A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ walls could be bolted to deeply buried cast-iron footers. The city, locked into thirteen miles long by two miles wide Manhattan Island, could now grow up instead of out, though the word “skyscraper” was still years in the future.

      Cast-iron buildings, which were fire resistant compared to wood buildings, were often falsely promoted as fireproof. In hot fires, iron melted, allowing flames to seep inside and set the interior wood walls ablaze. Still, cast iron was an improvement over brick and stone buildings as the mortar between bricks melted at much lower temperatures than iron.

      The lifestyles that truly set New York City’s citizens apart from each other in the mid-nineteenth century were the building of private homes for the upper crust. The vast majority of the city’s citizens, even the middle class and wealthy, lived in rented, multifamily structures that could range from luxury-filled hotels to drafty, dangerous tenements.

      Money was no object or deterrent to the city’s top social class who moved to the northern edge of the city starting in the mid-1830s to build huge houses along Fifth Avenue starting at Washington Square and heading north. Even mayors, who claimed to be just like the men who elected them, moved to the fashionable address of Fifth Avenue, even though the avenue was so far from the center of the city that it had not even been paved until the 1840s.

      At all levels of social classes, residents of Manhattan had the best entertainment that could be found in North America. If a famed European singer or actor planned to tour the United States, the citizens of New York saw him or her first.

      There was a range of entertainment options. There was the Academy of Music at 14th Street and Irving Place, the city’s first opera house, which was a huge 4,000-seat building that took more than two years to construct before opening in 1854. When the newest of the city’s wealthy found that the city’s old aristocracy would not sell them season tickets for the Academy, they started the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883.

      In 1860, four thousand of the city’s socialites were invited to a party at the Academy to welcome Edward VII, the 19-year-old Prince of Wales on his first visit to the United States. Queen Victoria’s son danced with scores of New York’s most eligible young women until he slipped away to visit the city’s best-known brothels.

      Theaters were a focal point of the city’s social life. Prominent New Yorkers packed theaters to see their favorite musicians performing in blackface. It was during such a minstrel show in 1859 that the “walk around” song of Dixie was premiered at Mechanics Hall at 442 Broadway by an Ohio banjo player named Daniel Decatur Emmett. Emmett’s band stayed booked in New York so long that it was weeks before Southerners even became aware of the song extolling the joy of living “in the land of cotton.”

      More serious theatergoers visited Niblo’s Garden Theatre at Broadway and Prince Street and the even finer Winter Garden Theatre at Broadway and Bond Street. It was at the Winter Garden that famed actor Edwin Booth performed Julius Caesar each night for more than one hundred performances. On the night of November 25, 1864, Booth hit on an idea to raise money to erect a statue to William Shakespeare in Central Park. He convinced his brothers, Junius and John Wilkes, to appear with him. The three most famous actors in the nation, all brothers, appeared on the stage together for the first and only time. John Wilkes would eclipse his brothers’ fame when he performed a dastardly deed in Ford’s Theatre in Washington City, District of Columbia, on the night of April 14, 1865.

      Most of the rest of the country did not care about New York City’s entertainment options. To citizens who needed bank loans, access to foreign markets, or imported goods and equipment, New York City was all about business. They might never visit what was then nicknamed The Emerald City, but they needed it.

      If New York City had a singular focus, it was about making money. Philadelphia was a close and constant rival, but New York was the nation’s banking capital. Hundreds of banks were headquartered here. One, the First National Bank of New York City at Broadway and Wall Street, founded by a man named John Thompson, was already changing the way banks did business nationwide. New Yorker Thompson’s idea would forever mold the entire economic system of the United States.

      Early in the war, Thompson realized how impractical and costly it was for the nation to continue minting metallic coins. He petitioned Lincoln to establish a single national currency based on paper money that banks and merchants would recognize and accept. Instead of putting its gold and silver into circulation, the nation would store the metals in vaults while issuing the paper money that would represent the real value of the money. Thompson believed that the people would have faith that their government could protect their accumulated wealth.

      Just as important as the city’s individual banks was the New York Bank Clearing House Association at William and Wall streets. Each morning, bank clerks gathered in a large room with a stack of bank drafts drawn on other city banks they had cashed or deposited for their customers the previous day. In turn, each bank’s clerk traded the drafts with the other represented banks. Once the trading of paper drafts was completed, cash was exchanged. The process started over again the next morning.

      The clearing house was a simple but vital means of making sure that each bank was paid by the end of the day. Banks in distant states established relationships with New York banks to make sure their local banking customers were paid. Southerners particularly depended on New York banks because New York sales agents bought the bulk of cotton and sometimes shipped it from East River ports.

      Each night the cash and the paper records of every New York bank were put into iron safes that bank executives assumed—or at least hoped—were fireproof. No one knew for sure. Nearly thirty years earlier, most of the city’s banks as well as the Merchants Exchange had burned, but the city’s financial industry recovered. If such a fire occurred again and those safes allowed flames to lick inside, it would be devastating for the city’s financial institutions. It could take even more time to recover because the city’s financial importance had grown so much in just thirty years.

      New Yorkers did not spend much time worrying about such potential disasters. They were too busy generating new ideas that made money.

      Alexander T. Stewart, an Irish orphan, immigrated to New York in 1818. By 1828, Stewart had opened a small dry goods store. Stewart kept building larger stores until he realized he was confusing his customers with the sheer volume of goods he was offering. He developed an in-store separation of goods where customers could visit different sections of his stores. He called the sections departments.

      Another man who moved to New York in 1858 to try his hand at making it there after failing in his native Massachusetts was a merchant named Rowland H. Macy. After examining the success of Stewart, Macy started the practice of putting price tags on merchandise, advertising those low prices in New York’s newspapers, and then promoting holiday sales by hiring Santa Claus to sit in his stores at Christmas. By his death in 1877, Macy had developed another idea, a chain of stores all bearing his name. He created a corporate symbol for his new store chain, another New York idea that had never occurred to any other store owner. Macy chose a red star based on a tattoo he had put on his forearm during his youthful days aboard a whaling ship.

      The nineteenth century had been good to New York City. By its midpoint the city was flying high. Only one cloud was on the horizon. New Yorkers were not too worried about it. The same cloud had been on the same horizon for decades. It had never darkened the city’s plans for the future. That cloud was the threat of secession by the Southern, slave-holding states.

      If the South left the Union, New Yorkers feared the end of good times. The city had grown wealthy trading Southern cotton and financing Southern slave purchases, not to mention buying and selling Africans on their own. What was good for the South was good for New York City.

      Chapter 2

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