Inevitably, Less Lucky

Yesterday I talked about one of a handful of surviving houses in the oldest portion of New York. Here are some that didn’t make it, circa 1825:

That picture was published in 1916 but obviously was based on older sources, and shows the houses at the foot of Greenwich Street, where it ends at Battery Place and Battery Park. That’s the park and the harbor on the left.

The movement of fashionable residential district uptown didn’t by itself doom these houses. A lot of once-high-end houses downtown were converted first to apartments and then to boarding houses and sometimes then to commercial use. But the explosive growth of the downtown commercial district ultimately doomed buildings this small.

Unless you have a very vivid imagination, it’s easy to forget that the roughly 150,000-person New York of 1825 wasn’t physically all that different from other cities and towns of the era. Physically differentiation set in with the growth of railroads, commuting, the modernization of the office district, and the steadily-larger ships that needed better infrastructure.