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By Root 8141 0

Courier, in 1799 (also the first in Kings County), and by the construction, in 1802, of its first “cage, or watch-house.” Besides numerous shops of coachmakers, pumpmakers, tailors, and cordwainers, the village boasted gristmills that used the East River tides to grind wheat for export as well as for local consumption and manufactories that produced chairs, tobacco, and floorcloth. Throngs of local carpenters, riggers, caulkers, coopers, and other craftsmen were employed in the maritime trades spreading along the waterfront, and the village’s many butchers maintained stalls in the old wooden market near the ferry slip, where they sold the meat wheelbarrowed over from nearby slaughterhouses (by black employees) or shipped it across the river to Manhattan’s Fly Market.

“Winter Scene in Brooklyn,” by Francis Guy, c. 1817-30. Imitating Pieter Brueghel’s paintings of peasant life in the Netherlands, Guy meticulously documented the life of what was still a close-knit village from a second floor window of his house on Front Street. This view along Front, ranging from Fulton Street (the old Ferry Road) on the far right to Main Street on the far left, records a mix of small shops, stores, and private residences (the dark building in the center was a slaughterhouse and butcher shop). Each of the figures is a portrait of one of Guy’s neighbors. Much of the area now lies under the approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge. (Eno Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

The more remote farming hamlets that dotted Kings and Queens counties—Bushwick, Flatlands, New Utrecht, Gravesend, Newtown, Flushing, Jamaica—likewise experienced a modest rush of prosperity by supplying the New York market with food for consumption and export. The tiny village of Flat Bush (still often spelled as two words) got itself a new private academy, Erasmus Hall (two hundred students), and a lovely new Reformed church—both of which still stand at the corner of Church and Flatbush avenues.

FIVE POINTS

Back in Manhattan, the negative consequences of economic restructuring were coming to malign fruition in the neighborhood known as Five Points. Ever since the Revolution, artisan proprietors had been colonizing the area east and south of the Fresh Water Pond, raising modest house-and-shops near its breweries, potteries, tanneries, and tobacco manufactories. The neighborhood had always been squalid, situated amid the swampy runoff from the ever more polluted pond. By the early nineteenth century, many of the streets here—Mulberry, Orange, Roosevelt, Bancker (now Madison), James, Oliver, Catherine, and Rutgers—were little better than foul, muddy lanes blocked by refuse-choked pools of slime and silt that washed down from hills around the pond. Some houses were half buried by erosion; when it rained, their cellars and kitchens filled with water, and many back yards were perpetually covered with green, stinking muck.

Sanitationists hoped that filling in the pond would revitalize the area, which many considered a breeding ground for yellow fever. It did, though not in the manner intended. Absentee landlords began to buy up houses once occupied by artisans, subdividing them or replacing them with new wood-frame structures: the dapper Edward Livingston, New York’s first Jeffersonian mayor, owned eight on Orange Street alone. Landlords then packed the buildings with tenants, transforming them into de facto boardinghouses for the wage-laborers now settling the area.

Some of these renters were artisans pushed out of gentrifying neighborhoods and no longer able to establish independent households. Others were the recent Irish immigrants who began settling near the docks in the 1790s, then spread inland after the turn of the century. Still others were African Americans whose ancestors had been in the area since receiving half-freedom plots from the Dutch West India Company. Most of their forebears had long since sold off their little grants to white proprietors; still legally