New York Ghosts

It does not seem too outrageous to suggest that ghosts range about Manhattan streets. It takes a few years of living and a bit of walking to recognize them, but they are there and they are mostly friendly or at least benign. In part, this is because the street configurations remain much the same from century to century, even south of Wall Street where there is less grid and more hunting trail discernible.

Paradoxically, areas like Hanover Square that have been completely altered often seem to most aggressively insist on their past identities. At Hanover Square, one knows the exact location of John Peter Zenger's journal, the New York Weekly, even though all traces of the building disappeared two centuries ago. It was at the square's southwest corner a short distance from India House, which stands at the southeast.

Zenger's journal was important not because it was unbiased but because it was invariably opposed to the governing elites that controlled the city, even when one could make good arguments for their being right. His trial, in 1735 under the system of English justice and while the city was still under British control, set the precedent for freedom of the press and the First Amendment that would be included in the Constitution. The trial was held on the site of what is today Federal Hall Memorial at Wall and William Streets. The Stamp Act Congress met here in 1765 to protest England's imposition of taxes upon the colonies. After the Revolution, the Continental Congress met here in 1787 to pass the Northwest Ordinance, which established the procedure by which territories became states.

The first Congress of the United States convened at the site in 1788 and approved the Bill of Rights, no doubt encouraged by Zenger's ghost, and George Washington was inaugurated here on the spot where his statue presently stands. The building now at Wall and William is the old Sub-Treasury Building, the forerunner of the Federal Reserve. This building, whose front face is pure Doric but which has an oculus in its roof like Rome's Pantheon, was built in 1842 and was intended to be the city's Customs House. This is the reason that an enormous safe dominates the west wall of the building, immediately to the right of its entrance.

Stand on the platform that supports the statue of Washington. Its height is that of the balcony from which our first president addressed a just-born nation in 1789. One can only imagine the hope that reigned at the intersection of Broad, Wall, and William Streets. One feels something of that hope even more than two centuries later, perhaps even more profoundly in uncertain times. Our kindly ghosts seem present, encouraging and urging us not to forsake this great experiment called America.