After the war the few remaining occupants of pretentious residences fled to the northward of Madison Square, and the sightliest and most picturesque portion of New York City was abandoned to saloons, emigrant boarding houses, warehouses, and shops, for, unlike the down-town section east of Broadway, it was not invaded and colonized by bankers, brokers, and importing houses.
Mr. David Morning, now widely known as the Arizona Gold King, selected this portion of New York City for the experiment of organizing pleasant and economical home lives for a class of dwellers in cities not ordinarily the subject of elemosynary effort.
The poverty of the very poor, who sometimes lack even for food or shelter, is hardly more distressing to the sufferers than the poverty of men who struggle to maintain a respectable position upon incomes inadequate, even with the most economical management, to meet their expenses. How is a married man, having an income of one, two, or even three thousand dollars per annum, derived from work which must be performed by him, as clerk, journalist, physician, or lawyer, upon Manhattan Island, to live there with such surroundings as are befitting his education and position?
He will be compelled to pay one-third or one-half of his income for a flat; an entire house is out of the question, unless he betake himself to such a locality in the city as will exile his family from social consideration. If he live in the suburbs, he must arise at daylight and stumble along unlighted lanes to the railroad station, and pass two or three hours of his time each day standing in a crowded ferryboat, or hanging to the straps of a jammed car, alternately frozen and roasted, and always stifled with the reeking perfume of unventilated vehicles and unsavory fellow-travelers, for while it may be true that all men are politically equal, they are not always equally well washed.
The alternative is to bring up his family in the brawl and small scandal of a boarding house. His wife requires always a certain amount of dresses and bonnets to maintain herself in a respectable position in the estimation of her friends, and dresses and bonnets entail an uncertain amount of expenditure. A man’s tailor will inform him in advance exactly how much his garment will cost, and one can contract for a bridge across the Mississippi at an agreed sum, but there is no force known in nature that will induce or drive a dressmaker into foregoing an opportunity for advantage taking, or persuade her to fix in advance a price for the making and trimming of a gown.
The married bookkeeper or salesman on a salary in New York City, is forever upon the ragged edge of embarrassment, unable to save the amount of the payments necessary for adequate life insurance, or to provide a fund for a rainy day. The laborer or mechanic who earns six hundred to nine hundred dollars per annum is, in comparatively easy circumstances, for he can live in a tenement house in a cheap neighborhood without loss of caste, and caste is of almost as much consequence in free America as in the Punjaub.
After some thought, Mr. David Morning devised a trial scheme for the relief of married men of small incomes, whose duties required their daily presence in New York City, below Canal Street, and in the autumn of 1894 his agents began to quietly purchase the real estate between Rector Street and the Battery, and bounded by Greenwich Street and the Hudson River. Some months were consumed in the acquisition of title to the realty, and in a few instances long prices were exacted by sagacious and selfish owners, who held out until the others had sold, but the bulk of the property was purchased at about its value, and the brokers were finally instructed to close with all persons willing to sell, without haggling as to price.
It required about $15,000,000 to complete the purchase, and for this sum sixteen hundred lots were secured of the orthodox dimensions of twenty-five by one hundred feet each. Electric lights turned night into day, and several thousands of men and hundreds of vehicles, divided into three armies of eight-hour workers, were at once employed in the work of demolition. Temporary railroad tracks were laid from the land to the North River piers, and the material and débris not needed to fill cellars and vaults was carried on cars to barges, which were towed to the Jersey flats, where their contents were dumped upon ground previously acquired by Mr. Morning for that purpose, and by the first of February, 1895, the lower part of Manhattan Island west of Greenwich Street was as bare as a picked bird.
The work, although generally prosaic, was not without its romantic and interesting incidents. In a stone house on Greenwich Street, which was once the colonial mansion of Diedrich Von Wallendorf, a walled chamber was opened. The rugs and hangings it had contained were fallen to shreds, but the Queen Anne cabinets, tables, and bedstead were in as good condition as when the room was closed with solid stone masonry, two centuries ago, without any reason now apparent for the strange proceeding.
Under the cellar floor of another house an earthen “crock” was found filled with sovereigns, coined in the last century, and through the destruction of an old wall cabinet, there came to light a package of letters from Lord North to Sir Henry Clinton, letters which indicated that the British Ministry of that day had been in negotiation with other patriot leaders than Benedict Arnold for a surrender of the revolutionary cause.