Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  Byrnes, the career detective, checked to find out about this McGregor and discovered that the New York City directory did not list a single Thomas McGregor. Byrnes grew more irritated; he mulled the indignities as he walked downtown from 57th Street on Saturday morning. He had been cooperating, ordering that impractical rules be followed, was investigating a respected captain, and yet the board allowed these anonymous charges to be published. By the time he arrived he was seething.

  He marched straight to Commissioner Parker’s office to complain. Parker, who knew Byrnes from years earlier, was acting as point man for the board; Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with Byrnes. After he left, Parker gathered the other board members for an informal meeting, and three out of four professed deep sympathy for Byrnes over the complaint letter and anonymous potshots. The board called Byrnes upstairs to apologize to him in person but Roosevelt left the room before Byrnes arrived. The board later issued a statement that it “deeply regrets” the publication of the letter and the members “unqualifiedly deny” making “derogatory” statements about Byrnes to the press.

  The Byrnes circus was threatening to split the board. Lawyer Parker was trying to keep Roosevelt from bringing charges, which might take months and leave the department rudderless. Andrews sided with Roosevelt but Grant, malleable, liked Byrnes and was open to letting him stay. It fell to Parker to negotiate a compromise.

  Parker met several times on Saturday with Byrnes. Neither man said a word to the press. Byrnes took the ferry to spend Sunday with his family near Red Bank, New Jersey. Monday morning, Byrnes arrived at 300 Mulberry before 8 a.m. looking glum. When Roosevelt arrived at 9 a.m., a reporter tossed an odd question at him: was it true that he would be the next police chief? “Just as much chance of it as I shall be made Admiral of the United States Navy.”

  Parker and Byrnes met again. “Never have I felt sadder at heart than during that talk with Chief Byrnes this morning,” Parker commented later. At 11:45 a.m. the other three members of the board met on routine business. Almost an hour later, Parker still hadn’t arrived in the boardroom. Roosevelt closed the session to the press; he could be overheard loudly talking to Commissioner Grant, who then went downstairs to find Parker and Byrnes. Parker returned alone at 1 p.m. to the boardroom carrying Byrnes’s application for retirement.

  Roosevelt clearly did not want to say anything pleasant about Byrnes so Parker, in this rare instance, spoke for the board. Parker once again denied that the board had issued negative comments about Byrnes and he noted that Byrnes had offered to assist in the future. However, probably per his agreement with Roosevelt, Parker conspicuously did not thank Byrnes for his long and illustrious career. In TR’s eyes, Byrnes’s profiteering negated all.

  Chief Clerk Kipp called for a vote on Byrnes’s application to retire with a $3,000-a-year pension. Roosevelt sang out the loudest of the four “Ayes.”

  A bit later, Byrnes, in a business suit, came upstairs and spoke to the board for ten minutes in private. Byrnes, usually the showman, then returned to his office through the quiet halls, and said very little, appearing subdued. The newspapermen found him looking somehow a tad more bald than the week before; Byrnes mumbled about the “fortunes of war.” Then he made a brief dignified statement in which he said little more than “I have given thirty-two years of my life’s work to the police force. I am proud of the service.”

  Sergeant Frank Mangin—Byrnes’s right-hand man for decades—tried to control his emotions but started crying. “Why Frank this is nonsense. I have been here thirty-two years, and I’m glad to get out. Don’t bother about this.”

  Grown men, who had wielded nightsticks and muscled thugs, had to wipe away tears. “Even the newspaper reporters at Headquarters showed more emotion than they usually do on hearing of a first-class murder or fire, and begged for a well-used club or some other little souvenir of his hard-working days.” Several officers began muttering about “criminals coming back in shoals.”

  “Not one of us all who had known him long did not regret it,” wrote Jacob Riis of Byrnes’s departure, “though I for one had to own the necessity of it.” Riis wrote that the chief represented the bad old days to too many people. “He was the very opposite of Roosevelt—quite without moral purpose or the comprehension of it, yet with a streak of kindness in him that sometimes put preaching to shame.”

  Roosevelt had wanted Byrnes run out of town on a rail but his small consolation prize came later that afternoon. The board voted unanimously to deny the retirement and pension of Captain Joseph Eakins. They also voted in as new acting chief fifty-four-year-old Peter Conlin, whom the New York Times called “a keen, handsome little man with a becoming gray mustache, polite and painstaking with just a trace of the soldier in his bearing.” In one of his first deeds in office, Conlin cosigned with the Parkhurst Society lawyer, Frank Moss, a long list of charges against Eakins.

  “I am getting the police department under control,” TR wrote in his Sunday, June 2, letter to sister Bamie. “I forced Byrnes and Williams out, and now hold undisputed sway.” Wife Edith also wrote Bamie that weekend. “I have never seen [Theodore] look better or more full of life energy.”

  ong past midnight on Thursday, June 7, 1895, two oddly dressed men lingered on the steps of the Union League Club, a bastion of Republican wealth in the city. Despite the unseasonable eighty-degree heat, one wore a loose knee-length white duster over black formal attire, with a floppy hat pulled down; the other, despite the very late hour, wore green-tinted spectacles. The pair drew glances from the prestigious organization’s night watchman.

  They scanned the wide streets near the entrance at Fifth Avenue and 39th Street and saw little except for the occasional “Nighthawk” cab trawling for fares. Both men were of medium to short height, with cropped mustaches. One spoke with a Danish accent; the other had trouble whispering.

  Theodore Roosevelt and his friend Jacob Riis, semi-incognito, were heading out on a stealth mission to hunt cops. Ever restless, TR wanted to find out more about the police department he thought he ruled “with undisputed sway.” And Riis was thrilled to find a kindred spirit willing to stay up after midnight to explore. Were the policemen doing their duty? Were they professional? Efficient?

  Roosevelt consulted the precinct map he had received from acting chief Conlin identifying the various posts of policemen. The 21st Precinct, a rectangle, stretched diagonally from the 42nd Street edge of Grand Central Depot, with its spectacular 200-yard-long arched glass-and-iron dome over the train platforms, down to Bellevue Charity Hospital at 26th and the East River, which housed the city morgue.

  The pair headed east from Fifth Avenue to Third Avenue, then ducked into the shadows of the Elevated Railroad. Avoiding the geometric zigzags of light cast through the girders by the Edison arc lamps, they whispered excitedly.

  Third Avenue—bisected by the spindly El—stretched out before them. A guidebook described it as “one of the longest and busiest streets in the city, lined with retail shops and tenement houses, with scarcely a single important building.” Working-class people lived in the neighborhood. Almost daily, lunatics, criminals, and contagious patients shuffled through it to reach the new city pier at 26th Street to board the ferry to Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island).

  The two men meandered under the railroad girders and saw two uniformed policemen talking together at 41st Street, inside the first of ten posts on the precinct map. Roosevelt and Riis kept in the shadows and ambled south another block when TR decided that perhaps those officers might chat too long. (Cops at night were supposed to walk their beats alone, and converse with fellow officers only in times of emergency.) Roosevelt turned back and they retraced the deserted streets to check, but the officers were gone. He and Riis paced five times up and down that first beat along Third Avenue from 36th to 42nd Street—walking a mile and a half—but never saw the two bluecoats again.

  They then trekked the half mile down to the precinct’s southern boundary at 27th Street an
d didn’t see a single police officer; they doubled back and decided to concentrate on finding the patrolman assigned to the smallest post, 27th to 30th Street on Third Avenue. They looked in doorways, alleyways, under illegally parked wagons (no overnight parking was allowed on public streets); they climbed the tall metal stairs to the El station at 28th Street and walked the platform. They descended.

  All of a sudden, a pudgy man in an apron came rushing out of O’Neill’s, an all-night coffee shop near 28th Street, and with a heavy club rapped three times on a lamppost. The sound echoed in the stillness of the night. “Where in thunder does that copper sleep?” shouted the man, as he banged three more times.

  Riis yelled over to ask what the emergency was. The man, a night manager, said the Edison Electric Illuminating Company had recently hooked up O’Neill’s and he was worried that the current wasn’t working right and might spark a fire. “He orter’d tole me when he giv’ up the barber shop, so’s a fellow could find him.” (Policemen on the late shift were notorious for finding a “coop” in which to spend part of the night.) TR and Riis retraced the beat four times before giving up.

  Roosevelt was growing increasingly disgusted. The Tammany cops were fulfilling the reformer’s worst expectations. In any case, pretty much every minute of his trek was an eye-opener for Roosevelt.

  Although he had explored the wilds of Maine and the Dakotas, the castles of Europe and pyramids of Egypt, Roosevelt had rarely, if ever, walked the side streets of his native city after midnight. Wealthy men took carriages at that hour. In addition, TR had spent the last six years living in Washington, D.C. Ironically, he needed a guide to his own hometown, and he couldn’t have found a better one than Jacob Riis.

  The forty-six-year-old Dane had not only covered the police for almost twenty years for the Tribune and Evening Sun but in the late 1880s, he had taught himself flash photography and had produced How the Other Half Lives, which critics would judge a genuinely groundbreaking photo essay and exposé of the horrific tenement poverty in New York City. Riis’s magnesium flash seemed to stun the poor out of their dimly lit oblivion: here was a family—from father to toddler—in a sweatshop sewing “knee pants” on Ludlow Street, over there dazed drinkers in a black-and-tan saloon on Thompson Street. Riis captured the bleakness, filth, overcrowding, disease, hunger, relentless poverty, but also the humanity.

  When Roosevelt first read the book, he sought out the author at the Evening Sun offices. Missing him, TR left his card, with these words on the back: “I have read your book and I have come to help.”

  Now it was Roosevelt who needed Riis’s help. Riis would one day call his years tramping with Roosevelt “the happiest by far” of his life and TR would write a deeply touching eulogy two decades later for “one of my truest and closest friends.”

  The pair walked over to Second Avenue and finally found a patrolman … asleep on a butter tub outside a grocer shop, his hat off, “snoring so that you could hear him across the street.” Roosevelt woke the man up with an opening salvo of: “Is that the way you patrol your post?” The cop, instantly irritated, looked at the two short well-dressed strangers and snapped: “Come now, get a hustle on before I dump you.” Roosevelt identified himself as a police commissioner, sternly lectured the man, and told him to come to headquarters the next morning. (That must have seemed like an extraordinarily bad dream for Officer Elbert Roberston.)

  Roosevelt and Riis continued on Second Avenue and found another policeman … standing beside a woman, no doubt a streetwalker. The sleuths lurked in the shadows and watched the patrolman chat for a full ten minutes until Roosevelt could stand no more. He jumped into the conversation and confronted him: “Officer, is this the way you attend to your duty?”

  Officer Thomas Connors, tall and handsome, was extremely peeved by the interruption. “What are you looking for, trouble? You see that street?” he said, pointing down Second Avenue. “Now run along, or I’ll fan you and I’ll fan you hard.” Connors brandished his nightstick. Roosevelt didn’t move. Connors turned to his companion. “Shall I fan him, Mame?” The doll’s giggling retort: “Fan him hard.”

  Roosevelt abruptly ended the comedy. “Oh no, officer, you will neither fan me hard or easy. I am police commissioner Rooosevelt and instead of fanning anybody, you report at headquarters at 9:30 o’clock.” TR clearly relished a sport that included hunting and defying bullies.

  Around 4 a.m., Roosevelt and Riis visited the precinct house at 35th Street “to ascertain if the whole police force had dropped dead and the entire Coroner’s office was in demand,” as the Evening World glibly put it.

  Sergeant James J. Fagan, surly at first, quickly straightened up when Roosevelt introduced himself and demanded that Fagan wake up the sergeant “on reserve” and send him out immediately to search for the missing roundsman and patrolmen.

  Roosevelt and Riis left the station and resumed their tramp; they headed back north to 42nd Street and Third Avenue, where they found some of the precinct’s missing officers: Roundsman White and patrolmen Magan and Mahoney. The burly blue-coated trio was standing outside a corner saloon amusing each other with stories.

  Roosevelt interrupted: “Why don’t you men patrol your posts?”

  “What the %$#%$# is that your business?” demanded Roundsman White, and Patrolman Magan said, “Move on, now, or I’ll pull you in.”

  Finally, Mahoney, reaching for TR’s lapels, said: “Yeah, let’s pull him in on general principles, he’s suspicious looking, anyhow.”

  Roosevelt introduced himself. “The city pays you to do your duty. Report to my office at 9:30.” TR and Riis returned to the station house and the commissioner informed Sergeant Fagan that all six officers (the butter tub sleeper, the chatty man, these last three, and the missing-in-action cop) must report to headquarters at 9:30 a.m.

  Energized by their adventures, TR and Riis boarded a streetcar and rode down to the Hester Street stop in the city’s most overcrowded slum, the notorious 11th Precinct, former haunt of Captain Devery. They saw sunrise amid the pushcarts as they entered the Eldridge Street station and later walked to 300 Mulberry at 6:45 a.m. “Is my room ready?” Roosevelt said to the white-haired sergeant on duty. “May I ask who you are and what room you occupy in this building?” A month into his new job, TR was still not well recognized in the city or even to some at police headquarters.

  Roosevelt napped on a chaise longue. He was refreshed at 9:30 a.m. when the six officers arrived—“a line of huge frightened guardians of the peace” as he later gloated to his sister. Roosevelt severely reprimanded them for half an hour, a “raking down which they will not soon forget,” especially critiquing them for the disrespect shown to him when they didn’t know his identity. He expected roundsmen to maintain “military discipline.” He extended a one-time clemency but vowed to fine them or any other officers in the future for such behavior.

  Riis had promised Roosevelt that he wouldn’t write up their mission, but apparently he was allowed to tell their adventures to the other press boys at 301 Mulberry. The newspapermen genuinely delighted in the street theater of someone, anyone defying police officers and they one-upped each other in supplying pithy dialogue. (The story of the cop offering “to fan” Roosevelt “hard” with his nightstick kept getting better.) The coverage, kicked off by Pulitzer’s Evening World (HUNTS IN VAIN FOR POLICEMEN AFTER MIDNIGHT), was universally positive. TR was dubbed “Haroun el-Roosevelt” after the caliph in Thousand and One Nights who explored Baghdad at night in disguise. Editorialists and letter writers raved. “The passing policeman is afraid even to go to sleep on his beat lest the sleepless president of the Police Commission catches him in the act; he is afraid to club a night-walking citizen lest his locust [wood] may by accident collide with the head of the ubiquitous Theodore.”

  Privately, he was quite pleased as well. “These midnight rambles are great fun,” he wrote his sister Bamie. “My whole work brings me in contact with every class of people in New York, as no other work poss
ibly could, and I get a glimpse of the real life of the swarming millions.”

  TR’s closest ally on the board, Avery Andrews, decided that he would imitate his reform mentor and also perform an unannounced inspection/ramble. At age thirty-one, Andrews was the youngest member of the Police Board and easily ranked as its most politically naive. He belonged to no political clubs, parlayed with no power brokers. He had landed the job in an almost otherworldly way that perhaps captured the best of the reform movement. He had written a detailed proposal on reorganizing the police and mailed it to Mayor Strong. The mayor had read it, liked it, and appointed him, hoping that an outsider such as Andrews would ignore politics and make decisions based on benefits to the city.

  He chose for his mission to observe whether saloons were selling beer on Sundays, contrary to New York State’s Sabbath and excise laws. The laws also forbade attending baseball games, horse races, and theater on Sunday or buying most anything except medicine.

  Andrews lived with his wife in upper Manhattan, on West 130th Street, in a leafy oasis. Harlem then offered a greener, almost suburban feel compared to tenement-filled stretches downtown. Not too far from him, Riverside Drive, with its trees, mansions, and expansive Hudson River views, was touted by Shepp’s guidebook as “probably … the finest avenue on the American continent.”

  At 9:30 p.m. on Sunday night, Andrews walked south to 125th Street, a wide esplanade flanked by an ever-increasing number of retail stores such as H. C. F. Koch’s, and banks, theaters, and churches. Zeisloft’s guide stated that the residents of Harlem—from the elite to the working class—enjoyed a nightly ritual of promenading along 125th Street, strolling to and fro from Third Avenue to Eighth Avenue, stopping occasionally at “the first class theaters,” the “free concert halls”…or the “respectable restaurants.”