The train finally let Charlotte off in New Jersey, at the Pennsylvania Railroad Station, and she paid the fare for the ferry to Lower Manhattan. New York was experiencing a summer heat wave, but the wind across the river was cool. Charlotte stood on the deck as the boat churned through the river water. She was always a bit seasick on boats and the fresh air calmed her stomach. The island of Manhattan stretched out along the Hudson River from the green cuff of Battery Park peeking out from the weft of dense buildings, to the north where the buildings petered out into farmland and marshland around 28th Street, and the forested area near Harlem, which was close enough for a weekend ramble and a picnic.
Charlotte disembarked from the ferry and began walking through Lower Manhattan. She searched for a cab to take her to her boardinghouse in the stifling humidity and heat, wearing a boned corset and several layers of petticoats, unable to avoid the smell of rotting garbage and unwashed bodies. It was not exactly glamorous. Around her she could hear a babel of languages and accents: Polish, Russian, German, Chinese, Yiddish, Spanish, French, rhyming Cockney, Irish brogue. The architecture, too, spoke a thousand dialects. The financial district had its elegant marble facades, its streets populated by men in dark suits with worried expressions. St. Paul’s Chapel, where George Washington had prayed, and the Washington House, where he prepared for battle, and the elegant Park Theatre on Chatham Row with its rhythmic arches and columns. Continuing up Chatham Street, one found the ostentatious Bowery Theatre with its screaming eagle over the door, covered in gold gilt, looking to one overheated observer “as if he could clutch almost anything in his talons, from Indian babies to Mexican candlesticks.” The eagle was part of Hamblin’s plan to whip up the audience’s patriotism “till they feel a comfortable assurance that every American can ‘whip his weight in wild cats.’ ”
As the cab’s horse picked its way slowly through the streets, stopped every few feet by someone dashing across the road, Charlotte saw a curious thing. Amid the crowded buildings there was a great empty space, like a row of missing teeth. Her cabby knew this neighborhood well. It was called the Burned District.
Where one of the greatest financial centers in the world once stood was now a charred mass stretching seventeen blocks from Beaver Street to Water Street in Lower Manhattan. Less than a year earlier, on the freezing night of December 16, 1835, the Bowery had blazed like a world in hell. Copper roofs poured down themselves in great molten drops, iron doors buckled, clapboard houses were quickly swallowed by fire. An icy wind blew snow and ash into the faces of onlookers and forced back the merchants trying to save some of the goods from their stores. One person remembered the smell of coffee being burned and looking down to see fine lace trampled into the snow. Temperatures were so low the rivers froze, stranding ships in the harbor, and water moved through the firefighters’ pumps in a slow trickle of icy sludge. Ships moved to the middle of the East River for safety from the blaze, only to find hours later that they were frozen in midstream.
By the time it was over, the fire had destroyed most of the financial district. Banks, stores, and the Merchants’ Exchange were wiped out, sparking a financial crisis that still reverberated months later. Yet, as Charlotte was now discovering, everything in New York—even destruction—was a spectacle. A guidebook to New York City published the year Charlotte arrived included the Burned District as a tourist attraction. If you had the money, you could buy a pair of gum arabic shoes “as wide as they were long” and hire someone to lead you on a walking tour through the mud—a slurry of animal feces, ash, human waste, and industrial garbage—that stood six inches deep in the streets.
Thomas Hamblin, like his contemporary P. T. Barnum, understood the attraction of spectacle. He specialized in “blood-and-guts” melodrama and used dangerous special effects like gunpowder and real fire to excite the audience. Although Charlotte’s manager in New Orleans had written her a letter of introduction to Hamblin, she wrote first to Edmund Simpson, the man in charge of the Park Theatre. The Park was the most prestigious theatre in New York. Compared most often to London’s Royal Theatre on Drury Lane, it catered to New York’s elite. But Simpson’s response disappointed her. She would need to audition first, and even then he could not guarantee her a job. She was offended. After her success as Lady Macbeth in New Orleans, it was hard for Charlotte to imagine making her New York debut in anything but a starring role.
Only then did Charlotte write to Hamblin. When she arrived in his office, he was impressed, even more so when she showed him her reviews. He told her she was exactly what he was looking for at the Bowery, a woman of hurricane-force passions who would not be dwarfed by his elaborate sets, special effects, or by himself. Six and a half feet tall, Hamblin had a “horror of little women” as he put it, and appreciated Charlotte’s height. She would look
