Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [451]
Peter Cooper, of mixed Dutch, English, and Huguenot ancestry, was the son of a Methodist hatmaker who had moved his family down to the city from Newburgh in 1808. After trying his hand at hatting, brewing, coachmaking and cabinetmaking, young Peter made a go of selling a cloth-shearing machine he’d developed. In 1816, however, Britain’s postwar dumping spree drove his customers out of business, and the twentyfive-year-old Cooper opened a grocery store in Bowery Village. He also continued tinkering with mechanical devices; among his inventions was an endless chain for drawing Erie Canal boats, which won De Witt Clinton’s applause but was never used.
In 1821 Cooper bought a glue factory at Sunfish Pond, amid clover fields and buttonwood trees near the village of Kip’s Bay. When the new Bull’s Head market opened nearby, providing a plentiful supply of cows’ and calves’ feet, Cooper devised new methods for using them to produce glue, gelatin, household cement, isinglass, and neat’s-foot oil. He thus became the premier supplier of such items to the city’s tanners, paint manufacturers, and dry-goods merchants. He also became a pioneer polluter: his factory so fouled the pond’s waters that it had to be drained and filled in 1839.
Cooper invested his profits in land purchases around town. In 1828, convinced the proposed new B&O would send Maryland’s land values skyrocketing, he purchased three thousand acres near Baltimore and began large-scale development there. While leveling hills and draining swamps, he discovered iron ore. Immediately he set up furnaces and forges, positioning himself to sell rails to the B&O.
When the company on which his future depended ran into technical trouble, Cooper promised to invent them an engine. “I got up a little locomotive,” he later explained, cobbling it together from old wheels, musket barrels, and a small brass steam engine he’d built in New York City. In August 1830, with Cooper at the controls, Tom Thumb hauled a carload of B&O officials at the breathtaking speed of eighteen miles per hour. Investors now snapped up B&O bonds, and the B&O used the proceeds to buy Cooper’s iron rails, making him his first fortune.
Now it was New York that faced a threat to its canal-based preeminence, and powerful Manhattanites quickly jumped into railroading. By 1831 the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad Company—with Stephen Van Rensselaer as titular head, John Jacob Astor an active director and major stockholder, and officers and promoters with such august names as Jay, Fish, Stuyvesant, Schuyler, and King—had completed a link between the Hudson and Mohawk rivers, connecting Albany and Schenectady.
Its success sparked a rail boom. Entrepreneurs and communities deluged the legislature with requests for corporate charters. Funds flowed into lines linking other Erie Canal towns, and within a decade through service was available from Albany to Buffalo. In 1832 New York City promoters won a charter for a New York and Erie line that would cut out Albany and slice diagonally across the state to Dunkirk, on Lake Erie, from Piermont, on the Hudson. The Erie’s backers—including leading merchants (Eleazar Lord), bankers (James Gore King), and land developers (Samuel B. Ruggles)—also had the clout to win three million dollars in state credits toward construction.
While these distant enterprises were getting under way, closer to home another set of investors had set out to connect the two ends of Manhattan Island. Banker John Mason and two large landholders interested in promoting their uptown real estate won a charter in 1831 for a New York and Harlem Rail Road, and its initial stock offering of $350,000 was immediately oversubscribed. The Common Council granted the NY&H the right to operate cars over a double track from City Hall to the Harlem River along Fourth