The last war had brightened the town’s prospects—“New York is growing immensely rich,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1756—not least because merchants sold goods to both the British and, surreptitiously, the French. The metropolis continued to spread north, with new streets and churches—lovely St. Paul’s, Brick Presbyterian, Scotch Presbyterian, and the Lutheran and Methodist meetinghouses had all been built in the 1760s. Milestones
