Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [453]
Negotiating Brooklyn’s streets was nowhere near as hazardous, but there too the transportation revolution had arrived. In 1832 the state legislature chartered the Brooklyn and Jamaica Rail Road, with the aim of linking the two oldest communities on the western end of Long Island. In 1834 (the same year omnibuses were introduced to Brooklyn) the line received permission to lay track down Atlantic Street. But it had barely started running its first locomotives (in 1836) when it was subsumed by the far more ambitious Long Island Rail Road (LIRR). The LIRR, chartered in 1834, was intended in part to foster the economic vitality of Kings, Queens, and Suffolk counties—whose farms were being outpaced by the fertile enterprises of Genesee and Cayuga counties now accessible via the Erie Canal—by enhancing the exchange of market garden produce for urban manure. Primarily, however, the LIRR was intended to speed travelers between New York and Boston, through the center of the island, by connecting Jamaica with the harbor at Greenport. Most local traffic in Brooklyn and Queens would continue to be handled by stagecoaches traveling along turnpikes (privately owned toll roads), though a glimpse of the far future arrived in June 1833 when Charles Durant lifted off from the Battery in a balloon and sailed eastward to a safe landing in Jamaica.
SMOKESTACKS AND SPECULATORS
Peter Cooper wasn’t the only one who realized that railroads needed tracks, engines, and boilers. New York’s iron foundries and machine shops, already flourishing in tandem with the city’s shipyards, expanded to meet the new needs. Happily, the local iron furnaces could now count on expanded and regular deliveries of coal, as the completion in 1832 of the Morris Canal across New Jersey had linked New York’s harbor to the Lehigh River. In 1830, moreover, a German-American ironmaster had smelted iron ore with anthracite coal at a laboratory furnace in the city, a process he patented in 1833, thus helping launch a new era in the commercial manufacture of iron.
Demand generated additional supply. The Allaire Works, hitherto the city’s biggest, faced new competition from the Novelty Iron Works (1830), Browning and Dunham’s North River Iron Foundry and Locomotive Engine shop (1837), and the Morgan Works (1838). Harmon Hendricks’s Soho Copper Works boomed as well with the demand for boilers, flues, and boxes. Hendricks, joined by his sons, Uriah and Henry, had moved their operations to Belleville, New Jersey. Eventually, most railspawned metal and machine work would follow them across the Hudson—Paterson, in particular, would lead the country in producing locomotive engines—but for the moment New York City remained a major site of industrial production and innovation.
The coming of the railroad also revitalized the city’s capital markets. Transactions had been relatively sedate on the New York Stock & Exchange Board (NYS & EB) in 1830, when shares of the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad first traded there. By 1831, however, with investors scrambling after the NY&H offering, a frenzied boom in stocks of the new technology got underway. By 1835, at the height of the mania, rail trades had outstripped those in all the NYS&EB’s hundred-plus listed stocks and bonds. Total volume reached six thousand shares a day, with orders pouring in from across the country.
Much of the investment business was handled by private bankers and loan contractors who bought up trustworthy securities and sold them to investors seeking safe and steady dividend income. The city’s most substantial investment banker, the so-called king of Wall Street, was Nathaniel Prime. Reputedly the third wealthiest man in New York in 1830, Prime avoided speculative operations, and his conservatism appealed to continental capitalists who, frightened by the Revolution of 1830, were seeking a secure haven for their funds. Europeans who had soured on Latin American loans and been excited by the Erie’s success now