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By Root 8054 0

pastries, coffee, chocolate, wine, and liquor. Three years later, the Delmonicos (as John and Peter now called themselves) opened a “Restaurant Francais” next door that was among the first in town to let diners order from a menu of choices, at any time they pleased, and sit at their own cloth-covered tables. This was a sharp break from the fixed fare and simultaneous searings at common hotel tables—so crowded (one guidebook warned) that your elbows were “pinned down to your sides like the wings of a trussed fowl.” New Yorkers were a bit unsure about fancy foreign customs at first, and the earliest patrons tended to be resident European agents of export houses, who felt themselves marooned among a people with barbarous eating habits. The idea soon caught on, however; more restaurants appeared, and harried businessmen abandoned the ancient practice of going home for lunch.

Visitors and native New Yorkers alike shopped in retail outlets, another new and specialized institution. Previously, importers had sold off their ships, and artisans from their workshops. As importers withdrew from retail and artisans concentrated on production, the gap was filled by independent stores clustered on streets behind the waterfront and along fashionable Broadway, which sold sugar, coffee, hardware, and other commodities harvested by the city’s merchants. After 1827 well-to-do consumers could stroll though the New York Arcade, a skylight-covered corridor shared by forty stores, which ran parallel to Broadway between Maiden Lane and John Street. Display methods too grew more sophisticated. Where an 1817 Broadway clothier simply hung samples of his ready-mades outside the door, leaving “the coat-tails and pantaloons” (one visitor warned) to “flap around the face of the pedestrian, like the low branches in a woodpath,” by the 1830s, as another traveler observed, “plates of the newest London Fashions” were “displayed in the shop windows of every tailor in New York.”

But it was a clutch of dry-goods stores that made the most lasting impression on the city’s commercial history. In 1818 Connecticut-born Henry Sands Brooks founded a men’s clothing store on Cherry Street, a waterfront location that he described as convenient to “the Gentry and Seafaring Men alike.” (His sons, who inherited the concern on his death in 1833, would later adopt the name Brooks Brothers.) In 1825 Englishman Aaron Arnold opened a small Pine Street establishment dealing in “silks, woolens, laces, shawls, and novelties from Europe and the Orient.” By the 1830s, when he took on James Mansell Constable as a partner, his thriving firm had relocated to Canal Street near Mercer. In 1826 another English immigrant, Samuel Lord, went partners with George Washington Taylor, his wife’s cousin, to sell “plaid silks for misses’ wear,” hosiery, and “elegant Cashmere long shawls” at their Catherine Street store.

The proliferation of mercantile firms multiplied the number of clerks, bookkeepers, copiers, and errand boys: the Tappans alone had a clerical staff of more than twenty. Virtually all were males, many were sons of the merchant’s kin or associates, and most were, in effect, merchants-in-training. Some labored over manifests and correspondence, seated on high stools and supervised by a chief clerk ensconced on a raised platform in the rear, rather like a ship’s quarterdeck. Others were deployed as salesmen or dispatched to lodging houses to “drum up” sales from visiting storekeepers.

Manual as well as mental labor was required of these early white-collar workers. Before William Earl Dodge joined Anson Phelps as a partner, his clerical duties had included fetching water from the pump at Peck and Pearl with which to sweep the sidewalk, putting out refuse to be collected by the city’s “dirt-carts,” taking letters to the post office, delivering goods, stocking shelves, and distributing handbills in the streets. Still heavier labor could be demanded. When longshoremen hauled barrels, bales, crates, or sacks out of ships’ holds, they lugged them across the wharves to South Street. There