"This City is One Grand Kaleidoscope": Tourists and the Image of the City in Antebellum New York

The first significant presence of tourists in New York City began in the late 1820s, an outgrowth of the greater tourist world of the Hudson River Valley. They were mainly Americans and in traveling spent time in New York City. At first, hotels were poor with few accommodations for, in particular, women tourists. The city was slow to respond in the 1830s, in part due to the turbulent economic situation, but that changed in the 1840s with a new generation of hotels. By the 1850s the city saw the world’s first grand hotels, combining elegance, luxury, and commercialism.

The emergence of those hotels correlated with a sharp rise in the numbers of tourists. These prosperous new visitors, although relatively small in number, began to have a rising cultural presence, figures in newspapers and magazines and novels. Their presence correlated with the emergence of New York as the continent’s first truly urban place, filled with possibilities and terrors. This image, of the city both as the nation’s greatest achievement and its locus of sin, emerged rapidly in the 1850s. The trope of an innocent visitor drawn into the mire was a centerpiece of what would become a vast sea of writing, representing a profound shift in how the nation viewed New York and American cities in general.

This paper brings together several heretofore disconnected strains of American urban and cultural history. Prior studies have analyzed the rise and impact of the genre of “city fiction,” while others have noted the shift in how Americans perceived New York City, correctly linking that to its remarkable and sudden growth. However, none have noted the origins of the central figures of so many of these tragic stories: that these innocent visitors were an outgrowth of a heretofore unnoticed phenomenon, the rise of urban tourism.