Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [696]
By fall, however, war had resurrected and reoriented the economy. Wheat began surging into the city. In 1860 and 1861 European (and particularly British) crops failed, while at the same time, the American West produced bumper harvests and great quantities of livestock. With the Mississippi closed by war—paddle wheels on sixteen hundred steamboats had stopped turning—westerners shifted from rivers to railways. Freight tonnage and passenger usage expanded rapidly on established East-West lines like the Pennsylvania, the Erie, and the New York Central. Demand spurred the strengthening of old lines—the Hudson River Railroad spanned the Hudson at Albany with a revolutionary two-thousand-foot long iron bridge—and induced construction of new ones. British capital and fifteen thousand British laborers and engineers were dispatched from Europe to lay tracks for the Atlantic and Great Western. It ran from Cincinnati through the newly discovered and already booming oil fields of Pennsylvania, and on to Salamanca in western New York, where it connected with and revivified the half-defunct Erie, cutting Cincinnati-New York travel time to less than a week. Looking ahead to still grander vistas, New Yorkers, including Dix, Dodge, and A. A. Low (now president of the Chamber of Commerce), assumed key roles in the federal government’s 1862 incorporation of the Union Pacific, which they planned to run to the eastern border of California. Together with the flood of waterborne traffic—Great Lakes and Erie Canal tonnage was still twice that of the New York Central and Erie combined—the new routing finished off New Orleans as a contender for leading export center. Atlantic seaboard competitors fell even farther behind: while exports of wheat, wheat flour, and corn from New York City mounted from nine million bushels annually to fifty-seven million, Philadelphia limped along with a mere five million, Boston with but two.
The amber waves of grain that rolled into the harbor flowed right out again to European ports. To speed the wheat on its way, merchants at Brooklyn’s Atlantic Dock deployed the first floating elevators. These could remove, weigh, bag, and reload grain from canal boats onto steamers at the rate of five thousand bushels per hour. Hundreds
of Irish grain shovelers were fired; the company boasted that thousands more would go. In July 1862 two thousand shovelers, organized by the Grain Workers Protective Association, joined three thousand longshoremen and stevedores in a strike to demand the machines be abandoned. The grain merchants used scabs from ships’ crews around the harbor to break the strike, something the grain workers would remember.
The West shipped cattle along with wheat. By the summer of 1862, Illinois alone was forwarding two thousand head a week. The city was overrun with cows being driven through the streets to more than two hundred uptown slaughterhouses. By 1864 over two million beasts were being butchered annually in New York (more than in Chicago) and the air reeked from boiling bones and rendering fat. Lumber came rolling in too, more than enough to sustain Brooklyn’s building boom. Sugar poured in, enough to warrant the opening of six new refineries during the war. The Havemeyer family rose to prominence as the sugar business became one of the city’s largest industries. Oil gushed in. Within a scant few years of the 1859 discovery of black gold in Titusville, millions of barrels were flowing out of northwestern Pennsylvania to the nation’s two hundred new oil refineries. Twenty-five of these still-small (ten-man) operations were in the metropolitan area, notably in Williamsburg and Greenpoint along the East River and Newtown Creek, where they produced “kerosene,” the cheapest illuminant ever known.