If you think today’s Manhattan has little in common with the tight little island of two centuries or so ago, you may have to think again.
In the early to mid-1800s Manhattan emerged as the financial and mercantile hub of America. The top 1% controlled a third of the city’s wealth. In 1856 Walt Whitman observed that, except for the poorest, New Yorkers were addicted to “occupying houses outrageously and absurdly too expensive.” The great American poet—along with Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe—was then helping to make New York the literary capital of the country.
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