The Junction of Broadway and the Bowery at Union Square in 1828
1885 (depicting 1828)
Albertis Del Orient Browere (1814 -1887)
Oil on canvas, 23 X 40
Signed lower right: A. D. O. Browere 1885
The J. Clarence Davies Collection, 29.100.132

This scene, painted from memory, records the sparsely settled intersection of Broadway and the Bowery at Union Square (called Union Place until 1832) as it appeared in 1828. The building boom that would bring fine residences, elegant hotels, exclusive boarding schools, and, subsequently, theaters and commercial enterprises to the square lay twenty years in the future. At this date the area was considered merely a northern outpost of New York City, which was still clustered south of 14th Street.

Union Place, first called the Forks to describe the junction of the Bowery, Broadway, and University Place at 14th Street,¹ originated as a burial ground for indigent people.² As the city continued to grow, the cemetery was transformed into a park, making Union Square a desirable location for the elegant homes of those wealthy New Yorkers who constituted the vanguard of the northward migration.

A map in the collection of the New-York Historical Society, dating from 1750 but otherwise unidentified, shows the depicted area bordered by farms, including those belonging to the prominent Stuyvesant and Brevoort families, Henry Spingler, Thomas Burling, and Cornelius Tiebout. (Despite its then-remote location, Union Place was the city's chosen site for welcoming General Washington on November 25, 1783, one day after British troops evacuated New York.) In 1822 the Manhattan Bank constructed the four-story white building at the left to use as its temporary business headquarters during the yellow-fever epidemics that raged in the city almost annually from 1791 until the late 1820s. The city itself is visible in the distance to the south.

Albertis (some references spell the name "Albertus") D. O. Browere was born in Tarrytown, New York, a son of sculptor John Henri Isaac Browere, who executed a well-known series of life masks of distinguished figures of the period, including Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette. The younger Browere studied at the National Academy of Design, where he exhibited his first painting at the age of seventeen. The American Art Union also exhibited his work. His subjects included illustrations from Washington Irving's stories, historical and genre subjects, and landscapes featuring the scenery around Catskill, New York, where he resettled about 1841. Browere supported himself primarily with sign and wagon painting; family tradition states that every shop sign in nineteenth-century Catskill bore his initials. In 1852, and again in 1858, Browere went to California to paint and to prospect, unsuccessfully, for gold, but he returned to live out his years in Catskill. He is also represented in the collections of the Museum of the City of New York by a painting from 1842 entitled Fire at the Tombs see plate 13.

  Notes:

1  "Union Square Turns the Century Mark," Gas Logic 2, no. 2 (May 1932). University Place, formerly part of Wooster Street, was renamed a year after New York University's first building went up on Washington Square in 1831. Jackson Avenue was another name briefly considered, and this appears on some maps.

  2  Washington, Madison, and Bryant Squares were three other potter's fields that gave way to public park-like squares.