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of omnibuses shot up from 255 in 1846 to 683 in 1853 (when they carried over a hundred thousand passengers a day). After 1840, cabs too began clattering about town. The din was terrific, what with hundreds of iron horseshoes striking cobblestone pavements, boxes rattling, drivers cursing and fighting. The racket was not much alleviated when, in 1853, the city began to substitute Belgian blocks—bread-loaf-size cut-granite chunks that were better able to withstand iron-rimmed wagon wheels than circular cobblestones and provided firmer footing for horses.

This profusion of conveyances soon swamped the downtown streets. On an average weekday in the mid-fifties, fifteen thousand vehicles rumbled by St. Paul’s at the corner of Broadway and Fulton. “The throng and rush of traffic in the business part of New York is astonishing even for London,” noted a visiting correspondent for the London Times. “There is a perpetual jam and lock of vehicles for nearly two miles along the chief thoroughfare.” Along the riverfronts, West Street and South Street were lined by block after block (as Gleason’s Pictorial Magazine put it in 1857) of bustling “sail-lofts, shipping offices, warehouses of every description, cheap eating-houses, markets, and those indescribable stores, where old cables, junk, anchors, and all sorts of cast-off worldly things, that none but a seaman has a name for, find a refuge.” Like Broadway, these dockside streets were clogged with horsedrawn wagons, carts, and carriages, which by the 1850s often choked off movement altogether.

Decay and disrepair was as pervasive as congestion along both rivers. Pilings wobbled and shook. Wharves vanished under the waves at high tide, some never to reappear. Rotting piers suddenly gave way, tumbling people and cargoes alike into the water. Pools of effluvia from open sewers and drains, trapped by masses of floating debris, lapped at crumbling bulkheads; except in the dead of winter, the stench and flies could be overpowering. By 1855, almost in defiance of the port’s burgeoning traffic, New York’s waterfront had deteriorated so badly that state investigators found no more than a dozen-odd piers in fair to good repair on either side of Manhattan. The one positive consequence was that wharfage rates remained low, maintaining New York’s strong competitive advantage over ports having better but more expensive facilities. In 1852, for example, it cost one packet $4.88 to unload seventeen hundred bales of cotton at a Hudson River pier over a two-day period; in Boston or Baltimore it would have cost sixty-eight dollars.

If there was short-term method in the madness, the city would pay a long-term price, as the deplorable condition of the Manhattan waterfront prompted new construction on the opposite side of the East River. From Green Point in the north to Red Hook in South Brooklyn, gangs of workmen filled in tidal marshes, built breakwaters, and threw up blocks of docks and warehouses. One of the largest projects was merchant and landowner Daniel Richards’s plan to transform forty acres of Red Hook marshlands into the Atlantic Basin. Surveying began in 1839; the first dock blocks were sunk in 1841; the initial warehouse rose in 1844 under the direction of contractor James S. T. Stranahan; the port’s first steam grain elevator was installed in 1846; and by the end of the decade, its forty acres of basin were capable of sheltering a hundred ships at a time. The docks in turn were covered with twenty acres of four-story brick and stone warehouses, erected by developers like Samuel Ruggles, and enough grain elevators to make it the main terminus for Erie canal boats. In the Brooklyn Navy Yard, meanwhile, the federal government spent two million dollars over a ten-year period on the construction of a massive masonry drydock.

Just as these sea-oriented projects were coming to fruition, new railroads began pumping even vaster quantities of cargo and passengers into the New York maelstrom.

Built in reponse to overcrowding and deterioration along the Manhattan waterfront, the huge Atlantic Basin