On a trip back later in life, Whitman wrote that “I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides, the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken.—the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land and water the globe affords—namely, Manhattan island and Brooklyn, which the future shall join in one city—city of superb democracy, and amid superb surroundings.”7
For better or worse, New York was a colossus. “Here are people of all classes and stages of rank—from all countries on the globe—engaged in all the varieties of avocations—of every grade, of every hue of ignorance and learning, morality and vice, wealth and want, fashion and coarseness, breeding and brutality, elevation and degradation, impudence and modesty,” said Whitman.8
In many ways, the city was the jewel of America. Residents bragged of their numerous mansions, museums, and gardens. It was the banking capital of the country and the nation’s chief manufacturing center as the Industrial Revolution took root in America. It boasted the greatest number of newspapers, plus literary magazines, political pamphlets, and the publications of the many social and political movements with headquarters in the city. It had the most lawyers, engineers, doctors, and architects in the country. Twenty-seven percent of all the mail in the United States passed through the New York City post office, and 60 percent of all foreign mail was sent from there. Three-quarters of all the books published in America were produced in New York City. If you wanted something, New York City had it. Journalist George Foster joked that every great country needed an intellectual center, just as a person needed a brain. New York, he said, was that for America.9
The city had the biggest stores, such as Lord & Taylor, Arnold Constable & Co., James McCreery & Co., and A. T. Stewart, the enormous discount store, a six-story-high shopping mecca so big that it had its own telegraph office.10
The owner of Stewart’s, Alexander Stewart, one of the wealthiest men in the world, became famous for a crime thirty years later. Grave robbers stole his body from a church cemetery in the Bowery in 1878 and demanded a $200,000 ransom for it. New York detectives launched a massive investigation and finally arrested two men. The district attorney said there was not enough evidence for a trial, though, and released them. The family did get Stewart’s remains back, or believed they did, in 1881, when their attorney paid unknown body snatchers $20,000 for a bag of bones said to be Stewart’s. The family buried the bones in a church they built in Garden City, Long Island, in the department store titan’s honor, and they remain there today.11
New York had begun to compete with Paris as a shopping and fashion capital. The stores that lined Broadway and Fifth Avenue were among the finest and most expensive on earth, and wealthy residents paraded up and down those avenues to show off their newly purchased and expensive suits and elegant dresses. “The shops of Broadway are world famed,” wrote Whitman. “A man can edify himself for hours by looking in the shop windows of Broadway.”12 And by the early 1850s, Fifth Avenue had become “the most magnificent street on this continent,” according to a guidebook.13
The sweet-smelling bakeries could rival those in any fabled European kingdom. “Cakes were of every conceivable shape—pyramids, obelisks, towers, pagodas, castles, &c. Some frosted loaves nestled lovingly in a pretty basket of sugar eggs; others were garlanded with flowers, or surmounted by cooing doves, or dancing cupids,” gushed Lydia Child, who loved to frequent them.14
And then there were the dozens of quaint, narrow ice cream parlors, whose chairs and walls were painted with every color of the rainbow. Brightly dressed young women stood behind counters full of tubs of different-flavored ice cream and surrounded by counters of fruits, candies, cookies, and other delicacies whose aromas filled the air. Men, women, and children sat at wooden tables in these shops long into the afternoon finishing the best ice cream the world had to offer. The emporiums opened in early April, when the snow started to melt, and stayed open until the first shadows of winter quietly crept across the city in late November.15
New York was the capital of both shipbuilding and shipping. Hundreds of sleek, handsome, tall-masted oceangoing ships and the brand-new, fast-moving, colorful steamships were berthed at the congested docks that ringed Manhattan like a shining necklace. The heaviest concentration of ships, with the largest horde of shipworkers, was at South Street, on the Lower East Side, where tall-masted vessels were berthed, or being repaired, as far as the human eye could see. In addition to merchant shipbuilding, the New York docks were home to dozens of companies that built and repaired warships for the U.S. Navy and for foreign countries such as Greece, Turkey, Russia, and France.16 The completion of the Erie Canal in upstate New York in the early 1830s brought steady boat traffic from the Midwest to the Hudson River and then to New York, with millions of pounds of additional cargo each year. By the early 1840s, more than five thousand ships a year docked in New York City. Several new railroad lines brought into Gotham boxcars full of produce that was then put on ships by thousands of stevedores who worked the busy, loud docks and sent to ports around the globe. The tragic crop failures in Ireland in the late 1830s made the demand for American crops, piled high on the wide decks of those ships in large wooden crates, nearly insatiable.
The city was a base for the nation’s young literary lions, such as Walt Whitman, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the morose, angry poet Edgar Allan Poe, just arrived from Philadelphia in 1844 and living downtown on Greenwich Street. People formed clubs to toast famous writers and public figures. Philip Hone founded the Hone Club, which held dinners for the famous, such as Daniel Webster. Half a dozen writers formed the Bread and Cheese Club. Noted public figures formed the Union Club in 1836, and it still has an active membership today.
New York surpassed all other United States cities in entertainment, with dozens of music halls that presented some of the finest orchestras in America and touring symphonies from Europe. Its theater district had exploded and was home to American productions, not just touring British shows, and New York’s homegrown singers, actors, and comedians were gaining fame throughout the world.17
Beneath that level there were theaters that featured Negro minstrel shows, heavily attended small concert halls that hosted orchestras, singers, and prominent lecturers, and small baseball fields where new city amateur teams played. Part of the rainbow array of entertainment meccas was P. T. Barnum’s Museum, admission just twenty-five cents, where the iconic showman offered patrons numerous large rooms of bizarre exhibits, such as a dog with two legs and a cow with four horns (“to gratify a morbid taste for the horrible,” said one visitor), a 3:00 P.M. comics showcase, and, if all that were not enough, a melodrama in the evening.18
Inordinately popular with all New Yorkers was the circus building on Fourteenth Street, whose interior was designed like the large tents the circus moguls set up outdoors in cities and villages where they stopped on their many national tours. Nearby was the huge Amphitheater, where colorful animal shows were produced. The Amphitheater often had hundreds of patrons inside and hundreds more outside, clamoring for tickets and pushing and shoving each other. Police were often called in for crowd control on the streets in front of the building and to prevent a riot by raucous fans who were unable to get tickets. One reason for the heavy demand was that city newspapers, especially the penny sheets, not only ran ads for theaters but, as a gesture of goodwill, ran columns of free space in which the newspapers let readers know what attractions were being staged in town each day.19
The Broadway neighborhoods were loaded with restaurants. One visitor from Great Britain, Basil Hall, was astounded at the number of eateries and how busy they were. He and a friend found the last table in one restaurant whose tables were separated into boxes by low wooden walls and could not get over the hum of noise in it or how efficient the waiters were. “[They] were gliding up and down, and across the passage, inclining their heads for an instant, first to one box, th
en to another, and receiving the whispered wishes of the company, which they straightway bawled out in a loud voice, to give notice of what fare was wanted. It quite baffled my comprehension to imagine how the people at the upper end of the room, by whom a communication was kept up in some magical way with the kitchen, continue to distinguish between one order and the other,” he said.20
And then there was the city’s carnival, the Bowery, the Las Vegas of its time. The Bowery was an avenue that ran north and south between Chatham Square and the Cooper Institute at Eighth Street on the city’s southeast side, parallel to Broadway and twice as wide. Broadway had its first-rate entertainment, and the Bowery had its third-rate entertainment. Broadway was where the city’s elite gathered at night, and the Bowery was where the most despicable congregated. It was anchored by a first-rate stage, the Bowery Theater, a cavernous edifice that could seat over a thousand people. It featured some classy actors, such as Edwin Forrest, and some touring British shows but made most of its money on lowbrow extravaganzas filled with acrobats, singing groups, jugglers, and horse acts. Ticket prices at all the venues were low. They were low at the Bowery Theater, too. That emporium sat, with its large entrance and thick velvet curtains, in the middle of the Bowery. Around it were whorehouses, bars, boardinghouses, stores, stables, and ever-present omnibuses, rambling along all day and all night. Peddlers, vendors, and out-of-work drifters filled its streets, which were also lined with pickpockets.
Ironically, the Bowery, cluttered with hundreds of organ grinders and their trained monkeys, as well as other street musicians, gypsies, fortune-tellers, and outrageously dressed men who sold questionable bottles of medicine, was developed on land that for decades served as pig farms or cattle slaughterhouses.
You never knew who you would see on the crowded streets of the Bowery or other avenues in New York in those years. Teenager Walt Whitman was walking through town one morning in 1832 and spotted a very rich man leaving his home. He was “a bent, feeble but stout-built, very old man, bearded, swathed in rich furs, with a great ermine cap on his head, led and assisted, almost carried, down the steps of his high front stoop, a dozen friends and servants, emulous, carefully holding, guiding him, and then lifted and tucked in a gorgeous sleigh, enveloped in other furs, for a ride. The sleigh was drawn by the finest team of horses I ever saw.”
The man Whitman was watching was said to be the richest man in the world—John Jacob Astor, worth between $50 million and $100 million.21
New Yorkers loved their town. “‘Our city’ is the great place of the western continent, the heart, the brain, the focus, the main spring, the pinnacle, the extremity, the no more beyond, of the New World,” Whitman wrote in 1842.22
The buildings were magnificent, the avenues inviting, and the crowds, buses, and carriages on the streets a waterfall of majesty. “All the walks here are wide, and the spaces ample and free, now flooded with liquid gold from the last two hours of sunshine,…” wrote Whitman of Manhattan. “A Mississippi of horses and rich vehicles, not by dozens and scores, but hundreds and thousands—the broad [Fifth] avenue filled and cramm’d with them—a moving, sparkling, hurrying crush, for more than two miles (I wonder they don’t get block’d, but I believe they never do). Altogether it is to me the marvel sight of New York. I like to get into one of the Fifth avenue stages and ride up, stemming the swift-moving procession. I doubt if London or Paris or any city in the world could show such a carriage carnival as I have seen here … these beautiful May afternoons.”23
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Yet at the same time, the metropolis’s raging success, beauty, size, and prosperity threatened to ruin it, just as the success and prosperity of old Rome brought it down with a thunderous roar long ago.
“The din of crowded life, and the eager chase for gain, still runs through its streets, like the perpetual murmur of a hive. Wealth dozes on French couches, thrice piled, and canopied with damask, while poverty camps out on the dirty pavement, or sleeps off its wretchedness in the watch-house,” wrote reformer Lydia Child after walking through the congested and dirty streets in the early 1840s, peering at all the laundry hung outside the windows of the grimy five- and six-story-high tenement houses to dry. “New York is a vast emporium of poverty.”24
The press of people in New York was at times overwhelming. The density of people living below Canal Street leaped from 94.5 per acre in 1820 to 163.3 in 1850, and the average block density rose from 157.5 to 172.5. In the Seventh and Tenth Wards, overloaded with newly arrived Irish, the average block density climbed from 54.5 in 1820 to 170.9 in 1840. Tenants had to pay between $3 and $13 per “apartment” per month and $1.25 per week for single rooms. The number of people in each block and building was so high that hundreds were forced to live in damp, barely lit, and horribly ventilated cellars; neighbors started to call them “cellar dwellers.” By the late 1840s, tenants held antirent rallies, started to form associations, and received wide support from newspapers in their struggle for lower rents. Angry tenants repeatedly charged that high and unmonitored rents were criminal acts, but their assertions were ignored in the yearly crime statistics.25
Work was scarce and wages were low for white workers and recently arrived immigrants, but they were very low for African Americans. One, Willis Hodges, a recently arrived black laborer from Virginia, found he could land only low-paying jobs, first as a maintenance man at the docks, where he swept up dirt in the summer and chopped up ice in the winter, and later as a cartman. He worked pushing carts for years and made some money, but then he lost his job and nearly lost everything. “I did not like New York any way it could be placed before me,” he said.26
And, too, low wages meant that hordes of workers had to live in the same neighborhoods as their jobs, because they could not afford more expensive housing or the omnibus commuter fares. This created hopelessly overcrowded streets and residential living zones. One problem was simply piggybacked on top of another. These people did not live in squalor, but they had none of the refinements of the wealthy, who lived uptown. The working class had no indoor privies and had to use chamber pots. Light was brought into their homes at night in cheap, badly made lamps. Their firewood was not purchased or secured by servants but cut from jangled clusters of fallen spruces and oaks in city forests.
The crowded tenements in which the working class was forced to live had been built by profit-hungry developers in the wake of the Great Fire of 1835, which destroyed one-third of the city and thousands of housing units, to handle the growing population of New York, especially the newly arrived immigrants from Europe. Some four-story-high brick buildings contained as many as ninety tenants, all jammed together and battling for fresh air and some peace and quiet, living their lives as the sounds of others living theirs loudly resonated through the thin walls of the building. Most tenements were 25' by 100' and had eighteen rooms per floor. Just two of those rooms received direct sunlight. Men trudged out each day to work for little money in factories, and women either went to someone‘s home to work as a domestic servant or used their own home as a shop to wash or mend clothes for others; the piled-up dirty laundry often took up the entire living room and a bedroom.
Many residents of the working-class neighborhoods of New York had a garbage problem. Municipal garbage pickups were few and far between, and most refuse ended up being tossed, or accidentally pushed, into the streets. There, it became a problem for the street-cleaning crew, whose members had to toil harder than any other street cleaners in urban America to keep their city presentable.27 The city smelled not only from garbage but from sewage. In the late 1840s, only one-fourth of New York City streets had any sewage lines. City health inspectors and beat patrolmen did little or nothing to improve sewage and garbage conditions.28
New York was, Philip Hone scoffed in 1832 and reiterated through the 1840s, “one huge pigsty.”29
Nearly every available building in the city was teeming with people. In the mid-1850s, there were 161,000 families in town, residing in 60,000 bui
ldings. Only 15,000 occupied single-family residences. The rest were jammed into any edifices they could find. Some tenements downtown housed more than 200 people; another was home to 112 families. A large old warehouse in Five Points was rumored to have a thousand people living in it. One tenement house was worse than another. Until laws were passed in the 1840s limiting their number and forcing them to obtain a city license, “immigrant runners,” hundreds of them, met families from Europe as soon as they arrived on the docks and, for a fee, hustled them off to tenement houses, where they promised lavish living at low prices. The agents took their fees; the immigrants opened their dwelling doors and stood in shock. Life went on.30
Hone was not the only aging public figure worried about overcrowding and crime in New York. Former president Thomas Jefferson had long been reluctant to promote the growth of cities. He wrote from Monticello, his Virginia plantation, that the city seemed swamped with problems. “A city life offers you … painful objects of vice and wretchedness. New York … seems to be a Cloacina [anus] of all the depravities of human nature,” he wrote a friend in 1823.31
* * *
New York’s problems seemed endless. The sanitary scene in the city was deplorable. One cop, officer William Bell, told his superiors about a depression on a Lower East Side lawn filled with stagnant water and carcasses of dead dogs. “This pond is not only detrimental to the public health, but is dangerous to the lives of our citizens. Within the last year, five persons have drowned in it.… The water is on a level with the sidewalk and a person walking down the sidewalk at night is liable to walk in it and drown before assistance could reach him,” he said.32
Poverty reigned, and many people had it worse than the tenement dwellers. Estimates were that between forty thousand and fifty thousand people were living in “almshouses,” or poorhouses, run by the city at an enormous cost. They were deplorable. “It was badly ventilated and badly lighted,” wrote Charles Dickens when he visited one. “Not too clean and impressed me on the whole very uncomfortably.”33
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