Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [153]
The most successful wartime retailers were the tavern owners who sold food and drink to the thousands of seamen and soldiers passing through town every year. New York, in fact, could boast of more licensed public houses than any other colonial city—334 by 1752, up from 166 only eight years earlier. Local merchants who had once imported rum now began making their own: of the ten rum distilleries in 1753, the leading “works” were those of Livingston and Lefferts, erected “at great expence” just behind Trinity Church. After 1760 Pierre Lorillard did his best to keep the city’s nicotine output on par with its alcohol production. Having served an apprenticeship as a snuffmaker, Lorillard opened his own “manufactory” in a small rented house on Chatham Street. Here he packed snuff into animal bladders, which had first been dried and tanned, then sold it to wholesalers, thereby launching Manhattan’s tobacco industry.
The pursuit of refinement by war contractors and others provided work for a small army of gardeners, coachmen, butlers, footmen, and maids, although many domestic servants remained unpaid slaves. In 1756 New York counted 695 female slaves over the age of sixteen and another 443 under it, constituting a pool of over a thousand black women to serve a population of almost 10,800 whites. Black men continued to do much of the town’s heavy labor, as well as to be used by their owners as fishermen, coopers, barbers, or boatmen. At the same time, the institution of slavery was gradually coming under more severe criticism throughout the English-speaking world, and white New Yorkers were exposed to a growing number of books, pamphlets, and newspapers that argued for abolition on economic as well as religious grounds. One essayist, after a careful statistical analysis, pronounced “the labor of freemen to be much more productive than of slaves” and concluded “that slavery is impolitic as well as unjust.”
MUNICIPAL IMPROVEMENTS
Although years of war boosted the city’s income from licensing fees, rents, fines, and other charges, both the mayor and the Common Council proved reluctant to spend money on municipal improvements. They made little effort, for example, to upgrade harbor facilities in response to the upsurge in waterfront traffic and made only occasional repairs to the municipally owned Great Dock, now used mainly for fishing boats, market boats, and other small craft. Rather, the magistrates continued the old practice of granting water lots, often to one another, for the building of quays (wharves that paralleled the shore) rather than substantial piers. Similarly, despite the expansion of overland traffic between Westchester and Manhattan, the city built no new bridges over the Harlem River. King’s Bridge, erected by Frederick Philipse in 1693, was still the only crossing, and still charged exorbitant tolls. Its monopoly was finally broken by private entrepreneurs in 1759, when Benjamin Palmer and Jacob Dyckman—blacksmith, tavern keeper, and the owner of a riverfront farm—constructed their Freebridge.
The Common Council was diligent, to be sure, about keeping streets and roads in good repair, inasmuch as they were vital to the local economy. Maintaining the upisland Kingsbridge and Bloomingdale roads cost little or nothing because the law required all inhabitants to do roadwork two days a year, using their own spades and pickaxes, or pay a large fine (wealthy residents routinely paid). Not until 1764 would the council create the first rudimentary highway department, hiring laborers and