e 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 and pools; brant, black duck, and yellow-leg
splashed in the marshes and fox, rabbit, woodcock, and partridge found
covert in the thicket. Here and there was a farm, but the city, then
numbering one hundred thousand persons, was far away. Then, in 1824, the
first stretch of the Avenue, from Waverly Place to Thirteenth Street,
was opened, and the northward march of the great thoroughfare began. Let
us try to picture the old town of that day, the