Walking the Post Road

Entry #1: Five mile marker Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts: The Art of Walking

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 09:01:10 -0500

The Art of Walking

I have decided to walk from Boston to New York. I could, of course, choose a more exotic setting for a long-distance perambulation such as the Camino de Santiago (of which more later) in Spain and France or the Via Appia in Italy or the Silk Road or the Karakoram Highway in Asia or the overland route from Cairo to Capetown or, closer to home, the Appalachian Trail, or I simply could walk across America. Instead I choose to walk out my front door, turn left at the crossroads and keep going for 230 or so miles until I get to the Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan.
The non-walker might suggest more rapid forms of transportation in the interest of time. I could drive, fly, take a bus, or take the train (though it is debatable at times whether any of these modes of transportation are, indeed, faster). What is the point of wandering through busy towns and past suburban shopping malls? What is the point of walking on an old road when you could take the highway? Isn’t this just a waste of time and energy?
The reasons for deciding to make this trip are manifold. First, I am cheap. I figured my feet were a less expensive way to go. Second, I like walking. I also enjoy bumping into things I had not anticipated. I like the voyage itself sometimes as much as or more than the destination. I also enjoy collecting information and processing it, and walking gives me more time to both collect and process many facts about small towns, about the landscape of New England, about the historical significance of the road and of the houses, the fields, and the towns it passes. I am a birdwatcher and it is quite difficult to watch birds at 65 miles per hour, but quite enjoyable at a walking pace.
Here is where I pull out the big guns, namely, one Henry David Thoreau, who wrote an essay entitled Walking, in which he describes the pleasures, purposes, and advantages of walking. He also believes that people do not walk properly: “I have met but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking.” (1) Thoreau did most of his travels on foot or in a canoe, observing small details as he went, building from the seemingly trivial the arguments and essays for which he is justifiably world-renowned. I want to be one of those one or two to whom he might be referring. Life on Earth might be a good sight more enjoyable if everyone read a little Thoreau instead of sticking Thoreau quotations on the bumpers of their Toyota SUVs.
There is an underlying goal and a concrete starting point for this madness. In the mid 1980s I watched La Voie Lactee (a movie by the Spanish director Luis Bunuel). In this film, two “pilgrims” travel to the holy site of Santiago de Compostela, a city in Galicia. This allegorical film has our heroes meet with a variety of adventures and characters. The film itself is interesting in its own right, and I will discuss it in detail later. What it did for me however, was to help generate an idea which has percolated for a quarter of a century. I became obsessed with the idea of walking from Paris to Santiago on the ancient trail, the Chemin de Saint Jacques in France and, after passing through Roncevalles in the Pyrenees, el Camino de Santiago (or Camino Frances as it is more properly known).
Anyone who knows me realizes that it was not a religious obsession. Richard Dawkins is the type of saint I admire. Rather, I was captivated by the idea of wandering roads that had been traveled by many people over long periods of time. It also occurred to me that people once walked great distances to get someplace because they had no other choice. One might argue that Homo sapiens evolved with a capacity, born of necessity, to walk long distances. The upshot is that I began to walk more and to maintain an obsession with Santiago.
There are a number of problems with walking to Santiago which I could describe in detail, but the fact remains that twenty-five years went by, and, except for a day or two now and then over the years, I have not walked the Santiago trail.

***

Just up the street from the house in which I live is a stone marker tucked way in a traffic intersection bearing the inscription
5 miles
Boston Townhouse
PD 1735
A couple of questions popped into my head the first time I saw this stone discreetly calling out to the occasional passerby who notices it. Because I live within the city limits of Boston it struck me as curious that ‘Boston’ was still five miles away. Which way to Boston? There are twenty roads leading into the Hub, so why is this stone here and not elsewhere indicating the main-traveled road to the eighteenth-century traveler. A resident of my neighborhood, even in the eighteenth-century, would surely be able to find his or her way to the city center without the aid of a milestone. So this was clearly meant for strangers; therefore this road, besides going to Boston, must come from somewhere else. Where? Who was PD, and why would he put up a stone in 1735 telling the aforementioned traveler the remaining distance to Boston? Is this the only stone of its type or are there more?
The milestone began to preoccupy my thoughts. I would walk over to it with my dog and stare at it while people stared at me. I would touch it as though it were a holy relic. I researched the road and the person who erected the stone. I even read some books by and about both people who had traveled past the milestone and those people who traveled past the spot where the milestone is before it existed. Finally I decided to see for myself where the road went. I would walk the road myself. Wherever it went I would follow. It would get me out of the house and get me focused on a project. Where does the road go? Is it still there? How does the road compare to the one traveled by my predecessors on this voyage? I would make a pilgrimage on this road, aspiring in the end to discover the meaning of the Post Road. Again, Thoreau said it best: “For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the infidels.” (2)

Editor’s note: Now that I have completed this journey I am revising each entry and changing the order so that readers can follow the entries from the beginning of the journey to the end rather than in reverse chronological order. There is no way on iWeb to organize these entries in any form other than chronological. Additionally, since I began this project, our good friends at Apple have decided to abandon MobileMe and iWeb to the dustbin of history and thus plan no further updates. Hence I have been obliged to change the dates of the original entries in order to achieve my objective. I will place the original date of publication of the entry at the bottom of each entry as I revise each one.

Originally published Monday, March 1, 2010.

Entry #2: Mile 0, Boston: The Origin of the Post Road

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 09:00:00 -0500

The Origin of the Post Road

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to understanding is familiarity. I do not mean by familiarity intimate knowledge but rather that pleasing sense of comprehension merely owing to long acquaintance. So for instance the all too familiar pattern of living in close proximity to a famous monument that in fact one never visits. I once worked at the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown and virtually every day someone would come in and tell me that they had lived in Boston their whole life but this was their first visit to the monument. We know it so we do not visit and thus, ironically, we do not know it at all.
The Boston Post Road fits into this category, familiar yet unknown. Many people can tell you where it is and what it means and most of them are wrong. It is not what people think it is, it does not go where people think it goes. Signs for Post Roads abound, especially in New England. The Boston Post Road is in Attleborough, Massachusetts, on the border with Rhode Island. The Boston Post Road is in Marlborough, Massachusetts, 20 miles west of Boston. It is found on the Southern Connecticut coast and in the hills of Northeastern Connecticut, and in Hartford. It is in the Bronx. All of these are in fact the Boston Post Roads.
The Post Road exists in many forms and permutations but there is the original road and it is hidden away; sometimes buried under a strip mall or condo development, sometimes a lost track in the woods. Sometimes it is right under your feet if you are walking in downtown Boston, although it is not called by that name. The first Post Road still exists under the clutter of familiarity, and underneath the many layers of more modern roads, like the lost City of Troy, sits the path taken by the Wampanoag and the Narragansett, Pequot and puritans from Boston to Maine and from Boston to Maryland and even beyond, through the wilderness to the urban oases of New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, New Haven, Newport, and Charleston.

*****
Near the old man in the Red Sox jacket hawking roasted nuts and cold drinks wandered a man dressed in a sort of piratical garb. Only he had reflecting shades and dragon feet sandals and a bunch of signs pasted to his body. One said, “tell me your first name and I can spell your last name-$5” Another said “I know your telephone number, your zip code, your age”. Occasionally a passing tourist would be curious and ask him to perform his trick. Cocodini, as he was known (although he looked and sounded very much like a Foley or Sullivan) would go into a sort of accountant’s trance, pull out a clipboard and ask a couple of questions sotto voce (so as not to give away his secrets I imagine), write a few things down, stare at the clipboard, make his customers laugh a little, and then show them the clipboard. All I could hear in the transaction was “how did you do that?” and see a look of amazement. Then he would collect $5 and wait for the next customer. I saw him make $30 in an hour. I didn’t want to ask him if he knew what I was doing; I wasn’t sure I knew myself and I was afraid what the answer might be.
Directly behind the Great Cocodini stands a small red brick structure dwarfed by modern skyscrapers. This building, now called the Old State House, was formerly called the Town House, and was the seat of colonial government in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Town house was also mile 0 in Boston, the point from which all distances were measured. This is where the Boston Post Road begins.
*****

Even this part of the story of the Post Road is muddled. For many years a myth has existed concerning a certain stone in the Blackstone Block, on the way to the North End of Boston, about a quarter mile from The Old State House. This stone, embedded in a wall of a building on Marshall Street, is often referred to as the Boston Stone or the zero milestone and is often mistaken for the starting point from which distances from Boston are measured. In fact, it is not, nor has it ever been used for that purpose. George Weston, in Boston Ways believes it to be a grinding stone for paint brought from England in 1700, which was later placed there by the owner of the establishment (1). Charles Bahne, in The Complete Guide to the Freedom Trail, states that “the stone was forgotten until a tavern owner found it on his property. He named it the Boston Stone, and set it in front of his tavern as an advertisement. It has been there ever since”(2). The present origin point of the distances one sees on signs indicating the distance from Boston for instance on I-95) is the State House on Beacon Hill (the “New” State House, built by Bulfinch in 1797). In Colonial Boston, the starting point for all distances measured to and from Boston was the Town House, at the intersection of State (formerly Great, then King) Street and Washington (formerly Cornhill, Marlborough, Newbury, and Orange Streets) Street, which was and remains the heart of Boston.

*****

In order to understand the origins of what became known as the Old Post Road, or Boston Post Road, it helps to understand the geography of New England, the history of settlement by Europeans, and the lives of the people living here at the time of contact by the English who eventually came to control the colony they formed. All of this will unfold as I walk the Post Road and contribute entries to this blog. For our purpose today I need only tell the reader that at the time of the foundation of Boston in 1630, the town was contained entirely on what was called the Shawmut peninsula, surrounded on almost every side by water with the exception of a small spit of land called “the Neck”, which provided the sole means of entry by foot into Boston. Hence the main road in Boston, now called Washington Street, ran from the Town House in a southwesterly direction for one and a quarter miles to the Neck.
Boston began as and remains an important seaport. From the largest of the wharves, known as Long Wharf, ran Great (later King, now State) Street to the Town House. As Walter Muir Whitehill, in A Topographical History of Boston, emphasizes about the importance of the source of the town’s prosperity “this broad half mile (King Street) was the obvious avenue to Boston from the part of the world that really mattered”(3). The Town House was thus situated at the intersection of the main roads leading into the town by land and by sea.

Boston, c. 1643. From Samuel Adams Drake, Old Boston Taverns, 1917, page 98. Note the main road leading out toward the Neck on the left side of the map. The Town House, not yet built, would be at the site marked as ‘Market Place’.

*****
Standing in front of the Old State House I can see down State Street to the Harbor. The most important and imposing building in it’s day, the Old State House now is dwarfed by towers of commerce. It is the second building on the site, replacing a wooden structure built in 1657 which burned in 1711. The seat of government in colonial Massachusetts, the building was also the commercial center of Boston in colonial days as the focal point of traffic from land and from sea. All visitors to Boston would have occasion to pass this building. As we shall see, this building and the surrounding area, the starting point of the Post Road, has played an important role in the evolution of the United States of America. Turning away from the sea, I take a step toward the Old State House. My journey on the Post Road has begun.

Below: View down State Street from Old State House. Long Wharf and Boston Harbor are just beyond the last office towers.

1. George F. Weston, Boston Ways, 3rd Edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), 49.
2. Charles Bahne, The Complete Guide to the Freedom Trail (Cambridge: Newtowne Press, 1985), 30.
3. Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 21.

Original date of publication April 13, 2010.

Comments: working on this. Sorry-Apple abandonment and indifference again. Boy, they sure are trying to lose all their longtime loyal customers! I will get these up and running as soon as I figure out how Disqus works.

Entry #5: Mile 3, Roxbury. The Parting Stone

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 08:59:00 -0500

Deviating From The Straight Path

Pity poor William Dawes. As one of the two midnight riders sent out from Boston on the night of April 18, 1775 to sound the alarm about the impending arrival of troops stationed in Boston, he deserves at least a place at the same table at which Paul Revere sits. The blame rests with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose famous poem is the quintessence of artistic license (1). Revere hogs all the credit even though Dawes left earlier via the road to the Neck, “no small feat” according to David Hackett Fischer in Paul Revere’s Ride, slipped past the soldiers guarding the Gate and the fortifications, passed through Dudley Square in Roxbury, turned right and climbed the hill to the Parting Stone, where he took the right hand road and continued on through Brookline to Cambridge, and, eventually, Lexington meeting Revere who had come across to Charlestown by boat and ridden the shorter, more famous ‘Midnight Ride’ to Lexington (2). Both men accomplished their mission to alert Hancock and Adams of the impending arrival of “The Regulars,” but history and poetry have been kinder to Revere.
Dawes did get a small amount of justice in 1896 when Helen Moore published a parody of Longfellow’s poem in the Century Magazine entitled “The Midnight Ride of William Dawes” (3):

I am a wandering, bitter shade, Never of me was a hero made; Poets have never sung my praise, Nobody crowned my brow with bays; And if you ask me the fatal cause, I answer only, "My name was Dawes"

'Tis all very well for the children to hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere; But why should my name be quite forgot, Who rode as boldly and well, God wot? Why should I ask? The reason is clear -- My name was Dawes and his Revere.

When the lights from the old North Church
flashed out, Paul Revere was waiting about, But I was already on my way. The shadows of night fell cold and gray As I rode, with never a break or a pause; But what was the use,
when my name was Dawes!

History rings with his silvery name; Closed to me are the portals of fame. Had he been Dawes and I Revere, No one had heard of him, I fear. No one has heard of me because He was Revere and I was Dawes.

Top: Dawes Plaque on James Timilty Middle School Wall, 205 Roxbury Street.
Bottom: Boundary Marker between the Towns of Roxbury and Boston. Washington Street south of Thorndike Street.
Left: Site of the George Tavern, Washington Street near Lenox Street.

So too has the route to Cambridge traveled by Dawes, and every traveler who averred the nautical option, been long forgotten. As mentioned in a previous post, the privileged position of the road on the Neck as the sole means of entry by land to Boston had been lost in the early nineteenth century. The straighter, wider, more modern Boylston, Tremont, and other streets of the Back Bay and the South End reduced Washington Street to just another road into the city. The construction of the Washington Street Elevated Railway in 1901, which ran above Washington Street from Dover Street (present East Berkeley Street, the site of the Gate) to Dudley Square in Roxbury, and from there to Forest Hills in Jamaica Plain, created a dark atmosphere down at street level and certainly stunted the development of Washington Street into a fashionable residential area until its removal in 1987. Ironically, the stations on what came to be known as the Orange line (in reference to the original name of the street, as mentioned in the previous entry, Orange Street) were designed by Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, the nephew of the poet who slighted Dawes. Apparently this family did not like Washington Street.

Above: Map of Boston during the siege. From Marshall’s Life of Washington, 1806. The George Tavern is located below the B in Boston Neck. Dawes took the road leading out of Roxbury and across the Muddy River to Brookline at the bottom left corner of the map. Cambridge is in the top left corner. Revere ferried across to Charlestown from the North End of Boston at top right of the map. The Parting Stone, marking the divergence of the Cambridge and Dedham roads, is at the bottom of the map beneath the word ‘Redoubt’ near Roxbury center (now Dudley Square). The Dedham Road goes south off the bottom of the map.

*****
The distance down Washington Street along the Neck from Boston Gate to the Roxbury Gate and the fortifications just beyond was approximately one mile. At this point the Neck was closer to half a mile in width. Dawes would have passed the George Tavern just as he approached the fortifications. The existence of the George was recorded as early as 1721 but it was burned by the Redcoats during the Siege of Boston shortly after Dawes passed it (4). The George can be seen below on the map of Boston and surrounding area located a little to the North of the Roxbury line, at about present Lennox Street and Washington Street.
A stone engraved with the date 1823 was placed on the sidewalk on the south side of Washington Street between Thorndike Street and what is today Melnea Cass Boulevard to mark the boundary between the town of Roxbury and the newly developed neighborhood of the South End of Boston. Although the stone remained after Roxbury was incorporated into the city of Boston in 1868 (and remains in the same spot), today the border of Roxbury and the South End is a subject of sometimes heated discussion. The historical border of Boston and Roxbury was located a little south of Lenox Street. The areas of mudflats off the Neck were referred to as Roxbury Flats in a 1728 map of Boston, but as the areas were reclaimed as the South End and the Back Bay they became part of Boston. Yet many people consider the South End to stop at about Massachusetts Avenue. This is very generous to Roxbury so how did this turn of events come about? The South End has become a fashionable neighborhood, while Roxbury has an unfortunate image as dangerous. Perhaps this is why real estate maps show the South End extending all the way to Melnea Cass Boulevard, which is located in what has historically been known as lower Roxbury (5). Various houses for sale by different realtors all refer to the area as the South End, or sometimes euphemistically as “Washington Gateway,” almost certainly to avoid identifying the house as being in Roxbury. However the Boston Globe/Boston Police Department homicide map shows various murders in the area, for example that of Alex Burgos in July 2008 or Thomas Speed in 2009, as occurring in Roxbury, when the area is historically the South End.(6)
In 1986 several residents of Roxbury, including now State Representative Byron Rushing and City Councillor Chuck Turner, proposed Massachusetts Avenue as the border for a new town to be called Mandela that would be created from neighborhoods seceding from Boston, including Roxbury, parts of Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, and Mattapan (7). The referendum was rejected but the word Mandela was painted on the side of a building visible just off Massachusetts Avenue for years after the issue had passed and the building today is known as Mandela Homes (8).
I discovered an interesting conversation on a website that took place over a murder on Lenox Street in 2005 (9). The argument revolved around an article in the Boston Herald which stated that the homicide happened in the South End to “sell papers by scaring people,” in the words of one blogger. The Boston Globe, on the other hand stated the same murder occurred in Hale Map of 1814 showing Roxbury Line. All the area under discussion is clearly in Boston.Roxbury. An argument ensued about whether it is in fact Roxbury, the kernel of the debate revolving around the unquestioned notion that the South End is ‘safe’ and Roxbury is ‘not safe’.
Perhaps a perusal of census data for the areas in question might help to clarify the discussion. The neighborhood bordering the north side of Washington Street from Massachusetts Avenue to Melnea Cass Boulevard is Ward 9, Precinct 3 which, according to the BRA compilation of 2000 census data has the following breakdown: White, non-Hispanic, 19.3%; Black, non-Hispanic, 47.4 %; Hispanic, 27.0%; Asian, 2.4%. Thus only one in five residents is White, compared to 53.2% of the population of Ward 9, Precinct 2, which is the adjoining Precinct on the other side of Massachusetts Avenue. Massachusetts Avenue, quite simply, has been a racial and class-based dividing line, not an official border. Nat Hentoff, the jazz critic, in his autobiography Boston Boy concurs: “Not far from Northeastern’s then extremely modest campus...was another institution of learning, the Savoy Cafe. The Savoy was at the beginning of black Boston. Except for cops, the whites who crossed over the line and into the Savoy were the jazz crazed, of almost all ages, from Boston and its environs.” (10) The Savoy was located at 421 Massachusetts Avenue.
In order for a neighborhood to gentrify, stereotypes must be dispelled, hence the real estate nomenclature ‘South End’ instead of Roxbury. Ironically, in their zeal to claim the area between Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard as the fashionable South End, the real estate agents are probably closer to the truth than the police blotter. The argument continues today as evidenced by an article in the Boston Globe from December 26, 2009 (11).
I decided to take an informal survey. I found ten individuals along Washington Street between Northampton Street and Melnea Cass Boulevard who said they lived in the area in question. I then asked them what neighborhood we were standing in. All responded that it was the South End without hesitation. Where was the border with Roxbury I wondered? Nearly all the individuals suggested Melnea Cass Boulevard as the border between Roxbury and the South End. One older gentlemen said that “real old-timers will tell you that the boundary was Mass. Ave.” When I asked him why he considered it to be the South End he suggested that many people had moved across Massachusetts Avenue a few blocks and did not consider themselves to have left the neighborhood. He also told me that the many music clubs in the neighborhood like “The Baby Grand” and “Estelles” were considered to be in the South End. He finished by saying “things change.”
 

Above Left: South End or Roxbury? Jim Rice Field, named for my favorite Red Sox player.
Above Right: Eliot Burying Ground, Dudley Square.
*****
Once I cross Melnea Cass Boulevard there is no disputing the fact that I am in Roxbury. Dawes would have passed through the area now called Dudley Square which was the center of colonial Roxbury, the first place upon leaving Boston where the road diverged in different directions. I pass one of the few “remains” of that era, the Eliot Burying Ground, dating from 1630. Inside are the graves of the minister John Eliot (more at a later date) and members of the Dudley family, including Governor Thomas Dudley [1653], Governor Joseph Dudley [1720], Chief Justice Paul Dudley [1752] and Colonel William Dudley [1743]. The Dudley tomb is covered with an oval marble slab which took the place of the original plate of pewter that was cut out by American soldiers at the Roxbury camp during the siege of Boston and made into bullets (12). Today’s Dudley Square is named after this illustrious Roxbury family, about whom I will have much to say in upcoming entries.
Although Dudley Square today is not the most fashionable area, efforts have been made to improve it. Roxbury developed into the center of black Boston in the twentieth century, and Dudley Square was the epicenter of African-American culture in Boston. However, judging by the beautiful but empty and boarded up buildings alone, it is obvious that the area has seen better days. Dudley Square was the subject of recent mayoral candidate and former city councilor Sam Yoon’s Master’s thesis in Public Policy at Harvard and he wrote:

Dudley Square has a unique and valuable history. As a part of Roxbury, it has maintained a separate and distinct identity since the founding of the colonies as a manufacturing, commercial and retail district. As an urban marketplace, it has changed dramatically, especially during this century, as did many of the urban centers in America. The flood of immigrants to cities during the early 20th century, the migration of African-Americans from the South, the rise and decline of the manufacturing sector, and suburbanization or “white flight” have all changed the character and usage of Dudley Square over the years.
However, buildings change more slowly than businesses and residents, and the large, vacant lots, buildings and upper-floor space in Dudley Square testify to the magnitude of the changes that have taken place there in recent decades. And yet despite the gloom that these stately, vacant structures impose upon Dudley Square, retail businesses continue to survive and even thrive there.” (13)

Above left: Dudley Square Bus Station. Above Right: Mural in Dudley Square.

I stop for lunch at one of the thriving restaurants in Dudley Square, Haley House Bakery Cafe which was started by an organization that works to alleviate the problems caused by homelessness. It is an oasis of calm in a busy and sometimes unpleasant area. The only time I have ever been harassed by anybody about being in the wrong neighborhood was on Washington Street near the cafe, although the gentleman who addressed his colorful epithets at me was in the process of using a coat hanger to bust into someone’s car and seemed to be somewhat unsteady, so I did not take it personally. Some things never change. Here is an example from 1820: “It was at this very time that two young men, to close a drunken nocturnal frolic, broke into Rev. Dr. Porter's church, tore the cushions in pieces, destroyed the Bible, removed the hearse from the graveyard, and performed other acts equally disgraceful.” (14)
Haley House is located near the site of the Greyhound tavern, opposite Vernon Street, “which for more than a century was the principal public house in Roxbury on the only road leading into Boston.”(15) Samuel Sewall paid a visit on July 11, 1687, but it had ceased to be a tavern by 1776. In 1741 there is a record of an exhibit at the Greyhound Tavern of a live “catamount” (puma, mountain lion, cougar, panther) that had been captured about 80 miles west (16). A tavern referred to as ‘Shippery’s’ --after the landlord of the time John Shippey (sic), (born 1695)-- is recorded in Thomas Prince’s Almanac of 1731 as being located two miles from the town house, in Roxbury (17). The Prince Almanac will prove very useful as I journey forth into the countryside trying to determine the correct route of the original road.

*****
I turn right and leave Washington Street after two and a half miles. Washington Street continues past Dudley Square for miles to the Rhode Island border, and I will revisit this road, which was constructed as a turnpike in the early 1800s, time and again as I make my way to Rhode Island. The original road veers right and is called Roxbury Street. Roxbury Street leads out of Dudley Square and starts up the first hill I have encountered, an indication we are leaving the marshes of Boston behind for the rocky countryside. After a few minutes I reach a beautiful neighborhood with a stately wooden church and some eighteenth-century houses and shortly arrive at a stone marker on the corner of Roxbury and Centre Streets. The Parting Stone marks the divergence of the Post Road for the first time. The road to the right, as indicated on the stone, goes to Cambridge and Watertown. This is the route Dawes took to get to Lexington, passing through Brookline on what is today Harvard Street. The road to the left is the road for Dedham and Rhode Island. This is the road I take to continue on my journey. I will return to the Cambridge road and its role as an important Post Road at a later date. Now I must take my leave of William Dawes, as we part and go our separate ways. Whether with a lemonade in Haley House Cafe or a flip in the now vanished Greyhound Tavern or the George Tavern I raise my glass to William Dawes as he joins Paul Revere at his rightful place at the table of Heroes of the Revolution.

Above: Left and Right Side of the three-sided Parting Stone . Dawes went right, I went left.

Original Date of Publication: May 12, 2010

References
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Revere%27s_Ride_%28poem%29 Accessed May 5, 2010.
2 David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 97. Of great interest in this book are the historiographical essays, particularly “The Union in Crisis: Longfellow’s Myth of the Lone Rider”, 331-333.
3 http://www.paul-revere-heritage.com/midnight-ride-william-dawes.html Note: The descendants of the William Dawes are justifiably annoyed at this historical slight as this website demonstrates. Accessed May 5, 2010.
4 Francis Drake, The Town of Roxbury (Boston: Municipal Printing reprint 1905 of 1878 original), 84.
5 http://www.zillow.com/homes/ditmus-court-boston A map of the neighborhood by a real estate oriented web site. I used the address of the site of Alex Burgos’ homicide (see below) as the point of reference for my search. Accessed May 5, 2010.
6 http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2008_murders_in_boston/ Information about murder of Alex Burgos in “Roxbury.” Note that other homicides in other years in the same area are referred to as taking place in Roxbury. The Boston Police district which covers this area is D-4 which is listed as Back Bay/South End/Fenway, just to confuse matters more. The D-4 boundary is Melnea Cass Boulevard, and the area on the other side, B-2, is referred to as Roxbury. Accessed May 5, 2010.
7 http://main.wgbh.org/ton/programs/4422_02.html An article about the Mandela proposal on WGBH Ten O’clock news from 1986. Accessed May 5, 2010.
8 http://web.mawebcenters.com/mandela/Mandelacorporation.ivnu . This article describes how the housing complex changed its name in 1987 in support of the proposed Mandela secession movement.
9 http://www.universalhub.com/node/2850#
10 Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy, (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1986), 110. Hentoff also revisits the Boston Jazz scene of the 1940s and 1950s here: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/the_shape_of_jazz_that_was/
11 http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/12/26/debate_rekindled_over_roxbury_south_end_border/?page=1
12 http://www.cityofboston.gov/parks/HBGI/hbginfo.asp?ID=13
13 Sam Yoon, “The Dudley Square Retail District”, The Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, April 12, 1995.
14 A Volume of Records Relating to the Early History of Boston, Boston Municipal Registry Department, 1909, 295.
15 Justin Winsor, Memorial History of Boston (Boston: Osgood, 1880), 421.
16 Francis Drake, The Town of Roxbury (Boston: Municipal Printing, 1905 reprint of 1878 original), 164.
17 Thomas Prince, “Vade Mecum for America”, or a companion for traders and travelers (Boston:Kneeland and Green for D Henchman & T Hancock, 1731),199. In Evans Boston Public Library.

Entry #65: Mile 274, New York. The Last Mile.

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 10:17:33 -0400

Today the lower stretch of the Bowery, the old Post Road in this section of New York south of the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, is firmly planted in Chinatown. The population in this area of New York is, unsurprisingly, heavily Asian. I pass through three census blocks on my way from the Manhattan Bridge to the Brooklyn Bridge near City Hall, and Asians make up about four out of five of the nearly 16,000 residents. The signs on the buildings are in both Chinese characters and in English. Many of these buildings are painted red, a color of good fortune in Chinese culture. One of the buildings along this stretch, at Pell Street, is easy to miss but is one of the few remaining buildings in the area dating to the eighteenth century. On the opposite side of the street is Confucius Plaza, a large ugly modern apartment block near the Manhattan Bridge.
In the late eighteenth century this area was owned by the Delancey family who planned and developed a neighborhood consisting of a grid of streets around what was to be Delancey Square. The grid was built but the square was eliminated from the plan, and the neighborhood east of the Post Road became the Lower East Side. The grid was extended a couple of blocks west of the old Boston Road, or the Bowery as it became known, and this today is Chinatown, settled by immigrant Chinese in the nineteenth century at the northern edge of the notorious Five Points neighborhood. Today Chinatown has escaped its historical boundaries and has even taken over most of Little Italy. As I continue down the last block of the Bowery I can see the beginnings of what looks like a transition to an area of large buildings and the end of the small residential and commercial buildings of Chinatown. As I enter this transitional area I reach the edge of colonial New York City and the final mile of the old Post Road.

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Milestone number one is shown on Christopher Colles’s 1792 map at the point where the old road made an abrupt turn to the north. This curve can be seen on eighteenth century, nineteenth century, and even contemporary maps of New York. A wonderful online project called Oasisnyc.net is making a heroic effort to map the entire city block by block including overlays of the topography and the historical land use through the long history of settlement. One set of maps shows the original Lenape footpaths that once criss-crossed the island. One of these became the old colonial road north out of New York City, which eventually became the road to Boston and is the road I have been walking as closely as possible to the original path. This map shows the Lenape trail in lower Manhattan superimposed on a map of the current streets of the city. One thing that immediately stands out is that there was a large body of water around which the Lenape trail passed to the south and east before the trail curved northward. The trail then essentially followed the line of what is today the Bowery as I have been doing (in the opposite direction of course) for the last couple of miles. When the old Lenape Trail reached what is today Madison Square Park it turned to the northeast to take the path of least resistance through the hills and across the streams that once were much more prominent features of Manhattan Island. This is essentially the route I followed across Manhattan.
The streams are mostly gone and many of the hills have been leveled, but the trail created by the feet of the Lenape Indians of Manna-hata (the island of steep hills) still exists here in the most densely populated place in North America, in the financial center of the world, with its soaring towers of commerce, in the neighborhoods that have been transformed from farmland to slums on the edge of town to high-end residential areas to commercial centers back to slums in the middle of a great metropolis and back again into desirable areas to live. The path of the Indians who lived here for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years still exists under all this asphalt and steel and concrete and glass and traffic and has been passed over by literally millions of people on the way to finding the American Dream or to an early death in an overcrowded tenement. The Indians are gone, the forests and streams are gone, most, but not all, of the vestiges of nearly two centuries of colonial New York are gone, as are most of the buildings of the nineteenth and even of the twentieth centuries, but the old path that antedates the recorded history of America is still plainly visible on a map of New York standing out from the grid. I think that is pretty damn cool, and it is the primary reason I have pursued this project.

*****

As I mentioned above, Colles’s map shows the one mile stone at the place the old road curved to the north. This is the spot at which the old trail would have passed around the body of water I mentioned, which was present into the early nineteenth century and was called the Collect Pond. The one mile stone was located at the junction of Division Street and the Bowery in an area called Chatham Square. Today this is in Chinatown and is sometimes referred to as Kim Lau Square, but it has been in existence as a square since at least 1766 as seen from maps of that period. Chatham Square was the center of the cattle market in New York, located as it was at the edge of the city and along the main road into the city. Nearby was a tavern called the Bull’s Head, (what else?) which had a long and interesting life in various locations in the city.
Near Chatham Square on colonial maps of New York (like the one below) tanneries can be seen to the west of the old road near the Collect Pond. The Collect Pond, a spring-fed pond, eventually became polluted by the waste products of the tanneries and slaughterhouses and became a public nuisance, which led to it being filled in with dirt from nearby hills that were leveled in the early 1800s. The area east of the Collect Pond was still swampy, however, and thus was considered insalubrious. Hence it became a place for poor people to settle, and the neighborhood came to be called Five Points, a reference to the intersection of three streets (hence five points, or corners) at the center of the neighborhood. The old Post Road (or Boston Road, or the Bowery) was the eastern edge of this notorious neighborhood (mentioned in my last entry). The first settlers were, unsurprisingly, African Americans, who were in turn succeeded by Irish refugees from the Potato Famine of the 1840s. The neighborhood achieved permanent notoriety in Charles Dicken’s description in his American Notes on a visit in 1842:

"What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies behind this tottering flight of steps? Let us go on again, and plunge into the Five Points. This is the place; these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruit as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home and all the world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken forays. Many of these pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright instead of going on all fours, and why they talk instead of grunting?"

Today Five Points is an unpleasant memory: the city demolished the neighborhood around 1900 and replaced it with administrative buildings for both city, state, and federal governments, collectively known today as the Civic Center. At Chatham Square the Bowery ends, and the old Post Road continues as Park Row, passing through the southern edge of the Civic Center area of New York City, before reaching the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, then passing City Hall, and ending at Broadway. Unfortunately, one negative aspect of the events of September 11, 2001 relevant to the Post Road is that the area around the Police Headquarters, which is on Park Row (also called Avenue of the Finest), is now closed to the public for security reasons. Thus I have no choice but to take a detour at this point along the Post Road. The old Lenape trail followed roughly along Park Row mainly to avoid the swampy areas around the Collect Pond, but since the Pond is no more and I have little choice anyway, I head right onto Pearl Street and into Foley Square, through a canyon of city, state, and federal courthouses and administrative buildings. I turn left in Foley Square and head down Centre Street which brings me shortly back to Park Row near the Tweed Courthouse and the lovely City Hall.
City Hall dates from the same period as the filling in of the Collect Pond. The building was built upon what in colonial New York was the Common at the northern edge of the city, shown on the map below published in 1776. Prior to 1812 City Hall was located on Nassau and Wall Street in what is now the Financial District. The original City Hall became Federal Hall when New York was briefly the capital of the new nation, and then returned to its function as City Hall until the completion of the new City Hall at this point a half mile north. The milestones along the Post Road were measured from the original City Hall, or Federal Hall as it is called on the map of Christopher Colles dating from 1792. When the current City Hall was opened in 1812 the milestones were replaced using the new building as the zero point. This is the source of the often conflicting descriptions of the location of milestones in Manhattan. For instance Milestone 1 is listed in many sources, including Wikipedia, as being on the Bowery, opposite Rivington Street, while on Colles’s map and in many other sources, the first milestone is located at what is now the Bowery at Division Street. The Bowery at Rivington Street is indeed about one mile away from the current City Hall but 1.6 miles from Federal Hall, while the Bowery at Division Street is about one mile from Federal Hall but less than a half mile from today’s City Hall. This location problem continues all the way up the island and, compounded by the opening of the Harlem Bridge and the subsequent rerouting of the Post Road from upper Manhattan through the South Bronx, makes sorting out the original location of the no longer extant milestones difficult and confusing.

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Above is a map of New York City in 1776. This map shows just how small New York City was, with about 25,000 people living in an area extending only about as far north as Chambers Street (below the gardens visible on the map), with some new development in the area north and east of the Collect Pond (labelled ‘Fresh Water’) around the Bowery, in what is now the Lower East Side but which was the Delancey Estate at the time. The Delancey family were Loyalists and thus their property was confiscated after the war. The Common below the Collect Pond is the site of City Hall today. Notice the sweeping curve of the old road to Boston as it passes the Collect Pond and through the Common before heading south as Broadway to the southern tip of Manhattan Island.

Below are scenes from the last mile of the old Post Road in lower Manhattan. Clockwise from top left: 1. A Federal-era building still stands along the Bowery in Chinatown. 2. Chinatown scene on the Bowery at Division Street, near the Bloody Angle, the center of the Tong wars of early twentieth century Chinatown. This is also the location of the one mile stone on Colles’s 1792 map of the Post Road 3. Manhattan Municipal Building, across from City Hall, was completed in 1914 to accommodate the large increase in the size of the bureaucracy required to run the consolidated City of New York after 1898, when the Boroughs officially became a part of the City and increased the population to over 3,000,000 residents. 4. City Hall, completed in 1812, replaced Federal Hall on Wall Street, and became the new point from which milestones were measured. Located on the site of the Common visible on the 1776 map above.

Park Row continues past City Hall and the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, and passes a series of elegant buildings, some of which are now part of the campus of Pace University but which, in previous incarnations, were the offices of many of the newspapers in New York, hence the epithet applied to this section of the old road to Boston, ‘Newspaper Row.’ All of the chief newspapers of the day (including the New York Times before their move to Long Acre, now Times, Square in 1904) had offices here and many well-known publishing figures, including Joseph Pulitzer, Horace Greeley, and William Randolph Hearst, spent long hours shuttling back and forth between their offices here, and the halls of power across the street. It is not an overstatement to say that this was the center of information distribution in America in the nineteenth century.
Opposite City Hall on Broadway is the magnificent Woolworth’s Building, another of my favorite buildings (I would list my three favorite skyscrapers in New York as --3. Flatiron Building, 2. Woolworth Building, 1. Chrysler Building, and all three happen to be on the old Post Road!) Completed in 1913, the Woolworth Building became the tallest building in the world until surpassed by the Chrysler Building in 1930. Only a year later the Empire State Building became the tallest building in the world, a position of primacy it held until 1971, when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were completed. The site of these buildings is clearly visible from the corner of Park Row and Broadway, as they were located only one block west of Broadway directly behind the churchyard of St. Paul’s Chapel. Sadly, the Empire State Building is once again the tallest building in New York, and, while more than a dozen buildings around the world have surpassed it as the tallest skyscrapers in the world, it is still 15th on the list after 80 years.
St. Paul’s Chapel is marked on Christopher Colles’s map at the place where the old road takes its final turn, this time due south on Broadway, before it reached the end at Bowling Green, less than 1000 yards away. To Londoners the church should seem familiar as it was based upon the Georgian St. Martin’s-in-the-Field. When completed in 1766 (it is the oldest standing church in New York) it was at the northern end of the growing city. After the Revolution, when New York was the capital of the country for two years, George Washington came here to worship following his inauguration and was a regular parishioner during his time in New York as President of the United States. Inside the church George Washington’s original pew remains, along with many historical relics of the illustrious old building.
The main thing I notice, however, is the large amount of material commemorating the victims of 911; above the main floor, attached to the balcony, are a number of banners from around the country and the world, including a large banner signed by and sent with sympathy from the families of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. A few of the many posters, photographs, cards, and letters that once festooned the gates outside are on display in the chapel. A door at the rear of the chapel leads to the churchyard, where the site of the World Trade Center is visible just across the street. Today there is a great deal of construction, but what strikes me is that it still is essentially a hole in the ground after ten years. I had originally generated the idea of walking the Post Road in the summer of 2000. A year later I was still planning to do the project when the planes crashed into the twin towers. Shortly thereafter, I made a promise to myself to commemorate the victims of this senseless attack when I finally arrived at St. Paul’s Chapel, whenever that day should arrive. Ten years and five months after that unforgettable day, I stand in the churchyard for a moment and look at the still unfinished site, light a candle in the chapel, and head out to Broadway and the final few yards of my journey.

*****

As I head down Broadway in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan it starts to hit me that I am finally walking the last mile of a journey that has taken me from downtown Boston on a tortuous course through the cities, suburbs, farmland, forests, and along the shore of much of Southern New England, through Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and now finally, New York, on a road that for the most part still exists and has existed since before the first European laid eyes on this continent. Perhaps the emotional impact of my visit to the site of the September 11 terrorist attack has also contributed to the upwelling of emotion I feel as I make my way to the end of the road. It is February 25, 2011, at 11:42 a.m. when I find myself standing in front of the Federal Hall Memorial, New York City, the end of the Post Road from Boston. It is raining pretty steadily so any tears streaming down my face are easily concealed from the busy passersby on Wall Street. Perhaps the occasion does not warrant quite such an emotional reaction, but for me the end of this journey is the culmination of over a decade of stop and start planning and research. The walk itself took only a small fraction of the total time I have poured into this project, and to finally be able to say that I did it gives me a feeling of immense satisfaction. But am I really done yet?
Of course I now face the question that has been bothering for many months as I planned this walk: Where exactly should I end this walk? The end of the Post Road is logically the place where it begins at the other end from where I started, and there is no doubt that Federal Hall was the start of the Post Road in New York City. But if I am following the Lenape trail, the continuation of a string of Indian trails which were the precursors of the Post Road, I surely must follow that trail to the end of its course at the southern tip of Manhattan. Except that the southern tip has changed over the course of the long history of the city by the addition of land extending the shoreline further south than it was in colonial New York or indeed when the Lenape ruled the area. The Bowling Green at the end of Broadway once fronted the harbor, but by the middle of the eighteenth century there was a large fort at the tip of the island, which today is part of Battery Park. Thus, in order to truly say I have finished the walk, I continue a few more yards down Broadway, through the Bowling Green, the oldest public park in New York City, past the statue of the Charging Bull, past the Museum of the American Indian, formerly the Alexander Hamilton United States Custom House, down to the bottom of State Street which was the southern tip of Manhattan in 1609 and marked the end of the Lenape trail, and across Battery Park to the edge of New York Harbor. From here I gaze across the harbor and see the Statue of Liberty and now I know I am done.
I walk along the waterfront toward the Staten Island Ferry Terminal and start to think about another day when I will continue to follow the route of the trip taken by Alexander Hamilton from his home in Annapolis Maryland to this spot and beyond to Boston. Hamilton, James Birket, and especially Sarah Kemble Knight have been my constant companions on this journey, and it is with no little regret that I bid them farewell. I will meet Alexander Hamilton again, but that trip is for another day. So, with a final wistful gaze at the ferry as it heads across the harbor to Staten Island, where a traveler from the colonial era like Alexander Hamilton would have continued to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and beyond to the rest of America, I turn from the harbor and head back up Broadway, back up the old Post Road, back up the road to Boston, back home.

*****

The Post Road. A name that is easy to forget, a road that is easy to bypass or to dismiss as a vestigial element of some long gone way of life. To do so is to ignore the long course of the development of America that can be easily seen in all its layers of complexity simply by meandering along the old Post Road. For many millions of Americans, the Post Road is just around the corner, a familiar yet almost completely unknown road. Sometimes it is not called the Post Road, but the original road that connected New York to Boston is still there, the road that linked the ‘cities in the wilderness’ that became the political, cultural, and economic centers of the newly established United States, a century and a half after the road was first traveled by early European settlers such as John Winthrop, Jr. I highly recommend a walk along the post road--it is pretty easy to do and I promise you will be rewarded for taking the time to travel deliberately and to see the history of the country, to see the changes over time that have transformed the landscape, to get a sense of the incredible richness of our cultural heritage, or merely to get outside and get some exercise. Walking the Post Road is a heck of a lot more interesting and fun than driving it, that is for sure. And now you have a guide to follow it. Have fun.

The end of the road: Top left: Washington’s Pew in St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway. Top right is Federal Hall Memorial. Center left: the Bowling Green, with the old Custom House in the background. Center right is the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street (in case you are the one person on the planet who does not know that fact). Bottom left: Only Jesus could walk any further: The end of the road at New York Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty over my shoulder. Bottom right: Looking back up Broadway from the end of the Post Road. Time to go home.

Entry #64: Mile 270, New York. Diversions along the Bowery.

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 10:51:23 -0400

Manhattan below Madison Square was the virtual edge of New York City in 1836, as the map below shows. Although the grid plan had been adopted and some streets above Madison Square had even been built, the population only slowly followed. In 1840, four years after the map below was published, the Census counted 312,710 residents of New York. Of these, only about 11,000 lived north of 26th Street. Twenty years later over 230,000 New Yorkers (of 805,000) called home somewhere above Madison Square, and the numbers continued to accelerate. Today more than two thirds of Manhattan’s 1,630,000 residents lives in the areas north of what is often called Lower Manhattan (although the definition seems to change depending on who is defining the area: some argue it is the area below 23rd Street, some say it is below 14th Street, others the area below Houston Street, and still others [the purists] argue that Chambers Street marks the northern limit of Lower Manhattan). Of the areas below Madison Square (roughly below about 26th Street), the area north of 14th Street (Chelsea, the Flatiron District, Union Square, Gramercy Park, etc.) has a population of a little over 100,000, while Greenwich Village and the East Village (Houston to 14th Street) have close to 150,000 residents. The area below Houston Street, essentially the northern limit of New York City before 1800, today has about 170,000 people. Thus, although more and more people choose to live in Lower Manhattan, the roughly 400,000 residents today do not equal the more than half a million who populated the lower reaches of Manhattan Island in the years before the Civil War. Indeed, a small portion of that territory, the area broadly defined as the Lower East Side, east of the old Post Road (Fourth Avenue and the Bowery) and below 14th Street, in the early 1900s had well over half a million people crammed into under 1.5 square miles, and a population density of close to 400,000 per square mile.
Despite the fact that New York County is the most densely populated county in the United States, with over 70,000 people per square mile, it used to be much higher. In 1910, there were over 2.3 million people on the island, over 101,000 per square mile; Manhattan has lost more people in a century than are to be found in all but about ten cities in the United States. Despite the dramatic loss of population, the difference between New York and the rest of the country is staggering even today; if New York City were a state of its own, it would have over 8 million people in a mere 305 square miles (one third the size of Rhode Island), which would place it 12th in the nation in terms of population and larger than the 9 smallest states (by population) put together! Cue rant about how unfair the Senate is, where the bottom nine states together have 18 Senators while New York City has to share 2 Senators with the remaining 11 million people of the state of New York.
More fun New York City facts: for most of the twentieth century, more than one in twenty people in America resided in New York City (not the suburbs, just the city). Even today about one in sixteen people in the United States is a resident of the New York metropolitan area. Depending upon who is doing the enumeration and what is included in the definition of the city, New York is anywhere from the second to the seventh largest city in the world. If you tried to put everybody in the United States into an area such that the population density of the entire nation was equivalent to that of Manhattan, you could fit everybody in the country into Connecticut with 10% of the state left over. And finally, the gross metropolitan product of New York is over $1.1 trillion, which would rank New York in the top 15 largest countries in the world in terms of largest economies and second behind only California in the list of states by gross state product. I could go on and on, but I think it is time to keep walking.

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Madison Square is the remnant of a planned ‘Parade’ in the original Commissioner’s Plan of 1811, which was to extend from 23rd to 34th Street and from Third to Seventh Avenues. (1) In the first decade of the nineteenth century a military outpost was established here, at the junction of the two major arteries which headed into New York City from the northern reaches of Manhattan Island: the ‘Eastern’ Post Road (the road I have been following) and the Bloomingdale Road, which passed up the western side of the island to the area called Bloomingdale, today the West Side of Manhattan. Bloomingdale Road is today known as Broadway, while the ‘Eastern’ Post Road is gone, a victim of the grid plan. The area was still an isolated military outpost well into the nineteenth century, but by the middle of the century the northeast corner of Madison Square was the site of the Union Depot of the New York & Harlem Railroad. After the terminal was moved to 42nd Street, eventually becoming Grand Central Station, the land was taken over by P.T. Barnum (whom we met in Bridgeport, CT) who built what was called the Hippodrome on the site. A decade later it became the first Madison Square Garden.
In 1890 Stanford White built the second and much more extravagant Madison Square Garden on the site, which survived until 1925 (twenty years longer than the architect White, who was shot in the Roof Garden of the building he designed, a very famous story recapitulated in the book Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow and the subsequent movie), when it was rebuilt at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue. In 1968 the current Madison Square Garden was built on Eighth Avenue between 31st and 33rd Streets ironically “on the site of McKim, Mead, and White’s greatest architectural achievement-Pennsylvania Station- which fell victim to the wrecker’s ball and civic short-sightedness.” (2) Thus, for those of you who are confused about why Madison Square is nowhere near the Garden, you now know the answer.
There are many other anecdotes about the buildings and the area that could easily fill this and other entries, but I need to get going--again I highly recommend The Bowery Boys website and podcast to those who might want to dig deeper into the history of New York. For the purposes of this project, I will try to stick to the history of the Post Road itself and try to give some sense of how the road and the areas through which it passes have changed over time. The salient points about Madison Square Park are: 1. It was the site of the three mile stone of the Post Road as shown on Christopher Colles’s 1792 map of the road; 2. It was the northern limit of settlement in New York as late as the 1840s and hence was the first place a visitor would begin to feel that he was entering New York; 3. The Post Road merged with what is today Broadway in Madison Square, and the road heads southeast for ten blocks as Broadway, before the two roads separate again at Union Square.
The entrance to the Post Road south of Madison Square is dominated by the classic skinny triangular form of one of the most famous buildings of New York, the Flatiron Building, whose triangular ‘prow’ jutting into Madison Square is a mere six feet wide. Broadway from 23rd Street to 8th Street had, by the 1870s, become the shopping center of New York, and the plethora of retail stores along what was once the Boston Road earned this stretch of the road the sobriquet “Ladies’ Mile.” For three decades, the major department stores of New York were located here, the most famous of which was Lord & Taylor, located on the southwest corner of 20th Street and Broadway from 1870 until 1914, when it moved to Fifth Avenue and 38th Street. (3) Today there are no more department stores as all of them migrated to points north in lockstep with the inexorable shift of the population. However the area has become newly fashionable as the ‘Flatiron District,’ and many of the interesting cast iron buildings from the late nineteenth century remain, albeit as smart boutiques, cafes, restaurants, and residential spaces today.

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Above is a map of New York City published in the 1830s that shows the extent of development in New York City (the blocks shaded in grey). At the top center is Madison Square. Notice that the Post Road is still shown on the map heading northeast out of the square and that Broadway heads northwest (although it is called Bloomingdale Road). Also notice the red line of the newly built New York & Harlem Railroad, which had its depot at the northeast corner of Madison Square until 1871, eventually moving to become what is today Grand Central Station. From Union Square, the red line of the railroad followed the Post Road along what is today Fourth Avenue and the Bowery.

Below are images along the Post Road from Madison Square south. Clockwise from top left are 1. The Flatiron Building, an early and important skyscraper. 2. Broadway at 20th Street, site of Lord & Taylor’s, one of many retail stores along what was ‘Ladies Mile’ in the late nineteenth century. 3. Union Square Green Market, held even in the dead of winter! 4. Decker Building (center) in Union Square. The sixth floor was the site of Andy Warhol’s Factory from 1968 to 1973, and the place where Warhol and his manager were shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968.

In the pouring rain I arrive at Union Square, named not for ‘The Union,’ but rather as the intersection of Broadway and the Bowery (i.e the Old Post Road), or the ‘union’ of the two streets, which then headed north to Madison Square where they diverged once more as described above. Much to my surprise, there is a farmer’s market in full swing on a cold and wet day in February on the square. I pass the fine statues of Lincoln and Washington, both erected when Union Square was a fashionable residential area, and a statue of Mahatma Gandhi of more recent extraction. As I head south I continue to run into areas that were earlier and earlier incarnations, for some brief period, of the center of commerce or the trendy residential area of a bygone era. Union Square was first a prime residential district from about 1831 then, after the Civil War, it became a center of commerce, a place where Brentano’s and Tiffany’s once had their stores. At the southeast corner is what is now called Fourth Avenue but what was once part of the Bowery. Whatever its contemporary name it once served as the main road from New York to Boston. After a brief stop to get out of the rain at a great cafe called ‘Think’ between 12th and 13th Street, I continue onward south to the older and older parts of the city. This walk is like time traveling backwards; each block I walk brings me to a part of the city that once was the edge of town, then became the fashionable center, then was bypassed in favor of a more northern new favorite area.
For many people this area is the hip center of the city, as I straddle the dividing line between Greenwich Village and its formerly ‘edgier’ neighbor the East Village. Fourth Avenue, from 14th to about 10th Street, was once known as ‘Bookseller’s Row’ because of the large number of secondhand book shops located here, and the area was before that, like areas to the north, a fashionable residential area. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the area again became a fashionable place, this time for intellectuals, hippies, beatniks and other members of the counterculture. What was for over a century a working-class neighborhood that was still considered the northern part of the Lower East Side became the epicenter by the 1970s of ‘cool,’ attracting Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, the Velvet Underground and the Ramones among others. The hip center of New York has since moved to ‘cooler’ neighborhoods as gentrification and the encroachment of NYU pushed up rents, old buildings were bought and spruced up or torn down to be replaced by dormitories or luxury condominiums.
Each step in these neighborhoods seems to bring me to some elegant old building, or to an important historical or cultural landmark, or even to a place that has undergone so many different incarnations that it is interesting in its own right. On my right is the lovely Grace Church from 1846 facing Broadway at 10th Street, while the Gothic Revival Grace Church House and School face Fourth Avenue. Ahead of me is the lovely restored subway entrance of Astor Place Station, built on the site of the Astor Place Riots, a nativist riot met with brute force by the police resulting in over 30 dead and hundreds wounded, a riot which was started over arguments about rival performances of Macbeth by an English actor, William McCready and an American actor, Edwin Forrest, at nearby theaters. Directly ahead of me in Cooper Square is the Cooper Union Foundation Building, site of the famous speech in 1860 by Abraham Lincoln where he elaborated his views on slavery which established him as the rising star of the Republican party, and helped propel him to the presidency. On 7th Street is McSorley’s Old Ale House, a great old place redolent of ‘Olde New York,’ as evidenced by the famous slogan “We were here before you were born.” And so on...my head is spinning, and I have only walked a mile, and have not strayed from the path. This is the New York I love.

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New York--History at every step! Clockwise from top left: 1. View of Grace Church, one of New York’s landmark churches, taken from the rear of the church on Fourth Avenue. 2. Subway kiosk in Astor Place. 3. Cooper Union Building, the first building of the school and the site of Lincoln’s famous speech in 1860. 4. McSorley’s, not really from 1854, but still older than you.

In John Clapp’s Almanack of the Year 1697, the author gives a description of the road out of New York City as follows: “From the Post-Office in New York to John Clapp’s in the Bowery is two miles, which generally is the baiting place where Gentlemen take leave of their friends going so long a journey, and where a parting glass or two of generous wine ‘if well apply’d makes their dull horse’s feel, one spur i’ th’ head is worth two in the heel.’” Apart from the fact that the owner of Clapp’s Tavern is none other than the author of the Almanac, the salient piece of information here is that his tavern, which was located on the Bowery near what is today Cooper Square, is two miles out of town. Clapp later adds in his almanac, in case anyone needed to be reminded about his place, that “at the aforesaid Clapps, about two miles without the City of New York, at a place called the Bowr’y, any Gentleman Travellers that are Strangers to the City, may have very good Entertainment for themselves and Horses, where there is a Hackney Coach and good Saddle Horses to be hired.”
Colles marks the two mile stone on his 1792 map at a place corresponding today to roughly Fourth Avenue at Astor Place, a place where he also locates a tavern called Davenport’s, a testament to the longstanding importance of the area as a stopping place for “Gentleman Travellers,” a tradition maintained to this day at McSorley’s only a few yards away (a place which refused service to women until 1970). In the seventeenth century this was ‘without the City’ and even in the early nineteenth century the area north of Houston Street was essentially in the countryside, but in the 1820s nearby Lafayette Street became a prime residential area, with many newly wealthy merchants moving into houses along Colonnade Row on Lafayette Street, including John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Warren Delano (Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather). In recent years the loft spaces of the neighborhood west of the Bowery, lately termed NoHo (North of Houston), have become prime real estate and made the area a well-to-do residential neighborhood again after a long history as a commercial center.
Although the streets technically are still numbered south to Houston Street, many have long had proper names as well, and the often lyrical and seemingly whimsical names are a welcome change from the miles of meaningless numerical streets and avenues. St. Mark’s Place (8th Street), Great Jones Street (3rd Street), Bond Street (2nd Street) and Bleeker Street (1st Street, where, nearby at 315 the Bowery, was the renowned CBGB, the center of the punk and New Wave scene, on whose stage many musicians, including the Ramones, Blondie, Patti Smith, and Talking Heads performed on their rise to fame) pass in quick succession as I continue down the Bowery which, like the Bronx, curiously possesses the definite article in its name. The Bowery is another word that has come to have a meaning greater than the street, in this case a byword for destitute poverty, a synonym for ‘Skid Row.’ The name derives from the Dutch word bouwerij, meaning farmland, which is what the area here was for many decades. The road itself predates the Dutch and was originally a footpath created by the Lenape Indians who lived here when Europeans first arrived in the early seventeenth century. (Incidentally, this website has amazing images of what Manhattan Island and the surrounding area might have looked like when the first visitors arrived on its shores from across the Atlantic.) That it was out of the city in 1704 is evident from Sarah Knight’s description of the habits of New Yorkers: “Their Diversions in the Winter is riding sleys about three or four Miles out of Town, where they have houses of entertainment at a place called the Bowery.” (4) Alas, the houses of entertainment along the Bowery had become distinctly disreputable by the Civil War, as the street marked the eastern border of the notorious Five Points neighborhood, a very poor and rough area notorious for the famous “Gangs of New York,” the most famous of which were the Bowery Boys, who were affiliated with the “Know-Nothing” nativist movement of mid-nineteenth century America. The rivalry between the nativists and the Irish gangs with whom they frequently did battle is the subject of the famous book by Herbert Asbury and the subsequent film of the same name by Martin Scorsese, with Daniel Day Lewis (who has Irish citizenship!) as William Poole, the deranged leader of the Bowery Boys.
The Bowery became a byword for flophouses, alcoholics, and dank, urban poverty. For decades the Third Avenue El ran above the Bowery, adding a greater sense of darkness to an already depressed area. In the 1870s the Bowery Mission was founded to help the many homeless people, and the Mission continues this work today at 227-229 the Bowery. As I cross Houston Street and head down the notorious stretch of this old road, I am stunned by the first thing I see: a Whole Foods grocery store on the corner, not exactly what I consider a sign of destitution (except when you leave it laden with groceries: it is not called ‘Whole Paycheck’ for nothing). A bit further along the road I pass the Mission. Trash bags are piled up on the street in front of the building, and the people hanging out on the sidewalk in front do not look like they spend much money at the store up the street. This is New York too, the part of New York I dislike, the juxtaposition of extremes of wealth and poverty, where the two halves can be seen simultaneously in close proximity. Things are better than in Jacob Riis’ day but certainly are far from perfect.

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Crossing Delancey, I look left and see the span of the Williamsburg Bridge, the second of the three bridges connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn, completed in 1903. Delancey Street is named for James Delancey, a colonial Lieutenant Governor and a Chief Justice of New York who presided over the Zenger trial in 1735 (mentioned in Entry #59). On a map of the area from the 1750s ‘Lt. Delancey’s’ large estate can be seen along ‘Bowery Lane’ in this area. Today I am no longer in farmland, but rather I am clearly now in Chinatown, as the signs, sights, sounds, and smells all indicate. I am also nearing the one mile mark on the old Post Road, which in the colonial era marked the edge of town. A few blocks ahead at Canal Street I look left again to see another bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the third and last bridge leading to Brooklyn. Ahead the Bowery begins to curve a little westward, in the area that was the outer edge of New York for much of the eighteenth century. I think I will stop here and begin the next entry on the edge of colonial New York.

Top left is one of Jacob Riis’s photographs from How the Other Half Lives, a book exposing the poverty of the area around the Bowery. Top right is the Bowery Savings Bank on the Bowery at Grand Street. Built in 1894 by McKim, Mead, and White (Stanford White, he of opulent Madison Square Garden and the ‘victim’ of the ‘Trial of the Century’ in 1907), it stands as an ironic monument on a street known for its connection to poverty. The photograph at left for instance, from 1890, is of a spot only a few yards from the bank. To the west of the Bowery are located what was once the Five Points neighborhood, Little Italy, and Chinatown while to the east is the Lower East Side, all areas of great poverty made infamous by the photojournalism of Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives (1890). Bottom left is a view south down the Bowery, near Grand Street, in Chinatown. Bottom right is a view east from Canal Street at the Bowery looking towards the Manhattan Bridge, the last of the three bridges built to connect Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn.