On August 30th, 1852, the name of the house was changed to the New York Theatre, under the direction of Charles R. Thorne. In a month's time he gave up the venture and Frank Chanfrau took it up. He also abandoned it after a few weeks.
In 1854 the Opera House was reconstructed and occupied by the Mercantile Library. It was given the name of Clinton Hall, which had been the name of the library's first home in Beekman Street. This building in time gave way to the present Clinton Hall on the same site.
Lafayette Place was opened through the Vauxhall Garden in 1826.
The Astor Library, in Lafayette Place, was completed in 1853, and was opened in 1854. The site cost $25,000.
The Middle Dutch Reformed Church was built in Lafayette Place in 1839, at the northwest corner of Fourth Street after its removal from Nassau and Cedar Streets. A new church was built at Seventh Street and Second Avenue in 1844. In the Lafayette Place building was a bell which had been cast in Holland in 1731, and which had first been used when the church was in Nassau Street. It was the gift of Abraham de Peyster, and now hangs in the Reformed Church at Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street.
Next to this church, for many years, lived Madam Canda, who kept the most fashionable school for ladies of a generation ago. Her beautiful daughter was dashed from a carriage, and killed on her eighteenth birthday--the age at which she was to make her début into society. The entire city mourned her loss.
Soon after Lafayette Place was opened, La Grange Terrace was built. It was named after General Lafayette's home in France. The row is still prominent on the west side of the thoroughfare, and is known as Colonnade Row. A riot occurred at the time it was built, the masons of the city being aroused because the stone used in the structure was cut by the prisoners in Sing Sing prison.
John Jacob Astor lived on this street. He died March 29th, 1848, and was buried from the home of his son, William B. Astor, just south of the library building.
A line drawn through Astor Place and continued to the Washington Arch in Washington Square, through Fifth Avenue to the neighborhood of Tenth Street, with Fourth Avenue as an eastern boundary, would roughly enclose what used to be the Eliot estate in the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was a farm of about twenty-one acres in 1790, when it was purchased for five thousand pounds from "Baron" Poelnitz, by Captain Robert Richard Randall, who had been a ship-master and a merchant. Randall dying in 1801, bequeathed the farm for the founding of an asylum for superannuated sailors, together with the mansion house in which he had lived. The house stood, approximately, at the present northwest corner of Ninth Street and Broadway. It was the intention of Captain Randall that the Sailors' Snug Harbor should be built on the property, and the farming land used to raise all vegetables, fruit and grain necessary for the inmates. There were long years of litigation, however, for relatives contested the will. When the case was settled in 1831, the trustees had decided to lease the land, and to purchase the Staten Island property where the Asylum is now located. The estate, at the time of Captain Randall's death, yielded an annual income of $4,000. At present the income is about $400,000 a year. It is conceded that the property would have increased more rapidly in value had it been sold outright, instead of becoming leasehold property in perpetuity.