Eat the City(46)

At midcentury, New York was already entering a new urban age. “It is really now one of the most rucketing cities in the world,” wrote Washington Irving. Buildings grew taller; more ships passed through the port. William Havemeyer Jr. retired from sugar as a leading businessman and in 1845 became mayor of New York—evidence of the growing reach of the city’s sugar interests. Frederick took a hiatus and traveled to Europe, observing new developments in the great sugarhouses. “I have been here only 3 days + have seen more of London then I have seen of it in the nine years I lived in it before,” he wrote in an 1839 letter to his wife.

He was on the hunt for technology to speed and ease the conversion of cane juice into pure white crystals. The vacuum pan permitted sugar to crystallize faster, without burning or caramelizing. Char, or bone black, derived from animal bones, provided a filter that left sugar a clean, expensive white. As production switched from man to machine, the sugarers saw that they could produce a year’s worth of goods in a month. Their children would make in a day what they once made in a year.

This mechanization helped make sugar cheap. Working people began to frequent little dry goods stores selling every manner of exotica—coffee, oranges, lemons, cochineal, camphor, hemp, nitrate of soda, and also sugar. The wealthy covered their dinner tables with “confectionary and gew-gaws” so elaborate that they barely looked edible. The poor, meanwhile, bought candy from street peddlers and hucksters. The Erie Canal connected the city directly to the Midwest and opened up new markets hungry for sweets. Per capita consumption of sugar leapt from about four pounds in 1815 to twenty-one pounds in 1860. As more and more people aspired to keep sugar on their tables, the Havemeyers strove to supply them.

In a move to be oft repeated by Manhattanites seeking space, the Havemeyers went to Brooklyn. Williamsburgh had recently been little more than dense thickets of cripplebush on swampy lowlands, but in a generation it had filled with distilleries, rope makers, shipyards, tanneries, a glue factory, and a fire insurance company. The Havemeyers’ million-dollar whiz-bang refinery opened on the East River in 1856, with its own docks and warehouses, and instantly made the inland sugarhouses obsolete. Other refiners followed to the Brooklyn waterfront, and soon the Havemeyers and their dozen-odd local competitors were producing half the sugar consumed in the United States. Sugar was the city’s most important industry, and Brooklyn was the country’s refining capital.

What was seen then as advanced technology looks pretty medieval today. The new refinery dedicated one building to boiling bones for char, which produced a stench like rotting meat, but whose product could be used to filter sugar and make it clean and white. The bones at such establishments came from nearby slaughterhouses, and also from wandering urchins. The children pawed through mounds of fetid garbage on the street, searching out discards from abattoirs, butchers, and the tables of meat-eaters. They might gnaw their findings, or boil them into a soup, and then sort, store, and sell their osseous wares. Big bones, such as the jaw, the shin, and the foreleg, were worth more; small bones from table scraps were worth less; chicken bones were useless—and sorting it all meant careful piles stowed under the bed, on tables, and on chairs in apartments smelling of rancid meat. “Bones is hard business now,” declared a thirteen-year-old girl who had stashed her putrid collection under the bed until it could be sold for thirty cents a bushel.

Sugar refineries had always been accident prone, built as they were on an ever-larger scale with the latest, untested machinery in an era without workplace regulations. In the Havemeyer plant in Brooklyn, you could get burned and bruised by an exploding boiler, crushed by a falling elevator, or you could lose a limb to a revolving wheel. You could stab yourself falling on a hook, scald yourself in the overflow from a vat of boiling sugar, drop a box of sugar on your foot, or find yourself pinned under falling sugar bags. You could certainly faint in the intense, 110-degree heat generated by 135 boilers. Amid flammable sugar, the greatest threat was fire, which could burn an unlucky worker “to a crisp,” as one newspaper cheerily reported, and blaze through the sugar stores.

The worst flames ripped through the Havemeyer-owned Williamsburg refinery in 1882. Some four thousand barrels of sugar incinerated while walls and floors, brick and iron, collapsed into their own seething furnace. Alarm after alarm rang and dozens of firemen hosed arcs of water into the smoke—but they could not best the fire. As night fell, a mess of flame reflected off the black water of the East River.

Naturally, the family’s response was to rebuild. “Colossal,” headlined the Brooklyn Eagle when the new refinery was finished. “We are here in the midst of the greatest sugar refining centre in the world,” the paper breathlessly wrote later, describing a plant that could, in a single day, convert four million pounds of raw material into 12,000 barrels of refined sugar. The refineries were “the most striking objects on the whole of Brooklyn’s waterfront,” and their “towering outlines on a foggy day, or in the last of the twilight” suggest “the lineaments of a Rhenish castle.” Having built a sugar castle, the Havemeyers began to govern like kings.

Henry O. Havemeyer, the younger, dominating son of Frederick Jr., had thick lips, a fat mustache, a growing gut, and pale, slightly bulging eyes. Harry, as he was known, had begun work at the family firm as a child after he was expelled from elementary school for fighting with the principal. He proved just as aggressive in business. The man who named his fine-lined yacht the Impatience fostered such an antagonistic relationship with his workers that when small fires broke out at the refinery, he assumed employee arson. When a group earnestly presented a petition for eight-hour workdays, Harry responded, “I cannot grant your request, boys,” and then banged his fist on the table. “No, I will not.” He accused his brother Theodore of leaking information about prices, and threatened to break up the family firm. “Get it down as a fact that Harry is King of the sugar market,” their father presciently wrote to Theodore.