Each post on this site contains a reprinted article from a column that appeared between 1880 and 1886 in the New York Sunday Mercury entitled “Thirty Years in Gotham”, with the byline “by Harry Hill.”
Harry Hill, the proprietor of the most infamous dance hall in Manhattan from the 1850s through the 1880s, likely offered comments, notes, and suggestions on some of the articles, but the actual composing was done by a ghost writer, Isaac George Reed. The columns covered topics dealing with the history of New York City: its institutions, characters, neighborhoods, social life, politics, disasters, sports, criminals, etc. The “thirty years” in the column title refers roughly to the amount of time that Hill had resided in the city since emigrating from England in 1850.
Hill was one of the most well-known figures in New York City, as well as the country, recognized not only for his scandalous entertainment venue, but as a stakeholder and referee for major sporting events, especially prizefighting. Though many people bemoaned the immoral activities that Hill immersed himself in, he was universally praised for his honesty, fairness, and common sense.
Hill, Reed, and the editors of the Mercury did not confine the scope of the columns to events from the 1850s-1880s, but instead covered many decades, as far back as Dutch settlement. Most columns used previously published books and magazine articles as source material, without attribution. Most of these have been identified, and are listed here. The Mercury was never criticized for reworking this content, perhaps because the rewrites were abridged, quick reads, and were leavened by Harry’s dialect voice (which basically was just dropping the pronunciation of g’s) and his man-on-the-street perspective. Also, the relatively limited circulation audience of the Mercury was fairly low-brow; they likely would never have been exposed to the original sources that appeared in publications like Harper’s Monthly.
The columns were published weekly from April, 1880 to early 1886. Each week’s column consisted of 3-4 “chapters,” each covering a different topic, so the entire run of the column included over 1,000 chapters. Each chapter averaged 2,100 words in length, so the size of the entire output was likely over 2 million words–enough to fill over a dozen printed volumes.
This material has, for the most part, been inaccessible since its publication. No libraries in New York have runs of the Sunday Mercury from 1882-1886. The only copies that exist reside in storage at the Library of Congress, where they are rapidly deteriorating from the acidic newsprint paper; it may be too late to use normal digitizing methods to preserve the papers as a whole. The editor of this site took photos of each column from these hardcopy volumes and transcribed them (using Google Voice Typing, which proved much quicker and more accurate than OCR software.)
Though the vast majority of the columns are derivative, there were several that appear to be original, and some seemed to have been directly based on Harry’s experiences and the anecdotes he heard. Of these, the editor has set aside three dozen or so for a possible book publication, since they offer unique details and perspective. The remainder will be published online at this site, hopefully to become a valuable, freely-available corpus of content on the history of New York City.
