Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [271]
Book buyers weren’t the only out-of-town merchants to descend on the city. Some came to attend fairs and auctions, others to shop (along with locals) in the expanding retail district above the wharves or in the fine specialty shops that lined lower Broadway, William Street, and Maiden Lane. (There was, however, as yet “no appearance of shop windows as in London,” one English observer noted, “only stores which make no shew till you enter the houses.”)
So many transients arrived, for business as well as pleasure, that taverns and boardinghouses proved unable to accommodate the influx. This dilemma led to the construction of New York’s first hotel in the modern sense—the five-story, 137-room City Hotel, which opened in 1794 on the west side of Broadway just north of Trinity Church. Besides room and board, it offered the facilities for public dining and dancing hitherto provided by taverns. Its gracious accommodations and excellent wine cellars were specifically designed to attract a wealthy clientele, and its “very handsome” street-level shops, elegant barroom, and coffeehouse fronting Broadway became important mercantile gathering spots. So did Pearl Street House (which opened around 1810). Aimed specifically at commercial travelers from around the nation, especially western New York and Ohio, it advertised explicitly that it was not intended “for the accommodation of families or ladies.”
By the first decade of the new century, Manhattan’s downtown district, like its docks, was a pandemonium. Bankers, brokers, and insurance men darted in and out of offices, contending for elbow room in the old Dutch streets with craftsmen, hucksters, slaves, women hurrying to market, and a noisy cavalcade of wagons, carts, and carriages. “Everything in the city is in motion!” exclaimed a French traveler, adding that New York’s opulence reminded him of “ancient Tyre, which contemporary authors called the queen of commerce and the sovereign of the seas.”
DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS
Shipbuilding in New York languished during the British occupation, and by Evacuation Day the old East River yards at Dover and Roosevelt streets were no longer in use. During the 1790s, however, new shipwrights arrived to meet the rising domestic demand for the big, deep-draft vessels needed to link the city with the Far East, Latin America, and Europe. One of the first was London-born Charles Brownne (who managed to evade parliamentary restrictions on the emigration of skilled craftsmen to the United States, perhaps in part by adding ne to his given name of Brown). Another was For man Cheeseman, who started a yard near the foot of present-day Rutgers Street in the 1790s, then joined with Brownne in 1800 to open a larger yard on a parcel bounded by what are now Montgomery, Clinton, Cherry, and Monroe streets. Scotsman Henry Eckford, who learned his trade in Quebec, moved to the United States in 1796, built one vessel in Brooklyn near the ferry in 1801, then joined with Edward Beebe in making boats near the bottom of Jefferson Street. One of Eckford and Beebe’s most famous commissions was the Beaver, commissioned by John Jacob Astor for the China trade and specifically designed for larger cargoes. When the Beaver came down the ways in 1805, it was the equal of anything the great British East India Company had afloat.
As the expanding city engulfed adjacent farmland, the shipyards pushed up to and around Corlear’s Hook, whose fine-sanded beach had long been used for bathing and Baptist immersions. Christian Bergh opened a yard there, and in 1804 Brownne too moved up to a spot near the foot of Stanton Street known as “Manhattan Island”—an oasis of solid ground near the shore but almost isolated