Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [295]
Livingston’s attempt to find a home insulated from the seamier aspects of urban life was as yet far from typical among well-to-do New Yorkers. Like master craftsmen, they were accustomed to living and working in the same building, and the boundaries between “family” and “business” life, between “private” and “public” spaces, were highly porous. Every day their families rubbed elbows with customers and clients, clerks and apprentices, servants and slaves. Indeed the households of prominent merchants ranked among the largest work establishments of the eighteenth century. Typically the first floor contained a store or counting room, with patrons, employees, and family members alike moving freely through adjacent hallways and rooms. Not even the second-floor drawing rooms and bedrooms were ever completely sequestered from this traffic, and the third would be filled with children, clerks, and servants engaged in domestic as well as business-related chores. It was the same story out of doors, for commercial neighborhoods, like commercial households, were spaces shared by all classes. In 1790 merchants constituted only a third of the residents of the dockside area. The majority of their neighbors were artisans, shopkeepers, and the laboring poor.
After 1790, however, Livingston’s peers began to follow his example. The frequency of pestilential diseases, the increasing tempo of business, the construction of ever bigger warehouses, the conversion of older residences into boardinghouses, the proliferation of artisanal workshops, and the profusion of shanties and cellars filled with impoverished Irish immigrants—all of these transformed the waterfront streets that wealthy New Yorkers had called home for a century or more. So, too, the impact of republicanism on class relations meant that gentlemen and their wives could no longer command an easy deference from the mechanics, sailors, and laborers living nearby. Thus, like Livingston, they decided to look for houses in less congested and troublesome parts of town.
More precisely, they decided to live and work in different places. Merchants transferred their countinghouses to their warehouses near the East River wharves, using the ground floors to sell and display goods while keeping the upper floors for storage. They then moved their families across town, into new residences whose richly ornamented interiors, generous yards, and many amenities—carriage houses, smokehouses, icehouses, liquor vaults, private pumps—were clearly designed for domestic isolation rather than trade. Once underway, the movement to separate home and work advanced rapidly. In 1800 one in ten merchants or professionals listed separate houses and workplaces in city directories. By 1810 better than half did so.
The west side of Manhattan meanwhile became New York’s most exclusive quarter. Not only did this part of town lie within convenient walking distance of coffeehouses, storehouses, and offices, but thanks to recent municipal improvements it was acquiring certain unique charms as well. After razing Fort George, the city had extended Broadway through the site, erected a bulkhead from Battery Place to Whitehall Street, and installed a spacious walk along the water’s edge shaded by elm trees. As early as 1793 civic boosters were hailing the emerging little park as “one of the most delightful walks, perhaps in the world,” much frequented by the city’s “genteel folk.” Another local attraction was nearby Bowling Green, recently refurbished with brick or fieldstone sidewalks and