Beyond the Fort there was a fringe of land with the water reaching to a point within a line drawn from Water and Whitehall Streets to Greenwich Street. Sixty years after the Battery was built fifty guns were added, it having been lightly armed up to that time.
The Battery was demolished about the same time as the Fort. The land on which it stood became a small park, retaining the name of the Battery, and was gradually added to until it became the Battery Park of to-day.
Castle Garden
A small island, two hundred feet off the Battery, to which it was connected by a drawbridge, was fortified in 1811 and called Fort Clinton. The armament was twenty-eight 32-pounders, none of which was ever fired at an enemy. In 1822 the island was ceded back to the city by the Federal Government—when the military headquarters were transferred to Governor's Island—and became a place of amusement under the name of Castle Garden. It was the first real home of opera in America. General Lafayette was received there in 1824, and there Samuel F. B. Morse first demonstrated the possibility of controlling an electric current in 1835. Jenny Lind, under the management of P. T. Barnum, appeared there in 1850. In 1855 it became a depot for the reception of immigrants; in 1890 the offices were removed to Ellis Island, and in 1896, after many postponements, Castle Garden was opened as a public aquarium.
State Street
State Street, facing the Battery, during the latter part of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century, was the fashionable quarter of the city, and on it were the homes of the wealthy. Several of the old houses still survive. No. 7, now a home for immigrant Irish girls, was the most conspicuous on the street, and is in about its original state. At No. 9 lived John Morton, called the "rebel banker" by the British, because he loaned large sums to the Continental Congress. His son, General Jacob Morton, occupied the mansion after his marriage in 1791, and commanded the militia. Long after he became too infirm to actually command, from the balcony of his home he reviewed on the Battery parade grounds the Tompkins Blues and the Light Guards. The veterans of these commands, by legislative enactment in 1868, were incorporated as the "Old Guard."
The "Stadhuis"
On the building at 4 and 6 Pearl Street, corner State Street, is a tablet which reads: