One of the first botanical gardens in America bloomed in 1810 where Rockefeller Center is today

Great cities are founded on great institutions, like banks, schools, and hospitals. New York City, the most populous city in the young United States as of 1790, checked all these boxes.

What New York was missing, however, was a botanical garden—a sweeping green space filled with native and imported plants that could be “one of the genteelest and most beautiful of public improvements,” advocated Samuel Latham Mitchell, a professor of botany at Columbia College, then on Lower Broadway.

Besides elevating New York as a metropolis, a botanical garden could be used for teaching and agricultural experiments, Mitchell argued. Though Mitchell proposed the idea in 1794, it was another Columbia botany professor and physician, David Hosack, who made it reality.

Hosack was a pivotal character in some headline-grabbing events in post-colonial New York City. Born in Manhattan in 1769, he was apprenticing at New York Hospital on Broadway and Pearl Street in 1788 when the “Doctors Riot” broke out: a violent mob, enraged by rumors of physicians stealing bodies from graves for medical experimentation, stormed the building.

After finishing his medical training, he opened a practice in the city and became the personal physician of the Hamilton family. In 1804, it was Hosack (below, in an 1826 portrait by Rembrandt Peale) who tried to save Alexander Hamilton after Hamilton was mortally wounded in his duel with Aaron Burr in 1804.

But back to the botanical garden: Hosack became the leading proponent at the dawn of the 19th century. He sough funds to build it from Columbia and the state legislature, but both turned him down.

“Finally, in 1801, Hosack resolved to take the matter into his own hands, personally financing the purchase of twenty acres of land in the countryside to the north of the city, between what is now 47th and 51st Streets and Fifth and Sixth Avenues,” states the National Gallery of Art.

He named the land, which he paid about $5,000 for, Elgin Garden, after his father’s birthplace in Scotland. (Below, Elgin Garden is marked on an 1897 redrawing of the 1807 version of the Commissioners’ map of the city street grid.)

At the time, this area was part of the bucolic countryside of Manhattan, located a good 3-4 miles from the main city. Today, of course, this is smack in the middle of the concrete and steel of Art Deco Rockefeller Center.

Elgin described the land as “variegated and extensive, and the soil itself of that diversified nature, as to be particularly well adapted to the cultivation of a great variety of vegetable productions,” according to the National Gallery of Art.

After purchasing the property from the city in 1801, Hosack got to work: he asked friends in Europe and the West Indies to send him plants. He built greenhouses and hothouses; he hired gardeners to help with the labor of planting so many specimens.

By 1806, Elgin Garden had 2,000 plants, including a ring of elms, sugar maples, oaks, poplars, and locust trees. The rest of the garden was completed within a few years—one of the first botanical gardens in America.

“Walks on either side of the garden led to compartments of plants laid out according to their scientific order, and beyond them lay a nursery of fruit trees, a pond…and native plants, such as rhododendron, magnolias, and willows, which favored the moist ground adjacent to the pond,” stated the National Gallery. Rocky outcroppings were planted with pine, juniper, yew, and hemlock.”

You would think such loveliness would be maintained and preserved for decades, especially in a city that had yet to build its great public park. But by 1811, Hosack could no longer handle the financial burden.

“Operation of the garden proved too costly for Hosack, who sold the land to New York State,” wrote the New York Daily News in 1982. The state allowed Columbia to use the land for study, but the school let it go into disrepair.

“On a visit in August 1813, Hosack, who continued to collect seeds and plant materials for the garden, was distressed to find that the greenhouse plants had not been set outdoors during the summer, that many of them were missing, that the shrubbery in front of the greenhouse was choked with sunflowers, and that vegetation had overtaken the walks,” wrote the National Gallery of Art.

Columbia bought the garden outright in 1814, according to the Daily News, under an agreement with the state that the school would move its facilities there from Lower Manhattan. Instead, Columbia allowed it to deteriorate.

By the middle of the 19th century, the urban city had arrived on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, making the land on the former garden was quite valuable. Columbia made money leasing it for residential development, but in the 1920s, “many of the 298 row houses in this once stylish neighborhood had deteriorated into an unseemly collection of boarding houses, nightclubs, and speakeasies on the northern boundary of New York’ s theater district,” wrote the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The wrecking ball arrived in the early 1930s to make way for Rockefeller Center. Hosack himself passed away almost a century earlier; he had a stroke at age 66 after exhausting himself during the Great Fire of 1835, when a quarter of the city burned to the ground.

Today, a plaque commemorating Elgin Garden exists in this skyscraper mini-city, memorializing David Hosack as a “man of science,” “citizen of the world,” and the developer of a botanical garden “for the knowledge of plants.”

[Top image: From the Archives of The New York Botanical Garden, via Wikipedia; second image: NYPL; third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: Wikipedia; fifth image: Drawing of Elgin by Reinagle, frontispiece of Hosack’s Hortus Elginensis catalogue, via Wikipedia; sixth image: Tabea Hosier, Elgin Botanical Gardens, 1936, National Gallery of Art]

Tags: David Hosack 19th Century New York City, David Hosack Elgin Garden, Dr. David Hosack NYC, Elgin Botanical Garden, Elgin Garden, Elgin Garden Rockefeller Center, First Botanical Garden in NYC, First Botanical Garden in U.S.