Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [521]
RAIL
In May 1851, with great fanfare, President Fillmore and a party of civic notables boarded a steamer at the foot of Duane Street and chugged twenty miles upriver to the westbank port of Piermont. There the party transferred to a New York and Erie Rail Road car and proceeded to travel 447 miles to Dunkirk, a hamlet on the shores of Lake Erie.
An ecstatic Common Council hailed completion of the long-delayed line as “emphatically the work of the age,” and for good reason. Incorporated in 1832, the New York and Erie had not only survived the bankruptcy of most of its original backers during the Panic of 1837, but its engineers and immigrant laborers had contrived to run a double track of six-foot gauge over a major mountain system. The economic significance of this linkage was manifest to all. As director and ironmonger William E. Dodge jubilantly exclaimed: “The Empire City and the great West, the Atlantic Ocean and inland seas, are by this ligature of iron made one!”
Also in 1851, a second force of engineers and laborers was driving the Hudson River Rail Road within sight of Albany, having laid 144 miles of track along the bank of the Hudson. Like the Erie, the Hudson Line had overcome more than natural obstacles—including the opposition of powerful Hudson River steamboat operators who had been pouring money into the development of mammoth floating palaces to attract customers, with great success. Roused by the threat of a rival road out of Boston, however, the legislature assented to a charter for the Hudson Line. By the end of 1851 it was scooting passengers from New York to Albany in less than four hours as against seven and a half hours by steamboat. By 1853 its passengers could transfer to a set of interconnecting roads that stretched all the way to Buffalo. Unlike the Erie, moreover, the Hudson Line ran directly into Manhattan. Its cars rolled south down Eleventh Avenue to a massive depot covering the area between 30th and 32nd streets. There, since municipal regulations prohibited steam engines below that point (the danger of explosion still being very real), passengers and freight were transferred to horse cars, which clopped downtown along Tenth, West, and Hudson, stopping at 23rd, 14th, and Christopher, skirting the west side of Hudson Square, and finally terminating at a shed on Chambers Street.
The arrival of the railroad on the city’s West Side, coupled with the increasing preference of steamships for the Hudson River docks, pulled vast numbers of drygoods merchants across town from their Pearl Street quarters. By 1855, speeded by a city-engineered program of street widenings that cleared vast tracts for real estate speculators, some two hundred warehouses had been erected, many handsomely designed in the latest Italianate mode with white marble or brownstone facades. Rents and prices doubled in three months, quickly driving out groggeries and boardinghouses. “From the old worm of Decay,” exulted the Tribune, “flutters forth the gorgeous butterfly of Wealth and Beauty.”
Together, then, the Erie and Hudson lines sustained New York’s overwhelming advantage in the movement of western produce to the East Coast. By the late fifties, the city was handling half again as much rail tonnage as Philadelphia and Baltimore combined. In 1860, counting the still-heavy volume of traffic on the Erie Canal, it received $161 million worth of goods from the West, just about the value of that year’s cotton crop.
A third line, the old New York and Harlem, was meanwhile acquiring a new look. It still ran cars every ten minutes from Union Square up to Harlem village, but in 1840 it bridged the Harlem River at 135th Street and began to push north. Two years later, construction crews had crossed the Bronx River and were driving into