Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [11]
When the city was still subordinate to the interests of either Holland or Great Britain, the pattern of ups and downs was shaped primarily by imperial decisions. Irving’s brief Dutch “dynasty” had time for only one such cycle. In the twenty years preceding the mid-1640s, while the Dutch empire prospered, New Netherland’s fortunes ebbed; in the twenty subsequent years, when the empire declined, the town’s situation improved. Under the subsequent century of English rule, imperial dynamics of war and trade sustained an undulating cadence of abundance and adversity.
It was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, when imbricated in the U.S. nation-state and the world capitalist economy, that New York commenced its characteristic roller-coaster ride in earnest, now surging to heights of affluence, now plunging into sloughs of depression. The city first rose to national preeminence in the wartime trade boom of the Napoleonic nineties; then its ascent was punctured by embargo and peace. The canal era boom of the 1820s and 1830s raced to culmination and crisis in 1837, then tumbled into a seven-year depression. The rail-spurred prosperity of 1844-57 was interrupted by the Panic of 1857, reignited by the Gvil War, then snuffed out by the Panic of 1873, which inaugurated a lengthy period of hard times.
Industrialization-based resurgence in the 1880s gave way to depression in the 1890s. Corporate consolidation and war with Spain ushered in prosperity in the 1900s, which subsided after the Panic of 1907. World War I and a consumer goods revolution led to the 1920s boom, which collapsed into the 1930s depression. Lifted again by the Second World War, the city flourished during the long postwar boom, until laid low by the mid-1970s recession. A 1980s quasi-boom buckled in 1987, making way for the stagnant early 1990s and the brisker but still problematic fin de siècle.
These cycles created characteristic and remarkably similar cultures of boom and bust. The jaunty and expansive 1830s, 1850s, 1900s, 1920s, 1950s, and 1980s (times of comparably frenetic construction and high living in the city) gave way to the depressed 1840s, 1870s, 1890s, 1930s, and 1970s (periods marked by unemployment, homelessness, and contentious protest movements).
This pattern inscribed itself in the city’s skyline and streetscape. In boom times, speculative capital cascaded into real estate, generating frenzied building sprees. When the fever broke, office and housing construction halted abruptly. By the time the economy regathered its energies, a new generation of promoters and architects had come along, new cultural fashions were in vogue, new technologies and construction practices had materialized, and the latest spurt of building bore little resemblance to its predecessor. This spasmodic evolution of New York’s spatial geography allows us to “read” the cityscape, rather as archaeologists decipher stacked layers of earth, each of which holds artifacts of successive eras. Here, remnants of built environment offer clues to New York’s periodization.
Working from the bottom up, we find traces of New Amsterdam’s prosperous upswing in the archaeological remains of the gabled Stadt Huys (the Dutch City Hall) uncovered beneath Pearl Street, visible now through a Plexiglassed hole in the ground. Nearby Fraunces Tavern, a conjectural reconstruction of the De Lancey family’s urban town house, recalls a heyday of England’s mid-eighteenth-century empire. Federal mansions betoken 1790s affluence. The upsurge of the 1830s is immortalized in Wall Street Greek temples like the Merchants’ Exchange and Federal Hall, and that of the 1850s lives on in Italianate mansions like the Salmagundi Club and Litchfield Villa. Turn-of-the-century flush times are traceable in neo-Roman artifacts like the New York Stock Exchange, and remains of the 1920s boom include exuberant art deco skyscrapers like the Chrysler Building.