New York, I Heart You

I'm not a huge history buff, but about very selective topics I can be. These include, and are limited to, Colorado, the church, baseball, music, and New York City. Occasionally I decide to further educate myself about one of these topics, and that was my motivation for reading Edward Robb Ellis's The Epic of New York City. When I first bought the book, I was intrigued by his used of the word "epic," which is more often used to describe stories than real events. But most real events, viewed through the right lens, can take on an epic quality, and I thought that anyone who felt he could construct New York City's history in such a way deserved my attention.

Ellis does a very good job tackling the biggest problem that faces historians, and that is the fact that history must be told both chronologically and topically. If you get too far into one, you lose the thread of the other, so walking the line between the two is imperative. It felt like things were always moving forward, and yet he grouped enough similar events together that I was able to draw the necessary connections among them. I wasn't wild about his attempts to make the book "narrative." Narrative histories can be very entertaining, but Ellis's M.O. was to cap pages and pages of facts with a small sensory detail, like describing a flock of birds that suddenly flew by a scene. Since he'd been straight reporting for many paragraphs by this point, the detail about the birds felt very obviously fabricated. Anyone telling about something that really happened has creative license to fill in details that are inconsequential to the facts, but it needs to be done with more consistency in order to enhance rather than distract.

Speaking of those facts, I learned a great many that I found utterly fascinating. A sampling:

• The first non-native to set eyes on Manhattan was the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano, for whom the Verrazano Narrows would be named. Verrazano turned his ship around without ever getting off, and the first non-native to actually set foot on our shores, Henry Hudson, didn't come along for another 85 years.
• Peter Stuyvesant was governor of New York from 1647 to 1664. By all accounts, he was more a puppet of the Dutch West India Company than a legitimate emissary of Holland's government. But he built a farm by the East River, on the site of which now sits the apartment complex that bears his name, and where I happen to live.
• New York officially became known by that name (after decades of going by "New Netherland") when its Dutch citizens surrendered to British negotiators sent by the Duke of York in 1664. Despite the apparent defeat for the Dutch, this development would ultimately prove to be a boon for the colonists, as it caused them to move toward political unity that made it possible for them to win their independence more than a century later.
• Benjamin Fletcher became governor of New York in 1692. The day he arrived from England, the aristocratic party greeted him with a great parade, and thus began New York's custom of celebrating every important event on the calendar with parades.
• "New York's gay young blades were called fribbles, meaning frivolous. Even more colorfully clad than women, fribbles adorned themselves in purple coats lined with sky-blue silk, cinnamon-colored breeches, dove-colored hose decorated with golden clocks, and red-heeled shoes. Dainty ruffles of white Holland shirts peeped through the front of their gold-threaded red-satin waistcoats, and their wrists were frilled with still more ruffles. Thier long-tailed coats and their vests shone with big silver buttons engraved with their initials."
• Turns out all that hubbub over no taxation without representation was kind of dumb. British citizens were hardly more well-represented in Parliament than Americans - only 1 out of 30 Englishmen could vote.
• New York was first nicknamed "Gotham" in 1807. Some satirists so named it after an English village in which King John tried to buy a castle in the 13th century. The villagers didn't want to have to maintain it for him, so they all acted like idiots to scare him off. It worked. Of both Gothams it was said, "More fools pass through Gotham than remain in it." I say Amen.
• Bank Street in the Village got that name in 1822 during a yellow fever outbreak in New York. People were so afraid of being exposed that many fled to "the suburbs" for safety. Banking offices relocated there from Wall Street.
• In 1852 land was designated for Central Park. At the time it was a shantytown for 5,000 squatters. They lived in huts, ate garbage, and kept 100,000 animals and birds. It was barren, treeless, and full of swamps.
  At the same time, the German revolution caused a mass immigration. They settled along the Bowery between Houston and 12th and soon there was 1 beer garden for every 200 Germans.
• Hey Southerners - it seems that New York was not as "Northern" during the Civil War as you've been led to believe. Most city-dwellers did not want to go to war or even for slavery to end, because Southern planters owed them a lot of money and they wanted to be paid back. In January 1861, Mayor Fernando Wood sent a message to the city council recommending that New York secede from the Union and become a free city.

  Eventually the Union's interests prevailed, but this led the South to feel betrayed by a city they thought was their friend. The Richmond Dispatch wrote: "New York will be remembered with special hatred by the South for all time." And so it has.
• The first subway was a secret. Boss Tweed used his connections to kill all legitimate attempts to build an underground railroad, so a man named Alfred Ely Beach received a state charter to build "a pneumatic mail tube system" under Broadway in 1868. Less than two months later, the subway was operational from Murray to Warren Street (one block).
• "New York City" consisted only of Manhattan until 1898, when the other boroughs were incorporated. This nearly doubled the city's population and caused it to pass Chicago and Philadelphia as the largest American city. Upstate Republicans were not in favor, worrying that a metropolis might dominate the state. A valid concern, it turns out.
• Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels on the federal government's 1917 request that cities cut down on the use of electric signs to conserve coal: "New York responded with such howls and denunciations as can hardly be described ... in some respects New York is more set in its provincialism than any 'hick' town in America. Smaller cities obeyed the order to do without the White Way at night because of the exigency of war. Not New York. It raised such a row that coal operators doubled their energies to furnish enough coal so that the White Way could again blaze brightly and let New York City turn night into day."

The biggest drawback to this book is the fact that it was published in 1966. Ellis went on to die in 1998, so there's no chance of him ever writing an appendix to update posterity on what came after that. Obviously a lot of really important things have happened in New York in just the last decade, from 9/11 to the banking and real estate crashes. It's impossible to tell the whole story about New York without these most recent occurrences. And maybe that's why "epic" is not a word that should be applied to non-fiction, since it implies an arc that begins with inciting event and ends with satisfying resolution. There can be no satisfying resolution to New York's history while it still exists, and the suggestion that Mayor Lindsay's election was anything like the end of the story was a little disappointing. So, a bit anticlimactic in the end, but overall an informative read that made me even more proud of and devoted to my home.

Favorite quote from the collection at the end: "To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements. Being there was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying." - P.G. Wodehouse