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By Root 8264 0

A superintendent of public buildings and grounds (1800) had oversight of the Battery, the Common, and the potter’s field (with his own force of special constables and marshals to prevent injury to trees or grass). The chief engineer looked after firefighting, the high constable ran the police force, the almshouse commissioners tended to poor relief, the city jailer dealt with correctional facilities, and the city inspector had a wide range of responsibilities, including the collection of municipal statistics. In 1801, the legal responsibilities of the recorder were transferred to a new official, the corporation attorney. That same year, some duties of the city treasurer were transferred to a new office of the comptroller, whose particular duty was to audit municipal accounts.

This growing division of labor among financial officers was accompanied by a profound shift in the way the city met its expenses. The rising cost of poor relief, police, jails, street cleaning and repair, fire equipment, lamps, wells, and the compensation of public officials had quadrupled the city’s budget between 1790 and 1800 alone, driving per capita expenditures up from $1.87 to $4.29. To pay for it all, the city drew on two funds. The first, its revenue account, consisted primarily of receipts from corporate properties, franchises, and fines—including income generated by slips, docks, markets, the rental of corporation lands, and, particularly lucrative, the monopoly income gained from leases to ferry operators plying the East River between Peck Slip, Fly Market, and Catherine Slip and vajrious points on the Brooklyn and Queens shorelines. The second fund, its tax account, consisted mainly of income from state-authorized taxes and from a liquor excise levy.

At first, the city drew most of its income from revenues, but as its initiatives and expenses mounted, it began calling on the state ever more routinely for authorization to tax. In 1787 the mayor, recorder, and aldermen were constituted as a Board of Supervisors to set tax rates when special levies were allowed; the board in turn appointed city tax assessors. Soon the bulk of the city’s income was coming not from the corporation’s private “estate” but from taxes. In 1800 they amounted to $112,000.

Still the city’s income couldn’t keep pace with its spending. To cover the shortfall the corporation began to borrow—mainly from the Bank of New York—to cover specific contingencies, such as the costs of dealing with yellow fever, building a new almshouse, or acquiring Bellevue and the lots for a new potter’s field. Sometimes the city borrowed in anticipation of forthcoming tax returns. Finally, in 1812, the city was allowed to set up a permanent bonded debt of nine hundred million dollars at 6 percent interest, known as New York City Stock.

CITY HALL

All of this activity—constructing wharves, fighting fevers, draining swamps, charting the future development of the city—had silently revolutionized municipal government, giving it, in practice if not yet in law, an increasingly “public” identity and legitimacy. Now the Common council decided that it needed a proper home. Nothing much was wrong with the old building down on Wall Street, elegantly renovated only a decade before. Nor was there a pressing need for additional office space. Government House, having served as the official residence of the governor, was currently being leased for a hotel and could easily have been pressed into service. What the council sought, rather, was the kind of public “ornament” that New Yorkers had never really given much thought to. The city’s present wealth and future prospects now exceeded those of any other in the country, the council complained, but it lacked even a single public structure of suitable size and opulence.

The Common Council chose the Common or Park—recently fenced and lavishly stocked with a variety of shade trees—as the site for a new city hall, then held a competition for the building’s design. Twenty-six architects and builders, including the renowned Benjamin Henry Latrobe, submitted plans.