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In November 1831 Fort Hamilton received its first garrison, the fifty-two men and two officers of Battery F of the Fourth U.S. Artillery Regiment. During the peaceful 1830s the citadel remained undermanned, but the village continued to grow. There was only one church, however—Dutch Reformed—so many soldiers had to travel to Brooklyn or New York to worship. In 1834, accordingly, soldiers and locals joined in building St. John’s Episcopal Church just outside the fort (its cornerstone was laid in 1835). In 1836, seeking to supplement its grandly named dirt roads, the city engaged a company to build a railroad from Brooklyn to the fort, then on along Gravesend Bay to New Utrecht, Bath, and Coney Island.

Grand schemes were conceived far to the east of Brooklyn too. For a century and a half the conservative farmers of New Lots had gone about their traditional business. In 1835 things changed abruptly. John R. Pitkin, a wealthy Connecticut merchant, began buying up large portions of land (above today’s New Lots Avenue) from local villagers. He intended to found a great city—East New York—that would rival Manhattan. The new metropolis would have access to cheap food from local farmers, low rents that would allow manufacturers to undercut competitors, and a vast transportation center all its own along the shores of Jamaica Bay. By 1836 Pitkin had assembled a vast tract, laid out streets and lots, and prepared a prospectus that spoke glowingly of future buildings, markets, factories, parks, and schools.

In 1835 Pitkin had jumped border boundaries to Queens, where he launched another model village, Woodside (later Woodhaven). But the county in general remained unaffected by the boom. Flushing’s population remained stable at about two thousand and was only incorporated as a village in 1837, while Jamaica’s railroad-spurred growth remained in the future. Staten Island too remained largely isolated from the speculative fever. One group of speculators formed an association to develop the island’s northeastern sector as a resort center, to be named New Brighton. They borrowed $470,000 from bankers and erected a large hotel and some houses, but the enterprise didn’t get much farther. The area did attract “Commodore” Vanderbilt, however; in 1835, now among the city’s richest men, he built a porticoed and Corinthian-columned house on the family farm, between Stapleton and Tompkinsville.

GOOD TIMES

Philip Hone, an active player in the real estate game, was a very happy man in 1835. Land values, he noted elatedly, had soared “beyond all the calculations of the most sanguine spectators,” with the consequence that “immense fortunes have been made and realized within the last three months.” Abounding in newfound wealth, Hone set out to enjoy himself.

New York’s boom-era Knickercrats spent their off-work hours differently than did their evangelical class counterparts. While Arthur Tappan and his colleagues were stamping out sins, Philip Hone and his comrades were merrily indulging them. Hedonism was not universal, to be sure: reaction to good fortune varied with the individual. Old Nathaniel Prime had speculated heavily in stocks, bonds, and real estate and had won big. He retired in 1832, vastly wealthy, his sons well launched, his daughters well married. But Prime became seized by a strange fantasy. He grew convinced he was becoming poor and would die in the almshouse. Unable to shake this monomania, he cut his throat with a razor and died instantly.

Something akin to Prime’s anxiety infected even Hone’s optimism, for the noted bon vivant’s pursuit of the good life mixed celebration of pleasure with a search for security. He and his peers fashioned one enclave after another dedicated to gregarious fun—men’s clubs, opera houses, pleasure gardens; each was as much a sanctum as a playpen. They were places, as were the elite’s exclusive neighborhoods, where a newly flush bourgeoisie could experiment with an aristocratic lifestyle, safely segregated from the hoi polloi of an increasingly