Mulberry Street’s grim 18th century nickname

Today’s Mulberry Street is a slender little strip of restaurants, cafes, and boutiques—part trendy Nolita, part Little Italy tourist district.

But it was a very different scene on Mulberry in the late 18th century.

The southern end of the street abutted Collect Pond, once a source of fresh water but by now the site of tanneries, pottery works, and other noxious industries that needed access to water.

One of those industries was the slaughterhouse business. After one opened in the 1770s, others followed, to the point where Mulberry Street was known as “Slaughterhouse Street.”

The rollicking Bull’s Head Tavern, on the Bowery (parts of which have been recently uncovered underground), catered to the butchers and cattle men who worked in the abattoirs on and near Mulberry Street.

This circa-1800 sketch of the tavern and an adjoining pen belonging to a slaughterhouse provides an idea of what Slaughterhouse Street looked like. (What it smelled like, one can only imagine!)

When western Canal Street had a “Suicide Slip”

Canal Street really was a canal back in the early 19th century; it carried filthy water from polluted Collect Pond, near Lafayette Street, and emptied it into the Hudson.

After the canal was filled in and made a road in 1820, the far western edge of newly named Canal Street served a more ghoulish purpose.

“The Street took its name naturally from the little stream which was called a canal,” writes Charles Hemstreet in his 1899 book Nooks and Corners of Old New York.

“The locality at the foot of the street has received the local title of “Suicide Slip” because of the number of persons in recent years who have ended their lives by jumping into Hudson River at that point.”

The Historical Guide to the City of New York also marks this as a suicide spot. “The small park at West and Canal Streets was once called Suicide Slip,” it states mysteriously.

The ladies looking out over lower Broadway

It kind of looks like they’re entombed in propped-up coffins and are about to be laid to rest, doesn’t it?

Whatever the backstory, these ladies now stand guard on the facade of the 12-story Broadway-Franklin Building.

Constructed in 1907 as an office tower, the building is also referred to as Collect Pond House Apartments, after the 18th century pond-turned-stinkhole that once existed across nearby Lafayette Street.

Remnants of old Manhattan live on in city parks

Bloomingdale Playground, a spit of land on Amsterdam Avenue and 104th Street, is a reminder that much of the west side was once known by Dutch settlers as Bloemendaal, or “valley of flowers.”

Bloemendaal turned into Bloomingdale once the British moved in. 

In 1703, an early highway called Bloomingdale Road was built. It eventually ran through today’s Upper West Side.

By 1900, Bloomingdale Road had become Broadway, and the Bloomingdale name forgotten.

Collect Pond was never a neighborhood name. But after the pond was filled in by the city in 1811, it eventually became the site of the notorious 19th century slum called Five Points.

[Illustration depicting Collect Pond in the late 18th century. What was once the city’s water source soon became a filthy, polluted body of water.]

Collect Pond Park, on Leonard Street off Lafayette Street, is all that’s left.

What happened to Paradise Square?

That very auspicious name was given to the neighborhood built in the early 19th century over the site of Collect Pond.

A pristine body of water in colonial times, Collect Pond was basically an open sewer by 1800. It was located near today’s Centre and Lafayette Streets.

The city filled the pond in 1811, and Paradise Square sprang up over it, according to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

But Paradise Square only lasted a few decades. The water table was so high, the neighborhood began sinking—and emitting a rancid smell, prompting affluent families to leave.

By the 1830s it was known as Five Points, the notorious slum that was a breeding ground for crime, gangs, and disease.

The Paradise name lived on until the early 1900s in the form of Paradise Park, as seen in the NYPL postcard above. It was renamed Columbus Park in 1911.