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 Legislature (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 not 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. Whenever 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 to 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.”