Old Farms in City of New-York

Original title: "Part of New York in 1742 : showing the site of the present park, the collect and the little collect ponds, and a portion of the west side of [now] Broadway", drawn from memory by David Grim, 1742. Hand colored map with relief shown by hachures. Source: Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

This is not a contemporary map. Grim would have been five-years-old in 1742. He probably drew his maps decades later. See also his Plan of the City and Environs of New York (1742-1744).

The map above shows, for example the Rutger's Farm (on the right), which became Ranelagh Gardens in 1765. Before 1750, Broadway did not extend to the north beyond present-day Vesey St. It was then known as the road to Anthony Rutger’s Farm. After 1750, Trinity Church laid out streets through a portion of the Church Farm, located from the west side of (now) Broadway (since 1794) to the Hudson River, until about Chambers Street. In the 1770s, the extension of Broadway in the west side of present City Hall Park (ceded by Trinity Church to the City in 1761), was part of the Great George Street, although many people called it Broadway. It became officially Broadway in 1794

At the time many swamplands existed in Manhattan and there was a yellow fever epidemic in certain areas. The palisades seen crossing the Common were, in fact, erected in 1745, and they existed until about the early 1760s. In the 1767 Bernard Ratzer map they are gone.

Adam Vandenberg (van Denberg) had a tavern and garden on the Church Farm, leased from Trinity Church, since about 1735 (upper left corner on this map). Robert Harrison had leased this plot in 1721.

The Poor House was erected in 1735, adjoining the John Harris property, who built the first house in the Common.