Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [555]
On leaving Broadway, “the lively whirl of carriages is exchanged for the deep rumble of carts and wagons,” Dickens noted. “The stores are poorer here, the passengers less gay. Clothes ready made, and meat ready cooked.” Then, with two police escorts, he plunged into the dark heart of the Five Points, along “narrow ways, diverting to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth,” passing “coarse and bloated faces.” Now, deeper still, through “lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee-deep,” past “hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder”; groping down pitch-dark rickety stairs, past rooms where “some figure crawls half awakened, as if the judgment hour were near at hand, and every obscene grave were giving up its dead,” past rooms from which “vapors issue forth that blind and suffocate,” culminating at “underground chambers” at the bottom of “the world of vice and misery” where blacks and whites “dance and game” together. A final judgment: “All that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.”4
From this rich storehouse of ready-to-wear metaphors, some popular New York authors drew heavily—and heavy-handedly, being far less talented than Dickens or Sue. In 1848 E. Z. C. Judson, better known by his nom de plume of Ned Buntline, penned the mammoth Mysteries and Miseries of New York. In it, he promised, he would provide “a perfect daguerreotype of this great city” from “above Bleecker” to the “horrors of the Five Points.” Advertising himself as a “Friend of the Working Man,” Buntline dwelt in lascivious detail on the plutocratic lifestyle of the city’s rich, and his hero also visited an underground nightclub—remarkably similar to the one described by Dickens—where, again, all is dirt and chaos and where blacks frolic with whites. In the manner of the Police Gazette, Buntline offered statistics on urban crime and provided a fourpage glossary of underworld argot. Mysteries and Miseries proved enormously successful. First serialized in popular journals, it was reprinted in the Harpers Family Library series, and the firm promoted it heavily in small-town and rural America as a testament to urban wickedness. It sold perhaps a hundred thousand volumes in all and helped mold perceptions of the metropolis.
With the public devouring Buntline’s Mystery, George Foster, who covered the city beat for Greeley’s Tribune, decided to collect his columns in book form. Foster, one of the first professional flaneurs, had long walked about the city, “eating with his eyes” and boasting of the “varieties of human nature” he encountered in New York: “Every face you meet is a character, every scene affords a piquant contrast. Talk of your Eastern bazaars and Parisian arcades!” Yet his articles also drew heavily on the conventions of urban sensationalism. Foster promised to get beneath the tall spires, commercial palaces, and princely mansions “where life flows so brightly and so gaily” to explore the profoundest recesses of the “deep, dark, sullen ocean of poverty, crime and despair” and “bring to light of day the horrid monsters that live and gender in its oozy depths.”
Foster’s city was as polarized as Buntline’s. Above, the deceitful parvenus—“pompous without dignity, gaudy without magnificence, lavish without taste, and aristocratic without good manners.” Below, a degraded underclass of drunken Irishmen, grasping Jews, and black men who danced (in the same old underground dance halls reached via the same old labyrinthine passageways) with “sluttishly-dressed women, in whose faces drunkenness and debauchery have destroyed every vestige of all we expect in the countenance of women, and even almost every trace of human expression.”
Foster’s New York in Slices (1849) did well. A second series, published in 1850 as New York by Gas Light, surpassed his own record (and Buntline’s too), eventually selling about two hundred thousand copies. He followed