Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [969]
Manhattanites were divided about annexation. Using arguments that would be recycled repeatedly during the next decades of debate, downtowners balked at underwriting Bronx-based competitors, though their objections were partly alleviated when local property owners agreed to shoulder half the improvement costs. They also protested the notion of paying to enhance the quality of life for suburban commuters who deserted the city each night. Proponents countered that annexation would corral the fleeing middle class back into the taxpaying fold, provide room for downtown to expand, and boost upper Manhattan’s real estate values. Put to the electoral test in November 1873, annexation passed overwhelmingly, and on January 1, 1874, the city’s territory jumped from fourteen thousand to twenty-one thousand acres, its thirty to forty thousand new citizens assembled in two new wards.
Not coincidentally, consolidation sentiment surfaced in Brooklyn that year. In 1874 a cohort of property owners, developers, and businessmen (including such potentates as J. S. T. Stranahan, D. D. Litchfield, and A. A. Low) formed the Municipal Union Society of the City of Brooklyn and the County of Kings. These gentlemen sought a merger between the two great cities and the five county towns. Union, they argued, would enhance property values, sustain the area’s commercial supremacy, and end boundary disputes. But even after they pointed out the benefits achieved by annexationist movements in Paris, London, Boston, and Philadelphia, public response in Brooklyn remained unenthusiastic, and consolidation, though it passed the Assembly, was defeated in the Senate.
Further such efforts were derailed by the depression of the 1870s. Andrew Haswell Green busied himself with estate management and with projects that secured de facto if not de jure linkages. Green was one of the original commissioners of the Brooklyn Bridge—as was Stranahan, who on opening day in 1883 prophesied that its bonds of steel would usher in political union. Green also helped get a bridge thrown across the Harlem River at 183rd Street in 1886 and was appointed in 1890 to a commission charged with planning a railroad bridge across the Hudson.
In the meantime, the harbor’s constituent communities had undergone such a degree of interlacing that the editor of the 1880 census’s volumes on social statistics suggested that a greater city had in effect already come into being. The population was separated “by physical and political lines,” he said, but as these “have had little influence on the character of the people, their industries, or their modes of life,” it “seemed proper” to consolidate the data on them under “the one head of ‘The Metropolis’ which they constitute.”
“IMPERIAL DESTINY”
A statistical consolidation had been wrought, but it was only after the Henry George campaign that Manhattan elites, jolted by the challenge of the radical and labor movements to their vision and command of New York City, wholeheartedly joined Green’s campaign, and his project began to rumble toward realization.
In 1887 the New York Chamber of Commerce officially urged that Brooklyn be added to New York. The assembled merchants expressed concern that the port was losing ground to the more efficient facilities of New Orleans, Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia—and between 1880 and 1890 New York did indeed suffer an absolute and relative decline in its percentage of the country’s exports and imports. The slovenly state of metropolitan infrastructure—decaying docks, clogged streets, and turtle-paced transit