ravine

At our Wednesday meeting of the Preservation Commission Dan Seckel reported that test borings for the enlargement of the Renaissance Theater revealed 15 feet of infill. That information rang a bell with me because of a detail I remembered from a letter from 1847 by Robert Bowland. Bowland had built a new home in the "addition" he had developed on West Third Street between Mulberry and where Bowman Street is today. I've circled his house on the map above. (West Market Street is Park Avenue West today.) Here is what he wrote:
"We have now had a number of days of wet weather. Yesterday it rained most of the day and unusually hard most if not all night, and now 2 pm still raining hard, and the waters excessively high. If it continues to rain much longer, there must be great damage done by the floods."Later in the letter "Saturday morning. The rain ceased after dark last night, all the low grounds near this place under water. I understand all the mill dams near this place, and bridges are gone and an immense quantity of fencing. I expect in a few days we will hear of a vast amount of damage done by the freshet. The culvert was not sufficient to vent the water as fast as it came down, and it was dammed up to near the top of the embankment in the ravine between my house and the town, but no damage done to the embankment."
So apparently there was a ravine between his house and "town". Looking at the 1853 map above and noting the land that wasn't built upon, it's clear that a ravine probably ran through the area I've marked with the dark line. That would account for the fill under the theater. The "embankment" would likely have bridged the ravine along Third street with a culvert (of stone in that day) to drain it.