City of Liars and Thieves (28 page)

After four years in exile, Burr returned to New York. During his absence, his Richmond Hill estate had sold for a fifth of its value. (An ex fur trader named John Jacob Astor bought the estate, on the western edge of SoHo, around 1807. Astor would divide the property into four hundred parcels and make a fortune.) Arriving home, Burr learned of the death of his cherished grandson and only heir, Aaron Burr Alston (affection
ately known as “Gampy,” because the child referred to himself and his grandfather by that name). In her book
Fallen Founder,
Nancy Isenberg cites a letter Burr wrote to his daughter, Theodosia, which illustrates his devotion to his family. (By coincidence, the letter is dated January 4, 1799, two days after Elma's body was discovered in the Manhattan Well.) Burr wrote, “The happiness of my life depends on your exertions, for what else, for whom else do I live?” Following Gampy's death, Theodosia Burr Alston made plans to travel to New York for a reunion with her father, but her ship was lost off the Carolina coast. Debris washed ashore, but no bodies were ever recovered. Some believe Theodosia Burr Alston perished in a storm, while others contend that pirates overtook the ship. In 1834, at the age of seventy-eight, Burr suffered a debilitating stroke. Two years later he died, impoverished, disgraced, and alone. He is buried in Princeton Cemetery near the graves of his father and grandfather.

If Catherine Ring did utter a curse, then Judge John Lansing also fell under its spell, with a fate that was as tragic and strange as that of Hamilton and Burr: In December 1829, he left the City Hotel to catch a night boat for Albany and was never seen again.

Others involved in the case fared better. Cadwallader David Colden was assistant attorney general when he tried Levi's case, but ten years later he became mayor of New York and, later, a U.S. congressman.

James Hardie, the reporter seated next to Caty in the novel, recorded one of three trial transcripts (the others were written by David Longworth and William Coleman). Levi Weeks's trial is the first fully recorded murder trial in U.S. history. The testimony in the novel is based on “The Defense of Levi Weeks” in the American Bar Association Journal as well as the version recorded in Estelle Fox Kleiger's book. During the trial, sixty-five witnesses testified in two days. The novel has condensed and edited testimony, melded several real-life figures into a single character, and changed the order in which witnesses testified.

Little is known about the story's less famous characters.

The Lispenard family has a somewhat crooked two-block street named in their honor; it runs from Sixth Avenue east to Broadway. In 2012, a portion of the Collect owned by the New York City Parks and Recreation Department was renamed “Collect Pond Park.” The park, located steps away from New York Criminal Courthouse, includes a bean-shaped pond that is supposed to evoke the original topography. Levi Weeks moved to the remote frontier town of Natchez, Mississippi, and became a successful architect. Auburn, a home he designed, still stands. Levi married a seventeen-year-old girl named Ann Greenleaf, and together they had four children. He died in 1819 at the age of forty-three.

Ezra Weeks's fate is less certain, but landmarks historians have cited his work on Hamilton's estate, the Grange, as evidence that Weeks may have built Gracie Mansion, New York City's mayoral residence. Hamilton's Grange is now a national memorial, located on West 141st Street in Manhattan.

On July 8, 1800, seven months following Elma's disappearance and death, Richard Croucher was tried in a New York City court for molesting a thirteen-year-old girl. According to Estelle Fox Kleiger, he was sentenced to life in prison, but he was pardoned and fled south to Virginia. There he was arrested for fraud. He escaped to England, where he was hanged for committing a “heinous crime.” Recently published, Paul Collins's nonfiction account of the Weeks's trial,
Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery,
concludes that Richard Croucher murdered Elma Sands. In his book, Collins reprints a wonderful poem by Philip Freneau entitled “The Reward of Innocence.”

Could beauty, virtue, innocence, and love

Some spirits soften, or some bosoms move.

If native worth, with every charm

combined,

Had power to melt the savage in mind,

Thou, injured ELMA, had not fallen a prey

To fierce revenge, that seized thy life away;

Not through the glooms of conscious night

Been led

To find a funeral for a nuptial bed,

When by the power of midnight fiends you

Fell,

Plunged in the abyss of Manhattan-well…

In the interest of plot, I have altered several details. Elma had been living in New York City for three years before her death. Others, including women, most notably Caty's sister, lived in the Ring boardinghouse at 208 Greenwich Street. Levi Weeks's defense team also included Brockholst Livingston, an attorney from a prominent New Jersey family. Finally, Catherine Ring did not leave Elias following the Weeks trial. The two remained married and had ten children together. Society of Friends records show that Elias Ring remained a Quaker for sixteen years after the trial but was disowned in 1816 for the “continued intemperate use of intoxicating spirits.” Elias is thought to have died in 1823 of yellow fever.

Yellow fever, which was not fully understood until the twentieth century, is an acute infectious viral disease that attacks the liver cells. It is spread by the bite of female mosquitoes. The disease most likely originated in Africa and was brought to America through the slave trade. Eighteenth-century New York City, with its stagnant swamps, filthy rivers, and lack of sewers, was an ideal breeding ground.

After Elias's death, Caty returned to Cornwall, where she lived with her aged mother until her death in 1855. She ran a boardinghouse known as Rose Cottage. The house still exists today on a grassy knoll leading down to the Hudson River. A small plaque out front reads Sands Ring Homestead, circa 1760.

The Manhattan Company did construct a reservoir on the north side of Chambers Street between Broadway and Elk Street, completed in 1801. Despite its elaborate façade, embellished with four Doric columns and a statue of the god Oceanus (the company symbol), it was woefully inadequate. The reservoir supplied only four hundred homes, though the city's population at the time was upward of sixty thousand people. (If there were an average of eight people per home, the reservoir would have served only thirty-two hundred people—lit
erally a drop in the bucket.) Water came from wells sunk on Reade and Centre Streets, near the base of the polluted “Fresh Water Pond.” Many residents were forced to resort to cisterns to collect rainwater. It was not until 1842 that an aqueduct was completed that carried clean water from the Croton River north of Manhattan to two newly constructed reservoirs. The first was located on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street (now the site of the main branch of the New York Public Library), the second in Central Park at 86th Street (which still exists but is no longer in use). Today, the city's eight million residents receive water from Westchester and Putnam Counties, the Catskill Mountains, and the Delaware River. It is said to be some of the best quality in the world. Because these watersheds are so essential, portions of them are under federal protection, yet freshwater supplies are threatened by overpopula
tion, toxic waste, and large-scale demands for agriculture and energy. Water is our most essential finite resource. As W. H. Auden famously wrote, “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”

Aaron Burr's Manhattan Company may never have provided the city with clean water, but the bank thrived. In 1955, the Manhattan Bank merged with Chase National Bank and became the Chase Manhattan Bank. In 2000, Chase Manhattan merged with J. P. Morgan & Co. to become J. P. Morgan Chase & Co. In 2006, mega-bank J. P. Morgan Chase acquired the retail division of the Bank of New York, uniting the two-hundred-year-old rivals and, no doubt, causing Hamilton and Burr to spin in their graves. In 1930, the dueling pistols used in Hamilton and Burr's fatal encounter were sold to the Manhattan Bank. J. P. Morgan Chase still owns the original pistols, displayed in a conference room, but replicas can be seen at the New York Historical Society. What's more, the Chase octagonal company logo is said to represent a cross section of the wooden pipes once used to transport water for Burr's Manhattan Water Company—pipes supplied by Ezra Weeks for the well in which Elma Sands drowned.

And last but not least, the Manhattan Well survives in the dank, dark recesses of a Spring Street restaurant, the “tavern” Caty envisioned in her dream.

On a rainy November night in 2009, I returned to my former neighborhood and sought out what I had come to think of as Elma's well. Though I must have passed the place a thousand times, I approached it now with trepidation. As depicted in Caty's dream, 129 Spring Street was wedged in the middle of the block, its upstairs windows dark and grimy. Dormers rested on the roof like sleepy eyelids. The four-story building was made of weathered red bricks. Built in 1817, it had once served as a carpenter's shop (which seemed both just and ironic, given Levi's profession). For the past fifty years, it had housed a French bistro.

I climbed the stoop and entered.

The inside was dimly lit. There was a long bar up front and a more formal dining area with white tablecloths in back. Both were empty. The walls were decorated with shadowy murals. The one in front featured patrons at a two-dimensional bar. A rotund woman sauntered across the scene in a revealing red dress and matching pumps. Behind her, a man sat hunched over his drink.

Street development and time had raised ground level so that the well was now located in the building's basement. The owner only learned about its existence from locals who told stories of a ghostly female figure whose face was “not quite human.” In 1980, while a wine cellar was being dug, the well was unearthed.

Descending, I smelled the dampness and was reminded that the river inspiring Spring Street's name continued to flow beneath my feet. The lower level was narrow and tiled like a bathhouse. There were two doors leading to the restrooms and a metal fire door with a sign that read Employees Only. Do Not Enter.

I took the knob in hand. It refused to turn, but I was able to push the door open. I peeked inside, then looked over my shoulder before closing—wi
thout completely shutting—it behind me. Bare bulbs illuminated a narrow corridor that led left and right. The walls were made of slender bricks, bound with crumbling mortar. Five paces away, the bricks jutted outward and in, forming a small alcove. Framed in the cobwebbed recess was Elma's well.