by Fran Leadon
But it was Chanfrau’s uncanny depiction of Mose that struck a nerve and made A Glance at New York a runaway hit, and before long the further adventures of Mose, his gal “Lize,” and his sidekick “Syksey” were featured in an endless succession of dime novels and theatrical sequels. Chanfrau supposedly based the Mose character on Moses C. Humphreys, a printer who lived in the 1840s on Mulberry Street, and Mose became both a celebration and a spoof of the ultimate New York working-class hero.
Mose was a butcher by trade at a time when butchers, instantly recognizable for their checkered sleeves, were flamboyant public figures. They broke down hog carcasses on the sidewalks, marched as a body in Broadway parades, drank and brawled in barrooms and pleasure gardens, and held court in their stalls located in the city’s open-air meat markets. Butchers represented all that was manly in mid-nineteenth-century New York, their position in the masculine pecking order rivaled only by the city’s burly volunteer firemen—and Mose was one of those, too.
It was an era when the “fire laddies” were idolized, and often feared, for their bombast and brawling ways. They held “chowder parties” and annual balls, sang maudlin ballads, and marched in torchlight parades. Whenever a comrade was killed in a fire they donated generously to the grieving widow. But mostly, it seemed, firemen spent their time fighting each other, especially when rival companies met on the street. “[For] about four hours there was the biggest riot seen before the war,” one retired volunteer recalled of a street fight between companies. “Bricks and stones were going around without owners, and half-a-dozen shots were fired. One fellow held his revolver in his coat-tail pocket, and fired her off at random.”
Frank Chanfrau as “Mose.”
Firemen insisted on pulling their ornately painted engines through the streets by hand, and boys and neighborhood toughs hung around the firehouses and vied for the honor of helping the laddies “run with the machine.” Firemen were headstrong and opinionated, and quick to take offense, which is perhaps why Mose struck such a chord with the Olympic’s audience when he vowed to never again “run wid dat mercheen.” It was precisely the kind of overblown nonsense heard every day on the streets of New York.
But there was still another layer to Chanfrau’s character: Mose was, through and through, a meticulously crafted send-up of New York’s irreverent, flamboyant, and defiant “Bowery b’hoy” subculture.
Bowery b’hoys (“b’hoy” was Irish slang for “boy”) had, by the 1840s, become bona fide New York archetypes, instantly recognizable by their distinctive clothing and bravado, and for their habit of standing on street corners with arms akimbo, as if they owned the city. They became so associated with New York that tourists sought them out, cautiously gawking at them as if they were anacondas in Barnum’s museum. When William Makepeace Thackeray arrived in the city during a cross-country lecture tour in 1849, he reportedly approached a b’hoy standing at the corner of Canal Street and the Bowery and asked directions.
“My friend, I should like to go to Broadway,” Thackeray supposedly said. “Well,” the b’hoy replied, “you can go, sonny, if you won’t stay too long.”
Bowery b’hoys strutted up and down the Bowery, of course, but spent at least as much time on Broadway, where they rubbed shoulders with the city’s wealthiest and most fashionable men and women. (For Mose, at least, Broadway was an acquired taste: “How comes it I find you in this part of the town?” one character in A Glance at New York asks him when they happen to meet on Broadway. “I heard that you held Broadway in such contempt, that you couldn’t be persuaded even to cross it.” “I’ve got over dat now,” Mose replies.)
Night after night, audiences packed the Olympic to watch Mose do battle with the police and assorted lowlifes and feast on pork and beans and brandy at Vauxhall Gardens—or “waxhall,” as Mose pronounced it. At one point Mose even takes in a foundling.
“The fire-boys may be a little rough on the outside, but they’re all right here,” Mose declares while clutching the crying infant and melodramatically touching his heart, “It never shall be said dat one of de New York boys deserted a baby in distress!”
IT WAS NO ACCIDENT that the Mose character was born at the Olympic. Only ten years earlier, the city’s first real theater district had formed around City Hall Park, but by 1848 had moved north into Broadway’s second mile. The Olympic was just one of at least a dozen theaters, circuses, museums, and halls between City Hall Park and Houston Street offering nightly plays, concerts, lectures, and exhibitions. Niblo’s Garden, the Broadway Theatre, the Apollo Rooms, the Coliseum, and Wallack’s Theatre all had their partisans, but it was the Olympic that best captured the riotous spirit of the 1840s, when the divide between rich and poor grew wider, immigrants battled nativists, and patriotic fervor carried the day.
The Olympic was small as playhouses went, and if not for a small marquee over the front door and an enormous American flag flying from a staff on the roof might have been mistaken for a house or commercial building. Tattersall’s famous horse market was next door in a dilapidated wooden building that had once been a circus, and every day horses on the auction block were trotted back and forth in front of the Olympic. The theater was one block north of the low-lying intersection of Broadway and Canal Street, which only thirty years before had been nothing but a cluster of tradesmen’s houses and shops. The area still maintained its working-class character, and nestled on either side of the Olympic were barrooms, billiard halls, restaurants, barbershops, daguerreotype studios, and “segar” stores frequented by the butchers, grocers, cabinetmakers, printers, and tanners who lived and worked in the neighborhood. The Olympic opened in 1837, but didn’t become a success until John Mitchell took over as manager in 1839, and after that it was always called “Mitchell’s Olympic.”
“Mr. Mitchell has, with great tact, seized upon local incidents and prevailing follies, and moulded them into most amusing pieces,” raved the editors of a guidebook published in 1846.
While the more expensive box seats were “nightly filled with the elite of the city,” Mitchell lowered prices for pit seats from the traditional twenty-five cents to twelve-and-a-half cents, which led to an influx of “market boys, butcher boys, newsboys, big boys, small boys, of every age, shape, and size.” On the occasions when his young audience became unmanageable, Mitchell would step from the wings and calmly announce: “Boys, if you misbehave yourselves I shall raise the prices.”
As was the custom in theaters of that era, audiences applauded when they enjoyed a performance and groaned and hissed when they didn’t. At the Olympic the audience threw all kinds of comestibles from the local markets onto the stage, much of it intended not as missiles but as tributes to favored actors. Stephen C. Massett, a member of Mitchell’s company in the early 1840s, recalled “wreaths of onions, large-sized carrots, with turnips to match, a string of tallow-candles, [an] occasional ‘red-herring,’ and in one instance an immense cod-fish” hurled onto the Olympic’s stage. One evening in the summer of 1843, Massett, who was known professionally as “Mr. Raymond,” a stage name Mitchell gave him in 1842, entered, walked down middle stage, and broke into song, at which point a calf’s head, “white as milk, beautifully clean-shaved, tied with blue ribbons, and a fine large lemon in its mouth,” sailed onto the stage and landed at his feet, a surprise gift from an admiring butcher boy. The audience saved their spoiled eggs, fruit, and vegetables for actors they didn’t like.
Despite its popularity, the Olympic couldn’t withstand the tide of stores, offices, factories, and warehouses that were pushing up Broadway from the south. Rents skyrocketed, and theaters gradually shifted to the north and away from Broadway’s second mile. In 1855 there were still twelve theaters operating on Broadway below Houston Street, but by 1865 only six were left; by 1875 there were only three.
The Olympic closed in 1852. Just before Christmas in 1854 it was destroyed, along with eight surrounding buildings, in a terrible fire that killed fireman James T. Laurie of Hose Company No. 7
. The Olympic had been converted to artist’s studios, and the painter Theodore Kaufman lost a series of eight canvases in the fire, each of them measuring 8 by 12 feet and representing “the development of the idea of God.” He had been working on them for ten years.
CHAPTER 9
MILLIONAIRES AND MURDERERS
THE EARLY 1850S SAW A BOOM IN HOTEL CONSTRUCTION along Broadway’s second mile, driven in large part by a humming economy and the prospect of an influx of tourists arriving for New York’s much-anticipated 1853 World’s Fair, or “Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations.” The mammoth new Metropolitan Hotel took up half a block at the northeast corner of Broadway and Prince Street, relegating Niblo’s Garden to an interior courtyard accessible only through the hotel.
The Metropolitan, designed by the firm Trench & Snook and owned by A. T. Stewart, who had branched out from the dry goods trade to hotels and theaters, was gargantuan, an Italianate cliff of brownstone five stories tall and extending 360 feet along Broadway. For its time, it was incredibly modern, with four hundred rooms, steam heat, and its own telegraph office, one of only six in the entire city. The interior furnishings were unlike anything seen in the city up to that time, with rosewood sofas and 120 mirrors imported from Belgium—two of them reportedly the largest mirrors ever imported into the country. Dances, called “hops,” with music provided by Allen Dodworth’s band, were held in the ballroom every Wednesday evening before dinner.
Other hotels, including the Collamore House at Broadway and Spring Street, and the Prescott House on the opposite corner, soon joined the Metropolitan along Broadway’s second mile, their size and deluxe appointments the cause of constant astonishment. “Hotels capable of accommodating the population of a township rise in quick succession along the line of our great fashionable thoroughfare,” the fledgling New York Times reported in 1852, two weeks after the Metropolitan opened to overflow crowds. But only a few months later a new entry into what had clearly become something of a competition opened on Broadway between Broome and Spring streets, and immediately vanquished all contenders in terms of its size and splendor.
The St. Nicholas Hotel, a marble-and-brownstone “monster,” as the Times called it, was by a wide margin the largest hotel America had ever seen—bigger even than the Metropolitan. Before its opening in January of 1853 the St. Nicholas’s owner, D. M. Haight, was already expanding in two directions along Broadway and west to Mercer Street, swallowing houses and shops in the process, until his hotel covered half the block. The Tribune called the St. Nicholas “the largest and most elegant hotel in the world,” and it was probably exactly that.
Visitors entered from Broadway through a portico supported by four fluted white marble columns into a grand reception hall floored with marble and furnished with settees covered in wild animal skins, its windows hung in green brocade and damasks embroidered in gold. Off to the side was a “gentlemen’s drawing-room” and, through a set of folding doors, a reading room lit by a large dome.
A monumental staircase of white oak, its first landing decorated with a large painting of Santa Claus stuffing presents into Christmas stockings, ascended from the reception hall to the upper floors, where there were four hundred guest rooms, many of them equipped with, wonder of wonders, their own water closets. The bridal chamber, its walls entirely covered with fluted white satin, went for $50 a night—$1,500 in today’s currency.
A second-floor hall led to an 82-foot-long “Grand Dining Room” on the Mercer Street side of the building that was lit with three enormous chandeliers suspended from an ornately frescoed ceiling 22 feet high. The dining tables were of polished black walnut, the chairs of rosewood. Meals at the St. Nicholas were choreographed pageants, and patrons dressed to the nines when the dinner bell rang. “In a fashionable hotel, you must dress fashionably—of course,” journalist Thomas Butler Gunn wrote in 1857 in his satirical travelogue The Physiology of the New York Boarding-Houses.
“Who could think of sitting down to a dinner at which two hundred guests assemble—where at a given signal, an equal number of carefully-drilled waiters remove the dish covers with a dexterous flourish of their white-gloved hands—where a band of music, in full blast, accompanies general mastication—in other than ball costume, or something very near it,” Gunn wrote of the St. Nicholas.
Four hundred guests could sit down to dinner at once, and across the St. Nicholas’s well-spread tables guests had ample opportunities to meet, or studiously ignore, dozens of people from far-flung corners of the globe. In a single, typical day visitors from Albany, Rochester, Buffalo, Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit, Cincinnati, Toledo, Chicago, Charleston, Savannah, Nova Scotia, Tennessee, California, and Alabama, not to mention London, Liverpool, Manchester, Paris, and Brazil, might check into the St. Nicholas, each dipping a crow-quill pen into an inkwell and signing the pale blue pages of the thick, leather-bound guestbook at the reception desk.
New York had become a city of strangers. Who was that man sitting next to you and stabbing a fork into his squab?
“The man who sits beside you at dinner is as much a stranger as he who jostles you on Broadway,” Gunn observed. “He may be either a senator or swindler, and you are as little surprised, three days hence, to learn that he is a millionaire, as that he’s going to be hanged.”
The anonymity of the St. Nicholas and other hotels reflected a loss of community in the wider city, which had gotten so big—the population had swelled from 391,114 in 1840 to 696,115 in 1850—that neither locals nor visitors knew many of the people around them. Millionaires and murderers alike passed up and down Broadway every day, and it was hard to tell one from the other.
It was an era when Dead Rabbits, Plug Uglies, and Roach Guards fought epic street battles; when thieves, con artists, and pickpockets lurked in the shadows; and when respectable citizens were targeted for regular muggings, beatings, or worse. Broadway, no less than the more notorious Bowery or the Five Points, was often the site of brutal crimes. It didn’t help that Houston, Mercer, Crosby, and Greene streets had become Broadway’s sordid backstage. Those streets had so many brothels, generally listed in city directories as “boardinghouses,” that guidebooks were published to direct visitors to the most interesting ones. One brothel guide published in 1859 suggested visits to “Mrs. Hathaway” and “her fair Quakeresses,” “Mrs. Everett” and her “beautiful senoritas,” “Miss Lizzie Wright” and her “French belles,” and “Miss Virginia Henriques,” where “its lady, its boarders, its fixins and fashions” were of “the Creole order.” Of the 105 brothels listed in the guide, 45 were within three blocks of the St. Nicholas, Metropolitan, Collamore House, and Prescott House hotels.
And all this extracurricular activity took place at a time when almost everyone, it seemed, carried concealed weapons.
“The practice of carrying concealed arms, in the shape of stilettos for attack, and swordsticks for defence, if illegal, is perfectly common,” English visitor Isabella Lucy Bird wrote that year; “desperate reprobates, called ‘Rowdies,’ infest the lower part of town; and terrible outrages and murderous assaults are matters of such nightly occurrence as to be thought hardly worthy of notice.”
Even the St. Nicholas Hotel, that gilded epicenter of elegance, couldn’t escape the violence of the 1850s—how could it, when its guests were armed?
Just before dawn on August 2, 1854, one Dr. Robert M. Graham of New Orleans returned drunk and disorderly to his room at the St. Nicholas after a night spent carousing in dives on Mercer Street. Graham repeatedly rang a bell in the hallway, attempting to call a maid, and became enraged when none appeared. At this point Graham wore no pants. Colonel Charles Loring of California made the mistake of repeatedly coming out of his room to complain about the noise, and their arguments escalated to the point that Graham drew a concealed sword from his cane and ran Loring through the chest, killing him instantly.
Graham was tried and convicted of second-degree murder,
and his high-profile trial did much to sully the St. Nicholas’s image. One month after the Loring murder, a wary, self-described “greenhorn from the country” wrote to the Tribune for advice on where to stay during an upcoming agricultural fair. The Tribune cautiously recommended the famous St. Nicholas: “You need not be at all afraid to go there; the charges are moderate, and most of the guests plain, honest, country folk. The whole house is elegant and has but one fault—one common to nearly all the best hotels in the world—it has a bar-room.”
Indeed, the St. Nicholas’s well-appointed barroom had become an epicenter of alcohol-fueled violence. On June 30, 1854, one month before the Loring murder, Thomas R. White of Augusta, Georgia, stabbed Arthur Connor there, after a heated argument. One year later, on September 17, 1855, two estranged owners of a steamboat got into a spat in the barroom. Captain J. J. Wright attempted to strike Robert S. Dean, his erstwhile business partner, in the face with a cowhide, and Dean responded by stabbing Wright twice in the stomach and groin. In 1860 there was yet another stabbing in the barroom, by which time the reputation of the vaunted St. Nicholas had been taken down a peg or two.
THE TRIBUNE WAS RIGHT: Even the best hotels had barrooms, and since Broadway was lined with hotels, violence inevitably followed. On October 23, 1851, in the barroom of Florence’s Hotel, at the corner of Broadway and Walker Street, bartender Charles Owens found himself held by his hair while two well-known boxers, William Poole and Thomas Hyer, “beat his face to a jelly,” as the Times put it. Owens’s tactical mistake had been in denying Poole and Hyer a third round of drinks. It was eight in the morning.