nineteenth and early twentieth centuries "Newspaper Row" was situated
on Park Row. Here James Gordon Bennett, Joseph Pulitzer, and William
Randolph Hearst fought their sensational battles. Lincoln Steffens dis-
coursed on political corruption, and Richard Harding Davis and O.
Henry spun their tales—O. Henry finding in this exciting, chaotic, sordid
section of the city much material for the stories oT "Baghdad on the
Subway."

With increasing rapidity, the residential areas receded northward.
About the 1850's aristocratic St. John's Park began to yield to commerce,
and the well-to-do were to be found only in the purlieus of Lower Man-
hattan, around Greenwich Village. By the time the World War was de-
clared, only a small number of the city's more prosperous residents re-
mained below Fourteenth Street, chiefly in mansions around Washington
Square and lower Fifth Avenue.

Beginning in the 1880's Greenwich Village was occupied by the Irish
and Negroes, and later by Italians. At approximately the same time, the
Germans and Irish of the Lower East Side were supplanted by Italians,
Russians, Poles, and to an even greater extent by East European Jews, who,
despite poverty, filth, and overcrowding retained their native gaiety and
hope. Today, a change is appearing in the Lower East Side; though it is
still a slum area, the old "lung" blocks are slowly giving way before
widened avenues and new apartment houses.

The settlement there of an increasing number of artists and painters in
the 1910's gave Greenwich Village national prominence as an artistic and
literary center.

Except for the East Side and Greenwich Village, lower Manhattan is
now almost entirely devoted to commerce and finance. In the Wall Street
district skyscrapers multiplied rapidly after the turn of the century until
building was halted by the stock market crash of 1929. Park Row is no
longer Newspaper Row, but an adjunct to the commercial district. Old
landmarks were erased by the postwar building boom; and a solid wall of
giant structures, almost unbroken from the Battery to Fourteenth Street,
hides the busy traffic of the Hudson River.

Battery and Whitehall District

Area: South of Battery Place, Beaver St., and Old Slip. Map on page 63.

The Battery, threshold of Manhattan, spreads in a decided arc along
the North River shore at the southernmost extremity of the island, where