Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [754]
Publicity was crucial to theaters, and the increased competition spawned a flourishing poster and playbill business. This in turn boosted the theatrical printing industry, which also turned out tickets, which were hawked by scalpers who wandered the Rialto crying, “I have seats in the front!” Printers ran off new trade newspapers, which covered the drama industry, playscripts, in great demand out in the country, and sheet music, for sale to middle-class families with parlor pianos, likely purchased at Steinway’s Union Square showroom.
Trade papers, scripts, and music alike were also sold at the bookstores that clustered in the Rialto. Agosto Brentano, a Sicilian immigrant, had for years run a newspaper stand in front of the New York Hotel. In 1860, gambling his earnings, he bought in bulk an issue of the London Times recounting the Heenan-Sayer fight. With the windfall profits he garnered selling these to sporting men, Brentano opened a larger stand in Union Square. After amassing capital selling foreign and domestic papers, he branched into books and playscripts, opening Brentano’s Literary Emporium in 1876. It became a popular rendezvous for the theatrical elite, as did specialty shops like Gustave Schirmer’s and Samuel French and Son; another favorite haunt was the Lambs Club (1874), which met in restaurants around Union Square.
Rialto restaurants also drew evening crowds of theatergoers and men-about-town. Many local oyster and chop houses—like Shakespeare Inn and Browne’s Greenroom—were opened by actors. Italian restaurants catered to Italian singers from the Academy of Music. As ever, the preeminent establishment was the ever prescient Delmonico’s at Fifth Avenue and 14th Street, where it hosted champagne and canvasback dinner parties—pre and après the theater—for wealthy patrons of Wallack’s and the Academy of Music. In 1876, sensing another impending shift in the center of theatrical gravity, Delmonico’s closed its 14th Street operation and moved to sumptuous quarters at 26th Street.
DOWNTOWN DOWNSIDES
Lower Manhattan had emerged as a well-oiled business machine, whose discrete parts related synergistically. Capital, legal expertise, trade information, wholesale goods had easy access to one another. Commodities flowed smoothly from train station to warehouse to workshop to emporium or harbor. But while the marketplace had in many respects reordered the cityscape to meet the needs of the new economic order in a rational way, vexing irrationalities remained.
Nowhere were these more manifest than in the streets. As property values rose, and buildings rose with them, more people and goods were accommodated in the commercial quarters. As a result, traffic levels—chaotic enough before the war—now approached the point of paralysis. Costly paralysis, the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide noted, as it forced merchants “to pay as much for the removal of a load from Courtlandt to Canal street as is required to bring it from Chicago to New York.” When to gridlock were added spectacular accumulations of garbage—filth that sometimes reached knee level—the judgment of the Evening Post that “New York is the most inconveniently arranged commercial city in the world” was uncomfortably close to the mark.
Some of the disarray was a consequence of success: the terrific increase in flow of bulky agricultural goods, fuel, and manufactured products. Much of the muck followed, from the still-unavoidable reliance on horses—forty thousand of them, who each working day generated some four hundred tons of manure, twenty thousand gallons of urine, and almost two hundred carcasses—exacerbated by municipal incompetence and corruption in garbage removal. Some difficulties stemmed from cramming a nineteenth-century economy into a seventeenth-century matrix of narrow and crooked former cowpaths. Others were the fault of the grid’s blithe disregard of Manhattan’s topography, or actual exacerbation of its shortcomings, as in emphasizing north-south arteries over east-west river-to-river connections.