Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [790]
After the war Kleindeutschland’s Germans enhanced the already considerable number of spaces devoted to community pastimes, adding Walhalla Hall, Beethoven Hall, and a new Turn Halle, among many others. Here German confectioners, upholsterers, barbers, horseshoers, morocco dressers, and goldworkers could hold their fall and winter balls.
German (and Irish) associations also traipsed en masse to pleasure spots around the metropolitan area. At first, the favorite Manhattan venue was Jones’ Wood, where the Schermerhorn and Jones families had leased their grounds to entrepreneurs who established a commercial picnic ground and hotel there. The proprietors then rented out the space to ethnic, social, athletic, and religious groups, who arranged their own excursions or festivals. Germans arrived in great numbers—by steamboat or the Second and Third Avenue street railways—to dance to German music, watch gymnastic exhibitions, and drink lager beer. The Scottish Caledonian Society held track and field games at Jones’ Wood, and Irish church groups and temperance societies held annual excursions and fund-raising picnics.
Improved transport made trips farther afield practical too. The Journeymen Plumbers traveled (along with Wallach’s Brass Band) by steamboat and barge up the Hudson to hold their annual picnics at Dudley’s Grove. Nearby rural Queens County was even more popular. Every Sunday four to five thousand would cross to Hunter’s Point on the 34th Street ferry and fan out to various country retreats for picnics. On one fine afternoon in 1872 so many Germans flocked to Schuetzen Park to hear the Prussian Guard Band play that over a thousand were turned away. Steamers ferried massive crowds directly to weekend resorts like Witzel’s twenty-seven-acre establishment at College Point for eels, clams, and beer and to Coney Island, whose west end was an increasingly popular destination.
Working people avoided the new Central Park at first—aside from special occasions like July 4—as Olmsted’s rules forbidding German singing society picnics or Irish church suppers made it clear that visitors were welcome only on bourgeois terms. Things changed when Tweed’s charter transferred power from state to city. The Tweed regime did not, as the New York Times was convinced it would, turn the park over to rowdies, peddlers, and prostitutes. Tammany politicians actually improved the park—while lining their pockets and those of well-connected contractors. It also loosened park rules, expanded permissible activities, and added new attractions like boat rentals, Sunday pony rides (though religious groups blocked Sunday concerts), and a children’s carousel, turned by a blind mule in the basement. Above all the Democrats renovated the Arsenal Zoo in 1870. By 1873 park attendance had jumped 43 percent, and the zoo, a free attraction, was the destination of roughly one of every four visitors (especially after circus owners like P. T. Barnum began quartering animals there). Working-class visitation continued to soar in the late 1870s, as the Sixth Avenue El cut twenty minutes off travel time from downtown and more working people had moved within walking distance. Sundays in the park were now dominated by working-class visitors, especially Germans.
Alongside these communal activities the city’s expanding commercial culture attracted people on a more individual basis. On Saturday evening, their week’s wages in hand, working people still headed for the Bowery. From its lower reaches in the Five Points up to its northern end where it spilled into the Union Square Rialto area, the Bowery was aflame with gas-lit clusters of white, red, blue, and green glass globes. The street itself was filled with entertainers: four- or five-piece German bands playing waltzes and schottisches, organ grinders with gaudily attired monkeys, black quartets singing spirituals, street vendors hawking hot