Livingston's sugar house The sugar house on Crown (now
Liberty) Street in
Manhattan was a six-story stone building which had been built in 1754 by the Livingston family as a refinery with very low floors. According to Revolutionary War veteran Levi Hanford, who was captured in March 1777, the cramped conditions initially housed about 40 to 50 prisoners. The population soon swelled to between 400 and 500, though attrition was constant due to those succumbing to starvation and disease. Rations consisted of pork and
sea biscuits, which were often moldy from sea water and infested with worms. Nevertheless, the starving prisoners seldom refused the food, which was made consumable by placing it in a kettle of water and skimming off the parasites. Supplies for sick prisoners were provided by the fledgling American government, as Hanford stated that "the British furnished nothing." The claim those prisoners are buried in Trinity Churchyard is disputed by Charles I. Bushnell, who argued in 1863 that Trinity Church would not have accepted the burials because it was a
Church of England parish, the
state church headed by the British monarch they rebelled against. Historian
Edwin G. Burrows explains how the controversy related to a proposal to build a public street through the churchyard. During the Revolutionary War it is believed to have been used by the British army as a prison. In 1852
Benson J. Lossing wrote: Van Cortlandt's sugar house, which stood at the northwest corner of Trinity Churchyard, corner of Thames and Lumber [now Trinity Place] Streets; Rhinelander's, on the corner of William and Duane Streets, now (1852) Lightbody's Printing-ink Manufactory; and the more emininently historical one on Liberty Street (numbers 34 and 36), a few feet eastward of the Middle Dutch Church, now the Post-office, were the most spacious buildings in the city and answered the purposes of prisons very well. Rhinelander's is the only one remaining, the one on Liberty Street having been demolished in June, 1840, and Van Cortlandt's during the summer of 1852. But
Brooklyn history professor
Edwin G. Burrows disagrees, writing in 2008: "Demolition of the Rhinelander Sugar House in 1892 gave rise to stories—completely unsubstantiated—that it had served as a prison during the Revolution." When the building fell into disrepair during the early 19th century, locals believed it to be haunted by ghosts of prisoners from the war. The old warehouse was replaced by the Rhinelander Building, which retained part of the original wall from 1892 to 1968, and continued to receive reports of ghostly sightings in a window. The site is now occupied by the headquarters of the
New York City Police Department, near which one of the original barred windows was retained. A section of wall with another window was moved to
Van Cortlandt Park in the
Bronx.
Van Cortlandt's sugar house The sugar house on the northwest corner of the yard of
Trinity Church in Manhattan was built by John Van Cortlandt and partner George Petterson around 1755; Van Cortlandt took sole proprietorship after their partnership was dissolved two years later. Used as a prison during the Revolutionary War, the building was torn down in 1852. == See also ==