Monday, June 13, 2022 – THINK OF HOW HARD IT WAS TO GET A COLD DRINK IN SUMMER HEAT
FROM THE ARCHIVES
MONDAY, JUNE 13, 2022
THE 700th EDITION
ICE IN NEW YORK
STEPHEN BLANK
Anyone remember when it was called an “ice box?” And some of us remember when the iceman delivered ice to your flat.
Ice man on Mott Street, 1943. Marjory Collins photographer, Library of Congress
Ice was a big business in New York City. Block ice was once a necessary piece of American culture. For about a century beginning in the 1830s, keeping food and beverages cold in New York City depended on it. New York City’s hotels, businesses, and restaurants consumed more ice than any other city in the United States. After a recent stay in Manhattan in 1832, the English novelist and travel writer Fanny Trollope observed, “I do not imagine there is a home without the luxury of a piece of ice to cool the water and harden the butter.” Of course, because it’s the City, all this ice came with scandals, scams and dirty politicians. And the interesting backstory is that throughout much of the 19th century, the ice business in New York City was just one part of a global industry.
So, sit back, have a cold drink and chill.
Ice wasn’t small potatoes. Demand grew so rapidly that by 1855 New Yorkers were consuming 285,000 tons of ice annually. During a typical week in the 1880’s, an iceman might deliver as much as 80 tons of ice, much of it carted up multiple flights of stairs. Manhattan and Brooklyn consumed 1.3 million tons in 1879, more than a quarter of the national market.
Much of New York ice was “harvested” from the Hudson River and nearby lakes. At its height in the 1880s, an estimated 20,000 workers cut out huge blocks of ice for storage in 135 specially built structures lining the river between Poughkeepsie and Albany. When the warm weather set in, barges carried the ice to the Manhattan docks, where it was transferred to icehouses around the city and then distributed to customers by ice wagons.
Ice man on Mott Street, 1943. Marjory Collins photographer, Library of Congress
Cheap ice changed New Yorkers’ basic diet. Butchers, fishmongers and dairymen began to use ice to preserve their stocks, leading to significant improvement in food quality and public health. Ice also greatly increased the diversity of culinary offerings available to New Yorkers as importers found ways to preserve previously exotic delights like freshwater fish. Ice cream, once the rarest of treats, became so popular that in 1850 a leading women’s magazine declared it a necessity. Ice had the additional effect of transforming New York into the nation’s first beer capital by allowing for year-round brewing.
In 1896, the ice market boiled over. New Yorkers were outraged when the ice companies – the Knickerbocker was the biggest – were absorbed into a massive national trust, the Consolidated Ice Company. Prices jumped 33% that spring, and more than doubled by midsummer. Hardest hit were the poor, who could afford to buy their ice, like their winter coal, only in small quantities.
http://wheelsthatwonthewest.blogspot.com/2015/02/ice-wagons-and-knickerbocker-ice-company.html
Citizens brought the ice but loathed the companies that provided it, and in the 1880’s and 1890’s, critics charged these firms with price gouging and monopolistic practices. In response, Knickerbocker and its competitors blamed the summer price increases on mild winters that produced insufficient stocks – “ice famines,” in the parlance of the day. And to frost the issue came Consolidated and soaring prices.
Of course, there’s a bad actor behind all of this. Charles Morse was an American businessman and speculator who specialized in fraud and corrupt business practices. At one time he controlled 13 banks. Morse organized the Consolidated Ice Company in 1897 and, in 1899, merged it with several other companies to form the American Ice Company which held a virtual monopoly for ice in New York. Morse quickly became known as “The Ice King”.
The ice hit the fan when the New York Journal and Advertiser revealed that Mayor Robert Van Wyck and other city officials had conspired to create a virtual monopoly for Consolidated. As the price of ice doubled, new revelations showed that the mayor and his brother had been given $1.7 million in Consolidated stock. Van Wyck and the suspected city officials appeared before Justice William Jay Gaynor and told the court that Morse had advised him to purchase these stocks, which he said, he never did. The investigations produced no convictions, but the mayor, hounded by catcalls of “Ice! Ice! Ice!” whenever he appeared in public, was soundly defeated by a reform ticket in the election of 1901.
Puck Magazine satirizing Mayor Van Wyck. https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2021/07/the-ice-craze-triumphs-and-scandals-of-the-19th-
Morse walked away: Having formed a holding company called the Ice Securities Company, he manipulated its stock and left the ice business with a profit of some $12 million. Morsew eHMorse went on to other dastardly deeds – said to have been one of the causes of the Panic of 1907. He was convicted of violations of federal banking laws and sentenced to 15 years in the Atlanta federal penitentiary in November 1908 but remained free on appeal until January 1910. Freed again because of “severe illness,” Morse recovered enough to be indicted for profiteering during World War I.
In 1911 the American Ice Co. split up “to avoid the expenditure of time and money necessary to defend the pending action of People vs. American Ice Company.” The distribution business ended up becoming the Knickerbocker Ice Co, and the production business spun off as the Ice Manufacturing Co.
Ice Truck in the 1940s, https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2021/07/the-ice-craze-triumphs-and-scandals-of-the-19th-
We usually think that a business is local before national, not to mention international. But before the ice business began here, it was an international industry. The ice trade was started by the New England businessman Frederic Tudor in 1806. Tudor’s plan was to export ice as a luxury good to wealthy residents of the West Indies and southern US states, where he hoped they would relish the product during their sweltering summers. He first shipped ice to Martinique, using a specially built icehouse. (Profit from ice was slippery for Tudor. He made his first profits by 1810, only to be swindled by a business partner and land in debtor’s prison.)
Over the coming years the ice trade widened to Cuba and southern United States, with other merchants joining Tudor in harvesting and shipping ice from New England. During the 1830s and 1840s the ice trade expanded further, with shipments reaching England, India, South America, China and Australia. Tudor made a fortune from the India trade, while brand names such as Wenham Ice became famous in London. (We’re told that Queen Victoria got her ice from Massachusetts.) By the middle of the 1820s, around 3,000 tons of ice was being shipped from Boston annually, two thirds by Tudor.
In 1833 Tudor and several partners had launched a new business to export ice to Calcutta. The Anglo-Indian elite, concerned about the effects of the summer heat, quickly agreed to exempt the imports from the usual East India Company regulations and tariffs, and the initial net shipment of around a hundred tons sold successfully. With the ice fetching for three pence (£0.80 in 2010 terms) per pound, the first shipment produced profits of $9,900 ($253,000), and in 1835 Tudor commenced regular exports to Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. The prospect of a steady supply of Tudor’s clear, solid blocks prompted English residents in the city to throw parties serving claret and beer chilled with his New England ice. The India Gazette thanked him for making “this luxury accessible, by its abundance and cheapness.”
Booming international business notwithstanding, the ice trade increasingly began to focus on supplying the growing cities on the US east coast and the needs of businesses across the Midwest. These large summer-scorching cities became major markets for ice. Ice became a major component in industries as well. It began to be used in refrigerator cars by the railroad industry, allowing the meat packing industry around Chicago and Cincinnati to slaughter cattle locally, before sending the dressed meat onward to either US domestic or international markets. Chilled refrigerator cars and ships created a national industry in vegetables and fruit that could previously only have been consumed locally. US and British fishermen began to preserve their catches in ice, allowing longer voyages and bigger catches, and the brewing industry became operational all-year around.
An 1870 refrigerator car, showing the ice stored at both ends, Wikipedia
Ice also delivered medical benefits. Doctors soon discovered that ice could save lives and began prescribing it as a means of lowering the body temperature of fever victims, especially the young. During the summer, city hospitals issued free ice tickets to the poor, and crowds often grew so anxious outside free ice depots during heat waves that free-for-alls known as ice riots erupted.
At its peak at the end of the 19th century, the US ice trade employed an estimated 90,000 people in an industry capitalized at $28 million ($660 million in 2010 terms), using ice houses capable of storing up to 250,000 tons each.
Competition had slowly been growing, however, in the form of artificially produced plant ice and mechanically chilled facilities. Unreliable and expensive at first, plant ice began to successfully compete with natural ice in Australia and India during the 1850s and 1870s respectively, until, by the outbreak of World War I, more plant ice was being produced in the US each year than naturally harvested ice.
Hope you have kept your cool,
Stephen Blank
MONDAY PHOTO
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WEEKEND PHOTO
“THE LION AND THE MOUSE “
BY TOM OTTERNESS
Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c)
Sources
https://www.scenichudson.org/viewfinder/remembering-the-valleys-ice-harvesting-industry/
https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2021/07/the-ice-craze-triumphs-and-scandals-of-the-19th-century-ice-trade.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/the-stubborn-american-who-brought-ice-to-the-world/272828/
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/nyregion/thecity/the-dawn-of-new-yorks-ice-age.html
https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2008/07/18/new-york-citys-ice-age/
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