Gotham Quotes

“Many novelists fumed at men they saw as jailers. A host of masculine villains paraded through their plots—neglectful fathers, cruel husbands, and assorted gamblers, alcoholics, philanderers, failures, or murderers—with whom courageous and creative women did combat or from whom they fled.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“On New Year’s Eve 1777, after performing in a play entitled The Devil to Pay in the West Indies, a party of drunken officers—one dressed up like Old Nick himself, complete with horns and tail—disrupted services at the John Street Methodist Church. Nor was that the worst of it. “I could narrate many and very frightful occurrences of theft, fraud, robbery, and murder by the English soldiers which their love of drink excited,” said one dismayed German officer.”
― Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Despite these individual successes, which built on the prewar legislative victories that allowed wives to keep their own earnings, middle-class females in general found themselves repeatedly thwarted in efforts to crack male monopolization of professional positions. When three women applied to Columbia Law School, one trustee responded, “No woman shall degrade herself by practicing law, in New York especially, if I can save her.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)—a strictly New York City concern despite its expansive name—had been founded in 1866 by Henry Bergh, son of wealthy shipbuilder Christian Bergh. Addressing a crowded Clinton Hall meeting of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, Bergh had denounced the cruelties practiced upon urban animals, particularly by the brutish (and Irish) lower classes, and urged New Yorkers to follow England’s example in tackling the problem organizationally and legislatively. The backing of wealthy bourgeois gentlemen (Astor, Fish, Belmont) and leading ministers (the Unitarian “Pope” Henry Bellows) won the ASPCA a charter and gained passage of restrictive laws, but the rank-and-file supporters of the organization were mainly middle class.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Rigorous admission procedures and hefty fees allowed the “worthy” to exclude the “uncouth in manners and habits, ignorant even of the English language, jostling and crowding and vulgarizing the profession.” A year after its formation, the self-selected and overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon Protestant founders had admitted only 450 out of New York’s approximately four thousand lawyers to their ranks. Grievance and screening committees were established to exercise some control over the behavior of attorneys and judges. The association’s pioneering effort at self-regulation was swiftly and widely copied throughout the country, and Manhattanites proved instrumental in forming the American Bar Association in 1878.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“a nostalgic belief that New York City had been a far better place just after the Revolution, and a conviction that the evils now afflicting it—rising rates of crime, pauperism, and immorality—were foreign imports.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Hamilton, still full of fight, quarreled on the street with Commodore James Nicholson, head of the Democratic Society and honorary captain of the Federal Ship Hamilton in 1788. Nicholson accused his former ally of being “an abetter of Tories” and used “other harsh expressions.” Hamilton promptly challenged Nicholson to a duel, and Nicholson accepted. Moments later Hamilton had a second confrontation with prominent opponents of the treaty, shouting that he would “fight the whole party one by one . . . the whole detestable faction.” The former secretary of the treasury had become a mere “street Bully,” sneered Beau Ned Livingston.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“When the North Atlantic Squadron steamed into New York harbor on September 29, 1899—its progress upriver marked by a Journal balloon that released showers of colorcoded confetti over Grant’s Tomb—it touched off two days of frenzied adulation.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“And among the prissiest. Gilder’s method of raising public standards of taste and morality required the production of bloodless pages. As custodian of genteel culture he sought out the delicate and the refined and stood guard against the vulgar and the vernacular. Walt Whitman, though a personal friend, was banned from the Century’s pages; a bit of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn snuck in, but only after Gilder deleted references to nakedness, blasphemy, and smells and emended all improper phraseology (changing “in a sweat” to “worrying”).”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“From Feltman’s, they might have walked to see the Elephant, a wood-framed, tinskinned hotel, 150 feet long and 122 feet high. It had thirty-four rooms in its head, stomach, and feet, a cigar store in one foreleg, a diorama in the other, and a dairy stand in its trunk.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“In the early 1870s Feltman, a German immigrant, had opened a shanty stand at the beach and begun selling clam roasts, ice cream, lager beer, and what Harper’s would call a “weird-looking sausage, muffled up in the two halves of a roll and smoking hot from the vender’s grid-iron.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“A string of city histories appeared, some in the elegiac vein pioneered by Abram Dayton’s Last Days of Knickerbocker New York (1882), others works of substantial scholarship, much though not all of it written by women. Martha Lamb’s History of the City of New York was published beginning in 1877; in 1884, Benson J. Lossing published his two-volume History of New York City; and Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer penned historical essays for Century Magazine, which prefigured her later two-volume study of the seventeenth-century city.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“In the symphonic world, musically inclined industrialists and financiers were having problems of a different sort with the New York Philharmonic. The old German cooperative presented only half a dozen concerts each year. As the orchestra couldn’t guarantee members full time work, they spent most of their time playing at balls and dances; hence their performances were less than highly polished, though much improved after Theodore Thomas was taken on as conductor. Neither their less than professional standards nor traditional repertoire bothered old-fashioned elites, but both failed to satisfy new tycoons. A capitalist combine including Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Carnegie underwrote a rival, the New York Symphony Orchestra (1878), another Leopold Damrosch project. Orchestra war ensued. In one notable sally Damrosch stole the American premiere of Brahms’s First Symphony from under Thomas’s nose.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Edison brimmed over with moneymaking ideas for the phonograph. He licensed two Brooklyn men to incorporate it into clocks and watches that would call out the time, wake people up, and emit advertising messages. He groped toward stereo by working up a two-sided disk, both sides of which could be played simultaneously. He aimed to marketan educational toy phonograph that would help children learn the alphabet. And to promote the new machine in the most colossal manner possible, Edison proposed that when the Statue of Liberty finally rose on Bedloe’s Island, a phonograph be put in its mouth so that it could talk and whistle to ships passing by in the harbor.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“At first, Third Avenue El passengers bound for the Bronx could only transfer—for a separate fare—to the socalled Huckleberry Line, a horsecar that meandered along the Annexed District’s Third Avenue so slowly that passengers could hop off, pick huckleberries in the fields, and reboard the same car.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Appropriately enough, in the years following Pulitzer’s coup, the term “skyscraper” first gained common currency. It was not a novel word, having had a long history of other associations. Since the eighteenth century it had been used to describe the triangular sails, set above the royals in calm latitudes, called skyscrapers or moonrakers due to their great height.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“But Comstock, who considered Bennett “everything vile in Blasphemy and Infidelism,” nailed him for mailing an “obscene” scientific pamphlet (How do Marsupials Propagate?) and in 1879 got a landmark decision against him.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“But that isolated coup was as nothing compared to the body of work sustained over years by George Leonidas Leslie (or Western George, as he was known) and his colleagues. This Ohio immigrant lived a remarkable double life. At one moment he was an independently wealthy man-about-town, known for his impeccable manners, his tailoring, his love of books, and his membership in several excellent clubs. At other moments he headed a highly sophisticated gang of bank robbers whose careful preparations—obtaining architect’s plans of the building under scrutiny, or constructing special burglars’ tools—helped pull off perhaps a hundred jobs like the robbery, in 1869, of the Ocean National Bank at Greenwich and Fulton, which netted them over threequarters of a million dollars. Beginning in 1875, Western George spent three years preparing for his master heist, a knockover of the Manhattan Savings Institution on Bleecker and Broadway, arrangements that included purchasing a duplicate of the Manhattan’s vault in order to ferret out its weak spots.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Fashion dictated the demise of the crinoline and the birth of the bustle. Dresses (both day and evening) gradually flattened in front while gathering at the back, assisted by the bustle, a half-cage or puff filled with horsehair or stiffened gauze and net. (This was not a new invention, having been favored in the eighteenth century, when it was known more forthrightly as a “false bum.”)”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“These boozy and licentious variety halls thrived on the patronage of civil War soldiers on furlough, prompting moralists to persuade the city to require in 1862 that all theatrical and musical performing spaces be licensed and that the sale of liquor and employment of “waitresses” be banned wherever a curtain separated performers from customers. Entrepreneurs of leisure promptly dove through this loophole by inaugurating nightspots that featured a raised platform in the rear, a piano, and an open dance floor surrounded by tables and chairs.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“During Christmas, when Macy’s stayed open till eleven, male clerks would often not bother going home but curl up in their bluish-gray uniforms and sleep on the counters.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“When Barnum’s American Museum burned down in July of 1865—a spectacular blaze, which left a dead whale in the street for two days—Bennett decided to erect a showpiece building on its Broadway and Ann Street site.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Before the war, five-stories was the rule, and commercial life was carried on primarily at ground level—in streets and showrooms, at sales counters, on exchange floors. After the war, office buildings went vertical, climbing to unprecedented heights—six stories, seven, eight. “Our business men are building up to the clouds,” one newsman exclaimed. The elevator made this possible. Lift technology had improved since the vertical screw used at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Now the “steam and drum” method was available. Steel wire cables were run over a drum at the top of the shaft, which was then revolved to raise or lower the cab. An alternative model hauled the cage up and down the shaft by looping its wire cable over a pulley, then attaching a wrought-iron bucket almost as weighty as the cage. When filled with water from a tank, the bucket descended by gravity, pulling the cage up. At the bottom, an operator emptied the bucket, shifting the weight balance in favor of the cage, which then descended and pulled the bucket back up.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Next, to ensure the popular acclaim that would overwhelm resistance from corrupt politicians, Beach installed a gas-lit entryway, a platform with frescoed walls, settees, and a grand piano, and a luxuriously upholstered twenty-two-person car. In February 1870 a huge rotary blower began propelling passengers smoothly back and forth—a public relations triumph that drew four hundred thousand riders that year, at twenty-five cents each. Nevertheless, the combination of Tweed’s opposition, protests from powerful Broadway landlords who feared for their buildings’ foundations, technical difficulties, and reluctance of private investors to undertake the enterprise led to its demise.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“By 1864 Wall Streeters had spies in the Confederate high command and could learn southern battle plans before colonels in the Army of Virginia did.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“The key to success in the Gold Room was information. Knowledge of a battle’s outcome obtained an hour before one’s competitors could be parlayed into a phenomenal fortune. At first, brokers haunted the wire services. Then they built their own: by 1863 private wires brought military results to New York’s financial district before they reached Lincoln in the White House.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Hoop skirts blocked traffic, which is why Mme. Demorest’s Imperial “dress-elevator” was immensely popular: its weighted strings allowed women to raise or lower their skirts at will, thus clearing New York’s mud and slush.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Spurned by the upper class, Wood garnered support from the organized workers. Ira B. Davis denounced the Wall Street Democratic renegades, noting that none had objected when the state government bailed out the banks: apparently what was “virtuous in them” was “a crime in Mayor Wood or the workingmen.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Carnally inclined males kept abreast of the possibilities by perusing handbooks such as Charles DeKock’s Guide to the Harems, Free Lovyer’s [sic] Directory of the Seraglios, and Butt Ender’s Prostitution Exposed.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Widows (though not widowers) were expected to wear mourning for two years, just as, in general, the burdens of refinement fell most heavily on women.”
― Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898