Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [290]
Between the mid-eighties and the mid-nineties, the almshouse budget soared from $12,500 to over $29,000, far exceeding all other municipal expenditures. A report to the mayor and aldermen by the commissioners of the almshouse in 1796 said: “We cannot help being alarmed at the enormous and still growing expense of this department, arising not so much from the increase of our own poor, as from the prodigious influx of indigent foreigners in the city,” especially the Irish, who often wound up in the almshouse. The almshouse, however, was falling apart. By 1796 there were 770 dependents in a sixty-year-old building capable of handling half that number. It was agreed that the structure was in such “Ruinous Condition” that repairs were useless. The state legislature authorized a municipal lottery, and in 1797 the new three-story, $130,000 almshouse (on the site of today’s Tweed Courthouse) was ready for occupants. Yet it was soon as outrageously overcrowded as its predecessor—by January of the following year it housed a record nine hundred paupers—and the Common Council began debating the possibility of erecting an enormous new edifice up at Bellevue.
Governor Jay proposed more immediate relief. Reacting to pleas from municipal officials, Jay urged the state legislature to assume some financial responsibility for alien dependents, suggesting they be treated as “the poor of the state.” The 1798 legislature agreed and authorized a 1 percent tax on auction sales in New York City to support the “foreign poor” there. The law also supported Manhattan’s first efforts at professionalizing the administration of relief, by allowing the Common Council to appoint and pay commissioners. After 1800 these commissioners in turn delegated direction of outdoor relief to an almshouse superintendent and his hired aides. By 1802 the city was spending thirty-five thousand dollars on outdoor relief alone, better than twice as much as a decade earlier.
Beyond this, authorities wouldn’t go. In the winter of 1804 City Inspector John Pintard told the council that winter fuel shortages were becoming endemic and that it was the “duty” of municipal government to relieve the situation. He urged the council to buy five hundred cords of firewood before winter then resell it according to ability to pay, using robust paupers from the almshouse to saw, stack, and deliver. The aldermen rejected the proposal, only to find that very winter an ice-clogged harbor forcing suspension of fuel deliveries from Westchester and New Jersey. In the ensuing crisis, committees of volunteers in each ward distributed fuel and food to the needy (fifty-four hundred persons were aided in just one week in January). But in June of that year, when warm weather had returned, Mayor Clinton authorized the chief marshal and his fortyplus deputies to round up “all idle Strollers, Vagabonds and disorderly persons whom you shall suppose would become chargeable to the City.” The magistrates would give them sixty days in the Bridewell or transportation out of the city.
UP THE RIVER
Throughout these decades, as the city expanded its involvement in fire prevention, market regulation, sanitation, and poor relief, it also enhanced its police powers. Beside the marshals, it could call on an expanded constabulary, under the direction of High Constable Jacob Hays. Appointed by Mayor Livingston in 1802 to the position he would hold for nearly fifty years, Hays, of Jewish parentage though reared in the Presbyterian faith, would convert the job from its eighteenth-century role as a server of court writs into that of de facto police commissioner. Under his command were sixteen elected constables and seventy-two members of the watch.
Hays’s men increasingly absorbed the responsibility of the magistrates to maintain public order. The mayor and aldermen were still expected to appear at major disturbances to assert municipal authority, and while they still possessed considerable political and economic influence, the city was getting too big for such measures. In addition,