Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [155]
One of the city’s first fire engines, detail from a notice of the Hand-in-Hand Fire Company. (I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
Back in 1731 the council had ordered two firepumps of the very latest design from London. Because they required teams of men to operate—some for the bucket brigades that kept the reservoirs supplied with water, others to work the levers that forced water out through a hose—the council appointed thirty “Strong able Discreet honest and Sober Men” to run “the said ffire Engines” (in lieu of wages they were exempted from serving as constables, highway laborers, or jurymen). When this force proved deficient in dealing with the blazes of 1741, the city immediately bought a hundred new buckets (marked “City of N.Y.”), purchased two more London engines, and expanded the force to forty-four men. Additional engines arrived in 1758, at which time the magistrates ordered construction of sheds to house them—at least one in each ward, with the largest at Hanover Square.
If its interest in civic improvements thus seemed haphazard—driven as much by a concern to protect the estate of the municipal corporation as by a sense of duty to an abstract public interest—the Common Council must have taken considerable satisfaction from the stream of visitors who praised the city’s busy, well-regulated appearance. As one of His Majesty’s naval officers admitted in 1756, it caught Europeans off guard. “The nobleness of the town surprised me more than the fertile appearance of the country,” he remarked. “I had no idea of finding a place in America, consisting of near 2,000 houses, elegantly built of brick, raised on an eminence and the streets paved and spacious, furnished with commodious keys and warehouses, and employing some hundreds of vessels in its foreign trade and fisheries—but such is this city that very few in England can rival it in its show.”
ARTISANAL WARDS
City authorities also spruced up the municipal almshouse in the 1740s and 1750s, for despite the general prosperity of the war years, poverty remained a problem. Some inmates were casualties of combat, others of inflated currency, others of the death of a provider. One widow told a local newspaper in 1752 that her husband’s death had left her “in the greatest poverty,” with only her eldest boy, twelve years old, able to support the family selling oysters. Oysters, in fact, were the mainstay of the poor. As Peter Kalm observed, many “lived all year long upon nothing but oysters and a little bread.”
Other working people had better luck. A few butchers, innkeepers, and sugar boilers got rich during the war years; blacksmith Matthew Buys, cordwainer John Sickles, and baker John Orchard did well enough to purchase estates of over 150 acres.
The bulk of New York’s laboring population happily settled for reaping the rewards of constant employment at high wages. Many saved enough to buy a piece of property on which to set up a house and shop—though not in the dock area, where competition between merchants, retailers, and real estate investors had driven the price of land near Hanover Square and Bowling Green beyond the reach of any but the most prosperous craftsmen. A standard lot there, measuring twenty-five by a hundred feet, could rent for as much as twenty pounds a year for the land