Stage Routes Established

In pre-Revolutionary days, stage routes were established to Boston, Philadelphia, Bordentown, Burlington, and other distant places. A foot post to Albany is mentioned in 1730, and the post was sent by rider in colonial days.

In 1786, the Legislature granted to Isaac Van Wyck, Talmage Hall, and John Kenny, all Columbia County men, the exclusive right "to erect, set up and carry on, and drive stage wagons between New York and Albany on the east side of the river, for a period of ten years, forbidding all opposition to them under penalty of two hundred pounds."

The grantees were obliged to furnish covered wagons, drawn by four horses each, and the fare was not to exceed fourpence a mile; and weekly trips were imperative. The trip was advertised to be made in two days in the summer. The venture was evidently a success; for in 1793, the stage was advertised to leave Albany twice a week and not to carry more than ten passengers.

Notwithstanding the traffic, the roads were bad, the stages were uncomfortable, and the trip fatiguing, as the passengers were routed up about three or four o'clock in the morning and traveled until nine, or later, at night, putting up at poor and ill-kept inns. The stages originally started from Cortlandt Street, but later from Broadway and Twenty-third Street; the route, of course, was over the Boston Road from that point to Kingsbridge. The distance was 159 miles, though Colles's map of the roads of the United States in 1789 gives it as 155 1/2 to the ferry at Greenbush. Every one who could do so traveled on horseback, as the stage was not of the kind we read of in Dickens. The steamboat and the railroad sealed the doom of the old stages.

In an advertisement of 1811, there is notice of the stage to Greenwich Village, and even earlier there was a stage to Harlem. In 1816, Asa Hall started a stage route from the Battery via Broadway to Greenwich, which years afterwards came into the possession of Kipp & Brown; and stages ran to other parts of the island. Kipp & Brown were very popular; and when their stables were burned out in 1848 a performance was given at the Broadway Theatre for their benefit. In 1819, a stage route was started from the Bowling Green to Bloomingdale.

Stages Superseded By The Omnibuses

For the city travel, these stages were superseded by the omnibuses, the first of which appeared in 1830, running from the Bowling Green via Broadway to Bleecker Street; but the drivers were obliging,, and if the weather was bad, or there was a lady passenger, the bus would go as far as the Kip mansion between Washington Place and Waverly Place, on the site of the New York Hotel. The buses, at first, were few in number, but were finely painted and decorated, bearing the names of distinguished Americans upon their sides.

There were the Lady Washington, the Lady Clinton, the George Washington, the De Witt Clinton, the Benjamin Franklin, and others. Some of the panels with which the buses were decorated were true works of art. The buses became popular, and there were soon three lines, run by Brower, Jones, and Colvin; the fare was a shilling (twelve and a half cents), collected by a small boy who stood at the entrance step. The entrance at first was on the side until Kipp & Brown changed it to the rear of the Greenwich buses, and the others followed suit. Other stage routes were established to the shipbuilding section on the east side, to Harlem, to Chelsea (Shepherd & Johnson), and to other places on the island.

The omnibuses were drawn by four matched horses, and there was great rivalry among the different lines. The drivers were wonderful whips, and it was truly a marvelous sight to see the dexterity with which they steered through the crowded thoroughfare, avoiding accidents and collisions by a hair's breadth. In the winter time great sleighs, drawn by four, six, or eight horses, took the place of the buses, and the New York boy thought he had a perfect right to snowball the passengers as the great sleighs passed by.

Many people took the sleighs for the pure enjoyment of the ride; and as there were no car tracks to be cleared, the snow remained in the street for weeks, making a long spell of sleighing weather. The doom of the stages was sealed when the street cars came; though Broadway stages held on until the seventies, because there was no car track on Broadway and the people were set against the street being still further congested in its traffic by the presence of surface cars. The Fifth Avenue line remained as a relic of the
golden era of the omnibus; it "lagged superfluous on the stage" and was the butt of many jests on the part of the up-to-date New Yorker until the introduction of the automobile omnibus in July, 1907, though experiments with electricity and gasoline motors had been carried on since 1900. Another one of the lines, started in 1819 from the Battery to Bloomingdale, gradually worked its lower terminus up Broadway until it reached the starting-point in front of the Union Dime Savings Bank at Broadway and Thirty-second Street in the eighties and then disappeared from human ken.