Who Lived Where?

A lost world

Some two centuries ago, New York City was vastly different. In 1793, New York was still rebuilding from fires that had ravaged much of the city during the American Revolution. Then, New York still lagged behind Philadelphia as the nation’s largest metropolis, and almost all of Manhattan, except for the area below what is now City Hall Park, was farmland. But all of that was changing rapidly. The first federal census in 1790 put the population of the city at about 30,000. During the next ten years that number doubled.

Since then, the city’s dramatic growth and forward-looking dynamism have blanketed the island with development and obliterated almost all of the structures that stood in Lanah Sawyer’s day. When Noah Webster, who became famous for his spelling books and dictionaries, arrived in a new city, he liked to walk the streets and tally the number of houses. In 1786, he counted 3,500 (Autobiographies, 146). By the mid-twentieth century, only a few survived

In 1965, architectural historian Ada Louise Huxtable wrote that spotting surviving eighteenth-century structures required “a careful combination of architectural bird-watching and careful detective work.” By now, most of the small, old, houses she identified at that time have long since been reduced to rubble and carted away.

And yet, some eighteenth-century land marks remain. Fraunces Tavern, down by the Battery, harkens back to before the Revolution. The original part of the Watson House on State Street went up in 1792. And St. Paul’s Chapel, which has presided over Broadway at the foot of City Hall Park since 1765, got its steeple in 1793

Remains

What has endured in lower Manhattan is the city’s basic layout. Most streets and blocks are still configured much as they were in Lanah Sawyer’s day—or, for that matter, her grandparent’s day: the crooked streets of the colonial city; the grand, straight thoroughfare of Broadway cutting up along the island’s spine. Even the new grids overtaking farmland in the 1790s were originaly laid out deccades earlier. And then there are Lower Manhattan’s iconic open spaces.

The current Trinity Church, on Broadway across from Wall Street, was built in the nineteenth century, but it is still surrounded by its old churchyard—where several members of Lanah’s family lie buried. In the fall of 1793, the first shade trees were being planted in the old city commons, now City Hall Park. The Battery had just been refashioned as an urban pleasure ground. And the Bowling Green looked much the same then as it does now: the same wrought iron fence has surrounded it since 1772—minus the crown-shaped finials that were hacked off in burst of revolutionary enthusiasm when news of the Declaration of Independence reached the city in July 1776.

What is new in the city has literally been built on the ruins of the old.

And, this makes it possible to identify precisely where Lanah Sawyer and many others involved in her story lived and where key events took place.

Mapping Lanah Sawyer’s World

Finding an address for Lanah Sawyer in 1793 wasn’t difficult. From the trial records, I knew the name of her stepfather. And he showed up in the most obvious place to look: the 1793 edition of William Duncan’s New-York Directory and Register. His name (John Callanan) was misspelled, but easily recognizable: “Callahan, John, pilot, 34 Gold.”

Such city directories were a relatively new phenomenon in the new American nation. The first directory for New York was published in 1786. Keeping track of the city’s inhabitants, including many renters who moved frequently, was a challenge. Generally, directories were published in mid-summer each year, based on information gathered after the traditional moving date of May 1. By the time Duncan published his first directory in 1791, two other printers had attempted the complex undertaking and given up. The directory for 1793 included the names, in roughly alphabetical order, of about 6,500 heads of household, along with their occupations and street addresses.

Most of the other men named in the records of Lanah Sawyer’s case also appear in the city directories—which generally listed the more prosperous and stable of the city’s household heads, and skipped over the poor and transient as well as married women, children, servants, and lodgers. (The first directory in New York that attempted to list more than just the heads of households was Elliott’s 1812 Double Directory.)

So, the 1793 directory listed Mrs. Bruce at 122 Broadway, because she was a widow with her own household, but not Lanah’s widowed aunt Rebecca Dyckman, who lived in that same house. Tracking down married women like Mother Carey and Lucretia Harper required tracking their husbands down and looking them up in the directories. The 1793 directory lists Ann Carey’s husband, on the page after John Callanan, as: “Carey, James, trader, 80 Beekman.”

Exciting as a find like that can be, it is only the beginning of the real challenge. 

Mapping historic addresses

Since 1793, some lower Manhattan streets have been renamed, others have been reconfigured, and almost all have been renumbered at least once. During the 1790s, the city worked to eliminate royalist street names: King Street became Pine Street; Crown became Liberty, and George became Spruce. Queen Street became Pearl Street (as did Hanover Square and Great Dock Street). And Cliff Street was cut through the block between John and Fulton.

Meanwhile, the city’s street numbering systems, if so grand a term can be used, were also in flux. Some streets were numbered sequentially from one end to the other. Others were numbered in the other direction. Still others had numbers assigned seemingly at random and some had no numbers at all. The notion that streets should be numbered in a consistent manner north to south and east to west—and that odd and even numbers could be used to distinguished the two sides of a street—was just beginning to catch on.

Duncan’s Directory for 1794 began with a helpful list of recent changes, such as: “Golden-hill and John-streets are now called John-street, and the numbers begin at Broadway” (xi-xii).

Puzzling out what a particular 1793 address meant in terms of Manhattan’s modern Borough, Block, and Lot numbering system generally involves triangulating data from a variety of sources. The city’s 1793 Tax Records are often a big help. For one thing, they were organized by ward, which often helps narrow the number of potential blocks a particular address could be on. Also, since tax assessors typically went door to door—either down a street or around a block—their lists often give other useful clues about how the numbering scheme on a specific street worked and who was neighbors with whom.

Finally, the tax lists generally identified not only the heads of each household but also the owners of the property. The 1793 Tax Record at the New-York Historical Society thus shows that Judith Bruce owned the house she lived in at 122 Broadway. But many New Yorkers were renters. John Callanan, meanwhile, rented the house at 34 Gold Street from a man named Jonathan Conrey. And Mrs. Carey’s house was rented by her husband James from the widow Ann White.

Mapping Mrs. Bruce

Predictably, Mrs. Bruce was the easiest of these three people to locate. She bought her house overlooking the Bowling Green in 1790 and promptly registered the deed—meaning that the transaction was recorded in one of the city’s deed books. The deed itself was easy to find because, in the mid-nineteenth century, the city created indexes of its old property conveyances. Occasionally, deeds give enough information to identify the precise location of a parcel, but they almost always include useful information: which side of the street the property is on (halfway there!), the names of owners of abutting parcels (who are sometimes easier to track down), and the property’s size and shape (which can then be compared to historic cadastral maps that show the boundaries of individual lots) and to the city’s modern property information system. In Mrs. Bruce’s case, however, not all of this work was necessary.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Mrs. Bruce’s 1790 deed was included in an extraordinary effort by the city’s Department of Finance to organize all of the city’s early deeds geographically and map them onto the city’s modern block-and-lot parcel-identification system. Starting in 1911, workers analyzed almost a million early deeds and mapped the locations of about six hundred thousand of them. The resulting Block Index of Reindexed Conveyances Prior to 1917 comprises some two hundred and thirty large volumes and is housed on the seventh floor of the Department of Finance’s Manhattan offices on John Street. The volumes are organized by block number—which means that to find a particular parcel, you have to work block by block. Conveyances tied to that block are listed chronologically—and identified, when possible, by the relevant lot number. 

In Mrs. Bruce’s case, knowing that she was both on the east side of Broadway and within the bounds of the First Ward in 1793 meant that there were only a handful of possibilities. As it turned out, she appeared under Block 22.

Her 1790 deed was listed and identified as Lot 7—as was the 1817 sale of the property after her death. From the map of Block 22 in the Block Index of Reindexed Conveyances, it was easy locate the location of Lot 7 in the city’s current property-information GIS—even though that parcel, along with several to the north, has been recombined into what is now called Lot 13—occupied by the Old Standard Oil building with the address 26 Broadway.

In the The Sewing Girl’s Tale, I give the best current approximation of the street address for Mrs. Bruce’s house; in the New York 1793 GIS I give a more precise location.

Mapping John Callanan

Locating Lanah Sawyer’s home was more of a challenge. From the trial record we know Lanah was living in her stepfather’s house on Gold Street; from the directory for 1793 we know it was number 34, but not much more. The property appeared in the 1793 tax record for Ward 3 as a house worth £220 at 34 Gold Street—occupied by “John Calahan” (who had £20 worth of personal property) and owned by Jonathan Conrey, who lived elsewhere. This was common.  Then, as now, many New Yorkers rented their homes.

But where was this property? I tried looking at the deed indexes for conveyances to and from this Jonathan Conrey—but nothing useful seemed to turn up. Then, I tried tracing Callanan’s whereabouts back in to earlier directories and forward into later directories—and found that by 1793 he had been 34 Gold Street for many years, that in the 1794 directory his address was given as 62 Gold Street (because of re-numbering or because he had moved?), and that by 1795 he moved around the corner to a house on Fulton Street. 

One again, the Block Index of Reindexed Conveyances provided a crucial connection. Scanning through the transactions for the blocks of Gold Street that were in Ward 3 in 1793, I noticed a 1826 transaction the transfer of three parcels on the Gold-Street side of Block 94 (lots 16, 17, and 18) to the executors of Priscilla Conroy.

I figured that any transaction after 1793 would have been a sale by the Conreys, not to them, but I looked up the deed anyway: it turned out that Priscilla was the widow of Jonathan Conrey, John Callanan’s landlord in the early 1790s, and that the transaction involved a reversion of rights to a property the Conreys had previously owned. Even though there were three parcels—making it unclear precisely which one had been rented by Callanan three decades earlier—the deed narrowed down the options from nine blocks to three contiguous lots.

As I puzzled over this conundrum, I got to know this stretch of Gold Street better. Lanah’s cousin Lucretia Harper, it turned out, lived just a block south of Lanah on the same side of the street. Samuel Hone, the baker, and his wife Hannah lived across the street from Lanah’s home on a property, it turned out, they rented from Lanah’s great-aunt Rebecca Dyckman. And, according to the city directories, one of Harry Bedlow’s defense lawyers, John Cozine, lived less than a block away from Lanah at the “corner” of Gold and Beekman Streets—though which corner was left unclear. The Block Index of Reindexed Conveyances did not yield an easy answer. Ultimately, reading through deeds for parcels adjoining the Callanan property did: In 1795, a woman named Ruth Prince sold Lot 18 on Block 94, and the neighboring property owners included Jonathan Conrey (Callanan’s landlord) to the south and John Cozine to the north.  Thus, Cozine occupied the large lot numbered 19 at the south-east corner of the intersection of Beekman and Gold. And that he lived just two doors down from Lanah Sawyer at the time he represented her alleged rapist and described the witnesses who testified in her favor as obscure people of “no reputation.”

Over time, I learned two things that came in handy. First, I noticed that the updated street numbers in Duncan’s New-York Directory … for 1794—which followed a broad effort by the city to rationalize and renumber streets around the start of the year—were often good proxies for the numbers still in use today. Second, among the Digital Collections published by the New York Public Library, I came across a crucial way-station between the late-eighteenth century addresses and deeds I was looking at and the early-twentieth-century maps in the Block Index of Reindexed Conveyances.

William Perris’s Maps of the City of New-York (1852) was an early example of the kind of fire insurance map now most commonly associated with the Sanborn Map Company. It is a large volume of colored lithographs of the city’s lower wards: showing not just the boundaries of each lot but also the footprint of each building, its construction materials, etc., and its street number. This makes it possible to compare the size and shape of lots to those described in deeds (RIGHT: A detail of the second edition from the NYPL).

And in most cases, the street numbers in use during the 1850s correlate to those in use today. Callanan’s rented house at 62 Gold Street, for example, is shown right in the middle of the three lots associated with his landlord’s widow Patricia Conrey in the 1820s. As with Mrs. Bruce’s property, the lot at 62 Gold Street has been recombined and redeveloped over the past century. the spot where Lanah Sawyer lived in 1793 is now at the southern end of a large building that spans what used to be two blocks, including that stretch of Beekman Street.

Mapping Mother Carey

Identifying the general location of Mother Carey’s brothel was easy—as was finding her 1793 address. It was clear from the trial report that her house was on the short stretch of Beekman on Block 90 between modern Park Row and Nassau Street and across from the Brick Presbyterian Church. From the 1793 city directory listing for James Carey, who turned out to be her husband, it was clear that the address was 80 Beekman Street. But which lot was that? 

To figure that out, I had to move beyond the resources that I had used in other cases. By 1794, when the street was renumbered, the Careys had moved, so the subsequent directories didn’t help. Moreover, the block was reconfigured during the 1790s.

The 1793 Tax Records listed the Carey household as though they owned the property, but no transactions relating to them showed up in the real estate records. As it turned out, they were long-term lessors—whom the tax assessors treated as owners. The Block Index of Reindexed Conveyances showed that all of modern Block 90 and parts of the block to the south the entire block belonged to a large tract known as the Vineyard, which the widow Anne White had inherited from her Loyalist husband after the Revolution. In 1784, she persuaded the commissioners of confiscated Loyalist property to turn the tract over to her. But that still didn’t tell me what I needed to know. 

One thing that did help was I. N. Phelps Stokes’ magisterial Iconography of the Island of Manhattan (New York, 1915-1928). Published in six deeply researched and heavily illustrated volumes, it is one of the great resources for researching the early history of New York. Stokes published copies and detail analysis of early maps and views of the city, a detailed “chronology” of events culled from newspapers, city county records, and other sources.  And he also carefully traced the city’s physical development, providing detailed histories of many of the various lower-Manhattan tracts and farms that comprise the modern city.

Phelps’s discussion of the Vineyard tract both clarified its history and pointed to a series of manuscript surveys—including one from 1759 held by the Department of Finance that showed the first plan for subdividing the tract into several dozen lots. Several other surveys at the New York Public Library showed how the Widow Anne White, when she assumed control of the property after the Revolution, had cut Ann Street through the south-western portion of the tract and created a number of small irregular lots open on the new street. 

From these plans, I was able to reconstruct the layout of the block in the early 1790s—when what is now Theatre Alley was still just an informal mews that opened on Anne Street and stopped at the rear of one of the lots that faced Beekman Street. Another survey included a list of tenants along that blockface—including Mrs. Carey and immediate neighbors. This made it it possible to determine with reasonable confidence that Mrs. Carey’s was the lot originally numbered 34. 

Evidently, after Mother Carey’s house was demolished in the aftermath of the rape trial, her house wasn’t rebuilt. Instead, the Widow White incorporated her lot into the alley so that it could cut all the way through the block. So, Mother Carey’s property is now the northern part of Theatre Alley. 

Findings: Lanah’s family

Mapping Lanah Sawyer’s world transformed my understanding of her family connections and social networks. As it turned out, Lanah’s family was more prosperous and better connected that I had assumed—and had deep roots in the neighborhood. 

A 1772 deed showed that Lanah Sawyer’s maternal grandmother had owned two houses in the city—both within a few blocks the Callanan family’s home decades later. The deed also gave a detailed picture of that side of Lanah’s family. It listed Lanah’s maternal aunts and uncles who had survived to that point and named many of their spouses. And it explained how Lanah was related to her cousin Lucretia Harper—who, on the evening after the rape, took Lanah under her wing, who subsequently testified on her behalf in court, and who lived just a few doors down Gold Street from Lanah’s home. 

Land records were also crucial to identifying the “aged aunt” whom Lanah visited at Mrs. Bruce’s on the day after the rape. It turned out that Lanah’s paternal great-aunt Rebecca Dyckman had been married to the prosperous baker and erstwhile alderman John Dyckman who had died in 1786, leaving her in possession of their country seat up Bowery Lane, which was worked by at least seven enslaved workers in 1790, and was adjacent to the even larger property owned by Judith (Bayard) Bruce and her family. A general sense of the location and scale of these properties was easy enough to gather from Benjamin Ratzer’s detailed maps of the city and from efforts of David Valentine in the nineteenth century and Phelps Stokes in the twentieth to map the city’s old farms. More detail and precision came from surveys and subdivision plans like those produced by Evert Bancker in the 1770s and 1780s of the Dyckman property—and from large-scale cadastral maps published in the nineteenth century, like those of the Bayard and Rutgers farms.

It turned out that Lanah’s great aunt and her children had also inherited the bakery across the street from Lanah’s home on Gold Street—which, in 1793, they were renting to friends of Lanah’s parents, the Hones.

Taken together, these facts helped explain how she got the courage and social support to take on someone like Harry Bedlow. Her immediate family’s modest circumstances made her easy to underestimate.

Findings: The Branch Pilots

Another set of social networks emerged from the process of mapping the small corps of Branch Pilots to whom Lanah’s stepfather, John Callanan, belonged. Since early in the eighteenth century New York’s governor had appointed a number of branch pilots who were charged with guiding ships through the hazardous passage between Sandy Hook and New York harbor. In the 1790s there were about fourteen branch pilots, each of whom had the right to appoint a deputy and take on apprentices. The lists of pilots in the city directories and almanacs varied a good deal, but in 1794 a series of affidavits in the newspapers listed not only all of the branch pilots active at the time but also many of their deputies. 

To figure out where they lived, I began with addresses from the Directory … for 1794 as a starting point. Then I worked through the process of locating those addresses in space. While some proved elusive, a striking pattern emerged. A large majority of the pilots and deputies lived in a tight cluster of only a few blocks. And at the heart of that cluster was John Callanan. 

I already knew from the the registers of Trinity Church and other religious institutions that the Branch Pilots tended to have densely interwoven social ties—and that a good number were related by blood and marriage. And I knew from tax records that they were among the city’s middling ranks, with many of them living in modest houses like the one John Callanan rented. 

Now, on the map, I could literally see their social connections. This, in turn, helped explain how John Callanan found the courage to support his step-daughter’s effort to hold Henry Bedlow accountable. And how, in the aftermath of the devastating rape trial, he could have managed to bring hundreds of men out into the streets to express their outrage and their solidarity. 

In the end, mapping people and places from the 1790s allowed me to see Lanah Sawyer’s world with new eyes. Part of that was physical. Knowing where people lived and where events took place helped me visualize the city she lived in. I was able, for example, to retrace the path she took on her evening walk with Harry Bedlow—and over the course of the next day: the streets she walked down, the buildings she passed, the open spaces where she lingered, the distances she traversed and what she may have seen along the way. And part of that was intangible—a way of seeing the invisible personal connections, neighborhood communities, and social divisions that shaped her experience.

Above all, I was struck by the city’s remarkable intimacy. From her stepfather’s house near the corner of Gold and Beekman Streets, Lanah could walk almost anywhere in the city in less than twenty minutes. She lived in a neighborhood animated by her family’s deep historical roots—and its living branches.  The past and the present were both written on the landscape. And never far away were both friends and foes.

Revisiting the past

Even after I submitted the final manuscript of The Sewing Girl’s Tale, I found that I still couldn’t quite let go. So, on the way home from a family vacation late in the summer of 2021, I turned our car down along the East River to the southern tip of Manhattan, under the Battery, and back out into the fading light to almost precisely the spot where, two hundred and twenty-odd years ago, Lanah Sawyer had paused on the banks of the Hudson to steady her nerves and gather herself. Today, it’s the site of the World Trade Center complex. As things worked out, we were there on the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Our hotel room looked down onto Ground Zero and the throngs of rescue workers who had returned to the scene from all across the city, the surrounding counties, and neighboring states.

In the morning, we walked around the block to visit the graveyard at Trinity Church Wall Street, where some members of Lanah Sawyer’s family were buried.

I had already written about these stones and the monument to Charlotte Temple on the other side of the church. And I had been there several times before. So, I suppose I was coming back to this city of the dead to say goodbye. But knowing more than I had before, I also saw things that I had passed over before. I saw that the mysterious “L.S.” footstone in the crook of the church’s transept was in the same row as the surviving stones of Lanah’s relatives. And I saw that the big white monument dominating this section of the graveyard was for Alexander Hamilton.

I took my kids and husband for a walk retracing Lanah Sawyer’s steps through the city on that fateful evening—down to the Battery to take in the views of the harbor and play in the grass, up Broadway, down Ann Street, and to the site of Mother Carey’s house on Beekman, just off City Hall Park. 

On the way back, we paused in front of St. Paul’s Chapel, one of the few buildings in lower Manhattan that survives from Lanah Sawyer’s day. Just behind the chapel, the new World Trade Center towers soared and glittered.  In front, the chapel’s wrought-iron fence fluttered with thousands of white-and-silver ribbons of remembrance (RIGHT).  A volunteer offered us some and a pen so we could add our own.

My husband had been in the city on 9/11. But our kids were too young to understand much of anything about that. They did, however, miss my mother, who had recently died. So, they wrote out her name on ribbons and we tied them in her honor. And I thought of Lanah Sawyer.