The gritty history of an 18th century Village lane

Prison inmates, slaughterhouse workers, runaway pigs, and unlucky sailors are some of the New Yorkers who tread the paving stones of Charles Lane—a Greenwich Village alley between Perry and Charles Streets that has a colorful history.

The prisoners walked here first. The lane was laid out in 1797, states the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. It formed the northern border of Newgate State Prison (below), built at the foot of the Hudson River that same year.

Newgate was supposed to be a new kind of prison a mile or so from the city downtown; it gave rise to the saying “sent up the river.” The novel idea was to provide moral instruction rather than just harsh corporal punishment.

But it quickly became overcrowded, and inmates frequently rioted.

Prisoners sentenced to death likely had to walk past Charles Lane to get to Washington Square Park, where execution awaited, according to Mike Wallace, coauthor of Gotham, per a New York Times article.

After Newgate was shuttered in 1828, the lane became “Pig Alley,” thanks to “the slaughterhouse which formerly graced the middle of it,” explains a 1913 Evening World article.

“There were always stray pigs about the place then, without sense enough to leave the spot where they were to meet their certain dooms.”

Men who worked the ships met terrible fates here too. “It was a wicked place of nights,” the Evening World continued, rather illustriously.

“Many a poor sailor or longshoremen has been carried out from under its yellow lanterns never to wake again except among the company of harped and winged saints who came by way of the Potter’s Field. . . . “

By 1893, Charles Lane got its current name and was officially mapped, states GVSHP.

When photographer Berenice Abbott shot Charles Lane in 1938 (left), the view looking north toward Washington Street shows us an unkempt alley filled with debris—but oh, those beautiful old blocky stones!

Today the alley is cleaned up, and the West Street end buts up against luxury glass co-ops. I don’t know if those co-op owners ever walk through Charles Lane, but I hope they do. I hope they tread lightly and feel its ghosts.

[All Photos © Ephemeral New York except photo 2, from the NYPL, image 3, from the NYPL, and image 5, from MOMA]

Broadway’s delightful bend at East 10th Street

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]

Was a beloved book written on Macdougal Street?

Macdougal Street in the West Village casts a huge literary shadow.

In the 1920s and 1930s, writers like Theodore Dreiser, Ezra Pound, and Sinclair Lewis drank and ate at Polly’s and the Minetta Tavern. Jack Kerouac and Frank O’Hara hung out at the San Remo and the Kettle of Fish.

And around the corner, Edgar Allan Poe published The Raven while living at 85 West Third Street in the mid-1840s.

But there’s another literary claim to fame on Macdougal Street. In 1868, Louisa May Alcott reportedly wrote part of Little Women from her uncle’s double-wide red townhouse at numbers 130-132.

“In 1868, Louisa May Alcott sat at her desk before the second story window in her uncle’s house on MacDougal Street and penned the final paragraph of Little Women,“ states this New York University web page, by way of City Guide NY. (NYU owns the house now.)

“The  joined houses at 130 and 132 MacDougal Street had been built in 1852 and purchased by Alcott’s uncle. Alcott remained in her uncle’s house until 1870.”

Despite what NYU says, there’s some dispute over whether Alcott wrote any of her story about the March family here.

Alcott reportedly wrote the novel at her family’s home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts.

An 1880 New York Times article on Alcott, by that time nationally famous, states that she wrote the novel in Boston.

“Most of her work has been done here; the first part of Little Women was written at the South End, and the second part in the Bellevue Hotel, on Beacon-Street, her favorite quarters. . . .”

And  in Susan Cheever’s Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography, Cheever references the “manufactured” fact that Alcott penned part of the book here.

“Even the amazing NYU archivists have only been able to find references to the fact that Alcott wrote Little Women on MacDougal Street, nothing about how that fact came to be manufactured.”

The model prison in Greenwich Village

If you were convicted of murder or robbery in the City of New York in 1797, you would be ferried up the Hudson to brand-new Newgate Prison on West Street near Christopher Street in the village of Greenwich.

Yep, just a stone’s throw from those luxe Richard Meier glass towers and other tony addresses was once New York State’s first penitentiary.

It was a model prison with a radical concept: that convicts could be rehabilitated through hard work and education. Corporal punishment was banned; inmates who followed the rules were allowed occasional visits from family members.

On a more macabre note, Newgate’s proximity to the infamous hanging elm of Washington Square Park also meant that it was an easy to march prisoners to the park for their appointment with the hangman.

Newgate didn’t last long; by the early 19th century, it was already overcrowded, not just with adult male felons but also juveniles and the insane. In 1828 it closed, and prisoners were transferred to the new Sing Sing prison . . . up the river.

All traces of it are gone, of course, but Newgate is commemorated on the plaques at the Christopher Street/Sheridan Square subway station.