It being a fine, bright, mild morning, I got up early, to take a walk on the Battery, the most glorious place for a morning or evening stroll, to be found in the world. Coming down into the entry, I found it cluttered up with a specimen of almost every thing that goes to the composition of house keeping, and three or four sturdy fellows with hand barrows, on which they were piling Ossa upon Pelion. I asked what the matter was, but all I could get out of them was, “First of May, sir—please stand out of the way—first of May, Sir.” So I passed on into the street, where I ran the gauntlet, among looking glasses, old pictures, baskets of crockery, and all other matters and things in general. The side walks were infested with processions of this sort, and in the middle of the streets, were innumerable carts loaded with a general jail delivery of all the trumpery, good, bad and indifferent, that the carelessness of servants had broken, or the economy of the housewives preserved. […] while all the apology I got, was “First of May—take care, sir—first of May.”1
I’ve been spending a lot of time digging into the writings of early 19th century authors – and yes, that has mostly meant spending time with Washington Irving.
Now, Washington Irving had a friend, James Kirk Paulding, who wrote a satire about May Day in New York (quoted above) that drew a very vivid picture in my mind because it very nearly described a similar “holiday” in Massachusetts known as Allston Christmas. Except worse. Everyone across the city appears to have moved simultaneously. Pets were lost. A Brooklyn newspaper noted that the pet business did very well due to the number of lost or killed pets – goldfish being particularly prone to accidents on Moving Day. “If there are children in the household, they should be sent to visit some friend for the day,” suggests an advice column in the Brooklyn Times Union on 12 April 1902.
To read the remainder of this post, you can find it here: “First of May, sir! Out of the way!”