The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  When the theater’s doors opened at 7 P.M., the sale of tickets exceeded the building’s capacity of 1,800. Macready’s friends outnumbered the Forrest fans 9 to 1. By 7:15 P.M. Astor Place from Broadway to the Bowery was a field of human flesh. At that moment Recorder Frederick Tallmadge arrived, as did word from General Sanford that his forces were ready. At 7:40 P.M., 10 minutes late, the curtain rose on Macbeth. Despite the rowdies in the audience, the first two scenes were played without incident.

  Then, in the third scene, Macready strode onto the stage dressed as Macbeth and spoke his first line: “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” Rynders led his gangsters in a storm of hisses and groans. Macready’s friends jumped to their feet to cheer and applaud and wave hats and handkerchiefs, but although they outnumbered the ruffians, they didn’t make half the noise. For fifteen minutes both groups clapped and whistled and roared, all action on the stage coming to a halt. The police inside the theater stood with tensed muscles but did nothing, for they had been ordered by Chief Matsell to make no move unless he signaled them. Matsell sat in a loge where he easily could be seen. At last the play resumed; but the hubbub continued, and not a word of dialogue could be heard.

  As the second act began, the crowd outside the opera house attacked the building. Nearby pavement had been broken up to lay sewer pipes, so the mob was well supplied with rocks. Although the theater windows had been barricaded with boards, they shattered under the impact of heavy stones. Windowpanes were reduced to slivers. The screaming, snarling, cursing mob heaved thousands of rocks and stones and bricks at the theater. Every nearby streetlamp was broken. Water hydrants were opened, flooding the pavement.

  The police counterattacked with clubs. A cop thrust a hose through a window and sprayed the rioters with water, but this didn’t faze them. At 8 P.M. the police captain of the Eighth Ward told the chief that his men could not retain their positions, let alone restore order. Policemen outside the theater were greatly outnumbered, the mob ranging somewhere between 10,000 and 24,000 persons. These troublemakers were carpenters, gunsmiths, organ builders, machinists, hucksters, printers, porters, sailmakers, clerks, marble cutters, plumbers, shoemakers, paper folders, and butchers—the working class. Most were young men; some were only fifteen years old. A few wore firemen’s uniforms, carried ladders, and yelled, “Burn the damned den of aristocracy!”

  At 9 P.M. the first militiamen arrived, and Mayor Woodhull squeezed into the theater to confer with the police chief, sheriff, and recorder. Now the mob was trying to batter down the doors. Between acts Macready found a pool of water on his dressing room floor; rocks had smashed overhead pipes. But the British star insisted on finishing the play, although he raced through acts IV and V.

  A militia officer, with blood streaming down his face, begged the mayor for permission to fire on the mob. Woodhull gasped, “Not yet!” The officer shouted that his men would be stoned to death. The mayor, a politician to the bitter end, vanished and left the big decision to others. Not until the end of the play, not until Macready was back in his dressing room, and not until forty-five minutes after the military had arrived, was the order to fire given.

  Swaggering back and forth in front of the crowd was Ned Buntline, clad in a monkeyjacket and cap, swinging a sword and bellowing, “Workingmen! Shall Americans or English rule? Shall the sons whose fathers drove the baseborn miscreants from these shores give up liberty?” The soldiers were frightened but shrank with horror at the thought of firing on fellow citizens. In the mayor’s absence Sheriff J. J. V. Westervelt finally told the militia’s commanding officer to let his men fire—over the heads of the rioters.

  The soldiers raised their muskets and volleyed into the air. Mob members thought that blank cartridges were being fired and continued to advance, still throwing bricks and stones. Chief Matsell, now outside the theater, was hit on the chest by a twenty-pound rock. One ruffian tore open his grimy shirt, exposing red flannel underwear, and roared, “Fire into this! Take the life of a freeborn American for a bloody British actor! Do it! Ay, you darn’t!” But the militia did dare. Now the soldiers were ordered to fire point-blank at the oncoming mob. Again and again and again they raked New Yorkers.

  A boy was shot in the feet. One bullet bored through a man’s head and scattered his brains on the pavement. A spectator—a tall and handsome Wall Street broker—was drilled through the head as he stood in Astor Place. A gangster was hit in the left eye. A Negro woman was shot through the cheek as she lay abed in a nearby house. Two men were felled when they stepped off a horsecar on the Bowery 150 yards from the theater. An Irish woman, walking with her husband two blocks from the scene, was wounded in one leg, which had to be amputated.

  It was the worst theater riot in the history of the world. That night 22 persons were killed, and 9 others died of injuries within 5 days. A total of 150 persons were wounded. More spectators than participants were killed and injured. Many policemen and soldiers were wounded, but none perished. Macready, who escaped unhurt, was spirited out of town and up to New Rochelle.

  That bloody evening eighty-six rioters were arrested and held prisoner awhile in the opera house. Among them was Ned Buntline. As he was being dragged under the stage, he broke away from his captors and tried to set fire to the building. Isaiah Rynders was not taken into custody. Ten of the eighty-six prisoners were found guilty of inciting riot and got prison terms, varying from one month to one year. Buntline received the maximum the law allowed—a year in jail and a $250 fine. He served time on Blackwells Island, and the day of his release he was met by rowdy friends and a band playing “Hail to the Chief.” A coroner’s jury held that “the circumstances existing at the time justified the authorities in giving the order to fire upon the mob.”

  Peaceful citizens were dismayed. The New York correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger wrote: “There is a bitterness and a rancor remaining behind, which I fear will manifest themselves on future occasions. It leaves behind a feeling to which this community has hitherto been a stranger. . . a feeling that there is now in our country, in New York City, what every good patriot hitherto has considered it his duty to deny—a high and a low class.”

  Chapter 21

  SLAVERY AND ABOLITIONISM

  WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON dressed carefully for the occasion. He knew that he and his fellow abolitionists faced a rough time when they opened the annual meeting of the American Antislavery Society in the Broadway Tabernacle that May 7, 1850.

  With the Herald sputtering about “the annual congress of fanatics,” Garrison didn’t want to look odd to New Yorkers. Instead of wearing his queer turndown collar, he put on a fashionable stand-up one. The Bostonian and editor of the Liberator was of middling height, bald, and rather deaf. From behind silver-rimmed spectacles his big hazel eyes shone with a saintly expression.

  Another scheduled speaker was Frederick Douglass, born in Maryland of a black slave mother and a white father. He was an eloquent orator with bushy hair and a tawny leonine face. In 1838 Douglass had run away from his Baltimore master and come to New York. On Broadway he met another escaped slave, who warned him to shun other Negroes because some, for a meager reward, tipped off slave-hunters. White riffraff considered Douglass’ presence at the Tabernacle to be an affront. Their cutthroat leader, Isaiah Rynders, regarded slavery as a divine institution. Before the meeting began, Rynders posted his tough Bowery B’hoys here and there in the auditorium.

  Garrison opened the session by reading from the Bible and then launched into his speech. Rynders jumped up and heckled him. An abolitionist choir started to sing, but Rynders and his hooting gangsters brought the meeting to a halt. The same thing happened again that evening and the following day. Because Parke Godwin, an editor of the Evening Post, denounced the demonstrations, Rynders’ mob decided to kill him. The editor was warned just in time.

  In 1850 all Americans mulled the question of the extension of slavery west of the Mississippi River. Southern states, with more than 3,000,000 slaves, f
avored its extension. Northern states, containing only 262 Negro slaves, opposed it. New York City became a link in the system of routes and hideouts called the Underground Railroad, but the city’s merchants sympathized with Southern planters, whose debts they held.

  Congress was deadlocked because neither its pro- nor its anti-slavery members held a working majority; both sides now agreed to the Compromise of 1850. This let California into the Union as a free state; set up the territories of Utah and New Mexico but left the slavery issue to be decided by their inhabitants; and amended the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Now anyone refusing to help a federal agent capture an escaped slave was guilty of treason. James Hamlet, a runaway slave who had worked in New York three years, was arrested and dragged back to Baltimore. John Jay, namesake and grandson of the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, headed the New York Young Men’s Antislavery Society and acted as attorney for escaped slaves picked up in this city.

  With the issues of slavery and nativism sundering the city and nation, New York writer Herman Melville unconsciously struck an ironic note in his 1850 novel White-Jacket. “We Americans,” he said, “are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our times; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.” Perhaps he was unaware that only one-third of the soldiers in the American army were native-born. In New York City the Irish accounted for 69 percent of all pauperism and 55 percent of all arrests. Homegrown Protestants were irked in 1850 when Pope Pius IX elevated the diocese of New York to an archdiocese and raised Bishop Hughes to archbishop.

  Hughes preached an inflammatory sermon, called “The Decline of Protestantism.” He vowed that the “true” church would “convert all pagan nations, and all Protestant nations, even England. . . . Everybody should know that we have for our mission to convert the world—including the inhabitants of the United States—the people of the cities and the people of the country, the officers of the Navy and the Marines, commanders of the Army, the Legislature, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President and all.”

  Perhaps the archbishop spoke recklessly because of the growing strength of Irish Catholics, who had organized military companies. In 1852 they staged the city’s first St. Patrick’s Day parade. One New Yorker, staring at the long line of marchers, cried, “Why, sure these can’t be all Irish! There aren’t so many in this city at least!”

  Although the Irish were not particularly kind to Negroes, their sentimentality was tapped by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was taking the country by storm. This was one of the most influential novels ever published. It was written by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, a sister of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of the Plymouth (Congregational) Church of Brooklyn. Visiting him, she said, “I have begun a story, trying to set forth the sufferings and wrongs of the slaves.” Rather diffidently, he urged her to finish it. Beecher was an opportunist who courted popularity; he was slow in taking the anti-slavery stand for which he is now remembered.

  In 1852 a dramatized version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, staged in Purdy’s National Theatre on the Bowery, was sensationally successful. For the first time “respectable colored people” were admitted to the theater through a special entrance and seated in a parquet set off from the rest of the house. During its first New York season the play was seen and applauded by Bowery toughs who had broken up abolitionist meetings.

  Henry Ward Beecher was eager to ride on his sister’s bandwagon. His Brooklyn church, on Orange Street between Henry and Hicks streets, had become one of the most influential in America. Beecher sent to Virginia for a beautiful mulatto girl about twenty years old and then let it be known she was fated “to be sold by her own (white) father. . . for what purpose you can imagine when you see her.” This titillation drew such a crowd that traffic jammed around the church, and thousands had to be turned away.

  Those lucky enough to get inside lapsed into silence as the rosy-cheeked Beecher mounted the platform with the mulatto girl. She was dressed from head to toe in virginal white. The preacher told her to loosen her hair, and gasps arose from churchgoers as glistening long tresses cascaded down her back. Then, sensually calling attention to the girl’s beauty, Beecher auctioned her off. Men wept, women became hysterical, and money and jewelry were heaped into collection baskets. Having reaped headlines, Beecher later set the girl free.

  This sensation was soon followed by another and longer lasting one. Some New York businessmen, eager to boost trade, decided to present the first world’s fair ever held in America. They formed a corporation and sold $750,000 worth of stock in the venture, called the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations. Many nations contributed to the 6,000 items of art and industry finally collected in the Crystal Palace.

  This huge building, inspired by the London Crystal Palace, took shape in what is now Bryant Park, just west of the reservoir and fronting on Sixth Avenue. It was shaped like a Greek cross, with four wings of equal length at right angles. Except for the floors, it was made of iron and glass and considered fireproof. A translucent dome, Moorish in design and bubblelike in delicacy, soared over the center of the handsome structure.

  The fair was opened in July, 1853, by President Franklin Pierce. It was a long hot summer, with the New York temperature reaching 100 degrees in the shade and 230 local residents dying of heat in one day. At first attendance was scant. When September’s cooler days came, so did the crowds. People marveled at the biggest and best collection of sculpture and paintings ever assembled in America; at the model elevated railway carrying passengers around inside the House of Glass; at the nuggets and bars and chunks of gold newly found in California; and at armor from the Tower of London, Sèvres china, Gobelin tapestries, and Marochetti’s statue of George Washington.

  The fair did not make money. As early as October stockholders who had bought shares at $175 found them worth only $55. In 1854 the fair association went into bankruptcy. Some believed that P. T. Barnum, who had brought the Swedish singer Jenny Lind here, might be able to save the venture. He was made president. When he discovered that Crystal Palace creditors expected him personally to pay all its debts, he resigned.

  In a final effort to save investments and reap a profit, the fair was reopened in 1854 as a permanent exhibit. Four years earlier the world’s first elevator, built by Henry Waterman in his Duane Street shop, had been installed in a flour mill at 203 Cherry Street. The invention of the elevator made possible a side attraction to the fair—Latting Tower. Created by Warren Latting, erected just north of the Crystal Palace, made of timber braced with iron, and rising 350 feet into the air, this 8-sided landmark suggested a lesser Eiffel Tower. Its steam elevator lifted passengers aloft, where they could gaze out over the city and countryside. But this $100,000 project also failed because the nearby reservoir with its tall walls provided a more spacious vantage point where people could walk and gawk without cost. The Latting Tower burned down in 1856.

  A little more than two years later, on October 5, 1858, G. T. Strong wrote in his diary: “Recent rains had laid the dust, and the air was cool. There was an alarm of fire as we emerged from the tunnel at Thirty-First Street, and a majestic column of smoke was marching southeastwardly across the blue sky, and men said the Crystal Palace was on fire. . . .” Arsonists apparently ignited paper in the building’s lumber room. More than 2,000 spectators were inside, and the doors were closed; but all managed to escape, one man being rescued seconds before the dome collapsed. Within fifteen minutes the entire structure with all its precious exhibits was a molten mass of ruins. Total damage ran to $2,000,000.

  But another civic wonder began to restore New Yorkers’ pride. This was Central Park.

  The Randall Plan of 1807-11 had failed to provide the city with enough parks. In 1844 William Cullen Bryant, the poet-editor of the New York Evening Post, declared that New Yorkers should have some place where they could find solitude. In an editorial he called for the establishment of a park between Sixty-eighth and Seventy-seventh streets from Third Avenue to the East River. He kept up the
campaign, but nothing was done. Battery Park, once the world’s best seaside resort, had decayed into a foul wasteland. In 1850 London’s 1,442 acres of parks gave 500 acres of breathing space to every 100,000 inhabitants. New York’s fewer than 100 acres of parks afforded only 16 acres to every 100,000 inhabitants.

  The disparity between London and New York was pointed out by Andrew J. Downing, a prominent American landscape gardener and editor of a horticultural journal. In 1851 Mayor Ambrose C. Kings-land told the city council that there was “no park on the island deserving the name.” The same year the state legislature gave the city permission to buy Jones’ Wood, which stretched from the East River to the present Park Avenue between Sixty-sixth and Seventy-fifth streets. Downing spurned this area as too small “for a city that will soon contain three quarters of a million people.” His opinion and the fact that Jones’ Wood was difficult to reach caused the project to be abandoned.

  The city council named a three-man committee to inspect other sites. In 1852 it recommended the area now known as Central Park because it was more central to the city than Jones’ Wood. Despite its better location and greater area, it hardly seemed suitable. Barren, treeless, pierced by outcroppings of rocks, and studded with quarries, the site was used as a shanty town for 5,000 squatters. They lived in huts and ate garbage and kept 100,000 animals and fowls. Horses, cows, pigs, goats, chickens, geese, dogs, and cats trampled the scant vegetation, tore roots out of the ground, and left it naked. Water was plentiful, streams veining the earth in all directions and natural springs bubbling up between rocks. Most of the creeks, however, ended in swamps that polluted the air. Most of the squatters were Irish and German. When they learned that their reeking enclave was about to be taken over by the city, they swore to fight off any invasion.