Kit Burns' Rat Pit at 273 Water Street
"Most of our readers have witnessed a dog fight in the street. Let them imagine the animals surrounded by a crowd of brutal wretches whose conduct stamps them as beneath the struggling beasts, and they will have a fair idea of the scene at Kit Burns's." - Secrets of the Great City, Edward Winslow Martin Just down the block from the Hole in the Wall is a three-story brick building at 273 Water Street. Built in 1773, 273 Water is the third-oldest building in Manhattan, behind only St. Paul's Chapel on lower Broadway and the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Harlem Heights. The first resident was a mahogany trader named Joseph Rose. Captain Rose built a comfortable two-story home with a steep-pitched roof, three fireplaces, a wooden sidewalk out front, and a dock out back where he moored his brig, the Industry . Later occupants would include tenant Abraham Walton, a vestryman at Trinity Church and a delegate to the First Provincial Congress in 1775, and son Isaac Rose,...