The Epic of New York City (37 page)

The sorry state of affairs caused conscientious New Yorkers to take stock of themselves. Not so Jacob Astor, who was scooping up Manhattan real estate at bargain prices, or Cornelius Van Derbilt, who was prospering as a steamboat captain. High-minded citizens studying the situation leaned more to a moral than to an economic interpretation. They decided that the whole problem was due to drunkenness, together with ill-advised and ill-regulated charity.

In his
History of the Great American Fortunes,
Gustavus Myers said: “A study of the names of the men . . . who comprised the New York Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, 1818-1823, shows that nearly all of them were shippers or merchants who participated in the current commercial frauds. Yet this was the class that sat in judgment upon the poverty of the people and the acts of poor criminals and which dictated laws to legislatures and to Congress.”

One man who owed a debt of only fifty dollars was kept in debtors' prison and fed by a humane society for three years before death ended his misery. Another spent six years in that fetid jail. At last the state legislature forbade the imprisonment of debtors for sums of less than twenty-five dollars. Justice of another kind was meted out to a certain Lawrence Peinovie, who got two years in jail for biting off his wife's
nose. “This,” cried the mayor, “is the first offense of its kind to blur the escutcheon of the republic!”

Yellow fever added to the city's woes. The first new case broke out on June 17, 1822, in Rector Street just below Trinity Church. In those days no one knew that this acute infectious disease is transmitted by a certain kind of female mosquito. However, all soon recognized its symptoms—flushed face, dull pain, a red and pointed tongue, yellowing of the whites of the eyes and the skin of the body, nausea, black vomit, delirium, convulsions, coma, and then death on about the eighth day.

By the middle of July the epidemic was spreading with fearful rapidity. The city fathers ordered quicklime and coal dust spread in the gutters and set fires to “purify” the air. They fenced off every block in which new cases appeared. Nothing did any good. By August all business had been suspended, and the only sounds in the city were the footsteps of doctors and the rumbling of hearses.

On the day that 140 persons died, a ship anchored at Governors Island. Among its passengers was Charles Mathews, the great English mimic. When he heard the size of the death toll, he refused to land. Word of his anxiety was sped to Stephen Price and Edmund Simpson, co-managers of the Park Theatre, who had brought Mathews here. Simpson and a physician boarded the vessel to try to persuade the entertainer to come ashore. The forty-six-year-old actor was tall and thin; his face was disfigured, and one leg was shorter than the other as the result of his having been thrown out of a gig in England. All his life he was neurotically melancholy, but this did not lessen his talent as a comedian. Now he limped about deck, muttering that he could feel the pestilence in the air, crying that every cloud carried death, and moaning that each wave in the harbor was charged with poison.

The producer and the doctor suggested that Mathews might feel safe if he landed in New Jersey instead of in New York. He agreed. Mathews was escorted to a cottage on the road to Hackensack. He paced the floor in terror all that first night. After staying in his bedroom a few days, however, he couldn't stand further confinement. Strolling out into the chicken yard, he practiced his mimicry before an audience of hens and roosters.

Mathews was not the only one terrified by the yellow fever. Residents of lower Manhattan fled by the thousands to upper Broadway
and to Greenwich Village. The ferry that normally ran between Brooklyn and Manhattan now bypassed the tip of the island and berthed at the Village, which had exploded into a boomtown. At first some people had to sleep in fields. Then wooden buildings rose almost overnight. Business was conducted in temporary booths, and prices soared.

Living on John Street in lower Manhattan at the time was an old Negro woman, named Chloe, who sold flowers and cleaned the offices of lawyers along the street. The attorneys were fond of her, and with sick people dropping like flies on the cobblestones, they urged Chloe to join them in their flight to Greenwich Village. She refused to budge. Shrugging, the lawyers left without her.

For a while there was serious talk of abandoning lower Manhattan entirely and creating a new city in Greenwich Village. What we now know as Bank Street got its name because banking offices, removed from Wall Street, were opened there. One Saturday morning a minister saw corn growing along Hammond (now West Eleventh) Street, but on the following Monday the same site held a house accommodating 300 boarders. A group of Scottish weavers settled in what is today West Seventeenth Street, then a country lane; built a row of modest dwellings; and resumed their handweaving. They called their new street Paisley Place in memory of their hometown of Paisley, Scotland.

By the end of October the weather had turned cold, and frost diamonded the earth for the first time that season. This dispelled fears. The first part of November New Yorkers flocked back to the city they had considered abandoning forever. Bank Street retained its name, although the countinghouses returned to Wall Street. As the makeshift buildings in Greenwich Village were vacated, laborers moved in, seeking low rents.

When the lawyers got back to their John Street offices, there was Chloe, still alive, still smiling, her small quarters filled with dogs and cats, goats, and birds. These were pets left behind by attorneys and householders in their frantic flight out of town. Having cared for them throughout the plague, Chloe now returned them to their owners. Everyone was so touched by her courage and compassion that an important artist was commissioned to paint a portrait of her surrounded by the pets whose lives she had saved.

Soon after the end of the epidemic New Yorkers were taken in by an amusing hoax. A market had been built behind what today is
Police Headquarters, located at 240 Centre Street between Grand and Broome streets. It was called the Centre Market. Butchers, farmers, fishermen, and others gathered there daily to sell their wares and to gossip. A certain teller of tall tales usually was surrounded by a crowd who enjoyed his yarns. He was John De Voe, a retired butcher commonly called Uncle John. One of his cronies was a retired carpenter, known to the idlers as Lozier, although this was not his real name.

One afternoon Lozier walked up to a group around Uncle John and asked what they were talking about. “Well,” said Uncle John with a straight face, “we have had a long conversation about New York Island, and we've come to the conclusion that it's getting too heavy at the Battery end. Too many buildings there. Fact is, the situation is becoming dangerous. So-o-o, our intention is to have it sawed off at Kingsbridge and turn that end down where the Battery is now located. But the question is, How shall it be done, since Long Island appears in the way? Some think it can be done without moving Long Island at all—that the bay and harbor are large enough for the island of New York to turn around in. Others say, though, that Long Island must be detached and floated to sea far enough, then anchored until this grand turn is made, and then brought back to its former place.”

A gleam flickered in Lozier's eyes, for he always enjoyed a practical joke. Deadpan, he asked questions about the technical problems involved and made a few suggestions. That day, the next day, and almost every day for the next two or three months, Lozier and Uncle John solemnly explored the subject of sawing off Manhattan. In addition to their regular audience, they attracted strangers taken in by the hoax.

Lozier slowly emerged as the genius who would mastermind this great engineering feat. He declared that the project needed hundreds of workmen, and of course barracks must be built for them at the northern tip of Manhattan, where the sawing would be done. They would have to build 24 sweeps, each 250 feet long. When finished, these would be placed on opposite sides of the northern and southern tips of Manhattan to sweep the island around after it had been sawed off. Naturally, the ironwork on the sweeps would have to be constructed with care. This was a challenge to a blacksmith whose shop was near the market; he begged to be allowed to take charge of this part of the plan.

Although the blacksmith's wife scoffed, every few days he conferred with Lozier about the dimensions and specifications of this or that portion of the huge sweeps. Word spread about this exciting job, and soon other men presented themselves to Lozier, asking to be enrolled. Graciously accepting each volunteer and never betraying himself with a smile, Lozier said that he especially needed pitmen. He had enough sawyers to work on the ground, but he wanted deep-chested fellows to labor in the earth, as well as under the surface of the Harlem River itself. Of many applicants he anxiously asked whether they were long-winded. Yes, indeed, they assured him.

The dupes who had dedicated themselves to this historic feat brought in others who wished to share the glory. They urged Lozier to name the day that operations would begin. The jokester, overwhelmed by the mass response to his prank, hedged. They insisted. At last he set a date on which they would gather and trek to the northern tip of Manhattan to set up camp. One work force was to gather at the Bowery and Spring Street. The other would meet at the junction of Broadway and the Bowery, now called Union Square. All were told to bring along wagons, tools, food, and their wives, who would cook and wash for them once they arrived at Kingsbridge.

Came the great day. Vast numbers of people appeared at the designated spots with all the equipment ordered by Lozier. But where was Lozier himself—the leader, the visionary, the great engineer? He was nowhere to be seen. Hour after hour wore on, and still Lozier failed to arrive. Gradually, painfully, everybody realized that he had been duped. Not wishing to admit this, however, most people pretended that they had known from the start that it was a hoax and had just gone along for the fun of it. Trying to erase their own images as fools, they ridiculed the men who stormed about, muttering threats against Lozier. Then the disenchanted went home, and within a few days hardly anyone would admit that he had wanted to help saw off Manhattan.

But Lozier feared that the dupes might want to saw him off. He holed up in his home and remained there for the next several weeks. Since his victims knew him only as Lozier, they could not find him. When he finally emerged, he wore a disguise and used his real name. Manhattan remained intact.

Considering the relative sophistication of New Yorkers, the story would sound incredible were it not for a mood then in the air. Most minds were open to the impossible. Everyone knew that the greatest
engineering feat in the history of America was nearing completion. This was the construction of the Erie Canal.

The story of New York City cannot be told without reciting the epic of the Erie Canal. This artificial waterway in upper New York State augmented the city's leadership, converted it into a metropolis, assured its position as the nation's most influential port, confirmed it as the gateway for European immigration, transmuted it into the country's commercial and financial center, and touched it with greatness. In the words of Lewis Mumford, New York City became “the mouth of the continent, thanks to the Erie Canal.” It was the longest canal in the world, built in the shortest time, with the least experience, for the least money, and to the greatest public benefit. It revolutionized the American capitalistic system by proving that large sums of money could be raised for public works through the sale of state bonds. It opened up the Middle West. It set off a craze for canal building. It became the nation's golden cord.

The Appalachian Mountain Range paralleling the Atlantic seaboard stood like the Great Wall of China between the coast and the interior. Although it had been penetrated, transportation and communication between these two areas were still difficult. At the end of the War of 1812 the hinterland of America consisted for the most part of a vast unpeopled bowl, whose natural resources lay untapped. Rivers provided the easiest method of travel. However, the St. Lawrence River did not give access to the Great Lakes. The Mohawk River in upper New York connected with the Hudson River at Rome, New York, but from Rome one had to travel overland to reach the West.

Roads were little more than ruts through forests, muddy in wet weather and dusty during droughts. Wagon wheels thudded into boulders and tree stumps. Drivers were happy to travel twenty miles a day. Between 1800 and 1830 chartered companies built turnpikes and charged tolls for their use, but overland travel remained slow, rough, and dangerous. Besides, the tolls were so high that farmers and merchants could not afford to move their products over the pikes. To avoid these fees, some wagoners resorted to shunpikes, or detours around tollgates. As a result, the turnpikes failed.

To transport wheat from Buffalo to New York cost three times its market value; corn, six times its value; oats, twelve times. It cost $100 a ton to move wheat from Buffalo to Albany and $120 a ton
for the entire distance from Buffalo to New York. Transportation from the Great Lakes to Montreal cost only a third as much as the long overland carries to New York. So the commerce of the interior followed the natural waterways to the markets—down the St. Lawrence to Montreal, down the Delaware to Philadelphia, and down the Mississippi to New Orleans.

After the initial hardships of homesteading, settlers wanted necessities and luxuries made in Europe and on the eastern seaboard. These items were too bulky to be transported profitably by land. Farmers were able to pay for machine-made wares only if they could get their produce to the more populous Atlantic coast and sell it at a fair price. Moreover, unless this commerce were deflected down the Hudson River, New York City would lose its commercial leadership.