The Epic of New York City (45 page)

Peaceful citizens were dismayed. The New York correspondent of the Philadelphia
Ledger
wrote: “There is a bitterness and a rancor remaining behind, which I fear will manifest themselves on future occasions. It leaves behind a feeling to which this community has hitherto been a stranger. . . a feeling that there is now in our country, in New York City, what every good patriot hitherto has considered it his duty to deny—a
high
and a
low
class.”

Chapter 21

W
ILLIAM
L
LOYD
G
ARRISON
dressed carefully for the occasion. He knew that he and his fellow abolitionists faced a rough time when they opened the annual meeting of the American Antislavery Society in the Broadway Tabernacle that May 7, 1850.

With the
Herald
sputtering about “the annual congress of fanatics,” Garrison didn't want to look odd to New Yorkers. Instead of wearing his queer turndown collar, he put on a fashionable stand-up one. The Bostonian and editor of the
Liberator
was of middling height, bald, and rather deaf. From behind silver-rimmed spectacles his big hazel eyes shone with a saintly expression.

Another scheduled speaker was Frederick Douglass, born in Maryland
of a black slave mother and a white father. He was an eloquent orator with bushy hair and a tawny leonine face. In 1838 Douglass had run away from his Baltimore master and come to New York. On Broadway he met another escaped slave, who warned him to shun other Negroes because some, for a meager reward, tipped off slave-hunters. White riffraff considered Douglass' presence at the Tabernacle to be an affront. Their cutthroat leader, Isaiah Rynders, regarded slavery as a divine institution. Before the meeting began, Rynders posted his tough Bowery B'hoys here and there in the auditorium.

Garrison opened the session by reading from the Bible and then launched into his speech. Rynders jumped up and heckled him. An abolitionist choir started to sing, but Rynders and his hooting gangsters brought the meeting to a halt. The same thing happened again that evening and the following day. Because Parke Godwin, an editor of the
Evening Post,
denounced the demonstrations, Rynders' mob decided to kill him. The editor was warned just in time.

In 1850 all Americans mulled the question of the extension of slavery west of the Mississippi River. Southern states, with more than 3,000,000 slaves, favored its extension. Northern states, containing only 262 Negro slaves, opposed it. New York City became a link in the system of routes and hideouts called the Underground Railroad, but the city's merchants sympathized with Southern planters, whose debts they held.

Congress was deadlocked because neither its pro- nor its anti-slavery members held a working majority; both sides now agreed to the Compromise of 1850. This let California into the Union as a free state; set up the territories of Utah and New Mexico but left the slavery issue to be decided by their inhabitants; and amended the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Now anyone refusing to help a federal agent capture an escaped slave was guilty of treason. James Hamlet, a runaway slave who had worked in New York three years, was arrested and dragged back to Baltimore. John Jay, namesake and grandson of the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, headed the New York Young Men's Antislavery Society and acted as attorney for escaped slaves picked up in this city.

With the issues of slavery and nativism sundering the city and nation, New York writer Herman Melville unconsciously struck an ironic note in his 1850 novel
White-Jacket.
“We Americans,” he said, “are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our times; we
bear the ark of the liberties of the world.” Perhaps he was unaware that only one-third of the soldiers in the American army were native-born. In New York City the Irish accounted for 69 percent of all pauperism and 55 percent of all arrests. Homegrown Protestants were irked in 1850 when Pope Pius IX elevated the diocese of New York to an archdiocese and raised Bishop Hughes to archbishop.

Hughes preached an inflammatory sermon, called “The Decline of Protestantism.” He vowed that the “true” church would “convert all pagan nations, and all Protestant nations, even England. . . . Everybody should know that we have for our mission to convert the world—including the inhabitants of the United States—the people of the cities and the people of the country, the officers of the Navy and the Marines, commanders of the Army, the Legislature, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President and all.”

Perhaps the archbishop spoke recklessly because of the growing strength of Irish Catholics, who had organized military companies. In 1852 they staged the city's first St. Patrick's Day parade. One New Yorker, staring at the long line of marchers, cried, “Why, sure these can't be all Irish! There aren't so many in this city at least!”

Although the Irish were not particularly kind to Negroes, their sentimentality was tapped by
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
which was taking the country by storm. This was one of the most influential novels ever published. It was written by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, a sister of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of the Plymouth (Congregational) Church of Brooklyn. Visiting him, she said, “I have begun a story, trying to set forth the sufferings and wrongs of the slaves.” Rather diffidently, he urged her to finish it. Beecher was an opportunist who courted popularity; he was slow in taking the anti-slavery stand for which he is now remembered.

In 1852 a dramatized version of
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
staged in Purdy's National Theatre on the Bowery, was sensationally successful. For the first time “respectable colored people” were admitted to the theater through a special entrance and seated in a parquet set off from the rest of the house. During its first New York season the play was seen and applauded by Bowery toughs who had broken up abolitionist meetings.

Henry Ward Beecher was eager to ride on his sister's bandwagon. His Brooklyn church, on Orange Street between Henry and Hicks streets, had become one of the most influential in America. Beecher sent to Virginia for a beautiful mulatto girl about twenty years old
and then let it be known she was fated “to be sold by her own (white) father. . . for what purpose you can imagine when you see her.” This titillation drew such a crowd that traffic jammed around the church, and thousands had to be turned away.

Those lucky enough to get inside lapsed into silence as the rosy-cheeked Beecher mounted the platform with the mulatto girl. She was dressed from head to toe in virginal white. The preacher told her to loosen her hair, and gasps arose from churchgoers as glistening long tresses cascaded down her back. Then, sensually calling attention to the girl's beauty, Beecher auctioned her off. Men wept, women became hysterical, and money and jewelry were heaped into collection baskets. Having reaped headlines, Beecher later set the girl free.

This sensation was soon followed by another and longer lasting one. Some New York businessmen, eager to boost trade, decided to present the first world's fair ever held in America. They formed a corporation and sold $750,000 worth of stock in the venture, called the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations. Many nations contributed to the 6,000 items of art and industry finally collected in the Crystal Palace.

This huge building, inspired by the London Crystal Palace, took shape in what is now Bryant Park, just west of the reservoir and fronting on Sixth Avenue. It was shaped like a Greek cross, with four wings of equal length at right angles. Except for the floors, it was made of iron and glass and considered fireproof. A translucent dome, Moorish in design and bubblelike in delicacy, soared over the center of the handsome structure.

The fair was opened in July, 1853, by President Franklin Pierce. It was a long hot summer, with the New York temperature reaching 100 degrees in the shade and 230 local residents dying of heat in one day. At first attendance was scant. When September's cooler days came, so did the crowds. People marveled at the biggest and best collection of sculpture and paintings ever assembled in America; at the model elevated railway carrying passengers around inside the House of Glass; at the nuggets and bars and chunks of gold newly found in California; and at armor from the Tower of London, Sèvres china, Gobelin tapestries, and Marochetti's statue of George Washington.

The fair did not make money. As early as October stockholders who had bought shares at $175 found them worth only $55. In 1854 the fair association went into bankruptcy. Some believed that P. T. Barnum, who had brought the Swedish singer Jenny Lind here, might
be able to save the venture. He was made president. When he discovered that Crystal Palace creditors expected him personally to pay all its debts, he resigned.

In a final effort to save investments and reap a profit, the fair was reopened in 1854 as a permanent exhibit. Four years earlier the world's first elevator, built by Henry Waterman in his Duane Street shop, had been installed in a flour mill at 203 Cherry Street. The invention of the elevator made possible a side attraction to the fair—Latting Tower. Created by Warren Latting, erected just north of the Crystal Palace, made of timber braced with iron, and rising 350 feet into the air, this 8-sided landmark suggested a lesser Eiffel Tower. Its steam elevator lifted passengers aloft, where they could gaze out over the city and countryside. But this $100,000 project also failed because the nearby reservoir with its tall walls provided a more spacious vantage point where people could walk and gawk without cost. The Latting Tower burned down in 1856.

A little more than two years later, on October 5, 1858, G. T. Strong wrote in his diary: “Recent rains had laid the dust, and the air was cool. There was an alarm of fire as we emerged from the tunnel at Thirty-First Street, and a majestic column of smoke was marching southeastwardly across the blue sky, and men said the Crystal Palace was on fire. . . .” Arsonists apparently ignited paper in the building's lumber room. More than 2,000 spectators were inside, and the doors were closed; but all managed to escape, one man being rescued seconds before the dome collapsed. Within fifteen minutes the entire structure with all its precious exhibits was a molten mass of ruins. Total damage ran to $2,000,000.

But another civic wonder began to restore New Yorkers' pride. This was Central Park.

The Randall Plan of 1807-11 had failed to provide the city with enough parks. In 1844 William Cullen Bryant, the poet-editor of the New York
Evening Post,
declared that New Yorkers should have some place where they could find solitude. In an editorial he called for the establishment of a park between Sixty-eighth and Seventy-seventh streets from Third Avenue to the East River. He kept up the campaign, but nothing was done. Battery Park, once the world's best seaside resort, had decayed into a foul wasteland. In 1850 London's 1,442 acres of parks gave 500 acres of breathing space to every 100,000 inhabitants. New York's fewer than 100 acres of parks afforded only 16 acres to every 100,000 inhabitants.

The disparity between London and New York was pointed out by Andrew J. Downing, a prominent American landscape gardener and editor of a horticultural journal. In 1851 Mayor Ambrose C. Kings-land told the city council that there was “no park on the island deserving the name.” The same year the state legislature gave the city permission to buy Jones' Wood, which stretched from the East River to the present Park Avenue between Sixty-sixth and Seventy-fifth streets. Downing spurned this area as too small “for a city that will soon contain three quarters of a million people.” His opinion and the fact that Jones' Wood was difficult to reach caused the project to be abandoned.