The Big Oyster (25 page)

In 1855, New York City mayor Henry Wood, responding to the oyster panic the previous year, moved to rigorously enforce the generally ignored laws restricting oyster sales. In 1839, a law had been passed reviving an old law about months lacking
R.
It outlawed the sale of oysters in New York from May 1 to September 1. This had created a festive moment in restaurants and markets when the oyster season reopened in September. Municipalities were free to lengthen the off-season, and the Great South Bay had stayed closed until September 15 and the Brookhaven beds didn't open until October 1. But by 1855, when Mayor Wood began rigorously enforcing the law, most New Yorkers had nearly forgotten about it. By then, New Yorkers were not panicked anymore and they laughed at the old-fashioned law.
Ballou's Pictorial
in the fall of 1855 wrote of oystermen who had started spelling the month “Orgust” so that it would have an
R.
Even then this was already an old joke.

The debate about the
R
months continued throughout the century. In September, at the opening of the 1883 season, a satirical
New York Times
editorial said, “There are eager lovers of the oyster who will eat ‘fries' and ‘broiled' up to 12 P.M. on the 30
^th
day of April, but no good man will touch an oyster after the hour has struck.” The article suggests that the unlucky Italians can't eat oysters in January because
Gennaio,
the Italian name for January, has no
R.
“On the other hand, the Arab of the desert can eat oysters in certain Mohammedan months which contain an R, while in the corresponding Christian months the gracious R is wanting.”

It was mainly with a view to oysters that Julius Caesar reformed the calendar. He found that what the almanach called the Summer occurred late in the Autumn, so that in the months in which oysters were peculiarly desirable no “r” existed. He therefore pushed back the “r”less months into the heat of summer and enabled the Roman to feast on oysters on the true first of September. Moreover he invented leap year merely for the purpose of adding another oyster day to February. It was by these two grand strokes of genius that Caesar won the enthusiastic support of the Roman oyster dealers and endeared himself to every Roman whose taste for oysters had not been destroyed by the artificial and unwholesome dishes affected by the rich and dissolute members of the Pompeiian party.

In 1864, a New York citizens' association undertook a block-by-block inspection of the city. In 1865, it published its three-hundred-page report, which was widely distributed and resulted in the formation of a Metropolitan Board of Health. The goal of the report, which was largely sponsored by the wealthy, was to clean up the sanitary and moral conditions in the slums that caused diseases. The report pointed out that “The mobs that held fearful sway in our city during the memorable out-break of violence in the month of July 1863, were gathered in overcrowded and neglected quarters of the city.”

It also reported that “everything is thrown into the street and gutters all times of the day. The slums still had overflowing outhouses . . . . Filth of every kind was thrown into the streets, covering their surface, filling the gutters, obstructing the sewer culverts, and sending forth perennial emanations which must generate pestiforous diseases.” Scientists did not yet know the causes of most diseases, but most educated New Yorkers were convinced that somehow the problem was slums—the source of disease and crime and violence. Always in the back of New Yorkers' minds was the 1863 draft riot. Finally, in 1887, the city turned to its usual solution and began buying up and tearing down the Five Points neighborhood.

The unheeled, limping nation
was quickly spreading westward. The cattle industry that fed the Union Army, the largest army to date in history, continued to grow. Industry that armed the Union Army in booming cities such as Cleveland continued its expansion. The railroads that moved the army continued branching into the West. Even before the war, in 1857, New York had been linked to St. Louis by train. After the war, New York oysters became a common feature of the restaurants in St. Louis hotels.

Ships were faster, and the Atlantic seemed smaller. The three thousand miles between New York and Liverpool had taken President Martin Van Buren five weeks in 1832. In 1850, the S.S.
Atlantic
of the New York & Liverpool United States Mail Steamship Company broke the record of its competitor, Cunard's Royal Steam Packet Company, by crossing from Liverpool to New York in ten days sixteen hours. Two years later, her sister ship became the first to cross from New York to Liverpool in less than ten days. After the war, ten-day crossings became commonplace.

New York City, the great port for this expanding nation, became a city of wealth and extravagance, with a brash sense of its own importance. War profiteers who had made fortunes settled in and began showing off. It was labeled the Flash Age. New York City had been known not only for its slums but for its beauty, its lawns and gardens and trees, including those in Battery Park, designed to be seen from the sea in the foreground. A pear tree on Third Avenue and Twelfth Street planted in 1660 by Peter Stuyvesant lasted until the early 1860s. It was a city of Georgian homes. Union Square, named not after the Northern cause but because it joined so many avenues and streets, was a flower market in the springtime.

After the war, the city grew from a charming port to a major commercial center. An enormous number of brownstones were built, denounced for modern architectural banality by the old guard. Steel- and ironworks, created for military contracts that ended with the war, turned to making cast-iron buildings, raising the skyline above what had been a three-story town. In 1870, the seven-story Equitable Life Assurance Society Building at Broadway and Cedar Street created a sensation with what the
New York Post
called “The new way of getting up stairs,” a steam-powered elevator, which encouraged the designing of taller buildings. In 1873, the first streetcar rails were laid, though the public was so skeptical of the invention—the car deriving electricity from one of the rails—that horse-drawn coaches continued to congest Broadway.

For all the new brownstones, living space was becoming even more scarce to a growing population. Folding beds that doubled in the day as a bookcase, a wardrobe, or a desk became a popular New Yorkism. Manhattan still had hills and marshes and wetlands. But waterfront marshes were being filled in with granite and earth from the center of the island.

New York had become a commercial center connecting the new American West and the old Europe. In 1830, the port of New York had handled 37 percent of the United States' foreign trade. In 1870, it was handling 57 percent.

Travelers who visited New York before and after the war were amazed by the difference. British journalist George Augustus Sala, who had been a harsh critic on his 1863 visit—also a Confederate sympathizer—returned, and in
America Revisited,
published in 1883, he wrote, “Manhattan is, at the present moment, perhaps with one exception, as enjoyable a metropolis as could be found in the whole world over.” The one exception was that he did not like the way, after it snowed, the streets became mired with sloppy, dirty slush. This problem remains unsolved.

Dickens also noted the change when he returned in 1867–68. He said he felt as though he “might be living in Paris,” staying at the Westminster on Irving Place with its French staff. “The number of grand houses and splendid equipages is quite surprising,” he wrote. Only in his fifties, the venerated author was in poor health and seemed elderly. He had been receiving offers to perform readings of his work in the United States since the end of the war and now had arranged a tour from which he was hoping to earn a considerable sum in ticket sales. He was an even bigger star than he had been on his first trip and was thought to be a brilliant reader. In New York, more than five thousand waited in line for hours to buy tickets and a man was arrested with thousands of forged tickets. Performances were sold out, with standing room let in at the last moment. But there were still bruised feelings from some who had attended the Boz Ball. George Templeton Strong wrote:

Charles Dickens' first Reading last night at Steinway Hall is said to have been admirable. It doubtless was so, but I am in no fever to hear him. I remember the
American Notes
and the American chapters in
Martin Chuzzlewit,
which were his return for the extravagant honors paid him on his first avatar twenty-five years ago. I also remember that both books, especially the former, were filled with abuse and sarcasm against the slaveholding republic, and that during our four years of death-struggle with slavery, Mr. Dickens never uttered one word of sympathy with us or our national cause, though one such word from the most popular living writer of prose fiction, would have been so welcome, and though it would have come so fitly from a professional “humanitarian.” I fear Mr. Dickens is a snob of genius, and that some considerable percentage of his fine feeling for the wrongs and sorrows of humanity is histrionic, but perhaps I do him injustice. Anyhow, I should like to hear him read the
Christmas Carol:
Scrooge, and Marley's Ghost, and Bob Cratchit.

Dickens was alone—he had separated from his wife and left her back in England with her suet dumplings, and, aware of the hostile feelings in the American press, did not want to show his new mistress. When not performing, he kept to his quiet French hotel and dined by himself at Delmonico's, eating and drinking well, according to the waiters. It was a kind of elegant New York existence that would not have been possible twenty-five years earlier in the rough little town of oyster cellars and dance halls.

Dickens being introduced at the banquet.
FROM AN 1868 PERIODICAL

Dickens spent four months in the United States and gave seventy readings, earning himself almost £20,000, considerably less than American scalpers made off his readings. This just added to his bitterness about a country whose failure to conform to copyright law had already denied him a considerable income. Yet before he left, New York just had to throw him another banquet. This time it was given by the New York press at Delmonico's, as were all grand occasions at the time in New York. The banquet cost $3,000, overtaking the Boz Ball and the City Hotel dinner but considerably less than the 1871 bill for a Delmonico's dinner to celebrate politician William “Boss” Tweed's daughter's wedding for $13,000. At the Dickens affair, tickets were sold for $15. Horace Greeley hosted the proceedings and the guests included many of America's notable journalists from Boston to Chicago. It was intended to be a dinner for 175, but 204 diners managed to get tickets.

Dickens arrived an hour late, limping in with the help of a cane. The
New York Herald
commented that the menu offered “oysters on the half shell, sure, but these were the only things that were not dignified with some literary name.” There was “
crème d'asperges à la Dumas,
” “
agneau farci à la Walter Scott,
” and “
côtelettes de grouse à la Fenimore Cooper.
” Those platters of oysters at the start were the only touch of the old New York and even they were labeled in French. The entire menu was in French—correct French—and the seventy-three dishes that had been served at the City Hotel had been cut to about half that number.

Women were not invited to the Dickens dinner. Even influential women writers were denied tickets despite the committee having invited members of the New York working press. When Jane (Jennie) Cunningham Croly, a fashion and theater critic for the
New York World,
applied for a ticket, the New York Press Club simply laughed, despite the fact that her husband, David Croly, managing editor of the
World,
was chairman of the dinner committee and supported her claim. Laughing at journalists always comes with risks, and Jennie Croly angrily reported this rebuke to other prominent women journalists, who in turn also applied for tickets, including Fanny Fern, one of the highest-paid newspaper writers in New York. Fern was a pseudonym for Sara Willis Parton, the wife of James Parton, another member of the committee. But Croly and Parton found that they were powerless to help their wives. The women retaliated by forming their own club that did not allow men. There was at the time not a single women's club in New York—not even a garden club or bridge club or church club. The men, who had men-only clubs excluding women for every occasion, continued to laugh.