New York in the early 1830s brimmed with energy.
The harbor had been a thriving port since the 1700s, but the completion
of the Erie Canal in 1825 linking the city with the vast agricultural
resources in the nation’s interior solidified New York’s
centrality to the national economy. By the 1830s, nearly 250,000
people lived in New York City. Traders, bankers, speculators, shipbuilders,
craftsmen, canal diggers, cart-pullers, and workers in the city's
early manufacturing trades peopled an island still only sparsely
settled above 14th Street. While the city was nowhere near the polyglot
metropolis it would become over the next century, there were still
significant and visible class and ethnic divisions within New York
society.
One factor affecting the growth and increasing diversity of the
city was immigration. In the 1830s New York City was in the process
of attracting large numbers of poor Europeans, including a massive
wave of Irish immigrants seeking relief from British colonial rule.
(Between 1830 and 1850, the foreign-born population of New York
grew from 9% to 46%.) Most Irish newcomers settled in and around
the Five-Points neighborhood in the city's Sixth Ward. A high percentage
of them practiced Catholicism, a fact that nurtured a simmering
anti-Irish sentiment in the still overwhelmingly Protestant city.
Many Americans viewed Irish Catholics, because of their loyalty
to the Pope and strong communal ties with one another, as unsuitable
candidates for participation in American democratic life. In addition,
that many Irish immigrants came to New York without employment and
had to scrounge for whatever low-paying work they could find further
contributed to the sense of the Irish in New York as a depraved
community.
A significant free-black population also existed in Manhattan, as
well as in Brooklyn. Slaves had been held in New York through 1827,
but during the 1830s New York became the center of interracial abolitionist
agitation in the North. An active black middle-class pushed for
African-American rights in the city, setting up free black schools,
literary societies, newspapers, and orphanages. This segment of
black New York remained tiny, however. In 1821 the New York State
legislature decreed that black men could vote if they owned property
worth more than $250. By 1835, only sixty-eight African Americans
were registered to vote in the state out of more than forty-five
thousand black residents. The vast majority of the 14,000 blacks
in New York City were working-class, and settled in the Fifth, Sixth,
and Eighth wards.City commissioners had imposed a grid system on
the city's landscape in 1811 that would organize all future economic
and real estate development. Many artisans, craftsmen, and other
small businessmen continued to live where they worked, near or above
their shops in neighborhoods such as Corlear's Hook, the shipbuilding
district in the Seventh Ward on the East Side. Wealthier New Yorkers,
however, increasingly moved away from the congestion of the downtown
trade and business districts to the more open land above Houston
Street on the East and West sides, in the Ninth and Eleventh Wards.
In many of these tonier neighborhoods, developers used restrictive
covenants to prohibit certain types of businesses, and also proscribed
the style and dimensions of buildings that could be constructed.
This spread of settlement was both a product of and contributor
to the booming economy of the 1830s. Merchants and bankers who profited
from New York's growth poured money back into the local economy
by hiring contractors and builders as settlement spread uptown.
Increasingly refined sections of the city emerged in proximity to
neighborhoods defined by deepening poverty. Many New Yorkers who
stayed in Manhattan’s lower wards as settlement spread north
lived in crowded, dark apartments in buildings that were often converted
churches, breweries, or single-family homes. Called "rookeries,"
such units were precursors of the tenements that dominated working-class
housing in New York later in the century. Many uptown neighborhoods
developed specific residential identities, while poorer areas continued
to mix commerce and residences. The result was overcrowding —
and not just of humans. Horses and scavenging pigs contributed to
the "messiness" of the poorer wards, and the refuse left
by such animals mixed with the noxious byproducts of local tanneries,
slaughterhouses, and distilleries to dirty the streets and foul
the air. Human waste was collected in privies (outhouses). Usually
located behind or in the gaps between buildings, privies typically
were shared by more than a dozen families, and almost always were
overflowing. Municipal sanitation services were extremely limited,
and African-American workers held the exclusive privilege of emptying
privies for low wages. In summer months, the stench was overwhelming,
and disease commonplace.
When disease hit the city, it invariably hit working-class neighborhoods
the hardest. In an era before the transmission of communicable diseases
was understood, this was read by genteel New Yorkers as further
proof of the moral depravity of the working-classes. When cholera
first hit New York City in late June 1832, understanding of the
disease was filtered through this worldview, which also shaped the
responses of city leaders to the outbreak.
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