Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [321]
Interracial camaraderie had shocked Daniel Horsmanden back in 1741, and despite all that had transpired in the intervening sixty years poor whites and poor blacks continued to mingle in gin mills, dance halls, and brothels that catered to both races. Such fraternizing took place, on occasion, in more public spaces, especially on Sundays and holidays like Pinkster. Although the old Dutch celebration of Whitsuntide had disappeared from anglicized New York City during the eighteenth century, it survived among the Dutch villages of Long Island and the Hudson Valley, where it was appropriated as a holiday by slaves, who then brought it back to the city in the 1790s and 1800s. As one resident remembered: “All made it an idle day; boys and negroes might be seen all day standing in the market laughing and joking and cracking eggs. In the afternoon the grown up apprentices and servant girls used to dance on the green in Bayard’s farm [west of Broadway].”
“Negro dancing” was a familiar feature of Pinkster time. Slaves or country free blacks trooped in to the marketplace at Brooklyn Village from Long Island or New Jersey (the former with their hair tied up in a queue with dried eelskin, the latter favoring plaited forelocks fastened with tea leaves). Sometimes as many as two hundred would perform exhibition dances, toot on fish horns, play games, and drink. Others crossed over to Catherine Market or the fish market in front of Burnel Brown’s Ship Chandlery. There they sold roots, berries, herbs, and birds to raise money for the holiday. Some were hired by resident butchers to engage in a jig or “break-down.” This pastime, performed at home on a barn floor, became a competitive display of skill, performed on a springy board, with percussive accompaniment made by beating hands on sides of legs, followed by the taking up of a collection from bystanders.
When white rowdies attended interracial gatherings, however, they were likely as not to indulge in violence: victimizing blacks (like attacking Irish) seemed part of the natural order of things. “A parcel of us lads,” Otter reminisced, went to John M’Dermot’s oyster shop in George’s Street, played “patent billiards” for drink and oysters, got loud and obstreperous, and stomped M’Dermot when he tried to stop them; “some of the spare hands fell upon the negroes who were employed by him to shuck oysters, and drove them into the cooking room, and beat them, poor d———Is, into a jelly.”
Traditional “blood sports” like cockfighting and bearbaiting remained another popular pastime, and as promoters vied to stage more and more bizarre contests they drew larger and more turbulent crowds. One impresario threw up a two-thousand-seat amphitheater for such spectacles; box seats sold for seventy-five cents, while admission to the pit could be had for as little as a quarter. By the mid-nineties several circus troupes were also competing for public attention. The most successful was led by John Bill Ricketts, whose inventive deployment of clowns, tightrope walkers, tumblers, aerobatic riders, mounted Indians, and fireworks lured sellout crowds to his New Amphitheater on Greenwich Street.
Rowdies turned up as well among theatergoers, the bulk of whom still consisted of working people because only the poorest apprentices and journeymen were unable to scrape together the price of admission. In 1789 ticket prices at Lewis Hallam’s John Street Theater ranged from fifty cents for the gallery to seventy-five cents for the pit and a dollar for the boxes. The fancy new Park Theater on Chatham Street, for all its appeal to the Broadway-area gentility, was even cheaper,