“Blunt’s Stranger’s Guide to the City of New-York” (1817) City Hall as it appeared when newly constructed.“Our political sky still continues to grow more and more dark and threatening,” the elderly statesman John Jay wrote in 1810. “Whether the clouds will quietly disperse and disappear, or whether they portend a storm, is uncertain. The present tempestuous state of the world does not encourage us to expect a long season of uninterrupted fair weather.”
Even as war with Britain seemed more and more inevitable, however, New York spent much of 1810 — boisterously and confidently — developing into the American metropolis. New York, just as I pictured it.
This was the year New York surpassed Philadelphia in population to become the largest city of the young republic, with 96,373 people; 94,687 of whom were free, 1,686 of whom were enslaved. (Emancipation was 17 years away.)
As the city grew, so did New York State, which then had 27 members in the House of Representatives. That is as many — as few — as it may have in the coming decade, as Sam Roberts reports today in an article on the state’s shrinking Congressional delegation.
Construction was well along on an enormous and beautiful new City Hall, the building from which New York is still governed. Copper for the roof arrived this year, though too late in the season to be installed. That would wait for next spring.
Sights were already set far beyond the southern end of Manhattan Island, which pretty much contained the entire city. Surveyors were mapping out metes and bounds to tame the jumbled countryside with the gridiron pattern we know today. The report of the commissioners of streets and roads, completed in 1811, dared to imagine that New York might stretch as far north as 155th Street.
The countryside was not the only thing in want of taming. New York was in its adolescence, and citizens behaved accordingly, as evidenced by a raft of regulations issued in 1810.
The common council set speed limits south of Grand and Vesey Streets: no faster than “a slow trot or pace, not exceeding at any time the rate of five miles per hour.”
The Fire Department warned New Yorkers not to ring “all the Bells at the same time on days of public rejoicing; for should a Fire break out at that time, it would probably make great progress before the alarm could be spread.”
Masked balls were banned in taverns and boarding houses because the council determined they were “of immoral and pernicious tendency, subversive of all just and honourable discrimination of character, and calculated to encourage the profligate, seduce the youth of both sexes and promote licentiousness & disorder.”
Street cleaning rules were also put into place, with the effect one might imagine.
None.
“The streets of New-York are the dirtiest in the United States,” Edmund M. Blunt wrote in a guidebook seven years later. “To us there appears one radical cause of this, and that is the number of swine which are allowed to go constantly at large. We are aware that there is a prohibitory law in existence respecting these animals, but it is seen that they roam abroad at pleasure, no one considering it their business to interfere with them.”
Just as I pictured it.
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