United States or Philippines ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If its old walls could have spoken they might have told of the time when almost all New York was housed below Chambers Street; when the "Bouwerie," free from its later malodorous associations, was a winding country lane where lads and lasses carried on their courtships in the long summer evenings; when Cherry Hill, now notorious for its fights and factions, was the abode of the city's wealth and fashion; when Collect Pond, on whose site the Tombs now stands, was the skating center where New York's belles and beaux disported themselves; when merry parties picnicked in the woods and sylvan glades of Fourteenth Street.
He was the keeper of the inn in the Bouwerie Village, and, having more idle moments than busy ones, he spent most of his time on the broad stoop of the inn, pipe in mouth, looking first at the house where Peter Stuyvesant had lived, then at the dusty road leading away up country towards the King's Bridge in one direction, and down country towards the town.
His residence became the seat of quite a genteel little court. "The country was parcelled out," writes Rev. Bishop Kip, "among great proprietors. We can trace them from the city of New Amsterdam to the northern part of the State. In what is now the thickly populated city were the lands of the Stuyvesants, originally the Bouwerie of the old governor.
They have salted us too long. We know where their booty is stored. And we know also where the young girls live who wear gold chains." Under these circumstances the governor was compelled to yield. He appointed six commissioners to confer with the same number of the English. The parties met at Governor Stuyvesant's residence on his farm or bouwerie, at eight o'clock in the morning of August 27th.
Stuyvesant went to Holland to explain why he had surrendered New Netherland. But he came back again, and years after he died in the little Bouwerie Village which he had built. In St. Mark's Church to this day may be seen a tablet which tells that the body of the last Dutch Governor lies buried there. NEW YORK under the ENGLISH and the DUTCH
One of the old dwelling-houses that remain from the day when the "Bouwerie" was yet remembered as an avenue of beer-gardens and pleasure resorts was burning. Down in the street stormed the firemen, coupling hose and dragging it to the front. Upstairs in the peak of the roof, in the broken skylight, hung a man, old, feeble, and gasping for breath, struggling vainly to get out.
Word Of The Day