McGowan's Pass

There were a number of stereoscopic views of this area manufactured in the 1860s and 70s. This is pretty much how things looked when Frederick Law Olmsted and his family lived here, 1859-1862, while Olmsted was directing the construction of Central Park.

This view from East Drive is recognizably the same “Mount” you see today when you go to the composting area. The buildings are long gone, but the driveway and topography are unmistakable.

Best of all, we can see a bit of the McGown House, the 1790 rebuilt version that became the Mount St. Vincent’s complex. It’s the small, recessed building in the middle, with what looks like a vast awning but is no doubt part of a pitched roof. The big south wing (on our side) and the north wing (far side) were the first expansions of the convent, built in 1847 and 1848. It appears that a extra story was added to the top of the farmhouse, connecting the upper floors of the two wings, so the nuns and others wouldn’t have to descend to the ground floor in order to move from one wing to another.

On the Bridle Path in Central Park, by East Drive near 102nd Street, there is a sudden rise in elevation. No more than a few feet in height, and no more than a few yards in length. It seems to be a rubble-filled mound, with lots of loose stones, like debris from an old building. Maps show that the old Black Horse Tavern was right about this spot.

Until 1756 the Black Horse, and surrounding property, were owned by a Jacob Dyckman. Dyckman sold the place to his in-laws, the McGowans, and went up north to Inwood to start a new Black Horse Tavern by the Harlem River. Perhaps thirty years later, the McGowans leased this tavern to a John Leggett. It seems Leggett and his family ran the tavern for the next fifteen or twenty years. In Christopher Colles’s 1789 map of the Post Road, the tavern is identified simply as “Leggets,” slightly south of the McGowan house, and midpoint between the seven- and eight-mile stones from New York City.

This drawing appears in a 1905 compilation of papers of New York’s first post-Revolution governor, George Clinton (uncle of Dewitt Clinton). It is captioned “Leggett’s Half-Way Tavern” but the drawing’s origin is not identified. Its rural shabbiness makes it seem authentic, as does the fact that it has no sign marking it as The Black Horse or Leggett’s. On the other hand, the rendering style seems late-19th century, when there was a whole genre of Decayed Wayside Inn etchings.

Addendum, May 12, 2011. Continuing points of confusion: was this the only tavern in the immediate area? Was there ever a tavern across the road, in the Dyckman/McGown house? Old guidebooks and popular histories often speak of the house and the tavern as one and the same. When you read of Mount St. Vincent’s or the McGown’s Pass Tavern, the story usually goes that this convent or that restaurant were founded on the site of an old tavern from the 1750s. Possibly this is just routine sloppiness, like the oft-reproduced comment that Catherine McGown was a “Scotswoman.” Or maybe the tavern really was at the Dyckman/McGown house originally, but it moved across the road when the Leggetts took over the business. Contemporary records aren’t much help here, since the whole area was “McGowan’s.”

John Joseph Holland was an English-born architect and watercolorist who settled in New York and drew most of the first-hand depictions we have of the Fort Clinton and McGowan’s Pass area in the early 1800s. This is his watercolor of the gatehouse in the Pass.

Let’s see where we are. A look at the central guardsman’s shadow tells us that we are facing east (actually east-northeast, if the maps of the time are right). We are supposedly on the old Post Road, between the lines of 106th and 107th Streets, with McGowan’s Hill to our rear. The wall on the right leads up to Fort Clinton, the defenses on the left go down to Nutter’s Battery near the western end of today’s Harlem Meer.

When Central Park’s East Drive was built here in the 1860s, it followed the line of the foreground road very closely up to the old site of the gatehouse. Then the Drive turned sharply to the west and southwest, alongside the old fortifications, in order to avoid running into the new Meer.

If you know this part of East Drive, you know this whole route is a downhill grade. So our foreground road must have been raised some 15 or 20 feet (no doubt with dredgings from the Harlem Meer) in order to meet the level of the earth-banks on the left.

Another curious image from Valentine’s Manual, 1863 issue, displaying that almanac’s continuing interest with McGowan’s Pass. The sledge may have been drawn from life, but the setting is just an imaginative reconstruction. You can imagine how the illustrator’s mind worked: There was a farmhouse, so there must have been a farm, so there must have been a barn, and cows and chickens…

Back in Central Park’s early days, if you kept a carriage, you probably kept a sleigh or sledge too. When the snows came you hitched it up and took a ride up the Central Park hills. When the Park ran a tavern at McGowan’s Pass (1866-1915), young bucks raced each other to the top at each winter’s first snowfall. The first driver to reach the tavern won a magnum of champagne.

Like so many of the other illustrations here, this one comes via the NYPL Picture Collection and its Digital Library.

A drawing c. 1855 from Valentine’s Manual, supposedly an 1814 view of Fort Fish and Nutter’s Battery (Nutting Battery?).  There is also Fort Clinton, the teepee-like rock in the left distance. And finally the McGowan house at the top of McGowan’s Hill, right across the road from Fort Fish.

We looking from the north, along the Kingsbridge or Post Road, over a little bridge crossing the Harlem Creek. It is this little pathway, now in the Harlem Meer, that is often wrongly cited as “McGown’s Pass.”

This view is hard to reconcile with present geography, or the more authoritative renderings of the 1814 period (particularly one of John Joseph Holland’s, shown below).  The two-windowed building on the left is probably supposed to be the gatehouse in the Pass, but it doesn’t look much like the watercolor renderings of Holland, who drew from life.

 

Patrick H. McCann, who held the lease for the rebuilt Mount St. Vincent’s Hotel, 1885-1890, did not get his lease renewed in 1890. When called to testify before the investigating committee of State Sen. Jay Fassett, he explained why.

Mayor Hugh Grant, Tammany leader Richard Croker, Excise Commissioner Leicester Holme, and other Tammany Hall regulars expected to receive free entertainment at the new hotel, and McCann would have none of it. He told Grant to stay away from the restaurant, Grant told Croker, and soon they were disparaging it as a den of lowlifes.

Quoth McCann, from the New York Times:

“…they have used every effort to cripple my business ever since. Grant individually told Croker that nobody went there but Jews and loose women. Leicester Holme has said as much and even more. But that is absolutely false. The character of the patrons of the place is of the very highest. Men with their families, the young and old people in parties, all of well-known and respectable people go there.” (NYT, April 26, 1890)

Croker and McCann were brothers-in-law; they married the Frazer sisters, highly respectable ladies.

(Snippets from the New York Times, 27 January 1886)

The Mount St. Vincent is two stories high, and heated throughout by steam and lighted by Edison’s incandescent light…

The building, which is owned by the city, was completed by the Park about 15 months ago, and is admirably adapted for use as a pleasure resort either in Winter or in Summer. In its present condition it probably has no superior as a roadhouse.

Mr. McCann takes special pride in the high character of his restaurant and he proposes to make the Mount St. Vincent a resort where ladies and children, as well as gentlemen, can enjoy themselves quietly and comfortably.

There are eight neatly furnished dining rooms on the second floor… The use of these rooms will only be permitted to persons of known respectability.  Mine host McCann has no use for any other kind of patrons.

It’s the Civil War era, and Mount St. Vincent’s is a military hospital in Central Park!

Note the American flag flying there on the left, atop one of the rambling frame wings that Elizabeth Boyle and the Sisters of Charity added to the old McGowan house (center) after they arrived in 1846.

East Drive and the 102nd Street Transverse Road are out of sight on the far left, behind the building with the flag. We are looking from due south, perhaps about 2pm on a late spring day. My guess is this is 1863. The Army had moved in around December 1862. Lacking nurses, they asked the Sisters of Charity to come back to their old property and help out. Did they commute down from Riverdale or move into their old rooms?

By way of comparison, look at the engraving below, made a year or two earlier. Our vantage point is a couple hundred yards farther back, but the artist gives us more detail. Apparently the spires and steeple were still on the chapel in 1861. Were they taken down only when it was Federalized?

This picture comes from the 1862 Valentine’s Manual. Valentine’s was a fat popular annual of 19th Century New York, mainly enjoyed for its postcard-size illustrations you could cut out and hang on your wall.

View, Looking North, Near Museum is the frontispiece of a privately published 1869 volume entitled A Description of the New York Central Park, by one Clarence Cook, and published by F. J. Huntington of 459 Broome Street.

The Museum is not the Metropolitan Museum of Art; that wouldn’t come about for another decade or so. No, this museum is the ecclesiastical-looking structure at right-center, the old chapel from the Mount St. Vincent’s academy and convent. A variety of old school buildings, now repurposed as a wayside inn, cluster to the left of the former chapel.

Nowadays (2011) this is the Central Park Conservancy’s composting area, and the buildings are long gone, apart from some odd corners of the stone foundations.

Off on the left, you can make out the Harlem River and the High Bridge, some four miles to the north.

But what’s this broad thoroughfare curving around below and to the right of the Mount? A drive full of Sunday morning joyriders, while the old chapel and schoolbuildings loom above them like a clifftop Mediterranean castle? It certainly isn’t Fifth Avenue—that doesn’t curve and it’s out of the frame. No, this magnificent road is pure artist’s fancy. It doesn’t appear on the accompanying map (right), which shows the same narrow footpaths that are there today.

This fanciful etching is the most impressive illustration in the book. It probably was chosen as frontispiece because the author had no text for it. It would have to be something like: And behold the Park’s carriage drive, which does not exist at present, except in the mind of our spendid illustrator…

The illustrator’s name was Albert Fitch Bellows, one of the “Hudson River School” painters. His only credit in this book comes in the introduction:

One of our most popular artists, Mr. A. F. Bellows, has spent many months in making the drawings, which add so much to the value of the work…

“A map of part of New-York Island showing a plan of Fort Washington, now call’d Ft. Kniphausen with the rebels lines on the south part, from which they were driven on the 16th of November 1776 by the troupes under the orders of the Earl of Percy. Survey’d the same day by order of His Lordship by C. J. Sauthier.”

Thus the ponderous title of a Revolutionary War map that fascinated me when I first saw it a little while ago on a site devoted to the ancient watercourses of Manhattan. The site provides a nice detail of the McGowan homestead (and their adjoining tavern, the Black Horse, which is not here named, though steadily patronized in the late 1770s by British and Hessian troops),  in what is now the northeast section of Central Park. Here is the detail:

But it was a complete puzzlement for me. Take a look at that Kingsbridge Road, here the “Road from New-York.” It is shown as leading almost directly north from the McGowans’ place into Harlem, slightly to the east of some fortifications, while another unmarked path seems to fork off to the left and dead-end in another fortification (just above the letter w in “McGowan’s Pass”).

Now, from what I know of Central Park, such paths seem incomprehensible. Both sides of the fork would lead down very steep hills, unless the topography then was vastly different from what it is now. Take a jog on Central Park’s East drive around 104th St. and check out the paths leading down into the Conservatory Garden and to Fort Clinton, and you’ll see what I mean.

And there is no representation whatsoever of the hairpin switchback, where Central Park’s East Drive swerves hard to the left and goes almost due south for about 200 yards (around the n in “Advanc’d Postes” here) before turning around and pointing north again. According to maps and drawings from the early and mid-1800s, this switchback road was very in place during the War of 1812. And why shouldn’t it have been? It followed the natural terrain. Furthermore, the “Road from New-York,” heading north, is not even aimed in the direction of Fort Washington.

It took a long time before the obvious answer occurred to me. The map is a lie!

Military disinformation, if you will. The British would not have published an honest map showing the proper roads —not in wartime and certainly not in late 1776 or in 1777.

This was the era when the Redcoats hanged Nathan Hale as a spy over on the East Side, and elegant spy Major André was trading notes with disgruntled colonial Benedict Arnold about how best to turn West Point over to the Redcoats. No, the British knew what the route was, down the winding road from McGowan’s and over to the west, and up north another three miles to Fort Washington (or “Fort Kniphausen,” as it was renamed when General von Knyphausen of Hesse took it over). The British and Hessian armies no doubt had good maps, but they were hand-drawn, top-secret, and carried around in officers boots; not distributed as lithographs suitable for framing!

Postscript: This was one of the first posts to the blog, and I now find my conclusions and attitude very rash, particularly in the above paragraph. “It’s all lies!” is a good place to begin for any amateur historian, since you won’t find anything worth having if you don’t scratch below the surface.  But sometimes a cigar is only a cigar. The content of the map may well be biased, but probably not by much. The direction of Kingsbridge Road north of the Pass is actually consistent with what we see on later [American] maps from the 1780s and 1810s. The East Drive switchback was not platted out till about 1860, although there was certainly a trail along that approximate route.