A Hoax of A Hoax

I’m not a fan of April Fools Day, but in the foul spirit of the thing, here’s a story: In the 1820s (usually stated as 1824), a man named Lozier convinced a bunch of people that the extraordinary density of new construction in lower Manhattan was causing that end of the island to sink. His solution was to saw the island in half uptown, tow the cut part (i.e., the city) out into the harbor, flip it around north-to-south and then return it in its original position. He arranged for a large group of workers – carpenters and presumably sailors – to meet for the great effort. When they showed up ready to work, he was gone and the plan remained unfulfilled. Much anger among the workers, much hilarity for others.

There are a number of versions of the story and they all have one thing in common: there’s no evidence that this hoax ever took place. A recent study came to the conclusion that the story was simply made up, since neither the existence of Lozier nor the crowd of workers could be documented. Of course, we’re not exactly talking about the city fathers here – we know nothing specific about the lives of the vast majority of New Yorkers of 1824. It’s entirely possible that the equivalent of an April Fools prank among a bunch of idlers fooled a few people and the story grew in the retelling.

The map above is from 1903 and shows Manhattan as we’ve come to see it. What did it look like in 1824? Here’s a map from that year, with dark hatching on the built-up blocks (and note that Greenwich Village was still a free-floating island of development north of the city proper):

The Commissioners Plan for the numbered street grid was released in 1811, and thirteen years later we have a little tendril of development extending up Broadway and the Bowery as far north as where Union Square should be, except that the square isn’t there because it wasn’t developed as such until 1831. New York was a boomtown then, with a population of 60,000 in the 1800 census, 96,000 in 1810, 124,000 in 1820 and 202,000 in 1830. The supposed weight of new buildings wasn’t because they were tall, it was because they were packed in solidly, with every available piece of land being built upon to handle the incessant growth. Was the island sinking so much harder to believe than the city more than tripling in size in thirty years?

In this case, a hoax of a hoax appears to be fiction, which is a bit odd since it feels like a hoax of a hoax should be the truth.