Fifth Avenue | Page 3

what is now Ninth Street. In 1790 Captain Robert Richard
Randall paid five thousand pounds sterling for twenty-one acres of

good farming land. In 1801 he died, and his will directed that a "Snug
Harbor" for old salts be built upon his farm, the produce of which, he
believed, would forever furnish his pensioners with vegetables and
cereal rations. Later Randall's trustees leased the farm in building lots
and placed "Snug Harbor" in Staten Island. Above the estate, in
diagonal form, and at one point crossing Fifth Avenue to the west, was
the large farm of Henry Brevoort. More limited holdings, in the names
of Gideon Tucker, William Hamilton, and John Morse, separate, in the
map, the Brevoort property from the estates of John Mann, Jr., and
Mary Mann. The latter must have been a landowner of some
importance in her day, for the fragment of a chart runs into the margin
above the line of Thirteenth Street without indicating the beginning of
any other ownership.
On the land to the west of the Avenue line may be read "Heirs of John
Rogers," "William W. Gilbert," "Nicholson" (the Christian name lies
somewhere beyond the map horizon), and "Heirs of Henry Spingler."
Irrigation is indicated by a line, running in a general northwesterly
direction, bearing the name "Manetta Water," while a thinner line,
joining the first line from the northeast, is described as "East Branch of
Manetta Water." Manetta Water was the English name. The Dutch had
called it "Bestavaer's Rivulet." It was a sparkling stream, beloved of
trout fishermen, rising in the high ground above Twenty-first Street,
flowing southeasterly to Fifth Avenue at Ninth Street, then on to
midway between the present Eighth Street and Waverly Place, where it
swung southwesterly and emptied into the Hudson River near Charlton
Street. It ran between sandhills, sometimes rising to the height of a
hundred feet, and marked the course of a famous Indian hunting
ground.
The joy of the Izaak Waltons of the past is occasionally the despair of
the Fifth Avenue householders of the present. Flooded cellars and
weakened foundations may be traced to the purling waters of the
sparkling stream. But perhaps the trout were jumping. Then the last
fisherman probably worried very little about the annoyances to which
his descendants were to be subjected. In much the same spirit we are
saying today, "What will it all matter a hundred years hence?"

Beginning at the Potter's Field, the line of what is now Fifth Avenue
left the "Road over the Sandhills" or the "Zantberg" of the Dutch, later
known as Art Street, long since gone from the map, and crossed the
Robert Richard Randall Estate. Thence it ran through the Henry
Brevoort farm, which originally extended from Ninth to Eighteenth
Streets, and which had been bought in 1714 for four hundred pounds.
Crossing the tributary stream at Twelfth Street, it passed a small pond
between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets, and then ran on, over low
and level ground, to Twenty-first Street, then called "Love's Lane." To
the right was the swamp and marsh that afterwards became Union
Square. Following the trail farther, the hardy voyager wandered over
"hills and valleys, dales and fields," through a countryside where trout,
mink, otter, and muskrat swam in the brooks and pools; brant, black
duck, and yellow-leg splashed in the marshes and fox, rabbit,
woodcock, and partridge found covert in the thicket. Here and there
was a farm, but the city, then numbering one hundred thousand persons,
was far away. Then, in 1824, the first stretch of the Avenue, from
Waverly Place to Thirteenth Street, was opened, and the northward
march of the great thoroughfare began. Let us try to picture the old
town of that day, the city that was still under the shadow of the
Knickerbockers.
First, at the southern extremity of the island, was the Battery and
Battery Park. When, in "The Story of a New York House," the late H.C.
Bunner described the little square of green jutting into the waters of the
upper bay, it was as it had been some years before the earliest
venturesome pioneers builded in lower Fifth Avenue. From the pillared
balcony of his house on State Street--the house may still be seen--Jacob
Dolph caught a glimpse of the morning sun, that loved the Battery far
better than Pine Street, where Dolph's office was. It was a
poplar-studded Battery in those days, and the tale tells how the wind
blew fresh off the bay, and the waves beat up against the sea-wall, and
a large brig, with all sails set, loomed conspicuous to the view, and two
or three fat little boats, cat-rigged, after the good old New York fashion,
were beating down towards Staten Island, to hunt for the earliest
bluefish. That was in 1808,