Original subtitles

my great-grandfather was the first he was michael manning a tenant farmer

who was dispossessed or gave up in the famine came to new york when michael manning landed at south

street in 1847 the first person who saw him was probably horrified i think with the

way he'd probably dressed and what he represented people weren't saying he's a

wonderful immigrant let's bring him in he's going to make the city better

probably the immediate thought was we wish he'd go home and then after that we'd wish he'd go

someplace else americans want to believe that it's a very natural thing for people to live

together and it's an aberration when they don't and actually if you look at human history

the exact opposite is true that it's very difficult to bring different cultures together

and have people live together in peace and learn to get along and new york is the great experiment

there one people piling on top of each other constantly and that brings tremendous conflict

i think it's the greatest source of strength of new york but it's also a source of conflict um

disunion um struggle

fewer than 170 000 people lived on the island of manhattan

in 1825 by any modern standard the largest city in america was still a

relatively peaceful place compact orderly and even rural

just two miles from where the dutch had landed two centuries before

the closely knit town tapered off into a wilderness of farms

country lanes and open fields george templeton strong a native new

yorker born as work on the erie canal began could easily walk from his father's

house down near the battery up to the old pear tree peter stuyvesant

had planted on the outskirts of town across the river in the village of brooklyn population

11 000 long island-born walt whitman loved to play baseball in the vacant

fields that surrounded the sleepy town

life in both cities was still strikingly simple

there was no regular police force no professional fire department

no public transportation only the most primitive water and sewage systems

and just a handful of public schools at night flickering gas lamps introduced

only two years before scarcely lit the poorly paved streets which after sundown

were nearly deserted

it was confined to extremely lower manhattan my great great grandfather who wrote a

memoir of his childhood in the first decade of the 19th century

remembered that all above grand street was country i mean city hall was his father actually my

four grandfather was a city alderman he was the one who found the compromise

to get city hall finished it had been under construction for 10 years and it

was lying there unfinished because it was so expensive he said let's finish the back of city

hall with brownstone instead of with marble because it's so far uptown nobody

will ever see the back of it anyway

never again would life in new york city be so simple or harmonious in the decades to come

forces that had been gathering for 200 years would converge on the island of manhattan

transforming every aspect of life in the city and bringing every possibility and every

problem of the modern age all american cities were experiencing

revolutionary change in terms of the way people lived but in new york it was on a more intense

level because the size of the city the narrowness of the geography

the intensity and extremeness of the growth was so much greater than other places

new york had only a hundred thousand people in eighteen hundred

by nineteen hundred it had fifty times as many people that's an incredible transformation

no city in america had ever grown so rapidly or so large no city on earth

had ever brought so many different kinds of people together in one place at one time

between 1825 and 1865 new yorkers would confront the most daunting question

of their entire history could they create a new kind of order on

the island of manhattan or would the city explode into chaos and violence

and subside into complete anarchy

we are rapidly becoming the london of america i myself am astonished and this city is

the wonder of every stranger john pintard

its advantages of position are perhaps

unequaled anywhere situated on an island

which i think it will one day cover it rises like venice from the sea

and like that fairest of cities in the days of her glory receives into its lap tribute

of all the riches of the earth francis

from the day it opened in october 1825 the erie canal sparked an economic

revolution that would transform forever life in new york city connecting the

great lakes to the hudson river and beyond it transformed new york almost overnight

into a gigantic funnel through which much of the wealth of the western world would now have to pass

by the erie canal new york effectively captured the economy of the middle east and it

began to grow so extraordinarily quickly it developed around 10 miles of street front per

year in the 1830s 40s and 50s it was just one gigantic construction zone

and once it starts it begins to snowball i mean it's like a planetesimals building up

into a planet once it gets enough gravity it sucks in everything else

and that's what happened in new york because new york was the largest city in the census

and then the larger it got the larger it tended to go on the canal changes everything after that

new york would be out in front and would never look back so in culture in the economy in

in spurring industrialization because now you've got a market for cast iron mass

manufactured goods because they can go out the ramifications are absolutely

total in in all areas by 1830 people were pouring into manhattan

to work in the new factories offices and workshops of the city

as commercial activity in lower manhattan exploded the narrow lanes of the old dutch

village were transformed into the first district in the world devoted exclusively to commerce

so in new york city almost for the first time in human history you get an area that's just business

and people don't live there you have to come there from somewhere else so it's a breaking up it's a

transformation of the historic city people with money begin to move away the

journey to work begins to increase we have a different kind of a place and

new york city is at the forefront of that we don't think about new york as an

industrial city really we think detroit we think chicago whatever but in fact

by the time of the civil war new york was the biggest industrial city in the united states

what we have in fact is a kind of a metropolitan industrialization it's

small scale there are little shops most factories so called are maybe 20 people

large and there's hundreds of them there's thousands of them and they're in incredible

intense competition with one another with astonishing speed the outlines of a

modern mass metropolis were beginning to appear on the island of manhattan

including the first slums and suburbs the first modern police force

the first public transit system the first department stores

and a vast new waterworks the massive croton aqueduct on the outskirts of town

by 1840 new york was moving into uncharted territory no longer merely a port but a giant

vortex drawing everything in america into its orbit goods money people

ideas and increasingly tensions

for better and for worse one man wrote new york is fast becoming

if she be not already america before some point i think my own sense

of it is that somewhere in the 1820s and 30s one could feel that they could grasp the

whole of new york after that point it became too complicated

for people to have that kind of confidence that's the difference between pre-modern

new york and modern new york

it is a place of multiple realities and partial comprehensions hopefully

enough comprehension so that one doesn't go around lost and disoriented all the time but i

think it would be a far less interesting experience if one thought

one really comprehended it

there is no great novel about new york there is no single novel there are a lot

of very good new york novels but there's no single all-encompassing novel the way

um you could look at any number of dickens books and say we know

london as a result of that i thought probably the best novel of new york was the newspaper

if you sat down and read the newspapers you'd get some gauge of what we'd gone through

and the reason is because it's dynamic the reason is because it's

of its dailiness there's a dailiness to life in the city a sense of

surprise it's a kind of a city that although it insists on routine from a

lot of its people um knows that routine is is

a utopian goal and that some other thing is going to happen between here and 57th

street you better be ready for it

the flight was a bold and perilous one but here i am in the great city of new york

safe and sound without loss of blood or bone

in less than a week after leaving baltimore i was walking amid the hurrying throng

and gazing upon the dazzling wonders of broadway the dreams of my childhood and the

purpose of my manhood were now fulfilled

a free state around me and a free earth under my feet

what a moment this was to me frederick

douglass april 1842 who does not know that our city is the great place of the

western continent the heart the brain the focus

the main spring the no more beyond

of the new world walt whitman

in the spring of 1841 22 year old walt whitman arrived in manhattan

looking for work as a newspaperman the son of a failed carpenter from

brooklyn whose own mother thought him a good boy but very strange he was one

of the tens of thousands of newcomers streaming in each year to find work in the city

the energy of the metropolis broke over him like a thunderstorm

this is the city he wrote ecstatically and i am one of its citizens

silence what can new york noisy roaring rumbling tumbling

bustling turbulent new york have to do with silence amid the universal clutter

the all-swallowing vortex of the great money whirlpool

who has any even distant idea

of the profound repose of silence walt whitman

he took to the city instantly and soon found work at a paper called the aurora

one of the dozens of new penny papers springing up all over the island

there had never been anything like them sold on the streets for a penny apiece

by gangs of ragged boys they were filled not with sober shipping reports but with

eye-catching stories of crime vice and sex often drawn from the streets of the city itself

of them all none was more popular than the new york herald

founded in 1835 by a bombastic scottish immigrant named james gordon bennett fond of

comparing himself in the pages of his own journal to julius caesar shakespeare and

alexander the great up until the 1830s newspapers

had very small circulation they were quite expensive and they were always

effectively owned by one political party it was james gordon bennett who changed all that

he put all the ideas together and came up with the new york herald which became

the most successful newspaper in the world it was very low priced it was politically independent

and it was written not with the idea of instructing the reader with what he

ought to know but with giving the reader what he wanted

to know modern journalism had begun

in its first two weeks alone the herald ran blood curdling accounts of three suicides three murders

a fire that killed five people and an accident in which a man had blown his own head off

monday february 1st 1841 there is a paper published in this city

i am not in the habit of quoting from it for i consider it a disgrace

nor would i do it now but to protest against the depraved and vitiated taste

of newspaper readers it is an undeniable fact that this filthy sheet

has a wider circulation than any other not only here but in other cities

philip hung

reporters like whitman went everywhere covering the spectacular fires that

broke out with increasing frequency now and the epidemics of cholera that

ravaged the increasingly congested slums from the imposing ramparts of the new

croton water works way out on 42nd street to the dizzying spire of newly rebuilt trinity church

the tallest structure in town

the vast and interminable city was spread out as upon a map before us there

beneath our feet and stretching far away in every direction lay one of the most

beautiful and exciting spectacles ever looked upon the new york morning news

by the 1830s and 1840s the city is so complicated the city has got so much

ethnic diversity economic differences social differences that people increasingly need a

newspaper to help them to decode the city to figure out what's going on

here's a place where every day i can get a handle on what's actually going on

and i can get some sense of order to what's becoming a very disorderly place

in less than a decade more than 20 dailies and dozens of weeklies had crowded into

a five-block stretch across from city hall called printing house row

along with samuel morse's new telegraph office and matthew brady's new photographic studio by 1841

the bustling district around city hall had become the center of news and information

for the entire nation remember at that period we're talking still about a kind of walking city

that is to say in a very very small area maybe a couple of miles

you could see the amazing contrasts that are growing up even with a few blocks

if you think about where city hall is the center of government

you think about where wall street is the center of commerce and then you think about the five

points the sort of worst slum of the era they're all pretty much when the stones

throw of each other and then if you include the emerging commercial entertainments like barnum's

museum and so on you can see that that really within a very very small area

you have all these amazing contrasts of wealth and poverty of high culture and low culture of

different ethnic and racial groups and all that stuff really in a fairly contained area

in the winter of 1841 an extraordinary establishment

called the american museum opened its doors for the first time

on the corner of broadway and printing house row at the very heart of the new metropolis

its proprietor was a 31 year old itinerant showman from connecticut named phineas t barnum an

ex-newspaperman with an uncanny instinct for the new mass culture beginning to emerge in new

york city barnum is a quintessential new yorker in part because he's not from new york

he has a sense of the times he has a sense of

the chaos of the times of the urban kind of familia there's lots of people

coming in and out of new york there's movement there's differences people are not quite sure

how to relate to each other they're not quite sure who to trust anymore

they're not quite sure if the person who appears to be a gentleman because he's

wearing good clothing and has a beautiful pocket watch is someone who really truly is a

gentleman or not eager to exploit the shifting interests and anxieties

of new york's increasingly diverse citizenry barnum programmed something

for everyone in the american museum including a scale model of dublin for

the growing number of irish immigrants and a 3 000 seat morrow lecture room for

new york's upright middle class establishment other popular attractions included a

mermaid from fiji a knitting machine operated by a dog

a bearded girl named annie jones a 25-inch named general tom thumb

a pair of chinese brothers named chang and eng the original siamese twins

and playing to the growing national obsession with the question of race and origins

an 18 year old microcephalic black man from georgia whom barnum presented simply as the what

is it march 2nd friday stopped at barnum's on my way downtown

to see the much advertised what is it some say it's an advanced chimpanzee

but it seems to me clearly an idiotic negro dwarf raised perhaps in alabama or virginia

his anatomical details are fifthly simian a great fact for darwin george templeton

strong barnum was the primal huckster he was

the adam and eve of huxterism but the idea was to draw a paying crowd no matter what

and he was a genius at it he changed his tricks on over and over again he had a

seemingly unending number of them now and then someone would cry out humbug and

charlatan but so much the better for me it helped to advertise me and i was

willing to bear the reputation i engaged queer curiosities and even monstrosities

simply to add notoriety to the museum pt barnum there's a game that's being

played here they enjoy the notion that they're being conned and

and he's almost inviting you to figure out how he's done it you know what's where's the humbug

in this and you know that you're being had but there's a pleasure

in the game of both being head knowing that you're being ahead trying to

decipher how he's doing you know how does the magician work work his tricks

so barnum is the spiritual grandfather of bali who of advertising of public relations

of a bold brassiness that's a critical component of the new york psyche

certainly from that point on from the day it opened the american

museum was a stunning success during its 27-year run barnum would sell

42 million tickets seven million more than the entire population of the united states

inside the enormous differences already dividing new yorkers dwindled for a moment against the

backdrop of the human extremes on display outside on the city streets however

those differences were becoming more and more troubling with each passing year

i think the fiction of new york history and new yorker self-perception is that

they were the most tolerant people in the world the cosmopolitan new yorker

able to accept anyone who came the reality of new york history reveals quite a bit

more tension and conflict in the actual day-to-day social relations of new yorkers

this was never said that welcomed immigrants if you if you read the history of new york

um whichever group was coming at the time everyone hated and then the group that got here five

minutes before them had someone to look down on and that's always been the case

june 2 1836 they arrived at this port during the month of may 15

825 passengers all europe is coming across the ocean

all that part at least who cannot make a living at home and what shall we do with them they

increase our taxes eat our bread and encumber our streets

and not one in twenty is competent to keep himself

philip home for years the number of immigrants coming into the city had been on the

rise as the demand for workers grew by 1840 more than 50 000 germans had pushed in

settling in an insulated neighborhood of their own called klein deutschland or little germany

an even greater number had emigrated from ireland impoverished farmers and unskilled day

laborers mainly most of whom quickly found work taking on the worst and toughest jobs in the city

digging sewers paving streets building houses or working as servants scholarly maids

and seamstresses 1842 nearly a hundred thousand irish immigrants had flooded into new york

city fueling waves of virulent anti-catholic bigotry and the bitter resentment of native-born

workers who feared for their jobs it's very hard for people nowadays to realize there was a white

christian english-speaking immigrant group that was essentially seen

as another race so far in that they could never be absorbed in the united states

their arrival really in the 1840s triggers the growth of the american

party as it's called the time or the know-nothing party which is essentially um

said we have to stop the immigration of these people to the country they're

gonna they're gonna destroy our identity they can never be loyal because of their

loyalty to the catholic church they don't want to work they're shiftless they're violent this was

the perception one of the most interesting thing about the irish is the

kind of discrimination that they fit that they faced when they came to new york

all of the cartoons of the period show them with huge brows show them drunk all the time show

them involved in fights and brawls the irish were called the blacks of the 19th century

they were not considered to be white ethnic conflict had already reached

alarming levels on the streets of the city when in the summer of 1845 a tragedy of

unimaginable proportions in the irish countryside sent a tidal wave of desperate people

streaming towards new york

in the years to come the influx of famine irish immigrants would overwhelm

the city's resources completely and change forever the social and political balance

of the metropolis

the great migration begins in 1845 between 1845 and 1855 you have a million

people die in ireland in the potato famine the great defining event of modern irish

history 2.1 million leave the 1.5 they come to the united states a million come across south street

in a 10-year period and it's an immigration very unlike the immigrations that follow

one because it's in sailing ships it's not in the steam ships that become the

regular vessel across the atlantic in seven days this is a 30-day passage

some of them will call coffin ships because there were more people dead on

them than alive when they landed and you have a million people one-eighth

of the irish nation comes across south street in a 10-year period there's

no other immigration from europe like that in the 19th century

hundreds of our people just cast on shore from the immigrant ships

parade daily the streets of new york as howling beggars they sleep

in droves in the station houses the commissioner's supplying them with bread

in the morning they wander over the city begging

no city on earth had ever had to contend with such an onslaught of humanity

in 1854 an old concert hall at the foot of manhattan called castle garden was pressed into

service to handle the flood tide of impoverished newcomers by then there were more irish in new

york city than any other place in the world except dublin and still they came on

pushing the congestion in the new slums to more than 300 people per acre

five times the density city fathers had anticipated

when laying out the street plan 50 years before

the huge famine irish immigration that hit in the 40s brought here

a rural people who had no urban skills many of them had no

english and and settled into pretty miserable conditions pretty fast

as thousands of irish immigrants pushed into the five points

one of the only areas in the city where african americans could afford to live

the two groups were thrown into increasingly bitter competition

for the worst dwellings and the lowest paying jobs

every hour sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room perhaps for some newly

arrived immigrants whose hunger and color are thought to give them title to a special favor

frederick douglass we'd like to think that segregation is a southern

phenomenon it's not a northern phenomenon and there are black burial grounds

and there are white burial grounds there are black sections in churches the pews up in the top

so racism is built into the very structure and culture of the city and

it's only exacerbated by the new arrivals profit-hungry new york businessmen only

made matters worse hiring irish laborers instead of blacks because they would work for even less

money then using blacks as strike breakers whenever the irish threatened to walk out

for better wages by 1855 the two groups with the most in common

in new york were locked in a life and death struggle on the lowest rung of the city's

economic ladder of the two groups that have come to new york there are striking similarities

between the irish and african americans the irish come from a rural culture in which they are

essentially dispossessed they're not connected to the government where they come from there are no

institutions that who reflect who they are their culture is in their

in two things really it's in their it's in their song and it's in their church

and those are the two things they take with them when they come out of this

culture where they've even lost their language they take on the language of the people

who've conquered them and they give new life to that language

few groups coming to new york would ever suffer the hardship and misery

experienced by the famine irish crowded into filthy vermin-infested

housing and brutally derided by their fellow citizens devastating outbreaks of cholera and

other diseases routinely swept through the wards they inhabited where the death rate was often

three times higher than the rest of the city

infants and children die in fearful ratios one worried observer noted

and yet even as the concern of middle class reformers mounted

most new yorkers blame the newcomers themselves for their condition

you have no idea what an immense vat of misery and crime

and filth this great city is i realize it more and more

think of ten thousand children growing up almost sure to be prostitutes

and rogues charles loring brace fearing for the future of the city

protestant missionaries invaded the slums hoping to assimilate the irish before it

was too late in 1853 an episcopal clergyman named

charles loring brace started the children's aid society for 17 cents a night

abandoned children could get a warm bed and bath a hot supper of pork and beans

and to the fury of irish catholic new yorkers protestant religious instruction often

administered by brace himself charles loring brace founded the

children's aid society he wrote a book called the dangerous classes of new york

and he pointed to the condition of the children living in those cellar holes without

parental supervision so often orphans often abandoned called the dangerous classes of new york

he said you see them now but wait in 20 years time they will have grown up and they will

vote and what will they vote themselves and we have to respond to them

you've got a city that is overrun with thousands of vagrant children

neighborhoods in which church life doesn't seem to really be that important

so from the perspective of people like a hoenn or brace or other middle class and

upper class reformers i think the 1850s really seems like a crisis moment precisely because

traditional sources of authority no longer seem to be able to to keep the city under control

the streets at night are infested with ruffians of all descriptions

they hang around corners they move about in gangs men and boys together abusing

and sometimes hitting the quiet passer by there is no security for life or limb in

the present disorderly state of things the new york times

violence of every kind now routinely erupted on the city streets

there were working-class riots against the upper class nativist riots against the foreign-born

anti-irish riots anti-english riots and anti-black

in the fifth ward and what was now called the bloody sixth

rival gangs of protestants and catholics vied for control of the streets

striking terror in the hearts of middle-class new yorkers like the conservative lawyer george

templeton strong who now retreated even farther up down

november 13 1854 met a prodigious no-nothing procession moving uptown

as i omnibus down broadway to the vestry meeting a most emphatic and truculent

demonstration they looked as if they might have designs on saint patrick's cathedral

and i think the celts of prince and martin streets would have found them ugly customers

we may well have the tremendous riot and carnage here

at any moment george templed and strong

by 1854 the chaos on the city streets had reached all the way to city hall

that fall to the horror of many upper-class new yorkers a slippery and corruptible one-time

liquor store owner named fernando wood swept into the mayor's office on a

tide of irish and german votes backed by a new force in city politics called tammany hall

the important point about wood is that he was really the first new york

politician to sort of nakedly mobilize the votes of these immigrants of the working classes

with the promise of of sort of paying them off with jobs with patronage with

favors and so on and so forth for the middle class and upper class

gentile elite of new york that seemed to be a very frightening thing indeed

because it really suggested that politics was now going to be

worked out in a very very different kind of way by 1857 new york was on the verge of what

george templeton strong called municipal civil war that spring woods republican opponents

determined to drive the democrat from office had the state legislature rewrite the

city charter stripping the mayor of most of his powers on june 17th two rival police

departments woods municipals and the state-run metropolitans

rioted on the steps of city hall in the heart of what the new york times called

the worst governed city in the world surveying the chaos the editor of harper's monthly

threw up his hands in despair nothing has gone as it was meant to go

he wrote nor is anything where according to map and calculation it should be

for many people around the country what's going on in new york may seem

frightening scary to many people in new york it seems frightening scary but i think

there's also a sense that that increasingly this is also going to be

the future this is what we're becoming this is where america is heading

and so we need to figure out what's going on in new york if we're going to figure out

the future of the republic

july 7 1857 yesterday morning i was spectator of a strange weird

painful scene the earth had caved in a few minutes before and crushed the breath out of a

pair of ill-starred celtic laborers around them were a few men blissless and inert

enough but not so the women i suppose they were

keening a wild unearthly cry half shriek and half song

now and then one of them would throw herself down on one of the corpses wipe some trace of

defilement from the face of the dead man with her apron slowly and carefully and then resume her

lament it was an uncanny sound to hear

quite new to me our celtic fellow citizens are almost as remote from us in temperament

and constitution as the chinese

george templeton strong

manahata how fit a name for america's great democratic

island city the word itself how beautiful how aboriginal

how it seems to rise with tall spires glistening in sunshine with such new

world atmosphere vista and action

you will hardly know who i am or what i mean but i shall be good health to you

nevertheless these heated torn distracted ages

are to be compacted and made whole

walt whitman

on july 5th 1855 a slim volume of poetry bound in green cloth and embossed in gold

went on sale in manhattan's bookstores though his name appeared nowhere on the

front cover the author was 36 year old walt whitman now living with his mother on ryerson

street in brooklyn doing odd jobs as a printer writer and builder

the book he said arose out of my life in brooklyn and new york

absorbing a million people for 15 years with an intimacy and eagerness and abandon

probably never equaled nothing like it had ever been written before in the english language

if you read 1855 leaves of grass there's not one archaic word in it it rings like so much

of it like it could have been written yesterday that um this man saw things he just had

this penetrating look into the new york soul which very few people have ever had but he had it

and he put it down on paper and it will always be there

the twelve poems it contained and the dozens more whitman added in the years to come

were composed during the most turbulent years in the life of new york

as the forces of growth and expansion threatened to pull the city apart

yet embracing the entire human landscape of new york whitman hoped to show his fellow

citizens what brought them together rather than what drove them apart

the job of the poet he wrote was to resolve all tongues into his own

the poet is the joiner he sees how they join

nested in nests of water bays superb rich

hemmed thick all round with sail ships and steamships an island

16 miles long solid founded

numberless crowded streets high growths of iron

slender strong light

splendidly uprising toward clear skies

the countless masts the white shore steamers

the lighters the fairy boats

the downtown streets the houses of business of the ship merchants and money brokers

the river streets

the poems are like streets you know he has this long line you know which is like walking the

street and then he comes to the end of it and he walks another street and each line is

another picture another person another encounter just the additive inventorying

cataloging nature of whitman is is obviously the first response

that one can have to a city like new york what am i supposed to

make of all this well let me list it let me start simply by listing it

he also describes the people of the city and the closeness of his sort of collective feelings

with them i think that there is no one else no other poet i think

a writer who has so literally absorbed the city what he did is he seemed to absorb it

and then refract it back on itself

immigrants arriving 15 or 20 000 a week the carts hauling goods

the manly race of drivers of horses

the brown-faced sailors

broadway the women the shops and shows

a million people manners free and superb

open voices hospitality the most courageous and friendly young

men city of hurried and sparkling waters

city of spires and masks city nested in bays

my city walt whitman

in whitman he's tremendously excited by the traffic by the noise

by the immigrants getting off the boat by the crowds by the stuff that everybody finds

on genteel and he's saying that in fact that that that that this is new york's real

contribution to the world that this kind of noise you know is the sound of the future

and that instead of that it doesn't drown us out you know that in fact it enables us to

talk to talk more to talk new ways to talk new languages if you read most

of the commentaries on immigration the 19th century they only see the dark side of this

immigration he saw the strength that these people had he heard their music he went in the

streets with them and he had the sense of the power of the city i think comes

out of these people that it's it's not just that one group represents a city it's this mix

and the energy that comes out of it and that this defines the soul of new york

and it's something to celebrate yes it brings problems yes it brings turmoil but i think the

whole power of whitman's poetry is in this celebration of out of this differences out of this

struggle something great is going to come and i think he's the only one in the

19th century at that particular time in new york history who understands it and sees it and

celebrates it where some saw an alien crowd of

strangers whitman saw a great democratic vista an endless river of people each pursuing

his or her own destiny where some saw the clash of races classes religions

and nationalities he saw a daily sharing and reveled in the dissonant chorus of

new yorkers calling it the glorious jam where some saw tumult and unrest he felt

the thrilling excitement of city life and the rising of a new kind of culture based on curiosity

fantasy and desire whitman wanted honesty candor

like inadvertent frankness directness and he wanted adhesiveness or affection

and there's an element of a wildness in it wild love wanted to be a city of orgies is one of

the names of his poems he'd like that element of the unexpected

the orgy astic the inadvertent meeting of eyes he

understood how sexuality was one of the keys to the excitement of a city

and one of the forces that held it together how the experience of fantasy itself was one of the

central experiences of city life that people could look at each other and

imagine sleeping with each other he went around and um looked at all the strangers

and and saw each one as a potential lover you know you felt that he was so filled with a kind of

undischarged erotic energy that even lampposts could have been lovers for him you know or

certainly ship masks you know and yet you know there's a sense in whitman's poems of

not of consummation so much as longing a longing that keeps going out from him

the proof of the poet whitman declared is that his country absorbs him

as affectionately as he has absorbed them to bolster sales he mailed in anonymous

reviews of his own work including one calling it the most glorious of triumphs

in the known history of literature but though he hoped his poems would take the country by storm

most readers were shocked by his unconventional style and by the frank sexuality of the poems the book did not sell well

yet even in the difficult times to come whitman would continue to hope

that his countrymen would make the immense democratic promise

he had once glimpsed on the streets of new york a concrete reality

it's overpowering sometimes whitman's poetry just going over the brooklyn

bridge and reading brooklyn ferry and hearing his voice talking to you i mean

i don't want to get sentimental but new yorkers aren't sentimental but it could make you cry

flood tied below me i see you face to face on the ferry boats the hundreds and

hundreds that cross returning home are more curious to me than you suppose

in you that shall cross from shorter shore years hence are more to me and more in my meditations

than you might suppose

it avails not time nor place distance avails not

i am with you you men and women of a generation

or ever so many generations hence just as you feel when you look on the

river in the sky so i felt

just as any of you is one of a living crowd i was one of a crowd

just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river

and the bright flow i was refreshed

just as you stand and lean on the rail yet hurry with the swift current

i stood yet was hurry

just as you look on the numberless masts of ships in the thick stem

pipes of steamboats i looked

these and all else were to me

the same as they are to you walt whitman

in the summer of 1857 whitman's hopes for his democratic island city

were dealt a grievous blow

in the last weeks of august 20 years of frenzied speculation on wall street

came to a shocking end when panic swept through the financial district

precipitating the severest economic crisis in the nation's history

september 28 1857 panic is very dreadful in wall street

failures are multiplying and no one knows on whom we can depend or on what

october 10th we seem foundering affairs are worse than ever today and a

period of general insolvency seems close upon us people's faces in wall street look fearfully gaunt

and desperate november 10th this financial crisis has thrown thousands of the working class

out of employment and made it a difficult matter enough to maintain peace and order in the city

through the winter george templeton strong for the country's growing urban

population the panic was nothing less than a disaster walt whitman estimated

that in new york alone more than 25 000 people were soon out of work

and a hundred thousand more facing hardship and even starvation

hardest hit were those with the fewest resources the immigrant poor and the city's

beleaguered black population we're talking about a period where

there's no social security there's no unemployment relief there's no medicare or medicaid there is

not that social safety net yet that's that's erected in the 20th century

that helps to ease some of that and so when you're unemployed or when you're

widowed or your child is in trouble with the law you're hurt you're injured

life is very very tough for most people in the fall of 1857 as banks failed

and businesses closed and thousands of unemployed new yorkers wandered the city streets

homeless the state authorities now in control of new york embarked upon one of the greatest public

works projects ever undertaken in an american city it would be the most ambitious attempt yet

to make whitman's democratic island city

a concrete reality

circumambulate the city of a dreamy sabbath afternoon what do you see

posted like silent sentinels all around the town stand thousands upon thousands of mortal

men some leaning against the spirals

some seated in the pier heads some looking over the bulwarks of ships

these are all lands men and weekdays tied to counters nailed to benches

clinched to desks how then to are this

green fields gone him in melville there is no place within the city in

which it is pleasant to walk or ride no field for baseball

or cricket no pleasant garden where one can sit with and chat with a friend or listen to the

music of a good band clarence cook

of all the deficiencies of the 1811 grid plan none was more glaring by 1857 than the

failure to provide enough park space for new york's overworked and overcrowded citizens

half a century of explosive growth had transformed much of lower manhattan into

a congested wasteland of factories warehouses and tenements

for most new yorkers there was simply no escape what few backyard spaces remained had

been all but obliterated and access to the riverfront almost completely cut off

by a tangled belt of shipyards and docks

commerce is devouring inch by inch the coast of the island if we would rescue any part of it for

health and recreation it must be done now

william colin bryant remember in this day um people are packed pretty tight together

you've got roughly half a million people living south of 14th street

think about that and there are no buildings really that are taller than five or six stories high

people are packed in very tight

in 1857 as the city spiraled ever more deeply into economic bloom

new york undertook the greatest physical transformation of manhattan

since the grid that fall the city finished purchasing a vast tract of sparsely populated land

north of town then issued eviction notices to the 1600 mainly black and irish residents

living on it two weeks later mayor fernando wood announced a special design contest

for what was called simply the central park six months later the winner was

announced entry number 33 called green's word by calvert vox and

frederick law olmsted they were an unlikely choice for the job vox

a respected english architect had never designed a public park before

olmstead a frail and melancholy 35 year old writer had never designed anything at all

but both men were acutely aware what the driving commercial city was doing to its people

reading physical congestion social disorder and spiritual unrest

new yorkers display a remarkable quickness of apprehension along with a peculiarly hard sort of

selfishness every day of their lives they have seen thousands of their fellow men

have met them face to face have brushed against them and yet have had no experience of

anything in common with them there need to be places and times for reunions

where the rich and poor the cultivated and the self-made shall be attracted together and

encouraged to assimilate frederick law olmsted

the park olmsted and vox now proposed would be an entirely new kind of public space

a man-made nature that would provide relief from the unrelenting commercial intensity of the city

as new yorkers entered the park they would leave behind the constant reminders of their differences

and it was hoped rediscover a common humanity this was to be a symbol of american

metropolitan democracy and he proposed that all peoples would find a space in this park it

wasn't just a spot of greenery that looked nice in the middle of the city and

let the place breathe olmsted's vision was in part that the classes will mingle here

that the upper classes and the lower classes will see each other and that it will have a tremendous

civilizing effect on the city that mingling of people will have a civilizing effect

olmsted and vox set right to work translating democratic ideas

as vox himself put it into trees and dirt

by the spring of 1858 an army of city employees was hard at work

laboriously remodeling every feature of the natural landscape

there were german gardeners italian stone cutters and hundreds of masons blacksmiths and

carpenters

most of the men were unskilled irish day laborers often paid less than a dollar a day and drawn

olmsted said from the poorest most dangerous class of the great city's population

to prevent any trouble with the irish african americans had been excluded from the workforce

entirely

my office was regularly surrounded by an organized mob carrying a banner inscribed blood or bread

this mob sent in to me a list of ten thousand names of men alleged to have starving families

demanding that they should be immediately put to work frederick law olmsted

it was one of the great pieces of construction of its time and maybe even to this day and it was

man making nature for the benefit of the people of the city

which is already another aspect of the phenomenal self-confidence of new yorkers

didn't need to go out into the country we would bring the country back here we would

create an idealized version of the way manhattan was but in fact it's much nicer it was lousy

land they created a paradise on it june 11 1859

improve the day by leaving wall street early and set off to explore the central park

which will be a feature of the city within five years and a lovely place in ad 1900

when its trees will have acquired dignity and appreciable diameters

perhaps the city itself will perish before then by growing too big to live under faulty institutions

corruptly administered templeton strong

in the spring of 1859 an inventor named thaddeus lowe sailed high above the construction site

in his new hydrogen-filled balloon called the city of new york from which

he could see the first completed sections of the park

he was stunned by what he saw sprawling across 843 acres 80 times the size of the next

largest park in the city stretched an endless labyrinth of artfully composed vistas

and scenes it was one man later said 19th century america's greatest work of

art

these guys plan this the way a later generation would plan a movie

they think about it kinetically you move through this space and you have a series of composed views

they're constructing environments that are in the height of unnaturalness because they're man-made

environments but the point is that they feel like they're real unlike the artifice of

the city

you can't underestimate central park as a vision because it was not built in the

middle of what the city was it was built in the middle of what the city would become

central park instead of having these piddling squares as though new york was a collection of

kensington-like neighborhoods in london we would have one huge 840 acre no small

piece of land big pleasure ground for the city

the park would not be a landscaped formal thing in the french tradition

but would be a kind of piece of captured nature entering at fifth avenue and 59th street

visitors were led slowly out of the city along an elegant tree-lined mall

a street of nature skewed away from the city's rigid street plan

and penetrating ever deeper into the interior of the park

at the far northern end of the mall the scene suddenly widened

to reveal a breathtaking view stretching as far as the eye could see

the park gave the illusion that the open space went on perhaps forever an image of the

unspoiled continent america itself had once been now transformed into an urban paradise

and permanently preserved

on a bright moonlit night in the summer the scene to be witnessed on the lake is brilliant

the clear waters gleam like polished steel and are dotted in every direction with pleasure boats

no sight or sound of the great city is at hand to disturb you and you may lie back in your boat with

half shut eyes and think yourself in fairy land

james d mccabe jr

october 1st 1859 who is not proud then in a day of swindling in politics

and of cast iron in building such grand works can be achieved in rugged honesty

and solid stone it silences forever the clutter of skeptics of the

democratic principle as inimical to vast public works

harper's weekly

aesthetically central park was a triumph from the start but to vox and olmsted's disappointment

it proved more popular with wealthier new yorkers than with the city's working poor

who needed it most but found it hardest to reach

at this point in the late 50s the area that they've got picked out is

way to the north the regular city on the bus horse cars do run up there but it costs

at least a nickel and for working man's dollar a day wage a nickel

there and back and for your whole family it's you know they're gonna come but

it's it's gonna be basically a genteel province on sunday afternoons the long sweeping drives

streamed with elegant carriages fewer than 1 in 20 new yorkers could afford

while working-class vehicles were barred entirely the irish and german day laborers who

had built the park found themselves further discouraged

from using it by the long list of rules olmsted had drawn up for its use

there were signs posted everywhere prohibiting group picnics walking on the grass and strenuous

activity of any kind school boys were strictly forbidden from

playing baseball unless they had a note from their principal he made a place that was for everyone

but then he wrote so many complicated rules about how it was to be used clearly everyone had to to

conform to a code of behavior that he thought was appropriate for a democratic american society

you know it's a little bit like the melting pot everybody goes in from

everywhere and they all came out presbyterian fox and olmsted have parked police so that

they in fact decide that the kind of behaviors that are going to be permitted here are

not those of the rough and tumble bowery world but in essence broadway refinement

so that you can't have militia parades and you can't have sports and you can't have

vigorous deimos on unleashed you can't have this order in riots god knows in particular

by 1860 the main features of central park were nearing completion but olmsted and

vox's masterpiece had done little to ease the tensions dividing the troubled city

and by then few new yorkers and few americans were thinking about parks anyway

the unrest that had been building in the city for half a century

was about to be overtaken by the worst crisis in american history

in the conflict to come new york would play a role more eventful and strange than anyone

could have imagined

at 11 30 on the morning of saturday february 25th 1860 a tall gangling man in an

ill-fitting black coat and battered beaver skin hat stepped off the cortland street ferry

in manhattan a lawyer and next congressman little known outside his home state of illinois

he had come to new york hoping to bolster his slim chances of winning the republican presidential

nomination when no one met him at the dock on arrival abraham lincoln found his way alone

to the astor house hotel across from city hall on broadway lincoln comes to town 1860. what does he

do he goes to the astor hotel you know which is where the celebrities

stay they give the announcement to this to the local newspapers who are right across the street

and they write this up new york is already becoming an engine of celebrity creation on sunday

the candidate took the ferry to brooklyn to hear the reverend henry ward beecher

rail against slavery back in manhattan he attended a minstrel show on the

bowery roaring with delight at a new hit tomb written in manhattan the year before called

dixon

everything was riding on the speech lincoln was to give at the cooper institute on monday

that afternoon in a pouring rain he stopped by knox's hat store on broadway

and traded in his old beaver skin for a shiny silk top hat crossed over to matthew brady's

targaryen studio to sit for a formal portrait

as evening came and the rain turned to snow lincoln's worry about the turnout began to mount

but the new york press corps had done its work and by 7 30 more than 1500 people had filled the

great hall of cooper union to capacity to give the odd-looking westerner with

the high nasal voice a hearing

stifled laughter rippled through the hall as the candidate began to speak

but the crowd grew quiet as he warmed to his theme imploring his listeners with passionate

logic to restrict the spread of slavery pretty soon i forgot his clothes his

appearance and his peculiarities presently forgetting myself i was on my feet with

a rest yelling like a wild indian cheering this wonderful man

when i came out of the hall a friend with his eyes aglow asked me what i thought about abe

lincoln the rail splitter i said he's the greatest man since saint paul

and i think so yet

the next morning lincoln woke to find himself a national celebrity

no man horace greeley wrote in the new york tribune ever before made such an impression on

his first appeal to a new york audience his speech had been reprinted in full in the daily papers

and in pamphlets that were already making their way across the country

together with reproductions of matthew brady's photograph looking back lincoln never forgot what

his three-day sojourn in new york city had done for him matthew brady and the cooper institute

he said simply made me president

on november 15 1860 one week after lincoln's election a giant meteor could be seen

illuminating the skies above the city omens auguries and portents dire

the new york times declared

lincoln's startling rise confirmed the worst southern fears the north and its rapidly expanding

cities were going to destroy the southern way of life within days south carolina had called

for a special session of the state legislature to consider seceding from the union

in new york merchants and bankers with southern investments grew uneasy

new york was a southern city it was the southernmost city north of the mason-dixon line

because in fact its fate relied upon the slave system we carried southern goods we insured

southern goods we financed the purchase of slaves we were totally implicated

in the southern slave system this meant that with the approach of war

and the increasing north-south cultural hostilities new york was the most reluctant of any

place to come to some kind of break because they knew that they would have the most to lose

first of all they didn't want to break up what was a very prosperous trading situation with the

confederate states and secondly they knew full well that the estimated 40 million dollars

owed to them by southerners would likely not be paid in the event of hostilities

on january 21st 1861 fearing that war would interrupt the lucrative cotton trade

mayor fernando wood suggested that new york itself secede from the union and in fact they

passed a sort of non-binding agreement of secession or statement of

secession in which new york declared itself the empire city of the south

and dedicated therefore more to its commercial ties than its political ties with the union

in lincoln saturday april 13 1861

this morning's papers confirmed last night's news that the rebels opened fire at sumter

yesterday morning so civil war is inaugurated at last

god defend the right george templeton strong

when news reached the divided city that the confederates had fired on fort sumter

an immense tide of pro-union sentiment swept through new york

there was now no turning back

on april 20 1861 250 000 merchants clerks and working men jammed

union square for a rally in support of the northern cause

it was boris greeley said the greatest popular demonstration ever known in america

april 20th 1861 walked uptown at two broadway crowded

and more crowded as one approached union square large companies of recruits parading up and down

cheered and cheering every other man woman and child bearing a flag

or decorated with a cockade the city seems to have gone suddenly wild

and crazy george templeton strong

so the city and country went to war before it was over more than 150 000 new yorkers

including 50 000 irishmen tens of thousands of germans and 8 000 blacks would fight for the

union cause frederick law olmsted resigned from his posted central park

to help run the u.s sanitary commission he would soon be responsible for the health and well-being

of hundreds of thousands of union soldiers walt whitman would soon go south too as a volunteer

in the crowded washington hospitals george templeton strong too old at 41 for active duty

helped train a brigade of local sharpshooters called the new york rifles

the civil war was the first industrialized war ever and it produced

an industrial north to make it possible the machines the mills the factories roaring out

um and new york was the financial

capital of that new capitalist world it was in that white heat of the war

that in industrial america finally emerged the war was incredibly beneficial for new york city

the manufacturers of uniforms of saddles of leather goods guns you name

it in fact we're making money hand over fist

and yet while industrialist and war profiteers grew rich the conflict would bring hardship and

misery to tens of thousands of ordinary new yorkers as rents climbed inflation soared and

the casualties mounted it would also bring to a tragic climax

antagonisms that had been building for years between rich and poor native-born and immigrant

protestant and catholic white and black all those tensions would come to a head

in the long hot summer of 1863 and when the trouble came it would begin

with the most wretched and despised of the city's beleaguered citizens

resentment have been building for a very long time there are class animosities that have

driven the city the irish for instance have been proselytized and missionarized

and invaded by these protestant missionaries who have been out to reform them

who have decided that their subpar in some cases barely sub-human

certainly heathens are certainly the wrong religion these people are finding themselves many

of them with their wages in fact going steadily down the quality of their living

arrangements in fact going down but there's a lot of people who are getting

the short end of the stick and they find it now exacerbated by the wartime conditions

but the draft triggers it by 1863 opposition to the war had been

growing for more than a year especially amongst the irish as one union defeat followed another

and the horrifying casualty lists grew longer anger towards the government

intensified abraham lincoln's emancipation proclamation

which had taken effect on the first of the year and which asked whites to fight

and die for the freedom of blacks only made matters worse but it was the passage of the

conscription act in the spring of 1863 the first federal draft in american

history that aroused the most fury it authorized the government to draft

hundreds of thousands of men into the union army against their will anyone with 300

to spare meanwhile nearly a year's wages for most working men

could buy their way out for the irish it was the last straw the opinion among

the irish was that emancipation would result in hordes of blacks coming north

and working for less than they did and they were working for minimum wages as it was

but the reality was that the oldest ethnic group in new york next to the

dutch are african-americans and it was the irish immigrants who had

really driven african americans out of serving jobs and hauling waste and every menial job there

was the irish had taken those jobs they were making it harder in the 1860s for

african americans to get jobs but the irish fear was that emancipation

would result in blacks taking their jobs and the rich don't have to fight in this

war because they can pay 300 to get out it was a perceived injustice and in some

ways i think it was a real injustice in june 1863 the war moved closer to home

when confederate forces under robert e lee invaded the north spreading terror throughout the union

and threatening harrisburg philadelphia new york itself as the july date set for new york's

draft lottery approached fear and resentment amongst the city's

immigrant poor began to seethe out of control

in i think 5960 in the campaign that lincoln was elected in a southerner wrote a book which was a

science fiction scenario what would happen if and he spelled out a possibility that included

great riots breaking out in northern cities along class lines of the irish rising

armies being having to pull back to deal with him and the south

becoming triumphant and that scenario you know was arguably within an ace being played out

on the 4th of july word reached new york by telegraph that more than 50 000 men had fallen

outside a tiny town in pennsylvania only 150 miles away called gettysburg

one week later on saturday july 11 1863 drawings began at the uptown draft

office on third avenue near 46th street the first to be called was a man named

jones by six that night more than twelve hundred names had been pulled from the

drum july 12 1863

draft has begun here and was in progress in boston last week

we shall have trouble before we are through the critical time will be when defaulting conscripts

are hauled out of their houses as many will be

this draft will be the crucial experiment to decide whether we have a government

among us george templed him strong

sunday july 12 dawned sullen and hot without a breath of wind

with every shop and office closed until monday people began drifting out of the

stifling tenements and into taverns and began to drink and talk with almost

every able-bodied soldier in the area still at gettysburg the city's small police force had no

reinforcements

but there was still no cause for alarm

sometime after midnight the mood changed towards dawn disturbing reports began

filtering into police headquarters on mulberry street of gangs of angry drunken men roaming

the streets

not long after sunrise on monday july 13 1863 waves of angry irishmen began

spilling out of the lower east side moving west across broadway and heading

up town towards the draft office armed with iron bars brick bats and bludgeons

and growing all the time at 8 30 a.m an urgent dispatch went out

from police headquarters trouble brewing telegraph lines cut

rush large force

the mob was composed of the lowest and most degraded of the foreign population mainly irish

raked from the filthy cellars and dens of the city calling it places where large bodies of

men were at work and pressing them in their numbers rapidly increased

to thousands

it was a strangely weapon ragged coatless army as it heaved tumultuously toward third

avenue a telegraph operator named charles chapin remembered

by nine o'clock the mob had grown to five thousand by the time it reached the draft office

it had swelled to fifteen thousand and then the violence began

the enraged mob beat through the scandi police car smashed and burned the draft office then

turned their fury on a detachment of 32 militiamen beating and kicking one soldier to death

then turning on another

the mob grabbed him and taking him to the top of the rocks

stripped his uniform of him and after beating him almost to a jelly

threw him over a precipice some 20 feet high on the hard rocks beneath the new york

tribune

by 11 30 the federal draft had been officially suspended in new york and the city itself was in a

state of siege the scene on third avenue at this time

was appalling

it was now noon but the hot july sun was obscured by heavy clouds which cast

dark shadows over the city as one glanced among the dense mass of men and women

the eye rested upon huge columns of smoke rising from burning buildings

for the mob had now begun to plunder and burn giving a wild and terrifying aspect to

the scene charles chaplin they also they cut the telegraph bars like indians did out west

when they had to cut the communication system and the reason that this rising can take

place is because there's no army here the army has and in fact a good deal of

the local militia are off fighting gettysburg gettysburg is over but lee's army is

wounded and dangerous and in the area and and could in fact perhaps make an end run

and you know attack washington attack new york so they're kind of pinned down

there for a while so they have the opportunity of no military a a presence and um

and they explode onto the streets the draft riots who represent the closest that new york

city ever got to a revolution it was just a sort of explosion of blind rage

there's no doubt that the biggest most fundamental cause were you know massive masses of immigrants

any of them irish who'd come to united states with the promise of

leading kind of a good life and had found that promise vacated we're living in misery we're

living in shacks all day marauding mobs of infuriated immigrants

rampaged up and down the island at will destroying street cars and train tracks

looting and burning the armory on 21st street the harlem temperance world

the magdalen asylum for aged prostitutes and brooks brothers on fifth avenue as

well as the homes of police officials and prominent republicans and politicians of any kind

and the rich

the riot over the next three days it's the largest incident of civil disorder in the

history of the united states the crowds do a couple of things

one they go after those that they think are the agents of this war they go after

the new york times huge crowds surge down and try to attack the times building

and leonard jerome one of the owners is up on the roof with gatling guns

you know sort of trained on the crowd they you know head for wall street

although wall street is the most vigorously defended of all their naval

gun boats that are brought up to train on the crowd and hot oil is being prepared by you

know employees up on the roof but they go after individual rich people you know and

because class divisions are played out on the streets sartorially

they'll say there goes a 300 man and they'll mob them or they'll go to gramercy park and try

and sort of smash up the homes so they attack upwards and they also attack downwards

because on the one hand they hold blacks responsible in some sense for this because

you know if there hadn't been blacks and been slaves there wouldn't be any stuff

that's what it was about just pure racial hatred and fear and then

those who have kept people of african descent down for so long begin to believe the lies

that somehow we are different from the rest of humanity somehow we don't deserve

our equal rights somehow we deserve to be abused and mistreated

and then they act out on that in the most vicious and brutal of ways

at 2 30 a mob of immigrants screaming burned the nigger's nest surrounded the colored orphan asylum

at 5th avenue and 43rd street home to more than 200 african-american

children under the age of 12. all of the terrified children managed to escape out a back door

the older ones carrying the younger ones on their backs before the mob broke in hacked apart

furniture and toys with axes then set the building on fire

the ten-year-old girl was killed on the street outside when a dresser heaved from a window

struck her in the head well the extent to which the black population had become the symbols

of everyone's anger in this war is really seen in the destruction of the colored orphan asylum

this is probably the most offenseless group of people in the city at the time but a mob

walks up to the asylum torches it and is attempting to kill the inhabitants a police guard

has to escort the children with their little bags and satchels of clothes

tossed across their shoulders through the streets of manhattan

the police and the soldiers are carrying rifles with bayonets on them

to keep the crowds back they have to put these children on a barge and carry them

out to the middle of the east river where no one can get to them where they

remain for a day or two before they go on to long island to safety

july 13 1863 the colored half orphan asylum on fifth

avenue is burned tribune office to be burned tonight

if a quarter of what one hears be true this is an organized insurrection in the

interests of the rebellion and jefferson davis rules new york today

george templeton strong

by the end of the first day of rioting the wealthiest and most important

city in the nation lay in a state of anarchy all but complete

as darkness fell an infernal palm of smoke shrouded new york

towards midnight stabs of lightning and lashing sheets of rain broke over the town

if the devil would appear before me now if i could just stand for an hour

on the streets of new york during the draft riots and see what this was like that this

explosion which i think in to large measure would define the city for

for generations afterwards and would stay in the recesses of the memory

what did the city smell like and look like at that moment that's the moment i would like to see

stand on a rooftop and look down

no sleep the sultanus

pervades the air and binds the brain

a dense oppression all is hushed nearby

yet fit flea from fire breaks a mixed surf of muffled sound

the atheist roar of riot

the town is taken by its rats ship rats and rats of the wharves

and man rebounds whole eons back in nature

herman melville was watching this from a rooftop and he said the rats have taken the city

and to the degree that you're beginning to think about the dangerous classes

and now here it is judgment day has come and they've exploded

onto the streets the worst fantasies that you can imagine are actually being enacted you look at

the riots in los angeles or you look at the gordon riots in london in the 1780s

or you look at the paris commune there's only one mob in history

all mobs do the same things there's a reptilian brain buried in the human brain

and when people lose their individuality in mobs they do things like this

and the draft riot mobs were no different from any other monk they were capable of really

extraordinary hideous violence against people

on tuesday the atrocities against african americans grew worse on eighth avenue

a mob of five thousand men went house to house searching for black families and

interracial couples to hang and burn

on wednesday the hottest day of the year a black shoemaker named james costello was beaten kicked

stoned trampled and then hanged a few hours later a mob of irish

laborers pulled a crippled 22-year-old black coachman named abraham franklin from his lodging

house he was tortured lynched burned and mutilated

then dragged through the streets by his genitals his body parts are then fetished the

crowd begins to chop pieces of his body up and carry them about as souvenirs

and that's not necessarily the most extraordinarily violent episode

that happens in this week of violence blacks were chased to the docks thrown

into the river and drowned while some after being murdered were hung to

lampposts between 40 and 50 colored persons were killed

and nearly as many maimed for life

around ten o'clock on wednesday night after three full days of anarchy and violence

the first union reinforcements the 65th new york regiment finally began arriving by ferry from

gettysburg the seventh new york regiment arrived the next morning and the tide of battle

turned there are nothing less than pitched battles in the streets and

you know they attack the barricades their gatling guns set up all the

machinery of high-tech warfare that we associate with the civil war is being played out

here on the streets but once the military power was fully brought to bear

it took several days but in fact the resistance was crushed

we soon cleared the streets and then commenced searching the houses

killing those within that resisted and took the remainder prisoners

some of them fought like incarnate fiends and would not surrender all such were

shot on the spot the fight lasted about 40 minutes the mob

being entirely dispersed we returned to headquarters captain h.r putnam

like the police the exhausted sunburned troops were almost all local boys

many from irish and german families themselves with strict orders to disperse the immigrant mob

and if necessary to shoot to kill there was a question i think of the

loyalty of irish police what will they do with their own i think

that was a question in the minds of the upper classes can they be trusted to put these mobs

down and as it turned out it was the irish cop who did his job and fought the mobs

and some of them lost their lives doing it

by friday new york had been completely occupied by federal troops and calm had been restored

but the city lay shattered hundreds of buildings had been burned or demolished

and five million dollars in property had been destroyed

the loss of life had been appalling no one would ever know for sure

but at least 119 people had been killed in the draft riots including 18 african americans 16

soldiers and 85 rioters most of them irish the number of killed will never be known

because bodies were thrown in the river or buried in secret but we do have enough of the

crude outlines of that conflict to know that there's never been anything

like it in the history of the united states a gloom of infamy

and shame will hang over new york for centuries over 3 000 are today homeless and destitute

without means of support for their families it is truly a day of distress to our

race the irish have become so brutish that it is unsafe for families to live near them

and while i write there are many now in the stations and country hiding from violence

the christian recorder

nothing delights us more greatly as to hear of yankees burning destroying and killing

yankee buildings yankee property and yankee men

the charleston daily courier

i think one of the great comments on the draft rights comes oddly from walt whitman who during

the war is in the south in washington dc and who writes a letter back to his

mother saying that feelings are hot as fire against new york city right now because

the whole country is being tortured so how can new york express its problems

violently against the government and against the black population

when no one is doing well under these circumstances it had been walt woodman wrote the

devil's own work all through and in an anguished letter home he struggled to make sense of what had

happened to his city and his people

so the mob has arisen at last in new york it seems the passions of the people were only sleeping

and burst forth with a terrible fury i do not feel it in my heart to abuse the poor people

or call for ropes or bullets for them we are in the midst of strange and terrible times

one is pulled a dozen different ways in his mind and hardly knows what to think or do

walt whitman

it would take decades generations for americans to come to terms with what

had happened on the streets of new york in some ways it is a culmination of the

economic transformation of the city the foundations of the industrial new

york that would be the new york that would last into the 20th century

were being laid and i think that there was lots of tension and conflict in that so it's a

it's a political crisis it's a racial crisis it's a class crisis

it is a simple crisis of fairness and justice and you have this

conflict start which still continues in america between people coming to the cities from

from inside the country african americans and people coming from outside and

that there's this conflict there between african americans and immigrants which

will survive to this day who's going to be at the bottom in new

york and what america has always decided in the end is that race is more important than

anything else that's who will stay at the bottom

in the months to come some efforts were made to make restitution to the city's black population

but it was too little too late

august 24th 1863 relief and damage money is well enough

but it cannot atone fully for the evils done by riots

it cannot bring back our murder dead it cannot remove the insults we feel

and it gives us no proof that the people have really changed their minds for the better

towards us dr jwc pennington

in increasing numbers african americans left new york as late as 1900 fewer than sixty

thousand african americans made their home in manhattan out of a population of almost 2 million

if you want to date the metropolis of new york you can date it from the draft riots it

was a defining moment in the city it had a world-class riot it's a mark of

a world-class city i mean paris london have had tremendous social explosions and

new york became a world-class city with a world-class riot this was

in a way in an ironic way it was a mock of the city's arrival i think on

on the world stage that you could have violence on this scale i think that the draft riots really

provide a kind of wake-up call um for the elite middle class of new york

because it is a demonstration of in the phrase of the day the volcano into the city

it was a demonstration of the enormous number of poor desperate angry people

who were there and who represented a threat to the city the draft riots marked a crucial turning

point in the history of new york city in the decades to come new yorkers would

begin to enlarge their sense of what a city should be it was a struggle that would take

generations to achieve and never really end but it had begun

within months the first modern fire department had been organized and the

police department greatly expanded new forms of public transportation would

soon begin to ease the tremendous congestion in lower manhattan

and by 1866 a metropolitan board of health had been formed

the first of its kind in the country as doctors plunged into the slums

to assess the sanitary conditions of the poor their findings shocked new yorkers and

forced the city to pass the first laws regulating housing in the united states it is shameful

george templeton strong wrote that men women and children should be permitted to live in such holes

what's important about the 1867 law is that it establishes the principle for

really the first time in american history that government in general

has the right to establish some minimal standards of livability and safety

and quality and there were other consequences of the

riots even more momentous in 1863 the year of the uprising

an ex-fireman from the five points named william m tweed was named grand sacham of tammany

hall one of his first acts was to push through a special low-interest loan program

that enabled poor new yorkers as well as rich to buy their way out of the draft

in the decades to come new york's immigrant poor would begin to acquire a voice in urban politics

for the first time the draft riots which the irish were

fundamental players in

were horrible there was the behavior was unspeakable in some cases some parts of it

but when they were over people knew that there was no way to deal with political

power in new york city without finding out how to deal with the irish

and i'm not saying that violence is the way to get people to respect you

but by 1870 they ran tammany hall

at 7 30 on the morning of saturday april 1865 church bells began tolling all over brooklyn

and new york the morning papers carried staggering news president abraham lincoln had been

assassinated the night before on portland avenue in brooklyn walt whitman and his mother

silently passed the morning papers back and forth too stunned to eat or talk

late in the afternoon whitman took the ferry to manhattan and walked up broadway under a darkening

sky

the normally bustling thoroughfare was eerily quiet the storefronts shuttered and hung with

black here and there people huddled in

doorways to escape the steady rain

saturday april 15 1865

black clouds driving overhead

lincoln's death black

black black as you look toward the sky long

broad black like great serpents

undulating in every direction walt whitman

ten days later a funeral train brought lincoln's body to new york on its way home to illinois

hundreds of thousands of grieving new yorkers silently lined the streets of manhattan

as the president's body was born slowly down broadway toward city hall

african americans were barred from the ceremonies at first then at the last minute allowed to march

but only at the very end of the parade scalpers sold choice positions along the

route for eight dollars apiece from the second floor of his family's

house on east 28th street seven-year-old theodore roosevelt and his brother looked on

parties for the moment do not exist while all men of whatever religious faith

of whatever political creed are united perhaps for the first time in the

history of the republic in love for the departed in sympathy for

the bereaved touching evidence of the firm seat occupied in the popular heart by the

lamented president is the almost universal exhibition by the poor

the very poor people of this city and the adjoining city of brooklyn

the new york times lincoln's death brought new yorkers

together as nothing else had

but in the restless turbulent decades to come as the city led america into a new age

crucial questions remained would it be possible to bridge the enormous chasms

still dividing americans and make the union

an enduring reality