Next to this church, for many years, lived Madam Canda, who kept the most fashionable school for ladies of a generation ago. Her beautiful daughter was dashed from a carriage, and killed on her eighteenth birthday—the age at which she was to make her début into society. The entire city mourned her loss.
La Grange Terrace
Soon after Lafayette Place was opened, La Grange Terrace was built. It was named after General Lafayette's home in France. The row is still prominent on the west side of the thoroughfare, and is known as Colonnade Row. A riot occurred at the time it was built, the masons of the city being aroused because the stone used in the structure was cut by the prisoners in Sing Sing prison.
John Jacob Astor lived on this street. He died March 29th, 1848, and was buried from the home of his son, William B. Astor, just south of the library building.
Sailors' Snug Harbor
A line drawn through Astor Place and continued to the Washington Arch in Washington Square, through Fifth Avenue to the neighborhood of Tenth Street, with Fourth Avenue as an eastern boundary, would roughly enclose what used to be the Eliot estate in the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was a farm of about twenty-one acres in 1790, when it was purchased for five thousand pounds from "Baron" Poelnitz, by Captain Robert Richard Randall, who had been a ship-master and a merchant. Randall dying in 1801, bequeathed the farm for the founding of an asylum for superannuated sailors, together with the mansion house in which he had lived. The house stood, approximately, at the present northwest corner of Ninth Street and Broadway. It was the intention of Captain Randall that the Sailors' Snug Harbor should be built on the property, and the farming land used to raise all vegetables, fruit and grain necessary for the inmates. There were long years of litigation, however, for relatives contested the will. When the case was settled in 1831, the trustees had decided to lease the land, and to purchase the Staten Island property where the Asylum is now located. The estate, at the time of Captain Randall's death, yielded an annual income of $4,000. At present the income is about $400,000 a year. It is conceded that the property would have increased more rapidly in value had it been sold outright, instead of becoming leasehold property in perpetuity.
Many efforts have been made to cut through Eleventh Street from Fourth Avenue to Broadway. The first was in 1830, when the street was open on the lines of the City Plan. Hendrick Brevoort, whose farm adjoined the Sailors' Snug Harbor property, had a homestead directly in the line of the proposed street, between Fourth Avenue and Broadway. He resisted the attempted encroachment on his home so successfully that the street was not opened through that block. He was again similarly successful in 1849, when an ordinance was passed for the removal of his house and the opening of the street.
Grace Church
Grace Church, at Tenth Street and Broadway, was completed in 1846. Previous to that date it had been on the southwest corner of Broadway and Rector Street, opposite Trinity Church.