VALENTINE'S  MANUAL
£f OLD NEW YORK

No.  7                                       FOR 1923                               New Series

THE FLASH AGE OF NEW YORK

By James L. Ford
Author of "Forty-odd Years in a Literary Shop"

The period of readjustment that followed the Great
War has been likened by many students of local history
and economics to that which came after the Civil War,
but there is a wide difference between the two. Each
one was the inevitable result of the disorganization that
always succeeds a great national struggle, but the nation
is saner now than it was half a century ago and the
guiding strings that control its commerce and finance
are, for the most part, in firmer, more conservative hands.

The era of municipal corruption, rash speculation,
crime and general demoralization that began before
peace was signed at Appomattox and ended suddenly
with the panic of 1873 lives in the history of the town
as the Flash Age of New York and well deserves the
title. Marked by the outrageous rule of the Tweed Ring,
the venality of the courts of justice, the daring financial
operations of Fisk and Gould and their associates and
imitators, the amazing series of murders, bank robberies
and jail deliveries and the sensational production of the
Black Crook, the earliest of the "leg dramas,'' the history
of those few years reads to us of the present generation

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