Abstract
Stephen Allen (1767–1852), mayor of New York City from 1821 to 1824, is remembered as a sail maker who retained his egalitarian artisanal ideology as he rose from obscure origins to become a wealthy merchant and powerful politician. In the late twentieth century, archaeologists working in Lower Manhattan’s South Street Seaport Historic District investigated Allen’s former home and workplace. The author, who worked on this project, explores aspects of Allen’s childhood experiences during the American Revolution. It is proposed that Allen’s political beliefs as an adult were derived from the memory of these experiences as well as from his “rootedness” in the city of his birth. Drawing upon Allen’s unpublished memoirs and an early maps of Lower Manhattan, this essay reconstructs and explores the relationships between these memories, the actual sites and historic contexts in which the original experiences occurred, and Allen’s possible emotional response as he wandered the city streets one imagined afternoon in the summer of 1808, visiting the scenes of his childhood and adolescence.
As soon as we move to a city, we search for our own center in it.
Lucy Lippard ( 1997 :199)
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Acknowledgments
Stephen Allen’s long life extended into two centuries and spanned several phases of New York City’s social and political history. So perhaps it’s only fitting that gathering the facts of his life has spanned three decades and several phases of my own life. In the process of writing Allen’s life story, I came to appreciate how many of the people I first worked with doing archaeology in Lower Manhattan during the late 1970s and early 80s remain my friends and colleagues. In fact, over the years, a number of them contributed in various ways to the completion of this paper. For this, I wish to thank Anne-Marie Cantwell, Michael Devonshire, Jed Levin, Kate Tarlow Morgan, Arnold Pickman, Marie-Lorraine Pipes, Nan Rothschild, and Diana Wall. I am also indebted to Thomas Bender who initially directed me to Allen’s memoirs and whose writing has helped me understand the relationship between Allen’s artisan origins and his subsequent political career. I wish to thank Daniel Pagano of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission for helping me locate reports describing archaeological work conducted in and around the South Street Seaport Historic District. I also wish to thank a more recent friend, Ken Chase, for giving me access to his extensive collection of books dealing with New York City during the Revolutionary War. I am grateful to New-York Historical Society staff members Marybeth DeFilippis, Eleanor Gillers, Tammy Kiter, Ted O’Reilly, and Jill Slaight for helping me find and obtain copies of Stephen Allen-related documents. Another person I wish to thank is Colleen Iverson, Director of the New York City Marble Cemetery, where Allen was once chairman of the Board of Trustees and is interred. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Meta Janowitz and Diane Dallal, for offering me the opportunity to contribute to this book as well as for helping me shape the final draft of this paper.
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Harris, W.E. (2013). Place and Memory on the City Streets: The Revolutionary War Childhood of New York’s Artisan-Mayor, Stephen Allen. In: Janowitz, M., Dallal, D. (eds) Tales of Gotham, Historical Archaeology, Ethnohistory and Microhistory of New York City. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5272-0_17
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