"The visits of yellow fever in 1798, 1799, 1803 and 1805
tended much to increase the formation of a village near the
Spring Street Market and one also near the State Prison; but
the fever of 1882 built up many streets with numerous wooden
buildings for the uses of the merchants, banks (from which
Bank Street took its name), offices, etc."
"'The town fairly exploded,'" quotes Macatamney,--from what writer he
does not state,--"'and went flying beyond its bonds as though the
pestilence had been a burning mine.'"
It was in 1822 that Hardie wrote:
"Saturday, the 24th of August our city presented the
appearance of a town beseiged. From daybreak till night one
line of carts, containing boxes, merchandise and effects,
was seen moving towards Greenwich Village and the upper
parts of the city. Carriages and hacks, wagons and horsemen,
were scouring the streets and filling the roads; persons
with anxiety strongly marked on their countenances, and with
hurried gait, were hustling through the streets. Temporary
stores and offices were erecting, and even on the ensuing
day (Sunday) carts were in motion, and the saw and hammer
busily at work. Within a few days thereafter the custom
house, the post office, the banks, the insurance offices and
the printers of newspapers located themselves in the village
or in the upper part of Broadway, where they were free from
the impending danger; and these places almost
instantaneously became the seat of the immense business
usually carried on in the great metropolis."
Bank Street got its name in this way, the city banks transferring
their business thither literally overnight, ready to do business in
the morning.
Miss Euphemia M. Olcott in her delightful recollections of the past in
New York, gives us some charming snapshots of a still later Greenwich
as she got them from her mother who was born in 1819.
"She often visited in Greenwich Village, both at her
grandfather's and at the house of Mr. Abraham Van Nest,
which had been built and originally occupied by Sir. Peter
Warren. But she never thought of going _so far_ for less
than a week! [She lived at Fulton and Nassau streets.] There
was a city conveyance for part of the way, and then the old
Greenwich stage enabled them to complete the long journey.
This ran several times a day, and when my mother committed
her hymn:
_"'Hasten, sinner, to be wise,
Ere this evening's stage be run'_
she told us that for some years it never occurred to her
that it could mean anything in the world but the Greenwich
stage."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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