Nineteenth-century New York City - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2000 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

In nineteenth-century New York City May 1 was a critical date, not because it was May Day but because it was Moving Day. On that day every rental lease in the city expired and people seeking to either trade up or scale back found themselves frantically looking for a cart to tote their worldly goods to their new abode. Then, as now, nearly every New Yorker lamented exponentially escalating real estate prices. Today we attribute them to the emergence of internet and Wall Street billionaires; our forebears ascribed them to the real estate speculators, bankers, manufacturers, and merchant princes who capitalized on the fortunes to be made in the economic boom following the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825.

By the time of the Civil War there were 115 millionaires living in New York City who built grand houses and were ever pushing the boundaries of the city northward to escape overcrowding. At the other end of the spectrum, as early as 1840 a critical shortage of housing in New York caused rents to soar, and in at least one slum area the population density reached an average of forty-five people per house. Years before the skyscraper transformed cityscapes throughout the United States, New York was evolving into a vertical city to accommodate expansion. Yet this was also a period when architecture, art, culture, and commerce flourished. All of these factors are examined in a large and wideranging show on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from September 19 to January 7, 2001. Entitled Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861, it explores New York's emergence as the epicenter of American arts, letters, trade, and commerce in some 310 works borrowed from more than eighty public and privat e collections. The dates in the exhibition's title encompass the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which enabled New York to eclipse Philadelphia as the financial center of the country, to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861. The objects on view include paintings, prints, sculpture, ceramics, metalwork, costume, photographs, architectural drawings, jewelry textiles, wallpapers, and furniture, both made or used by New Yorkers. The curators of the exhibition are John K. Howat and Catherine Hoover Voorsanger, both of the Metropolitan Museum. It is underwritten by Fleet, which has amplified its largesse by donating 1.5 million passes to students (kindergarten through high school) and their families in the New York metropolitan region. All of these students will at least once in their academic career study the history of their hometown.

As Dell Upton relates in his excellent essay in the exhibition catalogue, during the period covered in the exhibition the population of the city swelled from more than 125,000 to 815,000 (nearly half of whom were immigrants). New York was also the home of some four thousand factories, many of which were housed in vast buildings where the goods manufactured or imported were also retailed. The display areas of these establishments were literally heaped with goods, which in some cases were even suspended from the ceiling. Every sort of commodity could be had in New York from the latest fashions in Europe and Asia to goods made elsewhere in the United States and shipped via the Erie Canal.

Rubens Peale opened his museum and Gallery of the Fine Arts on the same day the city celebrated the opening of the canal. The National Academy of Design was founded that same year on the premise that art uplifts those in less fortunate circumstances and contributes to the public good.

Two projects of the 1850s defined New York City commercially and physically The first was the New York Exhibition of the Industries of All Nations, held in 1853, and the second was the creation of Central Park. The Crystal Palace, as the exhibition was known, celebrated the country's achievements in manufacturing. Central Park gave New Yorkers a place to escape the cemeteries, which had traditionally been used for recreational activities. Central Park changed the landscape of the city and paved the way for the construction of upper Fifth Avenue and Central Park's largest edifice, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The monumental exhibition catalogue, whose spine is as large as the Manhattan telephone directory, is co-published by the museum and Yale University Press.