The Epic of New York City (38 page)

Even before America won its independence, there was talk of connecting the Atlantic and the Great Lakes via the Hudson River and the Mohawk Valley. In 1773 an Irish-American, named Christopher Colles, lectured in New York about the possibilities of such a canal. In 1786 a man asked the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York for financial aid in building a canal, but although the chamber thought well of his scheme, it turned him down for lack of funds.

The problem seemed insuperable. The Mohawk Valley was a wilderness for the most part, while the Montezuma Swamp, near Syracuse, was a treacherous marshland. President Jefferson said that “talk of making a canal three hundred and fifty miles through a wilderness is little short of madness.” President Madison thought that the canal would cost more than the entire resources of the nation. Scoffers spoke of it as “a big ditch,” in which “would be buried the treasure of the state, to be watered by the tears of posterity.” State legislators at Albany feared that it would boost taxes so high that angry voters would refuse to reelect them. New York City's representatives at the state capital shunned what they considered upstate improvements.

Perhaps the only man who never lost faith in the canal was De Witt Clinton; certainly he deserves the most credit for it. Of Dutch and Irish descent, Clinton was born at New Windsor, near Newburgh, New York, on March 2, 1769. He belonged to an aristocratic family; his father was General James Clinton, and his uncle, George Clinton, became the first governor of New York State and twice was Vice-President of the United States. A precocious lad, De Witt studied in an academy at Kingston and then enrolled at the age of fifteen as a junior in Columbia College, the first student to be admitted to the
college under its new name. At seventeen he was graduated at the head of his class and delivered a commencement address in Latin.

Admitted to the bar two years later, De Witt Clinton never practiced much law. Instead, he became private secretary to his uncle, Governor Clinton, who also named him secretary of several boards. Thus, at an early age he gained much political experience and influence. He rose to fame because of his vigorous mind, forceful character, and awesome dignity. Although he seldom won love, he forever excited admiration; even his enemies respected his towering intellect.

A heavy man, more than six feet tall, De Witt Clinton moved with massive deliberation. He had a well-shaped head, a broad forehead, a Grecian nose, curly chestnut hair, clear hazel eyes, and a complexion as fair as a woman's. Once, after a political defeat, he shut himself up on his Long Island farm and drank for days on end. Then, snapping out of alcoholic self-pity, he again charged into public affairs. Clinton was that wondrous blend of a visionary-realist who aims high, but not too high, and accomplishes almost everything he sets out to do.

Speaking from the steps of City Hall one day, he predicted that within a century the city would be built up solidly from the Battery to the northern tip of Manhattan. The crowd hissed him. Even a gentle Quaker turned to a man beside him and said, “Don't thee think friend Clinton has a bee in his bonnet?” He did indeed have a bee in his bonnet—the idea of linking the Atlantic with the Great Lakes. Nothing could discourage him, not even the Tammany newspaper that printed this doggerel: “Oh, a ditch he would dig from the lakes to the sea,/The Eighth of the world's matchless Wonders to be,/Good land! how absurd! But why should you grin?/It will do to bury its mad author in.”

In 1810 the state legislature had appointed a commission to explore a route for a canal across upper New York State, and Clinton became one of its seven members. No armchair theorist, he journeyed through the Mohawk Valley, jotting down his keen observations in a notebook. Clinton and his fellow commissioners reported to the legislature that it would be feasible to dig a canal for about $5,000,000.

In 1811 the commissioners asked other states for financial aid, but Ohio was the only one to respond. The next year the commissioners tried for a federal subsidy but were turned down. They then recommended that New York State proceed alone and got a go-ahead signal from the legislature. But the War of 1812 delayed the project.

When peace came, all the friends of the canal had given up in despair—all but De Witt Clinton. Along the proposed route, landowners, blind to their own interests, asked fantastic prices for their properties. State and local politicians refused to vote the necessary appropriations. It seemed foolish to try to dig a canal more than 350 miles long through a wilderness. All the nation's existing canals totaled only 100 miles; the longest one was not quite 28 miles in length. When the Albany legislators killed the canal project, Clinton appealed directly to the people.

In the fall of 1815 he convened a great meeting of New York merchants in the City Hotel and read aloud his long memorial on the subject. This appealed to the self-interest of the merchants, whose business would boom once the canal was built. They ordered thousands of copies of his memorial printed and distributed throughout the state. Other merchants, shopkeepers, and manufacturers around the state held mass meetings. Finally, more than 100,000 New Yorkers signed a petition demanding that the legislature take positive action.

In April 1816—the month Brooklyn was incorporated as a village—the legislature named five new commissioners and gave them $20,000. The new board members elected Clinton president and went to work so energetically that by fall the canal route had been explored and surveyed and maps and profiles had been drawn.

Now a great deal of money was needed. Disappointingly, President Madison vetoed a federal bill that would have given New York State $1,500,000 for the canal. In 1817 the state legislature authorized the canal commissioners to do everything necessary to raise all the money they sought. The canal was to be built between Albany and Buffalo.

In addition to pursuing his pet project, De Witt Clinton served ten one-year terms as mayor of New York City and was elected to three three-year terms as governor. On the Fourth of July, 1817, only three days after his reelection as governor, Clinton turned the first shovelful of earth.

Construction of the canal was a formidable task. Eighty-three locks had to compensate for the difference of 650 feet in elevation between Buffalo, the high western end, and Albany, the low eastern end. Some lock machinery had to be imported from Europe. Transportation of materials was slow and difficult. Underbrush had to be cut away, trees felled, and stumps extracted from the soil.

The Erie Canal has been called America's first school of engineering, for when it was started, the nation had no professional engineers. The work was directed by brilliant amateurs, many of them lawyers, who learned as they went along. One man surveying the route hadn't even seen a transit before. These dedicated dabblers came up with new inventions—a machine to pull trees out of the ground, a grubbing machine that could remove forty stumps a day, a two-bladed plow to cut roots, and a new cement that quickly hardened under water.

This first massive public works project coincided with the first tidal wave of immigration from Ireland, and the hardy sons of Erin supplied most of the muscle power. Mainly small farmers, their uncouth appearance provoked barbed comments from New Yorkers. Local rowdies engaged in Paddy-making. They would fashion a dummy from rags, smear its painted mouth with molasses, string potatoes or codfish around its neck, stick a whiskey bottle in one pocket, and then erect this travesty in a public place on the eve of St. Patrick's Day.

The self-proclaimed upper classes should have been grateful to these bogtrotters, for Irish sweat put money in their pockets. The immigrants worked under appalling conditions, digging from one red-painted stick to another through thick woods, rocky barrens, and miasmic swamps. They floundered through mud and tried to fight off swarms of mosquitoes. One summer, in the Montezuma Swamp near Syracuse, 1,000 laborers were struck down by malaria, ague, and typhus; many of them died.

The Erie Canal was made 363 miles long, 4 feet deep, 28 feet wide at the bottom, and 40 feet wide at the surface. Instead of the estimated $5,000,000, it cost nearly $8,000,000.

At ten o'clock on Wednesday morning, October 26, 1825, the canal was declared officially open as the first boat moved from Lake Erie into the man-made waterway. De Witt Clinton headed the distinguished passengers aboard the elegant packet, the
Seneca Chief.
The news was announced by a battery of cannon stretching 500 miles from Buffalo to Albany and then to New York City. At Buffalo the sound of the first cannon was the signal to fire the second one, and so on down the line; the message rode the airwaves from Buffalo to New York City in 81 minutes. Later, when the
Seneca Chief
and her flotilla escort reached this city, Governor Clinton upended a green keg ringed with gilded hoops and poured Lake Erie water into the
Atlantic off Sandy Hook, saying, “May the God of the heavens and the earth smile most propitiously on this work, accomplished by the wisdom, public spirit and energy of the people of the state of New York, and may He render it subservient to the best interests of the human race. . . .”

What did the Erie Canal do for New York City? A German duke, who visited the city in 1825, said that it seemed to be attracting “nearly the whole commerce of the country.” This was only a slight exaggeration, for Manhattan merchants captured control of well over half of the nation's imports and more than one-third of its exports. They served as middlemen for America's farmers and England's manufacturers.

New York City set the pace for this nation's first great business boom. In the early months of 1825 at least 500 new merchants set up shop here. That first year 12 new banks and 13 new marine insurance firms were established. The city's banking capital rose from $3,400,000 in 1800 to $25,100,000 in 1825. The new canal made it possible to ship bulk goods more quickly and cheaply between the east coast and the interior. Previously, it had taken 3 weeks and cost $120 to move 1 ton of freight from New York to Buffalo; now it took only 8 days and cost just $6. Raw products from rural areas arrived here via the canal to be turned into factory-made goods.

The city's population exploded. Real estate values skyrocketed. In anticipation of this growth, 3,000 new houses were built in 1824, but there still weren't enough dwellings to go around the following year. Shops and stores doubled their rents. With old structures being torn down, new ones rising, and the streets almost impassable, all was hubbub.

From 1825 to 1850 Greenwich Village's population quadrupled. Farther uptown, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's great-grandfather, James Roosevelt, profited by selling his farm between 110th and 125th streets just east of what is now 5th Avenue. Two houses with marble fronts, probably the first in the nation, were erected at 663 and 665 Broadway. For the first time gas streetlights appeared in the city south of 14th Street.

The year the canal opened, 11 percent of the city's inhabitants consisted of aliens, and each day more poured in from abroad. Merchants began displacing the landed gentry as the city's social leaders, and both groups worried about the changing complexion of society. With the removal of property qualifications the suffrage was extended,
all white males now being allowed to vote. This was not to the liking of the old guard. The Federalists' chancellor, James Kent, warned: “The growth of the city of New York is enough to startle and awaken those who are pursuing the
ignis fatuus
(foolish fire) of universal suffrage. . . . It is rapidly swelling into the unwieldy population, and with the burdensome pauperism of an European metropolis. . . .”

In 1825 a seven-story tenement was erected at 65 Mott Street, the Society for the Reformation of Youthful Delinquents opened the House of Refuge, and the first organized gang appeared.

Chapter 18