Building a Modern City

This 1838 anti-Jacksonian cartoon below makes fun of Democratic patronage, depicting the Collector of the Port giving out licenses to cart men who are loyal Democrats. From the collection of the Library of Congress. Such patronage was viewed as corrupt by the Whigs, although they would do the same when they gained power.

First Elected Mayor: Cornelius Van Wyck Lawrence (1791-1861)

Born on a farm in Bayside, Queens. Becomes a clerk and ends up being a partner in a dry goods firm: Hicks,

Lawrence & Co. on the corner of Fulton and Pearl streets. Becomes a politically active Democrat, elected to the State Assembly in

1832. Up until 1834, the Mayor of New York City had been appointed the city’s

Common Council (had been appointed by the governor back in the colonial period).

The election in spring 1834 came with voter intimidation, massive fraud, and angry riots which overtook the polls, particularly in the volatile Sixth Ward.

Lawrence narrowly defeated Whig candidate Gulian C. Verplanck by a mere 180 votes. Verplanck was a wealthy and prominent scholar and politician who would later serve as the president of the New York State Board of the Commissioners of Emigration from 1848 to his death in 1870.

Building a Modern City

Immigration Irish Catholic immigration begins in the 1820s; played an important

role in canal construction. Numbers increase exponentially in the following decades. Total U.S.

annual immigration: 1820s: around 7,000 in 1822-1824, but hits over 27,000 in 1827 1830s: hits almost 80,000 in 1837 1840s: Over 200,000 in 1847-1849 (famine migration) 1850s: 1854 is peak with almost 428,000

Of the 7 million who come to the U.S. between 1820 and 1870, 70 percent land in the Port of New York.

Most immigrants want to move quickly to the West via the Erie Canal or railroads, but the poorest tended to be caught in New York City.

Building a Modern City

Government and Immigration City government had an ineffective system requiring ship captains to post a

bond for each immigrant or pay a fee in lieu of a bond. Funds that supposedly would take care of poor immigrants were often stolen by municipal officials, and liabilities were sold off to shady “bond brokers” who did not pay up if the city looked to collect on a bond.

Rampant abuse of immigrants by “immigrant runners” who would defraud them by selling them fake tickets for inland passage and bring them to crooked boarding houses leads to the creation of a state agency for immigrant protection in 1847, the New York State Board of Emigration.

In 1855, the Board opens the “Castle Garden Emigrant Depot,” the first landing state-run depot for landing immigrants. Offers protection from runners, relatively fair ticketing and baggage handling, and many other services.

Roughly Castle Garden eight million people pass through Castle Garden from 1855 to 1890. It is replaced by the federal station on Ellis Island, which open in 1892.

Building a Modern City

Building a Modern City

Immigrant runners before Castle Garden, from Harper’s Weekly in 1857

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Castle Garden in 1864, with army recruiters seeking to sign up immigrants

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Castle Garden/Castle Clinton Today

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George Catlin’s painting of “Paradise Square” in 1827, which would soon evolve into the notorious slum known as “Five Points.”

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The “Old Brewery” in Five Points, which would become the first “tenement”structure after the Panic of 1837, known for horrific living conditions.

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An 1865 map of the Five Points area with the outline of the old Collect Pond by Egbert Viele.

Building a Modern CityFrom Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation (1842)

“What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies behind this tottering flight of steps? Let us go on again, and plunge into the Five Points.

“This is the place; these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruit as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home and all the world over.

“Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken forays. Many of these pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright instead of going on all fours, and why they talk instead of grunting?”

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So-called “Dead Rabbits Riot” of July 4, 1857 in the corner of Elizabeth and Bayard streets, indicative of the widespread gang violence of the Five Points.

Building a Modern City

“DAGGER JOHN”• John Joseph Hughes (1797-1864)• Coadjutor Bishop of New York (1838-1842)• Bishop of New York (1842-1850)• Archbishop of New York (1850-1864)• Supported by Gov. William Seward, Hughes fought for government funding for Catholic schools since the Public School Society that ran elementary schools had a Protestant bias.• When Nativist riots hit Philadelphia in 1844, Hughes threatened to set the city aflame if one Catholic was molested. • Against abolitionism and the “Free Soil” movement.

Building a Modern CityJanuary 1836 print depicting thefire of Dec. 16, 1835

Building a Modern City

Another 1836 print depicting thefire of Dec. 16, 1835 from the top of the Bank of America, corner of Wall and William streets

Building a Modern City

Building a Modern City

Building a Modern City

Lithograph of the 42nd Street Reservoir in 1850. From the collection of the NYPL.

Building a Modern City

Late nineteenth-century image of the collecting reservoir on the current site of the main branch of the NYPL on 42nd Street. Demolition began in 1898 and construction on the new library began in 1902.

New York City Police Open until 1844, the city had an ancient

system of 100 marshals, 31 constables, and a “night watch” completely inadequate to the needs of a metropolis of its size.

Mayor James Harper (1844 one-year term) was elected as a nativist, but was mostly preoccupied with creating a modern police force. The aldermen did not like the mayor having full appointment power, so they rejected the law and passed a new one giving themselves and other city officials the power of appointing policemen as well. Formal military-style uniforms were required, which many saw as undemocratic and unfit for a republic.

Democratic Mayor William Havemeyer, a sugar merchant, replaced Harper in spring 1845 and created a new force of 800. Uniforms were abandoned, but a system of districts and station houses was created.

System of county sheriffs and marshals exists to this day.

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NYPD badge first issued in 1845

National Media Capital “Penny press” emerges in the 1830s to serve working-class readers.

Previous papers had catered to the wealthy merchant class, such as the Journal of Commerce, founded by Arthur Tappan and Samuel Morse in 1827.

First true penny press paper is the New York Sun founded by Benjamin H. Day in 1833. Employs sensationalism, such as the 1835 “Great Moon Hoax,” a story that claimed that the famed astronomer Sir John Herschel had discovered a race of “moon men” with bat-like wings.

Scottish-born editor James Gordon Bennett founded the New York Herald in 1835, mixing the new sensationalism with appeal to middle-class readers.

Horace Greeley founds the New York Tribune in 1841 as a progressive voice in the Whig Party. He hired Karl Marx as a European correspondent in 1852.

The staid and boring New York Times is founded in 1851 by Henry J. Raymond, to counterbalance sensational coverage.

Building a Modern City

Building a Modern City

Horace Greeley (1811 – 1872)Founder of the New York Tribune (1841) (Date of photo unknown)

James Gordon Bennett Sr. (1795-1872)Founder of the New York Herald (1835)ca. 1851-1852, Studio of Matthew BradyBenjamin H. Day (1811-1889)

Founder of the New York Sun (1833)

Astor Place Riot, May 10, 1849

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Building a Modern City

Edwin Forrest (1806 – 1872)William Macready (1793-1863)

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Jenny Lind -“The Swedish Nightingale”(1820 – 1870)

Phineas T. Barnum (1810-1891)

Building a Modern City

Building a Modern City

Barnum’s American Museum, 1841-1865 (corner of Broadway and Ann Street)

Barnum’s American Museum (1841-1865)An 1850 guidebook lists the following attractions: Busts of presidents, Shakespeare, Cicero, Homer, Byron, etc. Waxworks Portrait gallery featuring likenesses of figures like Henry Clay, Daniel Boone,

John Jay, Madison, Hamilton, painter Charles Willson Peale, etc. Naked Venus statue Tom Thumb’s suit “The Automaton” Live and stuffed animal specimens Dioramas or “cosmoramas” of foreign or exotic scenes like “The Bath Room

of the Turkish Sultan,” the Port of Naples, London as viewed from the bridge, etc.

Building a Modern City

Building a Modern City

Francis Guy, The Tontine Coffee House (1797). New-York Historical Society.

Italian Opera at Castle Garden in 1853

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Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900)Completed in 1859, this painting by a well known Hudson River School artist depicted a Castle Garden that no longer existed, having been surrounded by landfill by 1855. This idealized image shows the structure in its days as an opera house

Another Wonder of the City: Matthew Brady’s GalleryMatthew Brady (ca. 1822-1896) – famed photographer Born in upstate New York to Irish immigrant parents. Studies painting with William Page, a student of Samuel F.B. Morse,

who Brady meets. Morse had Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in France, the creator of the

daguerreotype, and teaches Brady that method. Brady opens his photography studio at 205-207 Broadway, at Fulton

Street. Enters annual fair of the American Institute and wins top prize. Starts to display his portraits of famous Americans in 1845, and his

gallery becomes a sensation.

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Matthew Brady in 1861

Portrait of Lincoln

by Brady in 1860

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Matthew Brady in 1861

Portrait of Walt Whitman by Brady during the Civil War

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Growth of New York Railroads Mohawk & Hudson Railroad: This was the first in New York, connecting the cities of

Albany and Schenectady. It was chartered in 1826 and opened in 1831. New York & Erie Railroad: Chartered in 1832 with construction beginning in 1836.

Ran from Piermont on the Hudson River to Goshen by 1841, reaching Binghamton by 1848. It did not reach Lake Erie at Dunkirk until 1851. Took a southern route across the state.

Railroads along the Erie Canal: Utica and Schenectady Railroad (opened 1836), Tonawanda Railroad (1837), Syracuse and Utica Railroad (opened 1839), Auburn and Syracuse Railroad (opened 1838), Attica and Buffalo Railroad (1842) Rochester and Syracuse Direct Railway (1853).

Hudson River Railroad: A rail connection between New York City and Troy (across the river from Albany) at last opens in 1851. New York City had been slow to connect because of its reliance on river steamboats to Albany. Steamship mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt acquired this line in 1864.

New York Central System: Many of the above roads (not the Erie) were consolidated under Erastus Corning in 1853 as the New York Central system. This system was acquired by steamship mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1867, who merged it with the Hudson River Railroad. Vanderbilt acquired land between 42nd and 48th Street between Lexington and Madison Avenues to build the Grand Central Depot, which opened in 1871.

Building a Modern City