A Vault of History

A Vault of History

Q. There's a spooky place at the north end of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx called Vault Hill. Can you tell me anything about it?

A. There is an empty stone-walled vault that looks spooky, but its location is important to history. The estate of the Van Cortlandt family that was acquired for city parkland in 1888 includes the Van Cortlandts' ancestral burial ground. It was established about 1749, after Frederick Van Cortlandt died. (After 1888, the family bought a plot in Woodlawn Cemetery, where the ancestral remains were reburied.) During the 1960's, the grounds were vandalized, and headstones were removed, though the stone walls and iron gate are intact. Rocky outcrops offer a view of the Parade Ground.

During the Revolution, history was made at Vault Hill. According to the Parks Department, the Provincial Congress told City Clerk Augustus Van Cortlandt to find a safe place for the city records before the British occupied the whole city. In August 1776, he wrote to his cousin John Jay that he had visited his ill mother in Westchester, and had used the opportunity to hide the city records in the family vault. They were returned after the British arrived. And in 1781, Washington had campfires lighted there to make the British believe that his army was still present, when it had actually decamped to fight Cornwallis in Yorktown.

No Irving Here

Q. As a fan of the works of Washington Irving, I always wondered about the connection between the author and Irving Place. Can you fill me in?

A. The logical guess, that Irving lived there, would be wrong. Irving Place, which runs from 14th Street to Gramercy Park South between Third Avenue and Park Avenue South (and is the site of Washington Irving High School), was named in the 1830's by Samuel Ruggles as he was developing Gramercy Park. Ruggles apparently chose the name to honor Washington Irving.

Although 122 East 17th Street, at the southwest corner of Irving Place, has long been called Washington Irving's House, the title has no basis in fact, according to the AIA Guide to New York City. The actress Elsie de Wolfe, known as America's first professional interior decorator, lived there from 1894 to 1911 with her companion, the literary agent Elisabeth Marbury, and is believed to have been the source of the myth.

So where did Irving live? In his later years, in his famous estate, Sunnyside, in Tarrytown. He was born at 131 William Street, and later lived at various other addresses in the city but never on Irving Place.

Holy Terror

Q. Did Captain Kidd really help build Trinity Church, as I've heard?

A. Aye, matey. Vestry records show that in 1696, William Kidd, at the time an established sea captain and landowner in New York, donated a runner and tackle for hoisting the stones for the first Trinity Church, which burned down in 1776.

Captain Kidd made his mark legitimately in the West Indies and off North America, sailing as a privateer for Britain and successfully fighting the French. In 1691, when in his late 40's, he married a rich widow in New York and came to own what is now some of the world's most costly real estate, on Wall, Pearl, Pine and Water Streets. He lived on Hanover Square and may have owned a pew at Trinity Church.

His later deeds did not have royal sanction, and he was hanged for piracy in London in 1701. A pew list from 1718 lists half of one pew as belonging to "Capt. Kidd's heirs."

MICHAEL POLLAK

F. Y. I. E-mail: fyi@nytimes.com