METROPOLIS
Middle English metropol, from Late Latin metropolis,
mother-city, from Greek: meter, metr-, mother, see meter- in Indo-European roots + polis, city
The word metropolis has a history that begins with Greece and Rome, indicating a large city. It took a space craft from another solar system to crash on earth to make ‘metropolis’ a name associated more closely with New York than with any other city on the planet. Superman, “who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper,” did as much to further the iconography of midtown Manhattan as the skyline itself. Unlike the Gothic aesthetic of Batman’s dark Gotham City (his bat signal only works in the cloudy night sky), Superman’s Metropolis is a modern city of steel and glass skyscrapers reflecting sunlight. Even the ‘Daily Planet’ news building looks like a trophy of accomplishment with its iconic silver globe gleaming from the roof. The connections to Manhattan at its best are unmistakable. But the deeper connection to New York is one that is virtually unrecognized and quite surprising. The character of Superman specifically as a superhero in New York City may have roots that reach back to 1848.
Bowery B’hoy as Superman
Mose(s) Humphrey* was a resident of New York during the 1830s. Like many young men of the period he was a volunteer firefighter, a member of ‘Lady Washington’ Engine Company 40. He was a printer by trade who worked for the New York Sun and a parishioner of St. Andrew’s Church. He was also a ‘Bowery Boy’ of local fame and renown. As the story goes Mose was a brawler with a formidable talent for never losing. As would have been said at the time, ‘the b’hoy’s got some sand in ‘em.’ According to the legend Mose met his match in 1838 at the fists of Henry Chanfrau from ‘Peterson’ Engine Company No. 15. In the shame of his defeat Mose left New York, moving to any number of places depending on which account one reads. Henry’s younger brother, Frank, never forgot Mose. This is where the history ends.
Here is where the legend begins. Frank Chanfrau became an actor. In February of 1848 he appeared as the lead in a play written by Benjamin A. Baker, A Glance at New York in 1848, the vehicle which introduced ‘Mose the Fire Laddie.’ It opened at William Mitchell's Olympic Theatre on Broadway between Howard and Grand Streets on Feb. 15th 1848. This play was the first time a working class audience was represented on stage in any significant way. Bowery b’hoys, Centre Market b’hoys, Chatham b’hoys and others who patronized the Olympic recognized themselves in Mose.
Baker and Chanfrau, who were initially apprehensive about displeasing the audience of ‘toughs’ with a send up, found themselves surrounded by ovations at the end. Word on the street and positive reviews later in the press helped to create a huge theatrical success and the beginning of a New York legend.
One month later on March 15th further scenes and characters were added, resulting in a then record run of 74 performances. During one later period of the plays popularity, Chanfrau played Mose at the Olympic in A Glance, ended the performance and headed over to the Chatham Theatre where he played in its sequel, New York As It Is, which was then followed by a third 'Mose' performance in Newark, N.J. requiring a ferry trip and a nine mile horse and buggy ride.
It is estimated that between April 15, 1848 and July 6, 1850, Chanfrau appeared at least three hundred and eighty-five times in seven different Mose plays. In all of the plays and later in the penny novels, Mose was always presented as an unbeatable hero, turning the tables on local ‘sharpers’ trying to take advantage of innocent victims (usually 'rubes' visiting the city), running into burning buildings and saving babies, looking for gangs and rowdies to ‘kick up a muss’ with ("I'm bilein' over for a rousin' good fight..."). Besides his passion for fighting fires and trouble makers he also made time for his 'g'hal' Lize, treating her to carriage rides along de Bowery or a 'gala night' to a "first rate shin-dig" at Vauxhall Garden.
As the years passed his legend grew into myth. The following account is an excerpt from the book ‘The Gangs of New York’ by Herbert Asbury. It is perhaps the first time in popular urban culture that a character performs feats of strength and prowess that could be termed ‘super.’
Excerpt from ‘The Gangs of New York’ (pp. 30-34)
But the greatest of the Bowery Boys, and the most imposing figure in all the history of the New York gangs, was a leader who flourished in the forties, and captained the gangsters in the most important of their punitive and marauding expeditions into the Five Points. His identity remains unknown, and there is excellent reason to believe that he may be a myth, but vasty tales of his prowess and of his valor in the fights against the Dead Rabbits and the Plug Uglies have come down through the years, gaining incident and momentum as they came. Under the simple sobriquet of Mose he had become a legendary figure of truly heroic proportions, at once the Samson, the Achilles, and the Paul Bunyan of the Bowery. And beside him, in the lore of the street, marches the diminutive figure of his faithful friend and counselor, by name Syksey, who is said to have coined the phrase “hold de butt,” an impressive plea for the remains of a dead cigar.
The present generation of Bowery riffraff knows little or nothing of the mighty Mose, and only the older men who plod that now dreary and dismal relict of a great street have heard the name. But in the days before the Civil War, when the bowery was in its heyday and the Bowery Boy was the strutting peacock of gangland, songs were sung in honor of his great deeds, and the gangsters surged into battle shouting his name and imploring his spirit to join them and lend power to their arms. He was scarcely cold in his grave before Chanfrau had immortalized him by writing Mose, The Bowery B’hoy, which was first performed before a clamorous audience at the Olympic Theater in 1849, the year of the Astor Place riot.
Mose was at least eight feet tall and broad in proportion, and his colossal bulk was crowned by shock of ginger-colored hair, on which he wore a beaver hat measuring more than two feet from crown to brim. His hands were as large as the hams from a Virginia hog, and on those rare moments when he was in repose they dangled below his knees; it was Syksey’s habit to boast pridefully that his chieftain could stand erect and scratch his kneecap. The feet of the great captain were so large that the ordinary boot of commerce would not fit his big toe; he wore specially constructed footgear, the soles of which were copper plates studded with nails an inch long. Woe and desolation came upon the gangs of the Five Points when the great Mose leaped into their midst and began to kick and stamp; they fled in despair and hid themselves in the innermost depths of the rookeries of Paradise Square.
The strength of the gigantic Mose was as the strength of ten men. Other Bowery Boys went into battle carrying brickbats and the ordinary stave of the time, but Mose, when accoutered for the fray, bore in one hand a great paving stone and in the other a hickory or oak wagon tongue. This was his bludgeon, and when it was lost in the heat of battle he simply uprooted an iron lamp-post and laid about him with great zeal. Instead of the knife affected by his followers, he pinned his faith on a butcher’s cleaver. Once when the dead rabbits overwhelmed his gang and rushed ferociously up the Bowery to wreck the Boys’ headquarters, the great Mose wrenched a tree out of the earth, and holding it by the upper branches, employed it as a flail, smiting the Dead Rabbits even as Samson smote the Philistines. The Five Points thugs broke and fled before him, but he pursued them into their lairs around Paradise Square and wrecked two tenements before his rage cooled. Again, he stood his ground before a hundred of the best brawlers of the Points, ripping huge paving blocks from the street and sidewalk and hurling them into the midst of his enemies, inflicting frightful losses.
In his lighter moments it was the custom of this great god of the gangs to lift a horse car off the tracks and carry it a few blocks on his shoulders, laughing uproariously at the bumping the passengers received when he set it down. And so gusty was his laugh that the car trembled on its wheels, the tree swayed as though in a storm and the Bowery was filled with a rushing roar like the thunder of Niagara. Sometimes Mose unhitched the horses and himself pulled the street car the length of the Bowery at a bewildering speed; once, if the legend is to be credited, he lifted a car above his head at Chatham Square and carried it, with the horses dangling from the traces, on the palm of his hand as far as Astor Place. Again, when a sailing ship was becalmed in the East river and drifting dangerously near the treacherous rocks of Hell Gate, Mose pulled out in a rowboat, lighted his cigar, which was more than two feet long, and sent such mighty billows of smoke against the sails that the ship was saved, and plunged down the river as though driven by a hurricane. So terrific was the force of Mose’s puff, indeed, that the vessel was into the Harbor and beyond Staten Island before it would respond to the helm. Occasionally Mose amused himself by taking up a position in the center of the river and permitting no ship to pass; as fast as they appeared he blew them back. But Mose was always very much at home in the water; he often dived off at the Battery and came up on the Staten Island beach, a distance which is now traversed by ferry boats in twenty-five minutes. He could swim the Hudson River with two mighty strokes, and required but six for a complete circuit of Manhattan Island. But when he wanted to cross the East River to Brooklyn he scorned to swim the half mile or so; he simply jumped.
When Mose quenched his thirst a drayload of beer was ordered from the brewery, and during the hot summer months he went about with a great fifty gallon keg of ale dangling from his belt in lieu of a canteen. When he dined in state the butchers of the Center and Fly markets were busy for days in advance of the great event, slicing hogs and cattle and preparing the enormous roasts which the giant needs must consume to regain his strength; and his consumption of bread was so great that a report that Mose was hungry caused a flurry in the flour market. Four quarts of oysters were but an appetizer, and soup and coffee were served to him by the barrel. For dessert and light snacks he was very fond of fruit. Historians affirm that the cherry trees of Cherry Hill and the mulberry trees of Mulberry Bend vanished because of the building up of the city, but the legend of the Bowery has it that Mose tore them up by the roots and ate the fruit; he was hungry and in no mood to wait until the cherries and mulberries could be picked.
Herbert Asbury, by all accounts, was a sensationalist writer. It is fitting that his translation of the myth should be the definitive modern version. All of the basic elements for a super hero are present, ripping trees and lamp posts out of the ground bare handed, moving ships in the water with the power of his lungs, picking up carriages full of passengers with horses dangling, single handed no less, and running them uptown, able to leap across the east river to Brooklyn ‘in a single bound,’ and perhaps most importantly, running into burning buildings and saving innocents, all are strikingly close to the talents of a certain caped hero of almost a century later.
The book ‘Gangs of New York’ made its first published appearance in 1928. Whether Siegel or Shuster, Superman's creators, knew the tale or not, (both were in their teens when the book came out), it’s interesting to consider that the story was still hanging around in the minds and probably on the lips of the older generations. There’s a slight possibility that the Mose myth was one of the seeds for Superman. Mose the person was said to work as a printer for the New York Sun and Clark Kent was a reporter for the Daily Planet. The odds are pretty good for a direct connection. While I’m objective enough to know this all may be pure unadulterated coincidence, I’m absolutely certain of one thing. There is no other place on the planet that could have been a better back drop for either of these two heroes.
“Yessiree, I'm man and no mistake. One of de b'hoys at dat!" - Mose
Notes:
*A Mose Humphrey is listed in the city directories between 1827 and 1842 as a morocco worker, living on Mulberry Street. For the legend see Fred Mathers, My Angling Friends (New York, 1901), 58, which has Chanfrau spending "weeks" studying Humphrey, However, Baker always insisted Mose was based on a type, not a particular individual, see his interview in the Clipper, 6 April 1878.
The background of A Glance at New York is well described in Peter Gordon Buckley, "To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820-1860," (diss., SUNY at Stony Brook, 1984) 388-399. The best primary source on the creation of the play is the Clipper, 6 April 1878.
Sources:
- The Gangs of New York - Herbert Asbury / 1927 Thunder’s Mouth Press 1998
- Mose the Far-Famed and World-Renowned - Richard M.Dorson / American Literature, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Nov. 1943)
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