Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [971]
Green began at the beginning, the prelapsarian age when the area’s European settlers had lived in harmony with one another. The three islands they settled—Manhattan, Long, and Staten—remained “in close indissoluble relation” at the mouth of the great river, serving as common “buttresses and breakwaters of a capacious harbor.” Then came the Fall. Natural unity gave way to artificial divisions: states, cities, counties. Waterways became walls, as residents perversely turned them from “bonds of union” into “symbols of division.”
But it was absurd to treat rivers as barriers. Green pointed out that the chief cities of the world—London, Amsterdam, Prague, Vienna—were municipally and commercially unified by rivers. Paris alone boasted twenty-seven spanning bridges. Far more troubling was that under existing political arrangements, protection of the navigable water system—the concern of all—had become the duty of none. Fragmentation of authority led to pollution and subversion of the area’s single greatest asset, even though all were affected equally by the decay. The tides marched through all the municipalities, collecting and distributing everywhere “offal and sewerage loaded with contagion,” and “exotic microbes, bacteria, and all variety of poisonous germic life” were not hemmed in by city boundaries.
Such harbor-level problems—garbage, smoke, stench, bad drainage, noxious manufactories—could not be attended to by municipalities in hostile array. In the absence of a supra-government that could make a corrective plan for the entire port, the area would continue to suffer from the depredations of a vast number of private “marauders, who by encroachment, appropriation and misuse, deplete the general system to transfuse its vitalities into some niggard scheme of individual profit.”
This situation was as unnecessary as it was ridiculous. Perhaps long ago, when it seemed there would not be enough commerce to go around, there might have been some sense in a hoarding of territorial advantages. But with benefits now clearly illimitable, interests had become interlocking; the prosperity of one territory promoted that of the others. Brooklyn’s lawyers did more business in New York courts than in their own, and its merchants’ mansions were paid for with profits from their New York-based trade. The reverse was also true: the waterfront from Astoria to Bay Ridge was largely owned, developed, and used by New York merchants.
If all could swim together, they could sink together too. One common problem was the port’s vulnerability to modern foreign fleets. Wherever the next war came from, Green warned, “New York must first answer at the muzzle of the gun.” It was essential that it “be allowed to answer at the muzzle of another gun as heavy as that by which we shall be challenged.” Local divisions only impeded the combined effort that alone could induce the national government to provide adequate defenses.
Access to the interior was another common predicament. Green reminded the citizenry that New York had become the nation’s chief emporium not simply because it commanded foreign commerce but because it controlled routes to continental markets. Norfolk’s was a better harbor, but it remained a summer watering place because it lacked inland connections. The Hudson seaport had long relied on its Erie edge, but that was no longer enough, as modern engineering skill whittled away mountainous impediments. New connections were essential—crucially, a bridge across the Hudson—and only a Greater New York could muster the resources to act without waiting for state or national governments.
Planning the city’s physical development was as critical as arranging its commercial future. New York