New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban SketchesFirst published in 1850, New York by Gas-Light explores the seamy side of the newly emerging metropolis: "the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch, and all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum—the underground story—of life in New York!" The author of this lively and fascinating little book, which both attracted and offended large numbers of readers in Victorian America, was George G. Foster, reporter for Horace Greeley's influential New York Tribune, social commentator, poet, and man about town. Foster drew on his daily and nightly rambles through the city's streets and among the characters of the urban demi-monde to produce a sensationalized but extraordinarily revealing portrait of New York at the moment it was emerging as a major metropolis. Reprinted here with sketches from two of Foster's other books, New York by Gas-Light will be welcomed by students of urban social history, popular culture, literature, and journalism. Editor Stuart M. Blumin has provided a penetrating introductory essay that sets Foster's life and work in the contexts of the growing city, the development of the mass-distribution publishing industry, the evolving literary genre of urban sensationalism, and the wider culture of Victorian America. This is an important reintroduction to a significant but neglected work, a prologue to the urban realism that would flourish later in the fiction of Stephen Crane, the painting of George Bellows, and the journalism of Jacob Riis. |
Contents
Broadway at Evening | 69 |
The Model Artist Exhibitions | 77 |
Bowling and Billiard Saloons | 84 |
The Golden Gate of Hell | 92 |
A Night Ramble | 104 |
ButterCake Dicks | 112 |
The Points At Midnight | 120 |
The IceCreameries | 132 |
Saturday Night | 189 |
The City at DayLight | 194 |
Selections from New York in Slices and Fifteen Minutes Around New York | 199 |
A General Dash at the Ferries | 201 |
The Mock Auctions | 208 |
The EatingHouses | 214 |
Wall Street and the Merchants Exchange | 220 |
The Needlewomen | 228 |
The DanceHouse | 140 |
Theaters and Public Amusements | 150 |
The Light Fantastic Toe | 163 |
Mose and Lize | 169 |
The DogWatch | 178 |
A Plunge in the SwimmingBath | 235 |
A Quarter of an Hour Under an Awning | 240 |
Sunday in New York | 246 |
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Common terms and phrases
American appearance aristocracy b'hoy b'hoy and g'hal beautiful big city Bowery Bowery b'hoy Broadway Butter-cake cellar cents character city's course Cow Bay crowd dance dark dollars door dressed drunken Edgar Allan Poe editor establishment fashionable Foster g'hal gentleman George G Graham's Green Griswold hand heart hour ice-cream ladies light literary lived look magazine ment metropolis midnight Mike Madden misery model artist morning Mose and Lize Mysteries Ned Buntline negroes never newsboys newspaper night omnibus once papers perhaps Pete Williams Philadelphia pocket-book police poor printed prostitution publishing respectable rowdies Sabbath saloons Stephentown stranger street sure theater thing Thomas Dunn English tion town Tribune urban sketches victim virtuous walk walls watch wife woman women York by Gas-Light York in Slices York Naked York Tribune young Zadock Pratt Zerubbabel