Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [579]
Middle-class workspaces differed sharply from artisanal workshops. In the financial district, men spent their days in quiet, clean, even elegant “offices” (a word that began to replace “countinghouse” in the 1850s, the same decade in which dealers in office supplies first appeared in city directories). One of New York’s earliest offices erected as such was the Trinity Building (1853). A five-story, double-width structure, enormous for the time, it replaced an eighteenth-century sugar house just north of Trinity Church. The commercial Trinity, like the ecclesiastical one, was an Upjohn-designed edifice whose very architecture proclaimed its occupants genteel.
Inside such buildings—and retail equivalents like Stewart’s Marble Palace—clerks and professionals seldom encountered manual workers. The same was true outside, on the streets and in the lunch-hour restaurants of the financial or shopping districts. As they made their way home on omnibuses and commuter trains, middling people again traveled in different circles from the bulk of walk-to-work laborers. Even in the industrial world, firms began to carve out separate workspaces for nonmanual employees, accessible by separate entrances.
Middle-class employees dressed differently from manual laborers. Salesmen in fancy retail stores were expected to be indistinguishable from patrons, both in clothing and bearing. Cashiers and bookkeepers not only had to look the part but could afford to, as salaried workers were usually better compensated than artisans and laborers. True, some old-fashioned firms still paid clerks less, considering them merchants-in-training. But most office workers were Bartlebys now—permanent wage-workers—solaced with annual salaries that could run as high as two thousand dollars. Professionals, lesser merchants, and small proprietors could earn considerably more.
These higher incomes allowed many to attain a modest version of haut bourgeois status. In the colonial era, the middling sorts had stood far closer to poor plebeians than to aristocratic elites. The new middle class repositioned itself much closer to the upper echelons, starting with how and where its members lived.
Middle-class families couldn’t afford mansions or grand row houses, but thousands managed to purchase or rent a red brick dwelling, or even a brownstone with showy facade, albeit a narrower model. Where the bon ton enjoyed twenty-five-foot fronts, upper-middle-class residents settled for twenty- or eighteen-foot widths, while lowermiddle-class buyers squeezed into structures but fourteen to twelve and a half feet wide. Still, most could afford amenities—indoor plumbing, Croton water, cast-iron stoves, gas lights, and plaster walls—that would have been considered the height of opulence only a decade or two earlier (and were still out of reach of the majority of their fellow citizens).
Middling families could live “above Bleecker” too—not in the upperten enclaves running up Manhattan’s spine but along the flanking avenues and streets that lay between the wealthy center and the working-class riverfronts. The most affordable opportunities lay far uptown, in areas still under construction. These once distant venues had become newly accessible with the rapid spread of street railways, hastened by the invention in 1852 of a grooved rail that lay flush with the pavement. By decade’s end horsecars were rolling smoothly up and down Third, Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth avenues and crosstown at 8th, 14th, and 23rd streets. They carried a hundred thousand passengers