Tammany Hall was reluctant to take Jews into its inner circle, but it did help the masses of Jewish immigrants. Seeking to maintain its reputation as the friend of the poor, Tammany gave the underprivileged of all faiths coal in winter, ice in summer, food on holidays, and favors the year around. In return, Tammany expected the votes of those whom it helped. Local Republicans tended to ignore the foreign-born and the poor.
Unlike the prodigal Irish, the Jews saved their money. According to an immigrant guidebook of that era, a Jew who earned fifty cents a day spent only ten cents for coffee and bagels and saved the other forty cents. But it wasn’t long before Jews wanted to live as well as the older New Yorkers in better parts of the city. Jews could not be kept out of schools, so intense was their passion for education. Teachers and public officials alike were astonished by the intellectual zest of Jewish children. Police Commissioner William McAdoo cried, “Think of it! Herbert Spencer preferred to a fairy story by girls and boys!”
Like other immigrant groups, Jews made a rich contribution to the political and artistic life of New York and the nation. The year 1891 marked the arrival of Morris and Rose Gershovitz, born in St. Petersburg, Russia. Morris soon shortened his name to Gershvin. He is remembered today only because of his son, George Gershwin, the composer and pianist. In 1893 a frail Russian rabbi, Moses Baline, settled on the Lower East Side with his wife, Leah, and their children. One of their sons was four-year-old Isador Baline, commonly known as Izzy. The Izzy Baline of that day became Irving Berlin, another renowned composer. The Lower East Side also produced sculptors Jo Davidson and Jacob Epstein.
William Sulzer was a Christian and a Democratic politician who went out of his way to help the Jews. After serving nine terms in Congress, he became governor of New York State. Undeniably beloved by Jews, Sulzer is said to have shouted during a political campaign, “Every night a hundred million Jews in Russia kneel to pray for William Sulzer!” A heckler called out: “Jews don’t kneel when they pray!” According to the story, Sulzer fixed his heckler with penetrating eyes and retorted, “They do when they pray for William Sulzer!”
Italian immigration into New York and the rest of America has been called modern history’s greatest and most sustained movement of population from a single country. The first Italian to settle here was a Venetian craftsman, named Peter Caesar Alberti, who took up residence in Brooklyn in 1635. Twenty years later an Italian, named Mathys Capito, became a clerk in the New York municipal bookkeeping office. Many Italians fought for this country during the American Revolution. In 1806 Lorenzo Da Ponte, the author of many Mozart librettos, emigrated to New York. Staten Island became a refuge for politicians exiled from Italy. Foremost among these, perhaps, was Giuseppe Garibaldi. After living from 1850 to 1854 on Staten Island, where he worked as a candlemaker, he went back to his native land to try to unify it.
In 1880 more than 12,000 native Italians lived in New York. Most congregated in Mulberry Bend, located on Mulberry Street between Bayard and Park streets, two blocks west of the Bowery. This slum area became known as Little Italy. A majority of the early Italian immigrants had been born in northern Italy. Beginning in the 1880’s, however, the bulk of Italian immigrants arrived from southern Italy and from Sicily. Unskilled and illiterate peasants for the most part, they were regarded with disdain by northern Italians. Among the Sicilian newcomers were members of the dreaded Mafia, which had a long history of preying on helpless and ignorant peasants. They began terrorizing New York’s transplanted Italians.
No ethnic or religious group, however, has held a monopoly on vice in New York. The city has known Irish gangsters, Jewish gangsters, Chinese gangsters, and Italian gangsters.
In 1880 Achille Luigi Carlo LaGuardia brought his bride to New York. They were the parents of Fiorello H. LaGuardia, who was born on December 11, 1882, in a tenement at 7 Varick Street in the Italian section of Greenwich Village. Fiorello LaGuardia became the first Italian-American to overthrow Irish-dominated Tammany Hall, and he finished his spectacular career as the greatest mayor in the history of New York City. At the time of his birth Greenwich Village was occupied mainly by the Irish and Negroes. As more Italians moved into the Village, the Negroes began to move out, gathering in an area just west of Columbus Circle in mid-Manhattan and on the Upper East Side. The year of LaGuardia’s birth, Eamon De Valera was born here. De Valera, who became president of the Republic of Ireland, was the son of a Spanish father and an Irish mother. He was delivered on October 14, 1882, in the Nursery and Child’s Hospital, at Lexington Avenue and East Fifty-first Street. The year 1882 also marked the birth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Hyde Park, New York.
Southern Italians were clannish. Despite the fact that they had shown enough spirit to emigrate to the New World, their outlook on life continued to be that of villagers. Intensely suspicious, they regarded everyone outside their own family as forestieri, or strangers. Differences in customs and dialects, together with centuries-old prejudices, separated Abruzzese, Calabrians, Genoese, Neapolitans, Pied-montese, Sicilians, Turinese, and miscellaneous others. Members of each group huddled near one another in their new homes here.
Most Italian men arrived without their women, for they had no intention of staying. They hoped to make a fortune and then to return to their native villages. As a result of this wish to go home, their fear of strangers, their lack of skills, and their illiteracy, Italians were slow in becoming Americanized.
Jews were also somewhat clannish and didn’t want their children to marry outside the group, but they considered their offspring to be the equal of anyone else. The Italians lacked this confidence and pride in their children. Stunted in outlook, many Italians fell victim to the very kind of exploitation which had caused them to leave their homeland. Just as some vicious Irishmen had preyed on later-arriving Irishmen, so did Italians fall into the hands of their own greedy people. A stereotype of the day was the padrone, an Italian straw boss who took charge of fellow immigrants when they arrived, found them jobs and apartments, acted as their brokers, and profited handsomely from each transaction. Many padroni wound up as wealthy men, but the masses of Italians went on working as common laborers.
Because Irish workmen predominated in the building trades, Italians at first found it difficult to break into this field. The backwardness of Italian immigrants enabled employers to play them off against other workers by using them as strikebreakers. As a result, they were sneered at as dagos. The word “dago,” a corruption of the Spanish proper name Diego, is the equivalent of Jack or Jim. Another derogatory nickname applied to Italians was guinea. Originally this word was confined to Portuguese exploring for gold along the part of western Africa then known as Guinea. Because southern Italians, like the Portuguese, tended to be dark-skinned, the insulting term “guinea” was applied to them.
The first Chinese known to have visited New York was Punqua Wingchong, who figured in John Jacob Astor’s hoax against the Jefferson administration. He arrived in 1807 and left in 1808. Historians differ about the first Chinese who lived here. Some say that it was Quimbo Appo, who landed in San Francisco in 1844 and arrived in New York a few years later. Others declare that it was Ah Ken, a Cantonese merchant who appeared in 1858, opened a cigar store on Park Row, and made his home on Mott Street. Another contender was a Chinese sailor, called Lou Hoy Sing, who settled in New York in 1862 and married an Irish colleen, who bore him two sons. Wah Kee appeared in 1868 and established a fruitshop, at 13 Pell Street, which served as a blind for the gambling den and opium dive he ran secretly above this shop. In 1872 there were 12 Chinese in the Mott Street district, and in 1880 they numbered 700. From then on they arrived in New York by droves, although more settled in California than on the eastern seaboard.
New York became a haven for almost all nationalities—Hungarians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Poles, Bohemians, Rumanians, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Greeks, Turks, Austrians, Arabs, Lebanese, Spaniards, Albanians, Syrians, and others. The so-called melting pot never
really dissolved their different identities. The process of assimilation resulted in something like vegetable soup. Although the ingredients retained their separate forms and flavor, they went well together. This was the way that liberals viewed immigration. Conservatives felt differently. As the tide of aliens rose, conservatives grew apprehensive and ultimately took alarm. Something of the spirit of the Know-Nothing era developed as Anglo-Saxons excitedly told one another that this immigration threatened the identity and character of the nation. Pride in ancestry dies hard. On December 23, 1894, the Society of Mayflower Descendants was organized in New York by descendants of the Pilgrims “to preserve their memory, their records, their history, and all facts relating to them, their ancestors, and their posterity.”
On the other hand, Abram S. Hewitt, onetime mayor of New York, declared that every immigrant worker meant a $5,000 increase in the nation’s wealth. Aleš Hrdlika, an American anthropologist born in Bohemia, once said, “So far as science is able to see, there has not been . . . a trace of any bad effect of these mixtures on the American people. Much rather otherwise. Probably a good part, perhaps a very important part . . . of the power and strength of the American people is the result of these very mixtures.” Italian-born Edward Corsi, who became an important American political figure, remarked, “Roughly one-half the total population of the United States traces its beginning to Ellis Island.”
Between 1855 and 1892 nearly 7,700,000 aliens entered this country through New York State’s big immigration station at Castle Garden near the Battery and through the state’s subsidiary depot on Wards Island in the East River. Conditions at Castle Garden became so bad that when Grover Cleveland was sworn in as governor in 1883, he devoted part of his first message to the problem. A state investigation resulted in better conditions there. With the increase in immigration, facilities at Castle Garden and on Wards Island became so inadequate that both were closed. In 1890 immigration control was transferred from the state to the federal government, and Ellis Island was chosen as the new immigration station.
On January 1, 1892, the first foreigners arrived at Ellis Island in the Upper Bay of New York Harbor. The island served as the main gateway to America until 1954. After numbing days and nights sardined in steerage, fretted by seasickness and homesickness and fear and a sense of rootlessness, many aliens arrived in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. Their spirits did not revive until some—the lucky ones—walked into the main reception hall and up to the famous “kissing post,” where they were reunited with relatives and friends who had preceded them to the New World. These scenes were very touching and very American because America is a nation of immigrants and New York City is the most cosmopolitan city in all of cosmopolitan America. Dutch blood flowed in the veins of patrician Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who once began a speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution with the words: “Fellow immigrants—”
Chapter 34
THE REVEREND PARKHURST SAMPLES VICE
THE REPORTER wondered what he was doing in church. W. E. Carson of the World had been urged to attend the Madison Square Presbyterian Church on Sunday morning, February 14, 1892. Half-suspecting that the tip might be a hoax, but hesitant to overlook a good story, Carson strolled into the Gothic brownstone church at Madison Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. Sitting down in a pew, he peered past green granite columns and soon spotted a frail and aging man, who held his silk hat between his bony knees. The reporter recognized him as Thomas C. Platt, Republican boss of New York State, who recently had declared war on Richard Croker, leader of Tammany Hall and thus boss of New York City.
Now the minister stepped into the pulpit. He was the Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst, a fifty-year-old man with a slender figure, a long and narrow face, nearsighted eyes peering intensely through rimless glasses, a chin cloaked in a Vandyke, and curly hair worn long at the sides and the back of his head. Dr. Parkhurst looked like the scholar he was. A graduate of Amherst College, he had also studied in Germany, and he knew Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. That Sunday morning he wore a black clerical robe with a white starched bib at his throat.
He had spoken no longer than a minute when a gasp rose from the congregation, and the World reporter reached for a pencil inside his pocket. New York City, the pastor declared, was thoroughly rotten. He laid the blame squarely on Mayor Hugh J. Grant, District Attorney De Lancy Nicoll, and the police commissioners. “Every step that we take looking to the moral betterment of this city,” Dr. Parkhurst charged, “has to be taken directly in the teeth of the damnable pack of administrative bloodhounds that are fattening themselves on the ethical flesh and blood of our citizenship. . . .”
The Presbyterians sat in a state of shock. The reporter scribbled notes as fast as he could. Republican Boss Platt narrowed his eyes as he schemed how to use this sermon for his own political ends. But no man present that day could foresee the full consequences of the remarkable sermon.
It shook the town because the World played up Carson’s story. Mayor Grant angrily called on the minister to prove his allegations. Tammany politicians denounced Dr. Parkhurst as “un-Christian” and “vulgar.” Charles A. Dana, editor of the Sun, urged that the minister be driven from his pulpit. Other pastors felt that if Dr. Parkhurst wished to denounce evil, he should have stuck to Sodom and Gomorrah. And District Attorney Nicoll ordered him to appear before a grand jury.
Nine days after his sermon the preacher was haled before the jury and asked for legal evidence of his charges. He had none. His attack had been based on newspaper articles never denied by public officials. Nearly everyone realized that vice was rampant in the city, but Dr. Parkhurst had not documented the case. The grand jury, which was partial to Tammany, rebuked him and called his charges sweeping and groundless. The jury sent its report to the court of general sessions, whose presiding judge agreed. Dr. Parkhurst was depressed. “I had waked up a whole jungle of teeth-gnashing brutes,” he later said, “and it was a question of whether the hunter was going to bag the game or the game make prey of the hunter.”
After moping a few days, Dr. Parkhurst sought the advice of commission merchant David J. Whitney, a founder of the Society for the Prevention of Crime. This was a private organization of clergymen, merchants, and lawyers. Parkhurst had been its president for the past year. Humiliated by the grand jury, he wanted to pick up where he had left off but didn’t know how to proceed. Whitney urged him to make a personal tour of the underworld to collect evidence at firsthand. The merchant also put the minister in touch with a private detective, named Charles W. Gardner, who agreed to act as guide. This young man wasn’t an altogether savory character, but Parkhurst didn’t know it at the time. Gardner flaunted a huge mustache, which curled at the ends, and wore the hard hat popular with most private eyes of that era.
The detective and the pastor met in Parkhurst’s home at 133 East Thirty-fifth Street. For six dollars a night, plus expenses, the detective agreed to show the cleric the seamy side of New York life. He also promised to hire other private detectives to collect further data on their own. As the two men conversed, young John Langdon Erving entered the room. One of Parkhurst’s parishioners, Erving was tall and blond, a society dandy, and the scion of a rich family. It was decided that Erving would accompany his pastor and the detective on their outings. The three men agreed to meet on Saturday evening, March 5, in Gardner’s apartment at 207 West Eighteenth Street. Naturally, they would need disguises. Gardner later wrote a book, called The Doctor and the Devil, or Midnight Adventures of Dr. Parkhurst, in which he told how he changed the pastor’s appearance.
Their first night out on the town the three men stopped at Tom Summers’ Saloon, at 33 Cherry Street, where they drank whiskey that tasted like embalming fluid and watched little girls buy booze at ten cents a pint to take home to their fathers. When the detective praised the pastor’s ability to hold his liquor, Parkhurst closed his eyes and smiled. Next, they headed for a whorehouse at 342 Water Street, where painted women stood in the doorw
ay soliciting trade. Two harlots grabbed Parkhurst, dragged him inside, and sat him down on a chair. He chatted easily with them, fended off their advances, and got away. The next stop was another red-light house, where a young prostitute asked Parkhurst to dance. To save the minister embarrassment, Erving danced with her, while Parkhurst sat and watched. Two old hags drifted up to him, begged him to buy them drinks, and he did. This so won the heart of a 200-pound crone that she leered at Parkhurst, asked him to call her Baby, and invited him upstairs. Again he managed to escape.
The night of March 9 the minister, detective, and socialite resumed their explorations. At Water Street and Catherine Slip they ducked into the bar of the East River Hotel, where they found two uniformed policemen enjoying drinks on the house. Parkhurst told Gardner to jot down their badge numbers. Then, acting like a roisterer, the minister ordered drinks for everyone in the bar. It cost Parkhurst only eighty cents to provide each of the sixteen customers with a whiskey. Next the trio visited a five-cent lodginghouse for men at 233 Park Row. Although this was a legal establishment, Parkhurst wanted to see it because Gardner had said that in places like this Tammany recruited voters to cast ballots frequently and fraudulently. In a room thirty feet wide and eighty feet long, dozens of foul-smelling bums slept on bare canvas cots; their stench drove Parkhurst out into the street.
On their next nocturnal trip the explorers headed for the Bowery and visited several brassy cabarets, known as concert gardens. Then they saw “tight houses,” where all women wore tights. Brothels were classified by the nationalities of their inmates, so on Forsyth Street the three men visited a “German house.” The madam said that the five scantily clad girls in the parlor were her daughters. Pushing on, the men got within a stone’s throw of Police Headquarters, at 300 Mulberry Street, when they were accosted by fifty tarts. One woman enticed them to a house on Elizabeth Street, which she described as “a boarding house for the most respectable policemen in the city.” By the time they left this place, Parkhurst had become ill from mixing his drinks, so the detective led him into a Third Avenue saloon for a glass of soda. As luck would have it, there sat a drunk who had gone to Amherst with the minister. When he greeted Parkhurst by name, the bartender looked up in surprise and fright, ordered the trio out of the place, and threw their money after them. Feeling better physically, Parkhurst demanded that Gardner “show me something worse.”
The Epic of New York City Page 49
