Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [461]
Uptown, a residential-based boom was underway, spurred by developers seeking to profit from housing the exploding population. Manhattan had contained roughly 124,000 residents in 1820, 167,000 in 1825, and 200,000 in 1830. Fed by a tripling in the rate of immigration, by 1835 the population topped 270,000, and with the annual overseas influx doubling again, Manhattan was headed toward an 1840 total of 313,000. During the 1830s New York was the fastest-growing city in the United States, and at some point during the decade it surpassed Mexico City in population, becoming the largest city in the New World.
Between 1821 and 1835 the population of every ward tripled or quadrupled, generating crowding, congestion, and soaring real estate prices. The value of land in Manhattan went from $64.8 million in 1826 to $87.6 million in 1830 to over $143 million in 1835—then shot to $233 million within the next twelve months, for a total rise of 280 percent over the previous decade. These numbers reflected both speculative expectations and actual improvements. Developers built commercial structures and private dwellings at a fantastic pace. In 1834, 877 commercials and 654 residentials went up; in 1835, 1259 and 865 of each were added; and in 1836, 1826 and 868. Buildings grew taller, too. In 1824 three-fourths of all new buildings had been two stories high, and none was over three; in 1834, a third of the structures surpassed three stories, and over two-thirds of the city’s new stores (15 percent of all new construction) had three or more floors.
The money for all this flowed in from private investors, many of them old landed families. Stuyvesants, Livingstons, Roosevelts, Goelets, Cuttings, Rhinelanders, Lenoxes, Lispenards, Brevoorts, and Bayards plunged into the real estate market, as, of course, did John Jacob Astor. Financial institutions also invested, after New York State removed restrictions on banks’ ability to make loans on urban land. Merchants, professionals, and shopkeepers, too, combined their savings with mortgage-backed loans to build speculative housing on an ever larger scale. A survey in 1831 showed that over six and a half million dollars had been loaned out on mortgages, two-thirds of it from individuals residing in the city, another third from “incorporated companies.”
Most actual construction continued to be undertaken by small, independent contractor-entrepreneurs, who put up perhaps one to three houses a year and operated on the thinnest of margins. But a handful of developers emerged on the order of London’s Thomas Cubitt, a carpenter who had risen to preside over much the biggest construction firm England’s capital had ever seen. Cubitt supervised the raising not of single buildings or even rows of them, but whole ensembles of houses, arranged in squares, crescents, and terraces—the grand estate developments like Bloomsbury, Belgravia, and Pimlico that blossomed in the 1820s and 1830s.
The New Yorker who most closely approximated Cubitt’s accomplishment was Samuel Bulkley Ruggles, though his social status was quite different from the Londoner’s. Ruggles, born in 1800 in New Milford, Connecticut, grew up in Poughkeepsie, where his father was a prominent lawyer. After graduating from Yale in 1814, he studied law, moved to New York in 1821, set up his own practice, and married Mary Rosalie Rathbone, daughter of a rich merchant. Her financial and social patrimony helped him establish close ties with the old Knickerbockracy, many of whom found payment of taxes and street assessments on their inherited estates to be a growing burden. Ruggles suggested he could turn their assets into profitable sources of income. Noting that canal development had helped push the value of Manhattan’s taxable real estate from fifty-two million dollars in 1825 to ninety-five million in 1831, he predicted that the impact of railroad construction would be even greater. “Within five years after the railroad from Albany shall reach Lake Erie,” Ruggles declared, “the real estate upon this little rocky