Tea-water, the 1741 Slave Insurrection, and Collect Pond

"Tea-water" is the name that eighteenth-century New York gave to potable water. It was, in other words, safe to use for making tea. In the days before the draining of Collect Pond (the area that includes Foley Square and past the Federal Courthouse to the north), such water was sold at a premium to those who could afford it. Often, it was sold in taverns built above spring water ponds, and one such tavern stood on the northeast corner of Greenwich Street and Murray in 1741. Greenwich Street was the western shoreline of Manhattan and led north to the village that bore the same name as the London suburb. Everything further west, including St. John's Manhattan campus, was created with landfill as more buildings rose and the North River, now better known as the Hudson, filled with tall ships.This was the very rural Out-ward of the city located to the west of the Common (now City Hall Park). The Common was much larger than the present City Hall Park, however, and was intersected by Broadway on the west and Chatham Street, now Park Row, on the east. According to Jill Lepore's marvelous book New York Burning, the tavern at Greenwich and Murray (then merely fields) was the possible meeting place of those who conspired to set fires at various places in the city. These included the royal governor's mansion at the Battery, located where the Custom House (which now houses the Museum of the American Indian) stands. The brackish, cholera-ridden Collect Pond required tea-water forays to outlying places like the disreputable tavern located in the field to the west of the Common. It threw together resentful slaves, poor whites, and a few greedy businessmen who sought to create chaos and snap up property along Pearl Street to the Battery. There were undoubtedly fires set throughout the winter and spring of 1741, and there were more than thirty slaves executed and buried in what is today the African Burial Ground on Duane Street. The irony is that there may never have been a slave "insurrection" at all, rather a terror campaign designed by have-nots to frighten the wealthy into selling their properties cheaply.Oddly, this entire event centers around the question of New York's water supply and its safety. The model system known as the Croton that New Yorkers enjoy today is a direct consequence of New York's eighteenth-century cholera epidemics. Its first "hydrant" or public tap stood where the Jacob Wrey Mould Fountain cools visitors to City Hall Park.