Less Bucolic Than It Looks

Looking north up Broadway, from about Fulton Street, in 1820:

The fancy building is City Hall, then eight years old. The street running off to the right is Park Row. Given that everything other than the street layout and City Hall has changed multiple times in the last two centuries, even City Hall Park, there’s nothing else here that’s familiar.

If you just saw the picture without knowing anything else, and if City Hall was less recognizable, this looks like a long-ago and prosperous small city or town. Stone-paved streets and sidewalks, a series of three and four brick buildings up the main street, and a lot of dogs. (No stray pigs, which was a real thing in New York at that time, but maybe more of a problem in poorer neighborhoods.) And that impression is true as far as it goes, but that’s not really very far.

New York was the fastest-growing city of the nineteenth century and that process was well underway in 1820. Some census data: in 1800, the city’s population was 60,515; in 1810, 96,373; in 1820, 123,706; in 1830, 202,589; and in 1840, 312,710. The increase from 1800 to 1810 was 59 percent; the increase from 1810 to 1820 was 28 percent; the increase from 1820 to 1830 was 64 percent; and the increase from 1830 to 1840 was 54 percent. The relatively low growth in the 1810s was mostly the result of (a) the embargo of 1807 that badly damaged international trade, and trade was New York’s main business in that era, and (b) the following War of 1812, from 1812 to 1814.

In other words, this was not a pretty and quiet town. This was a rapidly growing city that, by the 1820s, was already eating its own, physical-environment-wise, as the older residential neighborhoods downtown were redeveloped for commercial use. Those small buildings on Broadway would all be replaced within a few decades, some of them twice by the end of the century, and many of them three or four times up to the present.