Downtown: My Manhattan

by Pete Hamill

  The Knickerbockers were uncertain about how to measure Belmont, which is to say, how to judge him. He was not exactly in trade, nor was he part of the old landed aristocracy. They could not easily dismiss him with an anti-Semitic remark, and of course their manners were too refined for them to make such remarks to his face. In truth, he was practicing the art of the possible. The combination of intelligence, political connections, and money was essential to the growth of the city. August Belmont looked at the city with an immigrant’s cool eye and saw the future.

  The native Knickerbockers were increasingly imprisoned by the certainties of the past and their inevitable loss. As the wealthy part of the city moved into the Gilded Age, with its dreadful, occasionally disgusting excesses, it was perhaps no accident that some of them took to spiritualism in vain attempts to reach into the past. Nor was it an accident that so many of them read ghost stories, in which all of the houses were haunted.

  Chapter Eight

  On the Rialto

  ON THE DAY after the long night of September 11, after we had called our families to say that we were alive, after we had walked the midnight streets and filed our newspaper stories, after we had watched television until four in the morning, after some broken hours of jagged sleep, my wife and I went out together to see the changed world. Everything ordinary was suspended. The newsstand was closed, and the only store still functioning was the Korean deli four blocks away, packed now with begrimed rescue workers. The ruins of the World Trade Center were still burning, and the air was filled with an odor new to all of us, some vile combination of pulverized concrete, melting steel, and burning carpets, desks, paper, and human flesh. At that point, the numbers of the dead and missing were still unknown but were, as Mayor Giuliani said, “more than any of us can bear.”

  We had to show passports to get beyond the police and National Guard barriers on Canal Street. Nearby Chinatown was shut down. Many Chinese women, blocked from the sweatshops in which they labored, stood a block beyond the barriers. Many of them were probably illegal, with no passports from the country in which they worked so hard. The streets were loud with the sounds of alarm: sirens from fire trucks, ambulances, police cars. We found some food. We found some newspapers. We made many notes. We wrote our stories, substituting work for sorrow or fear. And that evening we found our way to Union Square.

  I still don’t know exactly why Union Square became the center for our Downtown collective mourning. Location had something to do with it, I suppose. For thirty years, you could see the Twin Towers from Union Square, the smallish park between Fourteenth and Seventeenth streets, Park Avenue South and Broadway. Now you could see only smoke and emptiness. And the equestrian statue of George Washington, high on his plinth just above Fourteenth Street, was facing south, to where those ruins were burning. There was, of course, no plan, no prearranged agreement that in the event of a monstrous calamity, we would all converge on Union Square. But Times Square was out; it was a place for mass celebration, not grief, its most enduring image being Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photograph of that sailor kissing that girl on the day the war ended in 1945. For whatever reason, my wife and I and thousands of others went together to Union Square.

  There we saw the candles at the base of the Washington statue, guttering in the breeze, forming congealed puddles of wax on the sidewalks. We saw posters, with their messages of anger or sorrow, some written in Spanish. We saw the first leaflets inquiring about those still missing, with their names printed in boldface, the places in each tower where they had worked, home telephone numbers, and, of course, photographs. In the photographs, every person was smiling. They were photographs taken at office parties or vacations or weddings, frozen moments of amusement or happiness.

  And all around us were people from the Downtown tribes, all races and classes, all ages, living versions of the people on those leaflets, most of whom would be among the missing forever. Some wept alone. Some prayed. Strangers whispered for a while, then burst into tears and embraced. Fukiko and I walked over to the edge of the park, and I stared in both directions at Fourteenth Street, for so long a kind of discarded, shabby monument to decay. Somehow, it now had a kind of tough majesty. “Goddamn these bastards,” I said to her. “They’ve ruined the world.” She shook her head and said, “Not yet.” Off to the side, under the trees, people talked in bursts and then surrendered to the sound of a saxophone player who was, of course, playing a blues. We walked back into the crowd, and I noticed small yellow leaves falling around the man with the horn. The blues, full of melancholy, filled the New York night. I held my wife tighter than ever, staring at the flames of the candles.

  For a while in the early nineteenth century, some optimistic Knickerbockers took to Fourteenth Street. The geography of Fifth Avenue, after all, was never absolutely strict. Grace Church, at Twelfth Street and Broadway, was an adjunct of Fifth Avenue, its clergymen full of certainties as they collected the pew rents and enforced the iron codes of social exclusion. So it was no surprise in the emerging city of right angles that a number of well-off people made a turn and moved into Fourteenth Street. Some of their money came from the traditional sources—whale oil, shipping, insurance, and banking, along with rented property—and if they had waited too long to inhabit Washington Square or Lower Fifth, well, Fourteenth Street would be fine. Some of the money was “new,” its possessors dismissed by the Knickerbockers as parvenus. The distinctions didn’t matter to the sellers of plots.

  The first mansion on Fourteenth Street was erected in 1847, and many followed. The exteriors were the familiar reticent brownstone. The interiors gleamed with satin, rosewood, immense mirrors, glistening porcelains stacked in cabinets, a variety of mediocre works of art. Each household averaged eight servants, and some had more, most of them Irish. The new arrivals were also filling University Place, which extended north from the growing New York University, founded in 1831. For all the residents, the social codes remained the same, no matter how often they were violated in secret. They also shared an urban vision. Together, they would establish the first of Manhattan’s great crosstown streets, moving from river to river, with ferries at each end to bring them downtown or across to New Jersey or Brooklyn. They would indeed establish Fourteenth Street, but it was not to be the wide, genteel, tree-lined street of their visions.

  Crucial to the early vision was the presence of Union Square. At midcentury, the square was still poorly designed and landscaped, and it would go through many renovations in the century to come. But it was open space in a city becoming more crowded by the day, a “ventilator,” as the press called it, reasonably safe, a pleasant place for strolling, showing off Sunday clothes, and flirting. Changes in Fourteenth Street would come sooner than anyone could have predicted, and the Knickerbockers would turn out to be the architects of their own later exodus.

  The most powerful agent of change was culture. In 1854, the lavish Academy of Music opened on the northeast corner of Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, presenting opera, symphonic music, and traditional theater to upper-class patrons from the mansions. In the early 1850s, the New York economy was booming, and there was money to spend and invest. And so the Academy of Music was financed by the same people who would become its patrons, those who still yearned for a European-based musical culture in spite of the violent riot that had doomed the Astor Place Opera House. Most of the audience could walk to the glorious new opera house from their brownstones, and if there weren’t enough of them to fill all four thousand velvet-covered seats, those in the less-expensive seats were generally well-behaved, and there were no disturbances.

  Not even in 1860. That year the nineteen-year-old Prince of Wales arrived in New York on an official visit and was given a grand ball at the Academy by his adoring Anglophile admirers. The hall was transformed into a dazzling vision of gaslight and flowers. A platform for dancing had been built over the seats on the main floor for the ball. As the prince walked in, the orchestra played “God Save the Queen,” followed by
“Hail, Columbia.” On the receiving line, there were curtsies, bows, and other forms of upper-class genuflection. New York had come a long way from 1783. Then there was a huge crashing noise. Under the weight of the groveling aristocrats, two sections of the platform collapsed. A number of tuxedoed gents vanished into the darkness of the orchestra seats. None were badly injured, but the reception line was stopped and the prince hurried off to supper in another part of the Academy. While he chose among heaping platters of turkey, suckling pig, grouse, and pheasant, a team of carpenters worked feverishly on the collapsed part of the platform. They knew what they were doing, made the repairs, and the dancing started at midnight. The embarrassed New York aristocrats declared the event an immense triumph. The prince said little. About a week later, after a prolonged round of other social events, the prince accepted the offer of James Gordon Bennett Jr. to see something beyond formality and painfully tedious dinner parties. Bennett arranged for firemen to place a ladder at the window of his suite in the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Madison Square. The prince then went off to do what young princes usually do: He spent the night in a brothel.

  Meanwhile, a familiar process was under way on Fourteenth Street. The brownstones started changing hands with increasing velocity. Familiar faces abruptly vanished, leaving no farewell notes. Some were men so set in their ways that they could not adjust to new technology. Others presided over exhausted businesses that could no longer sustain the money-draining combination of leisure and domestic opulence. Some were those parvenus who had their moments in the New York firmament and then vanished like shooting stars. Some were ruined in the Panic of 1857, when almost five thousand New York businesses collapsed forever. Some evaded personal disgrace by fleeing to Europe. Some went west. They all disappeared from the New York narrative.

  The brownstones found new inhabitants, and they owed their presence to what was becoming known as the Rialto. Its most powerful castle, its source of energy and authority, was the Academy of Music. “What news on the Rialto?” said Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. “Who is he comes here?”

  He and she who came to the Rialto of Fourteenth Street included some inevitable stock characters in the evolving New York show: brothel keepers, operators of boardinghouses, con men, men without history. But many came from show business. The Academy of Music attracted hundreds of musicians, piano makers, sellers of sheet music, and teachers. Other theaters were being built in the neighborhood. In 1861, Wallack’s on Thirteenth Street became the finest “legitimate” theater of its day, a successor to the much-mourned Park. It specialized in what were considered sophisticated comedies of manners, many written by an Irish immigrant (and actor) named Dion Boucicault. Steinway Hall, operated by the great piano-making firm started in 1853 by another immigrant, Henry Steinweg of Germany, was built on the corner of Union Square five years after Wallack’s opened its doors. Along the way, the Steinweg family had changed its name to Steinway, and their hall was designed to show off the excellence of their pianos. They booked superb artists from Europe for public recitals while accomplishing their commercial goal: selling many pianos. The hall had room for three thousand people and would be an ornament of the square for decades.

  Actors, musicians, and writers began taking rooms in the Fourteenth Street boardinghouses, gossiping in tiny new cafés, waging small feuds, and competing for roles or lovers or both. If to the brownstoners Fourteenth Street was a branch of Fifth Avenue, to the actors, musicians, and writers it was a branch of Broadway. They were sometimes volatile, almost always transient, devoid of any instinct to live safe, predictable lives. They were renters, not owners. And they were often in the company of newspapermen, whose editors knew that readers wanted the latest news about this vibrant world. Newspapermen, drawing on Shakespeare and the language of the London theatrical world, almost certainly labeled the entire neighborhood the Rialto.

  In 1861, while the country moved more rapidly toward civil war, a restaurant named the Maison Dorée opened in the largest house on Fourteenth Street, the 1845 Italianate mansion of a departing whale oil baron. The address was 44. The chef was a man named Charles Ranhofer, who had previously catered grand Parisian balls for Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie. The most stubborn brownstoners jammed its tables, as did the visiting European musicians, the employed actors, and even an occasional journalist. Surely there must have been much table talk about the approaching calamity of war, and predictions that grass would grow on the New York docks as the crucial trade in southern cotton came to an end. As in many places on the brink of war, there must also have been a kind of forced gaiety or a defiant fatalism. But to some of the visiting journalists, there was another story right there in the Maison Dorée: It was the first Manhattan restaurant to challenge the long supremacy of Delmonico’s.

  By 1861, Delmonico’s was a New York institution, featured in all the guidebooks of the day as the finest in the city, patronized by the American rich and visitors from the rest of the wealthy world. It had started as a wine and pastry shop in 1827, operated by two brothers from Switzerland. Three years later, they opened their first restaurant at 25 William Street, and because of the quality of the cuisine and the perfect service, it was a huge success. The brothers soon had to call for help from their nephew Lorenzo, who proved to be a genius at the new (to Manhattan) business of providing food for strangers. The restaurant burned down in the Great Fire of 1835, but a temporary version opened the following year on Broad Street, and two years later it moved into 2 South William Street, where it remained until 1890. Delmonico’s menus became famous, listing more than one hundred items, including specialties of Lorenzo’s own invention, such as lobster Newberg, eggs Benedict, and baked Alaska. Lorenzo Delmonico catered to the rich, pampered them, memorized their names and birthdays and wedding anniversaries, provided private space for their special celebrations and grand parties, and charged them handsomely for the service. Early on, he understood that fashionable New York was moving uptown, and in 1856 opened a second restaurant on Chambers Street that drew customers from the new hotels, shops, and theaters of Broadway, and the well-off women who came to shop at Stewart’s. It would not be the last.

  Maison Dorée suddenly rose as a threat, and Lorenzo fought back. He took over the Grinnell mansion at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, and transformed it into a third elegant restaurant. Then he hired away the rival’s chef, M. Ranhofer, who would stay with Delmonico’s for thirty-four years. The Civil War came, and the faithful remained loyal to Delmonico’s even as the exodus continued from the brownstones of Fourteenth Street. For a while, the city itself had a haunted feeling. Then slowly, a day at a time, the city adjusted to the war, to the loss of the southern trade. There was even, in places like Delmonico’s, a certain gaiety. To be sure, too many of the rich diners at Delmonico’s were happy to pay three hundred dollars to save their sons from the draft. They would let the Irish poor do the dying. And after the draft riots, too many rich children were sent for the duration to European safety, where they could ponder the works of the Renaissance or the genius of Francis I, far from Gettysburg or the Wilderness. In New York, ruthless new merchants prospered in the manufacture of uniforms for the Union army, goods of such poor quality that the word shoddy entered the language to stay. They were not welcome in Delmonico’s. As the dying continued on the distant battlefields, most of New York wanted the war to end, even if that meant the secession of the South and the continuation of slavery. But in general, the brownstoners remained loyal to the Union. They raised money, headed committees to improve sanitation among battlefield troops, and gave financial support to a regiment of black volunteers. Not all of their sons bought their way out of the draft. The cemeteries of New York and the South hold the bones of those rich young men who died in the war, along with the bones of the valiant poor who made up the infantry. In the 1864 election, Abraham Lincoln won only one Manhattan ward, the Fifteenth, which, in those brownstones, housed most of the old Knickerbocker families.

  On the lo
cal level, other changes were already under way before the killing started at Fort Sumter. The human turnover on the Fourteenth Street of the Knickerbockers was dramatic. In 1858, a man named Rowland Hussey Macy opened a small dry goods store on Sixth Avenue, just below Fourteenth. He was born in New England, went to sea at fifteen (coming home with a tattoo of a red star that later became a symbol of his store), and tried various businesses in the Midwest before settling in Manhattan. His little dry goods store quickly expanded into a little department store. Building on the merchandising ideas of A. T. Stewart, and using advertising to promote himself and his wares, Macy made the store a huge success, including the introduction of ready-made clothing. He put trade on Fourteenth Street. The success of Macy’s would tempt many others to move to the street, drawing thousands of customers from other parts of the city. Through the most terrible of the war years, the process went on. Some young men went off to the killing fields. Others shopped. Or dined at Delmonico’s. And actors strolled the Rialto, dreaming of playing Hamlet.

  The war ended, Lincoln was assassinated, mourning was general, and then a boom began that was to prove that the United States could prosper without the use of four million slaves. In 1867, under the direction of Boss William M. Tweed, Tammany Hall opened its muscular new headquarters next door to the Academy of Music. The building was large and grand. On the ground floor, it even had its own theater. If the snooty Whig patrons of the Academy of Music objected, they said very little in public, not even when the new Tammany Hall was host to the 1868 Democratic Convention. But some residents of Fifth Avenue must have seen this as a sign of the changing times. If so, they were right. The working-class masses—the “lower one million,” in contrast to the “upper ten thousand”—had this peculiar belief that in a republic no streets could be owned by an elite. Fourteenth Street was theirs to traverse too, its shops and restaurants and theaters theirs to patronize, if they had the money. Union Square, after all, was named because of the planned union of Broadway with the Bowery, not as an homage to that union for which so many New Yorkers had died. The working class might not be able to afford Delmonico’s or the Academy of Music, but they could come up from the Bowery or cross Fourteenth Street from the North River docks and stroll in Union Square on a Sunday afternoon. It was part of their city too. Among them were some writers, actors, and musicians who brought their own robust genius to the Rialto—and then to the world.