The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  Down on the soggy earth a teen-age boy quivered with excitement. As the son of the contractor who had built die pedestal, he had been granted the honor of signaling to Bartholdi when to unveil the face of the statue. Most eyes were on President Cleveland, whose huge fingers were locked across his great belly.

  The ceremony began. The Reverend Dr. Richard S. Storrs of Brooklyn read the invocation, but boat whistles erased many of his words. Then Count De Lesseps, his majestic mustache defying the elements, read in French some prepared remarks from large loose sheets of paper, italicizing his meaning with quick Gallic gestures. His voice was inaudible to the waiting Bartholdi, high above his head.

  William Maxwell Evarts stood up. Born in Boston, now United States Senator from New York and chairman of the Statue of Liberty committee, Evarts was an orator whose talent was better suited to an indoor hall than to a rain-swept island. When the Senator paused a moment to rest his voice, the contractor’s son thought that he had finished speaking. The boy waved his arm at Bartholdi. The sculptor and his helpers tugged at ropes, the French flag slithered off the face of Miss Liberty, and people and ships exploded in a bedlam of cheers and whistles. Evarts looked up in surprise. He gasped. He resumed speaking, but the pandemonium was so loud that he could not be heard. The tumult was augmented by a broadside fired from the flagship of the American naval squadron and a band’s brassy rendition of “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Evart’s lips still moved in pantomime. President Cleveland, courteous as ever, made a pretense of listening to him.

  At last Evarts finished. The President got up and said a few words about accepting the statue from the French in behalf of the American people. He was followed by Chauncey M. Depew, another renowned orator. Depew had a hulking nose, thin lips, and long sideburns, and he wore a gates-ajar collar and lapelled waistcoat. His rhetorical flourishes wearied the audience, which had been sitting in the chill and rain since 3:15 P.M. Finally the benediction was pronounced by Henry C. Potter, bishop of the Protestant Episcopal diocese of New York, who removed his soaked mortarboard and let the raindrops fall on his eyelids.

  It was done. The world’s best-known statue had been dedicated, and from this day forward it stood at New York’s doorway, a permanent reminder of an elusive ideal. Spiritually it belonged to all mankind—not just to New Yorkers, not just to Americans. It developed into a shrine, where all might worship. Perhaps an attendant said it best when he murmured, “Whoever visits the Statue of Liberty feels that he has come home.”

  Chapter 31

  THE BLIZZARD OF 1888

  THE AIR was soft. Birds twittered in trees. Farmers worked their fields. It had been the mildest winter in seventeen years, and now it seemed about over. This Saturday, March 10, 1888, wedges of geese honked through the heavens toward Canada, red-breasted robins skittered across greening lawns, bushes budded in Central Park, and Walt Whitman sent the New York Herald a poem about the first flower of spring.

  The weatherman decided to make one last check before calling it a day. He was Elias B. Dunn, jokingly called Farmer Dunn because the nation’s forecasting service recently had been transferred to the Department of Agriculture. Dunn and 3 assistants staffed the local Weather Bureau atop the 5-story Equitable Building, at 120 Broadway. Rising from the roof to a height of 150 feet above the street was a pole topped by a wind gauge.

  Dunn phoned coast guard headquarters at Peck Slip on the Lower East Side. Stationed up and down the Atlantic seaboard were weather observers, who dispatched reports to the coast guard by telegraph or carrier pigeons. That day they had nothing unusual to announce. Dunn next opened a telegraph line to Washington. The news was much the same. On the basis of these reports Dunn drew up his Sunday forecast for New York and vicinity: “Cloudy followed by light rain and clearing.” Then he took a hydraulic elevator down to the lobby of the Equitable Building and left for his home in Brooklyn.

  Sunday, March 11, was a relatively warm day. At noon the temperature rose to a high of forty degrees. Still, it was a gloomy day, for the sun never came out. Telling one another that winter was over at last, New Yorkers opened windows to air their rooms and went to church as usual. In the afternoon, as predicted, rain began falling—warm and gentle raindrops that peppered the dry pavements. Then, to everyone’s surprise, the light rain thickened and quickened and developed into a downpour, which exploded into a cloudburst.

  Gutters choked on muddy waters. The temperature sank. People began to grow uneasy. The drumming downpour flooded basements, slowed horse-drawn streetcars, and delayed the city’s four elevated lines. Although New Yorkers had no way of knowing it at the time, around Washington and Baltimore the rain turned to sleet, and ice congealed on telegraph and telephone wires. Two separate storms were zeroing in on the eastern seaboard—one moving down from the north in a southeasterly direction, the other blasting up from the south in a north-northeasterly line.

  Sunday was “Farmer” Dunn’s day off; but as he watched from a window of his home, he began to worry, so he bundled up and left for his office. Ice slashed through the sky on a rising wind. Streets and sidewalks glinted with slick layers of ice. Before Dunn arrived at the Equitable Building at 5 P.M., his assistants put out Monday’s forecast: “Fair and warmer.” Hastily shucking off his coat, Dunn tried telegraphing Washington weather headquarters. No response. He worked the telephone. No answer. However, he was able to raise coast guardsmen at Peck Slip. They said that they hadn’t heard from any of their weather spotters in hours. At 6:50 P.M., with the temperature down to 36 degrees and still sinking, Dunn issued a revised forecast, predicting a cold wave. At 10 o’clock that Sunday night Alfred E. Smith’s mother told her fourteen-year-old boy to shutter the family candy store in the basement of their new home, at 12 Dover Street, on the Lower East Side.

  On Monday morning, March 12, about ten minutes after midnight, the sleet and ice changed into dry snow, which whisked through the city in blinding clouds. At dawn seventeen-year-old Bernard M. Baruch arose in his home at 49 East Sixtieth Street, tugged heavy clothing onto his six-foot frame, and trudged through growing snowdrifts thirty-nine blocks to the College of the City of New York, at Lexington Avenue and Twenty-third Street. Baruch was surprised to find few fellow students in his classroom. Meantime, down on the Lower East Side, Al Smith hopped out of bed and bounded to a window with the rapture of a boy seeing the first big snowfall of his life. Already the Smith candy store in the basement was buried under snow and could not be reached from inside the building. Al Smith didn’t give a hoot about the storm itself; he fretted about his Scotch terrier bitch and her four puppies shivering in a back room down there.

  By five o’clock that Monday morning all railway service in and out of the city had come to a halt. Not a single ship entered or left the greatest port in the world. The mercury dropped lower and lower. The wind rose higher and higher. When gusts roared to seventy-five miles an hour, the snowstorm became a hurricane, descending on the city like a raid of white-sheeted Klansmen. In some narrow streets the wind blew straight up toward the sky. From the edge of every tall building a flapping, weaving, lashing banner of snow rippled through the turbulent air.

  J. Pierpont Morgan, the fifty-year-old financier, marched manfully out of his home at 219 Madison Avenue, climbed into his cab, and rode downtown to his office in the Drexel Building. About the same time Roscoe Conkling left his home on Twenty-ninth Street for his Wall Street law office. The former Congressman and U.S. Senator was still handsome and athletic, despite his fifty-eight years. That very day the New York Herald published a story from Buffalo reporting a Conkling for President boom, but few subscribers received copies of the paper.

  About 7 A.M., with the thermometer sinking to 21 degrees and the hurricane worsening, many city dwellers plunged outdoors in a holiday mood. They enjoyed bucking the elements as their primitive ancestors had done. Class distinctions disappeared. In the face of a common hazard people were uncommonly helpful to one another.

  Of course, the storm i
mposed special responsibilities on men like Henry D. Purroy, the fire commissioner. At 7:45 A.M., using the only city telegraph line still working, he sent this message: “I am snowed in at Fordham. No trains running. Impossible to reach city. Spare no expense to keep the department working.” His dispatch reached Firemen’s Hall, a three-story building at 127 Mercer Street, and was read with a frown by Fire Chief Charles O. Shay.

  Julian Ralph of the New York Sun, perhaps the greatest reporter of his day, described the blizzard this way:

  The wind howled, whistled, banged, roared and moaned as it rushed along. It fell upon the house sides in fearful gusts, it strained great plate glass windows, rocked the frame houses, pressed against the doors so that it was almost too dangerous to open them. It was a visible, substantial wind, so freighted was it with snow. It came in whirls, it descended in layers, it shot along in great blocks, it rose and fell and corkscrewed and zigzagged and played merry havoc with everything it could swing or batter or bang or carry away. At half past ten o’clock, not a dozen stores on Fulton Street had opened for business. Men were making wild efforts to clean the walks, only to see each shovelful of snow blown back upon them and piled against the doors again.

  There was something almost supernatural about the storm. A Herald reporter wrote:

  A horror of darkness deepened on the crowded city and the terror-stricken population cowered at the awful sounds which came from the throat of the whirlwind. . . . The heavens darkened and a great roaring sound came from the thundering clouds. It seemed as if a million devils were loose in the air. . . . Sign boards were stripped from the fronts of stores and hurled through the storm clouds. Hats were picked up and carried out of sight. As the afternoon wore away, men and women were blown flat on the ground or picked up into the air and thrown against buildings. Hundreds of pedestrians were cut and bruised. Many were run over. The very mail wagons had to be abandoned. They were left in all sections of the city.

  Sixty-six-year-old Mayor Abram S. Hewitt did not stir out of his 4-story house at 9 Lexington Avenue, and a good thing this was, for many people who suffered exposure that day took to their beds and never rose again. Only 23 of the 600 members of the New York Stock Exchange were on the trading floor when the opening gong rang. About 1,200 people worked for the American Bank Note Company, but only 40 of them showed up. Department stores had advertised spring sales for this very day, and although some stores did open, they were staffed by mere skeleton crews. One hardy housewife trudged 6 blocks to B. Altman & Company to buy a single spool of thread, but that was the only Altman transaction of the day. Macy’s spring sale was a failure.

  The previous Friday a man, named Edward Meisinger, had bought 3,000 unclaimed snow shovels at the bargain price of $1,200 for the downtown department store of E. Ridley & Company. Because the weather had been soft and sunny at the time, a Herald reporter had dubbed the hardware buyer “Snow Shovel Ed.” Now the snowshoe was on the other foot. The Ridley firm quickly sold its shovels at $1 apiece for a fast profit of $1,800. By this time men were tramping down Broadway on snowshoes, while on Fifth Avenue other sturdy souls ventured forth on skis. Rubber boots worth $3 sold for $10 a pair.

  Monday’s total snowfall was only eighteen inches, but the wind drove it into drifts thirty feet high in places. A man standing at a Broadway and Ann Street window watched in disbelief as a snowbank grew before his eyes until it covered the fence around St. Paul’s Chapel. On Second Avenue another man awakened late with a hangover. His first-story window was completely covered with snow. Aware that his eyes were open, but seeing only a white blankness, the man went mad.

  Walls of snow blocked all the streets west of Seventh Avenue. Traffic halted. Horse-drawn streetcars bogged down, and although first four horses, then six horses, and finally eight horses were hitched to one car, the cars couldn’t be budged. Steam trains were immobilized in the suburbs, some plowing to a stop in a deep railroad cut at Spuy-ten Duyvil just north of the city limits. A New York Central locomotive tried to butt through snow packed in the Fourth Avenue tunnel, only to topple off its rails. Some idiot asked Chauncey M. Depew, president of the New York Central, if the line could maintain its train service. Depew snorted, “Trains! Why, we don’t even know whether we’ve got a railroad left!”

  Vehicular traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge was halted, and police warned pedestrians not to walk across in the shrieking storm. Now Brooklyn was entirely cut off from Manhattan. After various adventures, ferryboats gave up trying to reach Manhattan; thus, Staten Island and New Jersey also became inaccessible. A few brave and greedy cabdrivers still slogged through the streets. Some poured whiskey into their horses to keep them from freezing to death, and the price of a cab ride rose to thirty dollars, then forty dollars, and ultimately to more than fifty dollars.

  When elevated railroads had first been proposed, their advocates said that bad weather couldn’t possible affect their operation. Now, however, all the steam trains on the four lines snorted to a halt, stranding 15,000 passengers high above the streets. On the Sixth Avenue line a backlog of trains stretched from Fourth to Twenty-eighth Street. At first commuters sat and shivered in the unheated wooden coaches. The slamming wind teetered the cars on their rails, frightening passengers into believing that the trains would be dumped onto the streets below. Some panic-stricken people left the coaches and climbed down onto the narrow paths by the side of the track, but this exposed them to the full force of the hurricane.

  The fire department tried to send hook-and-ladder companies to the rescue; few could force their way through the snowpacked streets. Men and boys propped ladders against elevated structures and brought victims down to safety at prices ranging from 5 cents to $1. A Negro, whose fee was 25 cents, collected more than $100 in an hour or so. One stalled train couldn’t be reached by ladders. Its 30 passengers sat it out for 15 hours; but by lowering a cord to a saloon directly below them, they were able to hoist up buckets of booze, so they survived cheerfully and bibulously. At Third Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street an elevated train chugging through the murk crashed into the rear of a stalled train; 14 passengers were hurt, and the engineer of the moving train later died of head injuries.

  The snow still buzzed like angry white bees, and the wind thudded into buildings like a berserk ram. Windows shattered. Glass slashed through the air. Bricks were torn loose from chimneys. Cornices toppled from buildings. So many pedestrians were felled by flying debris that an eyewitness swore the streets looked like snowy battlefields. Men, women, and children were treated at hospitals for gashed cheeks, broken limbs, and frostbitten fingers and toes. Drunks toppled into snowbanks and froze to death. In City Hall Park four girls trying to wade through the snow fainted from exhaustion. They were rescued by a burly cop, who dragged them by their wrists, two at a time, out of the park and into the safety of the Astor House.

  Before noon that Monday every hotel room was packed. At the Astor House one bank rented a single room for ten of its clerks. Another bank crammed thirteen employees into a single hotel room; still another, a total of fifteen. Besides sleeping on beds and cots, in closets and bathtubs, men sprawled on billiard tables and floors. State armories were thrown open, and within these shelters men and women, complete strangers to one another, huddled together in sleep. Police stations held open house, and many a respectable citizen snored in a cell for the first time in his life.

  Saloons, bars, grogshops, gin mills, and billiard parlors stayed open all night, offering hospitality to anyone lucky enough to make his way to them. Unable to get home, marooned in odd places, with time weighing heavily on their hands, and exhilarated by this white crisis, New Yorkers indulged in a mass binge. Steve Brodie, something of a celebrity because he claimed to have jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge two years before, now owned a bar at 114 Bowery. Over the door he nailed this sign: “A free drink of whiskey to anyone that needs it and has not got the money to pay for it. Come in if you need it. Steve Brodie.”

  The wind’s eerie wail fright
ened dogs and birds. A man standing at a window of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, saw “a veritable rain of sparrows falling dead from the eaves of nearby buildings.” Luckier sparrows flitted through the briefly opened doors of hotels; although it was against the law to feed them, people did. Five hundred warmth-seeking birds dashed themselves to death against the façade of the Old London Building, at Broadway and Waverly Place.

  Monday afternoon, about 1:30, Roscoe Conkling decided to leave his Wall Street office since no client had showed up. He planned to head for the New York Club. Conkling later said:

  There wasn’t a cab or carriage of any kind to be had. Once during the day I had declined an offer to ride uptown in a carriage because the man wanted fifty dollars, and I started up Broadway on my own pins. It was dark and it was useless to try to pick out a path, so I went magnificently along, shouldering through drifts and headed for the north. I was pretty well exhausted when I got to Union Square and, wiping the snow from my eyes, I tried to make out the triangle there. It was impossible. When I reached the New York Club at (Fifth Avenue and) Twenty-fifth Street, I was covered all over with ice and packed snow, and they would scarcely believe that I had walked from Wall Street. It took three hours to make the journey.

  Conkling did not mention that when he arrived at the club’s thresh-hold, he crashed full length like a timber felled by a lumberjack. As a result of this harrowing experience, Conkling developed pneumonia and mastoiditis and died the following April.

  Monday noon Macy’s had dismissed all its employees, but when the salesgirls got to the doors and saw the storm’s fury, they were afraid to venture out. Executives then announced that they could spend the night in the store if they wished. Sighing with relief, the girls turned back inside, took off their coats, and made themselves as comfortable as possible. Food was brought in from nearby restaurants, cots were set up in the furniture department, and all settled down for the night.