The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  Two stone lions flank the library’s Fifth Avenue entrance. According to New York folklore, these kingly beasts only roar when a virgin passes.

  Another notable structure that took shape about this time was the Woolworth Building, erected by round-faced Napoleon-worshiping Frank W. Woolworth, the ten-cent-store tycoon. He envied the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, which in 1908 was the tallest skyscraper in town. It stood at Madison Avenue and East Twenty-fourth Street, its tower soared fifty stories heavenward, and it contained four clocks with faces larger than those of Big Ben in London’s Houses of Parliament.

  Determined to let no one surpass him, the department store magnate hired an engineer just to measure the Metropolitan Building. From street level to the tip of its ornate peak the skyscraper loomed 701 feet 3 inches high. Woolworth then ordered architect Cass Gilbert to design a structure that would dwarf the Metropolitan. The site chosen for Woolworth’s masterpiece was Broadway between Barclay Street on the south and Park Place on the north. At the time the land was occupied by a 6-story building. Woolworth told his architect to model his new building after the Houses of Parliament, so Gilbert designed in the Gothic style. The building’s terra-cotta façade was so elaborately ornamented, so delicate and lacelike in effect, so studded with gargoyles, and so beautiful that it resembled a cathedral more than an office building. In fact, it came to be called the Cathedral of Commerce. One of the hod carriers who helped build it was William O’Dwyer.

  The finished structure rose 60 stories, or 792 feet above Broadway. It cost Woolworth $13,500,000, which he paid in cash. This was no strain for the chain-store owner; in 1913 his 684 stores did a business of more than $66,000,000. The new skyscraper was opened on April 24, 1913. Woolworth invited 900 guests to honor Cass Gilbert at a banquet held on the twenty-seventh floor. Woolworth’s private office, modeled after a room in one of Napoleon’s palaces, contained a life-size bronze bust of Napoleon, one of Napoleon’s clocks, and a painting of Napoleon seated in his coronation robes. Woolworth exulted because he now owned the tallest skyscraper in the world. It attracted 300,000 visitors every year until the Empire State Building was completed. Frank Woolworth once received a postcard from the Pacific coast addressed simply: “The Highest Building in the World,” and while traveling in Europe, he gleefully noticed that a trade paper symbolized all America with a photograph of his building, not even bothering to name it.

  The day the Woolworth Building opened, President Woodrow Wilson sat in the White House and pressed a button that turned on 80,000 light bulbs in the new skyscraper. Despite the glow, lights dimmed elsewhere in the world with the approach of war.

  Chapter 41

  THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS OPENS ON BROADWAY

  KAISER WILHELM II, the last emperor of Germany, said long afterward, “The visit of Colonel House to Berlin and London in the spring of 1914 almost prevented the World War.” President Wilson had sent his man from Manhattan to Europe in the hope of bringing about an understanding between Germany and England, which were rasping one another raw. On June 1, 1914, Colonel House was given a private audience by the Kaiser at Potsdam. House later wrote:

  I found that he had all the versatility of (Theodore) Roosevelt with something more of charm, something less of force. He has what to me is a disagreeable habit of bringing his face very close to one when he talks most earnestly. His English is clear and well chosen and, though he talks vehemently, yet he is too much the gentleman to monopolize the conversation. It was give-and-take all the way through.

  The Colonel was left with the impression that the Kaiser did not want war. House felt that Wilhelm, by trying a bluff, had put himself in a situation from which he could not back down.

  New Yorkers were surprised when they picked up the New York Times of June 28, 1914, and read this headline:

  HEIR TO AUSTRIA’S THRONE IS SLAIN

  WITH HIS WIFE BY A BOSNIAN YOUTH

  TO AVENGE SEIZURE OF HIS COUNTRY

  Psychologically unprepared for war, New York’s citizens tended to shrug off the assassination at Sarajevo. They thronged to movie houses to see the latest episode of The Perils of Pauline, a serial in which actress Pearl White was often left dangling from a cliff—in actuality, the New Jersey Palisades, where much of the action was filmed. Europe had had no general war for ninety-nine years, or ever since the end of the struggle against Napoleon in 1815, so it seemed unlikely that the continent could now be ravaged by a new war.

  Regardless of wishful thinking, events in Europe developed quickly. Austria sent Serbia an ultimatum. Serbia gave in to most of Austria’s demands. European stock exchanges collapsed. Despite peace efforts, Austria declared war on Serbia. Herbert Hoover said in his memoirs: “It is a curious commentary on a civilization in process of being blown up that so well informed a newspaper as the New York Times from July 1st to July 22nd carried no alarming European news on the front page.” An Austrian force attacked Belgrade. Russia, France, and Germany mobilized. A British fleet sailed under sealed orders. Germany ordered Russia to end its mobilization. The balance of power had been upset, and chaos was replacing order.

  On July 31 the New York Stock Exchange closed. Two days later Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo hurried from Washington to New York at the urgent request of Wall Street bankers. Among other pressing problems, $77,000,000 worth of New York City’s bonds and notes were held in Europe. McAdoo and his wife were met at Pennsylvania Station by harried financiers. She later wrote: “I was startled by their white faces and trembling voices. Could these be America’s great men?”

  German troops goose-stepped into Luxembourg and demanded free passage across Belgium. Great Britain demanded that Germany observe Belgian neutrality. Germany refused. England then declared war on Germany. So did France. Here in neutral America, here in the port of New York, ships of the warring nations were strung out from Ellis Island to Tottenville, so close that crew members could exchange scowls and hard words.

  Sixty-three days before the Sarajevo assassination that triggered World War I, an attempt had been made to assassinate New York’s new mayor. This was tall, long-legged, brown-eyed John Purroy Mitchel. As president of the board of aldermen, Mitchel had served as acting mayor during Mayor Gaynor’s recuperation from his bullet wound, and after Gaynor died, the administration of city affairs fell on Mitchel. On November 4, 1913, Mitchel was elected mayor in his own right. A Democrat, Mitchel was the candidate of the Republicans and the Fusion party, which resented, among other things, Gaynor’s attitude toward the Becker case.

  Taking office at the age of thirty-four, Mitchel became the youngest mayor in the city’s history. At noon on Friday, April 17, 1914, Mitchel started to leave City Hall to go to lunch. With him were Frank Polk, the corporation counsel; Arthur Woods, the police commissioner; and George V. Mullan, the tax commissioner. An elderly man stepped up to the mayor and fired at him point-blank. The bullet grazed the mayor’s ear and slammed into Polk’s left cheek, lodging under the tongue. The corporation counsel’s wound was painful but not critical, and he quickly recovered. The attacker was seized. Mayor Mitchel walked beside his assailant as the small group of excited men crossed City Hall Park and entered a nearby police station.

  The would-be killer was identified as Michael P. Mahoney, a psychotic with imagined grievances against the city administration. He was sent to an insane asylum. When the public read about this assassination attempt, it also learned for the first time that Mayor Mitchel always carried a revolver for his own protection.

  Next to LaGuardia, Mayor Mitchel gave New York the best government it has ever known. Brilliant, well educated, and honest, Mitchel did his work extremely well. His election as a Fusion candidate was one of Tammany Hall’s most decisive defeats. Theodore Roosevelt said that Mitchel had “given us as nearly an ideal administration . . . as I have seen in my lifetime, or as I have heard of since New York became a big city.” Oswald Garrison Villard, president of the New York Evening Post, wrote of Mitchel’s regi
me: “Never was the fire department so well handled, never were the city’s charities so well administered, nor its finances grappled with upon such a sound and far-sighted basis. . . . Under him the schools progressed wonderfully, while prisons were carried on with some semblance of scientific and humanitarian management.” The gangs that had terrorized the city for nearly a century were broken up, Police Commissioner Woods declaring that “the gangster and the gunman are practically extinct.”

  For all of Mayor Mitchel’s accomplishments he lacked tact and sometimes seemed downright unfair. When State Senator Robert F. Wagner tried to delay the federal government’s acquisition of property needed for coastal defense, Mitchel attacked him as “the gentleman from Prussia.” The remark antagonized New Yorkers of German birth or descent. Himself a Catholic, Mitchel also incurred the enmity of Catholics by insisting that the city had the right to examine the books of Catholic charities subsidized by the city.

  The outbreak of World War I intensified unemployment in New York, and young Harry Hopkins was named executive secretary of the city’s board of child welfare. Iowa-born Hopkins was now launched on the career that reached a climax when he became to Franklin D. Roosevelt what Colonel House was to Woodrow Wilson.

  New York’s large German population worried officials who favored England, France, and Russia. On August 1, 1914, when Germany declared war on Russia and the Kaiser made a rousing speech from the balcony of his Berlin palace, a German-American newspaper called the New Yorker Herold printed the story under this headline: “ALL GERMAN HEARTS BEAT HIGHER TODAY.” William Randolph Hearst owned a New York German-language periodical, called the Deutsches Journal. He opposed any help to the Allies. The Germans praised Hearst in the Berlin Vossische Zeitung, saying that “he has exposed the selfishness of England and her campaign of abuse against Germany, and has preached justice for the Central Powers.” Federal officials scanned Hearst’s papers for sedition, a Secret Service agent infiltrated Hearst’s home disguised as a butler, and a woman in a restaurant hissed, “Boche!” at him. Hearst is said to have bowed toward her and murmured, “You’re quite right, madame, it is all bosh.” Still, Hearst newspapers were banned in England, Canada, and France.

  Some men living in New York were reservists in the German army, and they paraded the streets with German flags. Occasionally they brawled with New Yorkers of British and French descent who displayed flags of their mother countries. Mayor Mitchel finally banned all foreign flags. President Wilson officially proclaimed the neutrality of the United States and called on all Americans to remain impartial in thought and action, but there was little neutrality. Colonel House believed that “civilization itself” could not afford to see the British “go down in the war,” and he preached preparedness to Wilson; but the President hesitated.

  In 1914 the private banking firm of J. P. Morgan & Company moved into a new gray five-story building at 23 Wall Street. Soon after the outbreak of the European war Henry P. Davidson, a Morgan partner, telephoned the State Department in Washington and asked for a ruling on loans to belligerent governments. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan told President Wilson that “money is the worst of all contrabands because it commands everything else.” The State Department told the House of Morgan that it had no objections to loans to neutrals, but that “loans by American bankers to any foreign nation which is at war are inconsistent with the true spirit of neutrality.” Yet at the same time the State Department sanctioned unlimited sales of munitions to all nations.

  On September 10, 1915, a joint English-French commission arrived in New York, hoping to float an Allied war loan in America. More than a year had passed since the State Department forbade American bankers to lend money to belligerent nations. Ties between the United States and the Allies had grown closer. Thomas W. Lamont, another Morgan partner, admitted many years later: “Our firm never for one moment had been neutral; we didn’t know how to be. From the very start we did everything we could to contribute to the cause of the Allies.” The Morgan bank now was allowed to sign a contract for a loan of $500,000,000 to be floated by 61 New York banks. Obviously, America had abandoned strict neutrality. Before the war ended, the House of Morgan bought $3,000,000,000 in war supplies for the Allies and realized a commission of 1 percent, or $30,000,000

  In 1915 a German submarine sunk the Lusitania 10 miles off the coast of Ireland. Among the passengers were 188 Americans, 114 of whom lost their lives. The day after the disaster the largest crowds since the outbreak of war gathered in front of New York newspaper offices to read about the Lusitania on bulletin boards. Many spectators cried that America should declare war on Germany. Frank Munsey, the newspaper magnate, telephoned from his New York office to Jay Edwin Murphy, managing editor of his Washington Times. “Has Wilson declared war yet?” Munsey shouted. “No, Mr. Munsey.” Furiously, Munsey screamed, “Tell him to declare war against Germany at once!” Here in New York, as elsewhere in America, the sinking of the Lusitania did much to destroy the considerable pro-German sentiment which had existed during the earlier part of the war. When the French composer Saint-Saëns arrived in New York, he was welcomed at the pier by, among others, a Wagnerian diva. The old man shrank from her in horror, crying, “No! No! Away! You are a German!”

  Now the United States stepped up the shipment of war matériel to the Allies. The most important spot in this nation for the transfer of munitions to Allied ships was Black Tom, a mile-long peninsula jutting into the Hudson River from Jersey City just behind the Statue of Liberty. Originally an island, Black Tom had been connected to the Jersey shore by a fill about 150 feet wide. Freight cars were nosed along a network of tracks to piers, where their supplies could be unloaded onto barges for transfer to waiting vessels in the harbor. The night of July 30, 1916, 2,000,000 pounds of explosives were stored in the railway cars, on piers, and in barges tied alongside docks.

  At 2:08 A.M. the New York area was rocked by a mighty explosion. All 2,000,000 pounds of munitions erupted in a series of blasts that demolished the Black Tom terminal. New York skyscrapers and apartment houses quivered. People were thrown out of bed. Bridges trembled. Half the windows in the Customhouse were shattered. In the nearby Aquarium all the skylights were smashed, but the fish tanks remained intact. Every window was broken in the House of Morgan, and a total of $1,000,000 worth of damage was done to windowpanes throughout the Wall Street area. In Brooklyn and as far north as Forty-second Street in Manhattan, windows shattered into glassy splinters. Damage estimated at $45,000,000 was done within a radius of 25 miles, and the shock was felt as far away as Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Connecticut. For more than 3 hours shrapnel and shells burst through the heavens like skyrockets.

  Surprisingly, only 7 lives were lost. Damage at Black Tom itself came to $20,000,000. New Jersey clapped an embargo on the transit of munitions through the state, but this ban remained in effect only 10 days. Most people regarded the disaster as an accident. The theory was not accepted by businessmen who suffered financial loss. For the next 14 years investigators conducted a worldwide hunt for the German agents they believed responsible for the blast. However, in 1930 the Mixed Claims Commission sitting at The Hague ruled that it had not been established beyond a reasonable doubt that Black Tom was the work of German saboteurs.

  Nevertheless, New York had become undercover headquarters for a gigantic ring of German saboteurs and spies. This was financed in part by Count Johann von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to the United States, who brought $150,000,000 in German treasury notes to this city and deposited them in the Chase National Bank. Perhaps the favorite rendezvous for German agents was a four-story brown-stone, at 123 West Fifteenth Street. This old-fashioned dwelling, with its big dining room and its wine cellar, was rented by Martha Held, who called herself Martha Gordon. A handsome buxom woman, with dark-blue eyes and glossy black hair, she herself did no spying but provided a haven for secret operatives. So many of them skulked in and out of her home at all hours of the night that neighbors whisp
ered that she ran a bawdyhouse. This gossip probably suited her because it kept snoopers away. Bombs and dynamite were stored in her place, and the destruction of ships and munitions and factories was discussed in guttural German accents over beer and wine.

  Colonel House learned that one German agent in New York was involved in a plot to kill President Wilson. By a series of notes to Germany the President caused that nation to restrict its U-boat attacks awhile, and largely because of his skillful diplomacy and the slogan “He Kept Us Out of the War,” Wilson won the Democratic nomination and in 1916 ran for the Presidency a second time.

  His Republican opponent was Charles Evans Hughes, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The November election was so close that Hughes fell asleep in the Astor Hotel thinking that he was the next President, only to awaken the following morning to learn that Wilson had been reelected. New York newspapers actually published extras bearing huge portraits of “The President-Elect—Charles Evans Hughes.” Tammany, dominated by Irish Catholics who were angered because Wilson had not helped Irish rebels, did little, if anything, to keep him in the White House. A straitlaced Presbyterian, Wilson considered New York “rotten to the core.”

  When Germany notified the United States that it was going to resume unrestricted warfare, the President asked Congress to arm American merchant ships. The Senate refused, but Wilson armed them by executive order. New Yorkers braced themselves for the worst. A cavalry force began guarding the city’s water supply, and other soldiers patrolled the East River and its bridges. James W. Gerard, the American ambassador to Germany, was recalled and happened to be in New York on the evening of April 2, 1917. He went to the Metropolitan Opera House for a performance of De Koven’s The Canterbury Pilgrims. Between acts he heard news-boys shouting on the streets outside that the President had asked Congress to declare war on Germany.