Wall Street’s Revolutionary War

Fraunces Tavern, Bowling Green, plus Charging Bull and the world’s most elegant shoe department

C all it the Financial District, the Battery, or just plain Wall Street, the tip of Manhattan in the American Revolution was the place to be for tumbled statuary, noble deeds, intrigue aplenty, a stern, bleak occupation by the British, an inferno, and, yes, a tea party. It’s a great spot for historic preservation, too. I’d never been to Fraunces Tavern, on the corner of Pearl and Broad Streets, built in 1719 and considered the oldest surviving building in Manhattan.

Fraunces Tavern is a restaurant today, very cozy with lots of wood paneling, Colonial Revival furniture, creaky floors, plenty of Revolutionary War scenes on the walls, and a fireplace in every room. I had a tasty clam-chowder lunch. Unknown to most is the tavern’s first-rate, three-story museum centered on its time, before 1776, as the primary haunt of the Sons of Liberty, the place where Washington delivered one of his farewell addresses and, later, when New York City was the nation’s capital, the home of the nascent State, War, and Treasury Departments.

I thought it might be a touristical, podunk operation in part because my press inquiries went into a black hole, the greeter was a ten-year-old child, and no one could find the WiFi password. I scrutinize donor walls and knew only one or two names, unexpected since the Sons of the American Revolution owns the building and runs the museum. That’s my kind of crowd.

First impressions deceive. I hit pay dirt with a gallery labeled Welcome to the Long Room. Fraunces (1722/23–1795), I learned, bought the building, then a private home, in 1762, converting it into a tavern that served fixed-price meals, sold pickled goods, offered bedrooms for lodgers, and rented meeting rooms. He was a gregarious host, possibly of French stock, possibly born in the Caribbean, and sided with the Patriot cause. During the long British occupation starting in 1776, he was impressed — forced — to cook for a British general. He doubled as a Patriot spy and on the side smuggled food, he later said, to Patriot prisoners kept in dreadful conditions in British prison boats docked in what’s now Brooklyn. During the war, more men died on these ships than in battle.

The Long Room, about 40 feet long, is decorated to represent the typical tavern public room in the late 18th century, with furniture, pewter plates, ceramics, brass candlesticks, and other fare all from Washington’s era. The Sons of Liberty, we think, was organized in the Long Room, first to protest the Tea Act of 1773 and then much else as tempers rose and wild ideas fermented. Not to be outdone by Bostonians, the Sons launched not one but two tea parties, planning them at the tavern. On April 19, 1774, they blockaded a British ship, the Nancy, from delivering 689 crates of tea to New York, chasing it out into the open sea. Insurgents dumped 18 crates of tea from another ship, the London, in New York Harbor on April 22 as crowds cheered. Unlike their Boston brothers, they didn’t even bother to disguise themselves as Indians. They acted in open defiance of their Loyalist lords.

The British occupied New York from 1776 to 1783, the longest of any American town, and often with despotic will and force. With Fraunces making fish and chips for a British general, the Tavern was run by his son-in-law, serving British officers with a smile but covertly countenancing a spy ring for the Patriots. The lowest of many low points was the Great Fire of 1776, which started five days after Washington’s army fled. It remains a mystery. At the time, it was thought to be a scorched-earth move by the Patriots. It destroyed a fifth of the city and exacerbated a shelter crisis as thousands of Loyalist civilians, ousted from Patriot-controlled towns and the countryside, poured into Manhattan. Broad Street acted as a firebreak, so the Tavern didn’t burn. Afterward, martial rule grew even more hostile and confiscatory.

There’s much to like in the Long Room. I learned about typical tavern savories — beef, mutton, pork and veal chops, fried and pickled oysters — and confections like tarts and cakes but also blancmange, which is like panna cotta, and syllabub, a frothy thing made from curdled milk, a dash of milk “straight from the cow,” and spirits. Fraunces Tavern is, after all, still a restaurant. New York had one tavern for every 55 residents, establishing it as the boozy town we know today.

More seriously revelatory is Washington’s Long Room Farewell Address, delivered on December 4, 1783. We can hear it by pressing a pedal. He gave a few farewell speeches in late 1783 as the Treaty of Paris secured our independence and the beaten Brits vamoosed, but this is the most personal. It’s really a toast. “With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you,” he said to a you-could-hear-a-pin-drop crew of his officers. “I most devoutly wish that your latter days be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.” With tears all round, he invited each man for one last embrace.

Washington’s 1783 farewells — “back to Mount Vernon I go” — shocked elites and dreamers worldwide since no one could believe that a victorious general would forswear power so well won, against all odds, and there for the taking. In 1775, Washington, rich and elite, put his life on the line. Why not get even and enjoy the spoils? That wasn’t Washington. And he didn’t stay at Mount Vernon for long. In 1789, having chaired the Constitutional Convention with discernment, he was back in New York as president.

A room across the hall from the Long Room evokes the tavern when New York City was our capital, from 1785 to 1790, and it was a government office. We don’t know whether this room was the setting where the postwar debt crisis weighed its heaviest or where Shay’s Rebellion, Indian wars, Algerian pirates, and the early China Trade had to be handled, but it’s convincing enough. None of the 1780s eyewitness furniture is there, but the vintage placeholders work — the Chippendale desk, chairs, and negotiating table, a squat Windsor writing chair, books such as the two-volume Military Guide for Young Officers, from 1776, a foot warmer, and spectacles, though a chamber pot on the floor is odd. Grand, bold Zuber & Cie wallpaper, the War of American Independence series, covers the walls. It was first made in 1852 in Paris, but Washington, Lafayette, horses, battle scenes, and sad, clobbered Redcoats are hard to resist.

The Centennial in 1876 stimulated a new class of Revolutionary War buffs aside from the elite Society of Cincinnati, which limited its membership to only the eldest living male descendant of any given Revolutionary War veteran. Goodness, that’s primogeniture. The Sons of the American Revolution emerged, taking all descendants and making a new, large cohort of preservationists.

The Sons bought the building, no longer a tavern, in 1904, and meticulously and, here and there, controversially restored it. The museum owns 8,000 objects. There’s lots of ephemera, including a piece of Washington’s first — and temporary — coffin, a plaque with the State Seal from the coach that carried him to his inauguration in 1789, Baron von Steuben’s commodious liquor cabinet, cannonballs, Colonial bar equipage, and Nathan Hale’s last letter and other manuscripts. Some think that Hale was part of the cabal that might have set the 1776 fire.

There’s a gallery dedicated to the Birch Trials. These were hearings that British and Patriot adjudicators held at Fraunces Tavern. The British had issued lots of manumission decrees to Loyalist blacks who may or may not have been slaves. Who could leave with the departing troops and who could stay? There’s also an excellent 30-minute introductory video, a gallery on the battles leading to the 1776 British occupation and another displaying state-militia flags. The one-hour tour was very good, led by an informed, energetic docent.

Fraunces Tavern was in the news big time in 1975 when the left-wing Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN detonated a bomb inside the building, killing four people eating there. Neither our crackerjack FBI nor CIA ever arrested anyone though FALN claimed responsibility. A pack of FALN terrorists were convicted on bomb charges — another bombing — a few years later, imprisoned, and freed by Bill Clinton in 1999.

Nearby is teardrop-shaped Bowling Green Park, New York’s oldest park and where, lore has it, Peter Minuit paid Lenape bigwigs $24 in axes, pots, cloth, and shell beads called wampum in exchange for Manhattan. Life was copasetic until July 9, 1776. After the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, aroused, possibly lubricated Patriots — probably the Sons of Liberty — demolished a two-ton gilded lead equestrian statue of King George III, whom I tend to call George the Turd, 8 feet tall, on a 15-foot pedestal, and raised on Bowling Green in 1770. The statue’s parts, or most of them, went with no majesty to Connecticut to be melted for 42,088 Patriots bullets. Today, a circular fountain occupies the spot where George stood. When I visited, the tulips surrounding the fountain had shed their petals and the fountain was dry, so it was a forlorn scene.

Steps away, on the edge of the park, is Charging Bull, the bronze sculpture near the stock exchange meant to elicit animal spirits, optimism, and forever-rising indexes. I was surprised to learn not only that it’s recent, from 1989, but that Arturo Di Modica, an Italian immigrant sculptor made good, designed the Bull, paid for its fabrication at a foundry, and dropped it at night by the stock exchange with the help of friends as a surprise gift to humanity. It was his pocket-us-up gesture in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash. “The Sun Will Come Up Tomorrow,” he sang on TV, adding “be strong, be brave” and no doubt channeling the Trumpy “fight, fight, fight.” The City’s Parks Department eventually accepted it as a gift, knowing a tourist draw when it saw one.

Charging Bull is overripe baroque kitsch, but public sculpture is back at Bowling Green, and it makes people happy. When I was there, a long line waited for photo ops. I snapped a group of young Italian women posing under the bull’s hefty palle, or testicoli if we want to be polite. They’re like watermelons. Speriamo di trovare mariti ricchi, one told me. “We’re hoping to find rich husbands.” Non guardare me, I’m taken and definitely not rich. I admire their very American ambition. I’m not beyond thinking that making money is patriotic.

If they do nab a Goldman Sachs VP, they can marry at Trinity Church or St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway. Before the wedding, there’s shopping to be done for a trousseau. I’ll end with Printemps, the French luxury department store for ladies of means, at One Wall Street and a two-minute walk from Bowling Green. The Art Deco pile was originally the Irving Trust Company’s headquarters. No, in 1929 the suddenly bankrupted didn’t throw themselves from the building on Black Monday, because it didn’t open until 1931. Anyway, in reality no one leapt to his death from the building on Black Monday, Tuesday, or Thursday. I visited Printemps not to shop — wow, it’s pricy — but to see the Red Room. It’s pure Jazz Age.

The Red Room, once the bank’s lobby, is still a room that stuns, an abstract, angular glass mosaic-and-tile space designed by muralist and mosaicist Hildreth Meière along with Perry Coke Smith, who worked for Irving Trust’s architect, Ralph Walker. It’s huge, 11,000 square feet, and now Printemps’s shoe department. It starts with a pink and deep-red tile floor that is now mostly covered with a patterned rose carpet. Then, rising from rose-colored banquettes — very comfy — are crimson, tiger-orange, and gold mosaics leading to the 33-foot-high ceiling, which becomes a canopy of gold and lighter reds and oranges. The gold-leaf tesserae — pieces of glass — get smaller as they go up, and there’s gradually more orange than red.

Meière is known today for her mosaics at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue and Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side. The Red Room was restored in the 2010s, closed to the public for a long time, and repurposed by Printemps last year. Though filled with fancy platforms, shelves, and $1,000 shoes, it’s still magnificent. Whether they knew it or not, our Revolutionary forebears fought so we could live well.