Gaslight and Sunlight
HECKSCHER, AUGUST
Gaslight and Sunlight Scenes from the Life of a City: Corruption and Conscience in Old New York by Eric Homberger Yale. 358 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by August Heckscher Author, "Woodrow...
...Reviewed by August Heckscher Author, "Woodrow Wilson";former New York City Commissioner of Parks NINETEENTH-CENTURY New York holds a peculiar fascination for the modern reader—witness, for instance, the cult status of Jack Finney's Time and Again...
...His, however, is no simple narrative, no catchall historical review...
...Suddenly there dawned the prospect of a New York without open spaces or green fields...
...Richard Barrett Connolly, known to fame as "Slippery Dick," was born in County Cork and came to these shores a lad who seemed destined to fulfill the American dream of poor-boy-makes-good...
...Its vistas, its turnings and containments were to touch the heart and soul, and soften the rough-edged city...
...A literary figure who could not be accused of insensitivity or harshness saw what might have been the truth of the matter and dared to state it...
...and in his effort to represent the density particular to urban life, he causes more confusion by moving circuitously around major situations, bringing in all manner of subsidiary persons and events...
...Though he dealt in physical change, in the transformation of whole landscapes, his political ideas were as pungent and radical as any philosopher's...
...The city of a century and a half ago was peopled, one feels, by strange beings...
...In elaborating his theme, he winds back and forth...
...The "objects' of reform," the author shrewdly remarks, "have a disconcerting capacity to resist or revise the agendas of reform...
...The Tammany Hall malfeasors were safe so long as their financial dealings could be kept out of public view, and Connolly, in his new office, was perfectly placed to offer this service...
...As a reward he received large payments, to say nothing of sums extracted from the city treasury...
...Through anecdote and character study he pursues a complex theme that may be briefly described as the paradoxes of reform...
...He believed, too, in the civilizing power of a landscape properly conceived...
...and dark and light fall over the scene, each with a shattering intensity...
...Her spurious claims included a long medical practice in Vienna and Paris...
...and the issue of park-building was deeply tied in with Gotham's reform programs and social values...
...They see the poor imprisoned in airless tenements, prey to infection, moral degeneration, and what is deemed impenetrable ignorance...
...The reader who perseveres, though, will enjoy a rich, if subdued, tapestry and a number of fresh perceptions and illuminating ideas...
...Her places of work were tastefully decorated...
...Nor would they have understood that the corrupt politics of Tammany, corrosive as they were, helped hold the community together as better men spurned civil service and devoted themselves to getting rich...
...The two worlds...
...The last of Homberger's subjects, the esteemed Frederick Law Olmsted, makes a somewhat surprising companion to Madame Restell and Slippery Dick...
...in later years she built a huge mansion on fashionable Fifth Avenue and had a chain of offices in her ownership...
...The "celebrated female physician," Madame Restell, was an uneducated English girl who had the good fortune to marry an irrepressible promoter and salesman, Arthur Lohman, alias Dr...
...There he lived handsomely, building a chateau on Lake Geneva—and always refusing to make restitution to the city...
...We walk the same streets as our predecessors, yet how alien and shadowed these streets appear in the contemporary imagination...
...None of their proposed "solutions" provide more than temporary success...
...Eric Homberger, a reader in American literature at the University of East Anglia, places himself in the very midst of this vanished Metropolis, recounting some fabulous incidents and recreating some astonishing personalities of a period running roughly from 1840 to 1870...
...He worked hard, was cheerful and resourceful, and served his superiors loyally...
...He believed systems and institutions were essential in domesticating men's violent impulses, yet was himself almost pathologically independent and reluctant to submit to authority...
...An "estimable and high-minded wife" had presided over his household, engaging in "noble and charitable projects...
...among hopes for the future this was soon no less significant than the abolition of slums and the establishment of civic honesty...
...The place is near to us, yet seemingly ages away...
...Still, he was a politician in a city whose gentry, increasingly devoted to its social and financial interests, looked on politicians with contempt...
...Olmsted's involvement in the planning of Central Park is a familiar story, but the originality of his contribution is not always well understood...
...Motherhood in the slums, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, was "strangely identical" to motherhood in the "happiest [of] homes...
...His sense of irony and respect for the mystery in things are given full play...
...Farmer, controversialist and gentleman, Olmsted was an authentic American genius, a representative figure like Whitman or Thoreau...
...Madame Restell considered herself a public benefactress, if not exactly a reformer, and indeed, for all her roguishness, she must have relieved much misery and saved many lives...
...A man of sagacity and shrewd common sense," the obituary ran, whose social life, moreover, had been "above reproach...
...Olmsted, however, was a far more complex and interesting man than those who know him only as Central Park's designer might imagine...
...It is also home to a growing spectacular opulence...
...In his New York nothing—for evil or for good—ever quite works out the way it was intended...
...Olmsted wanted his park to be for all the people, the design having a general therapeutic effect...
...He has the virtue of never treating anything as black or white, but this leaves everything seeming slightly gray...
...The character that emerges is a fitting conclusion to what is, despite its flaws, an enlightening and even endearing book...
...A large park was one persistent answer...
...the poor and wretched, and the villains among them, have their own way of coming to terms with the social order...
...The irony was that this outlandish woman came to be tolerated by the society of her day...
...Wealthy do-gooders, clergymen and reformers visit the slums as though descending into the lower circles of hell...
...They have their own values, not always so different from those of the prosperous and refined, and sometimes more neighborly and humane...
...But the forbearance was short-lived, and the reaction she ultimately caused among reformers brutally drove abortion deeper into the underworld for generations...
...Against this backdrop, Homberger sets the careers of three ambiguous heroes: a notorious woman abortionist, an unrepentant embezzler of city funds, and an urban planner and park-designer who served the city's great democracy while holding to reactionary, even authoritarian views...
...Those at the top of society are confounded in their resolve to improve the city...
...Homberger enlarges on Hawthorne's observation, insisting that those who saw only the horror of the slums had no conception of their distinctive customs, standards and forms of discourse...
...Homberger's method does make for a degree of obscurity...
...When finally the reformers closed in, Connolly had a multimillion dollar boodle to take with him to Europe...
...Homberger probes deeply into the formative life of this "literary man,' this "unpractical man...
...or historic values with numerous statues and memorials...
...Each became a major figure in mid-century Gotham...
...To opinion-makers who cherished "the quiet city" of their youth, the problem demanded serious reflection: "What sort ofplace are we going to leave to the next generation...
...The New York we traverse with the author is a city of misery, debasement and disease, a place of lost souls and living death...
...Although professing to have invented "Preventive Powders specially adapted to the female frame," in fact she practiced abortion—and this in a day when abortion was the ultimate crime...
...So much for those who, like certain reformers of our own day, recommended placing children in institutions rather than leave them in the care of "degraded" families...
...They were also, in some ways, troubled and contradictory...
...He made his rise through ward politics—a familiar figure in the gathering places of the poor, "all smiles, and laughter, and backslapping...
...In 1867, at the height of official corruption, he was elected Comptroller...
...Others who submitted schemes for the new park exalted military values with broad avenues for parades...
...The prospect became identified with uplifting and educating the deprived urban masses—and meshed with the private interests of real estate developers...
...Yet when he died the New York Times, usually so self-righteous, spoke of him kindly...
...A. M. Mauriceau...
...Nothing develops logically or achieves expected results...
...gaslight" and "sunlight"—rarely meet...
...By the 1850s the city had grown beyond the tight cluster of streets and buildings of the century's first decades: It was rapidly spreading northward along avenues on Manhattan Island's eastern and western sides...
...or aimed to give pleasure from the carriage-rider's perspective...
Vol. 77 • September 1995 • No. 12
