Downtown: My Manhattan Read online

  In flight from such depressing and pitiful sights, many Trinity congregants abandoned the downtown neighborhoods for Bond Street and Washington Square and Colonnade Row, higher up in the town. Some assembled even farther up the island, in Strong’s Gramercy Park. Many church members continued to pay their pew rentals (which Trinity collected until 1919), but the emptying church itself was forced to question its own reason for existence. Many must have felt the way Strong did, as expressed in the same day’s entry:

  And what am I doing, I wonder? I’m neither scholar nor philanthropist nor clergyman, nor in any capacity a guide or ruler of the people, to be sure—there is that shadow of an apology for my sitting still. But if Heaven will permit and enable me, I’ll do something in the matter before I die—to have helped one dirty vagabond child out of such a pestilential sink would be a thing one would not regret when one came to march out of this world . . .

  The shadow of an apology dominated the debates in Trinity over its future mission. The vestrymen chose finally to take their beliefs seriously. They had great wealth from real estate, including some income from the very slums that were producing the children of Broadway. As Christians, they must use the wealth to try to save these forlorn and broken children. As many of them as possible. Or even, as Strong said, just one vagabond child. The good Episcopalians of Trinity Church began working among the poor, a duty the church continues to perform to this day.

  At the beginning, this was not easy. The unforgiving Irish of the Five Points rebuffed them, snarled at them, broke many of their well-meaning hearts. Among the refugees from the Irish famine and their children, few forgot the role of the Anglicans in Ireland, where they made up the official church of their conquerors. Few forgot the punishing Penal Laws of the century before, enacted to break the Catholics of Ireland by barring them from owning property, attending schools, and voting. Among the Irish in New York, there was too much memory and too little forgetting. The poor prostitutes of Corlears Hook on the East River—some say they gave us the word hooker—had no desire for upper-class pity or jobs that paid thirty cents a day. Around this time, the word reformer entered the New York language as a term of derision. And yet, with Trinity as the engine of compassion, hundreds, perhaps thousands of the young were saved for decent lives. They became literate. They learned trades in vocational schools. They found their way into professions such as journalism that demanded only talent, not credentials or lustrous family trees. They served as policemen and firemen. They formed trade unions. They became the infantry for a surging Tammany Hall and made their votes count. Slowly they moved out of the slums and saw their children graduate from real schools. In short, those outsiders, those wretchedly poor Irish emigrants, became a permanent part of the New York alloy.

  Neither George Templeton Strong nor those early immigrants would recognize the modern city, of course, even though they helped create it. Sometimes, walking from the Bowling Green up Broadway, passing coffee shops, restaurants, delicatessens, and deliverymen, I try to imagine the place through nineteenth-century eyes. What is sushi? What are tacos? Or bagels? What, for God’s sake, is pizza? The most common foods of today’s New York did not then exist. Neither did so many other things that are now too common, from automobiles to skyscrapers. And yet this remains that lost city. The food alone is evidence of the persistence of tolerance.

  In the time of the Knickerbocker ascendancy, tolerance was severely tested by the explosion of population. Most of the Knickerbockers thought the world above Fourteenth Street would always be farmland or left wild. Along came the immigrants, including John Jacob Astor. The much less successful immigrants themselves paid little heed to the rigid virtues espoused by the Anglican elite. Trinity and other Protestant churches meant nothing to them. They were Catholics, or were in flight from religion itself. They certainly did not come to America to assume the posture of humble deference. After the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, the streets started filling with people from the American hinterlands, and from impoverished Europe, all in search of a piece of the American vision. Tammany Hall welcomed them. So did the speculators in shabby housing, the first New York slumlords. The aristocrats could not see their need, their ambition, their intelligence, their hope; all they saw was the rising shadow of the mob.

  And so the world changed, and the Knickerbockers too succumbed to nostalgia. They yearned for the intimate town that lay comfortably below Wall Street. They remembered meeting friends on the streets or snubbing their enemies. Now they passed hundreds of people each day they might never see again. They remembered the glittering parties. They remembered the names of much-loved dogs and certain horses, and liveried footmen, and slaves. They remembered the first Tammany Hall meetings on Spruce Street, then at Nassau and Frankfort streets, and how most of their friends laughed at these crude men dressed in such coarse cloth. A few remembered seeing George Washington worshipping in St. Paul’s Chapel, in that year when New York was the temporary capital of the new United States. They remembered that Hamilton lived for a while on Wall Street. And that the dreadful Burr lived in Maiden Lane and then at 4 Broadway, facing the Bowling Green. They had seen them often. They remembered lolling in the air of the Bowling Green themselves, watching flocks of birds cross the harbor. They remembered a town that created a certain measure of fear but absolutely no doubt about the way men were destined to live. And then they were gone from the stage.

  They were not gone from the city. The Knickerbockers did many fine things once they had assumed a more modest place as part of the alloy and not as the city’s true rulers by right of bloodlines. They created Central Park and the New York Public Library and Columbia University. They added intelligence and a certain moral rigor to the New York mixture. But they were also capable of melancholy about the city in which they had been young. In his diaries, George Templeton Strong recorded some of his laments. So did the former mayor Philip Hone, who had begun his own diary in 1826. With all their flaws, they were among Manhattan’s finest citizens. But they too headed north, out of their version of Downtown, which had begun to vanish as a precinct for the older families. Strong would live the rest of his life at 74 East Twenty-first Street, where he died in 1875. Hone, who earlier lived on Broadway across from City Hall Park, went up Broadway in 1836 and would live out his days on Great Jones Street, now loosely claimed for the East Village. Strong’s final address was the graveyard at Trinity Church.

  Chapter Four

  Velocity

  MANY DISCOVERIES, AS the world has known for centuries, come from accidents. Scientists make such discoveries all the time. Others go in search of fabled Cathay and find Staten Island. In 1954, after getting out of the navy, I went to work as a messenger in the art department of an advertising agency called Doremus & Co. I wanted a job anywhere, but I found that one in the heart of the old Downtown, thanks to an accident: It was the first listing I found under “Artists” in the New York Times classified ads. To my astonishment and joy, they hired me for forty-five dollars a week. The discoveries would come later.

  Doremus specialized in the offerings of stocks and bonds in what were called “tombstone ads.” The offices were (in memory) on a high floor at 120 Broadway, better known as the Equitable Building. I would learn that this immense structure had a special place in the history of New York architecture. According to the historian Keith D. Revell, the Equitable was erected in 1914, despite protests from its sun-starved neighbors, and rose thirty-six stories straight up into the sky, its great bulk throwing a shadow that covered seven and a half acres. At the base, it filled a complete city block, facing Broadway, extending to the limits of Cedar, Nassau, and Pine streets. Its rentable space could contain fifteen thousand workers, making it the largest, densest office building in the city. The public anger over its arrogant theft of sky, sun, and room on the lunchtime sidewalks did have a valuable consequence: In 1916, New York passed the first zoning law in the city’s history. This insisted upon setbacks in the upper stories of all future sk
yscrapers, thus allowing at least some sunlight to reach the citizens on the streets. In 1916, it was too late for the streets around 120 Broadway, but the new law led to the building of all those Manhattan towers that rose to spires, the most beautiful, of course, being the Chrysler Building.

  I knew nothing of this when I went to work for Doremus & Co. The immediate neighborhood was full of the towers I could see from Brooklyn, but on the street level, it was also layered with the past, which began to tug at me. That past was most graphically embodied by Trinity Church, which I saw every morning and lunch hour. In its Gothic presence, I began to imagine those forgotten years of its creation. Nobody at Doremus & Co. could answer my questions about Trinity or Broadway or the rise of the towers. “We’re getting ads ready for tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal,” one grouchy copywriter said. “Don’t worry about that stuff.” I didn’t worry about it, but I was curious about the world around me. It would take me decades to find answers to my questions.

  One thing I slowly learned was that around the time in the nineteenth century Trinity assumed its architectural dominance, the city itself had already assumed a newer character. Life was marked, above all, by the presence of velocity. Speed of movement, speed of change, speed of growth. From 1825 to 1850, the population had risen from 133,000 to more than half a million. Life was quicker, the people more driven, the pace more frantic. Horse-drawn omnibuses added to the roaring jam of traffic on lower Broadway, as men hurried to jobs or to homes while young men called “runners” dodged around pedestrians, carrying urgent messages by hand. Gaslight came to the streets in the 1820s, with lamplighters announcing the coming of a New York night that would never again be completely dark (the last of the gas lamps vanished around 1914). Men worked later than ever in the gaslit countinghouses along South Street and the East River. New wharves were jutting into the North River like immense fingers, and warehouses were rising nearby to handle the trade that came with the steam-powered ships. The speed of change was astonishing. In the early 1840s, the telegraph increased swift communications with the rest of the world. The Atlantic cable, imperfect at first and then increasingly refined, brought European markets closer to the booming marketplace of New York. By 1840, there were sixty-three wharves on the East River and fifty on the Hudson. The clipper ships, the last, most graceful and lofty of all sailing ships, were born in 1843, clipping days off the journeys to Europe. But they were already doomed to become objects of New York nostalgia.

  Velocity pervaded everything: ideas, visions, the dailiness of street life. As brusque New Yorkers rushed through their Downtown streets, they acquired a reputation for rudeness that has never gone away. The New York accent became general: clipped, blunt, hard, a fist of an accent. More and more New York men gobbled hurried lunches in packed and primitive restaurants, simultaneously devouring afternoon editions of the newspapers crammed with the latest news. Time was money, and so was information. In good weather, many stood in clusters on the streets at noon, feeding on oysters and clams and corn from sidewalk stalls, the way a century later I fed on hot dogs. Fine old Knickerbocker homes were transformed into malodorous, unruly boardinghouses for the young men who were soon being called “bachelors,” while their proud owners retreated to other neighborhoods and their own country of nostalgia.

  One place the Knickerbockers carried in their baggage was called St. John’s Park. All accounts of this exclusive square describe it as a lovely urban oasis, designed in 1803 on the London West End model of small, elegant places of domesticity, trees, and light. There was a small fenced park in the center (for which only residents had a key), the whole lined with handsome Federal and Greek Revival homes, a kind of early version of Gramercy Park. It was located between Laight, Varick, Ericcson, and Hudson streets, a few blocks from where I now live (in what the real estate people call Tribeca). The name came from St. John’s Chapel at the east end of the square, designed in the Georgian-Federal style by John McComb Jr., the Scots builder who worked with the French architect Joseph Mangin on the marvelous new City Hall. At night, the square was illuminated by gas lamps that gave it a warm, intimate glow, and a lone watchman made his rounds. By day, in all seasons, children played, governesses watched, servants shopped for large family meals. In spring and summer, the front and rear gardens blazed with the colors of flowers. The most pervasive sound was made by horses’ well-shod hooves on cobblestones.

  And then came the changes, starting in the 1830s as the North River was transformed by the steamboat, escalating in the 1840s. The ladies and gentlemen of St. John’s Park, many of them descendants of those aspiring aristocrats who were politically defeated forever in the 1820s and 1830s by Andrew Jackson, began to leave. Slowly at first, and then with quickening velocity, the fine houses fell into the purgatory of boardinghouses, their rich owners content to collect rents from the safety of their new homes (some of them located across the river in the heights of Brooklyn). Weeds rose in the green. Disorder alternated with seediness. Warehouses blocked access to the river. In 1869, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt (a son of Staten Island) bought the entire site for a railroad terminal. The church was torn down, its graveyard emptied. The Georgian houses were destroyed. The rail yards of the New York Central filled the days and nights with the squeals of steel wheels on steel tracks and the incessant clanking of couplers ramming into each other while cargo was loaded and unloaded. Eventually, even the railroads moved uptown. There is no sign of the elegant old square now, because the area itself was erased in the 1920s for the approaches to the Holland Tunnel. Nobody now alive can even remember Vanderbilt’s railroad yards.

  During the great days of St. John’s Park, rapid change was general all over the city. “The process of pulling down and building up is abroad,” complained Philip Hone, the businessman-diarist who also served as mayor. “The whole of New York is rebuilt about once in ten years.”

  Some things took longer to change. One of them was poverty. The Five Points grew more squalid and dangerous, even as speculators erected new tenements in other sections to handle, and exploit, the growing numbers of immigrants. The new arrivals were coming up the New York streets from the piers with their own forms of velocity. Most were in flight from the Irish famine or the failed European social revolutions of 1848. The Irish and Germans (along with some French) discovered, of course, that the streets were not paved with gold; that reversal of a cliché became itself a New York cliché. Like most clichés, it was repeated because it was true. Women were paid two dollars a week in a time when a furnished room cost four. It was thus not surprising that more and more prostitutes, many of them part-timers, worked the balconies of theaters or the gaslit shadows off Broadway. More and more criminals, working alone or in gangs, chose the quick robbery in preference to the long unpaid apprenticeships of tradition. Quick. Choose. Do it now. Time is money. In the 1850s, the Irish accounted for 55 percent of arrests, and that percentage would rise even higher. For many young men, gangs provided solidarity, safety, and even small amounts of money; it was better to be a Dead Rabbit or a Plug Ugly than an underpaid working stiff. Other impoverished immigrants chose the instant nirvana of alcohol or opium. A hundred years later, a writer named Willard Motley voiced in his New York novel Knock on Any Door the slogan that could have been applied to thousands of those young nineteenth-century men and women: Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse. Where I grew up in Brooklyn, in a time of street gangs similar to those in Five Points, many apprentice hoodlums used the line without irony. They heard it in the movie version of the novel. It could be used today by many of the city’s hardened young men.

  But, among rich and poor of the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a growing psychological velocity too. On the eve of the Civil War, thousands of New Yorkers were possessed of the dream of the quick fortune. They believed they could be little Astors, if only they could combine ruthlessness, audacity, and luck. The example of Astor was as vivid as Trinity Church. And so they would conceive elaborate sche
mes in land speculation. They would gamble in the stock market, or buy shares in the voyages of commercial clipper ships, or dream up inventions they hoped would change the world. The war against Mexico (1846-48) was a kind of metaphor for this impulse: a quick invasion based on fraudulent premises, a war that with fewer than two thousand American deaths led to the acquisition of about one-half of the territory of Mexico including California, which gave the United States a west coast. As a war, it was the equivalent of winning the lottery. And land was not the only thing that mattered. In 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Creek in California, a discovery kept from Mexican negotiators until after the conclusion of the peace treaty. When the news of gold reached New York, many young men rushed to the West, joining thousands of other Americans as forty-niners. A half-century later, Mark Twain would say that the gold rush drastically changed the American character, ending the tradition of patient apprenticeships, the gradual mastery of self, talent, and money. Gold created the get-rich-quick mentality that has been with us ever since, most recently during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.

  Far from the Rio Grande, New York shared the bounty of victory. Gold from California flowed into the banks of New York. Shrewd, hard Downtown men began planning the transcontinental railroad and were willing to bribe the United States Congress to make it real. In a city and country blazing with golden visions, moral debates were only debates, a form of empty talk. If God didn’t want the United States to spread across the continent, he would have intervened. Or so it was said among some moral men hurrying from Wall Street along Broadway. These discussions were not prolonged. Amid the culture of velocity, New Yorkers talked fast and walked fast. They still do.