I’ve set up a web site for a new blog project: “Harry Hill’s Gotham.” Each post on the 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 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.
Hopefully this will become a valuable, freely-available corpus of content on the history of New York City.