The Epic of New York City (43 page)

Not a single Carroll Hall candidate was elected. However, the Catholic ticket split the Democratic vote so badly that Whig candidates squeaked to victory. Tammany leaders took fright. They realized that in the future they could whip the Whigs only with the help of Irish Catholics, who had won the balance of political power in the city. For some time Tammany had been helping Irish Catholics in various ways but had been keeping them out of office. Now Tammany began handing out political plums to them.

State Secretary John C. Spencer urged that control of New York City's school system be given to officials elected by the people. A bill embodying his ideas was introduced into the state legislature. Peter Cooper was one of many lobbyists sent from New York City to Albany to agitate against the bill. Despite their opposition, the measure was passed. Under its provisions, state funds were denied to
any
school in which
any
religious doctrine was taught This disappointed Catholics and Protestants alike.

The compromise law was signed by Governor Seward on April 11, 1842. That night New York City gangsters beat up Irishmen, stoned the bishop's home on Mulberry Street, and broke windows in old St. Patrick's Cathedral. Other Catholic churches were saved from destruction only by prompt action by the militia.

Before long, however, New Yorkers began to prefer the new schools to the old ones. In 1853 the Public School Society disbanded and gave its property to the new board of education. Bishop Hughes now decided that the city's Catholics should create and maintain a complete educational system of their own. He told them, “Go build your own schools. Raise arguments in the shape of the best educated and most moral citizens of the republic, and the day will come when you will enforce recognition.”

Chapter 20

R
ECOGNITION
of another kind was accorded the Irish by Charles Dickens after a visit to one of their slums. The great English novelist wrote:

When Dickens wrote these words in 1842, the times were awry. The rich got richer, and the poor got angrier. Immigrants knew that they were being put upon. Greedy property owners discovered that more money could be made from tenements than from respectable property. Transients paying weekly rates were jammed into decaying buildings, into flimsy barracks built in backyards, and into cellars converted into apartments. Well-to-do-tenants could demand and get repairs; the poor were unable to force landlords to do anything to improve their hovels.

In 1843 the city's two prisons held twice as many Irishmen as native New Yorkers. One rabid nativist shouted, “If I had the power, I would erect a gallows at every landing place in the city of New York and suspend every cursed Irishman as soon as he steps on our shores!” An investigating committee accused relief agencies of failing to learn the “wants, capacities, and susceptibilities” of the poor. As a result, the town's many private welfare agencies banded together as the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor of New York City.

Ironically, in 1844 New York was known as the most prosperous and worst governed city in the world. In the election that year James Harper, a partner of the publishing firm of Harper & Brothers, ran for mayor as a reform candidate. He was a curious blend of arch reactionary, tinsel patriot, and businesslike administrator. During the campaign his adherents paraded the streets with banners that screamed: “No Popery!” Harper was elected.

New Yorkers now heard a rumor that some Irish in Philadelphia had trampled the American flag; tempers ran high here. Mayor Harper declared that no violence would be tolerated in New York, but the
American Republican
shrilled: “Blood will have blood! It cannot sink into earth and be forgotten.” As tension mounted, Bishop Hughes posted thousands of Irishmen around Catholic churches and schools and warned that if a single church were burned, all of New York would be converted into “a second Moscow.” Despite the bishop's intemperate remark and because of the mayor's sensible attitude, the city averted a bloodbath.

However, nativists organized more and more supersecret superpatrotic societies. In 1844 the Native Sons of America and the American Brotherhood were formed. In 1845 the Native American Party was created by foreigner-fearing fanatics, who called for a twenty-one-year period to precede naturalization. Although their program
was aimed primarily at
Irish
Catholics, it frightened
German
Catholics. The Germans met in the Broadway Tabernacle at Broadway and Anthony (now Worth) Street and formally announced their “secession” from Rome.

New York City held 10,000 Jews in 1846, but because they kept to themselves and remained quiet, there was no overt anti-Semitism. That year 1 of every 7 citizens was a pauper. Irish and Negro women vied for jobs as servants, although the work paid only $6 a month, plus room and board. Astonishingly, the city's poverty-stricken Irish community collected more than $800,000 for victims of the famine that had broken out in Ireland.

The war with Mexico, which began in 1846, had little impact on New York City, but many Irishmen were glad to enlist in the army just for the food and shelter it provided. Now they jeered that if the nativists wanted to fight so much, why didn't they join the colors?

In 1847 Philip Hone wrote in his diary: “Our good city of New York has already arrived at the state of society to be found in the large cities of Europe; overburdened with population, and where the two extremes of costly luxury in living, expensive establishments, and improvident waste are presented in daily and hourly contrast with squalid misery and hopeless destitution.”

Hone knew about luxury because he dined with aging John Jacob Astor. One night the diarist visited Astor's mansion at 37 Lafayette Place (now Lafayette Street) and then scribbled: “His life has been spent amassing money, and he loves it as much as ever. He sat at the dinner table with his head down upon his breast, saying very little, and in a voice almost unintelligible; the saliva dripped from his mouth, and a servant behind him to guide the victuals which he was eating, and to watch him as an infant is watched.”

In 1848 Astor was eighty-four years old, and the fat of his body drooped like tallow drippings on a guttering candle. The last few weeks of his life the only nourishment he could take was milk from a woman's breast. For exercise his servants gently tossed him up and down in a blanket. One of Astor's rent collectors was present one day as this went on, and from the blanket Astor asked in a feeble voice if a certain woman had paid her rent. The agent said that she was a widow who had fallen on hard times. No, she hadn't paid yet, but maybe Astor could give her more time? “No! No!” Astor wheezed. “I tell you she can pay it, and she
will
pay it. You don't go the right way to work with her.” Upon leaving his employer, the agent mentioned
the matter to one of Astor's sons, who counted out the proper sum and told the agent to give it to the old man with the message that the widow had paid up. When Astor got his hands on this money, he snuffled, “There! I told you she would pay it if you went the right way to work with her!”

John Jacob Astor died on March 29, 1848, and was buried by six clergymen. Most of his $20,000,000 went to his second son, impassive heavyset William Backhouse Astor, then fifty-five years old. The eldest son, John Jacob Astor, Jr., had been a mental incompetent from early childhood. James Gordon Bennett of the
Herald,
who had called Astor a “money-making machine,” now declared that half his fortune rightly belonged to the people of New York City. Their industry and intelligence, Bennett reasoned, had increased the value of Astor's huge holdings.

When Astor died, the city was a vastly different place from that which he had found when he arrived in 1784. Manhattan was built up solidly almost to Thirty-fourth Street, and already a row of houses stood on Forty-second Street. Philip Hone, who lived at 714 Broadway just below Waverly Place, exaggerated when he wailed, “The city of New York is so overgrown that we in the upper regions do not know much more about what is passing in the lower, nor the things which are to be seen there, than the inhabitants of Mexico or Grand Cairo.” Hone noted that “Overturn, overturn, overturn! is the maxim of New York.”

Broadway, between the Battery and Chambers Street, was being paved with granite blocks. Fifth Avenue, above Eighteenth Street, was a bumpy, unpaved road. The village of Yorkville held about 100 houses. G. T. Strong marveled in his journal: “How this city marches northward!”

The advance was helped by better transportation. The city's first public conveyances were stagecoaches holding four to six passengers. They were supplanted by larger horse-drawn omnibuses. Paris had its first omnibus in 1823; London, in 1829; New York, in 1830. Horse-drawn streetcars began running here in 1832. Three years later the “hurry-scurry of the Broadway and Wall Street” with their “driving, jostling, and elbowing” irked a British visitor, who went on to say, “Add to this the crashing noises of rapid omnibuses, flying in all directions, and carts (for even they are driven as fast as coaches are with us), and we have a jumble of sights and sounds easy to understand but hard to describe. The most crowded parts of London can
scarce be compared with it.” Bus rides were costly. In 1837 the city fixed fares at thirty-seven and one-half cents for less than one mile and at fifty cents for one to two miles.

New York
state's
first railroad, the Mohawk and Hudson, was chartered in 1826 and began operating in 1831 between Albany and Schenectady. The
city's
first railroad, the New York and Harlem, was chartered on December 22, 1831. It was promoted by Thomas Emmet, elder brother of Robert Emmet, the Irish martyr, but its first president was Allan Campbell. Its railroad cars were pulled first by mules, then by horses, and then by locomotives.

The pine-burning engines, running through the center of town, belched sparks and smoke and clanged bells and soon provoked public indignation. In 1839 a locomotive boiler exploded at Fourteenth Street, killing the engineer and injuring twenty passengers. As a result of this and other accidents, mobs tore up tracks on the Bowery. The city fathers then banned engines from the populous parts of town; horses pulled the railway cars from a terminal at Center and Chambers streets to the open countryside, where locomotives hooked onto them. Cornelius Vanderbilt invested in the line, and by October, 1839, double tracks had been laid from City Hall to Harlem. At a banquet celebrating this event, Philip Hone proposed this toast: “The locomotive—the only good
motive
for riding a man on a
rail”

Just as the New York and Harlem contributed to the northward expansion on Manhattan, so did the Long Island Rail Road (L.I.R.R.) enable New Yorkers to live in the country and commute to the city. The L.I.R.R. began operations on April 18, 1836. Long Island farmers regarded its trains as natural enemies. Bonging bells, hooting whistles, and clattering wheels frightened cows out of giving milk. Cinders and soot blackened the washing hung out by farmers' wives. Ministers denounced the railroad for running trains on the Sabbath. Suffolk County farmers tore up tracks, burned down stations, and caused train wrecks by pulling spikes out of the roadbed.