Fear,Commercialism,Reform,and Antebellum Tourism to New York City

Prologue—1849

John Coles Rutherfoord stepped down onto Pier 2 on the Hudson River just north of Battery Place on a rainy evening in early May 1849, anticipating a nice week in New York City, where he would witness the wedding of a cousin. ¹ Also on the agenda was a visit to the theater, some shopping, and perhaps a trip to an art gallery. Settled at the Astor House, the next morning he perused the stores of Broadway, including the world’s first department store, A. T. Stewart’s “Marble Palace,” just north of City Hall, and in the evening he met up with a female cousin. Together, they walked over to the Astor Place Opera House to see a production of Macbeth.

What they saw instead was the full chaos of the first true city in the United States. Rutherfoord and his young cousin, dressed in their formal best as per the opera house’s rules, were in the orchestra when the British actor William Macready took the stage. Agitators in the audience saw Macready as representative of English insults to American pride and they caused “disgraceful scenes,” wrote Rutherfoord, “rotten eggs were thrown.” ² His cousin was upset at the disorder and so they left and Rutherfoord escorted her back to her hotel. He then tried to return, but an angry, rock-throwing mob had filled Astor Place, ending the night’s performance, and so he returned to the Astor House. ³ The next day he ran some errands, visited other relatives, and in the evening went to the Broadway Theater, where he saw Edwin Forrest, Macready’s great rival, in one of his signature plays, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu. ⁴

Mid-morning of the following day he walked uptown a half mile to the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, being held in the Minerva Rooms on Broadway just below Canal St. Rutherfoord, who owned twenty slaves, listened for hours to the forefront of the movement dedicated to destroying his way of life. These included Frederick Douglass (“a coloured gentleman” who “address[ed] the audience with considerable fluency and animation)” ⁵ ; William Lloyd Garrison, who denounced the constitution; Wendell Phillips, Abbey Kelly Foster, and others. In all, Rutherfoord must have been fascinated (or horrified), since this event comprises the largest segment of his New York diary. But his diary does not record his reaction, only the content of the speeches. We do know that he was unswayed; later, he was a staunch defender of slavery in the Virginia House of Representatives and would be one of the leaders of Virginia’s secession. ⁶

The next day, after a long afternoon sightseeing in Brooklyn and Harlem, he once again attempted to see Macready play Macbeth. Although there had been fears for further unrest, a delegation of the city’s most respected writers and leaders had petitioned for a return and the militia was called out to ensure order. But when Rutherfoord and his cousin reached Astor Place, it was filled with an angry crowd that jostled them as they tried to approach the theater in what was, he declared, “A war between the classes.” Returning to his hotel, he nonetheless had a generally pleasant evening, playing cards with a group that included “a very lovely woman.” Every now and then someone came in from the streets, relaying reports of the violence that had happened: the militia had opened fire on the crowd, killing eighteen and wounding perhaps 150. “All carriages and hacks in Broadway,” Rutherfoord wrote, “had been pressed into service for the transportation of dead bodies.” ⁷

Now expecting further riots centered on the City Hall park that was just opposite his hotel, the next morning Rutherfoord decided to move a mile uptown to the New York Hotel. However, curiosity overwhelmed him and at midday he returned to the park where he saw the beginnings of an angry demonstration. Returning north, he first visited the American Art-Union and then had an early dinner at his hotel. Afterward, he strolled to Astor Place, which was filled with a peaceful, curious crowd. ⁸ However, down at the park, the mass rally had reached a fevered pitch and at that moment had begun charging uptown. Rutherfoord left Astor Place and tried to go back to his hotel along Broadway but was stopped by troops. He asked to pass, “stating that I was a stranger in the City on my way to my hotel, and was conducted by one of the officers . . . through several companies of soldiers.” Although the mob had been kept off Broadway, they boiled through side streets and at Astor Place they met the militia, muskets drawn and bayonets deployed. Behind hasty barricades they bombarded the troops with stones, who threatened to shoot; eventually the mob was stalemated and disbursed without casualties. When he read the papers the next morning, Rutherfoord had had enough; wedding or no wedding, he left for home. In his five days as a tourist in New York City, Rutherfoord had seen the best and worst of the city, the full panoply of urban life.

Discovering the City

Since at least the late 1810s, tourists had been coming to the city, traveling to the country’s first tourist destinations at Saratoga Springs and Ballston Spa, just north of Albany, New York. Tourism grew rapidly and by the early 1820s thousands of summer tourists migrated annually to the spas and onward. By mid-decade, other destinations—the Catskill Mountain House, Niagara Falls—had emerged and were quickly followed by dozens of other places that catered to this new tourist trade. While definitions of tourism differ, with some scholars arguing that it arrived much earlier than the 1820s and others insisting that tourism could not have happened until the mass tourism of the 1870s, it is obvious that the travelers of the 1820s and later acted like, spent like, looked like, and operated like tourists. ⁹

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Figure 1.

1849—“Great Riot at the Astor Place Opera House.”

The tourists of the 1820s were not all that much different from those of later generations in what they wanted from the city: they wanted to shop, to be entertained, to experience some urban life (but not too much), and to revel in urban novelty. Most were like the sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Heyward Manigualt, newly wed to the scion of an enormously wealthy South Carolina family and on her honeymoon, who came to the city in early summer of 1825. ¹⁰ She immediately went shopping, walking up “this celebrated Broadway,” to “admired the shops and their contents which make a great display.” She bought a bangle for a watch and, several days later, a suite of dresses for her coming days in Saratoga Springs, among other things. Her first night in town she took the young nephew she was traveling with and a school friend of his to see the circus, a first for all. She stayed three days at Bunker’s Hotel, a four-story, perhaps twenty-room hotel that was one of the city’s best. ¹¹ Likewise, in 1831, the Virginian John G. Blair, a bank officer, lawyer, and owner of several dozen slaves, visited the city for six days with two friends. He stayed at the City Hotel, considered by many historians to be the country’s first purpose-built hotel when it was constructed in 1797, in its last days as the city’s largest—soon, much larger hotels were to rise. After shopping, he had a dinner at Delmonico’s, which was newly remodeled into a full-blown French-style restaurant, the first to serve food in a self-consciously genteel environment. ¹² Blair later went to several plays and operas, visited friends of the family including Gen. Winfield Scott, and saw a collection of John Trumbull’s paintings at the American Academy of the Fine Arts. ¹³

The numbers of tourists increased steadily through the 1820s, and by the early 1830s, there was a corresponding change in the size and sophistication of the city’s hotels. When John Berkeley Grimball arrived in 1834, he stopped for dinner at the newly built Holt’s Hotel, six stories and 65 rooms, the first to extensively use steam to cook, clean, and lift food and supplies to its upper floors, before settling into the smaller Washington Hotel (“an old establishment of reputation,” read one guidebook) on the corner of Reade St. and Broadway. ¹⁴ Holt’s “Castle,” as it was referred to in a breathless magazine account, was very briefly the city’s largest, housing from one to (perhaps) three hundred visitors at a time, but it was quickly supplanted by the Astor House, the city’s first true luxury hotel, completed in 1836. ¹⁵ Taking an entire block with nearly 400 rooms and parlors, it was elegantly furnished, was lit with gas, had indoor plumbing, and a huge steam plant that provided power and hot water. ¹⁶ Perhaps most crucially for tourism, it, like Holt’s, had comfortable and elegant separate facilities for women travelers. The creation of specialized accommodations for them demonstrates that they were coming in significant numbers by the early 1830s. ¹⁷ Some felt the grand Astor House excessive: William Elliott, a South Carolina planter, “found the whirl and uproar of the Great City and the Great Hotel, too much for my nerves” and sought quieter accommodations. ¹⁸ The Panic of 1837 stopped hotel construction for several years, but it returned in the early 1840s. By the early 1850s, New York’s hotels, uniquely in the United States, had reached baroque size. These included the St. Nicholas, Metropolitan, and New York hotels, all combining expensive furnishings, great size (350 rooms at the St. Nicholas in its first year; 700 after an addition the next), central heating, luxurious lounges and libraries, forming microcosms of a city. ¹⁹

The Shadows

The tourists of this era came for the city’s glory; for them, as for most Americans, its darker side was not evident. That would be illuminated in flashes, as in an 1832 pamphlet that described how “hundreds of men” from “adjacent towns in this and the neighboring states” weekly came into the city “in steamboats, in stages” to visit the city’s prostitutes. These early sex tourists sought out the center of this trade in a neighborhood known as Five Points, located just north of City Hall. This area had begun to slide from mere decay into outright desolation beginning in the late 1820s. ²⁰ The widely publicized murder of Helen Jewitt in 1836 and the sensational trial of that summer flung New York’s sex trade into national attention, spurred by the newly formed penny press. ²¹ Several years later, the sudden emergence of the so-called “Flash Press,” a new genre of newspapers published in the city, publicized and sensationalized the city’s sex trade and crime to a wide, mostly male, audience with a reach that was certainly regional and perhaps national. ²²

While these media spread knowledge of New York’s decadence to specialized audiences, the point when the nation’s perceptions of New York City dramatically and permanently changed was just after the first American visit of a remarkable tourist: Charles Dickens, who came to the United States on a working vacation in 1842. Only thirty years old, he was already one of the English-speaking world’s best-selling authors. Landing in Boston in early February and given a triumphal welcome, he hailed as a hero in New York several weeks later. He stayed in the city for several weeks more and just before he left to see the rest of America, he spent an evening in Five Points. ²³

What happened then was vividly described in his book, American Notes, for Popular Circulation, published just months after he returned to England. ²⁴ Accompanied by a policeman, Dickens “started at midnight” from his hotel on Broadway into the neighborhood and “was out half the night,” he wrote to a friend. ²⁵ He continues in American Notes: “Poverty, wretchedness, and vice, are rife . . . narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth.” Passing “ruined houses . . . hideous tenements . . . all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed,” he follows his guide down into a bar, “Almack’s.” ²⁶ There he witnesses decadent scenes including recklessly dancing mixed-race couples and his first introduction to tap dance, performed by a “lively young negro” who ended by “leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink.” Although this episode sounds, to modern ears, as a good night out, Dickens is careful to minimize the fun, that all was immorality amid “indecent and disgusting dungeons.” Reemerging onto the streets of Five Points, the air “blows upon us with a purer breath, and the stars look bright again.” ²⁷ Ultimately, it was his summation of the Five Points neighborhood that had the greatest impact: this “one quarter,” he wrote, was “in respect of filth and wretchedness, . . . safely backed against Seven Dials, or any part of famed St. Giles’s.” ²⁸ That this internationally known expert on London’s slums would rate Five Points as having even a small portion of the notoriety of that city’s famous slums—London at that point was the world’s largest city—was stunning to many Americans. For them, during all of their history, London was the measure of cities: for luxury, excess, size, dirt, depravity. America was supposed to be a land unlike England; that it, too, had developed such a thing as a “real” city that, unfortunately, was afflicted with “true” slums was a point both of pride and deep uneasiness. ²⁹

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Figure 2.

1842—Map of New York City—Five Points, Carlton House Hotel, Astor House Hotel, City Hall.

Dickens’s observations caused two interlinked reactions: the first was a blossoming of efforts by moral campaigners to reform the district. The other reaction was a surging curiosity to visit for one’s self. An anonymous writer of The New Mirror, a magazine coedited by Nathaniel Parker Willis and George Pope Morris, ventured with hired police escort into “the one portion of New-York made classic by a foreign pen” in early 1843. However, to his surprise he discovered that the notorious Almack’s was “really . . . very clean and cheerful . . . excessively white-washed, nicely sanded, and well-lit, and the black proprietor and his ‘ministering spirits’ . . . [were] well-dressed and well-mannered people.” ³⁰ Reality did not matter: the neighborhood’s notoriety was assured. Lydia Maria Child’s widely read 1843 Letters from New York called it “something worse than Hogarth’s Gin Lane . . . There you will see nearly every form of human misery, every sign of human degradation.” ³¹ A definition began to emerge of Five Points as an exotic and mysterious world, rife with erotic overtones and danger, was creating an area that was both domestic and exotic. As soon as 1843, therefore, both New Yorkers and outsiders came to the district to go “slumming,” as Tyler Anbinder notes; a visit there became “a standard part of visiting tourists’ itineraries.” ³²

Translating Fear into Commercialism

Tourism to Five Points fits into the tendency of antebellum American tourism to combine recreation with moral reform. The historian John Sears argues that tourists visited prisons or orphanages to witness moral progress: prisoners were being rehabilitated, orphans uplifted from the streets. He identifies the height of this as the 1840s, but, he argues, enthusiasm had waned by the 1850s along with the certainty that the institutions were rehabilitative. ³³ However, there was no corresponding drop in tourist interest in New York’s seediest neighborhoods; instead, it only increased.

A primary reason was the striking rise of the popular literature about the decadence of New York City. Emerging in the late 1840s, it shaped and colored the city’s reputation in the American imagination. One of the key features of these books was the presence of the tourist, who offered the possibility of innocence lost in the big city. ³⁴ George F. Foster’s 1848 New-York in Slices offered cautionary tales of tourists led astray. His chapter on Five Points follows passages that extol the glories of Broadway, the shops of Chatham Street, and the moneyed mystery of Wall Street, before taking a dark turn into Five Points and its gambling halls. “Mr. Greenhorn” appears, “ripe for anything,” so obvious that “men of considerable address . . . [with] a flashy-genteel appearance, very impressive” descend upon him. One who “knows how to make himself agreeable to the stranger” quickly brings him into his confidence and promises him an introduction to the “the innumerable houses of ill-fame” that lurk in the city. An introduction is arranged to a “female acquaintance, splendidly dressed, and uncommonly sociable,” and the greenhorn is hooked. “Bewildered with the strangeness of all he sees and hears, overcome by flattery and attention,” he accepts “a glass of champagne . . . drugged with a small quantity of morphine,” just enough to lower his inhibitions. Taken to a gambling house, “he is scientifically plucked, and left to make his way to his hotel, a ruined, miserable man.” ³⁵ The male characters in these fictions were always young men of some means; their fall gives a crucial tragic gloss to the story. ³⁶ He returned to many of those themes in his most famous book, New-York by Gas-Light: With Here and There a Streak of Sunshine (1850), where tourists attempted to navigate the dark and dangerous streets and rooms of the great city. “The gay and reckless southerner, the half-frightened and half-fuddled country merchant . . . the green-horn” meet debased players of the city’s darkest games. In an elaborate brothel, “a greenhorn from the West” is tempted into sin. On the streets, more seasoned and less marketable prostitutes form partnerships with thieves to make the “occasionally lucky hauls from country merchants and strangers uninitiated in the ways of the city.” ³⁷ Tourists of this literature came both from the American south or from northern states, and, in many cases, were described as traveling alone or, perhaps, with one friend. Women tourists, however, essentially never traveled alone, and so the female characters in these stories inevitably were lower-class women from the north, raised in virtuous homes and forced by poverty or other circumstances to fall into a life of sin. The lure and danger of Five Points would be kept alive through the books of Foster’s and writers, including George Thompson, Joel Ross, and John Vose. For decades to come, they would continue to present Five Points as the ne plus ultra of North American sin, with innocent yet easily corruptible tourists inevitably drawn to it and to their own destruction. The district’s pervasiveness in this literature is exemplified as early as Foster’s 1850 New York by Gas-Light, where he wrote that “the ‘Old Brewery’” in the center of the district was “so often described that it has become as familiar as the Points themselves—in print.” ³⁸ An 1853 profile of the district declared that the “Five Points!” was a “name known throughout the Union, in England, and on the continent of Europe,” and that the Brewery’s “fame, or rather its infamy, has been sounded throughout Christendom.” ³⁹

The mental geography of an antebellum tourist to New York is difficult to reconstruct directly, of course, but through his or her accounts of visiting the city, one can gain some perspective. Uppermost in all accounts is Broadway, the site of the city’s showcase stores, hotels, and public buildings, particularly by the 1850s. The northern edge of Broadway shifted over the decades: just north of City Hall in the 1820s, by the 1850s it lay more than a mile north, nearly reaching to Union Square. The best-lit street in the city, and the one that was most consistently paved, the great “palace hotels” of the 1850s, all located on the northern edge of the built zone, created a kind of magnetic attraction for tourists. Foster’s New-York in Slices is an exemplar of this geography, with chapters that extol the glories of Broadway and the shops of Chatham Street and the moneyed mystery of Wall Street. However, he soon moved on, giving turgid descriptions of the sins and degradation of Five Points. While his book and others were not necessarily intended to be tourist guidebooks, any armchair traveler could construct a picture of the city defined by these chapters.

However, it is striking, given the trope in the popular literature of the foreignness and distance of that other world beyond Broadway, just how geographically close these areas of brightness and darkness were. When William Bobo, a South Carolinian, sought out the district in the early 1850s, he expected it to be distant—“somewhere up town . . . in the neighborhood of Union Place.” In fact, “we shall not need our hack, as it is only a short distance from the City Hall.” The neighborhood was so close, “only three short blocks,” that you could walk it in a few minutes, and that had been the case with Dickens, too. ⁴⁰ The historian Dell Upton has remarked that the “most titillating aspect” of Five Points existence was “its proximity” to the major shopping streets, particularly Broadway, with its stark contrast to the apex of American commercialism, luxury, and conspicuous consumption. ⁴¹

Perhaps it was the literal darkness of the district that helped give that area an exotic distance in the minds of writers and tourists. Street lighting in New York had always been inconsistent, with the most well-to-do commercial areas being the most consistently lit. From oil lamps to gas jets, pools of light existed on the major streets and best neighborhoods, augmented by the internal lighting of the biggest stores. Dickens’s Broadway was “dotted with bright jets of gas.” ⁴² Five Points, however, was essentially unlit except for, as George Foster put it in 1849, “here and there . . . a sickly lamp,” all privately maintained. ⁴³ In 1850, a single large gas jet, the first municipal lighting in the district, was placed at its heart, another step in the reform effort that continued for decades and that ended with the virtual destruction of the neighborhood. ⁴⁴

Dickens and the others had defined Five Points as a district that was both exotic and domestic, a place as mysterious and dangerous as any far-off land, a place that was, essentially, the transplantation of exotic foreignness to American soil. An 1846 article in the Advocate of Moral Reform, published by the Female Moral Reform Society, declared Five Points to be “The Sodom of New York,” a location, they wrote, “not among the Fegees, or Turks, or in any uncivilized portion of the globe—but in the very heart of Christian New-York!” ⁴⁵ Likewise, Ned Buntline declared that “missionaries can find a darker, deeper field for labor in New York, than they can find in any savage land.” ⁴⁶

By the time these words were published, there had already been the first stirrings of a reform of the district. In fact, it had started almost immediately after the publication of Dickens’s American Notes in 1842, when members of the Ladies Home Missionary Society, a branch of the Methodist Episcopal Church, began an outreach effort to Five Points. As they later wrote in their history of their efforts, it took “the eyes of an observant foreigner . . . [,] Mr. Dickens, in his walks about New York” for them to be able to see the worst of their city. ⁴⁷ Armed with this new perspective, they began their visits into the neighborhood. An 1843 article in the newspaper New Mirror sounded a call to action: its “true picture,” the writer hoped, would “touch some moving-spring of benevolence in private societies . . . that something may be done soon to alleviate the horrors of the Five Points.” ⁴⁸ Indifference to the neighborhood, argued the Advocate of Moral Reform, was criminal:

If an army were to invade the city, defence and protection would be topics of common interest—if the treasure lost in Kidd’s ship is supposed to be discovered imbedded beneath a river . . . an army of volunteers are ready for the service . . . Would the Master thou servest have thee look upon with indifference . . . will he excuse apathy and inaction here, and pronounce thy works perfect before God? Let conscience answer. ⁴⁹

Perhaps the relative ease tourists had in visiting the district helped it develop as a tourist destination. Having had to only travel several blocks to this heart of darkness, tourists could, once in the district, perform the sort of tourism that fit nicely into the antebellum era’s emphasis on reform—what one early writer on tourism called “travelling to good purpose.” ⁵⁰ Mere witnessing could be combined with action, forming a solid center for Five Points moral reform tourism: first, a stop at these fallen places, then, a moving on to the inspirational acts of good people in a place possibly lost to sin. . The exhortational literature rarely suggested that visitors come to stay; instead, the point of visiting was to jar loose money from the pockets of goodly folks. In their history of the Five Points Mission, the missionaries both defended their work and called for money:

When the true aim and object of this Mission is fully known; when the clouds which misrepresentation and misconception have cause to obscure our true purpose and design, have been dissipated by the light of truth . . . Then the Christian church of every name, and philanthropy of every mode, will gladly aid us in carrying out this grand experiment of love and mercy. ⁵¹

When the Home Missionary Society tore down the Old Brewery, they held several nights of illumination of the old building before the razing, a literal and metaphorical lighting of the darkness. Soon, a mission building would arise on the site would be the center point of Five Points reform. ⁵² Although it is cynical to consider these laudable charitable efforts to be mere commercialism, there is a clear element of publicity combined with solicitation that nudges these two worlds together.

Beyond the charities, there were at least two sincerely commercial efforts that profited greatly from Five Points notoriety. One was Almack’s, the notorious bar at 67 Orange Street owned by Pete Williams. As late as 1845, he had officially renamed Almack’s to the tourist-friendly “Dickens’s Place.” ⁵³ It became a center of Five Points visitation, “the dance-house of the Five Points,” his obituary declared, that “at times” was “visited even by Governors, members of Legislatures from various States, and prominent men from other countries.” ⁵⁴ Williams became quite prosperous; the 1850 census listed him with $5,000 in property, making him one of the city’s most prosperous African Americans. ⁵⁵ He died in November 1852. His New York Times obituary predicted that “his renowned place of resort will now probably lose its wide-spread reputation,” and that came to pass. Another person who profited was the “young negro dancer,” of Dickens’s night out, “Juba.” His real name was William Henry Lane, and he went on from New York to have well-publicized London run as “the king of all dancers” before dying there, apparently, in 1851. ⁵⁶

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Figure 3.

“New York City—Doing the Slums” (1885).

Another perhaps inadvertent commercial effort emanated from the reputation of Five Points as a dangerous place to go. Dickens had hired “two heads of the police, whom you would know for sharp and well-trained officers if you met them in the Great Desert.” ⁵⁷ Likewise, when William Bobo visited in 1853 he hired a policeman as a guide, asking him to “Please show us what is to be seen, and protect us from harm.” ⁵⁸ Similar suggestions appear in other accounts of these tours. These officers now became what were, in essence, the first know paid tour guides of New York City. In this era, writes a historian of the police, officers were “compensated by fees rather than salaries,” and undoubtedly acting as tour guides paid far more than other duties. ⁵⁹ Ironically, when Bobo’s guide was asked about whether there would be any personal danger, the policeman responded, “Oh, there is no sort of danger in visiting the Points now-a-days.” ⁶⁰ Regardless, driven by the persistent trope in the popular literature of the dangers of Five Points, policemen continued acting as paid guides for decades, as exemplified by an 1885 print from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, “Doing the Slums.” ⁶¹

Conclusion

In 1851, Frederika Bremer, a Swedish social activist, feminist, and writer, visited New York and made a special detour to Five Points. She stood before the Old Brewery, where, she writes, “the old brewer of all the world’s misery, the Evil One himself, has dominion.” What she saw, she continued, was “not any thing worse than I had seen before in Paris, London, and Stockholm . . . [in] all large cities where human masses congregate, may be found the Old Brewery of vice and misery.” ⁶² By the early 1850s, the fact that New York City had become like any other in the world had become a commonplace. John Stewart Oxley, a young Englishman, declared in an 1853 letter to an American friend that New York “seems more like old London,” that

to be amidst all the noise & bustle of omnibus’s & carriages, & to have a view choice of stores for everything you can possibly want, or fancy you want . . . the Opera & Theaters & [concerts] remind one of Drury Lane. ⁶³

The recognition that New York was a metropolis like any other, that it was an environment unto itself and one entirely new and different from the rest of America had settled into the American mind by the 1850s. A new, nearly foreign, mysterious geographic entity had emerged in the minds of Americans, a place where conspicuous consumption, danger, erotic allure, and opportunity formed a heady mix. The city’s attraction would only grow over time. Interrupted by the Civil War, with the return of peace the remembered allure helped form the next phase of American urban tourism, as inexpensive and rapid transportation helped speed a new generation of travelers into the heart of the country’s greatest city. The bedrock preconceptions formed in the era of antebellum tourism would become the city’s central lore, shaping our notions to this day.