Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [156]
Virtually the only place open to residents of modest means was the hundred-acre tract owned by Trinity Church on Manhattan’s west side. Known familiarly as the Church Farm, it lay in the West and Out wards between what are now Cortlandt and Christopher streets. In 1762, hoping to generate additional income, Trinity’s vestry had the property surveyed and mapped into rectilinear blocks. It then offered to lease two hundred lots, most of them measuring twenty by a hundred feet, for periods of twenty-one, forty-two, or sixty-three years and for attractively low ground rents—two pounds per year for the first seven years, three pounds per year for the next seven, and four pounds per year for the remainder of the lease—on the assumption that land values would double over time. Artisans and laborers realized that for the same money it would cost to rent near the wharves they could erect their own wooden houses on the Church Farm (improvements remained their own property).
The largest single group of working people to settle this part of town were the cartmen, whose numbers and incomes had swollen during the war. They built homes and stables and declared their presence by planting cart-and-horse signs in front of their houses. (Because Trinity permitted subletting, some leased two or three lots for purposes of speculation.) Second in numbers to the carters were bricklayers, masons, house carpenters, stonecutters, and other representatives of the flourishing construction trades. Like cartmen, many of them worked not in their own homes but at job sites around town. Some artisans (cabinetmakers, for example) and retailers moved west to set up combined work-and-living households, from which they could practice their trades. There were virtually no merchants or professionals (or blacks, who had been legally barred from owning property since 1712).
This proto-working-class neighborhood was set off by more than distance from the wealthier East River wards. The discrepancy between the Georgian grandeur of upperclass brick residences and the rough-and-ready wooden housing of artisans was readily apparent—inside as well as out. One knowledgeable observer calculated that while New York’s finest private homes averaged seven hundred pounds’ worth of “Plate and furniture,” and those of the “Middling” class some two hundred pounds, the contents of “lower Class” houses averaged a mere forty pounds, and many fell below twenty pounds. Then, too, the cobblestoned solidity of Hanover and Broad streets stood in marked contrast to the west side’s raw, unpaved roads, which frequently became quagmires of mud, garbage, and manure.
It was a comfortable quarter nonetheless, not too far from the city’s commercial district and anchored by institutions like Abraham Montayne’s tavern on Broadway, just across from the Common. Montayne’s became an informal neighborhood headquarters, a place to read a newspaper and talk over the latest news, a rendezvous for personal or public celebrations, a magnet for canny politicians who appeared on election day to buy a round for the voters. Its clientele could play at dice and cards (ignoring the provincial law that promised to fine innkeepers who let youths, apprentices, journeymen, servants, or common sailors gamble). They might also take a chance, between beers, on one of the “private Lotteries” that were springing up (also illegal because they encouraged “Labouring People to Assemble together at Taverns where Such Lotteries are usually Set on Foort & Drawn”). From time to time, as well, they could take in the display of a live leopard, a waxworks show, a bullbaiting, and other entertainments hosted by the proprietor.
Montayne’s was far from the only such establishment