BY SAM SPOKONY | A group of local residents and tourists from around the nation gathered Downtown on the afternoon of the 4th of July to kick off their Independence Day celebrations — but they weren’t there just to prep for the fireworks. This was a journey into the history of the American Revolution, taken amid a stroll through streets with timeless stories to tell.
It was Big Onion Walking Tours’ “Revolutionary New York” tour, which began just outside City Hall at the intersection of Broadway and Murray Street. Tour guide Jessamyn Conrad, a non-fiction author and a graduate student at Columbia University, began by introducing the crowd to a little-known reminder of the revolution.
Inside City Hall Park, and in plain sight while walking down Broadway, stands a replica of the Liberty Pole that was erected near the same spot about a decade before the American Revolutionary War began. Liberty Poles were built out of ship masts taken from the port cities and placed throughout the colonies in order to show support for the growing tide of independence, said Conrad.
But Conrad quickly noted that the site of the Liberty Pole revealed what she called “a great irony of the American Revolution.”
During the 18th century, the grounds beneath the pole — a symbol of freedom from the British crown — also held a massive burial ground for black slaves, she said. Although slaves made up a sizable proportion of the population of the colonies at that time, members of that group were not included in the Patriots’ call for freedom.
From there, Conrad took the group to St. Paul’s Chapel at Broadway and Vesey Street. The chapel, which first opened in 1766, is known by some as Manhattan’s oldest public building that is still in use. But many people don’t realize what a stroke of luck that is, she explained, because it was one of the only Lower Manhattan buildings to survive the Great Fire of New York, which took place in 1776.
Since the British quickly captured New York City at the start of the Revolutionary War to use as a base of operations, Patriots started the Great Fire in order to burn down anything that might have been useful to their enemies.
The chapel’s survival likely disappointed revolutionaries seeking to raze the entire area, but it served another historic role after the war. St. Paul’s was, in fact, the place where George Washington attended services on April 30, 1789, the morning of his presidential inauguration.
Another stop on the tour was the monument to Revolutionary War prisoners, located in the Trinity Wall Street churchyard on Broadway and Pine Street. The monument, built in 1856, honored the Americans who died in New York’s British prisons during the war.
Only about 29 percent of American deaths in the Revolutionary War occurred in combat, according to Conrad, and most of the other 71 percent of deaths actually occurred in British prisons. She added that, of the prisoners, an extremely high number — between 30 and 40 percent — died on the ships that, docked in New York City’s ports, which had been converted into prisons.
“It’s important to remember those people,” said Conrad, “but we don’t usually hear about them anymore because it just wasn’t a glorious aspect of the war.”
After taking the group to several other sites, including the tombstone of founding father Alexander Hamilton, which is also located in the Trinity Church graveyard, and Fraunces Tavern — the reconstructed site of the famous Patriot gathering place, located at Pearl and Broad Streets — Conrad ended the tour at Bowling Green Park, leaving participants with an insightful connection to one of New York’s present-day memorials.
After the Declaration of Independence was first read in New York on July 9, 1776, at what was once City Hall — and what is now Federal Hall, at Broad and Nassau Streets — Patriots rushed to tear down the statue of King George III that had stood within Bowling Green since 1770.
But, Conrad noted, directing the crowd’s attention to the middle of the park, that the British statue was replaced by a fountain rather than an American-themed statue.
She threw out a question to the tour group: Why was that choice made? Once they had completely reconquered Manhattan after the war ended in 1783, why didn’t the Patriots turn what was once a symbol of British victory and dominance into a statue proclaiming their own liberty?
Conrad told the group that today’s historians don’t quite know the answer to that question, but that she has her own theory behind the Patriots’ possible thought process.
“What I find really interesting is a connection one might make between Bowling Green and the 9/11 Memorial,” said Conrad. “We’re remembering the World Trade Center attacks by placing reflecting pools in the footprints of the original sites, rather than identical towers. Here, the early Americans did something very similar by replacing the statue with a fountain.”
She concluded, “It’s as if we have retained that feeling from them, of gaining strength through a sense of absence rather than presence.”
