Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [175]
The Empire, however, was not. In October 1770 London dispatched to New York a new royal governor in the person of John Murray, the earl of Dunmore, an alcoholic and corrupt Scottish nobleman whom the ministry soon sent away to take over as governor of Virginia. He took the news badly, wandering drunkenly through the streets roaring: “Damn Virginia. . . I ask’d for New York—New York I took, and they have robbed me of it without my consent.” Dunmore’s successor, William Tryon, arrived in July 1771. Tryon was another military man, well connected at court, and famous for his recent suppression of the Regulators in North Carolina, whose residents remembered him as “the Butcher.”
“A NEW FLAME KINDLING IN AMERICA”
Fleetingly, for a year or two after the end of nonimportation, New York’s economy seemed to be on the mend. But in June 1772 the British credit system collapsed, dashing hopes of an early recovery. More merchants in the city went under, more tradesmen closed their shops, more mechanics sought work. And more Scots, Irish, and English immigrants arrived, full of bitterness toward the landlords, employers, and politicians who had driven them out of their homelands.
During and after the winter of 1772-73 (so cold the East River froze over and people walked to Brooklyn), the condition of the city’s poor again became desperate. Over four hundred men, women, and children jammed the old municipal poorhouse while the Common Council made more and more frequent appropriations for apprehending and transporting vagrants beyond the city limits. The council’s yearly appropriations for outdoor relief climbed swiftly toward the twenty-eight-hundred-pound mark—better than four times what the city spent in 1760 and almost eight times what it spent in the 1730s. By 1773 the spread of sickness and disease had so severely strained the old municipal hospital that the council was obliged to order the construction of a new hospital near Broadway and Duane streets, on the outskirts of town. General Gage, serenely oblivious, praised New York’s “domestic tranquility.”
Crime too was on the rise again, a problem the council addressed by spending more money than ever for street lamps and the watch. By 1773 it had sixteen paid watchmen on duty every night and was placing “Centinal Boxes” at strategic locations around town (not enough, however, to protect James De Lancey Jr., son of the former governor and New York’s best-known politician, who was mugged by a pair of footpads the very next year). So many convicted felons were being packed into the New Gaol, erected only a dozen-odd years before, that the council decided, also in 1773, to confine them in a proper “Bridewell” (named after London’s notorious Bridewell House of Correction, which ever since the seventeenth century had been used to confine runaway apprentices, vagrants, prostitutes, and debtors). Completed two years later near the New Barracks at the north end of the Common, the Bridewell’s two stories and gray stone walls made it New York’s most impressive public building.
Given that hard times always bore down hardest on widows and unmarried women, it wasn’t surprising that more women turned to crime—as did Mary Daily and Margaret Siggins, who were hanged as pickpockets in 1771—and prostitution. Just west of the Bridewell, a red-light district had recently sprung up on land belonging to St. Paul’s. Residents called it the “Holy Ground.” Patrick McRobert, a Scot who visited New York in the summer of 1774, reported that “above 500 ladies of pleasure” kept lodgings in the “Holy Ground.” They included “many fine well dressed women, and it is remarkable that they live in much greater cordiality one with another than any nests of that kind do in Britain or Ireland. . . . One circumstance I think is a little unlucky,” McRobert added primly, “is that the entrance to [King’s College] is thro’ one of the streets