New York City Grows Larger

This past October the World Champion N.Y. Yankees were honored, once again, with a tickertape parade up Broadway and a speech by the mayor on the steps of City Hall.
In 1811, when City Hall was completed on Broadway and Chambers St., the building was considered to be the handsomest structure in the U.S., and perhaps the world. It stood on the outskirts of the city, it’s south, east, and west facing walls of brilliant white marble. No one complained that in order to save money, the city fathers had used common brownstone on the north wall. After all, they reasoned, since the building stood on the edge of town, few people would view this side of the building anyway.

The City Fathers were very wrong. After the results of the 1820 census were counted, New York was declared to be the most populous city in the nation with, a population of 123,706. (It would maintain this ranking with an 1840 population of 312,710, in 1860 it had grown almost three times to 813,660 and by1875 the population count had reached over one million). 
This tremendous growth in population led to the great construction boom which sent the city shooting northbound. In the process hills were leveled and used to fill in the many swamps, streams and meadows, which had made this wonderful island such a beautiful area. The refuse from this monumental growth fouled the water table, and caused our fresh water supply to be imported from the Croton area.

The best views of the city in the 1820’s were from the spire of Trinity Church at Wall St., right in the center of town, amid the finest residences, shops, business and hotel buildings. (Zoning laws were many years into the future). From this lofty view one could see to the east, Pearl St., which had been at waters edge until the 1720’s when land fill operations had widened the island first to Water St., then to Front St. and finally to South St. In this era the East River shoreline was described as a forest of masts.
The ocean going ships tended to dock on the deeper water East River side of the island while the interior sailing vessels docked on the Hudson or North River side of Manhattan, closer to the soon to be completed Erie Canal.

This simple fact explains why we have so many more east- west running streets than north-south running avenues. No one envisioned traffic needing to go more urgently in any other direction than from the docks on the East River back and forth to the docks on the Hudson/North River. The transportation of materials and supplies between the coast and the interior was essential to the growth of the nation and the city, imports, exports, all had to make the trip overland as the Hudson River Docks were shallow and thus unkind to boats that sat deep into the water. So when the commission planned the street grid for Manhattan it only made sense to have many streets in an east/west direction. Little need was felt for North/South travel.

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