whether it viewed with greater dismay the errors of the Democrats at
Washington or the running at large of great numbers of hogs within the
city limits. New Yorkers of to-day think of the toleration of swine as
characteristic only of the backward Southern towns described by Mark
Twain; but our great-grandfathers saw them rooting in City Hall Park
and basking in Broadway and Wall Street. As Coleman told his readers
in 1803, they were “a multitude.” Some men made a business of raising
them. One householder of the Fifth Ward in 1803 had sixty at large;
fifteen years later Coleman knew a colored man who had more than forty.
Whenever, from a diet of dead cats and other gutter dainties, they
threatened to become diseased, they were hurried to the butcher; with
the result that fastidious people ate no pork. Every one admitted that
they were unsightly, malodorous, and kept the walks filthy, while every
few months a carriage upset over one. But the poor demanded them, and
it was argued they were scavengers. The one restriction, ill-enforced,
was that their noses be ringed to protect the turf.
As late as 1828 Coleman complained that pigs were met everywhere in the
lower part of the city. In his campaign against them he gave full space
to the accidents they caused. A not untypical mishap occurred in 1819.
An alarm of fire in Maiden Lane brought the firemen and the usual
crowd of boys racing down Broadway with ropes hauling a fire-engine.
As they were at top speed a large hog darted into their path, the
whole line went down, and the heavy engine passed over several. The
corporation had already passed an ordinance (effective Jan. 1, 1818)
making it illegal to let hogs go unpenned, but it was flagrantly
violated. “Although every street in the city is thronged with hogs, yet
none could be found who were individual owners,” said the paper soon
afterward. When efforts were made to send “hog-carts” along the Bowery
and other infested streets, angry owners gathered and overset the
wagons. In the spring of 1829 three thieves were actually arrested for
driving into the city, collecting fourteen fat shoats from the streets,
and starting for the country; they intended to bring them back as prime
corn-fed country pork. How long, asked the _Evening Post_, would the
shameful indifference to the ordinance endure?
It was necessary to keep up an incessant fire of complaint against the
wretched street-repair and street-cleaning systems of the time. As
early as 1803 the _Evening Post_ declared that the streets should in
part be flushed, and that it would hence be well “if the waterworks
were the property of the public, as was originally intended; and not
of a private company, who are attentive only to their individual
interest.” In the summer of 1807 Coleman, who was fond of a horse and
gig, wrote that the Broadway road was in “such a state of neglect and
ruin that no one could drive through it after dark but at the hazard
of limbs and life,” that after a heavy rain horses sank up to their
girths, and that serious accidents had occurred, one rider breaking
his thigh and another his shoulder-bone. The ways were then crossed
at intervals by open gutters, sometimes so deep as to be a serious
impediment to traffic; even in front of St. Paul’s, in the heart of the
city, Broadway when the _Evening Post_ was founded was traversed by one
almost impassable. A campaign had to be begun by the press for covered
sewers.
In 1817 the streets were described as dirtier than at any other time
since “the year of filth,” when the British had evacuated the city
after the Revolution. In a sudden access of energy the next year the
authorities set gangs of twenty to fifty men once a week to attacking
the streets with brooms. A fearful dust was raised, and yet the
roadways were still imperfectly cleaned. Coleman pointed out that more
frequent sweeping by smaller forces would be better, and that in Boston
much of the work was done at night. In 1823 there came new grumblings
over the filth and garbage. “Notwithstanding the great extent of
the city of London,” wrote Coleman, “we have seldom seen cleaner
streets than those of the British capital. With those of New York the
comparison would be odious.” What was chiefly needed he thought to be
plenty of water, and common sewers connecting with every house. He
waxed satirical:
_To the Curious_:--The collection of filth and manure now lying in
heaps, or which has been heaped in Wall, Pearl, Water, and Front
Streets, near the Coffee-House, and left there, will astonish those
who are fond of the wonderful, and pay them for the trouble of a
walk there.
Sanitary ordinances were few, and apparently honored rather in the
breach than in the observance. The city was full of unleashed dogs,
and whenever in hot weather a hydrophobia panic occurred--which was
every two or three years--they were slain by the scores. During one
season they were dumped by cartloads into a vacant lot at Broadway
and Bleecker Street, and buried so shallowly that neighboring
residents had to keep their windows shut against the pestilential air.
Slaughterhouses were tolerated in the midst of residential blocks,
and the _Evening Post_ early in the twenties began to call for their
restriction. A correspondent related in 1825 how one butcher had
recently purchased a small plot, and threatened to erect a shambles
there unless the owners of valuable improvements near by paid him a
large bonus--which they did; and how when another butcher wished a
piece of property, he put up a slaughterhouse adjoining it to compel
the owner to sell at a low price. The ordinance against the summer sale
of oysters was long a dead letter. “You can scarcely pass through any
one street in the city,” grumbled Coleman, “without running against a
greasy table, with plates of sickly oysters displayed, well peppered
with dust, and swarms of flies feeding upon them.”
“The city of feasts and fevers” a visitor called New York--“feasts” in
reference to the frequent banquets on turtle, venison, and Madeira,
“fevers” in reference to the epidemics of yellow fever. There was one
such epidemic in 1803. So great was the exodus that in September the
population, which had been above 60,000, was found to be barely 38,000.
“It is notorious,” declared a writer in the _Evening Post_ at this
stage, “that notwithstanding the prevalence of a malignant disease, and
when great exertions are made to check its destroying progress, the
streets of this city are in a most noxious state; and will continue to
increase in putridity, unless we are favored with some refreshing rains
to clear them.” The _Evening Post_ removed its business office to an
address on the outskirts of the city, and Coleman as far as possible
edited it from the country. For a time, as he said, in most of the town
there was “no business, no society, no means of subsistence even.” New
Yorkers could only set their teeth and wait for the frosts.
With Noah Webster during 1803 the _Evening Post_ conducted a
long-winded debate upon yellow fever; Coleman maintaining that it was
always imported by some ship or immigrant, and Webster that it was
spontaneously generated at home. Coleman was right, though of course
absolutely ignorant of the reasons why he was right; and while the
articles, which abound in mutual complaints of discourtesy, became very
tiresome, Coleman’s argument tended to a sound conclusion. He argued
that the epidemics could be avoided by rigidly quarantining the city.
It was always held contrary to public policy by many merchants and
officials to breathe a word about yellow fever till the last possible
moment; for that drove trade to Boston or Philadelphia. But Coleman
never failed to play the Dr. Stockmarr rôle courageously.
In 1809, for example, the paper braved the anger of business men by
asserting on July 24 that, despite all denials, several deaths from
the fever had just occurred in Brooklyn. Though an epidemic was raging
in Cuba, ships from Havana had been allowed to come up from quarantine
within four days of arrival, and had not been unloaded and cleansed
according to the law. On July 28, by diligent scouting among doctors,
Coleman was enabled to report a death from fever in Cherry Street and
another in Beekman Street. He renewed his charge of malfeasance and
neglect by the Health Officer at quarantine, a political appointee who
pocketed $15,000 a year. Why, he demanded, were the laws as to the
removal of the sick and the reporting of new cases not enforced? Four
days later Mayor De Witt Clinton by proclamation forbade intercourse
with the village of Brooklyn. At last! exclaimed the editor. But why
not look to conditions within Manhattan itself, and make the ordinary
physician obey the law? “If he does, one of the learned faculty will
set a young cub of a student upon him to tear him in pieces for
alarming the old women; and then there is another set who declare him a
public enemy.”
Just ten years later, remarking that “it has heretofore been the
practice to stifle, as long as possible, the intelligence that the
yellow fever existed in the city,” Coleman served notice that if it
broke out, as it did in August, he would advertise the fact. In 1822
there was a severe pestilence. The first case occurred on July 11 in
a house on Rector Street, and was immediately made known to the Board
of Health and to the officer deputed by law to give the first notice
of its appearance. Yet it was concealed from the public for nearly a
month, deaths occurring all the while, but no precautionary measures
being taken; and before the epidemic ended, late in October, 388
persons died. The flight of the population toward the open parts of
the island was unprecedented. An immediate agitation was begun by the
_Evening Post_ for a different organization of the Board of Health. By
an act two years previous, it consisted of such persons as the Common
Council should appoint, a phrase which the Council always construed to
mean that it should itself act as the Board. The members were quite
untrained, while they were too numerous, and too busy with politics.
Coleman suggested a Board of from five to seven qualified men, to be
nominated by the Mayor and confirmed by the Council, and a reform
actually did soon follow.
An irritant of the time, akin to automobile speedsters of to-day, lay
in the Irish cartmen, who loved a race even more than a fight, and
whom Coleman denounced the more vigorously because they were Democrats
to a man. The bakers’ boys were called “flying Mercuries”; to excite
terror, said the _Evening Post_ in 1805, they particularly delighted in
crashing round a narrow street corner at a dead gallop, splashing those
whom they did not graze. The journal in 1817 felt it proper to attack
the practice of riding fast horses home from the blacksmith’s without
a bridle. Among the annoyances showing a lack of due city regulations
was the appearance in 1820 of an ingenious mode of kite-flying. As
flown in daytime, kites had always been admirably calculated to scare
horses. Now they were being sent up at night by hordes of urchins, said
the _Evening Post_, with a parachute and a little car affixed, the car
containing lighted candles, and the whole so constructed that it could
be separated from the kite at pleasure. They were miraculously adapted
for setting roofs afire.
Most residential streets must have been fairly quiet; but they were
not sufficiently so to suit the harassed editor. We find him in 1803
declaiming in order against the varied noises: “The measured ditty
of the young sweep at daybreak, upon the chimney top; the tremendous
nasal yell of ‘Ye rusk!’; the sonorous horn that gives dreadful note
of ‘gingerbread!’; and the echoing sound of ‘Hoboy!’ at midnight,
accompanied with its never-failing appeal to more senses than one.”
These “hoboy gentlemen,” whose profession was connected with Mrs.
Warren’s, were still an abomination in 1816, “bellowing out their
filthy ditties” for two hours after eleven. As late as 1819, at the
flush of dawn every morning, a stage traversed the whole length of
Broadway northward, the guard merrily blowing his horn as it went and
all the dogs barking. Hucksters, like beggars, seem at all times to
have been troublesome. At any rate, Coleman in August, 1823, fulminated
against them as to be found on every street and almost at every door,
and as offering “almost everything that can be named, from a lady’s
leghorn hat to a shoestring, from a saddle to a cowskin, from a gold
ring to a jewsharp.” Busy householders and ordinary rent-paying
tradesmen held them in equal dislike.
There was little of the moral censor or the preacher in the early
_Evening Post_. Yet it did not neglect the city’s manners. Temperance
sentiment was then weak, but the journal lamented the excessive number
of corner groggeries; for in New York licenses cost but 40 shillings,
and liquor-selling was more extensive than in Boston or Philadelphia.
In 1810 the Mayor and Excise Commissioners granted 3,500 licenses, and
it was estimated that of the city’s 14,000 families, no less than 2,000
gained a livelihood through the drink trade. Their little shops, many
of them in cellars, were reported to exhibit perpetual scenes of riot
and disorder. Six years later a writer in the _Evening Post_ computed
that there were more than 1,500 retail establishments for liquor, and
added that it were better to let loose in the streets 1,500 hungry
lions and tigers. The editor favored a heavy Federal tax to abate the
evil.
The journal had the courage in 1818 to take a stand against lotteries,
then resorted to not only for private gain, but to raise capital for
bridges, canals, turnpikes, colleges, and churches. Their abolition
would mean a sacrifice to the _Evening Post_, for in some periods of
previous years they had furnished one-fifteenth or one-twentieth the
whole advertising. But Coleman’s heart was touched by the losses of
the poor. “Look at the crowd of poor, ragged wretches that beset the
office-keeper’s doors the morning after the day’s drawing is over,
waiting with their little slips in their hands, to hear their fate, and
the yesterday’s earnings ready to be given to the harpies that stand
gaping for the pittance.” He thought there were two palliatives short
of abolition: first, to price the tickets so high that only people of
means would gamble; and second, as in England, to compel managers to
finish the drawings in a week or ten days, so as to end the pernicious
practice of insuring the fate of tickets. Three years later, in 1821,
an act passed providing that no new lotteries should be authorized.
The _Evening Post_ said nothing against public executions, which
during the first quarter of the century drew crowds of thousands; but
it did cease at an early date, on principle, to publish long accounts
of them. In June, 1819, it barely mentioned the fact that a great
concourse gathered for the execution in Potter’s Field, now Washington
Square, of a negress named Rose Butler for attempted arson, and that
the disappointment was keen when she was respited. Next month her
actual hanging was recorded in five lines. Imprisonment for debt was
repeatedly attacked by the editor.
Little was said by Coleman or any one else against cock-fighting and
other inhuman amusements of the time. In 1807, however, the _Evening
Post_ opened its columns to a writer who described with indignant
reprobation a bull-baiting which he had just attended. The bull was
worried by dogs until, with one horn broken off, his ears in shreds,
his tongue almost torn out, and his eyes filled with blood, he stopped
fighting and had to be driven away to save his life. In other cities
about 1815, notably Philadelphia, a great deal was being said against
the employment of chimney sweeps, a set of dirty, underfed, uneducated
urchins, who suffered from harsh masters and a dangerous calling.
Coleman joined the chorus, and printed extended accounts of British
inventions for the mechanical cleaning of flues. It is interesting to
note that in 1805 the _Evening Post_ was as willing to give up its
revenue from patent medicines as later that from lotteries. The editor,
rendered angry by the death of a little girl who had taken a worthless
nostrum, denounced “the quack medicines and quack advertisements
which ... so much distinguish and disgrace the city.” Some daily
papers were filled with advertisements of Restoratives, Essences,
Balsams, Lozenges, and Purifiers warranted to cure all human ills; and
the vendors had begun to publish in Maiden Lane a weekly organ, the
_Remembrancer_, of which they distributed five hundred copies free.
Upon the contributions steadily made by invention and private
enterprise to the comfort of the city many comments may be found
in the _Evening Post_. Some of the most interesting relate to the
old sailboat ferries, which were both slow and dangerous. Repeated
accidents occurred early in the century. Following the capsizing of a
Brooklyn ferry one bitter December day in 1803, with six passengers
aboard, Coleman remarked that it was a notorious fact that such craft
were placed in charge of fellows who were oftener half drunk than
sober, and who, unable themselves to steer, committed the helm to any
one who volunteered. He quoted the opinion of a competent sailor that
in build these boats were the most dangerous ferries, especially in
rough weather, of all he had seen throughout the world. The Paulus Hook
(Jersey City) ferries, when contending against head winds and strong
tides, required three hours to make a passage, and it was virtually
impossible to get a horse and carriage across the North River. On
summer Sundays, when many wished to go to Hoboken for picnics, and
during the autumn racing on Long Island, prodigious queues would
form at the piers. But on July 18, 1812, a steam ferry was set in
motion between Manhattan and Paulus Hook by Robert Fulton. Surpassing
all expectations, it proved able to accommodate six carriages and
horses--driven easily aboard by a floating bridge--and 300 passengers
at one time, and to cross during a calm in fourteen minutes, or against
the tide in twenty. On July 27 some 1,500 people were ferried across
and back; “a proud example of the genius of our country,” said Coleman.
When in the summer of 1807 Fulton’s steamboat, the _Clermont_, began
her regular service between New York and Albany, the _Evening Post_
was jubilant; he had made only a few trips before it wanted the mail
service transferred to him. It proudly recorded each new reduction in
the time, until one trip from Albany down was made in 28 hours. Even in
October great crowds gathered to watch the boat start:
Among the thousands who viewed the scene [wrote “New York” on Oct.
2] permit a spectator to express his gratification at the sight,
this morning, of the steamboat proceeding on her trip to Albany in
a wind and swell of tide which appeared to bid defiance to every
attempt to perform the voyage. The Steam Boat appeared to glide as
easily and rapidly as though it were calm, and the machinery was
not in the least impeded by the waves of the Hudson, the wheels
moving with their usual velocity and effect. The experiment of this
day removes every doubt of the practicability of the Steam Boat
being able to work in rough weather.
Unfortunately, this particular trip was actually disastrous. Leaving
the city at 10 a. m., the boat was forced by the gale and tide to
tie up to the bank at noon, staying there overnight. Next morning,
before reaching Tarrytown, she ran into a small sloop, and one of her
paddle-wheels was torn away. It was 10 o’clock on the morning of Oct.
4 before she set her stiff and hungry passengers ashore in Albany. She
was immediately withdrawn, and during the winter was almost completely
rebuilt.
The journal appreciatively noticed the opening of steamship navigation
on the Raritan and Delaware Rivers in 1809, as a means of shortening
the trip between New York and Philadelphia. In March, 1815, it gave
an account of the first trip through Hell Gate and the Sound to New
Haven. The steamship _Fulton_ left New York shortly after 5 a. m.,
and, the weather being bad and the wood for fuel poor, did not reach
her destination till 4:30 that afternoon. Eight or nine hours would
ordinarily be sufficient. The ease with which Hell Gate, theretofore
thought impassable by steam, was navigated, amazed every one. No less
than $90,000 had been spent on the boat. “We believe it may with truth
be affirmed that there is not in the world such accommodations afloat,”
wrote a correspondent. “Indeed, it is hardly possible to conceive
that anything of the kind can exceed the _Fulton_ in elegance and
convenience.”
By the beginning of 1816 the _Evening Post_ was giving much space to
the possibilities of coal gas as an illuminant. A schoolmaster named
Griscom lectured the evening of Jan. 26 on the light, the audience
including the Mayor, Recorder, many aldermen, and prominent business
men. He demonstrated the use of gas, argued that it would cost only
half as much as lamps or candles, and showed that it gave a superior
brilliancy without smoke or odor. At this time, as Coleman emphasized,
Londoners had extensively employed coal gas for four or five years.
During the summer of 1816 a successful trial was made in Baltimore.
At last, seven years later, the _Evening Post_ was able editorially
to direct attention to the advertisement of the New York Gas Company,
which was just issuing $200,000 worth of stock, and which the city
government had given a franchise for lighting all the town south of
Grand Street for the next thirty years.
But the use of old-fashioned illuminants involved no such hardships
as did the city’s exclusive dependence, when Hamilton’s journal began
its career, upon wood for fuel. As regularly as the Hudson froze and
snowdrifts blocked the roads, prices soared. In January, 1806, for
example, hickory rose from the normal price of $3.50 a load (three
loads made a cord) to $7, and some speculators even tried to get $8. In
1821, after a severe snowstorm, $5 was charged for a load of oak, and
$7.50 for better woods. It was with unusual satisfaction, therefore,
that in the summer of 1823 the journal said that it “congratulated the
public on the near prospect of this city being supplied with coal,
dug from that immense range” of potential mines lately discovered in
Pennsylvania. The new Schuylkill Coal Company and the Lehigh Coal and
Navigation Company were making preparations to ship the anthracite;
and Coleman hoped that the city’s fuel bill of $700,000 or $800,000
would be cut in half.
Little criticism was given the watch or the firemen, though neither
fully protected the city. In 1812 the journal very properly attacked
the “snug watch-boxes” in which the police were wont to sit, and
demanded that the men be warmly dressed and kept constantly on
patrol. During 1818 its complaints of the insufficiency of the police
redoubled, and in 1823, when the total annual expense to the city was
$56,000, Coleman asserted that for almost the whole ward surrounding
Coenties Slip, with many valuable warehouses, there was but one
watchman. The editor, using the adjectives “noisome,” “beastly,”
“filthy,” spoke of the jail and bridewell in 1812 as standing
reproaches to New York. He also condemned “the abominable practises
of the marshals, constables, low attornies, and a number of other
wretches” who hung about the courts and bridewell to prey upon arrested
men. The _Evening Post_ at intervals till 1820 complained of a lack of
inspection in public markets; while with almost equal regularity it
scored the neglect of the Battery, whose only caretakers were too often
the hogs.
The one reform of the time which the paper opposed was the aldermanic
decree in the spring of 1820 that no more interments should take place
south of Canal, Sullivan, and Grand Streets. This was good sense; but
Coleman, as a spokesman for the wealthy merchant families, objected
because it rendered many family burial plots or vaults worthless, and
because the nearest available cemeteries were three and a half miles
from the city.
II