Downtown: My Manhattan

by Pete Hamill

  The chance came in 1895. That year, he bought the failing Morning Journal, which had been founded by Pulitzer’s estranged brother, Albert, years before Joseph took over the World. Armed with an enormous fortune ($7.5 million) given to him by his widowed mother, Hearst set out to transform a loser into a winner. The battle that followed is familiar to many people now, if only through the fictional version of Hearst shown in Citizen Kane. He and Pulitzer fought with competing crusades. They fought with cartoons and comic strips. The first regular cartoon was a weekly panel called “Hogan’s Alley,” written and drawn for Pulitzer by Richard F. Outcault about a wisecracking slum kid in a yellow nightshirt. Yellow ink held fast better than other colors on the newer high-speed presses, and from that cartoon panel came the phrase “yellow journalism.” Pulitzer and Hearst raided each other’s staffs, with Hearst stealing editors, reporters, and even Outcault for the Journal. They fought with highly paid freelancers, including Richard Harding Davis, who covered the Yale-Princeton football game for Hearst and was paid an amazing (for the time) $500 as his fee.

  The competition reached its fevered climax with the run-up to the war against Spain in 1898. Hearst beat the war drums. Pulitzer rose to the jingoistic challenge. Every morning brought fresh tales of Spanish atrocities against their local rebel opponents in Cuba, Spanish use of torture, Spanish contempt for the United States. The popular “yellow” press was driving a president toward armed conflict with a country that had done nothing to the United States. Then the USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor under circumstances that remain unclear. In the end, Hearst and Pulitzer got their splendid little war.

  When it was over, both newspapers were losers. Daily circulation at the peak of the war reached more than a million each for the World and the Journal. But their expenses had been enormous. Each paper lost money, Pulitzer for the first time since arriving in New York. There were also signs that Pulitzer was ashamed of the way he had succumbed to the war fever. The true winners were Adolph S. Ochs, who had taken over the New York Times in 1896, and Bennett’s Herald. Ochs had no money to send fleets of correspondents to Cuba and so reported the basic war news while concentrating on the local and adding such cultural features as book reviews. He also dropped the price of his paper from three cents to one. His circulation tripled. From distant Paris, Bennett also seemed to gaze at the war with a cooler, more European eye. The Herald, which under his father had introduced the sensational to New York newspapers, was much more restrained than its competitors. Both the Herald and the Times presented news—particularly foreign news—in a more sober style. Their comparative gravity suited a number of readers who were embarrassed by the ranting jingoism of the “yellow” sheets. And then all of them, including Pulitzer, got lucky. Hearst managed to go too far.

  In the run-up to the war with Spain, Hearst had vilified President William McKinley, a Republican, for his cautious refusal to go to war when Hearst told him to go to war. His enduring contempt for McKinley was expressed in a 1901 Journal editorial: “If bad institutions and bad men cannot be got rid of except by killing, then the killing must be done.” That September, a psychopathic anarchist shot McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. McKinley died eight days later of gangrene. The other New York newspapers hauled out the old Hearst editorial and a column by Hearst’s Arthur Brisbane, who asserted that Lincoln’s assassination had brought many Americans together. The competitors lashed out at Hearst with high moral indignation. The circulation of the Journal started falling.

  Then Hearst went into active politics. He was elected twice to Congress as a Democrat. But he lusted for the presidency. The Democrats turned him aside at the convention in 1904. He lost out in bids for the governorship of New York and lost, through Tammany swindling, in his campaign to become mayor of New York, then failed again. In the end, he had spent $1,750,000 on a political career that was almost entirely a failure. Worse, the credibility of his newspaper eroded even more. Its crusades and its editorial positions seemed calculated only to endorse the dreams of political glory of its publisher.

  Meanwhile, Park Row was changing. Bennett was the first to move, in 1893, building a new plant at Thirty-fifth Street and Broadway, designed by Stanford White. His grateful new neighbors changed the name of the crossroads to Herald Square. Then, in 1904, Ochs moved the Times uptown to Longacre Square, where Broadway reached Forty-second Street. He arranged with Tammany friends to change the name of Longacre Square in honor of his newspaper. In April, Manhattan had a new name to remember: Times Square. Away to the south, in the old part of town, Park Row was beginning to look abandoned, if not yet forlorn.

  And so my present as a newspaperman was always accompanied by the past. Bennett and Greeley, Pulitzer and Hearst hovered near me as I was taught my craft. There was one other immense ghost in the room: Joseph Medill Patterson, who had started the tabloid New York Daily News on Park Place in 1919, moved it to a new Raymond Hood skyscraper on Forty-second Street in 1929, and built it into the largest-circulation newspaper in the United States. For one major reason, the tabloid was made for New York: It was easy to read on subways by men and women in a hurry. In the booming 1920s, almost everybody was in a hurry. Patterson’s tabloid was bright, accurate, funny, thorough, and lively about sports, filled with a variety of service features, along with heavy emphasis on show business. It featured the best photography in the city and called itself “New York’s Picture Newspaper.” Like Greeley, Patterson had once been a socialist, even managed a campaign for Eugene V. Debs, and after socialism faded as a personal passion, he still insisted on making a newspaper for the common man. That often meant making a newspaper for the immigrants to New York and for their American children. Certainly my father was not alone in becoming an American through the Daily News sports pages. He never did get to read The Federalist Papers.

  Patterson died in 1946, but the News was still the largest game in town, even though some newspapermen detected a weakening of its energy and stylishness. My own New York Post had become a tabloid in 1943, with Dorothy Schiff, a proud liberal, as the publisher, but remained in 1960 the seventh in circulation among the seven New York dailies. It made up for lack of funds with literary style and a brave liberalism (in particular during the dark days of McCarthyism). The sports section was aggressive and well-written. The columnists included Murray Kempton, which was like having Henry James sitting across the city room banging on an old Remington typewriter. My own instructors included a brilliant, hard-boiled editor named Paul Sann, a young editor named Ed Kosner, a sour copy editor (and superb writer) named Fred McMorrow. The staff was small, so there were few specialists. On the same night you could write a murder, a labor dispute, and a fire. Everybody took part in the process, cracking jokes, making remarks, showing a kid how to fix a lead. Most nights, I never wanted to go home.

  I quickly realized that newspapers were among the institutions that bound together the many different people of the city. In their own way, they were as important as baseball teams, public schools, and the subways. Television was, of course, everywhere now in the New York night, and its stars were known to millions. But many New Yorkers, after viewing the news on television, still needed a newspaper to make it feel real. And in those newspapers, the basic formula hadn’t changed since the days of the giants of Park Row. Except in time of war, foreign news was generally left to the New York Times or the New York Herald-Tribune (the two former rivals had merged in the 1920s). But the rest of the papers knew that all news, like all politics, was local. They covered power, particularly the nexus of New York wealth and New York politics. They were heavy on sports, and added great dollops of Broadway and Hollywood gossip in imitation of Walter Winchell, of Hearst’s New York Mirror. A few even began covering television. There were society columns too, and advice columns, and comics, and puzzles.

  Above all, there was crime. Big bank robberies, huge cases of corruption, drug busts: All were given attention according to the flow of other news. New Yorkers love cal
amity, so a swindle or a drug bust could never compete on page one with a war, a paralyzing blizzard, the explosion of a power plant, or a fatal crash in a subway. But from the time of Bennett, crime had been a beat for every newspaper. With the arrival in the early 1960s of the dreadful combination of guns and heroin, New York was becoming more dangerous. The annual murder statistics would climb from around three hundred a year to more than two thousand by the 1990s. A sense of menace began to pervade the city, staining the night, making each citizen—reading about the latest outrage on the way to work—feel uncertain and vulnerable.

  From the nineteenth century on, most New Yorkers knew that there were only a few basic scripts for murder. Some desperate fool with a rented gun would try a stickup, panic, and shoot the owner of the delicatessen, who was invariably the father of three young children. Another fool would try a mugging on a dark street and get gunned down himself when the victim turned out to be an off-duty cop. A busted-out gambler would be drinking in an after-hours club when a tall gunman and a shorter partner walked in with guns blazing. The cops, and the tabloids, would then send out an alarm for a Mutt-and-Jeff bandit team. The felons were always caught.

  Occasionally some hoodlum would be found in an alley with an ice pick in his ear. He had done something terrible inside the Mob, and his corpse was proof of the existence in the city of the ultimate secret society. Some reporters concentrated exclusively on the Mob, revealing its connections to unions, real estate, gambling coups, fixed fights, and, increasingly, to heroin. They made charts of the powers in the different Mafia families, traced their connections to Las Vegas or to other American mobs that were set up as intricately as the Federal Reserve system. Some became immense newspaper stars: Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky. Most of the time, the dead were from the lower ranks, not the high command. Siegel was murdered in Los Angeles in 1947, but Luciano, Costello, and Lansky died in bed.

  Mob murders were almost all in the name of business, but their numbers were tiny when placed among the statistics. An equally small number of murders were driven by avarice, particularly among those poor souls with large insurance policies. The truth was that human passion drove most homicides. One night in the early 1960s, a sad-eyed detective named Ray Martin told me: “The biggest killer in New York? It’s not drugs. It’s not robbery. It’s not greed. It’s jealousy.” That seemed true then and remains true now. Month after month, faithless husbands were killed by enraged wives. Faithless wives were killed by enraged husbands. The lovers of each were killed too, but less frequently. Often, the romantic logic of such murders—“I can’t live without you!”—commanded the killers to then kill themselves, leaving a one-day story without a mystery, a pursuit, an exercise in detection, a trial, or a final journey to the electric chair, labeled in its day by tabloid reporters as the “hot squat.”

  There were so many of these crimes of passion that not all of them made the newspapers, unless they fit into a special category: Murder at a Good Address. A murder driven by jealousy on Park Avenue was bigger news than a similar murder in Brooklyn. If the slain husband, wife, or lover came from the community of the rich, the headlines shouted. If they came from a slum, they were lucky to produce a three-paragraph story deep in the newspaper.

  Because murders had become so common in New York life, editors demanded those details that would make familiar scripts seem new. “Concrete nouns, active verbs, and details,” Paul Sann said to me one morning in the Post city room. “That’s all you need. Starting with the goddamned details.”

  The details never lost their horror. Human beings killed other human beings with guns, knives, poisons, axes large and small. They strangled them with ropes, neckties, and belts. They caved in their skulls with ashtrays, lamps, hammers, lead pipes, baseball bats, bricks, and frying pans. They shoved them under subway trains. They ran them over with automobiles. They heaved them off rooftops. Sometimes the corpses were naked. More often, they were clothed. The victims never had pictures of Lord Byron on the wall. But the accounts of their final hours went all the way back to James Gordon Bennett and his visit to 41 Thomas Street in 1836. His spirit was in the city room one hot summer night in the 1960s when nothing seemed to be happening anywhere on the planet. A few of us were standing around the city desk with little to do.

  “Man,” I said, “what we need around here is a good murder.”

  “At a good address,” said the city editor.

  Chapter Seven

  The Fifth Avenue

  FROM THE BEGINNING, Fifth Avenue was a very good address, although it seldom had any murders. It did, alas, contain murderers. The social and geographical foundation of what was called “the” Fifth Avenue for most of the nineteenth century was Washington Square. And before its six and a half acres were laid out as the city’s first planned square, it was the potter’s field. Starting in 1797, the impoverished were buried here, many of them women who had ended their days in the city’s almshouse. Buried here too were the thousands of victims of the many yellow fever epidemics, along with hundreds of African Americans stacked on top of one another in fifty square feet allotted to the African Zion Methodist Church, whose church crypts were overflowing. But in the center of today’s square—at approximately where the fountain was built in the 1960s—stood the gallows.

  Here, in the early years of the young republic, before crowds of the curious, the vengeful, and even some relatives of victims, the city’s murderers were hanged for their crimes. When they were safely dead, they were buried deep in the weeds of the spongy field with the luckless innocent. The field would eventually hold the bones of twenty thousand human beings. Public hangings were ended in 1820, and the last person executed was a black woman named Rose Butler, who was hanged for setting fire to the house where she almost certainly was a slave. All became part of the permanent alloy of the graveyard. The potter’s field was finally closed in 1826, filled to its capacity. But even in the late 1950s, when I was living in the East Village and spending time around the square, old residents were telling me tales about how on certain foggy nights you could see the dead rising from below the grass and the footpaths. Some wore the yellow shrouds in which they were buried, identifying them as victims of the fever. Some had distended necks. Many were women. I didn’t believe a word of these tales, of course, but knew they must be true.

  The first settlers in the area, at the time of the Dutch, were several hundred freed Africans, who were granted the right to live and farm in exchange for annual tribute that included at least one pig. That was all canceled when the British took the colony, confiscated the African land, re-enslaved some of the freedmen, and went into the slavery business in a major way. The remaining free Africans— some too old to work—settled in shanties in the marsh around Minetta Brook, which still courses under parts of the area, specifically under the southeast corner of Washington Square.

  But in the years after the Revolution, it was yellow fever that drove the first well-off New Yorkers to the edge of the ghastly potter’s field. Crowded, humid downtown, filthy with the leavings of pigs and horses, dense with mosquitoes, was the fever zone. The village of Greenwich, with its open land and steady breezes, seemed much safer from disease, particularly in summer, when the epidemics arrived to kill so many people (nobody was yet aware that the disease came from mosquitoes and the epidemics usually ended with the arrival of cold weather). The first summer houses, hastily built of wood, rose along the North River, where boats could carry workers to their downtown jobs.

  But after the opening of the Erie Canal, and the flood of profits that came to the expanding city, the Knickerbocker merchants began looking for permanent homes in those parts of Greenwich that were not inhabited by commoners. They bought empty properties along the edges of the closed potter’s field while Mayor Philip Hone led the drive to transform that field into a park. The political cover for Hone and his associates was very American: military defense. The city’s Seventh Regiment needed a place to drill. A dri
ll field had to be reserved before more and more speculators occupied the theoretical rectangles of the grid. In a fine political stroke, the patriotic Hone told the Common Council that he wanted the field ready for the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and that it would be named the Washington Military Parade Ground. The planners got their way in 1827. On July 4, the new ground, still lumpy and weedy, its borders an erratic mess, was opened with a huge celebration. Governor De Witt Clinton led the parade from the Battery to what newspapers were already calling Washington Square. Famous Knickerbockers were of course in the entourage, Van Rensselaers, Van Courtlands, the Fish and Bogardus clans. But so were the enthusiasts of Jacksonian democracy, all cheering at the right moments, all helping themselves to the food, which included two roasted oxen. Presumably, since they were New Yorkers, many were drinking and smoking. Presumably, the Seventh Regiment musicians played stirring tunes, including “Yankee Doodle.” Presumably, too, the real estate speculators looked on with immense visions in their heads, not only for the square but for what lay to the north: the Fifth Avenue.

  Quickly, the borders of the field were expanded and clarified; they would eventually encompass thirteen and three-quarters acres. Bodies too close to the surface were exhumed and buried elsewhere. The general lumpiness of the surface was leveled. Grass was planted. Paths were created. A wooden fence was constructed to keep wandering pigs (and other animals) from grazing too freely. Soon, the amateur militia soldiers were drilling in Washington Square, the weight of their artillery pieces sometimes uncovering the crushed coffins and muddy skeletons of the nameless dead. There were more patriotic assemblies, with bands playing and small boys cheering. And the grand houses along the edges of the square began rising. The first were built along the south side, all of them now gone. A number of those along the north side, larger and grander in a Greek Revival style, have survived to the present day, with their front yards, fine brick, welcoming stoops, and evocations of Henry James.