Alger and NYC

From before I learned to read until I was in high school, the New York City I knew best was that of the mid-1800’s, a city full of bootblacks and baggage smashers, where Christopher Street was way uptown and the wealthiest lived on Park Avenue—between Union Square and maybe the mid thirties. Central Park was “ a rough tract of land” with “no houses of good appearance near it.” You got to Brooklyn on the Fulton Street Ferry (two cents), and uptown on the Sixth Avenue [horse-drawn] cars (three cents). The Old Bowery and Tony Pastor’s were good for a night’s amusement, and Delmonico’s was the finest restaurant in town. (Alger made it clear that the Old Bowery and Tony Pastor's weren't quite high-class amusements, and that saving one's money was better than frittering it away on such fleeting pleasures, but it wasn't until more recently that I got the vaudville connection.) Barnum’s was a good place to take your kid brother, and if you were wealthy you would stay at the Astor House or the St. Nicholas hotel when you visited town. Poor people, especially the Irish, lived near Five Points, on Mott Street or Mulberry, or maybe on Leonard, where Tattered Tom lived in “one of the most wretched tenement houses to be found in that not very choice locality.”

My dad collected the novels of Horatio Alger, and his “rags to riches” stories written for teenage boys in the late 1800’s were my bedtime reading, and then, in grade school, they were the books I brought for silent reading in school. I also read on the bus and at recess, and under my desk in class. I didn’t just read Alger’s novels—I know the intimate details of the worlds of Laura Ingalls, Nancy Drew, the Pevensies (that would be Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter) and Anastasia Krupnik just as well. I read everything. But Alger wrote nearly a hundred novels for boys, with many more published under his name after he died, and I have probably read my favorites ten times or more. One of my favorites is his first, Ragged Dick, and since Dick spends the first eleven chapters showing visiting country boy Frank Whitney around the city, it’s a great introduction to their New York. The bit about Central Park above is from Dick’s tour, and Frank is disappointed: “’If this is Central Park,’ said Frank, ‘I don’t think much of it. My father’s got a large pasture that is much nicer.’” I just reread Tattered Tom, one of my favorites since childhood. More on that to follow.

Ragged Dick can be read online here, & there are also several contemporary reprinted editions available.