immediately following the
September 11 attacks in 2001 The earliest documentation of Greenwich Street came in the 1790s, when it ran parallel to the
Hudson River. At that time it was called 'Road to Greenwich', as it was the only continuous road from Lower Manhattan to
Greenwich Village other than
Broadway. By the late 18th century, lower Greenwich Street had become part of one of the most fashionable residential neighborhoods in the city, lined with four-story Federal-style mansions, although upper Greenwich street was home to artisans, shopkeepers and an enclave of free blacks. Greenwich Street still maintained its status as a choice address in 1820, but by the 1850s, the wealthy residents had fled uptown, and private residences on the street became unusual. Hotel owner
Amos Eno left once he was "surrounded by immigrant boarding houses," according to his daughter. In 1873, the Butter and Cheese Exchange opened on the street, not far from where dairy products arrived daily at the freight railroad terminals. By 1882, a steam generation plant of the
New York Steam Company was at Greenwich and Dey Streets. In the early 19th century, circus impresario John Bill Ricketts opened his New Amphitheatre on Greenwich streets, designed by
Joseph-François Mangin, where sell-out crowds watched his "Equestrian Circus", which featured "clowns, tightrope walkers, tumblers, acrobatic riders, mounted Indians and fireworks." This continued a tradition for the area, as 150 years earlier "Vauxhall Gardens", which boasted a wax museum and fireworks and served afternoon teas, was put up by
Samuel Fraunces, of
Fraunces Tavern, near the present corner of Greenwich and Warren Streets. In 1824, painter
Thomas Cole, who had arrived in the U.S. in 1818, maintained his residence in a
garret on Greenwich Street, exhibiting his paintings in local shops. Poet and writer
Edgar Allan Poe lived in a boardinghouse on the street briefly between 1844 and 1845, but did not like the neighborhood, complaining of dirty streets and the noise made by clam-and-catfish vendors. Also on Greenwich Street in the mid-1800s was one of the many outlets of "
Madame Restell" (Ann Lohman), who sold pills for
abortion of unwanted pregnancies. The Greenwich Street location doubled as a lying-in facility for women who wanted to bear their child. In 1846, an angry mob, riled up by Restell's competitors and false claims of murder, descended on her Greenwich Street headquarters and attempted to evict her from the city; 40 policemen restored order. Restell, who was wealthy from her business, was arrested a number of times, but was able to buy her way out of trouble, and eventually built a mansion at
Fifth Avenue and
52nd Street. In 1867, engineer Charles T. Harvey managed to get permission from the
New York State Legislature to build a short stretch of elevated track as an experiment on Greenwich Street north of Battery Place. The half-mile single-track set-up, which had two stationary engines at each end, attached by cables to a car which the motors shuttled back and forth, was ready for testing by June 1868. Harvey filed for personal bankruptcy on
Black Friday (1869), resulting from the speculations of
Jay Gould and
James Fisk, but the company he set up went through several reorganizations and emerged in 1872 as the
New York Elevated Railway Company, which utilized steam locomotives to pull cars on a single elevated track that ran up Greenwich and
Ninth Avenue to
30th Street, where a connection could be made at the terminal of the
Hudson River Railroad. Eventually, this would become the
IRT Ninth Avenue Line; the elevated tracks were demolished in 1940. At the
World Trade Center site, Greenwich Street once ran through a neighborhood called
Radio Row, which specialized in selling radio parts. The neighborhood was demolished in 1962, when the area was condemned to make way for the
Construction of the World Trade Center. After the
World Trade Center was destroyed in the
September 11 attacks, the public supported rebuilding a street grid through the World Trade Center site. It was ultimately decided to rebuild
Cortlandt,
Fulton, and Greenwich Streets, which had been destroyed during the original World Trade Center's construction.
Etymology Both Greenwich Street, originally called Greenwich Road, and
Greenwich Avenue, with which it is sometimes confused, derive their names from the formerly independent
Greenwich Village, a rural settlement that was subsumed by New York City as the city grew northward. "Greenwich" means "Green village", with the "wich" derived from
Latin vicus through
Old Saxon wick. Of the two roads, Greenwich Street was the shorter, more scenic and popular until the 19th century, when landfill moved the river's edge farther away. ==Transportation==