Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/499

Rh CITY.] NEW Y K K 459 streets which up to this line are mostly named after local notables of the colonial period, become designated by numbers, and are separated by equal intervals, known as &quot; blocks,&quot; of which twenty form a mile. Up to Eighth Street, Broadway divides the streets which cross it into east and west. After Eighth Street, Fifth Avenue, which begins at a handsome square, known as the Washington Square, lying a short distance west of Broadway, becomes the dividing line, and continues to be so out to the Harlem River, a distance of 8 miles. Broadway at Fourteenth Street runs into Union Square, which contains statues of Washington (equestrian), La Fayette, and Lincoln, and is surrounded by large shops ; it then trends westerly to wards the Hudson River, and thus crosses Fifth Avenue (which runs due north) at Twenty-Third Street, where it enters Madison Square, another open space, on the west side of which are clustered several of the largest hotels in the city. Fifth Avenue has played for the last forty years the same part, as the fashionable street, which Broadway played in the preceding period. It was long the ambition of wealthy men to live in it. It is lined from Washington Square to the Central Park, a distance of 3 miles, with costly houses, mostly of brown stone and red brick, without much architectural pretension, and producing from the preponderance of the brown stone a somewhat monotonous effect, but perhaps unequalled any where as the indication of private wealth. Fashion has long permitted, and of late has encouraged, resort to the side streets as places of abode, but the rule is neverthe less tolerably rigid that one must not go beyond Fourth Avenue, two blocks on the east side, or Sixth Avenue, one block on the west side, if one wishes to live in a good quarter. Within the district thus bounded the city presents a clean and orderly appearance, but mainly owing to the exertions of the householders themselves. 1 Harbour Defence. For this the city depends on forts situated at the western entrance to Long Island Sound, at the Narrows (a passage between the upper and lower bays), and in the harbour. itself. All these are confessedly powerless against a fleet armed with modern ordnance. The forts at the entrance of the Sound are Fort Schuyler, situated on Throgg s Neck, and a fort on Willett s Point on the opposite shore. The defences at the Narrows consist of Forts Wadsworth and Tompkins and several detached batteries on the Staten Island shore, and of Fort Hamilton and several batteries on the opposite Long Island shore. The forts in the bay are small and weak structures, and comprise Fort Columbus, Castle William, and some batteries, all on Governor s Island, and Fort Gibson on 1 When the present street plan was adopted, no arrangement was made for back entrances to the houses as in Boston and Philadelphia, and the consequence is that all ashes and refuse have to be removed by a front door, and are placed in barrels on the sidewalk in the morning to await the arrival of the municipal scavenger carts, which is very uncertain as to time. The streets, consequently, are defaced for half the day by these unsightly accumulations. In the better quarters the inhabitants avoid this by having their refuse removed at their own cost by dustmen who enter the houses for it. They have the streets in front of the houses swept in the same way to make up for the defects of the municipal street cleaning. When we pass out of this favoured region we find the garbage and ashes heaped in front of the doors, and the streets impeded by carts and waggons which their owners, in disregard of the municipal ordinances, are allowed to keep standing out of doors, thus saving themselves the expense of coach-houses. Consequently, all that portion of New York which does not lie within a quarter of a mile of Broadway or Fifth Avenue presents a spectacle of dirt and disorder and bad pavement for which it would be difficult to find a parallel in other great capitals. The fine and well-kept part of the city nowhere touches on the rivers or approaches them, but runs in a long central line north and south, and the river banks are lined by wooden wharves. Some part of this neglect to beautify the city is due to the rapidity of its growth, some to defects in the plan on which it io laid out, but more to the badness of the municipal government. Ellis Island. Fort La Fayette, made famous during the Avar of the rebellion as a prison, was destroyed by fire in 1868, and Bedloe s Island, on which stood Fort Wood, is now given up for the reception of Bartholdi s statue of Liberty. History. The history of the first Dutch settlements at Manhattan, and of their transference to England, is sketched in the article on NEW YORK STATE. Down to the Revolution the history of the city is to all intents and purposes that of the province at targe. The population grew slowly but steadily, and so did the trade of the place, the Dutch language and influence, however, gradually giving way to the English. During the Revolution the city, while containing a large body of loyalists, shared in the main in the feelings and opinions of the rest of the country, but was cut off from active participation in the struggle by being occupied at a very early period of the war by the British troops, and it was the scene of their final departure from American soil on November 25, 1782. Since the Revolution its history has been principally the record of an enormous material growth, the nature and extent of which are described in other parts of this article. It was the capital of the State of New York from 1784 to 1797, though the legislature met several times during this period at Albany and Poughkeepsie. From 1785 to 1790 it was the seat of the general Government, and there the first inauguration of Washington to the presidency occurred on the 30th of April 1789. Population. The population of New York, in spite of the great attractions of the site, increased very slowly for the first century after its settlement. When the Revolution began it amounted to less than 22,000, and the city stood far below Boston and Philadelphia in importance. It was, too, dominated to a degree unknown in the other Northern States by the landowners whose estates lined the Hudson as far up as Albany, and who played the leading part in society and politics. The original constitution of colonial society was thoroughly aristocratic, and it was main tained almost intact until after the Revolution, the large landed estates along the Hudson being still held by the descendants of the original Dutch grantees, and let on tenures which were essentially feudal in their character. In spite of the large influx of settlers from New England and other parts of the country, the Revolution found the Dutch elements in New York society still strong, if not dominant, and the political ascendency of the terri. torial families on the Hudson on the whole but little diminished. After the Revolution the growth of the city population became more rapid, but it did not reach 100,000 until 1815, nor 160,000 until 1825. From this date it grew by leaps and bounds until it reached, in 1880, 1, 206, 2 9 9, 2 although a large body of persons whose business lies in New York reside in Brooklyn or Jersey City, on the other side of the East and Hudson Rivers respectively, or in the lesser suburbs, and are not included in the census return. At the end of 1883 the population was estimated at 1,337,325. The impetus which the population received in 1825 was due to the opening of the canal connecting the Hudson with Lake Erie, which made New York the commercial entrepot for a vast and fertile region such as lay behind no other port on the eastern coast. The tendency of foreign trade to con centrate at New York, which has since reduced many small but once flourishing ports along the Atlantic coast, and has taken away from Boston and Philadelphia a good 2 The following are the numbers given in the different United States census returns : in 1790, 33,131; in 1800, 60,515; in 1810, 96373; in 1820, 123,706; in 1830, 202,589; in 1840, 312,710; in 1850, 515,547; in 1860, 813,669; in 1870, 942,292; in 1880, 1,206,299