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By Root 8198 0

a day, and allowed middle-class commuters to get downtown in less than forty-five minutes, though traveling conditions were admittedly less than optimal. “The seats being more than filled,” one paper observed, “the passengers are placed in rows down the middle, where they hang on by the straps, like smoked hams in a corner grocery.” Nevertheless rapid transit promoted rapid infill of Manhattan’s open spaces. By 1860 the island was solidly blanketed with residences as far north as 42nd Street. In another four years, over half the city’s population would live above 14th Street—the northern frontier as recently as the mid-1840s.

Middling sorts were a major presence in the new territories. On the west side they settled from west Greenwich Village and Clement Moore’s Chelsea up to the moderately priced brownstone row houses William B. Astor erected in the mid-40s between Broadway and Ninth Avenue. On the east side, old-fashioned but respectable three- or four-story brickfronts were to be had in the 20s, east of Third Avenue, and “handsome dwellings” between 30th and 45th streets could be rented for three to four hundred dollars per annum—beyond the means of most clerks but within the budget of a frugal professional family of four.

Even uptown, however, many middle-class New Yorkers could not afford a home of their own and had to settle for sharing space with others. “Part of a house to let”—read one 1854 ad, describing an opportunity in the west 303 near Ninth Avenue—“the upper part of a first-class house with modern improvements to a small genteel family.” Such quarters might be rented for $160 to $300 in the 1850s, too high for a mechanic making a thousand a year, but accessible to a middle-class person making twice that.

Others turned to boardinghouses. Doctors, lawyers, professors, and lower merchants—especially when single or married without children—might place an ad stating their preferences in the Herald, Tribune, or Times, or peruse there the communiques from proprietors seeking appropriate renters (“family must be small and of the highest respectability”). Boardinghouses ran the gamut from former mansions of Knickerbocker patricians, replete with furnished parlors, pianofortes, and “all modern improvements,” to dingy and warren-like barracks offering lodging, meals, threadbare carpets, and cockroaches to dry-goods clerks.

All of them had their drawbacks, however, said Thomas Butler Gunn in his humorous but instructive Physiology of New York Boarding Houses (1857). These ranged from landladies trying to palm off unmarried daughters, to thunderous snorers in adjoining apartments, to pious gatekeepers who locked up at eleven and refused to give out latchkeys. Even in the best of circumstances, multifamily dwellings were ultimately inconsistent with the middle-class desire for a “genuine home.” As one little girl replied when asked where her parents lived: “They don’t live; they BOARD.”

For those priced out of domesticity in Manhattan, a proper independence could be purchased at the cost of trekking greater distances. Some made their way north to the growing railway communities of Mott Haven, Morrisania, and Fordham. But far greater numbers of clerks, shopowners, teachers, and youthful professionals migrated east to Brooklyn. After 1853 a steamboat ferry connected Wall and Montague streets, supplementing the older Fulton Ferry to downtown Brooklyn and the South Ferry to Atlantic Avenue (where it linked with the LIRR). By the mid-1850s the giant Union Ferry Company had consolidated most such nautical operations, and its vessels, carrying as many as six hundred passengers at a penny a ride, shuttled an estimated seventy thousand commuters to and from Manhattan each day.

A building frenzy struck Brooklyn in the 1850s (to which Whitman and his brothers made their small contribution). Twenty-six hundred new structures—balloonframe houses and inexpensive row houses—went up during 1851 alone. Middle-class people filtered into the interstices of affluent Brooklyn Heights. Others migrated to South Brooklyn (embracing parts