Tavern, the same location where General Washington would bid farewell to his officers on December 4, 1783. Attending the first meeting were then hospital president John Watts, Philip Livingston, and Gerardus William Beekman. The Governors purchased in 1771, on elevated ground surrounded at the time on three sides by marshes. The location was several miles from the central part of New York; apparently the expansion of the city and the drainage of the marshes, which harbored malaria, was anticipated. A building's construction began in 1773 but was destroyed by fire before its completion. The American Revolutionary War delayed the building's reconstruction but a partial structure on Broadway and Duane Street served as a barracks for Hessian and British Army soldiers, as a laboratory for teaching anatomy to medical students, and as a military hospital. Although initially ignored by the wider community, grave-robbing incidents in the 1780s was met with public outrage when medical students carrying out these acts in order to dissect them for anatomical purposes turned from stealing from the New York African Burial Ground to more closely-located Trinity Churchyard. A raid on the university, attack on the student perpetrators, and riot, known The Doctor's Riot of 1788, followed. The hospital opened January 3, 1791. It initially was a small, two-storied H-shaped building located along the west side of Broadway between present day Worth and Duane streets, set back from the street frontage about 90 feet to allow for landscaping and expansion. The hospital's first patients were suffering from smallpox, syphilis, and acute bipolar disorder. In 1798, the hospital's governors announced the hospital's priorities as firstly for medical treatment, secondly for surgical treatment, thirdly for psychiatric treatment of the medically ill (then called "maniacs"), and fourthly for post-partum treatment of women. 1800s After some years of experience in treating the mentally ill, the hospital's board of governors decided to construct an additional building designed to specialize in treatment of the mentally ill. After receiving financial assistance from the New York state legislator, the governors erected "a substantial and spacious stone edifice on the grounds of the hospital in the city, within the same enclosure, and but a few rods distant from the original building. It was finished and opened on July 15, 1808. On the same day, 19 patients were moved to it from wards in other buildings and 48 total patients were admitted. The new department was called