NAMING NEW YORK:
Manhattan Places and How They Got Their Names
By Sanna Feirstein
New York University Press
($45, hardcover; $16.95, paperback)
Streets and public areas of Manhattan have acquired names for various reasons since shortly after the Dutch established a settlement on the southern tip of the island in the early 17th century. . . .
Lieutenant Petrosino Square. Named in 1987 for Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, a police officer who, when he joined the force in 1883, was the city's shortest officer at 5-foot-3. Disguised as a tunnel worker, a blind beggar and a gangster, he infiltrated and exposed the criminal gangs that preyed on Italian immigrants.
Promoted to detective, he was assigned to uncover anarchists, and warned President McKinley of the danger to his life. Petrosino's warnings were ignored and McKinley was assassinated in 1901. Working in Italy as part of an effort to stamp out the American-Italian mafia connection, Petrosino was shot to death in Palermo in 1909.
Macdougal Street. For General Alexander MacDougal, 1733-1786, a founder of the Sons of Liberty, a group of working-class men active in resisting British policies in the colonies before the Revolution. MacDougal went on to become the first president of the Bank of New York and a state senator.
Gramercy, Union Square and Chelsea
Union Square. Before the implementation of the 1811 Commissioners' Plan to lay out Manhattan Island in a grid form, the Bowery and Broadway crossed here at an irregular angle. The new streets and avenues dictated by the grid plan produced an awkward intersection here. The solution was to leave a public plaza, today's Union Square, named for the union of these thoroughfares. The square has been a traditional rallying place for labor and political protests.
Upper East Side
Henderson Place. This gemlike grouping of rowhouses tucked just off East 86th Street and East End Avenue was developed between 1881 and 1882 by merchant John C. Henderson. Henderson used the houses as rental properties and gave the cul-de-sac his name.
A Literary and Pictorial History of the Borough
By Lloyd Ultan and Barbara Unger
Rutgers University Press
While the established landed gentry, like those portrayed by [James Fenimore] Cooper, presided over the colonial government, economy and society, most residents of the area to become the Bronx were hard-working farmers who barely eked out a living raising flax for the linen market, sheep for the woolens trade, wheat to be made into flour and apples to be pressed into cider.
Discontent with British rule was growing. The First Continental Congress imposed an embargo on the exporting and importing of specific items to and from Britain in reaction to the British Parliament's passage of the Intolerable Acts following the Boston Tea Party. The town of Westchester had been granted privileges in a royal charter and its residents were reluctant to sacrifice them. They also thought that the American retaliatory measures went too far and were highly destructive to the local farmers.
For these reasons, many Westchester residents tended to support the British. Samuel Seabury, the Anglican rector in the town of Westchester, wrote a pamphlet, effectively using biting ridicule to make points in support of the farmers against the actions of the Congress.
He disguised his identity, posing as a simple farmer residing in the town.