Crosby, Conover and Lyles)
spent $365.14 for it. The congregation thought too much of it in 1848 to
allow its use by Engine Company 42 for fire alarms. The books of the
Market Street church were left to the Collegiate church and are now at
New Brunswick.

[Illustration]

All this having been done, the president of the consistory, Mahlon T.
Hewitt, handed out the remaining letters of dismissal to D. W. Woodford,
Robert R. Crosby, William Lain, Dr. Veranus Morse, John Van Flick, Henry
Taylor and Albert I. Lyon, and made a formal closing address in which he
offered "a sincere prayer that its old walls may still stand, and that
it may continue to be the birthplace of souls into the kingdom of
Christ." The prayer has been answered.

Thus ended the Protestant Reformed Dutch church in Market Street after
just fifty years.

III

While the Market Street Reformed Church was fighting its last fight,
a little congregation had come to life in the parlor of a sailor's
boarding house. It was intended chiefly for "seamen and others," the
"others" referring mostly to those who no longer sailed the seas. The
first meeting was held June 7, 1864. Those were the days of sailing
vessels; the New York of the thirties had been the ship building center
of the world, especially from Pike Street up. At every pier sail boats
were moored, coming from all over the world, and as they dismist their
crews on arrival it left the men on shore unoccupied until their meager
wages were gone, when they were crimped for another voyage. Low dance
halls and worse were all along the river front and the sailor was their
prey. The American Seamen's Friend Society sprang into being to improve
the situation, and erected a fine building in Cherry Street, to give the
men surroundings that were clean physically and spiritually. With the
present federal laws for the protection of seamen the condition in the
sixties can hardly be appreciated.

[Illustration: Sailors' Home]

Where Fulton had built his first steamboat fifty years before huge
yellow dry-docks now rose. Additional land had been gained so that
Water, Front and South Streets grew out of the river. All along the
river front sailing vessels pushed their bowsprits and gilded
figureheads far over the streets almost into the windows of the
sail-lofts that were numerous along South Street.

For these men then the Presbytery of New York on December 29, 1864,
at 52 Market Street, organized the Presb