Chelsea Village
Although Chelsea Village was long ago swallowed up by the city, and its boundaries blotted out by the rectangular lines of the plan under which the streets were mapped out in 1811, there is still a suggestion of it in the green lawns and gray buildings of the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, which occupies the block between Twentieth and Twenty-first Streets, Ninth and Tenth Avenues.
Chelsea got its name in 1750, when Captain Thomas Clarke, an old soldier, gave the name to his country seat, in remembrance of the English home for invalided soldiers. It was between two and three miles from the city, a stretch of country land along the Hudson River with not another house anywhere near it. The house stood, as streets are now, at the south side of Twenty-third Street, about two hundred feet west of Ninth Avenue, on a hill that sloped to the river. The captain had hoped to die in his retreat, but his home was burned to the ground during his severe illness, and he died in the home of his nearest neighbor. Soon after his death the house was rebuilt by his widow, Mrs. Mollie Clarke. The latter dying in 1802, a portion of the estate with the house went to Bishop Benjamin Moore, who had married Mrs. Clarke's daughter, Charity. It passed from him in 1813 to his son, Clement C. Moore. The latter reconstructed the house, and it stood until 1850.
Clement C. Moore's estate was included within the present lines of Eighth Avenue, Nineteenth to Twenty-fourth Streets and Hudson River. These are approximately the bounds of Chelsea Village which grew up around the old Chelsea homestead. It came to be a thriving village, conveniently reached by the road to Greenwich and then by Fitzroy Road; or by the Bowery Road, Bloomingdale, and then along Love Lane.
London Terrace
In 1831 the streets were cut through and the village thereafter grew up on the projected lines of the City Plan. It was for this reason that Chelsea, when the city reached it, was merged into it so perfectly that there is not an imperfect street line to tell where the village had been and where the city joined it. There are houses of the old village still standing; notably those still called the Chelsea Cottages in Twenty-fourth Street west of Ninth Avenue, and the row called the London Terrace in Twenty-third Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.
The block on which the General Theological Seminary stands was given to the institution by Clement C. Moore, and was long called Chelsea Square. The cornerstone of the East Building was laid in 1825, and of the West Building, which still stands, in 1835.
It was this Clement C. Moore, living quietly in the village that had grown up around him, who wrote the child's poem which will be remembered longer than its writer—"'Twas the Night before Christmas."