• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 8280 0

above the Battery. On the Manhattan side, circling around Corlear’s Hook, were the yards of Foreman Cheeseman, Charles Brownne, Henry Eckford, Christian Bergh, Adam and Noah Brown, and other principal builders—piled high with stacks of fresh-cut white oak, live oak, locust, and cedar (some now brought down the canal), the air fragrant with the smells of pitch, tar, and burning coke in the blacksmiths’ forges. Directly across the river, at the mouth of Wallabout Creek, sprawled the rapidly growing Brooklyn Navy Yard, which in 1815 launched the Fulton (the inventor’s war frigate) and in 1820 the Ohio, the country’s first ship of the line and its largest vessel yet. All told, they would send a prodigious number and variety of vessels down the ways over the next couple of decades—sturdy packets for the Black Ball Line, sharp brigs and schooners for the China trade, swift slavers that could outrun naval patrols, warships for the navies of several different nations, and steamboats by the score.

At first glance, the basic processes of shipbuilding hadn’t changed much over the previous century or more. Vessels of every description were still constructed by teams of leather-aproned axmen, carpenters, riggers, caulkers, and other craftsmen, employing tools and materials and techniques known to their trades for generations. To control costs and keep pace with demand, however, leading builders had already taken the first steps toward a more factory-like organization of their yards. Where smaller firms made hulls and subcontracted out the final stages of construction—making and raising masts, painting hulls, finishing cabins—to the city’s host of independent specialists, the bigger yards hired the necessary workmen directly, in some cases boosting the number of their employees to several hundred or more. They added specialized buildings, covered the ways with sheds, and embraced the use of steam power to drive saws, derricks, and pumps. The Browns even built a boardinghouse for two hundred apprentices. In 1824 several of the biggest builders banded together to form the New York Dry Dock Company, which was incorporated, given banking privileges, and capitalized at seven hundred thousand dollars the following year. By 1826 trials had begun on a three-hundred-foot-long inclined marine railway, installed at the foot of East 10th Street, capable of pulling vessels out of the water for repairs and application of copper sheathing to their hulls.

The transformation of shipbuilding on the East River owed much to the vision and diligence of James Allaire, a gifted mechanic who had worked on Fulton’s first steamboat. Allaire proved so adept at assembling engines shipped from England that he began to build them himself. When Fulton died, Allaire purchased the Fulton-Livingston engine shop in Jersey City and moved it to his ironworks on Cherry Street, close to the Corlear’s Hook shipyards. The yards awarded him contract after contract (in 1818 he turned out the Bellona for Gibbons and Vanderbilt), his designs became larger and more elaborate, and by 1829, with hundreds of employees, Allaire had become the premier manufacturer of engines and boilers in the country.

Nor was shipbuilding the only industry in New York to be transformed by the introduction of steam power or the reorganization of production into larger and larger units. Ropewalks and sugar refineries experienced comparable changes, as did the leather-making business, aided by an influx of hides from Argentina (Gideon Lee’s New York Tannery Company was capitalized at sixty thousand dollars). Printing too was transformed: in 1823 Jonas Booth printed an Abridgment of Murray’s English Grammar, the first American book manufactured by steam power; in 1830 Robert Hoe imported the country’s first Napier cylinder press, then improved it, and soon Harpers was using the new machine in a four-story plant on Cliff Street. By 1824 a sixteen-acre site on the north shore of Staten Island was occupied by a textile dye and printing works that employed 150 hands and had become the center of a growing