Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [106]
With the expansion of trade, too, came more taverns and coffeeshops. Between 1694 and 1720 fifty-four tavern keepers, victuallers, and vintners were granted the “freedom” of the city. New inns and ordinaries like the Black Horse Tavern joined the old King’s Arms in providing residents and travelers alike with food, lodging, and a convivial setting for business. The Exchange Coffee House, which opened in 1729 at Broad and Water, became the principal scene of real estate transactions, while the Merchants’ Coffee House (originally named the Jamaica Pilot Boat) catered to merchants active in auctions and shipping.
Taverns, and the dozens of dramshops that catered to seamen and the laboring classes, were often run by widows who received free licenses from the Common Council, an inexpensive form of relief. Women were also prominent in the retail shops that boomed after the late 1720s. The Widow Lebrosses carried Canary wine and olive oil in her store at Hanover Square, the city’s shopping center, while the Widow Vanderspiegel and her son sold imported window glass. Mrs. Edwards started a cosmetics business in 1736, offering “An admirable Beautifying Wash, for Hands Face and Neck, it makes the Skin soft, smooth and plump, it likewise takes away Redness, Fredkles, Sun-Burnings, or Pimples.” The continuing role of women in trade, English as well as Dutch, promoted a certain feistiness among their ranks that ran contrary to prescriptions for proper female behavior. In 1733 the Widow Lebrosses and other “She Merchants” complained bitterly to the press that while they were “full as Entertaining” as men, and certainly as brave, the governor never invited them to dinner “at Court.” As taxpayers who “in some measure contribute to the support of the government, they reasoned, “we ought to be entitled to some of the sweets of it.”
The typical retail shop carried a wide range of goods. In 1733 George Talbot displayed beds, chairs, tables, chests of drawers, and andirons. In 1736 the “New Store in Hanover Square” offered haberdashery, dry goods, laces, pictures, pipes, snuff, cutlery, hardware, and glassware. Visitors to William Bradford’s printing office could buy coffee, Bohea tea, and “Very good oatmeal” in addition to books. Thomas Adams, a stationer, had also begun selling reading matter, and by 1719 there were perhaps four booksellers in town.
The diversity of imported goods in New York was matched by their costliness. Governor Hunter asserted that a 100 percent advance over London prices was “reckoned cheap” on Manhattan, where profits from the West Indian trade, swollen by indirect earnings from insurance and interest on loans, were contributing to a relentless rise in the concentration of wealth. As early as 1716 John Fontaine, a visitor from Virginia, met “many rich people” in New York; ten years later the richest 10 percent of the population—mostly merchants, with a sprinkling of lawyers and landed gentlemen who had taken up residence in town—controlled half the city’s wealth. Judging by estate inventories of upper-class households, these rich New Yorkers proceeded to accumulate luxuries—silver, fine furniture, carpets—at a significantly greater rate than their seventeenth-century forebears.
The demand for luxury goods and services in turn spurred the formation of a pool of skilled local artisans and tradespeople. By the 1720s fine work was being turned out by New York goldsmiths, silversmiths, watchmakers, potters, and jewelers. Families of means seeking self-portraits patronized a small group of local artists (known more colloquially as “phiz mongers”), including old Evert Duycinck. “Crooked women” seeking to “appear strate” could get help at the stay shop run by James Munden and Thomas Butwell. Nichols Bailey, coachmaker, sold chaises and chairs for ladies. Barbers and periwig makers arrived to cater to