Cherry Street (Manhattan)
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Cherry Street, in the New York City borough of Manhattan, was originally established in colonial times to run from the intersection of Pearl Street and Frankfort Street in Lower Manhattan, approximately 1.44 Mile east to Grand Street in Corlears Hook. The section between Jackson Street and Montgomery Street, was removed and demapped to provide for Vladeck Park (now the site of public housing). The section between Pearl Street and Catherine Street was removed block-by-block due to development, starting with the building of the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1860's.
The street was named for the seven acre cherry orchard that sat on the general location that was owned by Goovert Loockermans, a wealthy Dutch merchant who was the New Amsterdam representative of the Amsterdam trading firm of Gillis Verbrugge & Company in the 1660s.
Loockermans' heirs sold the land in 1672 for $60.00. Richard Sackett acquired part of it, and opened a beer garden and a bowling green which became known as "Sackett's Orchard". In 1789, George Washington lived on Cherry Street, in a four-story mansion that belonged to Walter Franklin, a wealthy merchant. This house served as the first Executive Mansion of the President of the United States.
Cherry Street was the site of the first gas-lit house in Manhattan, owned by Samuel Leggett, a founder of Con Edison. The house was serviced via gas pipe from Pearl Street. Though Cherry Street once ran through to Pearl Street, it has since been terminated at Catherine Street due to the Civic Square development.[1]
In the 1930's, the first "superproject" development proposal in New York City was initiated for the Cherry Street area of Corlear's Hook. The Vladeck Houses, comprised of 24 six-story buildings, were completed in 1941, and were a precursor to the larger Unit Plans for public housing that predominated in later decades. A $50 million renovation of the Vladeck Houses began in 1998.[2] Cherry Street also traverses the Rutgers Houses and La Guardia Houses. All three of these large-scale housing projects are NYCHA developments.
Currently, the majority of structures along Cherry Street are residential co-op apartments, public housing, and older tenement buildings south of the Manhattan Bridge.
[edit] References
- ^ Moscow, Henry. "The Street Book"; an encyclopedia of Manhattan's street names and their origins.
- ^ The Villager Dot Com
- A brief history of Con Edison
- Feirstein, Sanna. Naming New York: Manhattan Places & How They Got Their Names. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
- Plunz, Richard. A History of Housing in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
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