Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [388]
Taverns were particularly popular with the vast numbers of young men stacked in dreary boardinghouses. Saloons became workingmen’s parlors—places to eat, play, and affirm one’s generosity by treating comrades. Saloons and groceries also served as informal labor exchanges; out-of-state employers set up temporary hiring halls there. In addition, publicans and grocers offered loans and lines of credit, posted bail bond, and provided workers a cushion in difficult times—while further encouraging consumption of booze.
Like commercial sex, commercial drink had powerful patrician supporters, including the city fathers, as a group of outraged petitioners discovered in 1829. Some twenty-four hundred memorialists from outside the Five Points urged the Common Council to tear down a triangle of the section filled with tenants, taverns, and “horrors too awful to mention” and build a new jail on the site. The Street Committee backed the proposal, noting that the buildings in question were “in ruinous Condition” and occupied only by the “most degraded and abandoned of the human species.” Others in government responded that the area produced great income for the Corporation “on account of its being a good location for small retailers of liquor who have located themselves in the vicinity. What may be considered a nuisance,” they concluded, “has in reality increased the value of the property.”
ON THE BOWERY
Men played as hard as they drank in the working-class wards. Though official opposition had almost eliminated the baiting of bulls and bears by 1820, cockfighting continued to thrive, as did ratbaiting, a blood sport even more suitably scaled for urban life. Patsy Hearn’s Five Points grogshop, across from the Old Brewery, had a “Men’s Sporting Parlor” famous for its ratfights. Seated on pine planks around a railed-in sunken pit, fifteen feet square, two hundred men at a time watched while an escaped slave named Dusty Dustmoor released packs of rats collected by neighborhood youths. While the rodents engaged in losing combat with trained terriers, spectators wagered furiously on the number of rats the dogs would kill.
Trotting flourished too, as plebeian drivers ran informal matches along Third Avenue from after work to dusk or on Sunday afternoons, after which they repaired with their panting steeds to one of the taverns dotting the high road. Eventually a track for harness racing was built in Harlem, and, in the winter of 1824-5, the New York Trotting Club was formed, dominated by prosperous butchers.
New circus theaters arrived as well. The Lafayette (on Laurens near Canal), the Broadway (in a large wooden building between Canal and Grand), and the Mount Pitt (on Grand Street nearer to Corlear’s Hook) featured dancing girls, equestrian displays and races, and shows by traveling musicians and acrobats.
The most novel development in popular amusements was the transformation of the Bowery itself into a full-blown working-class entertainment strip. On Saturday night, after weekly wages were paid, pleasure seekers headed for its lamp-lit sidewalks. Bowery taverns, brothels, porter houses, oyster houses, dance halls, and gambling dens filled up with sailors, young butchers, day laborers, small employers, journeymen and apprentices from nearby furniture shops and shipyards, and smartly dressed young women as well.
The street’s premier institution was the Bowery Theater. For a few years after it replaced the