Anthony Bleecker
Anthony Bleecker (October 1770 – 13 March 1827) was an author and lawyer, who was friends with Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. Bleecker was born in New York City in October 1770, the son of Anthony Lispenard Bleecker, one of the wealthiest and influential citizens of New York, who was one of the first settlers of the Huguenot community of New Rochelle, and the first of the family to settle in New York City, from Albany, NY. He graduated from Columbia University (1791) and studied law, but was reputedly never a successful practitioner principally due to his oratory skills, to which he was ever self-conscious of. For some thirty years he was a contributor of prose and verse to periodicals published in New York City and Philadelphia. Bleecker was one of the founders of the New York Historical Society, and was a trustee of the New York Society Library from 1810 until 1826. The poet William Cullen Bryant wrote:
"Anthony Bleecker, who read everything that came out, and sometimes wrote for the magazines, was an amusing companion, always ready with his puns, of whom Miss Eliza Fenno, before her marriage to Verplanck in 1811, wrote that she had gone into the country to take refuge from Anthony Bleecker's puns."[1]
Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, New York City was named by his father, "the proprietor of the Bleecker estate of twenty acres through which Bleecker Street now runs and to which he gave the name" [in honor of his family].[2] [3]
Anthony Bleecker deeded property to New York City in 1807.
Literary Works
The Narrative of the Brig Commerce
References
- ^ Wilson, Grant James and Fiske, John, eds. Appleton Cyclopaedia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1888, Vol. 1, p. 291.
- ^ Greene, Richard Henry, et al. The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. New York: The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, 1903, Vo. 34, p. 234.
- ^ Moscow, Henry (1990). The Street Book: An Encyclopedia of Manhattan's Street Names and Their Origins. New York City: Fordham University Press. ISBN 0823212750.
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