It was soon after this that the city began cutting up old lots into new, and turning what had been solitary country estates into gregarious suburbs and, soon, metropolitan sections.  Among other strange performances, they levelled the hills of New York—­is it not odd to remember that there once were hills, many hills, in New York?  And right and left they did their commissioner-like best to cut the town all to one pattern.  Of course they couldn’t, quite, but the effort was of lasting and painfully efficacious effect.  They could not find it in their hearts, I suppose, to raze Richmond Hill House completely,—­it was a noble landmark, and a home of memories which ought to have given even commissioners pause,—­and maybe did.  But they began to lower it—­yes:  take it down literally.  No one with an imaginative soul can fail to feel that as they lowered the house in site and situation so they gradually but relentlessly permitted it to be lowered in character.  It is with a distinct pang that I recall the steps of Richmond Hill’s decline:  material and spiritual, its two-sided fall appears to have kept step.

A sort of degeneracy struck the erstwhile lovely and exclusive old neighbourhood.  Such gay resorts as Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens had encroached on the aristocratic regions of Lispenard’s Meadows and their vicinity.  Brannan’s Gardens were close to the present crossing of Hudson and Spring streets.  And—­Richmond Hill did not escape!  It too became a tavern, a pleasure resort, a “mead garden,” a roadhouse—­whatever you choose to call it.  It, with its contemporaries, was the goal of many a gay party and I am told that its “turtle dinners” were incomparable!  In winter there were sleighing parties, a gentleman and lady in each sleigh; and—­but here is a better picture-maker than I to give it to you—­one Thomas Janvier, in short: 

“How brave a sight it must have been when—­the halt for refreshments being ended—­the long line of carriages got under way again and went dashing along the causeway over Lispenard’s green meadows, while the silvered harness of the horses and the brilliant varnish of the Italian chaises gleamed and sparkled in the rays of nearly level sunshine from the sun that was setting there a hundred years and more ago!”

The secretary and engineer to the commissioners who cut up, levelled and made over New York was John Randel, Jr., and he has left us most minute and prolific writings, covering everything he saw in the course of his work; indeed one wonders how he ever had time to work at all at his profession!  Among his records is this account of dear Richmond Hill before it had been lowered to the level of the valley lands.  It was, in fact, the last of the hills to go.

After describing carefully the exact route he took daily to the Commissioners’ office in Greenwich, as far as Varick Street where the excavations for St. John’s Church were then being made (1808), and stating that he crossed the ditch at Canal Street on a plank, he goes on thus: