We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time. New York in the nineteenth century was more creative, more deadly, more of a genius society, than it is now. It was high tech, heavily into railroading and telegraphy. Rotary presses put tens of thousands of newspapers on the streets for a penny or two. Enormous steam engines powered the mills and manufactories. Gas lamps lit the city at night. Public schools flourished. A city board of health enacted sanitation reforms that ended epidemic cholera.
The war of secession made New York rich. When it was over there was nothing to stop progress—no classical ruins of ideas, no superstitions, to retard civil republican ardor. Not that much had to be destroyed or overturned, as in the European cultures of Roman towns and medieval guilds. A few Dutch farms were razed, villages melded into towns, towns burned into precincts, and all at once block and tackle were raising the marble and granite mansions of Fifth Avenue, and burly roundsmen were wading through the stopped traffic on Broadway, slapping horses on the rumps, disengaging carriage wheels, and cursing the heedless entanglement of horsecars, stages, drays, and two-in-hands by which the people undertook to drive themselves into their business day.
The air was bad then too. Cinderous locomotives ran down the avenues on elevated tracks. Coal stoked the steamships and the ferries. At night the flaming stacks of the foundries on the Jersey shore cast torchlight like seed over the old wharves and packing sheds of the West Side. Cookstoves in homes burned coal, and on a winter morning without wind, black plumes rose from the chimneys in orderly rows, like the shimmering citizens of a necropolis.
Not church spires but fire towers were the tallest structures. Fire wardens tapped their telegraph keys and after a few minutes the hose companies came at a gallop.
The city’s water-supply system was put in place in the 1840s. From a string of Catskill lakes, the water flowed through Westchester in conduits, crossed the Harlem River on the High Bridge viaduct of fifteen Roman arches, and came to rest lapping the cobblestoned banks of the Croton Distributing Reservoir at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, where the New York Public Library stands today.
Of course, in the antebellum era, Forty-second and Fifth was the northern edge of civilization. Central Park, well to the north, was not yet unfolded, a wreckage of nature, all mudholes and ditches and berms of shoveled earth, a park still in the minds of its imaginers. So everyone went to the reservoir. The retaining walls were twenty-five feet thick and rose forty-four feet high in a kind of Egyptian slant. The corners were relieved by trapezoidal turrets, and bisecting each long wall face were temple doors. You went in, climbed up a stair and came out in the sky. It was at the reservoir people soothed their spirits, walking arm in arm with their friends along the parapet. If they wanted a breeze in summer, here is where it would blow. Puffs rippled the water. Children launched their toy sloops. From this elevation the rising city seemed to fall back before something that wasn’t a city, a squared expanse of black water that was in fact the geometric absence of a city. This was the closest they could come to pastoral.
The Egyptian motif held too in “the Tombs,” the municipal prison on Centre Street, a block-square, two-story columned structure with sun-god embellishments. But the nineteenth-century city copied nearly every style of the past—classical Greek, Romanesque, Second Empire, Belle Epoque, Gothic, and Moorish. New York in the nineteenth was a bizarre, endlessly self-revising culture of ancestor worship. Its most original architectural idea was to house the immigrant millions in Tenement.
Our generations were raw, spiritually unformed. Our literature was just proposing itself, and our national character was so cloven, so self-contentious, as to be undetermined. The people were given to rioting. They rioted when flour went from seven to twenty dollars a barrel, when abolitionists spoke; they burned the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue when Lincoln ordered conscription. There were gang riots when the Dead Rabbits clashed with the Roach Guards, and police riots when the old-guard Municipals fought the usurper Metropolitans.
Armies of newsboys battled for their corners, Hibernian societies attacked Orangemen’s parades, churchmen thundered from their pulpits, thieves in soft caps sapped thieves in tall hats, and matrons pointedly did not invite one another to their balls. Ragpickers, a professional class, roamed the streets.
After the war the Tweed Ring created a model for systematic corruption that is the envy of politicians to this day. The Wall Street stock frauds, insider-trading schemes, and market-cornering conspiracies of the time have never in our century been surpassed, though not for lack of trying. The theme of the nineteenth was excess, excess in everything—pleasure, gaudy display, endless toil, and death. Vagrant children slept in the alleys. A conspicuously self-satisfied class of new wealth and weak intellect was all aglitter in a setting of mass misery. Walt Whitman renders some of his feeling for the time in his poem “Song of Myself.” He was the city’s bard, among other things, and not all that unknown.
Somehow I have been stunned. Stand back!
Give me a little time beyond my cuffed head and slumbers and dreams and gaping …
I deliberately leave out of this reverie the colossal figures, the politicians, newspapermen, artists and writers, clerics, criminals, merchants and millionaires by which we identify the postwar decades of the nineteenth New York. Somehow, individual personality confuses the matter. It is easier to feel their culture in the aggregate. We move among the silent decisions of the nineteenth-century dead. It is their spirit that directs us—in their street names and configurations, in the technology they devised, in their buildings still standing, and, hauntingly, in the structures long razed. They made New York a global city, the place to come to from every part of the world, the place to be. They invested a lot of money in a very small space. With their oyster bars, theaters, saloons, racecourses, beer gardens, dance halls, and brothels, they proposed an ethic of human insatiability. From them we inherit, in any moment’s crowding at the intersection of two New York City streets, a vision of the anarchy of human intent. And New York, as the point of convergence of many of the world’s cultures, suggests the unreality of all of them.
The islanded city grew not up but in a northerly direction, and its citizens were taught twentieth-century time by the speed with which acreage was covered in paving stones. One day a limestone mansion would appear in a field. The next day it stood on a city street with horse and carriage riding by. The frontier was pioneered often by charities. The nineteenth tended to put its welfare institutions as far out of town as possible, behind stone walls and high hedges. Orphanages, insane asylums, poorhouses, sanatoriums, and mission homes for fallen women were built far uptown—in Washington Heights or on the North River, where the land was cheap, or on the East River islands.
Today, from Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive you can see the ruins of the old city almshouse standing on the south end of Blackwell’s Island. The astonishing thing in this city celebrated for tearing itself down and beginning again every generation or so is how much of the nineteenth is still visible. The Federal-style brick town houses in the West Village … the Jefferson Market Library … the great voluminous brownstone Cooper Union college on Astor Place, where Lincoln spoke … the stolid rows on West Twenty-third Street where the well-to-do moved to get away from the noise of downtown … the Brooklyn Bridge … the Memorial arch at Washington Square … the esplanade in Central Park … the Armory on Park Avenue.… In every neighborhood, from the Lower East Side to Harlem, well kept or neglected, the century is still with us, the ghostly nineteenth.
On nights of fog you see it best. Look south, over lower Manhattan: A heavy fog works its way down through the architectural strata. First the World Trade Center disappears, then the fifty- and sixty-story office buildings of glass, then the early-twentieth-century stone Woolworth Building … story by story the skyline blacks out, modernity deconstructs, and all that is left is the nineteenth-century city. Its grandeur is ground level. You can walk down Greene Street, in the fine mist, past the iron fronts, and know that this is the city that Melville saw.
The nineteenth is quietly with us in all sorts of fogs and dreams. Perhaps it is, after all, a ghost city that stands to contemporary New York as some panoramic negative print. It is reversed in its lights and shadows, and its seasons are turned around. It is a companion city of the other side, some moral hologram generated from an unknown but intense radiation of historical energy and randomly come to imprint on our dreaming brains.
So I won’t here write of New York’s actual history, the famous murders, fires, riots, strikes, conventions, state visits, and other momentous events that, if they were marked, would stipple the city in brass plaques. Let one parade stand for all: the slow march that was like a commencement procession for our century—the funereal march carrying the body of Abraham Lincoln up Broadway. For, of course, centuries don’t neatly end and begin centennially, but in their middles, in their accidental years of spiritual prophecy.
We can look at the steel engravings that were made on that day and think of the city as silent, as if etched into history on an engraver’s pen. But a hushed crowd is not silent: There was a restless sibilance, a rustling, an intoned exhalation of grief; people pushed and shoved, shoulder to shoulder, and cried and muttered opinions to the air. Some took it upon themselves to narrate what they saw to others seeing the same thing, as if it weren’t enough to look, as if the sight brought forth words as a church service brought forth prayer or psalm. They spoke of the caisson as it was coming, and described it as it went by, and suggested what it had looked like when it had passed. Children were held aloft and instructed to commit the scene to memory: an immense military procession, seemingly endless blocks of funereal infantry followed by a company of cavalry, the horses dressed with head plumes, and then, in a hollow moving square of men, the ornate hearse itself, canopied and bunted and draped in the color that buries color, the color that eclipses light and life. A puzzling parade to a young eye, perhaps even disappointing, lacking cannon, lacking the martial spirit, and a drummed-out military music to set the pace.
The Union’s flags flew from the rooftops at half-mast and from the hearse in gathers dipped in deference to death.… The hoisted frowning child watched the hearse, which seemed reluctant to bear its burden, and heard the muffled drums and the independently rhythmed footfall of horses alone with their task, the incredibly ordinary stamp of horse’s foot upon the pavement being now a monumental sound in the unnaturally chastened city.
And set alone in the middle of all this rustling pushing watching, the subject of everyone’s attention, was the thing that could not be seen, a body in its box, recumbent and hidden like any body given for burial, recumbent and hidden with its hands across its breast, while his famous face glowed in the child’s brain, the long, homely, sad-eyed face so immense in death as to be construed by public grief in the cloud formations hovering over the sunless city, and evoking, as the pathetic coffin could not, the moral immensity of what had happened.
Some regnant purpose was enshrouded in his death, but what was it? He had not been reasonable to suggest by his martyrdom a noble plane of thought beyond the reach of most of us.
But for weeks afterward, remnants and tatters of the funereal muslin, torn by wind and rain, hung from the windows of the parade route. Black dye stains marred the façades of the limestone buildings and blotted the awnings of the shops and restaurants. The city was unnaturally still. People were not themselves. The Union veterans, with their pinned-up sleeves and crutches at the entrance of A. T. Stewart’s department store, saw coins rain into their tin cups.
And then some soulless, social resolve began to work itself out of his grave and rise again. And the city’s new century began.
(1992)