396           THE ICONOGRAPHY OF MANHATTAN ISLAND

fort Street in the rear of the present World Building. The proposal was
first made at this time to use hearses at funerals in this city in place
of bearers.

In 1802 the study of art received special encouragement by the organi¬
sation of the New York Academy of Fine Arts, which exhibited during
the following summer, in the rotunda of the Pantheon on Greenwich
Street (formerly Ricketts' Circus), a collection of reproductions of classic
statuary from Paris. The Society ofthe Cincinnati, in 1802, decided to
place a bronze equestrian statue of Washington in the Park, but the plan
proved the first of several patriotic but futile efforts in the first half of the
nineteenth century to erect a public statue or monument in New York to
the honour of one whose living memorial was in the hearts of the people.
Nevertheless, the following year, De Lacroix installed in his garden at
Bayard's Hill the statue already referred to, "by an able artist," which
was similar to the one proposed by the Society of the Cincinnati. A
sufficient fund could not be raised to erect such a monument in the
Park, although in 1826 the Italian sculptor Causici placed on exhibition
there a full-size model of an equestrian statue, which remained four or
five years (see PL 100); nor did one appear elsewhere in the city until
1856, when that designed by Brown and Ward was unveiled in Union
Square.

Doctor David Hosack, professor of botany at Columbia College,
received from the common council in 1802 a grant of about fourteen
acres within the boundaries of Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 47th and 51st
Streets (as the streets were afterwards laid down in the Commissioners'
Map of 1811). This land was to be used for a public botanical garden.
Hosack developed there a large collection of choice plants, trees, and
shrubs, both native and exotic, and named it the Elgin Garden; he
then sold the property to the state, which later conveyed it to Columbia
College. It has since become one of the most valuable residence and
business sections of the city, and one of the chief sources of revenue to
the college.

The problem of disposing of the Collect Pond, which had been a
public nuisance for many years, and which, in 1796, the Mangin brothers,
engineers, had proposed to convert into "a safe harbour for shipping,"
was solved in 1802 by the common council's adopting the proposal of
William Beekman, that it be filled in with "good and wholesome earth."
An order to this effect was given in  1803, and at the same time it was