lived to be eighty-three, he gave his strength to the _Evening Post_
till the very day he was stricken down. The only sustained series of
editorials which he wrote after his final visit to Europe in 1867 was
a series upon reciprocity in trade, but he still contributed many
occasional leaders upon questions of the day. He was accustomed to come
down in the morning, and whether he wrote an editorial or not, to read
all the proofs with care and frequently to make heavy corrections. “He
would pass through the editorial rooms with a cheery good morning,”
says Eggleston; “he would sit down by one’s desk and talk if there was
aught to talk about; or, if asked a question while passing, would stand
while answering it, and frequently would relate some anecdote suggested
by the question or offer some apt quotation.” Hawthorne, who had seen
him abroad, spoke of him as “at once alert and infirm,” and with “a
weary look upon his face, as if he were tired of seeing things and
doing things, though with certainly enough energy still to see and do,
if need were.” Yet the vigor and fire with which he treated topics of
the day, if they seemed really pressing topics to him, was not a whit
abated.
It is the testimony of more than one co-worker that his last day in
the office, the day he delivered the address at the unveiling of the
Mazzini statue, showed him worn and depressed. He went into Eggleston’s
room, and asked the latter’s opinion upon two poems sent him by an
acquaintance. Eggleston said they were poor stuff. “I supposed so,”
Bryant said sadly; “and now I suppose I shall have to write to her on
the subject. People expect too much of me--altogether too much.” He
chatted also with Watson R. Sperry, the managing editor, who procured
a book of reference from the _Evening Post_ library for him. He was
as tranquil and physically as strong as ever, but there was a tension
in his voice. Finally, says Sperry, “he said to me that it was quite
unfair to ask a man of his age to make a public address. There was a
petulance and a pathos in his tone which I had never heard before.” A
few hours later, after speaking bareheaded in the sun, he collapsed on
the steps of Gen. James Wilson’s home.
Bryant’s work for the _Post_ must not be thought of as consisting
wholly of editorial writing and management. He filled literally
hundreds of its columns with his letters of travel, which covered
each of his six trips to Europe, and his tours to the South and the
Northwest, and which ultimately were collected into three volumes.
The letters are not literature, but good journalism. Bigelow once
wrote Bryant that “they are very much liked by the class--of course,
not the largest--who can appreciate them, and are of great value to
the paper. I like them none the less because they are very different
from the style of correspondence which ordinarily finds its way into
newspapers from abroad.” By this Bigelow meant that they did not depend
upon important events, adventure, or gossip. Their interest lay in a
careful observation of scenery and society which often caused them to
be widely copied. In the early days the poet wrote reviews and reports
of important lectures. His signed poems in the _Post_ did not aggregate
a dozen, but they were supplemented by unsigned light verse, of which a
good specimen is the poem on “Bully” Brooks, Sumner’s assailant, to be
found in Godwin’s biography (II, 92). Brooks had been challenged to a
duel in Canada by Anson Burlingame:
To Canada, Brooks was asked to go;
To waste of powder a pound or so;
He sighed as he answered, No, no, no,
They might take my life on the way, you know.
For I am afraid, afraid, afraid,
Bully Brooks is afraid....
Bryant reaped a generous material reward for his labors--the _Evening
Post_ made him by far the richest poet the country has had. He
possessed a competence and more by 1860, for he had shared equally
with Bigelow in profits that enabled the latter, after only twelve
years with the paper, to retire worth more than $175,000. The _Post’s_
business history in the Civil War is summarized in the statement that
its dividends reached 80 per cent. upon the capital invested, and
that at the close of the struggle its value was commonly estimated at
$1,000,000.
It made Bryant, with Parke Godwin and Isaac Henderson, wealthy while
some other New York journals were scarcely paying expenses. The
_Tribune_ in October, 1861, said that the circulation of American
dailies was larger than ever, but many had been forced into bankruptcy.
“We doubt that a single daily in this city has paid its expenses
throughout the last four months, or that a dozen in the Union have
done so.” The receipts of the _Tribune_ in 1864 were $747,501, and its
expenses were $735,751, the nominal profit not sufficing to pay for
the depreciation of the plant. The chief reason for the embarrassment
of the morning papers was the enormous cost of paper, especially as
the war neared its close. The _Tribune’s_ paper bill during 1864 was
$426,000, whereas in 1861 it would not have been more than $200,000 for
the same circulation. In the space of only four months, April to July,
1864, the combination of paper-makers in the Eastern States advanced
the price from fifteen cents a pound to twenty-seven cents. The _Times_
in 1863 imported paper from Belgium at seven and a half cents. The
position of the _Post_ was fortunate in that it used much less paper
than the _Herald_ or _Tribune_--it was still a four-page paper, while
they had eight or twelve pages, though of course smaller--while at the
beginning of the war it charged three cents a copy, and they only two.
Later the prices of all the journals advanced; the _Evening Post_ in
1862 going to four cents a copy and from $9 a year to $10, and in 1864
to five cents a copy and $12 a year.
Just how high the war-time circulation became we do not know. In
April, 1861, it exceeded 20,000, and it steadily increased, the demand
growing so heavy the first battle summer that whenever important news
came it was necessary to issue many copies printed on one side of
the sheet alone. To obviate this, in 1862 the journal installed “the
largest and most efficient eight-cylinder newspaper press that has
ever been constructed,” at a cost of nearly $50,000. We know that
in 1864 the total revenue from sales and subscriptions of the daily
reached $250,000. Advertising, moreover, had become so extensive that
frequently six pages instead of four had to be printed, and they had
swollen to enormous size. All of the evening papers were still “blanket
sheets,” and one or two morning papers, the most prominent being the
_Sun_, long remained so. At the close of the war the dimensions of the
unfolded _Evening Post_ were 30½ by 52 inches--it was not a journal
for use in such subways as the _Evening Post_ was already advocating.
No newspaper so large, the _Post_ boasted, had ever attained so wide
a circulation. Huge as it was, and devoting from 20 to 25 of its 40
columns to advertising, it had constantly to exclude advertisements.
The advertising receipts of the _Herald_ in 1865 reached $662,192; of
the _Tribune_, $301,841; of the _Times_, $284,412; and of the _Evening
Post_, which stood high above the _World_ or _Sun_, and easily led the
evening papers, $222,715.
Bryant, who in the late thirties would probably have sold his interest
in the _Post_ for a few thousands clear, thus by 1866 had grown rich
far beyond any wish or expectation on his part. He lived very simply;
a man who would rather walk than drive, who preferred oatmeal to any
procurable dainty, and whose most lavish entertainment was to have the
Rev. Dr. Henry Bellows or some other well-loved friend spend a week-end
at Roslyn, could not do otherwise. The chief outward signs of his
wealth were that he acquired, besides his little estate at Roslyn, a
town house, and the ancestral homestead at Cummington, Mass.; while he
unostentatiously gave large sums in charity. President Mark Hopkins of
Williams College, acknowledging a check from Bryant, wrote that it was
a queer world in which poets were able to be lavish philanthropists. It
was because of his large gifts that he was able to contradict with some
asperity a stranger who wrote him criticizing his tariff views, and
denouncing him as a plutocrat because he was said to be worth more than
$500,000. Bryant replied, in a hitherto unpublished note:
I am as much for free trade as yourself. The _Evening Post_ has
been all along known as an advocate for absolute free trade between
nations, and for the support of government by direct taxation. But
as the state of public opinion leaves no hope of this, the _Evening
Post_ for the present coöperates with those who seek a reduction
of the tariff to a simple revenue standard with no view leading to
protection. That is as much as we can now get and the _Evening
Post_ is for taking it. As we cannot go by a single jump from the
bottom of the stairs to the top, we take the first step.
Your estimate of the property I possess is greatly exaggerated. You
intimate that I ought to be a second Zaccheus. How do you know I am
not? You have no knowledge of how much of my income, such as it is,
goes to public objects, and to the poor. Nor is it my business to
inform you. I have for the greater part of my life been in narrow
circumstances, yet never repined on that account, and although I
have been prospering of late, it is not my fault, for I never made
haste to be rich. You see therefore that you have administered
reproof without knowing, or probably caring, whether there was any
occasion for it or not. (Dec. 14, 1870.)
Bryant began his journalistic career in poverty and discouragement, his
literary friends jeering at him for exchanging the dignified profession
of the law for the jangling, vulgar newspaper calling. He made it
pay richly in money, and above all in honor and influence. No man of
his time did more, and only three, Greeley, Raymond, and the elder
Bowles, did so much, to elevate the press in public esteem. “If our
newspapers have risen above the level on which they stood when Dickens
and Trollope held them up to the scorn of Europe,” said the Brooklyn
_Times_ when he died, “it is because they have been wise enough to
profit by the lesson set by William Cullen Bryant.” He had often
crossed pens with the _Journal of Commerce_ and the _World_. The former
spoke of him as “an editor whose example has been uniformly ennobling,”
and said that “journalism will never improve so much that it may not
safely pattern by Bryant.” “His long and honorable career,” said the
latter, “had put into his hands that mysterious influence called weight
of character.” Not a few journals, like the Philadelphia _Ledger_, and
some individuals, like John D. Van Buren, ranked the editor above the
poet.
When George W. Curtis delivered his commemorative address in New York
before an audience which included President Hayes and members of his
Cabinet, he paid his warmest tribute to Bryant as the journalist.
“The fact is no such man ever sat before or since in the editorial
chair,” a critic has just written in the Cambridge History of American
Literature; “in no other has there been such culture, scholarship,
wisdom, dignity, moral idealism. Was it all in Greeley? In Dana? What
those fifty years may have meant as an influence on the American press
... the layman may only guess.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
APARTMENT HOUSES RISE AND TWEED FALLS
Not long before the war New York’s manners were provincial, and not
long afterwards the city felt itself one of the world’s great centers.
In twenty years, 1850–70, the population grew from a half million to a
million. Such large groups were enriched by war contracts, the rise of
real estate, and the nation-wide business expansion that the increase
in luxury struck every observer. A Four Hundred was taking shape, rich
shops were arising, the opera was growing more and more gilded; in
1868, said the _Evening Post_, the receipts of the score of theaters
reached $3,165,000. The _Post_ that year listed ten of the richest
men in order--Wm. B. Astor, believed to be worth $75,000,000; A. T.
Stewart, Wm. C. Rhinelander, Peter and Robert Goelet, James Lenox,
Peter Lorillard, John D. Wolfe, M. M. Hendricks, Rufus M. Lord, and
C. V. S. Roosevelt. Their wealth, it told them, had become so great
that if they tried they could accomplish enormous benefits for New
York--they could sweep away the debasing tenement house system, or
shatter the Tammany Ring; and the people believed that public services
were the best if not the only justification for such wealth.
The growth in population emphasized the desirability of many diverse
improvements. At the beginning of 1867 the _Evening Post_ was demanding
a great art gallery, such as we now have in the Metropolitan Museum,
and pointing to European collections as models, while later the same
year it urged a zoological garden like London’s, there being as yet
none in all America. It and the _Tribune_ together in 1871 asked for
a single large public library. There were several small ones--the
Astor, the Mercantile, the Society Library, and the unfinished Lenox
Library--but none was “public” in the sense that it circulated books
free, while the city would obviously benefit from the union of some of
the larger collections. Having been the first to propose Central Park,
Bryant applauded the creation of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, for which
ground was broken in 1866. Theodore Thomas, who had begun to organize
his orchestra early in the war, and immediately afterwards had opened
his “summer night” concerts, issued a call through the newspaper for
a supporting fund of $20,000. In several editorials in the spring of
1868, the first entitled “Can a City Be Planned?”, the _Evening Post_
suggested that a board of engineers be named to lay out a city plan,
determining which areas should be used for retail trade, manufactures,
and residence. It was an Age of Innocence in many ways--people wondered
at the first concrete sidewalk, laid from Park Row to Murray Street
in 1868; they were just learning the use of safe deposit vaults, and
elevators were curiosities; but it was an age of progress.
The problem which most pressed upon New York after Appomattox, as after
the World War, was housing. Building had stopped during the conflict,
and its resumption was slow, but Manhattan had kept on growing at the
rate of 30,000 people a year. In the winter of 1866–7 the _Evening
Post_ pronounced New York the most costly place of residence on earth.
“Houses are so scarce that landlords see tenants running around,
like pigs in the land of Cockaigne, with knives and forks in their
backs, begging to be eaten; it is a favor to get a decent house at a
preposterous rent--at almost any sum, in fact; and we know of families
living comfortably in Europe from the rent of a house on one of the
favorite avenues.” That spring a great open-air mass meeting was
held in protest, and petitions were sent the Legislature for a law
basing rents upon the assessed valuation. Those of moderate means
suffered more than the rich or the poor tenement dwellers. “Bank
clerks, bookkeepers, and salesmen are compelled to go to New Jersey,
Staten Island, Long Island, or Westchester to secure attractive and
comfortable homes,” said the _Post_. “New York is practically losing
the best part of its population.” The practice of sub-letting parts of
single houses waxed common.
From this demand for housing there arose an unprecedented real estate
boom. Thousands of homes were placed on the market at high prices, and
land auctions took place daily. The _Evening Post_ reported that lots
in Manhattan and Brooklyn were eagerly bought at unheard-of rates. The
neighborhoods of Central and Prospect Parks had become popular for
residences, while merchants were purchasing sites for stores on Union
Square and Fifth Avenue. Lots that fronted upon what is now Central
Park West had sold in 1850 for a few hundred dollars apiece, and in
1860 for from $2,000 to $3,000, but in 1867 they were bringing from
$8,000 to $15,000. High up on the East Side, at 91st Street, lots now
sold at $3,000. When Bay Ridge Terrace was created in 1868 the journal
commented upon the rapid growth of that fine part of Brooklyn, which
it had already noted to be spreading eastward rapidly. Brownsville and
East New York before the war had been quiet farming communities, but
now the former had a hundred houses, and the latter had grown with a
rush to 5,000 souls.
The northward march of business, causing the demolition of hundreds of
old residences, increased the need for new residential construction.
When Ex-Mayor Opdyke’s house on Fifth Avenue near Sixteenth Street
was sold to James A. Hearn & Son in 1867 for $105,000, and a
milliner established herself on the Avenue at Twenty-second Street,
the _Evening Post_ devoted an editorial to the transformation. It
predicted that all Fifth Avenue to Twenty-third Street would soon
be engrossed by business, the new Fifth Avenue Hotel having given
the movement impetus. Higher up, residential property had reached
amazing prices. A brownstone house at Thirtieth Street had just been
purchased for $114,000, while P. T. Barnum had bought one at the corner
of Thirty-ninth for $80,000. A fine light brownstone mansion on the
corner of Fortieth, building for W. H. Vanderbilt, would cost at least
$80,000, the stable and lot included. At Forty-third Street a wealthy
Jewish congregation was building a synagogue at an outlay of fully
$700,000, while ten blocks farther up, where St. Thomas’s was about to
be erected, $100,000 had been offered and refused for a plot 100 by 125
feet. Seven houses with brownstone fronts had just been finished on the
west side of the Avenue, between Forty-third and Forty-fourth, and were
so finely furnished that the front doors had cost $700 each, and the
staircases $4,000.
The most serious aspect of the housing shortage was that as yet
respectable New Yorkers knew but two modes of residence: one must
either take a full single house, or consent to a dismal boarding house.
The apartment building was known only to travelers in Europe, and was
mistrusted as not being adapted to American individualism.
The possibility of utilizing the multiple-unit type of housing,
however, was unceasingly expounded by the _Evening Post_ from the time
peace returned, for the editors had lived in the “Continental flat”
abroad. An early editorial (Feb. 6, 1866) was called “How to Gain Room.”
It has been suggested frequently that tenement houses
scientifically built would be profitable in New York, and a great
boon to the working people. But they would be no less an advantage
to the wealthier classes, and we wonder that the attempt has
not been made first in the best part of town, and with houses
calculated to accommodate families of the wealthier citizens, at a
somewhat more moderate rent than is attainable now.
Many a family which now occupies a whole house uptown would be
content to rent a floor, suitably fitted up after the manner of
the houses of Paris and other European cities. Such an arrangement
would spare the women of the family the endless and often painful
toil of going up and downstairs, from the kitchen to the top of a
three-storied house, three or four times a day. It would be far
more convenient, and the rents might well make a considerable
saving.
The inertia of New Yorkers was to blame, the _Post_ said a little
later. “Such a thing as hiring a suite of rooms and having meals sent
in from a restaurant at a fixed and moderate charge is, we believe,
almost if not quite unknown here. As for the ‘flats’ in which thousands
of families conveniently and comfortably keep house in France and
Germany, they require an arrangement of house architecture not known
to our builders.” In the summer of 1867, when the congestion was at
its worst, the editors gave publicity to the design of an architect
for an apartment house for the “middling classes.” Upon two ordinary
city lots, 20 by 100 feet, he proposed erecting a four-story building,
containing eight distinct suites of rooms, all as completely isolated
from each other as though they were detached houses. There was to be a
central stairs, each landing giving entrance to two homes; but every
visitor would have to ring below for admission precisely as at the
front door of any other houses. Each suite was to contain a parlor,
dining room, four bedrooms, bath, and kitchen. For some time the
newspaper carried on a veritable crusade.
When the first apartment house was ready, in 1870, one designed by
Richard M. Hunt and erected at 142 East Eighteenth Street, the _Evening
Post_ rejoiced in it as the harbinger of a new housing era. It was said
to be better than most of those in Paris, though the _Post_ thought
it lacking in light and ventilation. Each of the sixteen suites had
six rooms and a bath, and rents ranged from $1,500 on the lower floors
to $1,080 on the upper--G. P. Putnam, the publisher, and others of
means lived in it. There was no elevator, but a dumbwaiter enabled the
tenants to bring coal up from the basement. The close of 1870 saw the
new movement in full swing, with eight houses built or building, and a
strong demand for more.
An apartment house on Forty-eighth Street boasted a porter, who lighted
the halls, removed garbage, and sent up fuel; the rents were only $40
to $75 a month. A block of flats overlooking Central Park from the
east at Sixty-eighth Street gave each tenant eight rooms and a bath,
elevator service, black walnut floors, and his own kitchen range and
hot water heater for $75 to $150. The most pretentious house, however,
was building at Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. It was costing a round
million, and was to be 125 feet high. “Each suite will have ten rooms,
four closets, and eight washbowls,” announced the _Evening Post_, and
rents were to run from $2,000 to $3,000 a year. The journal advised
builders to install elevators, and charge as much for the upper as for
lower floors.
For several years a marked prejudice against flats persisted. Most
New Yorkers believed that in this land of democratic sociability it
would be impossible to isolate the apartments and obtain privacy, and
that they would soon sink to the level of tenements. The _Post_ did
its share in ridiculing these fears, and in pointing out the ugliness
of the monotonous blocks of brownstone houses. It denied the common
remark, “No house is big enough for two families.” But as it later
said, one of the cardinal reasons for the rapid dissipation of the
prejudice and popular success of the apartment houses was the building,
in the first instance, of costly structures as pioneers in the movement.
By 1874 it thought that the new houses “may now be considered almost
perfect.” The Haight Building, at Fifteenth Street and Fifth Avenue,
offered thirty flats at $2,000 to $3,000 a year each, with an elevator,
an internal telegraph, and a restaurant. Among the notables living
here were Henry M. Field, the traveler; Col. W. C. Church, editor of
the _Galaxy_; Prof. Youmans, founder of the _Popular Science Monthly_,
and the Spanish Consul. But the last word in luxury was an apartment
building in Fifty-sixth Street, where “the whole house is warmed by
steam, and hot water is supplied to all the tenants at the expense of
the owner.” The paper’s prediction that ten-story houses with elevators
would be more popular than smaller buildings had been completely
justified.