The history of New York City (1855–1897) started with the inauguration in 1855 of Fernando Wood as the first mayor from Tammany Hall, an institution that would dominate the city throughout this period. There was chaos during the American Civil War, with major rioting in the New York Draft Riots. Later years saw the rise of the Gilded Age which saw prosperity for the city's upper classes amid the further growth of a poor immigrant working class, and an increasing consolidation, both economic and municipal, of what would become the five boroughs in 1898.
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The Dead Rabbits Riot between two gangs in Five Points occurred in 1857 lasting two days, killing about 100 people, and stopped only by intervention of the state militia. It was the worst riot up to that time.
Prior to the conflict, in 1861, Mayor Fernando Wood proposed New York City secession from the United States as a neutral sovereign city-state to be called Tri-Insula as a way to avoid the ravages of the war. Despite strong local Copperhead sympathies, the proposal was not well received. During the American Civil War on July 13, 1863 opponents of conscription began five days of rioting, the 'Draft Riots', the worst in United States history.
The post-war period was noted for the corruption and graft for which Tammany Hall has become proverbial, but equally for the foundation of New York's pre-eminent cultural institutions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, the American Museum of Natural History, while the Brooklyn Museum was a major institution of New York's independent sister city.
New York newspapers were read across the continent as editors James Gordon Bennett, Sr., Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst battled for readership.
The flood of immigration from Europe passed first through Castle Clinton (opened 1855) and then through Ellis Island (opened 1892) in New York Harbor, under the eye of the Statue of Liberty (1886).
The new European immigration brought further social upheaval, and old world criminal societies rapidly exploited the already corrupt municipal machine politics of Tammany Hall, while local American barons of industry further exploited the immigrant masses with ever lower wages and crowded living conditions. In a city of tenements packed with cheap foreign labor from dozens of nations, the city was a hotbed of revolution, syndicalism, racketeering, and unionization. In response, the upper classes used partisan hand-outs, organized crime groups, heavy handed policing and political oppression to undermine groups which refused to be coopted. Groups such as anticapitalist labor unions, native American patriot organizations such as the American Protective Association, and reformers of all stripes were fiercely repressed, while crime lords that became too independent disappeared.
William Magear Tweed, better known as Boss Tweed, had become the sole leader of Tammany Hall by 1867. From April 1870, with the passage of a city charter consolidating power in the hands of his political allies, Tweed and his cronies were able to defraud the city of some tens of millions of dollars over the next two years and eight months, most famously with the construction bill for a lavish courthouse. The efforts of muckraking newspaper accounts and the biting cartoons of Thomas Nast helped in the election of opposition candidates in 1871, resulting in Tweed's conviction for forgery and larceny in 1873. Tweed's fall put an end to the total immunity of corrupt local political leaders, and was a precursor to the rise of Progressive Era reforms in the city.
In the Orange Riots of July 1871 and 1872, Catholic Irish attempted to stop Protestant Irish from celebrating the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. These resulted in more than 33 deaths and many wounded.[1][2]
In 1874, nearly 61% of all U.S. exports passed through New York harbor. In 1884, nearly 70% of U.S. imports came through New York. The eventual rise of ports on the Gulf of Mexico and on the Pacific coast reduced New York's share of imports and exports to about 47% in 1910. The city's banking resources grew 250% between 1888 and 1908, compared to the national increase of 26%. Between 1860 and 1907, the assessed value of the land and buildings on Manhattan rose from $1.7 billion to $6.7 billion.
Muckraking pioneering photojournalist Jacob Riis documented the poor conditions of immigrant tenement dwellers in his 1890 How the Other Half Lives; he was befriended by mutual admirer, fellow progressive and future United States President Theodore Roosevelt, who, after losing in the mayoral race in 1886, undertook a major reform of the New York City Police Department in 1895-1897 during his term as President of the Police Commissioners.
In the late 19th century, the island's schist bedrock helped facilitate the early development of the highrises which characterize its skyline today.
In 1855, Brooklyn annexed Williamsburg and Bushwick, forming what became the third-most-populous city in America. In 1870, Long Island City was formed in Queens. In 1874, New York City annexed what is today the Bronx west of the Bronx River. The Brooklyn Bridge completed in 1883 epitomized the heroic confidence of a generation and tied the two cities of Brooklyn and New York inexorably together, and as in the decade from 1886 to 1896 Brooklyn annexed the remainder of Kings County, the issue grew more pressing.
The modern city of New York — the five boroughs — was created in 1898, with the consolidation of the cities of New York (then Manhattan and the Bronx) and Brooklyn with the largely then-rural areas of Queens and Staten Island.