One of the wonderful things about New York is how much of the city veers off the rectangular street grid codified by the Common Council in 1811.
The sudden bend on Broadway at East 10th Street is one of those street grid exceptions. And as one story goes, it’s the result of a single man intent on preserving his family farm.
Henry Brevoort Sr. was a descendant of the Brevoort family, which settled in New York from Holland in the 17th century.
His farm was on the outskirts of the early 19th century city, spanning 86 acres from present-day Ninth Street to 18th Street and bounded by Fifth Avenue and the Bowery.
In 1815, with New York’s population swelling and moving northward, city officials announced plans to expand Broadway to 23rd Street and have it run in a straight line.
Straightening Broadway meant that the busy thoroughfare and the urbanization it would bring would cut right through Brevoort’s estate.
He protested, and the city relented: Broadway would curve to avoid the orchards on Brevoort’s farm, on today’s 10th Street.
Brevoort must have been a persuasive (or stubborn) guy. He apparently disrupted the street grid again by barring “the opening of 11th Street between Broadway and the Bowery in the 1830s and [1840s] to prevent the destruction of the old family farm house,” states brooklynhistory.org.
Yet other sources offer a different explanation for the 10th Street bend, one that has nothing to do with Brevoort.
“Broadway was simply angled to run parallel to the Bowery as these streets reached Union Square,” writes Luther S. Harris in Around Washington Square.
“The city found no pressing need to extend 11th Street east through this relatively narrow strip of land at the expense of a rectory and school for Grace Church.”
Grace Church, of course, has graced the 10th Street bend with its Gothic beauty since 1846. The Brevoort family sold parcels of farmland to church planners so it could be built there, soon a fashionable section of the city.
The actual story may have been lost to history. But in one way or another, we have Henry Brevoort to thank for this scenic bend on Broadway.
[Top photo: NYPL, 1913; second photo: MCNY, 1908, x2010.11.791; third image: NYPL, 1960; fourth image: MCNY 1920, x2011.34.116; fifth image, 1884, NYC Vintage Images]
Tags: Broadway 10th Street NYC, Commissioners Plan 1811, Grace Church NYC, Greenwich Village 19th century, Henry Brevoort farm, NYC street grid
Ephemeral New York 
October 28, 2016 at 10:19 pm |
fascinating, I walk by there almost every day on my way to/from work.
October 31, 2016 at 3:27 pm |
“Grace Church, of course, has graced the 10th Street bend with its Gothic beauty since 1846.”
i see what you did there < : D
November 21, 2017 at 11:32 pm |
Isn’t there a similarly historic legend regarding the bend in the road at 3rd Avenue and 10th or 11th Street where the road bent in order to save “Peter Stuyvesant’s” pear tree?
December 4, 2017 at 7:09 am |
[…] begins with the story of the mansion, commissioned in 1834 by Henry Brevoort, a descendant of the Brevoort family—wealthy landowners who trace their lineage to the 17th […]
October 21, 2019 at 5:35 am |
[…] architectural firm, which explains the cathedral-like windows. (Renwick is the genius behind Grace Church and St. Patrick’s […]
July 31, 2023 at 6:13 pm |
Here is a poetic version of the story:
Dutchman’s Quirk
by Arthur Guiterman
Broadway reaches northward from fair Bowling Green
Direct as an arrow-flight, flexureless, clean
And certain of line
As the trunk of a pine
(And would that a rod of its frontage were mine!)
Quite suddenly then,
At the street numbered ” Ten, ”
Above a great warehouse of laces and shawls,
Just south of a chapel with gray Gothic walls,
It leaps to the west
Like a roadway possessed!
In flagrant defiance
Of Reason and Science,
Macadam and Telford and Byrne, and the laws
Of wise Roman roadmakers. . . . Hear ye the cause!
Old Hendrick Brevoort, in — what matters the date?
In days that are gone, held a goodly estate —
A ” bouwerie ” termed in the speech of the Dutch
(His neighbors were Stuyvesants, Banckers, and such);
And there with the hoardings of toil and frugality,
Lived at his ease and dispensed hospitality.
With head in the heavens, deep-rooted in earth,
A tulip-tree, mighty of burgeon and girth,
So stately and proud,
Wide-branching, great-boughed,
O’ershadowed his lawn with an emerald cloud.
‘Twas Hendrick’s delight in the cool of its bower
To smoke and to ponder from hour to hour
With tankard at knee;
” For, truly, ” said he,
” Of all friends, the very best friend is my tree
That never provokes me and never deceives,
But echoes my thoughts with the sigh of its leaves. ”
The Mayor and Council had sanctioned a plan
To straighten the roadways that rambled and ran
Cross-hatching our isle
In a wonderful style —
(Those happy old lanes!) — so they summoned a file
Of axmen with axes and chainmen with chains
And hardy surveyors of mountains and plains
And gave them instructions,
In spite of all ructions,
To follow the chart
Nor ever depart
A hair from its guidance; regardless of mart
Or hovel or mansion, to hew out the way;
Whatever the damage, the city would pay.
Forth sailed that trigonometrical band
To further the work that the Fathers had planned;
And strictly obeying
The rules of surveying,
Invested with powers that challenged gainsaying,
They carried the roadway o’er high land and low,
Direct as the flight of a bee or a crow,
O’er meadow and lot,
Through palace and cot,
By scenes that were seemly (by wiles that were not),
Through acres of flowers
And bird-haunted covers
And byways and bowers
Once sacred to lovers,
Though housewives defended beleagured dominions
Or voiced from their doorways unfettered opinions
Of levels and transits and government minions —
Though cattle protested from buffeted sheds,
Though turnips and cabbages rained on their heads,
Though farmer boys fought them,
Though maidens besought them,
They followed their map, undismayed, till it brought them
To Hendrick Brevoort at the foot of his tree. . . .
What! Yield up his friend to the axman? Not he!
He called out his neighbors, the Blauvelts, the Raynors;
They stirred up their vassals and sturdy retainers,
Their tenants and servants, white, yellow, and black —
Dirck, Chuffee, and Hubert, Claes, Mingo, and Jack —
Both merry young springalds and crusty curmudgeons
With ax-helves and pitchforks and scythe-blades and bludgeons,
Resolved to defend
To the bitterest end
The right of a Dutchman to stand by his friend!
The Knights of the Sextant yet sought to prevail
With promise of riches or threat of the jail;
But, finding old Hendrick perverse or obtuse,
They drew off their army and patched up a truce.
Brevoort left the tree in the keep of his horde
To make good in law what he held by the sword.
He called on the Mayor,
The City Surveyor,
The Coroner, Marshal, and every taxpayer
Of substance or influence, urging his plea
Of ” Woodman, oh, woodman, don’t fool with that tree! ”
Sing hey! for the hard-headed man with a whim!
The plan of a city was altered for him!
The highway led straight
To Hendrick’s estate,
Then gallantly swerved
And gracefully curved
Away to the westward. . . . The tree was preserved!
(To chuckle, no doubt,
At the numberless rout
Of mortals his Majesty made to turn out.)
When up through the canon entitled ” Broadway ”
You’re riding on business or pleasure to-day,
And suddenly, close to the front of Grace Church,
The car takes a curve with a jolt and a lurch
That loosens, mayhap,
Your hold on a strap
And drops you quite neatly in somebody’s lap,
Remember, the cause of that shameful jerk
Is, just as I’ve shown you, a ” Dutchman’s Quirk! “