Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows; Mike Wallace

Author:Edwin G. Burrows; Mike Wallace
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-fiction, History
ISBN: 9780195116342
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1999-08-15T10:00:00+00:00

Mary Taylor and F. S. Chanfrau in the roles of Mose and his ladyfriend, Lize, in the premier of “A Glance at New York,” 1848. (The New York Public Library for Performing Arts)

The fictional b’hoy’s nationality was ambiguous. In Baker’s play Mose was obviously a native-born worker, though the character also invoked Moses Humphrey, a wellknown fire laddie, brawler, and Irish Catholic printer at the Sun. But Mose was generally perceived as not an ethnic but an urban type—appropriately enough given that b’hoy youth culture, for all its internal stresses and strains, was a conglomerate affair. A mix of social fact and literary convention, Mose was the New York rude boy writ large, but as he liked to think of himself: opinionated, rowdy, but virtuous withal.

Over the next two years, as seven different Mose plays went on the national circuit, the image of Big Mose cohered into a cultural identity recognizable across the country. Lithographed reproductions of scenes from the plays then turned Mose into an international figure. The Bowery B’hoy—riotous and vociferous habitue of fire companies and theaters and prizefights and street corners—became as well known as the Wall Street Banker.

In the 1850s Mose cohered into a fabulous semimythic figure of the sort made popular by Davy Crockett (“half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with snapping turtle”), and he took his place alongside the likes of Mike Fink, swaggering riverboatsman. This urban Paul Bunyan was said to be eight feet tall, with ginger hair, a two-foot-wide beaver hat, and hands like hog hams, and he toted a fifty-gallon keg of ale as a canteen. He had the strength of ten: he could uproot iron lampposts and use them to smite rival gang members, lift a horsecar and carry it for blocks, leap the East River to Brooklyn with ease, and swim the Hudson in two mighty strokes (with six he could circumnavigate Manhattan).

As Mose grew larger than life, his roots in an adversarial milieu became fuzzed, his Boweryite critique of New York’s elite blurred. But there would be no such ambiguity in 1849, when Mose’s acolytes declared theatrical war against uppertendom and its associated thespians. That year real, not stage, blood ran through the streets of the city.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.