TWO SAILORS scampered up the rigging of a ship idled by embargoes and war. When they got to the top, they unlashed an empty tar barrel capping the mast for protection from the elements. As they lifted it off, one seaman cried, “Have a care below! Off comes Madison’s nightcap!” Then the sailors heaved the barrel down onto the wharf, where a waiting crowd made a bonfire of it.
The mast-capping barrels were called Madison’s nightcaps because many people blamed President Madison for the trade-crippling war. Now that the conflict was over, now that American ships might again plow the seas, the uncapping ceremony was repeated day after day. It symbolized the good times everyone felt were at hand. New Yorkers drank toasts to Peace and Plenty and to Peace, Commerce, and Prosperity. Jacob Astor soon had three fleets scouring the seas. Washington Irving didn’t tarry to watch the beginning of the boom but sailed in 1815 for Europe, where he remained the next seventeen years. He was surprised to feel a lump in his throat as he left his hometown.
The city’s first St. Patrick’s Cathedral was dedicated on May 6, 1815, on Mulberry Street just north of Prince Street, an area then so wild that foxes were caught in the churchyard. Despite some bigotry, life was becoming easier for Irish Catholics. It was decided in court that priests did not have to reveal secrets of the confessional. Pope Pius VII had created the diocese of New York, consisting of the state of New York and the eastern part of New Jersey. St. Peter’s Church was unable to accommodate the city’s growing Catholic population, so this second Catholic edifice was erected. Not merely a church but a cathedral, it was named for St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.
Another current attraction was the busy waterfront. Thousands of spectators watched the work of calkers, riggers, and sailmakers, who earned four dollars for a ten-hour day. Shipyards rang with hammer-blows and cries as keel after new keel was laid. Vessels couldn’t be built fast enough to meet the demand. As soon as they were finished, crews were hired, manifests were drawn up, and shipping clerks bustled about self-importantly.
During the war, when foreign trade had come to a standstill, domestic manufacturing had expanded, and Americans had been proud to wear homespuns. Now they hungered for the superior products of Great Britain, which led the United States in the Industrial Revolution. They yearned for Yorkshire cloth, Scotch muslins, silks, bedcovers, and toothbrushes—everything they could buy.
Because war-impoverished Europe was unable to absorb the huge inventories piled up in British warehouses, English manufacturers dumped their goods in America. They didn’t even wait for orders. To these shores they dispatched not just a few ships but great fleets. Never before had such heaps of merchandise been sent abroad. In one three-day period sixty-five cargo-laden vessels tied up in New York. In a single week auction sales of British wares exceeded $460,000. During April, May, and June, 1815, the duties paid at the New York customhouse came to $3,900,000. The city swarmed with buyers eager to pay any price asked of them.
Most imports were sold by auctioneers, many of whom became rich overnight. Although auctions had been common before the war, they had been used chiefly to dispose of damaged goods. Now British manufacturers sent their best goods to New York agents, who turned them over to auctioneers. Consumers got better bargains this way than by buying from local merchants. The governor and state council of appointments granted licenses to only a few auctioneers; in 1816 there were just twenty-nine of them in New York.
One auctioneer got rich so fast that he retired at the age of forty. This was Philip Hone, who served one term as mayor, took part in civic affairs, was a Whig leader, hobnobbed with celebrities, and set the style in fashion—but is best remembered for his 2,000,000-word diary. Hone was tall and fastidious, an arrestingly handsome man, with blue eyes and a clean-cut face.
At first the British were willing to sell here at a loss. Apparently they hoped to stifle the American manufacturing that had sprung up during the war. Then too, beef, tallow, butter, hams, and potatoes from Galway and Newry undersold local produce. When American buyers ran out of money, the auctioneers gave them credit. Thus, many consumers went into debt. While flooding American markets with British manufactures and produce, England closed its ports to American ships. So British manufacturers and shipowners and American auctioneers flourished as American manufacturers and wholesale merchants and importers withered. By the autumn of 1815 the American wool and cotton industry was prostrated, and eventually three-quarters of American factory owners failed.
Among those forced to the wall was Peter Cooper, who lost out as a manufacturer of shearing machines. Resignedly turning first to cabinetmaking and then to the grocery business, he vowed that he would always oppose free trade. Congress passed the nation’s first protective tariff in 1816, but by then most of the damage had been done. Moreover, the British destroyed this tariff wall by fairing sales and invoices.
The depression gripping New York was aggravated by immigration. From the beginning of the American Revolution to the end of the Napoleonic wars only a trickle of Europeans had left home. When the continent settled into temporary peace, though, foreigners began to arrive in the United States by the thousands, and New York was the favorite port of entry. Between 1820 and 1920 about 70 percent of all aliens entered America through the port of New York, many of them settling in the city. The population grew fast, but poverty and crime grew faster.
One-seventh of New York’s population soon lived on charity, and the debtors’ prison overflowed. This gloomy jail had a cellar honeycombed with dungeons for solitary confinement. The first floor was occupied by the families of the jailer and the keepers. It also had a bar, where prisoners lucky enough to own a few coins bought liquor at outrageous prices. The second floor was filled with relatively well-to-do debtors, who called themselves the Middle Hall Society. Most debtors, however, were confined on the third floor, which lacked light at night and sometimes fire in winter. Since neither the city nor the state gave them so much as a crust of bread, they depended on private charity for their food.
Poor people outside debtors’ prison tried to escape their misery by frequenting the city’s 1,900 licensed grogshops and the 600 other establishments where rum was sold without a license. Dead cats and dogs polluted the air, dust and ashes were thrown into the streets, and except for the most popular thoroughfares the streets were cleaned only once a month.
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.
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.