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…