Anna Melo:
New York City has been constantly refreshing, rejuvenating, and re-establishing itself over the course of centuries. This city has gone from being a shipping powerhouse to becoming a manufacturing industrial powerhouse, to today being a financial powerhouse. New York City has been on the top of the game for almost the entirety of its existence. And part of what we have to thank for that is our geography and the planning of our urban centers or lack of planning. So we're going to go back through 400 years of New York City's urban planning history. Joining us today is Justin Rivers, the chief experience officer for Untapped New York. Thank you for coming, Justin.
Justin Rivers:
Thank you for having me.
Anna Melo:
And we are also joined by the New York Stock Exchange's archivist, Dave D'Onofrio.
David D'Onofrio:
Pleasure to be here. I'm glad I brought my time machine.
Anna Melo:
And so let's go ahead and peel back the last 400 years of New York City history and talk about how we got to where we are now. So I think we should start at the very beginning, the kind of earliest parts of New York. And the very first thing that I want to talk about is why did the Dutch choose Manhattan to be the little far-flung outpost in their massive global shipping empire? What was it about Manhattan and New York Harbor, then New Amsterdam that was so attractive to a very naval minded people like the Dutch?
Justin Rivers:
Well, it's really interesting because the Dutch actually kept changing their mind. So when the Dutch get here at the first pass in 1623, '24-ish, they actually land on what we know as Governor's Island, Nutten Island for the chestnut trees, and they start setting up base there. And then they realize this island's way too small and they see the larger island, Manahatta, a little bit further north and they move over. But the Dutch West India Company, which was part of the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, which was just huge, had actually put their headquarters in what we know today as Albany for a while.
And everybody knows where Albany is. Why would you come right off the ocean and go up the river when you could come right off the ocean to have one of the deepest, best natural harbors in the world, which we have here in Manhattan? And it's actually the third director general, Peter Minuit who says, "Let's move everything down to the tip of this island in Manahatta and we'll call it New Amsterdam."
What's interesting is if you go a little bit further back is that the Lenape people who were in this area at the time actually used Manhattan, and particularly Lower Manhattan, as a seasonal trading ground. So we have a tour that's called the Remnants of Dutch New Amsterdam, which we in our office, so we don't have to say that all the time when we're talking about it on the calendar and staffing, we call it DNA. And so what I like to say, and I even tell this on the tour, is that the very DNA, the genetic material of New York, was actually laid down by the Lenape who were using it for business purposes. Why? Because you have two rivers. You've got a gorgeous harbor, you have access to most of the East Coast from here.
So you could use it as a corporate highway basically. You could bring goods in and out very quickly for the Europeans. It's right off the Atlantic. For the Lenape, it goes into the interior. It's coming from Delaware and from point south where other parts of the Lenape Nation are. And so the Dutch move their base of operations down to the southern tip of Manhattan, and they actually begin using some of the transportation. I say that loosely, infrastructure that the Lenape built, which the Wkwisket Trail is Broadway, which becomes the Carriage Highway by the Dutch. And you've got water on two sides of you, and it works out well for this, like you said, a maritime power who's using the ocean to make their money.
David D'Onofrio:
What I love about that is I love anytime you see different peoples in different times coming to essentially the same conclusion. Like one river's good. Two rivers? Oh, that's better.
Anna Melo:
Even better.
David D'Onofrio:
Even better.
Anna Melo:
Two rivers and an ocean?
Justin Rivers:
Right.
David D'Onofrio:
Tigris and Euphrates, this is where we're going to set up. We could have just done one. The Tigris would've been fine.
Justin Rivers:
No, we got two. And a harbor that was again, a gem. Everybody, if you look at accounts of people discovering New York or talking about New York at this time, they all talk about the size and depth of the harbor.
David D'Onofrio:
And I think until you actually look at a satellite view of New York Harbor, you don't realize just how well-protected New York Harbor is. It is truly phenomenal. I'm sure at the time they couldn't either. I can't think of another harbor naturally that has that level of protection.
Justin Rivers:
And imagine having more of it. There's so much land usage and development that we've had over 350 years. It was much larger. We've encroached on it more, but ...
Anna Melo:
Yes, we definitely have.
David D'Onofrio:
That's an understatement.
Anna Melo:
But you're absolutely right. Peoples from completely different places, completely different experiences, saw Manhattan and thought this is a shipping hub. And that's exactly what we used it for.
Justin Rivers:
Exactly.
Anna Melo:
Like I mentioned before, New Amsterdam was a little toehold in North America for the Dutch shipping empire. And they kept the spot up at Ford Albany, of course, because you needed access up to Hudson because that's where all the furs were. Because as we know, the number one hot commodity of Dutch New Amsterdam was of course beaver pelts and the fur trade.
Justin Rivers:
Yes. When I started the Dutch New Amsterdam tour, it was 2017. And so I likened beaver pelts to skinny jeans. I know skinny jeans aren't in anymore, but now we're going back to baggy, but-
David D'Onofrio:
Oh God, they're not?
Justin Rivers:
Yeah. And I'm wearing skinny jeans right now, but beaver pelts wore the skinny jeans at the time. Everybody in Europe wanted them, and they had basically hunted them to extinction on the continent. And when they found them here, they're like, "Yes, awesome. Let's keep going."
Anna Melo:
And then we almost hunted them to extinction.
Justin Rivers:
Here. Correct, right.
Anna Melo:
What are you going to do? But the Dutch understood that when you have something really good, that means that people are going to come for it. And so here we are at the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street, and as we all know, and as I'm sure many of our listeners also know, Wall Street got its name because it was a wall. It was called Het Cingel by the Dutch, and then later on it was called Wall Street. But the reason they built that wall was ostensibly to keep out the Native Americans, but we know the real reason they built the wall.
Justin Rivers:
The real reason was not the Native Americans, it was actually the English.
Anna Melo:
Correct.
Justin Rivers:
They did not want the English just marching down the road from Connecticut and saying, "Here we are." Of course the English head boats.
Anna Melo:
And that's what happened to New Amsterdam, dear listeners.
David D'Onofrio:
Yes. That's it.
Justin Rivers:
It's 1664. There you go. That's the story. But yeah, the wall is fascinating. I've always been fascinated by the wall and Wall Street, the development of Wall Street. I know we talked about this, but the general vernacular, my understanding was Het Cingel really meant the belt. It was the girdle, basically. And the idea was is as they were developing New Amsterdam here, Amsterdam in the Netherlands is still a relatively young-ish city for a relative-
Anna Melo:
For a European city.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah. For a European city, for a relatively young-ish nation. The Netherlands were actually newly independent when they were developing over here. And so the director generals, including the last and the most infamous, Peter Stuyvesant, was developing and building New Amsterdam to look like Amsterdam. There is, as everybody ... Well, I don't know if everybody knows this, but there was a canal that he basically almost parked right up in front of your own building called the Prinsengracht, or the Prince's Canal, which fed from the East River, what they called the Mauritius, and came all the way up to the wall basically.
The wall itself was considered to be not only defensive, but also a defining barrier for the city. And if you look at maps of Amsterdam at the same time, it too had a girdle. It too had a belt around it. And there are some historians that actually believe that Wall Street is a misnomer because really, people saw this street on a map called Walstraat, which actually was down by Pearl Street. And what they were talking about was the wall that formed the barrier between the water and the shoreline, down by what was the Stadthaus or the first city hall. But because you've built this palisade, and basically that's what they say the Dutch referred to it as, basically a palisade, and earth and mound and pine and it was about nine-ish to 12 feet, I believe. But later on it sort of again, the English take over in 1664. They keep the wall for quite a while, the wall stretches its way to the Western shore as well.
And then it just becomes known as Wall Street. And then we get this sort of myth that it was just a solid wall, but it wasn't. My favorite story about the wall was anytime there was basically a home improvement project somewhere in New Amsterdam, you didn't have Home Depot that you could go to or some people in the middle of the night would just steal wood from the wall, so there were holes in it every once in a while. They had to keep maintaining the wall. And I know before we started recording, we talked about New York's garbage problem. And we may talk about this now, but if you had to get rid of your garbage, where were New Amsterdamers dumping their garbage? Well, it was either in the canal, which stunk-
Anna Melo:
Which was infamously smelly,
Justin Rivers:
Awful. I mean, there's literally a plaque on Broad Street that talks bad how bad-
Anna Melo:
The stench.
Justin Rivers:
... the smell was.
Anna Melo:
Yes, this is going to be smells the podcast [inaudible 00:10:09]-
Justin Rivers:
Yeah, exactly. Or they were throwing their garbage over the north side of the wall. So New York's always had a garbage issue.
Anna Melo:
Well, and also, humans have always been cannibalizing our previous construction projects to build our new construction projects.
Justin Rivers:
Especially here.
Anna Melo:
Anywhere though.
David D'Onofrio:
And especially walls.
Anna Melo:
Yeah. Especially walls, yeah.
David D'Onofrio:
If you study the history of Hadrian's Wall in England, all you could do is walk to every parish church within a five-mile distance, and they're all just built out of the stones of that wall.
Justin Rivers:
And they all have stones from the wall. Exactly.
David D'Onofrio:
Yeah.
Anna Melo:
But even stuff that isn't walls too, the marble that had been on the Coliseum is now on St. Peter's Basilica.
David D'Onofrio:
Exactly.
Anna Melo:
So we are not the only ones that are constantly recycling ourselves.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah, no, totally.
Anna Melo:
So I think that we've gotten a little bit, we've definitely gone past Dutch New Amsterdam after the surrender. And it was actually a relatively bloodless transfer.
Justin Rivers:
Yes. Infamously.
Anna Melo:
Yeah, infamously. Governor Stuyvesant was more or less forced to surrender, and then kind of turned it over to the English who didn't kick the Dutch out. They allowed the Dutch to stay for the most part. And long story short, briefly, the Dutch retook the colony, but that was a very brief stint and then fell under British rule again until 1789, but we're going to get there. And so the British kind of allowed the wall to decay to the point that they finally had to tear it down. And then the newly named City of New York starts to expand northward. So what was the plan?
Justin Rivers:
There was none.
Anna Melo:
Exactly. There was no plan.
Justin Rivers:
There was no plan. There was no plan. The plan was ... And again, you say decay, but also the wall was constricting. The British were all about ...
Anna Melo:
Expansion.
Justin Rivers:
... expansion.
Anna Melo:
That's true.
Justin Rivers:
That's in their minds all the time. And so they didn't want the city to stay south of the wall anymore. They wanted it to grow. And what's interesting is, from my opinion, the development of Lower Manhattan is not as quick between the 1660s to right around the time of the 1760s. For 100 years, the development of the island still say south the Chamber Street, Which is not an incredible amount of distance considering how much New York had grown after. But what you have at that point is there is no plan. It's all about sort of private property. It's all about private development. It's all about who is developing.
And there's, if you look at the Ratzar map of 1766, which is one of my favorite maps of New York, which was Bernard Ratzar was a soldier in the British Army who was told after the Townsend Acts sort of went south, "I think we probably should map New York in case things get hairy here." And he creates this beautiful, very detailed map. And what you see somewhere about north and center east of the wards of Lower Manhattan is Delancey, and the Delancey Project. And that is the beginning of one of the first grids in New York because the Delancey family, who were loyalists by the way-
Anna Melo:
And that's how they lost their farm.
Justin Rivers:
And that's how they lost their farm, and that's how they lost their farm. They were carving up their farm for development. They were like, "We can make some really good money here." And there's Delancey Square, this little park in the middle. And you'd think of this idealized sort of living development. And they lose all of it. And that never happens, but it's the beginning of this idea that maybe we should start thinking about carving up this island in a more uniform way. Philadelphia has already done it. Philadelphia has a very uniform grid that they've laid out.
Anna Melo:
Oh, they had a plan.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah. They had a plan, and they were sticking to the plan and you can see it. And even their first maps, it's just, wow, that's really mathematical. That's really symmetrical. New York, not at all.
Anna Melo:
No plan.
Justin Rivers:
No plan. And it was sort of the frontier at that point.
Anna Melo:
It was absolutely the frontier. And you mentioned Delancey. And Delancey was probably the most notable for actually establishing kind of a little bit of a grid-
Justin Rivers:
Yeah. A little bit.
Anna Melo:
... but it was only landowners who were building roads on their property.
Justin Rivers:
Correct. Right.
Anna Melo:
So the only roads that existed were privately built roads.
Justin Rivers:
Correct.
Anna Melo:
Nobody was really thinking of how is New York going to connect to itself? He was thinking of, how do I get from my farm to my warehouse on the harbor?
Justin Rivers:
Correct. Right. It was all private. That's why you look at old maps of even, we'll go back to the Dutch for a second, and Broadway was considered to be the public road. That's what they called it, the public highway.
Anna Melo:
Yeah. The Public Road.
Justin Rivers:
The Public Road. That was it. That's the carriage, that's where you could drive your carriage. Everywhere else, it was private. Right.
Anna Melo:
Absolutely. And we'll definitely get back to Broadway in a second because Broadway is fascinating because it cuts the grid, but we can't talk about that until we actually talk about the grid.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah, we got to talk about that.
Anna Melo:
But we can't talk about the grid before we talk about the American Revolution and the role that New York and its planning play, and its lack of planning played in the American Revolution. And a little anecdote that I do love to mention is something that happened on the Bowling Green. Because in 1776 at the Bowling Green, as we know, is where the Declaration of Independence was read for the first time in New York City. And the result of it was that a group of soldiers and sailors were worked into essentially a blood frenzy.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah, a froth.
Anna Melo:
Yeah, a froth, a frothy rage, a nice frothy rage.
Justin Rivers:
Yes.
David D'Onofrio:
I think we should just call it a patriotic fervor.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah.
Anna Melo:
A patriotic fervor. A patriotic fervor. That's much better, Dave. And so they become excited. And the time, so the Bowling green, of course, the oldest public park in New York City had at the time an equestrian statue of King George III, which is only a couple years old at this point, lead covered in gold. And all along the perimeter, the perimeter fence of the Bowling Green on the top of the wrought iron fence, there were symbols of the British monarchy. And long story short, the soldiers and the sailors destroy it. They rip down the statue. It is actually sent to Connecticut where it is melted down and used as musket balls during the American Revolution, which is I think a very American tale. And the-
David D'Onofrio:
Sure. Also a great tale of recycling, once again.
Anna Melo:
That's right. We're a thrifty bunch. We're efficient, we're efficient.
David D'Onofrio:
Yes.
Anna Melo:
We have to be. We have no choice. If you today go to the Bowling Green and you go to the fence, you are going to see portions of it that look like they have been violently torn away. And that is because they were violently torn away during that riot back in 1776, kind of one of the earliest patriotic moments, American patriotic moments in New York City. So anyway, that's just one particular story, but let's talk a little bit about New York and the American Revolution.
Justin Rivers:
So I always like to tell people who come to get revolutionary history about New York that of course New York was a part of the revolution, but not the way a lot of people want to think about it. That story is the beginning of a really nice, again, froth of patriotism that kind of dies down once the war really gets started because we are an English garrison. We're one of the few cities that the English hold onto throughout the entire revolution. We're a prison city. We have people dying in prison boats off the coast of New York. And so it's the only time, I like to say in New York's history where the development of the city actually contracts instead of expands. Because you've kicked, all the loyalists moved out, the population has dwindled. There's a fire, which is reportedly started by a patriot that burns-
Anna Melo:
But scholars disagree on who really started the fire.
Justin Rivers:
There is. And I mean, you could do three podcast episodes in a series about that fire and I would love to ... Just putting it out there.
Anna Melo:
We could do 10 episodes about fires in New York City.
Justin Rivers:
Oh, yeah, no, please. And also, it's part of the development. The fires are a big part of why we have the New York that we have today, but that's a whole other story.
David D'Onofrio:
Same thing with London. Anytime you have sort of, I'm sure some people would say almost cleansing, you wipe the slate clean.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah. You wipe the slate clean, you start again.
Anna Melo:
Like in the Everglades.
Justin Rivers:
Sure. And that was sort of what happened in the revolution was nothing happened. It was decimated. It was a shell of a city. You have people set up in tents living here for years. You have soldiers in private homes, destroying them. And so during the revolution, New York actually shrinks. Only time. And when we are a liberated city, Evacuation Day, I always love to give a plug for Evacuation Day because it's the holiday that doesn't exist anymore. That it was one of-
Anna Melo:
Yeah. It was just a couple of weeks ago.
Justin Rivers:
It was, yeah, November 25th. It was the biggest holiday on the New York calendar, was bigger than the 4th of July. For a lot of New Yorkers, it was bigger than Thanksgiving. It was the day that George Washington reclaims the city for America. There's great stories about it, including the greasing of the pole at Fort George and John Vanartsdale craftily gets up there and changes the Union Jack for the Stars and Stripes before Washington gets down there so we could see it.
Anna Melo:
Can you imagine the stress?
Justin Rivers:
Oh.
Anna Melo:
The general is coming, we have to take down the Union Jack.
Justin Rivers:
And he's coming and we have to figure it out. And they've greased the pole-
Anna Melo:
They grease the pole.
Justin Rivers:
... and they've nailed it to the top. And they do everything that they can to get him up there. Actually, if you look at the accounts of the story, it says that he climbed his way up. But as they were trying to get him up, somebody found a ladder. Somewhere on Pearl Street, somebody had a large ladder, and he used the ladder to get all the way up to the top eventually. But that's a great story. But we don't really start developing in earnest until we're an American City because then Americans, after all is said and done, after we spend a year as the nation's capital and we are no longer the nation's capital, then the forefathers of this city, the American city, decide we need to look to develop it.
Mainly because we are now as drowning in cholera. We've got all of these people coming back to the city rebuilding again, south of Chamber Street still. We haven't pushed north yet. We have a fresh drinking water source called the Collect Pond, which is like Foley Square area where the courts are today. That's fetid. It's being used-
Anna Melo:
Fresh,
Justin Rivers:
Right. Fresh, yes. [inaudible 00:20:14] time-
Anna Melo:
Fresh meaning not salt water.
Justin Rivers:
Not salt water, but also being contaminated by tanneries and haphazard burials of humans. And people are just dying left and we have to figure out A, how to use this gigantic island we have, which is massively undeveloped, with the exception of a couple of farming villages to the north of us, not only for money making purposes, but also for the general health of this new urban center that's developing.
Anna Melo:
That's right. And we are on the precipice of the grid, but before we really get into the grid, I want to talk about the New York Stock Exchange because of course, during our year as the nation's capital, where was the nation's capital located? Well across the street from where the New York Stock Exchange sits today. And the reason we exist, the reason the New York Stock Exchange as an organization was begun in the very first place was because that was where the nation's capital was. And the nation's capital at what is now Federal Hall is the same site was right out in front of the old Dutch marketplace, which of course had been along the wall, along the Palisade of Wall Street.
David D'Onofrio:
Right, going right back to that canal.
Justin Rivers:
Yep.
Anna Melo:
Exactly. Yes. Our fetid canal. Yeah. In a lot of references, people called it The Ditch.
Justin Rivers:
The Ditch. Yes.
Anna Melo:
Famously, like the Dutch called it The Ditch.
Justin Rivers:
Yes.
Anna Melo:
So anyway, but The Ditch has been filled in by then, by the time America is born. And so right after America is born, our good friend, the Patron Saint of Wall Street, Alexander Hamilton, involves baby's first debt crisis by issuing ... Oh, yes. America's first debt crisis was in 1790. We started early ... by selling off our national debt in the form of American treasury bonds. And of course, speculators going to speculate. So what happens to these bonds is they get resold in an open air marketplace in the old Dutch marketplace at the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street.
Anyway, long story short, speculators going to speculate, market collapses, and in order to form a more organized exchange, the New York Stock Exchange is organized for the very first time in 1792. And why down here? Well, partially because New York City was very small. North of Chamber Street, it was farms. They didn't even bother to put marble on the back of City Hall when they first built it, because the ambassador's going to come in through the front door.
Justin Rivers:
He's not going to see the north side of it. Nobody's going to see the north side of it.
Anna Melo:
Nobody's going to see ... For the farmers, why are we going to put up marble? But imagine that, city hall being the northern border of the city and just rolling green hills beyond that. But anyway, so New York's power at the time still, and for a much longer afterwards, was the harbor. The harbor is where the money is coming from. That is where we need to have all of the merchants. And that is where we end up building the origins of the financial district. It's all because of that original shipping port.
That's where you have the money changers. That's where you eventually have brokerages, clearing houses, and the New York Stock Exchange. So we've been sitting here since 1792, but New York continues to expand and expanding without a plan, as we've already discussed, is a very bad idea. And so finally in 1807, they decide, we need a plan. Tell us about this plan.
Justin Rivers:
Wow. I want to just-
Anna Melo:
CliffNotes, CliffNotes.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah, no, that's okay. And I want to back up for one second, and it does have to do with this, but it's a very fascinating connection, which is you mentioned Federal Hall, which is right outside your door. Federal Hall was renovated from New York City Hall to Federal Hall by Pierre L'Enfant, who was the man who laid out Washington, DC.
Anna Melo:
Another city with a plan.
Justin Rivers:
Another city with a plan. And L'Enfant's plan was very deliberate. He used those angular streets and those circular sort of plazas or places. And he did that to prevent revolution, actually. So Washington DC, on the heels of the French Revolution, was designed so that you could coordinate off and shut it down in case the Natives got restless. And there was talk of, should we do the same thing with Manhattan? Should we develop the city like L'Enfant's doing with the new capital? And this island is not made for that. It's too thin. It's water on all the sides, as we talked about.
So they had to come up with sort of a better developmental plan. There was actually, somebody who gets absolutely zero credit for what he did in 17, I think it's 96. They get in manned by the name of Casimir Goerck in, and Casimir Goerck comes in and starts saying, "Well, let's do these rectilinear sort of five acre plots that we can start developing the city out. And people go, all right, well, they file it away for something different. But then the fathers of the city come up with what they call the Commissioner's Plan of what will be 1811, even though it starts before that. And they get this scrappy 20-year-old. I always imagine a 20-year-old planning an entire city out. John Randel Jr.
Anna Melo:
Well, 20 year olds used to be different.
Justin Rivers:
They used to be a lot different. But I could only imagine a 20-year-old today being responsible for terraforming and developing a whole island. But it's a years long process, which basically says we are going to develop New York into a series of streets and avenues and then put plots on those streets and avenues and lay it out very specifically. It's going to be very unforgiving, for the most part. People love still to this day, to complain about it. I think it's a marvel of urban development.
Anna Melo:
I'm also a defender of the grid.
Justin Rivers:
I am a huge defender of the grid. And because underlying all of that, everybody says, "Well, it was to make money and blah, blah." Sure, okay, that's what everything is in New York. But the mayors and the people of the state and the people who were running the city, because cholera was so bad and other diseases were running rampant, they had to figure out a way to unify the public service systems. And if they just kept haphazardly having private development all along the island-
Anna Melo:
And again, one road, one public road.
Justin Rivers:
One public road, they were never going to be able to service what they saw was ... The Erie Canal is coming roughly at the same time.
Anna Melo:
Yeah. Which actually distracted the commissioners for years.
Justin Rivers:
It did. They actually were like, "Oh God, we've got to do that and this," both of which will completely change the city. And Randel, he scours the whole entire island. He gets arrested multiple times, he gets shot at, people are throwing cabbage at him.
Anna Melo:
Yes. The cabbages and artichokes.
Justin Rivers:
The cabbages and artichokes that are thrown at him a daily basis because he's going around the city and he's trying to figure out how to lay out these streets and these avenues with these very specific plots. And then of course, when you lay out the streets and the avenues, then each one of them has these lots of a hundred feet and 20 to 25 feet wide, which is why we have buildings the way that we do. It's very specific to New York, and it's very specific to the aesthetic look of New York. And there's a lot of people who say, "We're still constricted by this iron vest that we wear." But it's like, there's no other city in the world like New York because of the grid, and there's no other city with the kind of accessibility.
But here's the one thing I want to tell everybody who's listening. I'm going to just say it, the very coolest remnant in New York City. There's a lot, you guys showed me the Buttonwood Agreement, and I lost my stuff for a long time, the original. But if you go to Central Park, in a very hidden spot, right behind the dairy, what Randel did was is he was surveying the island. He put either bolts marking the corners of streets and avenues or marble plaques with the street and the avenue on it.
And what was meant to be, because there was no Central Park in the original Commissioner's Plan, what was meant to be 65th Street and 6th Avenue, there is the only, what we know of remaining bolt of his process, which is jutting out of a rock. Very hard to find, but when you find it, it's the most rewarding thing ever because standing in front of the most incredible piece of history for one of the most incredible urban plans ever developed in history. And Central Park Conservancy doesn't like people to sort of advertise exactly where it is. I don't-
David D'Onofrio:
Too late.
Anna Melo:
No, it's like the dog ornament tree. You know if you know.
Justin Rivers:
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I could tell you exactly where I think it is. I mean, I know where it is-
Anna Melo:
No, no, no. Let it be a mystery,
Justin Rivers:
... but I'm not. And even if I told you, you'd still have a hard time finding it. Because I bring people there all the time, and it's like, "Oh, wait. Oh yeah, this way, this way, this way. And then that rock." And then there's usually a couple picnicking on top of it, and I'm like, "Could you move out of the way for a second?" And they're like, "What's going on? Why are there 20 people staring at me?" And I go, "There it is right there."
And it's just an amazing remnant of this city's development. And again, for all you listeners, go out there and try to find it. It's the most fun you'll have, trying to unpack this amazing history of the grid. And of course, as I always like to use the grid as the storytelling platform for New York, period, there's so many stories that come out of the development of the grid. Why we have it where we do, where we don't have it. What are the stories there? The Dutch Street grid still with us.
Anna Melo:
Oh, yeah.
Justin Rivers:
And the Dutch Street grid is alive and well, it's protected because of 85 Broad Street, which is again, another great story. So the streets are really the beating heart of the city.
David D'Onofrio:
Yeah. We never experienced the [inaudible 00:29:49] that Paris did.
Justin Rivers:
Exactly.
David D'Onofrio:
Someone that would just would come in and just wipe the slate clean.
Justin Rivers:
Exactly.
Anna Melo:
Yeah. We're very lucky to still have our original street grid, this first laid out by the Dutch and all those hundreds of years ago.
Justin Rivers:
And that story is amazing too. I knew very well, he passed away a couple years ago, but Richard Roth Jr. who was part of Emery Roth & Sons, an architecture firm that built quite a few of the office buildings down here, especially in the '70s and '80s. And he always said that you'd never wanted to hit the Dutch when you were building down here, because what would happen is you'd have to stop building and let archeologists come in.
And that's the story of a lot of buildings down here. 17 State Street was one of those buildings he had worked on. But then you have 85 Broad, and you've got those things that they call the portals to Old New York, which have the remnants of Governor Lovelace's Tavern. And the development of the grid, whether it be the Dutch or whether it be the Commissioner's Plan of 1811, tells the story of the city and why it is the city that it is today. So that's why I'm a huge fan of grids. I love them.
David D'Onofrio:
Well, if I could ask just one final, somewhat related follow up. By the time Randel drives that bolt, had we finally marbled up the back of City Hall?
Justin Rivers:
Yes.
Anna Melo:
Yes.
Justin Rivers:
We had.
Anna Melo:
It was actually just a couple of years later because New York expanded quite quickly.
Justin Rivers:
Well, and again, I think the story of the street grid, everybody even who knows it and loves it, even like the cursory story of it, they think, "Well, 1811, and then they just got started." But I mean, the street grid plays out throughout the entire 19th century of New York.
Anna Melo:
And it's a miracle that they stuck to the plan
Justin Rivers:
They stuck to it. I mean, so think about the fact that you've got William Magear Tweed, Boss Tweed coming in the 1860s, having sway over how the grid is sort of being executed. And by this time, we're further up the island, but we're still 55 years later sticking to that same plant. Could you imagine something like that today?
Anna Melo:
Yes. 55 years later.
Justin Rivers:
No.
Anna Melo:
Even Tammany couldn't kill the grid.
Justin Rivers:
The Tammany couldn't kill the grid. They could argue over how much is being paid for for the grid. And I always love to tell people, or I use them on tours, look at pictures of the Upper East Side in the 1870s, and all you see are these mud paths and these ditches and maybe one or two houses spread out over what was considered to be garbage land at the time, half of it. And that is something that was passed 55, 60 years ago that we were still adhering to as we're terraforming the island. It's incredible. It's still beyond belief.
Anna Melo:
Truly. And even today, we still get to enjoy that grid from the Commissioner's Plan and the grid and the Erie Canal, of course, led to New York becoming the premier shipping capital in America. We were connected to the Midwest via the Hudson River. We're connected to the Great Lakes. And that, of course fed the financial district.
Justin Rivers:
Exactly.
Anna Melo:
And that's what fed some of the earliest construction of skyscrapers. Why did the earliest skyscrapers end up in Lower Manhattan? Well, two reasons. Because of the bedrock underneath Lower Manhattan, which allows it to be very conducive to building skyscrapers. But all of that economic influence coming in from the rivers, coming in from the rest of America. Coming in from Europe, coming in from South America, all of it meeting in the financial district. So we truly are the meltiest part of the melting pot of New York City. Thank you so much for joining us today, Justin.
Justin Rivers:
Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.
Anna Melo:
That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X @icehousepodcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week, Inside the ICE house.
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