A writer, poet and New Yorker named John Flavel Mines keenly observed this providence:
In the summer of 1753, at the behest of King George II deputy postmaster Benjamin Franklin set out north by carriage along the King’s Highway from the old city hall at Wall and Nassau Streets. Equipped with an odometer and accompanied by a small crew of stone masons his objective was to place a two-foot tall stone every mile between New York and Boston to standardize postage fees charged by the King’s post riders. It was also meant to assuage colonists’ suspicions regarding the arbitrariness of the Crown’s levies. That last part became a tough sell for George and the boys. Ironically, those same markers became coordinates for martial maneuvers during the War of Independence. By 1812 New York City Hall had moved north to its present location at the intersection of Chambers, Park Row and Broadway. In so doing, the area west of the corner of 85th and Second Avenue became New York City’s new five-mile stone.
As a precursor to the grid system that would later come to define Manhattan these milestones did quite literally become a roadmap for the future City of New York, around which was located the central institution of early American life: the tavern. The tavern was the space for: public gatherings, the inception of new political ideas and movements, and more generally where the idea of “what is American” was simultaneously created and learned. Like each mile-stone the tavern was by nature a point of reference for the stories of a life lived on the island and beyond.
The Eastern Post Road, as Manhattan’s part of this came to be known, stretched northward through the Five Points at Chatham Square up Bowery and far past the limits of the old New York City. It continued along today’s Third Avenue sloping down towards Second and meandering up to the intersection of Rhinelander Lane and the Hellgate Ferry Road (west of Second Avenue at 85th Street) Here at mid-island, between the Dutch settlements of New Amsterdam and Harlem, lay the hamlet of Yorkville. The summer estates of New York’s premier families like the Astors, Gracies, Rhinelanders and Primes held this scenic stretch rising from the East river up to the ridge along Third Avenue. The Hellgate Ferry Road carved a path down through this lush landscape by easement to the foot of 86th Street onto a bluff the Dutch called “Hoorn’s Hook” (today’s Carl Schurz Park). Named for that perilous East River crossing the ferry would bring laborers across to factories in Astoria and return with Long Island’s plentiful stocks of produce and cattle. These products found a market in the surging immigrant community of wagonmakers, coachmakers, wheelers, carpenters and blacksmiths who settled nearby to meet the demands of the increasing road traffic.
As the roads became more passable “down-towners” embarked on leisurely carriage rides, winter sleigh rides, or even all-out horse races up Second and Third Avenues which quickly became a New York tradition. A particularly popular excursion would include a stop at Cato’s Tavern near the old four-mile stone (54th Street and Second Avenue). Cato Alexander was the consummate host and barman always hard at work serving up slings and toddies with his famous South Carolina-style fare. Up the road at the Hazard House in the heart of Yorkville (84th Street & 3rd Avenue) George Hazard ran a hostelry frequented by those horsemen or sporting gents where both man and beast stopped for refreshment. At the extensive stables adjacent to the inn horses were treated, traded, bought and sold. All the while gents gathered on the galleried porch where they would drink while “scanning and discussing the flyers” who raced up the Avenue. During the snowy season nearby at Wintergreen’s south of the old six mile stone (86th Street east of Third Avenue), an elaborately-decorated array of family “cutters” (sleighs) rested outside while their passengers alit for one of the sherry flips, cobblers, grogs or hot-buttered rums for which the tavern was famous.
By 1837 both the New York Harlem Railroad running up Fourth (Park) Avenue to 86th Street and public projects like the construction of the Croton Receiving Reservoir between 79th and 86th Streets and Sixth and Seventh Avenues (in today’s Central Park) were built by the hands of the German, Hungarian, Czech and Irish immigrants who settled east of Fourth Avenue. Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century in numerous waves and for myriad reasons Yorkville’s immigrant population continued to grow. Eventually this area became the home of “Germantown” with smaller cultural pockets of those original immigrant communities to the south and east. Yet, whether it was the Bavarian Bierhaus, Bohemian Hall, Hungarian Club, Irish Pub or any other cultural center a focus on community thrived.
It is in the spirit of the roadside taverns and any one of these ethnic public meeting houses that we pay tribute to continuity; to a place where locals and strangers, travelers and wanderers, laborers and revelers join in a Yorkville tradition of warm New York hospitality and quality drink and fare.