The Astor Place Riot: Setting the Stage

By Fran Leadon

Part 1 of a two-part series commemorating the 175th anniversary of the Astor Place Riot.

Astor Place, though barely five hundred feet long, is a hectic street of cafes and stores, with the bustling Astor Place subway station as the centerpiece and Cooper Union at its eastern end. But 175 years ago this month, the state militia confronted an angry mob on Astor Place and blood was spilled. It was one of the deadliest riots in New York’s history. How did it happen, and why did it happen there?

Astor Place riot in lithograph by Nathaniel Currier, 1849. Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/item/2002695805.

Much of it had to do with geography: Astor Place was originally part of the much longer seventeenth-century Sand Hill Road, which, by the eighteenth century, offered an important upland link between the Bowery and Broadway. The Bowery (from the Dutch word bouwerie, or farm) and Broadway (originally the Dutch Brede Wegh) didn’t meet until 1808, when Broadway was extended past Art Street—a section of the former Sand Hill Road—to form a fork with the Bowery at present-day 17th Street (later covered over by Union Square—the “union” of the two streets). Art Street, renamed Astor Place in 1840, diminished in importance as large sections of the old Sand Hill Road were erased (today’s Greenwich Avenue and Stuyvesant Street are the two other surviving fragments).

By the time Union Square was laid out in 1831, the Bowery and Broadway had developed in tandem as the city’s two principal thoroughfares. Both avenues attracted first residences and then prominent theaters, churches, and stores. In time, the Bowery acquired a reputation as Broadway’s evil twin, but Broadway, despite its renown as the city’s “path of progress,” was hardly virtuous. The presence of Trinity Church, St. Paul’s Chapel, and A. T. Stewart’s famous department store couldn’t disguise the fact that Broadway had its share of barrooms, gambling dens, and houses of assignation. The Bowery may have had its share of prostitutes, pickpockets, gangsters, and con artists, but Broadway had them too.

Theaters and other places of amusement lined both streets, catering to both the working class and elites, tourists and locals, native-born and immigrant. The Bowery had Zoological Hall, where visitors could see a “Thrilling and Interesting Performance by the Lion Queen, Miss E. Calhoun,” plus a live polar bear, but Broadway had P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, home to the Quaker Giant, Mammoth Lady, “who weighs 576 pounds,” “Wax Scripture Statuary,” and “Madame Rockwell, the fortune-teller.” [1]

Frank Chanfrau as “Mose” in lithograph by James Brown, 1848. Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/item/2013646748

Mitchell’s Olympic Theatre, on Broadway just north of Canal Street, toed the line between the reputable and disreputable. Actor Frank Chanfrau debuted his legendary Mose character there, in an original, locally-produced play called “A Glance at New York in 1848.” The Bowery, meanwhile, had the pleasure-ground Vauxhall Gardens, where in the play Chanfrau, as Mose, archetypal “b’hoy,” butcher, and “fire laddie,” entertained his flunkies.

Further down the street from Vauxhall, the Bowery Theatre, though much later converted to a Vaudeville house featuring comedians, trained-dog acts, boxing matches, and burlesque, was, in the 1840s, still one of the most prestigious playhouses in the US. “Drama, ballet, opera, farce—all are given in the most elegant manner,” the New York Herald reported in 1848. [2]

It was at the Bowery Theatre where, in the mid 1820s, the American tragedian Edwin Forrest first attracted widespread acclaim. Forrest, who possessed a great uprush of hair, manly jaw, and perpetually furrowed brow, became a working-class hero; American theatergoers saw in his passionate portrayals of Indians and frontiersmen an alternative to the more traditional, measured acting styles of English stage idols like Edmund Kean, Charles Kemble, and William Charles Macready.

Macready first toured the US in 1826, winning widespread popularity. But he was dogged from the beginning by a suspicion among both critics and the public that he lacked heart, that something was missing in his acting style: “Everything he does is well done,” the Herald acknowledged during Macready’s second US tour, in 1843. “But he lacks entirely the burning genius—the soul—of the Keans and Kembles. He elicits the highest admiration [for] his artistic skill, but he does not open the flood-gates of passion…” Philip Hone, merchant, diarist, social butterfly, and one-time mayor, was disappointed when, during the 1843 tour, he saw Macready perform for the first time: “I did not like him as well as expected,” he confessed. [3]

William Macready in Byron’s Werner, 1850. Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/item/2003681844.

But Forrest was ascendent. He first toured England in 1836 and was a hit; Macready, thirteen years older, reportedly treated him with generosity and kindness. A return visit to London, in 1845, did not go as well. Playing Macbeth, Forrest was coolly received, and he blamed Macready for manufacturing the frosty reception. Forrest tried to get even by turning up in Edinburgh and hissing as Macready played Hamlet. “Mr. Macready introduced a fancy dance into his performance …” Forrest later admitted, “which I hissed, for I thought it was a desecration of the scene.” [4]

There followed an ugly public feud between the two actors, played out in a fusillade of aggrieved “cards” printed and reprinted in newspapers. (Today the spat would undoubtedly take the form of a social media dust-up.) The fracas was metastasizing in the press when Macready, nearing retirement at age 55, returned to the US in the fall of 1848 for a much-anticipated “farewell” tour. Theater managers from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and other American cities intercepted Macready at his hotel as soon as he arrived, jockeying to be the first to engage his services. But all the newspapers could talk about was his quarrel with Forrest: “Mr. Forrest has many friends… and they will not let Macready pass through… without a most searching criticism on his style and mode of dealing with Shakespeare,” the Herald predicted. “We expect a great deal of amusement and interest in theatrical matters for the next month.” [5]

In the end, it wasn’t so amusing.

Macready’s opening performance in New York, October 4 at the Astor Place Opera House, was enthusiastically received. Flattered, Macready broke his usual scholarly reserve and made a grateful, gushing speech before the curtain at evening’s end. Only one person hissed him.

The tour continued, though the reception was uneven: In New Orleans, Macready was feted with a complimentary dinner; in Cincinnati someone threw the carcass of a dead sheep onto the stage. At the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia, where the Philadelphia-born Forrest was the favorite son, Macready was greeted with cheers but also groans and cries of “Forrest!” Pennies, and at least one egg, sailed onto the stage. Again, Macready made a curtain-call speech, but this time his tone was a bit self-righteous, and he refused to call Forrest by name, instead referring to him only as an “actor.” An enraged Forrest immediately responded with a card, calling Macready a “superannuated driveller” and “poor old man.” [6] Back and forth it went between the two actors. “They resemble two children,” the Herald editors sighed.

Macready made his way back to New York in the spring of 1849, ready for one last engagement before sailing home. It was announced that he would open the new season at the Astor Place Opera House.

The opera house had been completed in the fall of 1847. Designed in the Greek Revival mode by the prolific architect Isaiah Rogers, its plan was trapezoidal owing to the angled intersection of Astor Place and East 8th Street. It was, at the time, the northernmost theatrical outpost in the city. Its long axis stretched along Astor Place, placing the building equidistant from the Bowery and Broadway. Though Forrest, the workingman’s hero, had himself played the opera house, in the role of Macbeth, on February 8, 1849, only three months before Macready’s return engagement, the theater had gained a reputation as a snooty clubhouse of the “Upper Ten.” Tickets were slightly more expensive—$1 for the best seats, 75 cents for the cheaper ones, as opposed to 75 cents and 25 cents elsewhere—and a strict dress code of evening wear and kid gloves excluded newsboys and “rowdies” in flannel shirts and dungarees, at a time when other theaters welcomed them into the cheap seats in the “pit” closest to the stage. The Astor Place Opera House didn’t even have a pit: wealthy patrons were ushered to upholstered divans near the stage, while less wealthy patrons were directed to the nose-bleed seats in the balconies.

Portrait of Edwin Forrest by Mathew Brady, ca. 1840s. Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/item/2004663949.

Two famous, aggrieved actors arguing—so what? But it mattered very much that Forrest was American and Macready was British, at a moment when British-American relations were at a low point: Competing British-American claims to the Oregon territory had been settled only two years earlier, and the city’s burgeoning Irish immigrant population harbored deep resentment over the new British Whig administration’s laissez-faire response to the ongoing Irish famine. Siding with Forrest became a populist badge, even if hatred of Macready and his supposedly pro-British, elitist fans had forged an unlikely (and temporary) alliance between Nativists and the Irish immigrants they despised. Everyone was on edge anyway, as the Macready-Forrest rivalry played out against a backdrop of social unrest that had begun the previous year with revolutions sweeping across Europe. Theaters had long been forums for political debate, and in New York even farces like “A Glance at New York in 1848” referenced current events. (“I am opposed to all governments,” one character in the play shouts at one point. “I’m opposed to all laws!”) [7] Many Americans were left to wonder: could revolution spread from Prague, Vienna, and Budapest to Boston, Philadelphia, and New York?

Local politicians encouraged the perception that the theatrical rivalry was a life-or-death battle between British and American, rich and poor, Democrat and Whig. Caleb Woodhull, a staunch Whig, was set to take the oath of office as New York’s new mayor the day after Macready’s opening on May 7, and Tammany Hall ward—heeler and Nativist Isaiah Rynders saw an opportunity to make the beginning of Woodhall’s term as painful as possible.

The weather had been dry and unseasonably hot at the beginning of May, the streets dusty. Forrest, two weeks into a residency at the Broadway Theatre, a cavernous playhouse just north of City Hall, was rotating through his greatest hits, playing the lead in a different production every night, as was the custom.

The weather turned cold and rainy over the weekend, and the inclement weather continued into Monday, May 7, when Forrest would next play Macbeth. With Macready scheduled to reopen the opera house the same night in the same role, the stage was set for a head-to-head Shakespearian grudge match. Forrest’s performance went over well; Macready’s was a disaster.

When Macready made his entrance in the third scene, he was greeted with both cheers from his partisans and groans and hisses from the “Forresters.” Eggs, potatoes, and pennies sailed onto the stage. At one point Macready picked up a penny from the stage and, as the New York Tribune reported the next morning, “very coolly placed it in his bosom.” Amid the cheering and hissing no one could hear anything, and the play continued “as a pantomime.” Then a chair was hurled from the second tier and landed in the orchestra, causing “a prestissimo movement among the musicians, not set down in the original music for Macbeth.” Amid cries of “Three cheers for Forrest!” three more chairs landed on the stage, at which point Macready exited. The curtain dropped and a canvas sheet appeared onstage with “Mr. Macready has left the Theater” written in chalk. Thirty minutes later the crowd dispersed. The Tribune called it a “Disgraceful Row.” [8]

“This cannot end here,” Hone wrote in his diary the next day. “The respectable part of our citizens will never consent to be put down by a mob raised to serve the purpose of such a fellow as Forrest.” [9]

Hone was right—it didn’t end there.

Part 2 of the two-part series commemorating the 175th anniversary of the Astor Place Riot will publish to Gotham next week.

Fran Leadon is an Associate Professor at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York, and the author of Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles.

[1] New York Herald, April 8, 1849, 3.

[2] New York Herald, September 4, 1848, 2.

[3] Bayard Tuckerman, ed., The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828-1851, II, New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 197.

[4] New York Herald, November 23, 1848, 2.

[5] New York Herald, October 2, 1848, 2.

[6] New York Herald, November 23, 1848, 2.

[7] Benjamin A. Baker, A Glance at New York: A Local Drama in Two Acts. New York and London: Samuel French & Son, 1890, 7.

[8] “Disgraceful Row at the Opera House,” New-York Daily Tribune, May 8, 1849, 2.

[9] The Diary of Philip Hone, II, 360.