Lower Manhattan is the heart of the historical events of the
City of New York and was the center of real estate development in the City until
the late 19th century. This
began to change about the first opening of
Central
Park in 1859, but Lower Manhattan continued to be City's financial and
administrative center for the City, and home to many other important structures.
In 1812, the City Hall moved from Wall Street to the Fields, now City Hall Park.
Two great fires, in 1835 and 1845, devastated large part of Lower Manhattan, destroying some notable building of the time, like the Merchants' Exchange, the Garden Street Church, the Lutheran Church, Trinity Church, the English Free School, the Adelphi Hotel and many others.
Several newspapers and periodicals were established in New York City in the 19th century, all headquartered in Lower Manhattan, most of them on Park Row, Broadway, Nassau Street or nearby streets. Notable among them were the New-York Evening Post (1801), New-York Observer (1823), The Sun (1833), New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (1834), New York Herald (1835), New-York Tribune (1841), Sunday Times (1841), New York Times (1851) Scientific American (1859), The World (1860), Evening Mail (1867), Novo Mundo (1870). Some of these newspapers and periodical built some of the early skyscrapers in the New York City.
In 1845, magnetic telegraph connected the Merchant's Exchange and Post Office, in Wall Street, to Philadelphia. Later, utility poles and overhead wires transformed the cityscape with visual pollution. They were removed and buried after the Great Blizzard of 1888.
Electric lights in New York streets first appeared in 1880, on Broadway, as a demonstration. On September 4, 1882, Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street Station began generating electricity in Lower Manhattan.
