• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 8297 0

presented by the bustling port. Police Chief Matsell claimed in 1850 that there were over four hundred such robbers, organized into roughly fifty gangs, though his figures may well have been inflated in order to win creation of a harbor police force. Some river pirates simply prowled the wharves, snatching up unguarded property. Others were more venturesome—like the Daybreak Boys, named for their youthfulness (most were under eighteen) and their penchant for predawn operations. The Daybreakers would depart their headquarters (a gin mill at Slaughter House Point), head to the waterfront, and row to their objectives—ships at anchor—with muffled oars and greased locks. Once aboard, they rifled the cargo, rowed their booty ashore (at times to Brooklyn), and sold it off to fences. Between 1850 and 1852, it was claimed, the Daybreak Boys stole a hundred thousand dollars in property. Their career ended abruptly when, in the fall of 1852, a trio of Daybreakers shot a watchman who had surprised them on board his ship. Caught and convicted, Nicholas Howlett, nineteen, and William Saul, twenty, were condemned to death by the court but hailed as heroes by the Boweryites. When they were hanged in January 1853, hundreds showed up in the Tombs courtyard to shake hands with the condemned men on the scaffold.

“IF I DON’T HAVE A MUSS SOON, I’LL SPILE”

The b’hoys also adored theater, and immigrants were quickly incorporated into popular audiences. (Linguistic differences did generate a degree of ethnic segregation: the Bowery Amphitheater was rebuilt in 1854 as the twenty-five-hundred-seat Stadttheater, which presented classical German dramas, popular comedies, musicals, melodramas, and farces.) At a plebeian playhouse, the Spirit of the Times observed in 1847, “the pit is a vast sea of upturned faces and red flannel shirts, extending its roaring and turbid waves close up to the foot-lights on either side.” The most eager pushed onto the boards themselves, “chanking peanuts and squirting tobacco juice upon the stage.”

Shakespeare remained a major staple of popular theater, but burlesques based on life in New York grew rapidly in working-class esteem. William Mitchell’s Olympic Theater became the most popular venue in town, in part for its low prices, in part for its regular diet of lampoons, parodies, and travesties involving well-known city figures and activities. In the 1843 Macbeth Travestie, for example, the king and attendants appeared as “nabobs of the 15th ward,” while the witches resembled the New York’s market women.

Minstrelsy in particular, said the Literary World m. 1849, “convulse[d] the b’hoys and their seamstress sweethearts.” By the 1850s there were ten major minstrel halls or “Ethiopian Opera Houses” in town, and some became semipermanent features of the cultural landscape, E. P. Christy’s Minstrels (at Mechanics Hall) and Hooley’s Minstrels (in Brooklyn) each played for ten years straight. Minstrelsy too was a variety of social travesty. Its routines ridiculed the self-importance, pretentiousness, and hypocritical morality of New York’s middle and upper classes. One performer usually stood in for a nabob or reformer, whose high-flown diction the other actors delighting in puncturing, often via lewd buffoonery. Immigrants too took their knocks. To the dismay of Irish actors and the Irish-American press, comedians got easy laughs portraying stage Hibernians as ignorant, pugnacious, and drunken buffoons.

The foibles of stage Africans—whites in blackface, of course—received no such leniency. Vicious derision of blacks remained integral to the art form (albeit alloyed with fascination and envy). It afforded artisans and immigrant audiences, who feared their declining economic status might be seen as racial slippage, a chance to collectively display their whiteness by dissing their only inferiors. Whitman, a great fan of minstrelsy, was one of the few to see the racial intermingling underlying the insistence on racial separation—blendings at work behind the backs of the performers. One visitor to a black tavern observed that