Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [511]
Bottomfeeding was not the only route to success. Alexander Turney Stewart, born in 1803 near Belfast (where he was educated for the ministry), emigrated to New York in 1818 and found work as a schoolteacher. In September 1823 he opened a tiny drygoods store on lower Broadway just north of City Hall Park, offering Irish linens, French cambrics, damask, and similar items “on reasonable terms.” The business flourished, and over the next twenty years Stewart moved from one location to another, each one a little bigger and fancier than the last. By 1837 his five-story, double-width emporium at 257 Broadway was one of the city’s largest. In the panic, Stewart bought up great amounts of distressed merchandise from bankrupt wholesalers and resold it at lowprice high-volume, emerging as one of the city’s first millionaires.
Lewis Tappan fashioned a new industry out of hard times. At first, he and his brother, Arthur, had concentrated on simply staying afloat. Prevailing on their creditors to let them to stay in business, they cut expenses to the bone—Arthur moved into a boardinghouse and slashed his aid to abolitionists—and in eighteen months repaid all outstanding obligations, an amazing accomplishment. Still, the silk business remained a day-to-day struggle, and in 1840 Lewis departed to launch the Mercantile Agency, the country’s first credit rating firm (and ancestor of Dun and Bradstreet). Even in good times, New York wholesalers had lacked information about the solvency and reliability of the far-flung country storekeepers to whom they annually entrusted goods worth millions of dollars. The depression had underscored the problem, as unscrupulous (or merely desperate) retailers used evasion or fraud to escape their liabilities. Tappan’s solution was to establish a network of trustworthy informants—recruited from abolitionists, evangelical clerics, and solid young lawyers like Abraham Lincoln of Springfield, Illinois—who forwarded to New York confidential reports on the merits of local storekeepers. These communiques assessed net worth, liquidity, and “character.” They flagged storekeepers who had intemperate habits, led a sporting life, or were “mixed up with a bad woman” (marriage was deemed essential to good credit, though having too many children was thought to cut into capital). From these raw files Tappan fashioned reports he sent to subscribers twice each year, just in time for the fall and spring seasons, when inland storekeepers descended on the city. He thus secured his own fortune and strengthened New York’s position as a commercial center and haven for creditors.
“LAUGH AND GROW FAT”
Clearly, New Yorkers’ responses to the drawn-out depression varied widely. Some failed, others made fortunes; some gave charity, others accepted it; some plunged into politics, others into religion, others still into crime. But one reaction was well-nigh universal: a search for diversion, something to drive one’s cares away. For all but the rich, this dictated a search for inexpensive pleasures. At first, the panic had sandbagged the city’s entertainment trades, but it quickly became apparent to a new breed of entrepreneurs that substantial profits could be made in hard times by providing cheap amusements to mass markets.
In 1837 popular papers had suffered along with their working-class readers. The panic killed off most of the penny dailies, including the Transcript. Even pioneer Benjamin Day lost heart. Facing declining circulation and advertising revenues, Day sold the Sun to his brother-in-law, Moses Yale Beach, another Connecticut Yankee. Soon, however, it became clear that working people considered penny papers an excusable indulgence in difficult days. Beach infused the