HISTORY NOW!

We live with history in our built environment; history enriches our lives and gives us a sense of place. These are stories about historic places.

Changing Streets and Names-Houston Street

By Brian J Pape, AIA, LEED-AP

Credit: New York Public Library (NYPL) archives, NYC Parks Department, Gilbert Tauber’s Oldstreets.com, city records and Wikipedia provided historic notes. Of special note is the NYPL website with Interactive 1811 Plan maps that show old and new streets in adjustable overlays. There are three original manuscript copies of the 1811 Plan. The version presented in their interactive form is from the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (MssCol 605). The map is drawn in ink on paper, wax seals are attached at the bottom, and it measures 106 x 30 7/16. Pape text notations added.

Like so many other developments in the new American colony, Greenwich Village emerges from a group of farms established by Dutch and English settlers, who were sometimes government officials as well. One of these farms was the Bayard family farm.
The Bayards were the descendants of Peter Stuyvesant’s sister Anna. In the mid-18th Century the Bayard farm extended for about a half mile along the Bowery, tapering westward to a point near the present Sixth Avenue and Prince Street. A 1754 map shows a few streets laid out on the Bayard land closest to the Bowery. These are the present Elizabeth, Mott, and Mulberry Streets and the corresponding parts of the cross streets from Bayard Street north to Broome Street. After the Revolutionary War, Broadway was extended north of Canal Street, thereby opening the westerly part of the Bayard farm to development. Their property west of Broadway was laid out into streets and lots by 1788, and these streets were later extended through neighboring farms.
It is relevant to include DeWitt Clinton’s influence here in New York’s development. DeWitt Clinton (1769-1828) was a politician and naturalist born into a prominent NY political family. Among his many accomplishments, starting as New York State Assemblyman in 1798, U.S. Senator in 1802-3, then Mayor of New York from 1803 to 1807, 1808 to 1810, and 1811 to 1815, he was then elected  lieutenant governor from 1811 until June 1813, carrying a double load for New York.
From 1810 to 1824, Clinton was a member of the Erie Canal Commission appointed to plan and survey the route to be taken. Affiliated with the Democratic-Republican Party, Clinton was elected governor of New York from 1817 to 1822 and from 1825 to 1828, and presided over the construction of the Erie Canal. Clinton believed that infrastructure improvements could transform American life, drive economic growth, and encourage political participation. When the canal was finished in 1825, it created such an economic boon for the entire region and the Great Lakes, that it made Clinton a national hero and made NYC into a boom town again.
Nicholas Bayard (b. 1736), a descendant of the founding Bayards, established a street in the vicinity of Canal Street where he lived, which was christened Houstoun Street in 1790 by Nicholas and his wife Catherine Livingston. Their daughter, Mary, had married William Houstoun (1755-1813), in 1788. They had met while William, a member of an ancient and aristocratic Scottish family, was a delegate from 1784 through 1786 from the state of Georgia to the Continental Congress and to the Constitutional Convention in 1787.
The city-commissioned Mangin-Goerck Plan of 1803 (under Clinton) envisioned a major expansion of the Bayard West Farm Grid. It showed the streets from Mercer through Sullivan Streets continuing northward until they ran into the westward-trending Bowery.
Surprisingly, without a recorded explanation (since anti-royalty sentiment was still strong), Houstoun Street was re-named Prince Street in 1803, and the street further north was re-named Houstoun Street. The Mangin-Goerck Plan was superseded by the State Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 (again under Clinton). According to the Museum of NYC, the grid is “a plainspoken but heroic statement. The grid is simple but astonishing, structured but flexible, and embodies the forward thinking that prepared Manhattan for its unimaginably great future.”
The current spelling of the name is a corruption since the street appears as Houstoun in the city’s Common Council minutes for 1808 and on the official 1811 map, but the present spelling became dominant by the 1840s. (No relation to the younger Texan Sam Houston.) The city in 1833 extended Houstoun east to include North Street, the northern border of New York’s Lower East Side at the beginning of the 19th century. In 1891, Nikola Tesla established his laboratory on Houston Street, until much of Tesla’s research was lost in an 1895 fire.
The narrow, westernmost stretch of the current Houston Street, from Macdougal Street to West Street, was long known as “Hammersley Street” (also spelled “Hamersly Street”) and was inside Greenwich Village. In 1858, Houston absorbed Hammersley Street to the west and was divided into East and West Houston Streets at Broadway. The former Hammersley Place and Hancock Street were demolished for the extension of Sixth Avenue in the 1920s. Houston Street came to be regarded as the Village’s southern boundary, and the northern border of Hudson Square and SoHo (South of Houston) neighborhoods.
As Houston Street became more important to the growing city, the originally narrow Houston (and North) Street, was dramatically widened from Sixth Avenue to Essex Street in the early 1930s during construction of the Sixth Avenue Line subway. The street widening involved demolition of buildings on both sides of Houston Street, resulting in numerous small lots. Although some of these lots have been redeveloped, many of them are now used by vendors, gardens and playgrounds.
Today, Houston Street is a two-way boulevard, except for the narrow formerly Hamersly portion, which is one-way going west to the rapidly redeveloping West Street.
The New York pronunciation of Houston is not a corruption, since it has always been how’-ston