AT the end of the eighteenth century there were a large number of historic houses clustering about the old fort. The names of some of the most notable New Yorkers were associated with them, and the reign of social leaders long celebrated for courtly and unstinted hospitality gave distinction to a neighbourhood now occupied by steamship offices and noisy with a jargon of foreign tongues. It was here that was situated the great house built for the first President of the United States and his successors. It was never occupied by Washington, as before its completion he had removed with the government to Philadelphia; but it became the residence of Governor George Clinton, and after him of John Jay, whose wife led the beauty and fashion of the little metropolis. Several weddings of note were performed at this old mansion, which in its day was the most magnificent in the city. Mrs. Lamb says:

The newspapers in November, 1796, chronicle a marriage and reception of this character at the governor's mansion as fol-

New Buildings and Old 3^

lows: " Married on the 3d at his Excellency's John Jay, Governor, Government House, John Livingston, of the Manor of Livingston, to Mrs. Catharine Ridley, daughter of the late Governor William Livingston." The bride was Mrs. Jay's accomplished and piquant sister, Kitty Livingston, who in 1787 became the wife of Matthew Ridley, of Baltimore, and after brief wedded happiness was left a widow.

The fort and batter}^ that, to the discomfiture of all good Continentals, were held by the British troops, and which, to the immense satisfaction of the elect, they evacuated in 1783, were in large part within the hne of the present elevated railway, and never very far beyond it. The extension of the Battery Park to the south and west of the ancient water-front has finally resulted in a symmetrical wall that coincides with the front of Castle Garden, though the earlier pictures of that famous landmark represent it as an isolated structure.