Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [756]
The rise of Tweed’s Democracy scuttled these plans—the machine was not willing to forego the patronage possibilities inherent in waterfront development—but Tammany proposed an even more ambitious agenda of publicly sponsored and planned development.1 Tweed’s 1870 charter created a strong, centralized, municipal Department of Docks, which sent engineers to London and Liverpool to study current approaches and commissioned General George C. McClellan to design a master plan. McClellan proposed a waterfront revamping similar to Tweed’s projected Viaduct Railway in grandeur and potential cost. It called for ringing the riverside, from the Upper West Side round to Corlear’s Hook, with a massive masonry bulkhead, a grand waterfront highway, and a uniform system of piers, with all private wharves to be absorbed by the city.
Some land acquisitions began in 1872, but the project soon slowed to a crawl. Owners of waterfront property, including some of wealthiest men in New York City, fought the project. Transport magnates like Vanderbilt lobbied hard to be given control of dock improvements, but rivals and concerned merchants blocked that initiative too. Other merchants agitated for complete deregulation rather than municipalization. In the end, the multitudinous shipowners, wharf owners, insurance firms, canal interests, rail lines, ferry companies, real estate promoters, wholesalers, and assorted corporations and individuals were utterly unable to agree on a collective solution. The very diversity of competing forces led to stalemate.
And worse. Land values stagnated along the East River waterfront, reflecting the rapid decline of the East Side shipyards and the rise of superior portside facilities in Brooklyn and New Jersey. Low-cost land attracted space-hungry industrial users—breweries, stables, refineries, grain and construction mills, coalyards—which further devalued the area, leading to disinvestment and accelerating squalor. The result was a downtown landscape that, for all its efficiencies and its lucrative centers of finance, communication, wholesaling, and retailing, coexisted with an inefficient public sphere and decaying, overcrowded communities.
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Haut Monde and Demimonde
In May 1871 the New York Times observed that elaborate preparations for the ball honoring Grand Duke Alexis of Russia had “kept all the aristocracy and respectability of this good city in a fever of expectation for weeks.” Now, as instructed by the Reception Committee (which included John Jacob Astor, William Henry Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and John Pierpont Morgan), workmen at the Academy of Music were hoisting into position the evening’s decorative centerpiece: two huge banners, one portraying Czar Alexander abolishing serfdom, the other Abraham Lincoln holding up the Emancipation Proclamation. Elite New Yorkers would thus proclaim their commitment to human liberty, while at the same time asserting their parity with the aristocratic classes of Europe.
Since the Revolution, Manhattan’s elite had been torn between a lifestyle that befit their sober republican principles and one that displayed their increasing wealth and confidence. In the affluent fifties they had tilted toward public preening; now, in the gilded sixties and seventies, they lurched toward outright ostentation. The adoption of ducal levels of display was driven by tremendous self-assurance—engendered by their victory in war, mastery of the peacetime economy, and unprecedented accumulation of wealth. (After 1873, moreover, their riches would no longer be subject to federal exactions, thanks to successful lobbying and legal challenges by the Anti-Income Tax Association of New York, led by Astor, Belmont, Morgan, and others among the grand duke’s welcoming party.)
The New York haute bourgeoisie’s postwar passion for gilded display also reflected recent shifts in power, wealth, and cultural authority within its ranks. The frenzied industrialization and financial speculation