Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [344]
Everyone then returned to the Battery for a “Grand Procession” through the streets of Manhattan. As in the Federal Procession of 1788, the seven thousand marchers lined up in ranks, each “bearing their respective standards and the implements of their arts”—lawyers, physicians, militia officers, firemen, and artisans of every description—tangible affirmation that all elements of the social order endorsed the canal and understood its significance for the city’s future. (Only the presence of some journeymen’s societies, marching apart from the master craftsmen, hinted at the ongoing conflict in the shops.) Up Greenwich Street they marched, six abreast, to Canal and over to Broadway, up to Broome and across to the Bowery, and down Pearl to the Battery again, whence they rolled up Broadway to City Hall. As they marched they passed through a throng estimated at over one hundred thousand people—nearly two-thirds of the city’s entire population. It was the largest such gathering ever witnessed in North America.
As night fell, New York came ablaze. Private houses and public buildings, theaters and hotels, coffeehouses and museums, all were brilliantly illuminated. Most impressive was City Hall, lit up with 1,542 wax candles and 764 oil lamps and covered with glowing transparencies depicting the canal. At ten P.M. ten thousand people elbowed into the Park for a dazzling display of fireworks.
Grand Canal Celebration, drawn by Archibald Robertson and lithographed by Anthony Imbert, 1826. The building in the background, called Castle Clinton when built as a harbor fortification in 1808, was now a theater known as Castle Garden. (I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
Cadwallader Golden (grandson of the colonial governor and one of the Erie Canal’s most energetic promoters) boasted that “this extensive channel” would make New York “one of the greatest commercial cities in the world” before the end of the century. But even he underestimated the speed and scope of the canal’s impact. Within the year, Erie boatmen were steering forty-two barges a day through Utica, bearing a thousand passengers, 221,000 barrels of flour, 435,000 gallons of whiskey, and 562,000 bushels of wheat. Shipping costs from Lake Erie to Manhattan plummeted from a hundred dollars a ton to under nine dollars. A few more years of this brought the annual value of freight transported along the canal up to fifteen million dollars, double that reaching New Orleans via the Mississippi; by mid-century the figure would approach two hundred million. Enough money would be collected in tolls—nearly half a million dollars the first year alone—to repay the cost of construction and help subsidize an additional six hundred miles of canals in the state over the next fifteen years.
At first, most of the goods cascading down the Erie Canal toward New York came from farms and villages along the canal’s route. Its success inspired a frenzy of digging elsewhere in the country, however, and a burgeoning network of canals between western waterways and the Great Lakes soon drew more distant agricultural regions into the city’s orbit: Ohio by 1830, Indiana by 1835, Michigan by 1836. Produce and timber that once rafted southward along the Ohio River now reversed course and headed east toward Manhattan. One collateral consequence was the transformation of agriculture on Long Island: when local wheat, barley, corn, and rye proved unable to compete with cereal grains from the West, Queens farmers switched to market gardening, raising potatoes, cabbage, peas, beans, asparagus, and tomatoes for booming Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The growing power