Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [591]
Pianomaking was another specialized trade in which Germans excelled. In 1849 Heinrich Steinweg dispatched his son, then facing reprisals for revolutionary activities, to New York City. His glowing reports about Manhattan’s status as center of the growing U.S. piano industry fetched the elder Steinweg and family in 1850, and in 1853 they formed Steinway and Sons. (Steinweg anglicized the company name, because English pianos were reckoned the best, but kept his German name for some time and didn’t bother learning English.) His timing proved perfect, as refined New Yorkers were demanding parlor accoutrements, and when sales blossomed, Steinway and Sons purchased (in 1858) a site virtually next door to Schaefer’s brewery. The firm installed enormous steam boilers and a Corliss engine to run the plant’s saws, lathes, planes, and elevators, becoming the first industry in New York to mechanize on such a grand scale; by 1860 the company employed three hundred workers.
Cigarmaking had been a substantial industry in Hamburg and Bremen, but in the 1850s the German men (many of them Jewish) who handcrafted expensive cigars faced competition from poorly paid rural women churning out a cheaper product. Thousands migrated to New York City, and soon the old tobacco town became the capital of the North American cigar industry.
English machinists were in great demand to design and develop machine tools—a virtually brand-new trade requiring a knowledge of mathematics, metallurgy, and engineering. English, Scottish, or Welsh printers did well too, constituting nearly half the city’s total in 1855. German printers brought their own fonts and printed prayer books and wedding certificates for German-Jewish synagogues; they also worked for German book, newspaper, and magazine publishers and for English periodicals, like Frank Leslie’s, that started up German editions. (In 1851 Charles Dana, Greeley’s associate at the Tribune, made a bid for German readers by hiring Karl Marx as a European correspondent.)
For many of these skilled craftsmen, life in boomtime New York was a distinct improvement on their former condition. In 1851, attempting to demonstrate immiseration, the Tribune printed a workingman’s budget that allowed “only” 2.8 pounds of “butchers meat” (roasts and chops, not innards) per person weekly. But an annual consumption of 146 pounds of meat was three times that available to London’s workers, and well-nigh unimaginable to new arrivals from devastated Ireland, used to grains and tubers. Enough Irish ate themselves sick on arrival for the Shamrock Society to warn against an “abundance of animal food to which [they were] unaccustomed.” Refugees’ letters back to Ireland reveled in relating the sheer quantity, variety, and cheapness of food in the mouthwatering metropolis.
Many skilled workers could also afford inexpensive furniture (a bed, some chairs, a chest), a stove, perhaps even a swatch of carpet from Hiram Anderson, the Bowery dealer who billed himself as “Carpet Merchant of the People.” Better-paid Irish craftsmen could afford good quality ready-to-wears: “I wear as good a suit of cloths as any Gentleman in the City of Cork, and twenty dollars’ worth of a watch in my pocket,” said an Irish boxmaker in 1852.
These luxuries, to be sure, were tentatively held: the slightest dip in the economy and the watches were off to the pawnshop. And most immigrant craftsmen fared far less well. German and Irish tailors, woodworkers, and shoemakers had fled proletarianization, hoping to reestablish themselves as traditional artisans. But the same capitalizing process was