Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [350]
The mercantile firms that housed all this activity bulked ever larger on the cityscape, growing in size as well as complexity. By the 1820s three- to five-story office buildings and warehouses cost as much as a brig. By the late 1830s some cost as much as a full-rigged ship. Their style changed too, from Georgian brick to granite-faced Greek Revival (the earliest example of which, designed by Ithiel Town for Arthur and Lewis Tappan, went up on Pearl Street at Hanover Square in 1829). In 1832 Phelps and Peck built a new store and warehouse that towered six stories over the corner of Cliff and Fulton. It was one of the wonders of the city—until it collapsed under the weight of cotton bales within, killing seven clerks.
Similarly, because the mounting volume and complexity of commercial transactions made it inefficient to conduct business in coffeehouses, city merchants responded eagerly when William Backhouse Astor (John Jacob’s son) and Stephen Whitney proposed construction of a building where they might “transact in a few minutes, the business, which, if each were to seek the other at his counting-house, would require as many hours to accomplish.” By 1827 the two had raised a hundred thousand dollars for a new Merchants’ Exchange on Wall Street. Faced in Westchester marble, the neoclassical building boasted a fifteen-foot-high statue of Alexander Hamilton in its grand rotunda and a cavernous Exchange Room, as well as rooms for auction sales of real estate and stocks, a post office, and the Chamber of Commerce.
Bowne & Co.’s stationery shop on Pearl Street, c. 1830. As in other retail establishments, its clerks not only dealt with customers but hoisted wares for storage on the building’s upper floors. (Bowne & Co. Stationers, South Street Seaport Museum)
New York’s attractiveness as a marketplace was further enhanced by the adoption of gas lighting in the mid-twenties. Nobody liked the smoky oil lamps—few in number and not much brighter than lightning bugs—that had provided unreliable illumination on Manhattan thoroughfares since the 1760s. When Baltimore became the first American city to install gas lights, following the example of London, the Common Council decided to try an experiment. In 1816 a crude gasworks was set up near City Hall and tin pipes run down to several street lamps and store windows on Broadway. Merchants loved the new system, but opposition from tallow interests and a dispute over the merits of public versus private development delayed further action. Finally, in 1823, the city awarded a franchise to the New York Gas-Light Company, a private firm organized by banker Samuel Leggett and others. By early 1825 the company had a gasworks up and running at Hester and Rhynder—one of the largest edifices in the city—and over the next couple of years it ran cast-iron lines into the principal commercial streets. First to be lit was Broadway from the Battery up to Grand Street, soon followed by Wall, Pearl, Broad, William, Nassau, and Maiden Lane. The city paid for installing the street lamps, for “fitting” them up to the mains, and for gas consumed. Office buildings, fine stores, and plush hotels arranged their own connections, and printed warnings—“Don’t Blow Out the Gas!”—began appearing on the bedroom walls of up-to-date hostelries.
By the early 1830s, as Frances Trollope noted, many of the city’s retail shops, now brilliantly illuminated, stayed open as late as those of London and Paris, giving New York a lively nighttime appearance in marked contrast to Philadelphia’s. The contrast with other parts of New York City was equally striking. The gas company did lay mains under residential streets, but only fashionable (hence profitable) ones, leaving most neighborhoods, especially the working-class wards on the east side, blanketed in a darkness punctured only feebly by oil lamps.
THE WORD FROM MANHATTAN