Clifford Browder's Blog, page 49

101. Our Mayors: The Best and the Worst

A. Oakey Hall
   Probably the most versatile of New York mayors, and certainly the most elegant, was the 79th  (1869-72), Abraham Oakey Hall, known to his contemporaries as the Elegant Oakey.  Lawyer, journalist, politician, playwright, poet, and lecturer, he was a slim but active man, slight of build, with wavy black hair and a black beard and mustache, who sported a pince-nez with a black ribbon that dropped through an ample necktie into the depths of a snow-white shirt. 
     He came by his nickname rightly, for he dressed in the height of fashion and rarely wore the same outfit twice.  His wardrobe included velvet-collared coats made to order by the city’s most fashionable tailors; shirts of the finest linen; fancy vests, some of them embroidered by his wife; jewelry of his own design from Tiffany’s; and elaborate cuff links also designed by himself. 
     For special occasions he took care to dress appropriately.  At the annual Americus Club ball in 1869 he wore a bottle-green coat with half sovereigns of pure gold for buttons and a green velvet collar and lapels; an ample satin necktie; a shirtfront embroidered with shamrocks in green floss silk; outsized emeralds glinting in his buttonholes; and eyeglasses with a green silk cord.  Certainly he must have outshone all other attendees, but why, one might ask, all the green?  Because the club was Boss Tweed’s creature, and its members his Tammany cronies, many of whom were Irish immigrants; himself a WASP of the old order, the Elegant Oakey was well aware of this.  Needless to say, green dominated his St. Patrick’s Day apparel as well.
     A Whig turned Republican, he is said to have left that party in turn to become a Democrat, because he found Abraham Lincoln, the party’s 1860 presidential candidate, too backwoodsy, too uncouth.  Yet he himself, though WASP to the core, was no child of privilege; his widowed mother had had to run a boardinghouse to make ends meet, and her brilliant son had worked hard to get ahead.  Now, with Boss Tweed’s help, he became district attorney and prosecuted hundreds of cases successfully.  Yet he felt no deep need for change, was not inclined to make waves, and so was seen by Tweed as just the mayor he needed.  He was elected in 1869.
     The new mayor lived well, dined well.  A lavish spender, he was seen daily at Delmonico’s, and received dozens of dinner invitations from the gentry, in whose brownstones he was always welcome as a genial guest who enlivened the conversation with his quips and puns.  He was, in fact, useful to Tweed as a bridge to the brownstones, in whose tasteful parlors Tweed and his Tammany cohorts were never allowed to set foot.
     If less than diligent in overseeing the city’s accounts, Mayor Hall was a whiz at the mayor’s ornamental duties, entertaining distinguished foreign visitors, presenting toasts at public banquets, and performing marriages.  And no mayor had ever laid cornerstones of public buildings as deftly as he, brandishing one of a set of silver trowels he had accumulated for precisely this purpose.
     Many of the Tammany braves looked askance at the mayor, baffled or annoyed by his high society connections, his glittering wardrobe, his writing of – of all things! – plays.  But Tweed, aware of the Elegant One’s perceived lightness of being, reassured them:  “Oakey’s all right.  All he needs is ballast.”  By “all right” perhaps he meant slack, compliant, signing vouchers without asking questions..
     Suddenly, in July 1871, Mayor Hall’s snug tenure received a shock, when a disgruntled Tammany man leaked a series of accounts transcribed from the books of the city comptroller, showing huge payouts to contractors for work on the still unfinished county courthouse.  (Yes, in those days too there were whistleblowers.)  Published with fanfare in the New York Times, these accounts – thermometers $7,000, brooms $41,000, plastering close to three million, carpentry well over four – shocked and infuriated the public, provoking a mass movement of reformers to overthrow Tweed and his Ring, which presumably included Mayor Hall.  Tammany was in deep trouble, and the mayor as well.
     Spearheading the attack on the alleged Ring (“true as steal”) were the cartoons of Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly, which even the most illiterate of voters could grasp.  Nast turned Tweed into a bloated plundering monster, and Hall into a prancing little popinjay with drooping beribboned pince-nez, a figure as ridiculously lightweight as his Tweed was ponderous and menacing.  But lightweight or not, A. Okay Haul, as Nast labeled the mayor, was lumped with Tweed, his cronies, and the contractors in a vast conspiracy to defraud the public.  His defenders insisted that the mayor was honest, that his only fault was not inspecting the accounts more closely, but the reformers were not convinced.
A Nast cartoon: Who stole the people's money?  'Twas him.
Hall is on the right, with the outsized pince-nez.
     As the reform movement gathered momentum, many suspects developed a sudden yearning for the cultural delights of Paris (which had just undergone a lengthy siege by the Germans and, following that, a bloody insurrection) and decamped forthwith, but the mayor, protesting his innocence, stood his ground.  No less than three trials resulted, and the Elegant One, an experienced attorney, defended himself with skill, witty and charming one moment, caustic or tearful the next, but always the soul of innocence.  If he had signed some 39,257 vouchers as mayor, he had had neither time nor inclination to read them, having “an ineradicable aversion to details.”  The first trial ended with the death of a juror, the second with a hung jury, and the third with an acquittal.  Following this, the now ex-mayor wrote a play, The Crucible, about a man accused of stealing that was produced with himself in the lead.  As always, he was amazingly versatile.
     The play, alas, was a flop.  After that he seems to have suffered a nervous breakdown and moved to London, where he resided for several years.  He returned to public life as a journalist and lawyer, and in 1894 defended the anarchist Emma Goldman against charges of inciting to riot; though sentenced to a year in prison, she hailed him as a champion of free speech.  He died in 1898.
     Years after the Tweed scandals erupted, when the rage for reform had subsided, some of the reformers revised their opinion of Hall, whom they now believed to be innocent of knowingly defrauding the public.  Today historians tend to agree.  He was a skillful lawyer, a delightful punster, a dazzling dandy, and a deft wielder of silver trowels at the laying of cornerstones, but not a criminal.  Lightweight though he was, had it not been for his fatal connection with Tweed, he might have hoped to be governor.
Fernando Wood and Jimmy Walker
Striking a Napoleonic pose.
Or just scratching.     Previous posts have discussed this duo, who compete with other candidates for the distinction of most corrupt mayor.  (See vignettes #9 and #14, and posts #85 and #100.)  We have seen how “Fernandy,” the 73rd and 75th mayor of New York (he was elected to two nonconsecutive terms, 1855-58 and 1860-62), a veteran tippler, maneuvered skillfully in the 1850s to avoid implementing the prohibitory Maine Law in all but name.  During his second term, faced with the South’s secession and the city merchants’ opposition to war, he made the novel proposal that New York likewise secede from the Union and, as an independent state, continue its profitable trade with the South.  His proposal went nowhere and, despite its misgivings, the city contributed mightily to the government’s war effort.  After this second term he probably reached a secret understanding with Boss Tweed, a rising power, whereby he abandoned municipal politics to Tammany and with the Boss’s blessing ran instead for the House of Representatives, where he served several terms until his death in 1881.  A survivor, then, in politics, and as slick a customer as ever graced the mayor's office, but was he corrupt?  Though he was never convicted of anything, the consensus then and now says yes.  As the first professional politician to hold that office, and above all as a Tammany mayor, everything points to his guilt.
     Slim, dapper, and charming, Jimmy Walker, our 97th mayor (1926-32), was adept at surfaces, thus following in the nimble footsteps of the Elegant Oakey.  Notice that smile in the photograph; admittedly with the benefit of hindsight, I find in it a hint of the supercilious and sly.  Would you trust your money or the city’s to such a smile?  Certainly not.  But New Yorkers of the Jazz Age didn’t care; they were having too much fun.  So Gentleman Jimmy kept on doing what he did best: leading parades down Fifth Avenue sporting a silk topper and a smile, and a cutaway coat, striped trousers, and a walking stick; reveling at night in speakeasies with his chorus girl girlfriend, and rarely showing up at City Hall before noon; tossing off wisecracks and smiling.  For New Yorkers, having a fun-loving mayor was fun … for a while.  But when rumors of corruption led to Judge Samuel Seabury’s extensive investigation of his administration, under pressure Gentleman Jimmy resigned and promptly decamped for Europe and an extended vacation, returning only when the investigation had uncovered no hard evidence against him.  Greeting him at the dock were a multitude of well-wishers, a serenade of ferry whistles and horns, and an eager throng of reporters.  Beau James was, after all, charming.  Had he taken bribes (“beneficences,” he called them)?  Almost certainly.  But he never went to prison.
John Lindsay
     John Lindsay, our 103rd mayor (1966-73), was probably the handsomest mayor, but it did him little good in office; he came in riding high, experienced one crisis after another, and left office wounded and depressed.  It was his misfortune to preside over a city in deep crisis that allowed for no quick fix.
Carrying his budget.  And a heavy load it was.     A liberal Republican, for seven years he had represented Manhattan’s 17th District, the East Side’s so-called Silk Stocking District, in Congress.  In 1965 he ran for mayor, an office no Republican had held since Fiorello La Guardia’s time.  Winning support from key Republicans, he presented himself as a candidate that Democrats and Liberals could vote for (I know; I voted for him); campaigning ably, he won in a tight race.  The new mayor aroused great hopes and had an aura of glamor about him, but on January 1, 1966, his first day of office, the Transport Workers Union went on strike, shutting down all the subway and bus lines that the city depended on.
      Lindsay’s three-term predecessor, Robert Wagner, had known that Mike Quill,  head of the TWU, liked to threaten a strike and bluster, but would settle at the last minute on terms that both he and the city could call a victory.  But Lindsay knew little of such tactics and made the mistake of lecturing Quill on civic responsibility instead.  Quill, a gutsy Irish immigrant, resented this.  In fact, he resented everything about the incoming mayor: his boyish prep school looks (he was only 43), his naïve idealism, his aura of Mr. Clean.  “Coward!  Pipsqueak!  Ass!” he bellowed in a brogue at the mayor, whom he referred to contemptuously as “Lindsley.”  He was determined to teach this well-scrubbed kid, this WASP in shining armor, a lesson, even at the cost of time in jail, his strike being technically illegal. 
     Quill indeed went to jail, and the strike lasted an unprecedented thirteen days and cost the city $1.5 billion in lost productivity and wages.  “I still think it’s a fun city,” said Lindsay, who walked four miles from his hotel to city hall daily, but the “fun city” remark would be repeatedly thrown in his face by critics.  Meanwhile officials advised citizens to rediscover “the lower appendages,” and I did, walking up from the Village to Midtown to get a ticket to the previously sold-out play Marat/Sade, now available because of cancellations; then, to see it, I walked up again.  (Full title: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.  See why it’s referred to as Marat/Sade?)  As for commuting to my teaching job in distant Queens, with the subway system out I enjoyed a surprise vacation, but not everyone was happy.  A settlement was finally reached, giving the TWU a huge pay raise that committed the city to burdensome labor costs for years.  It was a great victory for Quill, but three days after the settlement he died of a sudden heart attack.
     More crises followed.  An attempt to decentralize the school system, where black students had mostly white (and usually Jewish) teachers and administrators, led to a strike by the United Federation of Teachers that closed 85% of the schools for 55 days, putting a million children out of classrooms and disrupting their families.  It was a nasty affair, with charges of racism and anti-Semitism flying thick and fast.  Tensions between blacks and Jews persisted for years, thus splitting the liberal base that the mayor depended on.  Meanwhile the sanitation workers went on strike, leaving the sidewalks heaped with stinking garbage that winds hurled hither and yon, and the police staged a slowdown, and firefighters threatened job actions.  One bright spot: when the assassination of Martin Luther King provoked riots in black ghettos across the nation, Lindsay walked the streets of Harlem to reassure residents that he mourned King and was working against poverty; no riot occurred.  But the chaotic last six months of 1968 were, in Lindsay’s own words, “the worst of my public life.”
     Not that 1969 was much better.  In February a blizzard buried the city in 15 inches of snow, leaving side streets in Queens unplowed for days.  When the mayor came to inspect, he was greeted by homeowners with boos and jeers and oaths.  “You should be ashamed of yourself!” screamed one woman. “Get away, you bum,” said another.  Never had an honest mayor with the best intentions been received with such antipathy.  The whole affair reinforced a growing impression that the mayor, biased in favor of minorities, was indifferent to the problems of the white middle class in the outer boroughs.
     The accusation that Lindsay favored minorities over whites smacked of racism, yet it was not without substance.  I recall hearing reports of a riot by angry welfare mothers in a welfare office.  Sensing that they could get away with it, they began trashing the office.  The police, though present, had strict orders not to interfere, so the office was demolished, its renovation another cost for taxpayers to bear.
      With the mayor’s popularity plummeting, in the 1969 election he lost the Republican nomination to a conservative, so he ran on a Liberal/Fusion ticket and won, his support coming from minorities and certain segments of the white middle class.  But the second term was no better than the first, being plagued by growing racial tensions, a rise in crime, revelations of police corruption, soaring labor and welfare costs, and a deteriorating fiscal situation; was Armageddon fast approaching?  When Lindsay, becoming a Democrat, embarked on a quixotic campaign to grab the party’s presidential nomination in 1971, he only made matters worse, since Democrats viewed him as an intruder, and New Yorkers resented this distraction from the problems at home.  When the next mayoral election loomed in 1973, the embattled mayor, abandoned by both Republicans and Democrats, gave up any thought of running as a Liberal and left office in a state of exhaustion.  It is said that he broke down in tears, frustrated because he had not accomplished more as mayor.
     What does an ex-mayor do with the rest of his life?  Unlike the governorship of New York, which has hatched many a presidential candidate and sometimes even a President, the office of New York City mayor is not a springboard to higher office, only a political dead end.  John Lindsay went back to the law and became a radio commentator and journalist.  In 1980 he lost a primary bid to become the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate; tipping the scales against him in the Florida primary was a flood of letters from Jewish citizens in New York to their Florida relatives and friends, inveighing against the former mayor.  Becoming chairman of the Lincoln Center Theater, he helped in its rejuvenation, but with failing health gradually faded from the scene.  Because he had no health insurance, medical expenses depleted his savings.  Learning of this, his friend Mayor Giuliani obtained a city position for him that included health insurance.  In 2000, at age 79, John Lindsay succumbed to pneumonia and Parkinson’s.
     Subsequent mayors would blame Lindsay for the city’s ongoing woes, which assumed gigantic proportions while he was in office.  He made grievous mistakes, especially in resorting to fiscal legerdemain, but those woes had been long in coming.  Yet if ever there was a failed mayoralty – indeed a tragic one – it was that of John Lindsay.  Just recounting it briefly depresses me.
Abraham Beame
Dullsville incarnate, but sometimes that's just
what's needed.      Abe Beame, a clubhouse Democrat who succeeded John Lindsay as our 104thmayor (1974-77), may well have been the blandest, dullest, most self-effacing mayor of New York, lacking La Guardia’s fire, Lindsay’s initial glamor, and the showmanship of Ed Koch.  I confess that I recall absolutely nothing about him personally, only the events of his time.  In TV debates he faded almost to the point of vanishing.  His jokes were lame, and his speeches so dull that those unlucky enough to hear them could hardly recall a word minutes later.  Nor did it help that he was short in stature (only 5 feet 2), not one to dominate a gathering.  Because of his passion for detail, some thought of him as a glorified bookkeeper, which, along with his dullness, actually appealed to many voters eager for a change.  He was quietly energetic, patient, dignified, and self-confident: qualities he would have vast and desperate need of during his one tumultuous term in office.                                                                          
     Why anyone would have wanted to be mayor  of New York in the 1970s, inheriting all the woes that had so bedeviled John Lindsay, is a mystery that only ambitious politicians can explain.  But mayor he was, and saddled at once with the worst fiscal crisis in the city’s history as banks denied credit and – to the astonishment and bafflement of most citizens – bankruptcy loomed.  It seemed impossible, inconceivable, but there it was: bankruptcy!  Schools were half-built, public works spending was halted, streets were dangerous and dirty, libraries had shorter hours, firehouses and police stations had to be closed; the city, in short, was in a state of collapse.  Desperate, Mayor Beame coped as best he could, cutting the city work force drastically, freezing wages, limiting services, and raising taxes – hardly a formula to endear him to a mystified public not used to such painful retrenchment.  With the city still short of funds, Beame begged state and federal officials for help.  President Gerald Ford was at first indifferent, provoking the Daily News’s memorable headline: FORD  TO  CITY:  DROP  DEAD.  In time both Washington and Albany came through, while taking great chunks out of the mayor’s autonomy.


     I remember those dark days, when the specter of bankruptcy loomed large.  Some said that bankruptcy would be fatal to the city and the nation; others scoffed, insisting that this was New York City’s problem only, and to think otherwise was another example of the city’s megalomania.  My own ill-informed reaction was: let’s let it happen, and see.  But wiser noodles prevailed.  An employee at my bank who oozed financial acumen later told me how he had urged his clients to buy city bonds, which were so reduced in price that they paid a fantastic rate of interest.  “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he insisted.  “There is no way that New York will be allowed to fall into bankruptcy.  No way, I tell you, no way!”  Those who took his advice fared well.  I was not among them, having no funds available to invest.  And when I went on a visit to Washington, an acquaintance there harangued me gently, beginning, “You New Yorkers …!”  This I quietly resented, recalling how the Brits so often initiate their assaults on us with “You Americans …!” – a formula I have vowed at all costs to eschew.  (That word again, like a sneeze; I love it.)
      In the 1977 Democratic primary Abe Beame, accused of misleading investors by at first concealing the city’s perilous fiscal condition, lost to an ebullient rival named Ed Koch, as colorful and assertive a character as Beame was bland and self-effacing, and who went on to become the next mayor.  Beame then retired from politics but continued to insist that he had saved the city, while the governor, the city’s labor leaders, and Washington all generously claimed that glory for themselves.  The fact remains that Abe Beame, having inherited a $1.5 billion deficit, left office with a $200 million surplus.
Edward Koch
     Recently I asked two friends if they had a favorite mayor.  Without hesitation they both said, “Koch!”  Asked why, they said, “He was outspoken, he told it like it was.”  I had heard him once, as a councilman, talking to people on the street, but until he succeeded Beame in 1978 as our 105th mayor (1978-89), I didn’t get the full blast of his personality.
     And what a blast it was!  Loud, feisty, combative, this Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants from Poland was the quintessential New Yorker.  He could rub you the right way or the wrong, depending on his mood and your own, but you would not easily forget him, nor did he want you to.  Balding with a broad, hearty grin that was often described as devilish, he was more rumpled than dapper and stood in vivid contrast to his immediate predecessors, the elegant Ivy Leaguer John Lindsay, and the self-effacing statistician Abe Beame.  “I’m the sort of person who will never get ulcers,” he told reporters on Inauguration Day.  “Why?  Because I say exactly what I think.  I’m the sort of person who might give other people ulcers.”  And he probably did.
     A city councilman, and then a congressman representing the 17th Congressional District (the Silk Stocking District, the very one that Lindsay had represented), he had opposed the Vietnam War and supported civil rights in the South, before shifting to the right and proclaiming himself a “liberal with sanity,” though some might have preferred “pragmatic conservative.”  In politics, timing is all; he had the good fortune – or the shrewdness – to become mayor when the worst about the city was known, and policies were in place to lead it out of the fiscal wilderness into the promised land of solvency and prosperity, for which he could of course take credit.  Ed Koch was never shy about taking credit, when credit – the good kind -- was to be had.
     In his first term he held down spending, kept the municipal unions in check, restored the city’s credit, and began the long-delayed work on bridges and streets.  During a 1980 subway strike he stood on the Brooklyn Bridge and encouraged commuters hoofing it to work.  “We’re not going to let these bastards bring us to our knees!” he shouted, and was applauded.  Re-elected in 1981 on both the Democratic and Republican tickets, he oversaw further improvement in the city’s finances, rehired workers, restored services, and planned major housing programs.  For a city long beleaguered by debt and mocked and censured by its critics, things were decidedly looking up.  Thanks to these improvements and a resurging local economy, New Yorkers could at last take pride again in their city.  And presiding over the recovery was a mayor who rode the subways like everyone else and stood on street corners asking passersby, “How’m I doin’?”
     In New York City politics, third terms for a mayor – very rare – have proved to be a wasteland and a mire, and so it was for Ed Koch.  Corruption in several city agencies was exposed, landing various high-placed Koch supporters in prison; while the mayor himself was not involved, he was accused of complacency and cronyism.  He was also assailed for an inadequate response to the AIDS epidemic that was ravaging the gay community, many of whom alleged that the mayor, a perennial bachelor who seemed to have no private life, was secretly gay and reluctant to deal with the crisis for fear of being exposed – an allegation that he ignored and later stoutly denied.  At the same time, various remarks of his helped further estrange him from a black community beset with homelessness and crack cocaine, just as racial tensions rose.  In the 1989 Democratic primary the mayor, hoping for an unprecedented fourth term, lost to David Dinkins, the only black candidate, who then won the general election.  As Koch himself came to realize, New Yorkers were tired of their bigger-then-life mayor and his in-your-face chutzpah; the mild-mannered Dinkins looked good to them.  The retiring mayor, too, was tired and even – was it conceivable? – less self-confident, less sure that Ed Koch had all the answers. 
     Not one to fade into the shadows, in his post-mayoral years he resumed his law practice; made appearances on TV and radio, sometimes playing himself; wrote columns for newspapers; endorsed commercial products; gave lectures throughout the country for hefty fees (“Koch on the City,” “Koch and the State,” “Koch on Everything”); issued political statements and endorsements that were often controversial; and wrote numerous books and taught.  As late as 2010, at 86, he campaigned against a dysfunctional legislature in Albany, shouting, “Throw the bums out!”  His first memoir, Mayor (1984), became a best-seller and inspired an Off Broadway musical by the same name.  Entering a hospital shortly before his death, he told a reporter one of the things he was most proud of: “I gave a spirit back to New York.”  In 2013 he died of heart failure at age 88.
     He was famous for his quips, calling his Tammany enemies “moral lepers,” black and Hispanic leaders “poverty pimps,” neighborhood protesters “crazies,” Donald Trump “piggy,” and the outspoken Bella Abzug “wacko.”  (For more on Bella, see post #81.)  Just as famous were his one-liners: “If you agree with me on nine out of twelve issues, vote for me; if you agree with me on twelve out of twelve issues, see a psychiatrist.” 
     If Ed Koch lacked vision and intellect, he achieved the near impossible by remaining popular through his first two terms while reducing city services and alienating certain groups.  He did it thanks to shrewd political instincts, blatant showmanship, and the ability to say bluntly what many citizens secretly thought.  Brains and vision are fine, but in politics it’s instinct that counts. 

Conclusion

     What can one conclude from glancing at these six mayors?  Several things, I think:
If you've enjoyed two successful terms as mayor, don't run again; quit while you're ahead.  People will get tired of you.Watch out for the slim, elegant ones, especially if they smile (Fernando Wood, Jimmy Walker); they aren't to be trusted.There's a law of opposites.  Tired of the incumbent, voters go for his polar opposite.  Dinkins was the opposite of Koch, who was the opposite of Beame, who was the opposite of Lindsay.
     Toronto’s mayor:  I thought New York’s galaxy of mayors couldn’t be outshone, but for sheer lurid glitter it’s hard to match Toronto’s current mayor, who has confessed to the use of crack cocaine and drunkenness, and is furthermore accused of making sexual advances to women.  Citizens are clamoring for his resignation, but the mayor, after mouthing a few apologies, absolutely refuses to comply.  And this in our tranquil neighbor to the north, whom I have always thought of as sober and sane.
     Bank note:  Followers of this blog know the love I bear my bank, J.P. Morgan Chase.  It is now reported that this noble institution, out of the goodness of its heart, is settling civil claims with the Justice Department about the sale of mortgages to the tune of thirteen billion (yes, billion, not million) smackeroonies – an unprecedented sum.  Hopefully the government will now leave that noble institution alone.  To be sure, critics note that some seven billion of the settlement may qualify as a tax deduction, but let’s not quibble.  They also complain that no one is going to jail, but such sadistic insistence is unwarranted.  Go in peace, J.P. Morgan Chase.  Let no one who has ever sinned cast the first stone.

     Coming soon:  The greatest mayor of them all, Fiorello.  Other prospects include Andy Warhol (a friend of ours knew him), transportation in the city, lighting in the city, and the ladder of thieves ca. 1870 (from hog thieves and coat snatchers up to safe blowers).

     ©  2013  Clifford Browder

     

100. New Yorkers and Booze, and Why Prohibition Won't Work

     New Yorkers have always had a love affair with liquor.  Not that this makes them any different from the rest of the nation.  Consider, for instance, all the names Americans have given to the stuff: booze, the ardent, the stimulating, juice, giggle juice, tangle-legs, fire water, hooch, diddle, tiger’s  milk, rotgut, coffin varnish, crazy water, and the oil of joy.  And there are plenty more.
Steven Alexander     And the terms we have used for “drunk”:  drenched, pickled, plastered, soused, snookered, crocked, squiffy, oiled, lubricated, loaded, primed, sloshed, stinko, blotto, flushed, cockeyed, and (a good nautical phrase) three sheets in the wind.  And that’s just a beginning.  To which I’ll add my late friend Vernon’s charming way of indicating a lush: “a bit too fond of the grape.”  
     All of which suggests a widespread social phenomenon, with attendant joys and woes.  Earlier texts have already touched on the matter: Alcoholics I have known (vignette #12); Texas Guinan and her speakeasies (post #83); and Mayor Fernando Wood (“Fernandy”) and an earlier attempt at Prohibition (post #85).  So now we’ll take the bull by the horns, or maybe the mug by the handle.
     There were always saloons in the city, but they weren’t called that at first.  A “saloon”  in the mid-nineteenth century was a large public room or hall.  Thus the ladies’ saloon on a steamboat was for respectable ladies and their male escorts; it was a refuge from noise and intemperance, and very, very dry.  So what were the terms for what we today call a saloon?  Grog shop, groggery, pothouse, gin mill, gin shop, dram shop, rum shop.  But whatever it was called, it did a good business.

     On every corner in the slums was a liquor grocery.  Inside a typical one you could find piles of cabbage, potatoes, squash, eggplant, turnips, beans, and chestnuts; boxes containing anthracite, charcoal, nails, and plug tobacco, to be sold in any quantity from a penny’s worth to a dollar; upright casks of lamp oil, molasses, rum, whisky, brandy, as well as various cordials manufactured in the back room; hanging from the crossbeams overhead, hams, tongues, sausages, and strings of onions; and here and there on the floor, a butter cask or a meal bin.  At one end of the room there was usually a plank stretched across some barrels, and on it some species of grog doled out at three cents a glass, and behind it on the wall, shelves with a jumble of candles, crackers, sugar, tea, pickles, mustard, and ginger.  Finally, in one corner there might be another short counter with three-cent pies kept smoking hot, where patrons could get coffee also at three cents a cup and, for a penny, a hatful of cigars.  Offering all that a tenement household might need, these places were well patronized by the locals, both men and women, and their mix of products show how drinking and grocery shopping and socializing were all jumbled together in a rich and complex tangle.  Not fertile grounds for prohibitionists, one might think.
     But prohibitionists there were, if not in Babylon on the Hudson, as some ministers were wont to call the Empire City, but in upstate rural counties and elsewhere, as for instance Maine, where the legislature in 1851 passed what would become known as the Maine Law, prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages except for medicinal and industrial purposes.  Many states followed suit, and seemingly for good reason, since alcoholism was rampant.  When two American males met, their greetings were often followed by, “Let’s liquor.”  Mindful of this, many a patriarch enjoined his son departing for college, “Beware the flowing bowl!”  Which was about as effective, I suspect, as similar admonishments today. 
     Regarding youthful follies of the time, I can only cite the charming memoir of the cartman I.S. Lyon, who tells of being hired to take two medical students and their baggage to a Philadelphia-bound boat.  Entering their attic room in a four-story boarding house on Broadway, he found some twenty medical students gathered for a parting “blow-out.”  The air was cloudy with tobacco smoke, and on a red-hot stove was a huge tin pot of badly concocted whiskey punch whose escaping vapors filled the room with noxious odors.  The furniture was begrimed, the ragged carpet soiled with spilled liquor and tobacco juice, and the whole place littered with empty whiskey bottles, greasy French novels, defaced song books, and torn and detached sheets of music.  Also strewn about were revolvers, daggers, sword canes, broken umbrellas, and pipes both long and short.  As the two departing students prepared to leave, the whole group rose, glass in hand, and sang “We won’t go home until morning” as if the day of doom had arrived.
     So would prohibition come to that den of inebriation, New York?  Yes indeed, or so it seemed, for if the city was notoriously “wet,” the upstate rural counties were adamantly “dry.”  (For the perennial conflict between upstate and downstate New York, see post #18.)  In 1854 the legislature passed an Act for the Prevention of Pauperism, Crime, and Intemperance whereby, as of July Fourth next (a date the city hailed with whiskey- and rum-soaked revels), liquor would be banned throughout the state and public drunkenness forbidden.  The law was vetoed by the governor, but his successor was a “dry,” and in 1855 the law was passed again by the legislature.
A New York beer garden on Sunday evening.     Prohibition in booze-ridden Gotham?  Was it even conceivable?  The city was now full of newly arrived immigrants who were just as opposed to the law as many citizens.  At the thought of prohibition the Irish in their grog shops, downing tumblers of cheap whiskey, muttered dark oaths.  At the mere hint of it the Germans in their beer gardens, clinking steins, scowled under frothy noses, while behind the elegant façades of brownstones (certain brownstones) genteel profanity glanced off the rims of stemware over delicate wines.  All eyes turned to the city’s newly elected mayor, Fernando Wood, himself once the proprietor of a groggery, and a known “wet” who over the years had frequented the city’s finest barrooms, his elegant form reflected in the huge gilt mirrors backing bars adorned with nippled Venuses and cupid-crowned clocks.  So what was he to do?
    Tall and dapper, “Fernandy” (as he was known to cronies) was as slick a character as had ever ruled the city (if anyone could rule it).  Having consulted legal experts, he announced that he would of course enforce the law, however needless and impolitic, while giving full attention to exceptions, technicalities, and the rights of citizens, violating which, officers would be held to strict account.  The law, in fact, had many flaws, and he had every intention of exploiting them to the full.
     Needless to say, the city understood the mayor only too well, and its tippling did not notably decrease.  Mercifully, within a year the law was voided in the courts, and the Sabbath quiet continued to be tainted by the din of unlicensed grog shops spilling out reeling drunks on the street.
Scripture in one hand, a hatchet in the other.
Many a bar was tomahawked.     So ended the city’s first brush with legislated temperance.  But the campaign for prohibition had only begun, aided and abetted – indeed, championed and promoted – by a host of female reformers determined to see the matter through.  The movement was sidelined by the Civil War, but afterward it regained strength, especially following the founding of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1873.  Successes followed: in 1881 Kansas became the first state to outlaw alcohol in its constitution, and subsequently Carrie Nation achieved notoriety there for entering saloons to smash liquor bottles by the dozen with a fiercely wielded hatchet.  Described as sporting “the biceps of a stevedore, the face of a prison warden, and the persistence of a toothache,” Carrie was a formidable activist, but hardly typical of the crusading women, who preferred hymns, prayers, and arguments to hatchets.  What explains their dedication?  For most of them,  painful personal experience with a drunkard father, brother, spouse, or son at whose hands they had suffered humiliation and abuse.
     Prominent among the drys were Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, and other Protestant groups, as opposed to Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, and German Lutherans.  Not that everyone involved was motivated by lofty ideals: tea merchants and soda manufacturers sided with the drys in hopes of increased sales following a ban on alcoholic drinks.  The conflict between rural upstate citizens and downstate urban residents in New York State was replicated throughout the country, with rural populations viewing the cities as not only rum-soaked but also crime-ridden and corrupt.  And when the WCTU expanded its campaign to include women’s suffrage, the leading group focused solely on Prohibition became the male-dominated Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893 in Ohio but soon active throughout the nation and especially influential in the South and the rural North.
An all-male bastion.

     New York City was not without some ardent prohibitionists, but the city generally remained passionately and determinedly wet.  Women reformers were especially resented by working-class males, who saw the reformers’  activities as an assault on a whole way of life centered in what was now called the saloon.  The saloon was their refuge and social center, a place to get free – for a while – of family obligations, a place to down a few with their pals after work, before trudging homeward with diminished funds to face the scolding tongues of their wives.  (“Women,” went a saying, “you can’t live with ’em and you can’t live without ’em.”)  And in Tammany-dominated New York the saloon was also the political base of the proprietor, often an alderman, who dispensed liquor and salty eats freely toward election time and so corralled the necessary votes for his own or his cronies’ reelection.  All this was threatened by these misguided and depraved reformers, these well-scrubbed preachers and goody-goodies, who had no understanding of the city’s raw needs.  To put it bluntly:
meddling females + preachers + hicks = Prohibition
whereas
no Prohibition = freedom = sanity = bliss

Singing hymns outside a saloon.


     And there is little doubt that the reformers had their sights on New York City.  Out-of-town ministers had long made a habit of visiting it on a whirlwind tour to see first-hand its sins, so they could go home and inform their congregations about this sink of depravity and cesspool of greed.  It was Babylon on the Hudson, it was Sodom and Gomorrah, it was Satan’s Seat.  So Prohibition was deemed especially appropriate for Gotham, where it was most needed; it would breed virtue and sobriety.


One year later, Prohibition went into effect.


Dumping beer into the New York City sewers.     By January 1919 enough states had ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to make nationwide prohibition a certainty, and on January 16, 1920 – a day that for New Yorkers would live in infamy -- the ban went into effect.  Police confiscated quantities of barrels containing wine and beer, smashed them, and dumped their contents into gutters or the harbor, while stunned Gothamites watched in shock and horror.  Huge vats of alcohol were discovered in outlying areas, and the Coast Guard began intercepting liquor-laden boats bringing thirsty Americans the hooch they longed for.
     The lower classes were at once deprived, but their betters had already  stockpiled vast quantities of their preferred labels.  Significantly, President Woodrow Wilson had promptly moved his personal supply to his Washington residence when his term of office ended, while immediately after inauguration Warren G. Harding, his successor, moved his own stash into the White House. 
     Such maneuvers were fine for the moneyed elite, but New York City had an answer of its own: the speakeasy, of which within a year or two there were between 20,000 and 100,000  in the city, and all of them thriving, since to tell New Yorkers they can’t do something at once kindles in them a passionate desire to do it.  At first the speakeasies operated clandestinely and required patrons, viewed suspiciously through a peephole, to give a password to enter, but soon enough there was little need for pretense, since the police were amply rewarded for looking the other way.



     The speakeasies ranged from the lowest dives offering cheap rotgut of dubious provenance requiring gastric fortitude, to well-appointed establishments catering to the wealthy and elite.  And if the now-banished saloons had enjoyed a strictly male clientele, these new night spots went defiantly coed.  Patrons included Charleston-dancing flappers and their callow escorts, cavorting businessmen from Cleveland and their intrepid spouses, assorted judges and aldermen, visiting dignitaries, silent film stars, and from 1926 on, His Honor the Mayor. 
     And where did all this liquor come from?  Some was homemade, with all the perils that entailed: foul-tasting brews, explosions, after effects ranging from atrocious hangovers to departures for the beyond.  But much of the booze came from elsewhere.  In a fit of neighborliness the distilleries of Canada labored diligently to supply the needs of a deprived population to the south, across a long and porous border.  And visible off the Rockaways was Rum Row, a fleet of ships at permanent anchor just outside the three-mile limit, where U.S. jurisdiction ended: floating warehouses for smugglers who, dodging the Coast Guard under cover of darkness, brought the precious stuff to land in speedboats.


A rum runner seized by the Coast Guard, with confiscated liquor stacked on the deck.
     The queen of speakeasies was Texas Guinan, who quipped her way through multiple arrests, always surviving a raid to open another night spot that brought patrons flocking to receive her signature greeting, “Hiya, suckers!”  (For more of Texas, see post #83.)  But if her series of clubs were the most popular, there were plenty of others in all the boroughs.  The most celebrated and frequented were clustered in midtown Manhattan, with 38 on 52ndStreet alone.  Prominent among them was the 21 Club, whose final address was 21 West 52nd Street, made famous by its ingenious engineering: in the event of a raid, a system of levers tipped the shelves of the bar, sending liquor bottles through a chute into the city’s sewers.  There was also a secret wine cellar accessed through a hidden door in a brick wall, opening into the basement of the building next door.  In the 1950s workers expanding the 53rd Street branch of the New York Public Library are said to have encountered the soil there still reeking of alcohol.
 Jimmy Walker     Other joints of the day included the Hi Hat, the Kit-Kat, and the Ha-Ha Club.  Noel Coward liked the elegant Marlborough House at 16 East 61stStreet, where black-jacketed waiters served partying socialites.  Fred and Adele Astaire danced at the Trocadero at 35 East 53rd Street, while pilots flocked to the Wing Club at 8 West 52nd Street, and artists to the Artists and Writers Club at 213 West 40th Street.  The Central Park Casino, in the Park near the 72nd Street entrance, was the favorite hangout of fun-loving Mayor Jimmy Walker, who spent more time there than at City Hall.
     But New Yorkers had other ways as well of coping with Prohibition.   Nathan Musher’s Menorah Wine Company imported 750,000 gallons of fortified Malaga wine that, certified as kosher, he sold to “rabbis” with sacramental wine permits, some of whom sported such names as Houlihan and Maguire.  In a more sinister mode, Meyer Lansky’s car and truck rental business in a garage underneath the Williamsburg Bridge became a warehouse for stolen goods and rented out vehicles to bootleggers.  Lansky went on to become a major gangland figure, associating with such stellar operators as Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano; as a Jewish gangster, he figures in my eyes as a supreme example of successful assimilation.
     As time passed, enthusiasm for Prohibition waned.  Far from reducing crime, as had been hoped, it promoted it by creating a bootlegging industry dominated by ruthless warring gangs.  Far from eliminating alcoholic consumption, it made it fashionable and prompted the fair sex to join their lusty males in imbibing.  Flouting the law was “in,” it was fun.  Nor was Prohibition an inducement to better health, since drinking bad booze from a bottle with a counterfeit label could on occasion be lethal. 
     The coup de grâce for Prohibition came in October 1930, just two weeks before congressional midterm elections, when the bootlegger George Cassiday contributed five articles to the Washington Post telling how for the last ten years he had supplied booze to the honorable members of Congress, of whom he estimated that 80 percent drank.  As a result, in the following election Congress shifted from a dry Republican majority to a wet Democratic majority eager for the Eighteenth Amendment’s repeal.  To bring that about, states began ratifying the Twenty-first Amendment.  In New York City anticipation mounted, and bystanders were astonished or amused to see phalanxes of sturdy matrons, who incidentally now had the vote, marching together under bold-lettered signs:  WE  WANT BEER!  Yes, the times had changed.  On December 5, 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment was ratified, thus repealing at last the now despised Eighteenth; New Yorkers cheered … and drank.







     There are many morals to this story, chief among them the folly of imposing morality from above by law, when vast numbers of those below have only scorn for the law enacted.  For better and for worse, New Yorkers  have always guzzled, and surely always will.
     And so …   Cheers!    Salute!    Prosit!    A la tienne!     Salud!


demi

     A note on WBAI:  The listener-supported, commercial-free radio station that I love and hate (see post #16) continues to stagger on, celebrating its successful fund drives while pleading desperately for more contributions.  There is even talk of some kind of leasing arrangement that, to my mind, would change the station completely.  Likewise indicative of its dire straits is the proliferation of imported talent, presumably at little or no cost, replacing familiar programs in hopes of reaching a wider audience.  One such is the Thom Hartmann program, its host an ego-driven, self-promoting talk-show host whose heart, if not his head, is in the right place.  Nothing so grates on me as the periodic announcement in a resonant voice, “This is the Thom Hartmann program!”  And his grandiose statements, always in a worthy cause, that seem just a bit inflated and flimsy. 
     An example of the latter: recently he proclaimed that the 1929 Crash and the Depression that followed “destroyed the middle class.”  Really?  I was there; he wasn’t.  In the 1930s, as a kid growing up in a middle-class suburb of Chicago, I was aware of modest living but no destruction.  My father was a lawyer with a big corporation in Chicago; we watched our pennies but certainly survived the Depression.  Our neighbors on the block included the successful owner of a small company that made paper boxes, a dentist, a night editor with the Chicago Tribune, an insurance man, and other businessmen, all of whom, except the dentist, commuted to jobs in Chicago.  To the south lay the city of Chicago, with its share of Depression misery, and to the north a series of lakefront suburbs with higher incomes and more imposing residences.  In between, we were very middle middle class and by no means ruined. 
     Mr. Hartmann’s dramatic assertion to the contrary is typical of WBAI, where grandiose negative statements and predictions of dire imminent catastrophes abound.  Frequent among the latter: a coming financial collapse far exceeding the recent one, and the dollar’s ceasing to be the dominant world currency.  All of which may be true – I certainly anticipate a serious correction in the market, if not a full-fledged bear market -- but then, there’s the story of the boy who cried “Wolf!”  But my measured skepticism includes no trace of gloating.  The commitment of WBAI’s dwindling staff is remarkable, and the station continues to broadcast many news stories neglected by mainstream media, as for instance poverty in America and the threat of the Transpacific Partnership, now being secretly negotiated, which would seriously undercut our national sovereignty.  I criticize the station, but I need it; it is unique.
     Coming soon (though in no particular oreder):  The mayors of New York (a colorful bunch); Andy Warhol (genius or fraud?); lighting the city (from candles to neon signs); transportation in the city (the kinds of carriages and what they signified, the first gas buggies, the subway); foreign influences on nineteenth-century New York (the mansard roof, hoopskirts, the ascot tie, the derby, lager beer, the polonaise, even a Chinese junk).
     ©  2013  Clifford Browder

99. Along the Docks, circa 1870

     This post will take us on a tour of the North River (Hudson River) and East River docks on a summer day circa 1870.  Our waterfront today has been prettified with parks and bike paths and dog runs and tennis courts.  Now we’ll see what it looked like circa 1870.  We’ll start on the North River at 34th Street and stroll south along West Street to the Battery.
     34th Street, North River.  Moored beside a pier is the offal boat, a small sloop piled high with the smelly carcasses of horses, cows, pigs, dogs, and cats that died in the city’s streets.  Scattered on the pier, barrels and tubs and hogsheads of blood and entrails from the slaughterhouses.  The offal boat will take this smelly cargo upriver to a bone-boiling plant that will turn it into leather, manure, soap, fat, and bone for soup and buttons.  So 1870 New York was recycling already.  Nothing for us to worry about today, since the internal combustion engine has supplanted horsepower in all but name.  Or is there?  What becomes of all those derelict cars and trucks?  Have you ever seen an automobile graveyard with its acres of rusting vehicles?  Those graveyards are always expanding, taking ever more space.  Will there always be enough space?  How will it ever end?  Hmm…  But let’s get back to the 1870 waterfront.  It’s rather smelly here on this pier, so let’s move along.
     Below 34th Street.  Brigs unloading bushels of potatoes.  Workers taking loads of cabbages from canal boats and tossing them into wagons.  Unloaded heaps of fruit.  Hungry street kids snatch a peach or two and flee.
     A mammoth grain elevator, a huge hulking wooden structure that dwarfs every other building in sight, where a steam-driven belt with buckets scoops up loose grain from the hold of a canal boat and hoists it up into its cavernous interior, where it will be stored temporarily in bins, then delivered through spouts into the hold of an ocean-going steamer for delivery to the England and Holland and Germany.  So grain from distant Ohio and Indiana, tens of thousands of bushels of it, finds its way to New York by barge via the Erie Canal and is hauled down the Hudson River by tugs to New York, where it is transshipped and sent to Europe to feed hungry populations no longer able to feed themselves.  New York City is essential to global trade.

     Farther along, everyone looks black, like a team of grimy demons: men in undershirts, smirched with coal dust, in the hold of a canal boat, shoveling coal into buckets that are raised mechanically to the dock.  That coal from the mountains of Pennsylvania, brought to the city via the Delaware and Hudson Canal, will be carted off and dumped in cellars, then fetched up in buckets and pails to burn in fireplaces with an orange glow, giving heat.  Or shoveled into furnaces to heat the boilers that make steam to drive the pistons of steamboats and locomotives, becoming power and speed.  Like all Americans, New Yorkers are awed by power, while speed makes them giddy and drunk.
     Next, an iron works.  From the outside we see flames leaping in a dark interior, and hear giant machines screech and groan and pound.  Iron from western Pennsylvania, to be shaped into shafts to reinforce buildings that can  now be taller and feature large glass display windows to tempt hordes of shoppers along Broadway.  Or made into boilers and propellers and sugar mills and lathes, or steel rails for railroads sprinting across prairies and deserts and mountains all the way to the blue Pacific.  Or melted and poured from vats into molds for marine engines with a white-hot hiss and glare that parches the face of onlookers and inspires in them visions of hell. 


Inside an iron works: the forges.
     And now a lumberyard with whining steam-powered saws.  And a monster of a cotton press, its giant jaws clamping on a bale of cotton, compressing it to one foot thick.  Seventy bales an hour of Southern cotton to be shipped to the mills of Manchester and Leeds to be turned into muslins and calicoes that will be shipped back to New York and sent by rail to the rest of the nation.  Likewise shipped to New York will be silks and ribbons and laces from Lyons for the adornment of ladies of fashion, of whom New York has an inordinate number, all inordinately eager for the latest French fashions and frilled bonnets whose cost puts a grievous dent in their husbands’ budget but proclaims to the world that they are in the vanguard of fashion, they are chic, they are “in.”
Fashions of the 1880s, or, why the textile mills of Europe kept busy.
     Sugar refineries towering twelve stories high refining raw sugar brought to the city by brig and schooner from the slave plantations of Cuba; piles of brownstone and brick hauled in by sloop from the nearby counties, to be used in the elegant houses of the affluent; and distilleries producing tiger’s milk, diddle, or the oil of joy (we had countless names for it) to sate the lusty gullets of Americans.


Inside a sugar mill: cooling and barreling the sugar.
     The “Hotel de Flaherty,” a tin-roofed shed patched together with wood, stone, mud, and plaster, offering overripe apples, dusty candy, and smoked sausages at 2 cents each, while hogs grovel outside by the door.  Mr. Flaherty’s establishment doesn’t tempt us, we move on.
     Ice wagons loading ice from barges at a dock.  The ice, harvested the previous winter from the upper Hudson by ruddy-faced men with hand saws who cut it into chunks 12 inches thick, has been stored in sawdust-insulated huge dark riverside barns and now, tugged downriver on hundreds of barges, it will be hooked into wagons and hustled off by whip-cracking drivers through the steaming summer streets, to be tonged into homes or slid down ramps into cellars of fancy restaurants and hotels.  Even without refrigeration New Yorkers will have their frothy cold schooners of beer in beer gardens, their fine white wines at Delmonico’s, the prince of restaurants, and the chilled lemonades and tinted sherbets that they sip and nibble genteelly in ice cream parlors on Broadway.


The New York City ice trade, all phases.
     18th Street.  The looming retorts and gas holders of the Manhattan Gas Company.  Ugly, sprawling, and smelly, gas works are located on the waterfront, far from the city’s fine residences.  Here, coal is scooped into red-hot retorts and burned there and 


Inside the retorts of a gas works.  Not something you would
want near your residence.its vapors carried off to be stored in gas holders, giant bulbed bellies of iron, then conveyed through underground pipes to hotels and restaurants and the bibelot-crammed homes of the rich.  There it becomes light, glowing from globed chandeliers, or from polished glass boxes of streetlamps along the Fifth Avenue and Broadway and other thoroughfares where lamplighters light them at twilight and snuff them at dawn.  Thanks to gaslight, pickpockets work in the evening, hotel lobbies glow, and Fisk’s Opera House presents in a stellar glare imported Spanish dancers, music by Offenbach, and cataracts with real water, climaxed by 100 Beauties 100 hiking their ruffled skirts, as 200 shapely legs kick high in that talked-about scandal from Paris, the  TERPSICHOREAN  AEROSTATICS  OF  THE  DEMON  CANCAN.


Yes, gaslight helped.
      Just offshore, a towering floating derrick with cables and pulleys that with only 1 horsepower and five men has lifted a sunken boat laden with 300 tons of coal.  Once again, the machine has triumphed.
     11th Street.  You think you’ve experienced noise and bustle so far?  Hardly.  Here we leave the quieter docks – yes, quieter -- dealing with grain, lumber, sugar, iron, and ice, and come to the docks of the shipping lines linking New York to Boston and New Orleans and San Francisco and Liverpool and Le Havre and Hamburg and Canton and Jakarta and Bombay. Surging across West Street come arriving and departing travelers, porters carrying baggage, and clerks with letter bundles scurrying after captains toting mailbags, all of them fighting past wagons blocking horsecars blocking stages amid shouts and curses of drivers, lumber spilling from a cart, mountains of barrels and bales, a black-garbed minister distributing tracts and Bibles to whoever will take them, and smells of fish, brine, tar, and molasses.
     The oyster market.  Rows of anchored oyster boats where men pry open oyster shells with knives, toss the oysters in pails of water.  Wagons take on loads of baskets of oysters that will be consumed by New Yorkers everywhere, in fine and not-so-fine restaurants, in oyster cellars, and even at stands in the street, as they relish glistening blue points on crushed ice with a wedge of lemon, or plump saddle rocks plucked from the groin of the sea.

     Slips where Coney Island sand is stored, so housewives can scour their pans and kettles and keep them bright.  Sand too for the floors of saloons, where untutored males of the lower classes, and even some tutored males of the upper classes, still have a habit of spitting. 
     10th Street.  Winches rattle, tackles run, officers whistle and gesticulate and halloo, as a gang of men in a hold strain to hoist a huge mahogany log out with tackle.  Mahogany from the steaming jungles of Honduras will be used in the fine furnishings of the palace steamboats of the People’s Line, where ordinary Americans can revel in luxuries reserved for the wealthy and titled in Europe.
     Under the piers of these docks are dense forests of pilings that only the smallest skiff can negotiate, a hidden world shadowy even by daytime where harbor thieves hide stolen goods that they hope to sell to licensed junkmen in boats who ask no questions.  From time to time policemen search under the piers and clean out the stashes of stolen goods, but more goods will be stashed, and the game goes on.
     Below Canal Street, a garbage dump where a long line of carts on a high pier dump refuse onto a lighter moored below.  Crawling over the huge mound of trash like a horde of maggots are men, women, and children scavenging bones, coal, rags, and old metal to sell to peddlers, and even scraps of food that they devour greedily.  Smells of burnt wood, ashes, shit.




     The Albany boat landing, where fashionables leaving for Saratoga scramble aboard amid the hubbub of cart drivers, cabs, baggage men, vendors, and the roar of escaping steam from the boats.  By August, everyone who is anyone flees the heat of the city, leaving behind the budget-strapped unfortunates who can only pull their front curtains shut and avoid being seen on the street, so the neighbors will think that they too are enjoying the amenities of Long Branch or Saratoga.  So it is in this distant time before air-conditioning.
     The Washington Market, between Vesey and Fulton Streets.  A sprawling old structure topped by a belfry.  In the early morning, a jam of wagons heaped high with meat from the Jersey slaughterhouses, produce from the garden patches of uptown shanty dwellers, and butter and cheese from Westchester farmers, all of them clattering down the narrow muddy lanes between the stalls where their crates, baskets, and barrels are unloaded while geese honk and chickens cluck.  


Gray-smocked vendors hawk their wares: dangling from hooks, carcasses of beef, deer, ducks, turkeys, rabbits, even the huge shaggy bulk of a bear; glistening heaps of silver-gray fish; huge yellow mountains of cheese; and baskets of peaches, plums, onions, and potatoes attended by ruddy-faced market women in broad-brimmed hats.  The first buyers flock: caterers from the best restaurants and hotels, among them Lorenzo Delmonico in a dark coat and top hat, scrutinizing the soft velvet plumage of a heap of fowl, pinching and sniffing, then tossing one bird, then another, into a wicker basket, his spoils destined for the tables of the city’s fanciest restaurant, the fabled Delmonico’s on 14th Street.  There, railroad men and politicians and foreign visitors and the city’s elite dine genteelly in the evening in a high-ceilinged room lit by crystal chandeliers, at tables with gleaming crystal and silverware, served by waiters who glide noiselessly over deep-pile carpet.  Yet even as Lorenzo Delmonico makes his careful selection, barefoot boys and old women pick at garbage sweepings nearby that even dogs reject. 

     At last, an island of silence, a plenitude of calm: the Battery, with its fine view of the river and harbor, where smoke-belching steamboats mingle with  three-masted sailing vessels and smaller schooners and sloops, and ferries plying to and from Brooklyn and Jersey and Staten Island, and even rowboats here and there.  But did I say peace and quiet?  An old woman tending a peanut and pineapple stand suddenly erupts at some visitors: “Get out wid ye, spittin’ all over me pineapples!  Do yees think I’ve got nothin’ to do but be washin’ me slices all day after yees?”  We move on.
The Battery, 1872.  A Currier & Ives print.  
     From here we’ll continue our imagined walk up South Street along the East River circa 1870 and see what today’s South Street Seaport, a historic district with renovated commercial buildings and sailing ships, can only give a hint of.
     North of Market Street, bowsprits of anchored sailing vessels jut high in the air overhead, while stevedores hustle huge bales and barrels and crates onto wagons and off of them, and iron-wheeled drays clatter on cobblestones amid smells of whale oil and sawn wood and brine.  Facing the docks are rows of old brick buildings housing sparmakers and riggers, and sailmakers’ lofts over the offices of shipping lines, and ship chandleries with everything needed for a ship: barometers and sextants and quadrants; cordage, paint, canvas, and oils; buoys and bells, windlasses and bilge pumps; and even cutlasses and axes that conjure up visions of seamen in old sailing vessels fighting off boarders from a British man-o’-war, or hordes of pirates armed with poisoned darts in the Sunda Straits.  Forges glow in ship smith shops where hammers clang on anvils, saws whine in spar yards, as shipwrights shape long timbers into spars, and a crowd of ragged boys watch, wide-eyed, as an aproned figurehead carver with a hammer and chisel hews out the shape of a bare-breasted sea nymph to adorn the bow of a ship.  Here, even in this age of steam, the age of sail still holds.   South Street, 1827.  The heyday of sail, before steamships began crossing the Atlantic.

     Above Wall Street, a brig from the Guinea Coast of Africa, having survived the deaths of a mate and two crewmen from yellow fever, unloads palm oil to be used in soaps and as a lubricant, and ivory needed for billiard balls, fancy buttons, jewelry, and the keys of pianofortes, fingering which young ladies in hushed parlors demonstrate their genteel accomplishments to guests.  (Which brings to mind an old joke:  “What do you think of her execution?”  “I’m in favor of it.”)
     At the foot of Pike Street, huge dry docks side by side.  Using a steam engine, four men jerk a ship up out of the water for repairs.  In the next dock over, two hundred workers peg away at a steamer’s bottom, scraping off barnacles, cleaning and repairing it. 
     Pier 54, at the foot of Grand Street.  Huge blocks of Italian marble are hoisted from the holds of vessels by creaking windlasses, to be taken by cart to the marble cutters, who will saw and hew them into smaller blocks and slabs that will become ornamental fronts of houses, baptismal fonts for churches, and monuments to the dear departed.  But some blocks are destined for studios where home-grown Michelangelos will labor to transform the frumpy consorts of Chicago hog butchers and Pennsylvania oil barons into sculpted magnificence, into music of stone.
     Near 12th Street, a sudden hush: the coffin of a skipper dead of a fever at sea is being borne down the gangplank of a ship.  Stevedores stand silent, hats off, until a hearse bears the coffin off.  Then, just as suddenly, the noise and bustle resume.
     We could go on a bit along South Street and see more shipyards and iron foundries and gas works, but this would simply repeat, and it’s late in the day and we’re tired, so we’ll end our tour here.
     Day’s end: sunset on the North River and East River docks.  In the fading ruddy glow, piers grow dim and anchored ships loom with darkened hulls and rigging, and water shines with the blackness of night.  Straggling teams pass with the last loads of the day, then silence.  Watchmen make their rounds, yawning; suspicious shadows skulk; gruff sounds from a groggery; ragged street kids fall deep asleep on cotton bales; harbor thieves in small boats glide noiselessly, on the lookout for unguarded spoils.  A brief repose for the docks until, in the wee morning hours, the first market wagons lurch and grate and creak.
     Such were the docks circa 1870, when city and nation were in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, with machines taking on more and more tasks once performed by men and horses and mules.  At the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, multitudes flocked to Machinery Hall to see machines press bricks, pump water into thundering Niagaras, spin cotton, print newspapers, drill metal, grind bone into dust.  And some giant Krupp cannon as well.  “What will you do with all these things?” wondered Thomas Huxley, the English champion of Darwinism.  Today we might ask the same of cell phones and laptops and tablets.


Krupp artillery at the Exposition.  What will you do with all these things?
In this case, the answer came in 1914.
      But the New York of 1870 knew what to do with machines and ships and docks.  It was not neat or subtle or just, but it did things.  It transshipped huge quantities of goods and turned iron into boilers and sugar mills, marble into memorials, ivory into piano keys, offal into leather and glue, and smirchy coal into the miracle of light.  Then as now there were thieves and cheats and manipulators, but the city did things, and did them big.
     Today the waterfront has dog walkers, joggers, cyclists, and sunbathers, but no grain elevators, sugar refineries, iron works, or dry docks.  What happened?  First, competing ports offered services at lower cost; New York  always was – and still is – an expensive place to do business.  Next, railroads, and later trucks and airlines, took on traffic that once went by water.  In the twentieth century racketeers got control of the unions, with little concern for maintenance of the waterfront, or for damage to the port’s reputation.  And from the 1950s on, containerization came in, requiring more space than the port of New York could offer, so that a lot of business went to the vast facilities of the port of Newark.  After that, much of the waterfront fell into decay, until the current movement to restore it and use it for recreation.  Once dirty and cluttered and busy, now it is clean and green.
Containers at the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal.  New York could offer no
such space as this.
     Source note:  Much of this post is drawn from my unpublished historical fiction, which draws on primary sources that include old prints of the time and two articles by journalists who described a day’s walk along the docks.
     Election results:  As expected, New York City has a new mayor – a Democrat, after all these years!  Bill de Blasio, who stands 6 foot 5, promises many longed-for changes, and multitudes cheer.  This is the honeymoon; it won’t last long.  Being mayor of this city is not the pleasantest job.  New Yorkers love to croak and complain, and the mayor spends half his time in Albany, begging the governor and legislature to let him raise a tax or two or otherwise attempt to govern.  And it’s a dead-end job: to my knowledge, no mayor has ever become a presidential candidate, whereas many a New York State governor has aspired to the White House, and a few have even succeeded.  So we’ll see how our 109th mayor fares.
     Coming soon:  Guzzling New York, and why Prohibition has never succeeded here; the city’s long-term romance with the oil of joy.  After that: mayors of New York, including the most honest, the most corrupt, the most elegant, the most good-looking, the most fun-loving.  In the offing: Lighting in the city; from candles to neon signs. And transportation: how New Yorkers did – and didn’t – get around; gigs and landaus and broughams, horsecars and stages, races and jams (not the kind you eat), the first gas buggies, the horrors and delights of the subway. 
     ©  2013  Clifford Browder

98. My Suicides and Further Thoughts on the Subject

     Just three.  At least, three that I remember.  The first one, and probably the most significant, took place far from New York, in the tranquil Chicago suburb of Evanston, where I grew up.  It was the year after my college graduation, when I was marking time hoping for a Fulbright scholarship that would get me to Europe, while reading and rereading the English poets and  taking beginning Greek with Professor Dorjahn at Northwestern.  Dorjahn, the head of the tiny Classics Department, was a crusty and demanding teacher who loved teaching this course, the gateway to Greek and the classics.  He had been known to reduce sensitive females to tears, so in the first semester was relieved to find only hardy males in this class of five.  A staunch Republican, he thought nothing of denouncing President Truman as a haberdasher out of his depth, but for all his crustiness and prejudices, we loved him.  Which, come to think of it, has nothing to do with suicides.
     As the months wore on, the gray vapors of depression began to infiltrate my being.  Reading poetry and taking Greek was fine, but it was hardly a  life in itself.  I was living at home after four years of college elsewhere, had lost contact with my Evanston friends, dated rarely, had little social life.  Not being used to introspection – at least, not the kind that probes deep into one’s own psyche – I found myself borne slowly on the current of my moods.  Attracted at this point to neither men nor women, I was in a strange limbo of indifference and abandonment, one that even today I have trouble understanding.  Excitement over something I was reading, or my progress in learning Greek, alternated with withdrawal, with alienation from everyone and everything around me.  And of all this, not a word to anyone.  Then I would snap out of it, read more, learn more; but sooner or later the gray mood crept back in.
     One evening that fall or winter, when that mood was upon me, without further reflection and almost like a sleepwalker I slipped out of the house unnoticed by my family, went to the garage, and in the darkness sat in the driver’s seat of my father’s car and, after a few moments of hesitation, turned the motor on.  The garage doors were shut, so monoxide poisoning was possible, even probable, and I knew it.  But the motor started with such a roar that it alarmed me and, fearing discovery, I quickly shut it off.  I then left the garage and slipped back into the house, still unnoticed by anyone.  Was I relieved, alarmed, amused by this fiasco?  I don’t recall.  Was it just a game that I intended to lose?  I doubt it.  The risk was real, and if the motor had come on with a gentle purr, I could well have seen the matter through.
     After that, sensing a need for change, I took a part-time afternoon job at a local insurance company, retrieving applications from the files when the staff had need of them: a menial job, but one that shook me free of those gray vapors.  If the Fulbright didn’t come through, I resolved to go to New York and find a job; I had to get free of family and a suburban life that depressed me.  But the Fulbright did finally come through, and from then on I was feverishly brushing up my French, with no time for either sex or depression.  So ends the account of my first suicide, hitherto untold to anyone.
A suicide prevention poster of the Department of Defense.
Suicide is common among returning vets.
     Fast forward now to 1965.  (I love “fast forward,” it’s so with-it, so twenty-first century.)   I’m a college French teacher now in New York, unattached, a very unpublished poet, but with many friends, many interests, few of the latter related to teaching nineteen-year-olds French.  A friend of mine got a volume of poetry published, and I was invited to a celebration of the event given by some mutual acquaintances.  I went, found a friendly crowd imbibing wine, and there, prominently displayed on a bureau, the volume, of which I later received an autographed copy.  Toward the end of the party it was obvious that the poet and some of his friends were going out to a dinner to which I was not invited.  But another friend, going out with some other guests for dinner, invited me to join them; for some reason I refused. 
     Instead, I went home, lapsed again into the gray mood of depression, and without reflection turned the oven on without lighting the gas, kneeled down, and stuck my head in, covering it with a towel so as to keep the gas from spreading and dissipating.  I remained in this awkward position for quite a while, breathing in deeply and hoping to gently pass out and shuffle off this mortal coil.  But I remained stubbornly alive and alert, and finally, deciding the whole business was ridiculous, got up, turned the gas off, and went to bed.
     Why had I done this?  Jealous of my published friend?  I don’t think so; I wished him and his volume well.  Depressed because I was not invited to the dinner party?  Maybe, but neither was the other friend who invited me to join his friends for dinner.  More to the point, I suspect, was my dislike of teaching – a dislike whose growing intensity I dared not admit to myself – and my frustrated wish for a relationship, as opposed to occasional sex with strangers.  It was still the era of the Mafia-run bars, crowded on Saturday nights, smoke-filled, and guarded by a thug at the door: not my preferred habitat by a long shot.  And my frustration as an unpublished writer probably counted for something as well. Yet even today, with hindsight, I can’t explain the incident adequately; it simply happened.
     “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” Karl Marx famously observed.  So it was with me and suicide, if we grant the first two attempts the grandiose label of tragedy; the third was certainly farce.  It must have come a year or two after the second suicide.  I had contemplated various possibilities, albeit with a certain detachment.  Suicide by jumping out a window was no good; I lived in a third-story apartment.  Besides, the dizzying plunge would be terrifying, and my splat on the pavement below might injure some passerby with whom I had no quarrel; pedestrian safety must be considered.  Suicide by revolver would be quick, neat, and clean, and once you twitched the trigger, no chance for reappraisal; alas, I had no revolver.  Finally I settled on a novel method: suicide by aspirin.  Granted, I had never heard of it succeeding; in fact, I had never heard of it at all.  But it seemed worth trying, and maybe, just maybe, it might work.
Fine for headaches.  But suicide???
Ragesoss   So one evening when that gray mood was upon me, I emptied a whole bottle of aspirin, swallowing one tablet after another, then went to bed and fell asleep, wondering if I would ever wake up.  The next morning I did, unmistakably alive, but with a feeling of weakness, a foul taste of aspirin in my mouth, and a craving for ice cream, a craving like I had never known before, worthy of a pregnant woman, and specifically for vanilla.  Too weak to go out, I phoned a friend, told him I was under the weather and asked him to bring me the ice cream; no word, of course, of the aspirin.  This he gladly did and, being a former ministerial student, he lingered a while and exhibited a most sympathetic bedside manner.  After he left, I devoured the ice cream, probably a whole pint at least.  It seemed to work wonders, since the aspirin taste diminished and I felt stronger by the minute.  But that awful taste, the faintest hint of it, hung on for days.  As did my sense of the ludicrous.  Suicide by monoxide has a certain minimal dignity, and suicide by the oven stops just this side of the ridiculous.  But let’s face it, suicide by aspirin plunges deep into the realm of absurdity.
     Such was my third and last suicide.  Often I escaped depression by simply going to bed and sleeping, a far better solution than alcohol or drugs. Then the gray vapors vanished, and with them the urge to suicide, owing to two changes: I quit teaching, I met my partner Bob.  These games faded in memory, became definitively a thing of the past.
     Were these attempts simply a game, a toying with fate that I had no real intention of pushing through to completion?  It’s hard to say.  A game, perhaps, but always with risk.  There are better, less dangerous games to play.  But the games served a purpose; following each attempt came a long period of calm and equanimity totally free of depression.  As Nietzsche observed, “The thought of suicide is a great consolation; it gets one through many a bad night.” 
     None of my friends or family had any inkling of all this, not one.  And certainly not my students, since every Monday morning I showed up on the campus as well scrubbed as ever, ready to leaven the sodden weight of grammar with attempts at quicksilver wit. 
     Why do I now relate all this, having never revealed it before to anyone?  Two reasons: it’s an ancient story, and with distance I see the humor.  But what I don’t fully grasp to this day is the motivation, which I can only  surmise.  The young man of those years is in many ways a stranger to me, and a baffling one at that.  How complicated we humans are, what a tangle of motives and frustrations, a mystery even more to ourselves than to others!
"Smoking can cause a slow
and painful death."  But
the French still love their
cigarettes.      My suicides were at least a frank attempt at self-destruction.  There are many other forms of suicide, less obvious and often unavowed.  My brother smoked for twenty years, knowing he had emphysema; he coughed horrendously at night, slept but was not rested, and finally collapsed and died within minutes.  My father too smoked for years, knowing it was doing him no good; he bribed his two sons not to smoke, but he himself, with his health deteriorating, finally succumbed to a stroke.  And a friend of Bob’s and mine, a gentle spirit, snacked for years on junk food, never ate a full and healthy meal, and finally died of pneumonia, his immune system hopelessly weakened, when antibiotics failed.  Sad cases, all of them, and to my way of thinking, suicide.
Slow suicide.
Oxfordian Kissuth
A mecca for suicides.
Jiuguang Wang     New York City has seen its share of suicides; the Empire State Building and the subway system, like San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, are  magnets for them.  More than thirty people have jumped from the upper parts of the skyscraper and usually succeeded in their attempt.  Two survived: one was blown back by a gust of wind and suffered a broken hip; the other landed on a ledge and was pulled to safety with only minor injuries.  In 1947 a fence was erected around the observation deck after five attempts in three weeks.
     Three suicides in New York come to my mind, beside which my attempts seem trivial.  In 1875 the board of the People’s Line, one of the two dominant steamboat lines on the Hudson River, forcibly retired Captain Alanson P. St. John, age 77, because of his age and ill health.  The captain had been on the river for over forty years, skippering boats from New York to Albany.  He knew every mile of that run, loved boats and everything about them, and loved being on the river.  At times he seemed depressed.  On April 23, 1875, he came from his home in New Jersey to inspect his favorite boat, one named for him, the St. John, then undergoing repairs at the foot of 19th Street.  Chatting on deck with the first mate, he seemed in the best of health and spirits, following which he entered the steward’s room alone.  Five minutes later a shot rang out.  Rushing inside the cabin, the workmen found the captain slumped dead in a chair, a smoking revolver in one hand, his features as composed as in sleep.  The coroner’s verdict was suicide “while laboring under temporary aberration of mind.”  Some of his friends attributed his depression to ill health, but others knew better: he could not live away from the river.

     Another suicide of that era is more troubling.  In 1878 Ann Lohman, age 67, alias Madame Restell, the city’s most notorious and conspicuously successful abortionist, was arrested by Anthony Comstock, agent of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.  Learning that she might be sentenced to years in prison, bringing shame upon her two beloved grandchildren, she who all her life had exhibited remarkable fortitude and contempt for public opinion lost her habitual self-possession and became distraught.  The day before her trial, she stalked about her sumptuous Fifth Avenue palace, trembling and moaning and wringing her diamond-studded hands, convinced they would convict her on one charge or another, that everyone was against her, that she had no friends.  “What shall I do?” she muttered over and over again.  “Why don’t they leave me alone?”  Her family tried to console or distract her, but to no avail.  Dazed among the bric-a-brac, she uttered broken monologs, whispered, started, wept.  Finally she went to bed, seemed calmer, fell asleep.  Early the next morning her maid noticed the door of the second-floor bathroom was open, saw her mistress’s nightgown lying on a chair, knocked, got no answer, entered, and beheld madam’s nude body half immersed in the bathtub, one arm spotted with blood, her head reclining, her throat slit from ear to ear, a sight that sent the maid shrieking from the room.  The coroner found an eight-inch kitchen knife in the tub, concluded that, given the deceased’s calm features, death must have been instant and painless.  Madam’s profession had required a strong will, settled nerves, and  a steady hand; in her final moments they served her well.  The press almost unanimously hailed her passing, the Times calling it “a fit end to an odious career.”  Though she was said to be the fifteenth offender whom he had driven to suicide, Comstock felt in no way responsible; as Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, he closed out her file with the comment, “A Bloody ending to a bloody life.”
     These first two suicides I learned of while researching my two biographies; the third one, one of the most sensational in twentieth-century New York, I learned of only recently.  On May 1, 1947, Evelyn McHale, age 23, went up to the 86th-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building and jumped to her death.  Her hurtling body landed with a crash on a United Nations limousine parked in the street below, smashing its roof.  Four minutes later a photographer who happened to be nearby photographed her body, her face surprisingly composed in the midst of twisted metal and shattered glass.  She had left her coat and a note on the deck: “I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me.  Could you destroy my body by cremation?  I beg of you and my family – don’t have any service for me or remembrance for me.  [Then, crossed out but legible:]  My fiancé asked me to marry him in June.  I don’t think I would make a good wife for anybody.  He is much better off without me.”  According to her wishes, she was cremated.  When her fiancé saw her the day before, she had seemed completely normal and happy.  She became known as the city’s most beautiful suicide, but her motivation remains unclear to this day.
Observation deck of the Empire State Building today.  This
barrier might have stopped Evelyn McHale.
Boris Dzhingarov
     Evelyn McHale’s story, imperfectly known as it is, is a warning that  potential suicides can conceal their depression from others, even those closest to them.  Never assume that you know anyone completely; deep in our psyche we all harbor secret closets, locked drawers.
     Evelyn McHale’s death inspires another reflection as well.  One key ingredient in the formula for suicide is a keen sense of unworthiness: if God there is, I’m not worth his attention, or anyone’s.  Even for those not inclined to suicide, demeaning oneself is no small weapon in the arsenal of survival and evasion; it gets one off so many hooks. 

     Some societies see suicide as permissible, even honorable, under certain circumstances, though not traditionally our own.  I see no reason why someone terminally ill, especially if in great pain, should not be allowed to end their suffering.  And should assisted suicide be permitted?  Again, in the case of terminally ill patients, I think so.  I applauded Jacob (Jack) Kevorkian ("Dr. Death") for helping such patients end their misery -- at least 130, by his own count -- and deplored his arrests and trials.  Three trials ended in acquittal, and one in a mistrial; he was finally convicted of second-degree homicide in Michigan and served over eight years in prison before being granted parole for good behavior in 2007.  Certainly he had provoked the authorities, even dared them to arrest him, but public opinion now seems to be turning in his direction, as Oregon, Washington, and Vermont have legalized physician-assisted suicide in the case of terminally ill patients.  Kevorkian died in 2011.        The thought of suicide, however momentary, visits most of us at one time or another; adolescents are especially vulnerable, and veterans who have seen too much war.  What guards us against carrying out these urges?  Here are my suggestions:
·      A lasting and rewarding relationship.·      Sustained creativity, as found in writers, artists, dancers, composers, and entrepreneurs.·      Fear of the unknown.·      A meaningful belief system.·      A keen sense of responsibility to others.·      A hearty sense of humor (as opposed to sardonic wit).·      Contact, even superficial, with others.  Suicide is usually a solitary event.·      A sense of wonder at the natural world around us.
     I would especially stress the last.  I find wonder in the arching magnificence of trees, in tiny flowers, in patterns of lichens and slime molds, in sunrises and sunsets, the flight of egrets and the haunting sounds of loons, in the scintillating magic of light on water, and the starry infinitudes of space.  “My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe,” said Alfred Einstein.  His religion is my religion, too, with maybe a dash of Taoism thrown in. 

RhinoMind





































































     Election note:  Next Tuesday, hot on the heels of Halloween, we have a mayoral election in New York.  The Republican candidate, Joe Lhota, comes off in photos as a nice little man with a mustache.  He has a good record as an administrator and showed some fire in the mayoral debates, but this is a big city that wants a big mayor, and Bill de Blasio, the Democratic candidate, seems to fill the bill.  It doesn’t hurt that he has an African American wife (who considered herself a Lesbian until she met him), and a fifteen-year-old son with an afro who charmed viewers when he appeared on television.  (There are New Yorkers who ask, “Is de Blasio the one with the kid with an afro?”)  De Blasio is far ahead in the polls.  There are many significant issues at stake, but I mention the preceding to show how voters are swayed by the superficial.  Such is democracy as we know it. 
Our next mayor?  Bill de Blasio with his wife, son, and daughter at a rally.
Chirlane McCray
     Coming soon:  A walk along the waterfront, circa 1870: the offal boat, the Hotel de Flaherty (notZagat rated), how things were kept cold before refrigeration, how coal from Pennsylvania helped pickpockets, where harbor thieves hid what they stole, how New York helped feed the hungry mouths of Europe, and where you could buy a whole carcass of bear.  But no bike paths, dog runs, or tennis courts.  After that, maybe a post on New York mayors past and present: the most colorful, the most fun-loving, the most corrupt, the best-looking, the most honest, the most elegant, etc.
     ©  2013  Clifford Browder

97. Wall Street, Its Past and Present Sins, and Do We Need It? Part 3

     With this third and last post on Wall Street we will press deep into the twentieth century and beyond.  This is not a full-fledged history of the Street, but rather a series of personal impressions of it, presented now as a timeline with commentary.
Timeline
     1920.  A bomb planted in a horse-drawn carriage explodes at the corner of Broad and Wall Streets, killing 38 people and injuring 143 others.  Someone doesn’t like Wall Street, but it’s not clear who.  This and other less spectacular bombings prompt a vigorous response by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI), including the BOI’s General Intelligence Division, headed by an unknown named J. Edgar Hoover.  Communists and anarchists are blamed for the blast, but in time it is attributed to Italian anarchists or Italian terrorists.  And J. Edgar is on his way to power and fame.
The scene of the bombing.  Federal Hall is seen in the upper right.
     1921.  The curbstone brokers, who trade speculative stocks out in the street, finally come in out of the cold, establishing themselves in a building on Greenwich Street; fewer colds presumably result.  So ends one of the most curious and colorful sights on Wall Street: brokers shouting and gesticulating their bids and offers in the open air.  They will become the American Stock Exchange in 1953 and merge with the New York Stock Exchange in 2008.
Crowd outside the Stock Exchange,
October 1929.     1929.  The Great Crash, the Big Daddy of all crashes, still unrivaled even today.  In October, just one year after my birth, though I deny any causality.  Stocks, having gone up up up, begin plunging down down down.  A substantial rally will fool many, followed by a dizzying decline ending only in July 1932.  Many fortunes are demolished, many corporations are bankrupt, there are runs on banks, and hundreds of thousands lose their jobs.
     This dire event prompts many comments:
·      It is said that many ruined victims jumped out of skyscraper windows, but those who have scanned the newspapers of the time find no such accounts.  Pure myth.
·      Just prior to the Crash, the gap between rich and poor in America was at an all-time high.  (Sound familiar?  It should.)
·      Some survived, some didn’t.  Years later, when I had a summer job as dishwasher in a kitchen feeding construction workers on an Army base in Anchorage, Alaska, I got to know a man named Scottie, fiftyish and beefy, with a ready tongue and a good sense of humor. While peeling quantities of potatoes and onions, he told us how in the 1920s he had owned General Motors stock, and in the 1930s he had been in the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the government agency employing millions of the unemployed in public works projects: a perfect reflection of the nation’s history at that time.  But Scottie had learned from experience.  Now, his $60 a week (a good wage in those days) was carefully budgeted: $20 for savings, $20 for necessities, and $20 (“honey money,” I called it) for a weekly visit to a lady of the evening.  On one occasion we dishwashers saw him decked out for his Saturday-night foray in a dapper hat, a jacket and tie, and stretched across his chest, a shiny watch fob.  We were amazed: he was elegant!  Yes, whatever Wall Street had done to him, Scottie was a survivor.
·      The repercussions of October 1929 on Wall Street reached into every nook and cranny of the nation, even into well-scrubbed Evanston, the genteel Chicago suburb where I grew up.  Not that the elm-shaded tranquility of this very middle-class community, staunchly Republican, was convulsed; it was not.  The fathers continued to commute to jobs in Chicago, the wives saw to the house and the kids, and we kids went off to our first-rate suburban schools.  The Great Depression was more in evidence in Chicago, that crime-ridden, corrupt, and drink-sodden  metropolis (Evanston was dry) stretching south from the boundary of Howard Street, where, we were told, liquor stores abounded and crime and municipal corruption began.  But into the calm of Evanston came victims of the times: clean-cut young men who in groups of two or three knocked at the back doors and courteously asked if we could spare some food.  The housewives and maids of Evanston always obliged, so that each suppliant might get an apple here, a sandwich there, and a hard-boiled egg down the street.  And the young women willing to work as maids were of a high caliber indeed, often public schoolteachers who had lost their jobs.  Grim times indeed.  And at grade school the kids got together once or twice a year to do a “teacher shower”: a surprise gift to our teacher of food, usually canned goods; the teachers, though secure in their jobs, were profoundly grateful.  All of which may seem far removed from events on Wall Street, but I include these reminiscences as examples of how the doings on that Street could affect everyone else, even residents in the snug, safe suburbs.
     1933.  Enactment of the Glass Steagall Act (named for the two Congressmen sponsoring it), erecting a firewall between commercial or retail banks on the one hand, and investment banks on the other.  From now on, commercial banks, which hold citizens’ money in deposits and make loans, cannot deal in or underwrite securities, and investment banks, which do deal in securities, taking greater risks for greater profits, cannot take deposits.  For the next forty years, while the economy has its ups and downs, the financial system is solid, and depositors’ deposits are safe.
     1934.  Establishment of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate stock exchanges and enforce federal securities laws.  The first chairman?  None other than Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., the patriarch of the famous Kennedy clan, a notorious insider trader and market manipulator of the 1920s, and one of the canny few who, by selling short in 1929, had added vastly to his already considerable fortune.  And why does President Roosevelt pick Kennedy?  Kennedy had contributed generously to his election campaign.  And when asked why he had appointed a crook, Roosevelt replied, “Takes one to catch one.”  Kennedy, using his knowledge of the financial world, will institute needed reforms and be widely praised for his work.
     1938.  Richard Whitney, a former president of the New York Stock Exchange and a respected figure in the Wall Street establishment, is arrested in New York for embezzlement, pleads guilty, and is sentenced to five to ten years in Sing Sing.  But so what?  In every barrel there’s always one bad apple.  And he’ll be a model prisoner and in get out on parole in 1941.
Abbie in his patriotic shirt.     1967.  On August 24 Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman and a band of fellow pranksters hurl real and fake dollars from the Stock Exchange’s visitors’ gallery to the hectic trading floor below, where some traders boo and jeer, others laugh, blow kisses, and wave, and still others scramble for the apparent windfall.  (Money, after all, is money.)  The Yippies are then escorted out of the building, but their bit of guerrilla theater, which stops the ticker-tape for six minutes, is reported worldwide and causes the Exchange to shell out $20,000 to enclose the gallery with bulletproof glass, so as to prevent a repetition of this dire event.
     1999.  In their infinite wisdom the solons of Washington, both Republicans and Democrats, repeal the Glass Steagall Act, which was no longer being strictly enforced.  Their rationale?   They must help American banks expand and better compete in global markets.  Though I am no financial expert, it occurred to me at the time that, before repealing a law that had been on the books that long, Congress should go back and study the reasons for its passage in 1933, and make sure that those reasons no longer hold today.  Thanks to this repeal, big U.S. banks become still bigger, becoming too big to fail – that is, so big that their failure would have dire consequences for the economy as a whole.
     2000.  The dot.com bubble bursts.  The dot.com stocks – stocks of newly hatched Internet-related companies --- having gone up up up, now begin going down down down, taking all the other stocks with them.  (As Wall Streeters like to put it, when the bad girls are rounded up, the good girls are carted off, too.)  Day traders who quit their regular jobs to stay home at their computer and trade stocks, buying in the morning and selling at the end of the day for a profit, suddenly find that trading stocks isn’t much fun. 
     In that same year J.P. Morgan merges with Chase Manhattan, which had merged with Chemical Bank, which had merged with Manufacturers Hanover, which had merged with …  But why go on? The result: a mega bank rivaled only by Citigroup, both of them too big to fail.
     2006.  The U.S. real estate bubble bursts.  Housing prices, having gone up up up, begin to go down down down.  People who bought a house and then sold it at a profit two years later, then bought another house and did the same, and then bought another, are stuck with that house and, as housing prices continue to fall, see their credit also fall, leaving them with a mortgage they can’t afford.  Home foreclosures follow, and the subprime (i.e., low-quality) mortgage industry collapses.  And who are heavy investors in that industry?  All the big Wall Street banks.  Oops!  Big trouble ahead.
     2008.  The subprime mortgage crisis causes a market collapse and the subsequent Great Recession.  Causes of the crisis:
·      The housing market bust.·      Homeowner speculation (see above, 2006).·      Mortgage fraud and predatory lending.·      Inaccurate credit ratings.·      Decreased government regulation (see above, 1999).·      Boom and bust in the shadow banking system, where affiliates of regulated investment banks found ways to operate free of regulation and undertake risky investments.·      And so on, and so on.
Confused?  So am I.  Let’s just say that whatever dubious financial practices Wall Street could conceive of, Wall Street put into practice.  And Wall Street’s imagination is bold and vast.  Who had ever heard of a shadow banking system before this?  And how about terms that emerged with it: “credit default swaps,” “collateralized debt obligations,” “structured investment vehicles,” and “interest-only adjustable-rate mortgages”?  Some of them baffled even veteran Wall Streeters not involved in these markets.  Here are a few specifics from this calamitous year of 2008.
Lehman Brothers headquarters, on
Sixth Avenue.  With such a soaring
tower, how could it fail?
David ShankboneSeptember.  The investment bank Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy, the biggest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.  The main cause: heavy exposure to subprime mortgage securities.  U.S. stocks, having gone up up up, begin going down down down, marking the start of a horrendous bear market and  the Great Recession, with repercussions worldwide.  Meanwhile the Lehman CEO is getting millions in bonuses.  A subsequent investigation will uncover a good deal of financial hanky-panky on Lehman’s part prior to bankruptcy.
October.  President George W. Bush signs into law an emergency bailout package establishing the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which will buy stakes in financial institutions and the big U.S. automakers, all of them deemed too big to fail.  Citigroup will get $45 billion, Goldman Sachs $10 billion, and my own beloved J.P. Morgan Chase $25 billion.  These loans are made with no strings attached.  (Just try getting a loan like that for yourself.)  The banks continue to award outsized bonuses and in time report record profits.
December.  Wall Street financier Bernard (Bernie) Madoff  is arrested for securities fraud, his firm having operated a colossal Ponzi scheme defrauding thousands of investors of billions of dollars.  Even Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, those master manipulators of the nineteenth century, never thought of this.  Bernie will subsequently get 150 years in prison.  But so what?  In every barrel there is always one bad apple.
     2010.  Congress passes the Dodd-Frank Act to regulate Wall Street and render a repeat of the recent financial crisis less likely.  Hailed as the most significant financial reform since the 1930s, it makes some progress toward transparency and accountability but leaves the banks still too big to fail.  And many of its provisions have yet to be implemented.
      2011.  Occupy Wall Street protests against inequality, greed, corruption, and the undue influence of Wall Street by occupying, not Wall Street, but nearby Zuccoti Park.  Its slogan “We are the 99%” stresses the disparity in wealth between the top 1% and the rest of us.  After two months they are expelled from the park and shift their focus to other sites.  I have talked with them several times at Union Square and cheered them on.  But since then they seem to have faded from the scene, another roar that dwindled to a whimper.


David Shankbone
     2012.  My very own candy-dispensing bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, registers a $6 billion loss in a trade in its London office.  (Yes, that’s six billion, not six million.)   According to CEO and board chairman Jamie Dimon, the strategy was “flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed, and poorly monitored.”  Which might suggest that his management was poorly implemented.
     2013.  Jamie Dimon announces a tentative $13 billion settlement – the biggest such settlement ever -- with the U.S. Justice Department over the bank’s sale of risky mortgages to investors unaware of the risks.  The bank still faces investigations by at least seven federal agencies, several state regulators, and two foreign countries and may face criminal charges.  Should Mr. Dimon be fired?  Writers, editors, and bloggers resoundingly chorus yes!  But analysts, board members, and regulators chorus no!  And who am I, a financial nobody, to scream for his scalp?  Photos show him to be a very clean-cut, well-dressed, downright handsome gentleman.  So leave Jamie alone; don’t pick on a gent when he’s down.  Especially when the board just halved his bonus, formerly the highest in the nation, to a mere $10 million.  Even if he and his minions have committed some minor indiscretions along the way, what are we talking about anyway?  A few billion here, a few billion there – chump change!  And if in every barrel there’s always one bad apple, it isn’t necessarily Gentleman Jamie.  Besides, I like his first name, so casual, so friendly – the very opposite of J. Pierpont Morgan, that formidable  titan of another day.

Handsome and elegant, his hand gestures showing an earnest 
desire to communicate.  How could anyone with such a
spotlessly white collar and cuffs wish ill to others?
And look closely at the cuff link: an American flag!
Steve Jurvetson
Possible conclusions based on recent financial history (take your pick)
·      Those naughty banks deserve another spanking.·      On Wall Street the bigger your blunders, the bigger your bonus.·      As regards J.P. Morgan Chase, federal regulators obviously don’t like candy.·      Big banks get bailed out.  How about the rest of us?·      Capitalism is dying of its own inconsistencies, failures, and corruption.  Workers of the world, unite!·      Only gold is safe.·      Bring back the Glass Steagall Act!·      In every barrel there’s always one bad apple … or maybe several.

The New York Stock Exchange Building and Integrity
     I’ve gotten so involved with recent financial shenanigans that I’ve lost sight of Wall Street itself, the street and its buildings.  Today of course it has come to be dominated by soaring high-rises, but empty office buildings have been converted to lofts and apartments, and recently there has been a trend toward luxury apartments and upscale retailers, alleviating the deathlike stillness traditionally characterizing the area at night and on weekends and holidays.  Also, the concentration of the financial industry in one district, so that buy and sell orders and stock certificates could be delivered promptly, is no longer necessary in the age of computers and telecommunications, prompting some big banks to migrate to midtown Manhattan.  And New Jersey has successfully attracted some Wall Street firms, the data centers of electronic trading for all the major U.S. stock exchanges, and other financial services to its shining shores.


Elisa Rolle     That said, let’s take note of an earlier but enduring structure, the New York Stock Exchange’s current home at 18 Broad Street, a pillared parthenon in the Beaux-Arts style that opened in 1903 and is now a National Historic Monument.  Topping its noble façade is a marble pediment with high-relief sculptures designed by John Quincy Adams Ward, whose very name breathes integrity, representing Integrity Protecting the Works of Man.  Integrity, a classically robed female, stretches her arms outward in a protective gesture toward figures symbolizing Agriculture and Mining on the left, and Science, Industry, and Realizing Intelligence (whatever that is) on the right.  Since the original marble figures weighing many tons threatened the structural integrity of the pediment itself (symbolic perhaps?), they were replaced in 1936 with lead-coated sheet copper replicas that come critics find disappointing.  But so what?  It’s the thought that counts.  If Integrity dominates the Stock Exchange, can anything really be wrong?  Surely not.



Who those little darlings are at the foot of Integrity I can't begin to say.Beyond My Ken
     Even so, I should add that Wall Street is also a tourist destination, with high points including the Stock Exchange itself, and the Federal Reserve Bank on Liberty Street whose gold vaults eighty feet below street level house $415 billion in gold bullion behind a 90-ton steel door. 
     Especially popular is sculptor Arturo Di Modica’s 7,000-pound bronze Charging Bull, which he originally deposited in front of the Stock Exchange in 1989 as a Christmas gift to the city.  He meant it to be a symbol of the strength and power of the American people, just two years after a little occurrence known as the 1987 stock market crash (yes, there was one in 1987 too).  The police quickly seized the work, but a public outcry followed; after all, a 7,000-pound gift is not to be sneezed at.  Result: it was installed at Bowling Green, where multitudes of tourists flock to see it and click their cameras.  Its flared nostrils, sharp horns, and head lowered in readiness to charge suggest a muscular and aggressive stock market, and a dangerous one.  But rubbing its horns, nose, and testicles is supposed to bring good luck.  (I haven’t tried it.  If any viewer does, please give me a report.)



Courtesy of Jessica, at Occasional Traveler

     Also, from May to September there is a weekly “Scoundrels of Wall Street Tour” featuring robber barons of the Gilded Age and more recent financiers adept at finding ways around financial regulations or loopholes through them.
Do we need Wall Street, and if so, why?
     If you think capitalism is hopelessly flawed, as some proponents of socialism do, then throw Wall Street away.  (Many voices on station WBAI are vehemently of this opinion.)  But if you think that capitalism, with all its flaws, can be saved and purified, then some financial center for handling money, making loans, and trading securities is necessary, and Wall Street, if spanked and punished sufficiently, maybe with cuts to its allowance, can serve.  And let’s face it, Wall Street salaries and bonuses are taxed and so contribute to the New York economy.  It is estimated that Wall Street provides almost one fourth of all income produced in the city, and 10% of the city’s tax revenues and 20% of the state’s.  So I reluctantly reach a conclusion that I had not anticipated: maybe, when all is considered realistically, alas, maybe greed is good.  Not what many of us want to concede, but there it is: as matters now stand, yes, greed is good.  Ayn Rand must be cheering from her grave.  Ouch!
     Re Ayn Rand:  I have read both the novels of this libertarian saint and apostle of unfettered capitalism and greed.  The Fountainhead (1943; 694 pages) is a challenge; Atlas Shrugged (1957; 1069 pages) is impossible, since it repeats, repeats, repeats.  Strictly for the hardy few.  Two reasons to read her: (1) To know what the buzz is all about.  (A dwindling buzz, I suspect.)  (2) To have something interesting to say at cocktail parties: “Oh yes, I’ve read her.  Very thought-provoking.”  (Or just provoking?)  Or:  “She’s mad, of course.  A delusional libertarian, quite off her rocker.  Ought to be banned.”
A Note on Covetous New Jersey
     As already mentioned, New Jersey has succeeded in enticing various financial facilities from Manhattan to its presumably less congested and less costly hinterland.  This in itself wouldn’t be a bone of contention, were it not simply the latest raid that the Garden State has perpetrated against the city and state of New York.  I have many friends from New Jersey and hold them in no way responsible for these blatant acts of aggression.  But when visiting them in Jersey City I often noticed an outsized statue of Peter Stuyvesant in Bergen Square, a short distance from Journal Square, that city’s chief plaza and the site of the PATH terminal, probably the most unlovely city square I have ever visited.  As for the statue, a looming creation in heroic mode, I have often wondered why a New York – or, more properly, a New Amsterdam – figure should be represented in Jersey City.  I now learn that in 1660 he established Bergen Village, the first European settlement in New Jersey, at this site, and that this village is regarded as the forerunner of Jersey City.  Well, all right, but there is no indication that Stuyvesant ever set foot on Jersey soil; he had plenty to keep him busy in New Amsterdam.  Here, in subtle form, is an attempt by the Garden State to annex a bit of the history of New York.
     The New Jersey’s aggression doesn’t end there.  In 1987 the mayor of Jersey City sued New York City, alleging that Bedloe’s Island, also called Liberty Island, where crumb of land where the Statue of Liberty looms nobly, belongs to the state of New Jersey.  The court declined to hear the case, so the island’s status remains unchanged: the parts of the island above water are deemed to be a part of New York, and the submerged parts are deemed to be a part of New Jersey.  But let’s face it, this was an insidious attempt to annex Lady Liberty herself.  When immigrants came by ship to this country, they didn’t say, “We are going to New Jersey.”  They surely said, “We are going to New York.”  And that should settle the matter.
     New Jersey has an inferiority complex, being squeezed in between two much larger states, Pennsylvania and New York.  I’m sure there are many fine things in the state, but my first impression was not the best.  Years ago I went with friends by car to the Rutgers campus at New Brunswick, experiencing en route the marsh smells of the Meadowlands, then a pig farm, and finally an oil facility – maybe a refinery – before arriving at our destination.  What do I remember of Rutgers and New Brunswick?  Nothing.  What I do remember is a sequence of stinks: marsh stink, then pig stink, then oil stink. 
     New Jersey, accept your fate as dormitory to New York City, and a transition between the Empire State and the Keystone State.  Glory in your own attractions, whatever they may be, and do not covet Peter Stuyvesant or Lady Liberty.  Pax vobiscum, New Jersey, please cease and desist.
     Coming soon:  Next Sunday, My Suicides, plus random thoughts on the subject.  Then, a walk along the waterfront circa 1870: cavernous ironworks, giant cotton presses, coal becoming heat and power and speed, gas works to light the city, and the offal boat taking away 3100 barrels of offal a week.

     ©  2013  Clifford Browder

96. Wall Street, Its Past and Present Sins, and Do We Need It? Part 2

     Part 1 of this series on Wall Street (post # 95) ended with the Panic of 1857.  This post picks up the story there and continues the account over the decades that followed.
     In the months that followed the Panic, when the unemployed marched on City Hall flaunting signs that said  WE WANT WORK  and  HUNGRY, while in the gutters of the Five Points women ragpickers clawed and shoved one another over a chicken bone snatched from a hog, bystanders remarked, “Pinching times.”
     When young ladies of refined education, whose families had once enjoined them never to fall in love with less than twenty thousand a year, having lost their father to bankruptcy and stroke, and their mother to shock and chagrin, got jobs as capmakers or book binding stitchers or tinters of artificial teeth, working from sunrise to sunset for a mere three dollars a week, and were glad to have employment, journalists announced, “Pinching times.”
     Pinching times prevailed for one year, then two, as the demand for gold cigarette cases and silver toothpicks dwindled, and bank note printers published temperance tracts, and factories sat idle.  Then, almost imperceptibly, stocks poked timidly up, winches creaked on the docks, and here and there a forge blazed, a lathe whined.  Once again in the minds of railroad projectors, real-estate visionaries, and manipulators of money, as in the hard  muscles of stonecutters, quarrymen, and roofers, the Spirit of Go Ahead – at first not a blast but a whisper – moved in Gotham, till even Mr. Bennett of the Herald, having gloated over the havoc and ruin, acknowledged the passing of the “late revulsion.”
     So the Panic of 1857, which brought misery to many, was followed by a year or two of “pinching times” – a mere moment, a fleeting instant of hardship, when compared to panics both before and after.  Is it any wonder that memory of it faded quickly, as the nation was rent asunder by the Civil War, and New York City, after a bit of initial doubt and shock, was immersed in a wartime boom, supplying the government (for a hefty commission, needless to say) with the foodstuffs and weapons and tents and blankets that it needed, while speculators on Wall Street bid the price of gold up and down in the market? 
     I have already told the story of that boom, and the profits raked in by the knowing few, in an earlier post (#82), so here I will only mention how the government financed its vast war effort.  Did Wall Street rush to the rescue?  Don’t be silly.  With the survival of the Union uncertain, it sat on its duff, left the financing to others.  The “others” proved to be Jay Cooke, a Philadelphia financier whom the Treasury Department hired as a special agent to sell $500 millions in Treasury bonds directly to the people.  He organized a nationwide sales campaign that bypassed Wall Street completely (yes, it can be done), sending 2,500 subagents into every Northern and Western state, and even Southern states as they were occupied by Northern armies, to appeal to the citizens’ desire to help the war effort, while realizing a decent profit on their investment.  This canny appeal to both patriotism and greed, well publicized in newspapers, handbills, and posters, reached the most ordinary  citizens – schoolteachers and ministers and small shopkeepers – who would never have succumbed to any offering of Wall Street, but who responded generously to this appeal, more than fulfilling Cooke’s goal.  And when, in early 1865, the government was again desperate for funds, Cooke sent his agents into remote villages and hamlets and even isolated mining camps in the West, selling some $830 millions of Treasury notes to finance the nation’s final war effort and bring victory. 
See how we won the war?     Jay Cooke was no fool; good financier that he was, he realized a huge personal profit and was even accused of corruption, though no investigation resulted.  But his work was essential in saving the Union, and by going directly to the people he brought democracy to, of all places, the world of finance.  The securities he sold were the granddaddies of the Liberty Bonds of World War I and the War Bonds of World War II, which were likewise sold directly to the people with a simultaneous appeal to patriotism and greed.  Or, instead of greed, let’s be generous and say enlightened self-interest.  That gets me off the hook, since at my high school I bought, and even peddled, the stamps that could in time add up to the price of the cheapest war bond, $18.75 (maturing in ten years for a value of $25.00), thus helping give their comeuppance to those villains Hitler and Tojo.  (How could you not, when even Superman and Batman and Robin were urging you to participate?)  And when my father, a veteran smoker, bribed me not to smoke before I was 21, offering first $100 and then $200, how did he pay me when I achieved that magical age?  In war bonds, of course.  For which I have to thank both him and Jay Cooke (though probably not Superman or Batman).  (Batman, by the way, was my childhood favorite.  Superman seemed just a bit square and prosaic, whereas Batman was sleek and sexy.  As for his relationship with young Robin, darting together over city roofs at night, well, I won't comment further.)
An 1866 theater bill for The Black Crook, 
a forerunner of both the Broadway musical
of today and burlesque.

     The wartime boom in the North continued in the postwar years in what has been called the Flash Age, when the city’s dark eros* and glitter were whipped into shimmer and froth.  It was a time of diamonds and champagne; of musical extravaganzas with the high-kicking dancers of the cancan, artificial waterfalls, and chariots of angels dropping from the sky; of Jim Fisk and Jay Gould convulsing markets as they attempted the unheard-of, the unimaginable, to corner gold; of faro dens just off Broadway with green baize tables ringed by glossy top hats, as dealers flicked out cards to grunts and murmurs and puffs on black cigars; and Tiffany & Company’s front window offering silver vases, paperweights, fans, and half-draped nymphs in bronze: the accessories and armature of Flash.
     *Dark eros: the force that drives the city, the blind energy, ambition, and desire that make New York New York.
     Above all, it was a time of railroad men, gilt-buttoned, with lavender or cream kid gloves, voicing in brokers’ front offices on Wall Street and at public meetings everywhere a vision of railroads inspired by the completion of the first transcontinental line, when the Union Pacific joined up with the Central Pacific in Utah in 1869.  A transcontinental railroad, spanning prairies and mountains and deserts – it was bold, it was dazzling, it was Go Ahead!  Of course there must be more -- the Northern Pacific, the Kansas Pacific, the Atlantic & Pacific, the Anything Pacific – jabbing twin bright bands of steel into the fabled goodlands of the West, past bison and astonished Indians into the sunny clime of California, its rugged shores frothed by the blue Pacific, beyond whose vast expanse loomed the ultimate dream spiced in mystery, the Orient.
     Yes, at times word came from the West of a town site marked by a buffalo skull and little else, of grasshopper plagues, or parched mesas whose Indians, bison, and rattlesnakes voiced no need of a railroad.  Even in the best of times cynics alleged scant profits, mounting costs, a hint of a taint of corruption.  To build five thousand miles of railroad a year, millions in bonds had been sold; tens of millions more were needed.  Rumors surfaced of meetings in board rooms and brokers’ back offices, where it was whispered the bonds weren’t selling.  Shhh!  The bond ads ran month after month.

Wall Street in 1867, looking east from Broad Street.  The pillared building on the left is the U.S. Subtreasury, with quantities of gold in its vaults; formerly the Customs House, it is now known as Federal Hall.  On the right, in the distance, is another pillared structure, the Customs House,   formerly the Merchants' Exchange and today housing luxury apartments.
     The railroad men bought luminous pearls at Tiffany’s, dined on wine-simmered snipe at Delmonico’s, and from boxes in Fisk’s Opera House craned joyously at the leggy spasms of the cancan.  In August they went to Long Branch for a whiff of the keen salt sea.  Everyone was there – bankers and brokers, moguls and minions, the President.  The railroad men, their broadcloth plucked by the breeze, strolled and chatted along verandas hung with baskets of roses, while their wives toppled tenpins, and their sons raced trotters on the beach.  From the click of croquet, from the waft of fountains bubbling with cologne, and from shiny turnouts foisting genteel nods at President Ulysses S. Grant passing in a carriage, the railroad men knew the summer, the nation was ripe.
     Back in the city, top-hatted, well brushed, richly sideburned, they strode by day on Wall Street, and evenings mixed with the money men thronging the ornate lobbies of the white-marbled Fifth Avenue Hotel.  This country can do anything, said their glowing red tips of cigars.  The eyes of the world are upon you, said their slick boots.  Destiny, said their rubied fingers.  Year after year in a grabbing, sprawling nation, the people ate the dream, the dream ate the people.
     Diamonds and pearls, railroads jabbing through wilderness, champagne, shimmering dreams: sound familiar?  It should, especially for viewers of post #95.  It was 1857 and its aftermath all over again, only worse.  Stocks, having gone up up up, began going down down down.  To grasp the Panic of 1873, triggered by the failure of Jay Cooke’s Northern Pacific, one need only scan the headlines of the time:
FAILURES                                                                       SILKS  FIFTY  PER  CENT  OFFBARGAINS  BARGAINS  BARGAINS
followed by
BETTER  TIMES  AHEADDEFAULTS            ALMOST  OUT  OF  THE  WOODS
followed by
PANIC  PASTCALMTRUST  RETURNING  ALL  ALONG  THE  LINE
followed by
THOUSANDS  OUT  OF  WORKSTRIKESMASS  RALLY
followed by
            FRENCH  EMPRESS  CLOTHS  REDUCED            BLACK  VELVETS  FOR  A  SONG
The depression that followed lasted six years.
Run on the Fourth National Bank, 1873.
     Side note on railroads:  Even the much vaunted Union Pacific got into trouble.  After the first year or two, when passengers flocked from both sides of the Atlantic for the novel adventure of crossing the continent by rail, business fell off, since the line traversed an unpeopled wilderness that wouldn’t supply a reliable passenger and freight business for years.  But my favorite example of an unnecessary railroad is the Adirondack Company, which in 1864 began building a railroad north from Saratoga Springs into the Adirondack Mountains, whose presumed ores and minerals it hoped to tap.  Just where it was going wasn’t quite clear, but maybe Canada, so as to bind that nation commercially to the United States.  By 1865 it had one engine and six freight cars operating on twenty-five miles of track, nothing more being possible in the face of fearsome winters, rugged terrain, soaring expenses, and massive debt.  It was now obvious that the company was a huge overblown fantasy, a debt-ridden venture building a railroad from nowhere to nowhere.  But in those days dreams died hard.  New financial wizards were called in, the most pressing debts were paid, and construction resumed.  By 1871 the railroad had advanced sixty miles to the crude little village of North Creek, the last town of any consequence in the Upper Hudson Valley.  There, for lack of funds, construction stopped.  The fabled riches of the Adirondacks remained inviolate, and in 1873 the company collapsed again, this time for good, in the panic.  R.I.P. Adirondack.
     No need to chronicle all the ups and downs of Wall Street and the economy throughout the rest of the century.  Let’s fast-forward to the Panic of 1907, when an attempt to corner a stock on the New York Stock Exchange led to the failure of a brokerage house and a bank, causing depositors to make a run on other banks, which in turn caused the panic to spread. 
     At this point, with chaos impending, enter J.P. Morgan, the most prestigious banker of the day, a massive chunk of a man with piercing eyes, a nose rendered purple by a skin condition (he hated being photographed, menaced photographers with his cane if they tried), a fierce mustache, a thundering voice, and so overwhelming a presence that one man said a visit from Morgan left him feeling “as if a gale had blown through the house.”  Top-hatted, frock-coated, and ponderous, he was Wall Street incarnate, fitting perfectly our stereotypical image of the fat-cat banker, the tycoon.  As for power, he had plenty of it, controlling 70 percent of the steel industry, one fifth of all the corporations on the New York Stock Exchange, the three biggest U.S. insurance companies, and several banks.  If he liked big deals, he also liked big boats (he was an avid yachtsman) and, it is said, big women.
     Hearing of the panic while attending a church convention in Virginia, this phenomenon rushed back to New York by train to redeem the situation.  Immediately he began conferring with the other major bankers of the day, who joined with him in putting up huge sums to keep threatened banks solvent and stop the spread of panic.  Crisis after crisis followed, as one major institution after another hovered on the brink of failure, only to be rescued by Morgan and his cohorts.  To get his way, Morgan blustered and, if necessary, locked his fellow bankers in a room in his library until a deal had been reached.  You didn’t say no to J.P.  Values on the stock exchange fell by fifty percent, but an even greater panic was averted.
Could you have said no to this man?  One did so at one's peril.
Soerfm     Only old J.P. had the resources and prestige to pull off this desperate act of redemption.  At first he was hailed as a hero, but then his role was scrutinized by Congress, and doubts were raised about the wisdom (or lack of it) in having one man wield such power.  As a result, in 1913 Congress created the Federal Reserve System to regulate banks and maintain the stability of the financial system. 
     Earlier that same year Morgan died, marking the end of an era; on Wall Street flags were flown at half-mast.  He was smart to check out when he did, since in that same year the Sixteenth Amendment was passed, permitting Congress to enact a progressive income tax.  Some see the end of the Gilded Age as 1914, with the beginning of World War I, or 1900, with the coming of a new century.  Personally, I suggest 1913, marking the enactment of the income tax.  How Wall Street must have groaned!  A tax on, of all things, one's income!  Worse still, the more you earned, the more you paid. From now on, amassing millions wouldn’t be as much fun.  But it wasn’t just those pesky Democrats who did it; the Republicans went along with it, too.  (Back then Republicans did all kinds of progressive things, such as busting trusts and creating the National Park System.  Ah, those were the days!)
     J.P.’s name is preserved today in the Morgan Library and Museum on Madison Avenue at 36th Street, which holds his collection of books, manuscripts, prints, and ancient artifacts, and in my very own beloved bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, whose local branch still generously dispenses quantities of candy even while that noble institution is under fierce siege by the meddling U.S. government, which just can’t leave well enough alone.  (More of this in the next post.)


The Morgan Library today.
Beyond My Ken
     A personal note:  Old J.P. was cozy with the Episcopal Church, and it was cozy with him.  It was a friend of his, Bishop William Lawrence of Massachusetts, who in 1901 expressed one of my favorite pronouncements of all time regarding religion:  “It is only to the man of morality that wealth comes….  Material prosperity is helping to make the national character sweeter, more joyous, more unselfish, more Christlike.”  Now who could argue with that?  So long live wealth!
      Another personal note:  The Panic of 1907 affected my family.  My maternal grandfather, a judge in Indiana, suffered losses to such an extent that he sent his spunky elder daughter, my mother, then 18, out to teach school in a one-room rural schoolhouse.  This she did for two years, boarding with a nearby farm family and keeping barely ahead of the brighter older boys in math.  It was a challenge, but she met it successfully; when she went on to college, she was more mature, more self-confident, more committed.  I can’t credit old J.P. for this, only the panic that he stemmed.
     One final personal note:  You’ll notice how easily I slip into calling Morgan “J.P.” or “old J.P.”  Just as, in other posts, I have called Taylor Mead “Taylor,” and Allen Ginsberg “Allen.”  But I would never refer to Julian Beck or Judith Malina of the Living Theatre as “Julian” or “Judith,” or to Brooke Astor as “Brooke” (posts #93 and #94).  What gives here?  It’s personal but hard to explain.  I guess I look on Morgan as a crusty old granddad whom, in spite of his faults, you can’t help liking.  And Taylor Mead and Allen Ginsberg are contemporaries of mine whom I first heard of before they were widely known.  But between myself and Beck and Malina I keep a certain distance; I respect them but don’t want to get too close.  As for Brooke Astor, who cherished hugs from a janitor, she puts one off a little with her furs and jewelry, even though I’d have loved to dance with her.  That’s as much of an explanation as I can muster at this time.
     I’ll end this post here, in the first decade of the twentieth century.  The next post will bring us up to the present, and the question of whether or not we need, and should put up with, Wall Street.  My opinion is of no more or less importance than anyone’s, but some interesting issues can be raised.

     Coming soon:  The last, and climactic, post on Wall Street, glancing at the fabled Crash of 1929 and its recent imitation in 2008, plus the current woes of J.P. Morgan Chase, the old boy's namesake and my dear bank of today.  Plus a brief appearance by Abbie Hoffman at the Stock Exchange and a note on covetous New Jersey, always trying to steal a slice of New York's thunder.  After that: My Suicides.

     ©  2013  Clifford Browder

95. Wall Street, Its Past and Present Sins, and Do We Need It? Part 1

     Wall Street is many things: a street, a financial community far exceeding that place, and a symbol of high finance.  Depending on your viewpoint, it can be described as a bastion of capitalism, a maze of complexities, a sink of corruption, or a nest of greed.  These posts will examine all these aspects.  This first one will have a look at Wall Street's origins and then get the feel of a boom and a bust.
     Before there was a street, there was a wall.  The wall, a twelve-foot-high stockade, marked the northern limit of the old Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, with one gate in it for the street that became Broadway.  The wall was a defense against the native peoples whom the Dutch had come to trade with and on occasion to cheat and kill.  New Amsterdam became New York with the arrival of the English in 1664, and in 1685 surveyors laid out Wall Street along the lines of the original wall.  Even in these early days merchants and traders were meeting there in the open to buy and sell stocks and bonds, and in 1711 the Common Council made Wall Street the city’s first official market for the buying and selling of slaves. 

A map of New Amsterdam in 1660, showing the wall.
     By the late eighteenth century, traders were gathering under a buttonwood tree at the foot of Wall Street to buy and sell securities.  In 1792 twenty-four of them got together to sign the Buttonwood Agreement, whereby the signatories agreed to charge each other a standard commission rate; others would be charged a higher rate.  This was the origin of the New York Stock Exchange, which to this day is a private entity with its own rules and regulations.  From the very first, it was a monopoly.
     Doing business outdoors had its inconveniences, since snow and rain might dampen the spirit of traders, so in 1794 the Tontine Coffee House, a four-story brick building, was built at the northwest corner of Wall and Water Streets to function as a merchants’ exchange for brokers, merchants, insurers, and others.  In those days before the telephone and telegraph, a merchant went “on ’change” daily to see others on business, and to make himself available to those who might wish to see him.  At the Tontine, while some drank coffee, others traded securities, auctioned goods, read or discussed the latest news, and argued politics vehemently.  It was also used for banquets and balls, and on occasion witnessed slave trading and gambling, and fistfights sparked by political differences.  One of the busiest sites in the city.


The Tontine Coffee House (on the left, with a flag) in 1797.  The smaller structure with dormer 
windows across the street is the Merchants' Coffee House, where brokers met before.  At the 
end of Wall Street the masts of anchored ships are visible.
the_adverse_possessors
The fire of 1835, showing the original Merchants' Exchange in flames.     But in time the trading of stocks required more space, so in 1817 traders formally organized the New York Stock & Exchange Board and rented rooms at 40 Wall Street.  The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 brought boom times to New York, a major port already and now the only one on the East Coast with access by inland waterways to the Great Lakes and the goods of the Midwest.  Wall Street was still partly residential, but residents were soon fleeing its noise and bustle for calmer vistas farther uptown.  A disastrous fire in 1835, and another in 1845, devastated the business district, but by the very next day workers were clearing away the smoking debris and hot rubble to build anew.
     Midcentury Wall Street was still a simple and rather narrow cobblestoned street frequented by dogs and grunting pigs in the early morning, when it had a small-town air.  Beginning at the west on Broadway, where the Gothic grace of Trinity Church loomed piously, it ran east for less than half a mile to South Street and the anchored sailing vessels of the East River docks. 
     To Wall Street, now the financial capital of the nation, money flowed from small country banks where interest rates were low, to big city banks where interest rates were high.  It flowed from grain exporters, and importers of woolens and wine, into the coffers of insurance companies.  It flowed from raspy-voiced auctioneers and canny investors in real estate, from husbands of heiresses, successful hatters, cotton speculators, and shipowners made mysteriously rich by the traffic between Africa and Cuba, into the scented palms of brokers and the big-knuckled hands of bankers.  In good times the money sloshed around; in bad times, like the years following the Panic of 1837, it shrank to a trickle.  But once a panic ended – and they always, in time, did end – the money spigot spat, dribbled, then gushed and sloshed again.  All through the century boom followed bust followed boom, each bust wiping out the fortunes of many, and each boom hatching a new crop of the affluent.
     Money also shone on Wall Street.  It shone in newly minted specie and in fobs and studs of gold, emblems of the wearers’ success.  It shone in the blue granite dome of the Merchants’ Exchange, with its portico of massive Grecian pillars, and in the classic fronts of banks, their wide steps mounting to tall doors flanked by fluted columns.


The new Merchants' Exchange in 1852.  It was built after the loss of the old one in the 1835 fire.   With four floors and a second colonnade added in 1907-1910, it still stands today, housing
condo apartments.
     Money sang on Wall Street.  It sang in the tinkle of coins over counters, and in the crackle of crisp new bank notes, and the rustle of limp worn old ones.  It sang in the clatter on cobblestones of high-wheeled gigs, as gentlemen bankers drove to their banks behind a fast-paced trotter.  It sang too in the chime of fine crystal in their Greek Revival or brownstone residences, in the clank of pewter mugs in taverns where their sons got drunk, and in jingly harnesses when their wives, sporting brooches in their bosoms, parasols, and a rainbow of ribbons, sallied forth to meetings of the Association for the Relief of Aged Indigent Females. 
     But mostly, on Wall Street money talked.  It hummed in the Exchange’s rotunda, where at midday a thousand voices sold flour, bought steamboats, set money rates, and quoted prices for potash and iron.  It jabbered at the Custom House, a marble parthenon whose confines better suited the rites of Athena than Mammon, as ships’ masters presented their manifests to cramped and squinting clerks.  Money shrieked in the gibberish of brokers trading stocks on the floor of the Stock Exchange, or outside in the curbstone market where newcomers and has-beens excluded from the indoor exchange – the green and rotten apples of the Street – bid hoarsely in the open air, their hats bobbing like a dance of chimneypots.  It murmured in the thoughts of gray-faced clerks on stools whose scratching quills ciphered figures into calfskin ledgers in basement countinghouses, each one dreaming of a partnership, and chattered in the musings of boys shoveling coal out of bins in dark hallways to be dumped into cast-iron stoves, each one dreaming of a clerkship.  And it whispered in back offices behind closed doors, where cliques formed and schemed.

The New York Stock Exchange in the 1850s.  Stocks were traded one at a time.
     From South Street on the east, where ships’ prows lunged at third-floor windows, to Broadway on the west, where each afternoon the spire of Trinity cast a Christian shadow down the Street, always, loud or soft, harsh or sweet, it spoke.
     It spoke even louder and sweeter when, in 1848, gold was discovered in California.  Gold!  The very thought of it raced the blood and sent hordes of young Argonauts armed with picks, axes, shovels, and a surfeit of hope westward via vessels bound for Panama or San Francisco, and brought other ships eastward bearing gold dust and nuggets – stuff that you could actually touch.  Small wonder that a new boom began.  Yes, there had been some kind of panic back in 1837 – did anyone remember it? -- but these were wild new times, fierce and giddy; something like that couldn’t happen again, not soon.
     By 1857, just twenty years after that unfortunate incident, bankers were weighing the gold dust that arrived by ship from California in the amount of fifty millions a year, and were founding a new bank a month to issue notes of the best rag paper, engraved with svelte lettering and bosomy nymphs hugging a portrait of Washington throned atop mountains of gold.  Railroad men were jabbing track through wilderness, and sending silk-hatted agents with diamond stickpins and silver tongues to Paris and London and Vienna to tout their stocks and bonds.  Speculators were snatching profits out of town lots, guano, gold mines, and fancy poultry; evenings they received with their wives in parlors lit by crystal chandeliers, and dined in black walnut dining rooms on French delicacies whose names they mangled.  From Europe travelers returned with thousand-dollar cashmere shawls, blue satin dresses trimmed with pink lace, carved antique mantelpieces, bonbon boxes, a bronze Puss-in-Boots.  These moneyed legions were the pith and marrow of the nation, had much, wanted more: more ships, banks, land, more Gothic villas and European tours, more railroads and schemes of railroads, plush, chintz, gilt – and most of it on credit.
     “Immoral,” said Mr. Greeley of the Tribune, who was staunchly moral, a foe of ignorance and vice.  “Imprudent,” said Mr. Bennett of the Herald, a mocker of all things secular and sacred, who poked at the edifice of trust, picked, pried.  “Rotten,” he announced, but he had said this many times.
     All through August – even as fashionables left town for Saratoga or Newport or the Catskills -- banks made loans, bonded messengers with bags of specie scurried hither and yon, and brokers traded stocks indoors and out, and even in hotel rooms in the evening, swarming like ants in jam.  Suddenly, headlines shrieked:
OHIO LIFE AND TRUST COMPANY FAILS
     At this collapse of a respected firm, brokers gasped.  Ohio Life had invested generously in Western land and railroads; its failure reached far – who was safe?  Immediately stocks, having gone up up up, began going down down down.  Banks yanked in their loans.  Merchants and money men hurried back from Saratoga or Newport or the Catskills.  Behind closed doors of board rooms and countinghouses, there arose a whispered flurry of due notices, threats, contracts, pleas.  Two presidents of railroads resigned “for personal reasons.”  “Calm!” urged the Tribune and the Times.  “Rotten,” repeated Mr. Bennett.
     In September, stocks kept on going down down down.  Pinched for cash, brokers and merchants failed, dragging down those they owed money to.  Foundry fires sputtered, went out; small railroads cracked, then big ones.  Screamed the Herald:
                                        FINANCIAL REVULSION                                        CRISIS IN BOSTON                                        SUSPENSION IN PHILADELPHIA                                        PRESSURE                                        FAILURES
                                        PANIC
                                     A teetery nation looked to the New York banks, those citadels of trust.  “We will not suspend,” said the banks.  “Rotten,” insisted Mr. Bennett.
     In October a murmur arose on the street, in offices: rumors, warnings, doubts.  One small bank suspended, then another.  On the morning of the 13th  all over the city barbers and florists and tobacconists scooped up the cash in the till, bagged it, and leaped aboard a Wall Street-bound omnibus.  Among the passengers, all toting sacks of suspect paper money, the murmur swelled to a buzz.
            “The Marine Bank has suspended!” said one.            “No, it’s the American Exchange Bank!”            “Both!  And the Irving and the Ocean, too.”            “Bank notes will be worthless!”            “Only gold is safe!”            “Get your money out while you can!”
     When they all jumped out at Wall Street, in the churning throngs the buzz crescendoed to a din.  The Merchants’ Exchange Bank had suspended … the Mechanics’ Bank … the Bank of New York … ! 
     “I got mine!” yelled a grinning depositor, brandishing a bag of chinking coins.  “Press in, boys, press in!”
     With their sacks of rag paper in hand, they wedged and bumped their way through the crowds up the steep steps of banks, determined to learn what truth of gold or hard fact of silver lay stashed behind those tall doors flanked by Grecian columns.  Against their incoming crunch and their fists, curses, and yells, the thick doors of banks slammed shut.  


The run on the Seamen's Savings Bank, 1857.
     Bank after bank had closed.  Up and down the Street merchants and money men surged, rubbing frenzied elbows with grocers and stationers and casket makers lugging bags of paper money or brandishing checks they couldn’t cash, all mouthing sad and sour jokes about lost deposits, collapsed stocks, and fortunes gone to blue blazes.
     Would his brewery survive? a brewer wondered.  He doubted it.  What would he tell his wife, another child soon due?
     “What will I do?” a pharmacist asked, his bank suspended, his meager savings lost.
     “Burst!” exclaimed a shipbuilder, top hat askew, tugged and squeezed by the crowd.  With bills for lumber, canvas, and rope falling due, plus the wages of his men at the shipyard, he was desperate for cash.  Through no fault of his own, his dream and deed of decades – the shaping of that tight, sleek wonder, a ship – was at risk.  Had he bet on America and lost?  He laughed, wept.  “Burst!” he exclaimed.  “We have burst!”
     Trinity’s chimes stroked three.
     The Great Western Blizzard had swept away fortunes galore.  For weeks and months to come, brokers languished, pickpockets idled.  Jobbers’ showrooms were full of goods, empty of customers.  “In God’s name, what does it mean?” the distraught wife demanded of her husband, who stared, stunned, as their damask ottomans, whatnots, rugs, and pianoforte were carted off to auction. Clipper ships dozed in the harbor, bank note engravers had a lean season, revivalists revived.  Urged the Journal of Commerce:
                                    Steal away from Wall Street                                    And every worldly care,                                    Spend an hour at midday                                    In humble, hopeful prayer.
 In the twinkling of an eye, boom had turned to bust.

     Source note:  Much of this post is adapted from my unpublished historical novel Metropolis, a long and sprawling work that follows numerous characters, both historical and fictional, through several decades of the nineteenth century.  Its inspiration came from background research for my two published biographies.  The account of the Panic of 1857 is based on newspaper accounts of the time.
     Another note on hair:  In my last post I confessed that, having seen women with pink, orange, and blue hair here in the West Village, I had yet to see purple and orange.  A friend in Atlanta assures me that there’s plenty of both down there, and a friend teaching at Smith College in Massachusetts says the same. 

     Coming soon:  Two more posts on Wall Street, the last one looking at today's financial mess.  Then, My Suicides.
    
     ©  2013  Clifford Browder

94. The Living Theatre, and Why I Kept My Clothes on

     This post is about the Living Theatre.  It isn’t a history of the Living, just an account of my impressions of it, usually in its early years and certainly not recently, though it still exists. 
     I first became aware of the Living Theatre in 1959 when I attended their production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection, a play about a day in the life of a group of drug addicts.  The portrayal of addiction was, to put it mildly, frank, though the addicts could come off as likable, even though they at times  screamed at the audience.  It is said that the actors playing junkies came down into the audience to ask for money for a fix; I don’t recall this, but it would have made it clear from the outset that the Living Theatre wasn't going to leave the audience alone.
     I next encountered them in 1963 when I saw ex-Marine Kenneth Brown’s The Brig, a brutally realistic play about a Marine prison where the guards routinely beat up and terrorized the inmates.  When the audience went to their seats, they became gradually aware that the actors were already performing on the curtainless stage, portraying the guards talking softly to one another before dealing with the inmates.  When the play actually began, it was a seamless transition, the most natural continuation of what had already quietly unfolded.  I was with a friend and his boss.  The boss, an ex-Marine, didn’t deny that brigs exist, but insisted that this was a ludicrous exaggeration.  He didn’t convince me; the play’s gripping realism was too powerful.  Said critic Robert Brustein, “I don’t remember a more unpleasant evening in the theatre.  But it made a point.”  The Living was always out to make a point.



     Both these plays got critical attention, usually negative, and won Obies (Off-Broadway Theater Awards).  By now I and a lot of people were wondering what the Living Theatre was all about and who were the people behind it.  It was founded in 1947 by Judith Malina and her husband Julian Beck, an Abstract Expressionist painter who switched his talent to theater upon meeting Malina, a Jewish immigrant from Germany.  Influenced above all by the French director and theorist Antonin Artaud, they embraced an extreme realism meant to shock the audience out of complacency.  With The Connection and The Brig, they succeeded.  Since they wanted no truck with commercial Broadway, their productions found a natural home in Off and then Off Off Broadway.  Politically they were as far to the Left as they could get, and had every intention of moving – some might say shoving – the audience in that direction, too, though their needs and demands were such that no existing political party could satisfy them.  For Beck and Malina the footlights, that barrier between stage and spectators, did not, must not, exist.  They wanted to mix with the audience, excite them, radicalize them, get them into the streets.


     In October 1963 their antiauthoritarian stance took on a new dimension when the IRS padlocked their 14th Street theater for failing to pay $28,435 in back taxes.  Defiant, Beck and Malina continued to stage performances inside the theater for small audiences who had to climb over rooftops and enter the theater through a fire door.  Audience and cast were then arrested and charged with impeding a federal official in the performance of his duties; in the end, only Beck and Malina faced trial.  In May 1964 they defended themselves vociferously in a much-publicized trial where they presented themselves as beleaguered champions of beauty and art resisting oppression by the IRS, anonymous agents of the military-industrial complex.  By not paying the taxes, Beck insisted, they had been able to pay their actors; it was a case of art vs. money. 
     Though Beck and Malina succeeded in turning the trial into theater with a far wider audience than their productions had reached, the jury found them guilty, imposing a fine of $2500, and the judge sentenced Beck to 60 days and Malina to 30 days in jail for contempt of court.  As a result, the Living Theatre soon left these cursed shores for a four-year self-imposed exile in the fairer climes of Europe, whose Old World charm was untainted by interventions of the IRS.  But whatever the pair lacked in practicality, they had more than made up for in imagination and spunk.
     The Living Theatre returned to New York in 1968 with a host of new productions that they had ripened in Europe.  “The Living Theatre is back,” one observer observed; “God bless them and God help them.”  Reports of near riots in the audience in Avignon, and the arrest of Beck, Malina, and others for indecent exposure after a performance in New Haven, heightened the anticipation, guaranteeing attendance by avant-garde theater buffs, rebels with or without a cause, exhibitionists, voyeurs, hardy adventurers, and those anxious to “keep up” like myself.

A typical Living Theatre production of the 1960s: a tangle of actors, gestures, and grimaces, with Julian Beck in the center.  The audience was not to be soothed.
     In Europe they had embraced collective creation, whereby the whole troupe participated in developing new productions.  Beck proclaimed it “an example of Anarcho-Communist Autogestive Process” (a typical Beck pronouncement) and, more simply, “a secret weapon of the people.”  This made for cumbersome and lengthy rehearsals, since each detail of a production required consensus agreement, and there was a fair dose of amateurism as well, because some of the actors had no training.  It soon became apparent as well that the Living had tuned from grim realism toward a more expansive and imaginative realm, toward a kind of wild poetry.

     The Living’s new productions were mounted in October 1968 not in Manhattan but at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, requiring their Manhattan fans and critics to undertake a long trek into that borough’s dark and distant hinterland.  The first production, guarded at its opening by a strong police presence, was Frankenstein, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s famous novel, or rather a creation somewhat based on that work.  The production involved a huge scaffolding mounted on the stage, a kind of outsized jungle gym where the actors clambered about, finally assuming poses, some of them dangling in space, that created the back-lit silhouette of the towering monster: a remarkable and memorable stage effect.  Whatever the ideological intent may have been – I never did figure it out – there was nothing like it on, or Off, or Off Off Broadway.






     The second production, Antigone, based on the play by Sophocles as adapted by Bertold Brecht and then translated from German by Malina, pitted Antigone, played by Malina, against the tyrant Creon, played by a lean and craggy Beck, his scalp now bald, but with a flow of long, graying locks below the hairline.  The intention was to encourage the audience to challenge authority just as Antigone, alone and without allies, had done: a theme that found resonance in the turbulent 1960s.  As for the production, I remember a tangle of actors in modern dress (or undress, though not nude) who at moments achieved striking visual stage effects.
     The climax of their season in New York was Paradise Now, performances of which at the Avignon Festival in France earlier that year had provoked such a turbulent audience response, both pro and con, that the mayor issued a decree forbidding any further performances.  The Living had then withdrawn from the festival and, ever ready to make theater of life, left the city in a formal procession, applauded by supporters who lamented the departure of le Living.  And it was following a performance of this play in New Haven that Beck, Malina, and others, surging out into the street, had been arrested for indecent exposure.  I got  my partner Bob to go with me, even though his taste in theater ran elsewhere.
     Paradise Now was meant to encourage a nonviolent anarchist revolution, a transformation that would be both external and internal for actors and audience alike, leading toward the realization of an alternative society.  To me and many others it appeared unstructured, though the actors were performing a series of actions intended to enlist the audience in revolution.  “Act!  Speak!” cried the actors.  “Do whatever you want!”  Then they circulated among the audience shouting a list of social taboos: “I’m not allowed to travel without a passport!”  “I don’t know how to stop wars!”  “I’m not allowed to smoke marijuana!”  “I’m not allowed to take off my clothes!”  Back on the stage and wearing only bikinis and sagging G-strings, they contorted themselves so as to spell the word “PARADISE.”  After this the performance – if that is the word – slid into chaos, with a few, but only a few, spectators stripping down to their underwear or less: mostly exhibitionists delighted to “do their thing.”  To my eye, no transformation occurred, no nonviolent revolution, only a mounting hubbub of confusion.  There was tedium in this four-hour-long happening, and bored spectators were beginning to peel away.  Bob left before I did, but I soon followed.  My last impression was a guy in his undershorts kissing a fully clothed girl who seemed quite taken with the adventure; far from liberating, it struck me as just plain sleazy.  Paradise Now: totems of nudity and gestures.

     The worst thing that permissiveness can do is bore, and that, alas, was my final take on Paradise Now: it was boring.  Other performances may have come off differently; I can only comment on the one I saw.  Yes, boring.  And nobody even got arrested. 
     But arrests were not lacking as the group toured the country.  Malina told later how, when they arrived in a city, the police would come and tell them they didn’t care what they did in the theater, they could do sexual things, smoke pot, burn money, take their clothes off; but they mustn’t go out and do it in the street.  Which was, of course, what they intended to do and did; arrests followed, and with them more publicity that surely brought more people flocking.
Their home away from home.  Or maybe just
a good imitation of it.
     After their American tour the Living Theatre returned to Europe, where Beck felt they enjoyed a greater freedom.  I lost track of them after that, though they developed new works and performed them widely abroad, often in the street or in schools, slums, and prisons.  In 1971 they were jailed for two months in Brazil for alleged possession of marijuana and then deported; their exposure of injustice and corruption in the country was surely not irrelevant.  Julian Beck died in 1985, but the group returned here and under Malina’s direction performed new plays at various locations in the city.  Malina is still active, and the group is still performing in New York.  A few years ago my partner Bob saw one of their plays and wished he hadn’t.  It was about a woman liberating herself, and Malina, playing the lead, at one point – inevitably – took her clothes off: a big mistake, in Bob’s opinion, since she was plump and jowly.  Yesterday’s tease is today’s fizzle.
     Still, the Living has left its mark.  Its mission statement, as expressed by Julian Beck, includes these points:
·      To call into question who we are to each other in the social environment of the theater.·      To set ourselves in motion like a vortex that pulls the spectator into action.·      To undo the knots that lead to misery.·      To fire the body’s secret engines.·      To insist that what happens in the jails matters.·      To cry “Not in my name!” at the hour of execution.·      To move from the theater to the street and from the street to the theater.
Beck was rarely so lucid.  He has left us a lot to think about.

     Nudity in the theater:  In the 1960s and 1970s there was lots of it.  Maybe Allen Ginsberg, not yet the later bearded sage of Poesie, led the way, since he got into the habit of exhibiting the contours of his unlovely flesh to others, while braying at supposed prudes, “Are you ashamed of your own body?”  To which I longed to answer, “No, Allen, only of yours,” but never got the chance.
     Proponents of the new nudity insisted that there had always been nudity on the theater, to which the theatrical Old Guard replied, “Yes, but it was interestingnudity.”  And they had a point, since much of the current nudity was boring.  An exception was the musical Hair, which hit Broadway in 1968, that year of international revolt.  At the end of the first act those actors who felt so inclined took their clothes off, but the lighting was such that the audience could just barely make them out, which personally I thought much more effective.  But in many ways the show was akin to the Living’s productions: there was little structure or plot; freedom and revolt were endorsed; and at the opening the actors came out into the audience, talked casually to one another, and walked across the tops of the seats, a stunt I had never seen before.  I had an aisle seat, and when one long-haired young performer lay back across my lap for a moment, I just smiled and said, “Well, hello there!”  Unlike Paradise Now, Hair was fun.

     The fall of that same eventful year saw the opening of another unstructured piece that sought to involve the audience: Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69, a production loosely – very loosely – based on Euripides’ Bacchae.  When I saw it six actors, three men and three women, performed naked, demonstrating the perils of nudity in the theater.  With the best will in the world, I couldn’t help but notice that one woman was full-breasted and another flat-chested.  And when the actors were lying prone on the stage, one of the men reached under to adjust his genitals, provoking howls of laughter from the audience.  This is what I remember, little else.  Yes, performers and audience were all mixed up together, but the real point of it escaped me. 
     Still, there’s no denying that Dionysus in 69 had a cult following and is said to have launched the vogue of “happenings,” unstructured events where performers and audience mixed freely, and chance developments were common.  Happenings were especially popular – for a while – in New York City, and were related to the hippie culture of the day.  All of which shows the matrix out of which the Living Theatre developed: a kind of joyous anarchy and lust for freedom mixed with rage at all that is wrong in society.  Yes, it was wild – often too wild – and immature, but hey, we could use a little of that joy and rage today.
     A note on hair:  Speaking of hair, in the West Village recently I have seen women with pink hair, orange hair, and blue hair.  Bold pink, flaming orange, and blatant blue, as opposed to the hint of blue that goes so well with gray and white hair.  I don't judge, I simply note.  I have yet to see green or purple hair, but look forward to the experience with intense anticipation.
     Coming soon:  Three posts on Wall Street, its past and present sins, and do we need it?  Bubbles, booms, and busts; J.P.  Morgan and his purple nose; the Depression in my home town; Abbie Hoffman and the New York Stock Exchange; how big banks become bigger; and more.  In short, everything that the Living Theatre hated, loathed, and detested.
     ©  2013  Clifford Browder
    

93. Brooke Astor, Aristocrat of the People

She loved her jewelry.  But that honey-colored hair,
is it dyed?  She said no; her friends thought otherwise.

      Philanthropist Brooke Astor burst into the news in 2006 when one of her grandsons filed a lawsuit accusing his father, her only son, of neglecting her care and exploiting her to enrich himself and his wife.  Brooke Astor, then 104, was suffering from dementia and anemia and other ailments, making her vulnerable to abuse.  Anthony D. Marshall, the son, denied the accusations, and the dispute stretched over many months, a bitter closing chapter in the long career of a woman who had come to be known as an aristocrat of the people and the unofficial first lady of the city of New York. 









     Brooke Astor died of pneumonia at her weekend estate in August 2007.  Her funeral at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue at 53rd Street was attended by 900 people, including luminaries from the worlds of finance, the arts, and philanthropy, and Mayors Bloomberg, Koch, and Dinkins.  Her son was present and in a choked voice read a note that his mother had written to be delivered at her funeral:  “When I go from here, I want to leave behind me a world richer for the experience of me.  I want the creatures and the animals and the birds to be a little less afraid of human beings.  Death is nothing and life is everything.  I want to leave behind me a deeper sense of God.”  He then broke down in tears.
     Sadly, Anthony D. Marshall later faced criminal charges of mishandling her estate.  In 2009 he was convicted of grand larceny, and his attorney of forgery; both were sent to prison. 
     Prior to this I had known of Brooke Astor only vaguely.  So who was she and how did she come to be known as an aristocrat of the people and the city’s first lady?
     Brooke Russell was born at Portsmouth, N.H., in 1902, her father a major general in the Marine Corps, and later the Corps’ sixteenth commandant.  She remembered her childhood as secure and happy, albeit solitary, since she had no siblings.  Much of it was spent abroad, because her father’s career took him to distant lands.  At age 16 she met John Dryden Kuser, a New Jersey politician with a vast fortune that dazzled Brooke’s mother more, it would seem, than it dazzled her.  When he proposed, she reluctantly accepted, thus embarking on a tumultuous marriage that she later termed the worst years of her life, owing to her husband’s physical abuse, alcoholism, and adultery.  They were divorced in 1930.
     In 1932 she married her second husband, financier Charles Henry Marshall, the love of her life.  Twenty years of happiness followed, with life in a penthouse full of servants, dinners and parties, and a castle in Italy.  When her husband’s firm suffered financial reverses in the 1940s, they undertook to live more modestly, and she went to work as a features editor at House & Garden magazine.  In 1952 Marshall was suddenly stricken with a heart attack.  She found him lying on the floor, summoned a doctor, cradled his head in her lap; by the time the doctor came, Charles Marshall was dead.
     So far, viewers may wonder what all this is about, and rightly so, for Brooke Kuser/Marshall had yet to become herself.  That transformation began in 1953, when Vincent Astor, a grandson of the Mrs. Astor, and great-great grandson of old John Jacob, the founder of the Astor fortune, proposed.  Though hesitant, she accepted.  As her friend Louis Auchincloss, the novelist, remarked, “Of course she married Vincent for the money.  I wouldn’t respect her if she hadn’t.  Only a twisted person would have married him for love.” 
     She tried to make her new husband happy, for he was a very suspicious person who thought everyone wanted something from him, and was given to depression.  To alleviate the depression, she would sing to him or dance with her dogs, until she provoked a smile.  Still, she felt shut off, losing contact with her friends; in the end the couple were left alone.  She did, however, take an interest in his real estate and hotel empire and his philanthropies.  And when he died in 1959, she inherited some $60 million, and as much more for a foundation to alleviate human suffering.  “Pookie,” he had told her, “you are going to have a hell of a lot of fun with the foundation when I’m gone.”  She did, reinventing herself as Brooke Astor.
     “Money is like manure,” she said with a wink and a smile, quoting Dolly Levi in Thornton Wilder’s play The Matchmaker.  “It’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around.”  Since most of the Astor money had been made in New York City real estate, she decided to spread her millions around in the city in the form of grants from the Vincent Astor Foundation to museums and libraries, boys’ and girls’ clubs, homes for the elderly, and other programs and institutions.  As a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and Museum, the Rockefeller University, and other prestigious institutions, she spent much time in their board rooms, working with curators and other staff members, but from 1983 on she devoted herself almost exclusively to the New York Public Library, where she remained honorary chairwoman until her death.  Thanks to her, the Arnold Constable department store was converted into the Mid-Manhattan Library, and the Astor Court, a replica of a Chinese gentleman scholar’s garden courtyard of the Ming Dynasty, was created at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 
     Me and Brooke Astor:  No, I never met her, never even glimpsed her in action.  But I have often visited the Mid-Manhattan Library and the Astor Court, sublimely unaware of whose largesse had made them possible, so I am in her debt.  The great attraction of the Mid-Manhattan Library is that, unlike the main library across the street, it lets you check out books.  And I have sat there reading or taking notes, in the company of restless teen-agers, and an older scholar whose innumerable scribbled notes were spread out in little piles on the table in front of him, so that any minor disturbance – a sneeze or a slight gust of air – would have sent what may have been his life’s work fluttering to the floor.  Fortunately, I never sneezed.  As for the garden courtyard, it is one of my favorite spots at the Met, since it brings alive for me the life of a Chinese gentleman scholar of earlier times.  I have also glimpsed that life in venerable scroll paintings of landscapes showing a scholar in his little house in the pine-clad mountains, while his invited guests, coming for tea, make their way up a path through the woods.  Nature, tranquility, a little house, friends: the formula for an ideal (or illusory?) existence.
The Astor Court, inspired by Brooke Astor, who had spent part of her childhood in China.  
Constructed by Chinese craftsmen using traditional materials, tools, and techniques.
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
     But Brooke Astor had no intention of confining herself to board rooms and their denizens.  Considering it her duty to evaluate personally every organization seeking help from her foundation, she sallied forth in her chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz to visit churches and tenements and neighborhood programs throughout the city, to witness the ground-breaking of a playground in a Brooklyn slum, or the launching of a day care center in the impoverished South Bronx.  During these forays she was often treated to lunch on paper plates and plastic folding tables set up for the occasion, prompting her to exclaim over the “delicious sauces” – deli mustard and pickle relish. 
     On her rounds she gladly talked to anyone: a child at a computer, a library secretary or guard, a janitor at a branch library whom she thanked “for keeping this place so clean.”  No wonder that, at the institutions she visited, she made friends among the staff at all levels.  At the Metropolitan Museum of Art a burly black janitor once gave her a hearty hug when she stepped out of her limousine, and she returned the hug with gusto.  And her money often went to humdrum necessities that were never publicized, like air-conditioning or a staff lunch room, new windows for a nursing home on Riverside Drive, fire escapes for a residence for the homeless in the Bronx, a boiler for a youth center in Brooklyn, or small parks scattered around the city.
     During these trips around the city she wore white kid gloves, finely tailored suits or designer dresses, a hat in all weather, and a cashmere coat in cool weather; in her later years she carried an elegant cane.  “If I go up to Harlem or down to Sixth Street,” she explained, “and I’m not dressed up or I’m not wearing my jewelry, then the people feel I’m talking down to them.  People expect to see Mrs. Astor, not some dowdy old lady, and I don’t intend to disappoint them.” 
     But at night, even into her 90s, she returned to the world of society – high society – usually as an honored guest at some black-tie affair, sporting designer dresses and jewelry, and seated to the right of the host at dinner, while flirting freely with every gentleman in sight.  Her apartment on the 15thand 16th floors of 778 Park Avenue had 14 rooms and 6 terraces.  An invitation to one of her luncheons or dinners there meant you had arrived at the highest level of society.  At her formal dinner welcoming President Elect Ronald Reagan to the city, the guest of honor dropped to his knees to find a diamond earring she had dropped under the dining table, and in so doing bumped into Walter Wriston of Citibank and Felix Rohatyn, the financier credited with saving the city from bankruptcy in the 1970s, both on their hands and knees hunting the same elusive earring. 
Her bedroom, giving a hint of how she lived.
     And yet, unlike her husband’s grandmother, the Mrs. Astor of the era of the Four Hundred (see post #88), she had no desire to be an arbiter of Society, was of that world and yet apart from it.  She appreciated those who helped her help others, but had a wicked eye for high society as a whole.  “Unlike Queen Victoria,” she said, “we are amused – we are always amused.” 
     She was slight of build and, in her last years, frail and thin, but she kept fit by swimming a thousand strokes on weekends and almost daily in the summer, even in the chilly ocean waters around her house in Maine.  Her hair remained honey-colored, and on meeting a member of the British royal family she captivated him with the announcement, “I am ninety-five, sir, and never had a facelift.”  (Bravo for her!  But her friends cast doubt on the assertion.)  Even into her 90s she loved to dance.  “When that music starts,” she said, “it enters my blood like a fever.”  Which this blogger enthusiastically applauds, having in his later, less inhibited years experienced that same kind of fever.  And I’ve seen photos of her dancing; it was no prim waltz or foxtrot, it was wild!
     A widow for 48 years, she could have married again but chose not to, though she admitted to a fondness for flirting.  An acquaintance once said to her, “Mrs. Astor, you’re such a beautiful woman, you must have had many lovers.”  “When I can’t fall asleep at night,” she replied, “I sometimes start counting them, but I’m asleep long before I get to the end of the list.”  Perhaps this was said with a wink and a smile.  One wonders if her philanthropic endeavors and active social life left room for any such adventures. 
     As age and infirmity overtook her, she remained at her Park Avenue  apartment, a recluse toward the end, unable to recognize friends and family.  In the litigation following her grandson’s suit against her son, gruesome stories emerged of overflowing wastebaskets, sofas reeking of urine, her pet dogs locked in a pantry, and the grande dame of New York society in rags, stumbling about in the once palatial rooms of her apartment.  The saddest of endings to a splendid life.
     Brooke Astor was always glad that she had not lapsed into the idle life of pleasure that her fortune would have permitted.  When she terminated the Astor Foundation in 1997, it had given away close to $195 million, mostly within New York City.  Her donation to a cause signaled to the big foundations that it deserved support; much larger grants often followed.  She had long since chosen the epitaph for her gravestone: “I had a wonderful life.”
     Brooke Astor combined glamor, wealth, savvy, patrician grace, and a gently wicked sense of humor.  Like Taylor Mead, her polar opposite (see post #91), she took herself seriously but at the same time could have a laugh at her own expense.  I never knew her, but I wish heartily that our paths had crossed just once, so we could exchange a wink and a smile.  But why stop there?  I’d love to have rubbed shinbones with her, to have heard her designer dress rustling and her jewelry clinking as she danced.  Yes, dance!  Brooke Astor and I could have danced up a storm.


     Congressional perks:  Members of Congress enjoy numerous perks, as for instance           A private gym with a swimming pool and basketball court           Private elevators, and a subway to get them the vast distances from their    office to the Capitol           Free mailings           On-site medical care           Free parking at Washington airports           A generous travel allowance           Free dry-cleaning 
To my knowledge, none of these have been suspended during the shutdown.  Presumably they are essential services, vital to the health and well-being of the nation.
     Coming soon:  The Living Theatre (champions of freedom and nudity, and why I kept my clothes on).  In the offing: Quentin Crisp.
     ©  2013  Clifford Browder

92. Rediscovering New York: West 12th Street and Columbus Circle

     New York City is inexhaustible; I am constantly discovering or rediscovering things in it.  This post is about West 12thStreet and Columbus Circle, places I have visited innumerable times but that I have recently rediscovered.
West 12thStreet
     It’s only two blocks from 11thStreet, where I live, and I go there almost daily, so you’d think I knew it pretty well.  But there are aspects of it I never noticed until recently.  For instance, a hand-lettered sign, about 3 by 5 feet, posted conspicuously in front of 254 West 12th.  It says, in printed letters of diverse colors:
IF  WE  ALL  DO  ONE  RANDOM  ACT  OF  KINDNESS  DAILY  WE  JUST  MIGHT  SET  THE  WORLD  IN  THE  RIGHT  DIRECTION.    MARTIN  KORNFELD                                                                                              

     Who Martin Kornfeld is I don’t know, but presumably a young person, with all the glowing idealism of youth, who lives at this address.  I have passed his sign many times, but only this time did I linger long enough to absorb his message and write it down.  With that message who can argue?
     Just across the street and a few doors down is an old row house fronted by a stoop that I have passed many times but never been in.  Until last week, that is, when an alumni gathering from my high school in was held there, and I attended.  Our host, who welcomed us at the door, must own the whole building, but he managed to host some eighty of us on the parlor floor, where we stood around like penguins, chatting and gobbling the lavish feast he provided.  But this isn’t about alumni, it’s about the apartment, or what I could see of it, in spite of the thronging guests.  It was old, well furnished, spacious.  In back there was a balcony overlooking a ground-floor garden, but what most caught my eye was the ornate marble fireplace in the dining room, a reminder of the tasteful splendor that these old row houses, often drab and undistinguished on the outside, can harbor within.  I regret that I was unable to absorb more of the furnishings, well concealed by the crowd of guests. 
     Where West 12thStreet crosses Greenwich Avenue, but a short distance farther on, there looms the hulking monstrosity of what was once the National Maritime Union headquarters, and now is, or at least has been, the Edward and Theresa O’Toole Building of St. Vincent’s Hospital.  Barriers and scaffolding now surround it along both West 12thStreet and Seventh Avenue, raising my hopes of its utter demolition.  It should be obvious by now that I, who treasure both old buildings and Modernist monuments like Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building, am not too fond of this structure.  It needs its own space, shouldn’t be here in the West Village.  Here, I loathe, hate, detest it, long to see it disappear.
In all its glory, before the current renovations.
Beyond My Ken
     But first, a word about it.  The west side of Seventh Avenue between Greenwich Avenue and West 14th Street has always struck me as a jumble of clashing architectural styles, a blatant example of our American inability to plan harmonious wholes, our willingness to let things occur haphazardly, even if eyesores result.  (Lincoln Center and Rockefeller Center are of course brilliant exceptions.)  Here, in the triangle formed by West 12thStreet, Greenwich Avenue, and Seventh Avenue, there was once the looming hulk of an old Loew’s movie palace fronted by a huge marquee.  Next to the Loew’s was I don’t recall what, and next to that a Gothic-style Methodist church, and next to that a soaring modern apartment building, and next to that a commercial building hosting various shops and stores. A more displeasing juxtaposition of edifices I can barely imagine. 
     The movie palace is long since gone, as are the buildings next to it.  In place of those buildings, in the early 1960s, rose the National Maritime Union building.  Since the union was then doing well, it launched an aggressive building program, the first project being its headquarters, the Joseph Curran Building, on Seventh Avenue between West 12thand 13th Streets.  They hired New Orleans-based architect Albert C. Ledner to design some unique buildings for them, and unique is what he gave them.  Completed in 1964, the Curran Building consisted of two ground-floor glass block cylinders topped by four floors whose white walls were rendered as two half-circle scalloped overhangs suggesting portholes or waves, though to many ground-level viewers staring up they looked like gears, or rows of menacing teeth.            The ground floor housed the hiring halls, while on the floors above were offices and committee rooms, and on the roof, high above the hurly-burly of the avenue and almost invisible from the street, the executive offices.  The structure clashed violently with all the buildings around it, which is exactly what the architect intended.  The interior, which I never saw, was said to be impressive, but my concern was the exterior, which I took to be a sort of post-Modernist concoction, garish, tasteless, brash.  The structure was hailed by some as a clean break with the stale conformity of Modernism, a daring leap into something new.  Some leap!  From the street, to my untutored eye it looks like an unwieldy ocean liner lumbering ahead on a misguided cruise.
     Perhaps its construction was an act of hubris.  In any event, with the decline of the Port of New York the union’s fortunes waned, and in 1973 it was obliged to sell the building to St. Vincent’s Hospital, which was expanding from its base on the other side of Seventh Avenue.  Not that the hospital tore the building down; no such luck.  Instead, they renamed it the Edward and Theresa O’Toole Building and incorporated it, incongruous as it was, into their complex of buildings, moving their faculty practice offices and out-patient clinics into it.  So the eyesore – icon to some – remained.
     Is the site jinxed?  St. Vincent’s seemed to be expanding vigorously, but financial problems developed and in 2005 it shocked the West Village by filing for bankruptcy, then emerged from bankruptcy only to file for bankruptcy again in 2010 and shut down all its services.  In 2011 it sold its property to Rudin Management Company, a real estate developer that got approval from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to gut the O’Toole Building so as to create a full-service emergency care center on the site.  The reconstruction is currently underway, while Rudin is demolishing the other St. Vincent’s buildings to make room for – alas! -- luxury condos.
     I share the outrage of Villagers at the loss of St. Vincent’s Hospital, the only full-service hospital in the area, but I thought that, by way of compensation, the O’Toole Building might vanish from this earth.  My rediscovery in this case is simply an updating on the status of the building.  Alas, only the interior will be demolished; the exterior, in all it garish glory, will be preserved, and the unwieldy ocean liner will continue to lumber on.  Those who see the building as an icon of post-Modernism can cheer; I do not.
Columbus Circle
     Going to my dentist’s office on Central Park South, I emerge from the subway at 59thStreet and Broadway to negotiate several lanes of onrushing traffic.  Some hardy souls jaywalk here, but I do not, denying myself this time-honored privilege of New Yorkers because the Circle is a roaring surge of vehicles swirling about, entering and leaving the Circle when you least expect it.  I do not plan to exit this world a traffic casualty in the midst of this savage maelstrom of traffic.
Columbus Circle, seen from the west.  Columbus towers atop his column in the center.
To the left, in front of the Park, is the Maine monument.
Choster
     This wild scene is surveyed from on high by the marble statue of Christopher Columbus that gives the Circle its name, perched atop a granite column in the center of the Circle.  The statue was erected in 1892 as part of the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of that doughty mariner’s “discovery” of the Americas, a landfall celebrated by everyone except the “discovered” native peoples, whose woes date from that event.  I don’t suppose I’ve ever seen anyone staring up at that statue; even the pedestrians here are in too great a hurry, too preoccupied with getting to the dentist or some other worthy destination.
     Following my last visit to my dentist I decided to catch a bus up Broadway to the Fairway supermarket at 74th Street to buy extra virgin olive oil at a bargain price, and so embarked upon a short journey of rediscovery.  What I above all rediscovered – having passed it countless times before without paying it much attention – was a massive monument at the southwest corner of Central Park, facing Columbus Circle.  There are always surging crowds here, but no one seems interested in the monument, a solid block of limestone with a gaggle of statues at its base and, crowning the top, another gaggle, gilded, of the same. 
The Maine monument, rarely noticed by passersby, except as a place to sit and catch your breath.
Becksguy
     On this occasion I took a moment to survey the monument and try to decipher what it was all about.  At its base is a diaper-clad youth, quite charming, with arms outstretched, atop what looks like the prow of a ship, with three other figures behind him, one of them serenely erect, and still others on the right and left sides of the monument.  Pegging the whole shebang as a Beaux Arts endeavor, I decided the diaper boy, on whom pigeons sometimes perch, was probably a Cupid, though there was no bow in sight, and the other figures assorted pagan gods.  As for the gilded figures at the top, they seemed to be a chariot with horses, and so, being on a classical kick, I opted for Apollo driving the chariot of the sun.  But this was all just a guess; I hadn’t a clue as to what the work really signified.
     And so, when I got home, I consulted that modern repository of knowledge, the Internet, and found what I needed to know.  Yes, it’s a Beaux Arts monument installed in 1913, but it has little to do with the gods of antiquity, since it commemorates the loss of American lives when the battleship Maine was blown up in Havana Harbor in 1898, precipitating the Spanish-American War, the “splendid little war” that Teddy Roosevelt yearned for … and got.  “Remember the Maine!” was the battle cry of that era, though I suspect that few passersby today, at the southwest corner of Central Park, have the slightest idea what that affair was all about.  At the time we blamed the Spaniards, who ruled Cuba, for the disaster, though today it seems likely that the explosion was internal, an accident and not the work of foreign agents, whether Spaniards or rebelling Cubans. 
Victory (topped by a pigeon), backed up by Peace (standing), a muscular nude Courage (to the left),
and a well-garbed Fortitude consoling a victim (to the right).
A very triumphant Columbia.     The figures at the base of the monument are said to represent Victory, Peace, Courage, Fortitude, and Justice, though which of these worthies is which I couldn’t at first begin to say, least of all which one the charming diaper boy at the prow of the ship represents.  Finally, after diligent research, I can report that the diapered youth is Victory, the standing female behind him Peace, the male to the left Courage, and the female to the right Fortitude, while the figures on the side of the monument represent the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (on the left and right respectively).  (As so often in life, Justice seems to have gotten lost.)  As for the gilded bronze figures perched on top, they represent Columbia Triumphant in a seashell chariot pulled by three hippocampi, signifying our dominance of the seas; they are said to be cast from metal recovered from the guns of the Maine itself.  Yes, we had demolished two antiquated Spanish fleets, one off Cuba and the other in Manila Bay, but as for our dominating the seas, the British Navy of the time might have had a word to say. 
     The façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grand Central Station, and the Public Library at 42nd Street are all Beaux Arts manifestations, but I don’t find them pretentious, whereas this monument, to my eyes, smacks of pretension.  Well, it reflects the jingoism of the time, when Teddy Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill and right into the White House, where as V.P. he succeeded President William McKinley when that eminence was assassinated.
     Continuing on my journey of rediscovery (remember my journey of rediscovery?), I passed the Trump International Hotel and Tower, an imposing high-rise situated on Columbus Circle between Central Park West and Broadway.  This soaring edifice is a reincarnation of the Gulf and Western building, which was stripped to its skeleton and given a new façade in 1995-1997.  I once worked on the Harper Collins World Anthology in that earlier incarnation and remember it as the building that swayed in the wind.  Hopefully, after Mr. Trump’s intervention, it stays still.  Outside the tower is a huge steel globe that I had never looked at closely, a tangle of wires in the form of a sphere representing the globe that Columbus navigated.  Like anything coming from the hand of Mr. Trump, it is grandiose; personally, I prefer globes that are solid, not skeletal, but perhaps that’s too old fogey for today.
     Pressing ahead on this journey of rediscovery, I reached my bus stop, and there, right across the sidewalk, smack against an embankment fronting the Trump Tower, was Occupy Wall Street.  I thought they had more or less vanished, but no, there they were, a dozen or so, reclining on sleeping bags and looking rather unwashed and bedraggled.  Announcing their presence in bold print were their signs:
OCCUPY  GOLDMAN  SACHS
THE  GOVERNMENT  SHUT  DOWNBUT  THEY’RE  STILL  RECRUITING
IF  YOU  AREN’T  PISSED  OFFYOU  AREN’T  PAYING  ATTENTION              The signs were bold, but they themselves looked to be off duty and just a bit tired.  I thought that they had all but vanished, but no, they’re still around … sort of.
     So ended my little journey of rediscovery; my bus came and I took it.
     Yes, New York is inexhaustible.  A diaper-clad Victory, and Columbia triumphant among sea shells, dolphins, and sea horses; Mr. Trump’s super modern globe; and the remnants of Occupy Wall Street: not bad for a casual fifteen-minute walk.  Of course there is more to Columbus Circle than what I mention here, but I’m covering only what my short walk rediscovered.  I encourage all residents and visitors to undertake a similar journey, to discover or rediscover the unconcealed secrets of the city, those things in plain sight that we all breeze by without really noticing.  Even if our rediscoveries include an eyesore like the Maritime Union Building that I so love to hate.  It’s all a part of the grandiose jumble, the dazzling conglomeration of buildings, statues, people, and events that make up the challenging, exciting, and ever changing city of New York.

     A passing thought:  Now that all the federal museums are closed, and the national parks are shut down tight, I wonder if Congress is denying itself any of its perks.  Hmmm...  Let's look into it.
     Coming soon:  Next Sunday, Brooke Astor, Aristocrat of the People – a woman who could host President Elect Ronald Reagan (and have him on his hands and knees, looking for her lost diamond earring) one day, and visit a school in the slums of Harlem, or get a hug from a museum janitor, the next.  After that: the Living Theatre, Quentin Crisp, and maybe the last of my posts on famous streets, Wall Street.
     ©  2013  Clifford Browder