WANT to check out some NYC history but don’t want to ferret it out in a museum? Ride the subway instead. This plaque, designed by Jay Van Everen and located in the BMT Canal Street station serving R and N trains opened 1/5/1918, is a reproduction of an 1800 print that shows Broadway extending over the canal where Canal Street would be built. When, in the mid-1910s, Squire Vickers, the pre-eminent subway art director from the mid-teens to 1940, was looking for mosaic designs for the BMT Broadway subway, he chose that print, reproduced in nearby Capsouto Park. This specimen can be found in the NYC Transit Museum.
The scene is described in Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes‘ New York Past and Present: 1524-1939:
The Arch, or Stone Bridge was probably erected during the Revolution to facilitate access to the fortifications near the Collect Pond. By 1782 Broadway (or Great George street, as it was then called) had been formally extended across and beyond the ditch, clearly indicating the existence of a bridge at this time. The large double house on the SW corner of Broadway and Canal Street is the “Stone Bridge Tavern” often referred to in writings of he period. The canal ditch ran from the Collect to the North [Hudson] river at Canal Street and to the east river at Catherine Street. In early times it supposed to have been navigable in canoes. It was formalized and a sewer constructed through the street in 1819.
Canal Street sits atop a ditch, or canal, that drained Collect Pond into the Hudson River. The pond, located where today’s Foley Square courthouse neighborhood is today, had become fetid by the Revolutionary War and gave rise to the undesirable Five Points neighborhood. The ditch has been covered since 1819 and the road built over it is Canal Street, so named because “Drainage Ditch Street” is not exactly good public relations.
I walked the full length of Canal Street, a roadway I had theretofore totally avoided, in the spring of 2019.
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11/28/23
2 comments
I never knew the tile represented that… thanks
I would believe that if it was called Canal Street, then there had to be an actual canal there at one time just like how Wall Street is named for a wall that is no longer there.