Gotham Back Then

...author, "The Living End: The City and Its Critics," "America's Housing Challenge" Those who are both seduced and repelled by every aspect of New York City will be delighted to welcome Edward K. Spann (a professor of history at Indiana State University) into their company...

...The political maturing began with the administration of Mayor Fernando Wood, a demi-hero in whom Spann convincingly finds virtues that have eluded less enterprising historians...

...In the face of this unwanted deluge of poor, the city received little guidance and even less aid from either the state or the nation...

...Still, neither voluntarism nor a few talented people could turn the mess of New York into a modern city, or adequately cope with the mounting pressures from a growing underclass...

...One was the vast and burgeoning power of the American-and specifically the New York-economy, which turned many of the "unwanted" people into productive citizens...

...Unlike other reformers of the period, he did not believe that children's lives could be straightened out simply by removing them from wicked urban influences...

...Spann's figures-assembled in his Appendix??are grimly striking...

...And New York City's economic pattern was uneven, responding not only to local fluctuations in demand and supply but to such remote contingencies as the discovery of gold in California and the call for raw cotton by the growing population of the British Isles...

...The streets were too narrow, and laid out in a manner that annulled some of the old city's most interesting and varied topography...

...Charles Loring Brace, trained as a minister in New England, came to New York and found his true calling in the crusade to save young people from the degradation of New York's underclass life...

...Sensitive to the needs of the immigrants, Wood nevertheless believed in the exercise of power to maintain order, and he had a vision of a better city...

...For better or worse, however, the city was destined to become the model of 20th century urban life everywhere: Its forms would inscribe themselves on older European cities, no matter how fiercely their residents protested against the "American" high-rise buildings and automotive transport...

...A corrupt, grossly inefficient government showed little sign of being able to master the work that had to be done to keep the city together, let alone expand it...

...The city's water supply was atrocious until 1842, when the first Croton Aqueduct was completed after years of bickering...

...If I read The New Metropolis correctly, two major factors prevented this from happening...

...Indeed, the economy's capacity to absorb the unwanted, and the political system's ability to adjust the public framework to the needs of the people, will be even more crucial determinants of New York's future than they were 120 years ago...

...The nearly 2 million immigrants who arrived in the 17-year period Spann examines were quite unlike their predecessors in language, religion and preparation for democratic governance...

...The civic health record was deplorable...

...Spann points out that the overwhelming problems facing New York in 1840 were physical...

...A population boom was not the only culprit: New Yorkers, unrestrained by having to pay for the quantities they consumed, used water on a scale unheard of in older metropolises like London and Paris...

...According to Spann, Brace combined "a superb practical intelligence with his sense of mission...

...Present-day New Yorkers can hardly imagine the stench in Manhattan's crowded neighborhoods during that era...

...The docks were decrepit, too, and no one wanted to pay for fixing them...

...Spann sums up the situation in these words: "New York had, in its commercial progress, become the reluctant guardian of hundreds of thousands of people whose misfortunes had begun elsewhere...

...Sewers planned after Croton were so badly designed that low points in the conduits became a series of disconnected cesspools where waste gathered, instead of flowing naturally to the rivers...

...In addition to the economy and the advancements of local government, I would cite a third force that contributed to keeping New York City alive...

...Regrettably, the prospects today seem cloudier than in the energy-rich, thriving time that is the subject of Edward K. Spann's excellent study...

...In addition, backyard privies were standard for family use until long after 1857...

...In 1978, New York City's infant mortality rate for deaths under one year of age (admittedly not exactly comparable with the 0-4 death rate listed above) was 17.1 per 1,000 births, while the overall rate was 9.6 per 1,000-little more than one quarter of what it had been in 1859-'61...

...As a matter of cruel fact, the very lack of public health that maintained the city's death and illness rates at a spectacularly high level also thinned the ranks of the poorest and most disorganized...

...New York was anything but that, although the constantly moving area inhabited by the upper class was fair enough...

...Today we worry about rats, but lower New York City in the years Spann covers was thronging with pigs, horses and cows...

...One of the most ominous consequences of the propinquity of cattle to urban industry was the practice of feeding milk cows on the malt waste, or "swill," from whiskey distilleries...

...The lack of an adequate water supply meant that there was no water-borne means of removing waste...

...Yet expand and prosper is exactly what the city did...

...Wood succeeded in quickening the pace of New York transit, for example, by shifting from horse-drawn omnibuses to horse-drawn street railways: The switch raised the average speed on city routes by 50 per cent, from two to three miles per hour...

...Essentially concerned with public health, he lacked the official power to do much directly, yet his reports played a significant role in alerting enlightened opinion to the dangers of bad sanitation...

...He clearly does not mean that the child as a whole was fair...

...The aristocratic class of merchants and bankers was totally ignorant of the conditions that the enlarging mass of working or non-working poor residents lived under...

...In 1859-'61 (when the first reliable statistics became available), the death rate of children up to four years of age was more than 250 per 1,000 births, while the overall death rate was 36.6 per 1,000 population...

...While the rectangular corners did facilitate transportation movement to some extent, the flourishing commerce was pinched by the absence of adequate north-and-south routes for cargoes heading both to and from the glorious river frontage...

...The central issue posed by Spann's history-how to maintain order with a larger, growing underclass-is as important now as it was in the mid-19th century, especially given the current improvement in health statistics at all economic levels (though life expectancy remains slightly lower for blacks than for whites, and infant mortality in low-income areas remains higher than in wealthier areas...

...The city's basic plant and structures were seemingly quite incapable of accommodating so rapid a growth...

...Instead, he tried to help children on the streets where they lived, and he succeeded in a measure, founding theChil-dren's Aid Society to carry on t he work...

...Expected to provide an ample water supply forever, it was obsolete within 40 years...

...Domestic space had to be allocated for the poor, the luckless and the vicious, as well as for everyone else, but to these unwanted people the city would give only its unwanted space...

...The milk these cows produced was adulterated to whiten its off-color, making it a leading carrier of cholera, dysentery and probably tuberculosis to children (the last is a surmise, since contemporary medical science had not developed a technique for analyzing the spread of that dreaded killer...

...He has written an endlessly interesting book on a particularly fascinating subject-the transformation of 1840 Manhattan (then the whole of New York City) from a port of merely national importance with a population of about 300,000 into an unquestionable world city with two and a half times that number of people...

...Through the ambiguities of the historical miasma, Spann recognizes Wood as a pivotal figure in New York's progress...

...His heroes include little-known figures like Dr...

...The city was the biggest American cattle market in the 1850s, he tells us...

...What intrigues Spann about this development are the difficulties that made it unlikely...

...In only 17 years the city became an international transportation hub, a manufacturing center of immense significance and a cultural phenomenon that could not be ignored...

...Moreover, in the process it became what Spann calls "the fair-haired child of the progressive 19th century...

...John H. Griscom, a physician who served as City Inspector...

...Spann's chronicle emphasizes the efforts of a few great New Yorkers to deal with the effects that the urban chaos had on New York's poor...

...The possibility was quite real that these "unwanted" people might make the city so unattractive that its national leadership in industry and commerce would be undermined...

...The other was an improvement in the political and technical competence of the New York City government...