Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [755]
Some of the problems reflected limits of the era’s technology. The city did replace cobblestones in Broadway, Wall, and West streets, among other key arteries, but replacements were not necessarily improvements. With asphalt still decades away, Department of Public Works officials relied on the “Belgian” method of setting granite blocks in sand. The slabs were durable (if horrifically noisy), but as they shifted in their foundations they produced a jarring, undulating ride; “carriages,” reported one French visitor, “appear to rise and fall as if on a troubled sea.”
Much of the difficulty lay in the inability to bring concerted public power to bear on the issue. Many of the city’s business leaders, public officials, and journalists—thoroughly disgusted with the effects of the preceding generation’s laissez-faire policies—clamored for a sustained and systematic approach to coordinating essential improvements in the built environment. “NO PIECEMEAL IMPROVEMENT WANTED,” blared the Guide in 1870: “What is wanted is one, general, comprehensive plan for . . . the thoroughfares of the whole city.” But the resistance of property holders to any constraints on short-term profitability, and the tremendous number of interested and competing parties, few if any of whom were willing to subordinate their interests to some larger vision, raised insurmountable obstacles to reform.
The docks provided a particularly egregious case in point. Thrown up in slipshod manner during the prewar boom, then neglected and abused, by the mid-1860s fewer than 10 percent were in good or fair repair. Docks periodically collapsed from the weight of merchandise piled high on rotting timbers or were swept away by the current. Wharves were too short and narrow for the era’s larger vessels and increased volume. They lacked such modern improvements as the steam-powered hoists commonplace at seaports in Europe, along the eastern seaboard, and across the East River. Unsheltered and unsecured, they were subject to weather, fire, and theft.
Ship captains could wait a week to land cargoes; without paying bribes, they could wait forever. Municipal piers adhered to the strategy of underpricing rivals by keeping rents and wharfage costs low, but this failed to generate enough income to maintain, much less upgrade, them. Regulation was inconsistent or absent and occasionally perverse: the Albany legislature, to boost the toll-earning capacity of the state’s waterway system, reserved the lower East River for its canal boat fleet, which clogged the piers around Coenties Slip, hindering deliveries of western grain.
Shipping continued to slip away to Brooklyn’s modernized facilities. Following the huge financial success of the Atlantic Docks, extensive waterfront improvements flowered after the war. The vast Erie Basin complex at Red Hook sped barged-in grain to Liverpool steamers using steam-driven elevators. Public works complemented private metamorphoses, transforming Wallabout Bay marshlands into the Kent Basin municipal docks. From Main Street to Red Hook Point, three thousand vessels (not counting canal boats) tied up each year, disgorging molasses, sugar, coffee, hides, and wool into the burgeoning warehouse districts and grain into elevators capable of storing fifteen million bushels.
Frustrated Manhattan merchants cried out for port improvements. For a city that had “a whole country tributary to its power, a whole nation concerned in its welfare,” said the Citizens Association, it was astonishing how little New York had done “to improve the commercial advantages which nature affords.” The group sponsored a meeting of indignant merchants in 1867, which proposed formation of a state Harbor Commission to unite the Manhattan and Brooklyn waterfronts. Other merchants, shipowners, and marine insurers formed a New York Pier and Warehouse Company