Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [770]
One of the greatest obstacles to even organized engineers’ winning professional autonomy was their continuing subordination to the political authorities who controlled public works, but here too there were breakthroughs. In 1860, when Mayor Wood fired Alfred W. Craven, chief engineer of the Croton Aqueduct, Craven fought back vigorously, arguing that he had the technical know-how required to run the city’s water and sewer systems, and the mayor did not. Craven won his point both legally (he was reinstated) and in the court of public opinion, where the mayor was denounced for putting politics above efficiency.
Professionalization spread among corporate managers too, particularly in the expanding railroad industry. Managers of competing companies, striving to rationalize a hodgepodge system, came together to standardize operating procedures and equipment, then continued to meet regularly. A growing sense of professional kinship transcending corporate loyalties gave rise to groups like the American Society of Rail Road Superintendents and the National Association of General Passenger and Ticket Agents.
At the other end of the middle-class spectrum, which consisted of employees rather than professionals and managers, postwar developments in the municipal economy swelled the ranks of clerical and sales forces. Insurance companies, banks, mercantile and stock exchanges, post offices and express agencies, credit rating firms, shipping and railroad companies, newspapers, large-scale manufacturers, and wholesaler jobbers—all these required sizable numbers of bookkeepers, cashiers, accountants, and clerks to staff them. The burgeoning of department stores, fashion and piano showrooms, and elegant retail outlets similarly required growing numbers of stockroom employees and salesmen—and, gradually, saleswomen: in 1869 A. T Stewart’s began to employ “American ladies of refinement and culture” to stand behind the counters.
Such workers seldom organized on the model of the professional organizations; most didn’t organize at all. What bound them together, rather, were common experiences and shared values. Most worked in “clean” environments—the giant new downtown office buildings—rather than grubby factories, grimy warehouses, or messy construction sites, and most of them dressed accordingly. Junius Browne, watching the morning ferry passengers disembark in 1869, noted that the first contingent—“mechanics with their flannel and check shirts”—was followed by platoons of salesmen, accountants, and clerks after seven A.M., at which time “the shirts of the passengers begin to whiten and raiment to improve.” Many of these white-collared workers believed, as an 1868 commentator in Galaxy put it, that “manual labor is disreputable” even though it often paid better than head work (masons earned twice what clerks did). To further distinguish themselves from mechanics and laborers, the lower middle classes adopted appropriate modes of personal conduct—taking their cultural cues from professionals and managers when deciding how and where to live their lives.
HOME SWEET APARTMENT
Manhattan’s middle classes had their own territorial enclaves, spatially distinct from both Hell’s Kitchen and Fifth Avenue. They settled in the West Village, in Chelsea, along cross streets in the rectangle bordered by 14th, 59th, Eighth, and Second, and on the Upper East Side and Harlem. Their travels to and from work downtown helped swell the annual ridership on New York’s thirteen streetcar lines to 150 million by 1873, up fourfold since 1860, despite crammed conditions on the commuting cars (it “would not be decent to carry live hogs thus,” huffed Horace Greeley). Shopping soon followed them northward, and dry-goods stores spread up Third, Sixth, and Eighth avenues, making them the commercial thoroughfares of middle-class neighborhoods.
When they could afford to, middling New Yorkers purchased their own homes. In the