New York City
In the year 1825, 200 years after the first Dutch New Amsterdam settlement at the foot of lower Broadway, the city had expanded northward about three miles. There was no other direction in which to go. This built up zone ended at Canal street, the former location of the drainage canal for the Collect Pond at the site of the current Foley Square.
New York City’s 166,000 residents could walk to almost any destination in town, and usually got around by foot or on horseback.
Above Canal street the Island was sparsely settled with only one unpaved road, the Post Road, running its entire length. This was fairly rugged terrain, rocky and hilly, intermixed with areas of trees, swamps, marshes, streams and creeks. Occasionally there was a homestead for some adventurous or reclusive family. Up in the area called Harlem, a few people were settling in. It had taken two hundred years to grow only 3 miles and now New York City was poised for growth.
In October of 1825 the fortunes of the city were set for major change by the simple contents of a wooden cask of water. Governor DeWitt Clinton stood on the deck of the barge called The Seneca Chief, and spilled the water taken from Lake Erie into the Atlantic Ocean. This was no ordinary water for just 9 days earlier it had been scooped out of Lake Erie and traveled with unusual speed on the first vessel through the brand new Erie Canal in record time and minimal cost.
This event marked perhaps the single most important event in the growth of New York City into the Metropolis of the Americas. By connecting the vast American interior regions to the great Port of New York, the canal enabled vast quantities of raw materials, such as furs, timber & farm products, to flow quickly and cheaply to the Atlantic. Here at the port city of New York the products could be consumed or be routed up and down the coastline or off to Europe. The Canal also served to accelerate the growth of the interior regions by feeding the clothes, tools, seed and peoples needed to grow the land.
By 1825 there were regularly scheduled packet ships traveling back and forth to European port cities. They carried passengers as well as textiles, money, newspapers, merchandise and raw materials, and New York City was the American terminus of these majestic sailing vessels.
The most important commercial product in the Americas, was the cotton grown in the Southern plantations by the slave labor. It was needed both here and abroad as there were no nylons, polyesters or acrylics, and wool was uncomfortable. The New York City bankers controlled the nations money and the New York Ship owners controlled the nations commercial fleets. Together these businessmen contrived to have the southern cotton crops pass through the New York harbors, to be reshipped to the final destination but not before these men had a chance to take a profit from this business. When these vessels returned to New York Harbor from the distant ports laden with European immigrants and merchandise, the city businessmen again had the opportunity to make more profit, and so the city grew with this great antebellum trade.
Thus the Erie Canal, the scheduled ocean vessels and the cotton routing, were three innovations that helped transform the city.
In 1800, New York City had a population of 80,000; London, Tokyo and Paris had close to and over a million, and Philadelphia was the most populous city in America. By 1900, New York City, with a population of 3.4 million was the second largest in the world, after London.
People came in droves during the eighteen hundreds to work in this remarkable land of opportunity. There were unskilled jobs for anyone willing to work. No place had the profusion of jobs that existed in New York. Stevedores and shipbuilders, rope makers and warehousemen, carpenters, garbage collectors, tailors and garment workers, all were needed. And so they flooded into the city, living as inexpensively as possible, in large immigrant ghetto-like neighborhoods, with populations surpassing 700 persons per acre on the lower east side of Manhattan, more congested than anywhere on the planet both then and now.
The geography of the city is ill suited to this kind of explosive development. The limited borders of our ice age molded island city created natural barriers to easy growth and travel. Certainly the 22 square miles comprising the island of Manhattan is inadequate for unlimited expansion.
As the city expanded northward there was an urgent need for cheap and efficient mass transportation. First came omnibuses, a horse drawn vehicle not unlike the stagecoach, which had a series of stops along a predetermined route. The omnibus tended to meander all over the streets in order to find the roughest ride and deepest potholes. Then there were the horse railways, which afforded a smoother ride along routes on rails embedded below the surface of the street. Both the omnibus and the horse railway were crowded, noisy and slow moving.
The streets and avenues of Manhattan were absolute pandemonium, you were risking life and limb with each attempt at crossing during peak traffic times. The traffic rules were not as we know them today, with drivers wandering from one side of the avenue to the other when they figured to gain a few more yards along their route. There were 671 omnibuses and 14 horse railway lines as well as private traffic competing for road space in 1860, all concentrated below 42nd street.
A solution was needed to solve the problem of mass transportation. The answer was to create a means of mass travel which was apart from the regular flow of traffic and therefore could travel at a fast rate of speed, be economical and comfortable. The answer was to either raise or lower this new transportation system above or below the crowded streets.
The answer was an elevated system of mass transport or a subway system of transport.
More to come…
Much of the information for this article came from the wonderful book 722 MILES THE BUILDING OF THE SUBWAYS AND HOW THEY TRANSFORMED NEW YORK by Clifton Hood, Johns Hopkins University Press