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Worse still was the prevailing antihistoric sensibility, evidenced by even so distinguished a citizen as Cadwallader Colden. In 1825, when hailing the opening of the Erie Canal, Golden had remarked: “We delight in the promised sunshine of the future, and leave to those who are conscious that they have passed their grand climacteric to console themselves with the splendors of the past.” Bryant and Verplanck suspected that “New-Yorkers seem to take a pleasure in defacing the monuments of the good old times, and of depriving themselves of all venerable and patriotic associations.” All the more imperative, therefore, to preserve any remaining “fragments of tradition and biography,” and the authors accordingly chronicled the little church where Whitefield used to preach, the site of Washington’s inauguration, Jefferson’s home on Cedar Street.

Cooper too cherished the few Dutch dwellings that remained—“angular, sidelong edifices, that resemble broken fragments of prismatic ice”—regretting a growth rate that forced old buildings “out of existence before they have had time to decay.” Asher Durand would try to conjure them back into existence by painting picturesque tableaux of New Amsterdam’s past—as interpreted by Washington Irving—in works such as The Wrath of Peter Stuyvesant.

In the end, however, the ties that bound many Knickerbocker artists to the city would prove tenuous indeed. When Cooper returned from Europe, he withdrew to the old family manor at Otsego Lake. Irving would establish himself as a country squire at an old Dutch farmhouse near Tarrytown. And Cole retreated to a country home just north of Catskill. Nevertheless, New York’s merchants, financiers, and lawyers were delighted with their artists’ achievements. Given “the growing Fame” acquired by Irving and Cooper, Philip Hone believed, in time the city would “become as celebrated for taste and refinement, as it already is for Enterprise and public spirit.”

Indeed, the Manhattan Medici had every reason to feel proud about the direction the civic ship was taking under their collective captaincy. They felt secure in their position as patrons of the arts and sciences, directors of economic enterprise, chief celebrants at municipal pageants, leaders in the political arena, and owners of most of the city’s terrain. True, there were intramural debates between Knickerbockers and Evangelicals, but none had proved sufficiently divisive to override their common republican conviction that they could and should assume responsibility for the common good. But this serene self-confidence in their ability to speak for the city as a whole, without rebuke from below, was at the same time being called into question in a series of confrontations with obstreperous lower orders, who, day by day, were developing opinions and judgments considerably at variance with their own.

29

Working Quarters

On New Year’s Eve, as the city bade farewell to 1827, several thousand workingmen—laborers, apprentices, butcher boys, chimney sweeps—set out from the Bowery on a raucous march through the darkened downtown streets, drinking, beating drums and tin kettles, shaking rattles, blowing horns. The crowd headed down Pearl Street into the heart of the city’s commercial district, smashing crates and barrels and making what one account described as “the most hideous noises.” From there the marchers wheeled across town to the Battery, where they knocked out the windows of genteel residences and attempted to tear down the iron railing around the park. At two in the morning they tromped up Broadway, just in time to harass revelers leaving a fancy-dress ball at the City Hotel. A contingent of watchmen appeared but, after a tense confrontation, gave way, and “the multitude passed noisily and triumphantly up Broadway.”

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, New York’s propertied classes had more or less tolerated such instances of plebeian revelry because they were relatively harmless and (as Petrus Stuyvesant