The History of New York City in THE HISTORY OF LIGHT by Michael Small

September 11, 2015

Imagine yourself at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Under a cold drizzle, you listen to dull speeches from old white guys. You can barely hear a word – because of horns and bells blaring from boats that fill the bay. And every few minutes, you catch a glimpse of one boat carrying only women. You see them screaming through bullhorns. And it’s clear that your presence is making them very angry.

This is what it was like to attend the dedication ceremony for The Statue of Liberty on October 28, 1886. Because no women were asked to speak in honor of  the giant female statue, and only two women (the wife of the sculptor and a young relative of the event organizer) were allowed to join President Cleveland on tiny Bedloe’s Island, it infuriated feminists. So they chartered a boat to disrupt the proceedings to their best ability.

That scene ”wet, cold, boring, angry ” doesn’t match the dainty sip-your-tea view of the past I gleaned from old-school history books and Hollywood movies. Which is exactly why I spent five years on research for my new musical The History of Light. What I learned with help from truly excellent new history books and original sources on websites like Guttenberg.org (thank you, Interwebs!) is that the 1900s were not stuffy and staid. They were gritty, contradictory, exciting, and disappointing in a way that – surprise! – is awfully similar to our messy world today.

New York City in 1886 was a place of extreme contrasts, where 1% of the super-rich got all the good stuff. Wealthy women paid $10,000 a pop for Worth gowns that they wore once and discarded, while a family of six on the Lower East Side struggled to live on $6 – $15 a week. The toast of the town, the Astors, made their original fortune selling furs and then drugs (opium) before they got fancy and joined the ranks of slumlords who gouged their poor Irish, Italian, Chinese and African-American tenants. Meanwhile, the slums produced such colorful characters as Madame Restell, who made such a fortune as an abortionist that she defiantly built a Fifth Avenue palace right across from the Vanderbilt chateau (and ultimately slit her wrists in her bathtub there). Constant change lead to strange ironies: After a revival of anti-semitism, the wealthy German Jew Theodore Seligman was banned from the Union League Club, which his own father had founded. For both rich and poor, there was nothing dainty about real life outside the front door. It was nearly impossible to navigate the stinking streets without stepping in rotting garbage or animal dung. For fun, you could go to a bawdy music hall on the Bowery and dance with men dressed as women (or go upstairs for a little more action), or you could take in an obscene version of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

And if you needed a home, you’d better race to be the first at an open house where you’d pay 20 times the value for a tiny, dark apartment. Sound familiar? Like the Internet today, the potential of electricity sparked imaginations. For many years, it was available only to businesses and rich people who had their own generators. JP Morgan’s noisy generator infuriated his neighbors on Madison Avenue; the Vanderbilts generator caused smoke to emanate from their metal-tinged wallpaper, so they turned it off. But there also was the promise of bringing this new power to everyone in a way that could make the world better.

1880s politics, like ours, were powered by extreme prejudices, deceptions, and fears. The 1886 race for mayor of New York City was expected to be a battle between young Teddy Roosevelt representing the clean-cut preppie college crowd and Abram Hewitt, the shoo-in backed by the crooks in Tammany Hall. But then Henry George an older socialist intellectual economist started speaking truths  that won over massive crowds. Bernie Sanders, anyone?  (If Tammany didn’t cheat, Henry might have won.)

When Downton Abbey‘s Julian Fellowes launches his NBC TV series about Gilded Age New York this fall, it’ll be interesting to see where he chooses to focus. In my  case, I zeroed in on the year 1886 for a variety of reasons, including the mayoral election and the first-ever May Day workers strike, in which hundreds of thousands across the country refused to work for days, culminating in the deadly Haymarket Riots in Chicago. And, of course, there was the Statue of Liberty dedication.

These events ”which became the backdrop for my play” gave me a whole new perspective on our own times and how we got here. But don’t rely on me. For starters, here are some sources to help with your own re-education: A Hazard of New Fortunes, William Dean Howells:  My favorite novel of the era, published in 1890. Funny, sad, honest, and enlightening. (My wife’s book group didn’t love it. But don’t listen to them.) Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace: It’s almost a miracle that such a comprehensive and entertaining history book exists. Very long and very wonderful.  Women Wage, Helen Campbell: This fearless sociologist went into New York’s slums and reported on “how the other half lives,” well before Jacob Riis borrowed that term for his famous photo essays. Society as I Have Found It, Ward McAllister: This equally repulsive and compelling memoire is by Caroline Astor’s toadie, who made himself the master of high society and then fell from grace when his fair-weather friends read this book. The Bowery Boys and Th History Chicks: The show notes for these podcasts overflow with surprises and delights that put the fun back in history. The History of Light has its first reading in the Writers Block Festival, presented by Howl! Happening on Saturday, September 12 at 6:30 PM, 6 East 1st Street just off The Bowery.

Scroll to Top