459 - THE EARLY SNOWBIRD

So far, as the residents of the New York City area

welcomed in the year 1830, there would have been

few complaints about the winter. James Stuart 

noted that the streets of Manhattan were so dry it

was necessary to sprinkle them to keep the dust 

down. But, downstate or up, New Yorkers are

suspicious of nice winter weather anytime before

mid-April. They were not to be disappointed.

Exactly one month after Christmas the mercury

headed for the cellar. Water transportation was

halted between the city and both Philadelphia

and Albany.


According to Stuart, “. . . all hands were set to

work in order to have the ice-houses filled with

that article which is so indispensable in a warm

climate. The ice-house attached to the boarding-

house where we were living contains thirty tons

of ice; and, as no ice is into an ice-house here

which is not perfectly clean and clear, so that a

lump of it may be put into a glass of water or a

bottle of wine, as much care is necessary in

selecting the ice perfectly pure from the ponds,

as in packing it in the ice-house.” He mentions

that his Hoboken neighbors the Stevenses keep 

large supplies of ice both here in New Jersey 

and at Albany, for use on their steamboats

during the warmer weather. Northeastern forests 

near the big cities are being depleted of wood,

much of it for the bark, which is ground up 

by tanneries to produce a tannin-rich liquid for

soaking animal hides, softening them to create

pliable leather. The spent liquid is then put to use

polluting nearby rivers and streams. Man-made

recycling at its worst; at least until new 

technologies come along.

Unlike most residents of the area Mr. and Mrs.

Stuart have no ties binding them to the colder

climates. He writes, ”On the  29th January, I set

out on a long-projected expedition to Charlestown, 

NewOrleans, the Mississippi and Ohio.” Left 

to our own devices after the snowbirds have

flown, we’ll hang around the mouth of the

Hudson and see what’s going on during the

rest of 1830. The Stuarts will return at the

beginning of summer.

Meanwhile, the city’s search for decent water

is ongoing. In April work is completed on a 

27-foot high stone tower on 13th Street, built

to contain Philadelphia engineer Thomas 

Howe’s iron tank, designed to hold 230,000

gallons of water. A system of twelve-inch iron

pipes will be laid to carry the water under

Broadway and the Bowery to supply three and

a half miles of streets with water, capable of

being pumped sixty feet above street level.

Two types of power are at work in this project-

water and political. The Manhattan Company,

a brainchild of Aaron Burr in the late 1790s,

had been formed to bring Bronx River water

downtown. But Burr had a more important

goal in mind, slipping language into the

enabling legislation to turn the entity into a 

private bank. Now, in the fall of 1830, State 

attorney general Greene C. Bronson will sue

to have the Manhattan Company's charter

dissolved, arguing that the company not

only has no right to be in the banking

business, but also has not fulfilled its main

obligation to deliver drinking water. Company 

lawyers will keep this one tied up in the courts

for the next two years. Proponents of alcoholic 

abstinence will leap into the fray, citing the 

lack of good drinking water as the excuse for

intemperance. The waters will remain muddied

(you should pardon the expression...or not) for

some time to come.

Broadcast on WXXI-FM / Simon Pontin's Salmagundi - April 22, 2006

© 2006  David Minor / Eagles Byte

SCRIPT No. 457, April 8, 2006

1830s, Here We Come

 

December of 1829 had been an unusually warm month; the following month remained so for a while. New York harbor remained free of ice. Visitor James Stuart was able to make quite a few visits to Manhattan from his boarding house in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he and his wife were staying.

Quite often his fellow passengers aboard the Stevens family steamboats were males; men did most of the marketing in the shops and stalls of Manhattan, returning later in the day with their produce and meats. Stuart had heard that even U. S. Chief Justice John Marshall, who occupied his residence on Staten Island when the Supreme Court was not in session, was often seen returning home with his dinner tucked under his arm, even the occasional turkey.

Most New Yorkers ate quite well. Stuart went to meet some friends for dinner once at a Manhattan boarding house. His shoes got dusty on the trip over; he stopped at a boot black’s house on Leonard Street for a polish, and found the man and his wife, “persons of colour”as he described them, “at dinner, consisting of one of the fattest roast geese I had ever seen, with potatoes, and apple-pie.”

In the several months they spent in Hoboken, many Sundays would find the Stuarts attending divine services in Manhattan. He mentions attending services at Episcopal, Presbyterian, Reformed Presbyterian, Baptist and Roman Catholic churches, as well as at several Methodist meetings. He found the various ministers to be equally impressive in their abilities. He was a little surprised when, turning up at the Oliver Street Baptist Church to hear the Reverend Spencer Wallace Cone, to find that he really had to hunt to find a vacant seat. “. . . the tide of Mr Cone's popularity was so great when I heard him, that the regular sitters were in some degree tenacious of their rights.”

It’s not too surprising that Cone was a popular preacher. The Princeton, New Jersey, native, had become an actor, much to the dismay of his devout mother, when he turned twenty. It may have been his presence during a fire that killed 72 people at the Richmond Theatre in the Virginia capital in 1811, including the state’s new governor, that made him decide to leave the stage. Afterwards, during a stint as a newspaper editor and writer, he was inspired by the biography of English divine John Newton to enter the Baptist church. Commanding a rifle company in the War of 1812, during which he witnessed the burning of Washington and the attack on Fort McHenry, he then moved to the nation’s capital. After preaching in the Washington and Philadelphia areas he moved to New York City in 1823 to take up the pastorate at the Baptist Church. Certainly Cone had a wealth of experiences to draw on, and by the time Stuart heard him, knew well how to work up a crowd.

The Stuarts must have done a bit of clothes shopping while they were in the area, probably in expectation of being on the road before long. He notes that most of the work in the fashion trade is done by women, apparently as opposed to the custom in Britain. The visiting couple may also have been refurbishing their outfits for the New Year’s celebrations to come at the end of the month. Well before Times Square was imagined.

                                                     

© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Script No, 456, April 1, 2006

Full Steam Ahead

“The situation is most convenient, in a charming spot in the country, with the finest walks conceivable at our door, and it is in our power at any time to be in the heart of New York in twenty minutes.”

Last April we left James Stuart and his wife, our Scots travelers, in mid-December of 1829, moving from their boarding house in New Rochelle, New York; as it was closing for the winter. While they made their plans for upcoming travels they had settled temporarily in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Their boarding house is run by a Mr. and Mrs. Van Boskerck, a couple in their sixties, who live there with their two maiden daughters, who actually manage the business. Only one other boarder is in residence at the time. Leaving the operations to his daughters, Mr. Van Boskerck makes several trips a week over to Manhattan to drum up trade. Stuart will be paying a number of visits to the city as well. They most likely made their commutes on a steam ferry owned by elderly inventor and Revolutionary War veteran Colonel John Stevens, rather than aboard a rival vessel belonging to young Staten Island native Cornelius Vanderbilt. At the close of the revolution Stevens bought extensive land along three miles of lower Hudson River property confiscated from the estate of Loyalist William Bayard. Over the past ten years he’s begun making improvements to the property. The stretch of marshy New Jersey land had cost Stevens today’s equivalent of $90,000 (which will buy you almost a fifth of a condominium there today) and he’d chosen to name the site Hoboken, after the Dutch name Hoebuck, or High Bluff. Today it’s the site of the Stevens Institute of Technology.

It was at one end of this property that the Van Boskerck house stood, so his loyalties would have been to his neighbor’s fleet of steam vessels. In addition to four steamboats making runs between New York and Albany, Stevens and his four sons operate a number of other boats between here and Manhattan and to Philadelphia, as well as stagecoaches across much of New Jersey. In the upcoming year Vanderbilt will become an increasingly large thorn in the sides of the five Stevenses, decreasing his fares to the point of unprofitability, eventually forcing them to buy him out at a cost of $100,000 plus ten annual payments of $5,000. The Commodore didn’t mess around.

Both Stuart and Van Boskerck had an easy commute. An eight minute walk to the Stevens dock down by the water, where the family manufactured their own vessels, and a ten-minute crossing in one of the four ferries, all of which can accommodate entire stagecoaches, which the passengers needn’t get out of. You have your choice of two landing sites, the foots of Barclay and Canal streets. All of this for a whopping sixpence sterling (only threepence during the summer months).

The Stevens family has other sources of income besides their basic transportation business. Spaces on the boats are rented out to concessionaires, who sell, “liquor, fruit, confectionaries, &c.” They also lease out their own hotel here on the New Jersey side. They charge pedestrians nothing for the privilege of strolling along public walks they laid out along the river. They do all right what with all those three- and sixpence fares to get there, thank you.

© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Script No, 460

(Continued from July 23, 2011)

Bury Them Not

Apart from the stone water tower being erected on 13th Street now in 1830, few major construction projects were under way but, as usual, the layout of lower Manhattan was undergoing constant change. Settlement of the affairs of the late (29 years ago) property owner Captain Robert Richard Randall finally drew to a close when the U. S. Supreme Court cleared his land title to the area around today’s Washington Square. The original will, by the way, had been drawn up by no other than Alexander Hamilton. The freed funds will be used to purchase land on Staten Island for construction of Sailors’ Snug Harbor, a retirement home for, “aged, decrepit, and worn-out sailors”, and to provide for its maintenance.

As for the Square itself, it had at one time been a potter’s field, where the city’s poor were buried in unmarked graves. Which made it a handy repository for criminals hanged on a nearby gibbet. But in New York, real estate rules and over the last four years the poor were reburied elsewhere and expensive homes constructed around the perimeter. New graveyards, especially for the poor will, of necessity have to be located away from lower Manhattan as the Common Council this year bans them from all land south of Canal Street. Meanwhile street construction goes on between 13th Street and Canal Street. Eleventh Street is laid out except for the two-block section between Broadway and the Bowery, construction there blocked by the apple orchard of council member Henry Brevoort, a buddy of Washington Irving’s. The second incarnation of Grace Church will rise on the site in 1843. Four blocks to the south, on lower Third Avenue one of the city’s many public markets will be laid out this year and named for the previous owner of the land, the late former governor and U. S. vice-president Daniel D. Tompkins. More changes to the city’s infrastructure are in the works this year as incorporation papers are filed for the Manhattan Gas Light Company, which will soon be providing gas street lights for the new neighborhoods.

Part of the impetus for the move of old money further uptown is the deteriorating condition of the area known as Five Points on the east side of the city a few short blocks northeast of City Hall. Here, where Park and Baxter streets intersect and Anthony Street thrusts its way into the crossing, buildings erected on formerly filled-in swamp land, the old Collect Pond, have begun to collapse in on themselves, driving out all but the most destitute. And there are over 13,000 of these unfortunates, existing in streets of flop houses and taverns, precursor of the tenements of the Lower East Side and the Bowery of future decades. Letters are beginning to appear in the New York Sun, complaining that these slums are not being demolished.

Across town (in today’s Triangle Below Canal Street, or Tribeca neighborhood), sits St. John’s Park, one of the city’s more exclusive neighborhoods. Now, in 1830, the residents have erected an iron replacement for the wooden fence that had surrounded the park they all face. As in a latter-day Gramercy Park, the gates are kept locked, the property owners all having their own keys. After the U. S. Civil War our budding millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt will knock down the fence, level the park’s greenery and convert the area into a stable for new toys, the iron steeds of his New York Central & Hudson River Rail Road.

© 2006 David Minor/Eagles Byte

Script No. 458

(Continued from May 23, 2011)

New Year’s Eve Bash

It had been mid-summer back in 1828 when Scottish traveler James Stuart first arrived in New York City. His timing was such that he had missed the city’s New Year’s Day celebrations by a good eight months. Perhaps fortunately for him. He might have been callithumped. There are a number of possible origins of the obscure word ‘Callithumpian’. Whatever the source, it’s described in “Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words” as, “a noisy demonstration”. The whole thing was a British import, as described by historian Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas. “By beating on tin pans, blowing horns, groaning and shouting catcalls, the music was performed as a gesture of deliberate mockery . . . the callithumpians . . . directed their 'rough music' against those who seemed to be claiming too much dignity or abusing their power."

On January 1, 1828, the entire cacophonous shivaree got out of hand. It had begun up in the theater district along the Bowery, when a contingent of middle-class revelers, armed with all sorts of noisemakers and well fortified with liquid refreshments started tossing limes (don’t ask me where they found limes in early Manhattan during the winter) through the windows of one of the local bars. Then they made their boisterous way over to the City Hotel on Broadway (where the Stuarts would put up in the coming summer). After roughing up attendees at a fancy ball there, they turned next to a nearby African-American church, bursting through the street door, smashing windows, breaking up the pews, and physically assaulting the congregation who were gathered to see in the new year. Heading down Broadway they looted shops all the way down to the Battery Park, where they tore down its iron fence and tossed assorted missiles through windows surrounding the park where the city’s elite had their town houses. Then they presumably scattered, stumbling off to nearby gutters to lie down and make their resolutions.

We don’t hear of repeat performances in the immediately following years. Certainly now, in 1830, the Stuarts apparently enjoyed a much more sedate celebration, since he makes no mention of any merrymaking at all. The sun rose on a quite mellow January 1st; the Stuart party caught a steamboat out of Hoboken and headed off to Brooklyn Heights to watch the various sailing packet boats headed for and returning from Europe. Stuart reports, “I never witnessed a more animating scene. On our return through New York we were surprised to observe the streets more crowded than at any former period . . . it is usual for people of all descriptions to call at each other's houses, were it but for a moment, on the first day of the year. Cold meat, cake, confectionaries, and wines, are laid out upon a table, that all who call may partake; and it seems the general understanding, that such a one's friends as do not call upon him on the first day of the year are not very anxious to continue his acquaintance.”

As we’ve seen repeatedly 19th century Americans really liked to pack away the vittles. Local bakers outdid themselves creating the ‘confectionaries’ Stuart mentions. During the holidays they would each advertise their grandest creations and visitors come around to gawk at the grandest, before they’re cut. One of the bakers would seem to have been going for a Guinness record, had such things existed then. His cake weighed in at 1500 pounds.

© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte