Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [1200]
1. Some New Yorkers let go of their profitable southern links with great reluctance. Trading in southern state bonds at the Merchants’ Exchange terminated only at the end of 1861. Gazaway Lamar, acting on a secret commission from the Confederacy, was able to buy a thousand muskets in Manhattan, and though the ship sending them south was seized by the Metropolitan Police—Mayor Wood apologized but noted his lack of authority over the state-run body—it was released when the governor of Georgia threatened to seize New York vessels in Savannah harbor. Some clothiers surreptitiously sewed southern uniforms, even after Sumter, and agent Lamar got the National Bank Note Company to print up Confederate bonds and ship them to Alabama. Still, these were exceptions.
1. The legislature did intervene in harbor affairs after an 1871 study by the U.S. Coastal Survey revealed that refuse dumping was fast filling up key harbor channels. Albany prohibited casting of wastes into the Hudson and East rivers, Upper New York Bay, and parts of Raritan Bay, though authorizing dumping in Lower New York Bay south of the Narrows, if okayed by the new slate office of shore inspector. They also shut down the official garbage dump site established at Oyster Island in 1857 and shifted it to the southeastern side of Staten Island, though by 1877 much refuse was also being used as fill in Bayonne, New Jersey, and Newtown Creek.
1. The continuing ecclesiastical hostility to the theater was famously manifested at the end of the 1860s when an old actor by the name of George Holland died, and the rector of a fashionable Fifth Avenue church declined to hold a funeral for him. He did, however, recommend asking at “the little church around the corner,” which obliged the bereaved thespian community. That establishment, the Church of the Transfiguration at 29th Street just east of Fifth, retains to this day its identification with the city’s theatrical profession.
1. On November 14, 1890, Ely left New York City aiming to travel around the world in fewer than the eighty days it had taken Jules Verne’s fictional Phileas Fogg. After a brief stop at Amiens to interview Monsieur Verne (who said she’d never make it), she dashed eastward while the World watched breathlessly, chronicling her race against time, whipping up excitement, and running “Your Nellie Bly Guessing Match,” in which readers were urged to estimate the number of days and hours she would take. The winning number proved to be seventy-two. When Bly arrived back in the city, thousands cheered and cannons were fired, as if her circumnavigation, like the opening of the Erie Canal or the Atlantic Cable, warranted a full-fledged Festival of Connection, which in a way it did. Pulitzer transformed Bly’s hoisting of the World’s circulation figures itself into news. He began publishing daily circulation statements, transforming business exigency into popular drama, while simultaneously underscoring the Worlifs reputation as an advertising vehicle.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction
PART ONE LENAPE COUNTRY AND NEW AMSTERDAM TO 1664
1. First Impressions The physical setting. From Ice Age to Indian ecosystems. European exploration of the lower Hudson Valley in the sixteenth century.
2. The Men Who Bought Manhattan Holland breaks with Spain. The Dutch West India Company, the fur trade, and the founding of New Amsterdam in 1626.
3. Company Town New Amsterdam's first twenty years. Race, sex, andtrouble with the English. Kieft's War against the Indians.
4. Stuyvesant Peter Stuyvesant to the rescue. Law and order. Slavery and the slave trade. Expansion of settlement on Manhattan and Long Island.
5. A City Lost, a City Gained Local disaffection with Stuyvesant's rule and the organization of municipal government. Stuyvesant's conflict with yews, Lutherans, and Quakers. Anglo-Dutch war and the English