The rising price of flour fuels a 19th century riot

1837 would be a rough year. A financial downturn caused in part by speculative lending (hmm, sound familiar?) ushered in a six-year recession nationwide.

Banks closed. Unemployment soared. And in New York City, a $5 hike in the price of flour touched off a riot at Washington and Dey Streets.

It happened in February, as the cost of necessities such as meat and fuel began going up. A barrel of flour (pictured on the right in the political cartoon above) that had run $7 was now $12.

With a recession settling in and a third of the city of 300,000 out of work, New Yorkers were outraged . . . and feeling desperate.

So when a speaker at a rally near City Hall suggested that a Washington Street merchant was hoarding flour and gauging prices, crowds went ballistic.

“As a result, hundreds of people rushed down Broadway to Washington Street where they stormed the premises,” wrote Joanne Reitano in The Restless City.

“Flour barrels were seized and thrown to the crowd who scooped up whatever they could into boxes, baskets, and aprons,” wrote Reitano.

By one account, hundreds of barrels were dumped, along with a thousand bushels of grain.

“The flour sifted onto the street a foot deep. Some of the rioters then attacked other flour stores and only the arrival of the militia stopped the pillage.”

[New York in the 1830s, above]

The slums of dark, forbidding Duane Street

Louis Comfort Tiffany—son of Charles Tiffany, founder of Tiffany & Co, the famed jeweler then located on Prince Street and Broadway—is better known for his lovely stained glass works.

But as a young man, he studied painting, and from his rented studio at a YMCA he depicted impoverished Duane Street in 1877.

The Belgian block paving is uneven and dirty; a wood frame building appears to house a plumber, while a man out front seems to tinker with potted plants.

It’s certainly not the Duane Street in posh Tribeca we’re used to today.