When John Randel, Jr., and his fellow surveyors set out in 1808 to map Manhattan Island, they surely anticipated having to wade through salt marshes and red maple swamps, climb rocky outcroppings, and make their way through thick forests of hickory, pine, and tulip trees. The island was ecologically and topographically diverse, and this would have been par for the course. They might not, however, have expected to be pelted with cabbages and artichokes while they worked. The commissioners charged with developing a plan for New York City had hired Randel to draw the map that they would use to...

On a sunny spring day in 1817, a New Yorker stepped out of his house to enjoy a stroll through the city. Along his route he experienced “sufferings and mortifications” that would have embarrassed any metropolis but had become increasingly common in Manhattan. First, he found a cluster of nine hogs cavorting about the street, along with “several smaller congregations.” The smells were too much to bear. As if this were not painful enough, he “was twice docked by chamber-maids cleaning windows . . . and once inundated by a grocer emptying his moptub on the pavement.” Looking for a...

Amid cannons roaring, guns saluting, church bells ringing, and fire-works bursting, New York City ushered in a new era. On November 4, 1825, the city celebrated the opening of the Erie Canal, the engineering marvel that would reroute much of the nation’s commerce through its port. New York City was the final stop on a ten-day-long jubilee that involved handsomely decorated boats, extensive festivities, and countless political speeches in every major town from Buffalo to New York. The highlight of the celebration in Manhattan was the marriage of the waters, when Governor Dewitt Clinton poured a cask of water from...

New York City left quite an impression on Charles Dickens during his visit in 1842, and not because of the plethora of new parks. On Broadway, amid “ladies in bright colours, walking to and fro,” he found two portly sows “trotting up behind this carriage, and a select party of half a-dozen gentlemen-hogs” turning the corner. Referring to one porcine acquaintance, Dickens declared: “He is in every respect a republican pig, going wherever he pleases, and mingling with the best society, on an equal, if not superior footing.” Despite the park boom of the 1830s, pigs continued to rule the...

Journalist George “Gaslight” Foster, upon entering one of the corner groceries that were common in poor neighborhoods, was struck by the “inferior and often positively unwholesome” food it sold, ranging from overpriced spoiled butter to rancid meat. The milk that the grocer kept in a tub was “ready to curdle from the loathsome diseases with which every particle is rife.” Though the grocery claimed it was “Orange County Milk”—the gold standard—Foster was confident that it was “swill milk”: milk from cows fed distillery waste. The food sold at these groceries, Foster contended, was “unfit to sustain life, ....

When a tourist from rural Virginia visited New York City in the summer of 1848, he was struck by the contrasts between the city he was visiting and the community in which he lived. Compared with “his quiet home and the fresh atmosphere of the country,” Manhattan was a “dusty, smoky, noisy, busy, great and animating emporium.” Class differences were also conspicuous. He observed on the one hand “the princely dwelling, the costly equipage and the splendid appearances; and on the other hand the squalid hut of poverty, of filth, of extreme misery and degradation.” The midcentury city was marked...

After barricading the windows and doors with bales of water-soaked newsprint to prevent rioters from setting the building on fire, Horace Greeley and his staff at theNew-York Tribuneoffices managed to publish accounts of the Draft Riots erupting at their doorstep and throughout the city. To those who lived through the riots in July 1863, Manhattan was anything but tame. Although the riots had begun as a protest against the federal Conscription Act, which unfairly affected those too poor to pay their way out of it, the rioters quickly expanded their targets to include not just draft offices, but...