Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [460]
The election proceeded with military guards stationed at the arsenal, City Hall, Merchants’ Exchange, and the local branch of the Bank of the United States. Huge crowds milled around Masonic and Tammany halls while the votes were counted. Finally it was announced that Mayor Lawrence, the antibank Democrat, had defeated Verplanck, the Whig, by the whisker-thin margin of 180 votes out of thirty-five thousand cast, but the fledgling Whig Party captured a majority of the Common Council.
“THE CITY IS REDEEMED,” crowed the Commercial Advertiser. To celebrate what Hone called a “signal triumph,” the Whigs threw a Castle Garden banquet on April 15. Tables were set for ten thousand, but the multitudes jamming the Battery were great enough to require several shifts. Hundreds of boiled hams and rounds of beef, along with three pipes of wine and forty barrels of beer, disappeared down the collective gullet. Afterward, thousands marched up Greenwich Street to where the visiting Daniel Webster was quartered; he gave a fiery speech of congratulations. The later inauguration of Mayor Lawrence was the occasion for a turbulent gathering of his Democratic supporters, but Tammany had been badly shaken.
Happily for the Democrats, the Bank War now moved to a victorious conclusion. Biddle had overplayed his hand, his colossal arrogance alienating even his supporters. When elder statesmen like Albert Gallatin and Isaac Bronson demanded Biddle relax the pressure, the Philadelphia!! refused, and New Yorkers mobilized to fend off his attack. The Safety Fund made available a multimillion-dollar line of credit to member banks, enabling them to defy Biddle and stabilize the markets, and another state agency, the Canal Commission, permitted the banks maximum use of its massive revenues, further helping undercut Biddle’s strategy.
With New York holding the line and angry denunciations of Biddle’s abuse of power sweeping the country, House Democrats mustered a majority for a resolution upholding removal and opposing recharter. Even Whig politicians felt compelled to abandon the BUS. By summer Biddle had given up, his bank was on the road to extinction, and New York City had emerged from the crisis as the undisputed financial capital of the country.
Business revived quickly, and in New York City support for Whigs eroded just as rapidly. Aided by a burgeoning labor movement, Tammany swept the fall 1834 elections. Discouraged by their swift rise but even swifter fall, downcast Whigs didn’t even contest Mayor Lawrence’s reelection bid in April 1835.
CITY BUILDERS
The Bank War interrupted the 1830s boom but failed to stop it. With the dramatic imbroglio over, stock speculators, railroad promoters, and real estate investors resumed their fevered dealings. Land developers, in particular, set a torrid pace, especially in New York City itself, and speculative building emerged as one of Manhattan’s (and Brooklyn’s) largest enterprises. Annual investment in new construction exceeded three million dollars, rivaling the stakes in shipbuilding, shoemaking, and clothing manufacture.
Ground zero for the building boom was the commercial area at the island’s lower tip, as a rapidly expanding mercantile and financial community tried to elbow itself into the seventeenth-century streetscape. Lot owners petitioned for wider roads, and the city responded with a massive program of prying open narrow and gloomy lanes. Between 1831 and 1834 Pine, William, Ann, Cedar, Hanover, and Exchange Place were among the many streets that had their residential houses relocated or, more often, torn down and replaced by purely commercial structures. The successful conclusion of the Bank War galvanized the process, with the victors determined to build a central business district worthy of the city’s new status. The year 1835 brought a surge of street widenings—Mill, Stone, and John streets were among the stretched thoroughfares—and a new