Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [606]
Audiences that laughed at Zip Coon or chuckled at Paddy positively roared for Mose. In 1848 Francis Chanfrau took to the stage at the Olympic wearing a version of the standard fire-laddie outfit, complete with red shirt, stovepipe hat, and soaplocked hair. At first, there was puzzled silence. Then Chanfrau took his cigar out, spit into the wings, and growled, “I ain’t a-goin’ to run wid dat machine no more!” There was an instant “yell of recognition” from the pit and galleries. And well there might have been, for Benjamin A. Baker, the playwright, had put the Bowery itself on the boards. The play—A Glance at New York in 1848—revolved around a young Connecticut greenhorn who fell into a series of scrapes with assorted loafers and sharpers, from which he was extricated by Mose.
Baker realized he had a good thing going and redrafted the play, called it New Yorkas It Is, and put Mose at its center. “I’m bilein’ over for a sousin’ good fight with someone somewhere,” Mose bellowed. “If I don’t have a muss soon, I’ll spile.” But Mose the tough guy was also Mose the protector of the weak. If pugilism was his avocation, firefighting was his mission in life. The plebeian hero rescued babies from burning buildings (played out onstage with elaborate sets and props), defended Bowery folk against urban corruption, saved Linda the cigar girl from molesters, helped a rural migrant cheated by city slickers, and—antiaristocratic hero that he was—thwarted effete and wicked gentlemen. The rough realism was a smash, crowds turned the theater into a frolicsome madhouse, and New York as It Is became one of the greatest successes in the history of the Manhattan stage.
Mary Taylor and F. S. Chanfrau in the roles of Mose and his ladyfriend, Lize, in the premier of “A Glance at New York,” 1848. (The New York Public Library for Performing Arts)
The fictional b’hoy’s nationality was ambiguous. In Baker’s play Mose was obviously a native-born worker, though the character also invoked Moses Humphrey, a wellknown fire laddie, brawler, and Irish Catholic printer at the Sun. But Mose was generally perceived as not an ethnic but an urban type—appropriately enough given that b’hoy youth culture, for all its internal stresses and strains, was a conglomerate affair. A mix of social fact and literary convention, Mose was the New York rude boy writ large, but as he liked to think of himself: opinionated, rowdy, but virtuous withal.
Over the next two years, as seven different Mose plays went on the national circuit, the image of Big Mose cohered into a cultural identity recognizable across the country. Lithographed reproductions of scenes from the plays then turned Mose into an international figure. The Bowery B’hoy—riotous and vociferous habitue of fire companies and theaters and prizefights and street corners—became as well known as the Wall Street Banker.
In the 1850s Mose cohered into a fabulous semimythic figure of the sort made popular by Davy Crockett (“half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with snapping turtle”), and he took his place alongside the likes of Mike Fink, swaggering riverboatsman. This urban Paul Bunyan was said to be eight feet tall, with ginger hair, a two-foot-wide beaver hat, and hands like hog hams, and he toted a fifty-gallon keg of ale as a canteen. He had the strength of ten: he could uproot iron lampposts and use them to smite rival gang members, lift a horsecar and carry it for blocks, leap the East River to Brooklyn with ease, and swim the Hudson in two mighty strokes (with six he could circumnavigate Manhattan).
As Mose grew larger than life, his roots in an adversarial milieu became fuzzed, his Boweryite critique of New York’s elite blurred. But there would