Set I

Beginnings

Collect Pond-Background:

Modern Day downtown Civic Center- City Hall, police headquarters and the courts-used to be the Collect Pond, outside the city limits. It was the size of four city blocks, 60 feet at its deepest. Before the island became Manhattan, it was home to 54 different environments-hard wood forests, fields, meadows, and swamps. Collect Pond was the source of water for both native people and early European and African settlers. The water was filled with oysters and clams. Many early residents either owned their own wells from Collect Pond or paid to use someone else’s. It was the source of water for the early New York City.

In 1776, the city government built public wells and even a reservoir; the water was pumped with hollow logs. The illustration below shows a family enjoying the pond as recreation. During the 18th century, the pond was used as a picnic area during summer, and a skating rink during the winter. It was the Central Park of colonial times. It is also the site of the first steamboat in 1796 by John Fitch. By 1800, it became a “sewer.” As the industries around it (rope-making, breweries, tanneries, slaughterhouses and gunpowder factories) grew, they would dump their wastes into the water, causing massive amounts of pollution to pile up. This would turn the drinking water into sewage water, unsafe to drink.

An illustration of the Collect Pond from the book, "History of the City of New York: Its Origin, Rise and Progress."

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"This beautiful pond, occupying the site of the present great gloomy pile of prison buildings known as the Tombs was the scene in the summer of 1796 of the first trail of a steamboat with a screw propeller. It was the invention of John Fitch."

Artifact A1) 1776 Map of New York.

Source: The Boston Public Library Digital Collection:

The area known as Five Points was not part of the original settlement of Manhattan, but just outside of it. It was close to the northern edge of the city. Look for the small pond labeled “Fresh Water” above the Southern tip of Manhattan; that is the neighborhood. Before the Five Points, there was a little part of Manhattan called the Collect Pond. This underground spring-fed lake was a major source of fresh water for the people of New York. In 1798, Collect Pond was also a “picturesque” spot as well as the source of New York City’s water supply. But by the early 19th century, businesses had so profoundly polluted it that the Common Council ordered the pond drained in 1808.

Artifact A2) Depiction of Collect Pond and vicinity, 1793

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As New York grew and sprawled northward, various forms of less-than-reputable industry began to spring up around Collect Pond and its adjacent streams. Various factories and breweries dumped their garbage and waste into the pond, and tanneries and slaughterhouses used it as a repository for their unwanted carcasses and animal by-products. By 1800, the formerly tranquil pond, on whose banks New York’s residents strolled and socialized, was a mar on the urban landscape: a stinking, festering cesspool of disease and death.

The Pearl Street Tanneries-Background

Today, Pearl Street is home to a federal court. When it was being built in the early 1990’s, many artifacts and foundations of structures have been found. The courthouse block was divided into eight lots that belonged to George and Jacob Shaw, tanners. Taking advantage of the moving water of the eastern outlet of the Collect Pond and standing water in the surrounding swamps, the tanners sited their operations along the sill of land that eventually became Pearl Street. Eventually the tanneries were forced to move north because of the unpleasant odors they produced. After the tanneries closed on Pearl Street, artisans built homes and shops in the neighborhood.

Artist's impression of tannery (tanyard) worker from The Tanners by Leonard Everett Fischer. Note the long hooked tool the tanner is using to handle the leather hides that are soaking in a wooden barrel in the ground.

Artifact B1)Portion of Maerschalk's "Plan of New York" showing a row of tanneries along the Collect Pond outlet

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The Maerschalk Plan of New York City was published in 1755; it shows the layout of New York City at the time. Taking advantage of the moving water of the eastern outlet of the Collect Pond and standing water in the surrounding swamps, the tanners sited their operations along the sill of land that eventually became Pearl Street.

Artifact B2)1785 Tannery Map

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A 1785 mapshows the modern-day New York Courthouse block divided into eight lots that belonged to George and Jacob Shaw, tanners. The Shaw's property is marked in the center of the map.

Artifact C1)Iron hook.

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This would have been attached to a long wooden handle, and used to move animal hides around in the tanning vats full of lime.

Artifacts C2)Wooden Slat, or board.

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This wooden slate would have been a barrel used as a liming pit.

Artifacts C3)A barrel made of Eastern White Pine slats;

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The barrel, which had been buried in the ground, probably held the liming solution that was used to loosen the hair from the hides before they were tanned.

Signs of Wealth-Background

The Tobias Hoffman family, who owned a bakery, used expensive porcelain dishes. Some families in this area had large wealth; others did not.In addition to the tanneries, slaughterhouses, breweries, ropewalks, and potteries contributed to making the neighborhood less than desirable. Despite these conditions, artisans continued to live here in order to be near their businesses. While the Hoffman Family ate on fancy Chinese porcelain dishes, other citizens complained loudly about the industries that were polluting the nearby Collect Pond. The Hoffman bakery (managed by a sequence of renting tenants) remained in business on Pearl Street well into the 1850s; the widow Hoffman, Margaret, lived on the property until circa 1830 when the Five Points had already achieved its notorious reputation.

Bakery illustration from Diderot's mid-eighteenth century encyclopedia

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Artifact D1) Hand-painted pearlware tea set, made in England, 1795-1825

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Artifact D2) Chinese Porcelain dinnerware, 1780-1800

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Artifact D3) Matching creamware, England 1760-1810

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Artifact D4) Staffordshire Teaware

Source: Rebecca Yamin,Tales of Five Points: Working-Class Life in Nineteenth-Century New York. 6 Vols. (West Chester, PA.: John Milner Associates, 2000). Volume III, B-32.

This tea set, manufactured in England, was uncovered during an archaeological dig of the former Five Points neighborhood, at the site of a former tenement building at 472 Pearl Street. While the neighborhood was known for its poverty and vice, this evidence of domestic life suggests an attempt by some households to maintain respectable middle-class standards.

African Community-Background

The area around Collect Pond was also home to a large African American community since the 17th century. African-Americans inhabited the area that would later become Five Points on and off from the mid-seventeenth century onward. African Americans were granted the land conditionally-under the half-freedom system, Africans had to work part of the year in return for some land. When New Netherlands came under British rule, they had to give up the land they farmed. Since parts of the area were less suitable for farming than others and, African Americans were given undesirable pieces of land.

After slavery was abolished in New York, early in the nineteenth century, slaves who had been agricultural laborers along the Hudson Valley and on Long Island tended to migrate to Manhattan and many came to the area around Collect Pond where black freemen had made their homes. By the time Collect Pond was drained and filled in, these freemen and freed slaves had come to be the most common as well as longest-term residents. As impoverished immigrants began to arrive in increasing numbers, the African Americans achieved a slight economic advantage over their immigrant neighbors so by running grocery-grog shops, taverns, oyster-bars, and — most notably — dance halls.

In 1991, while digging a foundation for a new Federal building, the workers discovered the remains of an African burial ground, which experts estimate once covered 4-5 acres and contained around 10,000-20,000 burials. The burial ground is located around City Hall. In 2006, the site was declared a national monument, with a memorial built and dedicated on October 2007.

Artifact E1)Pendant, silver.

Source: African Burial Ground; From Burial 254, Catalog # 1243-B.001

This is a piece of adornment (jewelry) from the African Burial Site in lower Manhattan. Personal adornments (jewelry) like those found at the African Burial Ground were easy to transport and widely available, esp. in North America. Most, if not all, were available in New York City as well. It is made of cast silver. The upper portion has a slightly twisted metal hoop. A jump ring is attached to the bottom of the sphere, from which hangs a pear-shaped dangle.

This piece of adornment is different from other pieces in European trading posts and Native American encampments from the 18th century. This is not because of trade in silver. From the 1750’s to the 1830’s, silver jewelry went hand in hand with the fur trade in upstate New York and in the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi regions. Fur from the north and the west passed through colonial Manhattan; silver ornaments (decorations and jewelry) made by city artisans followed the same routes taken by the traders of animal skins. The pendant may have been made with the general customer in mind. Its pear shape was a perennial favorite among colonial American jewelry wearer

Artifact E2): Beads, Bead Type 2, diameters 4.8-7.3 mm.

Source: African Burial Ground; From Burial 254, Catalog # 1243-B.001

If you examine the trade between Europe and Africa, you will notice that glass beads formed the largest portion of personal decorations imported to western Africa, with “many billions landed in barrels, cases, and casks” along the Guinea Coast. Many European countries had their own glass bead industries; Venice was the main center of European bead production, though bead making also thrived in the Netherlands from the late 16ththrough the mid 18thcenturies. However, many African countries added to or even melted down European beads to make their own versions. These beads look more like African designs and work than European. The presence in colonial Manhattan of glass beads that look more like West African beads tells us that the movement of adornment (jewelry) wasfrom Africa to the Americas. This fact about the trade in Africans is not well known. Africans crossed the Atlantic as sailors on ships, not just as enslaved labor chained below deck. The presence of enslaved and free black sailors in North American ports increased steadily after 1740, as did the number of black New Yorkers who fled from bondage.

Personal adornment was sold almost anywhere. The account books of merchant Samuel Deall record necklaces, earrings, and beads sold in 1758. The price of a “bunch” of black beads, perhaps like those shown below, was 2 shillings and sixpence. Deall’s store on Broad Street was typical of its time, stocking clothing, foodstuffs, house wares, light construction materials, and “all elements of ornamentation for person and home.” Although Africans are not likely to have shopped at stores like Deall’s, some of the less expensive adornments merchants and craftsmen carried would have made their way into smaller retail venues. “Cheap sales” and auctions of over-stocked merchandise lowered retail prices, and small-scale vendors such as peddlers would have bought inexpensively and sold with a modest mark-up.