the city that eats its history, day two

• Columbia University is built on the former grounds of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum.
  
• Samuel Morse's famous "What hath God wrought?" transmission was actually his second public demonstration of the telegraph. The first, eighteen months earlier, was between Governors' Island and Manhattan, and was scuppered shortly after it began when the wire caught on the anchor of a departing ship and was sliced up by puzzled sailors.
  
• Circa 1840, more than ten thousand institutions were empowered to issue currency in the USA.
  
• Bryant Park has been a field in which Washington's troops fled from redcoats; a pauper's burial ground (as was Washington Square, in which more than 20,000 were laid to rest); and home to New York's Crystal Palace, a monumental edifice of iron and glass, which sadly, like its London namesake, burnt down after only seven years.
  
• Baseball was invented in a vacant lot at Madison and 27th by white-collar workers.
  
• The New York publishing industry refused to recognize foreign copyrights for the longest time, and printed European texts without paying authors; a visit by Charles Dickens did nothing to alleviate this. (The policy wasn't so great for American writers either, for obvious reasons.)
  
• Karl Marx worked for the New York Herald.
  
• The massive wave of Irish immigration in the 1850s was contemporaneous with an almost-as-massive German wave.
  
• In the mid-nineteenth century, abortion was common, legal until the fetus's "quickening" around the end of the fourth month, and far less hazardous than childbirth.
  
• Meanwhile, pedophilia was a popular vice among gentlemen, and the age of consent was ten.(!)
  
• Prostitutes were the best-paid women workers in the city, theatres had entire levels devoted to assignations, Soho - the home of the sex-worker elite - was clogged with gentlemens' coaches all weekend, and Walt Whitman estimated that 95% of all New York men visited brothels regularly.
  
• For a month in 1857, New York had two rival police forces, who fought for control of police stations, rescued criminals arrested by the other force, etc.
  
• Racism grew steadily worse in the city between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, to the extent that near the end of this period 95% of city residents voted against equal suffrage for blacks.
  
• The inequality was breathtaking - in 1863, the wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers controlled more than three-fifths of the city's wealth. Meanwhile, child mortality rates among the poor were staggering.
  
• The leaders of Union Army during the first few years of the Civil War were, by and large, both corrupt and incompetent. The manufacturers providing the soldiers with equipment weren't much better.
  
• The worst incident of civil disorder in the history of the United States occurred in NYC in 1863, a mere week after the Battle of Gettysburg. Initially a working-class protest against the impending draft - which had a $300 buy-out clause that effectively exempted the rich - it turned into a riot: tens of thousands roved the streets for days, breaking and smashing and burning, erecting barricades, attacking the rich and powerful, and especially, hunting down and lynching black people around the city. The New York Times' publisher and chief shareholder stationed themselves behind a pair of Gatling guns to defend their presses; Customs House workers prepared grenades; employees of the Bank Note Company prepared to dump tanks of sulfuric acid on attackers; guns and bottles of acid were passed out to clerks of the Treasury. It took five regiments of federal troops to restore order.
  
• Postwar business was only marginally less bare-knuckled. A battle between Jay Gould and JP Morgan for control of a small upstate railroad culminated in a gunbattle at a railway station in Binghamton (a long way from the city) between eight hundred gang members from the Five Points slums (for Gould) and an equal number of Bowery Bhoys (for Morgan).
  
• Until late in the nineteenth century, the Upper West Side was the Badlands of Manhattan, undeveloped crags and swamps.
  
• In 1866, a mob of Fenians (Irish Republicans) travelled north from New York and attacked Canada, hoping to conquer the entire country and trade it to the British in exchange for a free Ireland. Unfortunately for them, their military ability did not match their chutzpah, and they were immediately routed by Canadian militia.