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SHANTY TOWN, NEW
YORK
by Mike McCormack AOH National Historian
It's only a shanty in old shanty town; It's roof is so slanty, it
touches the ground.
Just a tumbled down shack by an old railroad track, but like a
millionaire's mansion it’s calling me back.
I'd give up my palace if I were a king; it's more than a palace – it's
my everything.
There's a queen waiting there, in a silvery crown; in a shanty in old
shanty town
Lyrics - Joe Young (1932)
Central Park in New York City was the first landscaped public park in
the United States. Today it’s 843-acre expanse is the most expensive
piece of not-for-sale real estate in the entire world. Yet, it has a
dark side. Original advocates of creating the park were primarily
wealthy New Yorkers, who wanted an attractive area for their carriage
rides on a Sunday afternoon. However, there was just one thing in the
way of its construction. The land proposed was dotted with the homes of
thousands of underprivileged working-class families.
The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 had made New York the financial
and commercial capital of the nation, attracting many new businesses and
residents. The new rich of the city, who admired the public parks of
London and Paris, urged that New York needed a comparable facility to
enhance its international reputation. In an effort to put a charitable
tone on their argument, they claimed that a public park would provide
working-class New Yorkers with a healthy alternative to saloons.
However, while faced with the expense of a rapidly growing population,
the city was also besieged with a flood of Irish immigrants fleeing the
1845 - 50 failure of the potato crop in Ireland as well as German
immigrants fleeing 1848 revolutions in Germany. The population of the
city grew faster than housing allowed, leading to the overcrowding of
old houses as owners subdivided property and crammed as many tenants as
possible into space far too confining for healthy living.
A recently filled-in pond below Canal Street became an area known as The
Five Points – the worst overcrowded slum in the United States, if not
the world, with inadequate services for sanitation, health and welfare.
Those unwilling to commit their families to the misery of the Points or
unable to afford the tenement rents, settled on vacant land north of the
city. That land, between today’s Fifth and Eighth avenues north of 59th
street, was a muddy tract of broken, irregular, rocky acreage,
undesirable for private development. It had been a settler’s colony
since 1825 with residents erecting cabins or shacks as best they could.
The dwellings housed Irish and German immigrants, runaway slaves, freed
blacks and others who were not welcome in the heart of the city due to
their poverty, health, religion, or race. These communities, nicknamed
Dutch Hill, Dublin Corners, the Piggery and Seneca Village, were
estimated by one New York newspaper to contain between 12 and 16,000
souls. If municipal services were painfully inadequate in the slums,
they were virtually non-existent in those collective communities which
came to be known as Shanty Town, named from the Irish sean (old) and
tigh (house) to describe the rough, makeshift dwellings of those unable
to afford anything more substantial. In addition to the settler’s
dwellings, were the ‘nuisance industries’ banned from operating within
city limits such as glue, soap and candle factories which emitted bad
odors and bone-boiling plants that made oil used to refine sugar. There
were also stone quarries, farms, taverns, and even a Sisters of Charity
convent in Shanty Town.
The largest ethnic population of Shanty Town were Irish families who had
fled the Great Hunger to seek a better life in America. Unable to find
accommodations in the city, they wandered onto the unused land above
60th Street and erected small, one-room cabins on small plots of land.
The homes they built were, in many cases, no better or worse than those
they’d left in Ireland, but at least there were no bill, tithe and tax
collectors, and no threat of eviction. This was the freedom they had
come to America to find and they settled in to plant a crop and raise a
few livestock. However, to the growing nouveau riche of New York, these
people were dirty, unkempt and lived with animals further alienating
them from polite society.
There was also a community of German Catholic farmers who began to farm
and sell their produce from push carts in the city. There was a
community known as Seneca Village which was an African-American
settlement of freed blacks, who were not above lending a helping hand to
runaway slaves. These largely Irish-German-African shanty towns began to
grow larger after 1880. With no plan for the layout of streets and
pathways, dwellings were erected wherever the rocky ground would permit.
Even though the settlements included schools, churches, cemeteries,
shops, and public hospitals, a newspaper of the time described the look
of the structures as if it they were constructed by crazy poets and
distributed by a whirlwind.
By the end of the Civil War, the city began marching north. Fifth
Avenue, up to 59th Street, boasted more than 340 private residences,
among which were many of the city's largest and most extravagant homes.
By the late 1800s, Fifth Avenue had become synonymous with wealth, high
fashion, and architectural elegance. As the gentry began to build their
new mansions north of 59th street, they looked out from their Victorian
drawing rooms on shantys settled by immigrants who operated truck farms
and kept goats, chickens, and pigs. When millionaire Andrew Carnegie
erected his mansion at Fifth Avenue and 91st Street, his nearest
neighbors were living in a shack described as an Irish architectural
prototype. This was definitely not acceptable.
After years of debate over the site and cost of a park, in 1853 the City
suddenly used the power of eminent domain to confiscate more than 700
acres of land in the center of Manhattan. The land chosen was Shanty
Town whose inhabitants were suddenly described as disease-ridden tramps,
squatters and thieves living in dilapidated shacks surrounded by pigs,
sheep, and cows. The settlers had no chance in the face of the
press-inspired prejudice generated in a politically charged environment
amid rising prices of the residential land all around them. The city
notified the squatters, as they were now called, that they would have to
go.
By the summer of 1856, about 1,600 working-class families were offered
an insultingly low stipend for their land and their homes and told to
clear out. These families had no political or economic power with which
to argue against those who wanted a park playground. The residents were
evicted through 1857, and their homes were torn down. The civil servant
in charge of carrying out the sad task of evictions was the great-great
grandfather of future New York Yankee great, Joe Pepitone. No provisions
were made for the relocation of those who were displaced. To the Irish,
they had been evicted again; this time in a land where they believed it
would never happen. Little investigation has ever been done regarding
this shameful event in New York history. Once done, it was forgotten.
But where did the evicted go? What became of their families?
After blasting out rocky ridges with more gunpowder than was used at the
Battle of Gettysburg, workers moved 3 million cubic yards of soil and
planted more than 270,000 trees and shrubs. In the end, it cost more to
build Central Park than it did to purchase Alaska, so why wasn’t there
enough money to relocate the displaced families? We shall never know.
After the destruction of Shanty Town, the inhabitants vanished without a
trace. The next time you read of someone losing their wallet or purse to
a pickpocket or purse snatcher in Central Park, think about those
families who lost so much more in that same park. After all, many of
today’s New Yorkers could be their descendants.
Mike McCormack, NY State Historian
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