Postcard Thursday: Wall Street, 1847

A couple of days ago, we wrote about Frederick Muhlenberg, the first Speaker of House. When Congress first met, 225 years ago, its headquarters was in Federal Hall at the corner of Nassau and Wall streets.

Here's a view of Wall Street (not, technically, a postcard) from 1847, showing how the street had developed in the 70 years following Washington's inauguration. Rising up on Broadway is the familiar tower of Trinity Church, which at the time would have been brand new. The building flying the large American flag is what we today call Federal Hall National Memorial. It was also relatively new, having been opened five years earlier to serve as the United States Custom house. It would later become the U.S. Sub-Treasury before turning into a tourist attraction.

By 1847, Wall Street was the undisputed capital of the city's financial district; the other gleaming marble buildings you see lining the street were banks. However, all was not well in the financial markets: the failure of the harvest in Great Britain sent its economy into a panic, and the ongoing famine in Ireland reached its peak that year, sending over 200,000 Irish immigrants to New York.

What a contrast this serene street scene is from the view one would have had of Orange or Anthony streets in the heart of the Five Points, less than a half-hour walk away. The area around that intersection would soon become one of the most densely populated--and poorest--places in the country.

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Read more about New York in 1840s in
Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

|| AVAILABLE NOW ||

And, of course, Inside the Apple is available at fine bookstores everywhere.

Columbus Day Tour | Sunday, October 13, at 4:00pm

To celebrate Columbus Day, you're invited to a special immigration tour on Sunday, October 13, at 4pm, "From Farmland to Five Points," a look at the multiple, overlapping immigrants who've called the Lower East Side home.

Our new book, Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers (due out in the spring), focuses on this area of the city from multiple different perspectives. On our walk, we'll look at how people as different as Peter Stuyvesant, Alexander Hamilton, Calvert Vaux, Jacob Riis, Lillian Wald, and Martin Scorsese -- all subjects of the new book -- saw the area in their own time periods.

The walk will be about two hours. If you reserve from now until Tuesday, October 8, the cost is just $15 per person. Reservations taken on or after Wednesday, October 9, will be $20 per person.

Come experience this neighborhood through new eyes. Copies of our current book, Inside the Apple, will be available for sale and signing.

To reserve: email info@insidetheapple.net with your:

* Name
* Number in your party
* A cell number where we can contact you in case of emergency.

(Our general rule is to tour rain or shine, but we want to be able to be in touch with in a timely manner in case of inclement weather, so please do include a phone number.)

PLEASE NOTE THAT OUR PREVIOUS PUBLIC TOUR sold out pretty far in advance, so if you want to join us, don't forget to sign up while there is still space!

Charles Dickens's 200th Birthday

Today marks the two-hundredth birthday of Charles Dickens, the greatest Victorian novelist and one of his era's keenest social observers. While he is best known for his descriptions of 19th-century London, Dickens also wrote a famous travelogue of his 1842 trip to the United States, which included a stop in New York and a visit to the notorious Five Points.

You can read more about Dickens and the Five Points at this earlier blog post (as well as in Inside the Apple).

And if you can't get to Westminster Abbey today to visit the author's grave (where Prince Charles will be laying a wreath), you can visit the Morgan Library, where the "Charles Dickens at 200" exhibit is running for one more week.

Charles Dickens and the Five Points

Five Points: for those in the know, the name itself conjures up the worst imaginable New York, a slum of utter poverty and degradation. In recent years, Five Points has had a bit of a renaissance with Kevin Baker’s Paradise Alley, Tyler Anbinder’s masterful history Five Points, and Martin Scorsese’s fantasia on Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York.

But the first—and in some ways still the most influential—chronicler of Five Points was Charles Dickens, who wrote about the neighborhood in his 1842 travelogue American Notes for General Circulation.

Dickens came to America to do research for an American book. Though he was a popular author in America, the lack of international copyright or royalties meant that his book sales netted him little or no cash. Thus, the only way for him to make money off America was to write about America. (In the end, Dickens produced two books based on his American trip—American Notes and the fictional Martin Chuzzlewit.)

Dickens was in New York from February 12 to March 5, during which time he was feted at a “Boz Ball,” had dinner with Washington Irving, and complained “I am sick to death of the life I have been leading here—worn out in mind and body—and quite weary and distressed.”

But in the midst of being wined and dined, he also had time to visit the House of Detention (aka the Tombs), the city penitentiary, the asylum, and Five Points.

In American Notes, Dickens writes about the Tombs:

What is this dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter’s palace in a melodrama? A famous prison, called The Tombs. Shall we go in?

So. A long narrow lofty building, stove-heated as usual, with four galleries, one above the other, going round it, and communicating by stairs. Between the two sides of each gallery, and in its centre, a bridge, for the greater convenience of crossing. On each of these bridges sits a man, dozing or reading, or talking to an idle companion. On each tier are two opposite rows of small iron doors. They look like furnace doors, but are cold and black, as though the fires within had all gone out….

A man with keys appears, to show us round. A good-looking fellow, and, in his way, civil and obliging.

“Are those black doors the cells?”

“Yes.”

“Are they all full?”

“Well, they're pretty nigh full, and that's a fact, and no two ways about it.”

“Those at the bottom are unwholesome, surely?”

“Why, we do only put colored people in ’em. That's the truth.”

But by far the most famous passage from Dickens’s New York stay is his description of Five Points:

Let us go on again, and … plunge into the Five Points….We have seen no beggars in the streets by night or day, but of other kinds of strollers plenty. Poverty, wretchedness, and vice are rife enough where we are going now.

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 fruits 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. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of those pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lien of going on all-fours? And why they talk instead of grunting?

So far nearly every house is a low tavern, and on the bar-room walls are colored prints of Washington, and Queen Victoria of England, and the American eagle. Among the pigeon-holes that hold the bottles are pieces of plate-glass and colored paper, for there is, in some sort, a taste for decoration, even here….

The publication of American Notes at the end of 1842 shone a light on Five Points and many New Yorkers, who had never dared before to visit the area, were spurred by Dickens to go “slumming.” Indeed, Anbinder argues in Five Points that the term originated to describe visits to Five Points.

Dickens returned to New York in 1867 as part of a lecture tour. We will write about that trip in a future post.

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Much more on Five Points can be found in our book, Inside the Apple, which comes out later this month. It can be pre-ordered now from Amazon.com or other online merchants.

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York Avenue and Sgt. Alvin York

Most New Yorkers probably haven’t given a second thought to York Avenue, the thoroughfare that runs from 59th Street to 91st Street just east of First Avenue. And if they have thought much about its name, they probably ascribed it to the Duke of York, for whom the city was named back in 1664.

However, York Avenue is actually a much more recent appellation: it was named in 1928 to honor Sergeant Alvin C. York, America’s most renowned World War I hero. And since Tuesday is Veteran’s Day—originally Armistice Day*, a World War I holiday—we thought we’d devote a couple of paragraphs to Sgt. York and his eponymous street.

Alvin York (1887-1964) was drafted in 1917. Though a conscientious objector (his application for CO status was denied), York became a hero during the Battle of the Argonne Forest. In an improbable feat of courage, York found himself in charge of his unit after many of his compatriots were killed and he managed to almost single-handedly kill over 20 Germans soldiers and capture 132 more. York was awarded the Medal of Honor and upon his return to the United States was feted in New York with a ticker tape parade. York regularly stayed in the news over the next decade, both for his efforts to help the rural poor of Tennessee (his home state) by building a school as well as for his aversion to accepting charity. When offered a free honeymoon, he turned it down stating it would just be a “vainglorious call of the world and the devil.”

In April 1928, York had the honor of having Avenue A from 59th Street northward named for him. The move was sponsored by the First Avenue Association in an effort to revive the fortunes of the east side, which was better known for its German enclave (later dubbed “Yorkville”) and Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert’s brewery. Back in 1807, when the city deployed surveyor John Randal, Jr., to map out the new Cartesian grid plan, he and his team chose to create twelve wide avenues that ran the length of the island from Houston Street north. However, this left the problem of the area of the Lower East Side and Upper East Side where there was enough room east of the grid plan for more streets. Randal solved this problem by naming these eastern avenues “A,” “B,” etc. and on the original 1811 map of Manhattan, there is both an Avenue A in today’s East Village and one on the Upper East Side. (East End Avenue was originally designated Avenue B.)

This idea of renaming a street after a war hero to bolster its real estate values was not new. Anthony and Orange streets—two of the worst streets leading into the old Five Points neighborhood—were renamed Worth and Baxter in the early 1850s after two of New York’s two great heroes from the Mexican-American War, General William Jenkins Worth (who we’ll revisit in a later blog posting) and Colonel Charles Baxter.

And perhaps the most remarkable change in an avenue’s real estate fortunes came when Fourth Avenue—aka “Death Avenue”—was renamed Park Avenue.

More about street names can be found, as always, in Inside the Apple, which is available for pre-order now.

* Armistice Day was created in 1919 to mark the signing of the armistice with the Germans on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. In 1954, the holiday was renamed Veterans Day to honor those who had served in all wars.

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