Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [289]
Scene at a fire, c. 1800, from Ye Olde Fire Laddies, by Herbert Asberry. Rapid improvements in the city’s firefighting equipment would put an end to these citizen bucket brigades by 1820. (© Museum of the City of New York)
The city also received authority to make property owners correct or improve existing structures. An act of 1800 allowed the Common Council, within certain designated areas, to buy, at fair valuation, any houses or lots below city standards and dispose of them in such manner as “will best conduce to the health and welfare of the said city.” Municipal authorities even won the right to tear down houses and oversee the erection of “proper & wholesome Buildings thereon”—apparently the city’s first warrant to engage in slum clearance—though in the next decades such powers were usually exercised only in the case of abandoned buildings. The Board of Health, for its part, was given the right to enforce hygienic standards that went beyond issues of simple cleanliness to matters of population density. An 1804 Common Council ordinance regulating lodging houses was the first piece of legislation to specify maximum densities in housing.
Municipal powers were likewise expanded to include oversight of existing and future roads. In 1793 systematic house numbering and street signs (“direction boards”) were introduced, helping to rationalize the city’s built environment. The next year, one of intensely anti-British excitement, brought some overdue change in street names too. King, Little Queen, Prince, Princess, and Duke became Liberty, Pine, Cedar, Rose, Beaver, and Stone, respectively. Eventually, several dozen city streets would be named or renamed after Revolutionary heroes and other patriot worthies: Broome, Clinton, Duane, Franklin, Gansevoort, Greene, Horatio (Gates), King, Lafayette, Madison, Mercer, MacDougal (Street and Alley), Magaw, Montgomery, Sullivan, Thompson, Varick, Washington (Fort, Mews, Place, and Square), Willet, and Wooster, among others. A considerable number of Tory street names remained unchanged, however, including Beech, Cornelia, Desbrosses, Delancey, Abingdon, Fort Charles Place, Great Jones, Hanover, Nassau, Oliver (De Lancey), Pell, Pitt, Prince, Rivington, and Warren.
Strategic improvements were effected on key routes. In 1796 the city horse market was removed from Wall Street. In 1802 the Common Council pushed to have the main roads leading in and out of town “turnpiked” (paved). Broadway was extended north and regulated up to Canal—which involved leveling a fifty-foot-high hill at Duane Street—and then on till it intersected the Bowery at 14th Street. The Bowery, meanwhile, was turnpiked from Bullock (Broome) Street on up to the forks of Kingsbridge and Bloomingdale roads, at modern-day 233rd Street, and another two new bridges were thrown across the Harlem River. Finally, and most grandly, in 1804 the corporation decided to regulate the city’s future expansion and ordered the commissioner of streets to prepare a plan for “new streets hereafter to be laid out and opened.”
POVERTY
Via the commissioners of the almshouse, the municipality continued to provide outdoor relief—usually food, clothing, and firewood—to residents pitched into temporary dependency. In February 1796 the commissioners visited and subsidized forty families, “either by giving them money, where they supposed they might be trusted with it, or by leaving orders on neighboring grocers.” In addition, they supported, as of 1795, 622 paupers inside the almshouse, including the aged, lunatic, and blind. Some residents had been there for decades, like blind Susana