Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [593]
With construction booming, Irishmen opened lumberyards, stoneyards, and coalyards and established themselves as building contractors—ethnic middlemen who assembled and managed work crews. By 1860 there were 166 incorporated construction companies. These outfits afforded better-paid jobs for carpenters, masons, and stonecutters skilled in using the new planing machines and steam-powered stone-dressers. However, they relied chiefly on thousands of Irish laborers for the raw manpower needed to complete the Croton Aqueduct High Bridge, build the Hudson River Railroad from Manhattan’s West Side up through the northernmost Bronx, and double-track the New York and Harlem up the Bronx River Valley to White Plains. In Brooklyn, Irishmen filled in the boggy Red Hook marshlands, erected the new docks there, deepened the Buttermilk Channel, and enlarged Fort Hamilton. In Queens they drained meadowlands, filled swamps, and drove turnpike roads east from Hallet’s Cove to Flushing Creek (one them being today’s Astoria Boulevard) and south along the riverbank over Newtown Creek’s first bridge through Greenpoint on to Williamsburgh (including today’s Vernon and Manhattan avenues).
Irishmen reigned supreme in horse-reliant transport. They sat atop hacks, omnibuses, stages, and horsecars—in foul as well as fair weather—and piloted private coaches around town, often suited up in livery. Many found jobs taking care of animals—one agrarian skill transferable to the city—and by 1855 Irishmen accounted for 84 percent of immigrant hostlers. After 1849, when the Common Council, urged by businessmen seeking improved transport, ended ancient restrictions on the trade, Anglo- and Dutch-American one-horse entrepreneurs found themselves in competition with capitalist carting companies who hired immigrant wage-workers. By 1855 there were over eight thousand cartmen (up from thirty-four hundred in 1840), and the bulk of them were Irish.
Irishmen took over New York’s docks as well. “Along the wharves, where the colored man once done [sic] the whole business of shipping and unshipping,” noted one African-American newspaper, “there are substituted foreigners or white Americans.” On any given day five or six thousand of these “alongshoremen” moved mountains of cargo off ships and around the port, roaming from pier to pier for the “shape-ups” at which native-born stevedores amassed work crews. The work was hard, poorly paid, and erratic While waiting for ships to arrive or weather to clear, men hung around local saloons, took alternate jobs as teamsters, boatmen, or brickmakers, and relied on the earnings of their wives and children.
Others went to sea. Here too their arrival noticeably whitened the labor force. Captains relied increasingly on waterfront crimps to assemble crews, and these men, often Irish proprietors of taverns or boardinghouses, tended to favor their own. Black sailors were pushed to the bottom of an already wretchedly exploitative industry. (The glorious clippers were known to seamen as “blood boats.”)
It was much the same with service jobs. Gardeners on upperten estates overlooking the Hudson and Harlem rivers were 90 percent German, Scots, or French by 1855, and immigrants made deep inroads on traditionally black niches in barbering and hotel and restaurant work. Immigrant women competed with blacks for positions as hotel maids, waitresses, cooks, nurses, and washerwomen. By 1855 more than twenty-five “intelligence offices” were placing streams of applicants as household domestics, usually young, single, and recently arrived Irish girls in need of a place to stay as well as work. It was hard work, and the fifteen- or sixteen-hour days, six and a half or seven of them a week, brought in only four to seven dollars a month plus room and board. Still, it seemed better than sweatshop labor, and by 1855 Irish women made up 92 percent of a domestic workforce once overwhelmingly black. “Every hour,” wrote black spokesman Frederick Douglass in 1853, “sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room for some newly-arrived emigrant from the