The Restless City

A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present

Joanne Reitano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781134810482
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present is a brief, insightful and lively history of the peoples, events and interactions that have formed New York City. Weaving together the shifting currents of economic, political, social, and cultural life, Joanne Reitano shows how New York has acted both as an indicator and a driver of the American experience in its negotiation of evolving urban challenges.

The third edition of The Restless City has been updated to include new material on early settler/Native American interactions, and to be more fully inclusive of the outer boroughs of New York. Each chapter features at least two primary sources accompanied by discussion questions for students. Authoritative and comprehensive, The Restless City remains a superior resource for students and scholars interested in the rich history of the nation's premier urban center.

1 Introduction

“Overturn, overturn, overturn! is the maxim of New York.” As accurate in 1845 as today, this statement captures New York City’s most basic characteristic. It speaks to everyone, especially to those who, like its author, former mayor Philip Hone, regretted the relentlessness of rapid change. At the same time, it resonates with those who revel in change, the faster the better. Indeed, change itself is often cited as central to the city’s complex history. New York, said Hone, exemplified “the spirit of pulling down and building up.” It was chronically restless.¹

Hone should have known. His own life reflected the city’s rapid expansion. Born a carpenter’s son, he acquired enough wealth in the auction business to retire at age 40. After serving one term as appointive mayor in 1826, he chaired numerous civic commissions, supported countless philanthropies, and became one of New York’s most prominent citizens. Nonetheless, he was ruined by the Panic of 1837, forced to return to work, only to be ruined again by the fire of 1845. Depressions, crimes, epidemics, strikes, fires, and riots taught Hone that change was a mixed blessing. Despite his elite status and his contempt for poor immigrants, he worried about a society increasingly based on “two extremes of costly luxury and … hopeless destitution.” Hone saw that although change brought progress, it could also cause suffering and conflict.²

According to the urbanist Lewis Mumford, conflict was embedded in the “creative audacity” that made cities so restless in the first place. By contrast with the slow-paced, family-based village defined by continuity and conformity, the city was an unstable community that welcomed strangers, embraced individuality, and was energized by change. It was bold and bustling, exciting and inventive, arrogant and aggressive. Yet, Mumford also appreciated the importance of neighborhoods as buffers for the impersonal city.³

Mumford understood that cities were schizophrenic. On the one hand, they “enlarged all the dimensions of life … [and] became a symbol of the possible.” On the other hand, they “packed [people] together under pressure.” While cities encouraged freedom and innovation, they enforced order and regimentation. Although they depended on cooperation, they fostered competition. As a result of these internal contradictions, cities were in a constant “state of dynamic tension and interaction.”⁴

For better or worse, conflict characterized the restless city and complicated its sense of community. Mumford saw the significance of the “thousand little wars [that] were fought in the marketplace, in the law courts, in the ball game or the arena.” Indeed, competition was so central to urban development that “the city found a score of ways of expressing struggle, aggression, domination, conquest—and servitude.” Ambition promoted a shared aggressive culture, but when community was based on competition, it was inherently tentative and volatile. Urban energy could be simultaneously positive and negative, constructive and destructive.⁵

So it was in Gotham. Over almost four centuries, New York City revised economic, political, and social standards, nurtured controversial people, challenged cultural assumptions, weathered boycotts, strikes, and riots. Its conflicts were violent and nonviolent, innovative and reactive. They spanned the scope of urban diversity—rich versus poor, white versus black, male versus female, old versus new immigrant, worker versus employer, liberal versus conservative, rebel versus reactionary.

The constant jockeying of individuals and interest groups was natural in a city with fluid political, economic, and social structures. In that sense, conflict reflected the special vitality of New York’s multifaceted, ever-changing community. It also exemplified what Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville called the American tendency to be “restless in the midst of abundance.”⁶

Gotham’s turmoil was perpetually stimulating, but particularly unsettling for an optimistic nation steeped in myths of peaceful progress. As the archetypical city of opportunity and equality, as the capital of capital, New York’s tensions exposed the nation’s fault lines. Consequently, the historian Milton Klein concluded that Americans were always “scared of New York City” because it represented “the present or future problems they themselves must face.”⁷

If conflict functioned as a warning, suggested the sociologist Lewis Coser, it also could be an agent of change. In fact, most conflict presumed a desire to improve and participate in, rather than overthrow, the existing system. Reformers and protesters wanted more democracy, equality, and wealth, not revolution. Of course, power holders resented criticism of the status quo and feared disorder. The ensuing struggle over the right to dissent spurred a long and still lively controversy over the meaning of freedom and the role of police in a democracy.⁸

Much of the city’s conflict was violent. Colonization meant Indian wars. Slavery begat the nation’s most repressive response to a supposed 1741 “Great Negro Plot.” Then there were the 1765 Stamp Act riots, the 1834 anti-abolition riots, the 1849 Astor Place riots, the 1850s ethnic riots, the 1863 draft riots, the 1900 race riot, the 1935, 1943, and 1964 Harlem riots, the 1960s riots at Columbia, CUNY, and Stonewall, and the 1970s prison, Hard-hat and Blackout riots. In addition, there were many minor riots. Violence was not just a function of the frontier.⁹

Riots were particularly controversial because they were extralegal, angry, and often deadly. They represented chaos and the breakdown of community. However, far from being irresponsible social aberrations, historian David Grimsted concluded that riots were actually “social exclamation points.” For a brief moment, they gave voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless. Through what the historian Mary P. Ryan called “the social citizenship of the streets,” they promoted popular participation in the polity and vented deeply felt, widely shared grievances.¹⁰

New York also experienced a substantial amount of nonviolent conflict promulgated by provocative individuals such as Alexander McDougall, Jacob Leisler, John Peter Zenger, Fanny Wright, Fernando Wood, Henry George, “Red Emma” Goldman, W. E. B. Du Bois, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Al Sharpton. Controversy characterized the mayoralties of Fernando Wood, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, John V. Lindsay, Edward I. Koch, Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio. The changes they sought reflected core urban and national dilemmas.

So did specific events such as the 1765 Stamp Act Congress, the 1911 Triangle Fire, the 1975 fiscal crisis, the 2001 World Trade Center tragedy, and the 2008 Great Recession. Struggles over education, crime, development, homelessness, and gentrification unmasked fundamental problems that focused national attention on New York City. Consequently, the extensive history of violent and nonviolent conflict shows that Gotham was, in the phrase of the sociologist St. Clair Drake, “the nerve center of American life.”¹¹

This book starts with a discussion of Native American heritage and dilemmas. It then covers conventional time periods from 1609 to 2015 through selective material that highlights the major developments of each era. Figures add a visual dimension to the story and encourage critical viewing. Textboxes present primary sources. Without trying to be comprehensive, the book explores New York City’s special character as a metropolis of unique vigor, diversity, creativity, resilience, and national influence.

Every chapter begins with a timeline and an introduction. The subsequent text focuses on people, events, and movements that illuminate perennial debates over change. It explores the relationship between materialism and humanitarianism, private and public interests. The core disputes involved the challenges of leadership, the roles of government and the police, the impact of economic growth, the nature of equality, the scope of reform, and the meaning of community. Because those issues remain unresolved, the disharmonies of the past ring true today. From the start, New York City was both the paradigm and the pariah for the development of capitalism and democracy in America. New York’s complexity made it not only a symbol of optimism and opportunity, but also what British historian Lord Asa Briggs called a “capital of discontent.”¹²

During the colonial and revolutionary periods, New York developed a uniquely open, pluralist society that, nonetheless, exploited Native Americans and African slaves. This contradiction posed dilemmas about urban priorities that stimulated debate, challenged leadership, and spurred reform. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch West India Company, Adrien Van Der Donck, the Flushing Remonstrance, Jacob Leisler, and John Peter Zenger addressed these issues. Alexander McDougall, the Sons of Liberty, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay highlighted the important roles played by New York City before, during, and after the American Revolution.

The early nineteenth century was ushered in by DeWitt Clinton, who helped solidify Gotham’s development. Jacksonian democracy inspired positive and negative ferment evident in the penny press, the workingman’s movement, nativism, abolitionism, anti-abolitionism, riots in 1834, strikes in 1836, and a depression in 1837. The period exposed such deep fissures of class, racial, gender, and ethnic conflict that many people, including Hone, wondered if democracy could survive.

The mid-nineteenth century found the city innovating with the department store and Barnum’s museum while also absorbing German and Irish immigrants who made their mark on Kleindeutschland and Five Points. Cultural conflict led to riots in 1849 and the 1850s when Mayor Fernando Wood fought for home rule. Support for abolition was offset by trade relations with the South and the 1863 draft riots, which were the most lethal riots in U.S. history.

By the late nineteenth century, New Yorkers were considered the prototypes of the Gilded Age. The greedy robber baron and the corrupt political boss were represented by John D. Rockefeller and Boss Tweed. Although the era was dedicated to social Darwinism, New York prodded the nation’s social conscience through Jacob Riis’ “discovery of poverty” and Samuel Gompers’ labor movement. As Briggs observed, the problems of the industrial city “often overwhelmed people,” but those problems also inspired efforts to better balance “economic individuali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Textboxes
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 City of the Whirlpool, 1609–1799
• 3 Gotham: The Paradoxical City, 1800–1840
• 4 The Proud and Passionate City, 1840–1865
• 5 The Empire City: Questioning the Gilded Age, 1865–1899
• 6 The City of Ambition: Progressivism on Trial, 1900–1919
• 7 The Big Apple: Pursuing the Dream, 1920–1945
• 8 World City: Redefining Gotham 1945–1973
• 9 The Threatened City: Leadership under Fire, 1973–2000
• 10 The Restless City, 2001–2015
• Appendix
• Works Cited
• Index