Farmland

It’s hard to overstate the rapidity of New York’s growth in the nineteenth century. Just the bare facts of the census – Manhattan had 60,000 people in 1800 and 1,850,000 in 1900 – are astonishing. When you add in the construction required to provide housing, workplaces, and all the other functions of a city, it’s astonishing that the growth was managed at all.

This photo essay in Business Insider shows how late in the century the development of upper Manhattan took place. It also shows the blunt force of the infrastructure development: the streets were built, long before the city’s buildings had caught up, to pre-determined grades meant to even out Manhattan’s hills. As a result, some streets were cut through and left houses stranded on top of miniature cliffs and some streets were built up and left the blocks as depressed land in between.

The process was not all that different in physical scope to the way developers lay out new neighborhoods today, but it was run entirely be the city rather than private companies. But again, the remarkable thing here is that there were farms in Manhattan in the late 1800s and some of the farmhouses remained after 1900. It’s not a shock to find out that the Bowery was named after a seventeenth-century farm; it is one to see photographs of farms in what is, to us, the center of the city. The picture above, with some ordinary New York buildings in the background, is a dairy farm at 116th Street and Fourth (later Park) Avenue in 1889.

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