Open House on New Year's Day
- In 1763, when "Black Sam" Fraunces opened his tavern under the sign of the Queen's Head, New York was already a thriving center of colonial trade. The Boston Post Road started at the tavern's front door, great ships lay moored along the Hudson and East rivers and through the narrow streets thronged merchants, soldiers, tradesmen and privateers.
In the years that followed, Fraunce's reputation for striking just the right balance between elegance and democratic cordiality, as well as setting a fine table, attracted a distinguished clientele, who remained loyal to him even through the hard years of the American Revolution.
Patriot Fraunces stoically entertained high-living British officers and their Tory friends during the long occupation of New York, from 1776 until the end of the war in 1783.
When the British finally left, he took down the portrait of Queen Charlotte that had served as his sign and newly christened his inn Fraunces Tavern. His old patrons returned. Governor Clinton gave a great public dinner at the inn for George Washington to celebrate the British evacuation of New York and General Washington himself chose the so-called Long Room on the second floor of the tavern as the setting for his farwell speech to his officers.
But in 1664, the year that New Amsterdam became New York, Colonel Stephanus Van Cortlandt, the son of a wealthy Dutch merchant, was granted the plot of ground upon which Fraunces Tavern now stands.
He, in turn, deeded it to his son-in-law Stephen de Lancey, who in 1719 built a three and one-half stories high Georgian mansion constructed of small yellow bricks shipped from Holland. In 1762 the mansion passed into the ownership of Samuel Fraunces, a man of French extraction from the West Indies.
Early on, Fraunces had established a fabled reputation as a caterer in New York selling portable soup, catsup, bottled gooseberries, pickled walnuts, pickled and fried oysters,
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