Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  Healy, a short but well-muscled tough, often came in with his girlfriend, a pretty, dark-haired girl named Grace Tanzola. Although both were only seventeen, what Martha may not have known was that Grace had recently become Joe Healy’s wife. They had gotten married two months earlier when Grace had informed him she was pregnant. Now, thrown out of his father’s house, Healy and his child bride were living with her mother, Anna, and her nine-year-old sister, Rose Marie. With a baby on the way and no obvious means to support his family, Healy was scared and desperate for money.

  He lingered in the store, waiting for his chance, but that damn kid kept slurping his drink and wouldn’t go away. Healy had been sitting there for a half hour, seeing almost no other customers and eyeing the old lady’s purse on the counter by the cash register. When she finally3 rang up the kid’s soda, Healy thought he spotted “a big bill” in the old-fashioned register and then watched as Martha turned her back on him and walked into a rear room.

  He saw an opportunity and decided it was worth the risk. Quickly he jumped behind the counter and pulled open the unlocked register just as Martha came back into the store. They stared at each other for a brief, silent moment, both in utter surprise and unable to move a muscle. Then Martha grabbed4 the first thing she saw—the sharp butcher’s knife she had been using to cut meat for sandwiches in the absence of the working slicer. She came toward Healy, terrified but determined. Without her husband and against a wiry and desperate seventeen-year-old, she brandished the knife in his face and ordered him out of the store.

  They struggled. Healy acted fast, snatching the knife away from her. And then, in a fit of panic and rage at the denial of his urgent need for cash, he swiped the blade at her throat. Maybe he had meant to kill her out of fear that she could identify him; maybe he was reacting instinctively to the fact that anyone, even a sixty-five-year-old woman, had approached him with a knife. Whatever the motive, he slashed her once, viciously, and when the old woman still wouldn’t quit, he continued beating her until she finally fell motionless behind the counter, dying from the severe gash in her throat.

  Healy, shocked by his own crime, looked around to see if anyone had witnessed it. The windows of the store faced out onto Greenwich Street, but he saw no horrified faces peering in at him. Panicked, he decided to make a run for it, forgetting about the cash in the register. In his struggle with the old lady, not only had Healy dropped the murder weapon, but somehow the gray cap he’d been wearing had slipped off his head. Unaware of the evidence he was leaving behind, he ran into the afternoon sunlight and kept on running.

  At a little after four o’clock,5 a neighbor who lived on the fourth floor above the store decided to go downstairs to return a pie plate she had borrowed from the friendly Mrs. Hore. Catherine Troy, a teenager herself at fifteen, casually strolled in the front door and called out her name. The place was empty, and there were no customers. She walked to the counter and spotted Martha Hore lying in a pool of her own blood, then ran out into the street and screamed at the first person she saw. Charles Kuhn, a welder, was repairing his car at the curb directly in front of the shop’s window. Apparently, he had been so involved in his work that he’d seen neither the crime nor the murderer as he’d raced away.

  Kuhn ran inside, saw the body, and called the police. Catherine Troy returned to her family’s apartment, too distraught to speak.

  At the sound of screeching police cars, a crowd gathered around the familiar little shop. Most were neighbors who had known the Hores for ages. Someone who must have known them very well had taken off for the municipal court in search of the dead woman’s husband. Miraculously, only twelve minutes after his wife’s body had been found, Jeremiah shoved his way through the heavy throng and entered the store. His worst fears of leaving his wife alone had come true.

  It was a brutal scene. After allowing Jeremiah a few minutes to collect himself, Detective Captain Thomas Murray respectfully asked him to search around and see if anything had been taken. Together they looked in the open register; the same $8 and change lay untouched. Jeremiah found his wife’s purse on a shelf, opened it, and noted that whatever little money she carried was still there, along with her rosary beads. He dutifully handed them over as evidence.

  Murray was stumped. In the first place, who would kill an old lady for $8 and then leave the bounty behind? The crime incensed him, and he turned his fury on Kuhn. The back doors were locked, so the killer must have run right past him. How could he not have seen anything or heard anything when he was standing the entire time not ten feet in front of the shop’s entrance? Kuhn shrugged. There was an elevated track overhead; perhaps a train had gone by and drowned out the noise.

  Jeremiah was inconsolable. He simply could not fathom why anyone would want to do this to his wife. One detective posited6 that maybe some drunken customer had gotten in an argument with Mrs. Hore, but when they found Healy’s cap, Murray was fairly certain that what he saw was a robbery gone bad. Jeremiah was asked whether the cap looked familiar; he shook his head no, he couldn’t place it with any customer in particular. He was fairly certain he’d never seen it before. Worse, the cap held no identifying marks, no store label or name stitched inside. The only clue came from a small tag; now all they had to do was look for someone with a size 7¼ head.

  When Murray felt certain that Jeremiah could offer no further help, he asked if there was anyone they could call to help get him home. He had a son, Francis, Jeremiah told them. But maybe they’d better call his daughter, Easter, since she was married to a cop.

  The murder tore into Joe’s sensibility as an agent of the law. It was the ultimate slap in the face of his career, and it wasn’t the first time a Lynch family badge had proved useless. In an odd twist of fate, Joe’s own mother had once been attacked in public, though her injuries were not even remotely as serious.

  On December 29,7 1930, Mary and John Lynch, who was then a police sergeant, were celebrating at a pre–New Year’s Eve party held at the Farragut Inn in the upstate village of Hastings-on-Hudson. Apparently, despite Prohibition, there was much drinking going on, and sometime during the evening, a “Broadway figure” (by which it was meant a gambler and gangster) got into an argument with Mary. Before John could intervene, the man, named John Hanley, struck Mary with his cane. She wasn’t seriously harmed, but the sting of her husband’s pride hurt worse than her bruises.

  Unable to attain prosecution for the crime, the Lynches promptly sued Hanley for $100,000. Hanley denied the attack, and when the case finally came to court, a judge awarded Mary Lynch the grand sum of $500.

  Now, disgusted with the system, Joe cursed the ineffectiveness of his own uniform in failing to protect his family from harm. And when he wasn’t doing that, he spent every ounce of his remaining strength comforting his wife and caring for their children.

  Joe Healy wandered the streets for hours. He thought about the horrific crime he had just committed and what the penalty might be if he was caught; then he thought of his new wife and baby on the way. What kind of life could they hope to have if he went to jail? What kind of upbringing would his child experience with a heinous murderer for a father? As twilight fell, he decided on a plan of action.

  Steadying himself,8 he walked into his mother-in-law’s apartment on Renwick Street. Even though it was dark, Healy knew it was a risky move; the dingy tenement was only two blocks away from the murder scene. If there had been any witnesses, the cops would surely be waiting for him there. He stood outside in the shadows for a few minutes to make sure the coast was clear.

  Convincing Grace to come away with him would be no easy matter. By now the entire neighborhood had heard of the crime, but Healy felt fairly certain he could talk his wife into leaving without having to confess anything drastic. Somehow he did. The next morning the two of them boarded a train to Philadelphia, where Healy hoped to forget his crime and forge a new life.

  In this case, however, despite their somewhat unremarkable record in solving homicides, the
NYPD reacted quickly. Although initially no murder weapon had been found, once Martha Hore’s body had been removed, the bloody butcher’s knife turned up. It was sent to the crime laboratory at the Poplar Street station in Brooklyn to be examined for fingerprints. In the meantime, after canvassing the neighborhood and assuring themselves that there were indeed no witnesses to the murder, detectives focused on the single clue at hand: Healy’s cap.

  It wasn’t much to go on. Being so completely nondescript and of such a dark gray shade, the cap could probably be worn without any casual observer even taking notice of it. No one did. Fortunately for the cops, Healy’s primary mistake in committing the crime had been not the forgotten hat, but the fact that he had targeted a spot so close to his mother-in-law’s home for robbery in the first place.

  As quickly as the morning after the murder, Lieutenant Hugh Sheridan, in charge of detectives at the Charles Street police station, knew the identity of the killer. Anna Tanzola identified9 the cap as belonging to her son-in-law, whom she reported as missing along with her teenage daughter. Whether or not she knew she was implicating Healy in the murder, since it was already the talk of the neighborhood she must have had some inkling of the impact her testimony would have.

  Sheridan wasted no time issuing a description of the suspect as seventeen years old, five feet six inches tall, and weighing approximately one hundred and thirty-five pounds. Without naming Healy10 specifically, he further stated that the suspect “had recently married.” Robbery was the suspected motive for the crime, Sheridan stated, since Mrs. Hore “had been in the custom of leaving her pocket book lying around the store in conspicuous places.”

  The police knew who he was, but they didn’t know where to find him. On the off-chance that Healy would return home at some point, to retrieve either clothes or money for a prolonged escape, Sheridan ordered his men to stake out both Anna Tanzola’s apartment and the one his father lived in, another tenement just up the block. Joe Healy and Grace Tanzola had been close neighbors growing up, their buildings separated by no more than a hundred feet. If he showed up at either location, detectives would be there to grab him.

  Healy didn’t show,11 but on the following Tuesday, just five days after the murder, he sent his father a telegram asking for money, adding an address in Philadelphia where he wanted it to be sent. Had Healy waited a bit for things to cool off and for the detectives to abandon their stakeout, or had he sent the request via regular mail, Joe Healy might never have been found. As it was, the quick-thinking cops, spotting a rare Western Union man in a neighborhood where telegrams were considered a luxury, intercepted the message.

  Philadelphia was a quick four-hour drive, and the detectives wasted no time. The telegram had arrived on Tuesday evening, and by Wednesday morning Inspector Michael McDermott had Healy in custody. They brought Grace back as well. The officers completed the arrest in time for the morning papers to announce that the murder of Martha Hore had been solved and that Healy had immediately broken down and confessed. Grace, who protested that she knew nothing about the crime, was held as a material witness.

  Two days later,12 the case was in the hands of Assistant District Attorney Lawrence McManus, who promptly got statements out of both Joe and Grace Healy, then released the pregnant wife from custody. Clearly, among the members of his own family, Joe was not a popular figure. In solidifying the already airtight case against him, McManus also collected testimony from Joe’s sister Helen, as well as Anna and Rose Marie Tanzola. Although she could not identify Healy as the murderer, young Catherine Troy was also brought in as a witness.

  A grand jury13 was convened for the following week, and on December 9 they handed in an indictment of first-degree murder against Healy. In all, fifteen witnesses testified for the prosecution, although none had seen the actual crime being committed. The evidence was circumstantial at best, but Healy’s teary-eyed confession to Inspector McDermott practically ensured a conviction.

  That afternoon, Healy was taken away in handcuffs to the infamous Tombs, a massive and decrepit jailhouse that occupied a full city block in lower Manhattan. Although its official name was the Manhattan House of Detention, the structure more than lived up to its reputation as a mausoleum for the living. At one time or another, the Tombs had housed some of the worst criminals in the city’s history. Now Joe Healy was one of them. He would spend14 more than a year there, sitting alone in a tiny, darkened cell, waiting for his trial. For Joe and Easter Lynch, 1938 was a long, slow, and agonizing wait for justice.

  The Board of Design submitted this sketch for a 250-foot-tall “Theme Tower” in 1936, one of many concepts that would eventually become the Trylon and Perisphere. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)

  7

  WHY HAVE A FAIR?

  While all the controversy1 surrounding Flushing Meadows was going on, the World’s Fair concept itself began taking shape. And, as usual, it would begin with an argument. All the debate would result in an astoundingly clear vision and specific plan for the Fair in a relatively short amount of time, but it would take committee after committee to get them there.

  The problem arose almost immediately after the World’s Fair Corporation was formed. George McAneny, who had personally provided initial working capital and even secured offices for the board of directors, had taken it upon himself to hire a small group of marketing professionals from the Chicago World’s Fair to create an overall plan for New York’s. This did not sit well with the city’s fussy art scene, who felt that the blueprints for the Fair, including its overall theme, the layout of the grounds, and the presentation of exhibits, should be left to professionals like, for instance, themselves. For this crowd, the very lack of designers on the World’s Fair staff spelled trouble. Marketers were by nature concerned only with commercialism, and they pointed to Chicago’s criticism as evidence that only designers should be in charge of design. Let McAneny and Grover Whalen worry about how to pay for it all.

  In December 1935,2 a group of ninety-six artists, designers, and architects calling themselves “Progressives in the Arts” got together at a dinner at the New York Civic Club to decide what should be done about this. In charge was Michael Hare of the Municipal Art Society, supported by future Fair designers Gilbert Rohde and Walter Dorwin Teague. Lewis Mumford, a social commentator and curmudgeonly columnist for The New Yorker, backed them up.

  It was more than a design issue, they argued. What was needed was a new kind of Fair that would address social issues like unemployment and the vast mistrust the public felt toward the very technology the Fair would be presenting in its vision of the future. The problem was that Mumford, along with many other “progressives,” had a rather inflated sense of self-importance.

  “If we allow ourselves,”3 Mumford boasted, “… as members of a great metropolis, to think for the world at large, we may lay the foundation for a pattern of life which would have an enormous impact in times to come.”

  This kind of New York intellectual superiority would have significant impact on the fortunes of the Fair, just not in ways Mumford could then imagine.

  The end result of the dinner was the formation of a “Fair of the Future” committee. Taking the basic subtext4 of the corporation’s ideas for reflecting on the past only as a way to see into the World of Tomorrow, the committee asserted in its proposal, “The world is in chaos, struggling to master its own inventions.” Therefore, “Mere mechanical progress is no longer an adequate or practical theme for a World’s Fair. Instead we must demonstrate an American Way of Living. We must tell the story of the relationships between objects in their everyday use—how they may be used and, when purposefully used, how they may help us.”

  Industrial designers such as Teague5 had enjoyed great success with the new style of streamlining,6 and because such designs were closely associated with aerodynamics, with more than a touch of science fiction, the public ate it up. Everything from refrigerators to locomotives was suddenly streamlined and bullet-shaped,7 though why
anyone would want a streamlined refrigerator was never pondered. And while Chicago’s Fair had presented its new technology as living in the realm of Popular Science and its depiction of a future filled with flying cars and rocket packs, Teague and others like Raymond Loewy wanted to make science fiction a practical reality.

  Ultimately, the basic recommendation of the Fair of the Future committee was to create another one, the social planning committee, made up of members representing the fields of architecture, design, education, and engineering. This committee,8 they insisted, should be given total control over the planning and construction of the Fair in place of the marketers and promotions men from Chicago.

  Perhaps because the Fair of the Future’s suggestions fell in line so well with the corporation’s ideas, their proposal was quickly adopted9 as the overall framework for the World of Tomorrow. It was, in fact, a page right out of the Whalen playbook, marrying the product with the consumer and the consumer with the notion of greater good. And underneath that came the whiff of patriotism—capitalism dressed up as being good for America. The result would also help to rebuild a little of that lost trust in big business. Whether or not they could sell General Motors on the idea was not their concern; that they would leave up to Grover Whalen.

  Not surprisingly, many of their key members managed to secure jobs for themselves as the Fair’s designers and architects.