 On one day in 1836, there were 921 vessels on the East River waiting to load or unload onto South Street, while an additional 320 waited on the Hudson.At that time, New York City had 62% of the import business in the entire country.The amount of trade kept increasing, and by 1857 "Gleason's Pictorial Magazine" described both South and West Streets as blocks and blocks of "sail-lofts, shipping offices, warehouses of every description, cheap eating-houses, markets, and those indescribable stores, where old cables, junk, anchors, and all sorts of cast-off worldly things, that none but a seaman has a name for, find a refuge."