Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [282]
The city-run system of public markets was flourishing at century’s end. Although two of the five leading pre-Revolutionary markets had been abandoned, three new ones had been added (including Catherine Market near Catherine Slip). The old ones had been improved, including the oldest—the Fly Market, at the foot of Maiden Lane—which now consisted of three market houses, for meat, country produce, and fish. Under the aegis of the mayor, who served as clerk of the market, and the council, which regulated the deputy clerks, markers and sealers of weights and measures, inspectors, porters, packers, and cullers, the city prohibited forestalling, engrossing, and regrating and paid close attention to sanitary conditions (oysters could not be sold between June 1 and September 30). As a result, the quality of food sold in New York City was generally good.
At the same time the city was maintaining close oversight of distribution, however, it was dismantling pre-Revolutionary restrictions on production. In this they were supported by entrepreneurial masters, who believed that the explosive commercial and demographic expansion of the nineties would pay off only for those having the freedom as well as the character to act. What was the point of the Revolution, they asked, if not to free individuals from arbitrary, artificial, and oppressive restraints?
The Fly Market, 1816. Women are conspicuous in this scene both as venders of produce and, in the covered meat market (background), as consumers. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
During the later 1780s and 1790s the old requirement that none but freemen be permitted to engage in “any art, trade, mystery, or occupation, within the city, saving in time of fairs” was permitted to lapse. On the books, violators remained subject to fivepound fines, but as one observer noted in 1807, “no prosecutions are brought against those who carry on business without taking out their freedom.”
For a time, the city insisted that all butchers have their cattle slaughtered at the municipal abattoir, but vigorous protests won a ruling that licensed butchers could kill their own livestock on their own premises. The city would continue to crack down on fraudulent practices—for example, falsely designating meat as having been slaughtered according to Hebrew law—but tended to overlook sharp practices such as forestalling (meeting drovers up-island, cornering whole herds, and charging other butchers what the market would bear), in this case a latitude butchers deplored, as they were the ones who got skinned.
A similar ambivalence marked the bakers’ response to the assize—the regulation of bread prices by a committee of the Common Council. Although officials kept close track of the price of flour and adjusted bakers’ charges to bakers’ costs, the breadmen grew increasingly restive. Finally, in 1800, the Common Council acceded to demands by master bakers that the price of bread, like that of other commodities, be determined in the marketplace. Competition, they argued, “would create an Emulation among the Bakers and would of course produce good Bread . . . at a reasonable price.” A year later, however, when the cost of flour fell sharply, the bakers refused all appeals to lower their prices accordingly. The council then reinstated the assize, at which point the bakers went on strike, refusing to bake until allowed the price they wanted for their bread. Although the council got them back to work with a substantial increase, a group of “wealthy citizens” formed the New York Bread Company to manufacture bread in such quantities that residents would never again have to pay more than the market would bear. This wasn’t at all what the bakers had intended in denouncing the assize: free markets were one thing, industrial enterprises operated by semiskilled labor another. Besides driving them out of business, cried the bakers, the Bread Company was the opening wedge of a capitalist labor system that would in time annihilate the crafts, reduce mechanics to mere wage-slaves,