Astor Place Riots
February 22, 2018, by Tabitha
For today’s readings I found it very interesting on how these riots took place at a place I usually hop in and out the train either going home or coming to school. But in Cliff’s piece “Ex,Pursued by a B’Boy”, he states something that I feel related to today:
Yet something had been lost. As New continued to grow, the rift between the haves and, have-nots became still more immense, and even well-off New Yorkers wondered whether it was the poor alone who represented the forces of disorders, who had destroyed the bonds of neighborly understanding on which mild government was built. In that sense, too, the riot had been a watershed: it was the first time that the two classes of Americans had failed to resolve their conflicting rights without resorting to muskets and briskbats, and it confronted the nation with a new and shocking notion. The riot, wrote a reporter from Philadelphia, left behind it a feeling to which this community has hitherto been a stranger – an opposition of classes– the rich and the poor–white kids and no kids as all; in fact to speak right out, as feeling that there is now, in our country, in New York City , what every good patriot has hitherto felt it his duty to deny – a high class and a low class. Even the genteel Home Journal felt compelled to remind it’s reader that wealth in a republic should be mindful where it’s luxuries offend and that one of it’s most offensive luxuries was the aristocratizing of the pit
New York City itself is very divided in class throughout it’s neighborhoods from even today. To see classism unfold through this time period is quite interesting . Also what I find even more interesting is how the riots escalated from two actors Edwin Forrest and William Macready. A kind of cultural clash between the two stired the riots.