At No. 11 Reade Street is a dingy little house, now covered with signs and given over to half a dozen small business concerns, about which hover memories of Aaron Burr. It was here he had a law office in 1832, and here when he was seventy-eight years old he first met Mme. Jumel whom he afterwards married. The house is to be torn down to make way for new municipal buildings.
An Historic Window
At Rose and Duane Streets stands the Rhinelander building, and on the Rose Street side close by the main entrance is a small grated window. This is the last trace of a sugar-house, which, during the Revolutionary War, was used as a British military prison. The building was not demolished until 1892, and the window, retaining its original position in the old house, was built into the new.
The Tombs Prison
The Collect
Where the Tombs prison stands was once the Collect, or Fresh Water Pond. This deep body of water took up, approximately, the space between the present Baxter, Elm, Canal and Pearl Streets. When the Island of Manhattan was first inhabited, a swamp stretched in a wide belt across it from where Roosevelt Slip is now to the end of Canal Street on the west side. The Collect was the centre of this stretch, with a stream called the Wreck Brook flowing from it across a marsh to the East River. At a time near the close of the eighteenth century a drain was cut from the Collect to the North River, on a line with the present Canal Street. With the progress of the city to the north, the pond was drained, and the swamp made into firm ground. In 1816, the Corporation Yards occupied the block of Elm, Centre, Leonard and Franklin Streets, on the ground which had filled in the pond. The Tombs, or City Prison, was built on this block in 1838.
The Five Points
The Five Points still exists where Worth, Baxter and Park Streets intersect, but it is no longer the centre of a community of crime that gained international notoriety. It was once the gathering-point for criminals and degraded persons of both sexes and of all nationalities, a rookery for thieves and murderers. Its history began more than a century and a half ago. During the so-called Negro Insurrection of 1741, when many negroes were hanged, the severest punishment was the burning at the stake of fourteen negroes in this locality.