Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [697]
Shipbuilding, like almost every other city industry, was stoked by war contracts. As early as August 1861 the Tribune noted that local yards were busy producing a new gunboat fleet for the navy, refitting old steamers and merchantmen for war, and meeting businessmen’s demand for vessels to handle the exploding coastal, lake, and river trade. “Recently so idle and empty, [they] once more resound with the cheery hum of labor and the new music of the adze and anvil.” Soon four thousand men were at work in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard alone.
Skilled machinists were in great demand to develop and repair naval machinery. By 1863 the great ironworks—Neptune, Fulton, Morgan, Novelty, Continental, Allaire, Delamater, and McLeod—were turning out vertical and horizontal engines, boilers, furnaces, plates, and anchors. At the Novelty works twelve hundred men were kept busy refitting the Roanoke with a thousand tons of armor and three revolving turrets for fifteen-inch guns, while simultaneously making a beam engine for a Pacific mail steamship and machinery for three side wheel steamers.
The maritime engineering triumph of the war years came at Thomas F. Rowland’s huge Continental Iron Works along the Greenpoint waterfront at Calyer and West streets. In 1861, while most of its fifteen hundred hands were producing gun carriages and mortar beds for the Navy, the company began work on a design by Swedish engineer John Ericsson for an ironclad warship. Ironclads were an old idea. The United States had flirted with them during the Mexican War, and French success with them in the Crimean War (1854-56) had led the English and French navies to pour millions into their construction. The Monitor, launched at Greenpoint on January 30, 1862, was also a success: it fought the Confederate’s Merrimac to a standoff on March 9 and generated a host of additional government contracts for Continental.
Underwritten by federal dollars and protected by federal tariffs, New York manufacturers of every description expanded rapidly. Cooper, Hewitt turned out gun carriages and gun-barrel iron; Phelps, Dodge, and Company churned out iron forgings and castings; the Hendricks Brothers Copper Rolling Mills worked at full capacity throughout the war. Conrad Poppenhusen’s Enterprise Rubber Works in College Point flourished on orders for hard rubber flasks, cups, and buttons. City carriagemakers produced hundreds of ambulances and baggage wagons for the Quartermaster General’s Department. War galvanized Brooklyn’s fledgling pharmaceutical industry too. Edward Robinson Squibb, a former navy doctor, manufactured drugs (including ether) for the military, first in rented quarters on Furman Street, then in additional buildings on Columbia and Vine streets in order to handle the bulk orders of bandages, splints, and panniers (baskets of medicines and surgical instruments). Charles Pfizer, who had immigrated hi 1848 and established a chemical manufacturing plant in Williamsburg on Bartlett Street, similarly expanded to meet wartime demand.
War orders and the tariff on foreign ready-mades boomed the clothing trades too. A. T. Stewart’s army and navy contracts netted him nearly two million dollars annually during the conflict, and Brooks Brothers received its first contract from the New York State Military Board—for twelve thousand uniforms—as early as April 1861. Brooks Brothers also pioneered the use of “shoddy” when, discovering it lacked enough suitable cloth, it resorted to using shredded rags that were rolled, glued, and smoothed into ersatz cloth. When artisan tailors alerted government officials to the fact that the contractor was “fitting out soldiers with suits of clothing that disgraced the State” while paying a “grinding standard of wages,” the firm replaced the inferior goods. However, many of those who snared subsequent contracts were speculators who had influence and connections, but no experience in the business. After taking a hefty cut of the appropriated funds, they