The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  Tweed served the full year. The day of his release he was rearrested because a $6,000,000 civil suit had been filed against him. Bail was set at the unheard-of sum of $3,000,000. Unable to provide this security, Tweed was taken to the Ludlow Street Jail for debtors. This county jail, located in the rear of the Essex Market, extended from Ludlow to Essex Street. As a member of the county board of supervisors, Tweed had overseen construction of the brick prison, in which he now became an unwilling guest. Each of its eighty-seven cells was ten feet square, but the Boss occupied the warden’s quarters, consisting of two rooms. There Tweed took up residence on January 15, 1875.

  How much did the Tweed Ring steal? The exact amount will never be known because the reformers couldn’t find every document revealing the true figures. But apparently Tweed and his henchmen filched about $30,000,000 in cash. Considering the bribes paid to the ring by rich men for cutting their taxes, the plunder from the rigged sale of franchises, the issuance of bonds at extravagant interest rates, plus the sale of other privileges, taxpayers probably lost a total of $200,000,000.

  What happened to Tweed’s cronies? None suffered so much as the Boss himself. Cunningly having assigned their spoils to their wives, brothers, and close friends, most of them fled to Canada, England, and Europe. Mayor Hall was tried, but when a juror died, the trial had to be called off; at his second trial he was acquitted. Judge Barnard was impeached. Judge Cardozo resigned under pressure. Judge McCunn was deposed and died of heartbreak three days later. The new city fathers, realizing that the loot was beyond the law’s reach, promised immunity to Connolly, Sweeny, Garvey, and others if they would give back part of the swag. How much did the city recover? After all expenses had been deducted, a mere $876,241 of the $30,000,000 to $200,000,000 that had been stolen.

  Tweed’s Fifth Avenue mansion and other properties were attached to repay a portion of his thievery. On October 8, 1875, the state supreme court denied his appeal from the huge civil suit pending against him. The Boss worried about his fate if he lost this new case. Meantime, his status as a prisoner was more like the life of Riley than that of Jean Valjean. Almost every afternoon he strolled out of the Ludlow Street Jail, flanked by two guards, stepped into a carriage, drove to the sparcely settled northern section of the city, took a pleasant walk, and then stopped to dine with his wife en route back to jail.

  Late in the afternoon of December 4, 1875, Tweed got out of the carriage in front of the brownstone house his family now occupied at 647 Madison Avenue, between Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth streets. On that day’s outing he was accompanied by William M. Tweed, Jr.; Warden Dunham; and a deputy keeper, named Edward Hagan. As Tweed walked up the stoop, he looked for and found a secret mark on one of the steps. Once inside the four men sat down in the parlor, where they were joined by Tweed’s son-in-law. Darkness fell, and the gas lamps were lighted. About 6:15 P.M. the Boss said that he would like to go upstairs to see his wife. He left. Five minutes later the warden turned to young Tweed and said they’d better leave. Tweed’s son climbed the stairs. A moment later he clattered back down, shouting that he couldn’t find his father. Tweed’s overcoat still hung on a rack in the hall, but he had escaped. While the warden and deputy keeper nervously searched the house, young Tweed tugged at his hair and screamed that his father had ruined the family.

  Tweed had paid $60,000 for help in making his getaway. He may have had the assistance of a smuggler, named Lawrence, with whom he had struck up a friendship in the Ludlow Street Jail. The faint mark on the stoop had told Tweed that this was the chosen day. Instead of going upstairs in his home, Tweed had walked out the back door and cut through his backyard to Fourth (now Park) Avenue. The split second he reached the avenue, a wagon drew up close, and a man’s hand reached out and groped toward him. Another confederate, posing as a pedestrian, muttered, “All right—get in!” Tweed crawled into the wagon, and once inside he was covered up. The vehicle jogged across town to a Hudson River pier, where the Boss was transferred to a rowboat. Under the cover of December darkness he was rowed to the New Jersey shore.

  After landing, he was whisked to an old farmhouse in a lonely wooded area back of the Palisades, and there he hid for three months. He shaved off his whiskers, clipped his hair, donned a wig, and wore gold-rimmed spectacles. So far as any rambler could tell, he was an infirm gentleman, named John Secor, who needed rest and fresh air. Following his ninety-day confinement in New Jersey, Tweed was smuggled to a shad fisherman’s hut on Staten Island.

  From there a small schooner took him to Florida, and for a while he hid out in the Everglades. Next, he rode a fishing smack to Santiago, Cuba. He left Santiago in a bark, named the Carmen, and on September 6, 1876, landed at Vigo, Spain. By this time he had been traced to Cuba, where it was learned that he had departed for Spain. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish asked Spanish authorities to arrest Tweed. Although Spain and the United States had no mutual extradition treaty, the Spaniards voluntarily obliged. They sent to London for a photograph of Tweed, but none being available, they used a Nast caricature of the Boss.

  Tweed was arrested, and the U.S. cruiser Franklin sped from the Mediterranean to Spain to bring him back to America. When the ship steamed into New York Harbor, the broken Boss was transferred to a tug that put him ashore at Pier 46, where a curious crowd had gathered. Tweed was now gaunt and poor. Picking his way down a plank from tug to pier, he lost his balance, fell forward, and tumbled into a heap of coal.

  Back in the Ludlow Street Jail, Tweed learned that his fair-weather friends had escaped prosecution by turning state’s evidence and returning part of their loot. He raged. For the first time he offered to confess everything and did so—fruitlessly. He later said that he had been promised his freedom if he would testify, but the promise was not kept. Cared for in jail by a faithful Negro servant, recognizing passersby, and reciting their personal histories, Tweed finally caught a cold that developed into bronchial pneumonia. He began to die on the morning of April 12, 1878. That noon the clock on the nearby Essex Market started to bong the hour, and just as its last stroke reverberated throughout the jail, William Marcy Tweed died.

  Chapter 27

  THOMAS EDISON LIGHTS THE CITY

  PROGRESS was the magic word in the latter nineteenth century. In New York, as elsewhere in America, the prevailing mood was an optimistic faith that everything was fated to get bigger and better, that people would become richer and happier. Science was a ringmaster taming wild nature, a horn of plenty pouring out so many inventions that progress seemed inevitable.

  In this spirit, and while Boss Tweed still languished in jail, some notable New Yorkers gathered on the evening of May 11, 1877, in the Hotel St. Denis, at Broadway and Eleventh Street. They came to watch Professor Alexander Graham Bell, of Boston, demonstrate a strange new device, called the speaking telephone. He proved that he could speak to an assistant two miles away in Brooklyn. Bell’s success that night marked the beginning of New York’s place in telephone history.

  Six days later the first interstate telephone conversation was held between a man in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Professor Bell in Chickering Hall, at Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street. Soon the renowned vaudeville team of Edward “Ned” Harrigan and Tony Hart presented a sketch, called The Telephone, on the stage of the Theatre Comique, at Broadway near Spring Street.

  The Telephone Company of New York was incorporated in August, 1877, but it failed. In the autumn of 1878 the Bell Telephone Company of New York was organized. The next March it opened New York’s first commercial telephone exchange at 82 Nassau Street, and the following autumn the city got a telephone directory, a small card bearing 252 names. The first telephone operators were boys, but soon they were replaced by bustle-wearing girls. Instead of starting a telephone conversation by saying, “Hello,” subscribers shouted, “Ahoy!”

  The New York Stock Exchange got its first telephone in 1879. Five years later the first regular long-distance service in history went into operation between New Y
ork and Boston; in 1885, between New York and Philadelphia; and in 1892, between New York and Chicago. Telephone concerts became the rage, piano solos played in Philadelphia and elsewhere being heard in New York.

  Rich people enjoyed the convenience of telephones, but almost everyone complained about the telephone wires cobwebbing the sky. Telegraph wires had been bad enough. In the bitter winter of 1874-75 ice had felled telegraph poles and wires all over the city, and mounted fireman, called Cowboys, patrolled the slick streets, warning pedestrians against the danger of live wires. In 1878 a British visitor wrote: “In the old or lower part of the city . . . against the sky, you look upon a perfect maze of telephone and telegraph wires crossing and recrossing each other from the tops of houses. The sky, indeed, is blackened with them, and it is as though you were looking through the meshes of a net.”

  That year, 1878, William C. Whitney, the city’s corporation counsel, said that communication firms needed no special authority to bury their wires and cables under the streets, but die companies were slow to spend money for such a changeover. In 1881 the first underground telephone cables were laid in Attleboro, Massachusetts, and the next year Boston followed suit. In 1884 the New York state legislature ordered “all telegraph, telephone and electric light wires and cables” removed from the surface of New York’s streets before November 1, 1885.

  The law had little effect. Telephone poles rose to 50 feet, then to 60, 70, and 80. In 1887, 90-foot telephone poles were installed along West Street, bordering the Hudson River in lower Manhattan. Each was bisected by 30 double crossarms, looking like ladders mounting toward heaven, and each was strung with 300 separate telephone wires. They remained until after the blizzard of 1888.

  New York responded to the nineteenth century’s avid interest in natural science by founding the American Museum of Natural History. J. Pierpont Morgan was one of seventeen rich men who asked the state legislature for a museum charter. It was granted in 1869. The museum founders soon raised $52,000, with which they bought, among other things, a famous collection of stuffed mammals and birds owned by Prince Maximilian of Germany. This and other early collections were housed at first in the arsenal in Central Park. About eighteen acres of land were acquired along Central Park West between Seventy-seventh and Eighty-first Streets, and in 1874 President Grant laid the cornerstone of the museum’s first building.

  At the site an underground stream—one of many that lace Manhattan—cost the contractor a fortune because he had to divert it and sink foundation walls strong enough to resist the water pressure. This first building, of Victorian Gothic style and later known as the south-central wing, was opened on December 22, 1877, by President Rutherford B. Hayes. By then Morgan had been elected the museum’s treasurer, a tide he held for fifteen years. Far from being just an exhibit of old bones and stuffed birds, the museum developed into a dynamic research laboratory, a school for advanced study, a publishing house for scientific manuscripts, the sponsor of exploring parties sent out all over the world, and probably the finest institution of its kind anywhere on earth.

  It was a great day for New York’s Catholics when St. Patrick’s Cathedral was dedicated on May 25, 1879. Except during the Civil War, when construction stopped, passersby for more than twenty years had gawked at laborers hard at work on the Gothic Revival masterpiece. Now that all the scaffolding had been removed and the grounds tidied up, New York newspapers hailed it as the noblest temple ever raised to the memory of St. Patrick.

  Archbishop John Hughes had been succeeded by Brooklyn-born Archbishop John McCloskey, who in 1875 became America’s first Roman Catholic cardinal. On the day of dedication a host of Catholic dignitaries, headed by six archbishops and thirty-five bishops, watched solemnly as John Cardinal McCloskey walked around the outside of the Cathedral to bless it. The granite exterior resembled the Cologne Cathedral, and the interior suggested the Cathedral of Amiens—a forest of white marble piers, kaleidoscopic stained-glass windows, dominated by an impressive rose window twenty-six feet in diameter. St. Patrick’s ranked eleventh in size among the great cathedrals and churches of the world.

  The year 1879 also marked the first use of the name Madison Square Garden. Several years earlier the New York and Harlem Railroad had abandoned its depot on the block bounded by Madison and Fourth avenues from Twenty-sixth to Twenty-seventh Street P. T. Barnum and another showman, named W. C. Coup, leased the property and erected a one-story building with a square four-story tower. They called it the Great Roman Hippodrome. While overseeing the construction job, Coup had a nervous breakdown. He sold his interest to Barnum, who put on entertainment combining the features of a circus, menagerie, and museum. Barnum then sold the place to Patrick S. Gilmore, official bandmaster of the Union army during the Civil War. The best-known bandleader of his day, Gilmore changed the name to Gilmore’s Concert Garden. Finally, in 1879, the name was again altered to Madison Square Garden. It was the first of four separate buildings to bear the name, two of them on the original site.

  Bullfights were held in New York City in 1880. A promoter, called Angel Fernandez, built a bullring at the corner of 6th (now Lenox) Avenue and 116th Street in Harlem. Downtown New Yorkers got there by taking either the Sixth Avenue or the Third Avenue elevated. That summer billboards announced that “a first-class company of Spanish bull-fighters under the direction of the famous Spanish Espada, Angel Valdemoro,” would be brought to the city for this gala occasion. Puzzled New Yorkers had to be told that espada means swordsman.

  The bulls were shipped from Texas. The general admission was $1.50, the arena doors opened at 3 P.M., and the fights began at 5 P.M. Among the 3,000 to 4,000 persons attending the first of the 3-day fights were parents who dragged along children. Admission for tots under eight was half price. Most youngsters enjoy horror scenes, but these must have been disappointed, for no gore flowed. The rosettes were glued onto the bulls instead of being stuck into them. Rubber caps were placed on the bulls’ horns, and the matadors were not allowed to kill the beasts.

  More refined diversion than bullfighting was offered New Yorkers in 1880 with the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At a dinner held in Paris about a dozen years earlier, John Hay had suggested that New York City establish a museum not for art’s sake, but for the sake of humanity. Hay was a man of cultivated tastes who had served as private secretary to President Lincoln, and when he made this suggestion, he was first secretary of the American legation in the French capital. His idea fired the interest of the Union League Club, and the chairman of its art committee called a meeting to discuss it. Committee members felt ashamed that New York had no art gallery to compare with those already established in several smaller American cities. Poet-editor William Cullen Bryant was named chairman of a committee of fifty to launch a campaign to raise $250,000 for a public art museum. Another patron was J. Pierpont Morgan, who now controlled the Vanderbilt properties.

  The museum’s first full-time director was Italian-born, American-naturalized Luigi Palma di Cesnola. While serving as American consul to the island of Cyprus from 1865 to 1877, he had excavated Greek and Roman ruins and put together the Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities, the largest of its kind in the world. His stone sculptures, bronzes, pottery, and the like were bought by the new museum.

  Its trustees had acquired property in Central Park along the west side of Fifth Avenue from Eightieth to Eighty-fifth Street. This had been a disgraceful area; nearby Seneca Village, the largest and foulest squatter camp in the park, had stunk up the neighborhood. Now there rose the first permanent wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Until the building was completed, the museum occupied two temporary homes. The first was at 681 Fifth Avenue, in a place once known as Allen Dodworth’s Dancing Academy. The large skylighted dance hall was converted into a picture gallery whose walls were hung with 175 paintings, mostly of Dutch and Flemish masters, brought from Europe. When the growing collection began to overflow the renovated dance hall, the museum moved into its second temp
orary home, a mansion on the south side of Fourteenth Street just west of Sixth Avenue.

  In 1880, when the city’s shopping center reached Fourteenth Street, the museum was able to move into its permanent home. The first wing, set well back from Fifth Avenue, was a red brick structure designed in the Tuscan Gothic style. As New York City dedicated one new institution after another, American Presidents were kept busy shuttling back and forth between the national capital and New York. On March 30, 1880, President Hayes formally opened the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It became one of the greatest museums of art on earth.

  In the early part of the 1880’s New York streets flickered under the glow of gaslights more picturesque than efficient. At twilight it was pleasant to watch lamplighters making their rounds, using a long stick to poke open one side of each square gas lamp, turn on the jet, and set it aflame. But the lights were dim, costly, and troublesome.

  A scientist, named Charles Francis Brush, had invented an electric arc light, and by 1879 his creation was illuminating Cleveland’s Public Square. In December of that year the first Brush arc lights were installed in New York on Broadway from Fourteenth to Twenty-sixth Street. By July, 1880, Brush had erected one 6,000-candlepower lamp atop a 160-foot pole in Madison Square and another in Union Square. They could be seen from the Orange Mountains of New Jersey 16 miles away, but their dazzling brilliance was unbearable at close range. Women complained that the lamps made their faces look ghostly white.

  At this time Thomas Alva Edison was “fired with the idea of an incandescent lamp as opposed to the arc lamp,” as he expressed it. Born in Ohio of a Dutch father and Scottish mother, young Edison had only three months of formal schooling. He was tutored by his mother and at the age of twelve read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He went to work as a tramp telegraph operator but vowed that he would become an inventor. In late May or early June, 1869, he arrived in New York for the first time, nearly penniless and deep in debt. The only friend he had here was not at home, so the boyish-looking twenty-two-year-old trudged the streets the whole night through.