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the officers of the post were received on board as guests, the city in the evening, with the exhibition of various of the Corporation of New York, invited to take part in emblematic transparencies, and an unusual display of the closing festivities. Early on the morning of the next fireworks from the roof of the City Hall. day, the 4th of November, the fleet was anchored opposite the city in the North River. Here Governor Clinton was welcomed by a committee of the Common Council. Presently all were again in motion for the formation of the grand aquatic procession to be manauvred in the harbor and sail in magnificent array to the ocean. The fleet which had descended the Hudson was now joined by large accessions from the city, the Fulton assisting the Chancellor Livingston in towing the Seneca Chief; the watermen of Whitehall in their light craft; the Washington, carrying the Common Council with the Mayor of the city, Philip Hone, and some 800 invited guests; the barge Lady Clinton, reserved for the ladies of the party; and a large number of steamers plying in the bay, among them the Nautilus, Captain Vanderbilt. The day was remarkably clear and calm, so that this part of the entertainment had every advantage of sky and water. As the grand procession swept by the Battery, which offered the best view of the spectacle, it was cheered by the guns of the neighboring forts, and as it entered the Narrows a national salute was fired from Fort Lafayette. On reaching the ocean the United States schooner Porpoise was in readiness to offer the congratulations of Neptune. A salute was fired from her decks, and immediately the whole fleet formed a circle round her of about three miles in circumference. Here the ceremony was performed by Governor Clinton of mingling the waters of the lakes with the ocean by pouring a keg of the water of Lake Erie into the Atlantic. This was followed by a characteristic performance on the part of Dr. Mitchill, who came provided for the occasion with bottles of water from the Elbe, the Thames, the Seine and Tagus, the Orinoco, La Plata and Amazon, all of which he poured into the sea. Having emptied his bottles, the doctor drew upon the exhaustless stores of his reading in an address redolent of poetry and symbolism. On their return the fleet exchanged salutes with the British ships in the harbor.

The participants in the excursion were landed at the Battery in time to join the city procession, which, having started from that point in the morning, had passed along Greenwich Street and Canal to Broadway, through Broome Street to Bowery, down the Bowery to Pearl Street, and was now entering Broadway at the Battery, on its way to the closing ceremonies at the City Hall. The procession presented a brilliant display in the banners and decorations of the numerous benevolent and mechanic societies; many of the trades the coopers, hatters, and others were exhibited in operation on platforms. On the printers' stage, drawn by four horses, were two hand-presses of the latest invention, on which copies of an ode, written for the occasion by Samuel Woodworth, were struck off and distributed to the multitude. The Fire Department, with its glittering engines and implements, made, as usual, a gallant show. "It was probably," says Dr. Charles King, one of the aids of the day, "the most elaborate and most imposing public ceremony ever witnessed in the city. I know," he adds, "that it is common to speak of each celebration in turn as the finest; but I, who have witnessed a great many fine pageants here and elsewhere, have never seen one which, in all its effects and moral considerations, and actual display on land and on water, equaled the Canal Jubilee. "* The day was succeeded by a brilliant illumination of

Lecture before the New York Mechanics' Society, 1857.

The completion of the Erie Canal was an event of the first importance both to the City and State of New York. The next celebration of a great undertaking accomplished, following seventeen years after, belonged peculiarly, though not exclusively, to the city. This was the completion, in 1842, of the Croton Aqueduct, bringing the waters of the river, an affluent of the Hudson beyond Sing Sing, from its far home through the difficult region of Westchester County, rising in strong hills or sinking in deep valleys, across the Harlem River, to be carried onward in its covered channel of solid masonry, and distributed to the streets and houses of New York. The city from the beginning had a bad reputation for the insalubrity of its water. The wells in the earliest time were brackish and unwholesome. It was the complaint, as we have seen, of the traveler Kalm, that the stranger arriving at the place could get no water fit for his horse to drink. Good springs were to be found in the higher parts of the island, just beyond the inhabited portion; but, as population was pushed onward, it carried its deteriorating influence with it, and the sources were corrupted. The problem of securing a plentiful and wholesome supply of water for the citizens in their homes was one which, for a long time, gave employment to the scheming brains of restless speculators and cunning inventors, of practical men and the impracticable. It was probably a benefit in the end that the work constantly projected was so often deferred, so long delayed. When done at last, it was well done, and doubtless all the better for hesitation and failure which had exhausted all minor and less effective projects. New York, in more than one instance, has been the gainer by patient waiting. She has been slow to take upon her the work of many civic improvements, but when she has moved, it has been for great results. There are some things in the management or neglect of her affairs which afford material enough at present for grumbling, but the example of what she has done in suddenly removing old grievances, imparts confidence that what we groan over to-day may be supplanted by some brilliant achievement to-morrow. In this matter of the introduction of the Croton water, how long was it sighed for in vain; how much unavailing newspaper indignation was there expended on behalf of a long-suffering community? It is curious and instructive to note the various attempts made at the solution of the problem, distant and interrupted precursors of the conclusive effort. They not only illustrate the subject, but exhibit something of the actual condition of the city at different times. Projects were listened to at one period as all-sufficient, which at another were quietly dropped for their imbecility. The city had outgrown them.

The first serious effort to supply the inhabitants of New York with pure water was entered upon just before the Revolution, in 1774, when the Common Council of the city, entertaining the proposition of the ingenious Christopher Colles, actually purchased the land and issued paper bills of credit for the purpose of erecting a suitable Reservoir. The site chosen was then beyond the limits of the thickly settled portion of the city, on Broadway, or, as it was then called above the Park, Great George Street, between the present Pearl and White Streets. Pure springs then abounded in that locality. Wells were to be dug and the water pumped up into a Reservoir. An outline of the machinery by which this was to be effected may be seen on the reverse of the

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unpaid little treasury-notes of the city, having the imprint of Hugh Gaine, and the promises, in small amounts, of the Corporation of those days, in form and appearance very like the paper Continental money issued so freely a few years afterward. The money, from its minute subdivision, was probably freely circulated, and is still to be met with in the hands of collectors. The Van Cortlandt family were paid for the land; the work went on, and the Reservoir might have been filled with water but for

the untoward disturbance of the Revolution. After that was over nothing more was heard of the investment; but the want remained, and new schemes were set afloat to meet it. Private persons began to approach the Corporation with proposals, and that body got so farand no further-as to assert the principle that the privi lege of supplying the city with water should be kept to itself, and not given to individuals.

In 1789, Rumsey, of Philadelphia, confident of his

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into operation, but instead of drawing wholesome water from a distance, as was expected, sank a well in Duane Street, with which they supplied a distributing reservoir on their premises, fronting on Chambers Street. The water was thence carried about the city in wooden pipes. The Manhattan Bank flourished-the Manhattan water, loaded with noxious impurities, soon became a byword and offense. The company, with its privileges and promises, long stood in the way of improvement.

hydraulic inventions, offered to furnish the city with, The company was chartered in 1799, and went immediately pure water by contract. He was encouraged to bring forward his plan, and did not. Passing over others, in 1795 Samuel Crane, clinging to the old Tea-water Pump, proposed to lead the water from that source about the town. Then came propositions for pipe-laying, and in 1798 a communication of a larger scope than any heretofore made, by Dr. Joseph Brown, suggesting the Bronx River, in Westchester County, as a source of supply. A dam was to be built, from which the water was to be brought by a canal to the Harlem River, carried across the stream in pipes, and pumped up into an elevated Reservoir on New York Island, for distribution to the city. This was a wide leap, for those days, from the Tea-water Pump in Roosevelt Street.

In presenting his scheme, Dr. Brown spoke with authority as a physician, urging upon the citizens the necessity of action for the safety of their lives, as he attributed much of the virulence of the late visitations of yellow fever to the insufficient and impure water in use. The Common Council was moved, called upon the Legislature for power to act on the general subject, and obtained a report from the Canal Engineer, Mr. Watson, which proved favorable to the plan of Dr. Brown.

It seems that at this time there was a strong disposition to utilize that natural reservoir, the Collect. The water of this pond had a high reputation for purity; it was much admired for its coolness; its great depth promised an adequate. supply, and, in comparison with the distant Bronx, it certainly had the advantage of being at hand in the city. Dr. Brown, in his memorial, poured contempt upon

The subject, however, continued to be agitated. In 1819 a proposal was made by Robert Macomb to bring to the city the pure waters of Rye Pond, about thirty miles distant, in Westchester County. The Housatonic River was talked of for the purpose, and a charter obtained from Connecticut in 1823; in 1825 the New York Waterworks Company was incorporated by the Legislature, and in 1827 the New York Well Company, the water to be procured on the island, on elevated grounds; all

SAMUEL F. B. MORSE.

the notion of drawing water from "the large, stagnating, filthy pond, commonly called the Collect, which now is, or soon will be, the centre of the city," and consequently the drain and sink of its manifold contaminations; while the engineer Weston, admitting that "the general bias of opinion was in favor of the scheme," suggested doubts of the continued purity of the water, and questioned the adequacy of the supply. This discussion appears to have disposed of the Collect in this relation. A few years after, this pond, a natural feature of much interest in the geography of the island, was filled up, partly with earth from the neighboring elevation of Bunker's Hill, famed for the fine circular prospect from the summit, which was leveled in the same march of city improvements.

The Bronx scheme was costly for the time, and fell before the more easy and plausible method of financiering advocated by Aaron Burr, of securing the work mainly at the expense of an incorporation created under the name of the Manhattan Company, ostensibly with the primary object of supplying the city with pure water, but in reality with the design of securing perpetual banking privileges. I

these, and a project partly carried out the next year of sinking artesian wells, ended in nothing. In 1829, at the instance of the Fire Department, a well and reservoir were established, with distributing pipes, in Fourteenth Street, near Broadway. "From this feeble and economical beginning," says Charles King,

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only proper and sufficient means of supply, though the Bronx and inferior schemes were still talked of. In 1833 and the following year Acts were passed by the Legislature providing for the appointment of Water Commissioners charged with the subject of supplying the city with pure water, with power of employing engineers and making contracts, subject to the approval of the City Corporation, the whole, when matured and the expense estimated, to be submitted to a final determining vote of the people. Under this Act Stephen Allen, William W. Fox, Saul Alley, Charles Dusenberry, and Benjamin M. Brown, were appointed commissioners. The necessary surveys having been made under the direction of Major David B. Douglas, engineer, a report was made in favor of the Croton River as the only full and pure source of supply; and in April, 1885, the recommendation being approved by the Common Council, the ratification of the measure went before the people of the city, 17,330 voting for it, 5,963 against it. Funds were now raised by the creation of a special water stock, and the work was proceeded with without delay under the direction of J. B. Jervis as chief engineer.

Appraisements were made of the value of land required on the route of the Aqueduct; a dam was constructed at the Croton River, six miles above its mouth; conduits of solid masonry led thence a distance of thirty-two miles to the Harlem River. By a special Act in 1839 the Legislature ordered the construction of the High Bridge at that point; waiting its completion, the water was conveyed across the valley by a temporary pipe; a receiving reservoir was erected on New York Island at Eightysixth Street, now the lower reservoir in the Central Park, and a distributing reservoir at Murray Hill, the entire distance being about forty and a half miles. On the 22d of June, 1842, the water was let into the receiving reservoir with appropriate ceremonies; and on the ensuing 4th of July into the distributing reservoir. A grand civic celebration of the completion of the work took place on the 14th of October, 1842. A procession was formed in ten divisions, in which were represented the military; official persons of the State and city; the literary and benevolent societies; the temperance societies, an appropriate feature of the day; the butchers of New York and Brooklyn; the fire department. The route of the procession was from the Battery up Broadway to Union Park, down the Bowery to Grand Street, through Grand Street to East Broadway, thence through Chatham Street to the City Hall Park. As the front reached the eastern gate of the park, at the end of the circuit, the rear was passing the western, up Broadway. It was thus about seven miles long. The closing ceremonies took place in front of the City Hall, where addresses were delivered by Samuel Stevens, President of the Board of Water Commissioners, and J. L. Lawrence, President of the Croton Aqueduct Board, followed by the singing of an ode composed for the occasion by George P. Morris. Thus, in five years, between 1837 and 1842, with an expenditure of twelve millions of dollars, a work of inestimable importance, the discussion of which had agitated the city for the better part of a century in abortive schemes and unfulfilled expectations, was quietly and thoroughly accomplished, leaving its gigantic development in the future, commensurate with the increasing requirements of the city, a simple matter of

routine.

A commercial city, with its eager pursuit of material interests, would not, at a first glance, appear favorable to the cultivation of art; but, as it is more closely regarded, influences begin to appear which, in the end, prove its best encouragement and support. The energies required in the mercantile life generate other and higher forms of mental activity; accumulated wealth provides at once the means and incentive of art production, which enters largely into the commodities of advanced trade; luxury requires new resources of enjoyment beyond the supply of the mere necessities of life; the ideal is ever best sustained in healthy development by contact with the actual. These considerations explain the growth of art, in its various forms, in contact with wealth and material civilization. So the fine arts wait upon the metropolis, and crown the edifice which commerce has built.

New York, compared with the great cities of the Old World, is still in her infancy, yet we find her honorably connected with the history of art in America. The early painters of the country, in whatever colony they were born and nurtured, set up at one time or other their studios in this city. Benjamin West, the nursing father of the race, passed here nearly a year, at the age of twenty, painting the portraits of many leading citizens at double the prices he had hitherto obtained, and when he

left to sail for Italy to achieve his noble position in England, it was by the liberality of his last sitter, a New York merchant named Kelly, that he was cheered on his way by a munificent gift of fifty guineas. Among the portraits which he painted in the city were those of Bishop Provoost, still owned by Trinity Church, and of Gerardus Duyckinck and his wife, of the Rapelje family, a famous belle in her way. The latter were full-lengths. Copley, the contemporary of West, who, like him, left the country at an early age to rise rapidly to eminence in Europe, resided for some time in New York, “painting for the rich and fashionable" at his studio in Broadway. His portrait, painted about 1773, of the Rev. John Ogilvie, of Trinity Parish, remains an excellent specimen of his style. He also painted in crayons in the city at this time.

Malbone, the graceful miniature-painter, who lighted up the countenances of his sitters with the refinement of his own gentle nature, found a generous support for his art in his visit to this city in 1797, at the age of twenty. Stuart, among the foremost portrait-painters of all time, after he had established his reputation in London, on his return to America opened a studio in Stone Street, where, Dunlap tells us, "it appeared to him as if he had never seen portraits before, so decidedly was form and mind conveyed to the canvas. Among his chief New York portraits are those of John Jay, General Gates, Egbert Benson, General Clarkson and John R. Murray. Trumbull was much at New York, in the exercise of his art, painting Washington in the city in 1790, and others, and in his later days presiding, somewhat narrowly, it was thought, over the waning Academy of the Fine Arts. Vanderlyn, a native of the State, born in 1776, at Kingston, Ulster County, came to New York in his boyhood, and acquired a taste for his profession as a painter in the employ of a Mr. Barrow, an importer of engravings and dealer in prints. He was taught drawing in the school kept in the city by Archibald Robertson, an emigrant from Scotland, the painter of a miniature Washington, and, setting up a studio, was patronized by Aaron Burr, who assisted him in going abroad. On his return to New York, he was much engaged in furthering the fine-art interest of the city, where, about 1817, he opened an exhibition of panoramic paintings in the building known as the Rotunda, erected by him, with the pecuniary aid of his friends, in the City Hall Park. Here he exhibited, besides his "Panorama of Versailles" and others, his wellknown painting of "Ariadne," and "Marius amid the Ruins of Carthage," for the latter of which he had received the Napoleon gold medal in Paris. John Wesley Jarvis, born in England, the nephew of the great Church reformer whose name he bore, was brought in his childhood to Philadelphia, and early in life established himself as a portrait-painter in New York. Here he made his way upward in the professio1, at first in partnership with Joseph Wood, drawing profiles on glass, achieving popularity among the citizens by his rare social talents, and, in the war of 1812, securing permanence of fame by his numerous portraits of the military and naval heroes of the period, painted by order of the Corporation, for the Gallery at the City Hall.

With Cooke, the actor, and Gilbert Stuart, Jarvis has left a fund of personal anecdote, preserved on the pages of Dunlap. He was a most agreeable companion; his stories were excellent, and in more than one instance furnished material for the entertainments of Charles Mathews; but his pleasant experiences were, as is often the case, allied to a careless, improvident disposition, which somewhat clouded his professional career.

His

In 1793, there was an eccentric but very versatile follower of the arts in New York, John Roberts, a native of Dumfries, Scotland, and friend of Robert Burns, musician, mathematician, mechanician and engraver. There was then in the city an excellent miniature-painter, Benjamin Trott, who had copied Stuart's portrait of Washington. Roberts undertook to engrave this, and had completed his work, when a hasty misunderstanding with his friend Trott led him to destroy it. A few proofs had been taken off, one of which, in the collection of the late Dr. Anderson, shows the hand of a finished artist. Dunlap speaks of his engraving, in 1797, the frontispiece for Longworth's edition of "Telemachus," the plates of which were the work of another New York engraver, Thomas Clarke.

pupil, Henry Inman, carried his art much higher, his | engravings, was his pupil. Tiebout subsequently went best portraits ranking him with the masters of the Ame- to Philadelphia, where he had a prosperous career in his rican school in grace, refinement and power of expres- profession till he engaged in an unsuccessful trading sion. He was a native of the State, and early came to speculation, on the failure of which he removed to Kenreside in the City of New York, where his best artistic tucky, where he died. years were spent, and where his life was closed in 1846. His contemporary, Huntington, his rival in versatility, fifteen years younger, belongs entirely to the City of New York by both residence and his eminently distinguished professional career. Refined, tender, imaginative in art, he represents the noblest moral elements of the profession in his presidency of the National Academy of Design, to which he was called as the successor of Durant in 1862. The latter, like his distinguished predecessor in the office, Morse, achieved reputation in two distinct departments, either of which would secure his permanent fame as an engraver of the highest excellence, his numerous portraits of the eminent men of the country, his "Musidora" and "Ariadne," after Vanderlyn's painting, and his grand historical composition after Trumbull's "Declaration of Independence" ranking him with the foremost artists of this or of any country, while in his later career as a painter he has transferred to his canvas, with a grace peculiarly his own-the reflection of a truly generous nature-the most delicate and subtle beauties of the American landscape. Nor are his merits as a portrait-painter to be forgotten. Morse belongs to Massachusetts by birth, but to New York by long residence and the achievement here of his position in the scientific world, which has somewhat thrown into the shade his early career as a painter, when he was associated as a pupil with the fathers of the art, West and Copley, and as a fellow-student in bonds of ardent friendsip with Allston and Leslie. His art career in New York is identified with the history of the National Academy of Design, of which he was first president, and of which he may be said to have been the founder. Elliott, too, younger than Inman, like him born in the interior of the State, his successor as the chief American portrait-painter of his day, identified by the pursuit of his profession in the city with its social history, has passed away at the height of his fame, leaving an abiding impression of his strength and genius. These, the living and the dead, are historic names in the art records of the country, and are all identified with the City of New York. We might enumerate other contemporary artists of enviable fame, but our business here is mainly with the past.

We have spoken of eminent painters. There is another department of art, chiefly employed in rendering their works familiar to the public. It has a language, too, of its own, and its productions, freely multiplied, often survive the originals. This is engraving. Here also New York may challenge something of a position. Cornelius Tiebout, a native of the city, was one of the earliest American copperplate engravers. He was led to the profession by his apprenticeship to a silversmith in the city, who employed him in engraving. After being engaged on various miscellaneous works for the booksellers in New York, he visited London in 1796, and improved greatly under the instruction of the eminent engraver Heath. On his return he executed some excellent portraits. Dunlap speaks of a head of John Jay. Another of much merit was a plate of full quarto size, an excellent engraving of Stuart's fine head of General Gates. He also executed a portrait of Bishop White after Stuart. Tiebout's office, as we learn from his handsomely engraved card with a flourish of Cupids, was at 28 Gold Street. Benjamin Tanner, whose name appears on old

Rollinson, Scoles, Gimbrede, Forman, and the elder Maverick, were early copperplate engravers, employed by the booksellers in the city. Good specimens of the works of these artists are rare; but something more than has yet been attempted might be accomplished to rescue their memory from oblivion. Of their successors in our own time it is less necessary here to speak. The younger Maverick, master of a clear, open style, devoted himself to bank-note engraving, which has since absorbed so much of talent, and it is at the present day, in the hands of Smillie and others, the peculiar department of American art.

In this province, of those who have passed away, Danforth, one of the founders of the National Academy, who died in this city in 1862, will long be remembered for his admirable engravings of the works of Leslie, which rank him with the best of the English school. At a later date, Burt, Halpin and Marshall occupy the foremost place in the prosecution of one of the most difficult branches of the art, portrait-engraving.

His

In the history of wood-engraving, an art now of universal diffusion, there is one name which should not be forgotten in the annals of the City of New York-Alexander Anderson, the father of the profession in America, who died at the advanced age of ninety-five. father, a native of Scotland, carried on in New York the business of a printer, having, in 1773, in partnership with Samuel F. Parker, been engaged in an attempt to revive Parker's New York Gazette, and subsequently, at an office of his own, issued the Constitutional Gazette, a journal published twice a week, from July, 1775, till the end of August, 1776, and devoted to the popular cause. The printer's son, Alexander, was born in the City of New York, April 21st, 1775. He was therefore in his infancy when his father, the rebel printer, as he was called, was compelled to flee upon the arrival of the British. As he was leaving the island for a place of refuge in Connecticut, his wagons were seized for the use of the patriot garrison at Fort Washington, and his books and papers converted into cartridges. Young Anderson's first associations were those of rural life on the shores of the Sound at Greenwich; but he also derived some impressions of art, to which he was peculiarly susceptible, from the rude, grotesque woodcuts which were then printed in books, and something of a higher character from the prints of Hogarth. Returning to New York at the departure of the British, he entered upon a course of school education, receiving instruction in Latin and Greek, while he gratified his own boyish instinct in

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