Heads came. And Rowland Macy and his wife went north. They went to
Haverhill and there upon the bank of the Merrimac he set up his second
store. This venture was far more successful than the first. It
prospered, if not in large degree, at least far enough to encourage its
proprietor. But he did not cease regretting that the coin had not come
tails-up. Then he would have gone to New York. For New York, he was
convinced, was about to become the undisputed metropolis of the land.
Already it was going ahead, by leaps and bounds. And men who slipped
into it quickly and who possessed the right qualities of commercial
ability would go ahead quickly. Rowland Macy was convinced of this.
He was not a man who lost much time in vain repinings. To New York he
would go. He suited action to thought, sold his Haverhill business at a
fair profit, again bundled his wife and small family together and set
out for the metropolis of the New World.
II. The New York That Macy First Saw
In 1858 New York was just beginning to come into its own. It was ceasing
to be an overgrown town--half village, half city--and was attaining a
real metropolitanism. It had already reached a population of 650,000
persons, and was adding to that number at the rate of from twelve
thousand to fifteen thousand annually. Its real and personal property
was assessed at upward of $513,000,000. New building was going apace at
a fearful rate. Already the town was fairly closely builded up to
Forty-ninth Street, and was paved to Forty-second. Above it up on
Manhattan Island were many suburban villages: Bloomingdale, where Mayor
Fernando Wood had his residence, upon a plot about the size of the
present crossing of Broadway and Seventy-second Street, Yorkville,
Harlem and Manhattanville. To reach the first two of these communities
one could take certain of the horse railroads. John Stephenson had
perfected his horse-car and these modern equipages--how quaint and
old-fashioned they would seem today--were already plying in Second,
Third, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Slowly but surely they were
displacing the omnibuses, which dated back more than half a century. A
goodly number of these still remained, however; twenty-six lines
employing in all 489 separate stages--New York certainly was a
considerable town.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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