The Elysian Fields of Hoboken, New Jersey
William A. Mann
Until last year, McFarland published Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, which I had founded as a scholarly semiannual in the Spring of 2007. It continued to publish in that form until 2018, when I handed the editorial reins to Don Jensen, who commenced an annual, retitled as Base Ball: New Research on the Early Game. With the kind permission of the publisher I will, now and then, reprint some of the notable essays featured therein. The first of these I now introduce to readers of Our Game, in two parts; it has not appeared on the internet before and is vital to understanding the rise of the game at the Elysian Fields, and the exercise in nostalgia that is the very heart of the game.
This post originally appeared as an article in Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game (volume no. I, issue no. 1), and is reprinted by permission of McFarland (McFarlandBooks.com). I must add that Gary Mitchem has been the editor of Base Ball from its inception, so special thanks to him.
The author, William A. Mann, is professor emeritus of landscape architecture at the University of Georgia, where he taught from 1971 until 2005. Mann has worked and lectured in England, Italy, Australia, and Canada. He is the author of two books: Landscape Architecture: An Illustrated History in Timelines, Site Plans and Biography (1993) and Space and Time in Landscape Architectural History (1982). In 1999, the Harvard Graduate School of Design designated him one of its Distinguished Alumni for its centennial (1900–2000). His synopsis appears below, followed by his indispensable essay.
In 1804, John Stevens laid out Hoboken, New Jersey, from which he operated a ferry across the Hudson River to Manhattan. To promote interest in his town, Stevens transformed his 700-acre estate into the Elysian Fields, one of the earliest parks in the United States developed in the style of the English landscape garden. The new park proved wildly popular, as records indicate that Stevens would ferry as many as 20,000 passengers to his Elysian Fields during some weekends.
Attractions included a mile-long riverside promenade, a deer park, Sibyl’s Cave (from which Stevens sold artesian spring water), and a tavern. Concerts, ox-roasts, turtle barbecues, sideshows, balloon rides, boxing matches, and P. T. Barnum’s Great Buffalo Hunt were hosted. But baseball is responsible for the lasting fame of Elysian Fields.
In 1804 John Stevens III (1749–1838) began his 30-year effort to transform a portion of his wooded, 700-acre Hoboken property into a romantic, quasi-public rural retreat, called the “Elysian Fields.” This was one of the earliest parks in the United States to be developed in the English landscape garden style. For half a century, until the opening of Central Park in the early 1860s, the Hoboken park was legendary as one of the most popular outdoor recreation places in the New York metropolitan area.
Stevens’ grand scheme started with the laying out of “The New City of Hoboken,” from which he operated a ferry across the Hudson River to Manhattan. He developed the 100-acre park in order to generate traffic on his ferries and to promote interest in his planned town. The venture flourished; by the 1830s, property sales were brisk, and Stevens’ ferries transported 20,000 passengers a day to his Elysium on summer weekends.
Stevens foreshadowed Andrew Jackson Downing’s park editorials in The Horticulturist by two decades. In 1824, Stevens wrote: “The park has a tendency to civilize and refine the manners of all classes … where nature and art contribute largely to the embellishment of every scene.” Twenty-four years later, in 1848, Downing paraphrased Stevens’ ideas: “…by establishing refined public parks, you would soften and humanize the rude and enlighten the ignorant … [amidst] their lawns, fine trees, shady walks and beautiful shrubs and flowers … all classes of society, [may] partake of the same pleasures….” Frederick Law Olmsted, in turn, paraphrased Downing and Stevens in his description of Liverpool’s Birkenhead Park, in his Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, written in 1850 and published in 1852: “Five minutes of admiration, and a few more spent in studying the manner in which art had been employed to obtain from nature so much beauty, and I was ready to admit that in democratic America there was nothing to be thought of as comparable to this People’s Garden.”[1] Just a few months later, Olmsted read Downing’s essay, “The New York Park,” in The Horticulturist (August 1851), inspiring him to dedicate his career to the belief that public parks had the potential to remove the social barriers between the classes.[2]
This essay, drawn from a book-length work in progress, examines the history and development of the “Elysian Fields,” and it explores some of the reasons why Downing and Olmsted had so little to say about the place.
John Stevens
Stevens was characterized by his biographer, Archibald Turnbull, as a “dreamer of great dreams.”[3] His father, “Honourable John” (1716–1792), a Tory, was a member of the New Jersey Province Council in the years leading up to the Revolution. However, because he and two other councilors, Lord Stirling (William Alexander, 1726–1783, his brother-in-law through his marriage to Elizabeth Alexander) and Richard Stockton, had colonial leanings, Governor William Franklin (son of Benjamin Franklin) referred to them as “the unruly three.”[4] The elder Stevens and Stockton later became members of the Continental Congress, held in Philadelphia 1774–1777. The Honourable John Stevens was a man of immense wealth and connections. He owned no fewer than 20 properties in and around New York and New Jersey, totaling an estimated 35,000 acres. Through his father’s personal friendships and social invitations to the homes of such landed families as the Livingstons and the Alexanders, young John visited and presumably was impressed and informed by the character of the landscaped pleasure grounds of their country seats.
John graduated from King’s College (now Columbia University) in 1768 and became a member of the New York City bar, but practiced law only briefly. He fought in the Revolutionary War, earning the rank of Colonel in the Continental Army. From 1777 until 1782, he was the treasurer of New Jersey, when his father was the president of the New Jersey Council.
John Stevens was a classical scholar and a student of natural philosophy and metaphysics, authoring several treatises on the subject (which were never published). He was an avid botanist and an amateur gardener who imported and propagated many new plants that his European friends sent to him. His home, Castle Point, was a fine specimen of a picturesque Hudson River mansion. He was renowned for his love of luxury and his sumptuous lifestyle. Castle Point Mansion was furnished with European furniture and was the venue of lavish dinner parties, complete with his own imported wines and food. He rode around in ostentatious carriages and, as was the unfortunate custom at that time, kept a number of slaves.
The Stevens Estate and Castle Point
While the origin of the name for the town has been debated, most authorities agree that it was named after the Iroquois and Manhican Indian name for the territory of Hobocan Hackingh (“land of the tobacco pipe”).[5] Henry Hudson first explored the area in 1609; the Dutch settled it about 1630. The journal of Robert Juet, one of the other 17th-century navigators of the Hudson, noted that at Hoboken he saw “…a cliff that looked of the color of a white green, as though it were either [a] copper or silver myne.”[6] Local historian Daniel Van Winkle described that bold promontory, later named Castle Point, in his History of the Municipalities of Hudson County, New Jersey:
… with its white and green cliff, [it] extended out into the river and sloped gradually back to the marshes that separated it from what we now call West Hoboken and Jersey City Heights. Through this marsh ran the Hoboken Kill [creek], that on the occasion of a high tide overflowed its banks and completely inundated the adjacent swamps, rendering Hoboken in appearance a perfect island. It was very probably this green and white promontory that attracted the attention of Henry Hudson and his crew on their return down the river after their first passage upward.[7]
In 1784 Stevens bought at public auction a 689-acre tract of land along the Hudson River, opposite Manhattan Island. The majority of the land, 564 acres, was the former estate of William Bayard, a Tory (“loyalist”) whose property was confiscated by the State of New Jersey during the Revolution. Bayard had developed the land into a thriving farm, with orchards and formal gardens surrounding the summerhouse that he built. From there, he operated a ferry business to the city of New York. In 1788, Stevens bought an additional 125 acres from Jacobus Bogart in the rural area known as Weehawken. In all, Stevens possessed more than one mile of Hudson River frontage, directly in line with the route between New York and Philadelphia. This gave him a virtual monopoly on the overland / Hudson-River–ferry link between the temporary Federal capital and America’s leading metropolis. In his first year at Hoboken, he cleared enough land to sell 600 boatloads of timber. Originally, he intended to grow food crops to ship to the eager market on Manhattan.
On the lofty 100-foot promontory overlooking the river, he built his stately Georgian style mansion, which he called Villa Stevens. The house was begun in 1785 and completed two years later.[8] Turnbull states that the house at Hoboken “…was overlooking what the colonel hoped to make [into] a good American copy of the great English ‘parks.’”[9] Because the house was thought to resemble a castle, the landmark quickly became known as “Castle Point.”[10]
After four years on the land, Stevens’ farm was so successful that he was able to state in a 1788 letter, “I have so much produce to take in and am so behind hand in my work that I cannot think of leaving home at present.”[11] Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, Stevens continued to transform the grounds around his house into a landscape garden. His two hobbies were horticulture and books, and fittingly, to further his education, he consumed all the literature on the subject that he could find. Turnbull writes:
From Richardson Brothers, booksellers, of Cornhill, London, he ordered each book on horticulture as soon as it left the press, while every sale of seeds or bulbs found him elbowing his way to the front rank of buyers, in case some new variety might be offered. Except for Dr. David Hosack’s effort in New York, the Stevens gardens were the most elaborate and the most scientifically cultivated of the day … making the heights of Weehawken, New Jersey’s richest modern field for wild flowers.[12]
Writing in 1858, Thomas W. Whitley, editor of the City Gazette of Hoboken, described the grounds of the Stevens mansion, characterizing the place as “one of the finest private residences in the country.” He went further, however, in stating that the initial improvements to the site were made as much for purposes of security as for aesthetics. He was referring to the Native American occupants of the site, the Hoboks, when he wrote, “The shrubbery had all been cleared out, and the trees thinned out and burnt, so as to admit of an unobstructed view, and to guard against surprise by foe….”
The view from Stevens’ mansion was a source of amazement to many visitors to the site. Julian U. Niemcewicz, a Polish statesman who came to America in 1797, wrote in his diary in 1806, “…his house stands on a promontory in one of the most beautiful situations in the world, dominating the town, the river, the harbor and the sea.” Whitley, who in fact was promoting the real-estate charms of Hoboken,[13] said of the scenery to be enjoyed from atop Castle Point:
From the tower of this mansion the beholder will see that the surrounding country presents to the admirer of pictorial effects, a most interesting series of beautiful views. From this point as far up as Bull’s Ferry the eye is regaled with a beautiful panoramic view. A new road winding its way along the western bank of the river, over which hangs the battling and frowning cliffs of Weehawken’s cloudy top, imparts an additional charm to its rural rides and romantic scenery.
At the turn of the 19th century, Stevens’ property to the north of Castle Point acquired a new identity: “The Dueling Ground.” This was adjacent to the village of Weehawken, where New Yorkers went to stage their duels, which were outlawed in their own state. At Weehawken, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton fought their infamous July 1804 duel, resulting in the death of Hamilton.
That same year, Stevens laid out his town, Hoboken — a checkerboard of 800 lots and orthogonal streets.[14] At that time, Stevens’ new interest was real-estate speculation, and he used many ingenious schemes to promote his enterprises, such as his boast that the situation of Hoboken was “free from the danger of Yellow fever.”[15] In fact, his many transportation innovations were developed in order to bolster the value of his real-estate holdings.
The Creation of the Elysian Fields
A consummate entrepreneur, Stevens’ purpose for developing a quasi-public park was not entirely philanthropic. He had hoped to operate a steam-powered ferry business between New York and his planned town, but was precluded from doing so by the Livingston-Fulton “Hudson Monopoly.” Since the sale of his property was not proceeding at the pace he had envisioned, he seized on the idea of creating a “natural” attraction — a pleasure ground — to which Manhattanites could be lured while examining prospective building sites. He could thereby derive income from would-be purchasers of land, who would patronize his concessions as they were “rusticating in the Elysian Fields.” Before steam navigation on the Hudson, persons wishing to cross had to be transported by sailboat or rowed across. This was a trip of a few hours, and was subject to the vagaries of strong currents, tides, winds, and foul weather. Sometimes travelers were delayed several days in crossing.
Stevens’ first park improvements began with the making of the mile-long “shaded promenade winding gracefully among the overspreading foliage, leading by the river from the ferry around Castle Point to the dense woods on the north, then known as Turtle Cove.”[16] He opened his “River Walk” to the public about 1810, and, together with other improvements made along the waterfront in the 1820s, the place became known as the Elysian Fields.[17] Charles Winfield (1829–1898), in his Hopoghan Hackingh: A Pleasure Resort for Old New York, wrote: “There could be no other name for this charming spot than Elysian Fields, for did it not remind one of the Elysii Campi of old, blessed with perpetual spring, clothed with continual verdure, enamelled with unfading flowers, shaded by pleasant groves, and refreshed by never failing fountains….”[18]
In 1824, presaging future ballpark owners’ entreaties to municipalities, Stevens petitioned the City of New York for “the capital requisite for … making the requisite improvements” to his site, since there were, in his words, “immense, incalculable advantages” to the city to be derived from his park. The investment, he argued, would be minor compared to:
… the vast importance of such a place of general resort for citizens, as well as strangers, for health and recreation. So easily accessible, and where in a few minutes the dust, noise, and bad smells of the city may be exchanged for the pure air, delightful shades, and completely rural scenery — with walks along the margin of the Hudson to the extent of a mile.[19]
He cited “two gentlemen of undoubted credit” who “now offer to step forward and make the arrangements” on his behalf. These men were the real-estate tycoon John Jacob Astor (1763–1848) and Dr. David Hosack (1769–1835), professor of botany and medicine at Columbia University and founder of the renowned Elgin Botanic Garden of New York. Astor so enjoyed the place that he built a villa at the corner of Washington and Second streets in Hoboken in 1829. Stevens’ request was denied, forcing him to finance his park through his own resources. Nevertheless, in his appeal for funds from New York City, Stevens articulated some of his development plans as well as his rationale for creating the tourist attraction. He promised: “For affording accommodation and refreshment, and adequate protection against sudden showers, pavilions should be erected … in eligible sites … [the proprietors of such establishments should be] restricted from selling of any kind of intoxicating liquors.”[20] Each of his proposed pavilions was to be a “finished specimen of architecture and elegance,” the designs of which were to be obtained through design competitions.[21] About such exemplary buildings in a park setting, he said:
Nothing could have a more powerful tendency to civilize the general mass of society — to polish and refine the manners of all classes as the mixed intercourse necessarily taking place in such promiscuous assemblages of the rich and poor, in situations where art and nature are made to contribute so largely to the embellishment of every scene presented to view. The presence, too, of the most respectable members of the community would operate powerfully in restraining the vicious propensities of the licentious, and would give a tone of sobriety and decency to the general manners of society. As aiding and promoting such beneficial results, the Board of Aldermen would have frequent occasion of holding meetings in some of the pavilions.[22]
Such remarks predated the pro-park sentiments of William Cullen Bryant and Andrew Jackson Downing by more than two decades. In 1844, Bryant gave the movement for parks in American cities its greatest impetus, and Downing reinforced it during the eight remaining years of his life. Downing wrote two major editorials in The Horticulturist, in October 1848 and June 1851. In the first, he pleaded for the creation of public parks in the United States. Surprisingly, as he lived only 65 miles from Hoboken, he made no mention of any previous or extant parks for “healthful public enjoyment.” He noted only the few rural cemeteries that were created in the 1830s:
… we surpass all other nations in the beautiful resting-places for the dead. Greenwood, Mount Auburn, and Laurel Hill, are … superior to the far-famed Père la Chaise of Paris, in natural beauty, tasteful arrangement, and all that constitutes the charm of such a spot … if our large towns had suburban pleasure-grounds, like Greenwood (excepting the monuments), where the best music could be heard daily, they would become the constant resort of the citizens, or that being so, they would tend to soften and allay some of the feverish unrest of business which seems to have possession of most Americans, body and soul.[23]
In his editorial of October 1848, Downing paraphrased Stevens, stating:
… by establishing refined public … parks, and gardens … you would soften and humanize the rude, educate and enlighten the ignorant, and give continual enjoyment to the educated. Nothing tends to beat down those artificial barriers, that false pride … so much as a community of rational enjoyments. Make the public parks or pleasure grounds attractive by their lawns, fine trees, shady walks and beautiful shrubs and flowers … I see the public … places filled with all classes of society, partaking of the same pleasure….[24]
Hoboken and the Elysian Fields as a Popular Rural Retreat
Once established, Hoboken proved to be more desirable for some tourists to stay in than New York City, particularly in the summer months. This concept can be grasped through the commentary of some of those who opted for that more rural locale. In June 1819, the itinerant Englishman Adlard Welby recalled in his Visit to North America, “The heat of the weather in the city is so oppressive to English constitutions, that we have established ourselves across the river, on the Jersey shore, at a very pleasant place called Hoboken … and have a quick and pleasant communication with New York by steam ferry-boats every hour during the day….”[25]
The Hoboken Turtle Club was formed at the turn of the 19th century, when “turtle eating gastronomes” from New York City went to Stevens’ Turtle Cove, or Turtle Grove, to partake in the green turtle banquets put on there. In 1826, the visiting Dutch Navy Lieutenant, the Honorable John Frederick Fitzgerald De Roos, wrote about the place in his book, Personal Narrative of Travels in the United States and Canada in 1826:
A beautiful walk extending for two or three miles along the Hudson is kept in the finest order, and commands a noble view of the city on the opposite shore. American aldermen have the same predilection for turtle which is supposed to characterize our own; and the groves of Hoboken annually witness a vast consumption of green fat at the celebration of their civic festivities.
The Sketch Club of Knickerbocker fame was founded in New York in 1827 by 21 men of letters and art. Among its most notable members were Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and Samuel F.B. Morse. The group made at least three excursions together to the Elysian Fields during the decade.
Among the entertaining features that Colonel Stevens installed on the Green near his ferry dock were a primitive Ferris Wheel, a “Merry-go-round, a ten-pin alley, wax figures, a Camera Obscura, and a Flying Machine, or as Stevens called it, a “Whirligig.” The latter attraction was described by Winfield:
It was made of two cross poles sixty feet in length, mortised horizontally through a piece of timber which stood vertically on a pivot under ground. Under each of the four ends of the cross poles was affixed a car or basket suitable for four persons. The charge was twenty-five cents. The baskets swung just clear of the ground. Below the surface and hidden from view a team of mules was hitched to a cross-bar close to the upright. When the mules were urged forward the baskets swung around the sixty-foot diameter with sickening velocity. On a holiday the proprietor sometimes took in as much as $225.[26]
Steadfast in his confidence in steam trains, in 1825, when he was nearly eighty years old, Colonel Stevens installed a 200-foot-diameter circular loop of railroad track on the Green near his ’76 House Tavern. This was a three-carriage train pulled by a steam locomotive which he had designed and manufactured. During the summer of 1825, he gave rides to his park visitors, making this train “the first locomotive in America driven by steam upon a track [achieving the] appalling speed of six miles an hour.”[27] At the close of the season, the tracks and train were relocated along the river between the ferry dock and the Elysian Fields, north of the Castle Point, the distance being about one mile.[28] The engine is today in the Smithsonian Institution. Stevens then built another narrow-gauge track on the Green. This one was human-powered, with the passengers turning a hand crank to propel themselves around the circuit.[29]
Following the return from Paris of Stevens’ son, Richard, in 1825, the Colonel began his scheme to build a “Montagne Russe” (so named because such devices were first built in St. Petersburg and Moscow), an artificial “mountain” for use as a toboggan course.[30] Always thinking of a way to make a fast dollar, Richard wrote to his brother, John, that if they built such an attraction, the Stevenses “might have a sort of Vauxhall Garden, for which you might fix a price for entry. Wherever it is erected, there ought to be an establishment for refreshments. No doubt it would succeed at Hoboken. It would be very pleasant to sit on the green and watch the cars descend. I would make it thirty-five or forty feet high, and about two hundreds long.”[31] The toboggan hill was never realized, but a scheme growing out of the idea was completed and displayed to the always-curious public in early 1829. Stevens called this latest creation the “Round Iron Ways.” Stevens and his son, Robert, advertised the contrivance on December 31, 1828: “An exhibition will take place respecting these Ways on the green near the Mansion House of Mr. Stevens, tomorrow, of a nature entirely new. A carriage will be impelled through the Air, instead of on the ground, with a rapidity far exceeding any Land Carriage.”[32] James Renwick (1790–1863), a professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy and Chemistry at Columbia University (and father of the architect James Renwick, 1818–1895), explained the contraption, which he called the “Aerial Ways”:
The “Aerial Ways,” in which we took a ride, may become as popular here as the “Montagnes Russes” in Europe. The species of amusement called the “Montagne Russe,” owes its origin to the actual mountains of ice which are annually erected on the margin of the Neve, near Petersburg. The “Aerial Ways” of Colonel Stevens consist of two parallel iron rods, four hundred feet in length, running from a firm erection about eight or ten feet high to another perhaps forty feet in height. On these rods a carriage with four wheels runs, which is propelled from the starting place by means of a weight, not more that two or three hundred pounds, attached to the machinery. The car ascends the rods to the utmost elevation and will not only return again to the starting place, but progress with any given velocity ad libitum, at a rate from ten to one hundred miles an hour. As an amusement … the rapidity of motion may be regulated or accelerated according to the timidity or the fearlessness of those who ride. The present ways are erected in the green near the house of Colonel Stevens; but we understand they were to be removed to the public green near the ferry.[33]
In 1830–1831, Stevens built a Grecian-style pavilion near Turtle Cove. It came to be known as the Colonnade. Within, it was “devoted largely to the worship of Bacchus,” including raucous drinking.[34] There was already a “watering hole” on the premises — the “large commodious ’76 House,” or “Tavern on the Knoll,” which sat on the Green, the gently ascending lawn between the ferry dock and Stevens’ mansion. The ’76 House was an inn, complete with an “ice-house,” a tavern, and “a new nine-pin alley.”
“The lawn,” Winfield wrote, “is shaded with noble elms and other wholesome trees, under which the visitor may generally find a fresh and invigorating sea-breeze, and have choice refreshments brought to his seat. Here, throwing aside all care, people of every grade in society meet to pass the afternoon when the heat of the city is oppressive.” In the summer:
… the spacious lawn in front [of the inn] was thronged with hundreds seeking rest, pleasure, health and enjoyment. Here groups of children romped in unrestrained freedom, and young people now and then whirled in the mazy dance on the velvet lawn. Indeed, there were periods during the sultry season when all classes might here find a happy representative; where the belle and the beau, the rich and the poor, the worker and the drone, the merry and the disconnected, met upon a common level of enjoyment.[35]
In 1836, Stevens created Sibyl’s Cave by excavating a hollow in the face of the rocky cliff of Castle Point. From a steadily flowing spring that had existed there, “thirsty promenaders drank at one cent a glass.”[36]
Edgar Allan Poe wrote one of his stories, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), after visiting Sibyl’s Cave.[37] He based the story on a true tragedy that occurred in New York during the previous summer. On July 25, 1841, Mary Cecilia Rogers, a beautiful, young, recently engaged tobacco-store clerk from New York, disappeared after having last been seen riding the ferry to Hoboken with an unidentified young man. She had always been extremely popular with all of the store’s male clients. Three days later, her body was found in the river near Castle Point. For a year, no clues surfaced to lead to her killer. Poe fashioned his own version of the murder, setting it in Paris, with the name of the victim thinly disguised as Marie Roget. He had constructed his story almost exactly as the real-life incident was later explained. A year after Poe’s story was published, a woman dying of injuries revealed that Mary had accidentally died during an abortion and that her body was disposed of by a “naval officer.”
Part Two tomorrow! Endnotes for Part One below.
Notes
1. Olmsted, F. 1852. Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (p. 52).
2. In May 1851 Olmsted’s essay, “The Peoples’ Park at Birkenhead, near Liverpool,” was published in Downing’s The Horticulturist. Ten years later he wrote an article entitled “Parks” for the New American Cyclopaedia.
3. Turnbull, A. 1928. John Stevens: An American Record. Stevens was a self-taught steam-engine designer, who devoured all the literature on the subject that he could find. He scrutinized the work of the two leaders in the field, the Englishmen James Watt and Robert Stevenson, who once said “engineering is not a science — it is a living art” (p. 117).
4. Ibid., 39.
5. Since the New York–New Jersey territory was founded by the Dutch, it is speculated that a town named Hoboken in Belgium, five miles southwest of Antwerp and in the region that was formerly a part of Holland, lent its name to Stevens’ town.
6. Van Winkle, D. 1924. History of the Municipalities of Hudson County, New Jersey, vol. 1 (p. 286).
7. Ibid., 285.
8. For much of the summers when passage over the Hudson was safer, the family stayed at their “Stevens Villa,” as it came to be known. The Villa was enlarged in 1795 due to the expanding size of the family. John and Rachel Stevens had 11 children — five daughters and six sons, three of whom went on to distinguished careers in engineering: Robert Livingston Stevens (1787–1859), who worked with his father in developing railway plans; John Cox Stevens (1785–1857), and Edwin Augustus Stevens (1795–1868), who founded the Stevens Institute of Technology.
9. Turnbull 1928, 85.
10. Stevens thought of his “bold eminence” as an American Rock of Gibraltar, and coined the name, Castle Point, from his original name for the place, the “Point of Castile.” He believed that his tall, rocky promontory would be an ideal position for a fort to protect New York City during the War of 1812 and that protective sea walls could be constructed at its base.
11. Turnbull 1928, 96.
12. Ibid., 144–145.
13. In the Appendix to his Guide to Hoboken, Whitley stated: “The property for sale by the Hoboken Land Improvement Company, lies north of the city of Hoboken, including Fox Hill, the famous cricket ground, and the Elysian Fields.” He did, however, mention that “The Elysian Fields, or Fox Hill, afford ample grounds for a Park, Zoological, or Botanical Garden; and should the Hoboken Land Improvement Company make no provision for either, the City of Hoboken should lose no time in acquiring Fox Hill for that purpose.” Fox Hill was a large tract of land to the west of the Elysian Fields that was owned by another individual, who maintained it in a relatively natural state except for the ball fields he cleared there.
14. The town that Stevens laid out was comprised of 300 acres, divided into 800 single-family lots. He proposed to build all of the houses, a ferry landing, and the portion of the New Jersey State Road that he hoped would cross his land. He envisioned great profits from the tolls that he could charge travelers between New York and Philadelphia.
Perhaps Hoboken’s most famous son is Frank Sinatra, who was born there on December 12, 1915.
15. Winfield, C. 1895. Hopoghan Hackingh: A Pleasure Resort for Old New York (p. 31).
16. Ibid., 54.
17. The name is derived from Greek mythology. Elysion was the name for the “Isles of the Blessed,” the realm to which certain virtuous mortals, or those given immortality by divine favor, were spirited after death. The ancient poet Homer described this as a happy land on the banks of Oceanus at the edge of the Earth.
The name Elysian Fields came to mean any place or state of perfect bliss. The main avenue in Paris, the Champs Élysées, derives from the same source.
18. Winfield 1895, 56.
19. Turnbull 1928, 490.
20. In fact, Stevens operated a “public house,” or tavern, in his hotel, the “’76 House,” just a few minutes’ stroll up the hill from the ferry landing. The Interpeiad of June 15, 1831 [correcting an earlier citation of 1815 — jt], claimed: “The excellent soda water and mead, to say nothing of the lemonade, port punch, or spruce beer of ‘mine host,’ together with the freshness of the afternoon breeze, are subjects which drive all meaner ideas from the mind” (Winfield 1895, 60).
21. Turnbull 1928, 491.
22. Winfield 1895, 35–36; Turnbull 1928, 491.
23. Downing, A. 1848. Rural Essays (p. 144).
24. Ibid., 156–158.
25. Welby, A. 1821. Visit to North America (p. 164).
26. Winfield 1895, 68, 71.
27. Turnbull 1928, 478.
28. Winfield 1895, 63.
29. The first extended demonstration of John Stevens’ locomotion was the steam engine John Bull, which he imported from George and Robert Stephenson’s foundry in England. In November 1831, he laid down more than one thousand feet of tracks near Bordentown, New Jersey. There, three carloads of passengers, including the first woman to ride such a train, were treated to a ride of several minutes. That woman was Princess Caroline Murat, daughter of Joseph Bonaparte, the elder brother of Napoleon I. [Joseph Bonaparte had no daughter Caroline. His sister Caroline married Joachim Murat. — jt]
30. Richard wrote about those gardens he saw in Paris: “There are two gardens that have them; the Tivoli, handsomest and most fashionable, and the Grande Chaumière. But the most elegant was at Beaujou — just demolished…. The elevation of this was about 80 feet … I recollect riding down it — the velocity was tremendous…. The carriages were made to hold two persons; they resemble our sleighs in their shape…” (Winfield 1895, 67–68).
31. Turnbull 1928, 480; Winfield 1895, 64.
32. Turnbull 1928, 494–495.
33. Winfield 1895, 68.
34. Ibid., 56.
35. Ibid., 59–60.
36. Ibid., 59.
37. Poe lived in New York City in 1837, but was living in Philadelphia between 1838–1844, where he was the literary editor of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. “The Mystery of Marie Roget” was published in three installments in the Ladies Companion (November and December 1842 and February 1843).
