Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [10]
From the Revolution to the Civil War, New York remained preeminently a seaport, as did the adjacent city of Brooklyn, but a host of associated enterprises sprang up to accommodate and enhance the city’s mercantile outreach. New Yorkers built canals and railroads; established banks, insurance companies, and a stock market; developed means of communication (newspapers, telegraph); fostered new forms of wholesale and retail merchandising (auction houses, department stores); and augmented their capacity for hosting and entertaining (hotels, restaurants, theaters). Manufacturing capacity surged as entrepreneurs and workers churned out consumer goods for the new markets tapped and created by an expanding commercial network, and New York became the nation’s largest manufacturing center. An ever-widening stream of immigrants provided the labor power for all these activities and, in swelling the internal market, further increased demand for clothing, food, housing, and popular amusements.
Between the 1870s and the 1940s, New York’s mercantile sector underwent relative decline. The financial sector, meanwhile, expanded to underwrite continental industrialization and western expansion. A business services sector emerged to manage the new corporate economy and merchandise its products. The industrial sector burgeoned, fueled by new immigrants. And the entertainment industry emerged as an independent powerhouse, with New Yorkers hawking plays, vaudeville acts, books, magazines, newspapers, sheet music, records, movies, and radio shows to the nation.
V-E Day ushered in a brief Augustan age when New York was simultaneously major port, largest manufactory, financial center, headquarters of a corporate sector rapidly expanding to multinational dimensions, and vortex of cultural production. But World War IPs convoys proved the seaport’s last hurrah, and though its loss was partially counterbalanced by expanded air traffic, the growth of alternative hubs—notably West Coast ports attuned to Pacific Rim trade—undermined its gateway status. Manufacturing, which had begun to slip away into the national hinterland, now scattered across the globe, its departure offset only in part by the expansion of local government services. The culture industry remained potent, though regional competitors (and federal funding) continued to undermine its former predominance. Pieces of the corporate command post were dismantled and reassembled in outer suburbs, leaving finance, once an inconsequential component of the city’s economy, as its central and precarious prop.
OSCILLATIN’ RHYTHMS
These large-scale municipal remakings provide our book its macrostructure, its division into parts. There are five such parts in this volume, the first two of which—“Lenape Country and New Amsterdam to 1664” and “British New York (1664-1783)”—hinge on the establishment or loss of imperial power. The remaining parts encompass eras marked by relatively coherent and stable macroeconomies, with transitions between them marked, provoked, or accelerated by war, economic crisis, and/or internal conflict. These eras include “Mercantile Town (1783-1843),” “Emporium and Manufacturing City (1844-1879),” and “Industrial Center and Corporate Command Post (1880-1898).” The last of these closes out this volume with an account of the consolidation of once separate cities and townships into Greater New York, whose hundredth anniversary we marked in 1998.
When blocking out the city’s centuries-long story as a whole, it is these grand epochs of municipal development that command our attention. But when telling New York’s story on a year-by-year basis, a