old fort now holds the new Custom House. At the lower end of Broad- way is a group of splendid buildings, among them the Standard Oil, Welles, Bowling Green, Columbia, etc. |vOpposite the Green, at what is now No. i Broadway, was a lot belonging at one time to Arent Schuyler, brother of Peter Schuyler, the first Mayor of Albany. It afterwards came into the possession of Archibald Kennedy, who built a house with a handsome broad front and spacious rooms. Next door to the Ken- nedy house was that of John Watts, whose daughter Digitized by Microsoft® 32 The Hudson River Kennedy married. These two mansions were connected by a bridge and staircase. The grounds ran down to the water's edge, and were laid out after the approved English fashion of the day, with stately terraces and parterres of flowers. Kennedy was the son of the Hon. Archibald Kennedy, Receiver General under British rule, and he afterwards became by inheritance the eleventh Earl of Cassalis. His son, born in the old house at No. i, was afterwards Marquis of Ailsa. The Kennedy house was famous for the magnificenGe of the entertainments given there. A parlor fifty feet long, with a banqueting hall of equal size and grand appointments, made this old mansion one of the notable ones of the Colony. Afterwards the Washington Hotel occupied the place of the Kennedy house, and now the Field Building, erected by Cyrus W. Field, lifts its bulk on that historic site. Before the War for Independence Lieutenant-Gov- ernor James de Lancey owned a large and handsome house on Broadway. This was another of the well- known homes of New York, where the wealth and fashion of the day used to enjoy a hospitality that was princely, and the fame of which was not confined to one side of the Atlantic. It was the favourite meeting- place for British officers during the war, and was the scene of the great ball given on May 7, 1789, in honour of Washington's Inauguration. John Peter de Lancey sold the property to a Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® New Buildings and Old 35 syndicate composed of Philip Livingston, Gulian Ver- planck, Moses Rogers, and others, in trust for sub- scribers to the "Tontine hotel and assembly room." The price paid was six thousand pounds, New York currency. This company pulled down the de Lancey house and built in its stead the City Hotel, that long occupied a large place in New York's local history. It was for years the only large hotel in the city and was the scene of many brilliant social events. In 1849 it made place for a row of stores, which in turn disap- peared when the present Boreel Building took their place. Old Jan Jansen Damen had, in 1646, a farmhouse in the waggon road between Pine and Cedar Streets. It was a little back from Broadway, and is described as an exceedingly comfortable stone house. This was then outside of the city. It was at this house that Governor Kieft spent much of his time, and Stuyvesant became a frequent guest. Now the Equitable Building covers the place where Damen sat on his stoep and enjoyed his garden and listened to the hum of bees in the apple blossoms, — covers house, garden, orchard, and all, to the extent of nearly an acre of ground. The old Middle Dutch Church in time disappeared from Nassau Street, as even churches do in New York, and on the i8th of October, 1882, the Mutual Life In- surance Company purchased the site for six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. There is not one of the great buildings that tower Digitized by Microsoft® 36 The Hudson River even above the ordinary chimneys of the city, and chal- lenge the eye of the traveller upon the river, that has not sunk its foundations deep into the associations of an historic past. Beneath and within the looming walls are traditions and memories; the tragedies, the ro- mances, and the comedies of that older day. Every year, the "tale of bricks is doubled" in Man- hattan, and the huge buildings that stretch from the Battery northward multiply. In all that vast collec- tion of iron and masonry there are a few individual masses that are symmetrical, but these are lost in the great aggregation. Separate structures have been shot into the air as though impelled by some terrific volcanic agency, but there is no hint of any idea of relationship between them; they suggest rather the accidental huddling of more or less unrelated and even incon- PEAKS OF THE MANHATTAN RANGE Digitized by Microsoft® New Buildings and Old 37 gnious elements. The saw-tooth sky-line thus pro- duced does not add an element of