USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York, Vol. II > Part 17
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At this time, there were about fifty daily, weekly, semi-weekly and monthly journals in New York. Fore- most among these were the Commercial Advertiser, the oldest of the city papers, at this time under the charge of Col. William L. Stone ; the Evening Post, edited by William Coleman ; the Morning Courier of James Wat- son Wobb and the New York Enquirer of Mordecai M. Noah, blended in 1829 into the Courier and Enquirer ; the Journal of Commerce, commenced in 1827 under the editorship of David Hale ; the Standard, edited by John I. Mumford, and the Spirit of the Times, just issued by William T. Porter. The New York Mirror, edited by George P. Morris, in which N. P. Willis was first attract- ing public attention by a series of piquant European letters, and the Knickerbocker Magasine, commenced in 1833 under the auspices of Peabody and subsequently sold by lin to Louis Gaylord Clark and Clement M.
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CITY OF NEW YORK.
Old Church of the Messiah in Broadway.
Edson, were the only literary papers of the city. In these, Irving, Cooper, Paulding, Bryant, Simms, Fay, and a host of others, now well-known veterans in the literary world, made their first essays as candidates for public favor, and won an earnest of their future laurels.
The dailies were sixpenny journals, and were distri- buted to regular subscribers. Newsboys were unknown, and though, upon the occurrence of some unusual event,
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a hundred extra copies were sometimes struck off in view of a possible outside demand, the chances for the sale of these were so hazardous, that few of the dis- tributors cared to take the trouble and responsibility of offering them for sale. On the 29th of October, 1832, the New York Globe, a two-cent paper, was issued by James Gordon Bennett, the present editor of the Herald, who had been for several years connected with the National Advocate and the Courier and Enquirer; but the experiment proved unsuccessful, and the paper expired just one month after the date of its birth.
The idea of the possibility of a penny paper first originated in the brain of Dr. Horatio David Sheppard, a young medical student, rich in hopes but lacking in money, who vainly endeavored to persuade his friends of the feasibility of the scheme. Convinced as he was that a spicy journal, offered everywhere by boys at the low price of one cent, would be bought up by the crowd with avidity, he found the idea scouted by all the jour- nalists of the city to whom he in turn applied, and when he finally succeeded in prevailing upon Horace Greeley and Francis Story, who were on the point of setting up a printing establishment, to print his paper and give him credit for a week, he could only secure their cooperation by fixing the price at two cents per copy. On the 1st of January, 1833, he issued the Morning Post, his pro- jected paper, in the midst of a violent snow-storm, which checked the sale and disheartened the few newsboys engaged in the enterprise. At the end of the first weck, he met the promised payment, during the second, his receipts scarcely covered half his expenses, and at the
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expiration of the third, the young printers, themselves almost destitute of capital, finding him wholly unable to meet his engagements, were compelled to refuse him further credit, and thus to stop the publication of the paper. Discouraged at his ill success, Dr. Sheppard abandoned the ranks of journalism and returned to his profession.
The idea fell into other hands. On the 3d of Septem- ber, 1833, Benjamin II. Day, who, in 1829, had com- menced the publication of the Daily Sentinel, which he afterward sold to George H. Evans, issued the Sun, the first penny paper ever published in New York. He soon discovered that he had struck a vein. Sneered at and despised by its more pretentious contemporaries, the cheapness of the little paper commended it to the mass, and in less than a year, its circulation increased to eight thousand copies.
Entering the lists of competition with its powerful rivals without subscribers, and the acknowledged organ of no party, the proprietor of the new journal struck upon the method for insuring its circulation first projected by Sheppard, and, advertising for boys to work for him at two dollars per week, dispatched them with a hundred and twenty-five copies each to different parts of the city to cry the papers for sale to the passers-by, with a promise of more at a reduced rate as soon as these should be disposed of. In the course of two or three hours, the papers were sold, and the boys came back for a fresh supply, which was given them at the rate of nine cents per dozen ; and from this period may be dated the origin of the race of newsboys, now
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naturalized in almost every city in the Union. The experiment soon proved successful ; and the boys made the business profitable both to themselves and their employer. Ere long, the other publishers, taking the cue from this success, published an extra edition of their papers for the newsboys, while, by way of exchange, several of the regular distributors of these, finding that the profits of the boys amounted to more than their small weekly salaries, set to work to procure subscribers to the Sun, and to establish newspaper routes as private speculations.
The most curious fact in the history of this first penny journal, was the publication of the celebrated " Moon Hoax," or Discoveries in the Moon, written by Richard Adams Locke, at that time editor of the Sun and subse- quently one of the proprietors of the New Era. This paper, which purported to be an account of Sir John F. W. Herschel's discoveries at the Cape of Good Hope, taken from the Supplement of the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, was written with every appearance of con- sisteney. After disarming suspicion by a scientific description of an ingeniously-invented telescope by which these discoveries had been made, the author pro- ceeded to delineate the geographical features and the inhabitants of the moon with such graphic power and show of probability, that the gravest journals swallowed the bait, and took the account as a historical fact, piqued as they were at the lucky chance which had thrown the earliest intelligence of so important a discovery into the hands of the despised penny paper. One journal, indeed, gravely assured its readers on the day after the
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publication in the Sun of the lunar discoveries, that it had also received the account by the same mail, and was only prevented from publishing it by want of sufficient space. The papers throughout the country copied and commented on the article, keeping its much despised origin as far as possible out of sight, and, in many cases, leaving it to be supposed that they themselves had copied it from the Edinburgh " Supplement." Sir John Herschel was everywhere extolled as the greatest dis- coverer of the age, and enthusiasts even began to speculate on the possibility of opening a telegraphic communication with their newly-descried neighbors. The discovery of the hoax excited universal merriment ; but the offence was not soon forgotten or forgiven by the cheated contemporaries of the paper which had · issued the canard. In 1838, Mr. Day disposed of the Sun establishment to Moses Y. Beach for thirty-eight thousand dollars.
Stimulated by the success of this enterprise, in 1834, William J. Stanley, Willoughby Lynde, and Billings Hayward, commenced the publication of a second penny paper called the Transcript. This proved tolerably suc- cessful, and was continued until 1839. Soon after its publication, the Moon was issued by George H. Evans, the printer and publisher of the Working Men's Advocate. This, which was also a penny paper, survived but two or three years. The fourth penny paper, the Morning Star,. was published soon after by Lincoln & Simmons ; but this proved a failure, as did also the Morning Dis- patch, published in 1839, by Day, the former proprietor of the Sun, and edited by H. Hastings Weld.
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At this time, some of the best known journalists of the present day made their debut in the ranks of their profession. On the 22d of March, 1834, Horace Gree- ley, Jonas Winchester, and E. Sibbett, commenced the publication of the New Yorker, printed at first on a large folio sheet, and afterward in two forms, folio and quarto, the former at two and the latter at three dollars a year. This paper, though literary in its general character, leaned strongly to the side of the whig party. Park Benjamin was an occasional contributor to its columus, and in 1840 Henry J. Raymond, the present editor of the New York Times, then a recent graduate of Burling- ton College, Vermont, began his editorial career upon a salary of eight dollars per week. On the 6th of May, 1835, the New York Herald made its appearance as a two-cent paper, under the auspices of James Gordon Bennett and Anderson & Smith, a printing firm in Ann street. A few months after, the office of the paper, together with the whole printing establishment, was destroyed by fire ; upon which Anderson and Smith withdrew from the firm, leaving the paper in the charge of Bennett, who has ever since retained absolute control of its columns. In June of the same year, the New York Express was first issued by James and Erastus Brooks, and on the 10th of April, 1841, the Tribune appeared as the avowed organ of the whig party, edited by Horace Greeley with the assistance of Henry J. Ray- mond. This was a daily penny paper, about one-third the size of the present Tribune. In the ensuing July, Greeley formed a partnership with Thomas MeElrath, and soon after merged the New Yorker, together with
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the Log Cabin, a small paper which he had issued during the Harrison campaign, into the Weekly Tribune. Ray- mond quitted the paper two years after to form a connection with the Courier and Enquirer, which he maintained for several years ; then, on the 18th of Sep- tember, 1851, issued the first number of the N. Y. Daily Times, at first a penny sheet, which, the following year, was doubled in price and size, and thus placed on a par with the most prominent of the rival dailies.
At the time of the establishment of the N. Y. Tribune, a hundred periodicals and twelve daily papers were published in the city of New York. Of these, the Commercial Advertiser, Courier and Enquirer, New York American, Express, and Tribune, supported the whigs ; the Evening Post, Journal of Commerce, Sun, and Herald, inclined to the democratic party, and the Signal, Star, and Tatler were neutral. The Commercial Advertiser, was then, as now, the oldest journal in the city, having been first issued on the 9th of December, 1793. Next was the Evening Post, which, commenced as a federal paper in 1800, had, in 1830, espoused the cause of the democratic party.
The year 1835 will long be remembered as the era of the most fearful conflagration that ever devastated the city of New York. The fire broke out on the night of the 16th of December, in the lower part of the city. The night was intensely cold-colder than any that had been known for more than half a century ; the little water that could be obtained froze in the fire-hose before it could be used, the buildings were mostly old and wooden ; in short, everything favored the work of destruction.
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The flames raged fiercely for three days, completely lay- ing waste the business part of the city, and consuming 648 houses and stores with $18,000,000 worth of pro- perty ; among which were the marble Exchange in Wall street, hitherto deemed fire-proof, and the South Dutch Church in Garden street. Some buildings were finally blown up by gunpowder by order of the mayor, and the work of ruin was thus arrested. But the destruction had been fearful, and not less terrible were the consequences. Unable to meet the heavy demands of the sufferers, the insurance companies unanimously suspended payment, and the city seemed alnost beggared at a blow.
Close upon this calamity followed the commercial distress of the winter of 1837, which succeeded the sus-
0120501-607
Wall street looking toward Broadway.
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pension of the United States Bank. For a time, the business world seemed utterly paralyzed, bankruptcy followed bankruptcy in quick succession, and ere long the banks of the State unanimously suspended payment for one year, having been authorized to do so by the State legislature. But the elasticity of the city was not long depressed by these misfortunes, a reaction took place before many months had passed, and business revived more briskly than before.
Cornelius W. Lawrence was at this time mayor of the city, for the first time elected to the office by the votes of the people in April, 1834, in conformity with a recent amendment to the State Constitution. Mr. Lawrence was the candidate of the democratic party, which still retained its ascendency in the politics of the city. Two new parties had recently arisen ; the native American, whose policy it was to exclude all foreigners from a voice in political affairs ; and the equal rights or agrarian party, which, crystallizing in 1829 through the influence of the lectures of Frances Wright, then on her second visit to the country, had grown into a powerful faction, and now aspired to the leadership of the democratic party, from whose ranks it had first sprung. This name was also claimed by the Tammany party. The two fac- tions assembled together at the primary meetings at Tammany Hall, the acknowledged democratic head- quarters, each assuming precedence in the councils of the party, and scenes of violence often ensued. A curious accident fastened the name of " loco foco" on the friends of equal rights, a name which afterward came to be applied to the whole democratic party.
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Loco foco matches-an outgrowth from the phosplio- rized splinters with their accompanying vial of acid and cotton which, in 1825, had superseded the ancient tinder- box, with its flint and steel-had recently come into use with the penny newspapers, and were still regarded as a novelty by the community at large. At a ratification meeting held in Tammany Hall in 1835, at which the Tammany men, finding themselves in the minority, suddenly turned off the gas and left the assembly in darkness, a box of the newly invented matches was opportunely produced by the opposite party, which was henceforth derisively styled "loco foco" by its oppo- nents. The faction, however, accepted the name, and, idealizing it into an emblem of promptitude, proudly wore it as a badge of honor, and it was not long before the once despised nickname was adopted and acknow- ledged by the whole democratic party. It is a curious fact that most if not all of the party appellations which have served at various times to distinguish the politics of the country first originated in this city-republican, federalist, whig, democrat, loco foco, and many more.
The Sixteenth Ward was created in 1835, as was also the Seventeeth during the following year. At the spring election of 1837, Aaron Clark was elected mayor by the whigs, who also succeeded in gaining majorities in both boards of the Common Council. The election of the fol- lowing year was attended with the same result, but in the spring of 1839, Mr. Clark, who had been for the third time nominated by his party to the mayoralty, was dereated by Isaac L. Varian, the candidate of the demo- crats, who carried twelve wards out of the seventeen by
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small majorities. Mr. Varian retained his office until 1841, when he was succeeded by Robert H. Morris, who was elected by the still triumphant democratic party.
On the 23d of April, 1821, the attention of the citizens had been aroused by a new event, which was fraught with interest to the mercantile portion of the community - - the arrival from England of the steamships "Sirius" and "Great Western," the first ocean steamers ever as yet seen in the harbor of New York. This new bond of union between the Old World and the New was hailed with an enthusiasm scarcely equalled by that displayed on the late announcement of the success of the Atlantic cable, and schemes were at once projected by the busy speculators for the establishment of a line of steamers between the continents, which were realized a few years after by the Cunard and the Collins lines.
The spring election of 1835 decided another important event in the annals of the city. The Manhattan Works had long since been voted a failure, but though various schemes had been from time to time devised for bringing water into the city from the Bronx and various other rivers in the suburbs, nothing had been accomplished, and the people had been forced to return to the wells and pumps of olden times. But the growth of the city had now rendered it impossible to be longer delayed, and after much consideration, a plan for constructing an aqueduct from the Croton River was approved by the corporation, and the question of "Water" or "No Water" submitted to the people at the following election, and decided in the affirmative by a large majority, though those were not wanting who bewailed
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High Bridge-Croton Aqueduct.
the extravagance of the measure, and thought that the water which had served their ancestors would answer very well for the present generation. The popular ver- diet rendered, the Croton Aqueduct was at once com- menced at a distance of forty miles from the City Hall and about five miles from the Hudson River, where a dam was thrown across the Croton River, creating a pond five miles in length, covering an area of four hun- dred acres and containing 500,000,000 gallons of water. From this dam, the aqueduct proceeded, now tunnelling through solid rocks, then crossing valleys by embank- ments and brooks by culverts until it reached the Harlem
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River, which it crossed by the magnificent High Bridge, built of stone, 1,450 feet long, with fourteen piers, eight of eighty feet and six of fifty feet span, one hundred and fourteen feet above tide water to the top, at a cost of $900,000. From this bridge, at the foot of One Hun- dred and Seventy-fourth street, the aqueduct proceeded to the Receiving Reservoir at the corner of Eighty-sixth street and Sixth Avenue, covering thirty-five aeres, and containing 150,000,000 gallons, whence the water was conveyed to the Distributing Reservoir on Murray Hill,
Croton Reservoir, on Fifth Avenue, between Fortieth and Forty-second Streets.
of a capacity of 21,000,000 gallons, and thence distri- buted by means of iron pipes through the city. The work progressed rapidly. On the 4th of July, 1842, the water was let into the reservoir, and the event was cele- brated by an imposing procession. But these immense
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reservoirs have since grown too small for the increasing wants of the city ; and a mammoth reservoir has since been constructed in the Central Park of a capacity ex- ceeding any other in existence.
Next came the Magnetic Telegraph, first opened to the New Yorkers through the New York, Philadelphia and Washington line, constructed in 1845-the second in the United States, the first having been constructed in 1844 between Washington and Baltimore. In the following year, a line was opened between Boston and New York, and another the year after, between New York and Albany. Others followed in quick succession, and New York was soon placed within speaking distance of the chief cities of the Union.
On the 19th of July, 1845, another great fire, second only in its ravages to that of 1835, broke out in New street in the vicinity of Wall, and burned in a southerly direction to Stone street, laying waste the entire district between Broadway and the eastern side of Broad street, and consuming several million dollars' worth of pro- perty. The explosion of a saltpetre warehouse in Broad street during this conflagration, gave rise to the vexed question, " Will saltpetre explode ?" which furnished food for some research and much merriment to the savans of the day.
In 1844, James Harper was elected mayor of the city by the native American party, aided by the support of a large number of whigs. In the elections of the two fol- lowing years, the democrats were triumphant, electing William F. Havemeyer and A. H. Mickle to the mayor- alty. In 1847, the whigs regained the ascendency, elect-
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ing their candidate, William V. Brady. The following year, William F. Havemeyer was reelected by his party. In the April election of 1849, the whigs were again suc- cessful, electing Caleb S. Woodhull as mayor, and gain- ing a majority in both boards of the Common Council. In 1849, an amended charter was granted to the city, by which the day of the charter election was changed from the second Tuesday in April to the day of the general State election in November, the term of office to com- mence on the first Monday of the ensuing January. By the provisions of this charter, which was to take effect on the first of June, 1849, the Mayor and Aldermen were to hold their offices for two years, while the Assist- ant Aldermen were to be elected annually as before. The city at this time consisted of eighteen wards, an additional one having been erected in 1845. Another was added in 1851, and the number was increased to twenty during the course of the following year.
The mayoralty of Caleb S. Woodhull was marked by the occurrence of the Astor Place Opera riot, an event which created as much excitement as did the notorious Doctors' Mob in its day. The native American party was at this time powerful in the city, and a strong pre- judice existed among the populace against every one branded with the stamp of foreign birth. To enter into a discussion of the causes or the justice of this hostility, would transcend the limits of the present work ; it suf- fices to say that, at this crisis, the open rivalry between Edwin Forrest, the favorite American tragedian, and the English actor, Macready, was made the occasion for a popular outbreak, and that, on the night of the 10th of
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May, 1849, while the latter was performing Macbeth, in compliance with an invitation, at the newly-erected Astor Place Opera-house, the mob surrounded the building and attempted to hinder the performance of the play. A scene of violence ensued ; the mob, incensed by opposition, threatened to burn the building, and the mayor was finally compelled, as a last resort, to call out the military and order them to fire upon the rioters. The volley was succeeded by a sharp encounter, in which the mob assailed the soldiers in turn, wounding nearly one hundred and fifty of their number, and the contest
Interior of Castle Garden in former times.
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did not end until several valuable lives had been sacri- ficed and a host of bitter feelings engendered which time has not yet been able to efface.
On the expiration of his term of office, Mayor Wood- hull was succeeded by Ambrose C. Kingsland, the candi- date of the whig party. Many local events and changes occurred about the same time, which are of too recent a date to require more than a brief notice at our hands. Among these were the visit of Jenny Lind to the United States, and her first appearance in Castle Garden on the 7th of September, 1850, the subsequent visits of Parodi, Catherine Hayes, Sontag, Grisi and many other Euro- pean celebrities ; the new municipal regulations imposed by the amended city charter of 1849, the trial of the caloric ship Ericsson, the Grinnell expedition to the Arctic regions, and the arrival of the Hungarian patriot, Louis Kossuth, on the 5th of December, 1851.
At the November election of 1852, Jacob A. Wester- velt was elected mayor by the democratic party. During the ensuing session of the Legislature, the city charter was again amended in some important particulars, among which was the institution of a Board of Councilmen, composed of sixty members, to be chosen respectively from the sixty districts into which the Common Council was directed to apportion the city, in the place of the long-standing Board of Assistant Aldermen.
The chief event which characterized the administration of Mayor Westervelt, was the opening of the World's Fair for the Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations, on the 1 1th of July, 1853, at the Crystal Palace in Reser- voir Square, near the Distributing Reservoir of the
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Crystal Palace.
Croton Aqueduct. The fairy-like Greek cross of glass, bound together with withes of iron, with its graceful dome, its arched naves, and its broad aisles and gal- leries, filled with choice productions of art and manu- factures gathered from the most distant parts of the earth-quaint old armor from the Tower of London, gossamer fabrics from the looms of Cashmere, Sèvres china, Gobelin tapestry, Indian curiosities, stuffs, jewelry, musical instruments, carriages and machinery of home and foreign manufacture, Marochetti's colossal equestrian statue of Washington, Kiss's Amazon, Thor- waldsen's Christ and the Apostles, Powers' Greek slave, and a host of other works of art beside-will long be remembered as the most tastenil ornament that ever graced the metropolis. Contemporary with this, was Franconi's Hippodrome on Madison Square, covering an
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