The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism

by Allan Nevins

In 1817 the streets were described as dirtier than at any other time since “the year of filth,” when the British had evacuated the city after the Revolution. In a sudden access of energy the next year the authorities set gangs of twenty to fifty men once a week to attacking the streets with brooms. A fearful dust was raised, and yet the roadways were still imperfectly cleaned. Coleman pointed out that more frequent sweeping by smaller forces would be better, and that in Boston much of the work was done at night. In 1823 there came new grumblings over the filth and garbage. “Notwithstanding the great extent of the city of London,” wrote Coleman, “we have seldom seen cleaner streets than those of the British capital. With those of New York the comparison would be odious.” What was chiefly needed he thought to be plenty of water, and common sewers connecting with every house. He waxed satirical:

To the Curious:—The collection of filth and manure now lying in heaps, or which has been heaped in Wall, Pearl, Water, and Front Streets, near the Coffee-House, and left there, will astonish those who are fond of the wonderful, and pay them for the trouble of a walk there.

Sanitary ordinances were few, and apparently honored rather in the breach than in the observance. The city was full of unleashed dogs, and whenever in hot weather a hydrophobia panic occurred—which was every two or three years—they were slain by the scores. During one season they were dumped by cartloads into a vacant lot at Broadway and Bleecker Street, and buried so shallowly that neighboring residents had to keep their windows shut against the pestilential air. Slaughterhouses were tolerated in the midst of residential blocks, and the Evening Post early in the twenties began to call for their restriction. A correspondent related in 1825 how one butcher had recently purchased a small plot, and threatened to erect a shambles there unless the owners of valuable improvements near by paid him a large bonus—which they did; and how when another butcher wished a piece of property, he put up a slaughterhouse adjoining it to compel the owner to sell at a low price. The ordinance against the summer sale of oysters was long a dead letter. “You can scarcely pass through any one street in the city,” grumbled Coleman, “without running against a greasy table, with plates of sickly oysters displayed, well peppered with dust, and swarms of flies feeding upon them.”

“The city of feasts and fevers” a visitor called New York—“feasts” in reference to the frequent banquets on turtle, venison, and Madeira, “fevers” in reference to the epidemics of yellow fever. There was one such epidemic in 1803. So great was the exodus that in September the population, which had been above 60,000, was found to be barely 38,000. “It is notorious,” declared a writer in the Evening Post at this stage, “that notwithstanding the prevalence of a malignant disease, and when great exertions are made to check its destroying progress, the streets of this city are in a most noxious state; and will continue to increase in putridity, unless we are favored with some refreshing rains to clear them.” The Evening Post removed its business office to an address on the outskirts of the city, and Coleman as far as possible edited it from the country. For a time, as he said, in most of the town there was “no business, no society, no means of subsistence even.” New Yorkers could only set their teeth and wait for the frosts.

With Noah Webster during 1803 the Evening Post conducted a long-winded debate upon yellow fever; Coleman maintaining that it was always imported by some ship or immigrant, and Webster that it was spontaneously generated at home. Coleman was right, though of course absolutely ignorant of the reasons why he was right; and while the articles, which abound in mutual complaints of discourtesy, became very tiresome, Coleman’s argument tended to a sound conclusion. He argued that the epidemics could be avoided by rigidly quarantining the city. It was always held contrary to public policy by many merchants and officials to breathe a word about yellow fever till the last possible moment; for that drove trade to Boston or Philadelphia. But Coleman never failed to play the Dr. Stockmarr rôle courageously.

In 1809, for example, the paper braved the anger of business men by asserting on July 24 that, despite all denials, several deaths from the fever had just occurred in Brooklyn. Though an epidemic was raging in Cuba, ships from Havana had been allowed to come up from quarantine within four days of arrival, and had not been unloaded and cleansed according to the law. On July 28, by diligent scouting among doctors, Coleman was enabled to report a death from fever in Cherry Street and another in Beekman Street. He renewed his charge of malfeasance and neglect by the Health Officer at quarantine, a political appointee who pocketed $15,000 a year. Why, he demanded, were the laws as to the removal of the sick and the reporting of new cases not enforced? Four days later Mayor De Witt Clinton by proclamation forbade intercourse with the village of Brooklyn. At last! exclaimed the editor. But why not look to conditions within Manhattan itself, and make the ordinary physician obey the law? “If he does, one of the learned faculty will set a young cub of a student upon him to tear him in pieces for alarming the old women; and then there is another set who declare him a public enemy.”

Just ten years later, remarking that “it has heretofore been the practice to stifle, as long as possible, the intelligence that the yellow fever existed in the city,” Coleman served notice that if it broke out, as it did in August, he would advertise the fact. In 1822 there was a severe pestilence. The first case occurred on July 11 in a house on Rector Street, and was immediately made known to the Board of Health and to the officer deputed by law to give the first notice of its appearance. Yet it was concealed from the public for nearly a month, deaths occurring all the while, but no precautionary measures being taken; and before the epidemic ended, late in October, 388 persons died. The flight of the population toward the open parts of the island was unprecedented. An immediate agitation was begun by the Evening Post for a different organization of the Board of Health. By an act two years previous, it consisted of such persons as the Common Council should appoint, a phrase which the Council always construed to mean that it should itself act as the Board. The members were quite untrained, while they were too numerous, and too busy with politics. Coleman suggested a Board of from five to seven qualified men, to be nominated by the Mayor and confirmed by the Council, and a reform actually did soon follow.

An irritant of the time, akin to automobile speedsters of to-day, lay in the Irish cartmen, who loved a race even more than a fight, and whom Coleman denounced the more vigorously because they were Democrats to a man. The bakers’ boys were called “flying Mercuries”; to excite terror, said the Evening Post in 1805, they particularly delighted in crashing round a narrow street corner at a dead gallop, splashing those whom they did not graze. The journal in 1817 felt it proper to attack the practice of riding fast horses home from the blacksmith’s without a bridle. Among the annoyances showing a lack of due city regulations was the appearance in 1820 of an ingenious mode of kite-flying. As flown in daytime, kites had always been admirably calculated to scare horses. Now they were being sent up at night by hordes of urchins, said the Evening Post, with a parachute and a little car affixed, the car containing lighted candles, and the whole so constructed that it could be separated from the kite at pleasure. They were miraculously adapted for setting roofs afire.

Most residential streets must have been fairly quiet; but they were not sufficiently so to suit the harassed editor. We find him in 1803 declaiming in order against the varied noises: “The measured ditty of the young sweep at daybreak, upon the chimney top; the tremendous nasal yell of ‘Ye rusk!’; the sonorous horn that gives dreadful note of ‘gingerbread!’; and the echoing sound of ‘Hoboy!’ at midnight, accompanied with its never-failing appeal to more senses than one.” These “hoboy gentlemen,” whose profession was connected with Mrs. Warren’s, were still an abomination in 1816, “bellowing out their filthy ditties” for two hours after eleven. As late as 1819, at the flush of dawn every morning, a stage traversed the whole length of Broadway northward, the guard merrily blowing his horn as it went and all the dogs barking. Hucksters, like beggars, seem at all times to have been troublesome. At any rate, Coleman in August, 1823, fulminated against them as to be found on every street and almost at every door, and as offering “almost everything that can be named, from a lady’s leghorn hat to a shoestring, from a saddle to a cowskin, from a gold ring to a jewsharp.” Busy householders and ordinary rent-paying tradesmen held them in equal dislike.

There was little of the moral censor or the preacher in the early Evening Post. Yet it did not neglect the city’s manners. Temperance sentiment was then weak, but the journal lamented the excessive number of corner groggeries; for in New York licenses cost but 40 shillings, and liquor-selling was more extensive than in Boston or Philadelphia. In 1810 the Mayor and Excise Commissioners granted 3,500 licenses, and it was estimated that of the city’s 14,000 families, no less than 2,000 gained a livelihood through the drink trade. Their little shops, many of them in cellars, were reported to exhibit perpetual scenes of riot and disorder. Six years later a writer in the Evening Post computed that there were more than 1,500 retail establishments for liquor, and added that it were better to let loose in the streets 1,500 hungry lions and tigers. The editor favored a heavy Federal tax to abate the evil.