1. WILLIAM SMITH.
2. PETER STUYVESANT.
3. PHILIP FRENEAU.
4. THOMAS PAINE.
5. JOEL BARLOW.
Even in the lifetime of Freneau, changes came to Hanover Square. For more than half a century it was the "Newspaper Row," then it gradually became the dry-goods district, then settled down to a general centre for wholesale houses. At one corner of the square lived for a time Jean Victor Moreau, the French General, after he had been banished for supposed participation in the plot of Cadoudal and Pichegru against the life of the First Consul.
In the years that followed the Revolution, Freneau spent much of his time in sea trips, but he was in the city again when George Washington took the oath of office as the first President of the United States at the Federal Hall in Wall Street; and was in the quaint St. Paul's Chapel, then quite a new structure, when Washington went there on the day of his inauguration. In the same year, Freneau lived for a time in Wall Street, close by the house where Alexander Hamilton lived, who in those days was a figure in literary New York by reason of his writing of the Federalist papers. That was thirteen years before Hamilton occupied his country house, "The Grange," far up the island, which was to be still standing a hundred years later, when the city had crept up to and beyond it, and left it where One Hundred and Forty-first Street crosses Convent Avenue. Close by, in narrow Nassau Street, when Freneau lived in Wall, was the home of a man who had been his classmate in college. This was Aaron Burr. He, too, in a few years, was to leave the humble house in Nassau Street, to live in the Richmond Hill house, where the British Commissary Mortier had lived, and from which Burr walked forth on an eventful morning in 1804 to fight a mortal combat with Hamilton on the Jersey shore.
In 1791 Philip Freneau was in Philadelphia editing the National Gazette, the strongest political paper of his day, memorable for partisan abuse and for such bitter attacks on the administration that Washington alluded to its editor as "that rascal Freneau." The paper continued under Freneau until 1793, when he returned to New York for a time.
In those days of 1793 there were three or four detached houses in Cedar Street close by Nassau. In the one nearest the corner, on any day of the week a man, slender and tall, with eyes that were keen and gray, with dress always in perfect taste, with broad-brimmed hat and queue, could be seen. He came from this house and walked over to Broadway, and his neighbors watched regularly for his going and his coming. He was Noah Webster, editor of The Minerva, a paper at that time devoted to the support of President Washington's administration. His name was to become a household word, for his paper became the Commercial Advertiser (that lived and throve even in the twentieth century), and after he had left the city he wrote a world-famed dictionary.