Abraham Van Steenwyck conveyed to Anthony Van Trees a lot on Bridge-street, thirty feet front by one hundred and ten feet deep, for the sum of nine dollars and sixty cents. Until 1642 city lots were unknown. Less than fifty years ago a Lutheran Church of New-York being involved in pecuniary difficulties, a friend proposed to assist in relieving its embarrassments by the donation of six acres of land near the corner of Broadway and Canal-street; but after mature deliberation the trustees refused the gift, alleging that the tract in question was not worth the trouble of fencing in. The valuation of real estate on the island is now five hundred million dollars; and in 1856 the city gave nearly five and a half millions for the Central Park all Manhattan was worth a few years ago.

more than

Pearl-street, the oldest in the city, was first built upon in 1633; and in honest Dutch times the respectable Dutch burghers kept their own cows and rode in their own wagons. Now there are hundreds of miles of streets under-laid with a perfect net-work of sewers, gas and water-pipes, and traversed by over five hundred omnibuses and two hundred cars for public conveyance, beside innumerable private equipages. When the city was confined to a few houses, scattered around old Fort Amsterdam, Cornelius Dircksen, who owned a farm near Peck Slip, came at the sound of the horn that hung against a tree and ferried the waiting passengers across the East-River in his little skiff for the moderate sum of three stivers in wampum.

In 1657 a mail went regularly twice a week from New-York to Philadelphia, making the journey in three days; and in 1673 Lovelace established the first mail to Boston, consisting of a single messenger, who was to go and return with letters and packages once a month for a more speedy intelligence and dispatch of affairs.' In the year 1817 the Black Ball Line' of packet ships to Liverpool was established; and twenty years later the steam-ships Sirius' and 'Great Western' first entered the harbor of New-York. Now almost every day brings its ocean-steamer, and every wind-of heaven wafts tall ships to our port. Eleven telegraph-lines convey messages to distant cities with the rapidity of thought; seven lines of rail-road intersect the city, and eighteen steam-boat lines ply between its harbor and the transatlantic, southern and Californian ports.

William Bradford, in the year 1693, set up the first printing-office in New-York, executing as his first volume a small folio of the laws of the colony; and in 1725 he began the publication of the New-York Gazette. Now there are some three hundred and fifty periodical publications in the city, of every size and form, and representing every class and opinion. At the KNICKERBOCKER establishment, in the Swamp, the abode of the tanners of olden times and the substantial New-Yorkers of to-day, which was once leased to Rip Van Dam

for twenty-one years, at a yearly rent of twenty shillings, and in 1739 sold to Jacobus Roosevelt for two hundred pounds, in the KNICKERBOCKER establishment alone, more than thirty magazines and news

papers are regularly printed, and twenty-five steam-presses are in

sufficient to meet the wants of the reading public.

When Director Kieft had determined to build the first church erected on the island within the walls of Fort Amsterdam, notwithstanding the objection that it would intercept the south-east wind and obstruct the working of the wind-mill on the North-River, nothing was wanted but the necessary funds. Opportunely, at this juncture a daughter of Dominie Bogardus was married. The principal citizens were invited to the wedding; the wine circulated freely, and all were merry. The festivity having reached its height, the subscription-paper was produced, and the excited guests vied with each other in the amount of their donations; and there were some the next morning who would fain have recalled their reckless liberality. At the present time there are about three hundred churches in New-York; and two or three thousand dollars are not unfrequently laid on the plates as the collection of a congregation on a single Sabbath for the benefit of the missionary, or some other cause.

Equally marked have been the social changes in New-York. As Dr. Francis says: 'The Dutch gable-ends have disappeared; Yankees have driven out burgomasters; Cuban segars, Holland pipes; rail-ways,

old-fashioned gigs, and omnibuses, family chariots; the tonsorial occupation is all but superseded by the perpetual holiday of beards; and skirts, instead of being gathered up as of old, sway in fixed expansion on the encroaching hoop; turbans, shoe-buckles, queues, the pillory, spinning-wheels, and short ruffles are obsolete, while the last of the cocked hats' is visible in our streets; but the good old Knickerbocker honesty and geniality may yet be found

by some fire-sides.' There are however, a few relics of colonial and revolutionary times, which have more than a local interest.

The repeal of the Stamp Act served, in New-York, in the first flush of victory, to cover a multitude of sins. Though the right of Great Britain to tax the colonies was asserted by Pitt, a large meeting of citizens assembled, at Burns' Coffee-House, on the twenty-third of June, 1766, and petitioned the Assembly to erect a statue in honor of the great Commoner,' the so-called champion of American liberty. The request was granted. The statue was of marble, and was set up in Wall-street on the seventh of September, 1770. The statesman was represented in a Roman toga, with a half-open scroll in his right hand,

on which were the words, Articuli Magna Charta Libertatum. The left hand was extended, as if in the act of delivering an oration. The pedestal wore the inscription: The Statue of the Right Honorable William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, was erected as a public testimony of the grateful sense the colony of New-York retains of the many eminent services he rendered to America, particularly in promoting the repeal of the Stamp Act, Anno Domini 1770. It did not long retain its place. After the occupation of the city by the British in 1775, the head and right hand were struck off by the soldiery, in revenge for the insults before offered by the Americans to the statue of George the Third. The headless trunk remained standing until after the evacuation in 1783, when it was removed to the Bridewell Yard. It was thence transferred to the yard of the Arsenal, near the Collect, and finally found its way to the corner of Franklin-street and West-Broadway, where its headless trunk may now be seen in front of the basement entrance of the Museum Hotel.

At the same meeting at Burns' Coffee-House it was also resolved to erect an equestrian statue of George the Third on the Bowling-Green. It was set up in front of Fort George on the twenty-first of August, 1770, amid the noise of artillery and the huzzas of the people, but upon the reception in New-York of the news of the Declaration of Independence, it was dragged from its pedestal by a band of patriots headed by Belden, and sent, hewed in pieces, to Litchfield, then the residence of Oliver Wolcott, the patriot Governor of Connecticut, by whose wife and daughters it was run into bullets, of which the Whigs of the surrounding country were invited to come and take freely. In their hands they did good service, killing four hundred British soldiers during the subsequent invasion of Connecticut by Governor Tryon. Forty-two thousand bullets were made from the statue. The saddlecloth was sunk in a marsh opposite the house of Wolcott, where it was quite recently discovered by accident, and exhumed, and after passing through various hands, was purchased by Mr. Riley of the Museum Hotel, where it still remains, with a small piece of the pedestal of the statue, a fitting companion for the statue of Pitt. The remainder of the pedestal, we believe, is used as a stepping-stone in front of a house in Jersey City.

During the occupation of New-York by the British forces, in the Revolution, several of the churches, especially where the congregations zealously espoused the cause of independence, were sadly desecrated. The Middle Dutch Church-the Post-office of the city since 1844- was used as a prison, and afterward as a riding-school for the British officers and soldiers, and became the scene of habitual ribaldry, profanity, and dissipation. The whole of the interior, galleries and all, was destroyed, leaving the bare walls and roof. It is stated that a Mr.

Oothout obtained permission from Lord Howe to take down the bell, which had been cast in Amsterdam in 1731, and in the preparation of whose metal a number of the citizens of that place threw quantities of

silver coin.

He stored the bell in a secure place until the British army evacuated the city. When the church was reopened, it was brought

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