Welcome to New York at Its Core: Port City!

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DUTCH TRADING COLONY, 1609 - 1664

The town that became New York City was born as a commercial enterprise. In 1609 English explorer Henry Hudson, working for a Dutch company, sailed into New York Bay and found the homeland of the Lenape. Hudson was seeking a route to the spice markets of Asia, but recognizing the natural resources of the area, a land rich with furs, fish, and plants, he immediately laid claim to the Lenape territory for his employers. In 1624 a new firm, the Dutch West India Company, sent European traders and settlers to cash in on the colony’s potential. The new arrivals traded European goods to the local people— also known as the Munsee—for beaver pelts to ship back to Europe.

By 1628, 270 European colonists and enslaved Africans had built the town of New Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan as the capital of the colony of New Netherland, which stretched as far north as Fort Orange (today’s Albany). They also transformed its bay— one of the world’s finest natural harbors—into a commercial seaport embedded in a global Dutch trading empire. Other settlers created farms and villages scattered across today’s Bronx, Brooklyn, upper Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and northern New Jersey.

By 1664 New Amsterdam was a settlement of 1,500 people who reportedly spoke 18 languages, making it one of the world’s most diverse places.

Land of the Lenape

The Lenape of the 17th century lived where their predecessors had for at least 6,000 years before Hudson arrived. Their matrilineal society was based on hunting, fishing, and planting. They moved seasonally among networks of local villages located along the region’s many waterways. Although their farming and hunting were fairly localized, the Lenape traded over vast regions, and over time they had acquired corn seed from the southwest and copper from the west.

The Lenape left their mark on the landscape: they set careful fires to clear underbrush for planting and hunting grounds, while wood, stone, clay, shell, bone, and plant fiber provided materials for daily life. By the 1660s, their presence in New Netherland had diminished dramatically, as their numbers were decimated by disease, warfare, and migration. By 1700 only small groups remained in settlements scattered across the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.

Encounter

Native inhabitants forged a complex relationship with the European settlers who followed Henry Hudson. At the heart of that relationship was the fur trade, with the Lenape trapping beaver and also procuring pelts from the Iroquois to the north. Colonists secured territory from the Lenape—including the famous “purchase” of Manhattan Island in 1626— although initially the Native people probably viewed such transactions as agreements to share the land.

The growth of the European population brought new struggles for land and shifting balances of power. In Kieft’s War (1643–45), Dutch soldiers massacred Native people in New Jersey, lower Manhattan, and across the region, and Native warriors burned European farms and killed settlers, including preacher Anne Hutchinson. By 1664 three more wars and European diseases had broken Lenape power and reduced the region’s Native population from about 2,000 to a few hundred.

Cultural Crossroads of Trade

The fur trade sparked other exchanges between the Dutch and Native peoples. The objects displayed above were found beneath Pearl and Whitehall Streets in lower Manhattan near the homestead of Sara Kierstede. A Norwegian immigrant, Kierstede capitalized on the freedom available to women in New Amsterdam and became an interpreter for Dutch Governor Petrus Stuyvesant in negotiations with the Lenape. By the 1650s, an open-air market stood near her house, and these artifacts reveal the mix of cultures that came together there.

Other colonists, lacking sufficient gold or silver coins, paid the Lenape to mass-produce beads (wampum) out of carved seashells. This practice transformed wampum, which had rich ceremonial meanings for the Lenape, into a local money supply for daily use by settlers in a colony where European currency was scarce.

Religious Pluralism

Dutch Calvinism was the official religion of New Netherland, but the need for more settlers to people the colony reinforced the Dutch West India Company’s policy of admitting other Europeans (excepting Catholics) who wanted to settle here and allowing them to practice their religions in the privacy of their homes. When colonial governor Petrus Stuyvesant and the town’s Calvinist clergymen wanted to exclude Jews, Quakers, and other “heretics,” the company directors in Amsterdam ordered them to “allow everyone to have his own belief, as long as he behaves quietly and legally.”

 

ENGLISH IMPERIAL PORT, 1664 – 1775

In 1664 an English fleet sailed into the harbor and seized the Dutch colony. They renamed it for King Charles II’s brother, the Duke of York, and “New Amsterdam” became “New-York.” Most Dutch residents stayed on and adjusted quickly, maintaining their language and customs while their businesses expanded along with England’s trading empire. New York merchants shipped wheat and flour to Caribbean ports in exchange for sugar, molasses, and rum. They sent ships across the Atlantic to sell fur, fish, and lumber and bring back European wares and enslaved Africans for sale in New York and other colonies.

Under English rule, New York became home to an even wider variety of people. English settlers mingled with French Protestants, Jews, Africans, and German, Scottish, and Irish servants. The English removed most restrictions on the public practice of religion and, by 1744, the city had eight different Protestant churches and one synagogue (although not a single Catholic church, as a ban on Catholicism continued). But restrictions on the growing black population increased as the slave system became more violent and routes to freedom more difficult.

By the eve of the American Revolution in 1775, New York was the continent’s second most important city after Philadelphia, with maritime trade still its driving engine.

Law and (Dis)order in the Seaport

English officials presided over a small but cosmopolitan port, a place awash with merchants speaking multiple languages and using a dozen different European currencies. The East River waterfront’s taverns and coffeehouses were settings for the buying and selling of Hudson Valley flour, English woolens, Portuguese lemons, Jamaican rum, and scores of other wares, as well as enslaved Africans.

English New York was a busy, chaotic, sometimes violent place. Colonial governors tried to control trade for the British Empire’s benefit, while Manhattan merchants and ship captains often sidestepped the rules in pursuit of profit. Magistrates sought to punish the port’s pirates and smugglers (when not collaborating with them for a share of the spoils). They also exerted increasingly harsh authority over the growing slave population, amidst a white community living in fear of revolt.

African New Yorkers

By 1740 one in every five New Yorkers was an enslaved African or African American, making New York the second largest slaveholding city in the colonies, after Charleston. Some had come via the torturous transatlantic “Middle Passage” on slave ships, others were transported from the Caribbean, and still others were born in the American colonies. Some managed to sustain West African spiritual traditions even as they joined the city’s Protestant churches. A small population of freed people struggled to hold on to their land granted under the Dutch.

But conflicts also boiled over. As the English tightened regulations on slave behavior, anger rose. In 1712 dozens of enslaved New Yorkers staged a rebellion. In 1741 local officials blamed a series of fires on a supposed slave plot. In both cases white New Yorkers punished slaves brutally.

Diverse Craftsmen

New York’s artisans, who created objects for the city’s merchants and consumers, embodied its mix of peoples. The city’s silversmiths were a case in point: they included Dutch New Yorker John Brevoort, Englishman Benjamin Halsted, French Protestant Peter Quintard, and Jewish New Yorker Myer Myers.

New York’s relatively open environment notably let Myer Myers straddle two worlds. He became the chairman of the city’s Gold and Silver Smith’s Society and designed tableware for elite Protestant families, yet also created Jewish ritual objects like the circumcision shield and probe displayed here. He was a leading member of Shearith Israel (New York’s only synagogue until 1825).

Urban Dangers

New York City grew from 5,000 people in 1700 to over 21,000 by 1771. Most residents remained concentrated within the city limits in lower Manhattan, below today’s Wall Street. Urban crowding in the largely wooden settlement brought the risks of fire and epidemic disease. Fearing invasion by French or Spanish enemies and uprisings by their own slaves, many white New Yorkers viewed arson as a real threat. In 1776 a wartime fire devastated one-quarter of the city’s buildings.

Disease also threatened New Yorkers. Facing yellow fever and smallpox epidemics, those who could afford to do so fled temporarily to healthier rural retreats such as Greenwich Village, Harlem, or the Bronx.

 

REBIRTH, 1776 – 1827

The American Revolution was a turning point for New York City. When British forces sailed away in 1783 after occupying the wartime city for seven years, Manhattan’s population had plummeted, money was scarce, and a quarter of the city’s buildings lay in ruins. The question for New Yorkers was how the city could regain its momentum as an independent seaport. Although New York was only briefly (1789–90) the nation’s capital, merchants and politicians strove to secure New York’s preeminence, envisioning it as the new nation’s “Empire City.”

They made bold gambles and innovations in banking and overseas trade that fueled the city’s economy. Their success was remarkable. With its population almost tripling from 33,000 in 1790 to 96,000 in 1810, New York surpassed Philadelphia to become the nation’s most populous city and busiest seaport. Soon regularly scheduled packet ships, steamboats, and the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 further enhanced the city’s primacy. While white New Yorkers enjoyed new opportunities to expand trade and earn profits, they did not officially end slavery for all African Americans until 1827, some 50 years after the Revolution proclaimed the ideals of liberty and independence.

Devastation

In 1776, following a major victory in the Battle of Brooklyn, British troops drove George Washington’s Continental Army out of New York City. As the British army, with its redcoat soldiers, moved in, a vast fire—possibly accidental—destroyed 493 buildings in the city’s heart.

For the next seven years Manhattan served as Britain’s headquarters for fighting the war. At least 11,000 American patriots died from disease, neglect, and beatings in makeshift jails set up in warehouses, churches, and infamous prison ships. The city’s population plunged from 25,000 in 1775 to 12,000 in 1783, as many New Yorkers moved away. When the British evacuated in November 1783 they left behind a half-deserted city.

Creating New York Finance

New York merchants were eager to jumpstart the city’s postwar economy. Just months after the peace treaty was signed, Caribbean immigrant and lawyer Alexander Hamilton helped found the Bank of New-York (1784). It was the city’s first bank and only the second in the nation. Its investors included recent enemies who had fought on the British side; Hamilton strategically brought them back into the fold as a way to advance the city’s business sector.

By offering loans and by issuing notes that served as a money supply, the bank helped New York merchants reenter foreign trade. Bank credit also helped fuel a market in stocks and bonds, leading brokers to sign the Buttonwood Agreement (1792), which gave rise to the New York Stock Exchange. By 1825 Wall Street was lined with 11 banks, 29 insurance companies, and numerous brokers’ offices.

New Trade

To piece the postwar economy back together, New York merchants had to strike out on their own, looking for markets outside the network of British trade relations. Just months after the war’s end, New York and Philadelphia merchants sent a ship, Empress of China, to inaugurate the new nation’s trade with China. Others on the East River waterfront expanded their networks to the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Europe, while New York packet ships carried slave-produced southern cotton to Britain and returned with European immigrants.

The growing port depended on crops from surrounding rural areas. Farmers from the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Long Island, and New Jersey marketed their wheat, hay, and vegetables in Manhattan. In heavily agricultural Kings County (Brooklyn), enslaved and free African-American laborers were central to the farm economy.

"Clinton's Ditch"

Could New York beat Boston and Philadelphia to the agricultural riches of the American west? New York Governor DeWitt Clinton clinched the question with the Erie Canal, a 364-mile waterway stretching from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. Finished in 1825, “Clinton’s Ditch” made it possible for New York merchants to ship manufactured goods to western farmers in exchange for their flour, grain, and lumber.

The canal was only one arm of New York’s expanding trade. Transatlantic packets, Pacific clipper ships, coastal steamboats, and steam-powered ferries all put cargo and people in motion. The city’s first railroad, the New York & Harlem line (1832), soon ushered in a new era: by 1860 New York’s railway network carried freight exceeding the Erie Canal’s in dollar value.

 

CONFRONTING DENSITY, 1810 - 1865

The city’s success after the Revolution—its growing economy and population—came with a price. By 1810 New York City, still clustered below today’s Houston Street, was becoming a very crowded place, with a population of 96,000 and growing. The limited and polluted water supply increased the risks of fire and epidemic. Yellow fever and smallpox regularly swept through neighborhoods filled with new arrivals and old residents alike. Fearful observers blamed immigrants, African Americans, and the poor, suggesting that New York might be headed for the same urban ills that plagued Europe’s great cities.

How to cope with such conditions? An ambitious program of public works aimed to support the expanding population. In 1811 a state commission planned a grid of numbered streets and avenues that laid out the rest of Manhattan for development; across the East River in Brooklyn, civic leaders drafted their own plans for expansion during the 1830s. Angling to match European cities of the era, officials planned roads, parks, and a massive aqueduct system that brought fresh water from Westchester County’s Croton River to Manhattan. These efforts to make growth sustainable also fostered a real estate boom and prompted New Yorkers to move to new neighborhoods, even as new immigrants continued to settle in the older areas of the city.

The Grid Plan

Manhattan’s 1811 street plan offered a sweeping vision for the city’s urban future: a template of numbered streets and avenues stretching eight miles up the island, laid out over the existing acres of wooded country estates, farms, and other rural properties that filled the landscape north of the developed city. Over the years that followed, city officials oversaw a massive public construction project that leveled and filled Manhattan’s high and low ground to enable development.

Water and Disease

New York’s first water system was a private venture, built by Aaron Burr’s Manhattan Company in 1799. Burr, Alexander Hamilton’s rival, was actually more interested in using his state-granted company charter to create a new bank (the forerunner of Chase Bank) than in providing the city with clean water. Few New Yorkers paid to use the service, which drew from a well that was fed by the polluted Collect Pond.

When cholera struck in 1832, terrified residents turned to everything from herbs to fasting and demands for quarantine. In 1835 they voted to build a system of pipes and reservoirs to bring water from the Croton River, 41 miles north of the city. The Croton System’s completion in 1842 was marked with clean, fresh water piped into homes and spouting from a fountain in City Hall Park.

Parks For the City

As population spread up Manhattan toward 42nd Street, open space began to disappear in the dense street grid. By the 1850s, reformers warned that development would deprive New Yorkers of fresh air and greenery, while wealthy residents desired a public space for showing off their carriages, their clothing, and their grand civic ambitions. In 1857, partly inspired by Brooklyn’s landscaped Green-Wood Cemetery (1838), state lawmakers rejected the call for small parks throughout the city and acquired 778 uptown acres to create Central Park.

This grand public space for relaxing and soothing urban tensions was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Other projects followed for Olmsted and Vaux, including the beginnings of Riverside Park in Manhattan, and Prospect Park, Fort Greene Park, and Eastern and Ocean Parkways in Brooklyn.

 

THE NEW DIVERSITY, 1830 – 1865

Immigrants from Europe transformed New York City in the 1840s and ’50s. A deadly famine in Ireland and economic and political unrest in Germany joined urbanization and improved transportation to drive millions of people to the United States, two-thirds of them through New York Harbor. By 1855 over half of New York City’s 630,000 people were immigrants, the highest percentage in the city’s history. More than one in every four New Yorkers was Irish-born, and Catholics, who had earlier been banned, were now one-third of the population. German Jewish arrivals made New York’s Jewish community—numbering 30,000 by 1856—the nation’s largest.

Despite the obstacles they faced, including lack of housing, poor sanitation, and subsistence living, the newcomers often made their way up in the world. In the process, they reshaped New York. Immigrants provided muscle to unload ships, build streets, and produce vast quantities of goods. Collaborating with white and black native-born New Yorkers— even as they competed with them for jobs and housing—the new arrivals also created a new, ethnically inflected urban culture, expressed in music hall songs, street slang, and mass politics with a distinctive New York flavor.

A New Urban World

Irish and Germans sailed into a harbor that was already changing, as the port city became an industrial one. New Yorkers were discarding old regulations governing prices, employment, and markets, and the new, freer economy was opening possibilities for enterprise and exploitation alike.

By the 1830s, entrepreneurial artisans were expanding their production, hiring unskilled and semi-skilled men, women, and children to produce shoes, shirts, furniture, and tools in workshops and homes. A new working-class world was emerging in New York, with its own neighborhoods and boisterous street life on the Lower East Side.

The Five Points

Many poor New Yorkers—white and black—settled in the crowded tenements of lower Manhattan’s Five Points slum. Middle-class Protestants denounced the neighborhood as the epicenter of urban chaos: a place of alcoholism, brothels, crime, Catholic foreigners, and racial mixing. By the 1850s, visitors warned that the district rivaled London’s slums as the most densely populated place on earth.

Seeking a better life, the new arrivals created a system of institutions rooted in their own parish churches, schools, hospitals, and asylums. In the Five Points and other neighborhoods, immigrants turned saloons and firehouses into informal community centers and political clubhouses, sources of jobs in the expanding city, and headquarters for local street gangs.

Tammany Hall

The frustrations of poor workers exploded in 1863 in the Draft Riots, the worst civil unrest in American history. Enraged by a Civil War draft lottery that allowed rich men to pay for a substitute to serve in their place, immigrants rioted for four days, attacking African Americans and wealthy Republicans, both of whom they blamed for the war. One hundred buildings were burned, including the Colored Orphan Asylum. Over 100 New Yorkers died, and hundreds more were injured.

Sensing political opportunity, Tammany Hall, the city’s Democratic Party organization, backed a plan to pay for draft substitutes for poor men. Even before the war, Tammany welcomed Irishmen, rewarding their votes with jobs and favors. Under “Boss” William M. Tweed, Tammany now became a base for Irish-American political power. The Boss was toppled from power in 1871, but Tammany remained a stronghold for the city’s voting immigrants.

 

THE GILDED AGE, 1865 – 1898

The Civil War (1861–65) helped to catapult New York’s factories, sweatshops, brokerages, and banks to the leading edge of America’s economy. By 1880 New York City was the nation’s largest producer of manufactured goods and the city of Brooklyn, at number four, was not far behind. On Wall Street, New York financiers controlled one-quarter of all American bank deposits, money they loaned to speculators who made fortunes on the New York Stock Exchange. The city’s bounty glittered in department stores and specialty shops that made New York the nation’s leading retail center.

Meanwhile, conflict between “haves” and “have-nots” frequently pitted New Yorkers against each other. Forty-two percent of all American millionaires lived in or near New York City by the 1890s, and middle-class families filled new row-house and apartment neighborhoods. But the nation’s wealthiest city also had an outsized share of its poorest people, many of them toiling at manufacturing jobs in crowded, often filthy tenements. A growing labor movement was starting to organize poorly paid workers. By 1880 New York was home to over one hundred labor unions seeking higher pay and shorter hours for the city’s 350,000 wage earners, making it an important center of the emerging American labor movement.

Wall Street

As Wall Street bankers loaned Washington tens of millions of dollars to fight the Confederacy, they consolidated their own dominance in the nation’s economy. New York emerged from the Civil War as the center of a new national banking system created by the Lincoln administration. The city’s markets boomed as brokers, investors, and speculators made fortunes trading railroad and industrial stocks and bonds.

Newly wealthy business tycoons and their families built mansions on Fifth Avenue, funded museums and opera houses in a quest to establish New York’s place among world cities, and vied to marry their daughters to English noblemen. As a jealous Bostonian observed, New York was the “tongue that is licking up the cream of commerce and finance of a continent.”

Palaces For Shoppers

By the 1870s, women with spending money gravitated to Union Square and “Ladies’ Mile” between Broadway and Sixth Avenue and 15th and 24th Streets, the continent’s most densely packed zone of upscale retail stores. New York’s department stores— A.T. Stewart, B. Altman, Lord & Taylor, and others— helped pioneer a new style of retailing that used advertising, fixed prices, shop displays, catalogs, and large inventories to reach a far-flung public in and beyond the city. A New York label became a mark of fashion and elegance to customers across the country, and New York shopping became a leisure experience in its own right.

These New York shops were also at the nexus of a changing landscape for women’s employment. Working-class women made the garments that were offered for sale, while department stores provided work to “shop girls,” offering some young women the opportunity to find independence in the city.

Cigars and Workers' Rights

Cigar makers were at the forefront of New York’s growing labor movement. In 1886 Samuel Gompers, leader of the Cigar Makers’ International Union, founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as a national organization to fight for higher pay and a shorter workday. Skilled male workers (including AFL members) sometimes succeeded in winning concessions from employers through negotiations or strikes.

Unskilled and semi-skilled immigrants, women, and child laborers, who could be replaced cheaply by bosses, were less successful in gaining better conditions or pay. Many unions, in fact, looked down on the unskilled, seeing them as mere “tools” of employers and as hard to organize.

Documenting the Tenements 

Newspaperman Jacob A. Riis, a Danish immigrant, used words and photographs to expose “how the other half lived” in the tenements and shanties of lower Manhattan and beyond. Riis revealed the bleak conditions of slum poverty to a broad middle-class public, even as he also embraced negative stereotypes of Chinese, African Americans, Jews, and Italians in describing New York’s poor. He helped to rally support for a 1901 state law that required more light, air, space, and sanitation in the city’s new housing.

Riis’s advocacy extended beyond housing reform. He lobbied for parks and playgrounds to offset the density of the tenement districts and fought for government action to address these problems at a time when New York’s government, under the control of Tammany Hall, was seen by many middle-class New Yorkers as an enemy of reform.

 

ETHNIC NEW YORK, 1880 - 1898

In the late 19th century New York City became even more diverse, as its population swelled with new arrivals from eastern and southern Europe. By the time Ellis Island replaced the Battery’s Castle Garden as the official immigrant depot in 1892, thousands of Italians, Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe, Poles, Greeks, Syrians, and others were crossing the Atlantic and making New York their home. Most settled into the old Irish and German tenement neighborhoods of the Lower East Side, where African-American and Chinese newcomers joined them. By century’s end, newspapers in at least 13 languages served over one million foreign-born residents in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Together, these men and women reshaped New York—transforming neighborhoods, workplaces, union halls, and political loyalties. For many outsiders, the most visible impact was on American popular culture, as Yiddish, Italian, “Yankee,” Irish, German, Chinese, and African-American influences all mixed on the stages of the city’s music halls and cheap theaters. From the working-class crossroads of the Bowery and the new recreation zone of Coney Island came “ethnic” plays, songs, slang, jokes, games, and images that would help define New York’s character for decades to come. Turning diversity itself into an opportunity to make money, publishers and manufacturers marketed the city’s diversity to tourists and the rest of the country.

New Immigrants

Social and economic hardships in Europe transformed late 19th-century New York. Poverty unsettled millions of peasants and villagers across southern and eastern Europe, while deprivation and violence in the Russian Empire and Rumania led many Jews to seek refuge in America. The result was the “new immigration,” which added to New York’s existing population mix dominated by Protestant Northern Europeans, Catholic Irish and Germans, and German Jews.

The new arrivals remade the city’s life as dramatically as Irish and Germans had a half-century earlier. Italians, Yiddish-speaking Jews, and others transformed the urban economy and cultural landscape. They provided new labor to run the expanding city, working in the construction industry and mass transit, flocking into the booming garment-making industry, and opening thousands of small shops that provided food, clothing, and other necessities to their fellow newcomers.

Chinatown

A small number of Chinese seamen lived in 1850s New York. By the 1870s, Chinatown, near the Bowery, was home to over 2,000 people. This made it the second most populous Chinese community in North America, after San Francisco’s Chinatown. Immigrants, mostly male, worked as laborers, shopkeepers, and laundrymen scattered across Manhattan.

Caricatured in the English-language press and condemned by white reformers for their gambling and opium dens, Chinese New Yorkers created their own institutions. These included merchants’ societies, newspapers, and traditional Chinese opera companies. Chinatown residents such as journalist Wong Chin Foo also spearheaded efforts to repeal the 1882 federal law that excluded most Chinese, including women, from entering the United States. The law was not repealed until 1943.

The New Bowery

By the 1890s, new immigrants were bringing fresh life to the Bowery. Yiddish, Italian, and Chinese theaters joined older German beer halls and Irish-American music halls. Saloons, dance halls, dime museums, and tattoo parlors added to the street’s working-class allure, which drew out-of-town tourists and uptown New Yorkers eager for “slumming parties.” The Bowery’s medley of influences shaped New York’s evolving stage and music industries, ultimately influencing the Broadway stage and 20th-century Hollywood.

Coney Island

In the late 19th century, developers turned the beach resort of Coney Island on Brooklyn’s Atlantic shore into a hotel and saloon district reachable by streetcar, railroad, and steamboat. Seeing an opportunity, businessmen soon further transformed the island with dazzling amusement parks—Sea Lion Park (1895), Steeplechase Park (1897), Luna Park (1903), and Dreamland (1904)—with electric lights, mechanical rides, and performances by such stars as the escape artist Harry Houdini and the exotic dancer called Little Egypt.

The parks attracted millions of New Yorkers. Sideshows, dime museums, and tattoo parlors brought Bowery pastimes to the island. Generations of workers spent their free afternoons and nickels on Coney’s pleasures, escaping tenement life and factory labor for a few hours. A new form of urban recreation—commercial, boisterous, and democratic—had been born.

 

MAKING GREATER NEW YORK, 1880 - 1898

By 1880, with over 1.2 million people, New York was the world’s third most populous city, after London and Paris. The cities of New York and Brooklyn shared the Western Hemisphere’s busiest harbor. Manhattan, the nation’s economic and cultural capital, was also its most ethnically diverse place. The city’s preeminence was soon symbolized by two monumental structures in the harbor: the Brooklyn Bridge and a statue called “Liberty Enlightening the World.” City leaders had high ambitions for future growth, proclaiming New York “the commanding, commercial, and financial center of the civilized world.”

Nothing expressed this expansive vision more than the movement to unite the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island under a single city government. Advocates argued that “consolidation” not only would allow efficient planning, and the sharing of resources like fresh water, but would fulfill New York’s destiny of scale and grandeur. Despite resistance, particularly from devoted Brooklynites, their arguments prevailed at the ballot box and in the statehouse. On January 1, 1898, the five-borough city of Greater New York came into being. The city’s population jumped overnight from 1.8 million to 3.4 million, making it the world’s second largest metropolis.

The Great Bridge

In 1883 the world’s longest suspension bridge linked the cities of Brooklyn and New York. The sheer size of the “New York and Brooklyn Bridge”—with its main span of 1,595 feet—proclaimed the ambitions of the two cities it joined. Its two 276-foot high towers were Brooklyn’s and Manhattan’s tallest structures.

The construction of the bridge required a massive human effort. Between 1869 and 1883, several thousand laborers and engineers worked above, below, and along the East River to complete the structure. Many were Irish, German, Italian, African American, or Chinese. Most worked for a daily wage of $2.00 or $2.25; a strike for $3.00 was put down in 1872. At least 20 men died, several from “the bends,” a sickness caused by toiling in underwater caissons deep below the East River, while building the “Great Bridge.”

Liberty Enlightening the World

Parisian sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi chose Bedloe’s Island in New York Bay as the site for his statue of “Liberty Enlightening the World,” proposed as a gift from France to the United States in 1875. Americans donated over $100,000 to pay for its pedestal, designed by Richard Morris Hunt.

Towering 305 feet over the harbor after its completion in 1886, the statue of Franco-American friendship became an icon of national freedom and of New York’s role as the country’s dominant metropolis. In an era when about three-quarters of all European immigrants landed in New York, the statue also became a symbol of the city as a gateway to America.

Connecting the Region

Before the five boroughs officially became a single city, they were already knit together by new infrastructure, including gas, electric, and especially transit lines. Cable cars and electric-powered trolleys joined horse-drawn streetcars and omnibuses on the streets. Overhead, elevated trains—pioneered in Manhattan in the late 1860s—soon crisscrossed the region, creating outcries about noise, dirt, shadows, and the unsightly transformation of urban streets.

Expanding transit drove development in Brooklyn, the South Bronx, and upper Manhattan, as neighborhoods like Crown Heights, Melrose, and the Upper West Side filled with row houses and early apartment “flats” for middle-class families. By 1898, 100,000 commuters a day poured into Manhattan via bridge and ferry from Brooklyn. Hundreds of thousands more came by ferry from Staten Island and New Jersey or by commuter rail from Westchester, Long Island, and Connecticut.

Establishing the Greater City

Lawyer-planner Andrew Haswell Green spearheaded the movement to add surrounding areas to New York City in order to create a greater municipality. Green and others argued that shared taxes, harbor facilities, police, fresh water, and other resources would secure a more livable and prosperous metropolis. In 1894 residents of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island voted by 176,000 to 132,000 to consolidate as Greater New York City.

But the referendum was non-binding and anti-consolidation forces from Brooklyn blocked it in the state legislature until machine politicians took the reins. Thomas Platt, “boss” of the state Republican Party, decided that an enlarged city offered better opportunities for Republican control and patronage, and he secured the Republican governor’s signature in 1896.