the city that eats its history, day two

[rezendi]

• 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.
  

Comments

[redbird]

I believe Bryant Park has also been a holding reservoir for the city water supply system.

I'm skeptical of any single-origin claim for the invention of baseball, given that the game has clear antecedents in rounders and that the earliest user of the name "base ball" for a game is in Jane Austen.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Yeah, "invented" might have been a poor word choice, and the book fully acknowledges the game's antecedents. Let me restate to "the games in that lot led to the first codification of written rules, and were the seed from which the pastime spread throughout America."

[handworn.livejournal.com]

I'm not certain that even the first codification of written rules occurred there. There were several sets of rules based on different towns' players' ideas, and it's a matter of what you actually consider real baseball, much like deciding at what evolutionary point we can consider our distant ancestors "human."

The "Town Ball" I saw played at Cooperstown involved no going back to a base you overran, tagging or hitting the runner with a thrown ball to get him out (or catching the ball on the fly) and the ability to cross the plate in mid-pitch and hit the ball backwards. Is that baseball?

Like most popular histories, there are several other suspect "facts." The idea that pedophilia was "popular," that the early leaders of the Union Army (and there's a pretty vague term, leaders) were corrupt (though incompetent, no question) and the proposition that the British would have abolished slavery permanently if they'd won the Revolution are all highly questionable. The British did offer freedom to any slave who came and worked for them, but didn't propose abolition of slavery, and they didn't abolish slavery in British law until the 1830s. And the capital of the U.S. was not moved from NYC to D.C., but from NYC to Philadelphia, and only then to D.C. ten years later.

All that said, NYC in the middle of the 19th century was indeed a fascinating place. You might enjoy the marvelous book The Physiology of New York Boarding Houses by Thomas Butler Gunn (1857), a chapter of which I posted on my LJ in three parts, here (http://handworn.livejournal.com/17534.html), here (http://handworn.livejournal.com/18139.html) and here (http://handworn.livejournal.com/18216.html), respectively.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Heh. That was terrific. Thanks.

[el-christador.livejournal.com]

a monumental edifice of iron and glass, which sadly, like its London namesake, burnt down after only seven years

I've wondered this about the London one as well, it's just that iron and glass don't seem all that flammable, is all I'm saying. (I mean, you can burn iron filings like in fireworks just fine, but big iron bars seem to be harder to get going.)

Oh well, I'm sure there's an explanation. Maybe additional wood supports or something. Or being filled with flammable stuff, and big interior fire = bad news for iron/glass exterior, what with high temperatures tending to be reached with large, confined fires and all. (Authoritative sources claim indoor fires are a different beast from outdoor ones because the radiated heat and hot gases remain trapped, hence there's a disturbingly short time between an indoor fire going from a small, apparently manageable thing to the entire room "flashing over" in a horrific inferno of everything combustible breaking into flame.)

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

The authors mention that hardwood floors were the culprit in the NYC case; not sure about London, but I imagine it was probably the same.

[whythawk.livejournal.com]

Hey, is that "Gangs of New York"? I always found that quite ironic - home of the democrats (supposed champions of equality) from the most divided city in the US.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Same era, and the Dead Rabbits show up a half-dozen times in the book, yep.

It makes some sense that you'd get louder cries for equality in the most unequal places, I guess, but still, yeah, ironic.

[whythawk.livejournal.com]

Do you remember "Alice through the looking glass"? Where Humpy Dumpty explains the poem "The walrus and the carpenter"? He asks Alice who she liked best and she replies that she prefers the carpenter, because he - at least - sobbed while eating the oysters. To which he responds, "Yes, but he cried to hide the fact that he was eating so many."

So, might just be the other way round. After all, there is a reason that dictatorships like to prefix their country names with "Democratic Republic of" or even "Peoples Republic of"...