Art and the Empire-G New York, 1825-1861
Art and the Empire City New York, 1825-1861
Art and the Empire City New York, 1825-1861
Edited by Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Yale University Press, New Haven and London
This volume has been published in conjunction with the exhibition "Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861," organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and held there from September 19, 2000, to January 7, 2001.
The exhibition is made possible by 0 Fleet
The exhibition catalogue is made possible through the support of the William CuUen Bryant Fellows.
Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Copyright © 2000 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro- duced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information retrieval system, without permission from the publishers.
John P. O'Neill, Editor in Chief
Carol Fuerstein, Editor, with the assistance of Margaret Donovan
Bruce Campbell, Designer
Peter Antony and Merantine Hens, Production
Robert Weisberg, Computer Specialist
Jean Wagner, Bibliographer
New photography of Metropolitan Museum objects by Joseph Coscia Jr., Anna-Marie Kellen, Paul Lachenauer, Oi-Cheong Lee, Bruce Schwarz, Eileen Travell, Juan Trujillo, Karin L. Willis, and Peter Zeray, the Photograph Studio, The Metropolitan Museimi of Art
Galliard typeface designed by Matthew Carter
Printed on Phoenix Imperial 135 gsm
Separations by Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois
Printed and bound by Amoldo Mondadori, S.pA., Verona, Italy
Jacket/cover illustration: Detail, cat. no. 143, William Wellstood, after Benjamin F. Smith Jr., NetP Tarky i8ss,from the Limivg Observatoryy 1855
Frontispiece: Cat. no. 221, Unknown cabinetmaker. Armchair, ca. 1825
Endpapers: fig. 5, John Randel Jr., adapted and published by William Bridges, This Map of the City of New Tork and Island of Manhattan as Laid Out by the Commissioners, 1811
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Art and the empire city : New York, 1825-1861 / edited by Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat. p. cm.
Exhibition held Sept. 19, 2000 through Jan. 7, 2001 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Indudees bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87099-957-5 (he. : alk. paper)— isbn 0-87099-958-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)— 0-300-08518-4 (Yale University Press)
I. Art, American— New York (State)— New York— Exhi- bitions. 2. Art, Modem— 19th century— New York (State) — New York— Exhibitions. 1. Voorsanger, Catherine Hoover. II. Howat, John K. Ill, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y)
N6535.N5 A28 2000
709'. 747*10747471 — dc2i 00-041855
Contents
Sponsor's Statement vi
Terrence Murray^ FleetBoston Financial
Director's Foreword vii Philippe de Montebello
Lenders to the Exhibition viii
Preface and Acknowledgments x
John K Howaty Catherine Hoover Voorsan^er
Contributors to the Catalogue xv
Note to the Reader xvi
ESSAYS
Inventing the Metropolis: Civilization and Urbanity in Antebellum New York 3 Dell Upton
Mapping the Venues: New York City Art Exhibitions 47 Carrie Rebora Barratt
Appendix A, Exhibition Venues 66 Appendix B, Exhibitions and Auctions 75
Private Collectors and PubUc Spirit: A Selective View 8 3 John K, Howat
Selling the Sublime and the Beautiful: New York Landscape Painting and Tourism 109 Kevin J, Avery
Modeling a Reputation: The American Sculptor and New York City 135 Thayer Tolles
Building the Empire City: Architects and Architecture 169 Morrison H. Heckscher
The Currency of Culture: Prints in New York City 189 Elliot Bostwick Davis
"A Palace for the Sun": Early Photography in New York City 227 JeffL, Rosenheim
"Ahead of the World": New York City Fashion 243 Caroline Rennolds Milbank
The Products of Empire: Shopping for Home Decorations in New York City 259 Amelia Feck
"Gorgeous Articles of Furniture": Cabinetmaking in the Empire City 287 Catherine Hoover Voorsan^fer
Empire City Entrepreneurs: Ceramics and Glass in New York City 327 Alice Cooney Frelin^huysen
"Silver Ware in Great Perfection": The Precious- Metals Trades in New York City 355 Deborah Dependahl Waters
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
Checklist of the Exhibition 575 Bibliography 599 Index 618
FhotO£fraph Credits 636
vi
Sponsor's Statement
Fleet is proud to sponsor the exhibition "Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861" at The Metropol- itan Museum of Art. This beautiful exhibition, which celebrates New York's evolution into the country's cultural and commercial heart, is especially close to ours. Featuring works by Thomas Cole, Frederic E. Church, Gustave Herter, and Tiffany and Company, among many others, this exhibition of more than 310 objects is a visual celebration of the innovative spirit of New York and its imparalleled ability to lead the way for our country and the world.
This sponsorship, our first at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, marks a true coming of age for our company. FleetBoston Financial has evolved into a world-class provider of dynamic financial services, bringing innovative thinking and expertise to more than
20 million customers throughout the United States, Latin America, Asia, and Europe. Our customers and communities depend upon us for innovation in con- sumer and commercial banking, investment banking, institutional and individual investment services, and for creative investments in our communities. In that regard, we are pleased to fund the largest school-pass program in the Museum's history, issuing fi-ee admission passes to 1.5 million schoolchildren and their families through- out New York City. With this program and this exhibition, we hope to convey our unwavering com- mitment to the arts and our stakeholders and to playing a vital role in the glorious future of the Empire City.
We hope you enjoy the exhibition and, for many years to come, the treasures and history depicted in this catalogue.
Terrence Murray
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer FleetBoston Financial
Director's Foreword
The years 1825 to 1861 are those between the comple- tion of the Erie Canal and the outbreak of the Civil War. This was a tinie of remarkable growth, when the small and lively city of New York became a great and vibrant metropolis. One of the most extraordinary developments that marked the period was an aston- ishing flowering of all the arts, a flowering that assured the city its place as the cultural capital of the nation. The Metropolitan Museum is proud to present "Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861," an exhi- bition that offers an exceptionally broad selection of the finest examples of the visual arts produced or acquired during the memorable years it covers. Together the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue illumi- nate the nature, range, and refinement of those objects as well as the cultural life of the era.
The Museum is deeply grateful for the generosity of the eighty-four institutions and private individuals whose loans of objects of significant quality allow us to display the history of art in New York City rather than the history of New York City as seen in its art. A particular debt is owed to The New-York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York, which, not surprisingly, after the Metro- politan Museum made by far the largest number of loans. Other sister institutions also granted multiple loans that were essential to the realization of our exhi- bition; especially important were those from The New York Public Library; the Brooklyn Museum of
Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia Univer- sity; and Columbia's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.
Many acknowledgments follow, but here I wish to single out for particular notice John K. Howat, Lawrence A. Fleischman Chairman of the Depart- ments of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum, for originating the concept of the exhibition and for his leadership throughout its realization, and Catherine Hoover Voorsanger, Associate Curator, Department of American Decorative Arts, and Projea Director, for her exceptional skills as organizer and diplomat, which guaranteed success in the enterprise.
Undertakings of this importance and scale require significant financial expenditure, and various organi- zations have made major contributions in this respect. The Metropolitan Museum is extremely grateful to Fleet and its Chairman, Terrence Murray, for their generous support of the exhibition. The support pro- vided by the Homeland Foundation is also notewor- thy, as it has helped to make possible the conservation of several objects in the exhibition. In addition, the Museum is thankful for the assistance provided by the Private Art Dealers Association, Inc. Conner-Rosenkranz has also kindly provided support for this project. The publication accompany- ing the exhibition was made possible by the William Cullen Bryant Fellows of the Metropolitan Museum.
Philippe de MontebeUo Director
Lenders to the Exhibition
Albany, Albany Institute of History and Art 277
Baltimore, The Baltimore Musevmi of Art 288
Baltimore, The Walters Art Gallery 50
Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Museum of Art 302
Bennington, Vermont, Bennington Museum 270
Boston, Mxasexmi of Fine Arts 11, 23, 35, 125, 130, 131, 147, 154, 237
Boston, Society for the Preservation of New Eng- land Antiquities 215
Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum of Art 13, 26, 33, 89A, B, 149, 224, 244, 262, 298
Brooklyn, St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church 280
Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago 105, 247
Cincinnati, Cincinnati Art Museum 164
Cooperstown, New York State Historical Associa- tion 28, 282A, B
Coming, New York, The Corning Museum of Glass 273-75
Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art 289, 300
Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts 285
Fort Worth, Texas, Kimbell Art Museum 44
Hartford, Connecticut, Wadsworth Atheneum 24
Kansas City, Missouri, Hallmark Photographic Col- lection, Hallmark Cards, Inc. 171, 173, 174, 177, 194
Kansas City, Missouri, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 241
Lexington, Kentucky, Henry Clay Memorial Foun- dation, located at Ashland, The Henry Clay Estate 296
London, The National Gallery 47
London, Royal Institute of British Architects Library 82, 83
Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museimi 185-91
Los Angeles, The Los Angeles Covinty Museum of Art 34
Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Miaseum 245
Minneapolis, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts 54
Newark, The Newark Museum 60, 252, 303
New Haven, Yale Center for British Art 49
New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery 57
New Paltz, New York, Huguenot Historical Society 65
New York, Art Commission of the City of New York 2
New York, Columbia University, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library 79, 86-88, 93, 99, 100, 103
New York, Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library 146
New York, Congregation Emanu-El 305
New York, Cooper-Hev^tt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution 218
New York, Donaldson, Lufldn & Jenrette Collection of Americana i
New York, Gilman Paper Company Collection 160, 169, 175, 173, 196
New York, Grace Church 95
New York, Mercantile Library Association 58
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art 4, 9, 14, 15, 17, 20-22, 29, 31, 32, 39, 41-43, 48, 51-53, 55, 59, 62, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73-77, 80, 81, 84, 85, 97, 102, 113-16, 118-23, 127, 129, 132-35, 142, 144, 145, 148, 153, 156, 158, 165A, B, 195, 197-200, 202, 205, 212-14, 216, 217, 219, 223, 225, 235, 236A, B, 240A-C, 242,
ix
243, 246, 248, 251, 257, 259, 260, 269, 272, 276, 278,
279, 281A, B, 291-95, 301, 307, 308
New York, Municipal Archives, Department of Records and Information Services 192, 193
New York, Museum of the City of New York 25, 38, 63, 141, 150, 151, 199, 200, 203-5, 220, 238, 239, 253, 268, 284, 301, 306, 310
New York, National Academy of Design 6, 8
New York, The New-York Historical Society 7, 27, 40, 45, 46, 61, 67, 70, 72, 78, 94, 96, 104, 110-12, 152, 155, 162, 167, 170, 172, 179, 182-84, 209, 283A, B, 297
New York, The New York Public Library 5, 30, 106-9, 143, 157, 159, 163, 181
New York, Parish of Trinity Church 304
Norfolk, Virginia, Chrysler Museum of Art 64, 166
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, The Berkshire Museum 10
Pordand, Maine, Victoria Mansion, The Morse- Libby House 249
Richmond, Virginia, Valentine Museum 201
Rome, New York, Jervis Public Library 90, 91
Tarrytown, New York, Historic Hudson Valley 3, 207
Tarrytown, New York, Lyndhurst, A National Trust Historic Site 234
Toledo, Ohio, The Toledo Museum of Art 36
Trenton, New Jersey State Museum 263, 264
Washington, D.C., Library of Congress 92, 124, 126, 211
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art 37
Washington, D.C., National Portrait Gallery, Smith- sonian Institution 56, 161, 168
Washington, D.C., Octagon Museum loi
Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Libraries 98
Winterthur, Delaware, Winterthur Museum 221, 254, 265, 271, 287
Worcester, Massachusetts, American Antiquarian Society 117, i37, 139, 140
Worcester, Massachusetts, Worcester Art Museum 12
Mrs. Sammie Chandler 233
Mr. and Mrs. Gerard L. Eastman, Jr. 290
Jock Elliott 138
Mr. and Mrs. Stuart P. Feld 250 Arthur R and Esther Goldberg 266 Frederick W Hughes 229 Matthew R. Isenburg 176, 180 Richard Hampton Jenrette 231, 232 Kaufman Americana Foundation 255 Mr. and Mrs. Jay Lewis 256, 258, 261, 267 Gloria Manney 16, 18, 19 Robert Mehlman 299 Leonard L. Milberg 128
Mulberry Plantation, Camden, South Carolina 222
Dr. and Mrs. Emil F. Pascarelli 227
D. Albert SoelFing 309
Mr. and Mrs. Peter G. Terian 228, 230
Mark D, Tomasko 136
Janet Zapata 208
Anonymous lenders 206, 210, 226, 286
Preface and Acknowledgments
Widi the exhibition "Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861" and the pub- lication of this volume, the Metropolitan Museum presents the engaging story of how New York became a world city and assumed its vital role as the visual arts capital of the nation— a position it retains as we enter the twenty-first century.
The organizers of the exhibition and the authors of the catalogue have considered the full range of the visual arts and the related themes that assumed major importance in the city, and the nation as well, in the four decades prior to the Civil War. The physical and cultural growth of New York City; the city's develop- ment as a marketplace for art and a center for public exhibitions and private collecting; new departures in architecture, painting, and sculpture; printmaking, a fine art and a democratic one; the new medium of photography; New York as a fashion center; the embel- lishment of the domestic interior; changing styles in furniture, and the evolution of the ceramics, glass, and silver industries are the primary subjects repre- sented by the works chosen for the exhibition and dis- cussed in the essays contained herein.
A coherency of historical, cultural, and artistic forces in the years 1825 through 1861 provides ample license for the choice of these dates as the framework for the exhibition. The year 1825 was critical: it was then that the Erie Canal was completed, after sections of the waterway opened in 1820 and 1823, making a crucial contribution to the robust financial condition of both the city and state of New York. By 1825 the city had surpassed all other American seaports to become the financial and commercial center of the nation. During the antebellum years New York City grew physically, commercially, and culturally with such vigor that it earned not only the enthusiastic epi- thets the Empire City and the Great Emporium but also attracted the sometimes envious, and frequendy bemused, attentions of the world.
The cultural component of New York's dramatic burgeoning was as significant as its aggressive com- mercial expansion. The year 1825 saw the establish- ment of the National Academy of Design, which became the focus of fine arts activities in the city throughout the pre- Civil War era. The concurrent development of other institutions, associations, and
professions devoted to the arts and an increase in the numbers of people involved in the production of the arts were among the most notable signs that New York was becoming a metropolis of primary impor- tance and considerable cultural sophistication. With Broadway at the heart of the Great Emporium, New York was transformed into the nation's major manu- facturing and retailing center, the depot for luxury goods both made in and aroimd the city and im- ported from abroad. Despite occasional catastrophic fires (in 1835 and 1845, notably) and financial depres- sions (in 1837 and 1857, for example) visited on the city, the New York art world flourished in the decades prior to 1861. But this felicitous situation came to a painful end that year.
Southern forces fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, to begin the Civil War. In both the North and South energies that had been applied to trade, build- ing prosperity, and creating a rich and sophisticated culture in America were turned toward the conflict. The impact of the war on the New York art world was immediate. As Charles Cromwell Ingham, acting president of the National Academy of Design, reported in May 1861, "the great Rebellion has startied society firom its propriety, and war and politics now occupy every mind. No one thinks of the arts, even among the artists, patriotism has superceded painting, and many have laid by the palette and pencil, to shoul- der the musket. . . The post- Civil War years wit- nessed significant growth in and support for the visual arts of all kinds: thus, the Metropolitan Museum, founded in 1870, and many other great institutions were established. However, in cosmopolitan New York City there emerged a renewed appreciation of both early and contemporary European art and deco- ration, and there was a concomitant waning of interest in American culture. It was a decidedly new cultural climate.
Planning and executing an exhibition and a book of the magnitude of the present projea is an extended process that involves many individuals who must be acknowledged. "Art and the Empire City*' is the largest exhibition undertaken by the Museum's Departments
xi
of American Art since 1970, when "ipth-Century America" celebrated the institution's one-hundredth birthday, and it has been over five years in the making. It is also unique in its focus, for, while aspects of the arts in America during this period have been exam- ined previously, until now the subject of New York as the primary crucible for the nation's visual arts has not been addressed.
Our first thanks are to Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum, who endorsed the exhibition and stood behind it from its inception. We are also deeply grateful to the lenders, whose names appear elsewhere in this catalogue, for gener- ously allowing us to show their works, many of which normally do not travel, and to hundreds of colleagues throughout this country and abroad, whose willing collaboration guaranteed the project's successful real- ization. Special gratitude is due to The New-York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York, which have lent more works than any other institution save the Metropolitan Museum. Their curatorial and administrative staffs, under the leadership of Betsy Gotbaum and Robert Macdonald, respectively, have supported our endeavors whole- heartedly. Our indebtedness to the sponsors whose financial assistance has been crucial is detailed in the Director's Foreword.
"Art and the Empire City" was conceived in the early 1990s, with the imderstanding that the visual arts of the second quarter of the nineteenth century in America had not been studied adequately H. Barbara Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum, and Paul Staiti and Elizabeth Johns, J. Clawson Mills Fellows in the American Wing in 1991-92 and 1992-93, respectively, helped frame the questions we needed to address. At first the scope of our inquiry was national, but over time it became clear that New York City should be our focus. Kenneth T. Jackson, Jacques Barzun Professor of History and Social Sciences, Columbia University, and editor of the Encyclopedia of New Tork, took an interest in our undertaking early on and served as an informal advisor through- out. Historians Kenneth Myers, Postdoctoral Fellow in 1995-96, and Valentijn Byvanck, Predoctoral Fel- low in 1996-98, contributed valuable perspectives
during the planning of the exhibition, which began in earnest in 1995.
In 1996 and 1997 many colleagues participated in a series of seminars on exhibition themes and the selec- tion of objects, and to them we express our appre- ciation. Ulysses G. Dietz, Donald L. Fennimore, Katherine S. Howe, Frances G. Safford, D. Albert Soeffing, Kevin L. Stayton, and Deborah Dependahl Waters discussed silver and other metalwork with us; Alan M. Stahl guided our choice of medals. Mary- Beth Betts, Elizabeth Blackmar, Andrew Dolkart, Sarah Bradford Landau, Peter Marcuse, the late Adolph K. Placzek, Dell Upton, and Mary Woods contributed views on architecture, city planning, and related subjects, Michele Bogart, Valentijn Byvanck, H. Nichols B. Clark, David B. Dearinger, Linda Fer- ber, Elizabeth Johns, David Meschutt, Jan Seidler Ramirez, Paul Staiti, and John Wilmerding conferred on American paintings and sculpture, and Stephen R. Edidin made recommendations about foreign works. Mary Ann Apicella, Frances Bretter, Wendy A. Cooper, Barry R. Harwood, Peter M. Kenny, John Scherer, Thomas Gordon Smith, Page Talbott, and Deborah Dependahl Waters shared their knowledge of furni- ture. Florence 1. Balasny-Barnes, Barbara and David Goldberg, Esther and Arthur Goldberg, and Emma and Jay Lewis participated in a discussion of ceram- ics. Georgia B. Barnhill, Thomas P. Bruhn, Nancy Finlay, Harry S. Katz, Shelley Langdale, Leslie Nolan, Wendy A. Shadwell, and John Wilmerding consulted on the history of printmaking and print collecting. Laurie Baty, Dale Neighbors, Mary Panzer, Sally Pierce, Alan Trachtenberg, Julie Van Haaften, and, later, Herbert Mitchell advised us about early Ameri- can photography
Valentijn Byvanck recommended the portraits shown, and Janet Zapata selected the jewelry. Phyllis D. Magidson of the Museum of the City of New York worked closely with Caroline Rennolds Milbank on choosing the costumes and related accoutrements. Chantal Hodges researched bookbindings. Laurence Libin, Research Curator, Department of Musical Instruments at the Metropolitan Museum, served in an adjunct curatorial capacity.
In every aspect of the preparation of both the exhi- bition and the catalogue, we have been supported by
our superb research assistants, who have contributed significantly in matters both scholarly and profes- sional. Medill Higgins Harvey, who coordinated the research campaign, was a supremely accomplished leader. Julie Mirabito Douglass directed research per- taining to collectors and with Medill Harvey compiled a bibliography of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources, which provided the curators with a platform from which to embark on studies of their own. For assistance during this phase of the project, we are grateful to have had access to the Seymour B. Durst Old York Library Collection and especially thank Eva Carrozza, former Librarian, for her help. While the icons of American painting and sculpture of our period were well known from the outset, master- pieces in the other arts were not well documented. In search of objects from New York that might have been dispersed nationwide, hundreds of art muse- ums, historic-house museums, historical societies, and regional centers were contacted. To all who answered our queries, and to those who hosted our visits, we extend appreciation. Jeni L. Sandberg took charge of periodical research. Her insightful survey of periodicals and travelers' accounts published between 1825 and 1861 yielded the raw material on which many of the catalogue essays and the themes of the exhibi- tion are predicated.
Austen Barron Bailly researched foreign works of art and oversaw countless administrative and art- historical details. Brandy S. Gulp skillfully researched art patrons, surveyed manuscript collections, and managed the database of exhibition objects. In the last task she relied on the indispensable assistance of Frances Redding Wallace, as well as the support of Jennie W. Choi of Systems and Computer Services. Jodi A. Pollack coordinated the photography for the catalogue with consummate efficiency. Cynthia Van Allen Schaffner contributed expert research assistance and imflagging support of myriad kinds.
During the course of the project, the staffs of the libraries of many institutions graciously assisted our researchers. We thank the following institutions and individuals: the library of The New-York Histor- ical Society, especially Richard Frascr, Megan Hahn, Wendy S. Raver, and May Stone; the New York Soci- ety Library, especially Heidi Haas, Janet Howard, and Mark Piel; the New York Biographical and Genea- logical Library, especially Joy Rich; The New York Public Library, especially Virginia Bartow, Robert Rainwater, and Roberta Waddell; Janet Parks and the staff of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University; Claudia Funke and Jennifer Lee
of the Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; Special Collections, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, especially A. F. Bartovics; Stephen Van Dyk, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York; W. Gregory Gallagher, The Century Association, New York; Judith Gelemter, The Union Club, New York; Burt Denker, Decorative Arts Photographic Collection, and E. Richard McKinstrey, Gail Stanislow, and Eleanor McD. Thompson, Winterthur Museum Library, Dela- ware; Linda Ayres and C. Ford Peatross, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and Brian Cuthrell and Henry Fulmer, South Caroliniana Library, Univer- sity of South Carolina, Columbia. Our work was enriched by the holdings of the Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.; the Boston Public Library; and the Inventories of American Paintings and Sculpture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. William H. Gerdts, Professor Emeritus of Art His- tory, City University of New York, shared nineteenth- century exhibition reviews in his files. Last, but certainly not least, we acknowledge our colleagues in the Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum, especially Kenneth Soehner, Arthur K. Watson Chief Librarian, Linda Seckelson, Robert Kauftnann, and Katria Czerwoniak.
Graduate, undergraduate, and high-school interns, as well as volunteers, contributed invaluable assistance, without which we could not have realized this proj- ect. They combed primary documents for information on works of art, artists and manufacturers, collectors and dealers, and other subjects germane to our efforts. In this category we thank: Mary Ann Apicella, Lisa Bedell, Gilbert H. Boas, Rachel D. Bonk, Alexis L. Boylan, Millicent L. Bxims, Vivian Chill, Elizabeth Clark, Amy M. Coes, Claire Conway, Gina D'Angelo, Tara Dennard, Jennifer M. Downs, Cynthia Drayton, Margarita Emerson, Dinah Fried, Michal Fromer, Kevin R. Fuchs, Palma Genovese, Angela George, Alice O. Gordon, Joelle Gotlib, Rachel Ihara, Carol A. Irish, Jamie Johnson, Melina Kervandjian, Lynne Konstantin, Amy Kurtz, Barbara Laux, Katharine P. Lawrence, Ruth Lederman, Karen Lemmey, Josephine Loy, Constance C. McPhee, Andrea Miller, Mark D. Mitchell, Jennifer Mock, Francesca Pietropaolo, Anne Posner, Katherine Reis, Katherine Rubin, Emily U. Sadoff, Sxizannah Schatt, Elizabeth Schwartz, Lonna Schwartz, Nanette Scofield, Sheila Smith, Susan Solny, David Sprouls, Lois Stainman, Susan Stainman, Jennifer Steenshorne, Margaret Stenz, Rush Sturges, Michele L. Symons, Jeffrey Trask, Barbara W. Veith, Daphne M. Ward, Julia H. Widdowson, Jennifer
Wingate, and Katharine Voss. Amy M. Goes, Barbara Laux, Heather Jane McCormick, Jodi A. Pollack, and Cynthia Van Allen SchafFner wrote masters' theses that contributed to our knowledge of furniture mak- ing in the Empire City.
The subject of the exhibition spawned several grad- uate courses, which resulted in useful new research. Princeton students Peter Barberie, Peter Betjemann, Lorna Britton, Thomas Forget, Andrew E. Hersch- berger, Gordon Hughes, Sarah Anne Lappin, and Mark D. Mitchell enlarged our understanding of nineteenth-century printmaking through their work for a seminar conducted in 1997 by John Wilmerding, Christopher B. Sarofim '86 Professor of American Art, and Elliot Bostwick Davis. In 1999 the Ph.D. program in Art History at the City University of New York offered a broadly focused seminar in conjunc- tion with "Art and the Empire City" taught by Pro- fessor Sally Webster and several of the exhibition's curators. The same year Paul Bentel and Dorothy M. Miner initiated a year-long study of the Empire City itself with students in the Historic Preservation Pro- gram at Columbia University.
Many other colleagues, collectors, friends, and fam- ily members extended themselves in countless ways. In particular, we are grateful for the help of Clifford S. Ackley, Sue Allen, Lee B. Anderson, Elizabeth Bid- well Bates, Thomas Bender, John Bidwell, Mosette Broderick, Sally B. Brown, Frank Brozyna, Nicholas Bruen, Douglas G. Bucher, Stanley and Sara Burns, Richard T. Button, Teresa Carbone, Sasha Cher- mayeff, Janis Conner and Joel Rosenkranz, Holly Connor, Tom Crawford, Anna T D'Ambrosio, Leslie Degeorges, Ellen Denker, Ed Polk Douglas, Stacy Pomeroy Draper, Richard and Eileen Dubrow, Inger McCabe Elliott, Richard Fazzini, Stuart P. Feld, David Eraser, Margaret Halsey Gardiner, Max Har- vey, Donna J. Hassler, Ike Hay, Paul M. Haygood, Sam Herrup, Peter Hill, Erica Hirshler, R. Bruce Hoadley, Anne Hadley Howat, Margize Howell, Joseph Jacobs, Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Johnson, Richard Kelly, Julia Kirby, Joelle Kunath, Leslie LeFevre-Stratton, Margaretta M. Lovell, Bruce Lund- berg, Maureen McCormick, Brooks McNamara, Mimi and Ron Miller, Patrick McCaughey, Richard J. Moylan, Marsha Mullin, Arlene Katz Nichols, Arleen Pancza- Graham, John Paolella, David Scott Parker, Martin H. Pearl, Joanna Pessa, the late Churchill B. Phyfe, Dr. and Mrs. Henry Pinckney Phyfe, Mrs. James D. Phyfe, Catha Rambusch, Hugo A. Ramirez, Sue Welsh Reed, Ethan Robey, Mary P. Ryan, Anna- marie V Sandecki, Cynthia H. Sanford, Arlene Palmer
Schwind, Lisa Segal, Mimi Sherman, Kenneth Snod- grass, Jane Shadel Spillman, S. Frederick Spira, Theo- dore E. Stebbins Jr., Diana and Gary Stradling, Laura Turansick, Bart Voorsanger, Malcolm Warner, Fawn White, Shane White, Robert Wolterstorff, Sylvia Yoimt, and Philip D. Zimmerman.
Colleagues throughout the Museum supported our efforts with good grace, good advice, and assistance. We offer warm thanks to Mahrukh Tarapor, Associate Director for Exhibitions, and her assistants Martha Deese and Sian Wetherill; Doralyim Pines, Associ- ate Director for Administration; Linda M. Sylling, Associate Manager for Operations and Special Exhi- bitions; Emily Kernan Rafferty, Senior Vice President for External Affairs; Nina McN. Diefenbach, Chief Development Officer; Kersten Larsen, Deputy Chief Development Officer, her predecessor Lynne Morel Winter, and Sarah Lark Higby, Assistant Development Officer; Missy McHugh, Senior Advisor to the Presi- dent; ICay Bearman, Administrator for Collections Management; and Jeanie M, James and Barbara W. File, Archives. Aileen K. Chuk, Registrar, deserves special notice for her seemingly effortless coordina- tion of the comings and goings of the many objects in the exhibition.
For important loans from within the Museum, we thank Everett Fahy, John Pope-Hennessy Chairman, European Paintings; George R. Goldner, Drue Heinz Chairman, Drawings and Prints; Maria Morris Ham- bourg, Curator in Charge, Photographs; J. Kenneth Moore, Frederick P. Rose Curator in Charge, Musical Instruments; Olga Raggio, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Chairman, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts; and Myra Walker, Acting Associate Curator in Charge, Costume Institute. We are also grateful to Maxwell K. Hearn, Asian Art; Deirdre Donohue, Minda Drazin, Emily Martin, and Chris Paulocik, Costume Insti- tute; Heather Lemonedes, Valerie von Volz, David del Gaizo, John Crooks, and Stephen Benkowski, Drawings and Prints; Katharine Baetjer, Keith Chris- tiansen, Walter Liedtke, and Gary Tinterow, Euro- pean Paintings; and Thomas Campbell, James David Draper, Johanna Hecht, Danielle O. Kisluk-Grosheide, and William Rieder, European Sculpture and Deco- rative Arts; as well as Giovanni Fiorino-Iannace, Antonio Ratti Textile Center. Particular recognition is owed to Helen C. Evans, Medieval Art, and Malcolm Daniel, Photographs, for exceptional collegial support.
The extraordinary expertise of the Museum's con- servators has been of central importance. Gratitude is due to Marjorie Shelley, Conservator in Charge, Ann Baldwin, Nora Kennedy, Margaret Lawson, Rachel
Mustalish, Nancy Reinhold, and Akiko Yamazaki- Kleps, Paper Conservation; Dorothy Mahon, Paintings Conservation; Elena Phipps, Textile Conservation; Mindell Dubansky, Watson Library; James H. Frantz, Conservator in Charge, Hermes Knauer, Yale Knee- land, Jack Soultanian Jr., and especially Marinus Manuels, who was assisted by Tad Fallon, and Pas- cale Patris, Objects Conservation. Nancy C. Britton, Objects Conservation, merits special mention for her extensive investigation and interpretation of nearly all the upholstered furniture in the exhibition. She was assisted by Susan J. Brown, Hannah Carlson, L. Ann Frisina, Charlotte Stahlbxisch, and Agnes Wnuk. We also thank Mary Schoeser, who researched fur- nishing fabrics in England, Guy E. O. Evans, John Buscemi, and Edward Goodman for help with uphol- stery research.
Jeffrey L, Daly, Chief Designer, with the assistance of Dennis Kois, experdy shepherded the exhibition through its preliminary laying out. Daniel Bradley Kershaw inventively designed the exhibition, and Sophia Geronimus created the compelling graphics, while Zack Zanolli worked his usual magic with the lighting. We also thank installers Jeffrey W. Perhacs, Fred A. Caruso, Nancy S. Reynolds, Frederick J. Sager, and Alexandra Wolcott.
Kent Lydecker, Associate Director for Education, and Nicholas Ruocco, Stella Paul, Pia Quintaro, Alice 1. Schwarz, Jean Sorabella, and Vivian Wick are among the colleagues in the Education Department who cre- ated lively special programs to enhance the exhibition. Other members of the Education Department to whom we are grateful are Rika Burnham, Esther M. Morales, and Michael Norris. Hilde Limondjian, General Manager of Concerts and Lectures, also pro- duced special events. Harold Holzer, Vice President for Communications, and his staff members Elyse Topalian and Egle Zygas skillfully publicized "Art and the Empire City." Valerie Troyansky and her mer- chandizing team brought out handsome products to accompany the exhibition.
On behalf of all the authors of the catalogue, we express our sincere thanks to John P. O'Neill, Editor in Chief, and his outstanding staff for making this
magnificent book a reality. Carol Fuerstein, our lead edi- tor, masterminded the massive editing project with cru- cial assistance from Margaret Donovan and additional expert help from Ellyn Allison, Ruth Lurie Kozodoy, and M. E. D. Laing. Jean Wagner, v^th assistance from Mary Gladue, verified the accuracy of the notes and created the bibliography. Peter Antony and Merantine Hens, with assistance from Sally VanDevanter, superbly executed the production, and Robert Weisberg adroitiy managed the desktop publishing. Bruce Campbell is responsible for the book's elegant design. For produc- ing the lion's share of the photographs used in the book, we thank Barbara Bridgers, Manager, the Photo- graph Studio, and her staff, especially Joseph Coscia Jr., Anna-Marie Kellen, Paul Lachenauer, Oi-Cheong Lee, Bruce Schwarz, Eileen Travell, Juan Trujillo, Karin L. Willis, and Peter Zeray. Eugenia Burnett Tinsley printed the black-and-white images, and Chad Beer, Josephine Freeman, and Nancy Rutiedge con- tributed administrative and archival assistance. Jerry Thompson photographed sculpture in the American Wing as well as other objects. We are extremely grate- ful to colleagues who supplied photographs of exhibi- tion objects and images for the essays in record time. We are appreciative also of the help received from Deanna D. Cross, Diana H. Kaplan, Carol E. Lekarew, Lucinda K. Ross, and Sandra Wiskari-Lukowski in the Museum's Photograph and Slide Library.
For enduring the inconveniences occasioned by this project for more than five years, we thank all our col- leagues in the American Wing, especially Peter M. Kenny, Curator and Administrator, his assistant Kim Orcutt, and her predecessor the late Emely Bramson. As always, we are grateful to our administrative assistants Noe Kidder and her predecessor Kate Wood, Dana Pil- son and her predecessor Julie Eldridge, Ellin Rosen- zweig, and Catherine Scandalis and her predecessor Yasmin Rosner. Our technicians Don E. Templeton, Gary Burnett, Sean Farrell, and Rob Davis are the best in the business and we are grateful for their participation. Finally, we salute our fellow curators, the authors of this mighty tome. "Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861" and its accompanying volume are the product of your collective expertise and collaboration.
John K. Howat
Lawrence A. Fleischman Chairman^ Departments of American Art
Catherine Hoover Voorsanger Associate Curator, Department of American Decorative Arts
XV
Contributors to the Catalogue
Kevin J. Avery, Associate Curator, Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Carrie Rebora Barratt, Associate Curator, Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, and Manager, The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Elliot Bostwick Davis, Assistant Curator, Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Curator, Department of American Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Morrison H. Heckscher, Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator, Department of American Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
John K. Hov^at, Lawrence A. Fleischman Chairman, Departments of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Caroline Rennolds Milbank, fashion historian
Amelia Peck, Associate Curator, Department of American Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Jeff L. Rosenheim, Assistant Curator, Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Thayer Tolles, Associate Curator, Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Dell Upton, Professor of Architectural History, University of California, Berkeley
Catherine Hoover Voorsanger, Associate Curator, Department of American Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Project Director, "Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861"
Deborah Dependahl Waters, Curator of Decorative Arts and Manuscripts, Museum of the City of New York
Medill Higgins Harvey , Austen Barron Baillyy Brandy S. Culpj Julie Mirabito Dou^lass^ Jodi A. Pollack^ Jeni L. Sandher^y and Cynthia Van Allen Schaffiiery research assistants
Note to the Reader
Spelling and pionctuation of original tides are stan- dardized according to modern usage. Modern tides are listed first, preceding period tides in parentheses.
The photographer Victor Prevost's work survives primarily as waxed paper negatives. The three original works by him in this exhibition are reproduced as negatives. The Prevost photographs illustrated in the essays are reproduced from new gelatin silver prints made for this book from original negatives.
All works in the exhibition are illustrated in a section of the catalogue that immediately follows the essays. Works are grouped by medium as follows: paintings (portraits, portrait miniatures, American paintings, foreign paintings); sculpture (foreign, American); architectural drawings and related works; watercolors; prints, bindings, and illustrated books (American works, foreign prints); photography; costumes; jew- elry; decorations for the home; furniture; ceramics;
glass; silver and other metalwork. Within each cate- gory works are arranged chronologically, unless the point of a comparison supersedes the significance of chronology. Abbreviated captions are provided.
Fuller information on the exhibited works appears in the checklist, which is arranged in the same order as the illustrated works. For measurements in the checklist, height precedes v^dth, precedes depth or length, precedes diameter. Measurements of sculpted busts include the socle. Measurements of daguerreo- types are based on the standard plate size and do not include the case. Unless otherwise specified, artists were active in New York City, works were made in New York City, and original owners were residents of New York City. For most works, the tide, subject, sitter, or inscription communicates the object's rele- vance to the exhibition. For others, an explanatory sentence or noteworthy information is given.
Art and the Empire City New York, 1825-1861
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Inventing the Metropolis: Civilization mid Urbanity in Antebellum New Tork
DELL UPTON
On October 26, 1825, the canal boat Seneca Chief left Buffalo at the head of a parade of gaily decorated craft to celebrate the open- ing of the Erie Canal. On November 4 the procession reached New York City, where a small flotilla carry- ing members of the City Council and other New York dignitaries greeted it (cat. no. 118). Twenty- nine steamboats and a host of sailing vessels and smaller craft formed a circle three miles in diameter around the Seneca Chief. Governor De Witt Clinton (cat. nos. 4, I22B), the canal's most ardent pro- moter, lifted a keg of Lake Erie water high above his head, then poured it into the ocean. Other partic- ipants added waters from the Mississippi, Columbia, Orinoco, La Plata, and Amazon rivers, as well as from the Nile, Gambia, Thames, Seine, Rhine, and Danube. The party landed at the Battery and led a great parade up Broadway to City Hall, and ultimately to a dinner for three thousand at the Lafayette Theatre.^
As the celebrants understood, the Erie Canal- imagined for a century, projected for thirty years, and under construction for eight— cemented New York's position as the "capital of the country," in the words of the painter and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse.^ New York had emerged from the Revolution as the new nation's largest city, surpassing Philadelphia, the colo- nial metropolis. By 1825 New York's economic domi- nance was secured, as a result of its favorable location and year-roimd harbor, the establishment of regular transatlantic packet lines on the Black Ball Line in 1818, and its good fortune in being the site where Britain chose to dump its surplus textiles after the War of 1812, which gave it primacy in the national dry- goods market (cat. no. 35; fig. i).^ If New York had no equal by the time the Erie Canal was completed, the "artificial river" nevertheless assured the city's fiiture preeminence at the geographical and financial center of a web of national and international commerce. Not only did the canal's path set the pattern for
I am grateful to Michele H. Bogart^ Margaretta M. Lovell, Mary P. Ryan, Catherine Hoover Voorsanger, and Shane White for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
1. E. Idell Zeisloft, ed., The New Metropolis: Memorable Events ofThree Centuries, 1600-1900, from the Island of Mana-hat-ta to Greater New Tork at the Close of the Nineteenth Cen- tury (New York: D. Appleton, 1899), pp- 83-84; Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997),
pp. 61-68.
2. Samuel F. B. Morse (1831), quoted in Paul J. Staiti, Samuel F. B. Morse (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1989), p. 150. See also Evan Cornog, The Birth of Empire: DeWitt Clinton and the American Experience, 1769-1828 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 104-6, 171.
3. See Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New Tork Port (181S-1860) (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1939; reprint, Boston: Northeastern Univer- sity Press, 1984), PP- 16-38; and Eugene P. Moehring, "Space, Economic Growth, and the Public Works Revolu- tion in New York," in Infra- structure and Urban Growth in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Public Works His- torical Society, 1985), p. 31.
Fig. I. William Guy Wall, New Tork from the Hei£[hts near Brooklyn, 1823. Watercolor and graphite. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures, Bequest of Edward W C. Arnold, 1954 54.90.301
Opposite: detail, cat. no 135
4 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
4. See Comog, Birth of Empire, pp. 161-72; and Carol Sheriff, The Art^cial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), pp. 5, 18-21.
5. A Philadelphia Perspective: The Diary of Sidney George Fisher Covering the Tears 1834-1871, edited by Nicholas B. Wain- wright (Philadelphia: Histori- cal Society of Pennsylvania, 1967), p. 197.
6. Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wordey, Travels in the United States, etc. during 1849 and 1850 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851), p. 13; "Monumental Structures," New-Tork Mirror, and Ladies' Literary Gazette, December 12, 1829, p. 183.
7. Northern Star, "The Observer: The City of New-York," New- Tork Mirror, and Ladies* Liter- ary Gazette, November 15, 1828, p. 147.
8. Mrs. Felton, American Life:
A Narrative of Two Tears' City and Country Residence in the United States (Bolton Percy: The Author, 1843), P- 35-
9. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New-England and New-Tork,
' Ar vols. (New Haven: Timothy Dwight, 1821-22; facsimile edited by Barbara Miller Solo- mon, Cambridge, Massachu- setts: Harvard University Press, 1969), vol. 3, p. 330.
10. Stuart-Wordey, Travels, p. 13; "The City of Modem Ruins," New-Tork Mirror, June 13, 1840, p. 407.
11. "Widening of Streets," New- Tork Mirror, November 2, 1833, p. 143.
12. E. E., "Letters Descriptive of New-York, Written to a Liter- ary Gendeman in Dublin, No. II," New-Tork Mirror, and Ladies' Literary Gazette,
' January 6, 1827, p. 187.
13. John E Watson, Annals of Philadelphia .to Which Is Added an Appendix, Contain- ing! Olden Time Researches and Reminiscences of New Tork City (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1830), appendix p. 74.
14. "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 21 (June i860), p. 127.
15. "Great Cities," Putnam's Monthly \ (March 1855), pp. 257, 256.
urban, railroad, road, and communication networks focused on the Empire Citjr (cat. nos. 145, 152), but its construction also attracted foreign investment to the city and assured the dominance of New York- based capital in the nation's economy."^
The story of antebellum New York is the story of New Yorkers' struggle to come to grips with a city exponentially larger than any ever before known on the American continent. By 1825 its population had passed 125,000. That figure was in turn dwarfed by the nearly 815,000 people who lived in New York thirty-five years later. After a visit in 1847 the Phila- delphia diarist Sidney George Fisher noted ruefully, "Philad: seems villagelike." ^
To visitors New York was the "Empress City of the West," the "queen of American cities," the "London of the Western world."^ As impressed as these visitors were, they could not match New Yorkers' own self- absorption. There was no aspect of their town that did not seem vaster or more numerous, grander or meaner, more sophisticated or cruder, more refined or more debased, more virtuous or more vicious than elsewhere. No element was too subtie to escape atten- tion or too trivial to convey some vitally significant insight into the life of the city. Confronted with the "littie world" they lived in, New Yorkers marveled.^
However great it had become, antebellum New York was still a work in progress over which hung a perva- sive "air of newness."^ "The bustie in the streets, the perpetual activity of the carts, the noise and hurry at the docks which on three sides encircle the city; the sound of saws, axes, and hammer at the shipyards; the continually repeated views of the numerous buildings rising in almost every part of it, and the multitude of workmen employed upon them form as lively a spec- imen of 'the busy hum of populous cities' as can be imagined," observed Yale University president Timo- thy Dwight.^ But a work in progress was, fi-om another perspective, a "half-finished city," a "city of perpetual ruin and repair. No sooner is a fine building ereaed than it is torn down to put up a better." New York would be a "fine place— if they ever got it done."^^
New Yorkers' public bravado was tempered by an equally public uncertainty about the city's standing and its future. What did it mean to be the Empire City, "the greatest commercial emporium of the world" As early as 1830 a New York-born historian of Phila- delphia discerned in his birthplace "the very ambition to be the metropolitan city," a quality which "gave them cares which I am willing to see remote enough from Philadelphia."^^ All agreed that quantity— mere size and wealth— was not enough. Some elusive qualities
of charaaer and accomplishment were also necessary. "It is curious and melancholy to observe how littie manly and dignified pride New York has in its own character and position," lamented Hurper^s New Monthly Magazim. "A man may be large; but if his size be bloat, there is nothing imposing in it."^"^
"Great cities," claimed another essayist, are "the greatest and noblest of God's physical creations on earth." The nineteenth century was an age of great cities, and the greatest were characterized by "Civiliza- tion" and "Urbanity" (as well as by Protestant Chris- tianity and the English language). The first meant "'making a person a citizen\^ that is— the inhabitant of a city," developing the ability to live responsibly and effectively with one's neighbors; the second, "the qual- ity, condition, or manners of the inhabitant of a city," cultivating the ability to live with style. This was not to suggest, the writer added hastily, "that the bustiing, staring, heedless, rude, offensive manners of most self- important inhabitants of some modern commercial cities are the perfected result of the highest possible civilization, or are the acme of genuine urbanity."
Antebellum New Yorkers pursued many paths to bringing civilization, or citizenship, and urbanity to their city and its residents. Art was one path, for it offered both diagnostic and ideal images that helped educated New Yorkers define themselves and influ- ence the development of their city, and it embodied the refinement that urbanity implied. At the same time, the arts were deeply embedded, intellectually and practically, in antebellum New York's tirban demo- graphic upheaval and economic efflorescence. They were conmiodities and speaacles— "public ;entertain- ments"— offered for sale alongside laxatives and fine carriages and freak shows and houses and operas and food and women's bodies and fashionable clothing and grain futures. Art was shown and sold cheek by jowl with these other commodities and spectacles on the streets, in stores and offices, and (except for the brothels) in the classified columnis of New York's news- papers. Thus consideration of the arts entails under- standing them in the cotitext of the entire universe of material culture that defined antebellum New York, including the planning arid construction of the city, its verbal and pictorial representations, and its consump- tion of a vasdy expanded world of goods and images.
Regulating New Tork
New York's phenomenal econoinic and demographic growth was dramatically visible in its urban land- scape. At the time of the Revolution the city was
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY 5
confined to the southern end of the otherwise-rural Manhattan Island. Antebellum New Yorkers often described the colonial section of their city (those streets south of City Hall Park— then called simply "The Park") as "essentially defective" "a labyrinth— a puzzle— a riddle— incomprehensible to philosophers of the present day." It was nothing of the sort. Laid out by the Dutch as a rough grid (adapted to the shoreline) with major streets paralleling the East River waterfront and perpendicular streets leading back into the core of the island, the city was continually extended in the process of land reclamation along the shore (cat. no. 124; fig. 2).
The colonial district was embellished and rational- ized (or "regulated," as it was called) as money and occasion permitted. When New York emerged from the Revolution heavily damaged by British military occupation and by a disastrous fire of 1776 that burned much of the city west of Broad Street, city officials took advantage of the destruction to modify Broadway's grade as it descended from Wall Street to Bowling Green and to straighten and widen some streets. The improvement of the old town continued through the antebellum era, particularly during the 1830s, when Ann, Cedar, and Liberty streets were straightened and widened, William and Nassau streets enlarged, and Beekman, Fulton, and Piatt streets newly cut.^^ During the same years the waterfront was con- tinually redeveloped as landfill extended the shoreline into the river (cat. no. 119).
In the years following the Revolution urbanization began to creep along the East River beyond the Common, which comprised the present City Hall Park and the land adjacent to it, and the Collect Pond to the north. By the end of the eighteenth century a patchwork of gridded plats lay between the Park and Houston Street. Some had been created by the city from its common lands in the decades after the Revolution. Others were laid out by private land- owners as urban development moved northward. In the east Henry Rutgers issued ground leases for his farm along the East River, laying the foundations of the present Lower East Side. In the west Trin- ity Church, a major landowner in Manhattan from colonial times to the present, subdivided some of its properties, notably to create Hudson, or Saint John's, Square as an elite residential enclave focused on Saint John's Church, Trinity's chapel of ease. The section of Broadway that passed through these pri- vate grids was the scene of the most active retail com- mercial development during the three decades after 1825 (cat. no. 123). 1^
Fig. 2. Water Courses of Manhattan y 1999. Line drawing by Sibel Zandi-Sayek, after Egbert L. Viele, Sanitary and Topographical Map of the City and Island of New Tork^ 1865, reprinted in Patil E. Cohen and Robert T. Augustyn, Manhattan in Maps^ 1527-1995 (New York: Rizzoli Inter- national Publications, 1997)
Then the city exploded (fig. 3). By 1828 the streets had been paved and gaslit as far north as Thirteenth Street across most of the island. At midcentury urban development had reached Madison Square, and by the opening of the Civil War oudying residen- tial neighborhoods were being built in the Thirties and Forties (cat. no. 136; fig. 4).
In the second quarter of the nineteenth century New York was an irregular collection of mostiy regu- lar grids, a patchwork but not a labyrinth. As a cor- respondent to Putnam^s Monthly noted, in terms more measured than those of most of his contemporaries, lower Manhattan was "quite irregular. This irreg- ularity, however, is in the position of the streets, rather than in their direction," as he demonstrated by comparing lower Manhattan to a baby's bootee with a few misplaced threads.
Although the old city was no medieval maze, it was dramatically different from those parts north of Houston Street (and especially north of Fourteenth Street) that were shaped by the single most dramatic
16. Thomas N. Stanford, A Con- cise Description of the City of New York . . . (New York: The Author, 1814), quoted in Hendrik Hartog, Public Prop- erty and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730- 1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carohna Press, 1983), p. 159; "The Walton Mansion- House.— Pearl Street," New- Tork Mirror, March 17, 1832,
p. 289.
17. Paul E. Cohen and Robert T. Augustyn, Manhattan in Maps, IS27-199S (New York: Rizzoli International Publica- tions, 1997), p- 94-
18. "Late City Improvements," New-Tork Mirror, and Ladies^ Literary Gazette, March 27, 1830, p. 303; "Widening of Streets," New-Tork Mirror, November 2, 1833, p. 143; "City Improvements," New-Tork Mirror, November 3, 1833,
p. 175; John F. Watson, Annals and Occurrences of New Tork City and State, in the Olden Time . . . (Philadelphia: H. F. Anners, 1846), pp. 144-45.
19. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhat- tan for Rent, 1785-1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 30-31, 41; Peter Marcuse, "The Grid as City Plan: New York City and Laissez-Faire Planning in the Nineteenth Century," Planning; Perspectives 2 (September 1987), p- 297; Edward K. Spann, "The Great- est Grid: The New York Plan of 1811," in Two Centuries of American Planning, edited by Daniel Schaffer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 14-16. Mar- cuse's and Spann's essays, along with Hartog, Public Property, chap. II, are the best treat- ments to date of the evolution of New York's plan between the Revolution and the mid- nineteenth century, and they are the sources of the follow- ing paragraphs, unless other- wise noted.
20. Watson, Annals and Occur- rences of New Tork City, pp. 144-45-
21. "New-York Daguerreotyped. Group First: Business-Streets, Mercantile Blocks, Stores, and Banks," Putnam's Monthly i (February 1853), p. 124.
6 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
A. Bowling Green
B. WaU Street
C. Broadway
D. The Park
E. Chatham Square R The Bowery
G. Hudson (Saint John's) Square
1. Casde Clinton
2. Branch Bank of the United States
3. City Hall
4. Old Almshouse
5. The Rotunda
6. New York State Prison
7. Vauxhall Gardens
Fig. 3. New Tork Settlement in 1820, 1999. Line drawing by Sibel Zandi-Sayek, after Egbert L. Viele, Sanitary and Topographical Map of the City and Island of New Torky 1865, reprinted in Paul E. Cohen and Robert T. Augustyn, Manhattan in MapSj IS27-I99S (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1997)
22. Cohen and Augustyn, Manhat- tan in Maps, p. 102; Hartog, Public Property, pp. 167-75.
physical project to achieve civilization and urbanity, the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 (fig. 5). This was the work of a blue-ribbon panel appointed by the state legislature in 1807 to make a long-range plan for the city's growth after the Common Council and prop- erty owners had been unable to agree on a satisfactory course of action. The three commissioners in turn hired John Randel Jr. to survey the island. Together Randel and his employers established the all- encompassing framework for nearly every subsequent urban development in Manhattan.
Randel made three large maps on which he later drew the plan chosen by the commissioners, a grid that
was divided into 2oo-by-8oo-foot blocks extending up the island as far as 155th Street. For a decade after the plan's publication, the young surveyor and his assistants tramped Manhattan placing marble posts at the sites of all ftiture intersections, although the regulation and construction of streets and avenues proceeded on a block-by-block basis as urbaniza- tion moved northward over the course of the nine- teenth century. 2^
In creating the plan the commissioners and their surveyor carefiilly considered the nature of cities and the fixture of their own, as they made clear in the "Remarks" issued to accompany William Bridges's
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY 7
A. Bowling Green
B. Broadway
C. WaU Street
D. The Park
E. Five Points
F. Chatham Square
G. The Bowery
H. Hudson (Saint John's) Square
I. Tompkins Square
J. Washington Square K. Stuyvesant Square L. Union Square
1. Castie Garden
2. Trinity Church
3. Custom House
4. Branch Bank of the United States
5. Second Merchants' Exchange
6. American (Barnum's) Museum
7. Astor House
8. CityHaU
9. Old Almshouse
10. The Rotunda
11. A. T. Stewart store (The Marble Palace)
12. Edgar H. Laing stores
13. New York Halls of Justice and House of Detention (The Tombs)
14. E. V Haughwout store
15. Niblo's Garden
16. New York University
17. La Grange Terrace / Colonnade Row
18. Grace Church
19. Bellevue institutions
Fig. 4. New Tork Settlement in i860, i999- Line drawing by Sibel Zandi-Sayek, after Egbert L. Viele, Sanitary and Topographical Map of the City and Island of New Tork, 1865, reprinted in Paul E. Cohen and Robert T. Augustyn, Manhattan in Maps, i$27-i99s (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1997)
published version. In a famous passage they reported that "one of the first objects" they had con- sidered was
whether they should confine themselves to rectilinear and rectangular streets^ or whether they should adopt some of those supposed improvements by circles^ ovalsy and stars, which certainly embellish a plan, whatever may be their effect as to convenience and utility. In considering that subject, they could not but bear in mind that a city is to be composed prin- cipally of the habitations of men, and that strait- sided, and right-angled houses are the most cheap to
build and the most convenient to live in. The effect of these plain and simple reflections was decisive.
In addition, they wanted to devise a plan that would mesh with "plans already adopted by individuals" in a way that would not require major adjustments.^^
The product was New York's famous grid. Look- ing back half a century after the creation of the Commissioners' Plan, Randel boasted that many of its opponents (who objected to the costs of the improve- ments and to their conflict with already established land uses and building dispositions) had been forced to admit "the facilities afforded by it for the buying,
"Remarks of the Commission- ers for Laying out Streets and Roads in the City of New York, under the Act of April 3, 1807," in Manual of the Corpo- ration of the City of New Tork, edited by David T. Valentine (New York: The Council, 1866), p. 756.
8 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
Fig. 5. John Randel Jr., cartographer; adapted and published by William Bridges, This Map of the City of New York and Island of Manhattan as Laid Out by the CommissionerSy 1811. Hand-colored line engraving on copper. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Geography and Map Division
24. John Randel Jr. (1866), quoted in Spann, "Greatest Grid,"
p. 26.
25. On the new economic theories, see Joyce O. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideolo^iy in Seven- teenth Century England (Prince- ton: Princeton University Press, 1978); for their influence
in the early republic, see Joyce O. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York Uni- versity Press, 1984).
26. "Remarks of the Commis- sioners."
27. [Samuel L. Mitchill], The Pic- ture of Hew -fork; or. The Traveller's Guide, throujfh the Commercial Metropolis of the United States, by a Gentleman Residing in This City (New York: I. Riley and Co., 1807), pp. 128-43.
28. Edward K. Spann, The Nerv Metropolis: New York City, 1840-1857 (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1981), pp. 144-45.
29. "Washington Market," Gleason's Pictorial Drawin£-Room Com- panion', March 5, 1853, P- 160.
and improving real estate, on streets, avenues, and public squares, already laid out and established on the ground by monumental stones and bolts."^"^
Still, the 1811 plan was not simply a partition for resale. Although it has been criticized for its lack of public squares and broad processional avenues con- ducive to civic grandeur and ritual, these already existed in the old city. As the plan was being drawn, a monumental new city hall was rising on the Park at the head of Broadway (cat. nos. 186, 254), then and throughout the antebellum era New York's principal processional street.
The Commissioners' Plan can most accurately be described as the embodiment of an economically informed vision of urban society. It was created at a time when large-scale merchants and public officials were converting to economic theories that envisioned commerce as an all-encompassing, impersonal, sys- tematic exchange of commodities rather than, as it had traditionally been regarded (and still was by many small traders), a series of discrete, highly personal, morally tinged relationships.^^
This sense of trade as a commodity system was incorporated most explicidy in the commissioners' provision of a large marketplace (for foodstuffs and other "provisions") between First Avenue and the East River, and Seventh and Tenth streets. Eventually, they argued, householders would recognize that their time and money could be more efficiently spent
shopping in a centralized venue than among the city's many dispersed marketplaces. At the same time, ven- dors would enjoy a more stable clientele and a more predictable demand, which "has a tendency to fix and equalize prices over the whole city."^^
The commissioners' vision, imexceptionable to modern eyes, marked a radical change in the time- honored conception of the relationship between urban government and the markets. One of the firnc- tions of European and American city governments was to protect the food supply. City officials determined the sites of marketplaces, rented stalls, set market hours, controlled the quality, weight, and sanitary condition of goods sold, and most of all regulated prices. In the early nineteenth century New York had one main market, the Fly Market, replaced by Fulton Market in 1816 (cat. no. 120), and seven local ones.^^ At midcen- tury there were thirteen. The Commissioners' Plan envisioned a single large market whose prices would be governed by competition rather than law. This was the de facto system by the middle of the nineteenth century when, as one journalist noted of Washington Market, the traditional rules for pricing, quantity, and quality, although stringent, were "dead letters, for they are seldom or never carried into execution ."^^
Increasingly New York's city government stepped away from economic regulation and devoted itself instead to creating the infrastructure that would enable an ostensibly benign system to operate freely.
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY 9
Even had they wished to continue regulation, New York's superior harbor (cat. no. 121) and good fortune in controlling access to the easiest inland route, which were the foundations of its power, also integrated it into a world economy no longer susceptible to local control. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the completion of the transatlantic cable in 1858 reinforced the city's position as a key node in the geography of trade (cat. nos. 307-309).
The Commissioners' Plan, revised in minor ways and published in definitive form in 1821, laid out both the intellectual assumptions and the physical frame- work within which New York grew throughout the antebellum period. The theoretically grounded belief in a systematic economic order inspired a conception of the city as a spatial system that would articulate all uses and all users, permitting maximum freedom of individual action while ensuring transparent overall order. Again this differed from traditional concepts, which regarded urban spaces as static, unrelated aggre- gations of adjacent properties gathered around public spaces. Early-nineteenth-century writers sometimes used the analogy of a table, with a grid of "cells," each of which varies independendy in its values but stands in clear relationship to every other one. It was an appro- priate metaphor for the image of the articulated grid, which the New York commissioners shared with their merchant counterparts in other cities throughout the new nation. ^1
In New York, as in other American cities, public officials threw themselves into the business of regu- lation with a vengeance, cutting and filling and smoothing to make Manhattan Island resemble as closely as possible the flat surface and regular lines of the Commissioners' Plan. The Collect Pond and the Swamp, the Beekman property east of City Hall Park, were drained, watercourses were filled, the shoreline was extended, and, one by one, hills were leveled and valleys and ravines filled (cat. no. 124). The Evening Post complained in 1833 of the many plans "for opening new streets, widening others, ploughing through church yards, demolishing block after block of build- ings, for miles in length, filling up streets so that you can step out of your second story bed room window upon the side walk, and turning your first story par- lors and dining rooms into cellars and kitchens, with various other magnificent projects for changing the appearance of the city, and for preventing any part of it from ever getting a look of antiquity." "The great principle which governs these plans is, to reduce the surface of the earth as nearly as possible to dead level," complained the poet and academic Clement Clark Moore. ^3 Moore was right, but his objections and those of his fellow landowners had less to do with the intention than with the assessments levied against them for work adjacent to their properties.
The campaign to supply the city with water, the most conspicuous and, in some New Yorkers' minds, the most heroic effort to regulate the city, strikingly illus- trates the power of the systematic urban vision. New Yorkers obtained their water from wells far into the nineteenth century. As neighborhoods were popu- lated, the city typically ordered the provision of wells and pumps along with the paving of streets. The ear- liest efforts to create a systematic water supply also depended on wells. ^""^ One after another those few of these schemes that progressed beyond the planning stage failed. Even as other cities, such as Philadelphia and New Orleans, managed to get their water systems under way, New York's efforts stalled.
The major difficulty lay in the conception of the government's role. City corporations like New York's had traditionally accomplished major public works by offering construction incentives to private landown- ers.^^ At the beginning of the nineteenth century the city decided to undertake in its own name an ambi- tious plan to obtain water from the Bronx River. It was opposed by those who did not believe that the city should take on a project with uncertain financial returns and by others who regarded such works as
30. Amy Bridges, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New Tork and the Origins of Ma- chine Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. I.
31. Dell Upton, "Another City: The Urban Cultural Landscape in the Early Republic," in Everyday Life in the Early Republic, edited by Catherine E. Hutchins (Winterthur, Delaware: Henry Francis Du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1994), pp. 67-70; Dell Upton, "The City as Material Culture," in The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology: Essays in Honor of James Deetz, edited by Anne E. Yentsch and Mary C. Beaudry (Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press, 1992), pp. 53-56.
32. Untided item, Evening Post (New York), February 26, 1833.
33. Quoted in Cohen and Augus- tyn, Manhattan in Maps,
p. 108.
34. E. Porter Belden, New-Tork: Past, Present, and Future; Comprisin£i a History of the City of New'Tork, a Descrip- tion of Its Present Condition and an Estimate of Its Future Increase, 2d ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1849), p- 37; Edward Wegmann, Jhe Water- Supply of the City of New Tork, I6s8-i89s (New York: J. Wiley and Sons, 1896), pp. 3-10; "Corporation Notice" (adver- tisement), New-Tork Evening Post, September 30, 1826, p. 3.
35. Jane Mork Gibson, "The Fair- mount Waterworks," Philadel- phia Museum of Art, Bulletin 84 (summer 1988), pp. 2-11; Gary A. Donaldson, "Bringing Water to the Crescent City: Benjamin Latrobe and the New Orleans Waterworks System," Louisiana History 28 (fall 1987), pp. 381-96.
36. Hartog, Public Property, pp. 8, 21-24, 62-68.
lO ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
37. Wegmann, Water-Supply, pp. 11-12.
38. Belden, New-York, p. 38; Wcgmann, Water-Supply, pp. 12-14; "Pure and Whole- some Water,** New-Tork Mirror, and Ladies' Literary Gazette, December 22, 1827, p. 190. The Manhattan Company merged with Chase National Bank in 1955 to become the Chase Manhattan Bank.
39. "Pure and Wholesome Water" p. 190.
40. Wegmann, Water-Supply, pp. 16-37; Larry D. Lankton, The '^Practicable'' En^fineer: John B. Jervis and the Old Croton Aqueduct (Chicago: Public Works Historical Soci- ety, 1977), pp. 4-16.
41. Wegmann, Water-Supply, pp. 49-51, 57-59; Lankton, '^Practicable^ Engineer, p. 24.
42. "The Croton Aqueduct," Niks' National Register, July 16, 1842, pp. 308-9; Wegmann, Water-Supply, pp. 39-40, 55-
43. "Croton Aqueduct," pp. 308-9. The editors added that the Egyptian-style architecture of the distributing reservoir was "Svell fitted by its heavy and imposing character for a work of such magnitude,"
44. Beiden, New-Tork, p. 41.
business opportunities rather than public obligations and wished to reap the profits themselves. Some of the latter, including Aaron Burr, obtained a charter as the Manhattan Company in 1799 and set up operations on Chambers Street. They dug a well, built a small reservoir, and began to lay wooden pipes through the streets of the city.^''
In the early nineteenth century state legislatures commonly allowed private undertakers of public proj- ects such as waterworks and canals to establish banks in order to finance themselves. The Manhattan Com- pany's charter permitted them to raise capital as they saw fit and to make whatever use they wished of it over and above the costs of building and operating the works. The company concentrated its efforts on its banking enterprise and pumped only as much water as was necessary to protect its franchise, a practice that it maintained until the end of the nineteenth century, fighting off all attempts to charter bona fide water companies to serve New York.^^
By the 1830s the water supply desperately needed reconstruction: public wells had become polluted, and firemen were hampered by lack of water in extin- guishing major fires, such as the conflagration of December 16 and 17, 1835, which destroyed much of lower Manhattan's business district (cat. nos. no, in; fig. 6).^^ With the publicly financed construction of
the Erie Canal to offer as precedent, the city negoti- ated with the state the right to explore potential sources of water fi-om newly drilled wells on Manhat- tan Island, from the Bronx River, and from the more distant Croton River. Engineer David B. Douglass was hired to draft a report, which favored the Croton River as the only source capable of supplying the anticipated population of the city over the next sev- eral decades. When the Common Council and the voters approved the project, Douglass was named projert engineer and began work in May 1835. His lack of progress led to his replacement in the fall of 1836 by John B. Jervis, an engineer who had learned his profession during eight years' employment in the construction of the Erie Canal.'^**
Within a year construction of the water system was in full swing along the forty-one-mile aqueduct that connected a dam, created six miles upstream from the mouth of the Croton River, to a double receiv- ing reservoir between Sixth and Seventh avenues and Seventy-ninth and Eighty-sixth streets, in an area that would later become Central Park. From there water was conducted to a distributing reservoir on Murray Hill (cat. no. 90), on the present site of the New York Public Library ^1
The builders' most vexing problem was to devise a means of carrying the water across the Harlem River. After considering an inverted siphon imder the river and a pipe laid across a suspension bridge (the sugges- tion of renowned suspension-bridge builder Charles EUet), the Water Commission and its engineers chose to build a 1,450-foot aqueduct, now known as High Bridge, across the river (cat. no. 91)."^^
The Egyptian-style architecture of the distributing reservoir and the High Bridge's resemblance to a Roman aqueduct were meant to remind New Yorkers that their new waterworks rivaled the greatest mon- uments of antiquity. The Baltimore-based Niles^ National Register wondered whether New Yorkers were aware of the magnitude of their achievement. In constructing "this stupendous structure" they were "surpassing ancient Rome in one of her proudest boasts. None of the hydraulic structures of that city, in spite of the legions of slaves at her command, equal, in magnitude of design, perfection of detail, and prospective benefits, this aquedua.'"^^ Guide- book writer E. Porter Beiden agreed that the aque- duct dwarfed all modem engineering works and rivaled ancient Rome's Aqua Marcia and Anio Novus,"^
The waterworks projects called into question some basic assumptions that imderlay the sense of the city as a system, specifically the beliefs that the pursuit of
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS:
CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY II
individual advantages would mesh smoodily into an overarching general good and that government should be a neutral arbiter rather than an active agent of development. The interests of the Manhattan Company direcdy conflicted with those of the city at large. Nor was the Croton Waterworks as neutral as it seemed. Its construction was embraced by the Democratic city administration, which saw it as a way to employ four thousand party faithful, mostly Irish, and was driven forward by its contractors in the face of re- peated strikes and disturbances on the part of their underpaid, overworked laborers. Afl:er its completion water was supplied to the populace only through public hydrants and even then over the objections of the water commissioners, who believed that ordinary people "abused" the privilege. Only paying custom- ers—well-to-do householders and businesses— had water delivered directly to them.'''^
Republican New Tork
A day of civic ritual and public merriment marked the official opening of the Croton Waterworks on Octo- ber 14, 1842. A parade moved from the Battery up Broadway to Union Square, down the Bowery, across East Broadway, and back to City Hall Park. The pro- cession threaded its way through some of the most emblematic New York spaces, connecting the elite and plebeian shopping streets along Broadway and the Bowery and the rich and poor neighborhoods at Union Square and East Broadway. The last marchers passed City Hall Park just as the head of the pro- cession was returning to it down Chatham Street, forming a human chain that tied the city's diverse neighborhoods to the center of its political universe at City Hall and the Park, where speeches and choral odes solemnized the day.
These festivities produced a sense of oneness in democratic fellowship among New Yorkers of all classes (or at least among those who wrote about it). It was the "proud consciousness which every citizen of New-York felt that his or her own cherished and honored city had, in this mighty undertaking, accom- plished a work with no superior," a "gratification such as it is not often the pleasant lot of a municipal peo- ple to enjoy," wrote the New World^^
After the parades, speeches, and illuminations the New World'^s correspondent concluded:
There was much, . . . very much — indeed we may say everything — in this celebration — to excite
stron£fly the most grateful feelings and reflections. . . . [TJhere was the sense of grandeur always called into being by the sight . , . of a great multitudcy animated by one impulse, and moving or acting in the attainment of a common object. Nor was the proud reflection absent, that under the benign influence of political institutions which give and secure to every man his equal share in the general rights, powers, and duties of citizenship; amid this great convulsion, as it may be called — this mighty upheaving and commingling of society — where half-a-million of people were brought together into one mass as it were, there was not a guard, a patrol, a sentry, not even a solitary policeman, stationed any where to hold in check the ebullition of social or political excitement; that there was need of none. '^'^
The New WorWs observer articulated a characteris- tically republican vision of New York society, but one that was rapidly fading by the time the Croton Water- works opened. At its heart was the seductive image of a diverse population acting freely but as though ani- mated by a single will.
A republic was a polity of independent but related citizens who shared essential values and qualities but were differentiated in the degree to which they pos- sessed them. Sometimes republicans made the point by comparing citizens to currency, whose denomi- nations represented various quantities of the same essential value. The simile led one ambitious scholar of "National Arithmetic" to attempt to set a mone- tary value on the population of the United States and to use that to calculate the inevitable increase in national wealth.^^
The central theoretical problem of republicanism was to reconcile economic and political liberty with order and the notion of a single overarching public good. How could one allow citizens the maximum self-determination and still hope to have an orderly society? As it was worked out by the earliest American political theorists, a republic depended heavily on the concept of virtue, a quality of charaaer that prompted its members to discipline themselves and to subor- dinate personal interests to the larger good. Virtue depended on the inculcation of common values into citizens who, whatever their differences, all possessed an inherent, trainable moral sense. Because republi- cans could not imagine the state's surviving without roughly equivalent degrees of knowledge, values, and goals among all its citizens, they asserted the neces- sity of "republican equality," of a society not rent by
45. Bridges, City in the Republic^ p. 130; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A His- tory of New Tork City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp- 625-28; Wegmann, Water-Supply,
pp. 64-65.
46. "The Croton Celebration," New World, October 22, 1842, p. 269.
47. Ibid.
48. [Samuel Blodget], Thoughts on the Increasing Wealth and National Economy of the United States of America (Washington: Printed by Way and GrofF, 1801), pp. 7-10.
49. Dell Upton, "Lancasterian Schools, Republican Citi- zenship, and the Spatial Imagination in Early Nineteenth- Century Amer- ica," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
55 (September 1996), pp. 243-46.
12 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
50. Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), pp. 24-25.
51. Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720- 1830 (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1993), pp. 6-7; Margaretta M. Lovell, "'Such Furniture as Will Be Most Profitable': The Business of Cabinetmaking in Eighteenth- Century Newport," Winter- thur Portfolio 26 (spring 1991), pp. 27-28; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New Tork City and the Rise of the Ameri- can Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 61-103; How- ard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New Tork City in the A^e of Jefferson (New York: New York University Press, 1979), pp. 142-43; Bridges, City in the Republic, pp. 102-7.
52. Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, pp. 51-61; Rock, Artisans,
pp. 295-301; Wilentz, Chants Democratic, pp. 27-35; Elva Tooker, Nathan Trotter, Phila- delphia Merchant, 1787-1853 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 60, 137-38-
53. Watson, Annals and Occur- rences of New Tork City, p. 205.
54. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order, pp. 14-15; Rowland BerthofF, "Indepen- dence and Attachment, Virtue and Interest: From Republican Citizen to Free Enterpriser, 1787-1837," in Uprooted Ameri- cans: Essays to Honor Oscar Handlin, edited by Richard Bushman et al. (Boston: Littie, Brown, 1979), pp. 97-124.
55. Brooke Kindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary Amer- ica, 1735-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), pp. 260-62; John C. Greene, American Science in the A^e of Jefferson (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1984), pp. 52-57; Robert E. Schofield, "The Science Education of an Enlightened Entrepreneur: Charles Willson Peale and His Philadelphia Museum, 1784-1827," American Studies 30 (fall 1989), p. 21; Charles Coleman Sellers, Mr. Peak's Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), pp. 193, 214.
excessive disparities, or excessively visible disparities, of wealth and condition.
Republican equality was most strongly emphasized in the "artisan republicanism" favored by craftsmen and small tradesmen. Artisan republicanism endorsed the workers' long-held belief that every economic actor, high or low, earned a niche in society by pro- viding a service to the community and that each per- son consequendy had a right to a "competency," the resources necessary to live an independent life with access to the necessities and comforts appropriate to his or her station. Self-respect demanded economic independence as a sign of public recognition. For artisans, then, republicanism incorporated an ideal of independent existence based on the ownership of one's own residence and place of business. Its echoes can be heard in the commissioners' "Remarks," in their assumption that the city they laid out would primarily be a city of individual residences. Artisan republi- canism viewed society as a network of interdependent relationships and obligations. Artisans were respon- sible for their apprentices' and employees' welfare, and their patrons were in turn responsible for theirs. Artisans and merchants counted on a loyal clientele, making imseemly competition among themselves unnecessary.^^ The historian John Fanning Watson, who decried the "painted glare and display" of capi- talist competition (even though he was one of its prime movers in Philadelphia), emphasized this difference as he looked back nostalgically on business practices in prerevolutionary New York. "None of the stores or tradesmen's shops then aimed at rivalry as now," he wrote in 1843; "they were content to sell things at honest profits, and to trust an earned repu- tation for their share of business."
For some patrician conservatives, on the other hand, republicanism was a hierarchical concept that empha- sized the variations among individuals in the desirable qualities of citizenship. Those who traditionally ruled should continue to rule, but on the basis of superior virtue and wisdom rather than inherited privilege. Like artisans, although for different reasons, they wor- ried about the consequences of extreme differences between the top and the bottom of republican society. They sought to marshal their personal social and cul- tural authority over their inferiors in defense of stability
Eventually a third variety, liberal republicanism, emerged as the dominant strain. This emphasized the degree of personal liberty that was permitted if society and the economy were assumed to be governed by higher ordering forces that would act no matter what individuals might do. Liberal republicanism replaced
the call for self-denying virtue with a definition of virtue that stressed enterprise and self-reliance in pro- moting one's own and one's dependents' welfare. Self-interest would be restrained by the self-regulation of a market-based political economy, integrating dis- parate individual goods into a common one.^"^
Republicans of all stripes hoped that universal public education would inculcate republican equality and civic virtue. Li early-nineteenth-century America knowledge was still popularly imagined in Enlighten- ment terms: to list and classify was to know. At his celebrated museum in Philadelphia, for example, the artist, scientist, and educator Charles Willson Peale amassed an ever-expanding collection of natural his- tory specimens and a portrait gallery of American patriots that grew to nearly one hundred paintings as he added politicians, American and European scientists and artists, and (as he grew older) Americans famous for their longevity. Peale wished to create an articu- lated, totalizing system of knowledge that would edu- cate his fellow Americans for republican citizenship.^^
Given these assumptions, it is easy to understand how the grid might have been viewed as the spatial order most likely to encourage republican equality by coordinating citizens' activities and interests. The grid was particularly congenial to the republican concept of knowledge, for it was thought to facilitate the sepa- mtion and class^mtion (two ubiquitous watchwords of antebellum cultural life) that Americans then val- ued in every aspect of human activity. New York's gridded spaces satisfied the republican love of a kind of order that could be laid out in a simple, quickly and easily grasped scheme.
Yet the prospects for republican community seemed threatened by significant changes in the social and economic structure. Liberal republicanism's embrace of capitalist political economy eventually eradicated the mutual dependency that artisan republicans advo- cated. Until the late eighteenth century employers had provided the necessities of life— food, shelter, clothing— in addition to or in place of wages, and had exercised broad control over their employees' lives. Male heads of households assumed the same rights of social and moral direction over those who worked for them as over their relatives.
Traditional labor relations disintegrated under the impact of the new commodity-driven, capitalist econ- omy. Employers rapidly abandoned responsibility for their workers' social and spiritual, as well as their eco- nomic, welfare, substituting a simple wage-labor sys- tem. Workers may have gained independence fi*om paternalistic supervision, but they were rarely paid
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY I3
enough to enjoy their freedom or to compensate for some of the material benefits they had derived from living under their employer's roofs. Artisan employers, too, suffered the loss of a dependable living, as adver- tising, display windows, and longer hours marked the growing desire for customers' immediate patronage rather than their long-term loyalty.
The new, rough-and-tumble, laissez-faire capitalism transformed the lives of New Yorkers of all classes. The old colonial mercantile and agrarian elite were affected as surely as small shopkeepers, artisans, and laborers. Those who clung to their former habits entered upon a long decline, while others discovered ways to profit from urban land speculation and invested in banks, insurance companies, manufacturing, the infrastructure, and retail sales. By the time of the Civil War 115 millionaires resided in New York. They and their predecessors of a generation or two earlier- men such as banker John Pintard, auctioneer and diarist Philip Hone (cat. no. 58), fur trader and land speculator John Jacob Astor, merchant and art col- lector Luman Reed (cat. no, 9), and banker and art collector Samuel Ward— formed a self-designated elite who increasingly retreated into luxurious seclusion.
The new elite dismayed many of their fellow citi- zens, for republican equality survived in popular sentiment even though it was theoretically outmoded by liberal republicanism. At midcentury the journal- ist Caroline M. Kirkland criticized the new rich of Fifth Avenue for building houses "in luxury and extravagance emulating the repudiated aristocracy of the old world" (cat. no. 185).^^ Another journalist took the opposite tack: those mansions were "the spontaneous outgrowth of good old Knickerbocker industry, enterprise and thrift, engrafted on a freedom- loving and liberal spirit, and are scarcely possible under any other than republican institutions." Consequendy everything along Fifth Avenue was "suggestive of equal- ity, although wealth has made that equality princely."
The social and economic elite withdrew from their traditional political activism in the quarter-century before the Civil War, as they had from urban social life, leaving politics in the hands of new, up-from-the- ranks career politicians who catered to middling and lower-class constituencies. As economic interests diverged and ethnic and class divisions hardened, the extension of the franchise to all white men and the active participation of working-class men in poli- tics made the process of governing the city more democratic, but also more fragmented and more diffi- cult, and the eighteenth- century assumption of a sin- gle public good collapsed. ^1
Republican values appeared to be threatened from below as well as from above. By i860 just under half of the city's population was foreign born, with most immigrants having arrived after 1845. Of these the Irish-born comprised about 30 percent of the popu- lation and the German-born another 15 percent. Only 1.5 percent were African Americans, down from just under 10 percent in 1820. Their numbers had remained roughly stable since then as the white population expanded, after having kept pace with the city's growth in the decades just before the opening of the Erie Canal. In 1825 a few remained enslaved or held as indentured servants under the provision of New York State's Grad- ual Manumission Act of 1799. They were finally freed in 1827, but African Americans remained at the bot- tom of New York's social and economic hierarchies.^^
In the opinion of many middling and elite New Yorkers, these groups— immigrants and blacks— formed the cadres of a vast army of paupers, crimi- nals, and lunatics. Beginning with the construction of the New York State Penitentiary on the Hudson River side of Washington Street between Christopher and Perry streets in Greenwich Village in 1796-97, the city was encircled by a growing corps of institutions intended to rescue and reform New Yorkers— almost exclusively poor New Yorkers— from their failures as republican citizens, substituting institutional oversight for the personal relationships and direct supervision of dependents that well-off urbanites had abandoned with the advent of wage labor. These new institutions included the complex of a hospital, jail, workhouse, and almshouse built at Bellevue in 1816 to replace their predecessors aroxmd City Hall Park; a third genera- tion of the same institutions built on Blackwell's (now Roosevelt) Island between 1828 and 1859; the Bloom- ingdale Insane Asylum, successor to the wing for luna- tics in the old New York Hospital on lower Broadway; the House of Refuge, or reform school, on the parade grounds (Madison Square); and a dizzying assortment of asylums— for deaf mutes, the blind, orphans, Jewish widows and orphans, Protestant half-orphans, Roman Catholic orphans, friendless "respectable, aged, indi- gent females," friendless boys, aged and ill sailors (the Sailors' Snug Harbor), magdalens (reformed pros- titutes), and female ex-convicts. Feterson^s Monthly counted twenty-two asylums plus eight hospitals in New York City in 1853.
In addition to meticulously separating and classi- fying their charges among these institutions, their founders all assumed the need for separation and clas- sification within each institution, and they assumed as well that gridded spaces, like those that organized
56. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order, pp. 59-78, 95-96; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, pp. 60-68.
57. Bridges, City in the Republic, pp. 11, 50-54, 70-71; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, pp. 61-68.
58. Cor nog, Birth of Empire,
p. 162; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, pp. 36-43; Alan Wallach, 'Thomas Cole and die Aristocracy," Arts Maga- zine 56 (November 1981), pp. 98, 103-4; Spann, New Metropolis, pp. 205-11.
59. C[aroline] M. Kirkland, "New York," Sartain's Union Maga- zine of Literature and Art 9 (August 1851), p. 149.
60. "Fifth Avenue," Home Journal, April 1, 1854, p. 2.
61. Bridges, City in the Republic, pp. 62, 71-75, 127-31; Ryan, Civic Wars, pp. 8-11, 108-13. The wealthy continued to
be active behind the scenes as financial contributors and party functionaries, but their authority was diminished.
62. Nathan Kantrowicz, "Popula- tion," in The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Ken- neth Jackson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 921-23; Rock, Artisans,
p. 14; Spann, New Metropolis, p. 430; Bridges, City in the Republic, pp. 39-41; Eric Homberger, The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of Nearly 400 Years of New York City's History (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1994), p- 45; Shane White, Somewhat More Inde- pendent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810 (Ath- ens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), pp. 38, 47, 53-55, 153-54-
63. [Thomas Eddy], An Account of the State Prison or Peniten- tiary House, in the City of New- York; by One of the Inspectors of the Prison (New York: Isaac Collins and Son, 1801), pp. 17-18.
64. "The Benevolent Institutions of New-York," Peterson^s Monthly i (June 1853), pp. 673-86.
14 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
Fig. 7. Alexander Jackson Davis, architect and artist, House ofWiUiam C H. WaddeU, Fifth Avenue and Thirty-ei0hth Street) Perspective and Flan, 1844. Watercolor and ink. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The Phelps Stokes Collection
65. Quoted in Samuel L. Knapp, The Life oflhomas Eddy; Com- prising an Extensive Corre- spondence with Many of the Most Distinguished Philosophers and Philanthropists of This and Other Countries (New York: Conner and Cooke, 1834), p. 76.
66. Belden, New-Tork, p. 49;
"A Visit to the Tombs Prison, New York City," Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Novem- ber 29, 1856, pp. 388-89; John Haviland, ^Description of the House of Detention, New York, 1835-38, and List of Other Works," manuscript, 1846, p. 6, Simon Gratz Col- lection, case 8, box 11, Histor- ical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
good citizens, could correct— civilize— errant ones. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, all large institutional buildings were planned on a grid of identical cells or rooms opening off one or both sides of a corridor. Ideally each prisoner, inmate, or patient was assigned to a separate imit. This iso- lated the subject and prevented infection of the body or of the character, for as the Quaker mer- chant and reformer Thomas Eddy noted of prison inmates, where criminals were housed in groups, ^'each one told to his companions his career of vice, and all joined by sympathetic villainy to keep each other in countenance."
The New York State Prison at Auburn, converted to separate cells in 1819-21 pardy at Eddy's urging, and the renowned Eastern State Penitentiary at Philadel- phia (1821-36) established separate cells for individual
offenders as the standard of up-to-date prison design. New York City's antebellum penal institutions followed this model, most notably in the jail portion of the New York Halls of Justice and House of Detention (1835-38), popularly known as the Tombs and built on Centre Street near City Hall to replace the old Bridewell (cat. no. 83). Its architect, John Haviland, had made his reputation as the architect of the Eastern State Penitentiary. In the House of Detention portion of the Tombs, a freestanding i42-by-45-foot block on three levels, the 148 separate cells, "constructed after the model of the State Penitentiary at Philadelphia," were additionally "divided into four distinct classes for prisoners, and rooms for male and female, white and black vagrants" (cat. no. 82).*^'^ In this way, jailers could mete out food, reading matter, labor, and himian contact individually. Most important, in his
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY I5
cell, "where he is lonseen and unheard, nothing can reach [tJie convict] but the voice which must come to him, as it were, from another world."
The failure of the cell system was evident by the 1840S, and institutional discipline relaxed. When the Swedish novelist and travel writer Fredrika Bremer visited the Tombs in the 1850s, she found the pris- oners sharing cells and even worse, "walking about, talking, smoking cigars." Although New Yorkers continued to voice hopes for republican community
after the 1830s, they turned their main attention to the excitements of commercial society.
Selling New Tork
Liberal republicanism and capitalist enterprise had transformed the landscape of antebellum New York. Until the late eighteenth century merchants and artisans commonly lived in or beside their places of business or work, in households that included their servants,
67. Knapp, Life of Thomas Eddy, p. 94-
68. Fredrika Bremer, TTje Homes of the New World; Impressions of America, translated by Mary Howitt, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853), vol. 2, p. 605.
Fig. 9. Seth Geer, designer and builder, La Grange Terrace^ Astor Place-, buildings, 1833; photograph by Dell Upton, July 1998
l6 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
Fig. lo. Grove Court, Greenwich ViUage, New Tork: Rear Tenements behind a Street of Modest Working-Class and Artisans' Houses, build- ings, ca. 1850; photograph by Dell Upton, July 1998
69. Diana diZercga Wall, "The Separation of Home and Work- place in Early Nineteenth- Century New York Cityf American Archeokigy 5, no. 3 {1985), pp. 185-86; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, pp. 78, roo-105.
70. Spann, New Metropolis, p. 220.
71. James Gallier, Autobiography of James Gallier, Architect (Paris: E. Briere, 1864; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1973), P- 18.
72. "Marble Houses at Auction" (advertisement), Evening Post (New York), March 28, 1833, p. 4. As a result of ambiguity in the record, the authorship of La Grange Terrace has long been a matter of disagreement. See, for instance, "Building the Empire City" by Morrison H. Heckscher in this publication, p. 179.
apprentices, and employees. As they disengaged from these, merchants began to move away from their waterfront stores and residences, slowly at first, then in earnest around 1820, with artisans following suit a decade later. The city's builders and its growing coterie of professional architects erected comfortable, sometimes luxurious, houses for the mercantile migrants near the western side of the island and up its center at the advancing urban edge, near Washington Square, Bond Street, and Astor Place, on Union Square, and then (after the mid-i840s) up Fifth Ave- nue, the hotbed of the "Codfish Aristocracy," as the new rich were called (cat. nos. 185, 188; fig. 7)7^
Before Fifth Avenue was developed, all but the wealthiest New Yorkers were satisfied to live in dwellings erected by speculative builders, most often created as ready-made commodities fitted to the demands of the grid rather than to those of individual clients. They ran the gamut from endless rows of small, two-to-four-room houses for artisans up to substan-
tial semidetached houses (cat. nos. 84, 85; fig. 8). Builders for middling and well-to-do tenants some- times retained architects to design relatively standard- ized facades to enliven highly standardized plans, paying a few dollars for a drawing that might be dashed off in a morning (cat. nos. 87, 88).^^ At the upper end were luxurious, architecturally ambitious rows such as La Grange Terrace (Colonnade Row) on Lafayette Place (now Astor Place), carved out of Vauxhall, the old pleasure garden on John Jacob Astor's land (cat. no. 86; fig. 9)- Designed and built by the developer Seth Geer, this "splendid Terrace Row" of marble-fronted houses was offered at auction by Geer in April 1833.^^ Even those wealthy enough to construa freestanding residences, such as Limian Reed, who was said to have "the most expensive house in New York" in 1835, and Samuel Ward, often relied on a master builder to construct a more or less standard Georgian-plan house, sometimes distin- guished by an architect-designed facade.
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY IJ
Even the brisk rate of construction that character- ized New York building through most of the antebel- lum era was inadequate to accommodate the growing urban population. By 1840 the city was engulfed in a housing crisis from which it never emerged/"^ While well-off people enjoyed improved accommodation, more and more wage earners were paying higher and higher rents for smaller and worse quarters. Houses meant for one family were subdivided, often with a
Fig. II. Gotham Court, Five Points, 1850. Wood engraving, from Frank Leslie's Sunday Magazine 5 (June 1879), p. 643
different family or tenant group in every room. Build- ings of the flimsiest and most insubstantial sort were converted to dwellings for those who were too poor to afford anything better or who were excluded from it by racial discrimination. On a lot on Ludlow Street, between Grand and Hester streets, were "7 or 8 huts in close connection, . . . mere sheds," subdivided into more than fifty rooms occupied by 60 to 100 African Americans in 1830.^^ Four years later an alderman complained to the council about that portion of Laurens Street (now West Broadway) between Canal and Spring streets: at number 33 he found 21 whites and 96 blacks in residence, with 10 more of the latter living in a small building at the rear; this address and its nine nearest neighbors had a total population of 280 whites and 173 blacks, an average of 45 people per house. '"^
To take advantage of the need for low-end hous- ing that these documents reveal, new buildings were erected as tenant dwellings in backyards and in dis- tricts heavily occupied by working people, where, after the 1830s, speculators constructed three-story tenements for multifamily occupancy in place of the older, subdivided two -story single-family houses (fig. io)7^ A few developers built rental housing that looked forward to post-Civil War practices, such as the seven-story tenement reputedly constructed at 65 Mott Street in the 1820s, or Silas Wood's Gotham Court of 1850, near Murderer's Row in the Five Points district (fig. 11), This six-story structure provided ten- by-fourteen-foot, two-room apartments for 140 fam- ilies. By 1855 reformers found the situation so dire that they erected the first model tenement, the Working- men's Home, designed by architect John W. Bitch. Familiarly known as the Big Flat, this philanthropic building stood just north of Canal Street on a lot spanning Mott and Elizabeth streets. Within a few years it had become a problem in its own right.
Even middle-income people, especially if they were single, turned to multiple-occupancy housing, such as the "well regulated lodging-house . . . fitted up with all the modern improvements, the furniture entirely new and of the best quality" that was advertised in the Home Journal in 1850, and to boardinghouses, hotels, and rooms in private houses. Like their impover- ished fellow citizens, middle-class families were often forced to "a species of imcomfortable communism," the sharing of houses, "so that the direct order of the family is lost."^*^
Although workplaces and living quarters were beginning to be separated and residential districts to be differentiated by class and race, and although, crudely speaking, the west side of Manhattan was more
73. Thomas U. Walter, Diary, 1834-36, p. 33, Thomas U. Walter Papers, Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Both Reed's and Ward's houses were designed and built by Isaac G. Pearson, although Alexander Jackson Davis apparendy made a facade drawing for Reed's; see Ella M. Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed's Pic- ture Gallery: A Pioneer Collec- tion of American Art (New York: New-York Historical So- ciety, 1990), pp. 32, 50. Phila- delphia architect Thomas U. Walter, who visited both houses in i835> attributed them to the "pseudo Architect" Pearson,
"a merchant from Boston who thought he had peculiar talents for architecture, and left his mercantile persuits [«V], plung- ing headlong into the practice of the art, without a single qualification." See Walter, Diary, 1834-36, pp. 22-24 (quotes), 33-34.
74. ^h.<:)ijri2iT^ Manhattan for Renty pp. 204-12.
75. Deposition of Doctor Knapp, in The People v. Barclay Fan- ning, District Attorney In- dictment Papers, New York, May 14, 1830.
76. "Laurens Street, New York," Niles' Weekly Register, June 28, 1834, p. 303.
77. Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, pp. 70, 199-201.
78. Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New Tork City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1990), pp. 5-7; Robert H. Bremner, "The Big Flat: History of a New York Tenement House," American Historical Review 64 (October 1958), pp. 54-62.
79. "Rooms with Breakfast Only" (advertisement), Home Jour- nal, January 1, 1850, p. 3; Black- mar, Manhattan for Rent,
pp. 134-35, 197-98. The Home Journal lodging house was at the corner of Broadway and Bleecker Street.
80. "New York Society," United States Magazine, and Demo- cratic Review 31 (September 1852), p. 253.
l8 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
81. Alice B. Haven, "A Nice Neigh- borhood," Godey's Lady^s Book and Magazine 62 (January 1861), p. 33.
82. "May-Day," New-Tork Mirror, February 29, 1840, p. 287; "First of May in New York," Gleason^s Pictorial Drawing-Room Com- panion, May 10, 1851, p. 21; "Effects of Moving," Niks' Weekly Register, May 9, 1835,
p. 172; "House-Hunting," New-Tork Mirror, February 29, 1840, p. 287; Felton, Ameri- can Life, p. 52.
83. Longworth's American Alma- nac, New-Tork Register, and City Directory for the Sixty- Second Tear of American Inde- pendence (New York: Thomas Longworth, 1837), pp. 17-22.
84. Alexander Mackay, The Western World; or, Travels in the United States in 1846-47: Exhibiting Them in Their Latest Develop- ment Social, Political, and Industrial; Including a Chapter on California, 2d ed., 3 vols. (London: R. Bendey, 1849), vol. I, pp. 83, 87 (quote); E. E., "Letters Descriptive of New- York, Written to a Literary Gen- deman in Dublin, No. in," New-Tork Mirror, and Ladies^ Literary Gazette, January 13, 1827, p. 195.
prosperous than the east, New York was organized on a microscale rather than a macroscale, like most other cities of the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe and America. However exclusive the block or row in which one lived, one was never far from a fac- tory or from people of a different class or ethnicity. This was painfiilly obvious to Mrs. Ballard, the pro- tagonist of a Godey^s Lady^s Book and Magazine story. She and her husband, Fred, lived in a block of four houses on Nineteenth Street, west of Eighth Avenue, that were "unexceptionable," but "one had to pass cer- tain tenement houses to reach them, and the entire square [block] presented an incongruous mixture of comfort and squalor which one often sees in respectable localities in New York city." The Ballards each suffered their own particular torments in the mixed neighbor- hood. For him it was "the noisy children swearing on the sidewalk near their pleasant home," while for her it was "the rag man's cart with its noisy bell." The rag man "must have" lived in a rear tenement behind their house, for he tied his dogs to the curbstone in front.
If they were used to mixed neighborhoods. New Yorkers were also used to frequent changes of scene occasioned by the tight housing market and the rapid development of the city. Even wealthy homeowners such as Philip Hone or George Templeton Strong
periodically sold their houses and moved farther uptown. Renters of all classes were accustomed to the annual spectacle of Moving Day, May i, when all leases expired and tenants scrambled to find cartmen who would move them (fig. 12). The streets were full of vehicles rushing firom one location to the other, and the failure of a single tenant to move before a new one arrived could induce a chain paralysis that might end up in police court. A side effect of the moving-day custom was that New Yorkers enjoyed an extensive view of the ways their social peers lived. One journalist described two (probably fictitious) sisters who made a hobby of house hunting as a pretext for sniffing out scandalous gossip about their neighbors.
New York's bxargeoning antebellum residential neigh- borhoods complemented its booming commercial and industrial districts. On Wall Street, the center of finance and channel of European capital into the Empire City, banks proliferated (cat. nos. 38, 71). Fifteen of the twenty-nine banks in Manhattan in 1837 were located on or just off Wall Street, along with the Custom House and a succession of mer- chants' exchanges that culminated in Isaiah Rogers's monumental marble building of 1836-42. Its prede- cessor, Josiah R. Brady and Martin Euclid Thompson's
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY I9
niilpVJ"'""
Fig. 13. Broadway, New York, from Canal to Grand Street, West Side, 1856. Tinted lithograph by Jiilius Bien, published by W. Stephenson and Company The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures, Bequest of Edward W. C. Arnold, 1954 54.90.1171
exchange of 1825-26 (cat. nos. 74, 75), had been destroyed in the Great Fire of December 16 and 17, 1835, together with much of the rest of Wall Street and its environs. Along the waterfronts, on Pearl and Front and South streets, wholesale merchants were so busy that they commandeered the sidewalks to stack goods, leaving pedestrians "to jump over boxes, or squeeze yourself, as best you can, between bales of merchandize."
Although New York is no longer commonly thought of as an industrial city, its position at the center of a trade network and its new waterworks made it an industrial power in the mid-nineteenth century. Croton water, used as a raw material in the chemical industry and to supply steam power to a host of other manu- facturers, underpinned a 550-percent increase in indus- trial investment in Manhattan in the two decades after 1840. In i860 there were over four thousand factories of various sizes scattered throughout the city.^^ There were few New Yorkers of any social class who did not live in close, often vexatious, proximity to several of them.^^
Retail shops snaked up Broadway and pushed out along its side streets. At the time of the opening of the Erie Canal the premier shopping district centered around City Hall Park, with the portion of Broadway
south of Wall Street given over to elite residences and small hotels (cat. nos. 109, 123). Over the decades the retail distria moved gradually north, passing Wash- ington Square by the beginning of the Civil War (cat. no. 180; figs. 13-15).
85. Mochring, "Space, Economic Growth, and the Pubhc Works Revolution," pp. 34-35.
86. See Christine Meisner Rosen, "Noisome, Noxious, and Offensive Vapors: Fumes and Stenches in American Towns
jti^iiiirflSi
JB a DAB WAT *^
Fig. 14. Broadway, from Warren to Reade Streets, ca. 1855. Tinted lithograph with hand coloring by Dumke and Keil, published by W. Stephenson and Company. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures, Bequest of Edward W. C. Arnold, 1954 54.90.1044
20 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
Fig. 15. The Ruins cf Phelps and Peck's Storey Fulton and Cliff Streets, May 4, 1832, 1832. Lithograph by- Edward W. Clay. Collection of The New-York Historical Society
and Cities, 1840-1865," His- torical Geography 25 {i997), pp. 67-82.
87. "The Peculiar Advantages of Shopping at Coliimbian Hall** (advertisement). Chris- tian Parlor Magazine 9 (1852), p. 2; "Shopping in New-York," Home Journal, November 17, 1849, p- 4.
88. [William M. Bobo], Glimpses of New-Tork City, by a South Carolinian (Who Had Noth- ing Else to Do) (Charleston: J. J. McCarter, 1852), p. 162.
89. Dickens, American Notes (1842), in American Notes and Pictures from Italy (London and New York: Oxford University Press, i957)> p- 83; Kirkland, "New York," p. 150.
90. [Bobo], Glimpses of New-Tork City, pp. 117-19; "Economy" (advertisement). Evening Post (New York), Oaober 22, 1832, p. 4; "A Card" (advertisement). Morning Courier and New- Tork Enquirer, November i, 1832, p. i; Madisonian, "Sketches of the Metropolis. The Streets of New-York. Broadway-Chatham-Street," New-Tork Mirror, April 13, 1839, pp. 329-30.
91. "Modern Buildings," New-Tork Mirror, March 15, 1834, p. 295.
92. John R Watson, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the Olden Time, 2d ed.
Broadway was not the only commercial strand. Grand Street was the discount shopping distria, while Canal and Catherine streets were also popular retail thoroughfares.^^ On the Bowery, according to South Carolina visitor William Bobo, one could find goods equal to those offered on Broadway at prices 15 to 20 percent lower. Most of the Bowery's businesses, however, dealt in more ordinary commodities such as ready-made clothing, cooked meats, and lively enter- tainment. One of the city's principal showplaces, the often-burned Bowery Theatre, was located there, along with a zoo and a riding school. Chatham Street and Chatham Square, which connected the southern end of the Bowery to the Park, were the home not only of sidewalk booksellers, pawnbrokers, old-clothes merchants, and "mock auction" houses (where the bidding was rigged against the unsuspecting) but also of silversmiths, jewelers, furniture dealers, and shoe stores (cat. no. 178). Chatham Square was a Jewish residential center (the city*s oldest Jewish cemetery is there), and so many Chatham Street merchants were Jewish that it was sometimes referred to as "Jerusa- lem." It was also the site of the Italian Opera House, which failed and was converted to the National Thea- tre, a favorite working-class venue.
A stroll along any of these streets in the antebel- limi decades would have made clear how comfort- ably the grid accommodated commerce (figs. 13, 14).
Each owner filled his property as he or she saw fit, but the lot lines and the street network articulated the individually defined units into a legible overall order. Each wholesale and retail store was often arranged as a grid within a grid for the same purpose (figs. 15, 16).
Over time commercial prosperity and soaring real- estate values encouraged more and more intensive lot coverage, causing individual structures to balloon upward. This "babel style of building" was already noteworthy in the 18305.^^ By i860 it was possible to read a street's real-estate history in its cornice lines, superimposed like archaeological strata (figs. 13, 14). The lowest were the two- and three-story buildings constructed during the 1820s and 1830s. By the 1840s the stories grew taUer, and sometimes a fourth or fifth floor was added. After about 1850 six- or seven-story buildings broke what a frantic John Fanning Watson called, in reaction to the same changes in Philadel- phia, "the former line of equality, and beauty." city building on top oftheformerr he exclaimed. ^All^fo now on stilts! "^^^ The upward trajeaory continued throughout the century. These antebellum buildings, designed to make more intensive use of a lot, were products of real-estate theories that, combined with newer building technologies, produced the skyscrap- ers of the late nineteenth century.
In commercial streets the thinnest of architectural membranes separated public space from private, and merchants discovered that it was to their advantage to make this membrane as permeable as possible. In wholesale districts granite-piered shopfronts, an idea introduced from Boston about 1830, superseded the round-arched fronts of the 1820s (fig. 17).^^ The gran- ite piers permitted wider openings and less separation between store and street. For the same reasons cast- iron piers replaced granite at midcentury. Except for these thin supports, the fronts of the buildings were completely opened up to extend the circulatory space of the sidewalk into the stores and to spill their con- tents onto the sidewalk. There they were sheltered by block-long rows of awnings, supported on curbside posts, that commandeered public space as a commer- cial showroom.^"*^ In retail districts the process of opening up led from the bow or "bulk" windows of the late eighteenth century to the large plate-glass shopfronts of midcentury (fig. 14). In unpretentious shopping districts such as the Bowery, even retail stores might have open fronts. One visitor discovered that in the Bowery's most commercial stretches, no residences or offices interrupted the imbroken line of open-fronted shops, so that "the sides of the streets
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS:
CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY 21
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1868), p. 591. These lines were written for Watson's "Final Appendix of the Year 1856."
93. One journalist identified Ithiel Town's Pearl Street store for Arthur Tappan as the first granite-piered warehouse in New York; see "The Architects and Architecture of New York," Brother Jonathan^ May 27, 1843, pp. 91-92.
94. Mackay, Western World, vol. i, p. 87; Asa Greene, A Glance at New York: Embracin^i the City Government, Theatres, Hotels, Churches, Mobs, Monopolies, Learned Professions, Newspa- pers, Rogues, Dandies, Fires and Firemen, Water and Other Liquids, &c., &€. (New York: A. Greene, Craighead and Allen, Printers, 1837), pp. 7, 10.
95. [^obo]. Glimpses of New-Tork City, p. 163; Kirkland, "New York," p. 150.
Fig. 16. Salesroom^ Main Floor^ Haughwout Building, New Tork. Wood engraving by Nathaniel Orr and Company, from Cosmopolitan Art Journal 3 (June 1859), p. 142. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Thomas J. Watson Library
appear to be all door, and the wails only separate the different concerns "^^
Whatever their size or date these buildings were constructed as layers of open, flexible, but carefully arranged space, unbroken except for stairs. This is evi- dent in an unusually detailed interior description of the renowned Haughwout Building, built in 1856 at
the corner of Broadway and Broome Street as the second home of E. V Haughwout and Company (cat. no. 98). Like many antebellum retailers Haughwout's manufactured much of what it sold, and it decorated or embellished merchandise procured from other suppli- ers as well. The new building was a "monster manu- facturing and sales establishment" that "embraces
Fig. 17. Wholesale Store, 200 Block, Water Street, New Tork, building, 1827; photograph by Dell Upton, July 1998
22 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
Fig. i8. Cast-iron Components. Lithograph, £rom Bfu^er^s Architeaural Iron Work Catcdqgue (New York: Baker and Gcxlwin, 1865), pi. 49. Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
96. "Department of Useful Art. First Article. The Haughwout Establishment," Cosmopolitan Art Journal 3 (June 1859), pp. 141-47, quote on p. 141. The Haughwout firm was founded in 1832. The Haugh- wout Building's steam-powered elevator was Elisha Otis's first commercial installation, aldiough other kinds of mechanical elevators had been used in New York at least since Holt's Hotel opened on Fulton Street in 1832. See Sarah Brad- ford Landau and Carl W. Condit, Rise of the New Tork Skyscraper, 1865-1913 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 35-36; and "Holt's Marble Building," Momin£r Courier and New-Tork Enquirer, January i, 1833, p. 2.
97. Carl R. Lounsbury, "The Wild Melody of Steam: The Mech- anization of the Manufacture
more in value and interest than any single building in the world (if we except the Crystal Palace at Syden- ham, England) according to a journaUst who visited it soon after it opened. The seven stories, five above ground and two below, were arranged like a grain mill, meaning that goods entered at the lowest level, the cellar, and were taken by steam-powered elevator to the top. There they were processed on the fourth and fifth floors, before filtering down, level by level, as far as the basement, where "plain and heavy goods (crockery)" for ships, hotels, and the wholesale trade were sold, along with seconds. The first floor offered silver and silver plate, as well as antiques and luxury items such as bronze and Parian statuettes (fig. 16); china and glass occupied the second floor; and Haughwoufs original stock-in-trade, chandeliers and lamps, was displayed on the third.
As in many commercial buildings, vaults extended under the sidewalks. Borrowing a page from the
organizational patterns of contemporary textile mills, where ancillary services were confined to projecting towers to keep the manufacturing floor free of obstruc- tions, Haughwout's shipping and receiving clerks worked in the vaults imder Broadway and Broome Street, leaving the cellar floor unencumbered. Other offices were located at the rear of the first floor, a legacy of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century merchants' counting houses.
The fabrication of antebellum commercial struc- tures was as rationalized as their operation. Building construction was organized by modules based on the customary sizes of building materials. American and British bricks were made to a standard size that deter- mined wall thicknesses, wall heights, and the size and position of openings. Timbers, window fights, and other components were also made to standard pro- portions. This meant that many building parts could be prefabricated off site. With the introduction of steam machinery in the second quarter of the nine- teenth century, sash-and-blind factories turned out vast numbers of standardized doors, windows, shutters, mantels, and decorative elements.
Beginning with James Bogardus's remodeling of John Milhau's drugstore at 183 Broadway in 1848, ironmasters made cast-iron decorative elements and entire facades that could be fastened to commercial structures such as the Haughwout Building, whose facades were fabricated by the pioneer cast-iron man- ufacturers Daniel D. Badger and Company (cat. no. 98; fig. 18).^^ Cast iron offered economies of scale in production over even the wooden components pro- duced by sash-and-blind factories. Rather than carv- ing the same decorative element in an endless series of wooden or marble blocks, the artisan could make
|
1 |
1 |
Fig. 19. Haughwout Buildifi£f J constructed 1856; photograph by Dell Upton, November 1999
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY 23
a single wooden mold from which an infinite num- ber of cast-iron elements could be formed. This promoted building design that was as modular as the street grid, with monumental facades built up of many small, repeated elements (fig. 19).
Consuming New Tork
Haughwout's rationalized spatial organization, build- ing process, and business practices served the con- sumption of luxury goods, a distincdy irrational social process. Consumption is the construction of self through seeking, acquiring, and appreciating material objects; we might describe it as a search for personal urbanity. It hinges on the promise that in purchasing an object, the consumer acquires access to some desir- able but intangible experience that cannot be direcdy bought. Consumption aims less to satisfy a desire for a social identity than one for the sense of secure being that the sociologist Colin Campbell calls, sim- ply, pleasure. Pleasure encompasses both sensory stimulation— "an 'excited state in us" — say, in the feel of a silk garment, the sound of a song well sung, or the glint of the polished surfaces of a mahogany table, and the satisfaction that these sensations create. ^^^^ Since such pleasures produce only a momentary sense of fulfillment, the process of consumption never comes to an end but exists as a constant state of desire, acquisition, and renewed desire.
The material language of consumption in antebel- lum New York was borrowed from the preindus- trial aristocracy. To nineteenth- century eyes cast-iron classical ornament (and the marble ornament to which it referred) gave the city's retail stores the air of "mercantile palaces." Haughwout's was a "pal- ace of industry*' (cat. no. 98).^^^ According to the edi- tor of HarperX an immigrant, on first beholding A. T. Stewart's dry-goods store or Broadway's luxury hotels such as the Irving, the Astor House, and the Saint Nicholas, would be likely to ask: "What are these splendid palaces?" On the one hand, such buildings served to democratize American luxury as a form of republican equality: ^'Here palaces are for the people." ^^"^ On the other, they offered New Yorkers the luxuries of the "repudiated aristocracy" that Caro- line Kirkland challenged.
The association of mass-produced consumer goods with the tastes and prestige of aristocracy was a sales technique invented by English ceramic manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood in the eighteenth century, but luxury-goods vendors in antebellum New York found that it was still effective a century later.
The journalist who visited Haughwout's store was carefiil to list the prestigious commissions that the firm had received— from the governor-general of Cuba, Czar Nicholas 11 of Russia, the "Imaum of Muscat," and the United States government as a gift to the emperor of Japan, among others. To buy the same chandelier as Nicholas 11 would not make the purchaser a czar, or cause him to be mistaken for one, but it offered the possibility that by inhabiting the same material world he might enjoy some of the sybaritic pleasures that the czar commanded— that he might, in short, feel czarlike.
The association with specific elite customers at establishments such as Haughwouf s was corollary to an evocation of luxury that began with the archi- tectural imagery of the long procession of "palaces" that lined Broadway and continued inside each one, where customers found counters "heaped in wild pro- fusion with every imaginable dainty that loom and fingers and rich dyes and the exhausted skill of human invention have succeeded in producing— drawn together by the magic power of taste and cap- ital." Profusion was the key. Shoppers confronted items too numerous to count or to experience individu- ally. The generalized experience of luxury en masse promised nonspecific, and thus potentially more intense, pleasure.
Alexander T. Stewart, who emigrated from Ireland and opened a store at 283 Broadway in 1823, quickly mastered and refined these techniques. For that reason he enjoyed a reputation throughout the antebellum period as New York's premier dry-goods merchant, a man with a "character for urbanity, fairness of dealing and the immense stock of goods," at a time when dry goods accounted for over half the city's business. His success eventually made him the second wealthiest property owner in New York, after William B. Astor, and allowed him to become one of the city's premier art collectors.
In 1844 Stewart began to construct a five-story ^^dry^oods palace^^ on Broadway at Chambers Street (soon extended to Reade Street), across from "the low-browed and dingy long-room" he had occupied for two decades: "'Shopping' is to be invested with architectural glories— as if its Circean cup was not already sufHcientiy seductive." The project attracted great interest, spurred by the tantalizing refusal of the architea Joseph Trench to let his design be published before the building was finished (cat. no. 96).^^^ The interior of A. T. Stewart's was organized around a light court, treated as a hall 100 feet by 40, 80 feet high, topped by a dome. As befit a royal setting, the
of Building Materials, 1850- 1890," in Architects and Build- ers in North Carolina: A His- tory of the Practice of Building, by Catherine W. Bishir et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 212-19, 221-26.
98. "New Uses of Iron," Home Journal, October 21, 1854, p. 2; Margot Gayle and Carol Gayle, Cast-iron Architecture in America: The Si^n^cance of James Bo^ardus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), pp. 77-81, 224-25.
99. See James Bogardus [with John W. Thompson], "Cast Iron Buildings" (1856), in America Builds: Source Docu- ments in American Architec- ture and Planning, edited by Leland M. Roth (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), p. 72; and Gayle and Gayle, Cast- iron in America, pp. 220-21.
100. Colin Campbell, The Roman- tic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 63; Peter Lunt, "Psychological Approaches to Consumption: Varieties of Research— Past, Present and Future," in Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, edited by Daniel Miller (Lon- don: Roudedge, 1994), p- 249.
101. "Mercantile Palaces of New York," Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, June 20, 1857, p. 38.
102. "Palace of Industry," The Inde- pendent, May 7, 1857, p. I.
103. "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 7 (November 1853), p. 845.
I04- "Fashionable Promenades," United States Review, n.s., 2 (September 1853), p. 233.
105. Neil McKendrick, "Josiah Wedgwood and the Commer- cialization of the Potteries," in The Birth of a Consumer Soci- ety: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, by Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press, 1982), pp. 108-12.
106. "Department of Useful Art," pp. I43-++-
107. "Shopping in Broadway," Holden's Dollar Magazine 3 (May 1849), p. 320.
108. "New-York Daguerreotyped. Business-Streets, Mercantile Blocks, Stores, and Banks," Putnam's Monthly i (April 1853), p. 356; "The Dry Goods Stores of Broadway," Home Journal, October 27, 1849, p. 3 (quote). New York imported 75
24 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
percent of the nation's textiles; see Moehring, "Space, Eco- nomic Growth, and the Public Works Revolution," p. 31.
109. Spann, New Metropolis, p. 208.
no. "Diary of Town Trifles," New Mirror, May 18, 1844, p. 104; "Topics of the Month," Holden's Dollar Magazine i (March 1848), p. 187.
111. "Architecture," Broadway Jour- nal, March 22, 1845, p. 188.
112. "New-York Daguerreotyped," p. 358; "Dry Goods Stores of Broadway," p. 3.
113. Alice B. Neal, "The Flitting," Godey^s Lady's Book and Maga- zine 54 (April 1857), p. 331-
114. "Shop Windows," New-Tork Mirror, and Ladies' Literary Gazette, September 27, 1828, p. 93-
115. "Directions to Ladies for Shop- ping," An^lo American, Octo- ber 26, 1844, p. 14.
116. Alexander Walker, Woman Physiologically Considered, as to Mind, Morals, Marriage, Matrimonial Slavery, Infidelity and Divorce (New York: N.p., 1843), PP- 7-10; "Literary Notices. Domestic Duties," American Ladies' Magazine 2 (January 1829), p. 45; Mary R. Mitford, "Shopping," New- Tork Mirror, and Ladies' Liter- ary Gazeue January 31, 1829, pp. 233-34; "Going a Shop- ping," Arthur's Home Maga- zine 2 (November 1853),
pp. 329-31.
117. "Shopping in Broadway," p. 320.
118. "Why People Board," Godey's Lady's Book 46 (May 1853), p. 476.
119. "The Wife's Error," Godey's Lady's Book 46 (June 1853), p. 495.
120. Bridges, City in the Republic, p. 81.
121. "Directions to Ladies for Shop- ping," p. 14; "Literary Notices. Domestic Duties," p. 45; "Shop- ping in Broadway," p. 320.
122. "Shopping in Broadway," p. 320.
123. "Shop Wmdows," New-Tork Mirror, and Ladies' Literary Gazette, September 27, 1828, p. 93.
walls of his "Marble Palace" were hung with paint- ings, while merchandise— "every variety and every available style of fabrics in the market' —was piled on every surface and siispended from the ceilings and even the dome (cat. nos. 201, 219). This spectacle finally overcame Mrs. Cooper, the protagonist of an Alice B, Neal short story, on a visit to Stewart's: "She cared very litde for dress, and could look at the gor- geous brocades, suspended in the rotunda, as quiedy as she did at the painted window-shades of her oppo- site neighbor. It cost no effort to pass by the lace and embroideries of the intervening room, or to turn her back upon the enticing cloaks and mantles beyond; but those fleecy blankets, those serviceable table- covers, the rolls of towelling, and, above all, the snowy damask piled endwise, as children do their cob-houses, were a sore temptation."
Nineteenth-century commentators recognized the ways in which sales techniques stimulated desire, even if they could not always put their fingers on them. The New-Tork MirroVy and Ladies^ Literary Gazette described shop windows as the staging ground of a dance of desire that involved both con- sumer and merchant. The passerby who "looks atten- tively and delightedly at a shop-window, pleases two people. He pleases himself by indulging his curi- osity, or by gratifying his taste; and he pleases the shopkeeper by the unartificial homage which he thus pays to the taste which arranged the articles, and by the promise which he thus holds out of the proba- bility of his becoming a purchaser." ^^"^ The An£flo American^ too, sensed the nonspecific nature of con- sumer desire, offering a vignette of the shopper who sets out in search of a specific item, only to end up with a whole wardrobe as the result of the clerk's inquiry as to "Svhether there is any other article today Whether there is or not, let the shopman show you what wares he pleases; you will very likely desire one or more of them."^^^
Women were already stereotyped as the primary shoppers and the most avid and helpless of consum- ers. As weak-minded creatures with tenuous senses of selfhood, they were peculiarly susceptible to the blan- dishments of goods for sale, for their sensibilities were powerful but their reason was not.^^^ Shopping seemed to produce in them "urmatural excitements," and in some unfortunates "a morbid excitement of the organ of acquisitiveness," leading them to shoplift. Worse, consumption seemed to violate the ideology that identified women as the keepers of higher values in the home, and therefore as creatures who existed outside the realm of commerce. Domestic moralists
decried middle-class women's willingness to sacrifice "the very root and foundation of domestic privacy, and love, and faith" by taking in boarders, an act that they attributed to a craving for "ornamental stat- uettes, vases, clocks, and literally Svhat-nots.'"^^^
Shopping was the complement of business: while men toiled to earn money at the Merchants' Exchange, women spent it at the "Ladies' Exchange"— Stew- art's. Yet antebellum political economy recognized only production and accumvilation as healthy eco- nomic activities. 1^** In consuming, women entered the economy at the wrong end, for consumption was a kind of fraud. If a woman bought, she squandered her husband's laboriously acquired wealth; if she simply browsed, she cheated male clerks out of their liveli- hoods; if she shoplifted, she committed the equivalent of stock speculation and fraudulent bankruptcy.
As the antithesis of production, consimiption threat- ened republican values, particularly the rights of men to the firuits of their labor. Women were "the empresses and sultanas of our republican metropolis," seated before counters heaped with luxurious goods, while their husbands were "slaves of the dirty mines and dingy laboratories of Wall street and 'down town' . . . delving their lives out to wring from the accidents, the mistakes and the necessities of society the yellow dust that invests their ambitious household divinities with these magnificent adornments."
The World in Little
The political economy of consumption dramatically challenged a primordial assumption of republican citizenship, which emphasized the pursuit of knowl- edge as a path to virtue and the obligation of the learned and the talented to instruct their fellow citi- zens. The impulses to investigate and to educate were alive in New York intellectual life and popular cul- ture throughout the antebellxim era, but more and more they flowed through commercial channels. 'We have heard of a young man who learned geog- raphy by means of mapsellers' windows," wrote the New-Tork Mirror, and Ladies^ Literary Gazette in 1828. "That was certainly stealing knowledge; but he could not afford to pay for it, and therefore, the theft was easily forgiven."
The expansive Enlightenment confidence in the human ability to encompass all knowledge was sub- sumed by New Yorkers' sense of their power to acquire anything the world offered. "Every article which can please the fancy is here daily exposed to the gaze of the curious," wrote the pseudonymous
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY 2$
Fig. 20. The Five Senses—No. i. Seeing. Wood engraving, from Harper's New Monthly Magazine 9 (October 1854), p. 714. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts
Madisonian.i^"^ In the words of another observer of the city, "Whatever art has manufactured for the com- fort and convenience of man, is exposed for sale in her markets. If Europe affords a luxury, it is there; and if Asia has aught rich or splendid, money wiU procure it in New-York."
Not only merchandise but also lectures, theatrical performances, minstrel shows, symphonic, vocal, and band concerts, operas, freak shows, public gardens, fireworks displays, botanical exhibits, commercial museums and galleries, and other diversions were available for a price along New York's great com- mercial streets, side by side with the more carnal delights available in the many saloons and brothels scattered throughout the city, but particularly thick in the mid-nineteenth century in the entertainment district of Broadway.
As it was commercialized, though, the universal popular education of republican ideals was trans- formed into privatized spectacle, its content from pub- lic knowledge to salable commodity, its purpose from civic training to personal pleasure (fig. 20). Spectacle emphasized the striking and exaggerated fragment over the systematic totality, astonishment over under- standing, passive consumption over active investiga- tion, gratification over edification.
The process was most evident in the transformation of such characteristically republican institutions as Charles Willson Peale's Philadelphia Museum, which was briefly reincarnated at the corner of Broadway and Vesey Street in New York by his son Rubens. The yoimger Peale presented his Museum and Gallery of the Fine Arts, which opened on October 26, 1825, the day of the Erie Canal celebration, as an enterprise with the same intent and format as his father's, but his instructive human prodigies soon became a collection of freaks to compete with the American Museum across Broadway. After P. T. Barnum bought the American Museum in 1840, General Tom Thumb was usually in residence there (cat. no. 168), and from time to time customers could inspect such sights as a "real Albiness and his mighty hi0hnessy the Irish Giant," or ^fifteen Indians and Squaws . . . in their NATIVE costume,''^ who were "well authenticated as the first people of their important tribes." A journal- ist who covered the Native Ajnericans' appearances wondered whether, "in becoming a shilling show at the Museum, they have entered civilized society upon a stratum parallel to their own."^^^
Freak shows and the like were offered under the guise of "rational amusement" and republican educa- tion, not only at the American Museum but at more
124. Madisonian, "Sketches of the Metropolis" pp. 329-30.
125. Northern Star, "The Observer," p. 147-
126. Sellers, Mr. Peale's Museum, pp. 249, 256-57; "Fourth of July. Peale's Museum" (adver- tisement), New-Tork Evening Post, July 1, 1826, p. 3; "Peale's Museum" (advertisement), New-Tork Evening Post,
July 14, 1826, p. 2; "American Museum" (advertisement), New-Tork Evening Post, Octo- ber I, 1832, p. I.
127. "American Museum," The New- Torker, May 12, 1838, p. 125; "Sketches of New-York," New Mirror, May 13, 1843, P- 86. Many of the Indians died in New York before they could return to their homes.
26 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
THE AZTEC CHILDREN.
CORKEE OF BEOABWAY & LEOIABJ) STS.
FOE A mOVtTU OH TWO.
TThrrr !hrj ihts litter ktQ FiktblN iD mwft fl[ flafimfof nm or Ffliif *fgiiln !
JS'KfcSc^ '''^P* "'"^ tniwfrilikwui fUmEndkiiii dl^EiiKt^ nir I t<4nl*t.( -I, « «
^ amqu vtk r>^:!rrriirao?f can BE mw,^ or mmi.
Fig. 21. The Aztec Children: Two Active, Spri£fhtlyj Intelligent Little Beings, Wood engraving, from The Republic 3 (February 1852), unpaginated advertisement at end of issue
AUMISSSU.X as CENTS, , , rmLhU!:\ [fAU^ i%lCK j
128. "The Hybrid or Semi-Human Indian" (advertisement), New- Tork Daily Times, December 8, 1854, p. 5.
129. "Two Living Specimens of the Aztec Race" (advertisement). The Independent, January i, 1852, p. 4; "The Aztec Chil- dren," The Independent, Janu- ary 15, 1852, p. 10.
genteel institutions as well. Masonic Hall offered "the hybrid or semi-human Indian from Mexico," purport- edly a cross between a woman and an orang;utan, whose appearances were said to be "daily thronged by medical or scientific men."^^^ At the New York Soci- ety Library one could see the famed Aztec Children,
"a PIGMEAN VARIETY OF THE HUMAN RACE!" (fig. 2l).
Again the exhibition was claimed to be of scientific
interest and sparked a debate over whether the chil- dren were "specimens of a historic race now extinct" or merely "idiotic dwarfs "^^^
New Yorkers made litde effort to distinguish "high" from "low" culture among these offerings. Instead the entertainment offered for sale in antebeUimi New York was classified as moral, uplifting, and respectable or immoral, debasing, and disreputable. While Bar- num assured visitors to his American Museum that the exhibitions were "conducted with the utmost pro- priety," and the hybrid or semihuman Indian fi:om Mexico was commended for her "refined taste and remarkable disposition," a journalist attacked the drama Camille, then playing in New York, as a work in which "the morals of a courtesan [are] presented for the admiration of youth" It was an "attempt to make consumption and the interior of a sick room, a subject fit only for the wards of a hospital, attractive and artistic," which he thought "melancholy proof of a depraved public taste." 1^**
Consequendy a hybrid experience awaited most patrons of the city's commercial pleasures. The public gardens that antebellum New Yorkers enthusiastically patronized offer a good example of the routine mix- ture of what would now be thought of as radically different kinds of entertainment. Public gardens did not necessarily include gardens in the commonly imderstood sense of the term, although that was their origin. Instead they were primarily staging areas for any sort of entertainment for which New Yorkers would willingly pay.
Niblo's Garden, opened by William Niblo at 576 Broadway in 1828, was the best known and probably the favorite of these establishments (fig. 22). At first music and fireworks were Niblo's staples, but he continually added attractions. On July 15, 1839, he offered the Ravel family's "astonishing performance on the CORD elasttque," along with "three roman gladiators" by three of the Ravels; then, after inter- mission, "l'uomo ROSSO: Or, the Unforeseen Illu- sion," a "pantomime" that featured "a full Gallopade, by the Corps-de-Ballet of 30 persons." In addition Niblo's own orchestra played two overtures. Early on Niblo added Italian opera and "Vaudevilles" to his bill, and at other times he presented military bands, operatic ballets, and Signor Gambati, a celebrated valve trumpeter. On one occasion visitors could examine a panorama of Jerusalem, based on a David Roberts painting, ^^"^ Niblo's 'Svas more like a bazaar of aU amusements, than a mere theatre, a garden, or a salon de plaisir^^^^^ At the same time its owner assured the public that "efficient officers" were present
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY 27
Fig. 22. Niblo's Garden^ Broadway, New Tork. Wood engraving, from Gleason^s Pictorial Drawin0-Room Companion 2 (March 6, 1852), p. 145. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts
to prevent the admission of "improper persons," by which he meant unaccompanied women.
Public gardens were traditionally relandscaped and embellished anew each year to keep patrons from becoming bored. Niblo not only regularly reconfig- ured his garden but also filled it with "saloons," the- aters, and concert halls, all cast in the palatial imagery of consumerism, to house his long-running acts.^^^ On September i8, 1846, Niblo's Garden burned, destroying his greenhouses, theaters, and work- shops. The fate of the site was uncertain until the Home Journal reported in 1849 that William Niblo had "regained possession of the field of his former tri- umphs" and intended to rebuild a theater, garden, restaurant, dancing saloon, and arbor. In that year the rebuilt theater became the home of the New York Philharmonic.
The Urban Spectacle
The consumption of goods and images transformed the concept of republican citizenship. Theoretically New Yorkers knew there was a difference between out- ward appearance and the true self In his diary Philip Hone wrote a brief essay, "Dress," in which he com- mented on the responsibility of older men and women to dress well: "An old House requires painting more than a new one." But they also ought to dress appro- priately, soberly and not gaudily. He was scandalized by the refusal of his friend Daniel Webster to appear "in the only dress in which he should appear— the
respectable and dignified suit of black." Instead Web- ster was fond of "tawdry," multicolored clothes: "I was much amused a day or two since by meeting him in Wall Street, at high noon, in a bright, blue Satin Vest, sprigged with gold flowers, a costume incongruous for Daniel Webster, as Ostrich feathers for a Sister of Charity, or a small Sword for a Judge of Probates. There is a strange discrepancy in this instance between 'the outward and visible form, and the inward and spiritual grace,' the integuments and the intellea."i4o
In practice, though, New Yorkers were beginning to judge one another by their public presentation. The respectable and those who aspired to respectabil- ity adopted new codes of refinement that identified them to one another visually, set them apart from their neighbors, and rendered them more like people of similar social standing in other parts of the world. ^"^^ As Caroline Kirkland observed, New York was "fast assuming a cosmopolitan tone," making it "difficult to speak of any particular style of manners as pre- vailing."^"^^ This code of gentility emphasized bodily comportment and speech, tasteful consumption, and highly selective sociability. The satirist Francis J. Grund was amused to see how assiduously the New York gentry avoided their fellow citizens: "our fashionable Americans do not wish to be seen with the people; they dread that more than the tempest." ^""^^
Gentility was learned behavior. Readers of the Home Journal could seek out the services of Madame Barbier, at 4 Great Jones Street, to teach them "a cultivated
130. "American Museum" Ladies' Companion 19 (July 1843),
p. 154; "Hybrid or Semi- Human Indian," p. 5; "The Church. All-Soul's Church .- (Unitarian)," United States Magazine 4 (April 1857), p. 417-
131. "Niblo's," Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, May 14, 1853, p. 308.
132. "Niblo's Garden" (advertise- ment), Mornin£f Courier and New-Tork Enquirer, July 15, 1839.
13;. "Niblo's Garden," New-Tork Mirror, June 7, 1834, p. 391; "Niblo's Garden," The New- Torker, May 26, 1838, p. 158; "Niblo's Garden Is Now Open for the Season" (advertisement). Evening Post (New York), June 30, 1836, n.p.; "Niblo's Garden," Ladies' Companion 11 (May 1839), p. 50; "Niblo's Garden," Evening Post (New York), June 30, 1836.
134. "Fine Arts— Niblo's," Ladies' Companion 2 (February 1835), p. 192; "The Diorama," New- Tork Mirror, January 3, 1835, p. 214.
135. "The New Niblo," Home Jour- nal, April 21, 1849, p- 2.
136. "Niblo's Garden Is Now Open for the Season"; George G. Foster, New Tork by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches, edited by Stuart M. Blumin (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1990), p. 157.
137. "Niblo's Garden," The Corsair, June 15, 1839, p. 219; "Niblo's
28 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
Garden," Ladies* Companion ii (May 1839), p. 50; "^Niblo's" (Glaason's), pp. 308-9.
138. Philip Hone, Diary, entry for September 18, 1846, The New- York Historical Society; micro- film available at the Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum; ^TSTiblo's" (Gleason's), p. 308.
139. '^New Niblo," p. 2.
140. Hone, Diary, entry for March 29, 1845, The New-York Historical Society.
141. Richard L. Bushman, The R^nement of America: Per- sons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992); John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Man- ners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Gary Carson, "The Consumer Revo- lution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?"
in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Gary Gar- son, Ronald Hofi&nan, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the United States Capitol His- torical Society, 1994), p. 521.
142. Kirkland, "New York."
143. Francis J. Grund, Aristocracy in America from the Sketch- Book of a German Nobleman, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1839), vol. i, p. 19.
manner of speaking" French and of Clark's Broadway Tailoring, nearby at the corner of Broadway and Bleecker Street, to obtain men's clothes that "impart ease and elegance to the figure," even "to those WHO HAVE NO TASTE," with the assistance of Clark's "gentlemanly assistants''^"^ Although it was learned, gentility was also thought to signal some essential difference between the genteel and the hoi poUoi. Some groups, notably African Americans and the Irish, were constitutionally unable to learn gentility, while ordinary white artisans and working-class men and women never quite got it. Try as they might, they fell far short of the mark or overshot it laughably (fig. 23). Conservative satirists such as the cartoonist Edward W. Clay made a living lampooning their efforts (fig. 31). ^"^5
In short, while early republicans emphasized the essential similarities among all citizens, antebellvim New Yorkers began to stress the differences. Immigra- tion and the growing segregation of social classes within the city meant that, as midcentury passed, middle-class and well-to-do New Yorkers had less contact with their inferiors and knew less about them. Increasingly the city seemed to them to be populated with men and women whose departure from the neutral standard of refined behavior was at best pic- turesque, at worst threatening. In art, literature, jour- nalism, theater, and other forms of popular culture.
better-off New Yorkers viewed their poorer neighbors as spectacles only slighdy less exotic than the Aztec Children (figs. 24, 25).
As they confronted this human spectacle. New York's cultural arbiters turned toward what the art his- torian Elizabeth Johns has called typin£fy a process that tamed the complexity of the antebellum city by grouping its occupants into a limited number of generic characters. Visual and verbal reporters also imagined urban spatial types as habitats for their human types, mapping a series of distinctive social regions onto the evenly articulated grid of republican New York.
Writers and artists heightened the effea of typ- ing by juxtaposition, a technique that we have already seen employed in merchandising and one that was an artistic cliche by midcentury. To set the most dis- parate human and spatial types into the closest pos- sible proximity transformed the classificatory list of eighteenth-century science into a dramatic, high-relief portrait of nineteenth-century New York. In this mode one writer described the ships in New York harbor as national types: there were the '^'Yorker," the "sub- stantial representative of Old England," the "Dutch- man," the "clumsy Dane," the Norwegian polacca, and the "'long-limbed' brigs and schooners that come from 'down east.'"^'^^
Despite the rapid growth of their city and the mix- ture of people and activities that charaaerized every block of it. New Yorkers seized on a handful of sites as emblematic of fundamental truths about its makeup. Wall Street, Five Points, the Bowery, and, most of all, Broadway were particular favorites.
Wall Street, with the elite Trinity Church at its head and the docks at its foot, punctuated by the great banking houses, by Brady and Thompson's Merchants' Exchange (cat. no. 74), succeeded by that of Isaiah Rogers, and by the grand Greek Revival Custom House (cat. no. 81), stood for contemporary New York as a financial center in all its positive and negative aspects. Because so much of the street was burned in the fire of 1835 (cat. nos. no, in; fig. 6), there was litde to remind one of the past; it spoke of New York's present and its future. In Wall Street, "the far-famed mart for bankers, brokers, underwrit- ers, and stock-jobbers," "Every thing is on a grand scale [and] the talk is of millions." ^"^^ But in an age when a large portion of the political public was sus- picious of "speculation" as a nonproductive drain on the economy and an assault on those who worked for an honest living, Wall Street was also seen as the home of ^Shylocks and over-reachers, yclept Money
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS:
CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY 29
Fig. 24. Manufacturer unknown, probably English for the New York City market. The Cries of New York commemorative handkerchief, 1815-20. Copperplate-printed cotton. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1968 68.60
Brokers," who "carry on their occult operations against the fortunes and opulence of the unwary and credu- lous portion of the community." ^"^^ The disruption of traffic occasioned by reconstruction after the fire brought out New Yorkers' feelings. Forced to pick their way through the confusion, passersby muttered "what d— d nonsense!," which registered "generally expressed feelings of bitterness against the banks— for bearing so hard on the mercantile community," in the opinion of George Templeton Strong. ^^'^ Antebellum Americans were acutely aware of the volatility of individual fortunes, and Wall Street seemed to exemplify that: "We never pass Wall-street without a shudder. Who knows but what at the
moment we pass it, some infernally ingenious specu- lator is planning a financial juggle by which he is to make a fortune, and at least fifty of us to be ruined somehow or other right off!"^^^
A wood engraving of the street in 1855 shows a busy thoroughfare lined with substantial buildings, including the Merchants' Exchange at the left (fig. 26). According to the accompanying text, the sidewalk swarms with types personifying Wall Street's suspect character. The artist
has shown us the ^%ulls and hears/^ the curb stone brokers, the speculators in ^^fancieSj the heavy capi- talists, the needy ^'^shinners,^ all who blow bubbles
144. "Madame Barbier" (advertise- ment). Home Journal, Octo- ber 6, 1855, p. 3; "Clark's Broadway Tailoring** (adver- tisement), Home Journal, May 3, 1851, p. 3.
145. Nancy Reynolds Davison,
"E. W. Clay: American Political Caricaturist of the Jacksonian Era" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1980).
146. Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. xii-xiii, 12-22.
147. Northern Star, "The Observer"; "Editor's Drawer," Harper's
30 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
New Monthly Magazine 9 (August 1854), p. 421.
148. "Street Views in New-York. Wall-Street," New-Tork Mirror, January 21, 1832, pp. 225-26; "Wall-street" New-Tork Mirror, December 6, 1834, p. 183.
149. E. E., "Letters Descriptive of New-York . . . No. Ill," p. 195.
150. George Templeton Strong, Diary, entry for Oaober 5, 1839, The New-York Historical Society.
151. "Fashionable Promenades" p. 235.
152. "New York in 1855 and 1660," Bailouts Pictorial Drawing- Room Companion, April 21, 1855, p. 248. The writer of the article, published in a Boston periodical, conflises the Mer- chants' Exchange, illustrated in fig. 26, with the Custom House, not represented.
153. [Nathaniel P. Willis], "Diary of Town Trifles," New Mirror, May 18, 1844, p. 104; Moehr- ing, "Space, Economic Growth and the Public Works Revolution," p. 34.
HEW vftflic l^^ v-
Fig. 26. New Tork in iSss- Wood engraving, from Bailouts Pictorial Drawin0-Room Companion^ April 21, 1855, p. 248. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts
Fig. 25. Nicolino Calyo, The Hot-Corn Seller, 1840-44. Watercolor. Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Mrs. Francis P. Garvin in Memory of Francis P. Garvin Rov^^se
and buy bubbles^ who disperse wealth and pursue wealthy congregated about the choicest abodes of PlutuSy the haunts of mammon, in the great imper- ial city. Tou see men there who live in palaces, and dispense a regal hospitality away up town — you behold flashy adventurers whose whole wealth is on their backs — many a wealthy old Israelite who could draw a check for two hundred thousand dollars at a momenfs notice, and yet who dresses as shab- bily as an Vclo^ man, while young Judea exhibits his degeneracy in varnished boots, oiled mustachios, finger-rings, chains and a diamond breastpin,
The juxtaposed types and the casually employed eth- nic Stereotype leapt from the writer's mind far more readily than they did from the illustration.
At the opposite end of the economic ladder, Five Points stood for the worst that could be feared of an enormous democratic city (figs, ii, 27). The name was derived from the since-vanished irregular intersection of five streets: Miilberry, Anthony (now Worth), Cross (Park), Orange (Baxter), and Litde Water (no longer extant); but it applied more generally to the Sixth Ward just northeast of City Hall, north of Chatham Street, on and aroimd the filled-in Collect Pond (fig. 4). This '"Valley of Poverty" was repre- sented as a collection of run-down housing and ques- tionable businesses, occupied by some of New York's poorest citizens, although it was also an important industrial district, the scene of various sorts of metal fabrication and sugar and confectionery manufac- ture. Bogardus's and Badger's ironworks stood just two blocks from the notorious intersection. As early as 1810 Five Points' population was one-quarter black or foreign bom. Later in the century most of the for- mer had left, but three-quarters of the district's resi- dents were immigrants. ^^^^
To outsiders Five Points was the place where society seemed to sink below the horizon of viability. When Charles Dickens inspected the neighborhood— after carefiilly procuring the protection of two policemen- he visited a house in which "mounds of rags are seen to be astir, and rise slowly up, and the floor is cov- ered with heaps of negro women, waking from their sleep." The language implies that the women were barely human, as Dickens suggested more openly in observing that many of New York's free-roaming pigs seemed to headquarter themselves in Five Points. "Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? and why they talk instead of grunting?" Like nearly every other visitor, Dickens
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY 3I
thought he knew the reason for what he saw: for the people as for the buildings, "debauchery" had made them "prematurely old."^^^
Five Points threatened the respectable because it offered abundant and unabashed lower-class enter- tainment. It appeared to outsiders that every building contained a bar. The neighborhood also boasted the highest concentration of brothels in the city, including seventeen on a single block. Moreover, the streets seemed to be filled with idle people with nothing on their minds— least of all honest work.^^^
As a type of depravity, Five Points slipped easily from the pages of reformers' and travelers' tracts into the lurid "lights and shadows" literature of mid- century that purported to show respectable urban- ites hidden aspects of their cities. It figured, for instance, in George G. Foster's sensationalist New Tork by Gas-Li£fht (1850), a work claiming "to dis- cover the real facts of the actual condition of the wicked and wretched classes."
From another vantage point Five Points took on a very different cast. Careful observers recognized that it was less a resort for criminals than a neighborhood for the working poor in which most people's plight owed more to destitution than to vice. It was a dis- trict, as George Templeton Strong memorably put it, of "warens [sic] of seamstresses to whom their utmost toil in monotonous daily drudgery gives only bare subsistence in a life barren of hope & of enjoyment." When the perceptive Swedish visitor Fredrika Bre- mer toured the neighborhood about 1850, most of the people she met seemed to her "wretched rather through poverty than moral degradation."
The evidence of modern archaeology and historical research, which depict Five Points as a hub of working- class life and culture rather than as a haven for criminal behavior, supports Bremer's conclusion. The bars were small businesses and centers of a lively neigh- borhood conviviality that won over even Dickens, who described his visit to the black-owned Almack's sympathetically. Given the cramped quarters most Five Pointers occupied, bars and the streets were natural sites of social life and, as the historian Chris- tine Stansell has pointed out, important for foster- ing networks of mutual assistance among women and as places where children scavenged to help support their families. The life of Five Points was flavored with a keen patriotism and an active involvement in the politics of city and nation. As Dickens noted, "on the bar-room walls are coloured prints of Washing- ton and Queen Victoria of England, and the Ameri- can Eagle."
Fig. 27. The Old Brewery. Wood engraving, from B. K. Vtirct^ A Half Century with Juvenile Delinquents; or^ The New Tork House of Refuse and Its Times (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1869), p. 208. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
If Five Points was not the birthplace of all vice in the city, neither was it the only poor or mixed-race neighborhood. West Broadway and its extension, Laurens Street, and parts of Corlears Hook and of the waterfront were comparable places. It was the closeness of Five Points to the city*s center of govern- ment that made it so striking and so easy to visit, and thus one of the emblematic neighborhoods of New York. The careful siting of the Tombs between City Hall and Five Points in the 1830s dramatized the con- trast. Few observers missed the connection. Dickens, Bremer, and Nathaniel Parker Willis all combined visits to the slum and to the prison.
The most titillating aspect of Five Points was its prox- imity to New York's two emblematic thoroughfares, Broadway and its plebeian double, the Bowery. Broad- way, the "grand feature" of New York and "the pride of the Yorkers," was "like nothing in existence but itself": "In this most cosmopolitan of our cities, this great artery of life is the most cosmopolitan of streets" (cat. nos. 109, 123; figs. 13, 14).
The frenetic activity that masked Broadway^s mot- ley, ever-changing sequence of houses and commercial buildings— architecturally a "confused assemblage of high, low, broad, narrow, white, gray, red, brown, yel- low, simple and florid," "its glories . . . rather traditional
154- J. A. Lobbia, "Slum Lore" Village Voice, January 2, 1996, pp. 34, 36.
155. Dickens, American NoteSy pp. 88-90.
156. Ibid., p. 89; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New Tork City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), pp. 34, 38-41.
157. [Willis], "Diary of Town Trifles," p. 105.
158. Foster, New Tork by Gas-Li£fht, p. 69.
159. Strong, Diary, entry for July 7, 1851, The New-York Historical Society.
160. Bremer, Homes of the New World, vol. 2, p. 602.
161. Lobbia, "Slum Lore," pp. 34, 37-
162. Dickens, American Notes, pp. 90-91.
163. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New Tork, 1789-1860 (Urbana: Uni- versity of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 41-42, 50.
164. Dickens, American Notes, p. 89.
165. Stansell, City of Women, p. 42; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, p. 176.
166. "Transformations of Our City," New-Tork Mirror, January 30, 1836, p. 247; "Broadway," New- Tork Mirror, and Ladies' Liter- ary Gazette, September 9, 1826,
32 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
p. 55; "Broadwayj New York, by Gaslight" Bailouts Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, December 13, 1856, p. 381.
167. "City Improvements. The New Custom-House" New-Tork Mirror, August 23, 1834, p. 57.
168. "Broadway as Proposed to Be" Home Journal, Oaober 22, 1847; "Genin's Bridge" Glea- son's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, December 25, 1852, p. 416.
169. Strong, Diary, entry for August 24, 1845, The New-York His- torical Society
170. Madisonian, "Sketches of the Metropolis" p. 329.
171. "Sketchings. Broadway," The Crayon 5 (August 1858), p. 234.
172. Edward S. Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States of North Amer- ica, from April, 1833, to October, iS34f 3 vols. (London: J. Mur- ray, 1835), vol. I, p. 69.
173. Strong, Diary, entry for July 7, 1851, The New-York Historical Society; "Things in New York," Brother Jonathan, March 4, 1843, p. 250.
174. "Sketchings. Broadway," p. 234; Felton, American Life, p. 33.
175. "Astor^s Park Hotel," Atkinson's Casket 10 (April 1835), p. 217; "Town Gossip. Glass Walk over Broadway," Home Journal, November 17, 1849, p. 2. "Stewart's Temple," Morris's National Press, April 18, 1846, p. 2.
"Facts and Opinions of Litera- ture, Society, and Movements
176.
177-
than actual"— excited New Yorkers and visitors alike. The human mass, with pedestrians crowded SO densely on the sidewalks that someone proposed to build a glass-paved mezzanine above, and packed into so many vehicles that the hatter John N. Genin built a pedestrian bridge across the street from his shop at 214 Broadway to Saint Paul's Chapel, stood for all of New York (fig. 28).i68
This "river deep & wide of live, perspiring himian- ity*' encompassed the entire democratic public of America, represented, as always, by types. i**^ There were "the gay and serious— the wealthy and the house- less, the clothed in purpose and the half-clad in linsey- woolsey." There were newsboys and immigrants, merchants and clerks. "French and German dry goods jobbers, Bremen merchants, Jew financiers, southern, eastern, and western speculators and peculators, auc- tioneers, men of straw and men of substance; New York, New Orleans, Hamburg, Liverpool, San Fran- cisco, Boston, and Cincinnati are huddled together in a six cent omnibus pele-mele with St. Louis, Lyons, Charleston, Manchester, and Savannah; all rushing to— Wall street. Broad street. Pearl street. Front street. South street," wrote a correspondent in The Crayon, Unlike other parts of the New York business dis- trict, Broadway was heavily populated by "the lady- element," whom the writer described as "rather of a mixed character": a "small sprinkling of lady-like women" along with "a great number of vindomesti- cated ladies, not necessarily of doubtful character, but ladies unattached." The journal went on to include in
Fig. 28. Genin's New and Novel Brid£fej Extending across Broadway^ New Tork. Wood engraving by John William Orr, from Gleason's Pictorial Drawin^-Bj}om Companion^ December 25, 1852, p. 416. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts
the lady-element "many female day-dreamers, loimg- ing women, or she-loafers, whose hopeless vacancy of mind calls for the stimulant of the noise, the shops, the dust, the variety of faces, of the hissing, seething street." The English visitor Edward S. Abdy was "not a litde surprised" to encounter imaccompanied women on Broadway in the 1830s.
The Broadway crowd mixed occupations, origins, and genders, as well as social classes and races. Although they were seldom mentioned in the celebratory cata- logues of the street's denizens, beggars were common on Broadway, including "hideous troops of ragged girls, from 12 years down," described by Strong in his diary, and the beggars who took shelter in the portico of the Astor House hotel, Small-time vendors and a wide variety of roving tradespeople sought business along the street, filling the air with their distinctive identifying cries (figs. 24, 25). The Crayon recorded the "mixture of races," including blacks and Asians, on Broadway, while the English visitor Mrs. Felton expe- rienced the great street as "the fashionable lounge for all the black and white belles and beaux of the city."^^"^
If Broadway was the epitome of democratic New York, it also stood for the fissures in urban society. The street had its fashionable and unfashionable sides. The west side, on which the Astor House and the other luxury hotels stood, nearer to the wealthy resi- dences along Greenwich Street, was the fashionable side, where one was "sure to find the elite of the commercial metropolis." The east side, toward the commercial waterfi*ont and Five Points, and also toward Wall Street, was the unfashionable side. One journalist hoped that the completion of A. T. Stew- arf s elegant new store at the northeast comer of Broadway and Chambers Street in 1846 would draw carriage trade east, and create "a fair division" of foot traffic between the two sides.
What Broadway was to the fashionable shopping streets of Europe, what the east side of Broadway was to the west side, the Bowery was to Broadway as a whole: its "democratic rival." The Bowery, too, had its fashionable and unfashionable sides, but they mir- rored Broadway's: its west side was the unfashion- able, "dollar" side, while the other was the "shilling" side "from the fact . . . that all the fancy stores are upon that side."^^^
Tellingly, the Bowery, unlike Broadway, was not punctuated by a single church. It had no time for the formalities or pieties of respectable life. Compared to Broadway, the Bowery was 'Vrapt in no cloak of convention or pseudo-refinement. The fundamental
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY 33
business of life is carried on as being confessedly die main business; not, as in Broadway, as if it were a thing to be huddled into a corner, to make way for the carved work and gilding, the drapery and colour of the great panorama."
If Broadway was the haunt of many urban types, but most notably of the "fashionables," the Bowery was home to one type, the Bowery "b'hoy" and his brash but amiable "^g'hal" Mose and Lize (names de- rived from characters in Benjamin A. Baker's 1848 play A Glance at New Tork) were ambiguous figures. In one sense they were quintessential Americans, genu- ine and unsophisticated people indistinguishable from "the rowdy of Philadelphia, the Hoosier of the Mississippi, the trapper of the Rocky Mountains, and the gold-hunter of California," according to George Foster. All these types embodied the ^yree develop- ment of An£[lo -Saxon nature^' (cat. no. 127).^^^ In this light the Bowery b'hoy seemed a frontiersman in his own city. Like the figure of the Western trapper in the antebellum genre paintings discussed by Elizabeth Johns, he evidently lived a free life that his more re- spectable chroniclers envied even as they conde- scended to it.^^^ William Bobo compared the "pale and sickly beings who pace languidly" along Broad- way with the heartier Bowery b'hoys and g'hals who inhabited the Bowery. In this respect, the b'hoy and g'hal were unurbane and nearly uncivilized.
When Lize and Mose were described in detail, though, they seemed quintessentially urban, and at least parodically urbane. Lize was "independent in her tastes and habits," moved with "the swing of mis- chief and defiance," spoke in a loud and hearty voice, and dressed "'high' ... in utter defiance of those conventional laws of harmony and taste imposed by Madame Lawson and the French mantua-makers of Broadway."
Mose strode along,
black silk hat, smoothly brushed, sitting precisely upon the top of the head, hair well oiled, and lyin^f closely to the skin, lon^f in front, short behind, cra- vat a-la-sailor, with the shirt collar turned over it, vest of fancy silk, lar^e flowers, black frock coat, no jewelry, except in a few instances, where the insignia of the [fire] engine company to which the wearer belongs, as a breastpin, black pants, one or two years behind the fashion, heavy boots, and a cigar about half smoked, in the left corner of the mouth, as near perpendicular as it is possible to begot [fig. 29 ].^^^
The b'hoy and his g'hal were avid consumers of pop- ular entertainments, with opinions on theater, litera-
ture, and politics as strong as any journalist's. Indeed, one journalist, Walt Whitman, sang their praises and occasionally adopted the persona of the b'hoy in his writings. ^^"^ Although the Broadway stroller knew few people except those in his immediate circle, the Bowery b'hoy "speaks to every acquaintance he meets, and is hail-fellow-well-met with every body, from the mayor to the beggar."
The Bowery b'hoy's volunteer-fire-company insignia declared his membership in a significant institution in antebellimi New York. In addition to providing a nec- essary public service, fire companies were quasi-gangs offering male camaraderie and an active role in the city's transition from the world of the patrician public servant to that of the career politician up from the ranks (cat. no. 176),^^*^ The real Bowery boys who joined them were men employed in lower-middle- class occupations in shops and industries. In fire com- panies or as members of gangs (including one called, confusingly, the Bowery Boys), they were not so much the criminals they were often reputed to be as engaged political activists happy to glad-hand during eleaion campaigns but ready to back up their loyalties with their fists when necessary. During one of the peri- odic nativist episodes in New York political life, the Bowery Boys and an Irish gang, the Dead Rabbits (fig. 30), conducted a protracted and bloody skirmish in the streets of Five Points. This "battle between Irish blackguardism & Native Bowery Blackguardism," on the Fourth of July 1857, ended with the two sides join- ing forces to fight the police.
"A good big cigar placed in his mouth at the proper angle to express perfea content with himself and perfea indifference to all the rest of the world put the last and finishing touch" on the Bowery b'hoy's appearance. Cigars, ubiquitous on antebellum American streets, where they were smoked by men and boys of all classes and even by some lower-class women, were objects of wide discussion and multiple significance. Edward W. Clay's ne Smokers, a lively image of a New York street, vividly depicts the way the cigar's pervasive, offensive odor claimed public space as a male domain (fig. 31). Plebeian cigar smoke emphasized the overbearing, even claustrophobic presence of the lower classes. In the eyes of the respectable (like the Whig propagandist Clay), cigars stood for unwanted democratic equality. Their smoke clung to the clothes of the genteel and pur- sued them into their homes. Indeed, Strong noted in his diary that on a hot day the entire city smelled like "the stale cigar smoke of a country bar room."^^^
In urban literature, the cigar-smoking b'hoy was the type of "the Democracy," the worldly lower-class
of the Day," Literary World, January ii, 1851, p. 32.
178. [Bpbo], Glimpses of New-Tork City, p. 13.
179. Kirkland, "New York," p. 150.
180. Foster, New Tork by Gas-Li^ht, p. 170.
181. Johns, American Genre Paint- ing, pp. 60-100.
182. Foster, New Tork by Gas-Light, pp. 175-76.
183. [Bobo], Glimpses of New-Tork City, pp. 164-65.
184. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Mel- ville (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 508-12.
185. [Bobo], Glimpses of New-Tork City, pp. 164-65.
186. Bridges, City in the Republic, pp. 74-75-
187. Ibid., pp. 29-31, 76-77; "The Riot in the Sixth Ward," Frank Leslie^s Illustrated Newspaper, July 18, 1857, pp. 108-9; Strong, Diary, entry for July 5, 1857 (quote). The New-York Histori- cal Society; Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New Tork (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991), pp. 200-204.
188. Henry Collins Brown, cd., Valentine's Manual of the City of New Tork for 1916-7, new series (New York: Valentine Company, 1916), p. iii.
189. "Customs of New-York," NeiP- Tork Mirror, and Ladies' Liter- ary Gazette, July 5, 1828, p. 23.
190. Strong, Diary, entry for Sep- tember 5, 1839, The New-York Historical Society.
ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
Fig. 29. A Bowery Boy, Wood engraving, from Frank Leslie^s Illustrated Newspaper^ July 18, 1857, p. 109. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts
Fig. 30. A Dead Babbit. Wood engraving, from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Nen^aper, July 18, 1857, p. 109. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts
. [Robo], Glimpses of Nerp-Tork Cityy p. 165.
. "Frazee's Bust of John Jayf New-Tork Evening Post, March 21, 1832, p. 2; "The Late Awfiil Q)nflagration in New York," Atkinson's Casket II (January 1836), p. 29; Freder- ick S. Voss, with Dennis Montagna and Jean Henry, John Frazee, 1790-1852, Sculp- tor (exh. cat., Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gal- lery, Smithsonian Institution; Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1986), pp. 32-33, 77-
. Voss, Montagna, and Henry, John Frazee, p. 31; Bridges, City in the Republic, pp. 19, 104-7. In the parlance of artisan repub- licanism, a woridngman was any- one, including a shopkeeper or small businessman, who made a living by his own efforts rather than through financial specula- tion. Although the Working- man's Party was short-lived and unsuccessful at the polls, it bequeathed several of its active jfigures and its central ideas to both the Whigs and the Demo- crats in Jacksonian New York;
urbanite determined to have his say in the degentri- fied politics and civic life of post- Jacksonian Amer- ica. He was "a fair politician, a good judge of horse flesh . . . and renders himself essentially useful, as well as ornamental, at all the fires in his ward." Com- pared to this engaging specimen the Broadway man "is not only a fop but a ninny, knows about as much of what is going on out of the very limited circle of his lady friends, as a child ten years old" His cigar smoking is limited to a single cigar after dinner, after which this emasculated dandy visits a lady friend, "if he should be lucky enough to have one."^^^ Once again the b'hoy seemed at least as enviable as he was contemptible.
The Arts in the Empire City
Many New Yorkers believed that the visual and deco- rative arts were essential to the effort to bring both civilization and urbanity to the Empire City. Early in the antebellum era republicans conceived art as a form of manual and intellectual accomplishment that should be directed to the edification of fellow citizens.
who in turn were expected to support art for patriotic reasons. Artists inspired by republican civic* values acted in this spirit to create portraits for public places (cat. nos. I, 2, 55). John Frazee's bust of John Jay (fig. Ill), commissioned by Congress for the Supreme Court's chamber in the United States Capitol, was displayed to the public in New York's Merchants' Exchange before being sent to Washington; four thousand people reportedly came to see it. The same building housed Robert Ball Hughes's statue of Alexander Hamilton (fig. no), which was destroyed with the exchange itself in the fire of 1835.
Works such as these were hailed as examples of the native genius of American artisans and marvelous products of American industry on a par with complex machine tools or suspension bridges. There is evi- dence that some artists also saw themselves as arti- sans, socially and economically, with all that implied for their understanding of their place in society, their manner of working, and their right to a competency. Frazee, for example, was an active member of the Workingmen's Party, the last and most eloquent bas- tion of artisan republicanism in New York politics.
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY 35
The Workingmen promoted the idea that society was a family in which people of various stations in life should assist one another for the common good. This viewpoint animated self-made architects of the first forty years of the nineteenth century, men such as New York's Minard Lafever, who bootstrapped them- selves up from the status of builders and who then often published builders' guides and handbooks with the express intention of offering their brethren the means to advance themselves as well.^^"^
Belief in the civic role of art and in the artist as hon- est artisan survived throughout the antebellum dec- ades. In the last years before the Civil War New Yorkers could visit a gallery of historical art in City Hall or they could pay a quarter to see that "sublime tableau of beauty and patriotism," James Burns's painting Washington Crowned by Equality^ FmUrnity, and Liberty at the Apollo Rooms. They could also enjoy the marbles of Erastus Dow Palmer (cat. no. 69), hailed by the cognoscenti as a self-taught specimen of native genius who had transformed him- self from carpenter to sculptor solely through "his own innate ideas of excellence ."^^^
As time passed, those who clung to the notion of art's civic value were increasingly pessimistic about the fate of republicanism. Samuel F. B. Morse's conservative
Calvinist beliefs led him to fear for the future of the nation. As he understood it, his mission, like that of his Puritan forebears, was to call the people to reform. As an artist, Morse sought to use the "refining influ- ences of the fine arts" to stem "the tendency in the democracy of our country to low and vulgar pleasures and pursuits." He and such of his contemporaries as Thomas Cole (cat. nos. lo, 62, 161) evoked the tra- ditional aesthetic hierarchy that gave history paint- ing—exemplary images from the historical or mythic past— the highest value and hoped, usually in vain, to sway their fellow citizens through uplifting portrayals of legitimate leadership and an uncorrupted past. Patrons such as Philip Hone or Luman Reed, who purchased and sometimes publicly exhibited works by Morse and Cole among others, also saw art in this light. To the same ends they commemorated worthy ancestors through the fledgling New-York Historical Society (cat. no. 104), served on church vestries, and helped to organize and govern the prisons, asylums, and other so-called therapeutic institutions of the antebellum era (cat. no. 73). All served the common goal of recapturing civic and moral authority in a city rapidly slipping from their grasp.
Just as the republican ideal of the citizenry as mem- bers of a common family disintegrated, so the notion
THE SMOKKKS.
Fig. 31. The Smokers, 1837. Lithograph by Edward W. Clay, printed and published by H. R. Robinson. The Library Company of Philadelphia
see Bridges, City in the Repub- lic, pp. 19, 22-23.
194. Dell Upton, "Pattern Books and Professionalism: Aspects of the Transformation of Ameri- can Domestic Architecture, 1800-1860," Winterthur Port- folio 19 (summer/autumn 1984), pp. 116-17.
195. "Public Buildings of New- York," Putnam^s Monthly 3 (January 1854), p. 12; "Apollo Rooms, 410 Broadway^ (adver- tisement), Evening Post (New York), October 2, 1849, p. 3; "Apollo, 410 Broadway" (ad- vertisement), New-York Daily Tribune, October 2, 1849, p. 3-
196. "Palmer's Marbles," Frank Leslie^s Illustrated Newspaper, December 20, 1856, p. 42.
197. Staiti, Samuel F. B. Morse, pp. 2-5, 67-68; Edward Lind Morse, ed., Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), vol. 2, p. 26 (quote).
198. Staiti, Samuel F. B. Morse, pp. 71, 75; Wallach, "Thomas Cole," p. loi; Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 17; Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellec- tual Life in New York City from I7S0 to the Be£iinnin£s of Our Own Time (New York: Knopf, 1987), pp. 126, 128.
36 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
199. Angela L. Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Represen- tation and American Cultural Politics, 182S-187S (Ithaca: Cor- nell University Press, 1993), pp. 2, 7-10; Spann, New Metropolis, pp. 235-39; "Edi- tor's Easy Chair," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 15 (June 1857), p. 128.
200. "American Art," New York Quarterly i (June 1852), pp. 229-51, 230 (quote).
201. "Cheap Art," The Crayon, Ortober 17, 1855, p- 248; X W. Whitley, The Progress and Influence of the Fine Arts," Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art 10 (March 1852), p. 213; "Knowledge and Patronage," Atkinson's Casket 7 (January 1832), p. 27; "Fine Arts in New York," United States Magazine 4 (April 1857), pp. 413-14; Upton, "Pattern Books," pp. 123, 128.
202. Clarence Cook, ''Shall We Have a Permanent Free Picture Gal- lery?" The Independent, July 5, 1855.
203. "Free Galleries of Art," Home Journal, May 7, 1854, p. 2.
204. ''Fine Arts in New York," pp. 413-14.
205. The Bryan Gallery," United States Ma£fazine 4 (May 1857), p. 526.
206. Johns, American Genre Paint-
im PP- 42, 59.
207. [A. J. Downing], "Critique on the February Horticulturist," TTje Horticulturist 7 (April 1852), p. 174.
208. "The Growth of Taste," The Crayon, January 17, 1855, pp. 33-34.
209. "Taste in New-York," New York Quarterly 4 (1855), pp. 56, 59.
210. A. J. Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses, Including Designs for Cottages, Farm- houses, and Villas . . . (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1850), p. 20; Upton, "Pattern Books," pp. 125-26. The other two books by Downing were A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Garden- ing, Adapted to North Amer- ica .. . (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1841) and Cottage Residences; or, A Series of Designs for Rural Cottages and Cottage Villas, and Their Gardens and Grounds Adapted to North America (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1842).
211. W. L. Tiffany, "Art, and Its Fu- ture Prospects in the United States," Godey's Lady's Book 46 (March 1853), p. 220; "Knowl- edge and Patronage," p. 27.
of art fragmented, and the concept of art as a civic ex- pression weakened. The arts continued to stir national pride and to be understood as expressions of national identity, but gradually they came to seem more a mat- ter of urbanity than citizenship. One common answer to the question, What makes a city a metropolis .> was "A proper respect for Art.''^^^
Writers about art and architecture spoke of the artist's duty to address "all classes, because he appeals to sympathies common to the race, and is thus truly national." To do so, however, required some edu- cation of the public taste through exhibitions, repro- ductions, and exhortation, if only to create a market for good works. More important, the progress of urbanity required the enduring influence of art in civic life, and in the 1850s some New Yorkers began to call for the establishment of a "permanent free picture gallery" to supplement ephemeral commercial exhi- bitions and the annual shows of the National Acad- emy of Design (for which admission was charged), then the only places where ordinary New Yorkers could enjoy the fine arts.^^^ The Home Journal urged the state to establish free galleries of art as moral sup- plements to the mundane vocational training offered in public schools and colleges. ^^'^ The United States Magazine agreed, but observed that one of the prob- lems with such an institution was "the difficulty of preserving the rooms from the intrusion of disrep- utable persons"; security guards like those found in Stewart's would do the trick, the editors thought.^*''^ Like Thomas Jefferson Bryan, who opened the Bryan Gallery of Christian Art on Broadway at Thirteenth Street, most gallery operators found that a 25-cent admission charge was essential to preserve "that quiet and elegant taste" such a setting required. Although the commercial galleries professed to welcome the serious-minded artisan and the respectable poor, they were anxious to exclude the "sovereigns," the patrician term for those lower-class Americans who asserted their right to participate in politics and social life on an equal footing with everyone else.^**^ The sover- eigns' appreciation of art was allegedly epitomized by the one overheard to say of Horatio Greenough's statue of Washington: "I say Bob— if I had a hammer, Fd crack this nut on that old chap's toes!"^*^^
In some minds, then, art was transformed from a medium for reinforcing ties of republican citizenship to a medium for cultivating and demonstrating per- sonal urbanity. A subde shift in the concept of taste, defined simply by The Crayon as "the capacity of re- ceiving pleasure, from Beauty in some form," trans- ferred art from the realm of the universally accessible
and instructive to one that required an arcane and highly developed sensibility. As with gentility, of which taste was one major index, not everyone could be educated. A critic advised the opera conductor at the Academy of Music not to bother trying to please the patrons in the galleries, since those in the parquet and dress circles were much more capable of appreci- ating his work. He compared "An admiration for fine bearing on the street, for high-bom features or noble- gifted" ones to "superior judgment, a vigorous intellect, and ambition with deep-moved feeling" and con- cluded that "the elite of society ... are ever the patrons of genuine art."^**^
The landscape gardener and architectural popu- larizer Andrew Jackson Downing made the same point less stridendy as he worked out his aesthetic theory in three books pubUshed between 1841 and 1850. Downing borrowed his premise from the Brit- ish writer and horticulturist J. C. Loudon, who argued that everyone could appreciate those aspects of art and architecture that were accidents of history and culture, such as historical styles, while the deeper forms of beauty were based on geometrical prin- ciples and required close study. Downing inverted the relationship, assigning the "absolute" beauty of geometry to the realm of the widely accessible while arguing that the cultural elements of architecture were "the expression of elevated and refined ideas of man's life" and "the manifestation of his social and moral feelings." These higher forms of expres- sion were beyond the grasp of uneducated men and women, who would only make themselves ridiculous by striving to attain them.^^**
While conceptions of the arts' social value varied widely, everyone imderstood that they had to come to terms with the democratic, commercial milieu of the new nation. Reception of the arts was shaped by the reality that, whatever else they might be, they were commodities, thrown in among and often indistin- guishable from, the many other goods to which New Yorkers' money gave them access. The jeweler W. L. Tiffany thought wealthy Americans bought art as they "bought cotton and com" or "as they buy a watch or a buhl cabinet" (fig. 32).^^^ They guarded their artis- tic property closely rather than sharing the uplifting power of their collections with the pubfic.^^^
If artworks were commodities to be snapped up by the wealthy and even the not-so-wealthy, they were also the stuff of popular spectacle, along with every other form of entertainment. The Literary World conveyed a vivid sense of this in its review of
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY 37
^^1
im Buoir^: visits a tJOTDua PACfOJiv
Ar||#^^pdH ^^iifl^4'Pi^ ft»ipft*pfcp#^ iff Hpiipfcffctftf (^JJirr^ A pff. IB tparv "
- ■ ■ ■ ■
Fig. 32. Aff: Brown Visits a Piaure Factory. Wood engraving, from Harper's Weekly, January 16, 1858, p. 48. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Irene Lewisohn Costume Reference Library
an exhibition of Edward Augustus Brackett's Ship- wrecked Mother and Child, 1850 (fig. 123):
Although the deficiency of vital power and true £frowth in the public entertainments of New York, is by no means slight nor accidental, there is never a lack in variety and numbers, of popular exhibi- tions. We can always range the scale pretty freely, from the tiny Aztecs up to Mons. Gregoire, the stone- breaking Hercules; from the negro burlesque two minutes and a half long, to the complex opera of three hours; from the amateur farce of the ^spout- shop/^ to the elaborate tragedy of the legitimate Hemple of the drama, In the pictorial we are quite as opulent, and find no end to sketches, scratches, and colorings — from the chalk outline on the fence, to the mature finish of the Napoleon at Fontainebleau, Sculpturewise, we claim the entire circle of achievement, beginning, if you please, with the faces and heads casually knocked out of free-stone and granite by the house-mason^s hammer,
up to a work like this ^^Shipwrecked Mother and Child,^ wrought by the finest chisel, from the pure marble, by the patient and well tempered genius of BrackeU?^^
Brackett's work fared poorly in this market and went unsoid, despite having been shown in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. ^^"^
The fine arts' status as commodity and spectacle inflected every attempt to assign them a significant role in the creation of civilization and urbanity. For collectors such as Luman Reed, acquired wealth bought art, which in turn bought entree to the social circles to which he believed his wealth entitled him.^15 Like others of his kind Reed focused his buy- ing on contemporary American works when it became clear that many of the "old masters" favored by earlier American collectors were fraudulent or were otherwise bad investments.
During the antebellum decades some artists and architects groped toward a view of art as a sepa- rate realm— "a higher and better realm," in historian Thomas Bender's words— of human experience from the everyday world of ordinary people. But the real- ization of such an ideal was conditioned by the artists' and architects' own circumstances. In these transi- tional years many of them combined the then new but now familiar romantic notion of artist as a kind of prophet of the spiritual with a more traditional aspi- ration to gentility, cultivation, and acceptance as the social peers of their patrons.
To succeed, artistic and social claims required recip- rocal acknowledgment by patrons and the public, and it was slow in coming. The artist's traditional relations with both survived long into the antebellum years. Artists, like other sorts of manual workers, were accus- tomed at first to producing commissioned works, usu- ally portraits, for known clients— what artisans called "bespoke" works. While continuing to depend on the goodwill of wealthy patrons, artists increasingly sought a larger audience, working on speculation for sale through exhibitions and even, through such organiza- tions as the American Art-Union and the Cosmopoli- tan Art Association, for mass distribution by means of reproductions. This required that they compete in the commercial marketplace on its own terms. Wil- liam Sidney Mount admonished himself in his diary to "Paint pictures that will take with the public. . . . In other words, never paint for the few, but for the many."^^^ T. W. Whitley, the author of an article on the state of the fine arts published in Sartain^s maga- zine, offered in a newspaper advertisement "to paint
212. "^Ymc hrtsl^ Putnam^s Monthly I (March 1853), pp. 351-52-
213. "The Fine Arts. A 'Brackett' in Public Amusements," Literary World, April 10, 1852, p. 268.
214. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, pp. 101-2.
215. Wallach, 'Thomas Cole," pp. 103-4; Johns, American Genre Painting, p. 32.
216. Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The forma- tive Tears, 1790-1860 (New York: Clarion Books, 1970), p. 103; Foshay, Luman Reed's Picture Gallery, pp. 16, 52.
217. Bender, New Tork Intellect, pp. 121-24, 128-30 (quote); Harris, Artist in American Society, pp. 94, 98; Upton, "Pattern Books," pp. 112-13.
218. Foshay, Luman Reed's Picture Gallery, pp. 14-16, 60; Johns, American Genre Painting, pp. 75-76; "The Greek Slave!" (advertisement). Spirit of the Times, January 27, 1855, p. 598; Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, p. 9; Harris, Artist in American Society, p. 106.
219. Quoted in Staiti, Samuel F. B. Morse, p, 236.
38 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
220. Whitley, "Progress and Influ- ence of Fine Arts," pp. 213-15; "Landscape Painting" (adver- tisement). Evening Post (New- York), May 23, 1849, P- 3-
221. Fisher, Philadelphia Perspective^ p. 198.
222. "Christ Healing the Sick," Broadway Journal, September 13, i845> p- 155; Dell Upton, ed., Madaline: Love and Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 255.
223. Kevin J. Avery and Peter L. Fodcra, John Vanderlyn's Pano- ramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988), pp. 18-21, 33.
224. "Public Buildings," New-York Mirror, and Ladies^ Literary Gazette, September 25, 1829, pp. 89-90; "Panorama of Jerusalem" (advertisement). The Expositor, December 8, 1838; "New Panorama," The Knickerbocker 11 (June 1838), p. 572; "The Last Week at the Minerva Rooms" (advertise- ment), New York Herald, December 3, 1849, p. 3; "Evers*s Grand Panorama of New York and Its Environs," Evening Post (New York), November 20, 1849, p. 2; "City Saloon" (ad- vertisement). Morning Courier and New -York Enquirer,
July 15, 1839.
225. "Public Buildings," p. 89.
226. "City Saloon."
227. Harris, Artist in American Society, p. 100.
228. The Fine Arts. A 'Brackett' in Public Amusements," p. 268.
229. Morse, Samuel F. B. Morse, vol. I, pp. 276-77; Staiti, Samuel P. B. Morse, pp. 64-65, 149-69; Bender, New York Intellect, pp. 122, 127-30; Upton, "Pattern Books," pp. 109-50; Mary N. Woods, From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Arnica (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1999), pp. 28-38. The American Institution of Architects folded quickly. Its successor, the American Insti- tute of Architects, was orga- nized in 1857 under the aegis of New York architect Rich- ard Upjohn.
230. For the development of this sense of cultural hierarchy in the late nineteenth century, see Lawrence W Levine, Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Landscapes at every price," in a style that would "com- pare favorably with the works of our city artists," as well as to copy old master landscapes and to restore damaged paintings.
Other artists and entrepreneurs exhibited works commercially. The sculptor Hiram Powers, established in Italy since 1837, sent a version of his celebrated Greek Slave to America in 1847, expecting to make about $25,000 from its tour of major cities (cat. no. 60).^^^ A Mr. Morris, "a well-known amateur," sent one version of Benjamin West's Christ Healing the Sick on a similar tour of American cities, while entreprenexxr George Cooke compiled a 'T^^ational Gallery of Paintings," featuring John Gadsby Chap- man's portrait of Davy Crockett, that he exhibited in New York for some time before taking it for an extended stay in New Orleans.
Whatever their professional aspirations, then, both artists and architects were embedded in the market- place of commodities and spectacles, as the history of panoramas illustrates. John Vanderlyn attempted to make a living by exhibiting his panorama of Ver- sailles (figs. 33, 34) in the purpose-built New-York Rotunda on the Park (cat. no. 70), but his effort was doomed to failure by his inattention to business. Vanderlyn also rented and exhibited other painters' panoramas of Paris, Mexico City, Athens, and Geneva, while at different venues antebellum New Yorkers were offered panoramic views of Jerusalem (by the artist Frederick Catherwood), Niagara Falls, the Great Lakes, and their own city, as well as one of ''the Infernal Regions."
Panorama painters differed in their aspirations to fine-art status, but all pitched their works to the pub- lic as illusionistic spectacles. The light in Vanderlyn's Rotunda "seems to give life and animation to every figure on the canvass. ... so complete is the illusion . . . that the spectator might be justified in forgetting his locality, and imagining himself transported to a scene of tangible realities !"^^^ 'The Infernal Regions" were enlivened with the skeletons of executed Ohio criminals and preceded by "night illusions! Pro- duced by the New Philosophical Apparatus (lately from London) called the nocturnal polymor- phous FANTASCOPE."^^^
Ideology as well as commerce bound antebellum art to the world of spectacle. When a painter such as Morse argued for the fine arts' refining and elevat- ing qualities, he accepted the traditional notion of them as a moral and civic force. Successful artists accom- modated the widely held belief that art must be criti- cized within the scope of popular understanding, not
arcane theories.^^^ Like other forms of cultural expres- sion, fine art was to be read narratively and evaluated morally. 'We need not speak of such a work in any technicalities," wrote the Literary Worlds critic in praise of Brackett's Shipwrecked Mother and Child, "The mother and child belong to human nature at large," and thus to the public rather than to the connoisseur.^^^
Artists and architects responded to the market con- text by organizing themselves professionally. The National Academy (cat. no. 105), founded by Morse and his colleagues in 1825 in opposition to the patron- dominated American Academy of the Fine Arts, and the American Institution of Architects, convened by a group of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia archi- tects in 1836, were among the first fruits of these pro- fessional aspirations. These organizations were aimed less at establishing the high-art claims of either group than at situating them within the market- places of ideas and services as men with something distinctive to sell. They sought to create a group iden- tity through publicity (publications and exhibitions), training, ostracism of amateurs, and the definition of a common body of professional knowledge.
At the end of the antebellvim era claims that the arts and their makers inhabited a realm of expression inher- ently superior to that of popular culture began to be more widely voiced. Some writers started to treat the artist as a man of feeling and talent— "we should call the former Love and the latter Power"— which set him apart from ordinary mortals, as taste distinguished the connoisseur from the unenlightened viewer on the other side, of the easel.^^^ In architecture professional skill, defined early in the century as a body of empiri- cal knowledge— "architectural science"— accessible to anyone willing to study, was redefined as a mysterious quality available only to those few with talent and for- mal professional training. Occasionally people referred to this quality— and by extension to the per- son possessing it— as geniuSy by which they meant surpassing brilliance, not the characteristic quality of a place or a source of inspiration, as the word had been traditionally understood. Even these claims must be seen in the context of the market. Part of their purpose was to distinguish the professional product from that of others— amateurs, craftsmen— by distinguishing the professional himself
This new aesthetic elitism met vigorous opposi- tion among New Yorkers. Few were willing to accept either a single standard of taste in the arts or its confinement to a small segment of the population. Nor would many New Yorkers agree to a hierarchy of pleasures or commodities that set the fine arts at its
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY 39
Fig. 33. John Vanderlyn, The Palace and Gardens of Versailles, circular panoramic painting created for display in the Rotunda, 1818-19. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Senate House Association, Kingston, N.Y., 1952 52.184
Fig. 34. Detail of The Palace and Gardens of Versailles (fig. 33)
40 ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY
231. "Feeling and Talent," The Crayon, January 10, 1855, front page.
232. Upton, "Pattern Books," pp. 120-28.
233. Strong wrote that John Cisco "Thinks [the English immi- grant architect Jacob Wrey] Mould a genius; So does Dix;" Strong, Diary, entry for April 26, i860, The New-York Historical Society.
234. "Daniel in the Lion's Den," New Tork Herald, October 31, 1849, p. 3.
235. "Powers's Statuary^ (advertise- ment), Evening Post (New York), Ortober 2, 1849, p. 2.
236. "The Greek Slave!", p. 598.
237. "Panorama Saloon* (advertise- ment). New Tork Herald, November i, 1849, p- 3-
238. "Wallhalla" (advertisement), New Tork Herald, May 21, 1849, p- 3-
239. Foster, New Tork by Gas-Li^ht, pp. 77-78.
240. "Franklin Theatre" (advertise- ment). New Tork Herald, October 31, 1849, p. 3-
241. "Wallhalla, 36 Canal Street" (advertisement). New Tork Herald, October 31, 1849.
242. Foster, New Tork by Gas-Li£iht, p. 157.
243. "Model Artists," New Tork Herald, December 13, 1849, p. 2.
244. Bender, New Tork Intellect,
p. 121 ; Fisher, Philadelphia Per- spective, pp. 198-99; "Palmer's 'White Captive,'" Atlantic Monthly 5 (January i860), pp. 108-9; "The Art of the Present," The Crayon, May 9, 185s, pp. 289-90; Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, pp. 46-72, On verisimilitude and prurience in Western high and popular art, see David Freedbcrg, The Power of Im- ages: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), chaps. 9, 12.
pinnacle. They embraced spectacle in all its commer- cial variety. On Broadway in 1849 those with 25 cents to spend could see a watercolor painting of Daniel in the Lion's Den— twenty feet by twelve, so one received value for money— along with a collection of what purported to be old-master oil paintings ("Corregio, Poussin, &c."), and, as if those were not enough, there was "the genuine Egg Hatching Machine, in which chicks are seen bursting the shell, in the pres- ence of visiters." ^^"^
The contest for cultural authority often took the form of a struggle for control of the contexts that would determine the meaning of iconic visual images. Pow- ers's Greek Slave was one of the most popular, and was certainly the most hotly contested, of icons in antebellum New York. When it was exhibited for the sculptor's benefit at the Gallery of Old Masters, along with his Fisher Boy (fig. 73), Proserpine (fig. 119), and Andrew Jackson (cat. no. 55), it was shown in the context of paintings by "the best old masters," making them part of "the choisest [sic] and most instructive collection of works of Art ever brought to this country."
The statue was a hit in New York, and as a result it was absorbed into the world of luxury consump- tion and commercial spectacle all the more quickly. The Cosmopolitan Art Association included an orig- inal version in its first annual distribution of prizes to its members. Suddenly the Greek Slave mate- rialized all over the city. In 1849 the Panorama Saloon at the corner of Lispenard Street and Broadway announced the exhibition of a panorama of paint- ings of classical subjects, the finest of their sort "in spite of Art Union' criticism or 'Scorpion' slander." They included "a more faithful representation of die Greek Slave."237
The same year New Yorkers enjoyed a flurry of exhibitions of "model artists" staging tableaux vivants after famous works of art. At the Wallhalla, a hall on Canal Street, Professor Hugo Grotin offered his "celebrated Marble Statues and Tableaux Vivants, rep- resented by 25 ladies of unparalleled beauty, graces, and accomplishments." In New Tork by Gas-Li^ht Foster described the Wallhalla as a hall over a stable, with a prominent bar dispensing crude firewater, an atmosphere redolent of horse and cigar, and a floor covered with mud and tobacco juice. To the accom- paniment of a badly played violin and piano, a model portrayed Venus, Psyche, and the Greek Slave, her body covered only by a flimsy, hand-held veil of gauze. At the Franklin Theatre on Chatham Square, Madame Pauline's model artists offered an equally
eclectic gallery of well-known images, including "the Three Graces," '^enus Rising fi:om die Sea," 'The Rape of the Sabines," and "The Greek Slave."^
New Yorkers were lansure whether these were bla- tant striptease shows or legitimate entertainment. An advertisement for the Wallhalla's "Classical Museum of Art" assured readers that the performance was con- ducted in "the most decent manner." Foster, charac- teristically, labeled them "disgusting exhibitions."^^ A correspondent of the New Tork Herald saw in tableaux vivants "an illegitimate offehoot from those that are perfecdy correct and proper— such, for instance, as that of the beautifiil piece of sculpture by Power [sic] — the Greek slave." ^"^^
The panoramas and tableaux challenged genteel and professional definitions of the content and purposes of art. At the Panorama Saloon the old demand of truth to life and the desire for a verisimilitude bordering on illusionism, a common point of discussion in mid- nineteenth-century professional and popular art criti- cism, were reasserted as the proper goal of the artist. Tableaux vivants openly addressed the strong erotic content that respectable critics and viewers saw but euphemized in such statues as the Greek Slave or Palmer's White Captive (cat. no. 69), and defied gen- teel views of art as the uplifting attempt to transform "this hard, angular, and grovelling age" into "something beautiful, gracefvil, and harmonious" that shows us "always the image of God."^ Popular reinterpretations of the Greek Slave insisted on anchoring the experi- ence of art firmly in the realm of sensory pleasure, in the process tying the urbane to urban spectacle rather than to refined moral or intellectual experience.
The Palace and the Park
In their confrontations with the changing city and with each other, the ideals of civilization and urbanity, of republican citizenship and metropolitan refine- ment were themselves transformed. Yet both concepts informed New York's self-definition throughout the antebellum decades and animated the two great urban projects of the 1850s, the New York Crystal Palace, for the New-York Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, and Central Park.
The Crystal Palace exhibition was conceived in the wake of the phenomenal success of the first modem world's fair, the London Great Exhibition of 185 1, and of its iron-and-glass building, the original Crystal Pal- ace. The Association for the Exhibition of the Indus- try of All Nations was chartered by the New York State legislature in April 1852 to undertake a fair in New
INVENTING THE METROPOLIS: CIVILIZATION AND URBANITY 4I
Fig. 35. Charles Gildemeister and George J. B. Carstenscn, architects, ^ni? Tork Crystal PfUace^ Ground and Gallery Plans^ 1852. Lithograph, from Appleton^s Mechanics' Magazine 3 (February 1853), pp. 35-36. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts
York City.^''-^ A competition for the design of the exhibit hall, which the organizers assumed from the beginning would resemble the London Crystal Pal- ace, attracted several noteworthy competitors, includ- ing Andrew Jackson Downing, cast-iron entrepreneur James Bogardus, and Joseph Paxton, architect of the London building. The winners, New York architect Charles Gildemeister and the Danish immigrant archi- tect George J. B. Carstensen, designed an iron-and- glass structure with two tall, perpendicular galleries, 365 feet long and 68 feet high, forming a Greek cross crowned by a dome loo feet across (cat. nos. 141, 218). The angles between the arms were filled in at ground level to create an octagonal footprint.
In many respects the New York Crystal Palace was the valedictory festival of artisan republicanism. Its organizers aimed to stir patriotic feelings of admira- tion for American "triumphs of genius and industry," to promote the diffusion of mechanical skill and the growth of manufacturing, and to educate the pub- lic. ^^^^ An equestrian statue of George Washington stood under the dome, and the Literary World recom- mended that busts and portraits of American "sons of light" (inventors) be placed in the building. ^''■^ Works of art, including the Greek Slave, were scat- tered throughout, but their status was ambiguous (cat. no. 179). The picture gallery was predictably described as "a school of taste," but most journalists concentrated on art's role as a civic lesson (as in the statue of Washington, "the grandest of Nature's models") or as a species of artisanry.^"^^ By housing a
"Republican lesson on the capacities of man, the dig- nities of labor, and on the obligations of society to genius and toil" in a "People's Palace," "the institu- tions of civilized life are put upon a firmer basis and each one is brought to feel how nearly his neighbor's interest is allied to his own."^^^
Located on the western half of the blocks delineated by Fortieth and Forty-second streets, between Fifili and Sixth avenues, the Crystal Palace, like the streets of the commercial city, combined rational organization with picturesque presentation. The colorful massing and impressive size of the building (somewhat dimin- ished, everyone thought, by its unfortunate proxim- ity to the even more imposing Croton Reservoir) disguised its layout as an extensive structural grid (fig. 35).^^^ In line with the principles of the London exhibition,^^^ the exhibits were organized systemati- cally, falling into thirty-one subcategories and distrib- uted throughout the space on a grid with a twenty-seven-foot module; the products of the United States were separated from those of other nations. To the knowing visitor, a first glimpse of the building offered "a dazzle; a thousand sparkles and rainbows; light and movement undistinguishable for a while; then, as the eye setded, order emerging here and there; . . . vast climaxes of Art, Industry, and Invention, extending away and away in long perspective on every side; ... in which various national emblems and devices suggest the world-wide inter- est of an Industrial unity" (cat. no. 142). The combi- nation of order and profusion implied totality: the
245. "Association for the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations" (advertisement), New-Tork Daily Tribune, April 5, 1852,
p. 3.
246. "Notices and Correspondence. The American Association for the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations," Appkton's Mechanics' Magazine 2 (Sep- tember 1882), p. 216; "The New-York Crystal Palace," National Magazine 2 (January 1853), pp. 80-81. Carstensen had designed the Tivoli Gar- dens and the Casino in Copen- hagen.
247- "Association for the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations," p- 3.
248. "The Crystal Palace— Opening of the Exhibition," New-Tork Daily Times, June 18, 1853, p- 4; "The Industrial Exhibition" Literary World, September 25, 1852, p. 202.
249. "The American Crystal Palace," Illustrated Magazine of Art 2 (1853), p. 263; "The Great Exhi- bition and Its Visitors," Put- nam^s Monthly 2 (December 1853) p. 579.
250. "The Crystal Palace" New-Tork Daily Times, June 20, 1853, P- 4; "The Crystal Palace" New-Tork Daily Times,