Prologue

Abstract

Extract On April 10, 1839, Dr. J. S. Hurd, a New York City medical examiner, performed an autopsy on a man at William Gar‑ lick’s boardinghouse in lower Manhattan.1Close Garlick’s board‑ inghouse stood at 31 Washington Street, two streets east of the Hudson River and bordered by Battery Place and Moore Street. Washington Street was one of several thoroughfares in a neighborhood that was home to crowds of low-paid workers, a population mirrored across the island along the East River, where eighteenth-century Dutch and English inhabitants had built sturdy homes adjacent to flourishing slips, piers, and warehouses. As commerce increased, though, the “East Ward” had become overcrowded. Wealthier families moved uptown, as far north as Fourteenth Street along Broadway, into neighborhoods delineated by the “grid” plan that the city’s Streets Commission had instituted for more orderly development. Their previous homes then became boardinghouses for an ever-shifting population of clerks, craft apprentices, cart men, dockworkers, sailors, and various day laborers.