Peter Stuyvesant and the Cobbler
Peter Stuyvesant, Dutch Governor of N.Y. from 1647 to 1664 and a valiant member of the Reformed Church, had an intense prejudice against all other sects. At Flushing a Baptist cobbler, William Wickendam, ventured to preach "and even went with the people into the river and dipped them." He was fined 12,500 guilders ($5,000) and ordered to be banished. As he was a poor man the debt was remitted, but he was obliged to leave the province.
The house was built in 1763 by Roger Morris for his bride, Mary Philipse of Yonkers, for whose hand, it is said, Washington had been an unsuccessful suitor. The house was subsequently owned by John Jacob Astor and then passed into the hands of Stephen Jumel, a French merchant, who, with his wife Eliza, added new fame to the old house. They entertained here Lafayette, Louis Napoleon, Joseph Bonaparte and Jerome Bonaparte. Aaron Burr (1756-1836) in his old age, appeared at the mansion with a clergyman, and married Mme. Jumel, then a widow. She divorced him shortly afterward, and he died in poverty on Staten Island, 1836. Alexander Hamilton whom Burr killed in the famous duel at Weehawken, N.J. (July 11, 1804) owned a country place in the neighborhood, "Hamilton Grange," which now stands at 140th St. and Convent Ave.
Leaving Manhattan, that extraordinary island which Peter Minuit, director-general of New Netherlands, bought in 1626 from the Indians for sixty guilders' worth of goods (about $24), we cross the Harlem River to the Borough of the Bronx, named for Jonas Bronck, the first white settler, who made his home in 1639 near the Bronx Kills (where the Harlem River flows into Long Island Sound).
The original price paid for the Bronx—or a large share of it—was "2 gunns, 2 kettles, 2 coats, 2 shirts, 2 adzes, 1 barrel of cider, and 6 bitts of money." The assessed value of Manhattan today is $5,116,000,000 and that of the Bronx $732,000,000 (realty).
The Hudson River Division of the New York Central turns to the left and follows the course of the Harlem River, 7 M. long, which separates Manhattan Island from the mainland and connects the Hudson with the East River. On the south bank of the Harlem are Washington Heights, with the Speedway on the immediate bank, and Fort George (near 193d Street) named from a Revolutionary redoubt. The Speedway was built at a cost of $3,000,000 for the special use of drivers of fast horses. On the right, after passing the High Bridge, which carries the old Croton aqueduct, one of the feeders of the city water supply, and the Washington Bridge, are University Heights and (farther to the west) the township of Fordham, where the cottage in which Edgar Allen Poe lived from 1844 to 1849 and wrote Ulalume and Annabel Lee, is still preserved.
New York University, on University Heights, was founded in 1832; the principal buildings include Gould Hall, a dormitory; the library, designed by Stanford White, and the Hall of Fame, extending around the library in the form of an open colonnade, 500 ft long, in which are preserved the names of great Americans.
11 M. SPUYTEN DUYVIL.
(Train 51 passes 8:51; No. 3, 9:09; No. 41, 1:23; No. 25, 3:06; No. 19, 5:53. Eastbound: No. 6 passes 8:57; No. 26, 9:17; No. 16, 3:37; No. 22, 5:02.)
Spuyten Duyvil is situated on Spuyten Duyvil Creek, celebrated by Washington Irving, which connects the Harlem and Hudson Rivers. In recent years the creek has been enlarged into a ship canal.