Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [775]
By the late 1860s baseball had become a business, an urban entertainment commodity with Brooklyn and New York City at its center. The metropolitan area was a major market for recruitment: when a Cincinnati Red Stocking triumph in 1869 ended the local area’s domination of baseball, most of the Reds proved to be New Yorkers.
The huge crowds that came to contests were predominantly drawn from the city’s middling ranks. In part this was simply because the fees (twenty-five to fifty cents) and costs of travel to out-of-city fields effectively barred unskilled laborers. It was also due to baseball’s peculiarly white-collar charms, its appeal to middle-class sensibilities. An extremely orderly game, full of reassuring rules and penalties for infractions, baseball grew ever more “scientific” in nature as it professionalized. This was reflected on the field, in growing levels of specialization, training, and discipline and in the invention of new techniques: Dicky Pearce, the Atlantics’ star shortstop, became the first to employ the bunt as an offensive weapon. Even fandom required new levels of cerebration. Henry Chadwick, editor of the Chronicle, invented box scores and began calculating batting averages. Spectators could now peruse the reports, tables, and statistics in the sporting press and follow players and teams in a methodical fashion. The commentary of sports journalists in turn expanded the available information pool—the New York National Police Gazette, a major source, was widely available in hotels, barbershops, and saloons—and helped educate habitués in the finer points of observation.
The respectable middle class knew the kinds of entertainment it didn’t like, as well: the sordid goings-on in Kit Burns’s rat pit. The American Society for the Prevention of
“City Enormities—Every Brute Can Beat His Beast!’ from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, October 28, 1865. This depiction of cartmen abusing a horse is said to have prompted the formation of the ASPGA, which used it for many years to rally support among the urban middle classes. (General Research. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)—a strictly New York City concern despite its expansive name—had been founded in 1866 by Henry Bergh, son of wealthy shipbuilder Christian Bergh. Addressing a crowded Clinton Hall meeting of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, Bergh had denounced the cruelties practiced upon urban animals, particularly by the brutish (and Irish) lower classes, and urged New Yorkers to follow England’s example in tackling the problem organizationally and legislatively. The backing of wealthy bourgeois gentlemen (Astor, Fish, Belmont) and leading ministers (the Unitarian “Pope” Henry Bellows) won the ASPCA a charter and gained passage of restrictive laws, but the rank-and-file supporters of the organization were mainly middle class.
The ASPCA took out after lower-class blood sports, deploring both their cruelty and their waste of working-class time. It repeatedly raided Kit Burns’s establishment, forcing sportsmen to shift to pits in Brooklyn, Williamsburg, and Hoboken, and in subsequent decades largely succeeded in driving animal sports from the city. Except, that is, for the upper-class pastime of fox-hunting.
In addition to denouncing particular forms of working-class play, many professionals scorned the communal culture of the immigrant streets. Frederick Law Olmsted objected to “young men in knots of perhaps half a dozen in lounging attitudes,” who rudely obstructed sidewalks or descended into a “brilliantly lighted basement, where they find others of their sort, see, hear, smell, drink, and eat all manner of vile things.” Proper neighborliness did not consist in sitting about on doorsteps or curbstones while children “dodge[d]