Article New York Sawed in Half
During the Summer of 1824, a number of butchers and tradesmen used to meet every afternoon in the New York City neighborhood of Mulberry and Spring Streets to talk about the news of the day. One afternoon this group began discussing a popular rumor they had heard about the Island of Manhattan. Apparently all the new buildings going up around the battery had caused that end of the island to become too heavy, the result being that the entire island was tipping like a see-saw into the ocean. The men idly contemplated whether it would be possible to correct this problem by sawing the island in half at Kingsbridge, towing the sinking half out to sea, turning it around, and then towing it back and reconnecting it to the secure half.
For the next few months this group continued to loudly and earnestly discuss this problem, often attracting a large crowd of listeners. One member of the group, a retired carpenter who identified himself to strangers as ‘Lozier’ (his real name is not recorded), decided to appoint himself foreman of the imaginary island-reclamation project.
Soon, however, ‘Lozier’ had taken the project out of the realm of the imaginary and began offering employment to men on the street who overheard him discussing his plans. Eventually so many workmen were anticipating employment in the project that ‘Lozier’ felt obliged to set a date when the “sawing off” of the island would begin. He told half the men to meet on an appointed date at the “forks of the Broadway and Bowery” and the other half to meet at No.1 Bowery, corner of Spring Street. When the day arrived, a large crowd of men presented themselves at the agreed locations, ready for work. ‘Lozier’ himself, however, was nowhere to be found. He had gone into hiding rather than face the mob of angry workers. Many of the men who had been duped swore that if they ever got hold of ‘Lozier’ they would “saw him off”.
This story of the sawing off of Manhattan is one of the most popular tales about the early history of New York City. But when the author Joel Rose recently investigated the tale, he concluded that the hoax never occurred. Or rather, if it did occur, it was never mentioned in a book, newspaper, or diary until almost forty years later when the first recorded account of it appeared in a history of New York City’s markets written by Thomas De Voe. Rose theorizes that a minor prank occurred during the 1820s, not worth recording at the time, and that decades later a highly embellished account of the prank was told to De Voe. Once in the history book, the story became a permanent part of New York City folklore.
Like Rose, I also spent some time scrolling through microfilm copies of New York newspapers from the 1820s in order to find some evidence that this prank had actually occurred, and like Rose I came up empty handed. Of course, newspapers in the 1820s tended not to report on the activities or pranks of common tradesmen. But nevertheless, one would think that some reference to the event would survive… if it happened.
But whether it’s real or not, the hoax has long served as an archetypal example of the humor of Yankee tradesmen.
References
- Rose, Joel. (2001). New York Sawed in Half. Bloomsbury.
- De Voe, Thomas F. (1862). The Market Book, Containing a Historical Account of the Public Markets in the Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn with a brief description of every Article of Human Food sold therein, the introduction of cattle in America, and notices of many remarkable specimens. Burt Franklin, New York. 462-64.