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’s first large-scale drug dealer, smuggling five thousand pounds of Turkish opium from Smyrna to Canton. In the 1820s Astor shifted into other ventures and was replaced by Thomas H. Smith, a speculator who in 1826 brought in so much tea that he glutted the market and went bankrupt. By the early 1830s great firms like Griswold, Goodhue, Grinnell-Minturn, and Rowland and Aspinwall were preeminent in the Pacific. These in turn gave way to the House of Low, launched in 1829 when Seth Low moved his business from Salem to New York. It would be brought to fruition by Abiel Abbot Low, the eldest of Seth’s twelve children, who went out to Canton in 1833, spent seven years learning the business, and returned with enough contacts and market knowledge to dominate the industry. Yet here too the British remained the primary power, not least because the Empire controlled access to the opium of Bengal, while Astor and his successors were relegated to supplying an inferior Levantine product.

EMPORIUM

The web of canals, steamboats, and packets that New York flung out across the world in the 1820s and 1830s captured a wider and wider share of the nation’s import business—from 38 percent in 1821 to 62 percent in 1836. It also brought an unprecedented multitude of ships into the harbor. One day in 1824 there were 324 at anchor off Manhattan, a huge number by comparison with prior years, but nothing in light of those to come. On a single day in 1836, 921 vessels lined the East River bulkhead, their bowsprits and carved figureheads looming over South Street, while another 320 bobbed along the Hudson (still known to sailors as the North River).

With this increased traffic came important changes in the scale, organization, and tempo of the city’s commercial life. Dozens of new wharves, hastily constructed of hewn log frames filled with loose stone and earth, sprouted out from the shores of both the East River and the Hudson River, all tidily numbered (a practice that began in 1815, when the municipality began to rationalize the waterfront as it had the streets).1 The auction system created a new breed of businessman, the wholesale merchant or “jobber,” who bought, say, cheap imported British manufactured goods at auction and shipped them, on commission, to far-off country storekeepers via coastal packets and the Erie Canal. The low cost and abundance of these goods further spurred rural demand, inducing farmers to concentrate more and more heavily on the production of food and fuel for the Manhattan market—which in turn drew still more city merchants into the business. By 1840, in addition to the 417 commercial houses active in foreign trade, New York had 918 commission firms that consigned goods to domestic markets in every region of the country.

South Street from Maiden Lane, by William J. Bennett, c. 1828. Only a few years after the opening of the Erie Canal, activity along the East River waterfront had increased dramatically. That well-dressed family in the center appears ready to board the Leeds, one of the Swallowtail packets. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Edward W.C. Arnold, 1964. The Edward W.C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps and Pictures)

Every spring and fall, moreover, thousands of the most prosperous and adventuresome storekeepers converged on the city in person, prowling its countinghouses and auction rooms in search of bargains. The clamor for space in boardinghouses, inns, and the city’s few hotels (only eight in 1818) attracted the attention of builders and investors, who flung up a score of new hotels during the 1820s and 1830s. Grandest of the lot was the six-story, three-hundred-room Park Hotel that John Jacob Astor opened on Broadway, directly west of City Hall Park, in 1836. Eventually renamed Astor House, it remained the nation’s most prestigious hostelry for decades.

In 1827 two brothers from Switzerland named Giovanni and Pietro Del-Monico— the one a wine importer, the other a pastry chef—opened a shop on William Street with a half-dozen pine tables where customers could sample fine French