New York Unearthed / The Shrine of Elizabeth Ann Seton
Exploring Downtown
New York Unearthed
The underground chambers of “New York Unearthed,” a museum operated by the South Street Seaport Museum, display the remarkable extent of archaeological finds in New York. These range from the surprisingly old-3,000-year-old pottery shards-to the rather new-1950s lunch counter artifacts. In between sit the castoffs of three centuries of city dwellers: Delft tiles and clay pipes from the Dutch, tenement medicine bottles from 19th-century immigrants, and children’s dolls from the early 20th-century African-American community of Weeksville in Brooklyn.
Exhibits on the museum’s lower levels graphically depict the potential finds, layer by layer, beneath a typical Wall Street building. The “Unearthing New York Systems Elevator” simulates a ride from street level down to the lowest levels of a typical “dig.” And visitors can watch archaeologists work behind glass walls, cataloguing and conserving real finds.
The Shrine of Elizabeth Ann Seton
New York is a city of straight lines – it’s the very rare building that curves. The rectory of the Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton occupies one of them: the elegant house built in 1793 for one James Watson, with an 1806 addition whose portico curves along State Street.
At the time, the entire area was a posh residential district lined with fine brick town houses; today the Watson House is the sole survivor, one of the few Downtown buildings that survived the Great Fire of 1835. The double-story wooden columns of the extension’s upper floors are said to be made from old shipmasts.
Marker is at the intersection of State Street and Adm George Dewey Street, on the right when traveling west on State Street.
Courtesy hmdb.org
