manhattan Island. What is now South Street was then under water, so the exact location is inland. The NEW YORK STATE BARGE CANAL TERMINAL occupies Pier 6 where arklike, weather-beaten Erie Canal barges are moored. Many of the barge captains are married, and their families live on board the year round. In winter the boats sometimes lie for months along the river banks farther north.

At 6 1 Whitehall Street is the old EASTERN HOTEL, now used as an office building. In 1822 the owner, Captain John B. Coles, remodeled the original structure, a warehouse, and named it the Eagle Hotel. It was renamed the Eastern in 1856. The frame of the building reputedly contains mahogany beams that were used as ballast in eighteenth-century merchantmen. Among the hotel's guests were Robert Fulton, Jenny Lind, P. T. Barnum, and many of the illustrious entertainers who appeared in Castle Garden, now the Aquarium (see page 307).

The two blocks between Whitehall and Broad are typical of the lower length of South Street. Here, dilapidated brick and brownstone structures crowd the sidewalks, upper floors forlornly vacant, street floors occupied by cut-rate "drink and food" stores, low-priced barber shops, secondhand clothes stores, sail lofts, and chandleries.

Broad Coenties Slip, which was filled in about 1835, encloses JEANETTE PARK, a rendezvous popular with South Street's army of beached seamen and homeless unemployed. The, park was named for the ill-fated vessel of the Jeanette Polar Expedition, promoted in 1880 by the elder James Gordon Bennett. The concrete and chromium structure within the park houses the famous OYSTER BAR, established in the neighborhood in 1849. ^ s founder, Robert Peach, opened up shop by the simple device of setting three planks across two barrels. In 1898, Patrick O'Connor, age twelve, became his assistant, and, five years later, his partner. Peach retired in 1917, but O'Connor carried on. He now operates the park bar.

The SEAMEN'S CHURCH INSTITUTE OF NEW YORK occupies a thirteenstory brick and stone-trimmed structure at 25 South Street (latitude 40 42' 10" N, longitude 74 oo' 35" W). Surmounting the roof is a small lighthouse tower erected in 1913, by public subscription, as a memorial to the passengers, officers, and crew of the S.S. Titanic, luxury liner that sank April 15, 1912, after striking an iceberg on her maiden voyage to America. Standing guard over the main entrance of the building is a gilded figurehead of Sir Galahad, reminiscent of the carvings on the prows of the clipper ships which docked near by during the nineteenth century. Above the figurehead is a ship's bell rescued from the S.S. Atlantic which foundered off Fisher's Island on Thanksgiving Day, 1846, with a loss of seventy-eight lives. The bell, connected with a clock, rings ship's time every half -hour. The institute was founded in 1834, and in 1843 established churches on the water front. In 1854 activities were expanded to include provision for sailors' lodging and entertainment. Several missions, floating churches, and boarding houses were operated throughout the port until 1913 when the present building was opened as the institute's center. An annex with accommodations for a thousand guests making a total lodging capacity of about fifteen hundred at the institute was completed in 1929. Seamen are charged moderate rates for lodging and meals; privileges include admission to moving pictures and other entertainment, and the use of libraries, club, game, and writing rooms. A merchant marine school, conducted by the institute, is the oldest surviving school of its kind in New York. It was founded in 1916.

In the middle of Old Slip is the FIRST PRECINCT POLICE STATION, a grim, solid structure reminiscent of a fortified Florentine Renaissance palazzo. North, across the street, is the UNITED STATES ASSAY BUILDING, a five-story granite building with a massive chimney. The public is not admitted to this sanctuary where scrap gold and silver are melted into bullion.

The thoroughfare's only skyscraper is at Wall and South Streets, 120 WALL STREET. It is a huge, white, thirty-three-story building, uncompromising in its literal conformance to the setback ordinance. Ely Jacques Kahn was the architect. A bronze PLAQUE identifies the site as that of Murray's Wharf, where George Washington landed April 23, 1789, on his way to Federal Hall for his inauguration as President. Private seaplanes of Wall Street commuters land at the MUNICIPAL DOWNTOWN SKYPORT between Piers n and 12.

The squat fortress-like WAREHOUSE on the corner of De Peyster Street is one of the oldest buildings on the street. It was built of rough-hewn granite blocks more than one hundred years ago by the Griswold brothers, East India merchants.

FULTON MARKET, largest wholesale fish mart on the Atlantic Coast, was established in 1821 as a retail market to "supply the common people with the necessities of life at a reasonable price." The market covers an area of six city blocks bounded by Fulton, Water, Dover, and South Streets, and includes two large markets on the South Street docks near Fulton. Before daybreak tons of fish are unloaded from the holds of stubby-sticked trawlers and draggers and from refrigerated trucks from New England and New Jersey. Six days a week, from 2 to 9 A.M., the section is a bedlam as rubber-booted men in the street and in narrow stalls clean, bone, ice, unpack, and repack approximately one hundred varieties of fish. After a section of the market structure collapsed in 1936, the city undertook the modernization of this landmark. Three new market buildings have been planned (1939).

SWEET'S, a restaurant established almost a century ago, is on the southwest corner of Fulton and South Streets. In old days it was especially popular among shipmasters and South Street merchants, and from 1850 to 1860, when "blackbirders" flourished along the East River, many nefarious slave-running deals were transacted in this South Street "Delmonico's."

From a pier near the present Peck's Slip, the first licensed Brooklyn ferry began operations in 1654. Fares were three stivers for whites, and six stivers for Indians. Between Dover and Roosevelt Streets, South Street passes under the Brooklyn Bridge (see page 313). Near by, at 174 South Street is the BIRTHPLACE OF FORMER GOVERNOR ALFRED E. SMITH.

Almost the entire block between Catharine Slip and Market Slip is occupied by the HEARST PUBLICATION PLANT which houses the editorial and press rooms of the New York Journal and American and the Sunday American. The American Weekly is also printed here.

The stretch of shore from Catharine Slip to Corlears Hook was occupied by the shipbuilding industry during the War of 1812 and in the decade preceding it. Many of New York's privateers that harassed British sea-traffic during the war were constructed in the local shipways. And from these yards was recruited Noah Brown's heroic band who fashioned Commodore Perry's fleet for the Battle of Lake Erie.

South Street gradually assumes a quieter tempo at Market Slip as trucks and pedestrians become less frequent. Farther on, at Rutgers Slip, there is a pathetic little park more liberally supplied with benches than with shade. From Clinton Street to Corlears Hook Park the East River is walled from view by a continuous line of railroad pier sheds, and only an occasional blast from an unseen tug reminds one that water-borne traffic is passing.

WALL STREET DISTRICT

Area: Battery Place, Beaver St., and Old Slip on the south to Fulton St. on the north; from Trinity Place and Church St. east to South St. Map on page 91.

Wall Street, financial heart of the nation, is itself but little more than a third of a mile long from its head at Broadway to its foot at the East River, although its name is applied to a small district lying to the north and south. Functionally, Wall Street is a complex mechanism developed to provide the centralized banking and credit facilities and the efficient securities market place that modern industry and commerce demand. Walled in by towering structures, the street, by historical coincidence, is well named.

At this place in 1653, Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Amsterdam, ordered a protective wall built across what was then the colony's northernmost limit. It was not long before the city had pushed past this barrier, and under British rule the district flourished as a center of government and fashion. Following the Revolution, Wall Street became for a year the seat of the Federal Government, and here were located the establishments of such statesmen and leaders of commerce as Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.

The four buildings of the famous NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE cover the area between New, Wall, and Broad Streets and Exchange Place one block east of Broadway. The original building, designed by George B. Post, was finished in 1903, and the twenty-two-story addition, in 1923, from the plans of Trowbridge and Livingston. The adjoining BLAIR BUILDING and COMMERCIAL CABLE BUILDING were bought in 1928. The Exchange building proper, with its well-proportioned Corinthian order and sculptured pediment, shows an expressive use of the "temple" form of facade. The Exchange is owned and administered by 1,375 member brokers, each of whom possesses a "seat." In the boom year of 1929, seats sold for as much as $625,000; the top price in 1938 was $85,000. During 1937, the Exchange had on its trading list some 1,200 stock issues, valued at almost sixty billion dollars, as well as 1,400 bond issues valued at more than forty-two billion dollars.

The Exchange was established shortly after the formation of the United States. In 1790, the first Congress authorized the issue of eighty million dollars in bonds. Three large banking institutions were incorporated about this time, and for the public sale of their stock, a market was developed under a buttonwood tree at what is now 68 Wall Street. Here, in 1792, a group of twenty-four brokers drew up a trading agreement. Financing the next war, in 1812, gave the exchange a new importance and the New York Stock and Exchange Board was organized with offices at 40 Wall Street. It was as a result of financing the Civil War, however, that the board began to approach its full power. The organization was combined with the Open Board of Brokers and the Government Bond Department to form the present New York Stock Exchange early in 1863.

There followed a half-century of unprecedented expansion. Money was needed for railroads, telegraph lines, factories, for building cities over night and exploiting the resources of the West. Financial titans arose: Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Daniel Drew, Jim Hill, E. H. Harriman, and the elder J. P. Morgan. After Gould, Fisk, and Drew, with the help of bribed New York legislators, had succeeded in their struggle with Commodore Vanderbilt for the control of the Erie Railroad, Gould and Fisk conceived the plan of cornering the gold market, counting on the United States Treasury not to sell from its gold reserve. But when the price of gold reached 162 on Black Friday (September 24, 1869), President Grant ordered the Treasury to sell, breaking the corner. The panic of 1869 resulted, followed by a depression which lasted ten years. Banks, brokers, merchants suspended business; nearly one hundred railroads failed, and the Stock Exchange closed its doors.

With the fall of men like Fisk came the rise of Morgan, Harriman, and others, unbridled expansion, larger fortunes, and further battles for personal financial dictatorship. It was in this period that Morgan's and Harriman's struggle over the great Northern Pacific Railroad was followed by the collapse of the market and the nation-wide panic of 1901. Again, in 1907, Morgan's struggle with the Knickerbocker Trust Company brought about the failure of that and other institutions.

The World War brought further prosperity to the Exchange and necessitated the erection of a twenty-two-story addition to its building. After the war, except for the depression of 192022, the market rose to new heights, and with it the expectations of an expanding nation. The panic of October, 1929, and another depression were the inevitable reactions.

One radical result of this depression was the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934, which for the first time attempted governmental regulation of the influential Stock Exchange.

The function of the Exchange is to provide a liquid market where securities can at all times be disposed of or acquired virtually without delay. Trading in America's greatest securities market is conducted on the floor of the Great Hall, one of the largest rooms in the world. Orders to buy or sell, telegraphed and telephoned from all over the world, are relayed through brokerage houses to their active members on the floor, who transact business orally with traders stationed at numerous horseshoe trading posts. Despite the informal nature of these transactions, they are quickly recorded in meticulous detail on the Exchange's ticker tape and are communicated by telegraph and cable to other markets.

Trading operations may be viewed from the visitor's gallery. Admission was comparatively easy until 1933, when a visitor unkindly deposited a tear gas bomb in the ventilating system. Today admission is available only to guests of an Exchange member firm.

The visitor, standing in front of Trinity Church (see page 310), Wall Street and Broadway, shortly before nine o'clock in the morning, will see the empty "street" fill suddenly with swift-moving clerks, tellers, stenographers, and office boys pouring from subways, ferries, and elevated trains ; while bankers and brokers arrive almost as promptly in chauffeured automobiles or by planes landing at a ramp near the foot of Wall Street.

Directly behind Trinity Church, is the NEW YORK CURB EXCHANGE, 78 Trinity Place, second largest securities market in the nation. Here certain other securities not listed by the New York Stock Exchange are traded. The Curb Exchange's two buildings, designed by Starrett and Van Vleck, were opened in 1921 and 1931 respectively. The 550 regular and more than four hundred associate members include many members of the Stock Exchange.

Before 1921, the Curb conducted transactions in the open street, from which comes its name. The brokers, known originally as "Curb brokers" in Wall Street, met at the northern end of Broad Street and communicated by violent gesticulations with their colleagues in the windows above. In 1908 the New York Curb Agency was organized, and reorganized in 1911 as the New York Curb Market, with fixed trading hours. The present name was adopted in 1929. The lowest price accepted in 1929 for a Curb seat was $150,000; the 1938 minimum was $8,000.

At the entrance to Wall Street are two skyscrapers, the IRVING TRUST COMPANY, at No. i, and the FIRST NATIONAL BANK, at No. 2. The former, completed in 1931, from the plans of Voorhees, Gmelin, and Walker, is fifty stories high, and resembles a solid shaft of stone. Fluted walls and chamfered corners (an expensive device on land worth $520 a square foot) help create this illusion. The site is about 180 by no feet and is assessed at $10,250,000 without improvements. The twenty-onestory First National Bank, erected in 1933 from a design by Walker and Gillette, is marked by a flat, unimaginative use of classic precedent. At No. 14, is the entrance to the thirty-nine-story BANKERS TRUST COMPANY, designed by Trowbridge and Livingston, and erected in 1911. The twenty-five-story addition, facing Pine Street, was completed in 1933. Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon designed the addition.

Opposite the Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Nassau Streets is the SUBTREASURY BUILDING, a dignified structure designed in GreekRevival style by Ithiel Town and A. J. Davis. Built in 1842 as a Custom House, it was remodeled in 1862 for use as a Subtreasury. The Federal Reserve Bank used it until 1925. Now the building houses the New York Passport Agency of the Department of State, several departments of the U.S. Public Health Service, and the Bureau of Accounts of the Interstate Commerce Commission. It stands on the site of the Colonial City Hall, built in 1699 and torn down in 1812. Here, in 1735, John Peter Zenger, imprisoned editor of the New-York Weekly Journal, was. tried on charges of libeling the administration of the royal governor, William Cosby, and was acquitted after the country's first major battle for freedom of the press. The Stamp Act Congress met here in 1765, and the Continental Congress in 1785. In the expectation that New York would be the national capital, Major L'Enfant, who later planned the city of Washington, was commissioned to remodel the building in 1788 as the Federal Hall, and here Washington took oath, April 30, 1789, as President of the United States. The place above the steps where it is claimed he stood on this occasion is marked by J. Q. A. Ward's STATUE OF WASHINGTON erected in 1883. The actual stone on which Washington stood is preserved in a glass case within the building.

Near the Subtreasury, in front of the adjoining old Assay Office, a horse-drawn wagon, loaded with explosives, blew up shortly before noon, September 16, 1920. Thirty of the noonday crowd were killed and one hundred wounded. Scars of the explosion are still visible on near-by buildings. Occurring during a period of anti-radical hysteria, the disaster was said by some to have been a protest dynamiting of this important financial corner. Others held that the wagon had belonged to an explosives company and had been using a prohibited route when its load of dynamite was accidentally discharged. Neither theory ever was proved.

At 23 Wall Street, across from the Stock Exchange, is the diminutive MORGAN BUILDING, home of America's most powerful private banking firm. Erected in 1914, the gray five-story building is impersonal to an almost forbidding degree. It was designed by Trowbridge and Livingston.

East, at 40 Wall, is the BANK OF THE MANHATTAN COMPANY, the city's second oldest bank. By-product of the feud between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Manhattan Company was organized by Burr in 1799, and though chartered as a water company, the bank was opened almost immediately. The water service ceased in 1842. The present building, called the Manhattan Company Building, was designed by H. Craig Severance in association with Yasuo Matsui. Seventy-one stories in height, it was intended to be the world's tallest structure when construction was begun in 1929, but the last-minute addition of a spire to the Chrysler Building (see page 224) defeated the plan. Within five years it had dropped to fifth place in height. The observation tower stands 830 feet above the street. (Open daily 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; admission free.) Solid glass automatic doors in the lobby are an unusual feature.

Hamilton's bank, the BANK OF NEW YORK AND TRUST COMPANY, the city's oldest, is just east, at No. 48; it was organized in 1784. The present thirty-two-story structure was erected in 1928, from the plans of Benjamin Wistar Morris III.

The NATIONAL CITY BANK, the second largest bank in the country, has offices at No. 55. The building's lower part, with its four-story colonnade, was built in 1842, and served- as customhouse from 1862 until 1907, when it was taken over by the bank, and the second tier of four stories and another colonnade were added under the direction of McKim, Mead, and White, architects. The simple power of the composition of the north fagade is most effective. The bank, chartered in 1812, was an outgrowth of the First Bank of the United States, established in Philadelphia in 1791.

A block to the north, at 18 Pine Street, is the CHASE NATIONAL BANK, the nation's largest bank since its merger with the Equitable Trust Company in 1930. At its Cedar Street entrance is a free exhibit of more than forty thousand coins. (Open weekdays 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. to 12 m.)

The tallest building in lower Manhattan, and third highest in the city, is SIXTY WALL TOWER (the Cities Service Building), at 70 Pine Street. An underground passage and a bridge connect with older quarters at 60 Wall Street. Sixty-seven stories (965 feet) high, it was designed by Clinton and Russell, and erected in 1932. A complicated play of overlapping forms emphasizes long vertical lines that accentuate the height of the building. There is an observation room in the tower. (Open weekdays 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; admission 400, children under eight, free.)

The TONTINE BUILDING, northwest corner of Wall and Water Streets, is on the site of the Tontine Coffee House, erected in 1794, a favorite meeting place for merchants and political groups. The Merchants' Coffee House, erected about 1737 on the southeast corner of Wall and Water Streets, was a rendezvous for Revolutionary plotters, and is memorialized by a bronze plaque on the present building.

Hanover Square, where Hanover, Stone, Pearl, and William Streets converge on OM Slip, south of Wall Street, was a public Common as early as 1637. On the southwest side of the square is INDIA HOUSE, built in 1837 by Richard Carman, and headquarters since 1914 of a group of foreign traders. Ship models, prints, and other relics are housed here. Nicholas Bayard built a house on this site in 1673, while across the square (119-21 Pearl Street) in about 1691 lived his friend Captain William Kidd. The Bayard House, together with a greater part of the square, was destroyed in the great fire of 1835.

The lower end of William Street has probably undergone more changes of name than any other street in the city. It has been known as: The Glass Makers' Street, The Smith Street, Smee Street, Smit Street, Suice Street, De Smee Street, Burghers Path, Burger Jorisens Path, King Street, Berger Joris Street, and Borisens Path.

The NEW YORK COTTON EXCHANGE, at 60 Beaver Street, two blocks south of the Stock Exchange, is the most important cotton market in the world; it was organized in 1871. Its present building, designed by Donn Barber, was erected in 1923. Other exchanges in the vicinity include the MARITIME EXCHANGE at No. 80 and the COMMODITY EXCHANGE at 81 Broad Street, three blocks south of the Stock Exchange; and the NEW YORK COFFEE AND SUGAR EXCHANGE at 1 1 3 Pearl Street. The New York Produce Exchange (see page 66) is at 2 Broadway.

KEY TO MAP OF SOUTH STREET, WALL STREET DISTRICT, CITY HALL DISTRICT, AND CHINATOWN

SOUTH STREET

1. Hearst Publication Plant 9. First Precinct Police Station

2. Birthplace of Alfred E. Smith 10. Seamen's Church Institute

3. Fulton Market 11. Jeanette Park

4. Sweet's 12. State Barge Canal Terminal

5. The Old Griswold Warehouse 13. Site of the First Dock

6. 120 Wall Street Building 14. Municipal Lodging House

7. Municipal Downtown Skyport 15. Site of the Eastern Hotel

8. U.S. Assay Building

WALL STREET DISTRICT

16. Maritime Exchange 32. New York Curb Exchange

17. Commodity Exchange 33. New York's Oldest Restaurant

18. India House 34. Trinity Church

19. Cotton Exchange 35. First National Bank Building

20. Coffee, and Sugar Exchange 36. Bankers Trust Company Building

21. Site of Merchants' Coffee House 37. Chase National Bank Building

22. Tontine Building 38. Equitable Building

23. Sixty Wall Tower 39. New York Clearing House

24. Bank of N.Y. and Trust Company 40. Mutual Life Insurance Company

25. National City Bank Building 41. Federal Reserve Bank

26. Manhattan Company Building 42. Chamber of Commerce

27. U.S. Subtreasury Building 43. Singer Building

28. Morgan Building 44. Site of John Street Theater

29. New York Stock Exchange 45. Golden Hill

30. Irving Trust Company Building 46. Old John Street Church

31. Aldrich Court Building 47. Washington Irving's Birthplace

CITY HALL DISTRICT

48. St. Paul's Chapel 61. City Court Building

49. Woolworth Building 62. Stewart Building (The Sun)

50. Statue of Nathan Hale 63. Hall of Records

51. Civic Virtue 64. Court Square Building

52. Statue of Benjamin Franklin 65. St. Andrew's Church

53. Newspaper Row 66. U.S. Court House

54. Tribune Building 67. Site of Tea Water Pump

55. Old Beekman (Tavern) 68. Supreme Court Building

56. Pulitzer Building 69. State Office Building

57. Brace Newsboys' House 70. Health Department Building

58. Municipal Building 71. Tombs

59. Statue of Horace Greeley 72. Criminal Courts Building

60. City Hall

CHINATOWN

73. Chinese School 77. Tom Noonan's Rescue Society

74. Wall Newspaper 78. Bloody Angle

75. On Leong Tong 79. Hip Sing Tong

76. Joss House

SOUTH STREET

WALL STREET DISTRICT

CITY HALL DISTRICT

CHINATOWN

At 45 Broadway, between Morris Street and Exchange Alley, is the ALDRICH COURT BUILDING, housing the United States Shipping Commission, the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation and other Federal agencies. A TABLET in the building's fagade marks what is said to be the site of the first residence of white men on Manhattan. In November, 1613, the ship Tyger burned offshore, and the captain and crew landed here and built four huts.

Running north of the Stock Exchange, Nassau Street, known originally as "the Street that Runs by the Pye Woman," a continuation of Broad Street, is the retail shopping center of the financial district. Here in low old buildings are shops and restaurants catering to the noonday crowd.

At 77 Cedar Street, between Nassau and Broadway is the NEW YORK. CLEARING HOUSE, a five-story building with a marble front, erected in 1896. R. W. Gibson was the architect. In this important institution many millions of dollars in checks and drafts drawn on member banks are cleared daily. Although constant mergers have reduced member banks from a maximum of sixty-seven to twenty, the volume of business has expanded enormously since it was organized in 1853.

New York's oldest restaurant, YE OLDE CHOP HOUSE, is located at 118 Cedar Street, and for more than 1 30 years has catered to men in the Wall Street area. At 120 Broadway, between Cedar and Liberty Streets is the EQUITABLE BUILDING, planned by E. R. Graham. Erected in 1914, before the setback law, it shoots up forty-one stories, unrelieved and formidable. Its total of 1,200,000 square feet of rentable floor space makes it the second largest building in floor area in the city. The MUTUAL LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY of New York is at 34 Nassau Street, between Cedar and Liberty Streets. Chartered in 1842, it is the oldest organization of its kind in America. The insurance section of the financial district is now largely concentrated in the neighborhood of Fulton and William Streets.

The FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF NEW YORK, 33 Liberty Street, occupies the block bounded by Maiden Lane, Nassau, Liberty, and William Streets. The fourteen- story building, completed in 1924 from plans by York and Sawyer, is constructed of heavy limestone blocks. It strongly suggests the fortified palaces of the Florentine Renaissance. The rusticated stone exterior is almost without ornament except for iron lanterns, and the iron grilles of the great arched windows complete the picture of a building ready for a siege. Five stories are below street level. Subterranean vaults are barred by doors weighing as much as ninety tons.

The NEW YORK CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, 65 Liberty Street, occupies a five-story building designed by James B. Baker and completed in 1902. This, the oldest commercial organization of its kind in the world, was founded in 1768 in the Long Room of Fraunces Tavern (see page 68) and chartered by George III in 1770 with the aim of encouraging commerce and supporting industry. Its resident membership, limited to two thousand, includes many of the city's prominent bankers and industrialists.

Maiden Lane, one block north of Liberty Street, was so named when, as Maagde Paatje (the Dutch equivalent), it was a footpath used by lovers along a rippling brook. Once the city's noted retail jewelry center, the street is now given over to wholesale trade and manufacturing. A TABLET in the Jewelers' Building, 17 Maiden Lane, marks the location of the John Street Theater, built in 1767, and frequently attended by President Washington.

One block north, John Street, center of insurance and jewelry business, was known before the Revolution as Golden Hill and was the scene of the "Battle" of Golden Hill where, in January, 1770, two men were wounded in a skirmish between citizens and British soldiers. A TABLET at the northwest corner of John and William Streets marks the site of this early encounter. The SINGER BUILDING, 149 Broadway, at the head of John Street, was built in 1908 and remained the city's tallest edifice for eighteen months ; forty-one stories (612 feet) high, today (1939) it ranks sixteenth. Ernest Flagg, the architect, gave it the first slender skyscraper tower. At 46 John Street is the OLD JOHN STREET METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, mother church of American Methodism. The present edifice, Federal in style, and erected in 1841, is the third on the site since 1768.

In 1783, Washington Irving was born at 131 William Street, corner of Fulton an appropriate birthplace for the man who coined the phrase "the Almighty Dollar." One block east, at the corner of Pearl Street, Holt's Hotel, later known as the United States Hotel, was erected in 1833. It was considered "the pioneer of the 'great' hotels of New York City and of America." The roof contained a promenade and an observatory whence the city's traders could watch for incoming vessels.

CITY HALL DISTRICT

Area: Fulton St. on the south to Franklin St. on the north; from Church St. east to Pearl St. Map on page 91.

One mile north of Battery Landing, the imperfect triangle of CITY HALL PARK is wedged into Broadway's steep eastern wall. Here is the venerable seat of the municipal government, and the scene of important historical events. Broadway clips the park precisely on the west as does Chambers Street on the north and hems it in with a palisade of commercial buildings whose architectural distinction, except for the Woolworth Building, lies mainly in their renovated store fronts. The apex of the park's ten-and-one-half-acre triangle points to St. Paul's Chapel, the oldest church in the borough and probably the only building that presents its back to Broadway. The eastern boundary of the park is fixed by two streets: Park Row, which slants northeast from Broadway past old "Newspaper Row," and Centre Street, which runs north from the end of Brooklyn Bridge (see page 313) through the new civic center at Foley Square.

Paved walks subdivide the park into small grassy areas set with trees. Rows of benches bordering the walks accommodate strollers and idlers who pause to rest, to read, to have their shoes shined, to feed the pigeons, or to enjoy the transient sunshine. This is a restless park: six days a week crowds of office workers stream to and from the IRT subway kiosks on both sides; elevated trains rattle and screech in a rambling shed at the approach to Brooklyn Bridge; well polished automobiles bearing low license numbers nudge into a parking space "For Official Cars Only"; policemen ceaselessly patrol the grounds; lunch-hour crowds, released from near-by office buildings, fill the paths at noontime.

There are but two buildings in the park proper, although a third, the triangular post-office building that was called "Mullett's monstrosity," occupied the southern segment until 1938. In the north central section of the park is City Hall, and to the rear and fronting Chambers Street is the City Court Building, formerly known as the Old County Court House.

CITY HALL houses the offices of the Mayor, chief executive and magis.trate of the city, and his staff; the City Council, the municipal legislative body; the Board of Estimate, the general administrative body; and the Art Commission, the agency that passes on the designs for all public buildings and works of art.

Architecturally, City Hall is an exceptionally well-executed design of the post-Colonial period showing clearly the fact, noteworthy in its day, that professional rather than amateur architects planned it. The design, a beautiful adaptation of French Renaissance and American Colonial influences, was essentially the work of Joseph F. Mangin, a Frenchman, but his partner and co-winner of a competition for the commission, John McComb, a Scotsman, supervised the work in New York and received most of the contemporary credit. He was paid six dollars a day, a very good salary at the time. Construction was under way for nearly a decade; it took three years to settle on the plan alone. To save $15,000 the city fathers, tempering their recklessness in spending a half million dollars for the structure, insisted that brownstone be used for the rear. City Hall was completed in 1811.

Reminiscent of the Hotel de Ville of the eighteenth century, the dignified marble structure, chastely embellished with Louis XVI pilasters between arched windows, is noteworthy for its unusual grace and delicate scale. The two wings are balanced on either side of a central portico that is surmounted by a cupola. Its finial is a figure of Justice, said to have been executed by John Dixey. The interior is marked by McComb's fine attention to detail, especially in the rotunda, in the superb double curve of the self-supporting marble stairway with its delicate wrought-iron railings, and in the slender columns of the upper gallery.

Portraits of former governors crowd the walls of the corridors, and mayors' portraits are hung in the mayor's antechamber and reception room on the first floor. Over the mantelpiece in the mayor's office is a portrait of Lafayette, painted by Samuel F. B. Morse on the occasion of the general's visit to America in 1824. The Governors' Suite, on the second floor, was originally intended for the official use of the State's chief executive when in New York, but its three rooms have been converted into a museum. (Open Monday to Friday 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. to 12 m.) A mahogany writing table used by George Washington during the first days of his Presidency is exhibited along with other historic pieces of furniture. In the Governors' Room of the suite are Trumbull's portraits of such noted personages as John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington (valued at more than a quarter of a million dollars), and in the other two rooms are hung paintings by John Wesley Jarvis, Henry Inman, John Vanderlyn, Thomas Sully, George Catlin, and others. The portrait of Henry Hudson is the work of Paul van Somer, a seventeenthcentury Flemish master; the identity of the subject is doubtful, however, for there is no authenticated portrait of the navigator. This valuable collection is under the care of the Art Commission.

The mahogany- lined City Council chamber, once the aldermanic chamher, on the second floor, contains portraits of Henry Clay and George Washington, a statue of Thomas Jefferson by Pierre Jean David (d' Angers), and a pretentious ceiling mural, New York City Receiving the Tributes of the Nations, by Taber Sears, George W. Breck, and Frederic C. Martin. The adjoining committee room is decorated with portraits of General George B. McClellan, by William H. Powell, and of William Bainbridge, by John Wesley Jarvis. The former Common Council chamber, on the second floor, is now the meeting place of the Board of Estimate. Corinthian columns and pilasters give the room an atmosphere of dignity. A bust of John Jay, on the north side, is the work of John Frazee; that of John Marshall, on the south side, is by an unknown artist.

The steps of City Hall are worn smooth by official public receptions and ceremonies. Here the mayor welcomes distinguished visitors, awards promotions to members of the fire, police, and sanitation departments, and makes contributions opening charity campaigns.

The CITY COURT BUILDING is a white marble structure with Corinthian columns and pilasters. Built (1861-72) by the Tweed Ring at the cost of more than $12,000,000, it provided the opportunity for one of the most gigantic steals in the city's history.

City Hall Park is New York's approximation of a courthouse square or village green. This little plot of land is all that survives of one of New York's earliest municipal gathering places. The site was once part of the common lands. Whenever the community peace was threatened or cause for celebration arose, the populace gathered there. An oak planted near City Hall in 1911 does honor to the memory of Jacob Leisler, who fought against the tyranny of English rule and was hanged for treason in 1691 close to this spot. Near the front of the building the Sons of Liberty erected five successive "liberty poles" between 1766 and 1776. In 1776 the Declaration of Independence, brought by courier from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, was read here, for the first time in New York, in the presence of George Washington.

On February 13, 1837, the "Flour" or "Bread Riot" took place during a financial panic then threatening the country. The price of flour had advanced from six dollars to fifteen dollars a barrel amid widespread speculation. A placard was carried through the streets announcing a meeting at the park, and declaring: "All friends of Humanity, determined to resist Monopolists and Extortionists are invited to attend, rain or shine. Bread, Meat, Rent, Fuel the voice of the people shall be heard." The six thousand who attended vented their anger by breaking into the flour stores, dispersing only after the militia had been called out. The distressed gathered again in ominous protest during the lean days of the 1850's.

The park was the scene of a peculiar riot in 1857 when opposing bands of policemen cracked one another's heads. The Municipal Police, venal and inefficient, had been abolished by an act of the State Legislature and a new body, the Metropolitan Police, established under State control. The Municipals refused to disband, however, and when a large force of Metropolitans attempted to serve warrants for the arrest of Mayor Fernando Wood, the two groups clashed in a savage battle that stormed through the corridors of City Hall and was finally checked only by a show of bayonets by the Seventh Regiment of the National Guard.

During the Civil War, food for the soldiers went out across the park from the supply