Beyond the limits of the city, Manhattan Island retained much of its primitive appearance. Roads, farms, country-seats, interspersed it, but not thickly; and as yet the salient features were hills, marshes, patches of rocky land, streams, and woods. Just upon the outskirts, midway between the rivers, at about the corner of Grand and Centre Streets, the ground rose to a commanding elevation on the farm of William Bayard, which overlooked the city and the island above a distance of more than three miles. Further east, a little north of the intersection of Grand and Division Streets, stood another hill, somewhat lower, where Judge Jones lived, from which opened an extensive view of the East River and harbor. On the west side, on this line, the surface sank from Bayard's mount into a spreading marsh as far as the Hudson, and over which now run portions of Canal and Grand and their cross streets. Where we have the Tombs and surrounding blocks, stood the "Fresh Water" lake or "Collect," several fathoms deep, with high sloping banks on the north and west, and on whose surface were made the earliest experiments in steam navigation in 1796. One nearly central highway, known as the King's Bridge or Post Road, ran the entire length of the island. Where it left the city at Chatham Square, it was properly the Bowerie or Bowery Lane. Continuing along the present street by this name, it fell off into the line of Fourth Avenue as far as Fourteenth Street, crossed Union Square diagonally to Broadway, and kept the course of the latter to Madison Square at Twenty-third Street. Crossing this square, also diagonally, the road stretched along between Fourth and Second Avenues to Fifty-third Street, passed east of Second Avenue, and then turning westerly entered Central Park at Ninety-second Street. Leaving the Park at a hollow in the hills known as "McGowan's Pass," just above the house of Andrew McGowan, on the line of One Hundred and Seventh Street, west of Fifth Avenue, it followed Harlem Lane to the end of the island. Here, on the other side of King's Bridge, then "a small wooden bridge,"[13] the highway diverged easterly to New England and northerly to Albany. [Footnote 13: "King's Bridge, which joins the northern extremity of this island to the continent, is only a small wooden bridge, and the country around is mountainous, rocky, broken, and disagreeable, but very strong."--_Smyth's Tour, etc._, vol. ii., p. 376.]