Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [540]
Raymond acquired a Lightning press, hired a large staff, and joined the Associated Press. He also set out to establish a clear identity for the Times, one professing objectivity, detachment, and bourgeois respectability. The paper’s first issue, in September 1851, declared, with unmistakable reference to Greeley’s tubthumping, that “we shall make ita point to get into a passion as rarely as possible.” Raymond’s mix of prudent politics, good manners, and sober design found a readership at once—ten thousand in ten days—drawn, he claimed, from “business men at their stores” and “the most respectable families in town.” Advertisers flocked in, circulation doubled, and the Times replaced the Tribune as the favored organ of New York Whiggery.
Raymond and his backers had entered an extremely influential circle. By 1860 the five leading New York dailies, with a combined per diem circulation of 250,000, wielded immense power. Printing House Square had become the hub of American journalism, and city editors and publishers would become national celebrities—better known than manufacturers, department store moguls, or clipper ship captains.
A PAGEANT OF TEXT
Newspaper publishing, the city’s fourth largest manufacturing sector by the late 1850s, proved crucial to making the printing trade New York’s fastest growing industry. But a vast array of quite different kinds of material also rolled from the city’s presses, helping make Manhattan an ink-drenched town.
Ads were everywhere. Aleksandr Lakier, a Russian visitor in the 1850s, was struckby the steady flow of “notices and announcements [that] are thrust in your hands” along Broadway. Trade cards—four-by-six-inch handbills promoting everything from patent medicines to prostitutes—blossomed with the spread of lithography. “Bill-stickers” with paste buckets mades their rounds late at night, plastering their posters over those of their rivals, creating a patchwork of odd and quintessentially urban juxtapositions.
“New York is distinguished for its display in the way of signs,” noted chronicler John F. Watson in 1846; “every device and expense is resorted to, to make them attractive.” Not only were stores festooned with ever more and ever bigger placards and announcements, but so were warehouses, carriages, buses, fences, lampposts, trees—and people: men walked the streets with sandwich boards on their shoulders. One commentator noted with mock surprise that umbrellas had as yet been left blank, “their ample and conspicuous surface bearing no announcement of any new pill, new adhesive gum, bankrupt’s sale, or What is it?”
Civic text added to the visual pageant—banners draped over buildings for celebration, broadsides for political campaigns, and “Direction Boards” erected at the Board of Aldermen’s insistence “for the accommodation of the whole public, and especially strangers.” Often these street signs appeared only on gas-light stanchions, making it difficult, complained visiting novelist Anthony Trollope, to know when to get off the horsecar. There were, however, remarkably few injunctions in the cityscape—little by way of traffic regulations or health warnings telling people what they should or should not do—though omnibuses did post warnings to BEWARE OF PICKPOCKETS.
Some of the cleverest trade bills on the street were designed to resemble paper money—no surprise, given the city’s role in producing the real thing. Manhattan was headquarters for the nation’s three largest banknote manufacturers, whose clients included many of the over ten thousand institutions empowered to issue currency. It was also home to those who produced bogus bills. “We have never known counterfeiting carried on to a more alarming extent than at present,” wrote the Sun in 1840. “We were shown yesterday a one dollar bill on the Atlantic Bank of Brooklyn, altered to a ten in so ingenious a manner as to have deceived all but the most wary.” This in turn gave rise to an impressive array of daily, weekly, and monthly journals