(Lispenard's
creek) with the famous Collect (Kolck) pond, a depressed and bog-like
pond on the present site of the Tombs in Centre Street. The Tombs,
fifty years ago known as " The Hall of Justice," stands about at the
center of this old pond, or lake, a celebrated resort for winter
pastimes, and referred to by its contemporaries as " a beautiful sheet
of water."
Further
north, at the foot of Rivington,* Grand, Houston, 5th, 7th, 10th and
30th Streets, the edges of the island were eroded and frayed by a
variable fringe of marshes. The island area has been almost everywhere
below 14th Street added to by artificial enlargements, and these
extensions of filled land have been, all along its southern limits,
quite considerable.
The
present Battery Park is made land. Greenwich Street, on the west side,
was the former boundary of Manhattan Island, and the line of Water
Street the limit on the east. The rapid currents of both the Hudsott
and East Rivers probably existed to even a greater degree in "the past
than they do today, and to their wearing and tearing down the
unconsolidated strata on either side, and their convergence at the
south, is due the triangular extremity of the island and its contracted
area. Below Barclay Street, on the North River, the rock is met sloping
toward the river, but in other places the mud, tenacious and rigid,
forms an almost impenetrable layer over the bottom.
The
present borders of the Harlem River illustrate the growth upward of mud
flats, and it was over such surfaces that the filled-in areas about New
York were made. They are lifted gradually toward the water level by
slow accumulations of sediment. They are invaded by grass (Spartina patens, Ait),
which, growing thicker and thicker, entraps more and more silt, and
gradually creates a land surface below the water, to become a widely
extended swamp-bed. Such
*Here
were Marinus Willet's and Stuyvesant's Meadows, where, by common
repute, at Burnt Hill Point, Manhattan Island, or Dry Dock, Kidd and
Blackbear buried their treasure. The meadows were a mile along the
shore.
