Many groups opposed consolidation. The people of Brooklyn preferred their slower pace of life to the frenetic tempo of Manhattan. New York businessmen thought that the addition of undeveloped areas might increase their tax burdens. Upstate Republicans were afraid that a metropolis might dominate the state. Because Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island were normally Republican, Tammany fretted lest their inclusion weaken its power.
Green and his colleagues advanced counterarguments. They pointed out that political separation had become a costly and cumbersome anachronism. Brooklyn’s government duplicated that of New York. Staten Island and Queens residents suffered from restrictions imposed by small governmental units. Citizens of outlying areas would benefit from consolidation because of lower taxes, lower interest rates on mortgages, more public works, better business opportunities, and increased employment.
For all his logic, Green was able to accomplish little until his cause was taken up by Thomas C. Platt, the Republican boss of the state. Platt’s motives remain a mystery. He may have felt that by uniting the Republican strongholds of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, he could bring the enlarged city under permanent Republican control.
In the prolonged drive to create Greater New York the pro and con forces were motivated by a variety of factors—political, economic, social, sectional, and selfish. Finally, an act of the state legislature, signed into law on May 4, 1897, called for consolidation on January 1, 1898.
This gave the city a new charter. (A charter is to a city what a constitution is to a state.) The city’s counties and boroughs were declared to have common boundaries. A county is a political subdivision of a state. In New York City a borough is a political subdivision of the city. Manhattan became the county and borough of New York; Brooklyn became the county and borough of Kings; the villages lying north of Brooklyn became the county and borough of Queens; the villages of Staten Island became the county and borough of Richmond. Although the Bronx became a city borough in 1898, it did not become a county—the last county created by the state—until 1914.
Each borough could elect its own president. These borough presidents acted as local mayors responsible for some local improvements and administration. Legislative power for the entire city was vested in the sixty-member board of aldermen and the twenty-nine-member city council. Executive power was centralized in the mayor, whose term of office was increased from two to four years. Now came the question, Who would be the first mayor of Greater New York?
Boss Platt picked attorney Benjamin Tracy as the Republican candidate. Tracy, however, was unacceptable to a Republican party faction, which nominated Seth Low, former mayor of Brooklyn. Thus, the anti-Tammany forces were split in the expanded city’s first election. Tammany Boss Richard Croker chose an obscure judge, named Robert A. Van Wyck, as the Democratic candidate. Van Wyck was elected the first mayor of Greater New York, and Tammany again vaulted into the saddle.
New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia had striven to win the tide of the largest American city. With consolidation, New York City easily won. The new charter trebled the city’s area and nearly doubled its population. It increased New York’s total population by nearly 126 percent over the figure of the previous decade. New York now had 3,393,252 inhabitants to Chicago’s 1,698,575. The city’s extreme north-south length was 36 miles. Its maximum east-west breadth was 16½ miles. It contained a total of 320 square miles. The geographical center of the city now lay in northern Brooklyn 200 feet west of Reid Avenue between Van Buren Street and Greene Avenue. Among all the cities of the world New York was second in size only to London.
With the approach of January 1, 1898, the New York Tribune exulted: “The sun will rise this morning upon the greatest experiment in municipal government that the world has ever known—the enlarged city.” Of course, some mourned the passing of Littie Old New York. Among these was outgoing Mayor William L. Strong, who suggested holding a “funeral service.” Indeed it began to appear that city officials planned nothing except a stuffy speech or two to celebrate the founding of Greater New York.
Into the vacuum rushed William Randolph Hearst. A city booster when it suited his purposes and addicted to fireworks, Hearst proposed that the Journal organize a fete and pay all the costs. Although no city father openly admitted it, Hearst’s offer was accepted. Journal staff members collected $500 from Tammany Boss Croker, J. Pierpont Morgan, and others, together with smaller sums from average citizens. Hearst himself donated thousands of dollars to bring the total to more than $7,000. Singing societies, military units, bands, civic organizations, marching societies, and bicycle clubs were recruited. Carloads of fireworks were purchased. The Journal offered 10 silver loving cups as prizes for the best costume, the best float, and the best of everything among several participating groups. The leader of the Seventh Regiment band set to music an “Ode to Greater New York,” which began: “Hail, thee, city born today,/Commercial monarch by the sea,/Whose throne is by Hudson’s way,/‘Mid thousands’ homesteads join’d to thee.”
Brooklyn’s twenty-eighth and last mayor, Frederick W. Wurster, sat in Brooklyn’s City Hall, soon to become Borough Hall, to perform his last official act. He turned over to Greater New York nearly $10,000,000 in Brooklyn funds. With consolidation the annual budget of the expanded city now exceeded $90,000,000. As Wurster sighed and signed, the weather worsened outside his windows. That evening of December 31, 1897, rain began falling. Gradually it turned into wet snow, but this did not dampen the spirits of citizens who gathered at Union Square to march to City Hall for the climactic moment of midnight. Men tippled freely, but the police were indulgent with drunkards on this great occasion. After the procession had got under way and while a horse-drawn float was mushing past the Broadway Central Hotel, at 665 Broadway, exploding fireworks frightened the horses. They bolted into a band, smashed several instruments, and injured 15 persons. Despite the accident, the celebrants danced through the dank streets to City Hall Park, which glowed in the garish glare of 500 magnesium lights.
As midnight approached, the crowd of 100,000 umbrella-huddling people broke into “Auld Lang Syne.” Exactly at the stroke of 12 their voices hushed, and all waited breathlessly. Mayor James Phelan of San Francisco, sitting in that West Coast city, pressed a button that flicked an electric impulse 3,250 miles to New York City, and sent the new blue and white flag of Greater New York swishing up the staff on the cupola of City Hall. The waiting crowd roared. Near the post office at the southern end of City Hall Park a battery of field guns thundered a 100-gun salute, and skyrockets slashed into the murky heavens. Even the New York Tribune, hardly a Hearst admirer, admitted that this was the “biggest, noisiest and most hilarious New Year’s Eve celebration that Manhattan Island has ever known.” At long last, on January 1, 1898, at the mouth of the Hudson River, there was created the “imperial city” of which Andrew H. Green had dreamed.
Chapter 37
OPENING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
J. PIERPONT MORGAN dealt himself another hand of solitaire and listened for the twentieth century. It was the night of December 31, 1899, and Morgan sat in the library of his Madison Avenue mansion. Logs crackled in the fireplace. To the left of the hearth stood a bookcase holding two metal statues of knights in armor, a clock perched between them. From time to time Morgan may have lifted his dark-hazel eyes to glance at the clock.
The hulking six-foot financier sat at his desk in his usual flat-footed position, toes turned out. With strong and well-formed fingers, he laid out the cards, playing almost automatically, as he did when he had something on his mind. A long cigar protruded from the paper cigar holder clenched in his teeth under his mustache.
Although it was almost midnight in Morgan’s mahogany study, it was the high noon of capitalism in America, and no American stood out so starkly as he. Morgan was centralizing the control of industry and credit. He was the capitalist’s capitalist. President William McKinley of the large head and barrel torso sat in the White House; but businessmen
guided the nation’s destiny, and Morgan guided the businessmen. Indifferent to social reform and defiant of public opinion, Morgan felt that he owed the public nothing.
The clock began tolling the hour of midnight. Morgan may have raised his massive head at the first bong. So the twentieth century had arrived? Very well. Within a little more than a year Morgan was to create the first billion-dollar corporation in history, the United States Steel Corporation. Bong!
At the turn of the century eighteen-year-old Fiorello LaGuardia was earning $100 a year as a clerk in the American consulate in Budapest, Hungary. James J. “Jimmy” Walker was a skinny nineteen-year-old attending LaSalle Academy, a business school on Second Avenue, and working as a part-time referee at prizefights in Brotty’s Bar on Hudson Street. Alfred E. Smith was a slim twenty-six-year-old who worked for the city’s commissioner of jurors, checking applications for exemptions from jury duty. Franklin D. Roosevelt was an eighteen-year-old standing an inch more than 6 feet but weighing only 146 pounds; he sang in Harvard’s Freshman Glee Club. Robert Moses was an eleven-year-old boy, who had moved with his family from New Haven to New York in 1897; he felt that New York was too big, too crowded, too noisy, and too confused. Theodore Roosevelt, now forty-two, was governor of New York State, partly because he had become a hero of the Spanish-American War. William Randolph Hearst, at the age of thirty-seven, was cruising up the Nile in search of Egyptian art treasures.
The city, state, and nation this year of 1900 enjoyed prosperity. Never had such good times been seen from coast to coast. A New York minister exulted: “Laws are becoming more just, rulers more humane. Music is becoming sweeter and books wiser. Homes are happier and the individual heart becoming at once more just and more gentle.” Except for the Boer War in South Africa, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and unrest in the Philippines, peace reigned throughout most of the world.
Sixty percent of all Americans lived in small towns or on farms. New York City itself had more than 2,000 farms, occupying nearly a quarter of its land. But the city was in the middle of a building boom. Land and buildings on Manhattan alone were valued at $3,600,000,000, having risen $2,600,000,000 since the year 1865. The city’s 40,000 manufacturing establishments accounted for more than 60 percent of the manufacturing of the entire state. Hundreds of firms escaped taxes by incorporating themselves in other states, paid almost nothing for fire and police protection, yet asked the city for help whenever their underpaid workers struck. The shopping center had reached Twenty-third Street and was gliding north toward Thirty-fourth Street.
Wages were low. City employees put in a 10-hour day, with half an hour for lunch, but many had to work even longer. At 4 A.M. the streets were filled with people heading for their jobs, and any worker who reported late was sure to be penalized. To work from 5 A.M. to 9 P.M. was customary. Twelve-year-old boys and girls were allowed to earn wages if they went to school 80 days a year. Because of undernourishment, some children were slow to learn their lessons. Hundreds of youngsters lived on canal boats along the waterfront, seldom attended school, constantly played hide-and-seek with truant officers. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of homeless children in the city.
Nearly 7 percent of the population was illiterate, and 173,000 residents could not speak English. Of the city’s inhabitants, 37 percent were foreign-born. About 25 percent of these immigrants came from Germany; 22 percent, from Ireland; 12 percent, from Russia; 11 percent, from Italy; 6 percent, from Austria; and 5 percent, from England. The remainder had arrived here from all other parts of the world. Although most Irishmen were still members of the working class, no longer were they caricatured on the stage as living in shanties and dressing in rags. The city’s 700,000 Jews lived mainly on the Lower East Side. The 145,000 local Italians staged their first Columbus Day parade in 1900. Between 50,000 and 60,000 Negroes were residents of New York. The main Negro center was near West Fifty-third Street in Manhattan, although a large Negro community was also developing in Brooklyn.
New York was the last American city of any size to establish public high schools. The De Witt Clinton, Wadleigh, and Peter Cooper high schools were opened in 1897, and in 1900 one De Witt Clinton student was an energetic Irish boy, named Grover Whalen. Only 13,700 of the 500,000 pupils enrolled in the elementary schools were graduated from the eighth grade.
Although Berlin had outstripped New York as the city of tenements, more than 1,500,000 New Yorkers lived in slums in 1900. Many European visitors, after one horrified look, concluded that the slum dwellers lived in misery worse than that in Berlin, London, or Paris. The section of Manhattan bounded by the East River, East Fourteenth Street, Third Avenue, the Bowery, and Catherine Street was probably the most densely populated area in the world. New York’s poor lived under worse conditions and paid more rent than the inhabitants of any other big city on earth.
The average New Yorker was shorter and younger than his counterpart today. The mortality rate for children was more than five times higher then than now. Life expectancy at birth was much lower. Hospital conditions were horrible by modern standards. The city’s water was first chlorinated in 1910, and milk was pasteurized for the first time in 1912.
Like artichokes, women were covered by layer after layer of clothing—chemise, drawers, corset, corset cover, and one or more petticoats. Skirts were so long that they merely showed the tip of the shoe. Ladies exposed much of their bosoms for a formal evening on the town, but during the day they wore shirtwaists with high collars. It was considered fashionable for well-dressed women to walk in such a forward-sloping position that they seemed to be falling forward. Gentlemen wore blue serge suits most of the time, and only dudes put on garters. Men’s shoes had tips as sharp as toothpicks. In hot weather, men might remove their jackets in their offices, but never, never were they allowed to take off their vests. To appear hatless, whatever the season of the year, was unthinkable. Men wore derby hats in winter and hard straw hats in summer. Policemen wore long blue overcoats with two rows of nine brass buttons, a hard gray helmet, a leather scabbard holding a nightstick garnished with a fancy blue tassel, and a service revolver. Most cops were Irish, and almost all sported mustaches. Until 1902 they spent eighteen hours a day on patrol duty and then six hours more on reserve in the station house. They got one night off every twenty days—sometimes.
With Tammany in control again, the city was a free and easy place. On March 9, 1900, the New York Times said a Tammany “commission,” consisting of a city official, two state senators, and the dictator of a poolroom syndicate, was raking in $3,095,000 a month in graft from gambling alone. New York had 25,000 prostitutes, and their come-on was: “It costs a dollar, and I’ve got the room.”
Washington and Buffalo were better paved than Manhattan. Vehicular traffic here consisted mainly of hansom cabs, victorias shaped like gravy boats, and closed carriages, called broughams. At busy intersections trolley tracks crisscrossed one another in bewildering patterns. Because of the building boom and the quickening thrust of population toward the north, streets were ripped up much of the time. Manhole explosions were commonplace, and horses and drivers often were hurt by manhole covers hurtling into the air. This was the gaslight era, which reached its peak in 1914.
The social center of the city had advanced from Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue to Forty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. Never before had so much private wealth been concentrated in a single street as was on Fifth Avenue. In some of its mansions hostesses could serve dinner for 100 or more guests on a few hours’ notice. India was famished, so it became fashionable to send shiploads of food from New York to the stricken country.
In the winter of 1900 Bernarr MacFadden opened a restaurant, at 487 Pearl Street, where most items sold for one cent. In addition to this penny restaurant, New York had a cafeteria in the basement of the New York Life Building, on Broadway four blocks north of City Hall. At most restaurants a regular dinner cost fifteen cents. Foreign-born laborers bought six rolls for a nickel and munched
them on their way to work. In the evening, by paying a nickel for a stein of beer in a saloon, they were entitled to free bread, pickled herring, salami, or hard-boiled eggs. Butter cost nineteen to twenty cents a pound, and oleomargine was available. Macaroni factories were operating in the city. Chop suey had been invented here in 1896, but the dish, unknown in China at the time, was slow to win popularity. Ice cream sundaes, only three years old in 1900, came into favor more quickly than chop suey.
Shortly before the turn of the century New Yorkers became used to seeing automobiles. In 1890 the city granted the first charter to experiment with horseless trucks. By 1895 there were 300 motor vehicles operating in America. The nation’s first automobile accident occurred in New York City on May 30, 1896, when Henry Wells of Springfield, Massachusetts, driving his Duryea motor wagon, collided with a bicycle rider, named Evylyn Thomas. She was taken to Manhattan Hospital with a broken leg. In 1897 electric taxicabs were introduced into the city by the Electric Vehicle Company, whose office and garage were located at 1684 Broadway. At the start of the automobile age no one could tell whether electric batteries or internal-combustion gasoline engines would prove superior. By 1898 there were more than 100 electric taxicabs on the streets of New York. Tires cost $40 apiece. In 1899 cars were banned from Central Park, and those chugging around the rest of the city had to observe a 9-mile-an-hour speed limit and carry a gong.
Jacob German was arrested in 1899 for driving on Lexington Avenue at the “breakneck speed” of twelve miles an hour. The same year America’s first auto fatality occurred when a sixty-eight-year-old real estate broker, named Henry H. Bliss, was knocked down as he stepped off a southbound streetcar at Central Park West and Seventy-fourth Street. Bliss was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where he died. Automobiles were regarded as a curiosity at first, but when the number of accidents rose, New Yorkers became critical of them. On December 27, 1900, the Tribune said editorially:
The Epic of New York City Page 53
