The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  The compromise law was signed by Governor Seward on April 11, 1842. That night New York City gangsters beat up Irishmen, stoned the bishop’s home on Mulberry Street, and broke windows in old St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Other Catholic churches were saved from destruction only by prompt action by the militia.

  Before long, however, New Yorkers began to prefer the new schools to the old ones. In 1853 the Public School Society disbanded and gave its property to the new board of education. Bishop Hughes now decided that the city’s Catholics should create and maintain a complete educational system of their own. He told them, “Go build your own schools. Raise arguments in the shape of the best educated and most moral citizens of the republic, and the day will come when you will enforce recognition.”

  Chapter 20

  THE ASTOR PLACE RIOT

  RECOGNITION of another kind was accorded the Irish by Charles Dickens after a visit to one of their slums. The great English novelist wrote:

  Let us go again, and plunge into the Five Points. This is the place; these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. . . . Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of these pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright instead of going on all-fours, and why they talk instead of grunting? . . .

  When Dickens wrote these words in 1842, the times were awry. The rich got richer, and the poor got angrier. Immigrants knew that they were being put upon. Greedy property owners discovered that more money could be made from tenements than from respectable property. Transients paying weekly rates were jammed into decaying buildings, into flimsy barracks built in backyards, and into cellars converted into apartments. Well-to-do-tenants could demand and get repairs; the poor were unable to force landlords to do anything to improve their hovels.

  In 1843 the city’s two prisons held twice as many Irishmen as native New Yorkers. One rabid nativist shouted, “If I had the power, I would erect a gallows at every landing place in the city of New York and suspend every cursed Irishman as soon as he steps on our shores!” An investigating committee accused relief agencies of failing to learn the “wants, capacities, and susceptibilities” of the poor. As a result, the town’s many private welfare agencies banded together as the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor of New York City.

  Ironically, in 1844 New York was known as the most prosperous and worst governed city in the world. In the election that year James Harper, a partner of the publishing firm of Harper & Brothers, ran for mayor as a reform candidate. He was a curious blend of arch reactionary, tinsel patriot, and businesslike administrator. During the campaign his adherents paraded the streets with banners that screamed: “No Popery!” Harper was elected.

  New Yorkers now heard a rumor that some Irish in Philadelphia had trampled the American flag; tempers ran high here. Mayor Harper declared that no violence would be tolerated in New York, but the American Republican shrilled: “Blood will have blood! It cannot sink into earth and be forgotten.” As tension mounted, Bishop Hughes posted thousands of Irishmen around Catholic churches and schools and warned that if a single church were burned, all of New York would be converted into “a second Moscow.” Despite the bishop’s intemperate remark and because of the mayor’s sensible attitude, the city averted a bloodbath.

  However, nativists organized more and more supersecret superpatrotic societies. In 1844 the Native Sons of America and the American Brotherhood were formed. In 1845 the Native American Party was created by foreigner-fearing fanatics, who called for a twenty-one-year period to precede naturalization. Although their program was aimed primarily at Irish Catholics, it frightened German Catholics. The Germans met in the Broadway Tabernacle at Broadway and Anthony (now Worth) Street and formally announced their “secession” from Rome.

  New York City held 10,000 Jews in 1846, but because they kept to themselves and remained quiet, there was no overt anti-Semitism. That year 1 of every 7 citizens was a pauper. Irish and Negro women vied for jobs as servants, although the work paid only $6 a month, plus room and board. Astonishingly, the city’s poverty-stricken Irish community collected more than $800,000 for victims of the famine that had broken out in Ireland.

  The war with Mexico, which began in 1846, had little impact on New York City, but many Irishmen were glad to enlist in the army just for the food and shelter it provided. Now they jeered that if the nativists wanted to fight so much, why didn’t they join the colors?

  In 1847 Philip Hone wrote in his diary: “Our good city of New York has already arrived at the state of society to be found in the large cities of Europe; overburdened with population, and where the two extremes of costly luxury in living, expensive establishments, and improvident waste are presented in daily and hourly contrast with squalid misery and hopeless destitution.”

  Hone knew about luxury because he dined with aging John Jacob Astor. One night the diarist visited Astor’s mansion at 37 Lafayette Place (now Lafayette Street) and then scribbled: “His life has been spent amassing money, and he loves it as much as ever. He sat at the dinner table with his head down upon his breast, saying very little, and in a voice almost unintelligible; the saliva dripped from his mouth, and a servant behind him to guide the victuals which he was eating, and to watch him as an infant is watched.”

  In 1848 Astor was eighty-four years old, and the fat of his body drooped like tallow drippings on a guttering candle. The last few weeks of his life the only nourishment he could take was milk from a woman’s breast. For exercise his servants gently tossed him up and down in a blanket. One of Astor’s rent collectors was present one day as this went on, and from the blanket Astor asked in a feeble voice if a certain woman had paid her rent. The agent said that she was a widow who had fallen on hard times. No, she hadn’t paid yet, but maybe Astor could give her more time? “No! No!” Astor wheezed. “I tell you she can pay it, and she will pay it. You don’t go the right way to work with her.” Upon leaving his employer, the agent mentioned the matter to one of Astor’s sons, who counted out the proper sum and told the agent to give it to the old man with the message that the widow had paid up. When Astor got his hands on this money, he snuffled, “There! I told you she would pay it if you went the right way to work with her!”

  John Jacob Astor died on March 29, 1848, and was buried by six clergymen. Most of his $20,000,000 went to his second son, impassive heavyset William Backhouse Astor, then fifty-five years old. The eldest son, John Jacob Astor, Jr., had been a mental incompetent from early childhood. James Gordon Bennett of the Herald, who had called Astor a “money-making machine,” now declared that half his fortune rightly belonged to the people of New York City. Their industry and intelligence, Bennett reasoned, had increased the value of Astor’s huge holdings.

  When Astor died, the city was a vastly different place from that which he had found when he arrived in 1784. Manhattan was built up solidly almost to Thirty-fourth Street, and already a row of houses stood on Forty-second Street. Philip Hone, who lived at 714 Broadway just below Waverly Place, exaggerated when he wailed, “The city of New York is so overgrown that we in the upper regions do not know much more about what is passing in the lower, nor the things which are to be seen there, than the inhabitants of Mexico or Grand Cairo.” Hone noted that “Overturn, overturn, overturn! is the maxim of New York.”

  Broadway, between the Battery and Chambers Street, was being paved with granite blocks. Fifth Avenue, above Eighteenth Street, was a bumpy, unpaved road. The village of Yorkville held about 100 houses. G. T. Strong marveled in his journal: “How this city marches northward!”

  The advance was helped by better transportation. The city’s first public conveyances were stagecoaches holding four to six passengers. They were supplanted by larger horse-drawn omnibuses. Paris had its first omnibus in 1823; London, in 1829; New York, in 1830.
Horse-drawn streetcars began running here in 1832. Three years later the “hurry-scurry of the Broadway and Wall Street” with their “driving, jostling, and elbowing” irked a British visitor, who went on to say, “Add to this the crashing noises of rapid omnibuses, flying in all directions, and carts (for even they are driven as fast as coaches are with us), and we have a jumble of sights and sounds easy to understand but hard to describe. The most crowded parts of London can scarce be compared with it.” Bus rides were costly. In 1837 the city fixed fares at thirty-seven and one-half cents for less than one mile and at fifty cents for one to two miles.

  New York state’s first railroad, the Mohawk and Hudson, was chartered in 1826 and began operating in 1831 between Albany and Schenectady. The city’s first railroad, the New York and Harlem, was chartered on December 22, 1831. It was promoted by Thomas Emmet, elder brother of Robert Emmet, the Irish martyr, but its first president was Allan Campbell. Its railroad cars were pulled first by mules, then by horses, and then by locomotives.

  The pine-burning engines, running through the center of town, belched sparks and smoke and clanged bells and soon provoked public indignation. In 1839 a locomotive boiler exploded at Fourteenth Street, killing the engineer and injuring twenty passengers. As a result of this and other accidents, mobs tore up tracks on the Bowery. The city fathers then banned engines from the populous parts of town; horses pulled the railway cars from a terminal at Center and Chambers streets to the open countryside, where locomotives hooked onto them. Cornelius Vanderbilt invested in the line, and by October, 1839, double tracks had been laid from City Hall to Harlem. At a banquet celebrating this event, Philip Hone proposed this toast: “The locomotive—the only good motive for riding a man on a rail”

  Just as the New York and Harlem contributed to the northward expansion on Manhattan, so did the Long Island Rail Road (L.I.R.R.) enable New Yorkers to live in the country and commute to the city. The L.I.R.R. began operations on April 18, 1836. Long Island farmers regarded its trains as natural enemies. Bonging bells, hooting whistles, and clattering wheels frightened cows out of giving milk. Cinders and soot blackened the washing hung out by farmers’ wives. Ministers denounced the railroad for running trains on the Sabbath. Suffolk County farmers tore up tracks, burned down stations, and caused train wrecks by pulling spikes out of the roadbed.

  In addition to railways, revolutionary changes in merchant shipping helped the city grow and prosper. After 1838 steamships, called packets, plied between New York and foreign ports, their success resulting from the regularity of their schedules. By 1840 New York was second only to London among ports of the world. It owned more than one-fifth of all registered American tonnage. It boasted sixty-three wharves on the East River and fifty on the Hudson. Then, beginning in 1843, came the clipper ships—long, narrow vessels with lofty sails, the most beautiful craft ever to sail any seas, faster than steam-driven packets. They were called clippers because they clipped time off speed records.

  John Jacob Astor did not live long enough to see the Astor Place riot, which took place one block north of his home. He and other rich men had donated money for the erection of the Astor Place Opera House or Theatre—the terms were used interchangeably. It rose on a site bounded on the south by Astor Place, on the west by Broadway, on the north by Eighth Street, and on the east by what is now Fourth Avenue. Seating 1,800 persons, the building had classical lines and tall colonnades that gave it the look of a Greek temple. The opera house restricted admittance to those wearing kid gloves, so working-men dubbed it the kid-glove opera house. Verdi’s opera Ernani was presented on the opening night, November 22,1847.

  The trouble began when co-managers William Niblo and James H. Hackett announced that the noted British tragedian William Macready, would appear in a four-week “farewell” engagement beginning on May 7, 1849. There was bad blood between Macready and America’s greatest actor, Edwin Forrest.

  Macready had passed the peak of his fame. Worried at the age of fifty-six about his being “far advanced in life,” he suffered from mental depression and a dwindling fortune. Both talented and tem-perimental, the British star was gaunt and angular, with an odd nose, square jaws, a skinny neck, and grizzled hair. He called himself an aristocrat, sneered at American life, and blinked in surprise when his superior airs offended people. New York’s social leaders preferred him to Edwin Forrest because of the American’s lowly birth and impassioned style of acting.

  In 1849 Philadelphia-born Forrest was at the height of his popularity, the unchallenged star of the American stage and the first American tragedian to equal any British thespian. But the forty-three-year-old Forrest wanted more; he sought acclaim as the world’s greatest tragedian. Unschooled, a coarse fellow with a ferocious temper, rugged and muscular, dark-haired and dark-eyed, Forrest radiated animal magnetism. A dabbler in politics, he was the hero of the common man, although he was almost a millionaire.

  While touring Great Britain, he dined with Macready, who said kind things in his diary about Forrest. However, when the American played Hamlet in London, he was hissed by the audience and reviled by the British press. Forrest suspected that Macready was behind these insults. Forrest later went to Edinburgh to see Macready in Hamlet and hissed him. The outcry in British newspapers was echoed in New York newspapers, and by the time Macready arrived here, the actors’ quarrel had attracted widespread attention.

  Their feud was augmented by social unrest. In 1848 a wave of revolutions convulsed Europe. American workers despised all kings and aristocrats. New York festered with a hatred of foreigners. Macready was a foreigner, an aristocrat, and the pet of local society. He had been booked into the Astor Place Opera House, the very symbol of privilege. All these factors gave nativists a chance to propagandize their doctrine of “America for Americans.” Two spread-eagle patriots began plotting.

  One was Isaiah Rynders, a knife fighter, a gambler, and an English-hating Tammany politician. He owned the notorious Empire Club at 25 Park Row and half a dozen Paradise Square dives, bossed the Sixth Ward, and controlled all the vicious Five Points gangs. During a previous Macready engagement in New York, Rynders had interrupted the Englishman’s curtain speech by leaping to his feet and shouting abuse.

  The other plotter was E. Z. C. Judson, frontiersman, political propagandist, and writer, better known under his pen name of Ned Buntline, which he used to write hundreds of dime novels. In 1848 Judson became publisher of a weekly, called Ned Buntline’s Own. The next year he headed a nativist group, the American Committee, and ached to start a fight between native-born Americans and aliens, between workers and aristocrats. The Macready-Forrest feud was the very opportunity he sought, and he turned a theatrical dispute into a sham patriotic crusade.

  Although Forrest took no active role in the plot to humiliate his rival, he did nothing to stop it. The city seethed with excitement despite the Herald’s remark that it was silly for the public to get worked up about the relative merits of two “impertinent” actors. Other newspapers played up the issue. When Macready opened in the opera house on the evening of May 7, 1849, he was showered with rotten eggs, old shoes, and the like.

  Chagrined and angered, the British star wanted to end his New York engagement then and there. In a petition signed by forty-seven distinguished New Yorkers, among them Washington Irving and Herman Melville, he was implored to continue. Macready gave in reluctantly. He agreed to appear again as Macbeth on the night of May 10. The same evening Forrest was to open in the Broadway Theatre a mile south of the opera house. The play was The Gladiator, and Forrest was to play the part of Spartacus, which gave him a chance to lead a stage assault on an oligarchy.

  Newspapers heaped more fuel on the flames by printing articles headlined “Forrest and Macready.” The Evening Post insisted that “the fullest and most effectual arrangements must be made for the preservation of order.” It was rumored that the British crew of a Cunard liner docked here intended to rally to the defense of their countryman. The morning of May 10
New Yorkers found that the American Committee had plastered the city with posters bellowing: “Workingmen, shall Americans or English rule this city? The crew of the English steamer has threatened all Americans who shall dare to express their opinion this night at the English Aristocratic Opera House! We advocate no violence, but a free expression of opinion to all public men!”

  The posters frightened Caleb S. Woodhull, who had been sworn in as Whig mayor only two days before. He called an 11 A.M. meeting in City Hall. Into his office filed the police chief, sheriff, recorder, and Niblo and Hackett, co-managers of the opera house. Also present was Major General Charles W. Sanford, commander of the national guard’s Seventh Regiment. At the very moment they discussed ways to preserve peace, Bowery B’hoys raced through the streets, scattering notices that called on everyone to show up for the evening’s fun.

  At 4 P.M. Police Chief G. W. Matsell and his top officers arrived at the theater to make the arrangements decided on in the mayor’s office. When Macready appeared at 5:40 P.M., Astor Place was filling with people. A force of 325 policemen reached the opera house shortly before 6 P.M. Matsell posted 200 of them in various parts of the building, ordered 50 to cover the rear along Eighth Street, and deployed the other 75 along Astor Place. The sky was overcast, and the temperature stood in the low fifties.

  About this time General Sanford was assembling his 8 companies of guardsmen, numbering fewer than 300 men. Some mustered at the Washington Parade Ground (now Washington Square). Others formed farther downtown in the artillery drill room of the Centre Market, where they were issued 1,500 rounds of ball cartridges. A troop of light artillery was given two 6-pound cannon, plus a supply of grape and canister shot. At the arsenal there gathered 2 troops of cavalry—haphazardly uniformed milkmen and carmen astride their own horses.