CITY DESK - Death.(instances of disastrous loss of life in NYC history)(Brief Article)

'America the Beautiful" says, "Thine alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears." But that is a hope, not a description. New York has been dimmed by everything from accident to evil; by war, disease, riot, and fire.

The first disaster to strike New York was the worst: its recapture by Britain during the Revolutionary War in the summer and fall of 1776. The military match-up was grossly uneven. The Americans under George Washington had 19,000 troops, most of them militia, and no navy. The British came to the city in several hundred ships-"I thought all London was afloat," wrote one Maryland private-with 32,000 British and Hessian professional soldiers aboard. On August 27, the British beat an American force in what is now Brooklyn, killing 500 and taking 1,000 prisoners, and on November 16, they captured the last American redoubt in Manhattan-Fort Washington, far up on the West Side-taking over 2,500 prisoners.

The city suffered from the occupation. One quarter of it burned early on, in a blaze that may have been set by pro-American arsonists; British soldiers were often disorderly, and their officers extortionate. The American prisoners suffered far worse: The British kept them in the stale holds of ships moored in Wallabout Bay in the East River. The prison population was augmented by captured American seamen, and winnowed by deaths from bad food, dysentery, and beatings. One captive described his fellows as "mere walking skeletons . . . overrun with lice from head to foot." Actual skeletons, the remains of bodies thrown overboard every morning at the call, "Prisoners, turn out your dead," turned up along the waterfront for years. The death toll of Americans on the prison ships is supposed to have been 11,500, which strikes me as a high figure, though every reference work cites it (by way of comparison, American deaths in battle, on land and sea, were 6,700).

Malignant cholera was one of the great world plagues of the 19th century. It brought death by dehydration from diarrhea and vomiting. An 1817 outbreak in Bengal spread through Persia, Russia, and Europe until, in 1832, it crossed the Atlantic. In June it was reported in Quebec and Montreal, and moved south down the lakes and the Hudson until, on June 26, an Irish immigrant in New York named Fitzgerald came down with violent stomach cramps. Martin Van Buren, angling to be vice president, prudently canceled a political trip to the city. The socialite Philip Hone recorded the sudden deaths in his diary. "George E. Smith, alderman of the Fourth Ward . . . attended the board on Saturday night until eleven o'clock, was taken ill with cholera at three in the morning, and died in seven hours . . . Last week a man was found in the road at Harlem, who had died of cholera. A coroner's inquest was called, and of twenty persons, jury and witnesses, who were present, nine are now dead." Half of the city's 200,000 souls temporarily moved out. When the epidemic finally ended at ...