New York Unearthed / The Shrine of Elizabeth Ann Seton

New York Unearthed, also, The Shrine of Elizabeth Ann Seton. Heritage Trails New York. , New York is a city of straight lines – it’s the very rare building that curves. The rectory of the Shrine of St. Elizabeth Seton occupies one of them: the elegant house built in 1793 for one James Watson, with an 1806 addition whose portico curves along State Street., At the time, the entire area was a posh residential district lined with fine brick town houses; today, the Watson House is the sole survivor, one of the few downtown buildings that survived the Great Fire of 1835. The double-story wooden columns of the extension’s upper floors are aid to be made of old shipmasts., The underground chambers of “New York Unearthed”, a museum operated by the South Street Seaport Museum, display the remarkable extent of archeological finds in New York., These range from the surprisingly old – 6,000 year old stone points and 3,000 year old pottery shards – to the rather new – 1950s lunch counter artifacts. In between sit the cast-offs of three centuries of city dwellers: Delft tiles and clay pipes from the Dutch, tenement medicine bottles from the 19th-century immigrants, and children’s dolls from the early 20th century African-American community of Weeksville in Brooklyn., Exhibits on the museum’s lower levels graphically depict the potential finds, layer by layer, beneath a typical Wall Street building. The “Unearthing New York Systems Elevator” simulates a ride from street level down to the lowest levels of a typical “dig”. And visitors can watch archeologists work behind glass walls, cataloguing and preserving real finds.