On the land to the west of the Avenue line may be read “Heirs of John Rogers,” “William W. Gilbert,” “Nicholson” (the Christian name lies somewhere beyond the map horizon), and “Heirs of Henry Spingler.” Irrigation is indicated by a line, running in a general northwesterly direction, bearing the name “Manetta Water,” while a thinner line, joining the first line from the northeast, is described as “East Branch of Manetta Water.” Manetta Water was the English name. The Dutch had called it “Bestavaer’s Rivulet.” It was a sparkling stream, beloved of trout fishermen, rising in the high ground above Twenty-first Street, flowing southeasterly to Fifth Avenue at Ninth Street, then on to midway between the present Eighth Street and Waverly Place, where it swung southwesterly and emptied into the Hudson River near Charlton Street. It ran between sandhills, sometimes rising to the height of a hundred feet, and marked the course of a famous Indian hunting ground.
The joy of the Izaak Waltons of the past is occasionally the despair of the Fifth Avenue householders of the present. Flooded cellars and weakened foundations may be traced to the purling waters of the sparkling stream. But perhaps the trout were jumping. Then the last fisherman probably worried very little about the annoyances to which his descendants were to be subjected. In much the same spirit we are saying today, “What will it all matter a hundred years hence?”
Beginning at the Potter’s Field, the line of what is now Fifth Avenue left the “Road over the Sandhills” or the “Zantberg” of the Dutch, later known as Art Street, long since gone from the map, and crossed the Robert Richard Randall Estate. Thence it ran through the Henry Brevoort farm, which originally extended from Ninth to Eighteenth Streets, and which had been bought in 1714 for four hundred pounds. Crossing the tributary stream at Twelfth Street, it passed a small pond between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets, and then ran on, over low and level ground, to Twenty-first Street, then called “Love’s Lane.” To the right was the swamp and marsh that afterwards became Union Square. Following the trail farther, the hardy voyager wandered over “hills and valleys, dales and fields,” through a countryside where trout, mink, otter, and muskrat swam in the brooks