Lot: O5 (Taxlots)

This is the small house which Jacob Steendam, New Amsterdam's first poet, built "wholely out of the line of the Street, . . . without the consent of the Fence viewers, or the Court," in January, 1655. "Jacob Steendam insisted that he could build on his lot, as he pleased." — Rec. N. Am., I: 276. On February ist, following, he tried again to move the court by petition to allow his house to stand where he had put it. The petition is endorsed: "Ordered that petitioner shall, pursuant to the survey of the Commissioners, erect his house within 14 days from date . . . and that, meanwhile, he shall not presume to build any further thereupon, before he has obeyed this injunction." — Ibid., I: 280. Steendam tried to get back at his grantor, Jacob Hendricksen Varrevanger, saying that, "Whereas now [he has begun] to build, and is forbidden to erect on the furthest ground on the street," he requests Varrevanger "to free the lot according to the deed of survey." Varrevanger refers the matter back to his grantor, Cornelis van Tienhoven, who responds that the lot is free from all conditions, but demands "that the survey executed by the Road inspectors may be enforced." Steendam then asks that he may "be permitted to place his house in question (opposite J. v. Couwenhoven) on the Strand, according to survey, the Court granted the same." — Ibid., 285-6. But, after this flurry of ill-temper, the poet just straightened his building line to agree with that of his neighbours on either side, as the Plan proves, and did not move the house to the Strand. As this is the first transaction entered before the burgomasters and schepens under the permission given them by the Amsterdam Chamber, May 18, 1654 {Rec. N. Am., I: 219), so it is also the earliest attempt to enforce a warrantee.

Jan Cornelisen van Hooren, the ancestor of the Van Horn family of New York, bought the property, September 23, 1656 (Liber Deeds, A: 72), and sold the southerly part of the lot, fronting to the "Waal," to his son, Cornelis Jansen, from Hooren, in September, 1659. — Ibid., A: 174.

Cornelis Jansen, often called Cornelis Jansen Visser, from his occupation as a fisherman, erected here the "shed" which is so clearly shown on the Plan, and which, according to a deed of 1672 {ibid., B: 191), was the only building on the lot at that date. There are three little sheds on the Plan. Possibly, all these were in use by the fishermen for storing their nets, sails, and oars, etc.

This property, from street to street, was conveyed by Elizabeth van Home, widow of Cornelius, and Philip and John van Home, to Charles McEvers, December 31, 1773. The deed, by mistake, was entered in Liber Mortgages, III: 121. The original Van Home and McEvers deeds, etc., are in the possession of the Title Guarantee & Trust Co.

Site: No. 61 Pearl Street; No. 26 Stone Street.