Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [610]
Some tender-hearted souls looked askance at the use of force—surely republics didn’t do this sort of thing! The Democratic Review noted that more lives had been lost than in many of the Mexican War battles in which b’hoys had served as volunteers. Nathaniel Parker Willis, of all people, noted in his upperten Home Journal that the riot was a protest “from Mose and the soap-lock-ery” against “aristocratizing the pit” and suggested the rich “be mindful where its luxuries offend.”
Future entertainment entrepreneurs would follow Willis’s advice, especially once the opera house itself proved a casualty of the affair. Burlesque shows were soon calling it the “Massacre Opera House” at “DisAster Place”; when it reopened in September, attendance was dismal, and it was eventually sold off. The upper classes relocated their sanctum a bit farther north, to the more defensible precincts of Union Square. In 1853 Moses H. Grinnell (a staunch Macready supporter) and others formed a corporation to build the Academy of Music at 14th Street and Irving Place. Embodying the grandest metropolitan ambitions, it was the largest opera hall in the world when it opened in 1854. Like the ill-fated Astor, it boasted a plush interior and a small number of private boxes. But in a manifest bit of caution, enhanced by the need to fill the space, many of the four thousand seats were priced inexpensively, and management forswore all claims to aristocratic exclusiveness, insisting rather that its mission now was to cultivate taste and knowledge among the citizenry at large.
In the immediate aftermath of the riot, however, Judge Charles Patrick Daly, who presided over the trial of those arrested, pushed hard for their conviction, to serve notice that the old republican acceptance of crowd actions as inevitable, even legitimate, even functional, had come to a definitive end. Judson, convicted, got a year in jail and was treated as a hero on his release. Rynders got off with the help of attorney John Van Buren, the former president’s son, a sign from Tammany that the party would look after its own.
What was clear to all concerned was that the Astor Place affair signaled (in the Herald’s words) a “collision between those who have been styled the ‘exclusives,’ or ‘upper ten,’ and the great popular masses.” It was left to a reporter from Philadelphia to sum up the newly hardened positions. The riot, he wrote, “leaves behind it a feeling to which this community has hitherto been a stranger—an opposition of classes—the rich and the poor—white kids and no kids at all; in fact, to speak right out, a feeling that there is now, in our country, in New York City, what every good patriot has hitherto felt it his duty to deny—a high class and a low class.”
The riot at Astor Place, a frenzied challenge to the cultural authority of New York’s nascent bourgeoisie, was swiftly followed by a far more disciplined attack on its right to set the city’s economic agenda. Since at least the 1820s—the heyday of Thomas Skidmore, Fanny Wright, and the Workingmen’s Party—plebeian New Yorkers had been fashioning analyses and programs to contest the degradation of their working and living conditions. Now another upheaval got underway, rooted in prior protests but boosted by thousands of feisty immigrant agitators who contributed their own radical traditions and energies. Laissez-faire polemics, it turned out, were not the only ideas capable of crossing the Atlantic.
TENANTS VERSUS LANDLORDS
One way to improve the quality of life in New York Gty, said the “land reformers,” was to get a lot of New Yorkers to leave town. Given the vast numbers surging into what was still an overwhelmingly rural continent, this approach had many advocates, but the leading tribune was George Henry Evans. The old workingmen’s spokesman of the 1830s had retreated to a New Jersey farm during the depression era, where he pondered the work of Tom Paine and Thomas Skidmore. Evans became convinced that labor’s problems, at home and work, were chiefly due to its swollen ranks. A surplus of workers