English explorer Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch East India Company on the Half Moon, reached this area in 1609, the furthest point north that he led his expedition. The Dutch settlement that followed was strictly about commerce - mostly beaver furs shipped out of the trading post of Fort Orange that would wind up on trendy European heads. The beaver was so all-important that when it came time to name the village that grew on a small plateau by the Hudson it became Beverwijck, the Dutch name for the luxuriously pelted rodent. When the British took over New Netherlands in 1664 the name Beverwijck was changed to honor of the Duke of Albany. In 1686 Albany was formally chartered as a municipality by provincial Governor Thomas Dongan and is today the longest continually chartered city in the country.
From the beginning Albany has been a center for transportation. During the revolutionary War it was such a prize that on February 28, 1777 Lt. General John Burgoyne submitted a plan to the British ministry called ‘Thoughts for Conducting the War from the Side of Canada.” The ultimate goal was to sever the American states along the Hudson River by moving on Albany. It became the basis for British military strategy, a plan that was blown up by the American victory in the Battle of Saratoga that October, one of history’s most influential battles.
After rotating among several towns Albany was made the permanent capital in 1797 and when America’s first super highway - the Erie Canal - opened up the country’s interior in 1825 Lock #1 was located north of Colonie Street. At the time of the next census, Albany was the 9th largest city in the United States. Furs and lumber and iron and cattle all flowed through Albany’s port in great abundance. In 1831, some 15,000 canal boats tied up at city wharves. By 1865, there were almost 4,000 saw mills in the Albany area and the Albany Lumber District was the largest lumber market in the nation. There was beer, too, brewed by descendants of the Dutch settlers. Beverwyck Brewery, originally known as Quinn and Nolan was the last remaining brewer from that time when it closed in 1972. And books. Other than Boston no other city produced as many books in the 19th century as Albany. Industry would eventually scatter away from the city and today’s economy is driven by the government machine.
Albany has a rich architectural heritage with representative buildings from nearly every period of America design - beginning with Dutch Colonial looks from the early 1700s. The city grew up the slope from the Hudson River and we’ll start our walking tour at the top, in the midst of a complex of modern American buildings that did not arrive without a whiff of controversy...
As a veteran of the Revolutionary War Captain John L. Hardenbergh received a land bounty in western New York. The captain was a veteran of John Sullivan’s campaign against the Iroquois in 1779 and after the war he had been a deputy under the surveyor general when the original townships in the Onondaga Military tract were mapped. Where other veterans opted for more settled communities, Hardenbergh disposed of his award in favor of a spot he knew beside the rushing waters of the Owasco River. By 1793 he had cleared some land, put up a log cabin and built a mill on the Owasco Outlet near the convergence of several early roads.
When he wasn’t grinding flour Hardenbergh busied himself laying out roads and selling lots to fellow veterans. The Seneca Turnpike, providing direct connections eastward toward Albany, was operational as far west as Auburn in 1799. By 1800 the little settlement had been named Hardenbergh’s Corners and boasted a post office, with couriers arriving on horseback every two weeks. By 1810 there were seventeen mills humming along the Oswaco River as it tumbled 170 feet through the community.
Early political machinations were already shaping the future of Hardenbergh’s village. It was renamed Auburn in 1805 when it was tapped as the seat of power for the new Cayuga County. In 1816, the New York State legislature sited and began construction of a major state penitentiary in Auburn. Over the years the ideas for treating prisoners inside its massive limestone walls spawned the “Auburn System” by which prisoners worked together in shops and fields in strict silence, to return to their cells at night. The cheap source of local labor did much to spur the local economy until the practice was abolished in 1882.
The transportation lines, the abundant water power, and the inexpensive labor pool conspired to lure industry from established eastern markets. There were manufacturers of agricultural implements and carpets and iron works and corn starch. For a time Auburn was the center of the American silk industry, with many growers starting the cultivation of the mulberry tree. After the Civil War the seeds of the American Express Company were sown in Auburn as the Merchants Union Express Company made the town the center of a great delivery business. William G. Fargo commenced his eventful career in the transportation business as agent in the old Auburn and Syracuse Railroad freight depot on Genesee Street.
Cayuga County has applied for more state historical markers than any other county in New York and we will begin our explorations of Auburn’s rich contribution to that heritage in the front yard of the town’s most illustrious citizen...
Batavia, is the largest town in Genesee County, both in point of territory and population, and sited practically at its center. The original town of Batavia included practically the entire Holland Purchase, a swath of three million acres bought from Continental Army financier Robert Morris. The lands from that purchase would eventually form ten New York counties. The town was formed by act of the Legislature, March 30, 1802. Batavia village, the county seat, is situated in the east half of the town and was founded in 1802 by Joseph Ellicott, surveyor and sub-agent for the land company.
Ellicott erected an office from which to direct his operations at the junction of the old Genesee Road and Tonawanda Creek, where two great Indian trails crossed. Ellicott proposed naming the place Bustia or Bustiville after the company’s general agent, Paul Busti but the honoree demurred, objecting that it sounded a tad ferocious, and proposed Batavia, the name of the Dutch republic to which the proprietors belonged.
Batavia’s early promise as a distribution hub in western New York was dashed when it was bypassed by the routers of the Erie Canal. Several decades later those hopes were rekindled when the railroads came through, following those old trade routes. Batavia developed into a lively industrial and trading center. Smack in the center of a bustling agricultural area, the town became known for the manufacture of tractors and agricultural implements with the largest manufacturer, Johnson Harvester Company setting up shop in 1868. Other products produced here included ladies’ shoes, paper boxes, shoe dyes and polishes, and flavoring extracts.
Batavia followed a familiar script in the 20th century - industries drifted away, downtown shriveled up, buildings sacrificed. In 1982 a core of civic buildings, including Joseph Ellicott’s land office, were declared a United States historic district. That’s where our explorations will center and we’ll begin at a small downtown park right next door...
The Dutch West India Company established Bedford in 1663. It was a rural community for the better part of 200 years until descendants of the original Dutch settlers began selling off their property in the heart of what was blossoming into the new city of Brooklyn. One entrepreneur who bought large swaths of land was James Weeks, an African-American who sold building lots to other black settlers. Weeksville became one of the first free black communities in the United States. Bedford eventually expanded to include the area of Stuyvesant Heights, named for Peter Stuyvesant, the last governor of the Dutch colony of New Netherland.
The boom times around Bedford occurred from 1880 to 1920 when the new electric trolleys opened up the community to commuters working in downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan. At this time many of the sturdy brownstone houses that became its trademark were built in the popular Neoclassical, Romanesque and Queen Anne styles of the day.
The financial straits in the United States brought on by the Great Depression of the 1930s had a profound impact on Bedford. With its century of history as an African-American cultural mecca, Bedford became a magnet for thousands of black men and women streaming from the rural South to replace disappearing farm jobs. The construction of the A train in 1936 made the commute between its Manhattan counterpart, Harlem, and Bedford much easier. Many people arrived from uptown to central Brooklyn, which offered more jobs and better housing.
Bedford-Stuyvesant began an era of long decline as increasingly the magnificent brownstones were carved into multiple dwellings and rooming houses. The slide culminated in its recognition as the largest ghetto in America. In recent years the community has experienced a renaissance, thanks in large part to its historic architecture and richness of available housing stock in the old brownstones.
Our walking tour will start at the intersection of two key cultural streams in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Fulton Street and Nostrand Avenue...
Dutch settlers founded Brooklyn in 1645. The village was sparsely populated until 1814, when Robert Fulton’s steam ferry first offered a means of quick travel to Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights became the island’s first suburb. On April 8, 1834 the New York State Legislature granted Brooklyn - at the time with a population of 25,000 - its city charter. The Heights became a magnet for the affluent and the popular Greek Revival style of the time became the predominant rowhouse along the streets. But you can still find clapboard Federal homes from a decade earlier in Brooklyn Heights. Later homes employed any manner of graceful architecture.
With more than 600 antebellum homes in the Heights the entire neighborhood was granted landmark status by New York City in 1965 - the first historic district so recognized. The designation halted any new construction, ironically at a time when the Heights was in decline. Brooklyn Heights has roared back with a vengeance and today a foot explorer can trace practically the entire history of New York residential design beginning in the 1820s.
Our walking tour will start in the eight acres of open space surrounded by government buildings in Cadman Plaza. The Reverend Doctor Samuel Parkes Cadman was a Brooklyn Congregational Church minister known far and wide for his oratory, and first to have his own regularly scheduled coast-to-coast radio sermon. For 36 years of his life, Cadman was pastor of the Central Congregational Church in Brooklyn and helped to found the Federated Council of Churches in America, which he headed from 1924-1928. After World War II this was the largest civic development project in the country ...
The movement to create Prospect Park, a large public greenery for America’s third largest city, began in the late 1850s. Construction began in 1866 and within two years city officials reported that 100,000 people had visited the park in the month of July - even though the first construction stage was still three years away from being completed. Despite its popularity the area around the green oasis was slow to develop. As late as 1884 the area to the west of the park that flows downhill to the Gowanus Canal and the flatlands beyond was still characterized as “fields and pasture.”
Soon thereafter a new street grid was laid out and the first mansions began to appear. A wonderland of Victorian finials, pinnacles, pediments, towers, turrets, bay windows, and stoops quickly followed and the lavish homes clustered around Plaza Street and Prospect Park West were christened the Gold Coast, rivaling the opulent lifestyle of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. The 1890 United State Census confirmed that Park Slope was the nation’s richest neighborhood.
Like most of New York City, Park Slope slumped through the middle of the 1900s. In mid-century one could find hundreds of vacant houses. By the 1960s, an official revitalization movement was in full swing to preserve the neighborhood’s historic row houses, stately brownstones, and Queen Anne, Renaissance Revival, and Romanesque mansions. The boom that followed has once again made the Slope a premier New York address. In December 2006, Natural Home magazine named Park Slope one of America’s ten best neighborhoods based on criteria including parks, green spaces and neighborhood gathering spaces; farmer’s markets and community gardens; public transportation and locally-owned businesses; and environmental and social policy.
Our walking tour will start at Grand Army Plaza where, in 1892, President Grover Cleveland presided over the unveiling of The Soldiers and Sailors Arch, a notable Park Slope landmark...
For more than a century after it was settled this enclave was a village called Bushwick Shore. In 1802, real estate specualtor Richard M. Woodhull purchased thirteen acres of land at the foot of today’s South 2nd Street and hired Benjamin Franklin’s grandnephew, Jonathan Williams, a United States Army engineer to survey his property. Woodhull named the proposed village in his honor and established a ferry to New York (then the island of Manhattan). The enterprise went bankrupt in 1811 but the tiny village trundled on and was incorporated into the Town of Bushwick in 1827.
Thomas Morrell and James Hazard picked up where Woodhull had left off. They also established a ferry, this time to the Grand Street Market at Corlear’s Hook, providing an outlet for the farmers of Bushwick to sell their produce in New York. The impetus to the area’s growth, however, was the establishment of a distillery in 1819. The distillery is gone (as is the Schaefer brewery that followed it on the same site). With a population over 10,000 by 1840 Williamsburg(h) separated from Bushwick and became its own city, organized into three wards.
In 1855 the city lost its independence and its “h” when Williamsburg was annexed into the City of Brooklyn, helping propel Brooklyn to the status of America’s third-largest city. Throughout the 19th century Williamsburg was a wealthy industrial enclave. Astral Oil, later swallowed by Standard Oil, was built here. Corning Glass Works was founded here before drifting upstate. German immigrant, chemist Charles Pfizer founded Pfizer Pharmaceutical here. Gilded Age barons Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jim Fisk and William Whitney stayed in elegant resorts on the Williamsburg shoreline.
But nothing had an impact on the community like the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903. Overnight the tony hotels gave way to an immigrant district absorbing the overflow from New York’s Lower East Side (the New York Tribune dubbed the bridge the “The Jews’ Highway”). Well-to-do families moved away and mansions and handsome brownstones from the post-Civil War era fell into disuse or were converted to multiple dwellings.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that a hip art crowd found large loft spaces, cheap rent and convenient transportation throughout Williamsburg and kick-started a renaissance that continues into the new century. Our walking tour will start where so much of the immigrant experience began - at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge...
Governor De Witt Clinton traveled through the wilderness of western New York in 1822 to chair a meeting that promised long-range ramifications. The digging of “Clinton’s Ditch,” the Erie Canal, had begun five years earlier and would soon reach its western conclusion. But where? There were two contenders. One was Black Rock, on the Niagara River, and the other was a small village two miles further south that had only been incorporated in 1816. It was originally called New Amsterdam but the residents preferred to call it Buffalo after the small creek that poured into Lake Erie. Black Rock had the better harbor but the Buffalo Harbor Company was working hard to overcome that by borrowing $12,000 and constructing a new breakwater. At the meeting Judge Samuel Wilkinson successfully advanced the case for Buffalo and the little village was awarded the coveted prize. Buffalo became a great city and Black Rock disappeared.
As the continent’s major hub of east-west trade, Buffalo grew rapidly. Manufacturing followed commerce and by 1850 the city was speckled with iron works, foundries and plants churning out mirrors, picture frames, porcelain bathtubs, millstones, soap and candles. At that time, the coming of the railroads threatened to siphon business away from the Erie Canal but city leaders need not have worried. The city soon was being served by eleven main railroad lines as Buffalo grew into the second largest railroad center in America.
By 1900, Buffalo claimed more millionaires per capita than any other city in America. Only 96 years after the first streets were laid out in the village, more than 350,000 people called Buffalo home. Those streets were created in a spoke-like radial plan by Joseph Ellicott, the surveyor for the Holland Land Company who mimicked those of Washington D.C., which his brother Major Andrew Ellicott had helped draw up several years before. Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s greatest landscape architect, called Buffalo “the best planned city as to its streets, public places, and grounds in the United States, if not the world.”
Our walking tour to explore those streets will begin at the hub of those spokes but there is nothing there today that Frederick Law Olmsted would recognize...
Erastus Corning never had anything to do with glassmaking and probably never visited the town that bears his name. Corning began his business career in Troy, New York in 1808 at the age of 13 behind the counter of his uncle’s hardware store. In his work as a hardware man Corning was a dealer in all manner of iron products, from nails and stoves to farming equipment and railroad tracks. The Corning hardware store was one of the most significant businesses in the Hudson Valley by the 1830s and morphed into the Rensselaer Iron Works, which, under Corning’s guidance, installed the first Bessemer converter in the United States. Meanwhile, Corning was founding the Albany State Bank and branching into railroads which he would organize into America’s largest corporation, the New York Central. Amidst these interests Corning dabbled in politics, putting in a term as mayor of Albany and doing a stint in the New York state senate.
With his few moments of spare time Corning invested in land speculation in western New York. One place that caught his interest was timberlands along the Chemung River. With the opening of the Chemung Canal in 1833 large mills were sprouting to float logs and finished lumber out of little villages in the region. Corning was at the head of one investor group that gobbled up a village along the canal so the town was named for him. The plan was to build a railroad from the new anthracite coal lands of northeast Pennsylvania and ship it out via the canal.
With the canal and the railroads the village of Corning blossomed as a transportation center. One of the manufacturers who was attracted by the area’s cheap coal and transportation was Amory Houghton who was running the Brooklyn Flint Glass Works in, of course, Brooklyn, New York. When the people of Corning offered to put up $50,000 to his $75,000 Houghton began work on a new glass plant on June 1868 and was producing cut glass by October 22, 1868. The business was now the Corning Glass Works and the community was on its way to being “Crystal City.” Houghton left the business and the company’s new name and retired to his farm in Westchester County in 1870.
There were other industries in the hustling little town - there were firms making iron and bricks and drills and stoves but they would all pale behind the global corporation that became one with the name of the town. The face of that town would change forever in the summer of 1972 when flood waters from Hurricane Agnes wiped away businesses and factories. In the aftermath Corning has reinvented itself as an art town and tourist destination with the Corning Museum of Glass at its heart. Our walking tour will stop in on Corning and the Gaffer District but first we’ll start in a park named for a city engineer a century ago...
The land-grant program offered to veterans of the Revolutionary War spurred development of the north bank of the Chemung River in the 1780s. Most of the soldiers sold their interests to land speculators but some packed up and came to carve a homestead out of the wilderness. Captain Curtis Ramsey is given the credit as being perhaps the first, building his log cabin in the vicinity of Miller’s Pond that is named for him. The hamlet was called Newtown in its formative days at the intersection of Newtown Creek and the Chemung River. The adoption of the name Elmira in 1828 is smothered in the historical muck but local tradition hands down the colorful tale that a rambunctious child’s mother spent so much time calling her name that the townsfolk grew to accept their village as “Elmira.”
The town was kick-started into the national economy with the opening of the Chemung Canal in 1832 that connected the Chemung River here with the rich timberlands surrounding Seneca Lake and thus the new Erie Canal and New York City by water. In the canal building craze that was gripping New York at the time a feeder canal made connections with Corning to the west. In 1836 Chemung County was organized with Elmira the county seat. By 1849, the New York and Erie Railroad was completed to Elmira and was soon crossed by the New York Central in the town. The canvas was now complete for the emergence of Elmira as a transportation center. The New York & Erie Railroad tagged Elmira as the “Queen City of the Southern Tier.”
Elmira’s most significant growth began during the Civil War when it was a major troop staging area with a large prison camp. In 1864 the village was incorporated as a city and that same year the Union camp was converted into a Civil War prison. Hastily patched together, “Hellmira” became one of the most notorious prison camps of the conflict. Roughly one in four Confederates died at Elmira, either wasting away from malnutrition or perishing during a brutal winter. Wood lawn Cemetery, about two miles north of the original prison camp site was designated a National Cemetery in 1877; all traces of the camp today have vanished under a residential area. On Christmas Eve, 1866, a fire destroyed most of the buildings in the downtown area. In retrospect it served mainly to wipe the platter clean before Elmira’s most prosperous period. Between 1870 and 1890 the population doubled. Its superior transportation facilities made Elmira a manufacturing center. There were metal foundries and woolen mills and lumber mills and processing plants for the surrounding dairy region. Other products that poured from Elmira factories included glass bottles, office equipment, tools and wood pipe.
It was also during this period that Elmira welcomed its most distinguished guest, Mark Twain, who married local girl Olivia Louis Landon in 1870. The couple moved to Hartford, Connecticut but returned to the Landon family’s Quarry Farm each summer where Twain authored many of his most famous works, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in a small writer’s cottage set up on the property. The Samuel Clemens family would be buried in Woodlawn Cemetery and his grave is adorned by a monument 12 feet high or “mark twain,” the expression from which his adopted pen name derived.
The city’s population reached 47,000 in 1930 and essentially stopped growing after that. In June 1972 flood waters from Hurricane Agnes filled buildings along the Chemung River with as much as six feet of water, wiping out most of the downtown area. Many of the buildings that survived the subsequent urban renewal program are civic buildings and it is a fine collection reflecting Elmira’s one-time status as the the most important city in New York’s Southern Tier. But before we visit them our walking tour will begin at the oldest commercial building in the city, one that was standing back when that mischievous Elmira was still alive...
While under Dutch rule in 1662 Jan Frans Van Hoesen bought land from the Esopus Indians here but settlement never occurred by the Dutch or the English who seized control of New Netherlands in 1666. After the American Revolution in 1783, however, New England whalers began fretting that their coastal operations were vulnerable and sought a sheltered inland location.
Brothers Thomas and Seth Jenkins led a group representing families from Providence, Newport, Nantucket and Edgartown on a scouting expedition and sailed up the Hudson River. They found a harbor deep enough for sea-going vessels here in a place called Claverack Landing for its abundance of clover. The group, who called themselves the Proprietors, paid 5,000 pounds sterling for land and wharfage in 1783.
These folks were for the most part serious-minded Quakers and when they settled, they settled. Some arrived on the banks of the Hudson with pre-made houses on board ship. A grid was laid out and docks and warehouses built in short order. Some two dozen schooners in the whaling, seal and West Indies trade registered Hudson as their home port. Chartered as the first city in the new United States in 1785, it was already the 24th largest city in the country by 1790.
The whaling trade died out when oil was discovered in the western Pennsylvania hills in the middle-1800s but the Hudson economy had already transitioned to light industry by that time. Hudson factories produced woolen knit goods and beer and matches and flypaper and ginger ale and cement.
When those industries began to flag in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, Hudson became notorious as a center of vice, especially gambling and prostitution. At its peak, or nadir, Hudson boasted more than 50 bars. The officially-tolerated prostitution on what is today Columbia Street made the city known as “the little town with the big red-light district.” It took raids by Governor Thomas E. Dewey to end Hudson’s unique approach to the erosion of its manufacturing base. Today, it is genteel antique shops that churn the economy.
Hudson’s architectural stew is as rich and meaty as any in New York State. Virtually the entire downtown has been designated the Hudson Historic District and features 756 contributing properties from the founding in 1785 until the mid-1930s. Our explorations will follow the progress of that architectural catalog which begins at the edge of the city’s namesake river...
Perched at the southern end of Cayuga Lake, the largest of the Finger Lakes, Ithaca has always been defined by its unique topography. The gorges and waterfalls for which it is famous are ballyhooed today to attract people to the city; historically they have made it difficult for folks to get here. In the 19th century the railroads went elsewhere along easier routes and in the 20th century the interstate system similarly bypassed the city - there is no highway within a half an hour of Ithaca.
The first settlers with names like Yaple and Dumond and Hinepaw came west from the Hudson Valley after the Revolutionary War to claim land in the Finger Lakes region offered as a reward for service. Ithaca was planned by Simeon DeWitt, the State Surveyor General, and it was named by him in 1804 because of its location within the Town of Ulysses - the ancient Greek whose home was on the island of Ithaki.
In the 1820s New York was in the throes of a canal craze and Ithaca saw itself as a budding water-based metropolis. In 1821 businessmen put a steamboat, The Enterprise, on the lake. Ground was broken in 1825 for a grand new hotel, the Clinton House, to accommodate the anticipated water traffic. The village bustled into the 1830s but those railroads didn’t come and the Panic of 1837 did and Ithaca’s growth essentially stagnated.
One who came and stayed was Ezra Cornell, an itinerant carpenter who was hired by Colonel Jeremiah S. Beebe to manage his flour mill of Fall Creek. Cornell became involved with the construction of lines for the new telegraph and invented the idea of protecting wires on wooden poles with glass insulators. He parlayed his ingenuity into a fortune as a founder of the Western Union company. Cornell drifted into the New York State Senate and Assembly and used the state’s Morrill Land Grant to create Cornell University on farmland located on East Hill.
Ithaca was known for producing high-quality shotguns and clocks as well but it would be Cornell University and the Ithaca Conservatory of Music that opened in 1892 and became Ithaca College in the 1960s that came to define the city, that was incorporated in 1888. Today there are about 30,000 residents of Ithaca and 30,000 students in the city. We’ll probably see plenty of both on our walking tour that will start on a patch of land that has remained undeveloped since it was set aside 200 years ago...
The “James” of Jamestown is James Prendergast, the youngest of eleven children in a family that bought 3,500 acres of mostly pine forest in 1806. James would purchase 1,000 of those acres from his brother for $2 an acre with a mind to starting a settlement and manufacturing lumber at a spot of rapids on the Chadakoin River. By 1809 Prendergast had built a cabin and a dam, a saw mill and grist mill soon followed.
Weathering several fires, Prendergast persevered in his enterprise and in 1815 lots fifty by one hundred twenty feet were surveyed and placed on the market at $50 each. Settlers indeed followed and in 1827 Jamestown was incorporated into a village. Among the early settlers were a number of skilled woodworkers who crafted furniture for the pioneering families coming to western New York.
By 1830 Jamestown was shipping forty million board feet of timber per year and the busy mills chewed up the stands of first class pine timber by 1840. In 1849 Swedish immigrants, many of whom were cabinet makers, began to settle in Jamestown. The first Swedish manufacturer of furniture in Jamestown, Augustus Johnson, began making doors in 1869 and the population would grow to be predominantly Swedish for many generations. By 1920 there were 15,025 people of Swedish birth or parentage in Jamestown, making the Swedes the city’s largest ethnic group.
More than 5,000 workers would be engaged by the 1900s in lumber-related factories and Jamestown would fashion itself the “Furniture Capital of the World.” Furniture-making remained Jamestown’s largest industry well into the 20th century and the city still hosts a handful of major furniture plants today.
Jamestown boasts an eclectic roster of native sons and daughters including actress and comedienne Lucile Ball, jurist Robert H. Jackson, birdwatching guru Roger Tory Peterson, National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell, and alternative rock musician Natalie Merchant and her band 10,000 Maniacs. And our walking tour will commence where many of the first citizens of Jamestown once rested...
Between the main Dutch trading post of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island and the distant outpost of Fort Orange in today’s Albany was a third 17th century settlement called Wiltwyck, Dutch for “wild woods.” The wildness in the woods turned out to come mostly from the local Esopus Indians and after a few unpleasant incidents the leader of the Dutch colony, Peter Stuyvesant, built a stockade of eight-foot palisades to protect the settlers. The village remained under Dutch rule for only a dozen years before the English took over and renamed the place Kingston. Although it was no longer needed, the wooden wall remained standing until almost 1700.
As the American Revolution flared Kingston became known as “the breadbasket of the Revolution” as area farmers supplied the Continental Army with wheat. In September 1777 the nascent New York State Assembly met in a stone house to draw up a new constitution and Kingston briefly became New York State’s first capital. On October 7 the legislature disbanded before the advance of a British force under General William Clinton on the way to meet troops coming down from Canada. Seeing a chance to punish Kingston, Clinton landed and put the torch to every house in the village - some 200 structures - but one. The evacuated residents returned and quickly set about rebuilding their limestone houses, many of which stand today.
In 1805, Kingston was incorporated as a village. In 1828 the Delaware and Hudson Canal opened, reaching back 107 miles to the coal fields of northeast Pennsylvania. Valuable anthracite coal shipments arrived in the town of Rondout, now a part of Kingston, which became an important freight hub as the terminus of the canal on the Hudson River. Also shipping out of Kingston was native bluestone used to create the sidewalks of New York City. The dominant industry in town was cement-making after deposits began being quarried throughout the valley. Cement production reached its peak about 1900, when Kingston produced 3,000,000 barrels annually. In the winter ice was cut from the Hudson River and stored in large warehouses in town to be shipped throughout the year.
Kingston has evolved into distinct neighborhoods. The uptown area, the Stockade District, and the downtown area where the village of Rondout was located are the main ones. Our explorations will take place in the stockade area bounded by Green Street, Main Street, Clinton Avenue and North Front Street but first we’ll begin in a spot that was just outside the 1658 stockade where Peter Stuyvesant met with the leaders of the local Esopus Indians...
There were settlers in these parts in the early 1800s, most notably the Comstock family from Connecticut who planted an orchard with some 700 trees and probably dispatched as many rattlesnakes in the effort. But if not for the routing of the Erie Canal by David Thomas, state surveyor, there would almost certainly be no town here today. When excavation began on the canal there was no frame house or barn within five miles in any direction.
Almost overnight there were 2,000 workers in the immediate vicinity. The canal reached Lockport in 1824 where engineers were maneuvering their way through a 60-foot drop in the raceway. The canal was opened in 1825; by 1829 Lockport was a village and in 1865 was incorporated as a city. The surplus water from that precipitous drop became the source of power for the town’s growing industries. Products shipped out on the canal included electric alloy and other steels, towels and linens, thermostats, iron castings, wallboard and paperboard, milk bottles, paper boxes and felt. The surrounding farmlands and orchards made Lockport an important marketing and milling center. In the 20th century manufacturing parts for General Motors became the biggest game in town.
In 1974, the “Lockport Industrial District” was formed, including the Hydraulic Tunnel, a 1700-foot underground power tunnel constructed during the early 1850s by Birdsill Holly. The tunnel provided water for mechanical power to three manufacturing companies employing close to 2000 people. Our exploration will center in the district, where underground boat rides of “Lockport Cave” are available. The city was an enthusiastic player in urban renewal and notable buildings are spaced out between wide swaths of openness and we will begin at one stone building that survived the slaughter...
Central Midtown (sometimes called simply “Midtown”) comprises the area between 40th and 59th streets, flanked by Eighth Avenue to the West and Park Avenue to the East. While quite a few New Yorkers work here (an estimated 700,000 commuters daily) very few actually live here...or in any area even remotely resembling Midtown.
Central Midtown is what many people imagine the entire city of New York to be. Skyscrapers, neon lights, crowds of people, a cacophony of car horns, and so on. Even subway announcers (or digital recordings gradually replacing them) sometimes play into this by announcing the 42nd street stop as “the crossroads of the world.”
That’s where this walking tour will begin, but we will only venture as far west as Sixth Avenue on this landmark-stuffed tour...
The area around City Hall is commonly referred to as Manhattan’s Civic Center. Most of the neighborhood consists of government offices (city, state and federal), as well as an increasing number of upscale residential dwellings being converted from older commercial structures. Architectural landmarks - ecclesiastical, commercial and governmental - envelop City Hall.
New York’s first government home was erected by the Dutch in the 17th century on Pearl Street. The city’s second City Hall, built in 1700, stood on Wall and Nassau streets. That building was renamed Federal Hall after New York became the first official capital of the United States. Plans for building a new City Hall were discussed by the New York City Council as early as 1776, but Revolutionary War concerns and debts delayed construction until 1812.
That is where our walking tour will start, to explore what has happened int he 200 years since...
In the 1750s Robert Murray, a prosperous Quaker merchant began laying out a 25-acre farm near the top a hill called Inclenberg that is now Park Avenue between 36th and 37th streets. For the better part of the next 100 years the Murrays who lived here called their country estate “Belmont.” New Yorkers called it Murray Hill.
According to legend the Murrays played a part in the American Revolution. On September 15, 1776 the Battle of Manhattan began in Kips Bay when five British warships routed untrained Colonial troops and sent them in disorderly retreat. Mary Murray took this moment to invite the British commander General Sir William Howe and his men to interrupt their pursuit and rest at Belmont to enjoy a pot of tea, allowing the Americans to escape. Apparently Mary Murray’s charms trumped the desire to put down an armed rebellion.
The coveted Murray property began to be divided into building lots in the 1840s but family injected the famous “Murray Hill Restrictive Agreement” into each deed that barred business and commerce from fouling their beloved land. So only residential dwellings were allowed in Murray Hill and it became New York’s most fashionable address for a time in the mid-nineteenth century. Some of the families receiving mail here included the Belmonts, Rhinelanders, Roosevelts, Havermeyers, Tiffanys and Morgans. Opulent mansions were built between Fifth and Park avenues and carriage houses serving them occupied spaces between Lexington and Third avenues. There were plenty of handsome townhouses, mostly in brownstone, as well.
The Restrictive Agreement couldn’t keep out the crass commercial class forever. Retailers invaded Fifth Avenue in the early 1900s and Park Avenue became the street of choice for multi-unit, high-rise apartments. But the attempt to steer the fortunes of their ancestral lands helped shape the vibrant residential oasis in midtown Manhattan that survives to this day.
Our walking tour will start at the site of Belmont, where the two-story stone house stood, until a fire in 1835, facing on the present intersection of Park Avenue and 37th Street...
Manhattan - Financial District
The Dutch established the first European settlements in Manhattan, which were located at the lower end of the island. The first fort was built at the Battery on the shore at the southern tip of the island. The original settlement stretched only a few hundred yards to the north to present day Wall Street, where the settlers had indeed built a wall to protect themselves from Indians, pirates, and other dangers. The path had become a bustling commercial thoroughfare because it joined the banks of the East River with those of the Hudson River on the west. The path was named Wall Street. Early merchants built their warehouses and shops on this dirt traverse, along with a city hall and a church.
In 1771, Bear Market was established along the Hudson shore on land donated by Trinity Church, and replaced by Washington Market in 1813. In March, 1792, twenty-four of New York City’s leading merchants met secretly at Corre’s Hotel to discuss ways to bring order to the securities business and to wrest it from their competitors, the auctioneers. Two months later, on May 17, 1792, these merchants signed a document they called the Buttonwood Agreement, named after their traditional gathering spot, a buttonwood tree. The agreement called for the signers to trade securities only among themselves, to set trading fees, and not to participate in other auctions of securities. These twenty-four men had founded what was to become the New York Stock Exchange. The Exchange would later be located at 11 Wall Street.
New York was the nation’s capitol from 1785 until 1790 and George Washington was inaugurated as the first President on the steps of the one-time city hall now called Federal Hall. In 1817 with their stock exchange in decline over Revolutionary War bonds the New York merchant group sent an observer to Philadelphia, where the nation’s first stock exchange was organized in 1790. Upon his return, bearing news of the thriving Philadelphia exchange, the New York Stock and Exchange Board was formally organized on March 8, 1817.
The money men leased a room at 40 Wall Street and every morning the president, Anthony Stockholm, read the stocks to be traded. Back then a seat on the exchange cost $25; in 1827 the price increased to $100, and in 1848 the price skipped up to $400. Members conducted their business in top hats and swallowtail coats. The Financial District of Lower Manhattan has come a long way since then. To see what the princes of commerce have wrought, this walking tour will begin where the Dutch began back in 1623, Battery Park...
Greenwich Village’s known history dates back to the 16th century, when it was a marshland called “Sapokanican” by Lenni Lenape Indians who camped and fished in the meandering trout stream later known as Minetta Brook. By the 1630s Dutch settlers had cleared pastures and planted crops in this area, which they referred to as Noortwyck. After the English conquest of New Amsterdam in 1664, the settlement evolved into a country hamlet, first designated “Grin’wich” in 1713 Common Council records. Sir Peter Warren, vice-admiral of the British Navy and commander of its New York fleet, amassed a vast land tract here in the 1740s, as did Captain Robert Richard Randall.
Greenwich Village survived the American Revolution as a pastoral suburb. Commercial activity after the war was centered near the edge of the Hudson River, where there were fresh produce markets. The comparative seclusion of the area began to erode when outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera beset the core city in 1799, 1803, 1805, and 1821. Those seeking refuge fled north to the wholesome backwaters of the West Village, triggering the construction of temporary housing as well as banking offices. During an especially virulent epidemic in 1822 many who had intended to remain in the area only temporarily chose instead to settle there permanently, increasing the population fourfold between 1825 and 1840 and spurring the development of markets and businesses. Shrewd speculators subdivided farms, leveled hills, rerouted and buried Minetta Brook, and undertook landfill projects.
The Village at the turn of the 20th century was quaintly picturesque and ethnically diverse. By the start of World War I it was widely known as a bohemian enclave with secluded side streets, low rents, and a tolerance for radicalism and nonconformity. Attention increasingly focused on artists and writers noted for their boldly innovative work: books and irreverent “little magazines” were published by small presses, art galleries exhibited the work of the avant-garde, and experimental theater companies blatantly ignored the financial considerations of Broadway. A growing awareness of its idiosyncrasies helped to make Greenwich Village an attraction for tourists. Entrepreneurs provided amusements ranging from evenings in artists’ studios to bacchanalian costume balls. During Prohibition local speakeasies attracted uptown patrons. Decrepit row houses were remodeled into “artistic flats” for the well-to-do, and in 1926 luxury apartment towers appeared at the northern edge of Washington Square.
The village’s rural roots have left it with a hodgepodge of streets and alleys that defy New York City’s otherwise orderly grid. This exploration of the backstreets of Greenwich Village will begin in Washington Square Park, which was once a city potter’s field...
In the 1750s Robert Murray, a prosperous Quaker merchant began laying out a 25-acre farm near the top a hill called Inclenberg that is now Park Avenue between 36th and 37th streets. For the better part of the next 100 years the Murrays who lived here called their country estate “Belmont.” New Yorkers called it Murray Hill.
According to legend the Murrays played a part in the American Revolution. On September 15, 1776 the Battle of Manhattan began in Kips Bay when five British warships routed untrained Colonial troops and sent them in disorderly retreat. Mary Murray took this moment to invite the British commander General Sir William Howe and his men to interrupt their pursuit and rest at Belmont to enjoy a pot of tea, allowing the Americans to escape. Apparently Mary Murray’s charms trumped the desire to put down an armed rebellion.
The coveted Murray property began to be divided into building lots in the 1840s but family injected the famous “Murray Hill Restrictive Agreement” into each deed that barred business and commerce from fouling their beloved land. So only residential dwellings were allowed in Murray Hill and it became New York’s most fashionable address for a time in the mid-nineteenth century. Some of the families receiving mail here included the Belmonts, Rhinelanders, Roosevelts, Havermeyers, Tiffanys and Morgans. Opulent mansions were built between Fifth and Park avenues and carriage houses serving them occupied spaces between Lexington and Third avenues. There were plenty of handsome townhouses, mostly in brownstone, as well.
The Restrictive Agreement couldn’t keep out the crass commercial class forever. Retailers invaded Fifth Avenue in the early 1900s and Park Avenue became the street of choice for multi-unit, high-rise apartments. But the attempt to steer the fortunes of their ancestral lands helped shape the vibrant residential oasis in midtown Manhattan that survives to this day.
Our walking tour will start at the site of Belmont, where the two-story stone house stood, until a fire in 1835, facing on the present intersection of Park Avenue and 37th Street...
SoHo - the name is a blend of “South” and “Houston” from “south of Houston Street” - is today a fashionable shopping and cultural district built on the shoulders of artists. What became SoHo was to have been the locale of two enormous elevated highways of the Lower Manhattan Expressway before the project was derailed and abandoned in the 1960s. After abandonment of the highway scheme, the city was still left with a large number of historic buildings that were unattractive to manufacturing and commercial interests. Many of these buildings, especially the upper stories which became known as lofts, attracted artists who valued the spaces for their large areas, large windows admitting natural light. The cheap rents were nothing to sneer at either.
The source of these airy, well-lit lofts are the cast-iron facade buildings that were constructed during the period from 1840 to 1880. Cast iron enjoyed a brief flurry of popularity as a building material - it was easy to form into ornate French- and Italian-influenced architectural styles, it was quick to assemble and if was inexpensive. SoHo boasts the greatest collection of cast-iron architecture in the world with approximately 250 such buildings.
There was a profusion of cast iron foundries in New York whose badges can be spotted on many SoHo buildings - Badger’s Architectural Iron Works, James L. Jackson’s Iron Works, and Cornell Iron Works. The strength of the metal allowed building frames to be stretched and once dreary interiors of the industrial district were suddenly flooded with sunlight through the newly enlarged windows. The strength of the cast iron permitted high ceilings with sleek supporting columns, and interiors became more expansive and functional.
Soho’s gradual transformation the neighborhood from a short-lived residential area (1820s-30s), into a predominantly textile-oriented commercial district (1850s-1910s), a low grade manufacturing district (1910s-50s), and finally into a neighborhood containing galleries, artists’ studios and trendy boutiques (1960s-present).
Our walking tour of the Cast-Iron District will begin at the intersection of Broome Street and Broadway, in front of the most influential and beautifully proportioned of the metal masterpieces...
In 1699 a petition was first made for a license to perform plays in Manhattan and 30 years later the first theater opened. From colonial New York the city spread northward until the Theater District landed in Times Square beginning at the turn of the 20th century. Actually it was still Longacre Square in 1895 when Oscar Hammerstein developed a large entertainment complex on 42nd Street, and had three theaters.
During this time, a lot of new theaters opened on The Great White Way, so named for Broadway’s famous light show. The vaudeville circuit found success along with legitimate theatre. In 1904, the New York Timescelebrated a successful effort to rename Longacre Square with their new office building, the second tallest in Manhattan.
Times Square became the premiere theater district in the United States during the First World War. During the 1914-15 season, 113 productions were staged all within the 13-block area. During this time, films were becoming a big part of popular culture and with them came a lot of openings of new film theaters in the square and around the city.
The Great Depression turned many of the live stages into movie palaces and television helped turn many of the movie houses into live nude shows, erotic bookstores, and X-rated movie theaters in the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in the 1980s, businesses and city officials began to clean up the Square as new legislation and building condemnations began to reverse Times Square’s seedy reputation. By 1993 there were 36 adult businesses, down from 140 in the 1970s.
During the 1990s, Times Square became a new symbol for the vibrancy of Manhattan. It is the only place in New York City where tenants are required to display big neon signs. Boasting an estimated 26 million annual visitors each year, it is the first stop for many a newcomer. So let’s not tarry in joining them. This walkingtour will begin at what is affectionately called “the crossroads of the world”...
Stretching from East 59th Street all the way up to 110th Street, from Fifth Avenue eastward to the river, the elite Upper East Side has since the 1800s been the place to live for Manhattanites who value the cachet of their address; the latest United States Census claims that the Upper East Side had the highest per capita income of any urban quarter in the nation.
The 50+ blocks of the Upper East Side are home to some of Manhattan’s most luxurious residences. During America’s Gilded Age, Fifth Avenue was known as “Millionaire’s Mile.” Generations later, with many of the most fantastical spaces converted to alternate use, it is referred to as “Museum Mile.”
Our walking tour will start at the foot of the Upper East Side on 59th Street and Central Park. Begin by marching north on Fifth Avenue with the park on your left and sumptuous architecture on your right...
The New York of a century ago was a town in constant flux. Growing northward at the galloping pace of a mile every decade, the city’s centers of wealth, entertainment, commerce and residence metamorphosed in a constant, dizzying dance. One theme remained always – an agonizing housing shortage.
So when the 9th Avenue El’s opening in 1879 made the West Side easily accessible for the first time, most everyone expected would-be homeowners to absolutely pour into the area, checkbooks at the ready. But it didn’t happen that way. This was especially true in the southern portion of the neighborhood-to-be, the land where John Somerindyck had once farmed, fished and hunted his vast estate. The 1880s saw an invasion by hordes of cheap, speculative tenements west of Broadway. The land around Central Park remained mostly vacant. There was nothing particularly compelling to lure new homesteaders away fromthe heart of fashionable society far downtown along Fifth Avenue between Madison Square and Murray Hill. The billowing smoke and noise of the ugly but essential El on Ninth Avenue cast a palling cloud upon the area. Farther to the west ran the massive trackworks of the New York Central railroad line, which opened around 1880. Besides adding another dose of smoke and noise, the trains carried livestock to stockyards at 60th Street with its own special odors.
The Upper West Side experienced a building boom from 1885 to 1910, thanks in large part to the 1904 opening of the city’s first subway line. Like the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side is primarily a residential and commercial area today, with many of its residents working in more commercial areas in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. Although an affluent neighborhood the Upper West Side never acquired the crustiness associated with its fellow Central Park habitue on the East River.
Our walking tour will start at the foot of the Upper West Side in Columbus Circle...
The first settlement on the site of Newburgh was made in 1709 by a band of German Lutherans led by Joshua Kocherthal in the vicinity of Quassaick Creek south of the present city center. As Scottish, Dutch and English settlers came to the western shore of the Hudson River the Germans drifted further inland. In 1762 the settlement took the name of a Scottish town on the River Tay.
Newburgh experienced a brisk river trade connecting wagon trails to Western New York until this business was diverted by the Erie Canal in the 1820s. But Newburgh’s prime location midway between New York City and Albany did not leave it at a disadvantage for long. Railroads connected the city to the Pennsylvania coal fields and in 1881 the city became the western terminus of the New York & New England Railroad and in 1883 the West Shore Railroad provided direct connection with New York City.
In the latter half of the 19th century Newburgh was firmly established as a transportation and manufacturing hub in the Hudson Valley. Pouring from the city’s factories were paper boxes, flannels, soap, iron and wire products, paints, ice machines, perfumes, carpets bleach, lawn mowers and more. The 20th century was not so kind to Newburgh. Trucks sucked up much of the shipping traffic on the Hudson River and in 1963 the final blow was landed when the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge opened destroying ferry traffic between Newburgh and the eastern shore and carrying automobile traffic past the downtown area altogether.
Newburgh has always been at the forefront of historic preservation. The town sported the country’s first state-acquired historic site in 1850 and its Historical Society was founded back in 1884 and has been rescuing threatened properties since the 1950s. Its historic district is the second largest in New York state. Despite that legacy urban renewal was eagerly embraced and voracious in its execution on Newburgh. In the 1970s the city’s historic waterfront area was completely demolished.
Our tour will examine the historic architecture remaining, standing in various states of repair. And we will begin at that very first preserved historic site, now a National Historic Landmark and a site that is depicted on the city seal, on which ground it was determined that the United States would not become a kingdom...
By the 1830s both the Erie Canal and the Buffalo and Niagara Falls Railroad had come together at the Niagara River, assuring the industrial development of the Town of Tonawanda that had been settled here back in 1805. The first to take advantage of the advantageous situation was the East Boston Timber Company that purchased timber rights on White’s Island, now Tonawanda Island, in 1833. Soon they were loading barges high with fine white oak bound for eager markets on the Eastern seaboard.
But it was not the hardwoods of western New York that were to make Tonawanda but the seemingly limitlesssupply of high quality white pine from the vast forests of the Upper Midwest in Michigan and Minnesota and Wisconsin. In 1861, J. S. Noyes created the first practical cargo barge for open water by removing the mast and deck from an old schooner, an invention that revolutionized Great Lakes shipping. Timber would be loaded onto barges and pulled - sometimes four or five at a time - across the Great Lakes by steam tugs bound for Tonawanda and a trip down the Erie Canal.
Tonawanda, developed on both sides of the Erie Canal/Tonawanda Creek, split in 1865 when North Tonwanda was incorporated as a village. There was some ongoing nastiness over the use of a gravel pit but mostly the political management of communities in two different counties was becoming unwieldy. It was North Tonawanda that became “Lumber City.” The first cargo of lumber unloaded for distribution was in 1867. By 1890 over 700,000,000 feet of sawed lumber was docked here and for a brief time North Tonawanda was the world’s largest lumber port.
There were more than 150 lumber companies operating in town. Most were dealing in the usual suspects - fence posts, railroad ties, wooden laths and the like. J.S. Bliss and Company became the second largest manufacturer of shingles in the world, turning out as many as 56,000,000 white pine shingles of all shapes and sizes in a single season. The Ray H. Bennett Lumber Company produced kit homes sold around the nation and Canada for 70 years. But the abundance of lumber also attracted some more colorful manufacturers: Allan Herschell was turning out the nation’s finest merry-go-rounds with hand-carved wooden horses by the 1880s and Rudolph Wurlitzer established a plant for crafting organs in 1908.
When the lumber fields were depleted and the railroads pushed further west, new industries of steel, paper, chemicals and auto parts manufacturing set up shop due to the established bulk transportation infrastructure. Today the lumberyards are all gone and so are the rapids in the water that led the Senecas to call it Tonawanda Creek meaning “Swift Running Water.” Our walking tour will work into the neighborhood spawned by the wealth of that lumber but first we will begin at the spot that started it all, looking out at the western end of the historic Erie Barge Canal...
The point where the Oswego River flows into the open waters of Lake Ontario was visited by French explorer Samuel de Champlain in 1615 and was well known to early travelers. The English finally got around to establishing a trading post here in 1722 and a crude fort followed five years later. In 1755 a full contingent of 700 men arrived and constructed two fortifications - Fort Ontario on the east bank of the river and Oswego New Fort on the west side. The English would remain in possession of Oswego until late in George Washington’s second term as President when the Jay Treaty went into effect on February 29, 1796.
Building lots and public squares were laid out in 1797 as Oswego became America’s first freshwater port. Freight was transferred between rafts from inland waterways and larger lake schooners. The War of 1812 interrupted Oswego’s march of progress and Fort Ontario was laid waste by the British but Oswego County was established after the war ended in 1816 and the town once again anticipated a bright future as the largest port on the Great Lakes. Those hopes were temporarily dashed by the construction of the Erie Canal that opened the western lands to Lake Erie and not Lake Ontario. New York’s canal-building craze soon linked Oswego with the Erie Canal in 1828 and when Canada opened an easy water route between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario with its Welland Canal in 1840, Oswego was primed for a boom time.
By 1850, Oswego had become the largest American port for Canadian imports and was collecting more customs receipts than all but three ports in the country. The Oswego River and the adjacent boat basin were crowded with canal boats and lake schooners, flouring mills, shipyards and drydocks. The world’s largest starch family located here and there was a large iron factory churning out steam shovels and dredges and railway carriage works and repair shops and box factories. Vast quantities of grain and timber and coal and salt moved through the port. A business district of three and four-story warehouses and business blocks developed along West First Street and Bridge Street.
The Oswego streetscape has been altered through the years by fire and urban renewal but a significant handful of buildings remaining from the glory days of the mid-1800s. Our walking tour will visit both sides of the Oswego River and we’ll start on a public green that was laid out on the east side in 1797 when the city of Oswego was laid out...
The town site of Poughkeepsie - the name derives from an Iroquois word meaning “the reed-covered lodge by the little-water place” referring to a small spring that fed the Hudson River - was settled by the Dutch in 1659, just a few years before the English would seize control of the entire region. Poughkeepsie would emerge as the mid-Hudson Valley’s largest and most influential city on the east bank, growing rapidly and even enjoying a two-year stint as capital of New York after the American Revolution. In addition to the Hudson River the town sat on two other important Colonial transportation routes - the Albany Post Road and the New Hackensack Road.
Lumber and grain milling were the first important industries and the town became a major center for whale rendering early in the 1800s. There were also glass factories, textile mills, ball bearing manufacturers and breweries. After the Civil War Poughkeepsie experienced a period of rapid industrial expansion, with a corresponding increase in population. By 1854 Poughkeepsie’s population grew to 20,000. But the city’s economic triumphs failed to register on the national radar. Instead, as Poughkeepsie boomed, homes and businesses began constructing individual wells and cisterns for sewage disposal. This activity caused groundwater contamination resulting in epidemics of cholera, typhoid fever, smallpox and diphtheria, which claimed hundreds of victims. To the City’s embarrassment Poughkeepsie was heralded in newspapers as “The Sickly City,” even as far west as Chicago. One account called Poughkeepsie, “A fine place to live, with fine schools and churches and railroad accommodations, well governed but oh, how sickly.”
In 1870 a general election to decide the question of whether or not to develop a public water supply resulted in a vote of 544 to 43 in support of the proposal. On this basis a Water Board was formed which sought out an engineer for the project. In 1871 progress moved dramatically forward as Harvey G. Eastman was elected Mayor. Mayor Eastman was credited as the driving force that carried out the public wishes. Through his leadership, gift of persuasion and vision the first successful slow sand filtration plant in America was placed into service July 8, 1872. The success of this project was heralded as epidemics all but disappeared and the plant was copied across the land and to this day Poughkeepsie is recognized as the national leader in filtration.
Our walking tour of today’s “Queen City of the Hudson” will begin at the entrance of Harvey Eastman’s park and a memorial he donated to the city, a water-based memorial naturally...
Ebenezer “Indian” Allen was the first settler in this area. He had obtained a grant of 100 acres at a gaping cataract on the Genesee River with the provision that he build a mill. Allen built his mill in 1789 but nobody was in a hurry to make use of it, let alone settle nearby. No one wanted to deal with the “Genesee Fever” that was almost certain to come due to the mosquitoes infesting the dismal swamp around the falls. The rattlesnakes didn’t help either. Allen had moved on by 1792.
Title for the land subsequently passed through several owners, none who did anything to develop it. Finally the property came into the hands of three Maryland men and in 1811 one of them, Colonel Nathaniel Rochester, began offering lots for sale. This time a few settlers trickled in; there was a tavern by 1815, a newspaper in 1816 and the next year the village was incorporated as Rochesterville. It was only one of eight similar settlements scattered along the final eight miles of the Genesee River’s run to Lake Ontario, and far from the most promising. Carthage had built a great bridge across the river in 1819 that drew travelers and trade but after 15 months it buckled and collapsed. And about the same time the Erie Canal was routed through Rochester, along today’s Broad Street, and that dealt a death blow to its rivals. Rochester was named the county seat of the new Monroe County in 1821, soon absorbed the surrounding communities and was off and running.
The awesome power of the Upper Falls of the Genesee had begun to be harnessed as well, most efficiently by the Brown Brothers, and Rochester was a genuine boomtown. The local mills were churning out flour in quantities that had never been seen before. Local millers were grinding upwards of 25,000 bushels of wheat daily. The first ten days the Erie Canal was open east to the Hudson, 40,000 barrels of flour floated down to Albany and New York City from the new Flour City. By 1838 Rochester was the largest flour-producing city in the world. About that time a new, less obvious, industry was sprouting in town - the seed and nursery business. It would become so prominent that Rochester was being called the Flower City even before the bulk of the flour-milling business was departing for the wheat fields of the midwest. An added benefit of the nursery business was the early development of the city parks.
With the foundation laid by flour and flowers, Rochester became one of America’s great industrial cities. George Eastman’s Kodak film and cameras and John Jacob Bausch and Henry Lomb’s optical products were foremost among Rochester goods but there were shoes and machine tools and horseless carriages and mail chutes as well. The population would peak in 1950 with more than 330,000 but our walking tour will begin near the site of Ebenezer Allen’s first mill when nobody wanted to live here, on the site where Hamlet Scrantom built the first house in the village, on the spot that was for more than 100 years the center of Rochester life...
For centuries the area occupied by today’s Rome has been known to the travelers in the north-central woods. Boats coming up the Mohawk River from the Hudson River had to transfer their cargo and boats overland only between 1.7 and six miles, depending on the season, to continue west to Lake Ontario. The portage between the Mohawk River and Wood Creek was used by canoeists of the Iroquoian-speaking peoples and early English settlers called it the Oneida Carrying Place. Such a place of importance needed to be protected and the British erected several small forts along the Carrying Place to guard its lucrative fur trade from French interests in Canada. In 1758, during the French and Indian War British General John Stanwix began building a more substantial fortification here. Fort Stanwix was abandoned in 1768 and allowed to go to ruin but was revived by American Continentals during the Revolution. It was the primary staging point for American attacks against the British and continued to protect the frontier until it was abandoned in 1781.
With peace at hand settlers began to trickle into the Carrying Place. Dominick Lynch acquired 2,397 acres here in 1786 and began selling village lots. In 1797 the portage was eliminated with the completion of a canal connecting the Mohawk River and Wood Creek, a considerable engineering feat for the day ushering in a new era of progress. Twenty years later the Erie Canal, which was originally sited south of the village, was relocated and Rome’s success was assured.
Railroads followed the canals and with it came industry. Jesse Williams founded America’s first cheese factory at Rome in 1851. More importantly, in 1866 the Rome Iron Works began rolling iron rails and a decade later began rolling brass. The company evolved into Revere Copper and Brass, employing thousands in the world’s largest copper rolling mill. At one time, 10 percent of all copper products used in the United States were manufactured in Rome.
The United States Air Force became the dominant employer in Rome in the second half of the 20th century. Ground was broken on August 2, 1941 for the Rome Air Depot which became named Griffiss Air Force Base after Lt. Colonel Townsend E. Griffiss, the first U.S. airman to be killed in the line of duty in the European Theater during World War II. Griffiss became the headquarters of the Northeast Air Defense Sector until it was de-activated in the 1990s.
Rome is the second largest city by area in New York State and aggressive urban renewal efforts make it seem that way. Our spread-out tour will begin where the British dug their trenches during the siege of Fort Stanwix...
Saratoga Springs - there are 17 of the mineral springs in the town - first came to the attention of European settlers in the 1770s. From the beginning those who arrived here cast an eye to catering to potential visitors to the waters rather than carving out farmland in the wilderness. The first permanent resident is considered to be Samuel Norton who was soon operating a crude log hotel near the High Rock Spring. As the area around this spring developed it would become known as the “Upper Village.”
About a mile to the south the Congress Spring that would become the cornerstone of the village was discovered in 1792. Gideon Putnam, who had been in the area since 1789 making a living shipping wooden staves and shingles down the Hudson River, tapped the Congress Spring and constructed the Tavern and Boarding House in 1802. He then set about platting a street grid and grand hotels soon followed. By 1819 Saratoga Springs was cleaved from the Town of Saratoga and in 1826 it was incorporated as a village.
The railroad accelerated growth and in 1864 John Hunter and William R. Travers introduced thoroughbred horse racing to Saratoga Springs with a four-day meet. Gambling mixed well with the carbonated natural spring water and Saratoga moved easily to the head of resort destinations for wealthy Americans in the Gilded Age from the 1880s to the 1910s.
The glory days did not last. By the middle of the 20th century gambling was illegal and Americans had no interest in medicinal waters. The rich and famous could jet to resorts around the world. One by one the rambling luxury hotels were torn down and scores of old “cottages” were pressed into service as boarding houses, college dorms or just left vacant.
The “idea” of Saratoga Springs never died, however, and by the 1990s the appeal of a summer at the spa had returned. Much of the fabled building stock for the 19th century is gone but enough remains to experience what it was like when each summer high society settled comfortably in the “Queen of Spas.” So grab a cup to sample the waters and our walking tour will begin hard by the most famous spring of them all...
Someone who checked once counted that the name Schenectady is spelled seventy-nine different ways in the early documents. It derives from the Indian description “at the end of the pine plains” for the western end of the portage between the Mohawk and Hudson rivers. The area’s importance as a transportation route continued with the arrival of European settlers first along the river, then along the Erie Canal (entombed beneath the pavement of Erie Boulevard) and then along the lines of the Mohawk & Hudson Railroad.
Schenectady evolved as a company town, the first being the Schenectady Locomotive Works built by Scotsman John Ellis with his master mechanic, Walter McQueen. In 1851 the 56-year old Ellis acquired a little locomotive plant in town that had managed to produce but a single locomotive, “The Lightning,” which was run for about a year between Utica and Schenectady, but was finally pronounced a failure by locomotive engineers of that day. It was the ambition of John Ellis not only to construct locomotives but to build the cars behind them and his railroad works came to rival the largest in the land. For the remainder of the 19th century “The Big Shop” carried the growth of the city on its shoulders.
But it was a couple of abandoned and unused warehouses from the railroad works that set the course for Schenectady in the following century. In the 1880s Thomas Edison was in the early stages of electrifying America around New York City when he became weary of the labor problems he was constantly butting up against. He determined to move his nascent machine works elsewhere. He heard tell of two buildings in the McQueen yard that were still not completed and came to Schenectady to inspect the facilities. He offered to buy them from the railroad men but his offer was $7,500 below the asking price.
Schenectady businessmen caught wind of the dealings and set out to cover the difference. They struggled to raise the money and were still $500 short with a deadline looming before Edison was to close a land deal in New Jersey. Although it was after hours the group’s leaders knocked on the door of the Mohawk Bank anyway and indeed found the son of one their group working late. He agreed to put up the last $500 which was wired to Edison and sealed the deal. The Edison works moved to Schenectady in 1886 and in 1894 the city was designated as the headquarters of General Electric.
Those two small buildings would spawn a complex of 360 buildings spread across 670 acres of land. The Schenectady plant would be the largest of more than 150 General Electric facilities around the globe, employing more than 23,000 workers. Our walking tour of the “The City that Lights and Hauls the World” won’t find much remaining from its two giant industries but their legacy remains and we will begin at a grand building that symbolizes those heady times...
Today Seneca Falls is known as the birthplace of the struggle for women’s rights that began in earnest in America in the 1840s but in the 19th century the town was known for the industry that was powered by those namesake falls. Job Smith is accepted as the first white settler in the area, arriving in 1787 where he set up a portage business for travelers to get around the series of rapids that tumbled some forty feet in the course of about a mile on the Seneca River. The Bayard Land Company was formed to exploit the power pent up in the rushing waters with the industrious Wilhelmus Mynderse serving as the concern’s resident business agent. Mynderse located here permanently in 1795 and soon had a grist mill in operation. Other mills and dams and the Seneca and Cayuga Canal would follow as he carved the most lasting legacy in the village’s history. The settlement was called Mynderse Mills for a time before the village was incorporated in 1831. In a few more years Seneca Falls was the third largest flour milling center in the world.
The water was also powering tanneries and distilleries and woolen mills. The most important technology developed along the Seneca River involved pumps and hydraulic engines. The town became known the world over for the quality of its water pumps and when the Silsby Manufacturing Company applied the technology to design and build their first Steam Fire Engine in 1856 Seneca Falls staked a claim as the “fire engine capital of the world.”
The go-go days of the 19th century began to come to an end in 1890 when the business district was decimated by fire. Then New York State decided to convert the old Erie Canal into the Erie Barge Canal which would modernize the old canal beds and locks and accommodate larger tonnage vessels and motorized propulsion. In Seneca Falls, the new, larger channel and locks required more water, to supply the forty-nine foot lift of the proposed locks. Sixty residential and 116 commercial buildings were torn down including the Goulds Manufacturing Company, Rumsey Pumps, and American LaFrance.
Seneca Falls’ industrial heritage began to recede from the public imagination. History books written in the 1930s scarcely made mention of it. Instead, an event that took place back in 1848 in a small brick chapel began to gain magnified importance in the story of women in America. Henry and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had moved to Seneca Falls in 1847 from Boston and she became increasingly involved in the community to combat the dearth of big-city intellectual stimulation she had known in Massachusetts. She had been exposed to social reform through her cousin, abolitionist Gerrit Smith and Quaker friend Lucretia Mott. While traveling together to London for a World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840 the two women talked about holding a similar gathering for women’s rights. Eight years later, on July 19 and 20, 1848, Mott, Stanton, Mary Ann M’Clintock, Martha Coffin Wright, and Jane Hunt acted on this idea when they organized the First Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls. Some 300 people attended and at the end of the two days, 100 people made a public commitment to work together to improve women’s quality of life. Today that beginning is celebrated at the Womens Rights National Historical Park and that is where we will begin our tour, next to the visitor center...
The salt springs that would come to define Syracuse were first discovered by Jesuit missionaries back in the 1650s. But it was not a pretty sight. For as far as the eye could see was dark, impenetrable swampland. Ephraim Webster was the first settler of European descent to try and make a go of it here, establishing a trading post near the mouth of the Onondaga Creek in 1786. James Geddes dug the first salt well in 1794 and ten years later, as a member of the State legislature, he obtained funds to build a 10-mile corduroy road across the marshy land to get the salt out to market and kick-start development in the region. Gradually the swamp was drained and soon the Erie Canal arrived. The canal not only facilitated the shipment of salt from the Onondaga Valley but caused farmers to shift production from wheat to more profitable pork and curing pork required salt. Until the brine fields and wells shut down in the early 1900s, almost all of the salt used in the United States came from “The Salt City.”
By the time the villages of Salina and Syracuse were merged to form the City of Syracuse in 1848 there were enough people living here to immediately make the new city one of the fifteen largest in the country. Salt production had fueled the growth but the industrial base quickly diversified. By 1860 Syracuse had several foundries, machine shops and factories producing agricultural implements, boots and shoes, furniture, saddlery, hardware and silverware. It was said a greater variety of products were coming from the city in the heart of the state than from New York City. Charles Dickens, who gave a reading in the Weiting Opera House in 1869 wrote of his experience in the rapidly growing city, “I am here in a most wonderful out-of-the world place, which looks as if it had begun to be built yesterday, and were going to be imperfectly knocked together with a nail or two the day after tomorrow.”
Manufacturing drove Syracuse well into the 20th century with the population peaking at 221,000 in 1950. Today’s population is about 2/3 of that but the metropolitan area has a population of over 700,000. Our walking tour will begin in Clinton Square, the historic center of downtown through which the Erie Canal once flowed and nineteenth-century freight and passengers were transferred to a parade of canal boats arriving at the Packet Dock...
The flatlands around the head of navigation for the Hudson River were uneventfully farmed by Dutch settlers and their descendants for the better part of 150 years. After the American Revolution one of those farms, the Vanderhyden place, was subdivided into building lots. Streets were laid out in a grid plan based on Philadelphia’s and in 1793 the new settlement was designated the Rensselaer County seat. There was a spate of classically-inspired town-naming going on in New York State at the time and the village became Troy.
During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Troy gained prominence as an exporter of grain and vegetables. In 1822 Henry Burden, a native of Scotland, arrived as superintendent of the Troy Iron and Nail Factory. His inventive mind soon automated work that had previously been done by hand and he soon patented a process for manufacturing iron spikes for the new railroads. In 1835 Burden invented a horseshoe machine that cranked out a horseshoe every second, a technological wonder of the day. Troy had its feet planted firmly in the Industrial Revolution. Foundries were busy churning out stoveplates and casting bells.
Visiting Europe in 1864, Horatio Winslow purchased the rights to manufacture and sell Bessemer steel in the United States and began production at his company;s Troy works. Introduction of the the metal brought a new order of mass haulage by rail, and Troy became the steel center of the country for a decade before its supremacy was eclipsed by Andrew Carnegie’s Pittsburgh mills.
In the 1820s a local housewife, Hannah Lord Montague, wearied of washing her husband’s entire shirts when only the collar was dirty so she cut them off and started a new industry. Ebenezer Brown began the manufacture of detachable collars in 1829 and in 1834 Lyman Bennett opened the first successful collar factory. And Troy had a new moniker: “Collar City.” While Troy’s industries were propelling it to the first rank of American cities it was also a leader in education. Under the patronage of Stephen van Rensselaer, Troy was the home of the first strictly scientific academic institution in the United States, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1824, and Emma Willard was a national leader in the education of women, establishing some of America’s first and most admired women’s colleges.
Troy’s fall from prosperity mirrored other northern cities in the post-World War II period. The industries have mostly disappeared but the schools still thrive - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is the city’s largest private employer. The population has dwindled to mid-19th century levels and that suits the streetscape. In 2006, the New York Times described the city as having “one of the most perfectly preserved 19th-century downtowns in the United States.” Hollywood has found its way to Troy to take advantage of these living set pieces and our walking tour of this by-gone world will begin with a statue dedicated to a fictional character, Uncle Sam...
Utica’s existence has always been tied to transportation, and not because the town lies only 20 miles east of the geographic center of New York state. It was at this point that early travelers could best ford the Mohawk River for miles in either direction. The land was part of a grant of 22,000 acres made by George II of England to William Cosby, governor of the Province of New York in 1734. During the French and Indian War in 1758 the British erected Fort Schuyler near the ford but it was never garrisoned and abandoned after the war. Despite its advantageous location the swampy environs delayed settlement beyond a few traders until the early days of the Republic.
A bridge was constructed across the Mohawk River in 1792 and stagecoaches were running from Albany the next year. One of the first to take advantage of the increased traffic was Moses Bagg who shod horses from his blacksmith shop and operated a much-frequented tavern. Utica’s main streets came to radiate away from Baggs’ little fiefdom and Bagg’s Square would be a focal point of city life for the better part of 200 years until it was obliterated by modern access roads.
No one prospered more from transportation in Utica than John Butterfield, who left his family farm in Berne, New York to come to the nascent village of Utica as a mail carrier. A single trip in a one-horse wagon each week was enough to supply all the demands of the inhabitants. At length with the accumulations of his small earnings, he purchased the right to carry the mail on his own account and was soon able to open a small livery stable and provide a stage service. After the Erie Canal was completed in 1825 Butterfield would move into packet boats and become an early investor in the railroads. In 1850, Butterfield convinced Henry Wells and William Fargo to consolidate their express companies with his own Butterfield & Wasson Company to form the American Express Company, which Butterfield then directed. Butterfield lived at #30 Whitesboro Street, was elected mayor in 1865 and died after a stroke in 1869 at the age of 68.
Meanwhile the textile industry that was to become the backbone of Utica’s economy began with the opening of woolen mills in 1847 and cotton mills the following year. But there was also locomotive headlights and firearms and beer and fishing tackle all being produced and shipped from Utica plants. The population would peak at over 100,000 in the 1930s and 1940s when the Utica freight yards were the largest in America east of the Mississippi River.
The early settlement lay wholly south of the Mohawk River, chiefly upon one street, called Main, running parallel with the river. Our walking tour will focus on the Lower Genesee Street Historic District that is the oldest part of the city of Utica as it inched away from the river. Despite extensive alterations and demolition buildings can be found that date to Utica’s charter as a city in 1832. But first we’ll start at one of those replacement buildings, where decisions affecting the fate of Genessee Street are hatched...
Settlers from New England began pushing into the New York wilderness in earnest after the Revolutionary War. Three who made their way here in 1800 - Hart Massey, Henry Coffeen, and Zachariah Butterfield - were attracted by the energetic Black River that promised the potential of power for early industries.
Indeed water-powered mills and factories would soon take their places along the river. In 1805 Jefferson County was founded and Watertown was tabbed as the county seat a decade before the village was incorporated in 1816. When the War of 1812 broke out the bustling village became a center of supplies to the soldiers coming to Lake Ontario. Now as the legal and industrial center of the “North Country,” Watertown was on the fast track to becoming a significant city. The progress was slowed by a devastating fire in 1849 that wiped out a large swath of the business district but rebuilding was swift and certain.
Meanwhile the mills and factories hummed along the Black River. Paper-making was important and so was cotton and wool manufacturing. Watertown-manufacturedcarriages were in demand across the country. The first portable steam engine was developed here in 1847 and the Davis Sewing Machine Company was a big employer as Watertown was incorporated as a city in 1869 and entered into its greatest period of prosperity - one that would last more than fifty years.
Our walking tour will visit many structures from those heady times and we will begin where six roads pour out of and where Watertown history has been made for over 200 years...