Bond Street, extending from Broadway to the Bowery at a point where those two thoroughfares are less than a thousand feet apart, is an unknown region to many present day denizens of New York, but eighty years ago, when Broadway ended at Union "Place" and the Astor House was new, when water was peddled in barrels at a cent a gallon and gas cost $7 per thousand feet, Bond Street was one of the best known streets in the city and none stood higher in favor as a place of residence.

 In its short stretch there dwelt at one time or another between 1820 and 1850,. the mayor of the city; the town's most popular physician; the pastor of one of the largest and wealthiest churches; a senator of the United States; one of the city's two representatives in Congress; an ex-secretary of the treasury; a major general in the army who became one of our most distinguished soldiers and a candidate for the presidency; and two members of a firm of bankers who in the financial world of their time exercised an influence unequalled on this side of the Atlantic.

In the words of "Uncle David Valentine," Bond street "was projected about 1807." Why it was so named has not been ascertained, but it seems not unlikely that a famous street of the same name in London had something to do with the choice. In Elliott's 1812 directory the sole resident of Bond street is Samuel Hallett, probably the Samuel Hallett who had a carpenter shop in the Bowery near Bleecker Street. Beyond this we know nothing of Mr. Hallett, but perhaps he worked at his trade on the more pretentious house that later rose on the site of his own dwelling. At any rate he is entitled to such fame as may flow from the fact that he was one of the pioneers of Bond Street.

The social history of Bond street begins about 1820, when Jonas Minturn built the marble-front house that still stands at No. 22. Within five or six years came John J. Morgan, John Griswold, James Gore King, Dr. Gardiner Spring, Knowles Taylor, Jonathan Prescott Hall, Samuel Ward, and Benjamin Deforest. By 1835 the residential pre-=eminence of Bond street was unquestioned. It yielded nothing to its rivals, Lafayette place, St. John's park, Second avenue, Great Jones street and Washington square; and if these were longer in favor it was because there was no Save New York committee in those days and the undesirables were then, as now, eager to seize upon the best.

Architecturally Bond street was much the same as other residence streets of the period. Except for a few at each end of the street the houses were of the familiar three story-and-basement type with dormer-windowed attics. Some had marble fronts, but the most of them were brick. There were less than sixty of these old houses, of which twenty-six remain__Nos. 2, 4, 6, 8, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 41, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53 and 55. One of them, No. 8 retains something of its former dignity, perhaps because it was among the last to succumb to the irresistible encroachment of trade; though No. 23, the very last to yield, is as dilapidated and shabby as the rest and its fire escape is as rusty and unsightly as the others.

The Bond street trees were famous. There were two in front of each house, and in 1857 they were so tall and dense that from the roadway only the stoops of the houses could be seen. Tuckerman, in his biography of Dr. Francis, says that "the lamps, gleaming amid the leaves, reminded one of Paris." It is needless to remark that no such reminder of Paris will be found in the Bond street of the present.

Before 1850 Bond street showed unmistakable evidence of decline. By 1855 it had robbed Park place of its long held distinction as the favorite street for dentists' offices. Two years later it was the scene of one of the most gruesome and sordid crimes in the annals of the city. In 1860 a few of the old residents still lingered, but the glory if not the fame of Bond street had vanished forever. Today it is the habitat of cheap manufacturing, and the names on the doors have a sound that would have startled the owners of the names that embellished the same portals three-quarters of a century ago.

On the north corner of Broadway stood the famous Ward house, a plain but dignified structure of brick with white marble trimmings, not unlike the houses now standing on the north side of Washington Square. Samuel Ward, its owner, was the head of the banking house of Prime, Ward and King, and as such was the most influential financier in America, enjoying a position of power and influence equal to that of the late J. Pierpont Morgan seventy years later. In the financial panic of 1837 he played a like part to that of Mr. Morgan in the panic of 1907.

In 1819 Samuel Ward lived at No. 1 Market field street, on the north side, next to the corner of Broad street. There, in a house that vanished many years ago, was born his gifted daughter Julia, author of the immortal "Battle Hymn of the Republic." A year or two after Julia was born he moved to No. 5 Bowling Green, the old "Steamship Row" of later days, where he had as neighbors such men as John Hone, Elisha Riggs, and Stephen Whitney. Mrs. Ward was Julia Rush Cutler. She died in the Bowling Green house in 1824, and two years later her husband took his family, a son and three daughters, to No. 16 Bond street. Here he lived till 1833, when his mansion at the corner of Broadway was completed. In this house he died in 1839, his death being hastened by the overwork and strain incident to the financial depression of the time.

The Samuel Ward of whom we have been speaking was the second of that name in New York. His father, Samuel Ward, senior, was a distinguished officer in the Continental Army and after the Revolution settled on Long Island. In 1829 he moved to the city and took the new house at No. 7 Bond street, where his daughter Anne, unmarried, kept house for him and her three brothers, Richard R., William G., and John. Samuel Ward senior died in 1832, and about 1840 John and Richard Ward, with their sister, went to No. 32 Bond street and in 1844 to No. 8, while their brother William went to 14 Carroll Place, on the northeast corner of Bleecker and Thompson streets.

The mansion of Samuel Ward II. was known in the Ward family as "The Corner." In the directories of the period it is always given as "Bond c. Broadway" and though the entrance was in Bond street it was, strictly speaking, a Broadway and not a Bond street house. Adjoining it in Broadway on the north was the "windowless house," which in the sixties excited so much curiosity among persons who were ignorant of its history. It was the picture gallery of Samuel Ward, built to shelter his art collection, the first private building erected for such a purpose in America.

Samuel Ward was a trustee or director in many of New York's public institutions and societies. He was a director of the Bank of Commerce, and a trustee of Columbia College; director and president of Stuyvesant Institute; and president of the New York Temperance Society.

Some years after the death of Samuel Ward "The Corner" passed out of the possession of his heirs, and later was the residence of Joseph Sampson, an eminent merchant in the India trade. In 1873 the house was razed to make way for a commercial structure.

No. 1 Bond Street

Across the street was No. 1. the home of the celebrated Dr. John W. Francis, whose "Old New York, or Reminiscences of the Past Sixty Years," is at once the delight and the despair of the extra-illustrator. Dr. Francis was an authority in the medical world, and it is said that for years he enjoyed the largest and most lucrative practice in the city. He was a character and a personage, and was known simply as the Doctor, very much as we speak of the Colonel today. He was the last New York physician of standing to continue the practice of bleeding. The story is told (in the Life of Julia Ward Howe, by her daughters Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott) that at a dinner party at his house he suddenly left the table and summoned his wife to an adjoining room where he proceeded to bleed her. In answer to her piteous protestations he stated that he perceived she was about to suffer a stroke of apoplexy and deemed it best to avert it! Mrs. Francis, whom the Doctor married in 1829, was Eliza Cutler, a sister of Julia Ward Howe's mother. She was "Aunt Eliza" to the Ward children, and Dr. Francis, the Wards' family physician, was "Uncle Doctor." For several years after their marriage Dr. Francis and his wife lived at "The Corner," the Doctor keeping his office at 67 Chambers street, but in 1837 they went to No. 1 Bond street and the Doctor moved his office to the ground floor of Samuel Ward's picture gallery, No. 662 Broadway. "The Doctor," says Frederick S. Cozzens, "is one of our old Knickerbockers. His big bushy head is as familiar as the City Hall. He belongs to the "God bless you, my dear young friend' school. He is as full of knowledge as an egg is of meat." Dr. Francis lived at No. 1 for twenty-three years. In 1860 he went to 37 (now 113) East 16th Street, where he died on February 8, 1861. This house disappeared only a few years ago.

After Dr. Francis left No. 1 it became the office of the newly established Department of Public Charities and Correction and was retained as such until the erection of the Department's building at the northwest corner of Third avenue and Eleventh street. About 1870 Nos. 1, 3 and 5 Bond street were demolished to make room for the building that now stands on the site, erected for the American Watch Company.

Prior to Dr. Francis' occupancy No. 1 had been the residence of Thomas L. Smith, a merchant, whose place of business was at 52 Wall street. he came to Bond street from Prince street, corner of Crosby street, in 1826. Following Thomas L. Smith the house was taken in 1834 by John H. L. MacCrackan, a merchant of 85 Pearl street, who prior to that year had lived at 66 Greenwich street, in the old house that still stands on that site. John H. L. MacCracken's comfortable fortune, his literary attainments (he published a number of popular articles in the magazines of the period) and his fine conversational powers, enabled him to bear a distinguished part in New York society. From No. 1 he went to No. 44, but in 1845 moved to 33 St. Mark's Place. He died in 1853 at Sierra Leone while on a business trip to that region.

No. 2 Bond Street

No. 2, directly across from the home of Dr. Francis, still stands. In 1829 it became the residence of Judge David S. Jones, a distinguished jurist, who in 1828 lived at 37 Great Jones street. he was a son of Samuel Jones, often called the "father of the New York Bar." Judge David S. Jones' grandfather, Thomas Jones, also a distinguished lawyer, married Anne de Lancy, a daughter of James de Lancey, then Chief Justice and Lieutenant Governor of New York. From her brother she received a plot of ground between the Bowery and the East River, and on this plot Judge Thomas Jones erected the estate known as Mount Pitt. Later he lived in a spacious and elegant mansion fronting Great South Bay. This house, known originally as Tryon Hall, was built for him by his father in 1770, and here Judge David S. Jones was born in 1777. While residing at Massapequa he was county judge. Coming to New York before 1810 he speedily acquired a large and remunerative practice and took rank as one of the ablest, most active, and most influential members of his profession. From 1813 to 1816 he was corporation counsel. For many years he was trustee and legal advisor of Columbia College, the Society Library, and the General Theological Seminary. He was also a director of the Phoenix Bank. In 1835 he returned to Long Island to live, though still practicing in the city. In 1840 he came back to town and resided then at 79 Third avenue. He died in 1848 at his residence in Fifteenth street, near Third avenue. His son William Alfred Jones was an author and from 1851 to 1865 was librarian of Columbia College.