I am as much for free trade as yourself. The Evening Post has been all along known as an advocate for absolute free trade between nations, and for the support of government by direct taxation. But as the state of public opinion leaves no hope of this, the Evening Post for the present coöperates with those who seek a reduction of the tariff to a simple revenue standard with no view leading to protection. That is as much as we can now get and the Evening Post is for taking it. As we cannot go by a single jump from the bottom of the stairs to the top, we take the first step.
Your estimate of the property I possess is greatly exaggerated. You intimate that I ought to be a second Zaccheus. How do you know I am not? You have no knowledge of how much of my income, such as it is, goes to public objects, and to the poor. Nor is it my business to inform you. I have for the greater part of my life been in narrow circumstances, yet never repined on that account, and although I have been prospering of late, it is not my fault, for I never made haste to be rich. You see therefore that you have administered reproof without knowing, or probably caring, whether there was any occasion for it or not. (Dec. 14, 1870.)
Bryant began his journalistic career in poverty and discouragement, his literary friends jeering at him for exchanging the dignified profession of the law for the jangling, vulgar newspaper calling. He made it pay richly in money, and above all in honor and influence. No man of his time did more, and only three, Greeley, Raymond, and the elder Bowles, did so much, to elevate the press in public esteem. “If our newspapers have risen above the level on which they stood when Dickens and Trollope held them up to the scorn of Europe,” said the Brooklyn Times when he died, “it is because they have been wise enough to profit by the lesson set by William Cullen Bryant.” He had often crossed pens with the Journal of Commerce and the World. The former spoke of him as “an editor whose example has been uniformly ennobling,” and said that “journalism will never improve so much that it may not safely pattern by Bryant.” “His long and honorable career,” said the latter, “had put into his hands that mysterious influence called weight of character.” Not a few journals, like the Philadelphia Ledger, and some individuals, like John D. Van Buren, ranked the editor above the poet.
When George W. Curtis delivered his commemorative address in New York before an audience which included President Hayes and members of his Cabinet, he paid his warmest tribute to Bryant as the journalist. “The fact is no such man ever sat before or since in the editorial chair,” a critic has just written in the Cambridge History of American Literature; “in no other has there been such culture, scholarship, wisdom, dignity, moral idealism. Was it all in Greeley? In Dana? What those fifty years may have meant as an influence on the American press ... the layman may only guess.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
APARTMENT HOUSES RISE AND TWEED FALLS
Not long before the war New York’s manners were provincial, and not long afterwards the city felt itself one of the world’s great centers. In twenty years, 1850–70, the population grew from a half million to a million. Such large groups were enriched by war contracts, the rise of real estate, and the nation-wide business expansion that the increase in luxury struck every observer. A Four Hundred was taking shape, rich shops were arising, the opera was growing more and more gilded; in 1868, said the Evening Post, the receipts of the score of theaters reached $3,165,000. The Post that year listed ten of the richest men in order—Wm. B. Astor, believed to be worth $75,000,000; A. T. Stewart, Wm. C. Rhinelander, Peter and Robert Goelet, James Lenox, Peter Lorillard, John D. Wolfe, M. M. Hendricks, Rufus M. Lord, and C. V. S. Roosevelt. Their wealth, it told them, had become so great that if they tried they could accomplish enormous benefits for New York—they could sweep away the debasing tenement house system, or shatter the Tammany Ring; and the people believed that public services were the best if not the only justification for such wealth.
The growth in population emphasized the desirability of many diverse improvements. At the beginning of 1867 the Evening Post was demanding a great art gallery, such as we now have in the Metropolitan Museum, and pointing to European collections as models, while later the same year it urged a zoological garden like London’s, there being as yet none in all America. It and the Tribune together in 1871 asked for a single large public library. There were several small ones—the Astor, the Mercantile, the Society Library, and the unfinished Lenox Library—but none was “public” in the sense that it circulated books free, while the city would obviously benefit from the union of some of the larger collections. Having been the first to propose Central Park, Bryant applauded the creation of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, for which ground was broken in 1866. Theodore Thomas, who had begun to organize his orchestra early in the war, and immediately afterwards had opened his “summer night” concerts, issued a call through the newspaper for a supporting fund of $20,000. In several editorials in the spring of 1868, the first entitled “Can a City Be Planned?”, the Evening Post suggested that a board of engineers be named to lay out a city plan, determining which areas should be used for retail trade, manufactures, and residence. It was an Age of Innocence in many ways—people wondered at the first concrete sidewalk, laid from Park Row to Murray Street in 1868; they were just learning the use of safe deposit vaults, and elevators were curiosities; but it was an age of progress.
The problem which most pressed upon New York after Appomattox, as after the World War, was housing. Building had stopped during the conflict, and its resumption was slow, but Manhattan had kept on growing at the rate of 30,000 people a year. In the winter of 1866–7 the Evening Post pronounced New York the most costly place of residence on earth. “Houses are so scarce that landlords see tenants running around, like pigs in the land of Cockaigne, with knives and forks in their backs, begging to be eaten; it is a favor to get a decent house at a preposterous rent—at almost any sum, in fact; and we know of families living comfortably in Europe from the rent of a house on one of the favorite avenues.” That spring a great open-air mass meeting was held in protest, and petitions were sent the Legislature for a law basing rents upon the assessed valuation. Those of moderate means suffered more than the rich or the poor tenement dwellers. “Bank clerks, bookkeepers, and salesmen are compelled to go to New Jersey, Staten Island, Long Island, or Westchester to secure attractive and comfortable homes,” said the Post. “New York is practically losing the best part of its population.” The practice of sub-letting parts of single houses waxed common.
From this demand for housing there arose an unprecedented real estate boom. Thousands of homes were placed on the market at high prices, and land auctions took place daily. The Evening Post reported that lots in Manhattan and Brooklyn were eagerly bought at unheard-of rates. The neighborhoods of Central and Prospect Parks had become popular for residences, while merchants were purchasing sites for stores on Union Square and Fifth Avenue. Lots that fronted upon what is now Central Park West had sold in 1850 for a few hundred dollars apiece, and in 1860 for from $2,000 to $3,000, but in 1867 they were bringing from $8,000 to $15,000. High up on the East Side, at 91st Street, lots now sold at $3,000. When Bay Ridge Terrace was created in 1868 the journal commented upon the rapid growth of that fine part of Brooklyn, which it had already noted to be spreading eastward rapidly. Brownsville and East New York before the war had been quiet farming communities, but now the former had a hundred houses, and the latter had grown with a rush to 5,000 souls.
The northward march of business, causing the demolition of hundreds of old residences, increased the need for new residential construction. When Ex-Mayor Opdyke’s house on Fifth Avenue near Sixteenth Street was sold to James A. Hearn & Son in 1867 for $105,000, and a milliner established herself on the Avenue at Twenty-second Street, the Evening Post devoted an editorial to the transformation. It predicted that all Fifth Avenue to Twenty-third Street would soon be engrossed by business, the new Fifth Avenue Hotel having given the movement impetus. Higher up, residential property had reached amazing prices. A brownstone house at Thirtieth Street had just been purchased for $114,000, while P. T. Barnum had bought one at the corner of Thirty-ninth for $80,000. A fine light brownstone mansion on the corner of Fortieth, building for W. H. Vanderbilt, would cost at least $80,000, the stable and lot included. At Forty-third Street a wealthy Jewish congregation was building a synagogue at an outlay of fully $700,000, while ten blocks farther up, where St. Thomas’s was about to be erected, $100,000 had been offered and refused for a plot 100 by 125 feet. Seven houses with brownstone fronts had just been finished on the west side of the Avenue, between Forty-third and Forty-fourth, and were so finely furnished that the front doors had cost $700 each, and the staircases $4,000.