DAMN INTERESTING

May Have Settled

Announcement #33 • written by Alan Bellows

It was early in the morning on the 1st of May 1832 in New York City. The ordinarily gentle horse-drawn traffic of the up-and-coming metropolis seemed a bit more dense than usual, and as the morning progressed the avenues and boulevards became increasingly crowded. At 9:00 AM, almost as if on cue, thousands of doors on thousands of buildings burst open to vomit humans, furniture, and other sundries out into the bright morning sun. Within moments the streets of New York were a jangling amorphous pandemonium.
English author Frances Trollope happened to be in New York City to witness this peculiar spectacle:

On the 1st of May the city of New York has the appearance of sending off a population flying from the plague, or of a town which had surrendered on condition of carrying away all their goods and chattels. Rich furniture and ragged furniture, carts, wagons, and drays, ropes, canvas, and straw, packers, porters, and draymen, white, yellow, and black, occupy the streets from east to west, from north to south, on this day.

All over New York, tenants along with their belongings abandoned their abodes to criss-cross the city in mass migration to fresh dwellings. This was Moving Day. Owing to a quirk in New York law, nearly all rental contracts expired every year on May 1st at 9:00 AM, resulting in the simultaneous relocation of a multitude of persons and property. For over a century, from colonial times until shortly after the Second World War, it was the custom for the city to spend every May 1st as a scarcely navigable morass of humans, carts, and livestock.
We here at Damn Interesting headquarters (i.e., my residence) have recently performed our own interpretation of Moving Day, having spent an exhausting morning, noon, and night shuttling furniture, appliances, and corrugated cardboard cubes from one structure to another. The preceding packing and subsequent reorganizing have unavoidably disrupted our normally abnormal posting schedule. Next week, however, our jangling amorphous pandemonium will be over, and we shall be back to posting new articles.