Steamship Row ( 1880 ).  Built c. 1820, these mansions on Bowling Green were elegant homes in what was then the most fashionable residential district of the City. When the well-to-do moved to midtown, these buildings became the offices of several foreign consulates and steamship companies known as "Steamship Row" - eventually demolished to make way for the Custom house. You may be interested to know that the first stationary bathtub was set up under the stoop of the Eli Whitney house ( the second from the right ). The New York Produce Exchange Building is in the left background.  [ Continued ]

REFERENCES:  Steamship Row mansions on Bowling Green,  Steamship Lines on Steamship Row,  Custom house,  N.Y. Produce Exchange

"These splendid houses were the wonder of their day. In point of grandeur they far exceeded anything that had yet appeared. They were occupied by families of the first social importance. Stephen Whitney, inventor of the famous cotton gin and counted the richest man of his day, lived in the second house from Broadway; Peter Remsen, John Guion, David Austin, Elisha Riggs and Ferdinand. Suydam completed the sextette. At a later date, Commodore Vanderbilt lived in the house at the State Street corner. In spite of all their magnificence, however, these houses for the greater part of their existence were without running water, gas or steam heat. Open fireplaces furnished all the warmth obtainable. The pump that supplied the water was still standing late in the seventies on the southwest corner. Smoke from the great fire of 1835 which prostrated the city, ruined the draperies in these houses and tarnished the silver.

During the Civil War the Battery was naturally the scene of bustle and confusion early and late; and when the park was used as a detention camp for Southern prisoners the combination effectually destroyed the quiet dignity of the neighborhood and its fall from social grace was rapid and complete. In the late [ 1860's ], the great Cunard Line moved its offices into one of these abandoned houses, to be followed soon afterward by all the other foreign steamship companies — the White Star, Anchor, Inman, Guion, Transatlantique, Holland and others, and the street became known the world over as 'Steamship Row.' About 1900 the Government finally decided to buy back the old location for the Custom House, which it did, paying three million dollars for what had been sold for a tenth of that sum. Nevertheless the land which belonged to the Government in its very earliest days, three hundred years ago, has now reverted to its original owner and probably will never again be permitted to go out of its possession."

[ Qutotation from:  Henry Brown Collins, Valentine's City of New York Guide Book, pp. 30 - 32 ( New York: The Chauncey Holt Co., 1920 ) ]
[ Image from Henry Collins Brown, Valentine's Manual of Old New York - No. 5, Opp. p. 1 ( New York: The Chauncey Holt Co., 1920 ) ]

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