The Big Oyster (13 page)

The New York argument, as in Hudson's time, was the sweetness of the air and the healthiness of the city. It was pointed out that the Congress had met in New York for a three-month session and only one member had been sick in all that time. Dr. John Bard argued that New Yorkers were unusually healthy, and stated as one of the reasons the variety of fresh seafood that was available.

New York is justly esteemed one of the healthiest cities of the continent. Its vicinity to the ocean, fronted by a large and spacious bay: surrounded on every side by high and improved land covered with verdure and growing vegetables, which have a powerful influence in sweetening and salubrifying the air and which often in their season salute the inhabitants settled on the west side of the Broadway with fragrant odors from the apple orchards and buckwheat fields in blossom on the pleasant banks of the Jersey shore . . .

All of this may have been a bit too much of a sales pitch. In August of that year, during a heat wave, twenty New Yorkers dropped dead. But it was certainly as accurate as the opposing side, the District of Columbia promoters, who were claiming—with shades of John Smith and Henry Hudson—that the Potomac River connected with the Ohio and thus provided a waterway through the continent.

Six years after
Washington said farewell to his troops in a warscarred and rebuilding New York, he was inaugurated president and New York was a thriving commercial city, well on its way to becoming the most important port in the new country. The tip of Manhattan had four thousand houses and twenty-nine thousand inhabitants, more than double its wartime population. Trinity Church had not yet been fully restored and the landmark Lutheran church on Rector Street and Broadway was still a blackened ruin, popularly known in acidic New York humor as the Burnt Lutheran Church. Not surprisingly, the first insurance company, founded with the help of Alexander Hamilton in 1789, specialized in fire—the Mutual Assistance Company Against Fire.

There were six food markets in lower Manhattan where oysters and fresh fish from the harbor, local fruit and produce, and meat were sold. The oldest was the Fly Market, started in 1699 on Maiden Lane between Pearl and Water streets. Soon all of these markets would be gone and replaced by newer ones. But these older markets had had very exacting government-enforced quality and health standards. In the nineteenth century, courts ruled that such market codes were an unlawful interference with free enterprise. An 1843 decision virtually ended consumer protection in New York City for one hundred years.

This map was included in the city directory of 1789, the third such directory. These books would be published annually until the twentieth century creation of telephone books. This was the first city directory in the United States to include a street map. The map shows the completion of Greenwich Street, a fifty-year landfill project along the Hudson River and also shows the Collect, marked “Fresh Water Pond.”
COLLECTION OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The city had an increasing number of taverns and oyster houses. In fact, the Bowery village, a suburb just north of the city where Peter Stuyvesant's farm had been located near East Tenth Street, used an oyster house as its village post office.

The city did not become the capital of the new nation; it did not even become the capital of the state, losing out to Albany in 1797. But it continued to grow, and in the same year that it lost its seat to Albany, it became the leading port of the United States, surpassing Boston and Philadelphia.

Robert Fulton is
often credited with having invented the steam engine, which he did not, and never remembered for inventing the submarine, which he did. That is because he was never able to sell the submarine, whereas his steamboats changed New York City.

The first steam-powered vessel in New York City was built by a man from Bristol, Connecticut, named John Fitch. In 1790, Fitch had built and operated a steam-powered ferry service between Philadelphia and Trenton. The venture had lost money, as did all his subsequent ventures, in part because he could not attract substantial investors. Few had been excited about the commercial possibilities of Fitch's somewhat reduced crossing time from Philadelphia to Trenton and the service had never made a profit and had left many convinced that steamboats were not commercially viable. His last project was a steamboat with a screw-type propeller that in 1796 he demonstrated on the Collect, lower Manhattan's increasingly defiled pond. Among the passengers aboard the experimental vessel were Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston, Fulton's future patron. No one expressed interest in backing Fitch's boat and it was never used. Fitch committed suicide.

Robert Fulton's life, too, defies logical biography. He died at the age of fifty-one from not tending to a cold. He grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he studied art but became a gunsmith. Then, still only seventeen years old, he moved to Philadelphia, where he became a painter of portraits and landscapes. When the forgotten Fitch was building steamboats, Fulton was painting portraits. It was while studying art in England under Benjamin West that he became interested in engineering, the master gunsmith in him emerging again. He worked on canal projects.

In 1796, he went to Paris at the invitation of Joel Barlow, a former chaplain of the Continental Army and passionate booster of all things American. Barlow was in Paris convincing a group of Frenchmen to immigrate to Ohio. In France, Fulton became fascinated, obsessed according to some accounts, with underwater warfare. He designed submarines that fired torpedoes. In 1801, he demonstrated his prototype, which stored fresh air in a copper globe, to the French Admiralty. Although the vessel managed to stay under the water in Brest Harbor for more than four hours, the French government declined to develop such a weapon.

Then he visited Robert Livingston, with whom he had several years earlier steamed across the Collect. Livingston had been a deputy to the Continental Congress, law partner of the first Supreme Court chief justice, John Jay, and a native New Yorker who was serving as the U.S. ambassador to France. Fulton could not interest Livingston in his submarine either. Livingston had a long-standing interest in steamboats, though, which was why he had been on board Fitch's invention on the Collect. Being from New York City, Livingston immediately grasped the significance of Fulton's idea for using the steam engine. The engine Fulton wanted to use had been developed by James Watt, a Scot who is also sometimes credited with inventing steam engines but had not—Thomas Savery did in 1698—to drive two paddle wheels and power a vessel. Livingston contracted Fulton to build a boat with steam-powered paddle wheels that would work the Hudson River between New York City and Albany. Their first prototype in 1803 sank in the Seine. The French were nevertheless impressed with the theory. But Fulton and Livingston were not theorists, they were a new breed of American pragmatists in search of commercial success.

They returned to America, and Livingston secured a monopoly from the New York State legislature for all steam-powered vessels on New York rivers. On the East River, the site of numerous shipyards, they built the
Clermont,
a 130-foot vessel with two 15-foot-diameter side paddle wheels and two masts flying square canvas sails for added power.

In August 1807—historians disagree on the exact day—the
Clermont
steamed from Manhattan to Albany, 150 miles up the Hudson, in thirty-two hours. Along the way the forty-one-year-old artist-engineer-inventor-entrepreneur at last found the time to propose marriage to Harriet Livingston, a relative of his partner. He made it back downriver to Manhattan in thirty hours. The state monopoly had been on condition that they could produce a steamboat that traveled at least four miles an hour. They had averaged five miles an hour. “The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved,” Fulton wrote Joel Barlow. Immediately following this successful demonstration, Fulton and Livingston began regular service between Manhattan and Albany. The fares were high, seven dollars one way to Albany, and yet the boats were packed with eager customers. Fulton and Livingston had shown that steam travel was profitable and that is what changed New York and the world and probably why Robert Fulton is erroneously remembered as the inventor of the steamboat.

The travel time was reduced even further and the ability to travel between New York and Albany in half a day instead of a week had tremendous commercial implications not only for passenger traffic but also for freight. It meant that Hudson Valley produce could be shipped out of New York and around the globe, and goods could be brought in from around the world and quickly delivered to be sold in the Hudson Valley. This held special promise for New York City producers of perishable goods, and near the top of such a list were oyster producers.

Not everyone was pleased. The
Clermont
burned pine and belched black smoke and spit bright sparks, but this was the beginning of the nineteenth century, an age when some feared technology and others pointed at black smoke with pride as a sign of progress. One observer called the
Clermont
“the horrible monster which was marching on the tide and lighting its path by the fire that it vomited.” The operators of the old river sloops took every opportunity to attempt to scuttle or block the
Clermont.
The state legislature passed a law specifically against injuring the
Clermont
or other steamboats.

But the possibilities were apparent, and not only to oystermen. On October 2, 1807, the
New York Evening Post
ran an article reporting on “Mr. Fulton's Steam Boat” that concluded: “Yesterday she came in from Albany in 28 hours with 60 passengers. Quere would it not be well if she could contract with the Post-Master General to carry the mail from this city to Albany?”

New Yorkers fell in love with the technology, which led to reckless steamboat races down the Hudson. At least fifty passengers died in 1845 when the
Swallow,
racing two other steamboats, rammed into a rocky island and caught fire. More than sixty people were killed, including Nathaniel Hawthorne's sister in 1852, when the
Henry Clay,
also racing, caught fire near Yonkers and was run aground.

Fulton turned to the ferryboat. Of what are today the five boroughs of New York City, only the Bronx is situated on the mainland of North America. Today the boroughs are interconnected by bridges and tunnels, but from the time of the Dutch, and possibly the Lenape, to the late nineteenth century, the only connection was by ferryboats. Until Fulton, these ferries were powered by teams of horses walking in a circle on the boat deck, turning a pole that was the driveshaft to the paddle wheel. At the speed these boats traveled, even a trip across the East River became a voyage. In 1812, Fulton began producing steam-powered ferryboats to connect Manhattan with New Jersey and with Brooklyn. Fulton also invented the pontoon dock, which enabled the loading dock to rise with the water and always remain level with the ferry deck for bringing vehicles on and off, a system that is still in use.