Ten years before the Civil War, New York city had 515,000 people, the population having risen by more than 200,000 in the forties. The northward march of buildings had passed Twenty-third Street, and the extreme northern boundary could now be placed at Thirty-fourth, though there were many empty districts south of that line. Madison Square had just been laid out. The nineteenth and twentieth wards were added within a twelvemonth. Broadway was now more than four miles long from the Battery to the open country, and along its course as far as Bleecker Street old residences were being ripped apart in clouds of dust to make way for stores. The year 1850 was that in which the time-worn City Hotel disappeared, and in which the Astor Place Opera House was remodeled for business uses. Canal Street was extended, and Dey Street widened. Almost before men realized it the old transportation facilities had become inadequate, and in 1852–3 the Third Avenue and Sixth Avenue horse railways began to carry passengers. With the whole lower part of town engrossed by trade, with more well-to-do New Yorkers fleeing northward year by year for light and air, the city in 1852 undertook the grading of Fifth Avenue from Thirty-fourth Street to Forty-fifth. The New York which thrilled to Jenny Lind’s singing and turned out a quarter of a million people to watch the military procession marking President Taylor’s funeral, was a New York that had suddenly bloomed into a metropolis.
In this thriving city, larger than Buffalo to-day, there was not a single open-air recreation ground worthy of the name. Dickens had remarked in 1842 that New York’s summer climate was such that it would throw a man into193 a fever merely to think what the streets would be but for the daily breezes from the bay. It was a smoky city—Bryant had written in the Evening Post of 1832 a striking description of its unwonted brightness when the cholera stopped nearly all industry—and it was ill-cleaned. The city directories, indeed, listed nineteen parks. But a number, as Five Points Park, Duane Park, and Abingdon Square, were merely places where the street intersections were a little wider than usual. Others, like Hudson Square and Gramercy Park, were private property, and still others, like the Bowling Green, were padlocked. The whole park area was only about one hundred and seventy acres, and the grounds open to the public did not exceed one hundred acres; while the largest single park, the Battery, contained only twenty-one.
The first proposal for a large uptown park was made by Bryant in the Evening Post, and that journal was the sturdiest of the fighters for what eventually became Central Park. It was a bold proposal, for which public sentiment could only slowly be aroused. In Edward H. Hall’s scholarly history of Central Park, published by the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society in 1911, the plan is said to have originated with Andrew J. Downing, editor of the monthly Horticulturist, in a letter contributed to that magazine in 1849. Charles H. Haswell, in his “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” also gives Downing the credit, saying that he merits a statue from the city. But the real originator was the poet-editor. In 1836, Parke Godwin, taking frequent rambles with him, found him emphatically expressing the opinion that the city should reserve as a park the finest area of woodland remaining there, since in a few years it would be too late. Five full years before Downing’s letter, on a hot July day in 1844, Bryant made a walking trip over the middle of Manhattan to examine the adaptability of a certain large tract for park purposes. Upon his return, he wrote for the issue of July 3, 1844, his proposal, heading it “A New Park.”
The city the afternoon this article appeared was194 streaming out to spend the Fourth at neighboring points. Some, wrote Bryant, would go to shady retreats in the country; some would refresh themselves by excursions to the seashore on Staten Island or the river front at Hoboken. “If the public authorities, who expend so much of our money in laying out the city, would do what is in their power, they might give our vast population an extensive pleasure ground for shade and recreation in these sultry afternoons, which we might reach without going out of town.” Where? He answered:
On the road to Harlem, between Sixty-eighth Street on the south, and Seventy-seventh on the north, and extending from Third Avenue to the East River, is a tract of beautiful woodland, comprising sixty or seventy acres, thickly covered with old trees, intermingled with a variety of shrubs. The surface is varied in a very striking and picturesque manner, with craggy eminences, and hollows, and a little stream runs through the midst. The swift tides of the East River sweep its rocky shores, and the fresh breeze of the bay comes in, on every warm summer afternoon, over the restless waters. The trees are of almost every species that grows in our woods—the different varieties of ash, the birch, the beech, the linden, the mulberry, the tulip tree, and others; the azalea, the kalmia, and other flowering shrubs are in bloom here in their season, and the ground in spring is gay with flowers. There never was a finer situation for the public garden of a great city. Nothing is wanting but to cut winding paths through it, leaving the woods as they now are, and introducing here and there a jet from the Croton aqueduct, the streams from which would make their own waterfalls over the rocks, and keep the brooks running through the place always fresh and full....
If any of our brethren of the public press should see fit to support this project, we are ready to resign in their favor any claim to the credit of originally suggesting it.
Bryant referred to the beauty and utility of Regent’s Park in London, the Alameda in Madrid, the Champs Elysées in Paris, and the Prater in Vienna. By the official plan for New York, drawn up in 1807, an area of two hundred and forty acres had been reserved between Twenty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets, and Third and Seventh Avenues, to be called the Parade; this, however,195 had been reduced by degrees to the six or seven acres of Madison Square. At the beginning of the century any one had been able to walk in a half hour from his home to the open fields, but it now seemed that all Manhattan would soon be covered with brick and mortar.
The editor’s proposal was not for the area now included in Central Park, and was for a comparatively small tract, though Bryant had understated its size—it contained about one hundred and sixty acres, against eight hundred and forty-three in Central Park to-day. But it would be a magnificent park compared with any then existing, and the suggestion was sufficient to open a discussion. Jones’s Wood, as the tract was called, was the last remnant of the primeval forest on the East River, as wild as when the Dutch had settled on the island. It was the subject of many a tale and tradition connected with the infant days of the colony, and was reputed to have been the favorite resort of pirates who descended through Hell Gate and landed there to bury their treasure and hold their revels. The first John Jones purchased it when it was called the “Louvre Farm,” in 1803, and a son by the same name succeeded him. In time it became a favorite nutting and fishing ground. Anglers would sit in the shade of its rocky bluffs and overhanging elms and cast their lines into the deep waters of the East River, while in autumn boys would wander through its recesses clubbing the branches above. “What a place of delight Jones’s Wood used to be in the olden days!” exclaimed “Felix Oldboy” in the eighties.
Nor was it long until Bryant himself suggested the alternative scheme for a central park. From time to time he recurred editorially to the subject, now expatiating upon the ever-increasing need for a city breathing place, now pointing to what European cities had done. In 1845 he was in England. From London he wrote (June 24) a glowing description of the fresh and verdurous expanse of Hyde Park, St. James’ Park, Kensington Gardens, and Regent’s Park, and in this letter he spoke of a “central” reservation in New York:
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These parks have been called the lungs of London, and so important are they regarded to the public health and the happiness of the people, that I believe a proposal to dispense with some part of their extent, and cover it with streets and houses, would be regarded in much the same manner as a proposal to hang every tenth man in London....
The population of your city, increasing with such prodigious rapidity; your sultry summers, and the corrupt atmosphere generated in hot and crowded streets, make it a cause of regret that in laying out New York, no preparation was made, while it was yet practicable, for a range of parks and public gardens along the central part of the island or elsewhere, to remain perpetually for the refreshment and recreation of the citizens during the torrid heats of the warm season. There are yet unoccupied lands on the island which might, I suppose, be procured for the purpose, and which, on account of their rocky and uneven surface, might be laid out into surpassingly beautiful pleasure-grounds; but while we are discussing the subject the advancing population of the city is sweeping over them and covering them from our reach.
The Evening Post repeatedly pressed the park project. Its editors had the more faith in it, they said, because while New Yorkers were somewhat slow in adopting plain and homely reforms, they were likely to engage eagerly in any scheme which wore an air of magnificence. They wouldn’t take the trouble to keep the streets clean, but they would spend millions to bring a river into the city through the Croton aqueduct, forty miles long. They wouldn’t sweep Broadway, but they would cover Blackwell’s Island with stately buildings, some of them not needed. Bryant had in this way prepared the ground when Downing, in 1849, also writing from London and using many of Bryant’s arguments, published his appeal in the Horticulturist. Downing, like the poet, had no clear or fixed idea of the limits that should be assigned the new park. The fundamental requirements, he said, were that it should be just above the limits of building, should be spacious, and should be reserved while the land was yet easily obtainable. Downing’s letter, followed in 1850 by an admirable series of articles, attracted much attention. But thanks chiefly to Bryant, the subject was197 now familiar to all interested in city improvement. In 1850 Fernando Wood ran for Mayor against Ambrose C. Kingsland, and both warmly advocated the establishment of a park. Kingsland, who was supported by the Evening Post, was elected, and on May 5, 1851, sent the Common Council a message recommending “the purchase and laying out of a park on a scale which will be worthy of the city,” but not indicating a definite site.
The fight was now well begun; and when opposition appeared to the park project in toto, the Evening Post naturally felt that upon it lay the chief responsibility for defending the campaign. The Journal of Commerce attacked the scheme, declaring that the cost to the taxpayer would be tremendous, that New York city already owned park lands worth $8,386,000, and that the cool waters and green country surrounding the city made more unnecessary. The Post’s answer was contemptuous. As for the cost, the money spent would, like that laid out upon the Croton water system, be an economy in the end. “Every investment of capital that renders the city more healthy, convenient, and beautiful, attracts both strangers and residents, and leads to a liberal patronage of every department of trade.” The fact that the city already had eight million dollars worth of park area had nothing to do with the question. The argument was as absurd as it would be to compute the area covered by the city streets, estimate their value, and make that a reason for narrowing the Bowery or Broadway. London and Paris, like New York, had waters and a green surrounding country within easy reach, but no Londoner or Parisian would dispense with his parks.
Mayor Kingsland’s message was referred to a committee of the Council, which recommended that Jones’s Wood be selected, and the Council, adopting this recommendation, applied to the Legislature for a law to authorize the establishment of the park. In July, 1851, the Legislature responded by passing a measure to allow the city to take possession of Jones’s Wood.
But by this time it was believed by many citizens that the 160-acre stretch upon the East River would be insufficient,198 and that the “range of parks and public gardens along the central part of the island” which Bryant had suggested in 1845 would be preferable. Downing deserves great credit for his insistence that Jones’s Wood would be “only a child’s playground.” London, he pointed out, already possessed parks aggregating 6,000 acres, and New York should now acquire at least 500. Such a tract “may be selected between Thirty-ninth street and the Harlem River, including a varied surface of land, a good deal of which is yet waste area.... In that area there would be space enough to have broad reaches of park and pleasure-ground, with a real feeling of the beauty and breadth of green fields, the perfume and freshness of nature.” The Common Council was impressed, and in August appointed a committee to ascertain whether “some other site” was best.
By the autumn of 1851 three main parties had taken shape upon the question. A large and influential body of business men wanted no park whatever; a considerable group of citizens would be satisfied with Jones’s Wood alone; and a growing number wished a great central park. The Evening Post was for taking both sites. “There is now ample room and verge enough upon the island for two parks,” wrote Bryant, “whereas, if the matter is delayed for a few years, there will hardly be a space left for one.” Having again and again expressed its hopes with regard to Jones’s Woods, it now published glowing descriptions of the Central Park area. There was no part of the island, it said, better adapted to the purpose. “The elevation in some parts rising to the height of one hundred and forty feet above tidewater, and the valleys in other parts being some forty feet below the grading of the streets, a richly diversified surface is presented, to which a great variety of ornamental and picturesque effects may easily be given.” The valleys abounded in springs and streams, which could quickly be converted into artificial lakes, while the Croton aqueduct could supply water for fountains.
By the efforts of leading citizens, City Hall, and the199 friendly part of the press, the Legislature in the summer of 1853 was induced to sanction the creation of both parks, passing two separate bills. This filled those who opposed any park at all with rage. Admit the possibility of two huge pleasure grounds, aggregating perhaps more than a thousand acres? “What is it, in effect,” demanded the Journal of Commerce, “but a law or laws to drive our population more and more over to Brooklyn, Williamsburgh, Staten Island, Jersey City, etc., by creating a barrier half a mile to two miles wide, north and south, and occupying half the island east and west, over which population cannot conveniently pass? If ever these projects should be carried into effect, they will cost our citizens millions of dollars.... Small parks would be a public blessing; and might be as numerous as the health and comfort of our citizens would require, but a perpetual edict of desolation against two and one half square miles of this small island, might better come from the bitterest enemies of our city than from its friends.” On the contrary, replied the Evening Post, the park would dissuade residents of Manhattan, made desperate by the congestion, dirt, and noise of the streets, from removing to greener and more spacious districts like Brooklyn and New Brighton. Even after the parks were created, the island would offer room for four or five million people. The same sort of skeptics had assailed the Croton project.
Nor did the Journal of Commerce lack help. In 1854 Mayor Jacob Westervelt spoke with hostility in his annual message of the two park projects. The Central Park enactment, he said, reserved six hundred acres in the center of the island, “toward which the flood of population is rapidly pouring”; while its limits embraced “an area vastly more extensive than is required for the purpose, and deprives the citizens of the use of land for building purposes, much of which cannot be judiciously spared.” As for Jones’s Wood, it ought not to be taken at all. “The shore on the margin of this park is generally bold, affording a depth of water invaluable for commercial purposes.” The Evening Post denied that200 the tide of population was setting toward the center of the island, saying that it moved fastest up the Hudson and East Rivers—an historical fact. The waterfront of Jones’s Wood was probably not more than one two-hundredth of the island’s whole margin. “Can we have no fresh air, no green trees, no agreeable walks and drives, that Smith may have more houses to let, and Brown and Co. have less distance to go to their warehouses and ships?”
The endeavor to save Jones’s Wood failed in 1854, and for a time it seemed likely that the proposed area of Central Park would be decidedly reduced. A member of the State Senate that year introduced a bill for slicing one-sixth off each side of the park on Fifth Avenue and Eighth Avenue, for shortening it at both ends, and for “interspersing the park into suitable squares connecting with each other but on which, or parts of which, family edifices may be erected.” This, as the Evening Post said, was simply a scheme to destroy the park. It could understand “that the eye accustomed to look upon the dollar as the only attractive object in this world, would not find the beauty of a park ‘materially lessened’ when beholding it covered with rent-paying brick and mortar; but the idea of ‘public recreation’ among dwelling houses, in open spaces like union and Washington Squares ... is too absurd.” When hearings were held this same month (January, 1854), upon Mayor Westervelt’s proposals for curtailing Central Park, the advocates of the original limits seemed to be weakening. The Mayor’s supporters desired a park of about one-third the area originally proposed, and presented a petition with several thousand signatures. The chief spokesman for the opposite side, Samuel B. Ruggles, indicated his willingness to consent to a less drastic reduction, making the park extend from Sixth Avenue to Eighth, or from Fifth to Seventh, instead of from Fifth to Eighth. But against any weakening whatever of the plan as it stood the Evening Post protested energetically. In the heart of London were more than 1,500 acres of park, it said, which would command201 high prices for building lots, yet New York jobbers grumbled over sparing 700. The people owed it “to the thousands coming after them, who will before many years make this city the first in the world in point of size, to bequeath them pleasure grounds commensurate with its greatness.”
The struggle continued until, in February, 1856, following a favorable court decision, Bryant could congratulate the city that it had been won, and that the landscaping of Central Park might begin within a few months. This was eleven years after his original proposal. He, more than any one else, deserves to be called the father of the idea; though Downing’s labors in promoting it were quite as great as his.
II
These were years in which much had to be said of the defects of the municipal services, and especially of the police. When the forties began there was no force for the prevention of crime, and only a small, underpaid watch for making arrests. Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., remarked in the Evening Post of September, 1841, upon “the frequency of atrocious crimes”; why was it “that brutal crimes, murders, and rapes have suddenly become so common?” The answer, he thought, was that New Yorkers elected their city administrations for their views upon national questions, not because they would furnish efficient government. It was then held shocking that in less than two years, 1838–9, there had been six murders in the city and no convictions. On the Fourth of July in 1842 a German named Rosseler, who kept a quiet beer garden on Twenty-first Street, ejected some ruffians from it; and two days later they returned, burnt his house, destroyed his property, and almost killed a neighbor whom they mistook for him. The Evening Post was moved to demand “a police which has eyes and ears for all these enormities, and hands to seize the offenders.” Just a week before Mayor Morris called upon the Legislature202 (May 29, 1843) in his annual message to provide an adequate police, Bryant penned another protest:
We maintain a body of watchmen, but they are of no earthly use, except here and there to put an end to a street brawl, and sometimes to pick up a drunken man and take him to the watch house. In some cases, they have been suspected of being in a league with the robbers. At present, we hear of a new case of housebreaking about as often as every other day. Within a few days past, in one neighborhood in the upper part of town, two houses have been broken into and plundered, and an attempt has been made to set fire to another.
Of course there will be no end to this evil, until there is a reform in the police regulations—until a police of better organization and more efficiency shall be introduced. Our city swarms with daring and ingenious rogues, many of whom have been driven from the Old World, and who find no difficulty in exercising their vocation here with perfect impunity.
“Our city, with its great population and vast extent, can hardly be said to have a police,” wrote the editor again in the following February. But immediately after the election of James Harper, the publisher, as Mayor, a force of 200 patrolmen was organized, a number soon increased to 800. When Mayor William V. Brady in 1847 proposed abolishing them and restoring the watch system, the newspaper was amazed. The night watchmen had never arrested any one when it was avoidable, for every arrest meant that the officer lost half of the next day from his usual work testifying at the trial. The watch had never stopped a public disturbance—the abolition and flour riots had destroyed property that would have supported a police force several years; but the police had quelled several incipient outbreaks. The Evening Post was not for abolishing, but for improving the new force. One of the reforms it sought was the clothing of the men in distinctive uniforms. As it explained again and again, a uniformed policeman could be seen from a distance and accosted for information or help; he would be obeyed by rowdies when a policeman out of uniform would lack authority; and he could not203 loiter in corner groggeries. This salutary improvement was finally effected in the fall of 1853.
As for the fire department, New York depended upon the volunteer system from the time the Evening Post was founded until 1865, and at no date after Bryant’s return from Europe in 1836 had his journal any patience with it. There was never any difficulty in making the force large enough; when abolished, it consisted of 125 different hose, engine, and ladder companies. The objection was to its personnel. Gangs of desperate young blackguards, said the Post at the beginning of 1840, assembled nightly near the engine-houses, devoted themselves to ribaldry, drinking, fighting, and buffoonery, and not infrequently were guilty of riots, robbery, and assaults upon women. They levied forced contributions upon storekeepers to buy liquor and pay their fines whenever they were jailed. At conflagrations they carried off whatever movables were spared by the flames. The volunteer system, collecting these ruffians in various capacities, gave them the opportunity to gratify their restless love of excitement, destroyed their fitness for regular employment, and rapidly made them confirmed drunkards. The clanship engendered by the hostility of the different companies led to bloody street fights. What should be done? The Evening Post recommended “the prohibition of the volunteer system by penal enactments”; and if the city could not support a paid force, the abandonment of the field to the insurance companies.
In September, 1841, the Evening Post was again vigorously denouncing “the desperate scoundrels nourished by the fire department.” These denunciations it had ample opportunity to keep up month by month, for the frequency of incendiarism and of street affrays among the volunteer companies was appalling. The best companies were ill-equipped, since not until 1856, after obstinate opposition, were really powerful fire engines introduced from Cincinnati. The regular firemen were accompanied by a swarm of “runners” and irregular assistants, many of them known to be guilty of arson. Whenever204 two rival companies wished a trial of skill, a fire was sure to break out in a convenient place. The subscriptions for funds circulated among shopkeepers and householders were little better than blackmail, for it was well known that those who withheld contributions were peculiarly liable to fires. In their deadly feuds the companies, fighting with hammers, axes, knives, and pistols, furnished the morgue and the hospitals with dozens of subjects a year. Thieves frequently started conflagrations. We read in the Evening Post just after the destruction of Metropolitan Hall (1854):
At the fire on Saturday night, about half of the goods that were thrown out of the windows of the La Farge Hotel, it has been estimated, were carried away by thieves. The inmates of the Bond Street House, who were obliged suddenly to decamp, found afterwards that their rooms had been rifled, and all the valuables which they left behind carried away....
There is no city in the world where the thefts committed at fires are so many and so considerable as with us. The rogues have an organization which brings them in an instant to the spot, the goods are passed rapidly from hand to hand, and disappear forever. A large fire is a windfall to the whole tribe.
Cincinnati the previous year, as the Post said, had substituted a paid fire department for the volunteer system. It was disgraceful for New York to depend on a violent, licentious body which was educating the city’s youth in turbulence and rowdiness and was often worse than useless when the firebell sounded. The insurance companies at this time kept eighty men, at a cost of $30,000, to guard against fires, and many merchants and families employed private watchmen. But relief did not come for more than a decade.
Similar complaints rose constantly from the Evening Post regarding the foulness of the streets. It said in the early forties that they ought to be swept daily, as they were in London and Paris, and by machinery; that with New York’s hot summer climate and the popular habit of throwing offal into the gutters, it was intolerable to205 have them cleaned only every two or three days. In 1846 it called the neglect “scandalous,” the dust and odors “insufferable.” The reason why horse-brooms were not employed was that the use of manual labor gave employment to gangs whose votes the ward-heelers wanted at election time; but really no men need be thrown out of work—they could be set to repairing the broken pavements. When the Crystal Palace exhibition was held in New York in 1853, the British section contained two street-sweeping machines, one of which not only gathered together but loaded the dirt. The machines, it was true, could not vote, but by their use, according to the Evening Post’s calculations, the cost of cleaning New York might be reduced from $330,000 a year to between $50,000 and $90,000. Next year Bryant gave publicity to the experiment of John W. Genin, a Broadway merchant, who collected $2,000 from his business neighbors, obtained horse-brooms, and at an expense of $450 a week, for a month, made Broadway from Bowling Green to union Square look like “a new-scrubbed kitchen floor.”
Not until the end of the thirties did allegations of corruption in the city government become frequent in Bryant’s editorial columns. In August, 1843, we find the Evening Post beginning the complaints against the Charter which it was to maintain without interruption until the early seventies. It believed and continued to believe that the two boards of aldermen and assistant aldermen, soon nicknamed “the forty thieves,” had too much power. “They are at once our municipal legislature and our municipal executive; in part also, they are our municipal judiciary; they are the directors of the city finances; they are the fountain of patronage; they are all this for the greatest commercial city in the western world.” Their government it held to be always expensive and arbitrary, often inefficient, and sometimes dishonest.
The Post supported an abortive effort to amend the Charter in 1846, and in 1853, after Azariah Flagg as Controller had stripped some flagrant extravagance and grafting, it gave its voice to another movement which206 proved successful. Tweed was at this time an alderman. The newspaper charged the body of which he was a member with selling city property and valuable franchises for nominal prices, and then by its control of the courts quashing all efforts at prosecution. When by a smashing popular vote (June 7, 1853) the new Charter was carried, abolishing the Board of Assistant Aldermen, and excluding the aldermen from sitting in the courts of Oyer and Terminer and of the Sessions, the Post said that “a more significant and humiliating rebuke was never administered upon a body of public officers in this State before.” It little thought then that the corruption of the past was but a trifle to the corruption coming.
Bryant’s place as the foremost citizen of the lusty young metropolis was by 1850 becoming secure. He, Irving, and Cooper were universally regarded as the country’s greatest literary men. Irving was passing his final placid years at Sunnyside; Cooper on Otsego Lake, one of the most quarrelsome men in the country, was near the end of his stormy career. The city heard of them only occasionally. But Bryant was in the prime of life, seen almost daily on the streets, and heard upon every passing question. In the late forties he began to be known as a speaker upon public occasions. He delivered his eulogy upon the artist Cole in 1848 with much nervousness, but by 1851, when he presided over the press banquet to Kossuth, he had acquired self-confidence and ease. Thereafter he was in constant demand for addresses to all kinds of audiences—literary groups, the New York Historical Society, the Scotch when they celebrated the centenary of Burns’s birth, the Germans in their Schiller celebration, and so on. His increasing prestige in the city was naturally reflected upon the Evening Post.