Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [360]
Pierrepont’s vision of the future began to look more promising in 1814, when his good friend Robert Fulton formed the New York and Brooklyn Steam Ferry Boat Company. Pierrepont eagerly contributed money and influence, knowing that improved transportation to New York would do wonders for Brooklyn real estate values, and after Fulton’s death he became a part owner and director of the operation. Soon the Nassau—the East River’s first steam ferry—was shuttling people, carriages, and wagons back and forth to Brooklyn forty times a day, each trip lasting a mere four to eight minutes.
In 1816 Pierrepont and a committee of prominent Brooklyn residents successfully petitioned the state legislature for a village charter, which authorized a new board of trustees to open streets, build sidewalks, install water pumps, and establish a watch—much-needed improvements that would enhance Brooklyn’s image among affluent New Yorkers. When the trustees received a street plan that favored the Hickses’ vision of development, Pierrepont hired his own surveyor, worked up an alternative proposal, and got it adopted for the area south of Clark Street, leaving the Hickses predominant above that line. Pierrepont likewise blocked the powerful Schermerhorns from establishing a ropewalk in his part of the Heights, forcing them (and their workers) over to what is now Schermerhorn Street.
Pierrepont’s readiness to combine the roles of land speculator, local politician, and community booster—so unlike Astor, who preferred to work behind the scenes—began to pay off during the yellow fever epidemic that struck New York in 1822. Like Greenwich, Brooklyn received an influx of well-to-do refugees (the steam ferry Nassau skipped downtown Manhattan and plied back and forth between the two locations), and Pierrepont began at once to advertise his lots on the Heights. They were “elevated and perfectly healthy at all seasons,” he wrote—ideal for “Families who may desire to associate in forming a select neighborhood and circle of society” and especially convenient for “Gentlemen whose business or profession requires daily attendance into the city.” These and similar claims by Hoyts, Boerums, and other landowners stimulated a construction boom that raised nine hundred new buildings on and around the Heights over the next half-dozen years. By 1830 Brooklyn had become the country’s first commuter suburb, and Hezekiah Pierrepont a very rich man.
“THE LONDON OF THE NEW WORLD”
As the Erie Canal neared completion, the Times of London predicted it would make New York “the London of the New World.” The city’s meteoric growth over the next ten or fifteen years largely bore out that prediction. Though the Hudson River town could hardly be compared with the colossus of the Thames, it had established itself as America’s preeminent seaport, emporium, and financial center. After an 1831 visit, even the hard-to-please Mrs. Trollope found herself gushing about New York that, “situated on an island, which I think it will one day cover, it rises, like Venice, from the sea, and like that fairest of cities in the days of her glory, receives into its lap tribute of all the riches of the earth.”
New York’s success owed much to the entrepreneurial daring of its businessmen, who had proven themselves more willing than counterparts in other cities to take risks in pursuit of profit. Immigrant Yankee and European capitalists, having demonstrated their feistiness in the very act of relocating, seemed more flexible, less bound by tradition. They didn’t always succeed—New York firms failed more often than did the dynastic enterprises of Boston—but their collective ambition stoked the city’s economic furnace.
Yet if New Yorkers were willing to hustle in the marketplace, it was a marketplace both cosseted and regulated by the state. Public enterprise was as much a part of New York’s civic culture as private