A History of New York in 27 Buildings

by Sam Roberts

  Originally envisioned as a replacement for City Hall, it morphed into a cornucopia of corruption, a horn of plenty, and plenty more—a county courthouse, then, successively, the home of the City Court, the Family Court, and an assortment of city offices. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Kramer vs. Kramer and Gangs of New York would film there. The Bloomberg administration reversed an agreement to alter the interior to meet the specifications of the Museum of the City of New York and, once the newly reconstituted Department of Education was placed under mayoral control, the schools’ administrators were transplanted from downtown Brooklyn into the old courthouse, where City Hall could literally provide greater oversight.

  Officially, it is known as 52 Chambers Street, but it is commonly called the Tweed Courthouse in a begrudging homage to the audacious plunderer. In 1966, in the American Institute of Architects Guide to New York City, Elliot Willensky and Norval White likened the building to a “Palladian country house” and described the central well as “one of the few great spaces our city government still maintains.” Designating the hybrid mid-nineteenth-century Italianate and later High Victorian edifice worthy of conservation, the Landmarks Preservation Commission described the courthouse as “one of the few remaining and one of the finest of both architectural trends in a major institutional building.” Inside, the commission cited the cast-iron staircases that flank the rotunda from the basement to the third floor and the cast-iron columns that support the balcony on the second floor (which was originally the main entrance until the front steps were lopped off in 1942 so Chambers Street could be widened) as “the sole known surviving cast-iron interior space in the city where that architectural material was introduced and most extensively developed.”

  Construction began on September 27, 1861, on the site of another almshouse and a cemetery for African Americans, sandwiched between City Hall and Chambers Street. The cornerstone was laid three months later. Sealed inside, among other artifacts, were two copies of the Bible, Washington’s Farewell Address, and, presciently, the Manual of the Board of Education for 1861. Mayor Fernando Wood expressed the hope that “truth and justice may be maintained here by a learned and incorruptible judiciary.” Justice Thomas W. Clerke of the State Supreme Court voiced a similar sentiment. With surprising specificity, Clerke foreshadowed Tweed’s trial a decade later in the very courthouse from which he would extract his final ill-gotten windfall—the courthouse that sealed his fate.

  “All the other branches of a Government may be inefficient and corrupt,” Clerke declared. “The Executive may be faithless or incompetent; the Legislature may be tyrannical, ignorant, and under the influence of sordid motives; yet deplorable as such a state of things may be, detestable and lost to every sense of shame, honor and patriotism, as such betrayers of their sacred trust must be, handing down a heritage of disgrace—a tainted name to their children and their children’s children—yet, if the administration of justice remains pure and unspotted, if the ermine is yet unsullied, some hope is left to the injured State, and citizens will not altogether despair.”

  The Times reported stenographically on the cornerstone-laying ceremony, but editorially, still referring to the building as “the new city hall” (the first reference to it as a courthouse was around 1869), complained that notwithstanding the number of speeches delivered that invoked New York’s distinguished history, not a single word in any speech was devoted to the liability levied on future taxpayers. “We do not see in any one of them any very satisfactory explanation of the reasons for throwing upon the city this enormous additional burden,” the Times editorialist wrote.

  “Enormous” was a robust adjective for a newspaper that was not prone to hyperbole. (Robert Roosevelt, a Manhattan congressman and Teddy’s uncle, would call the bills for the courthouse “not merely monstrous, they are manifestly fabulous.”) Even by 1871, the uncompleted New York County Courthouse had cost sixteen times more than its counterpart in the city of Brooklyn. Ultimately, though, the Times and others would discover that the courthouse cost New York’s taxpayers at least thirteen million dollars, or roughly three billion in today’s dollars. That was more than the state had paid to build the 363-mile Erie Canal between Albany and Buffalo earlier in the nineteenth century. When all the invoices were finally accounted for, New Yorkers spent twice as much to build the new courthouse as the U.S. government anted up in 1867 to buy Alaska.

  Despite his vast power—Tweed had been elected an alderman in 1851, when he was twenty-seven, became a congressman the following year, was appointed to the newly empowered New York County Board of Supervisors, served as a state senator, and controlled the Manhattan Democratic machine as the grand sachem of Tammany Hall—even Tweed could not have swindled the city out of so much money by himself. His cohorts included Abraham Oakey Hall (known as “the Elegant One”), who was mayor from 1868 to 1872; Peter Barr Sweeny (there are various interpretations as to why the middle initial also inspired the nickname “Brains”), a former Manhattan prosecutor whom Tweed had installed as the city chamberlain; and Richard Connolly, whose moniker, “Slippery Dick,” was sufficient by Tammany standards to later qualify him for comptroller.

  For two decades, the Tweed Ring plundered the city, elevating civil servants, elected and appointed, into powerful plutocrats. Few citizens suspected the magnitude of their thievery. While their rapacious pillaging was an open secret, they remained virtually immune from prosecution (since they picked the prosecutors and the judges) and from the press (they bought off potentially hostile publishers with lucrative contracts to print legal notices for the courts and for city government). And, even after the Times exposed Tweed’s most egregious siphoning of city funds in excruciating detail, while Thomas Nast’s caustic caricatures in Harper’s Weekly unsettled Tweed’s faithful if less literate constituency, he still managed to win reelection to the state senate.

  Tweed valiantly rejected an offer from a few friends to pay the full cost of erecting a statue of himself, preferring instead that the funds be raised by public subscription to demonstrate the breadth of his support. The Times wrote incredulously: “We think that a community which can allow itself to be pillaged in a thousand directions by such a man as Tweed, ought to have his statue thrust in its face, as about the most fitting insult which could possibly leveled at it. When the statue is finished, it will bear witness to a decline in the standard of public honor, and to an apathy on all questions which ought to stir men the deepest, far more remarkable than the peculiar virtues of Tweed.” A few months later, the newspaper suggested that even more than a statue, the courthouse itself embodied his career.

  “It was there that the ‘Boss’ laid the foundation of his fortunes, both pecuniary and political; it was there that he learned the true value of money, and its intimate connection with his own advancement, and the success of pure Democracy,” the Times wrote. “Had the new Courthouse never been built, (or begun), the ‘Boss’ would never have reached the proud position he occupies today.”

  Seeking to stifle some distractive mutterings of reform, city officials established a special investigative committee to audit the courthouse’s ballooning budget. After a twelve-day inquiry, the commission delivered its verdict: construction was proceeding apace. The special commissioners billed the city eighteen thousand dollars—nearly half of which they spent on printing their final report, which Tweed published through the company he had acquired in 1864. It seemed as if all the gears (and palms) had been greased, until January 1871, when James Watson, an ex-convict whom Tweed had installed as the county auditor, died after being kicked in the head by a horse in a sleighing accident. He was succeeded by Matthew J. O’Rourke, who had covertly become a Tammany turncoat and secret crony of Sheriff James O’Brien, a Tweed rival who, with another mole in the comptroller’s office, delivered to the Times what the newspaper headlined that July as “The Secret Accounts.” By November, those articles led to Tweed’s arrest, the first official response to the challenge—“What are yo
u going to do about it?”—that was supposedly the boss’s taunting retort to previous accusations by choleric reformers.

  Inflation aside, the allegations of extortion, bribery, inflated invoices, and kickbacks were staggering. Andrew J. Garvey, a Tammany functionary who, not for nothing, earned the sobriquet “Prince of Plasterers,” took home $3 million—including $1.2 million for repairing his own flawed plastering—for work that was actually worth about $30,000. The interior was largely cast-iron and almost devoid of woodworking, but a carpenter collected $360,000 for one month of filigreeing (the Times estimated that nearly $2.2 million was diverted to carpentry that actually cost about $30,000). Bills were submitted and approved for nearly $180,000 to buy three tables and forty chairs, for $350,000 to purchase carpets worth about $13,000, for $41,000 to procure what must have been enough brooms to equip an army of sweepers. Preferring to work shrouded from sunlight, the miscreants had appropriated more than $41,000 for awnings—enough, at the highest going rate, to shade more than sixteen hundred windows.

  One Tweed contemporary, George Washington Plunkitt, a former butcher turned Tammany district leader who famously moralized decades later from his pulpit at the shoeshine stand in the Tweed Courthouse, justified becoming a millionaire through political pull by saying, “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.” Plunkitt defined those opportunities, for the most part, as “honest graft.” But imagine if William L. Riordan, the New York Evening Post reporter who was his Boswell, had asked if that facile phrase encompassed the opportunities that Tweed and his cronies had taken in that very courthouse. Tweed finally went to trial in 1873. He was convicted, was sentenced to twelve years, appealed, won a reduction to one year, and was charged again, but escaped to Spain while on leave. Thanks to Nast’s caricatures, he was recognized, captured, and returned. He died in the Ludlow Street Jail in 1878—by which time the courthouse was still not finished.

  It would take twenty years in all to complete. The Court of Appeals occupied the building in 1867, prematurely as it turned out. The judges repeatedly appealed to city officials to compete the roof, at least, to keep out the rain and snow. Some delays could be attributed to the diversion of men and matériel to military priorities during the Civil War. Others resulted from rising costs that required new protocols for approval by complicit politicians. Still others followed the death in 1871 of John Kellum, the original architect. Kellum had envisioned a three-story Anglo-Italianate building that encompassed thirty courtrooms beneath a dome fifty feet in diameter topped by a gilt ball one hundred feet high. When work resumed several years after Kellum’s death, the commission to complete the courthouse fell to Leopold Eidlitz. Eidlitz retained Kellum’s cast-iron balustrades and ornamental panels in the rotunda, but appended a not unattractive though anomalous Romanesque wing and introduced polychromed brickwork. When construction of the marble-ashlar-clad courthouse finally finished in 1881, the building got very mixed reviews.

  The cadre of preservationists who sought to save City Hall generally did not share the same affection for the courthouse. “Old ‘gems’ like City Hall, linked to the city’s early heritage, had to be preserved,” Michael H. Bogart wrote in 1999 in the Journal of Urban History. “On the other hand, buildings like the Tweed Courthouse and the post office, tainted by the memory of more recent corruption and ethnic politics, could well be eliminated and not replaced.” Many late-nineteenth-century critics also couldn’t see past the cloud of corruption that engulfed, of all public buildings, one that had been consecrated as a temple of justice. “It might be considered that the cornerstone of the temple was conceived in sin, and its dome, if ever finished, will be glazed all over with iniquity,” a leading reformer, Judge George C. Barrett, said. “The whole atmosphere was corrupt. You look up at its ceilings and find gaudy decorations; you wonder which is the greatest, the vulgarity or the corruptness of the place.”

  By the twentieth century, after the courthouse had suffered from years of neglect, even more critics deemed it dispensable. Morris Robert Werner, a historian of Tammany Hall, described it as “a gloomy, meandering mess of unattractive rooms designed in the worst taste and executed with ugly materials.” In their 1967 book Tigers of Tammany, Alfred Connable and Edward Silverfarb denigrated the courthouse as a “grim, gray building” that was “not beautiful nor does it appear to be expensive.” Still, while visions for a cohesive civic center downtown uncontaminated by the Tweed Courthouse came and went, movements developed to save the building. One reason was, of course, its historical significance. The other was its cost. Over time, public sentiment had shifted to the point that it became gospel among many New Yorkers that since the courthouse had cost so much to build, it would be equally injudicious to tear it down. By the mid-1970s, when the building had deteriorated into what officials described as “one million cubic feet of unusable space,” the city was on the brink of bankruptcy and could no longer afford to demolish the building, much less replace it.

  And by the early 2000s, when the city finally decided not only to save the courthouse but to restore it to its original elegance for the Department of Education, the renovations wound up costing ninety million dollars—twice the projected budget. The restoration was so successful that while nobody was suggesting a posthumous pardon for the boss, perhaps his legacy gained some luster, too. “Tweed may have cheated the taxpayers,” Paul Goldberger wrote in the New Yorker in 2002, “but he gave them something for their money—one of the finest public buildings the city has ever had.” Jack Waite, who oversaw the reconstruction, said, “If there’s one building that really encapsulates the history of New York during the second half of the nineteenth century, when the city became the capital of the world, it’s this one.”

  Now the headquarters of the Department of Education, the County Court House is best known for its chief boodler, Boss Tweed. (George Samoladas)

  7

  THE MARBLE PALACE

  A. T. Stewart, a Scottish immigrant, defied naysayers to build his Marble Palace, the prototype for the modern department store. (Moses King, ca. 1892)

  If you’ve never heard of Alexander Turney Stewart, think Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Saks, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, and the other merchants who followed in Stewart’s footsteps. When Stewart died in 1876, his obituary consumed six of the seven columns on the front page of the New York Times. The editorial page gushed with accolades, lauding Stewart as “the man who has amassed the largest fortune ever accumulated within the span of a single life” (he had multiplied the five thousand dollars he started with in 1822 to nearly fifty million dollars by the time of his death). As a taxpayer, Stewart was the second largest individual contributor to the city treasury, by far the largest to the nation’s. In a 2004 book, American Architectural History, the Dartmouth College professor Mona Domosh proclaimed Stewart “the most influential retailer in nineteenth-century New York.” While his biography does not begin quite as ingloriously as a Horatio Alger story, its concluding chapters lionize an Irish immigrant who had grown disproportionately more prosperous than any Alger protagonist. Yet hardly anyone today has heard of A. T. Stewart, because the empire he built collapsed when he died—a natural death eclipsed by a bizarre epilogue.

  Details about his boyhood are sketchy. Stewart’s father died a few weeks before he was born in Lisburn, county Antrim, Ireland. His mother remarried and emigrated to America with her new husband, leaving him behind when he was about three to be raised by his maternal grandfather. He figured on becoming a minister. But when Alexander’s grandfather died, he quit Trinity College in Dublin, pawned his watch and sold his books, and immigrated to America in 1818. He was sixteen years old and alone. He taught school in New York until he turned twenty-one and inherited his father’s estate.

  After circling back to Ireland briefly to settle the family’s financial affairs, he returned to New York as a self-tutored entrepreneur. He disembarked laden with as much Irish lace, linen, scallop trimmings, and poplin as he could carry, determined to prove
that the anonymous and thrifty teacher who had saved two hundred dollars in salary when he left his adopted hometown and had now returned with five thousand dollars, half of it in merchandise bought wholesale, intended to make a name and fortune for himself. The New York to which he re-immigrated was a boom town. The city’s population had tripled to two hundred thousand since the nineteenth century began, and the opening of the Erie Canal now assured its future.

  On September 2, 1825, the New York Daily Advertiser carried this notice: “A. T. Stewart, just arrived from Belfast, offers for sale to the Ladies of New York a choice selection of Fresh Drygoods at Two Hundred Eighty-three Broadway.” His first store was tiny, about twelve by thirty feet. But Stewart was a born salesman. He had a knack for satisfying customers, especially when the customers were women, whose status at the time was largely defined by what they wore. “Half the time of the fashionable ladies of New York, at the lowest calculation,” the New York Herald observed in 1846, “is spent in the dry goods store, in laying out plans for personal decoration.”

  The young nation to which Stewart had recently returned was in the early throes of industrialization. Mass production meant standardization, which, in turn, created volume, which demanded more space in stores for display. Stewart shortly expanded to more commodious quarters at 262 Broadway, then to an even larger space at No. 257. He installed what were likely the first full-length mirrors from abroad, personally greeted customers, gave a 10 percent discount to teachers and clergymen, and introduced the sale of his existing stock “at actual cost” because Stewart, “having purchased a large amount of goods, soon to arrive, is obliged to make room for these.” He marked down spurned merchandise, sometimes even below cost, to accommodate the expanded turnover generated by mass production. But while he stooped to sidewalk sales of newly delivered merchandise (“you buy your goods, pay for them and carry them away—we can’t even afford to pay for wrapping-paper and string”), Stewart was also cultivating customers whose means of conveyance anointed them as the carriage trade. To woo a better class of consumers, his rubric became “Not How Cheap, But How Good,” and his modest shop evolved into a palatial department store. He sold fancy goods at a discount, bought the inventory of competitors at auction for depressed prices during financial panics, and in 1837, by the age of thirty-three, he was already a millionaire.