Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [269]
In the mid-1790s, recognizing the limits of European and American demand for furs, Astor also began to participate in the China trade. At first he bought space on Canton-bound ships owned by other merchants, shipping otter, beaver, and fox skins (along with ginseng) and bringing back tea, silk, and porcelain. He consigned these goods to local auction houses, to local retailers, or to Manhattan wholesalers for reshipment to Bordeaux or Hamburg. In the early 1800s Astor began building his own ships and had become the executive manager of a far-flung mercantile empire, with employees and agents in several countries and headquarters in New York. By 1808, when the state legislature chartered his American Fur Company, he had become the city’s first and only millionaire.
Early on, convinced that Manhattan—and Manhattan real estate—had a golden future, Astor began to invest his profits in land. He bought two lots and four half-lots from his brother Henry in 1789. Two years later, he acquired the first of what would become sizable holdings along the waterfront. After the turn of the century, flush with China trade profits, his interest in real estate grew more systematic, more ambitious, and more calculating. Weekends often found him on his horse, scouring the countryside north of the city for parcels—as in 1803, when he bought a seventy-acre farm that ran west of Broadway to the Hudson River between 42nd and 46th streets. That same year, he’ also gained control of Richmond Hill when the high-living Burr, hard pressed for cash, sold Astor the leasehold on 241 lots for $62,500; the following year, with Hamilton in his grave, Burr sold off still more land to Astor before heading into exile. Over the next decade, Astor continued to buy or lease additional parcels just north of the developed city—then sat back to await further developments.
CONCOMITANTS OF COMMERCE
The success of Astor and his fellow businessmen had innumerable ramifications for New York, perhaps the most obvious being the transformation of its waterfront. Ships from all over the world jammed the East River docks during the wartime boom—more ships “than I ever before saw, except on the Thames below London Bridge,” wrote the English traveler William Strickland. “Bales of cotton, wool, and merchandize; barrels of potash, rice, flour, and salt provisions; hogsheads of sugar, chests of tea, puncheons of rum, and pipes of wine; boxes, cases, packs and packages of all sizes and denominations, were strewed upon the wharfs and landing-places, or upon the decks of the shipping,” observed another English visitor, John Lambert.
Presiding over this waterfront whirl were the merchants, great and small, who according to the English actor John Bernard worked harder and lived faster than any he had seen in America:
They breakfasted at eight or half past, and by nine were in their countinghouses, laying out the business of the day; at ten they were on their wharves, with aprons around their waists, rolling hogsheads of rum and molasses; at twelve, at market, flying about as dirty and as diligent as porters; at two, back again to the rolling, heaving, hallooing, and scribbling. At four they went home to dress for dinner; at seven, to the play; at eleven, to supper, with a crew of lusty Bacchanals who would smoke cigars, gulp down brandy, and sing, roar, and shout in the thickening clouds they created, like so many merry devils, till three in the morning. At eight, up again, to scribble, run, and roll hogsheads.
No less dramatic was the increased size and scale of enterprise in the city. As shipping boomed in the 1790s and early 1800s, importers and commission merchants began consolidating capital into partnerships, expanding their operations, and erecting grand new brick warehouses. These massive