Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [508]
But not efficient enough. Old Hays, as he was known, was in his sixties. The daytime men were unsalaried and often corrupt political appointees, more interested in earning fees than preventing crime. The “leatherheads” (as watchmen were jeeringly known, after their leather helmets) were poorly paid moonlighters, scantily trained and ill respected. In the big upheavals of the 1830s civil authorities had been repeatedly forced to resort to the militia—usually the elite Twenty-seventh—but frenzied lastminute responses to street turbulence no longer seemed acceptable.
After the shipworkers’ strike of February 1836—an affair that underscored the vulnerability of the city’s commercial core—an elite consensus had emerged in favor of strengthening the forces of law and order. The Twenty-seventh was issued standing orders to be ready to deal with street violence, and the state legislature (in March 1836) specifically authorized the mayor to order out the militia to “quell riots, suppress insurrection, to protect the property, or preserve the tranquillity of the city.” Yet widespread sentiment still held reliance on the military to be inappropriate for a republican government. In 1836, accordingly, Mayor Lawrence had asked Police Justice Oliver M. Lownds to consider ways of reorganizing the police department.
Lownds proposed that New York establish a twenty-four-hour professional police force, modeled on the one created in London by Robert Peel back in 1829. Lownds’s “System of Police” envisioned the creation of multiple stationhouses, each armed with alarm bells. It won the approval of Mayor Lawrence, but opponents killed it by rousing old fears of a standing army and playing on new antigovernment sentiments, distrust of professionals, and fears that political parties might control the police. Besides, the Twenty-seventh Regiment had done such a sterling job suppressing riots. “Six hundred strong,” one paper noted, and “composed entirely of the respectable young men of the city,” they “may be considered the most efficient police we have, and we believe the Mayor and Common Council look upon them as such.” So, apparently, did the federal government, which in 1839 allowed the Twenty-seventh to drill at Fort Hamilton (making it the first National Guard training camp in the nation); in 1840 granted the fort twenty thousand dollars for additional armaments; and in 1841 dispatched Captain Robert E. Lee for a five-year stint as post engineer, charged with improving the fort’s defenses along with those of other military installations in the area.
The council did agree that New York needed a new jail. The old Bridewell was a nuisance, and the Bellevue Penitentiary was too distant from the downtown courts. In 1835, accordingly, construction commenced on a Hall of Detention and Justice. Situated on the grounds of the old Fresh Water Pond, along Centre Street between White and Leonard, the structure had a highly distinctive appearance. John L. Stevens of Hoboken had returned from the Holy Land with illustrations of an Egyptian tomb that caught the fancy of the Common Council. Completed in 1838, the new and imposing city prison became popularly (if mordantly) known as the Tombs.
In the depression, the propolice movement revived. The Twenty-seventh no longer seemed quite so potent a weapon since the panic had bankrupted many of its officers and men, and each passing year had underscored the inadequacy, inefficiency, and outright corruption of the existing force. The daytime marshals and constables, unsalaried, were compensated by fees, supplemented by privately offered rewards. The officers, not surprisingly, concentrated on crimes that seemed most likely to generate emoluments, such as thefts from a rich merchant’s warehouse. With New York in effect having evolved a system of privatized justice, some enterprising