Duel with the Devil Read online

  “But a few days ago our city was covered with sack-cloth and ashes,” wrote one New-York Mercantile Advertiser correspondent. “Scarcely a carriage was to be seen but the black and dismal hearse; nothing was to be heard in habitations but the expiring groans of victims, and the lamentations of surviving friends. Thank God the scene has changed; business and bustle, joy and gladness have taken place of Death and his sickly band of diseases.” But now, he fretted, youth with “their bottles, their billiards, and their brothels” were roaming the streets. Where, he demanded, was “he who convinces giddy youth that wisdom does not consist in the thickness of his pudding neck-cloth, the breadth of his whiskers, or the spindle straw size of his rat tail queue?” And what better way to save the young men of the city from such foolishness, the correspondent wondered, than by occupying them with an intellectual puzzle?

  “I therefore humbly hint,” he proposed, “that a certain premium be offered, say a hundred guineas, to any one who shall produce the best solution to any philosophical or mathematical problem.”

  In fact, some of Manhattan’s greatest minds had already spent the previous year grappling with a deadly serious puzzle: what to do about the city’s foul and brackish water. Potable water was supplied by just one well, the Tea-Water Pump, a couple of blocks north of the site being considered for a new city hall. Some residents made pilgrimages there, like a thirsty urban herd to an oasis: The proprietors would let you fill up a large barrel for threepence. Everyone else waited for the Tea-Water Men, a small army of deliverymen who carted massive wooden 140-gallon hogshead casks around the city, selling water by the bucket to subscribing households.

  But everyone knew the stuff was terrible.

  “They pretend their water is pure and nice; it is no such thing,” one of Noah Webster’s correspondents charged. The local pond not far from the well, known as the Collect, had become “a very sink and common sewer”—a frothing brew of effluence from tanneries and furnaces. “Dead dogs, cats, etc, [are] thrown in daily,” one resident grumbled, “and no doubt, many buckets from that quarter of town.” As to what was in those buckets, another proclaimed, it was “all of leaking, scrapings, scourings, p——s——gs, & ——gs, for a great distance around.”

  Schemes for clean running water had been bubbling up for as long as most residents could remember; after a plan to pipe Manhattan with hollowed-out logs was proposed in 1774, a well was even dug and a crude steam engine erected before British invaders interrupted the project. Its engineer, the ingenious Irish émigré Christopher Colles, was held at bayonet point by British troops but managed to escape through the tall grass of Trinity Church’s graveyard; returning after the war, he found occupying troops had cruelly wrecked his work. It proved to be the only project that the hapless genius had ever come close to seeing through.

  “Had I been brought up a hatter,” he sighed, “people would have come into the world without heads.”

  After the great fever in 1798, the calls for a solution had grown louder. “The health of a city,” warned physician Joseph Browne, “depends more on its water, than on all the rest of its eatables and drinkables together.” Browne’s own ambitious proposal for driving yellow fever out of Manhattan was to pipe in clean water from miles away, via an elaborate series of dams and reservoirs by the Harlem River. If the scale of Browne’s idea was a bit grand, the basic notion behind it was entirely sensible, and in the spring of 1799 the state assembly passed a bill to charter a corporation that would provide the city with clean water.

  Dubbed the Manhattan Company, its board of thirteen local worthies had received five proposal bids in short order; nearly all came from recognized contractors and inventors, men already well-known to the committee members. But the first to arrive bore a return address that led back to a boardinghouse, of all places. It read: 208 Greenwich Street.

  Behind the archaic dress and the careful thee and thou of his manner, Elias Ring possessed the restless mind of a modern inventor. The young patriarch had mulled the mechanics of water for years since operating a mill upstate. Along with tending the boardinghouse with his wife, Elias had painstakingly designed and built a patent model of his own contrivance, and for the past two years had run an ad in Philadelphia and New York newspapers for this grand invention:

  NEW PATENT WATER WHEEL

  The subscriber has taken this method to inform the public that he has invented a new WATER WHEEL to work in the TIDE or other CURRENT, which may be fixed at the end of any dock, where there be a good tide so as to go.… If it were necessary, he could produce sufficient proof of its efficacy from the best characters in the States, whose judgment may be relied upon as having seen it tried on a small scale were convinced that a wheel built on this principle, and fixed in a good tide, would go with any force sufficient to drive any works. This wheel may likewise be of great use in raising water out of large rivers and or for the use of watering Towns and Cities.

  But the city to be watered by his inventions, he now realized, was his own. And unlike the rather fanciful proposals of Joseph Browne to bring in water from Harlem, Elias made an astoundingly practical proposition: The supply they needed, he claimed, was the much-abused and fouled waters of the meadows nearby.

  “The Collect has been unjustly stigmatized with the name of a filthy stagnated pond,” Ring began, “but the Collect proceeds from a collection of springs. [It] is rendered in some measure filthy by throwing dead carcases into it.” The solution was simply to fill in clay over the more putrid banks and erect a high fence to bar tanneries and butchers from using the Collect anymore. Refilled with sweet new water by its springs, and pumped out by a steam engine, “the Collect will supply a daily sufficient quantity of water for the consumption of the City.” It could be done, he estimated, for the pleasingly round sum of $100,000.

  That some of that windfall might come to him had been his dream back in the spring. But it had not quite turned out the way he imagined.

  AT THE boardinghouse, Richard Croucher could be seen returning from his final evening rounds, having bothered the local householders to buy stockings. There was far worse work to be had than his: Staggering along some of those same rounds were the milk merchants. It wasn’t even good milk that they were selling—it always stank of Long Island meadow garlic—but New Yorkers drank it anyway, and so the merchants barged over from Brooklyn and made deliveries with two heavy pails hung over their shoulders by a rod. Everyone on these streets had their own burden, but for Croucher it was this peculiar one: Something about him kept the occasional prospect from buying his fabric. It was hard to say what was off-putting about his sales manner. Yet he doggedly made his rounds, never entirely giving up.

  Levi Weeks, lounging at the boardinghouse between carpentry jobs, was not so easily discouraged, either.

  Do you wish to accompany me to my brother’s? he asked Hope.

  It wasn’t far—Ezra Weeks kept his contracting business and lumberyard just eight blocks away, over on the corner of Greenwich and Harrison—but Levi was making a social call, not reporting to work.

  Hope was taken aback; then she demurred. It had been some time since Levi had shown her much in the way of attention, and besides, she really couldn’t go today. And even if she could—well, answering to the handsome young carpenter’s first request for an outing was perhaps unwise.

  Elma, passing through the room, felt no such restraint.

  “Why don’t you ask me?” she asked pointedly.

  “I know,” Levi replied, “that you would not go if I did.”

  He was right, of course: Elma did not go to Ezra’s with him. She never would, these days. She was always claiming illness, and she’d turn moody about it, then strangely weak—almost glassy-eyed. But whenever he was home from his work at Ezra’s job sites, Levi still took pains to attend to her, even nudging the other boarders and family aside: You will not attend to her as carefully as I will, he’d insist.

  And so Levi went to his brother’s without either woman b
y his side. A visit to Ezra’s house—where the contractor lived a steady married existence, building manors in the day and returning home to the hearth in the evening—was like a glimpse into a possible future for young Levi. And a prosperous future, at that, for his older brother had landed one of the most desirable contracts in the city.

  To see it, one needed only to stand outside and look northward. Just a block away, at what would come to be called Leonard Street, the road and the city gave way to a marshy wilderness. This was the northern border of the city: Lispenard’s Meadow, an untrammeled and swampy tract of mud, gnarled wild apples and brambles, with Manhattan on one side and the enclave of Greenwich Village on the other. Crossing it was a fine trip for courting couples; on the Manhattan side lay a popular theater and a saloon, while on the other lay the route to Turtle Bay, where parties of dozens of young men and women would go with hampers for a “turtle feast.”

  For urbane dandies, the meadow in between was a trackless waste so ill thought of that, one resident recalled, “when one man offered to present the Lutheran Church with a plot of six acres … the gift was coldly declined because the land was not considered worth fencing in.” Those fond of the flintlock fowling piece and the pin-hook fishing rod were happy to let their fellow city dwellers hold such notions; they knew better. A small creek, Minetta Brook, burbled through much of the length of Lispenard’s Meadow; there were fine trout to be had from it, and fat pheasants to be flushed out from the stands of goldenrod that leaned over the streamside.

  But the real catch in the meadow was in wood and water: namely, in the bored-out logs that Ezra Weeks dragged there to carry the city’s new water supply. The Manhattan Company’s board had quickly decided they wanted wooden pipes—because iron ones were seven times as expensive. “Two wooden Cylinders, of five and six inches caliber, will be amply sufficient for the mains down Broadway,” they explained. These pipes, they assured themselves, would last twenty years before they needed replacing. But that still meant thousands of logs needed to be bored out and laid in a matter of months, before the ground froze. There was not much question as to who was up for that job: Ezra Weeks had the contract from the Manhattan Company for some three miles of buried wooden piping, and he’d also secured the immense pile of white and yellow pine logs needed for it. New Yorkers who complained the previous month when wood was six dollars a cord now found it going even more dearly.

  “People are paying the enormous fee of sixteen dollars for a single cord of hickory wood,” one local noted in amazement.

  If they wanted to know where the timber had gone, they needed to look no farther than under their feet.

  IT WAS a fine time to be in the Weeks clan, but after visits with his brother, Levi still found himself a bachelor living alone at Elias Ring’s boardinghouse.

  Do you want to go the Charity Sermon? he finally asked Hope one day.

  A charity sermon by the Bishop Prevoost had been announced for St. Paul’s Chapel on December 8, 1799—for the benefit, it was said, of a local school. Everyone knew that a charity sermon by the bishop was one of the highlights of the year at St. Paul’s; until moving back to Virginia a few years before, George Washington himself had been a regular presence at them.

  This time, Hope said yes.

  They stopped off first at Ezra’s, where the theater up the block had been displaying a double bill: THE YOUNG QUAKER, read the first listing; THE AGREEABLE SURPRISE, added the second. Even with its bone-chilling lack of heat and its rather makeshift orchestra of fiddles and drums, the theater was a fine place to sit back, buy some oranges from concessions, and then eat them lasciviously until the women in the next gallery box blushed and snapped their fans open.

  If the play was no good, the audience would entertain themselves by singing gibberish back at the stage:

  Ditherum doodle,

  Adgety Nadgety,

  Gooseterum foodle,

  Fidgety nidgety nadgety mum!

  There would be no such base entertainments for Levi or Hope, though. They instead made their way over to St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway and Fulton. Looking about a church darkened in the coming winter evening, its shadows cast long by candlelight, Levi observed an overflowing collection plate passed around, for St. Paul’s that evening was, one observer wrote, “one of the most crowded churches we ever witnessed.” He gazed upon the assembled great and the good of the city of Manhattan, dressed in the rich modesty of stiff brocades and satin linings; next to him on the bench, he could see Hope, her garb plain but dignified by her Quaker dictates. But alas, no Elma; he’d asked her to come, too, of course—and, naturally, she had begged off on account of physical strain.

  “A father of the fatherless,” intoned the bishop, “and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.”

  The city had plenty of both now. Just a few weeks ago, a fellow carpenter had fallen off a scaffold on Water Street and died, leaving a widow and two children behind. Days later, some live wolves on exhibit in the museum—the very one just up Greenwich Street, where they’d gone with Elma—had broken out of their pens and fallen upon a young boy, nearly killing him before the patrons’ eyes. But above all, mortality this year meant the fever. Announcements had been made by nearly all the city’s major congregations that the following week would have a day of Thanksgiving, in gratitude to God for surviving “the destructive Disease with which we were visited the last season.”

  The city felt more bountiful and generous now, and the evening had been a fine one for charity: As Levi and Hope left, it was found that $138 had been collected. The air outside was cold and filled with the crunch of boots through the first snow of the year, which had fallen just days earlier. For children, that meant the joyful pelting of the house at Garden and Broad, an abode blessed with a crotchety owner who burst out like a jack-in-the-box, shaking his fist as boys fled. For courting couples, the snow meant sleigh rides northward through Lispenard’s Meadow, across what was known as the Kissing Bridge.

  Hope’s and Levi’s breaths were barely visible; on moonlit nights like this, the city saved whale oil by not lighting the streetlamps. The streets bore the spectral cast of the moon and the snow, and the sounds about them were curiously muffled as they walked the block north from the chapel. But had they cleared away the drifts of snow on Broadway and set an ear to the ground, they might have been able to make out a new and unaccustomed sound beneath them, one running counter to their direction—a rush flowing south—the sound, three and a half feet underground, of piped water coursing down from the northerly meadows.

  NOTICES HAD been appearing for days, signed by the board of the Manhattan Company:

  NOTWITHSTANDING THE INTERVENTION OF A MALIGNANT FEVER, WHICH OCCASIONED SO GREAT AND LARGE A DESERTION OF THE CITY … THE DIRECTORS ARE HAPPY IN ANNOUNCING TO THEIR FELLOW CITIZENS THAT CONDUIT PIPES ARE LAID IN SEVERAL OF THE PRINCIPAL STREETS, AND THAT WATER IS NOW READY TO BE FURNISHED TO MANY OF THE INHABITANTS AND TO ALL OF THE SHIPPING IN THE HARBOR.

  The last point was a welcome one: Near the harbor was where the fever was always at its worst, and there was hope that—as one resident put it—the Manhattan Company might fulfill “the wish of every citizen, to have the water conveyed, in the first instance, to those parts of the city most exposed to autumnal fevers.”

  But for prosperous residents on the more fashionable interior streets, the water would be a boon as well. It was, the directors proclaimed, “of a quality excellent for drinking and good for every culinary purpose”—and there was enough of it, they claimed, that every subscribing household could positively gorge itself on fifty gallons’ worth a day. And this, of course, was just the beginning: As soon as the frost came out of the ground, the service was to be expanded another twofold across Manhattan. Ezra Weeks and his younger brother would have a busy new year indeed.

  But as Hope and Levi returned to the boardinghouse that evening, one person there was not sharing in the Weeks brothers’ good fortune. For back in the springtime, th
e board had not adopted Elias Ring’s plan—no, they’d gone with hollow logs carrying water out of a well in the meadow, and a primitive pump supplied by one Nicholas Roosevelt. Curiously, the water board’s president knew Roosevelt—he’d sold Roosevelt thousands of acres in a rather scandalous land deal years earlier. And for the plum $1,500-a-year position of water superintendent, the board had hired not Elias Ring or Christopher Colles, but none other than Joseph Browne—the engineering dilettante who had lobbied for the system to be built in the first place. That was quite a coincidence, too, for Dr. Browne happened to be a business partner from years earlier with one of the board members. He also happened to be the brother-in-law of the board’s president.

  Elias Ring never stood a chance.

  Hope and Levi, arriving home that night, could be forgiven if they didn’t notice a curious absence in any stray issue of that day’s Greenleaf’s New-York Journal. Elias Ring’s hopeful ad promoting the New Patent Water Wheel, after running for some two years, had quietly been withdrawn—and it was never to return.

  THE INCOMING MAIL CARRIAGES FOR DECEMBER 19, 1799, ARRIVED to a slumbering and sodden city. As it was a day of prayer for delivery from recent fevers, many of the shops would stay closed that day. At the Merchants’ Coffee House, however, where deals were struck amid tables of appraisers, stockbrokers, and lingering Chamber of Commerce board members, it was an ordinary Thursday for the more determined men of business. But one newly arrived letter from Virginia, when carefully sliced open, contained a shocking announcement:

  Alexandria, 15th Dec. 1799

  Dear Sir,

  This is a day of mourning to us, and will be so to the United States, when the cause is known—

  GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON IS NO MORE.

  Word raced down Wall Street as another letter from Alexandria was opened to reveal the same stunning news about the sixty-seven-year-old statesman: “He made his exit last night between the hours of 11 and 12 after a short but painful illness of 23 hours.… We are all to close our houses, and act as if we should do if one of our own family had departed.”