Out Now Everywhere You Get Your Podcasts:
The New Audio Fiction Series About The Fastest Growing City In The World, And The Opportunists Who Shaped It.
IMAGINE THE LAWLESSNESS OF THE WILD WEST SET IN A CITY OF 270,000 PEOPLE, ALL LIVING BELOW FOURTEENTH STREET. THIS IS NEW YORK IN 1835.
May 1st, 1835. It’s a cold and rainy Moving Day. All leases expire simultaneously. More than 200,000 are looking for lodging. It’s ten years since the completion of the Erie Canal. Most live in wooden or brick buildings no taller than five stories, but construction is booming. The gap between rich and poor is rapidly expanding as thousands of new people stream onto New York’s dangerously overcrowded streets. Many come to earn an honest living. Others for more nefarious reasons.
And it’s here where our story begins.
Aaron Columbus is an illegitimate son.
He’s desperate to make his fortune. He’s struck an illegal import deal with John Jacob Astor, America’s richest man. The import? Two exiled Russian Countesses; Sorina and Raisa Zubov, and their inheritance—eleven pounds of diamonds.
Together with Aaron’s brother Wyndham Bowen—an African man born in Europe—they involve themselves in backroom deals, Abolitionism, potential war with France, and City politics.
Their actions will engulf New York’s very unstable economy.
As New York grows, widening and creating streets is paramount. It raises property value, but taxes only increase with land improvement.
Flipping unimproved property is creating severe artificial inflation.
Access to clean drinking water is relegated to the rich: City water is scarce and polluted. It’s behind recent pandemics and the inability to fight fires. New Yorkers vote to build the Croton Aqueduct in April, but who will pay for this? The Corporation, a powerful entity, seeks to push progress at any cost.
John Jacob Astor and Eliza Jumel believe the man capable of getting the Croton built is Stephen Allen; a Tammany Democrat with a penchant for control.
Will Allen’s appointment be a stroke of genius, or an ill-fated nightmare?
Should we ask Helen Jewett? She’s an upscale courtesan, enjoying a rare level of power for women in 1835.
It makes her the target for unstable men, endangering Miss Jewett’s life.
Cholera and fire fears are stirred by the City’s penny papers: The Sun and New York Herald. Publishers Benjamin Day and James Gordon Bennett are battling for readership. Bennett is unpleasant and shrewd. He’ll do anything to make The Herald the world’s most popular paper. So, Benjamin Day hires a new editor, Richard Adams Locke, known to have ghost-authored a recent disruptive play. In August, their battle leads to the greatest literary hoax of the nineteenth century, fooling both layman and scholar:
The Sun claims intelligent life exists on the Moon.
Even as he calls the hoax remarkable, Phineas T. Barnum is orchestrating one of his own. Barnum is set to display a woman named Joice Heth, who claims to be George Washington’s one-hundred-sixty-one-year-old nursemaid. Their ensuing relationship will change the trajectory of Barnum’s life. Remarkable indeed.
But not nearly as remarkable as what happens in December.
