The now bricked up doorway in the Clinton Hall Lexington Avenue subway station often goes unnoticed, but it holds an interesting history. The plaque above the old doorway inscribed “Clinton Hall” once connected the station to 21 Astor Place which, at the time, was the old New York Mercantile Library. The library was one of the largest periodical subscriptions in the city, and it also held lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain. Before Clinton Hall, however, 21 Astor was the site of the Astor Place Opera House where the infamous 1849 Shakespeare Riots took place.
On May 7th, a riot broke out over which actor–American actor Edwin Forest or British actor William Charles Macready–could better perform Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth. The English-American tension at the heart of the riots stretched back to the Revolutionary War, when arguments raged over whether the English or the British were going to rule New York. With the famous Five Points gangs backing Forest and the upper classes backing Macready, violence broke out at the theater. Armed militia shot into the crowd of 10,000 in an attempt to stop the protests and ended up killing at least 25 civilians.
Not long after the riots, the theater closed down and became the Mercantile Library. In 1904, the Opera House building was torn down and replaced with the building that stands there today.
| internal | gDoc TBC |
| internal | When Astor Place Was a Riot |
| internal | Clinton Hall at Astor Place |
| internal | The Forgotten Entrance to Clinton Hall |
| internal | Astor Place Riot |