It’s easy to become absorbed in a panorama view of New York City—to find yourself enthralled by the details of streets and buildings and enchanted by the mysterious towers and steeples of the expansive cityscape in the distance.
And when that panorama dates back to the 1860s—a time when landscape photography was certainly in use but not quite as widespread as it would be a decade later—you might as well cancel all your plans for the day; you’ll be entranced for hours.
That’s my experience looking at this 1864 image of Jefferson Market, at Sixth and Greenwich Avenues and 10th Street in Greenwich Village. While the Victorian Gothic Jefferson Market Courthouse that replaced it in 1877 (and still stands today) is a magnificent sight to behold, this low-rise warren of market stalls and the fire watchtower beside it offer insight into the Civil War-era Village.
The first Jefferson Market, at the northwest corner of Sixth and Greenwich Avenues, got its start in 1833; it was a one- and two-story collection of stalls with a wooden cupola on top that served as a fire watchtower (above).
That original watchtower actually burned down in 1851. The eight-story watchtower in the photo at the top of this post and in the below illustration is its replacement—one of the tallest structures in the city at the time.
At the market, butchers, fishmongers, poultry vendors, and hucksters sold their wares, according to NYC Parks. A “country market” of vegetable sellers joined the complex, all serving the food and grocery needs of an increasingly industrialized Greenwich Village.
The fire watchtower—one of eight in the city in the mid-19th century—was manned by a watcher who sounded a bell that summoned volunteer firefighters to the site of smoke or flames. No longer needed after 1878 thanks to the invention of the telegraph and the creation of a professional fire department, the watchtower at Jefferson Market became obsolete.
What’s beyond the market and fire watchtower captivates me. I believe we’re looking north in the panorama photo at top; there’s a stretch of two-story buildings with an ad for “C.H. Howe, Painter” on the side. On the next block, a row of three-story buildings can be seen. I think this row still exists—one building might be Barney’s Hardware, at 467 Sixth Avenue.
The area near the market has a gritty feel, with wagons backed into the market sheds and barrels piled on the sidewalk. A streetcar running on hard-to-see steel rails is the only vehicle on a rough-looking Sixth Avenue; perhaps the photo was taken early in the morning, before the workday commenced.
While the fire tower dominates the photo, church steeples loom in the distance. The spire to the right of the tower might belong to the Church of the Annunciation (above), a Gothic-style church on 14th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues from 1846 until it was demolished in 1895, according to David W. Dunlap’s From Abyssinian to Zion : a Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship.
Spires and towers, wooden and cloth canopies covering storefronts, wagons and a streetcar, and a somewhat shabby marketplace crowned by a strangely lovely watchtower—it’s not the charming Greenwich Village of winding cowpaths and precious shops but a bustling part of the urbanized city.
In the 1860s, the neighborhood had already been left behind by the fashionable set in favor of newer enclaves beyond 14th Street.
[Top photo: New York Then and Now; second image: dlibopenlib.org; third image: NYPL Digital Collections; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections]
Ephemeral New York 