Five miles beyond Newark the diminutive Elizabeth River flows down to the Kills, and here is the city of Elizabeth, with fifty thousand people, noted as one of the handsomest of the Jersey towns. Like Newark and Paterson, it is really an outlying suburb of New York, providing homes for much of the overflow of population, who rush into the metropolis for business every morning, and back again every evening. Under the name of Elizabethport it spreads down to the Arthur Kill, and over there are most of its factories and extensive coal-shipping piers. The original settlement dates from 1665, when it was named in honor of Lady Elizabeth, wife of Sir George Carteret, one of the grantees of East Jersey. The early inhabitants were largely Puritans, and its chief establishment is the extensive works of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Here was founded the College of New Jersey, afterwards removed to Princeton, and a tablet marking the original site was unveiled in 1897. A few miles beyond, another little river flows down to the Kills, first named after old Rahwack, the Indian sachem whose tribe owned the land thereabouts, and here is another thriving town, Rahway, which is noted for its carriages. At Menlo Park, nearby, the electrical inventor, Thomas A. Edison, sustained by New York capital, toiled for years in seclusion to perfect his discoveries, and developed the germ that has grown to such vast proportions. The "Wizard of Menlo Park" afterwards located his chief laboratory and his home at Newark. Then, crossing what are known as the "Short Hills" westward, past many villages, among them Metuchen, once the domain of Metuching, the Indian "King of the Rolling Land," we come to the Raritan River, thirty-one miles from Jersey City.
Here debouches the Delaware and Raritan Canal at New Brunswick, a city of twenty-five thousand people. The Raritan flows through the red shales and sandstones of Central New Jersey, generally a chocolate-colored stream, and goes off to form Raritan Bay, fifteen miles below. Factories cluster on the New Brunswick lowlands along the river and canal, but there is a handsome town built upon the higher grounds, encircling the lower and older portions like a crescent. The Dutch came here from the Hudson River early in the eighteenth century and found a village which had been started by some fishermen from Long Island. They organized the town, naming it in honor of the Ducal House of Brunswick. Its most prominent feature is Rutgers College, housed in red sandstone buildings upon attractive grounds, alongside the railway, a venerated foundation of the Dutch Reformed Church, originally chartered by King George III. as "Queen's College," but afterwards receiving the name of Rutgers from a benefactor in 1826. It has an important adjunct in the New Jersey Agricultural College. There is also the Dutch Reformed Theological Seminary, the first established in America, and dating from 1771, its main building, also named from its chief benefactor, being Hertzog Hall. An early traveller, visiting New Brunswick in 1748, described it as "a pretty little town with four churches;" and these quaint buildings are still there, the ancient Christ Church being surrounded with the graves of the first settlers. Eighteen miles to the southeast the Revolutionary battle of Monmouth was fought in June, 1778, and a monument commemorates it at Freehold (Monmouth Court-house). Sir Henry Clinton, having evacuated Philadelphia, was marching towards New Brunswick, intending to embark on the Raritan for New York. Washington, coming from Valley Forge in pursuit, gave him battle. The day was very hot, and the result was an uncertainty, General Charles Lee's misconduct, for which Washington reprimanded him on the field, preventing a victory, and at night the British withdrew quietly. Lee was afterwards court-martialed and suspended from command for a year. Monmouth was the scene of "Molly Pitcher's" famous exploit. She was Mary Hays of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, wife of John Hays, a soldier in the First Pennsylvania Artillery. Molly was with the army, and engaged in bringing water to the battery, which was behind a hedgerow, her husband managing one of the cannon. The British made a charge, and a shot killing him, the officers, having no one to manage the gun, ordered it withdrawn. Molly saw her husband fall and heard the order; dropping her bucket, she seized the rammer and served the gun with skill and dexterity. Next morning General Greene presented her to General Washington, who conferred upon her the office of Sergeant. She afterwards lived at Carlisle Barracks, and died there in 1823.
GREATER NEW YORK.
The Dutch city of New Amsterdam, which became New York by the English conquest in 1664, was of slow growth. It had hardly more than twenty thousand inhabitants at the time of the Revolution, being less than either Boston or Philadelphia, and a map made in 1767 shows that the town scarcely extended beyond Wall Street. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were sixty thousand people, and its rapid growth began through large immigration after the War of 1812, and was stimulated by the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, which gave it greatly increased foreign trade. By the new Charter of "Greater New York" coming into operation in 1897, the city was made, next to London, the largest in the world, being expanded beyond Manhattan Island, so as to include all the outlying cities. It now consists of five boroughs, Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Richmond, having an area of three hundred and twenty square miles, and a population exceeding three and one-half millions. If Jersey City and the other New Jersey settlements on the west side of the Hudson were added, the population would be four millions. This great city is about thirty-five miles long from north to south, and nineteen miles wide. The long and narrow island of Manhattan stretches thirteen miles, while it is not much over two miles broad in the widest part, and sometimes narrows to a few hundred yards, particularly in the northern portion. The Harlem River and the winding strait of Spuyten Duyvel separate northern Manhattan from the mainland. The island is very rocky, excepting the southern part, which is alluvial, and at the upper end the cliffs rise precipitously from the Hudson over two hundred and thirty feet into Washington Heights, and the surface descends sharply on the eastern side to the Harlem flats. It does not take the visitor long to recognize, however, that the capacious harbor, the converging rivers and numerous adjacent arms of the sea combine all the requisites of a great port, and they could not have been better planned if human hands had fashioned them. There is a vast wharf-frontage, for over fifty miles of shore-line are available for shipping, thus accommodating an almost limitless commerce. This has made the metropolis and continues its wonderful growth.
At the lower end of Manhattan is the Battery Park, of about twenty acres, with the elevated railways coming over it from both sides of the city, and joining at the lower point of the island in a terminal station at the South Ferry. Here were located the old forts for the city defense, but the park superseded them after the War of 1812, and in the earlier years of the nineteenth century this was the fashionable resort for an airing. The old circular fort, Castle Garden, now the Aquarium, was formerly a popular place of amusement, and here, under the auspices of the great manager, Barnum, Jenny Lind made her first appearance in America in 1850. The Park contains a statue of John Ericsson. The lower point of the island is Whitehall Slip, and here is the Government Barge Office, an appanage of the Custom House. To the northward of the Battery is the Bowling Green, the space between them having been the site of the original Dutch palisade fort which guarded New Amsterdam. A row of fine residences was built here, which afterwards became the favorite locality for steamship offices, and the new Custom House is now being constructed on their site. This Bowling Green, a triangular space of about a half-acre, was in the early days surrounded by the homes of the proudest Knickerbockers. For seven years during the Revolution, and until the evacuation, November 25, 1783, this was the British headquarters. Here lived Cornwallis, Howe and Clinton, Benedict Arnold occupied No. 5 Broadway, and Washington's headquarters was in No. 1, on the west side, now occupied by the towering Washington Building, rising nearly three hundred feet to the top of the cupola. To the eastward is the spacious Produce Exchange, in Italian Renaissance, with its huge square tower, part of the ground on which it stands having been the site of the house where Robert Fulton lived and died. Talleyrand also once lived on Bowling Green. In the centre is the statue of Abraham de Peyster, an original Knickerbocker, erected in 1895. There was a leaden statue of King George III. here at the opening of the Revolution, but it was pulled down when the Declaration of Independence was promulgated in 1776, carried to Litchfield, Connecticut, and melted into bullets for the Continental soldiers, so that it was facetiously said at the time that "King George's troops will probably have his melted Majesty fired at them."
BROADWAY.
The two smaller streets on either side of the Bowling Green, Whitehall and State Street, unite to the northward and form Broadway. This is the chief highway of New York, and one of the most famous in the world, extending in various forms all the way to Yonkers, a distance of nineteen miles. The long and narrow formation of Manhattan Island puts Broadway longitudinally in the centre of the city, and necessarily throws into it an enormous traffic. One can hardly make any extended movements in New York without getting into Broadway. Hence the noted street has its show, always on exhibition, of the restless rush of life in the modern Babylon. The architecture of its great buildings, which tower far skyward, excites admiration, and its perpetual din of traffic, with the moving crowds and jam of vehicles, is the type of New York activity. This wonderful street is eighty feet wide between the buildings, and extends of that width from the Bowling Green five miles to Central Park at Fifty-ninth Street; and from its upper end, beyond this, the "Grand Boulevard," one hundred and fifty feet wide, with pretty little parks in the centre, is prolonged northward. In its course, which inclines somewhat to the westward, Broadway diagonally crosses Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and at the Central Park boundary intersects Eighth Avenue. Here is the "Merchant's Gate," entering the Park from Broadway, the opposite entrance from Fifth Avenue being known as the "Scholar's Gate." The intermediate entrances at Sixth and Seventh Avenues are the "Artist's Gate" and the "Artisan's Gate."
A survey of Broadway gives the best idea of the characteristics of New York. Its lower course is a succession of wealthy financial and business establishments and huge office buildings, and the adjacent streets on either side are similarly occupied. Banks, trusts, insurance offices, and manufacturers' and merchants' counting-rooms, railroad and steamship offices are everywhere. But in the midst of all this display of worldly wealth and grandeur is the quiet graveyard at the head of Wall Street, wherein stands the famous Trinity Church. Its chimes, morning and evening, summon the restless brokers and business men to attend divine service, though few may take heed. It is a wealthy parish, with over $500,000 annual revenue, maintaining a magnificent choir and various charities, and owns valuable buildings all about. The old graveyard stretches along Broadway, and in Church Street, behind, the elevated railway trains rush by every few minutes. It is part of the valuable domain of Trinity Church that "the heirs of Anneke Jans" have long been trying to recover. Anneke Jans Bogardus was an interesting Dutch lady who died in Albany in 1663, having outlived two husbands. The first husband owned the whole of the Hudson River front of New York between Chambers and Canal Streets, with a wide strip running back to Broadway. Her heirs sold this to the British Colonial Government, and it was known as the "King's Farm," being afterwards given as an endowment to Trinity Church. This is what the present generation of heirs want to recover, but thus far have gained more notoriety than cash by the effort.
In 1696 the first Trinity Church was built, being afterwards burnt, while a second church was built and taken down, to be replaced by the present fine Gothic brownstone edifice, whose magnificent spire rises two hundred and eighty-four feet. This church was dedicated in 1846, and its chancel contains a splendid reredos of marble, glass and precious stones, the memorial of William B. Astor, while the bronze doors are a memorial of his father, John Jacob Astor. The churchyard is chiefly a mass of worn and battered gravestones, resting in the busiest part of New York, the oldest stone being dated 1681, for it has been a burial-place more than two centuries. Near its northern border is the Gothic "Martyrs' Monument," erected over the bones of the patriots who died in the British prison-ships, moored over on the Brooklyn shore during the Revolution. There are hints, however, that it was not so much the reverent memory of these heroes that prompted the erection of the monument as the desire of the vestry to stop the proposed opening of a street through the yard. There is also a remembrance that, while these patriots were in prison dying, among their relentless foes was the Trinity rector, Dr. Inglis. When General Washington came into New York in 1776 he desired to worship at the church, and sent an officer to Dr. Inglis, on Sunday morning, to request that he omit reading the usual prayers for the king and the royal family. The rector refused, and afterwards said: "It is in your power to shut up the churches, but you cannot make the clergy depart from their duty." Among the noted graves is that of Charlotte Temple, under a flat stone, having a cavity out of which the inscription plate has been twice stolen. Her romantic career and miserable end, resulting in a duel, have been made the basis of a novel. William Bradford's grave is here, one of Penn's companions in founding Philadelphia; but he removed to New York, published the first newspaper there, and for fifty years was the official printer. A brownstone mausoleum covers the remains of Captain James Lawrence of the frigate "Chesapeake," killed in action in 1813, when his ship was taken by the British ship "Shannon," his dying words being, "Don't give up the ship." Here also are buried Alexander Hamilton, Robert Fulton, Albert Gallatin and other famous men, almost the latest grave being that of General Philip Kearney, killed in the Civil War.
SOME FAMOUS BUILDINGS.