The Epic of New York City (41 page)

That bitter night the air was so clear that the fire's reflection was seen as far away as Philadelphia to the southwest and New Haven to the northeast. The blaze raged 16 hours before it was brought under control, and 3 days passed before the last spark was extinguished. When all was over and citizens took stock of the disaster, they found that 17 blocks of lower Manhattan, consisting of 52 acres, had been gutted. Exactly 693 buildings—about 500 of them stores—were destroyed. Only 1 structure was left standing in the afflicted area. Not a single life was lost, but property damage came to more than $20,000,000.

The city's fire insurance firms, unable to pay policies in full, were ruined. Many banks closed. As a result, businessmen were unable to get money to rebuild their shops and factories. Thus, the great fire of 1835 was one of the causes of the panic of 1837.

Since the year 1762 the nation had experienced ten major depressions; two were especially severe. The panic of 1784-88 lasted forty-four months, while the panic of 1815-21 stretched out for seventy-one months. The depression beginning in 1837 was fated to endure for seventy-two months. In fact, it remained the worst panic in the nation's history until the Great Depression, which started in 1929.

The fire, however, was only one of many factors triggering the panic of 1837. States had piled up huge debts to build canals and railroads. People had speculated recklessly in buying land in the West—and even on Long Island. To check the speculation, President Andrew Jackson ordered all payments for public land to be made in gold or silver; this cramped banking operations. Banks overextended themselves. Interest rates were too high. Imports exceeded exports. Bad weather ruined crops. British bankers called in their loans. Stock prices fell. Real estate collapsed.

“This is the most gloomy period which New York has ever known,” Hone scribbled in his diary. “The number of failures is so great daily that I do not keep a record of them, even in my mind. . . . All is still as death; no business is transacted.” Depositors began a run on the city's banks, which held more than $5,500,000 of their securities. Hone “witnessed the madness of the people—women nearly
pressed to death, and the stoutest men could hardly sustain themselves; but they held on as with a death's grasp upon the evidence of their claims, and, exhausted as they were with the pressure, they had strength enough to cry, ‘Pay! Pay!' ” The banks hired plug-uglies and ordered them to fire on the crowds if the situation got out of hand.

All coins vanished. Firms paid their workers in shinplasters. A real shinplaster was a paper plaster saturated with tar and vinegar and applied to a sore shin. During the American Revolution the word took on the meaning of fractional currency. Now the paper currency called shinplasters assumed every form and denomination, from the alleged value of five cents to five dollars. Badly printed, it was easy to counterfeit; in fact, counterfeiting became a flourishing business. Although workers didn't know if shinplasters had any value, they were compelled to accept them or starve.

Wages were cut. Jobs grew scarce. With the cessation of all shipbuilding for two years, shipyard employees were left idle. Building construction came to a halt, throwing 6,000 more laborers out of work. Soon every third workingman was unemployed. Job-seeking Negroes vied with the Irish, native Americans competed with the foreign-born, skilled craftsmen wrangled with the unskilled—and the puny labor movement collapsed. About 10,000 citizens lived in absolute poverty. The almshouse commissioners said that seven-tenths of all relief applicants were Irish women whose husbands were out of town. But—added the native-born anti-foreigner officials—the husbands were “very particular to be here to vote at the spring election.”

This “year of national ruin,” Horace Greeley was publishing a weekly, called the
New Yorker,
from an office at 18 Ann Street. Troubled by the misery he saw at every hand, Greeley wrote: “Mechanics, artisans, laborers, you cannot with safety give heed to those who prophesy smooth things. . . . We say to the unemployed, you who are able to leave the cities should do so without delay. . . . Fly—scatter through the land—go to the Great West.” In issue after issue he repeated this advice until he became known as “Go West” Greeley.

He also claimed that local rents were higher in New York than in any other great city of the world. Agreeing, the City health inspector, Gerret Forbes, said, “We have serious cause to regret that there are in our city so many mercenary landlords who only contrive in what space they can to stow the greatest number of human beings in the
smallest space.” John Jacob Astor, the so-called landlord of New York, didn't suffer lack of space himself; his thirteen-acre Hell Gate estate on the East River gave him plenty of elbowroom.

Seventy-four years old when the panic began, his once ruddy skin sagging in gray pouches, Astor no longer needed his China trade or fur profits to earn money to buy ever more Manhattan real estate. Income from rent alone more than covered the price of his new land. While hungry men scrabbled for jobs that paid off in dubious shinplasters, Astor lent a friend $250,000. The old man also bought mortgages from people who couldn't keep up payments on their property and then promptly foreclosed, thus accumulating more land at ridiculously low prices. He made millions out of the panic.

Washington Irving, now back from Europe, was glad to take money from Astor to write an authorized history of
Astoria,
the old fellow's ill-fated trading post on the Pacific Coast. Despite the fame Irving enjoyed, he wrote: “My own means. . . are hampered and locked up so as to produce me no income.” It was during the panic of 1837 that Irving coined his famous phrase, writing of
“the almighty dollar.
that great object of universal devotion throughout our land.”

Cornelius Vanderbilt now owned the greatest fleet of steamers on Long Island Sound, and in 1837 the press began calling him Commodore. Arthur and Lewis Tappan failed in business. Philip Hone lost two-thirds of his fortune, but in the depth of the depression he wrote: “We had a handsome supper, with oceans of champagne.” Meantime, a pale, sharp-faced painter, named Samuel F. B. Morse, who hadn't yet won fame with his telegraph, went twenty-four hours without food.

Speculation in flour boosted the price from $6 to $15 a barrel, and it was rumored that a few big flour and grain merchants were buying all the flour in town. On February 10, 1837, newspapers and placards announced that a protest meeting would be held in City Hall Park, at 4
P.M
. on February 13, to denounce the high price of bread, meat, fuel, and rent.

Although it turned out to be a cold bleak afternoon, there gathered 6,000 persons, most of them Irish immigrants and nearly all of them in faded working clothes. Speaker after speaker reviled the rich, especially landlords and those who hoarded flour. One agitator cried, “Fellow citizens, Eli Hart and Company now have fifty-three thousand barrels of flour in their store! Let's go and offer them eight dollars a barrel for it, and if they do not accept—” A man who stood
near the speaker, noticing the presence of Mayor Cornelius W. Lawrence, Eli Hart, and a knot of policemen, whispered into his ear. The orator then ended, in a softer voice, “If they will not accept it—we will depart in peace.”

But the crowd understood the speaker's meaning. With a roar, people rushed down Broadway. Hart's big brick building stood on Washington Street between Dey and Cortlandt streets. The worried merchant gathered some cops and trotted toward his place; but at Dey Street they were surrounded, and clubs were snatched out of the hands of policemen. Hart's clerks tried to bar the store's three iron doors and its windows, only to be assaulted before the place was secured.

Surging inside and swarming upstairs, the rioters rolled flour barrels to the windows and pushed them out. Dashed onto the icy pavement, the casks burst open, spilling flour everywhere. Then the mob ripped open burlap bags holding wheat and spilled their contents on the street; a fog of powder thickened the air. The mayor got to the scene, mounted a flight of steps opposite the store, and tried to reason with the vandals. Nobody listened. Angry people pelted him with bricks and stones and hunks of ice until he retreated. The rioters tore one of the store's iron doors from its hinges and used this as a battering ram to beat open the other two doors. Three streams of maniacal people poured into the place to hasten the plunder.

The violence reached its peak at twilight. With Washington Street knee-deep in flour and wheat, scores of tattered women waded in to scoop the precious grain into boxes, pails, sacks, baskets, and aprons. They worked fast and panted, and their breath bloomed like white flowers before their pinched faces. They were helped by small boys, one of whom was sentenced to hard labor in Sing Sing Prison. Finally, as the edge of night crept over the city, two companies of national guardsmen trotted up. The sight of their loaded rifles dispersed the rioters.

The police arrested several vandals and began marching them toward the jail in City Hall Park. Other rioters jumped the cops and rescued some of their friends. In the brief fight the police chief had his coat torn off his back. Forty persons were convicted and sent to Sing Sing, built in 1825. Two other stores near the Hart establishment were attacked, and a total of 1,000 bushels of wheat and 600 barrels of flour were destroyed. The next day the price of flour rose again.

The financial panic that began in 1837 ended in 1843. By this time the city had a fabulous new water supply, and Irish Catholics had
reached a turning point in their political fortunes. The Democratic administration gave some Irishmen petty jobs, such as marshals, street inspectors, health wardens, lamplighters, fire wardens, dock-masters, weighers, clerks, and inspectors of pawnshops, junkshops, and meat markets. The lucky ones joined the white-collar class. Philip Hone wrote bitterly that Bishop John Hughes deserved “a cardinal's hat at least for what he has done in placing Irish Catholics upon the necks of native New Yorkers.”

Chapter 19

I
N HIS ESSAY
on fate, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie.”

In the first half of the nineteenth century New Yorkers could not imagine how these foreigners could ever fertilize their culture and bring it to blossom. Aliens were no-good, whiskey-swilling troublemakers. Far from greening the prairie, they soiled this city, huddling in stinking slums near aristocratic noses. It never occurred to society leaders that John Jacob Astor and other rich landlords helped create
these slums. In the fall of 1835, on Broadway between Barclay and Vesey streets, Astor began building a magnificent hostelry, which dwarfed the largest hotels in London and Paris. At the same time a cramped, dark, airless, unsanitary tenement rose on Cherry Street.

Most foreigners were Irish, and the Irish were Catholic, and by 1835 abuse of Catholics had developed into mass hysteria. Butcher boys, born in New York and proud of it, beat up the Irish, who lamented that the Declaration of Independence had been changed to read “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Irishmen.” Bullies snarled that aliens not only deprived them of jobs but also accepted less money and thus kept down wages. This wasn't necessarily true. Irish stevedores struck for more pay, only to have their leaders jailed for rioting. If the Irish took less than the prevailing wage, they were scabs; if they demanded higher pay, they were termed agitators.