On the left, Manhattan (except the north end) in 1811. On the right, the same view in 2018. The 1811 image is from the book American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic, by Victoria Johnson.
Who was David Hosack? He was the most famous doctor I'd never heard of. If I heard the name in an American History class, I didn't retain it. Two items in the 1811 view indicate his importance. The first, a spot that matches the location of Rockefeller Center, which is marked in the 1918 image, is a tiny rectangle labeled "Botanic Garden". The second, across the Hudson River and farther north, is a spot labeled "Monument of Gen. Hamilton". The monument marks the spot where, on July 11, 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr shot former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel over Hamilton's opposition to Burr in his bid to be Governor of New York State. The attending physician was David Hosack. Though he failed to preserve Hamilton's life, he had saved many lives that other doctors considered lost causes.
David Hosack (a Scottish name pronounced "Hozzick"), born in 1769, had studied both medicine and botany, and spent time in his late twenties in Scotland, where he first encountered botanical gardens in Edinburgh. he developed a passion for learning medical uses for plants. He already knew how to cure, or at least alleviate, symptoms of malaria and other fevers using "Peruvian bark", which contained quinine; the few effective medicines besides mercury were all plant parts or plant extracts.
After returning to New York and establishing a medical practice, Dr. Hosack bought 20 acres of land on the Middle Road in the middle of Manhattan Island where he established Elgin Garden in 1801. In just the ten years he had the garden, he gathered plants of all kinds, trained numerous medical students to recognize and use the medically useful ones, and corresponded with numerous botanists and botanical-medical men all over Europe and the American colonies. He corresponded with Jefferson, who had some interest in botany. He became the most famous doctor of the time, and his garden inspired others to set up gardens and arboreta that became the network of horticultural establishments found all over the U.S.
Ms Johnson's book outlines all this, with a wealth of fascinating details about life in and around New York two centuries ago, when Manhattan was mostly farmland. Only later, but in Hosack's lifetime, was Middle Road renamed Fifth Avenue. In 1810, after a few years of lobbying effort, Hosack sold Elgin Garden to the State of New York, though the state took its own sweet time to pay him. He could not continue the massive financial burden of maintaining the garden and its workers. It wasn't but a few years before the state divested itself, turning the garden over to Columbia University, which later sold the land to the consortium that began to build Rockefeller Center, which almost exactly covers the footprint of Elgin Garden, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
Whenever you see paintings by members of the "Hudson River School", some of which depict scenes in and around Manhattan and the other areas that now comprise New York City, take a moment to reflect upon the lovely scenes that once filled the area before it all became paved over and built to the sky with monuments to corporate power. And remember to be thankful that only a few percent of this nation has been paved and built upon, that large areas were set aside to retain their natural splendor. Also remember to be thankful for scholars such as David Hosack, whose passion for learning from nature inspired many of the medicines we take for granted, bestowed by the plants that grow all around us.
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