of New York and set up offices in the old mansion, until moving three years later to Hanover Square. At one time a boarding house, it was taken down in 1881. Herman Melville was born at 6 Pearl Street in 1819. In 1831 soap magnate William Colgate owned a Counting house at 211 Pearl. In the winter of 1835, a gas pipe burst in a warehouse at the corner of Pearl and Merchant Streets, causing a fire that consumed some 600 buildings over seventeen blocks. Both sides of Pearl Street burned from Wall Street to Coenties Slip. In 1833, the publishing house of J. & J. Harper changed its name to Harper & Brothers. The firm was located at 329–331 Pearl Street, facing Franklin Square. They began publishing Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1850. In December 1853 a fire destroyed the premises, but the brothers built a large cast-iron building designed by architect James Bogardus, which was connected to a second structure on Cliff Street by cast-iron walkways. The building was demolished in 1925, but is memorialized in a painting by Richard Haas in the New York Public Library Main Branch’s DeWitt Wallace Periodicals Room. As of 2018, the company, now known as HarperCollins, is headquartered at 195 Broadway. In 1851, a three-story brownstone masonry structure was built in the Italian Renaissance style at 1 Hanover Square. The building extends southwest to 60–64 Stone Street (also known as 95–101 Pearl Street), a set of four-story Greek Revival brick structures completed in 1836. It served as the first headquarters of the New York Cotton Exchange from 1872 to 1885. Operated since 1915 as part of a private club called India House, the building is designated as a New York City landmark and is a National Historic Landmark. In July 1854, African American school teacher Elizabeth Jennings boarded a streetcar at the intersection of Pearl and Chatham Streets and was forcibly ejected. Chester A. Arthur, a 24-year-old attorney, was successful in a lawsuit brought against the Third Avenue Railway Company, thus beginning the gradual desegregation of all New York City transit systems by 1865. Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station, the first public power plant in the United States, was located at 255-257 Pearl Street. It began with one direct current generator, and it started generating electricity on September 4, 1882. New York Telephone put up a large administrative building at 375 Pearl