Posted on 03/06/2020 1:32:32 PM PST by Impala64ssa
Panic engulfed New York City like in an apocalyptic movie. Almost half of the city fled the threat of an unknown contagion. The long forgotten global pandemic of Asiatic cholera that reached America in July 1832 set off a mass panic. Since the disease seemed to know no boundaries or limits, city residents who could afford it found ways to leave the city any way they could for places without cholera. Refugees bought passage on steamboats headed up the Hudson, paying almost any price. Most villages along the Hudson provided shelter, Nyack among them.
An often-fatal disease of unknown origin called cholera originated in India in 1817 and spread slowly to Europe, killing 13,000 in Paris before it arrived in America. Americans had hoped that the Atlantic Ocean would be a barrier. The disease was poorly understood and little was done to prepare. A quarantine was placed on all people arriving from Europe in June, 1832, shortly before the pandemic hit the US. In New York City, five temporary hospitals were built, the streets were cleaned, and many were forced to evacuate the slums. As a water-borne disease it mostly struck the poorer sections of the city, where water was polluted. Immigrants were blamed for the disease, especially by political forces that would soon create the anti-immigration, nativist Know Nothing Party.
First, a case appeared in Canada, then an Irish immigrant named “Fitzgerald” became sick at Five Points in New York City, as well as his two children, who died. Public health officials were slow to call it cholera. On July 2, the news became public in the city. When his death was announced, panic ensued.
Philip Hone, a diarist and former mayor of NYC who stayed behind, stated that, “There are no booths in Broadway, the parade which was ordered here has been countermanded, no corporation dinner, and no ringing of bells.”
New York City panic
On July 3, 1832, a great exodus from New York City began. People left by carriage, boat, and on foot. In the words of the Evening Post,”all panic struck, fleeing from the city, as we may suppose those of Pompeii fled when the red lava showered down on their houses.”
By that afternoon, the steamboat North America left Barclay wharf with, according to a Dr. Clark, “such a crowd on board as she never carried before; while from the pier, foot of Barclay Street to Broadway and up to Chambers Street stood a double row of carriages, their inmates wishing to go on the board, and offering the most fabulous prices for a passage.” The steamboat line owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt made a fortune that day. It also probably helped spread the disease to other regions. Every farmhouse and country home within a radius of thirty miles was soon full.
It is estimated that between 80,000 and 100,000 left the city of 200,000 within three days, roughly half the population at the time. Roughly 3,000 people died in the short-lived epidemic that ran its course locally by Christmas (although cholera outbreaks occurred again in later years).
The Mansion House
Nyack’s first hotel, the Mansion House (not to be confused with the much later Mansion House in Piermont and Rockland Lake), was built in 1827, and it was a bustling, Italianate, three-story wooden hotel and farm-to-fork restaurant with a large porch that resided in a lot stretching from Main to High Streets west of Broadway and bordering Park. Nyack at this time was beginning to come out of its isolation. The Nyack Turnpike had just been completed, opening Nyack as a port for shipping of goods grown and made in interior Rockland County. Only a few houses populated the area near the docks. The John Green House is typical of the better houses built at the time. The ornate Mansion House stood out among the few commercial establishments.
The only known depiction of the Mansion House is an etching that appeared in the 1889 New York Daily Graphic article, “Nyack, N.Y.- The Naples of America.” A rendering of the house also is shown in Burleigh’s 1884 map of Nyack. The three-story building is remarkably similar to the two-story 1854 Tunis Depew house that still stands on Piermont Avenue in Nyack. Both have an elevated first floor accessed by a central stairway. A porch with rounded columns stretched the width of the first floor, topped by a low decorative fence on its roof.
Mansion House during the panic
The Mansion House had already developed a clientele of city-dwellers who wished to escape summer in the city along with its dangers of malaria, and now, cholera. As many as 80 boarders stayed at the Mansion Hotel during the July epidemic. The owner contracted with private houses to handle the overflow. All meals were served at the main hotel. There is no record of any cholera outbreak in Nyack at the time.
A Silver lining
2019 view of the corner of Park and Main Streets. The 1885 Daniels building is on the corner. The Mansion House would have been to its right (just before the next three-story brick building) and just behind what’s now Casa Del Sol restaurant.
Because of the epidemic, Nyack discovered a new business model as a summer resort, a safe haven from disease (and heat) for those who could afford it. With the success of the Mansion House, other houses followed suit. Village leaders like Peter Smith and Robert Hart opened their houses to guests. By 1849, the Pavilion, a large resort, was built on the hill at the end of Catherine Street. Others followed, including the Prospect House and the Tappan Zee Inn, catering to the summer pleasures of vacationers. The boom as a summer resort lasted until the turn of the century when larger resorts and distant locations became available and Nyack’s day as refuge from pandemics was over.
The Mansion House stayed on for many years as the downtown slowly encroached on its gardens and open space until it was reduced to an aging hotel with a restaurant and a small front yard. By the turn of the century, the Mansion House was gone, one of the lost reminders of a time when global pandemics were the worry of the day.
Sounds like the makings of a good movie. Are the sets for “Gangs Of NEW York” still standing?
Yellow Fever used to strike regularly in those days too.
There is a small island on a lake in north Jersey (Ramapo Lake?), where the wealthy former owner of much of the current parkland put his family during an epidemic in the early 1900s. The ruins of the home on the island are supposedly still there.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.