USA > New York > New York City > History of New York City : embracing an outline sketch of events from 1609 to 1830, and a full account of its development from 1830 to 1884, Volume I > Part 43
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The Penitentiary was a stone building at Bellevue, on the East River, adjoining the almshouse. It has already been described in a
* The first named was exclusively devoted to the confinement of prisoners for debt, whom barbarous laws illogically and cruelly incarcerated. Well did Red Jacket, the great Seneca chief, illustrate the folly and injustice of the imprisonment of a debtor. when, on seeing a man taken to prison in Batavia, N. Y .. he inquired what his crime was. " He is in debt and cannot pay," answered his compamon in the street, the late vener- able Mr. Hosmer, of Avon, who was the first lawyer settled west of Utica.
"Why, he no catch beaver there !" said the chief-he could not work in jail to earn money to pay his debt. So this " son of the forest" illustrated the unwisdom of the law.
Happily such a law no longer prevails in any part of our Repubhe. The State of New York was the leader in adopting measures for its abolition so early as 1831. It is be- lieved that one of the most powerful instrumentalities in bringing about the repeal of laws which sent debtors to prison was a stirring poem written by the gentle Quaker poet, John G. Whittier, called " The Prisoner for Debt," in which he said :
" Down with the law that binds him thus ! Unworthy freemen, let it find No refuge from the withering curse Of God and human kind ! Open the prisoner's living tomb, And usher from its brooding gloom The victims of your savage code To the free sun and air of God : No longer dare as crime to brand The chastening of th' AAlmighty's hand !"
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notice of Bellevue Hospital. It was opened in May, 1816, and was devoted exclusively to the confinement of such persons at hard labor as should be convicted at the Court of Sessions of petit larceny and other offences, and of vagrants. Some of the prisoners were employed on the roads on the island, or in garden work ; others in house-work, shoe. making, tailoring, and whatever other employment they were efficient in, while the women were employed in the kitchen, or in making and mending the clothes of their fellow-prisoners. .
The House of Refuge for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents had its origin in a benevolent movement in 1817, in which John Griscom, LL. D., a member of the Society of Friends, was the chief leader. He was the pioneer in the founding of the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism. In this society his most earnest coadjutors were Thomas Eddy and John Pintard. The society investigated the causes of pau- perisi, studied the statistics of prisons in England and the United States, and came to the conclusion that the most efficient work in the enterprise must be among the young of both sexes.
Late in 1823 some benevolent persons formed an association entitled The Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents. Into this society the former association was merged. Measures were then taken for the establishment of a house of refuge for erring or criminal youth, the first institution of the kind ever founded. A charter was obtained in 1824, and in the okl arsenal grounds, on the site of Madison Square, near the junction of Broadway (then known as the Bloomingdale Road at that point) and Fifth Avenue, two stone buildings, two stories in height, were erected, one for boys, the other for girls. The grounds were surrounded by a strong stone wall inclosing an area three hundred by three hundred and twenty feet in size, and seventeen feet in height.
The House of Refuge was opened on the first of January, 1825. On that occasion there appeared before a large and respectable audience, gathered at that dreary out-of-town spot, nine wretched " juvenile delinquents"-three boys and six girls -- in tattered garments, as candi- dates for the reformatory. They were the first of nearly one hundred who were found within its walls during the first year. The first super- intendent was the late Joseph Curtis, a philanthropist of purest mould. and for many years before his death an indefatigable worker in the cause of free schools in the city of New York.
The Refuge remained there until the buildings were destroyed by fire in 1838, soon after which time it was removed to Bellevue. There it continued until November. 1854, when it was removed to Randall's Island, its present location.
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According to the fifty-eighth annual report of the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents (1852), there had been received into the House of Refuge, since its opening in 1825, 20,624 juvenile delinquents, and that the weekly average number of inmates during the year was 771. Careful inquiries reveal the fact that mtemperance is not a prevailing vice of the parents of these delinquents, nor that their delinquency is chargeable to their being orphans, for about 86 per cent of the fathers and 94 per cent of the mothers were temperate peo- ple, and correspondingly few of the children had lost their parents."
Randall's Island is one of a group of beautiful and picturesque islands in the East River belonging to the city of New York. It contains about one hundred acres of land.
The other islands of the group alluded to are Blackwell's and Ward's. Blackwell's contains about one hundred and twenty acres, and was purchased by the city in 1828 for $50,000. It has a heavy granite sea- wall, built by the convicts. Its public edifices are large and substan- tial, built in medieval style of architecture, with turrets and battle- ments. The buildings are of stone quarried on the island by the con- victs. Around the buildings are gardens and pleasant shaded grounds. On this island are a penitentiary, with an average of between twelve hundred and thirteen hundred inmates ; a correctional workhouse, a charity hospital, with accommodations for eight hundred patients ; an almshouse, a lunatic asylum for females, an asylum for the blind, a hos- pital for incurables, and a convalescent hospital. The houses of the offi- cials are pleasantly situated among the trees on the island. It is esti- mated that the entire population of the island is about seven thousand, all under the care of the commissioners of public charities and correction.
Randall's Island, as we have observed, contains about one hundred acres of land. It is divided from the shore of Westchester County on the north by a narrow channel known as the Harlem Kills, and on the south from Ward's Island by Little Hell Gate. It contains, besides the House of Refuge, an idiot asylum, a nursery. children'sand infants' hospital, schools, and other charities provided by the city of New York for'destitute children. The buildings of these institutions are chiefly of brick, and imposing in appearance. The island is pleasantly shaded with trees. These institutions are all under the care of the commis- sioners of public charities and correction.
* The officers of the society for 1882-83 are : John A. Weeks, president : Benjamin B. Atterbury, James M. Halsted, J. W. C. Leveridge, Edgar S. Van Winkle, John J. Town- send, Alexander MeL. Agnew, vice-presidents : Nathaniel Jarvis, Jr., treasurer ; Frederick W. Downer, secretary ; Israel C. Jones, superintendent.
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On the southern end of the island is the House of Refuge, under the care of the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents. The two principal buildings are of brick, nearly one thousand feet in length. in the Italian style of architecture. The boys and girls are kept sepa- rate, and those guilty of social crime apart from the younger inmates. Children brought before magistrates are sentenced by them to this institution. The average number of inmates is about eight hundred. They are all taught to work, and are educated in the common English branches. The total population of the island is about twenty-five hundred.
Ward's Island is nearly circular, and is situated near the junction of the East and Harlem rivers. It is the largest of the three islands, con- taining about two hundred acres, and is finely wooded in some parts. It is owned partly by the city and partly by individuals. The part belonging to the city is apportioned between the commissioners of emigration and the commissioners of public charities and correction. Under the care of the latter is an insane asylum for males and a homoeopathic hospital ; under the charge of the former are the State Emigrant Hospital, a lunatic asylum, houses of refuge, and a nursery or home for children. In these institutions, under charge of the com- missioners of emigration, sick and destitute aliens arriving in New York are cared for.
The buildings on Randall's Island are generally plain but substantial structures of brick. Those erected by the commissioners of emigra- tion are noticeable for their spaciousness and beauty, being built of brick and gray stone. They are much hidden from spectators on the water by fine old trees. The lunatic asylum contains an average of over one thousand patients. The convicts froni Blackwell's Island are constantly engaged in the grading and beautifying of Ward's Island, and in constructing a sea-wall around it.
These three islands in the East River display the richest fruit of the magnificent public charities of New York City.
The State Prison stood near the bank of the Hudson River, at what was then known as Greenwich Village, and about a mile and a half north-west of the City Hall. It was one of two publie prisons author- ized by the Legislature of the State of New York in the closing decade of the last century. One was to be erected at Albany, and one at New York.
The prison at Greenwich Village was built of stone, three stories in height, and surrounded by a massive stone wall fourteen feet high in front and twenty feet high in the rear, where the workshops were sit-
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uated. The prison and its appendages covered about four acres of ground. It was called Newgate, and was opened for the reception of prisoners in 1797. It soon became crowded. and another prison was erected by the State at Auburn, Cayuga County. Of the convicts in this prison, the average was always about seventy per cent of foreign birth.
The rooms in this prison were large, and several convicts occupied the same sleeping apartment. This was found to be a very unwise arrangement, as it had a powerful tendency to a further corruption of the morals of the inmates. It was finally deemed wise to abandon this prison in the city and erect another and more spacious further up the Hudson River. In 1825 the Legislature authorized the erection of a new prison, and the spot selected was Mount Pleasant (Sing Sing), on the Hudson, in Westchester County. The foundations of this new prison were laid in May, 1826, and it was completed in 1828. The site was selected largely because it was in the vicinity of extensive beds of white marble, the quarrying of which would give profitable employ- ment to the prisoners.
A powerful impetus to the growth of a city consists in facilities for transporting persons or merchandise within its borders to and from distant points. New Yorkers perceived this when the steamboat ap- peared, the Erie Canal was completed, the omnibus was introduced, and the railway made its advent into this country. Such facilities on the island would greatly increase the migration of population from the dense precincts of business, and increase the value of real estate at remote points from the centre of trade. Alert New Yorkers readily joined in a scheme for so benefiting the city by building a railway that would bisect Manhattan Island longitudinally, but extend finally to Albany.
New York City has the honor of introducing to the world the system of horse railroads in city streets, that of the New York and Harlem Railroad (Fourth Avenue) having been the first constructed.
The New York and Harlem Railroad Company was incorporated on the 25th of April, 1831, with authority to construct a double-track road to any point on the Harlem River, between the east bounds of Third Avenue and the west bounds of Eighth Avenue .* The capital stock
* The following persons were the incorporators of the New York and Harlem Railroad Company in the spring of 1831 . Benjamin Bailey, Mordecai MI. Noah, Benson MacGowan. James B. Murray, Charles Henry Hall, Moses Henriques, Isaac Adriance, Thomas Addis Emmet, Gideon Lee, Silas E. Burrows, Samuel F. Halsey, Cornelius Harsen, Robert Stewart. At the first election of directors, in July, 1531, John Mason was elected president.
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HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY.
was $1,100,000. An act was passed the next year authorizing the com- pany to extend the track along the Bowery (now Fourth Avenue) to Fourteenth Street, and such other streets as the city authorities might from time to time permit. The use of steam as a motor was first in- troduced in 1834 on this road-W. T. James, the machinist of the road, being the inventor of the first steam-motor for city railways.
In 1833 the common council passed an ordinance authorizing the company to lay a track in Broadway. Rails were actually laid the distance of two blocks, but there was so much opposition to the meas- ure that they were taken up, and a track was laid down to Prince Street and the Bowery. A portion of the road was open to travel in 1832. The conductors were boys, and they were required to report the receipts to the superintendent once a week-every Saturday night. There arose a suspicion that the boys were " taking toll." A liberal reward was offered to the boy who should report the largest amount of receipts at the end of the week. The result was a very large increase in the receipts returned by each boy.
The introduction of a street railway into New York City in 1831-32 created a new mechanical business in the metropolis-the manufacture of tramcars, as the English call them, for the use of such roads. In that business John Stephenson was the pioneer. He had recently finished his apprenticeship to a coach-builder, and began manufactur- ing omnibuses for Abraham Brower on his own account, when he received an order from the New York and Harlem Railroad Company to build a street-car for them. Mr. Stephenson constructed it after a design of his own, and named it John Mason, in honor of the first president of the company and founder of the Chemical Bank.
This was the first street-railway car ever built. It was made to hold thirty passengers, in three compartments. The driver's seat was in the roof, and it had passenger seats on the roof, which were reached by steps at each end. It was a sort of cross between an omnibus, a rockaway, and an English railway coach, and had four wheels. This was first put on the road between Prince and Fourteenth streets, on November 26, 1832, carrying the president of the road and the mayor and common council of the city of New York. For this car Mr. Stephenson received a patent from the United States Government.
Other orders from the same company soon followed, and very soon Mr. Stephenson was employed to build passenger-cars for railways as they rapidly increased in numbers and extent in our country. These were, at first, cars with four wheels. When eight wheeled cars were introduced by Ross Winans, of Baltimore, Mr. Stephenson found it
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necessary to extend his premises. In 1836 he built a spacious factory at Harlem, and in 1843 he bought the land on Twenty-seventh Street, near Fourth Avenue, where his present establishment now is, and built the nucleus of the factory which, with its lumber-yards, covers sixteen city lots. Mr. Stephenson has continued to build omnibuses from the beginning, and has been a constructor of these and railway cars for the space of fifty-three years. Now, in his seventy-fifth year, he is vigorous in mind and body.
The street-railway car is a purely New York product. It was in successful operation in that city for twenty-five years before it appeared in any other city of the Union or elsewhere. George Francis Train introduced a street railway into Birkenhead, England, in 1860, and also commenced one in London. It bred a riot, and the mob tore up the rails. Now they are seen in all civilized countries, and the John Stephenson Company manufacture street-railway cars for North and South America, for Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and isles of the sea.
Mr. Stephenson (with Mr. Slawson) is the inventor of the " bobtail " or one-horse car, now so popular. They were first introduced into New Orleans just at the breaking out of the Civil War, but only since the war have they been in use everywhere in the United States .*
* John Stephenson was born in the north of Ireland on July 4, 1809. . His parents, James Stephenson and Grace Stuart, of English and Scotch lineage, had settled there. In 1811 they came to New York with John, their first-born, who received an academic education at the Wesleyan Seminary in New York. His father designed him for merean- tile life, but his proclivities for mechanics changed his destiny and caused him to be apprenticed to a coachinaker. At his majority (1831) he set up business for himself. chiefly as a maker of omnibuses, then a new business in the city. His shop was adjoin- ing the rear of Brower's stables, No. 667 Broadway. Here, in 1831, he designed and con- structed the first omnibus built in New York. In less than a year he lost all his property by fire. He then planted his business in Elizabeth Street, and there "he built the first street-railway car. He transferred his business to Harlem (Fourth Avenue and One Hundred and Twenty-ninth Street) in 1836, and to its present site in 1843, then a rural district of the city. His prosperous course in railway-car and omnibus building bas been intimated in the text ; and now, at the age of over seventy-four years, he is actively engaged at the head of the most extensive establishment of the kind in the United States.
Mr. Stephenson is an earnest working member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, as both his parents were. He had seven sisters, who were all church member .. About 1816 he entered a Sabbath-school, then just organized by Mrs. Divie Bethune, Mrs. Mary Mason, and others ; and from that time to this he has been active in Sabbath-schools in various capacities. He has now (1853) under his teaching a Bible-class of forty mem- bers. He is passionately fond of music. He was a performing member of the Sacred Music Society, which about fifty years ago met in the Chatham Theatre (then Chapel, and he was subsequently an active member of the Harmonie Society. He was for forty years leader of a church choir of forty volunteer singers, chiefly from Sunday-school
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HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY.
The New York and Harlem Railroad was extended to Yorkville, a suburban village, in 1837, a distance of about five miles. Late in that year it had a double track from Prince Street to Yorkville. Its coaches ran at intervals of fifteen minutes every day in the week. The fare for each passenger was twenty-five cents. The road was extended down the Bowery to Walker Street, and afterward through Broome, Centre and Chatham streets and Park Row to the southern end of the City Hall Park, where the Post-Office now stands.
Such, in brief, is the genesis of the first horse-railroad in the world. This system originated in the city of New York about fifty-two years ago ; now (1883) there are twenty lines of railway traversing the city in various directions.
As the New York and Harlem Railroad was the first of the great arteries of transportation which contributed to the life, vigor. and growth of the city, the history of its extension toward the political capital of the State may be appropriately given in a few sentences.
In 1837 the widening of Fourth Avenue from Thirty-fourth Street to Harlem River was authorized, and the extension of the New York and Harlem Railroad into the open country beyond the Harlem River was speedily begun.
In 1835 the company was authorized to convert into capital stock the amount of money which it had borrowed. The amount of the capital stock was increased from time to time, and in 1849 amounted to $1,000,000. That year the company was authorized to extend the road in the county of Westchester beyond the Harlem River, to build a bridge across the same, and to connect with the New York and Albany Railroad. In 1545 it was authorized to extend its road through the counties of Putnam, Duchess, and Columbia. The road was com- pleted to Chatham, its northern terminus, in 1852.
In the year 1859 the company was authorized to run horse-cars to Forty-second Street and up Madison Avenue to Seventy-ninth Street : also to use steam oa Fourth Avenue, from Forty-second Street to the Harlem River, for thirty years.
The capital stock of the company was increased to $10.000.000 in 1871, and in 1872 the great Fourth Avenue improvements, between Forty-second Street and Harlem, were authorized. The actual cost of those improvements was about $6,500,000. The Grand Central Depot
classes which he had trained. He has in his library a rare collection of musical litera- ture. Mr. Stephenson was for over twenty years a public school trustee in the Twenty- first Ward.
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was constructed in 1870-71, at a cost of about $3,000,000, including the cost of the land.
A greater portion of the stock of the New York and Harlem Rail- road (as well as the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, to which it is leased) belongs to the Vanderbilt family. Cornelius Van- derbilt, " familiarly known as ". the Commodore," was made a director
* Cornelius Vanderbilt, a native of Staten Island, N. Y., was the most eminent and successful organizer of methods of transportation by steam on land and water. His ancestors were among the earlier settlers on Staten Island. The original members of the family settled in Flatbush, Long Island, and held a high social position as persons of wealth and public spirit. They were members of the Reformed Dutch Church. The first of the family who settled on Staten Island was Jacob, who made his residence there about 1715. He was the great-grandfather of Cornelius. The latter was born May 27, 1794, and died January 4, 1877. The famous "Rose and Crown" tavern on Staten Island, which was the headquarters of General Sir William Howe in the summer of 1776, belonged to the Vanderbilt family.
The place of Cornelius Vanderbilt's birth is claimed by several places on Staten Island -Port Richmond, various houses in Stapleton, and two or three in the interior of the island. While he was an infant his parents were residents of Stapleton. His mother was Phebe Hand, of New Jersey, a niece of Colonel Hand of the Revolution. His only inheritance was the careful training of his mother, a vigorous physical constitution, a clear head, sound judgment, and indomitable energy. He received very little book learning away from his mother's knee. He was a " healthy, harum-scarun lad," a good oarsman, an expert swimmer, and a perfect rider. He rode a race-horse against a colored boy in a race when he was six years of age. He worked on the farm, sailed the boats of his father (who was a ferryman), and when he was sixteen years of age he earned money enough to purchase a sail-boat and began business on his own account in the transporta- tion of passengers and garden " truck" to and from New York City, then containing between 70,000 and 80,000 inhabitants. In the same line of business largely, Cornelius Vanderbilt, at the close of an active life of about sixty-seven years, had accumulated a fortune estimated at $100,000,000. Honestly recognizing his duty to his parents, he gave to them a larger portion of the receipts from his business until he was twenty-one years of age.
During the war of 1812 young Vanderbilt's boats were in constant demand in carrying soldiers and supplies from point to point in the harbor. In this public service his per- sonal bravery was often called into requisition. The business was very remunerative. Meanwhile he had married his cousin, Sophia Johnson, in 1813, a sensible and practical young woman. He had been able to become the owner of several boats of larger capacity, and he was soon the acknowledged head of the local transportation business of the harbor. He also extended his voyages up the North and East rivers, engaging in traffic of every kind, and so combining the merchant and the navigator.
At the age of twenty-three years Vanderbilt had accumulated nearly $10,000 in addi- tion to his property in vessels. At that time (1817) he became captain of a small steam- boat called the Mouse, owned by a wealthy New Jerseyman. The next year he was put in command of a larger steamboat, which remained over night at New Brunswick. Thither he removed his family, and became the successful proprietor of a hotel there for the accommodation of travellers. In that hotel his son and successor, Williams HI. Vanderbilt, was born in 1821. Such was the " Commodore's" introduction to the steam-
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