Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [552]
UNQUIET BONES
Another worrisome feature of New York life was the very “fluctuation, and neverceasing change” so beloved by boosters. “Overturn, overturn, overturn! is the maxim of New York,” declared former mayor Hone in 1845. “The very bones of our ancestors are not permitted to lie quiet a quarter of a century, and one generation of men seem studious to remove all relics of those who precede them.” Putnam’s 1853 series “New York Daguerreotyped” fretted that the businesses spreading “with such astounding rapidity over the whole lower part of the city” were “prostrating and utterly obliterating every thing that is old and venerable, and leaving not a single land-mark, in token of the former position of the dwelling-places of our ancestors.” Manhattan was a “modern city of ruins,” agreed the New-York Mirror, where “no sooner is a fine building put up than it is torn down.”
The result, said Harper’s Monthly in 1856, was that “New York is notoriously the largest and least loved of any of our great cities. Why should it be loved as a city? It is never the same city for a dozen years together. A man born in New York forty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew.” The city’s relentless focus on the future was ravaging its past, undermining the sense that New York was a home, not just a grid of opportunities.3
The razing and rebuilding generated nostalgia for an older, quieter, more comprehensible city and fostered efforts at commemoration. James Miller’s guidebook, New York as It Is, lamented that the city had sacrificed “to the shrine of Mammon almost every relic of the oldentime” and offered as counterweight a walking tour of such historic sites as remained. A more thoroughgoing intervention got underway when David Thomas Valentine, clerk of the Common Council, began issuing Manuals of the Corpo-ration of the City of New York, an annual compilation published and widely distributed by the city between 1841 and 1866. Though mainly an assemblage of official data, the Manuals included woodcut and lithographic reproductions of old paintings, prints, drawings, maps, and documents that Valentine had rescued “from oblivion, to which they were hastening down the stream of time.” Nevertheless, Valentine worried in 1856, “the present rapid progress of the City” threatened “soon to obliterate all the natural landmarks of the island,” and he urged still greater efforts to preserve “for future generations” images of what remained.
Painters began tackling historical subjects: William Walcutt recalled Pulling Down the Statue of George III at Bowling Green (1857). Plays like Charlotte Temple and Jacob Leisler, or New York in 1690 became popular fare at the Bowery Theater. Autobiographies appeared lamenting the passing of the Knickerbocker era, such as Grant Thorborn’s Fifty Years Reminiscences of New York (1845). Evacuation Day was celebrated with fife-and-drum parades by ancient veterans in cocked hats and buff breeches and with full-scale reenactments of the British departure. And the New-York Historical Society took on nearly a thousand new members in the 1840s and 1850s, growing prosperous enough to erect a neo-classical headquarters at Second Avenue and nth Street, in genteel proximity to St. Mark’s Church.
This wave of looking backward also spurred historical scholarship. When E. Porter Belden researched his model of New York in the late 1840s, he reported in astonishment that “no history of the city had ever been published, and that no accurate descriptive work had been issued in the last twenty years.” He wasn’t far wrong, as remarkably little had been published since William Smith’s History of the Province of New-York back in 1757.
There was, however, much newly available raw material