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By Root 8026 0

found out) difficult to uproot. Even after the Revolution, “Callithumpian bands”—echoing ancient European traditions—had continued to parade about, beating on pans, shouting and groaning, mocking the powerful and overly dignified. Respectable opinion had grown steadily less tolerant of self-organized plebeian frolics, however, partly because they affronted genteel notions of correct behavior, and partly because every year they became more truculent, more defiant of authority. It was one thing for great throngs of working people to rejoice noisily at Lafayette’s visit or the opening of the Erie Canal, civic ceremonies orchestrated by gentlemen; it was quite another for rowdies to take over the streets, wantonly destroying property and terrorizing law-abiding citizens.

The very next year, accordingly, Mayor Walter Bowne ordered the watch to disperse all crowds on New Year’s Eve, and there was no Callithumpian procession. But such street confrontations would not fade away, in part because they were rooted in widening divisions between working-class wards and gentry precincts over the proper canons of public and private behavior.

WORKING QUARTERS

On point of divergence concerned the seemliness of living where one worked. While some prosperous entrepreneurial artisans had joined the gentility in commuting to their place of business from uptown bedroom communities, few master craftsmen, journeymen, or unskilled laborers could afford the expensive new omnibuses. They stayed, accordingly, in craft-based communities, within which they could walk to work.

Greenwich Village remained one such house-and-shop stronghold. Especially after the Christopher Street pier (1828) became the main point of entry for building materials used in transforming the uptown cityscape, the area grew dense with carpenters, masons, painters, turners, stonecutters, dock builders, and street pavers. Brooklyn Village too continued as a working community based on agricultural processing and transport, its streets lined with household-shops of coachmakers and coopers, saddlers and blacksmiths. Butchers remained prominent: one was elected first village president. By the mid-1820s the booming hamlet had more than tripled its prewar population, creating additional jobs for resident carpenters and masons.

Corlear’s Hook still hosted the shipwrights, sailmakers, coopers, and chandlers whose livelihoods depended on the nearby shipyards—along with sailors, including a group of Chinese tars on Market Street who constituted the first significant Asian presence in New York. The Five Points also housed a great array of trades: breweries, potteries, and tobacco manufactories; tailoring, shoemaking, and printing establishments.

Bowery Village remained notorious for the stomach-turning stench of its slaughterhouses and lanyards. As late as 1825, upstate drovers like Daniel Drew were herding an estimated two hundred thousand head of cattle across King’s Bridge each year and making their way, accompanied by hordes of pigs, horses, and bleating spring lambs, down Manhattan to Henry Astor’s Bull’s Head Tavern and adjacent abattoirs. A butcher who acquired an exceptionally fine cow would then parade it through the streets, preceded by a band and followed by fellow butchers in aprons and shirtsleeves, stopping before homes of wealthy customers, who were expected to step out and order part of the animal.

Some of those customers, bolstered by gentry families filtering in from the lower wards, wanted to transform the Bowery into a more genteel neighborhood. Taking aim at the stink, the endless whinnying, lowing, and grunting, and the occasional steer running amok and goring passers-by, they set about driving the Bull’s Head from the area. In the mid-1820s, an association of socially prominent businessmen bought out Henry Astor and dismantled his enterprise. (A new Bull’s Head opened in semirural surroundings at Third Avenue and 24th Street and soon attracted cattle yards, slaughterhouses, pig and sheep pens, and a weekly market; the area became known as Bull’s Head Village,