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Advertising
      Advertisements were everywhere in New York at this time. Posters were pasted anywhere there was a flat surface. People handed out trade cards in the streets, and 4"x6" handbills fluttered everywhere, promoting everything from patent medicines to prostitutes.   TOP

Bohemians and Intellectuals
      The Bohemians were New York’s first self-declared counterculture, and flourished in the 1850s. The term derived from Paris’ Left Bank, which repudiated middle-class morality and adopted alternative work habits and domestic arrangements. The Bohemians were writers, artists, and poets. Walt Whitman was a leading light amongst these people. They chose Pfaff’s Tavern on Broadway as their chief hang out. By 1860, Pfaff’s had become as famous as Castle Garden, Tammany Hall, and Barnum’s Museum as a New York City landmark.   TOP

Books
      Books on New York varied greatly in terms of quality and reading audience. The first comprehensive study of New York history was Mary Louise Booth’s A History of New York City (1859). In 1848, Ned Buntline published Mysteries and Miseries of New York. This lurid little volume contained urban crime stats, hideous tales of bad neighborhoods, and sold over 100,000 volumes. George Foster, a columnist for Greeley’s New York Tribune, published similar works between 1849 and 1859 with such titles as New York in Slices, New York by Gaslight, and New York Naked.
    New York had three major libraries. The New York Society Library at University Place was perhaps the most famous.   TOP

Church and Religion
      Out of a population of 630,000, only 140,000 went to Church regularly, and over half of these were Catholics. Immigrants swelled the ranks of non-Protestants. There were over 200,000 Catholics in New York City by 1855, and 40,000 Jews by 1859.
    By the 1850s, the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of New York, began a building spree of Catholic churches. Nine new churches were built from 1853 to 1859 between 14th and 42nd Streets. 7 German Catholic churches were also established. In 1853 Brooklyn became a separate diocese, under Bishop John Loughlin.
    Perhaps the most famous church in the City was Grace Episcopal, at Broadway and 10th. The Church was a Gothic masterpiece, and the Church of the elite in the 1840s and 1850s.
    The Brooklyn middle class in Brooklyn Heights had the Plymouth Church, where the famous Henry Ward Beecher began preaching in 1847. In 1849 the Church burnt, and Beecher built a new one with a central platform, and seating arranged in a large semicircle.
    In addition to the regular churches, there were also missions established by the churches in the worse parts of the City. There were 76 missions in the Five Points alone at one point.   TOP

Clubs
      The New York Yacht Club, in 1851, took the yacht America to England, and beat Britain’s best in a race, in the first America’s Cup challenge.
    The Union Club was a famous gentleman’s club in the City, but one had to be very rich to get in. A more popular and populistic club was the YMCA. The American version started up in New York in 1852, at the Old Lyceum at 659 Broadway. Members were mostly lower middle-class clerical workers, many fresh to the City. They flocked to the Y, which had a lending library, and was a meeting place for a new network of friends, forming a surrogate family which helped young men find housing, churches, and jobs.   TOP

Crime and Punishment
      In 1837 a severe depression hit the U. S., causing a precipitate rise in crime in the City. Irish gangs flourished during the Depression and throughout the mid 19th century, with names like the Forty Thieves, the Kerryonians, the Shirt Tails, the Roach Guards, the Dead Rabbits, mostly centered around the Five Points, the most notorious sink of depravity in New York City. Tammany Gangs, closely allied with politicians, levied tribute from brothels, saloons, and gambling dens for “protection.” Evil did not go unpunished, however. Sing Sing Prison, built in the 1820s, was the eventual home of many a New York City bad man.
    Victimless crime was also prevalent. By 1850, there were over 6000 gambling houses in New York, ranging from “faro” houses with wealthy clientele, to poker dens, tin-pan alleys, billiard rooms, saloons, and cockfight pits. Gambling’s popularity rose even further throughout the decade, prompting the formation of the New York Association for the Suppression of Gambling.
    In 1845 New York established a Police Force, under local control of the Wards. Each ward had patrol districts with their own station houses. In 1853, the police were ordered into blue uniforms. In the 1850s, the Chief of Police was George Matsell, or, as some people called him, “300 pounds of blubber and meanness.”
    In the 1850s, the number of Catholic orphans on the streets greatly increased. In 1853 the State Legislature passed the Truancy Law . It authorized police to arrest vagrant children between the ages of 5 and 14. If they were orphans, they were made wards of the state. If they had parents, they were enjoined to send them to school. The law was so harsh, many policemen did not enforce it. The orphans who were caught were packed off to the House of Refuge, located in 1854 on Randall’s Island. They were trained to make shoes, and various other items.
    In 1855, the New York State Legislature, under pressure from Temperance advocates, passed a “Dry” bill, severely limiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol. The City government refused to enforce it, and an 1856 State Appellate Court ruled the law unconstitutional.   TOP

Economy and Industry
      By the 1850s, New York City was fattened by maritime trade and California gold, and became the leading manufacturing center in the United States. Waterfronts bulged with barges full of New Jersey pig iron and Pennsylvania coal for consumption at waterfront ironworks in the City.
    Factories built trestles, engines for steamships, and other large machinery and metal components. Perhaps the largest factory in New York City was the Novelty Ironworks on the East River Shore at 12th Street. It was a five-acre maze of buildings which employed over 1200 people.
    However, because of increasing real estate prices in Manhattan, industry began moving to Brooklyn in the 1850s. Brooklyn had sugar refineries on docks, and became the greatest sugar refinery in the world by 1860. The factory district in Brooklyn lined the East River shore, and stretched from Greenpoint in the north down past the Brooklyn Naval Yard to South Brooklyn.
    Drug companies also flourished in Brooklyn. Pfizer started up with its Williamsburg Plant in 1849, and Squibb opened on Furman Street in 1858. Liquor was also a booming business in Brooklyn, whose distilleries produced over 5 million gallons of whiskey a year. Other concerns included ropeworks, porcelain and glass factories, and lead factories. Across the Hudson, New Jersey was also taking part in the industrial boom. Cities like Patterson, Newark, Orange, and Passaic, created an industrial belt girdling Manhattan.
    One out of every 15 people who worked in industrial concerns in the U. S. worked in Manhattan alone! However, most of these factories were different than what we would imagine. Most industrial employees in the 1850s worked in shops with fewer than 100 hands. They were mostly small and medium sized companies crammed into the upper stories of buildings whose bottom floors were used for commerce. The work was very labor-intensive as well, most New York City workshops relied on muscle, and not steam, which was expensive. By 1860, less than 20% of New York workshops were steam-powered.
    The ready-made garment industry exploded in the 1840s. By 1860, New York produced 40% of the country’s clothes in its sweatshops.
    Another big industry involved slaughterhouses. In the 1850s there were over 200 slaughterhouses in New York. In 1853, the City banned cattle drives south of 42nd Street during the day, being rather filthy and disruptive of traffic.
    In the Winter of 1854-55 the booming economy began to falter. There were many commercial failures, exacerbated by business frauds and a recession. Factories, shipyards, and other industrial concerns began laying off thousands of workers. As temperatures dropped, there was much suffering amongst the lower classes because of want of food and fuel. Workers marched and demanded public works projects or public assistance. However, the economy rebounded in 1856, and class consciousness disappeared for the moment.
    The North’s economy was largely dependent on the growth of wheat in the midwest and the northeast, the shipment of these products from these places to New York and other ports, and their export to the European states. In 1857, European demand for American wheat dropped after the Crimean War ended and Russian wheat became available to Europe. Shipments, railroad earnings, and stocks all fell precipitously, but worse was to come. In August of 1857, European farmers harvested a bumper wheat crop, depressing world wheat prices. Midwestern businessmen began wiring New York banks for the return of their surplus funds that they had deposited to accumulate interest.
    Unfortunately, this exacerbated another problem: banks had overextended their loans in the previous times of plenty. This caused the banks to demand immediate payment of all matured loans from their debtors. The banks thus jammed on the credit brakes, saving themselves for the most part, but forcing merchants into bankruptcy. Hundreds of firms began failing, and panicky stockbrokers could be observed engaging in fisticuffs on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. New lists of failures and suspensions were posted hourly in large type on bulletin boards in front of newspaper offices.
    New gold from California was supposed to help the shortage of specie. However, the Central America, a California gold ship, went down on 12 September 1857, with the loss of 400 passengers and crew, and $1.6 million in gold. This disaster which sunk untold amounts of specie into the Atlantic caused a new wave of business failures. Small banks in the interior of the country went under as businessmen ran to the banks to withdraw their savings.
    Credit, manufacturing, construction, and transportation withered, while Western staples and Southern cotton prices plummeted. By October 1857, the nation’s trade was at a standstill, and it got even worse, as depressions are wont to do. Banks stopped redeeming paper notes for gold. The stock market plunged, and half the brokers on Wall Street were wiped out. The panic spread to London, Paris, all of Europe, South America, and the world.
    On 14 December 1857, New York went back to a hard money standard. By this time, a thousand New York merchants had failed. Maritime construction collapsed, with 3/4 of all shipbuilders laid off. The American Merchant Marine never recovered from the blow. Foundries, textile factories, mechanics, retailers, clerks, everyone was hard-hit. Of course, the construction industry was brought to a standstill.
    For years New Yorkers were witness to many buildings and mansions standing half-finished, mute monuments to the Panic of 1857. By September of 1857, unemployment in New York was estimated at 40,000, and by October, 100,000. There was much homelessness that hard winter, with over 41,000 homeless seeking shelter at police stations. The situation did do wonders for the City’s spiritual life, as it sparked a prayer revival in the early part of 1858.
    On 5 November, thousands of laborers assembled at City Hall Park, many from the American Workers League. These demonstrators wanted state-sponsored work. Mayor Wood wanted public works projects to relieve destitution. He planned on building streets, police stations, docks, the Central Park, and other projects. Although many of these projects never got off the ground, many laborers were hired to work on Central Park in 1858-1859.
    Throughout 1858 and 1859, business conditions gradually improved. Credit eased up, trade expanded, and the European demand for Southern cotton eventually proved higher then wheat, and helped ease America out of the recession. New York merchants were pulled back up on their feet thanks to the quickly recovered, booming cotton trade. New York City had always been the most closely connected Northern city to the Southern slave states. Because of close economic ties with the South, few New Yorkers were inclined towards abolitionism.   TOP

Education
      In the early 1840s, the City developed a public education system, financed by public treasury, controlled by local people (each ward elected a commissioner to the school board). In 1853, the popularly elected Board of Education completely assumed control of all public schools. They established an evening program for adults, which by 1856 had 15,000 students enrolled in it. The public schools put heavy emphasis on rote memorization and Protestant indoctrination. They had a tendency to weed out poor students, and protect middle class students.
    The Free Academy was open to poor adults in 1849, at Lexington and 23rd. The studies in the classics, law, ministry, and medicine were eminently practical. Cooper Union, established in 1858, had coed night adult education courses, although 95% of the students were male. A non-sectarian reading room was open until 10 pm.
    Three Catholic colleges started in the 1850s: St. Johns (later Fordham), 12 miles north of the City; St. Francis Xavier on W. 16th St.; and Manhattan College. In the 1850s, with the rise in immigration, Catholic Parochial schools expanded greatly both in Manhattan and Brooklyn. And in 1856, Columbia College moved north to 49th Street, at about the edge of the City, as it was getting too crowded in it original location.   TOP

Fashion
      The fabric of choice for high-class businessmen was plain black broadcloth, topped off with dark stovepipe hats. Of course, there were many dandies as well who wore the latest French fashion, and promenaded on Broadway.
    The ideal beautiful (middle-class) woman of the period was pale, with a heart-shaped face, a rosebud mouth, and an 18" waist. However, the ideal for the rough Bowery set was something else altogether. Bowery “g’hals” went for the plump and hearty look. G’hals promenaded the Bowery after working hours, with recycled classical-style fashions of the 1820s for a sort of “retro” look.
    Fashion talk evolved quickly in the 1840s and 1850s. “Elegant” made its magazine debut in relation to fashion in 1845, while “stunning” became the word for 1849. “Chic” was popularized in 1856. The cosmetics field boomed as makeup came to be in vogue, thanks to French fashion magazines and Parisian designs.   TOP

Food and Drink
    Carbonated soda water became popular in the 1830s. In the 1840s, German immigrants introduced a new kind of beer, laager, to the rest of the American public, the most popular brand being Schaefer. Laager was less heavy and intoxicating, and lasted longer in hot summers, than ales and stouts, which dominated the American beer market in the earlier part of the century. By the 1850s, New York had gone crazy about laager.
    Delmonico’s was a famous New York restaurant which had served the City since the early 19th century. In 1856, it added a venue on Broadway, then becoming the high street of fashion and shopping in the United States, and rose to a position of setting New York’s cuisine trends.
    Many restaurants were all-male, others allowed mixed dining. Some were completely identified as women’s places, particularly Taylor’s Ice-Cream Parlor on Broadway.   TOP

Fun and Diversion
      Coney Island had exclusive beaches and hotels. Tourists watched waves from porch chairs, and hunted snipe and duck in the marshes.
    The theater, of course, remained a prime diversion of all classes. The upper ten went to the Lyceum Theater on Broome and Broadway. Laura Keene, one of the bright shining lights of her time, established her own theater troop on Broadway, below Bleecker Street. Audiences also packed Park Theater and Niblo’s Gardens. The Astor Opera House, built in 1847, turned upper class New Yorkers on to Verdi, Bellini, and other contemporary composers.
    For the lower of brow, the Bowery Theater and other theaters of its kind put on everything from Shakespeare to burlesques to black-face minstrelsy. Edwin Forrest was the star actor of the lower classes, his histrionic and macho style matched the demands of the Bowery melodramas.
    The minstrel shows in particular were quite popular with most audiences, “Zip Coon” and “Jim Crow” being original stock characters in the genre. Christy’s Minstrels were regulars at Mechanics’ Hall, while Hooley’s Minstrels were popular in Brooklyn. Many old music favorites had their origins in these Minstrel shows. In fact, “Dixie” made its New York City debut in April 1859, when Bryant’s Minstrels performed it at Mechanics’ Hall. Another popular stage stereotype was the Stage Hibernian, always drunk, ignorant, and pugnacious poltroons.
    Perhaps one of the biggest stage smashes of all time was introduced to New York audiences in 1850, with the title of New York as It Is. The hero of the play was the Fireman Mose, an accurate characterization of the working class “b’hoy.” Some of his stock sayings were: “If I don’t have a muss soon, I’ll spile;” and “I ain’t a-goin’ to run wid dat machine no more!”
    Illicit dealings went on in theaters, which were notorious hang-outs for prostitutes looking for a trick. The Third Tier of boxes in theaters were notorious for this. Many theaters actively encouraged prostitutes at their establishment in order to drum up business, while others, like the Astor Opera House, the Academy of Music, and the New York Philharmonic Society, actively discouraged such shenanigans.
    Middle-class men enrolled in literary discussion societies, went to concerts, and attended lyceum lectures. Rounders clubs took off in New York. These were gentlemen’s clubs which insisted on decorum and gentlemanly behavior. They played intramural games, playing each other by formal and written challenge. South Brooklyn’s main team was called the “Excelsiors,” which had been established by the early 1850s. In the late 1850s, the game’s popularity exploded, and there were 71 clubs in Brooklyn, and only 25 in New York City.
    The first intercity all-star match occurred in 1858, when the New York team beat Brooklyn in a 3 game series at the Fashion Course in Brooklyn. It was paid admission, another baseball first, and because much of the national press was centered in New York, rounders soon became America’s game.
    People danced to music as well. Popular dances in the 1850s included polkas, waltzes, and quadrilles. A rougher set inhabited the so-called “Concert Saloons,” a cornucopia of music, drink, and sex. By the 1850s, many old theaters and even brownstones were rigged with a long bar and a curtainless stage at the rear. Entertainment was a pastiche of French vaudeville, Italian opera, German beer garden, and English theater. Between acts, performers would sit with the audience and solicit for prostitution in upstairs bedrooms.   TOP

Garbage
      In the early part of the 19th century, New York was famous for her street pigs, privately purchased porkers who roamed the streets eating up garbage. In the 1850s, wishing to clean up her image, the City government began driving the pigs further up the island, until in 1860, most pigs were exiled past 86th Street, well past the actual City limits. Garbage was carted out of the City, or thrown into the Hudson or East Rivers.   TOP

Geography of the City
      West and South Streets were lined with bustling shipping offices, warehouses, cheap eating houses, markets, and ship chandleries. Ironworks dotted the East River and Hudson River waterfronts. The area of what is now called the Bronx and Harlem were largely forest and farmland, although there were some industrial concerns dotting the countryside, including ironworks. Many factories were located in the lower wards, so the proletariat could walk to work.
    The middle class generally lived above Bleeker Street, between the wealthy center of Manhattan Island and the working class riverfronts. By 1860, Manhattan was blanketed with houses up to 42nd Street, with enclaves at West Greenwich, Chelsea, and the mid-40s between Broadway and 9th Avenue. A middle-class resident of the latter area could get to downtown by horsecar in 45 minutes.
    Broadway in the 1850s was lined with fashionable shops and stores (see Retail and Shopping). Half of the entire population of German immigrants were crammed into a tiny enclave called Kleindeutschland, a 5-block span between Canal and River Streets, and stretched north above Houston, and east from 3rd Avenue towards the East River shore. This area was characterized by breweries, coalyards, factories, and slaughterhouses.
    The Five Points was New York’s most wicked area. The Five Points was the worst neighborhood in New York City. Dickens described it in the 1840s as a section with “narrow ways, diverting to the right and left... reeking everywhere with dirt and filth... lanes and alleys paved with mud knee-deep.” He described “underground chambers” where blacks and whites “danced and gamed” together. One had to be careful walking the streets in this neighborhood, one might be “garrotted” (mugged). The Five Points, and the rest of the 6th Ward, were dominated by the Irish.
    The Bowery was another rough section of the City. Here, nativist gangs such as the Bowery Boys, the Short Boys, the O’ Connell Guards, and the Atlantic Guards flourished, as well as an Irish Gang, the True-Blue Americans. Gangs guarded “turf,” invaded other gangs’ territories, and fought each other with bludgeons, brickbats, and clubs. Some of these gangs, such as the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys, were tied to political strong-arming.
    Two cultural spines ran through New York City. Up the west side ran Broadway, with its fashionable retail and department stores, hotels, and its role as a promenade for the fashionable. To the east ran the Bowery, the fare of sportsmen, dandies, gangsters, and fire laddies. The streets were not exactly parallel. At Astor Place, south of Union Square, the two worlds intersected (or rather, collided).
    Most of Brooklyn’s wealthy lived on Brooklyn Heights. East of this was known as “the Hill,” and the area to the south was Cobble Hill. West of Brooklyn, small Long Island farming communities such as Flatbush, Flatlands, New Lots, New Utrecht, and Gravesend, flourished.
    However, the face of Brooklyn changed rapidly in the 1850s, thanks to a population and building boom. The middle class began infiltrating the previously upper crust area of Brooklyn Heights. Other middle class folks went to South Brooklyn.   TOP

Health Care
      The sick poor and immigrants were shunted to Bellevue Hospital, which being rat and lice infested, had a very high mortality rate. Public health was horrible in the City. More New Yorkers died in 1857 then were born, the majority of these being lower class.
    Blackwell’s Island was a home for the insane, a prison, and a poor-house, most of these unfortunates being immigrants.   TOP

Holidays and Special Days
      By the 1830s, modern Christmas traditions such as Christmas Trees and Santa Claus had been popularized.   TOP

Immigrants
      Almost all immigrants who came to the United States in the 1850s went through the Emigrant Landing Depot, just offshore from the Battery at the tip of Manhattan. This was a giant round structure that had been converted from Castle Garden, formerly a theatrical venue. Prior to this, it had been Battery Clinton, a Revolutionary War-era fort.
    By the 1850s, so many Germans had arrived in New York that the city became the third-largest German-speaking city in the world.
    By the 1850s, New York’s Jewish population was rapidly rising, thanks to increased social and economic restrictions imposed by the German states in the 1840s and 1850s.
    The City was also a hotbed for Irish nationalism, and of course the Irish had been flooding New York for decades (See Population). By 1853, the St. Patrick’s Day parade was large enough to bring the City to a standstill.   TOP

Maritime New York
      In the 1840s, more piers were built on the East River at Brooklyn, because of the bad condition of the piers across the River in New York City. Brooklyn’s shipping industry expanded rapidly, including the construction of the Atlantic basin (Fig. __), an enclosed 40 acres of wharves, countinghouses, and warehouses that could hold 100 docked ships. The Brooklyn Naval Yard also saw great expansion at this time. By 1850, piers collared Manhattan at all points below 14th Street. Sailing ships docked on East River piers, while deeper draft transatlantic steamships docked at Hudson River piers.   TOP

Newspapers and Magazines
      In the 1850s, the most popular papers in New York were the New York Herald (a Democratic paper) and the New York Tribune (run by Horace Greeley, this was a Republican paper). Newspapers were popular with New Yorkers, in 1850 one newspaper was sold a day for every 4.5 residents in the City. In 1851, the New-York Daily Times, later the New York Times, was founded, a conservative, Democratic paper. The Home Journal was the newspaper of the upper ten, and featured talk-of-the-town columns, book and music reviews, and a digest of the week’s news. Catering to the City’s burgeoning German population, 28 German language newspapers appeared between 1850-1852 in New York. One, the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, by 1860 had the largest circulation of any German language paper in the world. The Irish, too, had their own big paper, the Irish-American, a moderate nationalist paper.
     The National Police Gazette was a magazine that exposed New York City’s corrupt criminal justice system. It was also very much a tabloid, specializing in lurid crime reports, quasi-pornographic illustrations, and trial coverage involving plenty of sex and violence.
    The Brooklyn Daily Eagle was a prominent paper in Brooklyn. The prominent German language paper in Brooklyn was the Long Island Zeitung.   TOP

New York Slang
      Much of American slang made popular Mid-19th century originated on the streets of New York. In 1849 the word “confidence-man” is coined in New York City. Other expressions originating in the 1840s and 1850s include “cave in,” “ dry up,” “bully for you,” “that’s rough,” and the Bowery Boy saying, “Sa-a-a-a-y! What-a-t?” Rich people were called, and called themselves, “upper tens.”   TOP

Parks
      In the early 1850s, Green-Wood Cemetery became the preeminent park of both Brooklyn and New York. The Cemetery featured landscaped terrain, pastoral winding paths, statues, and plots enclosed by iron railings. It was a picturesque landscape, reached by crossing the Hamilton Avenue toll bridge over Gowanus Creek, and located on the Hills of Gowanus, which had figures so prominently in the disastrous Battle of Long Island fought by Washington in 1776.   TOP

Politics
      A note should be given about the nature of the modern boroughs (Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx, etc.) that we are familiar with today. This system of government happened at the turn of the century. Before that time, Brooklyn and New York were two separate cities, and the Bronx was farmland and a few scattered villages.
    Beginning in the 1830s, Democrats were being called LocoFocos, named after a brand of the new friction matches. By the 1840s, both Democrats and Whigs had established their national headquarters in New York.
    A strong anti-Democratic force in New York politics were the Wide-Awakes, or the Know-nothings. These folks were mostly native white workers and artisans alarmed at the influx of immigrants and Catholics. They wanted to drastically restrict immigration, eliminate all foreigners and Catholics from public office, Bible reading in public schools, and wanted to ban foreign language from public schools.
    The Common Council was made up of alderman and assistant aldermen. These politicians were ambitious, petty entrepeneurs or skilled craftworkers. Many were politically based in the liquor trade. Almost all city alderman rose from the working class streets.
    Patronage kept the City running. For instance, policemen had to be reappointed annually by the Council, so the policemen had to keep attuned to the Council’s wishes. Political supporters were rewarded with saloon licenses, appointments as health wardens, street sweepers, contracts for school, sewer, dock, and street construction. There was, of course, much padding of bills, bribes, budget, and overall general corruption. In fact, the Common Council was knicknamed “The Forty Thieves.”
    Candidates for ward offices were chosen at wide-open walk-in primaries, held in saloons and hotels. These meetings also selected delegates for nominating conventions. These gatherings were held in August and September, when respectable folk were, for the most part, out of town. The people intent on dominating these gatherings simply “packed” them. Politicos turned to “shoulder hitters” to keep opponents from the polls, and to guard and stuff ballot boxes.
    Corrupt practices such as “immigrant running” were the norm. In “immigrant running,” a political operative would meet immigrants at the docks, get them naturalized, find them homes and jobs in return for votes. This was mostly the practice of Democratic Tammany Hall, which protected immigrants and immigrants’ customs against bigotry.
    Rising politicians in this roughneck political environment, like Boss Tweed, developed personal followings by displays of courage and generosity leading volunteer fire companies. These volunteer fire companies were one of the more popular kinds of clubs in New York, which served a real civic function, although this was largely subsumed by the rivalry and territorality inherent amongst the companies. The members were often of the rougher sort, in fact, gangs and saloons were fertile recruiting grounds for the companies.
    The Whigs claimed (correctly) that the Democrats rigged elections with “beastly ruffians,” however, Whigs themselves employed gangs.
    Taxes increased greatly throughout the 1850s. People gradually became more angry about the corruption and wastage of private resources to grease the pockets of political insiders.
    Prominent people from the City Reform League blasted this corruption, the high taxes, and municipal waste. Under pressure, some reform came in the 1850s. The Board of Assistant Aldermen was replaced with a 60 man Board of Councilmen. Penalties for bribery were threatened, and policemen were no longer appointed by the Council. The reforms also strengthened the office of the Mayor. Now a veto by the Mayor could be overridden only by a 2/3 vote. In 1853, the Forty Thieves were turned out of office in a Nativist, Whig, and Reformist triumph. The new government failed to stop taxes from increasing, though corruption plummeted. However, in 1855 the Know-Nothings collapsed, a severe blow for the coalition. Fernando Wood, an ardent aristocratic Democrat was elected Mayor in yet another campaign for reform. He had a reputation both as a friend of the Irish and as a dishonest businessman. Much to Tammany’s chagrin, however, the Whigs maintained control of the Council that year.
    Under Wood, the police force was disciplined and centralized, helped by the Mayor’s decision to connect all stations together by telegraph. Many Irish were appointed to the Police force under Wood’s watch, and his strong-arm tactics at the polls insured successive mayoral victories.
    The Republicans, a new party, appeared on the scene in 1855. The new party was made up of Seward Whigs, Free Soil Democrats, and old Know-nothings, joining hands to oppose the expansion of slavery. By the Fall of 1856 the Republicans had the majority in the State houses, and the governorship.
    The New York State Republicans attempted to grab control of many of New York City’s functions from Mayor Wood. The Prohibition Liquor Law of 1857, however, gave him political ammunition to fight back (See Crime and Punishment). Wood became very popular in the City for standing up to the State authorities.
    The State upped the ante when New York Representatives passed the Metropolitan Police Act, shifting control of the Police from the Mayor to the now Republican-dominated City Council. By 1857, Republicans had control over police commissioners, liquor licensing, and the election machinery of both New York and Brooklyn. Democratic newspapers denounced the “despotic” Republican Boards of the two cities
    Wood blasted the new laws, particularly the Police law, and called for resistance to state centralism. Wood got the Common Council to establish a separate Police Force controlled by the Mayor, the Municipal Police Force. Now there were officially two police forces in the City! Between May and June of 1857, individual policemen had to choose sides between the two competing departments. 815 cops went to the Wood-controlled Municipals, while 307 went to the Council-controlled Metropolitans, or Mets as they were also called. This was split mostly on ethnic lines, with the Irish going to the Municipals.
    Chaos ensued. Criminals had a great time, as they were arrested by one force, they were rescued by another. The forces battled over control over police stations. In mid-June, the Mets tried to enforce an arrest warrant for the Mayor. A clash broke out between the Mets and the Municipals, broken up only with the arrival of the City’s elite 7th Regiment of New York Militia. Meanwhile, on 3 July 1857, the State Court of Appeals ruled against his establishment of a separate Police Department, and he was forced to disband the Municipals.
    However, feelings smoldered between the political factions. The next day, the Fourth of July, began with the usual rowdy celebration, and ended in a full-scale riot in the Bowery area. The Dead Rabbits gang and other supporters of Mayor Wood attacked a force of the Mets, which were quickly overwhelmed, broke, and ran for their lives. The Bowery Boys, an anti-Wood nativist gang (whose headquarters was at a saloon at 40 Bowery), rescued the police force, in a pitched street battle which featured barricades, thrown brickbats, cudgels, and firearms. The battle raged for hours. 12 died and 37 were injured.
    On 12 July, a Sunday, the Mets tried to enforce New York’s new Sunday liquor laws. In the heart of Kleindeutschland, at Avenue A and 4th Street, the Mets were involved with another riot with beer-loving Germans, who did not want their saloons closed for Sundays. Three regiments of the National Guard were called out and pushed the rioters back, resulting in the loss of one life.
    In the Panic of 1857 (See Economy and Industry), Mayor Wood instituted public works programs for unemployed laborers, and his speeches were laced with the rhetoric of class warfare. This cost him the remaining support of the elite of the City. Three weeks before the election of 1 December 1857, powerful merchants in the Democratic Party’s inner circle bolted. Daniel Tiemann, one of these merchants and an anti-slavery Democrat, ran against Wood with the support of Republicans, Whigs, and disaffected Democrats. However, Mayor Wood garnered support from laborers and organized workers, his new allies. Wood won the votes in the Irish and German eastside wards, but lost the election because of defecting middle and upper class Democrats.
    Wood was down, but not out. In 1858 he bolted from the Tammany Democrats and formed a separatist group, the Mozart Hall Democrats. In 1859 he again ran for Mayor, with the powerful New York Herald’s support. Wood also garnered support from the New York Daily News, a paper run by Benjamin Wood, Fernando Wood’s brother. Fernando Woo won the election, and again became Mayor of New York.
    When Southern states began seceding in 1860 and 1861 because of the election of Abraham Lincoln, Fernando Wood, being an ardent supporter of local governing rights, was a fairly ardent supporter of the South and secessionists. In January of 1861, Wood even proposed to the Common Council that if the entire South seceded, New York City should declare itself a free city in and of itself! This pro-Southern attitude began to change when the seceded states repudiated their debts to Northern bankers and merchants. Without Southern cotton there was little for Northerners to trade, and this resulted in the Panic of 1861, when many Northern creditors were ruined at the commodities market as they bottomed out. Then the newly-formed Confederacy announced its tariff policy. Southerners cut their tariffs in half, expediting foreign access to Southern ports and essentially cutting out the New York middleman. This was too much for the propertied classes, and by the time Ft. Sumter was fired upon, the whole City was enthusiastically pro-war.
    Just after Ft. Sumter, on April 20, 1861, the largest ever public gathering on the continent up to that time occurred in Union Square. Between 100,000 and 250,000 people flooded the area. Dignitaries made speeches from five bedecked platforms, including Major Robert Anderson, the commander at Ft. Sumter. And that is how New York City entered the Civil War.
    Lincoln visited the City in February of 1861. He arrived at the Hudson River Railroad Company depot on 30th Street and 10th Avenue, and was taken to the Astor House, right across the way from City Hall. A huge crowd of 40,000 people watched as the new President entered the Astor House, a man full of doubts and worries about the now divided nation.   TOP

Population
      Because of surging Irish and German immigration in the 1840s and 1850s (because of the Irish Potato Famine and failed revolutions in the German states in 1848), New York City’s population skyrocketed from 313,000 people in 1840 to slightly less than a million in 1860. In 1855 alone, 2 out of 3 of all Manhattanites had been born abroad. Brooklyn’s population grew from 11,000 to an astounding 267,000 people between 1840 and 1860. Brooklyn was the third largest city in the United States by 1855. In Brooklyn, Germans accounted for 2/3rds of the population of its Williamsburgh section by 1847. Bushwick was known as “Dutch Town.” For the most part, the upper and middle classes were Protestant Anglo-Saxons, while more than 3/4 of the working class were foreigners. More than half of the immigrants in Brooklyn were Irish, the Germans numbered about half of the Irish, and most of the balance were from England.
    African-Americans accounted for a fairly sizable minority of the City’s population. They were universally looked down upon and despised, and were relegated to the meanest and most vicious physical labor. A common New York term was “Jim Crow,” a derogatory epithet used for African Americans. Racism was rather virulent in New York. Because of their close economic ties to the South, the upper classes looked with a jaundiced eye upon the Republicans and their anti-slavery tendencies. Working class racism amongst laborers was also highly prevalent.   TOP

Residences
      By the 1830s few people lived below Wall Street. Wealthy families flocked to live on 5th Avenue in the 1850s. By 1847, Madison Square had been built. These wealthy families built in the predominant architectural style of the Italian Renaissance, which was of the latest fashion. The new material of choice was brownstone. Middle class homes were typically brick brownstone rowhouses, between 12 and 20 feet wide. Most middle class families could afford indoor plumbing from the Croton Aqueduct water supply, cast iron stoves, gas lights, and plaster walls.
    The mid-19th century was a time of tremendous change within homes thanks to improved technology and ideas of living, at least the homes of the wealthy and middle-class. Water closets became common in upper class dwellings by 1845, and water taps splashed into marble washbasins. By the 1850s, in middle class dwellings, bathing and toilet facilities supplanted chamber pots and privies. Many upper class houses even had central heating, which consisted of cellar furnaces fired by coal, which forced hot air through pipes and tin ducts up to cast iron or brass registers.
    Of course, maintaining all this, one needed servants. Fuel and ash had to be carried to and from stoves, icebox water pan needed emptying, and hundreds of other myriad chores needed attending to. A middle class family had at least one servant, a cook or a maid, usually a young, single Irish.
    Brooklyn was cheaper and very attractive to lower-middle class people. It was possible for a clerk to rent a narrow row house with a large backyard for $200 a year in South Brooklyn.
    Unfortunately, lodgings were quite different for the urban poor, who lived in tenement houses, where workers and their families were crammed into cheap housing. Most tenements lacked “modern improvements,” except for stoves. Most were not hooked up to water or sewer mains, bedpans and privies were used. Tenements were usually about 25 feet wide and 70 feet deep, the average tenement housing 24 tenants or families in 2 room apartments. These apartments had a 10'x10' parlor facing towards a street or yard, and an 8'x 10' windowless room. The poor also populated shantytowns on New York’s periphery, where squatters raised pigs, cows, and horses.
    A rather curious New York custom was “Moving Day,” the First of May. In a law dating back to colonial times, every New York lease expired on May 1, causing much commotion when tens of thousands of people (usually the lower class) had to pack up all their belongings in carts and move to their new digs. The mass confusion in the streets was staggering. The custom was still going strong into the 1850s.   TOP

Retail and Shopping
      In the 1850s, retailers adopted radically new marketing techniques, greatly increasing sales volume and production. The vanguard of this marketing revolution was the advent of the department store, introduced by a chappie named Stewart. Prior to the department store, each individual customer was engaged by a clerk. Prices were not fixed in stores, but settled over by “leisurely dickering.”
    In 1846, Stewart built a giant store on the east side of Broadway between Chambers and Reade Streets. Stewart’s department store was advertised in ladies’ magazines, and it was here that America’s first fashion show was organized. The store’s street-level facade had 15 huge plate glass windows showing an opulent interior, organized around a circular court with a skylight. People called it the “Marble Palace.” It was organized into separate departments. People were encouraged to stroll around and inspect the wares which lay on polished mahogany counters. By 1859, sales topped $20,000 a day, an unheard of sum.
    Companies copied Stewart’s success, and soon other stores such as Lord and Taylor, Tiffany’s, and Brooks Brothers set up shop on Broadway. Broadway became a stage for the fashion conscious to promenade. Devlin and Company was another large-scale store that sold good, cheap, ready-to-wear clothing on the corner of Broadway and Grand.
    Many New Yorkers were clerks at these stores. Brooks Brothers on Broadway alone had over 200 clerks and salespeople at any one time.   TOP

Sex and the City
      New York’s bawdy district was clustered behind Broadway around Mercer, Green, and Howard Streets, present-day SoHo. Upper-class prostitutes walked the streets, even Broadway, during late afternoons and evenings. The women who frequented Broadway were high-class, and usually worked at brothels situated behind Broadway. These brothels were stylish, with luxurious furniture, fine liquor, black servants, and attractive women. Different houses had different specialties. Mrs. Hathaway’s featured “Fair Quakeresses,” Lizzie Wright’s had “French Belles,” and so on. Different houses served different clientele, Southerners, Astor House visitors, Germans, etc. There was an entire underground press geared to this industry, featuring printed handbooks and guidebooks to houses, calling cards, and even advertisements in mainstream newspapers!
    This area also had second class brothels for clerks and mechanics at SoHo’s lower end. To the North were the patrician and middle-class establishments, “frequently visited by gentlemen of the best standing.” And, from Saturday to Monday, most brothels did roaring business.
    The number of prostitutes estimated on the City streets was about 8000 during the 1850s. A questionnaire given out be missionaries revealed that about half of these were country girls, about a third were Irish, and a tenth were German. Many cited destitution for their reasons for pursuing the trade, although about an equal number cited “inclination” to work as a prostitute.
    There were tremendous advantages to being a prostitute. A seamstress or servant girl only made about $2 or $3 a week, while a high-class courtesan could make from between $10 and $50 a trick.
    Prostitution among the working classes was a rougher affair. Interracial brothels were the norm for the Five Points. Kleindeutschland had its illicit “Basement Bars,” and the waterfront area known as Corlear’s Hook, around Walnut, Water, Pearl, and Cherry Streets was filled with half-exposed whores sitting on the stoops of former mansions, beckoning sailors fresh off ships.
    Many men celebrated brothel culture as an essential part of sophisticated urbanity. Bowery soaplocks, young clerks, and “fast” gentlemen read “sporting” papers celebrating the fast life, with names like “The Flash, “The Libertine,” and “The Rake.” A fast b’hoy was called an “aristo,” while a working-class frequenter of prostitutes was a “blood.” Group rape was known as “getting our hide.”
    Prostitution was, in fact, legal per se, no local or state laws being on the books about the practice. For the most part, the constabulary left prostitutes alone, except for the poorer ones.
    Abortion, too was legal at this time, at least up until the woman’s first awareness of movement of the fetus. Most people considered abortion akin to contraception, and upper-class Protestant women expanded their reliance on it, although many frowned upon it as well. Madame Restell was the most notorious abortionist in New York. She had branches of her abortion clinic in five other cities, and was quite wealthy.   TOP

Special Events
      The Crystal Palace, built in 1853 to rival London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, was built at 6th Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets. 1800 tons of iron supported 15, 000 panes of glass, topped by a 123 foot dome, the highest built in the U. S. It housed an Exhibition of Industry of All Nations, and included art as well as science exhibits. It was a smashing success, as people marveled at the miracles of the age, of clocks, guns, scientific instruments, and machinery. In October of 1858, the Crystal Palace burnt down.
    In August of 1858, another 19th century marvel was completed, the connection of transatlantic cable service from New York to London. The first message was a signal from London, telling of the quelling of the Great Mutiny in India. Cannons boomed, bells pealed, and fireworks set City Hall on fire, burning only the cupola on the roof. A grand parade on September 1 extended the celebration, the route going from Battery to the Crystal Palace. The procession went past buildings festooned with banners and placards. Evening saw a torch-lit procession. Unfortunately, the cable fell silent days later, and was to remain that way until after the Civil War.   TOP

Tourism
      Thanks to tourists visiting the Crystal Palace, the number of hotels in New York City greatly increased. 19 were located on Broadway alone. The grandest hotel was the 6-story 600 room St. Nicholas Hotel on Broadway and Spring Street. It boasted a white marble facade, gas-lit chandeliers, hot running water, central heating, a telegraph in the lobby, and steam-powered washing machines. Downstairs, next to the Hotel’s entrance, Phalon’s Hair-Dressing Establishment was the most fashionable place in town for a gentleman for a shave and a haircut.   TOP

Transportation
      New York City had busy, bustling streets. By 1857 598 licensed hacks, 4000 carts, 190 express wagons, and probably about 800 omnibuses clattered through New York City. These omnibuses were long carriages designed to carry many passengers at once, and it is estimated that 100,000 people a day rode these behemoths. By this time cabs were in evidence as well.
    As can be imagined these vehicles swamped downtown streets. On any given weekday in the 1850s, one person estimated that 15,000 vehicles went past St. Paul’s at the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street. In the words of a London correspondent, “There is a perpetual jam and lock of vehicles for nearly two miles along the chief thoroughfare.” The din of traffic was terrible, and was not made any better by the city’s decision in 1853 to replace circular cobblestones with Belgian block, which provided firmer footing for horses, and was better able to withstand iron-rimmed wheels. The conditions of the street itself was often pretty disgusting. Street cleaning was done by private contractors, but they were really political money plums handed out to cronies of sundry politicians. The contractors did, at best, an indifferent job.
    There was a certain element of beauty to the cacophonous traffic. Broadway “at night... gas lamps & illuminated store windows captured the streams of pedestrians in their glow and the colored lamps on carriages and omnibuses transformed Broadway into a river of light.”
    By 1851, the New York and Erie Railroad opened, along with the Albany Railroad. Passengers could travel from Albany to New York in just four hours. The Hudson Railroad Line ran down Manhattan to a massive depot between 30th and 32nd Streets, where passengers and freight were transferred to horse-drawn trolley cars for further travel downtown. The Harlem Line was a local line that helped people commute from rural villages at the North end of Manhattan down to the City.
    In mid-1852, tracks began to be laid flush with the pavement. Horsecars moved up and down 3rd, 6th, 8th, and 9th Avenues, and crosstown at 8th, 14th, and 23rd Streets. These horsecars carried about 100,000 passengers a day.
    Some omnibus and street car lines were racially segregated up until 1855, when an African American customer won a lawsuit against a segregated streetcar line. After this case, most lines desegregated their cars.
    Ferries transported people from New York to Brooklyn and New York to New Jersey. The Union Ferry Company owned most ferry boats plying this route, charging customers a penny a ride. The ferries carried 70,000 people between New York and Brooklyn each day.
    In Brooklyn in the 1850s, the Brooklyn City Railroad Company began running 40-passenger horsecars along recently opened Fulton Avenue. Villa plots, including residences with stables and gardens, sprang up along the route, making a little suburbia thirty minutes away from downtown Brooklyn along the car lines.   TOP

Water and Plumbing
      In 1842, the Croton Aqueduct was opened. 41 mile aqueduct from the Croton River, with reservoir bounded by 79th, 86th Streets, 6th and 7th Avenues (essentially, far north of the contemporary city). Tenements often had overflowing privies and cesspools. The poor had to pay privy cleaners (who were African American) to take all the excrement from these places, put it in carts, and dump it off the ends of wharves, where it often held fast to the piers, making the shoreside and insufferable pool of filth, stench, and disease.
    The water closet made its appearance with the opening of the Croton Aqueduct. However, because of this, wealthy homeowners’ cesspools began overflowing. Hook-up sewers began appearing soon after water closets, hooking up to a separate sewage system (before, sewers hooked up to rainwater runoff channels).
    However, this new sanitation was available only to those who could afford it. IN 1854, however, the Common Council ruled that all residences had to be connected by sewer lines. Buty by 1857, only 138 of New York City’s 500 miles of streets had been sewered, and 2/3rds of New Yorkers still had privies and cesspools.   TOP

Work
      About 30% of New York’s population were middle class, including professionals, lawyers, clergy, teachers, engineers, architects, lesser merchants, grocers, barbers, druggists, shopkeepers, undertakers, and dealers in commodities. Another large portion of the population consisted of lower middle class folks, like clerks, bank tellers, accountants, and copyists, employed to handle the surging paperwork of the mid-19th century. Others acted as management assistants, such as staff at the headquarters of manufacturing companies, publishing companies, and railroad companies. Clerical work accounted for 14,000 of the City’s population, the third most popular line of work, after servants and laborers.
    Middle-class workplaces were quite, clean, elegant offices (a word which had replaced “countinghouse” by the 1850s).
    Immigrants dominated retail jobs. Bakers and grocers were predominantly German. Long-bearded Central European Jews opened clothing stores along Chatham and Baxter Streets. By 1860, German-Jewish shops lined Houston, Division, Bowery, Grand Streets, and lower Broadway. The Irish predominated in the junk and horse-handling businesses. In fact, by 1855, the Irish accounted fro 87% of New York’s unskilled labor, and 84% of immigrant hostlers (horsehandlers).
    The lower classes were not politically dormant. Many laborers or artisans formed working co-ops in the 1840s, at the urging of radical German immigrant socialists. By 1850, there were co-ops for tailors, cigarmakers, upholsterers, and other trades. Labor unionism surged in the early 1850s, thanks to an inflationary spiral caused by the California gold rush, when the real value of wages plummeted. Strikes, mass marches, and labor meetings characterized this period of labor unrest.
    This period of labor activism soon came to an end. Most co-ops collapsed in 1852, when banks stopped loaning them capital or credit, and wholesalers refused to buy them their goods. However, unions continued to launch strikes into the 1850s. Omnibus drivers, ferry pilots, hatmakers, machinists, painters, dry goods clerks, and others struck at one time or another in the 1850s.   TOP