on the
Bowling Green in 1770, the dawn of Independence, so sturdily ushered in
and cherished by the Liberty Boys, and culminating in the evacuation of
the British in 1783, the entrance of Washington with the American army,
and, two years after, in the meeting of the first Congress. These
vicissitudes left their impress on the street. Every church but the
Episcopal was turned by the English into a riding-school, prison, or
stable; each successive charter was more liberal in its municipal
privileges. The Boston stage long went from the Fort to the Park, and so
on by the old post-road, and was fourteen days _en route_; pestilence,
imported from the West India islands, depopulated the adjacent houses;
water was sold from carts; and dimly lighted was the pedestrian on his
midnight way, while old-fashioned watchmen cried the hour; and when, in
1807, Robert Fulton initiated steam navigation, the vast system of
ferriage was established which inundated the main avenue of the city
with a perpetual tributary stream of floating population from all the
outlying shores of the Hudson and East Rivers, Staten and Long Islands,
and the villages above Manhattan. A lady who lived in New York forty
years ago, and returned this season, expressed her surprise that the
matutinal procession of rustics she used to watch from the window of her
fashionable domicile in the lower part of Broadway had ceased, so
completely had suburban citizens usurped the farmers' old homes.
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