Scenes from the Life of a City: Corruption and Conscience in Old New York - Hardcover

Homberger, Dr. Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300060416 ISBN 13: 9780300060416

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1994

Synopsis

Glittering and glamorous, New York in the mid-nineteenth century was also plagued by political corruption, sanitation problems, and a growing gulf between rich and poor. In this book, Eric Homberger brilliantly evokes the life of a city through vivid portraits of New Yorkers struggling to reconstruct a sense of community amid the selfish materialism of their urban environment.
Homberger focuses on four main characters who played important roles in various reform efforts of the period: Ann Lohman, known as "Madame Restell, the world-renowned medical expert," whose services as an abortionist were partly responsible for the creation of a harshly repressive public policy toward abortion that persisted for more than a century; "Slippery Dick" Connolly, comptroller of New York City, who escaped to Europe with millions of the city's dollars and betrayed his confederates in the Tweed Ring; Dr. Stephen Smith, a young surgeon at Bellevue Hospital, who was able to show that dozens of cases of typhus had originated in a single tenement on East 22nd Street; and Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect-in-chief of Central Park, who brought into reality a concept promoted by the aristocracy for the benefit of rich and poor alike.
In the course of telling the stories of these New Yorkers, Homberger describes a host of other characters: cynical politicians employing the ever-effective language of racism, real estate speculators angrily contesting who was to reap the benefits of Central Park and who was to pay, well-meaning preachers, cunning lawyers, destitute immigrants, curious journalists, wealthy New Yorkers who anxiously feared the city's mobs, moral reformers, and many more. Wonderful reading, Homberger's book is also timely, for his account of the struggle to define and create a community within a diverse and contentious city evokes similar struggles taking place in cities today.

About this title

About the Author

Eric Homberger is presently reader in American literature at the University of East Anglia.

Reviews

Four scholarly glimpses of 19th-century New York City, adding up to a dull but informative portrait of an urban community in search of its soul. Homberger (American Literature/Univ. of East Anglia) focuses on the ills that assailed New York City as a result of a population boom that quadrupled its population to nearly a million between 1830 and 1860. His first essay examines the ``Virgilian mode of social investigation'' conducted by 19th-century journalists, who portrayed the city as a Dantean underworld of hardened criminals, lost souls, and terrible torments. Reports by Jacob Riis and others prompted a public outcry against slums, with eerie echoes of the 1990s, including attempts to close down homeless shelters and relocate the poor. Simultaneously, the city went on a crusade against abortion--another campaign with ironic modern overtones. Homberger then turns to the sorry life of Richard Barrett Connolly, a.k.a. ``Slippery Dick,'' an Irish immigrant who became treasurer of New York during Boss Tweed's heyday and absconded to Europe with several million dollars when Tammany Hall collapsed. Earlier portraits of Connolly present a self-serving lout, but Homberger (John Reed, not reviewed) depicts a good man ground down by the machinations of corruption. After these forays into crime and misery, the author lets in the sun with his final study, which recounts the construction of Central Park. Frederick Law Olmsted led the charge, designing a retreat that offered the city just what it needed: bucolic vistas, paths for quiet strolls, ponds for ice- skating. Central Park was an instant success, a glorious creation that ``truly represented the achievement of New York in this period''--from a modern perspective, the final irony in a book teeming with them. Less popular than H. Paul Jeffers's Commissioner Roosevelt (p. 905), which also limns the woes of old Manhattan: a painful reminder that New York was once a city on the rise. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Homberger's theme, the struggle of mid-19th-century reformers to awaken a sense of community in laissez-faire New York, unfolds in four absorbing but largely independent essays. He focuses on Steven Smith, whose probe of typhoid clusters in the slums led to the creation of the Sanitary Board in 1866; Madame Restell, the abortionist who rose from poverty to residence at a Fifth Avenue mansion before the persecutions of Anthony Comstock drove her to suicide; "Slippery Dick" Connolly, the only member of the Tweed Ring to escape with his fortune; and Frederick Law Olmsted, whose design of Central Park represented the era's great attempt to reconcile the city's warring social classes. Homberger (American literature, Univ. of East Anglia) has a keen sense of historical irony, a remarkable command of 19th-century memoirs and journals, and a rare talent for drawing vivid characters acting on complex motives. One wishes he had constructed a more coherent frame around his individual "scenes" or drawn more connections between them, but this book is highly recommended for any collection with an interest in urban and social history.
Gregory Gilmartin, New York City
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300060416
• ISBN 13: 9780300060416
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368