USA > New York > New York City > History of New York City : embracing an outline sketch of events from 1609 to 1830, and a full account of its development from 1830 to 1884 Volume II > Part 22
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Since the publishing firm of Munn & Co. was begun, in 1845, the number of applications for patents prepared by that establishment and filed in the United States Patent Office and sent abroad and filed in foreign patent offices had aggregated ninety thousand at the beginning of 1883.
Early in this decade the largest fire-insurance company in New York was formed. The fires of 1833 and 1845 had created an indisposition to risk much capital in insurance enterprises, as we have observed, and New York was behind several cities in this respect, where companies were existing with capitals of $500,000. But in 1852 a number of leading merchants on comparing views came to the conclusion that the growth and enterprise of the city demanded something more substantial in the line of indemnity than the small local insurance companies were able to furnish. The result was the formation, in January, 1833, of a company with 8500,000 capital. There was, however, a seeming reluc- tance on the part of the new company's managers to enter boldly upon the general insurance field, and the object originally aimed at, as regarded a widely scattered business and a liberal underwriting policy. appeared to have failed of accomplishment.
To meet what was manifestly required, another company of large capital with more progressive scope was projected, and on the 13th of April, 1853, the HOME INSURANCE COMPANY, with 8500,000 capital, all paid. in, entered upon its career of honor and success. It was wisely assimned, at the outset, that a New York company, with ample capital. with a proper spirit of enterprise for such a work, if conducted judi- ciously, ought to and must succeed in a general agency business. It was in this spirit and with this aim that the projectors of the Home began to lay the foundations of an institution which has become the largest and most successful insurance company on this continent doing an exclusively fire business.
When the Home began its work only one New York company was professing to do any agency business whatever. By many, if not most, of the local underwriters the new enterprise was looked upon as
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a somewhat daring and decidedly doubtful experiment. The managers of the Home, however, proceeded promptly to the establishment of agencies at prominent points in the New England, Middle, and West- ern States. Within the first year and a half 140 agents were actively engaged in cultivating the field. The entire working force of officers and employés of all the New York and Brooklyn insurance companies fifty years ago did not outnumber the present working force of the head office of the Home alone. The 140 agents of 1855 have become an army of more than 4000, inclusive of sub-agents and partners in agency firms.
Meanwhile the capital of the company has been several times in- creased, to keep pace with the growing demand for its policies, until in 1575 it reached $3,000,000. The premium income rose steadily from about $250,000 the first year to 82, 745,662 in 1882. The total income of the Home in the latter year was 83,086,817, and the total assets of the company at the close of that year reached the amount of $7,208.459 -- a sum one fifth larger than the combined capital of all the fire-insur- ance companies of New York and Brooklyn fifty years ago. Of this aggregate of assets, no less than $1, 774,061 represented the reserved profit or net surplus over capital and all liabilities, including among such liabilities an ample reinsurance fund (82,116,832) to meet the contingent claims upon unexpired policies.
During the thirty years of the existence of this great corpora- tion down to April, 1883, its total premiums received have been $57.204,108 ; amount of interest received, $6,125,111 ; amount of losses paid, 834,760.260 ; number of losses, 60,964 ; amount of dividends paid (including two stock dividends of $500,000 each). 86.965.000. The total amount covered by the policies of the company on all kinds of property during these thirty years has been something more than $6,000,000,000, a sum almost startling of itself, and indicat- ing plainly the energetic character of the management and the unlimited confidence of property-holders all over the country in the Home's contracts of indemnity. To accomplish such results despite the many large fires that have occurred during the last thirty years, including the phenomenal conflagrations of Chicago in 1871 and of Boston in 1872, indicates the exercise of peculiar managerial skill.
The Home entered upon its work of prosecuting an agency business fully equipped with officers who believed underwriting to be a profes- sion, and who were experts in its practice. To its progressive and vet conservative methods of management the insurance business of the country owes much of its honorable position.
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The president of the Home Insurance Company is Charles J. Martin." who has been with it from its foundation, first as its secretary, and then as its presiding officer. Its vice-president is D. A. Heald ; its secretary is J. II. Washburn, and T. B. Greene and William L. Bigelow are assistant secretaries.
* Charles J. Martin is a native of Middlesex County, N. J., where he was born in November, 1815. " He came to New York with his parents when between five and six years of age, and was a resident of this city during his childhood and youth and until about twenty-six years ago, when he transferred his residence to the mountain-side at Orange, in his native State. He received his education at one of the common schools in the Eighth Ward, known to the elder residents of that ward as the Village Academy, his father being its honored and respected principal for more than a quarter of a century.
Leaving school at the age of fourteen, with a creditable record in reading, writing, and arithmetic, he entered the employ of a respectable retail dry-goods house on Hudson Street, in the Fifth Ward, that street being then one of the principal retail dry-goods marts of the city. There he remained nearly three years, when, through the influence of a relative who was an officer of the company, a clerkship was tendered him in the office of the Contributionship Fire Insurance Company, then occupying rooms at No. 44 (now No. 56) Wall Street. His main object in making the change was to escape the long hours from early morning until late at night and the drudgery of opening and sweeping out the store, making the fires in winter, carrying out packages of goods sold, etc., to which the younger clerks in such establishments were subjected in those days. This was in January, 1833. In this office during the six years following he received his first training as an underwriter, and was an eye-witness, during all that terrible night of the great fire of December 16, 1835.
In the early part of 1839 young Martin left his clerkship to take the position of secre- tary of a new company then being organized, which had been tendered him, but the enterprise proved an injudicious one at the time, from the fact of the depressed condition of business in the city and of the whole country, which had not yet recovered from the effects of the general revulsion and bankruptcy of 1837. After a brief existence the company went into liquidation and wound up its affairs, returning to the stockholders the capital which had been paid in, with the loss of only about three per cent. He had the charge, under a committee of the directors, of winding up the affairs of the institu- tion, after which for a short period he had partial employment only in his profession until the winter of 1843-44, when he went to New Orleans, and was the first agent appointed by the company in whose service had been his clerkship of six years. Return- ing to New York in the spring of 1845, Mr. Martin was appointed general agent of that company, with authority and powers such as had probably never before been given to an employé in a similar position.
The great fire of July, 1845, which ruined many companies in this city and sadly crippled many others, brought the necessity for discontinuing business in April, 1846, and winding up its affairs, the charge of which also fell into Mr. Martin's hands under a receiver. When nearly through with these duties he became associated with the agent in this city of the Franklin Fire Insurance Company of Philadelphia, and after a few months was appointed sole agent. Not agreeing with the then head of the company in regard to the management of the business of its New York agency, ho resigned the position ju February, 1850, and within thirty days thereafter was offered the secretaryship of the
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Ang Iev Ges E Fepine, N York
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THIRD DECADE, 1850-1860.
Commercial Insurance Company, then about organizing. He accepted the position, and woon placed the company among the first of its class at that time in this city. Early in the spring of 1553 he accepted the secretaryship of the Home Insurance Company, which was then organized for the purpose of doing an agency business throughout the country in addition to the ordinary business of fire insurance in the city and vicinity.
The varied experience thus obtained had eminently fitted Mr. Martin for the duties of this new, and as was thought by many at that time doubtful, enterprise. Filling the position of secretary for about twenty months, he had so won the confidence of the board of . directors daring that time that upon the retirement of the chief officer he was called to the presidential chair, which he has since filled with the result which is shown in the brief history of the company given in the text.
Mr. Martin is one of the veterans in fire insurance, not only in this city but in the country, having just completed his half century as a fire underwriter since he commenced his clerkship in an insurance office in Wall Street. There are only two others in the business who antedate him, one of whom is the venerable president of the North River Insurance Company of this city, who commenced his career in that company in 1822, and has been connected with it until the present time.
CHAPTER III.
E ARLY in the third decade a heroic effort was made to purge the city of one of its most corrupt sinks of moral impurity and crime, familiarly known as the Five Points. The locality derived its name from an area of open land containing about one acre of ground, into which five streets entered like five rivers entering a bay. These streets were Little Water, Cross, Anthony, Orange, and Mulberry. In the centre of this area, surrounded by a wooden paling, was a small triangular space known as Paradise Square. Opposite this park was the Old Brewery, so famous in the history of this region. Its neigh- bors were miserable tumble-down buildings swarming with squalid men, women, and children of every hue ; liquor-shops were every- where, and nearly every house was a brothel. The men, as a rule. were petty criminals ; the women were vile and disfigured by de- bauchery of every kind, and the children were the miserable victims of these horrible surroundings.
Of the Five Points, Charles Dickens, who visited the locality in 1841 with two police officers, wrote :
" This is the place : these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here bear the same fruit here as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home and all the wide world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. . Many of their pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all fours? and why they talk instead of grunting ? So far nearly every house is a low tavern."
After describing some personal adventures, Mr. Dickens continued :
" Here, too, are lanes and alleys paved with mnd knee deep ; underground chambers where they dance and game, the walls bedecked with rough designs of ships, and forts, and flags, and American eagles out of number ; ruined houses open to the street, whence through wide gaps in the walls other ruins loom upon the eye, as though the world of vice and misery had nothing else to show ; hideous tenements, which take their name from robbery and murder ; * all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here !"
* One was called Murderer's Alley, another the Den of Thieves, and so on. Ther3 were underground passages connecting blocks of houses on different streets.
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Such was the loathsome place-more loathsome than the stables of Augeas-which pious and benevolent women, with herculean strength of purpose, attempted to cleanse. The seemingly hopeless task was begun with prayer and faith ; it was sustained by prayer and faith ; the workers, few in number and feeble in resources at first, wrought with courage and fidelity, stimulated by faith, and they finally achieved a victory. They turned into this abode of the sirens the pure waters of religious instruction, moral suasion, human charity and kindness, and intellectual and spiritual aliment, and it was cleansed to a great extent, and remains so. The bulk of the population has changed in nationality and character. The chief denizens of the neighborhood of the Five Points are now Italian organ-grinders, bootblacks, peanut- venders, many beggars, receivers of goods stolen by petty thieves, Chinese cigar and opium peddlers, and others with no " visible means' of earning a livelihood. Open vice and immorality are no more soon there. Business houses are yearly coming nearer and nearer to that once vile locality, and the time seems not to be far distant when the renovation and purification of the Five Points will be completed.
The story of the cleansing of this foul locality forms an exceedingly interesting chapter in the history of the city of New York, and may be briefly told !.
The work was really instituted two years before the opening of this decade. For several years the New York Ladies' Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church had been anxious to include the Points within the sphere of their labors. In their report for Ist they said :
" We intend to make a new point on Centre or Elm streets, in the vicinity of the Tombs. The deepest interest was manifested by the board respecting this effort. Sev- eral members pledged their personal labors to the Sunday-school, and all feel that this is emphatically ' mission ground.' We plead for the children-for we commence with the Sabbath-school -- the children, because through them we hope to reach the parents : the children. because ere-long they will hold the destiny of our city within their hands. We expect to employ a missionary there who will avail himself of every providencial opening for usefulness. If there is a spot in this crowded city where vice reigns unchecked, surely all will admit it to be in that vicinity ; and who can think of the hundreds born in sin, nurtured in misery, with no earthly prospect but the prison and the gallows, with- out a deep, unutterable yearning to snatch them from the fearful vortex ?"
A committee was appointed to visit the neighborhood. No suitable place could then be found to open a mission, and the work was delaved until 1550. The society asked the Conference to send them a mission- ary for the Five Points-a dreadful plague-spot-a focus of moral con- tagion. To this request the Conference cheerfully responded. The
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Rev. L. M. Pease was sent. He was soon succeeded by the Rev. J. Luckey.
The devoted women engaged in this work were encouraged by the sympathy and interest of their husbands, brothers, and friends, and they selected a number of gentlemen of the highest respectability and social and business standing to act as an advisory committee, for the difficulties of the task were foreseen. This committee was empowered, in conjunction with the missionary, to find a suitable place and make all arrangements for the opening of the Sabbath-school. A room was found at the corner of Little Water and Cross streets, about 20 by 40 feet in size. It was thoroughly cleaned and seated, and made capable of accommodating about two hundred persons comfortably. There a Sabbath-school was first opened, composed of seventy pupils.
Such a school ! It was never equalled in quality before nor since. Neglected children, emaciated, half naked, and filthy ; hardened and reckless adults encased in filth and rags ; young women with linea- ments of former beauty scarred and marred by the fangs of vice ; half- grown boys, already victims of intemperance and licentiousness ; and half-grown girls, some reckless in demeanor, and some modest and anxious. " I never imagined a more vivid representation of hell," said a lady who was present at this first Sunday-school at the Five Points. The pioneers in this work, men and women, sang and prayed, and exhorted their hearers to lead better lives, specially urging the im- portance of personal cleanliness. Such words and such music had prob- ably never before been heard by a large majority of the listeners.
For a few Sabbaths the school was a sort of pandemonium-a circus rather than a Sabbath-school. The children were unruly, for they had never been taught lessons of self-restraint. This lack was one of the most painful features to be considered, for the anxious question would arise, To what will all this lead ? The boys would perform somersets. play leap-frog, quarrel, fight, and swear, or follow any other inclina- tion which arose. But it was not long before the exercise of good judgment and extreme kindness transformed the school into an orderly organization, and gave the projectors pleasing hopes for the future.
The urgent necessity for an every-day school was apparent at the outset, for weekly impressions on the mind so indurated by vice and poverty were too evanescent to be of much benefit, to the children especially. Preparations were made for the organization of a school : a teacher was selected, donations of maps, books, slates, etc., were received, and the ladies were rejoicing in the prospect of a wider field of usefulness. when the school was placed in other hands and
,
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removed entirely from the control and much of the influence of the mission.
One of the greatest obstacles to the work of the mission was the prevalence of intemperance in the neighborhood. To remove this obstacle in some degree stated temperance meetings were held at the mission-rooms, at which temperance addresses were made, temperance songs sung, and earnest exhortations to sobriety delivered. The effect of this effort was wonderful. In the first year one thousand persons had signed the temperance pledge. Among the signers were some of the worst denizens of the Five Points. In a large majority of cases the pledge was faithfully adhered to.
During the first year a successful effort was made to find employ- ment for those who were willing to work. After much effort an establishment was formed in which fifty or sixty men and women found constant employment. They boarded in the house of the missionary, and generally attended the religious meetings, and the children the Sabbath-school. The same adverse influence which removed the day- school from the control of the society also operated here in a similar way.
The mission-room becoming too small for the number of men, women, and children who gathered there, a large building known as the Old Brewery was purchased and converted into a mission-house. It was a large, dilapidated structure situated on Paradise Square. It was a resort and a shelter for the most active and depraved of the dan- gerous classes. Low, dark, winding passages ran through the building, and thereby thieves and murderers were enabled, the first to conceal their plunder and the second to make way with their victims. It was a fortress of crime, and in it dark deeds were almost nightly committed with impunity. The society appealed to the public for help to pur- chase this building in order to change it from a pest-house of sin to a school of virtue. The response was immediate and generous, and in less than six months 818,000 of the $16,000 needed to complete the purchase of the building was subscribed. The Old Brewery was bought in March, 1852, and the remaining 83000 were soon subscribed.
In November of the same year the children of the Five Points enjoyed their first Thanksgiving dinner. The gathering there on that occasion was a memorable scene. The guests were the children of the Sabbath-school and hopeful candidates. In upper rooms were tubs of water and attendant women. There the children were scrubbed, arrayed in clean suits of clothes, and each furnished with a badge. These were then gathered in the mission-room. . At half past four-
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o'clock an orderly procession of 370 children was fornied and marched to the mammoth tent of the Evangelical Alliance, sixty feet in diameter, which was pitched in Paradise Square. They entered the tent singing :
" The morn of hope is breaking, All doubt now disappears ; The Five Points now are waking To penitential tears."
The tables were spread in the tent, and the abundant provisions were transferred to them from the office in the Old Brewery. The eager, hungry throng cheered each of the sixty turkeys, as well as the chick- ens and geese and ornamental pyramids, as they passed into the tent- a sight marvellous to behold to many of the bright eyes dancing with unwonted joy.
" It was touching," wrote an eye-witness, "to see those little ones. rescued from infamy and admitted to the possibilities of virtue, stand with folded hands before the table while the Doxology was sung and a blessing asked."
The evening entertainment was closed at an early hour with an illumination of the Old Brewery, emptied of its sin, and for three or four nights it was thrown open to the public, and thousands of people with lighted candles groped through its dark recesses.
The Old Brewery was demolished in December, 1852, to make room for a new mission-house to be erected on its site. After its demolition a well-known journalist wrote of the old fortress of Satan :
" What no legal enactment, what no machinery of municipal government could effect, Christian women have brought about quietly, but thoroughly and triumphantly. From henceforth the Old Brewery is no more. The great problem of how to remove the Five Points had engaged the attention of both the legislative and executive branches of the city government, and both had abandoned the task in despair. It is to the credit of the Methodist Episcopal Church that they were the first to enter the then unpromising field, and it will be an imperishable honor to the Ladies' Home Missionary Society of that Church that with them the idea originated, and by them has been so successfully carried Out."
On the 27th of January, 1853, the corner-stone of the new mission- house was laid. On that occasion the Rev. Dr. De Witt, of the Reformed Dutch Church, delivered an address, and the secretary of the American Bible Society read a brief history of the operations of that society at the Five Points. Bishop Janes, of the Methodist Epis- copal Church, in laying the corner-stone, remarked :
"Education is to be promoted, therefore here is to be a free school-room ; virtue and temperance are to be advanced, and here we have a lecture-room ; the salvation of im-
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mortal souls is our end in view, and there will be a chapel in the edifice ; and as tem- poral blessings will be an object, here will be accommodations for the sick and needy."
On the 1Sth of June following the mission-house was dedicated to its sacred uses-the promotion of education, virtue, and religion. It was a substantial edifice of brick, five stories in height, seventy-five feet in length on the street, and forty-five feet in depth. It contains a chapel, in which 500 persons may be comfortably seated, and in which services are held three times each Sunday. Next to the chapel is the dwelling- house of the missionary and his family. The ground floor had school- rooms, and in the upper stories were twenty tenements for poor and deserving families, who, as an equivalent for their rent, were to keep the building clean. The original cost of the building was $36,000. Extensive additions have been made to it-large school-rooms in the rear and a four-story buikling on the street, which is used for various purposes. The institution was incorporated in 1856.
According to the report of the managers * for 1852, these buildings were all free of debt, and nineteen families occupied the upper part. They had given away during the year 517,834 rations, and assisted and relieved 5146 persons. They had given away during the year a large , quantity of garments of every kind-11,806 pieces. To the children who attend the day-school they give a hot dinner every day-beef soup with vegetables, mutton stew, fish, hominy, rice, and bread. It is really the only substantial meal the 400 children have each day. There had been only two deaths among the SS7 children who had been taught in the school during the year. Within the ten years (1872->2) over 6000 children had been cared for by the mission. They have a sewing-school wherein the girls are taught the useful art very thoroughly.
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