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NOTE: Most of the information here, including components of the title, are obtained through The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of 400 Years of New York City’s History by Eric Homberger, Henry Holt and Co., 1998.
The period spanning the time from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War gave witness to New York’s most dramatic growth, and secured its preeminence as the center of American culture.
The change was largely due to transportation improvements that enabled the city to take full advantage of its unrivaled natural harbor. The newly completed Erie canal wound several hundred miles to connect the Hudson river at Albany with Lake Erie just south of the falls. Not only did this allow a far more efficient transfer of goods to and from New York, but the timing was particularly appropriate; the midwest was being settled in large numbers at this time, and relied on goods sent in from the more developed east coast. Meanwhile, cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, had a great need for raw materials such as lumber to accomodate their ever growing populations. New York’s situation made it easily the best conduit for such goods, and the city prospered immensely as a result. Closer to home, improvements in roads and transport services made the east coast more accessible as well. Trips which had taken over a week (to travel to Boston, for example) could now be managed in a couple days.
A side effect of the expansion, accelerated by the quality and organization of new construction to recover from the fire of 1776, was an increase in property values; as early as the 1830s New York’s cost of living far exceeded the rest of the country’s. As the docks came to dominate downtown more and more and new construction moved north along Broadway in the direction of the Village, the exclusive district moved uptown as well. As architecture had shifted from the austerity of the Dutch gabled houses, and came to take on the neoclassical aura of a European-styled national capital, again the booming commercial life of the city excited a trend of ostentation and bombast, as flourishes and precious metals were set against doorways, windows, and finials.
Meanwhile, the riverside districts, which had within living memory had seen the wealthy Dutch merchants displaced by wealthier British transplants were cleared in favor of immigrant tenement neighborhoods and slums. A quarter of the city was Irish at this time, most having immigrated to the states in response to the potato famine. Most immigrants’ experience had been primarily rural, and in a milder climate. The shock upon arrival was severe.
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Some neighborhoods acquired a particularly infamous reputation. Chief among these was Five Points and “the Tombs.” Five Points was situated just inside the juncture of the dock districts on the East and Hudson rivers. More importantly, this neighborhood had formerly been the site of the Collect Pond, the old city’s reservoir. When land values rose, the pond was filled, but remained boggy and flooded easily, soon becoming an epicenter for periodic disease outbreaks and securing Five Points’ status as New York’s least desirable neighborhood. The Old Bowery, located on the acutal Five Points was a massive tenement building crowding dozens of immigrants in rooms together for a few dollars a month. It is estimated that 1,200 people lived in the building at one point. Poverty and sanitation problems were exacerbated by rampant crime. “The Tombs,” in the west of Five Points, was a massive prison modelled on Egyptian architecture that became notorius for its abuses. Five Points and the Tombs came to represent the extremes of New York’s “gaslight” element.
Most New Yorkers had a feeling of “ambivalence” toward the rapid change of their city; between the “sunlight” of urban progress and the “gaslight” of those it left behind, and those who prospered off the efforts of others.
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From 1820 to 1860, Manhattan was developed from 10th Street to 155th Street, and the city’s population swelled from just over one-hundred thousand to just shy of a million. By the mid-1830s, the local water supply was unsafe due to industrial pollution and a lack of proper sanitation and the city had an annual mortality rate of about 1 in 40. Continuing troubles with cholera and yellow fever, and the pressure of Temperance movements (those dependent upon wells added spirits to their water to make it more drinkable) led to the damming of the Croton river north to the city and the subsequent piping of water into New York. A more stable sewage system was also lain down at this time. While only the wealthiest residents could afford the running water and private baths these technologies allowed, the undertaking increased awareness of basic hygiene, and standards of living improved notably.
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As a post-colonial community, New York’s government was radically restructured, with governance now divided between a mayor and a “common council,” typically consisting of wealthy merchants but elected by the population at large. Popular elections for local posts commenced in New York’s climate of class segregation, and the city’s wards were sharply divided between support of the two dominant parties at the time: the wealthy supported the Whigs, while the poor and southern interests supported the Democrats. There was a fine balance of power in this period, with close calls largely defined by the voting patterns of dominant immigrant groups. Often, elections were accompanied by riots, vandalism, and scandal.
The assembly of loose political alliances into highly stratified “machines” resulted in the outright institutionalization of many “gaslight” elements, such as prostitution, gambling, and cockfighting. Organized crime developed an almost guildlike structure, as gangs and individuals vied against each other for money and political favor, trading votes for a blind eye. One young politician with southern sympathies, Fernando Wood, came to epitomize this endemic corruption. He quickly rose through the ranks of the Democratic machine at Tammany Hall and by the late 1950s had been elected the mayor of New York.
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If sites such as Five Points and the Bowery came to symbolize the worst of American blight, they also became the focus of New York’s cultural life. Theaters and Opera houses with a traditional, continental flavor opened all about downtown: the Broadway, the Olympic, the American, the Bowery, the Theater in Mount Vernon Gardens, the National, the Italian Opera House, the Franklin, the Chatham Garden, the Lyceum, the City, the Park, the Richmond Hill Theater, Niblio’s Garden and Theater, the African Grove, the Vauxhall Garden, the Tivoli, the Astor Place Opera, the Grand Opera House, and the Fifth Avenue Theatre. Most of these were located south of Canal in the vicinity of Broadway and Division. Columbia and other universities were founded. Several museums were founded, including Cooper institute and the Astor Library, and a number of publishers opened in the heart of Five Points.
While the lively arts flourished in this setting, New York’s literary scene, while active, was relegated underground. Writers such as Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant were considered the aristocrats of American and New York literature, but on the whole, taste ran toward European writers. With a lack of sympathy from the publishing community and the bias of unrealistic copyright laws, writers such as Edger Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, and Herman Mellville struggled to survive in New York’s economic climate, all while turning out what would become some of America’s most enduring literary traditions. Other writers banded together in small clubs for mutual assistance, a couple of which were the “Bread and Cheese Club” and the “Hudson River School,” which included Asher B. Durand and Thomas Cole.
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New York’s age of “go ahead,” which would come abruptly to an end with the onset of the American Civil War, was capped off with one of the city’s most noteworthy achievements: the creation of Central Park. Originally conceived as an idealistic venture, it was ultimately the realization that a large park would bolster propetry values uptown, encouraging growth further north, that encouraged the capital investments that made Central Park a reality.
The land that the park was to occupy lay roughly at the center of the island, was swampy with a high water table, and at that time was the site of a shanty town with free-roaming livestock. When the residents had been relocated and the land was drained, Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux set about the execution of their design.
The park encouraged a sense of community, and offered visitors as sense of relief from the crowded streets of the city. From the moment it opened, Central Park was known as one of New York’s most nobly executed ventures.
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