Pre-existing networks:

To complicate matters further, on a property I've studied arguably on
both original shoreline and within an historic district, and "on" an
empty parking lot that has been thought to be the "next job" in
archaeology in lower Manhattan for decades, the large urban lot, once
consisting of many addresses, is suddenly transformed into one
address, i.e., one number, often the center of the block making the
site sound like one thing, a single dwelling, and actually to be a
very large building.

New York City has been fortunate to have gravity fed aqueducts built
from watershed to the north, some built over the years and some still
being built. I have learned that this property was to be where one of
the new tunnels being built, water would or might come up from
hundreds of feet below the surface, where "sandhogs" work mining the
rock below NYC. It would be connected into the near-surface water
network, its former past some time's found in evidence in the wooden
pipes found in street digging, in fact just reported found recently
nearby, probably from the time when a single reservoir served the
area, an Aaron Burr founded company that became the former Chase
Manhattan Bank.

The only alternative to this location I read, is to have it brought up
in the "park" next to the police headquarters, a mapped "park" though
never built (heard at a city hearing as "Cabrini Park") that is used
as a parking place next to "1 Police Plaza" relatively new in the
history of the city. These two locations present problems in public
and private development, as the current owners of the South Street
Seaport Historic District have gone though many contentious building
design proposals. The historic property was once to be condemned for
the water tunnel and shaft under the Dinkins administration, the
city's first African-American mayor. It's current owners have also had
property involved in the renaissance of Times Square under the
succeeding Giuliani administration.

I helped investigate the deed history and social history of the lots a
number of years ago and as these siting matters and the economics of
building go, it has been quite a long time, though in London it might
be done quicker not as procedurally complicated perhaps. I understand
the archaeology consultants were ordered to dig in the historic lot
shortly after Sept 11, 2001 and the lot still is being used for
visitors to the South Street Seaport. You can see where they were
digging from the Google Earth and/or Windows Live Earth, the
assumption being the asphalt patches where they were excavating. It's
interesting to "go back" using these new online mapping tools and see
some of the "after the wrecking ball" (outlawed in Manhattan) and the
new construction, what may or may not have been an effective testing
and recording strategy for archaeology and preservation. Truly today
(groan) "the whole world is watching" (from the film, "Medium Cool").

If you've ever read "In Small Things Forgotten" buy James Deetz sort
of a must-read for the earlier archaeology of the Northeast, there is
a passage where he's asked to look at some artifacts an architect had
uncovered at a proposed building site. They were very old artifacts
and James Deetz found that what was there was the unfinished
construction of one Isaac Allerton, a passenger and Puritan on the
Mayflower that founded the Plimoth colony. He, I found, though perhaps
the last "Pilgrim" to be buried in Connecticut, moved to the cemetery
maintained by Yale University, was an important merchant in the early
New Amsterdam Dutch colony, one of the English who conducted business
in Manhattan at "Allerton's Warehouse" just outside the "Wall" that
became Wall Street, and a marker was once there onsite of the property
I studied. It was also the location of the transfer of orphan settlers
from the almshouse in the Netherlands, who became early dwellers in
New Amsterdam, a complicated business arrangements were set up with
Allerton who traded from the current state of Maine to what became New
York while residing in Connecticut.

Are the remains of "Allertons Warehouse" still under the landfill of
Manhattan? I once worked on "Augustine Heerman's Warehouse" (a "Czech"
as the Dutch called him, and ambassador from Maryland, sometimes cited
as introducing tobacco cultivation to the Dutch) site within the New
Amsterdam settlement (versus outside) and the tendency has been to
dismiss the possibility based on so-called "basement depth records". I
just hope they put a monument back up, and I'm sure the Mayflower
Society may yet.

George Myers