Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [660]
Reformers worried about more than taxes, however. They were dismayed by what they saw as the Forty Thieves’ encouragement of lawlessness and disorder. In the summer of 1852, for instance, the aldermen used their judicial powers to discharge over fifteen hundred of the two thousand men arrested for street fighting and disorderly conduct—many of them loyal party activists—at just the moment when an epidemic of “garotting” (mugging) seemed to be sweeping Manhattan. Reformers were also appalled that council-dominated police officers were taking money to leave underground entrepreneurs alone. This was evident from the throngs of thimble-riggers and three-card monte men who worked the streets openly (and particularly thickly near City Hall) and from the gambling joints on Barclay, the Bowery, and Ann Street (between Broadway and Nassau) that were jammed with volunteer firemen, shoulder-hitters from Tammany Hall around the corner, and gangsters from the Bowery and the Points.
Cordial relations with politicians were key to the gamblers’ survival, and indeed the line between the two was often hard to spot. After working for Rynders, John Morrissey went on to a career as a bare-knuckle prizefighter; he took on Yankee Sullivan in an indecisive brawl in 1853, which the umpire gave to Morrissey, and no sooner had he become top dog of the boxing world than he opened his own faro parlor and taproom. Michael Norton, another pugilistic politician, established an entire community of outlaws on the far westerly end of Coney Island (soon known as Norton’s Point), which quickly attracted gamblers, sporting men, and others with a distaste for law and order.
If bourgeois New Yorkers were alarmed at losing control of the police—an increasingly critical government agency, given employers’ strained dealings with labor unions in the mid-1850s—they were equally dismayed by deficiencies in the fire department. Between 1837 and 1848, notwithstanding the introduction of Croton water, New York suffered twenty-five hundred fires, and some of the worst took place in downtown business wards: the great blaze of 1845, which rivaled that of 1835, destroyed one hundred buildings. Disgusted observers blamed brawling (a la Tweed), the companies’ steadfast refusal to introduce steam engines (the first was not adopted until 1857 and was the gift
of a fire insurance company), and, most of all, the councilmen who protected the politically potent firemen.
Environmentalist reformers joined the indictment of municipal politics. They insisted that inefficiencies in sanitation, and thus the soaring mortality rates, stemmed from aldermanic disbursal of cleaning and scavenging contracts to incompetents or crooks. In 1852 John Griscom denounced as well the failure of council-appointed health wardens to enforce such sanitary laws as existed. Merchants in general increasingly feared (as one said in 1854) that “men will go with reluctance to make money in a city where pestilence or violence renders life unsafe.”
The growing power of politicians, moreover, seemed to coincide worrisomely with the growing public presence of immigrants. The St. Patrick’s Day parade had been a small and insignificant affair up until 1849, when it suddenly swelled to a reported fifteen hundred marchers, in part because of a feisty newcomer, the Laborers United Benevolent Association. By 1851 seventeen societies, including other new labor organizations, had formed a Convention of Irish Societies,