Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [270]
The mounting demand for access to the waterfront prompted the merchants who ran the municipal corporation to extend the shore around Manhattan’s southern tip. In 1798 the city began the filling, grading, and paving of South Street, a new seventy-foot-wide border, and by 1801 new wharves, slips, and piers were under construction from Whitehall to the Fly Market. Spiked wooden poles were drop-hammered into the river bottom to form sea walls, then the water lot they enclosed was filled in with rubbish, earth, and cinder. In some places the traditional sheet piling was supplemented by cribworks—wood-frame, boxlike receptacles filled with loose stone and sunk to the river bottom as a base for larger and sturdier docks.
As in the past, the city enjoined proprietors of adjoining land to carry out these projects, under the direction of municipal surveyors. On completion, the developers received clear title to the filled water lots along with the right to collect the fees from pier users. The Common Council did, however, require that dockside fronting slips be reserved as “publick property,” to ensure that private wharf owners would not be able to jack up food prices by charging monopoly rents to market boats. In 1806, moreover, the city began to develop public basins at its own expense, retaining the right to wharfage.
The increase in traffic coming down the Hudson from the interior prompted commercial development along the west side of Manhattan as well. By 1810 West Street had been created on landfill, its new facilities for docking providing a grand counterpart to South Street across town. By 1807 the Hudson side had fifteen wharves, nearly half the thirty-plus on the East River. By then, too, ships that through the 1790s had still been forced to anchor offshore and transfer their cargoes to smaller boats—lighters—for loading and unloading were now able to pull directly into shore, their bowsprits arcing out over South Street. The result was a circumferential forest of spars, and the “tall masts mingled with the buildings,” John Lambert wrote in 1807, “together with the spires and cupolas of the churches, gave the city an appearance of magnificence.”
Streets adjacent to the eastside docks were equally alive with commercial activity. Bankers and brokers elbowed their way into the blocks nearest the Tontine Coffee House at Wall and Water, epicenter of mercantile transactions (and the site, not coincidentally, of New York’s first hackney station). Insurance companies, accountants, and law firms rented space in subdivided old town houses—one ad placed in 1803 announced the availability of an “Office and Cellar in Pearl Street near the Coffee Houses”—their presence announced by shiny brass plates.
Merchants’ operations also grew more specialized in the 1790s and 1800s. Emerging alongside the all-purpose general traders were new commission merchants, brokers, jobbers, factors, importers, and auctioneers. Many devoted themselves to handling just one or two lines of goods (textiles, drugs, provisions, hardware) or one kind of trade (retail or wholesale, import or export). Businessmen advertised on a much larger scale too, and papers began to carry ever greater quantities of the commercial information merchants needed to operate in an ever larger and more impersonal market. From 1796 a weekly newspaper, the New-York Price-Current, devoted itself entirely to covering these complex affairs.
Business took on a newly organized quality as well. In the twenty-odd years after Evacuation Day, for example, the number of booksellers in the city jumped from five to thirty, and the importance of the New York print market was in turn recognized, in 1802, by formation