This farm had a front of about 400 feet on the Bowery-road, and ran thence easterly almost to the river, with seme upland, but much morass, overgrown with cat-tails, and through which wandered a stream known as Crummassie-Vly or Winding Creek, * * * He planted on the edge of the morass, in December, 1831, Gramerey park, by gratuitously giving the whole of the 66 lots it comprises--now worth two hundred thousand dollars-- and attaching to the grant a condition that ten dollars a lot should be annually paid for ever by the residents around the square as a fund out of which to plant, preserve, and adorn it. Disdaining too, the personal vanity of entailing his own name upon thig creation of his own energy and property, he preserved the name by which the old Duane estate was known, the Gramercy Seat--corrupted, probably, from the Crooked Creek, or

Cromme-see, which meandered through its meadows.--President King's Progress of New-York during the last Fifty Years.

1078 MEMOIR OF THE

"as no one," they say in their petition, "is better' qualified, so none will be more acceptable to us and our constituents at large than Mr. Duane. Few have sacrificed more or deserve better from their country." Many private friends urging him to accept this office, Mr..D. consented and was accordingly appointed on 5th February, 1784, Mayor of his native city.

Though his duties now were, in many respects, very onerous, yet his position was, on many occasions, a source of great gratification. In 1785 he had the pleasure, as Chief Magistrate of his hative city, to welcome to their session therein, the old Congress under the Presidency of his old friend Richard Henry Lee, and filled with others of his Revolutionary colleagues as members; the same agreeable duty he performed in March, 1789, to the first Congress under the present Constitution, and a few weeks after, he welcomed Wasnixcton himself as President of the Republic, which their joint labors, in diverse but equally essential fields of action, had helped to establish.