Read Online The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Matthew Goodman
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must have envied Day’s newfound success and resented taking instructions from a former colleague. They must also have regretted not listening more closely to his ideas about a penny paper when they had the chance, because only a few months after Day hired them, Lynde and Stanley left the Sun to start a penny paper of their own.
The new paper was to be called the New York Transcript, and another printer, Billings Hayward, would join them as co-owner. As the paper’s editor they chose Asa Greene, a local bookseller and the author of several satirical novels. The Sun had shown the Transcript’ s owners that a penny paper could not succeed without a police court reporter, and for that position they hired William H. Attree, a printer at a local type foundry, paying him the munificent salary of three dollars a week. (A recent English immigrant, Attree was, by every account, abrasive and mean-spirited, prone to confrontations, and not overly concerned with the accuracy of his news reports. The normally even-tempered Horace Greeley characterized him as “a shrewd, active and unprincipled penny-a-liner,” while Isaac Clark Pray, a New York journalist of midcentury, observed that Attree was “facile with his pen” and “indifferent . . . to the feelings of the poor creatures left to its mercy.” Attree’s general character was perhaps most cogently captured in the nickname by which he was widely known around town: “Oily Attree.”) In March 1834 the Transcript began publication and proved to be a surprisingly potent rival. Attree’s police columns, while coarser in tone, were otherwise strikingly similar to Wisner’s (from the heading “Police Office” to the device of presenting certain cases in dramatic form), and thus helped negate an advantage the Sun would otherwise have had. The Transcript gave extensive coverage to prizefights and horse races, some-
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thing the Sun had not emphasized, which won the paper a following among the city’s sports fans; its printer owners had also chosen well in Asa Greene, who brought a winningly light touch to the paper’s columns, with a special flair for amusing descriptions of city life. By the end of 1834
the Transcript was fast catching up to the Sun in total circulation and was even outselling it in the towns outside the city.
Benjamin Day, however, was not to be outdone. At the start of 1835 he bought yet another printing press for the Sun, this one a state-of-the-art Napier. He also increased the size of the Sun’ s pages to eleven by eighteen inches. (The new paper was costing him four-fifths of a cent per sheet, nearly as much as the price of the newspaper itself, but he hoped to make up the difference with the additional advertising the larger pages would allow.) The Sun’ s expanded news page offered each day a richly flavored salmagundi, in which a forceful call for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, an investigation into reports of new cholera cases, and a critique of urban renewal plans (“of all the improvements recently introduced, there is not one that does not favor the rich, to the inconvenience of the poor ”) might be mixed together with accounts of comically weaving drunkards and a local pig with a face like a human being’s. In the spring, Wisner took the Sun’ s readers on a tour of the Five Points, offering them “a thorough examination of those haunts of iniquity which have become so infamously celebrated,” its cellar lodgings and tipling houses and brothels with names like the Diving Bell and the Yankee Kitchen and Squeeze Gut Alley. For only a penny the Sun ’s readers were, from the safety of their own homes, allowed entry into “seats of vice, hot beds of debauchery, wretchedness, and poverty, such as few eyes have witnessed.” It was a sensational story, done in classic Sun style: equal parts crusade and carnival.
A more fanciful story reported how a
The new paper was to be called the New York Transcript, and another printer, Billings Hayward, would join them as co-owner. As the paper’s editor they chose Asa Greene, a local bookseller and the author of several satirical novels. The Sun had shown the Transcript’ s owners that a penny paper could not succeed without a police court reporter, and for that position they hired William H. Attree, a printer at a local type foundry, paying him the munificent salary of three dollars a week. (A recent English immigrant, Attree was, by every account, abrasive and mean-spirited, prone to confrontations, and not overly concerned with the accuracy of his news reports. The normally even-tempered Horace Greeley characterized him as “a shrewd, active and unprincipled penny-a-liner,” while Isaac Clark Pray, a New York journalist of midcentury, observed that Attree was “facile with his pen” and “indifferent . . . to the feelings of the poor creatures left to its mercy.” Attree’s general character was perhaps most cogently captured in the nickname by which he was widely known around town: “Oily Attree.”) In March 1834 the Transcript began publication and proved to be a surprisingly potent rival. Attree’s police columns, while coarser in tone, were otherwise strikingly similar to Wisner’s (from the heading “Police Office” to the device of presenting certain cases in dramatic form), and thus helped negate an advantage the Sun would otherwise have had. The Transcript gave extensive coverage to prizefights and horse races, some-
– 42 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 43
The News of the City
thing the Sun had not emphasized, which won the paper a following among the city’s sports fans; its printer owners had also chosen well in Asa Greene, who brought a winningly light touch to the paper’s columns, with a special flair for amusing descriptions of city life. By the end of 1834
the Transcript was fast catching up to the Sun in total circulation and was even outselling it in the towns outside the city.
Benjamin Day, however, was not to be outdone. At the start of 1835 he bought yet another printing press for the Sun, this one a state-of-the-art Napier. He also increased the size of the Sun’ s pages to eleven by eighteen inches. (The new paper was costing him four-fifths of a cent per sheet, nearly as much as the price of the newspaper itself, but he hoped to make up the difference with the additional advertising the larger pages would allow.) The Sun’ s expanded news page offered each day a richly flavored salmagundi, in which a forceful call for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, an investigation into reports of new cholera cases, and a critique of urban renewal plans (“of all the improvements recently introduced, there is not one that does not favor the rich, to the inconvenience of the poor ”) might be mixed together with accounts of comically weaving drunkards and a local pig with a face like a human being’s. In the spring, Wisner took the Sun’ s readers on a tour of the Five Points, offering them “a thorough examination of those haunts of iniquity which have become so infamously celebrated,” its cellar lodgings and tipling houses and brothels with names like the Diving Bell and the Yankee Kitchen and Squeeze Gut Alley. For only a penny the Sun ’s readers were, from the safety of their own homes, allowed entry into “seats of vice, hot beds of debauchery, wretchedness, and poverty, such as few eyes have witnessed.” It was a sensational story, done in classic Sun style: equal parts crusade and carnival.
A more fanciful story reported how a
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