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The life insurance industry finally took root, as businessmen, scarred by the depression, responded to new hard-sell campaigns. Agents warned that “experience demonstrates that the possession of property is almost equally unstable with that of life,” presented statistics demonstrating that “the merest fraction” of those in mercantile pursuits “leave any property to their surviving relations,” and printed up chilling lists of men who had died shortly after taking out a policy. Using the new domesticity to counteract religious objections that insurance interfered with the workings of Divine Providence, agents pleaded with merchants and professionals not to let their “beloved wife or children” be left “often worse than penniless, to the cold charities of the world.” Eleven life insurance companies soon were thriving in the city, paced by the Mutual Life Insurance Company (1843), which by 1860 had over twelve thousand contracts on its books.

IRON AGE

During the 1850s, fattened on trade and gold, New York became the nation’s leading manufacturing center—indeed one of the fastest-growing industrial areas in the world. Testifying to this transformation were the ironworks that hunkered down along the East River and Hudson River waterfronts, attended like economic royalty by flotillas of barges full of New Jersey pig iron and Pennsylvania coal. (In 1854 alone over one million tons of the latter came down the Delaware and Hudson Canal.)

Some of the biggest—the Globe Iron Works, the Morgan Iron Works, and the Delameter Iron Works, each acres in extent and employing hundreds of workers—were creatures of the boom in railroads and steamships, producing entire trestles, thirty-ton marine engines, and the enormous bed-plates on which a ship’s machinery rested. Largest of the lot, an acknowledged wonder of the age, was the sprawling Novelty Iron Works on the East River shore at the foot of 12th Street. Founded in the 1830s by Thomas B. Stillman and Horatio Allen, Novelty was a five-acre maze of buildings that employed as many as twelve hundred workers by the early 1850s. Highly systematized, Novelty was sectioned into eighteen departments, each directed by a foreman who in turn answered to the “front office”—one of the city’s first—staffed by a superintendent and eleven clerks.

Another set of foundries turned out cast iron for warehouses and stores. In the mid-forties James Bogardus, a New York watchmaker and inventor, developed and patented a method for mass-producing prefabricated building elements. Columns, panels, and arches—in any architectural style—were cast from molds, laid on the foundry floor, primed, and assembled into small numbered units. Then, packed in straw, they were loaded on a horse-drawn dray, taken to construction sites, and raised and bolted into place, ready for painting (usually a light earthen color) and the installation of plateglass windows. At first Bogardus’s modular facades were simply fastened to the front of existing brick buildings, converting downtown structures from domestic to commercial use. In 1849, he designed a complete cast-iron facade, for a Broadway drugstore, and in 1850 he patented an all-cast-iron building.1

Bogardus broke the logjam in commercial construction, and his structures—inexpensive to make, easy to erect and maintain, supposedly fireproof—were soon in great demand. Foundries were created or converted to supply them. Daniel D. Badger had moved to New York in 1846 to make iron shutters. Now he relocated his Architectural Iron Works to East 14th Street and Avenue C, where he churned out Corinthian columns, roof cornices, and (from 1852 on) complete cast-iron storefronts. Though Badger dominated the field, competitors flourished as well—notably the Jackson, Cornell, and Etna ironworks—most also located near the rivers for ease of access to coal and pig iron.

There were, however, serious drawbacks to erecting giant industrial plants in Manhattan. Apart from the overcrowded streets and jammed docks, the rapid rise in the price of land (and of taxes tied to assessed valuation) meant