Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
At the lower end of Manhattan is the Battery Park, of about twenty
acres, with the elevated railways coming over it from both sides of
the city, and joining at the lower point of the island in a terminal
station at the South Ferry. Here were located the old forts for the
city defense, but the park superseded them after the War of 1812, and
in the earlier years of the nineteenth century this was the
fashionable resort for an airing. The old circular fort, Castle
Garden, now the Aquarium, was formerly a popular place of amusement,
and here, under the auspices of the great manager, Barnum, Jenny Lind
made her first appearance in America in 1850. The Park contains a
statue of John Ericsson. The lower point of the island is Whitehall
Slip, and here is the Government Barge Office, an appanage of the
Custom House. To the northward of the Battery is the Bowling Green,
the space between them having been the site of the original Dutch
palisade fort which guarded New Amsterdam. A row of fine residences
was built here, which afterwards became the favorite locality for
steamship offices, and the new Custom House is now being constructed
on their site. This Bowling Green, a triangular space of about a
half-acre, was in the early days surrounded by the homes of the
proudest Knickerbockers. For seven years during the Revolution, and
until the evacuation, November 25, 1783, this was the British
headquarters. Here lived Cornwallis, Howe and Clinton, Benedict Arnold
occupied No. 5 Broadway, and Washington's headquarters was in No. 1,
on the west side, now occupied by the towering Washington Building,
rising nearly three hundred feet to the top of the cupola. To the
eastward is the spacious Produce Exchange, in Italian Renaissance,
with its huge square tower, part of the ground on which it stands
having been the site of the house where Robert Fulton lived and died.
Talleyrand also once lived on Bowling Green. In the centre is the
statue of Abraham de Peyster, an original Knickerbocker, erected in
1895. There was a leaden statue of King George III. here at the
opening of the Revolution, but it was pulled down when the Declaration
of Independence was promulgated in 1776, carried to Litchfield,
Connecticut, and melted into bullets for the Continental soldiers, so
that it was facetiously said at the time that "King George's troops
will probably have his melted Majesty fired at them."
BROADWAY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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