Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [528]
METROPOLITAN MANUFACTURING
As of 1855 roughly two-thirds of the city’s industrial workforce was employed in firms with fewer than a hundred hands, half of them in firms with under twenty-five—big by the standards of 1840, but nonetheless lilliputian alongside a behemoth like Novelty. Even in the iron industry, small- to medium-size firms were the rule. By 1860 New York had 539 iron works with 10,600 employees—an average of twenty per shop—producing gas meters, plumbing fixtures, printing presses, cutlery, iron beds, springs, nails, bolts, and the like. In woodworking, giant companies turning out pianos were far outnumbered by small furniture shops where handfuls of workers turned out cheap tables, cane chairs, sofas, beds, and chests. Shipmaking required huge yards but depended also on the sixty-odd firms that produced sails, blocks, and other marine equipment. All in all, in 1860 Manhattan housed 4,375 manufacturing establishments, which employed 90,204 workers. Most of these were small operations, crammed into the upper stories of buildings used otherwise for trade and commerce (44 percent were in the downtown warehouse district bounded by the Second Ward). Why did New York attract such a bevy of manufacturers?
Partly it was a matter of finance. Banks were still unwilling to lend to small manufacturers. Hence enterprising artisans either paid their own start-up and overhead costs, which limited them to the cheap rental spaces available in the warehouse district, or they relied on loans (and orders) from downtown merchants, who preferred their partners (and investments) close to hand.
Partly it was a matter of markets. For manufactures destined for export, it made sense to locate production facilities near the port, the place where it was easiest to get information about, and ship to, distant markets. When items were destined for Manhattan—and the city consumed most of what it made—it was proximity to local purchasers that dictated the choice.
Partly it was a matter of access to other manufacturers. New York was a warren of interlocking suppliers. Iron foundries produced steam boilers for shipyards, gas tanks for gas companies, architectural ornaments for contractors; and they relied in turn on a network of repairmen, machine shops, and importers of raw materials. Cabinetmakers prized nearness to sawmills, dealers, and auction houses. Papermakers, rag collectors, publishers, printers, and even pencil factories (the country’s biggest was on the East River) developed synergistic relationships. P. J. Lorillard cut and cured tobacco at his plant in the Bronx and packed it downtown on Broome and West Broadway. While there were areas of topographical specialization, most manufacturing areas were a jumble of businesses. In the 1850s, when the blocks south of Houston and west of Broadway began to change from residential to industrial, they filled with foundries, copper and brass shops, locksmiths, China and glass manufactories, cabinetmakers and furniture makers, and the lumber yards that supplied them.
Partly—principally—Manhattan’s was a labor-intensive economy. Most New York workshops relied on skill and muscle, not steam. Powered firms were roughly three times as expensive to establish as unpowered ones, so by 1860 only 18 percent of New York’s shops were engine driven. This was up considerably from the 4 percent using steam a decade earlier, but it still left three-quarters of Manhattan’s workers in firms where people-power was the only source of energy. Not surprisingly, most firms planted themselves close to the low-wage, walk-to-work proletarians who were stacked into the island’s lower wards.
The most characteristic form of metropolitan manufacturing was the transformed textile trade. After 1840 the ailing artisanal system of production, unable to withstand the pressure of low-paid immigrant labor and a new national demand for ready-to-wear men’s clothing, had succumbed to capitalist relations of production. Ready-mades had once