Although Greenwich Village’s Bank Street does not border the bank of the Hudson River, its name is connected with water. The origin of the name of this six-block long street is connected with New York City’s diseased-ridden water.
With an expanding population during the late-18th and early-19th centuries, the water supply was inadequate, both in quantity and quality. It posed an ever-present threat of water-born diseases for Manhattan’s early residents. Yellow fever was a particular concern.
Lower Manhattan’s last significant outbreak of yellow fever was in 1822. The following year Dr. Peter S. Townsend (1795–1849) wrote about, “the timely and almost total abandonment of all that part of the city south of Fulton Street.” Another citizen recalled how “from daybreak till night, one line of carts, containing boxes, merchandize and effects, were seen moving towards Greenwich Village and the upper parts of the city.”
Businesses set-up shop temporarily in Greenwich Village; soon they were thriving as before. The financial services industry of that time, which has been associated with Lower Manhattan and Wall Street for more than two centuries, relocated to Greenwich Village too. Banks and bankers, seeking to escape the yellow-fever outbreaks, moved north.
The Bank of New York bought eight lots in Greenwich Village as early as 1798. During that year one of its clerks at its main Wall Street office had contracted yellow fever. With the purchase of land in the Village, the bank established a branch office where it could conduct business in the event of future emergencies. The Bank of New York—established by Founding Father Alexander Hamilton in 1784, making it the oldest bank in the United States—started the trend; banks moved temporarily northward to escape yellow fever.
Subsequent epidemics in 1803, 1805, and 1822 pushed other banks, including Bank of the Manhattan Company and Phenix Bank, to the same area of Greenwich Village that served as the temporary home for the Bank of New York, which was the first corporate stock to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange in 1792. This cluster of financial institutions gave rise to calling that strip of land Bank Street; it still travels from Greenwich Avenue to the West Side Highway today in the Village.
The customs house, the post office, banks, insurance companies, and newspapers printers relocated themselves to the Village as well. Here they were free from the impending danger. Greenwich Village became the seat of business, if only temporarily and for short periods.
The need to use the Village as a temporary sanctuary would not continue much longer. By 1837 construction of the Croton Aqueduct had begun. In 1842, when the 41-mile aqueduct was completed, the city had an abundant and clean water supply, resulting in yellow-fever outbreaks subsiding.
As a result of this activity, the bucolic nature of Greenwich Village was changed forever. In addition to an increase in residential population, gradually over time, the area became home to factories, warehouses and tenements. However, before these developments, the Village provided a refuge to the citizens of Lower Manhattan, and allowed New York’s banks to conduct business as usual.
Discover more about Bank Street as well as other parts of Greenwich Village when you participate in Walk About New York’s Greenwich Village Walking Tour ( http://www.walkaboutny.com ). See you on a tour!
