Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [550]
CROWDS AND CIVILIZATION
Much of this city scrutinizing zeroed in on particular features of urban life, and among the closely watched phenomena none seemed more fascinating than the “crowd.” “Crowd” had long been disturbingly interchangeable with “mob,” but now it evoked something benign: a vibrant street life, an exciting tempo, a flood of sensation. Charles Loring Brace, a young seminarian arriving to study at Union Theological Seminary after graduating Yale in 1846, was astonished by Broadway. “Faces and coats of all patterns, bright eyes, whiskers, spectacles, hats, bonnets, caps, all hurrying along in the most apparently inextricable confusion. One would think it a grand gala-day. And it’s rather overpowering to think of that rush and whirl being their regular every-day life.” Guidebooks trumpeted the sensuous excitement as a prime reason for visiting, with William Bobo’s Glimpses of New York (1852) typical in hailing “the throng upon the sidewalks” as “one grand kaleidoscope in perpetual motion.”
Natives might grumble at the rush and whirl’s impracticality—trying to cross Broadway was considered a risky business—but they too were taken with its poetry. One set of local enthusiasts—admittedly a committee of Broadway merchants—celebrated their chief thoroughfare’s bustle and color, its collisions and complexity. “The din, this driving, this omnibus-thunder, this squeezing, this jamming, crowding, and at times smashing, is the exhilerating [sic] music which charms the multitude and draws its thousands within the whirl. This is Broadway—this makes Broadway. Take from it those elements, the charm is gone.”
“Living in crowds,” the Times suggested in 1852, “gives to the business, the daily life, the whole character of great cities, such wonderful energy and vigor. Men in cities live and work constantly under high pressure. It is almost impossible to go on a walk on Broadway or Wall Street in business or pleasure; one naturally and unthinkingly quickens his pace to a run.” Living in crowds (the Times continued) gave a distinctively modern shape to the way people experienced life, in “gusts of passion and excitement.” Any “startling incident—the arrival of a steamer, the perpetration of a crime, the advent of a celebrity—anything at all calculated to stimulate curiosity or startle attention—comes upon half a million of people at once,” courtesy of the morning papers, and then “every man sees it in his neighbor’s face and hears it from his lips the moment he meets him.”1
Crowds offered more than mere sensation, it was believed; they fostered interactivity, hence progress. Tribune reporter George Foster argued in 1849 that “a great city is the highest result of human civilization,” the place where people’s energies could be developed “to their utmost power and excited to their highest state of activity by constant contact with countless other souls.”
Going hand in hand with this new metropolitan self-confidence was a brash disdain for rural life and people. The author of an 1859 treatise called Civilization in New York suggested that living in the country “stupefies rather than deepens character.” A “human being dwelling alone, or in sparsely settled districts, without any communication with cities, remains unacquainted with his own capabilities,” he explained, and thus “deteriorates in prejudice and ignorance.” New York banking authority J. S. Gibbons reported that “any one who has travelled among our country villages, out of the immediate influence of cities,” was struck by “the lack of energy, the rudeness of life and character, and the almost savage features