New York's First Murder

Yesterday marked a somber date in New York City history -- the 404th anniversary of the city's first murder.

It happened on September 6, 1609, just days after Henry Hudson and the crew of the ship Half Moon had arrived in the area of what would become New York City.

Hudson had anchored the ship somewhere near Sandy Hook (where they later ran aground). He sent a shallop to explore, and his crew ran into a band of Native Americans.

We know of the incident from the journal of Robert Juet, Hudson's first mate. He wrote:

"The sixth, in the morning, was faire weather, and our master sent John Colman, with foure other men in our boate, over to the north-side to sound the other river, being foure leagues from us. They found by the way shoald water, two fathoms; but at the north of the river eighteen, and twentie fathoms, and very good riding for ships; and a narrow river to the westward, betweene two ilands. The lands, they told us, were as pleasant with grasse and flowers and goodly trees as ever they had seene, and very sweet smells came from them. So they went in two leagues and saw an open sea, and returned; and as they came backe, they were set upon by two canoes, the one having twelve, the other fourteene men. The night came on, and it began to rayne, so that their match went out; and they had one man slaine in the fight, which was an Englishman, named John Colman, with an arrow shot into his throat, and two more hurt. It grew so darke that they could not find the ship that night, but labored to and fro on their oars. They had so great a streame, that their grapnell would not hold them."

The next day Hudson and his crew buried Colman, at the spot they named Colman's Point that is now lost to us.

Juet relates:

"The seventh, was faire, and by ten of the clocke they returned aboord the ship, and brought our dead man with them, whom we carried on land and buryed, and named the point after his name, Colmans Point. Then we hoysed in our boate, and raised her side with waste boords for defence of our men. So we rode still all night, having good regard to our watch."

A few days later, on September 11, 1609, Hudson and his crew would sail up the river -- now the Hudson -- on their way past Manhattan for the first time.

* * * *

Read more New York City history in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.

Find us on Facebook.

To subscribe via email, follow this link.
Or, follow us on Twitter.

Historic Richmond Town's Kruser-Finley House Gutted by Fire

This summer, we snapped the above photo during a visit to Historic Richmond Town, Staten Island's remarkable collection of colonial and early American architecture. That's the Kruser-Finley house, which was built around 1790 and is one of only four houses in Richmond Town built in the eighteenth century. The house, originally located in nearby Egbertville, was built as one room. Two additions were made in the nineteenth century, and it probably served as a house/shop/workshop for various craftspeople, including a cooper (barrel-maker).

Alas, on Wednesday around 4:30pm, the house caught fire. Though the blaze was extinguished in an hour, most the house was lost: the interior was gutted and roof is now completely gone. Though the investigation is still on-going, it has been deemed "suspicious."

courtesy of MARC A. HERMANN/FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

If you've never had the chance to visit, Historic Richmond Town is well worth the trip. Located in the middle of Staten Island, it was the county seat of Richmond County before Staten Island was annexed into New York City. More than 25 significant historic buildings -- some relocated to the site, others original to the town -- are scattered around the property. Though you can walk the streets on your own, the only way to really see the buildings up close is on a tour, which will generally take you inside three or four historic houses.

* * * *

Read more New York City history in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.

Find us on Facebook.

To subscribe via email, follow this link.
Or, follow us on Twitter.

Otis's First Elevator

The view from the top of the Latting Observatory. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Yesterday, our friends at Curbed highlighted a mostly forgotten chapter in New York's history -- the Crystal Palace Exhibition in Reservoir Square (today's Bryant Park) and the accompanying Latting Observatory, which was the tallest building in New York when it was constructed.

However, there was one chapter of the story they left out -- the debut of the commercial elevator. The man behind the elevator was Elisha Graves Otis, an engineer and inventor who was also, evidently, quite the showman.

As we write in Inside the Apple:

The idea of the elevator was not new; since antiquity, hoists and pulleys had moved cargo. But ropes frayed and pulleys malfunctioned, which meant that there had never been a viable passenger elevator. Without elevators, commercial buildings were limited to six or seven stories, and rents diminished the farther one had to climb from the street. Otis’s invention was a mechanism to automatically stop an elevator in the event of a fall. And to show the world how much he trusted it, he used himself as the test subject.

One block north of the Crystal Palace grounds stood the Latting Observatory, with a steam-powered elevator which could take visitors up two levels. They would then, however, have to climb stairs to the top of the observatory as no one trusted an elevator to take them higher. For his demonstration Otis got inside the elevator cab, which was suspended from the top of the observatory, and called down to his assistant who—with a dramatic flourish—severed the elevator cable. The cab lurched, dropped an inch, and then shook to a halt, held in place by Otis’ new brake.

The story has, over the past 160 years, developed the mystique of legend. In Gotham, Mike Wallace and Edwin Burroughs write that when Otis's platform "reached the highest level, an assistant presented the inventor with a dagger on a velvet cushion" that he used to cut the rope. In the new book Cities are Good For You, Leo Hollis tells a version where Otis is hoisted aloft with "several barrels and heavy boxes, until [he is]... 30 feet above the heads of the throng. After a dramatic pause an assistance cut the hoists with an axe and the crowds gasped as they anticipated seeing the engineer crash to the floor."

Whether it was a dagger or an axe, it was dramatic, and hundreds of people left the observatory that day having witnessed the future. In 1857, Otis installed his patented safety break in the Haughwout china store on Broadway, and it quickly became a tourist attraction. (The store would also become famous in 1861, when Mary Todd Lincoln came to buy a new set of White House china. But that's a story for our next book, Footprints in New York.....)

* * * *

Read more New York City history in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.

Find us on Facebook.

To subscribe via email, follow this link.
Or, follow us on Twitter.

Summer Streets: The Old Fourth Avenue

Tomorrow, August 17, is the last day of this year's iteration of Summer Streets, the program where numerous city agencies ban together to turn a Manhattan avenue into a pedestrian thoroughfare. This year, the city is closing down Park Avenue from East 72nd Street all the way down to Fourteenth Street, and then Lafayette Street south to Foley Square and the Brooklyn Bridge.

One highlight of this year's program is rare access to the Park Avenue tunnel south of Grand Central Terminal, where artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has installed an art piece using lights and loudspeakers that are triggered by the voices of passersby.

The Park Avenue tunnel is a vestige of the street's earlier incarnation as a railroad right of way. For most of the nineteenth century, the entire avenue was known as Fourth Avenue. As we write in Inside the Apple:

In 1831, the New York and Harlem Railroad had established its at-grade tracks along a mostly uninhabited stretch of Fourth Avenue. The first New York and Harlem trains were horse drawn along the entire length of the line; however, this soon gave way to steam locomotion, which drew complaints from people living and working along the more densely populated stretch of Fourth Avenue near the train’s depot on 27th Street. In 1854, the city passed an ordinance banning steam travel south of 42nd Street, which forced the railroad to unhook its steam locomotives at 42nd Street, and, one by one, haul passenger cars by horse to the depot farther downtown. These horse-drawn cars were shunted into a covered viaduct from 42nd to 32nd Streets, which not only solved an elevation problem, but also kept the horses and the trains out of sight. When the area atop this covered viaduct was planted, it came to be known as “Park Avenue.”

For a long time, Fourth Avenue north of 42nd Street was an open railroad cut, but it was finally paved over after the electrification of New York's train system and the name Park Avenue extended north. Now, the only vestige of Fourth Avenue is a small sliver that extends south of Fourteenth Street to Astor Place, where it then becomes Lafayette Street.

* * * *

Read more New York City history in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.

Find us on Facebook.

To subscribe via email, follow this link.
Or, follow us on Twitter.

Edith Wharton's View of New York

This weekend marks the seventy-sixth anniversary of the death of Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862-August 11, 1937). Though she spent much of her adult life living outside the city, Wharton was born and raised in New York and returned to it again and again in her novels and short stories.

We've been doing a lot of Wharton reading in preparation for our next book, Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers, which is due out next April (save the date!) from Lyons Press. Though most people are familiar with Wharton's great New York novels, such as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence (which made her the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature), many of Wharton's stories also concern life in the city, including her very first published tale, "Mrs. Manstey's View," which came out in July 1891.

The story concerns a widow, Mrs. Manstey, who lives in a third floor room of a boarding house. Her husband has been dead for seventeen years, and her daughter has married and moved to California "so many years [ago]...that they had ceased to feel any need of each other's society." Mrs. Manstey is cordial to her fellow boarders, but keeps most people at a safe remove. She is, in Wharton's words, "lonely if not alone."

What Mrs. Manstey has to keep her company is the view out the back of her building and into the yards of neighboring buildings. It reads almost as if it could have been written today:

[She] looked out first upon the yard of her own dwelling, of which, however, she could get but a restricted glimpse. Still, her gaze took in the topmost boughs of the ailanthus below her window, and she knew how early each year the clump of dicentra strung its bending stalk with hearts of pink. 

But of greater interest were the yards beyond. Being for the most part attached to boarding-houses they were in a state of chronic untidiness and fluttering, on certain days of the week, with miscellaneous garments and frayed table-cloths. In spite of this Mrs. Manstey found much to admire in the long vista which she commanded. Some of the yards were, indeed, but stony wastes, with grass in the cracks of the pavement and no shade in spring save that afforded by the intermittent leafage of the clotheslines. These yards Mrs. Manstey disapproved of, but the others, the green ones, she loved. She had grown used to their disorder; the broken barrels, the empty bottles and paths unswept no longer annoyed her; hers was the happy faculty of dwelling on the pleasanter side of the prospect before her. 

In the very next enclosure did not a magnolia open its hard white flowers against the watery blue of April? And was there not, a little way down the line, a fence foamed over every May be lilac waves of wistaria? Farther still, a horse-chestnut lifted its candelabra of buff and pink blossoms above broad fans of foliage; while in the opposite yard June was sweet with the breath of a neglected syringa, which persisted in growing in spite of the countless obstacles opposed to its welfare.

How many New Yorkers have stared out their windows and marveled at the views--hidden to passersby on the street--of a secret world behind the buildings?

The whole story is worth a read--it's quite short--and we're looking forward to sharing more of Edith Wharton's view of the city when Footprints in New York comes out in the spring.

* * * *

Read more New York City history in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.

Find us on Facebook.

To subscribe via email, follow this link.
Or, follow us on Twitter.

Happy Birthday, John Sloan

Today marks the 142nd anniversary of the birth of John Sloan, the great Ashcan school painter, who created vivid scenes of life in New York City. Sloan was born in 1871 in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and after spending a number of years in Philadelphia, he moved to New York in 1904, settling in Greenwich Village. That same year he participated in a group show of "The Eight" at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park, an exhibition that thrust him into the limelight and drew critical attention to the Ashcan school's realist art.

Sloan, like his friend George Bellows, painted life as it unfolded around him. Below are just some of his wonderful New York City scenes.

Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair, 1912, courtesy of the Addison Museum of Art.

Sloan exhibited this painting in the famous 1913 Armory Show.

Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street, 1928, courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Picture Shop Window, 1907, courtesy of the Newark Museum

The Lafayette, 1927, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Lafayette was a cafe in a hotel on University and Ninth Street where Sloan liked to hang out. Now gone, it was one of the last great literary and artistic meeting places in the Village.

Dust Storm, Fifth Avenue, 1906, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

McSorley's Bar, courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Art.

See our earlier blog post about McSorley's Bar here.

* * * *

Read more New York City history in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.

Find us on Facebook.

To subscribe via email, follow this link.
Or, follow us on Twitter.

July 24, 1983: The Pine Tar Incident

If you were at Yankee Stadium thirty years ago today, you were there to witness George Brett of the Kansas City Royals getting tossed out of the game during the ninth inning for the infamous pine tar incident.

Future Hall of Fame slugger Brett was well known for the amount pine tar he used on his bat to improve his grip. At the top of the ninth inning, Brett came to the plate with a runner on first base. Pitcher Goose Gossage, who'd been brought in to close the game, tossed one right across the plate, and Brett knocked it into the seats, putting the Royals into a 5-4 lead.

Immediately, Yankees manager Billy Martin came out of the dugout to complain. He showed Brett's bat to the umpires and reminded them that Major League Baseball's rules forbid pine tar more than 18 inches from the handle of the bat. Using home plate as a ruler (it's 17 inches wide), they determined the bat was in violation. Brett was called out and the game was won by the Yankees.

Brett immediately charged from the dugout in protest and had to be restrained. The Royals quickly confiscated the bat to use as evidence in a formal protest, which they lodged with the American League. League president Lee McPhail ultimately agreed with the Royals--even if the bat was in violation, the rule had been designed to protect baseballs from being ruined by the tar, not because it gave batters an illegal edge. McPhail restored Brett's home run and ordered that the game be finished at a later date. The Yankees dragged their feet, hoping not to have the play the remaining out of the ninth inning, but on August 18, the game resumed. The Royals won, 5-4. Brett's bat was placed in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

You can watch the play-by-play of Brett's home run and the aftermath at Major League Baseball: http://wapc.mlb.com/play/?content_id=3180386#.

* * * *

Read more New York City history in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.

Find us on Facebook.

To subscribe via email, follow this link.
Or, follow us on Twitter. 

July 16 and 17, 1863 - The last days of the Civil War Draft Riots

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War Draft Riots -- still the deadliest civil disturbance in American history.

The riots lasted July 13 - 17; we'll be posting a summary of what happened each day, drawing from our own work and contemporary sources. (These are lightly edited versions of posts we wrote a few years ago.)

Jump to: July 13 | July 14 | July 15 | July 16-17

As Thursday, July 16, 1863, began, many New Yorkers were surprised to hear the news from Mayor George Opdyke that not only had the draft been suspended but that the city council had voted the day before to authorize a fund to pay for a substitute for any New Yorker who was drafted and chose not to serve. The city had appropriated $2.5 million dollars for the cause--money it did not have and which surely would have bankrupted the city if spent. Opdyke promised that the riots were coming to an end and ordered people to go back to work and for the street car lines to resume running.

But to add to the confusion, that same day the papers also published a proclamation from Governor Horatio Seymour--actually issued on Tuesday, two days earlier--letting them know there was riot going on. (In case, somehow, no one had noticed.)

A third letter also appeared in the press: an appeal from Catholic Archbishop Hughes to his flock urging them to come to his home on Friday to hear him in person.

What only a few people knew was that the military had begun to arrive from Gettysburg. The Seventy-Fourth Regiment arrived soon after midnight on Wednesday and by the end of Thursday, the Seventh ("Silk Stocking") Regiment, the Sixty-Fith Regiment and others had been stationed at points around the city.

The arrival of more troops did not instantly quell the riots: there was a bloody clash between about twenty-five soldiers and a crowd that chased them into a foundry on First Avenue. But by the end of the day--as a rainstorm tore through the city, naturally discouraging the mob--it seemed as if the riots were on the verge of burning themselves out.

* * *

The next day, Friday, July 17, over 5,000 people gathered to hear Archbishop Hughes's address, but as J.T. Headley noted in Great Riots of New York, 1712-1873:

They were on the whole a peaceable-looking crowd, and it was evidently composed chiefly, if not wholly, of those who had taken no part in the riot. None of the bloody heads and gashed faces, of which there were so many at that moment in the city, appeared. The address was well enough, but it came too late to be of any service. It might have saved many lives and much destruction, had it been delivered two days before, but now it was like the bombardment of a fortress after it had surrendered--a mere waste of ammunition. The fight was over, and to use his own not very refined illustration, he "spak' too late."

There were no further outbreaks of violence that day and none the next day, Saturday, despite the news from Washington that the draft would be enforced and would recommence as soon as the city was ready.

As we write in Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City:

No one is certain how many people died in the clash. At the time it was estimated to be 1,000 but the official death toll afterward was reduced to just 100 people. The true figure may never be known, but surely rests somewhere in between, making the Draft Riots the single worst civil disturbance in American history.

Democrats, led by rising Tammany Hall powerbroker William “Boss” Tweed, reached a compromise which allowed the draft to continue. Tweed would appoint a commission on behalf of the city to hear claims by those who felt they could neither serve nor pay the $300 and the city would decide to hire substitutes on a case-by-case basis. In the end, through a combination of city money, medical infirmity, and people simply not reporting for duty, only one person from Five Points served in the war because of the draft.

* * * *

Read more about the Civil War in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.

Find us on Facebook.

To subscribe via email, follow this link.
Or, follow us on Twitter. 

July 15, 1863 - Day 3 of the Civil War Draft Riots

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War Draft Riots -- still the deadliest civil disturbance in American history.

The riots lasted July 13 - 17; we'll be posting a summary of what happened each day, drawing from our own work and contemporary sources. (These are lightly edited versions of posts we wrote a few years ago.)

Jump to: July 13 | July 14 | July 15 | July 16-17

Wednesday, July 15--the third day of rioting--proved to be the pivotal day in the confrontation. Had the rioters made more headway on Wednesday, the city could have fallen into utter anarchy and chaos. Instead, it was anarchy and chaos that worked in the favor of the beleaguered police officers and soldiers protecting the city. Each day the nameless "mob" spread out around Manhattan to destroy property and kill and injure black New Yorkers, but because the rioters had no real leaders and no thought-out plan, most mob actions were short lived. Like so many explosions, they burned bright, caused a lot of damage, and soon fizzled out

Wednesday dawned hot. Many New Yorkers, fearing the city was about to fall to the rioters, spent the day trying to get out of town, clogging the Hudson and East River piers and flooding north out of the city toward the Bronx and Westchester County.

The police, many of whom had barely slept in 48 hours, tried to keep pace with the rioters. The police headquarters on Mulberry Street was connected via telegraph to the precincts for instant communication. Throughout the riots, police repair crews were constantly working on the telegraph lines in a vain attempt to keep information flowing in and out of the central command post, which was run by Police Commissioner Thomas Acton.

In The Volcano Under the City, an anonymously written 1886 book that purports to be the first "true" account of the draft riots, the author writes:

In many respects, Wednesday was, to the Metropolitan Police, the most trying day of the riot. All of them were weary, and many of them were more or less injured. Some had succumbed to their exertions under intense heat, and others required all their pluck and sense of duty to keep their wearied bodies up to their work. They had been on duty night and day, with rapid marches and with much hand-to-hand fighting against strong and desperate men. Well might President [aka Commissioner] Acton shout, as he did, with mingled humor and enthusiasm, from the front of the Central Office, to column after column of the men he was so proud of, as he hurried them off to their arduous and perilous errands:

"Go on, boys! Go on! Give it to them, now! Quail on toast for every man of you, as soon as the mob is put down. Quail on toast, boys!"

What kept Wednesday from being the worst day of the riot--and kept the riots from escalating--was the city's ability to protect its munitions. J.T. Headley, the other Nineteenth-century source for information about the riots, notes:

At about two o'clock in the afternoon word was received that a large number of muskets were secreted in a store on Broadway, near Thirty-third Street; and Colonel Meyer was ordered to proceed thither, with thirty-three soldiers belonging to Hawkins' Zouaves, and take possession of them. Reaching the place, he found a large mob gathered, which was momentarily increasing. He, however, succeeded in entering the building, and brought out the arms. An Irishman happening to pass by in his cart, the colonel seized it, and pitching in the guns, closed around it, and moved off.

The worst confrontation of the day took place on Wednesday evening. A regiment of soldiers under the command of Colonel Cleveland Winslow was sent to disperse the rioters who'd gathered at First Avenue between 18th and 19th streets. The Volcano Under the City describes the scene:

No sooner did the detachment make its appearance and undertake its appointed task than it was assailed by a dense mob in front, and by showers of missiles from the houses, including a brisk discharge of pistols and musketry. The fire from the mob in front instantly betrayed something like organization, for it was by volleys, given at the word of command. Here, at least, the rioters went into action under competent leadership, such as might have secured successes for them at many other points. Colonel Winslow and his men stood their ground courageously….Ten rapid rounds of grape and canister tore through the masses of the mob and hurtled along the wide avenue. The slaughter was horrible, and the ground was momentarily cleared; but not so were the buildings on either side. The actual number of killed and wounded cannot be estimated with any accuracy, but there were rows of bodies on the pavement for about two "blocks." The fire from the houses grew hotter, and Colonel Winslow saw that he must retire…. Every tenth man of the entire command was down, and others were falling fast, not to mention those who were disabled more or less by minor hurts. It was literally "decimated," and more than that, before it could escape. The military made good the retreat, and the mob was left in triumphant possession of the battle-ground.

Then, at 11:00 p.m., a second wave of soldiers descended on First Avenue under the command of Captain Putnam. Headley writes:

Putnam immediately charged on the crowd in the street, scattering them like a whirlwind. He then turned his guns on the buildings, and opened such a deadly fire on them that they were soon cleared. Having restored order, he halted his command, and remained on the ground till half-past twelve.

What most of those fighting did not know was that reinforcements were on the way. Late on Tuesday, Mayor Opdyke had telegraphed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in Washington requesting that New York's militia companies--fresh from winning the Battle of Gettysburg--be sent to the city to quell the riots. As the violence calmed for the night on Wednesday, those militia companies were fast approaching the city. By daybreak, they would be on Manhattan and the riots would soon be over.

* * * *

Read more about the Civil War in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.

Find us on Facebook.

To subscribe via email, follow this link.
Or, follow us on Twitter. 

July 14, 1863 - Day 2 of the Civil War Draft Riots

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War Draft Riots -- still the deadliest civil disturbance in American history.

The riots lasted July 13 - 17; we'll be posting a summary of what happened each day, drawing from our own work and contemporary sources. (These are lightly edited versions of posts we wrote a few years ago.)

Jump to: July 13 | July 14 | July 15 | July 16-17

July 13, 1863--the first day of the Civil War Draft Riots--saw the attack on the draft office, the Colored Orphan Asylum, and houses of wealthy Republicans, including Mayor George Opdyke. (The attack on Opdyke's house didn't amount to much since it was one of the few places in the city protected by federal troops.)

But before we can get to the events of July 14, there was one final event on the first day of the riots that stretched through the evening into the second day: the attack on Horace Greeley's Tribune.

The Tribune was the most outspoken Republican paper in New York and Greeley--who would later go on to run for president in 1872--was one of the founding members of the party. (Indeed, it was Greeley who championed the name "Republican" in print for the new political faction.)

Throughout the day, Greeley and his managing editor, Sidney Gay, argued about whether or not to arm themselves. Greeley was adamantly opposed and when he was then urged to leave the Tribune's offices on Newspaper Row, he is said to have replied: "If I can't eat my dinner when I'm hungry, my life isn't worth anything to me."

Once Greeley had finally gone home for the day, Gay and other staffers began to arm the building. As journalist Joel Tyler Headley wrote in his 1873 survey Great Riots of New York, 1712-1873:

All day long a crowd had been gathering in the Park around the City Hall, growing more restless as night came on. The railroad-cars [ED: streetcars] passing it were searched, to see if any negroes were on board, while eyes glowered savagely on the Tribune building…. [T]he Park and Printing-house Square* were black with men, who, as the darkness increased, grew more restless; and "Down with it! burn it!" mingled with oaths and curses, were heard on every side.
At last came the crash of a window, as a stone went through it. Another and another followed, when suddenly a reinforcing crowd came rushing down Chatham Street*. This was the signal for a general assault, and, with shouts, the rabble poured into the lower part of the building, and began to destroy everything within reach. Captain Warlow, of the First Precinct, No. 29 Broad Street [joined forces with] Captain Thorne, of the City Hall [Precinct]….. Everything being ready, the order to "Charge" was given, and the entire force, perhaps a hundred and fifty strong, fell in one solid mass on the mob, knocking men over right and left, and laying heads open at every blow. The panic-stricken crowd fled up Chatham Street, across the Park, and down Spruce and Frankfort Streets, punished terribly at every step. The space around the building being cleared, a portion of the police rushed inside, where the work of destruction was going on. The sight of the blue-coats in their midst, with their uplifted clubs, took the rioters by surprise, and they rushed frantically for the doors and windows, and escaped the best way they could.

This ended the heavy fighting of the day, though minor disturbances occurred at various points during the evening. Negroes had been hunted down all day, as though they were so many wild beasts, and one, after dark, was caught, and after being severely beaten and hanged to a tree, left suspended there till [Police Commissioner] Acton sent a force to take the body down. Many had sought refuge in police-stations and elsewhere, and all were filled with terror.

* Printing-house Square (aka Chatham Street)

is today's Park Row, across from City Hall Park.

The second day of the riots, July 14, saw the intensification of attacks on black New Yorkers, and a number were lynched. As Barnet Schechter notes in The Devil's Own Work:

The pillaging of entire black neighborhoods that had begun the previous night continued on Tuesday. On Sullivan and Roosevelt Streets**, where blacks lived in great numbers, boardinghouses, a grocery, and a babershop burned down since they either were owned by blacks or catered to them. Some blacks were chased all the way to the rivers and off the ends of piers.

** Roosevelt Street ran where the Brooklyn Bridge now stands.

New York's governor, Horatio Seymour, arrived in the city that day and called for calm, but to little effect. Seymour, an anti-war Democrat, met with other high-ranking Democrats at the St. Nicholas Hotel on Broadway to determine the best course of action. What he did not do was to call on federal officials to declare martial law. While state militia troops were augmenting the police force, the federal army in New York was tasked solely with guarding military and federal installations, such as the custom house on Wall Street and Castle Clinton in Battery Park.

Violent clashes continued throughout the day, despite Seymour's efforts to send emissaries to calm the mob. As night fell, a group of rioters attacked Brooks Brothers, then located on Catharine Street on the Lower East Side. Not only was it a preferred clothier of the well-to-do, it also provided uniforms for the Union army. As Headley notes:

[S]oon from the crowd arose shouts, amid which were heard the shrill voices of women, crying, "Break open the store." This was full of choice goods, and contained clothing enough to keep the mob supplied for years. As the shouts increased, those behind began to push forward those in front, till the vast multitude swung heavily towards the three police officers. Seeing this movement, the latter advanced with their clubs to keep them back. At this, the shouts and yells redoubled, and the crowd rushed forward, crushing down the officers by mere weight. They fought gallantly for a few minutes; but, overborne by numbers, they soon became nearly helpless, and were terribly beaten and wounded, and with the utmost exertions were barely able to escape, and make their way back to the station. The mob now had it all its own way, and rushing against the doors, burst bolts and bars asunder, and streamed in. But it was dark as midnight inside, and they could not distinguish one thing from another; not even the passage-ways to the upper rooms of the building, which was five stories high. They therefore lighted the gas, and broke out the windows. In a few minutes the vast edifice was a blaze of light, looking more brilliant from the midnight blackness that surrounded it.

As the second day of the riots ended and the body count grew, the great unanswered question that hung in the air was: would tomorrow be better--or worse?

* * * *

Read more about the Civil War in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.

Find us on Facebook.

To subscribe via email, follow this link.
Or, follow us on Twitter.