NYC Post #7: Greater New York. 1898-1945. A Brief History of the Big Apple. (#7 of 8).

EVENT

^{NOTE: Most of the information here, including components of the title, are obtained through The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of 400 Years of New York City's History by Eric Homberger, Henry Holt and Co., 1998.}

New York, which at the beginning of the 1890s still consisted only of the island of Manhattan, had grown independent of surrounding communities.

South and west, across the East river, Brooklyn, whose name derived from Dutch for "broken land," had grown from a scant village of two thousand at the end of the Revolutionary War to a thriving port town of 100,000 by the 1840s. Growth continued to accelerate, and by 1880s, with 600,000 residents, Brooklyn was the third largest city in the nation. Clearly, the expansive growth of Brooklyn was largely dependent upon New York's development. On the one hand, the East River was a forbidible physical barrier that prevented the city from matching Manhattan's commercial momentum. However, New York had made use of Manhattan's space as far north as Harlem, while Brooklyn had plenty to spare. Residential and industrial sectors, which could afford the inconvenience of the East River, increasingly looked to Brooklyn as an alternative. In 1894, a referendum was held as to whether Brooklyn would merge with New York. The motion passed by three hundred votes.

Queens, situated northeast of Brooklyn and due east of Manhattan,lagged far behind its neighbors in terms of development. Unlike Brooklyn, which had existed as a city of its own for a full century before the referendum, Queens was a loose conglomeration of separate towns and villages. It joined with New York in 1898, and its relative abundance fo available space has been used over the last hundred years for cemeteries and airports. By 1920, Queens had less than 500,000 residents. The number had doubled by 1930, and today, with over two million residents, the population of Queens is almost equal to that of Brooklyn.

The Bronx, named for Jonas Bronck, had been a strategic interest interest in colonial and revolutionary times, first because it was the most direct contact with the mainland, and later because crossing the Harlem river was the easiest alternative to British tolls. Like Queens, development of the Bronx in the 19th century was much slower than strategically positioned Brooklyn. Nevertheless, the borough was annxed in two stages in 1874 and 1898. An upper middle-class alternative to Manhattan for commuters, with rolling hills and plenty of space, the Bronx grew more slowly than its neighbors, but almost more steadily. By the turn of the 20th century, the population had reached 200,000, and rose to over 700,000 by 1920. Today, about 1.3 million people live in the Bronx.

Conspicuous among the boroughs, Staten Island is about the size of Brooklyn, but much more remote, and has developed more slowly. Both more rural and conservative than the rest of the city, Staten Island has continually tried to keep the city at arms length, having voted twice for succession. Despite the continuing growth of its population, it is still well under 500,000 people.

By 1898, New York City had grown from one to five boroughs, taking in over three-and-a-half million people. And the city continued to grow. This expanded consciousness would influence, and in many cases, dictate the development of New York well into the 20th century.

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One of the first and most important developments of Greater New York was the steady implementation of a new public transit system. The first subways were initially a public-private venture spearheaded by Gould, Sage, and Morgan, who had pioneered New York's El system. Incorporation of other lines over time led to the creation of subway lines, the dismantling of the Els, and the establishment of passeges between Manhattan and the outer buroughs. In the thirties, under Mayor LaGuardia's guidance, the city took control of the financially strapped system, and ran it for twenty years until the establishment of the Transit Authority. Today, the system encompasses 710 miles of track, or almost enough to run from New York City to Chicago.

New York's greater infrastructure was, from 1921 on, consolidated in the ahnds of the Port of New York Authority, with jurisdiction in a roughly twenty mile radius out from the Statue of Liberty. With measured accountability to the governors and legislators of New York and New Jersey, but with a deliberate insularity from local politics, the Port Authority was responsible for improving transporation throughout the metro areas, and they received the funding to act decisively. In addition to their role in consolidating public transportation among the numerous operating agencies, the Port Authority oversaw the construction of structures such as the Triborough Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel. The Manhattan Bridge was also built at this time.

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Crime and gang activity had always been a problem in New York, and groups such as the Hudson Dusters and the Dead Rabbits were notorious for their recourse to violence and their ability to make a profit off gambling and illicit activities while bribing official to turn the other cheek. They were, however, intensely neighborhood oriented, skirmishing mainly along turf borderlines.

Prohibition dramatically changed all of this. First, the margin of profit in "elicit" activity expanded dramatically; more people wanted to drink than gamble or have prostitutes. Second, the market was everywhere, and the extension of paved roads and public transit allowed gangs access to the whole city and beyond.

Throughout the twenties, gangs lost, or at least downplayed local affiliations in favor of familial connections, and gang activity as a whole became more profit oriented. This situation was not unique to New York but developed in major cities and even smaller communities throughout the nation. However, the initial framework of bitter rival gangs eager to expand their reach, and New York's prominence as a transportation and shipping hub, ensured that the problem was particularly dramatic. More, with the repeal of Prohibition, as drug trade replaced alcohol as gangs' mode of profit, gang activity itself had already spread far beyond the tenement districts to more middle-class midtown and uptown, as well as the outer buroughs.

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The era New York's greatest physical expansion coincided with the construction of some of the city's most distinctive buildings. The Washington Square and Manhattan Bridge arches, the U.S. Custom House, the Grand Central Terminal and the New York Public Library were all built according the the Beaux-Arts style inspired in Paris. The school stressed aesthetic pleasure, emulation of beautiful buildings of the past, and particularly craftsmanship and composition. One of the first genuinely internation architectural movements, and one which, ironically, promoted the same characteristics in the fundamentally austere Modernist and New International styles to follow, the Beaux-arts style held sway in New York for the first twenty years of the century. It fell abruptly out of style, in part due to its perceived excess, but equally due to the rising costs of construction due to unionization. Nevertheless, the school left a destinct impression on the city, and many structures remain today, particularly in the vic inity of Central Park.
The decline of Beaux Arts architecture did not, however, imply a decline in the city's prestige. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were erected in the 1930s as apogees of Art Deco design, while its contemporary, the Rockefeller Center, was lauded for its monumental scale by wise apportioning of public space. Later on, skyscrapers such as the World Trade Center would demonstrate New York's absorption of and influence on the New International Style.

Another side of New York's culture was demonstrated in what might be termed the "golden age of Coney Island." Coney Island is small nub projecting into the Atlantic ocean in Brooklyn, on the southwesternmost extreme of Long Island. Throughout the 1800s, the area developed somewhat slowly as a beachside resort. It's geographic situation (as from from lower Manhattan as the Bronx) made it only accessible by ferry, a ride that took two hours. Noted for a picturesque view of the ocean and its broad, sandy beaches, Coney Island grew with the establishment of a railroad from the city in 1869. Exclusive hotels sprang up to the east, including the Brighton Beach, the Manhattan Beach, and the Oriental, while a rowdy gambling district grew up on the west, at Norton's Pier. The conlfuence of sin, money, and sand primed the area for further recreational growth, and these elements finally took off in the 1890s with the opening of Sea Lion park. During it's thirty year run of glory, the beaches of Coney Islands wer lined with some of the oldest carnival rides in the country, as well as vaudeville shows, girly, and family shows, including the nation's only (and today's last) circus sideshow. A boardwalk was built along the length of the beach, and connected the various piers and opera houses. Unfortunately, coney island was unable to expand, and many of its highlights have been swallowed by housing complexes.

While the Beaux Arts school and Coney island play, in a very generalized way, to opposite ends of a high art / low art continuum, New York's cultural conversation was being bisected in more novel and paradoxical ways. The most visible of these alternative developments occureded in Greenwich Village.
By the 1890s, the Village alrady had a long and idiosyncratic history. As one of the first areas to benefit from the growth of Colonial New York, a number of prominent figures took advantage of the scenic vistas that lay a short walk from Broadway and downtown. The most famous estate, Richmond Hill, had been George Washington's New York Base-of-operations before the British took over, and was later owned by Aaron Burr before he lost it in financial tribulations. The area was acquired by Astor and developed into sublots, and later tenements, and after the Draft Riots during the Civil War, the West Village became an enclave for African Americans and Italians. Industry was an increasing presence through the latter half of the 19th century, and it looked like the Village would become another dockyard slum, when circumstances took an unexpected turn.
Liveries formed an influential core of Greenwich Village's industrial orientation. Early in the 20th century, the automobile was engineered as a workable, practicle commodity, and within years early assembly line technique started producing these vehicles in large numbers. With the auto industry based in Michigan, the bottom fell out of New York livery economy. The shops in the Village all closed. While this led to a drop in property values, the trend was somewhat buoyed by the neighborhood's proximity to New York University and the commerce generated by dockyard districts on the Hudson River and West Street. Just as importantly, artists who worked downtown and in the proximity of the University now had a convenient and insular area with affordable housing. Greenwich Village effectively became the first, most concentrated, and thereby archetypical "artists enclave" in the nation. Local figures in the village included Willa Cather, Marianne Moore, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, Hart Crane, and Eugene O'Neill. Greenwich village was an active site for both avant-garde and Off-Broadway theater, and well as incubating progressive "flapper" culture, and provided a groundswell of support for the Womens' Suffrage movement.

New Yorks force as an artistic center extended beyond its own borders. Entertainment derived from other locations such as the Charleston or Ragtime were "discovered" in New York, whiles others, like the Lindy Hop, grew up in the city itself. All were diseminated from New York through through print, radio, or theater to the outside world. The same could be said of Yiddish and black music. Meanwhile, the New York publishing industry employed more people those in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston combined. The effective networking ("plugger" culture) between creative talent, public relations, and financial interests secured NYC's cultural ascendency. and as a media and entertainment center, only Los Angeles could compete with New York, and then, only in the film industry. This reputation would only be enhanced by the presence of artists and entertainers such as Jimmy Durante, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin.

Oh, yeah, and in 1919, the Yankees bought Babe Ruth.

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Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, New York, and particularly Manhattan, continued to wrestle with problems of sanitation, congenstion, public health, and particular the dilemma of the tenement districts that now covered roughly half of Manhattan in a vast "u" running from the mid 70s streets on both rivers south to Battery Park.

The tenement districts, however, continued to evolve a cultural life of their own, and this period is particularly noted for the vital Jewish community on the Lower East Side. New arrivals, sometimes packed onto a tenement block by the thousands founded literally hundreds of synagogues, dozens of mutual aid societies, and eventually, labor unions. Events such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory fire of 1911 and unreasonable working conditions in sweatshops were widely publicized, and provided political momentum for the continuing influence of unions.

Throughout its history, New York's African American population had steadily grown, with a major influx after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War. Having suffered at the hands of mobs during the 1863 Draft Riots, this community first formed an insular neighborhood called "the Tenderloin" between 26th and 56th Streets, also known as "Black Bohemia." Later, clashes between blacks and the immigrant Irish promped another move north to Harlem at the turn of the 20th century. Over the next forty years, the African American community expanded from a bore at Lenox and 135th street to the entire neighborhood north of Central Park and East of Broadway.
Culturally, the impact of Harlem can scarcely be overstated. New York's African-American population had been organized and assertive since pre-Civil War days, and with the consolidation of the community in Harlem, organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (founded 1909) and the "Back to Africa" movement (1917) obtained political experience, financial backing, and membership. Culturally, the neighborhood was also rich. Names such as Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston all cut their teeth writing, living, and playing in Harlem. The neighborhood also represented, to New York's black community, the same role of New York at large as a filter for national talent. Musical trends taking root in New Orleans (jazz) and Chicago (blues) were actually recorded and distributed through recording companies located uptown.

In New York at large, the influx of immigrants continued unabated, with the general trend that new arrivals settled downtown, and moved north or to the outer burroughs as communities stablized and raised capital. Thus the Jews on the lower East Side had replaced Germans and Russians, and within a generation were themselves replaced by Italians. The African Americans in Greenwich Village and the Tenderloin area had displaced Anglo-Americans, and were replaced in those neighborhoods by the Irish. As Robert Hunter observed in 1912: "In New York alone there are more persons of German descent than persons of native descent, and the German element is larger than any city of Germany except Berlin. There are nearly twice as many Irish as in Dublin, about as many Jews as in Warsaw, and more Italians than in Naples or Venice." The National Origins Quota Act of 1921 has a momentarily limiting effect on immigration. Immigration from Italy and Eastern Europe dropped, while the influx of Germans, English, and Irish increased. New York remained the primary port-of-entry in the nation.

It was during this period, that the successful use of electricity revolutionized New York with light. Broadway, swathed in streetlamps for the first time became known as "the White Way," just as the dingiest tenements were fitted with outlets for incandescent bulbs. Each year, the New Year was greeted by crowds watching a ball of light descend over Times Square.