Before Central Park by Sara Cedar Miller (part 1)

PART I Topography

View of Haarlem and the Haarlemmermeer by Jan van Goyen hangs in the Dutch painting galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, barely a mile from the actual waters of Central Park’s Harlem Meer. The Haarlemmermeer was a inland body of fresh water at the confluence of the Spaarne River. In the painting, the artist looks down from the church bell tower of St. Bavo of Haarlem.1 In the same way, Central Park’s first European residents, the de Forest-Montagne family, scanned the flats of what would become New Harlem and the waters of the Harlem Creek, and the Harlem and East Rivers, from the towering cliffs that still loom above the Meer today. And like the rural farmers, who chose to live at a distance from the city of Haarlem, so too the first settlers of the future park forewent the safety and security of the port of New Amsterdam for a landscape to the north with a combination of favorable topographic elements found nowhere else on Manhattan Island.2 These features in the northern part of Central Park and today’s Harlem and East Harlem shaped its human history, from centuries of Native use to European colonialism to the first decades of the American republic.

At only five feet above sea level, the Harlem Meer, the manmade lake in the northeast corner of Central Park, is the park’s lowest point.3 This low-lying terrain and its adjacent farmland to the north in many ways resembled the Netherlandish homeland of the early Dutch settlers. The circumstances that created this landscape are invisible to the eye, unless we look as much as five hundred feet below the surface. Whereas most of Manhattan is undergirded by a hard bedrock of schist, underneath much of Harlem lies a bed of softer marble.4

flat

Source: Jan van Goyen, View of Haarlem and the Haarlemmermeer. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, 1871, accession number 71.62, https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ep/original/DP146495.jpg.

Marble began as hard-shelled sea creatures from the ocean floor, which after undergoing enormous heat and pressure over millions of years, metamorphosed first into limestone and then into marble, a rock of interlocking calcite crystals. And because the bedrock in this area of Manhattan was composed of this softer stone, it eventually eroded, which allowed the incoming sea to flow inland and form the briny waters of the East River and Harlem River.

The marble bedrock is also responsible for the vast flatlands of today’s central Harlem, from the Harlem Meer all the way to West 124th Street. Called Muscoota or “flat land” by the local Lenape tribe, it would later be called Montagne’s Flats after a member of the first European family to farm it. This grassy plain had once been a woodland, but the Lenape transformed it. They routinely controlled their environment by felling forests and burning the remaining understory to create trails, plant crops, and hunt game. Burning the woodland, even if only once a decade, added “a pulse of nitrogen” and other nutrients to the soil. It also created

I.1  Dutch artist Jan van Goyen painted View of Haarlem and the Haarlemmermeer in 1646. It depicts a

and watery terrain, features similar to those that attracted the first prepark family to settle in the similar Harlem landscape.

Source: Egbert L. Viele and Ferd. Mayer & Co., Topographical map of the City of New York: showing original water courses and made land [New York: Ferd. Mayer & Co., 1865]. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, digital image, https://www.loc.gov/item/2006629795/. a clearing in the canopy so they could grow crops like the three sisters—corn, beans, and squash—and grasses that attracted deer.5

The Muscoota was a vast savannah rich with grasses and groves of berry bushes, prized farmland for Natives and the incoming Dutch. In his 1628 letter to Dutch West India Company Director Samuel Blommaert, company agent Isaac de Rasieres described the “large level field, from seventy to eighty morgens [about one hundred and sixty acres] through which runs a very fresh stream, so that land can be plowed without much clearing.”6 In 1858, more than two hundred years later, Central Park’s designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, also praised the “dark, fertile soil of the Harlem flats, which here extend into the park.”7

The Harlem flats was home to a cornucopia of edible plants—nuts, Jerusalem artichokes, wild onions, leeks, juniper berries, currants, wild grapes, mulberries, blueberries, strawberries, prickly pear, gooseberries, wild cherries, persimmons, and plums—enough to provide year-round nourishment for the local tribes and

I.2  Egbert Viele’s 1865 Topographical Map of the City of New York depicts Manhattan’s original watercourses. This detail from Seventy-Seventh Street north to 124th Street and from the Hudson River to the East River depicts the vertical Harlem Creek at 108th Street as it entered the marshland that is today the Harlem Meer.

the newly arrived Dutch settlers. In his discussion of “Food Products of the Country,” Dutch patroon David De Vries also listed maize (which the Dutch called “Turkish wheat”), mulberry trees, pumpkins, melons, watermelons, chestnuts, wild grapes, and hazelnuts. The Dutch learned from the native tribes how to make linen and hemp from the local flax and weave it into sacks called notassen. 8

The mountain lion, American black bear, and gray wolf were scarce there, unlikely to threaten human habitation. Hunters would have abundant prey: deer, squirrel, muskrat, duck, geese, frogs, snakes, turtles, partridge, pigeons, and wild turkeys, weighing from thirty to forty pounds.9 Taming and farming this watery topography were familiar practices to the Dutch, who farmed where the marshland met the sea.10

The region also enjoyed inland waterways unique to the island. A tongue of underground marble running along a fault line created the circumstances for the Harlem Creek, a twenty-foot-deep, one-hundred-foot-wide watery trench that flowed between what is now East 107th Street and East 108th Street. The creek began at the East River and emptied into the swampland that is now the Harlem Meer landscape. Even though it was shallower toward Fifth Avenue, the inland course to the East River would have been an essential and strategic body of water for the Lenape and the Dutch settlers to reach the riches of Manhattan’s coastal waters, with fish, oysters and other shellfish, eel and otter, and salt hay for the cattle.

The waters on Manhattan Island flow west from the highlands to the eastern lowlands into the Harlem River and East River. Two different freshwater streams or “runs” that began in the west merged into the waters of the Harlem Creek. The northern stream originated in the highlands of Manhattanville at West 124th Street and flowed southeast through the central flatlands, irrigating the animal habitats and eventual farms.11

The second freshwater run originated at the highlands of today’s West Ninety-Fourth Street and Tenth Avenue and snaked northeast through today’s Ravine, merging with the wetlands that became the Harlem Meer.12 Today the original waterway is still there, and flows underground where it mixes with New York City drinking water to form the Pool, the Loch, and the Harlem Meer water bodies.13

The metamorphic rock that made most of Manhattan was formed more than 450 million years ago by the collision of tectonic plates called the Taconic

I.3  Since the creation of the park in the nineteenth century, the Loch that meanders through the steep woodland Ravine has mainly been composed of city drinking water that comes from pipes hidden in the landscape and is merged with the freshwater “run” or stream, the natural water body that entered the prepark at Eighth Avenue and 100th Street and flowed northeast into the marshlands that became today’s Harlem Meer.

Source: Sara Cedar Miller, Loch, Ravine. Courtesy of the Central Park Conservancy.

Orogeny. The silts and shales were lifted and metamorphosed by heat and pressure into the much-harder schist and gneiss. A huge mountain range erupted underground, of which the rock outcrops in Manhattan are remnants. Most of what was lifted has long eroded away.

An extensive wall of schist bordered the Muscoota plains on its western side, today’s Morningside Heights and the rocky spine of Harlem that includes Morningside Park.

On its southern side, the rock barricade crossed the prepark at 106th and 107th Streets. It was through a narrow chink in this wall, later called McGowan’s Pass, that the local Wickquasgeck tribe forged their fourteen-mile trail from

I.4  Some of the most significant rock configurations within the prepark were the lofty cliffs that ran along the southern edge of the Muscoota flats. From these bluffs, one could have seen both rivers and the surrounding countryside, providing warning of encroaching enemies. Today those outcrops still loom over the Harlem Meer and meander across Central Park close to its northern terminus.

Source: Sara Cedar Miller, Fort Clinton, Harlem Meer. Courtesy of the Central Park Conservancy.

their known campsites in the Bronx and the northern end of Manhattan Island to the seasonably rich hunting and fishing grounds of the southern end.14 From this gap in the rock, the trail meandered south and east and exited at the prepark around Ninety-Second Street and Fifth Avenue in order to avoid the impassable hills and swampy terrain to the south. British colonists would expand on this Native footpath and name it the Kingsbridge Road after the monarch who ruled New York. In his 1642 journal describing New Amsterdam, David De Vries first mentioned the trail as the “Wickquasgeck road over which the Indians pass daily.”15

Aside from the Muscoota planting fields and the Wickquasgeck trail, Native peoples seemed to bypass the land of central Manhattan. They neither settled nor farmed there, preferring the more favorable ecologies near the rivers. The two closest settlements were a campsite at the Harlem River and 120th Street and

I.5 The map by New York archeologist Reginald Pelham Bolton, “Yorkville and East Harlem in Aboriginal Times,” shows the path of the two Native trails that intersected within the prepark. Bolton also placed Konaande Kongh, a Native settlement near the heights of Park or Lexington Avenues at about Ninety-Ninth Street. Rechewanis and Conykeekst are today’s East Harlem, and Muscoota is today’s central Harlem and the Harlem Meer landscape.

Source: [Reginald Pelham Bolton], “Yorkville and East Harlem in aboriginal times.” Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library, New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/f7162d60-d044-0138-647e-016d95d47a82.

Konaande Kongh, located at the pinnacle of what became known as Carnegie Hill. According to well-respected amateur archeologist Reginald Pelham Bolton’s map, another footpath would have entered the park at about East Ninety-Fifth Street and headed north.16

Natives took advantage of the richer, more promising land farther south. The local Lenape farmed tobacco, which they smoke ceremoniously. A large plantation was located in what is now the West Village, then known as Sapokanikan or “tobacco fields.”17 The land farther south, on the site of today’s Center Street courthouses and the African Burial Ground, was inhabited by the Manahate. Their settlement centered around the natural sixty-foot-deep water body known by the Dutch as the Kalch Hoek, meaning “a small body of water.” In 1922, Bolton identified it as the most significant habitation site in lower Manhattan.18 By the 1720s, its once-crystalline waters, called by the English “the Collect,” were polluted beyond use. Ninety years later, the largest inland water body on Manhattan was filled in.

THE LAND BELOW NINETY-SIXTH STREET

Narratives of Central Park tend to ignore the topography north of Ninety-Sixth Street that attracted early Dutch and English settlements and to focus on the less fertile lands—the southern, central, and western portions of the prepark—that were not settled. The rocky and swampy terrain below Ninety-Sixth Street has always been described as “waste” or “barren,” echoing the Dutch who first used the terms. This land, stretching between Fifty-Ninth Street and Ninety-Sixth Street, was part of a larger section of Manhattan Island that was first “purchased” from the indigenous peoples to the Dutch West India Company and then to the colony of New Amsterdam by the Dutch Assembly. In 1686, when the city had fallen under English control, Thomas Dongan, the royal governor of New York, granted the vast and largely undesirable tract that now comprises midtown and much of Central Park to the Corporation of the City of New York, and it became known as the “common lands.” Similarly, the royal governor gave Harlem, a separate colony until 1712, the “barren” Harlem Commons.

But it was not all wasteland. The Dutch and the English considered the west side of Manhattan, an area still known today as Bloomingdale, as a place that favored investment, habitation, and cultivation. Its main attraction was its

proximity to the Hudson River. Bloomingdale stretched from Fifty-Ninth Street to 107th Street and from the shoreline east to Seventh Avenue, where it butted up against the inhospitable terrain of the city’s common lands. This strip comprised a small section of more than ten one-hundred-acre parcels offered to investors in 1667 by the royal governor Richard Nicholl. The prepark land remained uncultivated or uninhabited until the eighteenth century and will therefore be discussed later in this study.

The earliest colonial settlements in the land that would become Central Park, however, were in Harlem. This unique topography north of Ninety-Sixth Street attracted the first farmers and settlers, and it was again this topography that dictated the cultivation, social history, and military events to which we now turn.

PRAISE FOR BEFORE CENTRAL PARK

“Central Park is the most important and influential urban public space in the world. But what did its 843 acres look like before Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux performed their magic? Sara Cedar Miller has given us the answer and so much more. The illustrations are beautiful, the prose rolling and imaginative, the research thorough, and the result splendiferous.”

—KENNETH T. JACKSON, EDITOR IN CHIEF OF THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NEW YORK CITY

“Wandering through the green heart of the city, Central Park, who hasn’t wondered: What have these rocks seen? What do the trees know? Who came before? Thank goodness for the charming, curious, careful historian, Sara Cedar Miller, who labored thirty years to bring us their surprising stories. Highly recommended.”

—ERIC W. SANDERSON, AUTHOR OF MANNAHATTA: A NATURAL HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY

“A stunning display of historical sleuthing. Brilliantly researched and superbly illustrated, Miller’s book unravels the story of the 843 acres that became Central Park. Anyone interested in New York City’s past will find Before Central Park indispensable.”

—SHANE WHITE, AUTHOR OF PRINCE OF DARKNESS: THE UNTOLD STORY OF JEREMIAH G. HAMILTON, WALL STREET’S FIRST BLACK MILLIONAIRE