The landscape was literally transformed in the 1850's. The state legislature authorized the city to accumulate hundreds of acres north of Fifty-ninth Street. By the end of the decade, Olmsted and Vaux's Greensward Plan was chosen as the official design for Central Park.
ALSO DURING THIS DECADE:
1851--The New York Times begins publishing as The New York Daily Times with an anti-immigrant platform.
1852--Boss Tweed enters politics as an alderman in the Seventh Ward.
1853--The World's Fair opens in the Crystal Palace beside the Reservoir in what is now Bryant Park. Otis will demonstrate his elevator safety brake here. The Crystal Palace, a glass and iron structure, will burn down in 1858.
1854--McSorley's opens on East Seventh Street.
1855--The theater known as Castle Garden becomes an immigrant depot through which eight million immigrants will pass over the next few decades.
1855--The first "model tenement" opens at Elizabeth and Mott.
1856--George Washington by Henry Kirke Brown is erected at Union Square. It is Manhattan's oldest outdoor bronze and the second equestrian statue carved in the United States.
1857--Another Financial Panic.
1857--The E.V. Haughwout Building, one of the city's most important landmarks, is built on Broadway and Broome. The first building in the world to have an Otis safety passenger elevator, it's known today as the Parthenon of Cast Iron Architecture.
1858--R.H. Macy opens a dry goods store on Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street.
1858--Theodore Roosevelt, the only U.S. president to be born in New York City...is born in New York City.
1859--The Cooper Institute opens. See Little Byte below.
Sources: Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace; The Historical Atlas of New York City by Eric Homberger; The Works by Kate Ascher; New York: An Illustrated History by Ric Burns and James Sanders, with Lisa Ades; The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson.
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