Clifford Browder's Blog, page 50

91. Taylor Mead, Icon and Almost Innocent

      Way back in 1959, when I left my spacious Morningside Heights apartment and moved into a shabby little room on West 14th Street, so I could be near the Beatnik scene on McDougal Street, I first encountered him, a thirtyish poet name Taylor Mead who could be seen roaming about the streets clutching a shaggy manuscript to his chest.  He was skinny, cleanshaven, and dark-haired, with a long, narrow face and a high forehead, but what most caught my eye was the depraved look he had about him.  What do I mean by “depraved”?  Over the hill, past the point of no return, lost, lost, lost.  When I heard him read at the Gaslight Café, his stuff was mostly unmemorable, but he was not.  If he was heckled or interrupted or otherwise annoyed, he screamed at the offender, which settled the matter, since Taylor Mead could outscream anyone. Which encouraged me to keep my distance.

Taylor Mead (right) with Andy Warhol. 
     Fast forward a few months to 1960, when I had followed the Beatnik scene and my own restlessness out to San Francisco and settled into a small room in an SRO on Broadway, conveniently near to Chinatown for cheap meals, and to North Beach and the Beatniks.  Attending a poetry reading with my newfound friend Floyd at the Mission, a welcoming place on Grant Street run by a young minister who served a free meal once a week and otherwise catered to the Beats, I saw Taylor Mead again, the same lost look, the same shaggy manuscript pressed tight to his chest. 
     “I know that guy,” I told Floyd, meaning of course that I knew ofhim.  “I heard him read in New York.”
     When Taylor Mead plunked himself down on a chair right behind us, Floyd, with a sly grin, turned to him and said,  “Hi there!  My friend here heard you read in New York.  He loves your stuff.”
     Taylor Mead flashed instantly the warmest smile.  “Why, thank you.  My poetry isn’t just surface.  It has real meaning, it has depth.”
     To date, I hadn’t sensed much depth in his poems, just a lot of ragged surface.  But this was a different Taylor Mead: relaxed, not defensive, even charming. 
     I don’t recall if Taylor Mead read at that reading, but soon afterward I heard him read at the Co-existence Bagel Shop, the chief Beatnik hangout of the time, where Beats and tourists mingled cheerily, or not so cheerily.  Taylor’s first line was memorable: “I was a cocksucker in Arcady…”  What followed I barely recall; that first line was hard to top.  Mostly I remember a passing reference to his wealthy father, against whom he was obviously in vehement revolt.  But I also recall the comments of those around me.
     Two well-dressed men of middle years, obviously out of their element.  “He’s not that good,” one said, softly.  “I’ve heard homosexuals of real talent read.”  His friend concurred.
     “Give him a chance,” said a black man.  “He’s doing his best.”
     Overhearing them, a woman remarked, “In this place I keep my opinions to myself.”
     The next I knew of Taylor Mead was once again at the Mission, where a fragment of a film in progress was shown, with pleas for contributions so the fund-strapped project could be finished.  It was an amateurish effort in black and white, though not without charm, featuring Taylor wandering haphazardly through the city.  The high point came when, at one point, his pants dropped, exposing his bare bottom; the audience roared.  I don’t recall if I was inspired to donate; I rather doubt it.
     That summer I went to Mexico and, returning to San Francisco, I found that most of the Beats had decamped.  By then I had tasted of their scene sufficiently to know that it wasn’t for me; I’m too neat, too practical, too work-oriented.  But from them I had learned both positive and negative lessons, one being, in the words of a knowledgeable friend who had also tasted of bohemia, “Get to know these people a little, learn from them, but don’t let them into your life.  They can destroy you!”
     The unexpected offer of a teaching job brought me back to New York and I saw Taylor Mead no more.  So what was my final impression of him at that time?  An aging adolescent given to temper tantrums but also capable of charm.  He needed attention, craved it, was irate if he didn’t get it.  A lost soul, almost an innocent, but a calculating innocent, if such a thing can be.  And certainly a free spirit, but paying a price for it.  I assumed he was on some kind of drug, didn’t think he’d last to enjoy a ripe old age.
     Fast forward fifty-three years to today.  Imagine my surprise when, researching my recent post on the Bowery, I went to the website of the Bowery Poetry Club and encountered the name of Taylor Mead, who had often read his poetry there.  Clicking on a link, I learned that, a longtime resident of the Lower East Side, at age 88 he had died in May of this year during a visit to a niece in Denver and had received obits in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and numerous blogs that hailed him as a poet, actor, exuberant bohemian, and star of underground films.  “An elfin figure with kewpie-doll eyes,” said the L.A. Times.  (Elfin perhaps, but I never noticed the kewpie-doll eyes.)  Imagine too my shock on seeing recent photos of him: the skinny young poet with a depraved look had turned into a little old man, wrinkled and bent, who walked with a cane, an old man capable of smiles but who, far from exposing his anatomy, was well bundled up even in mild weather.  So he had survived into old age and was even older than me!  I then went on to learn more about him so as to update and correct my earlier impression; what I learned follows here.
     Taylor Mead was born in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a Detroit suburb that, as a Midwesterner, I know to be an enclave of the rich and privileged.  His father was a wealthy businessman and influential figure in the Democratic Party in Michigan, and his mother a socialite; they divorced before he was born.  He endured a private high school (“brainwashing for the bourgeoisie,” he later termed it), and, through his father’s influence, got a job with Merrill Lynch in Detroit, but soon found that he had no inclination for finance.  Taylor Mead at Merrill Lynch -- the very idea boggles the mind!  He soon left, and left Detroit as well, needing to put space – a lot of it – between himself and his family.  Knowing from the age of 12 that he was gay probably had a lot to do with it.
      I won’t recount every phase and detail of his life; that can be left to a future biographer.  Having read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and, inspired by it, hitchhiked across the country more than once, he came to New York to be anonymous, to have a private life.  By this, I think he meant to live freely, as he could not do back in Michigan.  Which reminds me how Quentin Crisp, author of The Naked Civil Servant, came here decades later to live more freely than he felt he could in his native England.  (A future post will “do” Quentin Crisp.)  But Taylor Mead wanted only a degree of anonymity.  His whole life and career were fueled by a desperate desire for attention; he took to notoriety as a wasp takes to jam.
     When I first encountered him in New York in 1959, he was reading his poetry in bars and coffee houses, but he had yet to achieve real fame.  When I encountered him again in North Beach, San Francisco, in 1960, his career as an underground film performer was beginning.  The fragment of film I saw him in was obviously the first segment of The Flower Thief, an experimental low-budget black-and-white film using war surplus film stock and a hand-held camera, and directed by Ron Rice.  Taylor says of Rice that he was stealing his girlfriends’ support checks, running off with theater receipts, and chasing people down the street trying to film them, but that everybody loved him.  In the film Taylor, a bedraggled Chaplinesque innocent, wanders  around the city with three precious possessions: a stolen gardenia, an American flag, and a teddy bear.  Hardly acting, he is playing himself.  Film historian P. Adams Sitney called the film “the purest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema.”  According to Taylor, he and Rice were to split the proceeds of the film 50/50, but Rice eloped with all the money.
     After that Andy Warhol “discovered” him and, back in New York, he began starring in Warhol’s underground films.  In the first one, Tarzan and Jane Regained … Sort Of (1964), Taylor played – unbelievably – the heroic Tarzan, whose sarong kept falling off as Tarzan was climbing trees, prompting one critic to state that he did not care to see any more two-hour films of Taylor Mead’s behind.  The star and Warhol then searched the Warhol archives and, finding no such film, decided to rectify the matter.  The result was Taylor Mead’s Ass (1964), an hour-long silent epic of the star performing just with that part of his anatomy.  I haven’t seen it, but it should now be obvious why underground films stay underground.  (Taylor himself later remarked, “Only a sicko would watch the whole thing.”)  During the 1960s he made eleven films with Warhol, their collaboration ending in 1968, when a radical feminist writer who had grievances against Warhol shot and seriously wounded him.   
Taylor on the Tarzan set with Dennis Hopper.  Taylor was a very winsome Tarzan.
     In 1966, while living in Europe (how financed? one wonders), Taylor heckled a Living Theatre performance in Southern France that he found “communal to the point of sameness.”  Irritated by actor and cofounder Julian Beck’s repetition of “End the war in Vietnam,” Taylor began shouting “A bas les intellectuels!” and “Vive la guerre de Vietnam!”  (A future post will “do” the Living Theatre as well.)
     Subsequently Taylor made numerous other underground films, some of them so spontaneous that they involved only one take.  Always he was playing himself, since his art was his life, and his life was his art.
     Note on me and Andy:  I saw several Warhol films back in the 1960s, though none with Taylor Mead.  They were unstructured, haphazard, a series of improvisations.  There were some charming and humorous moments, but in general they violated the Supreme Commandment of Performing Arts:  Thou shalt not bore.
     The obits and online sources are curiously silent about the next thirty years, so that a big middle chunk is missing from the arc of Taylor’s life.  In addition, one wonders about how he supported himself (even a legend has to pay rent), and about his sex life.  Fame was what Warhol offered him, not cash.  He evidently got a little income from his father’s estate – just enough to survive on -- and as for sex, he probably reaped it haphazardly, being too much in love with himself to sustain a long-term relationship.  In the 1970s Gary Weiss made some short films of him talking to his cat in the kitchen of his Ludlow Street apartment; one of the films, in which he expatiated on the virtues of constant television watching, was later aired on Saturday Night Live. 
     Certainly Taylor Mead became a beloved icon of the Lower East Side, where he lived for years in a rent-stabilized fifth-floor apartment at 163 Ludlow Street.  He read his poetry in various venues, took up painting and got his work shown in various galleries, and fed stray cats in a Second Avenue cemetery and elsewhere during his nocturnal prowls.  The snippets of his poetry that I’ve seen online are prosy and rambling, and rich in non sequiturs and four-letter words – in other words, just what you’d expect.  As for his paintings, they seem to have been bold and splotchy.
     Though a nonsmoker and vegetarian, he did drugs like the opiate Vicodin, but seems to have kept free of the heavy stuff so prevalent in the Warhol entourage.  Having a great propensity for booze, he hung out in bars where he sometimes got free drinks.  His block was full of drug dealers, but the dealers in and around his building looked out for him when he came home drunk at 4 a.m., or when he went out in the early morning hours to feed the cats.  Some minor strokes finally limited his walking, so he had to give up feeding felines, turning the task over to an elderly lady.  But he loved his neighborhood, drugs and all; when he went out, people always recognized him and said hello, and young people helped him out of cabs and up the stairs.  When the Bowery Poetry Club opened in 2002, he read there regularly, amusing audiences with his vivid comments on sex, death, genius, and himself.     He was also, it would seem, a clutterbug.  William Kirkley’s 2005 documentary Excavating Taylor Mead shows him trying to clean up his apartment, crammed with the ephemera of his colorful life, including thousands of loose manuscript pages and his vivid paintings, so as to avoid eviction by the city authorities, who had probably condemned it as a firetrap.  In the same year his volume of poetry A Simple Country Girl was published, with the memorable line, “I am a national treasure / If there were such a thing.”      Not everyone who encountered him hailed him as a beloved icon or a treasure.  When someone pointed him out to a friend of mine at a gathering circa 1970, my friend’s reaction was, What is that?  And novelist and poet Eamon Loingsigh has told of entering a dark Lower East Side bar one afternoon a few years ago and finding “an old, creepy looking man leaning on the bar, crouching like a frail spider among a few smarmy-dressed women.”  The spider screeched at times, sipped his beer, flirted with the newcomer, and called for champagne, but the bartender merely smiled.  The spider was obviously the center of attention, his wit and spontaneity eliciting cackles from the fiftyish ladies.  The visitor thought the old man’s face looked familiar, but he couldn’t quite place him.  Loingsigh left the bar after an hour and only later, seeing some Warhol films, did he recognize the screeching spider as a young man and realize that he was Taylor Mead.
Taylor in his Ludlow Street apartment, March 2013, minus heat.
Clayton Patterson
     Taylor’s last months in New York were consumed by a battle with his new landlord, who was converting all the other apartments in the building to market-rate rentals.  Taylor clung to his home of thirty-four years, where he paid only $380 a month, while workers hammered outside his door from 7 a.m. until evening, and plaster fell from the walls, roaches crawled up his legs, and the kitchen sink didn’t work.  Finally, no longer able to navigate the stairs, he agreed to move out in return for a financial settlement.  He then went to stay with a niece in Denver, but was planning a trip to New Orleans and ultimately a return to New York when he succumbed to a stroke.
     So where do I end up?  I don’t think my initial take on Taylor was wrong, except for doubt that he would make it to a ripe old age.  He was an exhibitionist and narcissist for sure, a free spirit and perhaps a lost soul, but in the losing he found himself, he became Taylor Mead.  An almost innocent of considerable charm who both took himself very seriously and chuckled at his own quirks and pretensions.  Said Susan Sontag in Partisan Review, “The source of his art is the deepest and purest of all: he just gives himself, wholly and without reserve, to some bizarre autistic fantasy.  Nothing is more attractive in a person, but it is extremely rare after the age of 4.”  Yes, Taylor Mead gave himself and in so doing became the one and only thing that mattered to him, his chief object in life and supreme accomplishment: Taylor Mead.  I too mourn his loss.
     Unless, of course, a biographer comes along, peels away the legend, and reveals some raw, hard truths.
     Coming soon:  Rediscovering New York: West 12th Street and Columbus Circle; and Brooke Astor, Aristocrat of the People.  In the works: Quentin Crisp, the Living Theatre; personal anecdotes or impressions concerning either are welcome.
     ©  2013  Clifford Browder




    

 

90. The Bowery: From B'hoys to Bums to Condos

     The street known as the Bowery runs north from Chatham Square at Park Row in Lower Manhattan to Cooper Square at East 4th Street, though it once was considered to end at Union Square, where it met Broadway.  It has a long history with many phases, more really than Broadway or Wall Street.
Peter Stuyvesant, a statue by
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney,
1941, in Stuyvesant Square.                 Originally it was a Native American path spanning the entire length of the island of Manhattan.  When the Dutch came and founded New Amsterdam, they named it the Bouwerij, an old Dutch word for “farm,” because it connected farms and estates outside the city wall to the settlement at the southern tip of Manhattan.  In 1651 Peter Stuyvesant, the last governor of the Dutch colony, bought a large farm that, supplemented by additional purchases, came to 300 acres bounded by what is now 17th Street on the north, the East River on the east, 5th Street on the south, and Fourth Avenue on the west.  When, over his objections, the colony surrendered to the British in 1664, he retired to this estate, died there in 1672, and was buried in the floor of his private chapel. 












Momos     But that’s not the end of Old Silver Leg, as he was sometimes called because he wrapped his wooden leg in silver bands to strengthen it.  His descendants lived on in the area, and in 1778 his great-grandson sold the crumbling chapel and graveyard to the Episcopal Church.  On this site, in 1799, the church of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery was built, with the family vault holding the governor’s remains under its east wall.  From then on there were reports of a one-legged ghost stalking about, its peg leg going clop clop clop on the floor, and of the church bell being rung by unseen hands.  The old governor was evidently still angry about the colony’s surrender and resented as well the disturbance of his remains.  These reports continued into the twentieth century and beyond; in 2002 the clop clop clop of his wooden leg was once again allegedly heard in the church. 
      In the eighteenth century the dusty road known as Bowery Lane ran past farms, several owned by Stuyvesants, and past gentlemen’s estates.  A small community named Bowery Village sprang up with a few houses, a blacksmith, a wagon shop, a general store, and a tavern.  By the early 1800s, as the city expanded steadily northward, the village attracted more wagon stands, shops, groggeries, an oyster house where post riders could leave mail, and a brothel, in spite of which respectable residences were also built.  Clearly, change was coming, as evidenced in 1812, when Third Avenue was cut through Stuyvesant property, and old roads were closed and the houses on them removed or demolished.  The Stuyvesants resisted bitterly and managed to save a few homes, but the neighborhood, no longer rural, was subjected to the Commissioners’ rigid grid plan designed for all of the island of Manhattan.
The junction of Broadway and the Bowery at 14th Street, 1831.  What is now Union Square.
     As the years passed, the Bowery, sometimes paved with cobblestones and sometimes with gravel, became a broad avenue paralleling and rivaling Broadway.  But in spite of a few fine residences, the street soon became a commercial and entertainment center for the working classes, in effect a poor man’s Broadway.  In 1836 the Bowery Savings Bank was established at 130 Bowery to serve the workers in the area, where there was no other bank.  Lining the avenue by the 1840s were saddleries, stove shops, druggists, jewelers, candy and peanut vendors, pawnshops, junk shops, oyster stands, taverns, livery stables, and clothiers who spread their wares out on the sidewalk.  Thronging that sidewalk were pleasure-seeking sailors, sleek-haired young butchers, flashy girls, bullies from the slums, and, peddling to the lot of them, black women offering baked pears, or hot yams cooked over charcoal fires, or hot corn ladled out of cedar pails filled with steaming water.  Already the street was being hailed by some as the most democratic scene in the city, and even the most Christian.  If a fellow who had seen better days showed up there in a torn coat and battered hat, no one thought the worse of him, since they or their friends had all been there as well, and might be there again. 



     Prominent among the Bowery denizens was the Bowery B’hoy, known at a glance by his loud clothes, often the red flannel of his volunteer fire company, and by his soap-greased sidelocks topped by a stovepipe hat set at a rakish angle, with a cigar or chaw in his mouth, a black silk tie, and high-heeled calfskin boots.  A butcher or mechanic by day, or a shipbuilder or carpenter or unskilled laborer, at night and on holidays he swaggered down the Bowery as if he owned it, which in a sense he did, or leaned against a lamppost with the same unmistakable air of possession.  Everything about him proclaimed his rowdy independence, his hate of pretense, his disdain for  bourgeois sobriety.  Good-humored, loyal to his friends, and fiercely protective of his girl, he believed in fair play and a boisterous brand of chivalry, wasn’t a thug or a bully, but was always ready for a fire, a fight, or a frolic.  For entertainment he was partial to prize fights and dog and cock fighting, but nothing delighted him more than a fire alarm.  Hearing one, he rushed to join his volunteer fire company and help haul their engine to the scene of the fire, clashing with any rival company that got in the way, but often performing rescues of great courage and daring.

     Matching him in independence was the Bowery Gal, a working girl who in her off hours sashayed along the Bowery with a swinging gait.  Her gaudy bonnet trimmed with an exuberance of flowers, feathers, outsized bows, and ribbons, plus the clashing colors of her clothing, and her short skit revealing a well-turned ankle, proclaimed her the very opposite of the well-mannered young middle-class lady, who was schooled to be proper, modest, tasteful, and demure.  One journalist of the time discerned in the Bowery Gal and her male counterpart the most original and interesting phase of human nature yet developed by American society.
     Catering to the rowdy working-class denizens of the Bowery was the Bowery Theatre, which opened at the corner of Canal Street and the Bowery in 1826 and survived numerous fires, being rebuilt each time and lasting well into the twentieth century.  Women and children and the less hardy patrons took refuge in the gallery, leaving the pit to the boisterous males who, when the doors opened, rushed in like a horde of unchained demons.  If any stranger was so misguided as to claim the seat of a regular, the B’hoys lifted the offender bodily over the heads of the crowd and passed him to the rear of the theater. 
The Bowery Theatre in 1846.
     The fare offered at the Bowery was primarily melodrama, with heroes rescuing damsels in distress from the clutches of villains who died wretchedly and deservedly, with jerks, spasms, and groans, to the appropriate cheers and hisses of the audience.  If the curtain failed to go up on time, whistles and stomps erupted, and shouts of “H’ist dat rag!”  But if the play ended satisfactorily, no audience ever produced such thunderous applause.  That applause reached a new level of enthusiasm in 1848, when the actor Frank Chanfrau introduced the character of Mose, the Bowery Boy incarnate, whom the audience at once recognized and cheered obstreperously.  Mose soon became a legendary theatrical figure, assuming the prowess and proportions of a Paul Bunyan in his ever greater and more fantastic exploits.
A performance at the Bowery Theatre, 1856.
     By the 1850s a great influx of Irish and German immigrants added new colors to the Bowery scene, with half the signs in German, since Germans  settled in large numbers on the Lower East Side.  On Sundays whole German families flocked into the beer gardens for a day of entertainments, singing, dancing, and feasting: a total contrast with the Irish saloons and their strictly male clientele who met there for conviviality before trudging homeward to the realities of spousedom.
Saturday night on the Bowery, 1871.     But to really know the Bowery one had to see it on Saturday night, when it was ablaze with gaslight from red and blue and green glass globes, while horsecars passed with colored lights and jingling bells, and working-class men surged along the sidewalks looking for fun and entertainment.  Music and laughter issued from the dance halls, and the crackle of rifle fire from shooting galleries, while on the sidewalk small German bands played waltzes, organ grinders presented their gaudily clad monkeys, and black quartets sang spirituals.  Vendors hawked hot corn and oysters, theaters offered melodramas and musical extravaganzas and French opera bouffé, and dime museums enticed passers-by with mechanical contrivances, flea circuses, and wax figures representing famous events and lurid crimes.  Whatever distractions a young working man might desire on his night off were available there, and cheap.  Yes, there were abundant drunks and whores, and gang fights on occasion, and even a riot now and then, but the Bowery had a life all its own, unmatched by any other scene in the city.  It was raw, undisciplined, and free, it was  rambunctiously alive.
     Nineteenth-century New York was perennially in flux, and the Bowery was no exception.  In 1878 the Third Avenue El began operation, running from Chatham Square north over the Bowery and then over Third Avenue all the way to 129th Street.  Nighttime riders could glance into second- and third-floor interiors, where they might see a family at a late meal, a woman sewing by a lamp, or a girl and her boyfriend leaning over a windowsill, but anyone on the street below had a less magical experience.  Not only did the El line darken the street, but it also made a screeching noise and showered pedestrians with oil drippings, soot, and hot cinders. 
The Bowery, 1896.
      Equally significant was the founding in 1879 of the Bowery Mission at 14 Bowery, seeking to provide food and shelter to the homeless men of the neighborhood.  The Mission, still in operation today, continued at various addresses on the Bowery, which was becoming more and more the haunt of down-and-outers, with flophouses and cheap restaurants and clothing stores catering to them, as well as cheap saloons.  By the 1890s prostitutes abounded, as well as bars and dance halls for “degenerates” and “fairies,” who found a working-class neighborhood more tolerant than middle-class neighborhoods elsewhere.  But if they fled middle-class gentility, that gentility began pursuing them as respectable citizens went “slumming,” making daring forays into this realm of outcasts and the damned.
Blossom Restaurant at 103 Bowery, 1935.  Notice the Depression prices: 3 pork chops, 30¢;
beefsteak onions, 20¢; veg. dinner, 10¢; shave, 10¢.  Ah, the good old days!

     In the early twentieth century the Bowery became notorious as the Skid Row of New York, and the most famous one in the nation; in 1907 the population of its flop houses, missions, and cheap hotels was estimated at twenty-five thousand.  The Depression of the 1930s only made matters worse.  And yet, by way of contrast, the Bowery from Houston to Delancey Street became the city’s chief market for lighting fixtures and lamps, and from Delancey to Grand Street its chief market for bar and restaurant equipment, markets that are still there today.
On the Bowery, 1977. 
Gerhard Vormwald     When I came to New York in the 1950s, mention of the Bowery meant only one thing: hopeless drunks and down-and-outers, bums.  But even then there was more to the street than that.  In the late 1960s my newfound partner Bob took me to Sammy’s Bowery Follies, a unique joint at 267 Bowery that was part dive, part tourist trap.  What I chiefly remember is feisty women in garish outfits singing feisty songs; it was fun. 




     Sammy’s was past its prime by then, having been founded in 1934 by Sammy Fuchs first as a run-of-the-mill saloon, but then, in a spurt of inspiration, as a cabaret that he proclaimed “the Stork Club of the Bowery.”  In its heyday Sammy’s, with its packed sawdust floor and Gay Nineties pictures and photos of prize fighters on the walls, drew drunks and celebrities alike, skylarking sailors and local down-and-outs, the rich and the forgotten, all of them rubbing elbows in a Gay Nineties-style bar while reborn vaudeville has-beens belted out songs.  It got so famous that tour buses rolled up and sent their occupants thronging in for a brief taste of how the other half lives.  But in time its glory faded, and in 1970, a year after Sammy Fuchs died, it closed its doors.  Sitting at the bar on that last night were Prune Juice Jenny, Box Car Gussie, Juke Box Katie, and Tug Boat Ethel, all mourning the loss of a beloved hangout. 

Ethel, the Bowery Queen, at Sammy's.
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

     Another sign of change was the demise of the Third Avenue El.  The Depression had brought decreased ridership for all the elevated lines, and Mayor La Guardia decided to eliminate them so as to raise property values.  The Third Avenue El ceased service on May 12, 1955.  My partner Bob was a longtime fan of the line, which he rode sometimes to get somewhere and sometimes for the sheer fun of it.  With many likeminded veterans of the El, most of them casting mournful looks and some of them swigging champagne, he rode on the very last train from Chatham Square to 34th Street, where he got off because of the crowds now jamming the train.  Property values may well have soared, but a bit of old New York was gone, never to return.
     But the Bowery never quite dies and always resuscitates.  In 1964 Anthony Amato established his Amato Opera at 319 Bowery, near 4thStreet, where it flourished for thirty-five years, presenting mostly French and Italian operas on a postage-stamp stage; in recent years Bob and I attended many.  And in 1973 the music club CBGB moved into 315 Bowery, just a few doors away, to offer hard core punk, then rock, folk, and jazz to enthusiastic audiences.  Meanwhile the Bowery’s vagrant population was declining, partly because of the city’s effort to disperse it.  Decidedly, the Bowery was on an upswing, leaving its Skid Row image behind. 

Adam Di Carlo

The Bowery Hotel
Beyond My Ken
     Today the Bowery is definitely undergoing gentrification, as high-rise condominiums appear, plus an upscale food market and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as curio shops, art galleries, a poetry club, celebrity lounges, and the luxurious Bowery Hotel, offering 24-hour room service, valet parking, a fitness room, spa services, and many other amenities.  (But does Manhattan really need another luxury hotel?)  So the elite no longer come on quickie slumming tours; they come to visit and to stay.  What would the Bowery B’hoy of yore think of spa services and a fitness room?  His comment would be unprintable.  There are still some flophouses and the Bowery Mission, so the street’s reputation for a mixed population endures.  But gentrification winning out with a vengeance.




     Bank note:  The founding of the Bowery Savings Bank to service the workers of the Lower East Side, recounted earlier, is a reminder that banks once served the public and not just themselves.  Many nineteenth-century New York banks had names indicating the specific clientele they meant to serve: the Butchers’ and Drovers’ Bank, the Importers’ and Traders’ Bank, the Merchants’ and Clerks’ Bank, the Seaman’s Bank for Savings.  Quite a contrast with the big banks of today, as for instance my beloved J.P. Morgan Chase, now under siege from regulators for various peccadillos, among them a whale of a trading loss in London.  So far the CEO, Mr. Jamie Dimon – a handsome and distinguished gentleman, to judge by photos in the papers – has survived, his bonuses intact.  But for the sins of the higher echelons I do not blame the employees at my branch, cordial and friendly minions dispensing the warmest greetings and an abundance of candy.  The candy I eschew (there’s that word again, resounding like a sneeze), but I could use a few more pens; alas, they are nowhere in sight.
     Coming soon:  Next Sunday, Taylor Mead, Icon and Almost Innocent (a free spirit whom I experienced long ago and rediscovered recently).  In the works: Brooke Astor, an aristocrat of the people ("Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around"); Quentin Crisp (another free spirit who realized himself most fully here in New York); and the Living Theatre (I endured and survived their freewheeling productions and indecent exposure).



©  2013  Clifford Browder

89. Who Really Runs America? David Rockefeller?

     On WBAI recently (where else?) I heard nutritionist Gary Null, who also comments on current affairs, expound seriously on a vast conspiracy of corporate and military powers who constitute a shadowy permanent government of this country and really rule it, our elected officials being their pawns or dupes.  Prominent among these sinister figures he named David Rockefeller, the aging patriarch of that clan, whom I and many know only as the banker brother of the late Nelson Rockefeller, the forty-ninth governor of New York State (1959-1973) and the forty-first vice president of the U.S. (1974-1977) under President Gerald Ford. 

     Having heard vaguely of such theories before, I decided to look into David Rockefeller and his possible implication in such a conspiracy.  I am no friend of conspiracy theories but cannot deny that important things happen that we ordinary citizens only learn about later, if even then.  So who is David Rockefeller and what has he been up to?  I launch my little investigation with no expertise whatsoever and with access only to information available to the public.
     He was of course a banker, and this makes him suspect at once.  We Americans profess to dislike bankers, since we think of them as fat cats with too much money who are not inclined to share it with the rest of us who have too little.  This prejudice – and it is a prejudice – has seeped deep into our popular entertainments.  Long ago, when the soaps were making their last stand on radio, I recall how, when the writers of Ma Perkins needed a villain in the little town of Rushville Center, they trotted out the local banker, who was referred to not as Mr. So-and-So, but Banker So-and-So.  And our recent financial convulsion and its ongoing aftermath, brought on in large part by misbehaving banks, haven’t exactly enhanced the profession’s reputation.  Still, with noble intent I shall push this bias to one side and proceed as objectively as possible.  So what kind of a guy is David Rockefeller, and what are his connections to this alleged conspiracy?
A sitting room at 10 West 54th Street.
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.
     He is a son of John D., Jr., who, as I mentioned in a recent post, built Rockefeller Center at his own expense, and a grandson of old John D., the Standard Oil mogul and founder of the family fortune.  David was born in New York City in 1915 in his father’s sumptuous residence at 10 West 54thStreet, then the largest private residence in the city, and one full of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance art collected by his father, not to mention a whole floor devoted to his mother’s private modern art gallery.  In his bedroom at one time were the famous Unicorn Tapestries now at the Cloisters museum in Fort Tryon Park, near the northern tip of Manhattan. 
     Much of David Rockefeller’s childhood was spent at Kykuit, a 40-room neoclassical mansion on a 250-acre family estate near Sleepy Hollow in Westchester County, N.Y., where he recalls visits by General George C. Marshall, Admiral Byrd, and Charles Lindbergh.  And for summer vacations there was the family’s 100-room house on Mount Desert Island, Maine.  Yes, a privileged childhood with wealth and connections right from the start, though he and his siblings were raised strictly, as his father had been before him.

Kykuit, seen from the south.
Gryffindor
     The Rockefellers and art:  David Rockefeller’s father, John D., Jr., was a passionate collector of traditional art of the past, while his wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (David’s mother), was just as passionate a collector of modern art, which her husband professed to despise.  She was one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 1929, and persuaded her husband to donate land on 53rdand 54th Street for the present MOMA, which opened in 1939.  To make room for the new museum, John D., Jr., demolished both his sumptuous residence at 10 West 54th Street, and his deceased father’s palatial mansion at 4 West 54th Street; in their place today is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.  The Rockefellers have been affiliated with MOMA ever since.  But if Abby’s modern art collection found a home at MOMA, her husband’s medieval collection went to the Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
     His education:  He graduated cum laude from Harvard, did postgraduate work in economics there and at the London School of Economics, and got a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, his dissertation entitled “Unused Resources and Economic Waste.”  My take so far: this was no playboy, and no slouch either.  He had a mind and put it to good use.
     For eighteen months he served as secretary to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia at a dollar a year, and then worked for the U.S. Office of Defense, Health, and Welfare Services.  When we entered the war he attended Officer Candidate School and became an officer in the Army, working in North Africa and France (he spoke fluent French) for military intelligence.  Serving as well for seven months as an assistant military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Paris, he made use of family and Standard Oil contacts and established contacts of his own that proved useful thereafter.  Even so, an exemplary career and nothing that I find objectionable.  In the military as in business, there’s nothing inherently wrong with developing a network of contacts.
     In 1946 he went to work for the Chase National Bank, with which his family had long been associated.  Beginning as a lowly assistant manager, he worked his way up through the ranks, developing relationships with correspondent banks throughout the world, and finally became president and CEO.  In 1955 he persuaded the bank to erect its new headquarters in the Wall Street area, thus helping revitalize the downtown financial district, which other companies had deserted for locations farther uptown.  In 1960 the new sixty-story building opened at One Chase Manhattan Plaza on Liberty Street, then the biggest bank building in the world.



     Under David Rockefeller’s leadership Chase spread internationally and became a major force in the world’s financial system, with some fifty thousand correspondent banks, more than any other bank in the world.  He even opened a branch at One Karl Marx Square near the Kremlin and established relations with the National Bank of China.  Trouble came in 1979 when, along with his friend Henry Kissinger and others, he persuaded President Jimmy Carter to admit the deposed Shah of Iran for hospital treatment in the U.S., an action that precipitated the Iran hostage crisis and brought him under media scrutiny for the first time in his life.
     Now a major political and financial figure and a moderate Republican, he had relations with every U.S. President from Eisenhower on, and at times served as an unofficial emissary on high-level diplomatic missions.  In 1968, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, his brother Nelson, then Governor of New York, wanted to appoint David Rockefeller to the vacant senate seat, but he turned the offer down.  Subsequently  President Carter offered to make him Secretary of the Treasury and Federal Reserve Chairman, but he turned those offers down as well.  Clearly, with all his worldwide contacts he preferred a private role, well removed from the publicity and brouhaha of politics.  Which of course has made him a natural target for conspiracy theorists of every stripe and hue.
A young David Rockefeller with Eleanor Roosevelt,
Trygvie Lie, the first Secretary General of the U.N.,
and IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson, 1953.
     His contacts over the years included Henry Kissinger, a personal friend; Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles; former CIA director Richard Helms; Archibald Roosevelt, Jr., and his cousin Kermit Roosevelt, both involved with the CIA; and countless others.  Who, indeed, didn’t he know among the rich and powerful?  All of which, again, has made him a natural and inevitable target for conspiracy theorists.
     Throughout his life he was involved with numerous policy groups that were concerned with domestic and international problems: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; the International Executive Service Corps, promoting prosperity and stability through private enterprise in underdeveloped regions of the world; the Partnership for New York City, a group of CEOs seeking to promote the city as a global center of commerce, culture, and innovation; the Council on Foreign Relations, an influential foreign-policy think tank with some 4700 members; the Trilateral Commission, an organization of leaders in the private sector founded by him and committed to discussion of issues of global concern; and the Bilderberg Group, an annual conference of political leaders and experts from various fields to discuss major issues facing the world.  All this, while becoming the family patriarch and looking after a fortune that came to him mostly through trusts set up by his father, and that is estimated at $2.8 billion, which makes him #193 in the current Forbes 400 List of the richest people in America.
On a visit to Abu Dhabi in 1980, shaking hands with Jawad 
Hashim, President of the Arab Monetary Fund.
Hashmoder
     If one goes online, where conspiracy theories run wild, one can easily find websites warning that so-called Globalists are working secretly to establish a one-world government that will suppress national sovereignty and individual liberties and rule the world.  Who are these nefarious individuals?  International bankers, the super rich, the elite, members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, and other mysterious, secretive, suspect organizations, including the Illuminati, an 18th-century secret society in Bavaria that opposed superstition, prejudice, and the influence of religion in public life, and that supposedly survives to this day.  Among today’s suspect elite, obviously, David Rockefeller looms large, albeit at the age of 98.  These power mongers, these “banksters” are everywhere, theorists assert; they manipulate everything, they will destroy the world as we know it. 
     And what does David Rockefeller say to these charges?  In his autobiography Memoirs, published in 2002, he observes:  “For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with [Fidel] Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions.  Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing me and my family as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will.  If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it” (Memoirs, p. 405).
     “Aha!” cry many conspiracy theorists, seeing this statement as a brazen confirmation of their charges.  But Rockefeller has in no way confessed to participation in a conspiracy, only to advocating a “more integrated global political and economic structure.”  He then goes on to see his critics as influenced by Populism, and observes that Populists believe in conspiracies and consider him the “conspirator in chief.”  He insists that the Rockefellers’ international role during the past half century has produced tangible benefits like the defeat of Soviet Communism, and improvements in societies around the world as a result of global trade, improved communications, and greater interaction of people from different countries. 
     So far, I think the defense of this “proud internationalist” sounds valid.  David Rockefeller one of the Illuminati?  Why not throw in the Hitlerjungen and the Ku Klux Klan as well?  Except that, so far as I know, those groups lacked international connections and therefore might be allies of the conspiracy crowd.  Rockefeller was certainly a lord of think tanks, but that doesn’t make him and them a clutch of conspirators.  The conspiracy gang  whom I have encountered online – and they are legion – strike me as paranoid; frankly, they are just plain nuts.
     So let’s escape from cloud cuckoo land and enter the realm of possibility.  Not all Rockefeller’s critics allege a worldwide conspiracy; rather, they see a shadowy permanent government that really runs this country, with whom our elected Presidents have to come to terms.  Gary Null seems to be one of this tribe, though I’d need to know more about his views to be certain.  But there are other voices of the Progressive Left whom I have to take seriously.  Noam Chomsky has argued that the Trilateral Commission’s report The Crisis of Democracy, proposing solutions for the “excess of democracy” characteristic of the 1960s, embodies “the ideology of the liberal wing of the state capitalist ruling elite.”  He sees the Commission as advocating “more moderation in democracy,” a more passive and obedient citizenry less inclined to put undue restraints on government.  He also asserts that the Commission had an undue influence on the administration of President Jimmy Carter. 
President Carter hosting the Trilateral Commission, 1978.
Rockefeller must have been there, probably in the first row.
     Whether I fully agree with Chomsky I’m not sure, but I listen to him.  The Trilateral Commission is a creation of David Rockefeller, so any criticism of it implies criticism of its founder.  Chomsky’s assertions aren’t all over the place, sniffing out conspirators everywhere; he is focused in his attack and raises questions well worth pondering. 
     So where do I end up?  David Rockefeller has had a vast network of connections and has no doubt wielded tons of influence, perhaps at times too much.  He has shunned the public arena, prefers quiet private conferences, is never flamboyant, eschews attention-getting gestures, is really quite quiet, even colorless.  (Eschew: I love this word, even if it sounds like a sneeze.)  But that doesn’t make him a conspirator or a nefarious person.  He’s only one of many of the elite exerting influence on our government and society.  Confirming my impression of him as an individual are reminiscences of him by my partner Bob’s doctor, who long ago met Rockefeller and conversed with him on several occasions.  He found him very knowledgeable, very personable, unassuming, and easy to relate to, which is remarkable, given his privileged childhood.
    Yet if Rockefeller or his associates are promoting the free-trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is being secretly negotiated now, then I have to agree that they are potentially eroding our national sovereignty.  According to certain leaked documents, the TPP would exempt foreign corporations from our laws and regulations, and let them challenge those laws and regulations as being unfair practices in restraint of trade.  Our hard-won regulations on clean air and clean water, for instance, could be imperiled, not to mention countless other measures, and this worries me a lot.  And if Rockefeller isn’t personally involved in promotion of the TPP (he is, after all, 98), like-minded people of great influence certainly are.  And the general public is barely aware, if at all, of what is going on.  Whether it involves a conspiracy or not, the TPP merits scrutiny and should be fought tooth and nail, unless its proposed provisions are radically revised.  So score one – and a big one – for David Rockefeller’s more responsible critics, among them Gary Null.

Leaders of the Trans-Pacific Partnership member states, 2010.  Guess who's beaming, right smack
 in the middle?  No, it's not David Rockefeller.
Gobierno de Chile
     Even so, my impression of the Rockefeller clan is favorable.  They have long since risen above their robber baron origins, which were tainted with labor strife, to become philanthropists and patrons of the arts on a grand scale.  John D., Sr., gave millions to worthy causes and created the Rockefeller and other foundations; John D., Jr., created Rockefeller Center at his own expense, and with his wife helped launch the Museum of Modern Art; and David’s brother Nelson, as Governor, built the magnificent Empire State Plaza in Albany, and in his will left his interest in Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate, to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, so that it is now open to the public.  (For Rockefeller Center, see post #87, From Ghosts to Grandeur: Fifth Avenue; for the Empire State Plaza, see post #18, Upstate vs. Downstate: The Great Dichotomy.)  All in all, this city, state, and nation owe them a lot.
      Coming soon:  The Bowery: From B'hoys to Bums to Condos.  In the works: Taylor Mead, a free spirit and bedraggled innocent whose bare posterior has been seen in many an underground film.  Other possibilities: Quentin Crisp ("Be yourself no matter what they say") and the Living Theater ("God bless them and God help them").  
     ©  2013  Clifford Browder

88. The House of death, the Mystic Rose, and Avenoodles

     The story of Fifth Avenue in the second half of the nineteenth century is fraught with social wars waged with engraved calling cards dropped in silver card receivers just inside the entrance of palatial free-standing mansions.  It was a war waged above all by the ladies, while their spouses competed on Wall Street or at the race track or in fancy gambling dens, or in regattas where they raced their yachts. These wars were fought with fervor and conviction, and for those involved, if not for society at large, the stakes were high.  The battlefield was an avenue well built up to the south, but stretching on northward as a rutted lane into a semirural wasteland that a visionary few – mostly real estate developers, one suspects -- had christened the city’s future Axis of Elegance.  Confirming their vision in 1853 was the decision by Archbishop John Hughes to build a majestic Catholic cathedral on Fifth Avenue between 50th and 51st Street, a decision followed by excavations and a sprouting of walls but nothing more, owing to a lack of funds.  Still, the promise of a cathedral, albeit Romanist, did seem to foretoken a thoroughfare of taste and distinction.
     One citizen who shared this opinion was Charles Lohman, a free-thinking self-appointed physician who in 1857 must have driven north over the rutted course of the  avenue through an area given over to stockyards, truck gardens, scattered institutions, a few dispersed houses and shanties, and finally a rocky wasteland of scrub pines and bushes fit only for grazing cattle and goats.  Quite possibly he took his wife with him, so he could show her some land that he was tempted to buy.  The pending construction of the cathedral, and the city’s plans to begin work on the magnificent new Central Park, seemed certain to enhance the value of the Avenue.  What Lohman had in mind were ten lots at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street that the archbishop was said to want for his official residence.  Since His Grace had seen fit to denounce Madame Restell, the abortionist, from the pulpit, and since Madame Restell was the nom de guerre of Lohman’s wife, the couple deemed it deliciously appropriate to snatch the property out from under the archiepiscopal nose.  On May 1, 1857, Lohman did exactly that, outbidding the archbishop handily.  Informed of this, respectable citizens offered Lohman a substantial sum for the property, but he refused to sell.  Later that year a panic erupted on Wall Street, sending real estate prices plummeting, and halting construction along Lower Fifth Avenue.  Had the Lohmans made a mistake?  After a year of “pinching times” the stock market recovered, trade picked up again, and construction along the Avenue resumed.  No, the Lohmans had not made a mistake. 
The Lohman residence, a palatial brownstone.
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.     Respectable society was now venturing farther uptown, building brownstones along the Avenue in the 50s.  Then, in 1862, ground was broken on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street, where the walls of a handsome new mansion began to rise: the Lohmans were building at last!  Horrified by the thought of the town’s most notorious abortionist residing grandly in their midst, adjacent property owners offered Lohman a reputed $100,000 for the property, but he spurned it.  The construction took two years but in the end produced a four-story brownstone with a monumental entrance, its recessed doors flanked by pilasters and topped by a protruding ornamental hood, with gardens and stables adjoining: a monument worthy of the Avenue and destined to catch every passing eye. 
     So Madame had installed herself just two blocks from the rising walls of the unfinished cathedral, and just across 52nd Street from, ironically (given her profession), the spacious grounds of the Catholic Orphan Asylum.  “She’ll have no society!” opined the neighbors were certain that she would have no society, but sometime later the windows were ablaze with gaslight to receive a jam of carriages with arriving guests: wealthy merchants, brokers, railroad moguls, physicians, lawyers, and even a few magistrates and legislators, all lured there by the hostess’s charm and notoriety, and the thrill of witnessing her ill-gotten wealth; some of them – unthinkable! – even brought their wives.  All four floors were on display: three ground-floor parlors in bronze and gold with frescoes by Italian artists; the second floor with the Lohmans’ sumptuous bedroom; the third floor with servants’ rooms showing Brussels carpets and mahogany; and the fourth with a billiard room, and ballroom whose windows gave a fine view of the Avenue and the Park.  Guests danced, played cards, smoked expensive cigars provided by the hosts, feasted at a table laden with delicacies, and gaped at the luxurious furnishings. 
     No gold speculator or thriving war contractor could match Madame’s dazzling debut on the Avenue.  But if she and her husband gave receptions regularly thereafter, and they were well attended, it was mostly by gentlemen who didn’t bring their wives.  Ann Lohman had all the trappings of wealth – costly millinery, a palatial residence, and five carriages and seven horses – but she waited in vain for calling cards to be dropped in her  card receiver, cards that would acknowledge her acceptance by Society, cards that never came.  So despite a promising beginning, Madame had lost the war.
     Chagrin at her defeat may at in part explain why, in May 1867, a large silver plate bearing the engraved word OFFICE appeared on a gate in the low iron railing at 1 East 52nd Street, informing sharp-eyed neighbors that the mistress of the mansion would henceforth carry on her profitable business in the basement.  Soon, closed carriages began arriving and depositing heavily veiled women who descended to the basement and, sometime later, came back up, still heavily veiled, to depart discreetly; the neighbors watched, shocked.  Complaints to the authorities proved useless; Madame had arrangements with them.  Only she knew which husbands mounted the steep stoop to her receptions, and which of their wives descended to the basement, and her lips were sealed.  But this was revenge of a kind.  For moralists, the persistence of this shadowy business on the Avenue proclaimed the impotence of justice and the rewards of crime and vice; as for the house itself, they labeled it the House of Death.
     Not even an abortionist’s presence on the Avenue could slow down the relentless push uptown of the wealthy.  In 1869 Mrs. Mary Mason Jones, a dowager of impeccable pedigree and, incidentally, an aunt of Edith Wharton, shocked everyone by moving to the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, an area still afflicted with slaughterhouses and shantytowns, and charitable institutions that, however noble their purpose, were not deemed fit neighbors for the mansions of the affluent.  And once again the pioneer proved right: others followed and the area was soon filled with brownstones topped with a mansard roof.
Mrs. Astor, as painted by
Carolus-Duran.     Inhabiting these residences, often as not, were fresh waves of parvenus who relied on their vast fortunes to worm their way into Society, and whom others labeled Avenoodles.  Determined to be a bulwark against the inroads of these moneyed barbarians was Caroline Astor, the wife of William B. Astor, a wealthy grandson of old John Jacob, whose older brother John Jacob III ran the family business, leaving him to a life of idleness given over to race track attendance, pursuing women other than his wife, and yachting.  Unburdened by a usually absent spouse, Caroline, a Schermerhorn who could lay claim to even more illustrious ancestry than the Astors, acquired a court chamberlain in Ward McCallister, a Society-obsessed Southerner who had long since come North, traveled abroad, studied the manners, genealogy, and heraldry of European aristocrats, and married an heiress. 
     Together, in 1872, this like-minded twosome created the Patriarchs, a group of social eminences including both Old and New Money, who inaugurated the Patriarchs’ Balls, exclusive affairs reserved only for those deemed socially acceptable.  Well covered in the press, these affairs made it very clear who was in and who was out, thus imposing a rigorous order on what might otherwise have been a chaotic social flux.  Supplementing the balls were private weekly dinner parties at Mrs. Astor’s Fifth Avenue and 34th Street mansion, where conversation was limited to food, wine, horse flesh, yachts, country estates, cotillions, and marriages.  Lacking both beauty and charm, Caroline Astor through force of will and cunning quickly established herself as the reigning queen of New York Society – “Society,” be it noted, with a capital S.  McCallister christened her “the Mystic Rose,” a reference to the celestial figure in Dante’s Paradise around whom all other figures revolve; she didn’t object.
The Vanderbilt mansion, flanked by brownstones.  Suddenly, palatial brownstones like the Lohman
residence began to look drab and dated.  French chateau style was definitely in.
     Into this rarefied world, or at least butting up against its barriers, came the Vanderbilts.  Not just one but a whole bunch of them who, between 1878 and 1882, built residences between 51st and 58thStreet, a neighborhood redeemed at last from scandal by Madame Restell’s arrest and suicide in 1878.  Mrs. Astor was not inclined to let these upstarts into her charmed social circle, even though the Vanderbilts had more money, and the grandchildren, well educated and well traveled, had put a distance between themselves and the founder of their fortune, old Cornelius, a gritty character who never quite shook off the rich profanity and rough ways of a wharf rat.  But Alva Vanderbilt, the wife of William K., was determined to make her way socially, and got her husband to commission a new Fifth Avenue residence at 52nd Street, a palatial edifice modeled on Francis I’s sixteenth-century chateau of Blois.  The result was an imposing three-story chateau in gray limestone (emphatically notbrownstone) with a steep slate roof, like nothing the Avenue had ever seen before; it launched a vogue in French chateau-style residences that changed radically that thoroughfare’s look.  In no time the east side of  Fifth Avenue above 59th Street would be crowded with such residences facing the Park, earning the Upper Avenue the name Millionaires Row.
Alva Vanderbilt, costumed for her ball.     Alva filled her new residence with Renaissance and medieval furniture, tapestries, and armor, and announced a costume ball for March 1883 that the city’s elite, seeing it as the most spectacular event of the season, decided they simply must attend.  Dressmakers toiled day and night for weeks, and groups of young ladies of the appropriate status practiced complex quadrilles to be performed on the magical night.  Among them was Caroline Astor’s daughter Carrie, a school acquaintance and friend of one of Mrs. Vanderbilt’s daughters.  But no invitation for Carrie came.
     Puzzled as others received invitations, and well aware that her daughter had her heart set on performing in the quadrille, Caroline Astor put out cautious feelers: why no invitation?  Through third parties, the word came back: Mrs. Vanderbilt would love to invite dear Carrie, but how could she, when she didn’t know Mrs. Astor?  So there it was: the Vanderbilts might be upstarts, but her daughter’s happiness was at stake.  “It’s time for Vanderbilts!” declared Mrs. Astor.  Going up the Avenue in her carriage, she sent a  footman in Astor-blue livery to deliver an engraved calling card to a servant in Vanderbilt-maroon livery at 660 Fifth Avenue, who dropped it in his mistress’s card receiver.  Mrs. Astor hadn’t even entered the Vanderbilt chateau, but the calling card sufficed; the invitation came.  With this simple act, the Vanderbilts were “in.”
     The ball itself was the grandest event to date in the city’s history.  Outside, police held back a dense crowd of onlookers as guests, their costumes masked, stepped down from their carriages and entered the brilliantly lit mansion, while other carriages drove slowly past so their uncostumed occupants could peer though the windows.  Inside, palms and ferns, and orchids of every hue, had transformed the mansion into a tropical forest.  In the oak-paneled ballroom the young ladies performed their quadrilles to the satisfaction of the other guests, who were costumed splendidly as knights, brigands, monks, bullfighters, Music, Fire, Summer, Louis the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth, Bo Peep, and the Electric Light.  What Mrs. Astor wore I haven’t been able to ascertain.
Mr. Roland Redmond, whose costume
I haven't been able to decipher.
Mrs. John C. Mallory, well garbed,
well veiled.

      The affair was amply recorded in the newspapers, and guests were encouraged to visit a designated photographer, lest their magnificence be lost to posterity.  Many did, and the photographs have been preserved, showing the elite of the day posing very seriously in white satin with gold embroidery, black velvet with puffed sleeves, gauze wings when appropriate, gold-trimmed velvet and gray tights, flowered chintz, and a hundred other materials, all taking themselves very seriously, sublimely unaware that viewers of a later age might find them just a mite pretentious, if not downright silly.  Among the guests were ex-President Grant and his wife, who hopefully were not required to wear costumes.
     Despite the advent of the Vanderbilts, Caroline Astor extended her sway for years.  To show her distinction, she announced that she would simply be known as “Mrs. Astor,” and had her calling cards printed accordingly.  In 1888 Ward McCallister explained to a Tribune reporter that there were only 400 people in New York society, a group small enough to fit comfortably into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom; outside that group were people who wouldn’t be at ease in a ballroom or would make others ill at ease.  So appeared the term “the Four Hundred,” which occasioned much comment and criticism.  And his Mystic Rose had thorns; for the socially ambitious, not to be invited to the annual Astor Ball was calamitous.  But in 1887 the Social Register appeared, a list of two thousand socially prominent names with ample information about each: a challenge to Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred. 
     Not all the Astor clan acquiesced in her assumption of the title “Mrs. Astor.”  Her nephew Waldorf Astor particularly resented it, thinking his wife just as deserving of the title, and moved to England to insinuate himself into the British aristocracy.  By way of revenge on his aunt, he tore down his residence adjoining hers and in 1893 opened on the site the luxurious thirteen-story Waldorf Hotel.  Caroline Astor was, to put it mildly, chagrinned, remarking sourly, “There’s a glorified tavern next door.”  Her son John Jacob Astor IV now finally persuaded her to join the exodus northward, and in 1893, having leapfrogged the Vanderbilts just as they had leapfrogged her, she settled into a magnificent French chateau-style residence at Fifth Avenue and 65th Street, really a double residence housing her on one side and her son and his family on the other.  In 1897 the son then built the seventeen-story Astoria Hotel next to the Waldorf Hotel, and later the two were joined to become the first Waldorf Astoria, whose successor is now on Park Avenue. 

Mrs. Astor's new residence at 65th Street.   
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.
      In her palatial new residence the Mystic Rose, now a widow, continued to stage the Astor Ball, exclusion from which banished one to the depths of social degradation.  The art gallery featured a massive marble fireplace at one end, and satin-paneled walls with a vast array of gilt-framed paintings under a ceiling of elaborate molding with huge crystal chandeliers.  This was the scene of the annual event, and many other receptions as well, where the hostess greeted her guests under a painting of her by the French artist Carolus-Duran, her very real fleshly presence rivaling the likeness above her in formal dignity and chilling authority.  Yet this social dominatrix now spent five months of the year in France, three in her palatial summer home at Newport, and only four in New York.  Even in her absence, her authority was felt.
Mrs. Astor's new art gallery/ballroom.  It could hold twelve hundred guests.
     But it was not to last.  The Mystic Rose was fading, and McCallister departed this earth in 1895, his funeral well attended by the socially elite.  By now many were questioning the relevance of the Four Hundred, or even the Social Register’s Two Thousand, including some who might reasonably aspire to inclusion.  Such feelings were intensified by the publication of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives in 1890, a pioneering work of photojournalism that documented the squalid living conditions of the city’s poor, which he blamed on the greed and neglect of the wealthy.  As the new social awareness grew, Mrs. Astor’s balls came to an end, and her last years were ravaged by periodic dementia.  But she didn’t give up easily: at times she was seen standing pathetically at the entrance to her empty ballroom, greeting throngs of imagined guests.  She died in 1906, spared the news of her son’s death in the Titanic disaster of 1912, and her expatriate nephew Waldorf’s becoming the 1st Viscount Astor in Britain in 1917.




     Me and junk mail:  I hate it.  It comes every day in huge batches, appeals from worthy causes who got my name and address from the other worthy causes to whom, in weak moments, I give modest but reliable donations.  They try every conceivable ploy to get me to open the envelope: fake or real handwritten addresses; URGENT; RUSH  RUSH RUSH;  2  FOR  1  GIFT  OFFER; FREE  GIFT  INSIDE; PETITION  ENCLOSED; no return address;  CHECK  ENCLOSED.  If there is no return address, I discard the envelope unopened along with all the others.  CHECK  ENCLOSED / DO  NOT  MUTILATE  OR  TEAR  ENVELOPE  is a new gimmick perpetrated recently by the National Cancer Research Center.  God knows I’m in favor of the war against cancer, being a cancer survivor, but how much can you do?  Still, I opened it and there, sure enough, was a genuine check for the princely sum of $2.50.  They invited me to accept the check, but suggested that I donate that amount or a larger one to the fight against cancer instead.  Any decent, right-minded person would have at once made a substantial donation.  So what did I do?  I cashed the check.  Gleefully, without a smidgen of embarrassment or shame.  In the war against junk mail, I give no quarter.  And if they phone me, you can imagine my response: “I don’t take solicitations by phone!” and then I immediately hang up.  In the war against junk mail and junk phone calls – made even in the name of compassion, health, and a better world – I am ruthless.  “Scrooge!” some may cry.  “Skinflint!”  “A grinch who’d steal Christmas!”  Guilty, guilty, guilty as charged.  But it’s me or them, my sanity and serenity versus their relentless attacks.  And I intend to win.
     Coming soon:  Who really runs America?  A look at conspiracy theories and the alleged existence of a permanent unelected government, with emphasis on the prime suspect, a multimillionaire and lord of think tanks who grew up with the Unicorn Tapestries in his bedroom, and who knew everyone in the world who counted.
©  2013  Clifford Browder

87. From Goats to Grandeur: Fifth Avenue

      Early in the nineteenth century Fifth Avenue was a muddy rutted road leading north from Washington Square, where the city’s most distinguished bankers and merchants had just built handsome Greek Revival houses fronting three sides of the square.  Optimistically, the city opened the avenue to 13th Street in 1824, then to 21st Street by 1830, and to distant 42nd Street by 1837.  But the “avenue”  was at first inhabited by only by those few who, having little need of company, preferred a landscape with rock outcroppings grazed by goats, and clusters here and there of squatters’ ramshackle shanties. 
     This changed in 1834, when Henry J. Brevoort, Jr., was so adventurous as to build a Greek Revival mansion on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street.  Indeed, from about 1830 on the city’s prosperous merchants grew increasingly discontented with their Federal style row houses on Lower Broadway, and were motivated to move north partly by the influx of commerce and the lower orders, and partly by a desire for the greater space and splendor of a freestanding house.  With Washington Square at its base to shield it from commercial inroads, the new Fifth Avenue drew these migrants like a magnet, and in time the wide thoroughfare, now tree-lined and paved with cobblestones, was built up well to the north with long rows of handsome Greek Revival houses, their stoops rising grandly from the sidewalk, and here and there  a Gothic mansion with pointed entrances and windows, and crenellated towers more suggestive of a castle than an urban residence.  By the 1840s the avenue was lined with elegant residences all the way to Union Square and beyond, the square itself now nicely landscaped with a high-spuming fountain. 
     Then, in 1858, the six-story white marble Fifth Avenue Hotel opened on Fifth Avenue between 23rdand 24th Streets, offering accommodations for 800 guests and such unheard-of luxuries as sumptuously decorated public rooms, a fireplace in every bedroom, many private bathrooms, and that startling new invention, the vertical railroad, later known as an elevator.  “Too far uptown!” proclaimed skeptics, but once again they were proven wrong; the hotel prospered from the start, inaugurating an era when Madison Square, at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway, became the center of the city’s fashionable world. 


     Already, by the 1850s, a new style had come into fashion along Fifth Avenue and its parallel, Madison, and the cross streets between them: Italianate brownstone, which would characterize these and other thoroughfares for many years.  Brownstone, obtained from quarries in New Jersey and Connecticut, was now viewed as more dignified than wood or brick, though in fact it was used simply to cover over brick façades and give them a dark “romantic” look.  This soft stone also allowed for richly carved façades and lavish ornamentation, in contrast with the elegant restraint of the Greek Revival style, now seen as plain and dowdy.  So from now on, for exteriors and interiors alike, classical simplicity was out; Victorian clutter was in.

Brooklyn brownstones today.  The rage for brownstones spread
all over the city.  The high stoops are typical.
     Who were the inhabitants of these brownstones?  First of all, Knickerbockers, old Dutch families that could trace their lineage back to the days of New Amsterdam, but also old English families that came to the city in colonial times.  They lived tastefully and quietly in homes where the somber gilt-framed portraits of their forebears, governors and mayors and their wives, stared down austerely from the walls.  Some had made fortunes in whale oil and tobacco and sugar, but by now often had transitioned into landholding, which seemed a bit more genteel.  It was a world where everyone knew everyone, who their forebears were, and how they made their money.  They socialized and married among themselves and were leery of the “new” people.  It was a tight little world, conformist, predictable, and dull, but its residents found the dullness reassuring, a bit of stability in a world of endless change.
A mansard roof     For change was all about them, gnawing at the edges of their world.  In 1858 William B. Astor, Jr., and his brother John Jacob Astor III, built adjoining townhouses on the northeast corner of 33rd Street and Fifth Avenue, John Jacob’s house featuring a mansard roof, a style fresh from imperial Paris that at once became all the rage.  And who were these Astors?  Grandsons of John Jacob Astor, the German immigrant who came to America and made a fortune in the fur trade before branching out into other profitable fields of endeavor, a man remembered for sharp dealings and the ruthless accumulation of wealth, a philanthropist in his later years, but one who had no time for appeals from the needy or the outstretched palm of a beggar in the street.  As was usually the way in America, the grandchildren and great grandchildren were glad enough to put space between themselves and the founder of the family fortune, who was often more skilled in the ruthless amassing of money than in the social graces.  Whatever the Knickerbockers might think of them, the Astors were now on the scene as exemplars of Old New Money, as opposed to upstarts like the Vanderbilts, foremost in the mounting tide of New New Money.  
     Of concern to Old and New Money alike was the announcement in 1853 by Archbishop John Hughes, the leader of the city’s Catholic minority, of plans to build an impressive cathedral far to the north of the settled parts of Fifth Avenue, on its east side between 50th and 51st Street – a location so far to the north that the whole project was greeted by many with skepticism.  But once again the visionary proved right. The cornerstone was laid in 1858, and slowly, very slowly, the white marble walls of the Gothic structure began to rise.  The WASP majority, leery of Romanist plots and the boozy doings of Hughes’s mostly Irish parishioners, began to take note: the construction, however slow, of such an edifice seemed to confirm developers’ predictions that Fifth Avenue, stretching on to the north, would be the city’s axis of elegance. 
     In the 1860s Fifth Avenue’s growing renown as the axis of elegance was enhanced by two developments.  In 1859 the new Central Park was opened, prompting a steady flow of shiny equipages north on the avenue to the park entrance at 59th Street and Fifth, en route to the park’s pebbled Drive, where Fashion went to see and be seen.  Soon after, the outbreak of the Civil War halted construction at first, but by 1863 a whole new horde of parvenus began appearing, their fortunes fattened by war contracts and speculations.  More fancy brownstones went up, clogging the avenue with piles of brick and stone, huge mortar-mixing appliances, teams of workmen, and mountains of barrels, boxes, windowframes, and doors, making the ride to the park an ordeal.  And for whom were  these imposing new brownstones being built?  Gold and cotton speculators, stockbrokers, factory owners, railroad and patent medicine men, patented shirt manufacturers, and occasionally the inspired inventor of a truss.  One can imagine the horror this inflicted on the genteel Old Money residents of the lower avenue.
     The last several decades of the nineteenth century – the so-called Gilded Age -- saw brownstone mansions supplanted in turn by the ornate French chateau style, and a flocking of Old and New Money alike to the Upper Avenue, which came to be known as Millionaires Row.  The social wars that raged there, above all between the Astors and Vanderbilts, will be recounted in a future post.  Suffice it to say that Upper Fifth Avenue was the most elite residential section of the city, the lavish balls and receptions of its denizens much reported on in the press, much envied, and much criticized.

The William K. Vanderbilt residence, a French-chateau-style
house, flanked by brownstones.
     With the coming of the Twentieth Century the character of Fifth Avenue changed radically, as commercial enterprises moved in and both Old and New Money moved out.  The Avenue was still an axis of elegance, but renowned now not for residences but for fancy hotels and stores.  To assure the proper tone for the Avenue, merchants and residents joined forces in 1907 to form the Fifth Avenue Association, which exists to this day.  A guarantee of elegance and cultural eminence was the completion in 1911, between 40th and 42nd Streets, of the New York Public Library, a magnificent Beaux Arts structure owned by a private nonprofit organization, now rated as one of the five greatest libraries in the world.  I have spent many hours there doing research for this or that project. 
     Flanking the steps of the library’s main entrance on Fifth Avenue are the library lions, two stalwart marble sentinels guarding the troves of information inside.  Mayor Fiorello La Guardia christened them Patience and Fortitude, deeming these the qualities New Yorkers needed to get through the Great 
PatienceDepression.  Much photographed and much reproduced in art, they have been adorned with holly wreaths in winter, floral wreaths in spring, and baseball caps in summer, while witnessing the many parades that now proceed up or down the Avenue.  They are to New York what the four horses of San Marco are to Venice.  But Venice stole those horses from Constantinople, whereas the beloved library lions are most decidedly a work of our own, via the skillful hands of sculptor Edward Clark Potter.
     But not all residents took flight from the Avenue.  In 1914 industrialist and real estate operator William Starr Miller built a handsome red brick and limestone residence with a mansard roof at 86thStreet, its quiet restraint contrasting with the ornate palazzos then typical of Upper Fifth Avenue.  In 1944 it was acquired by the eminent socialite Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III, and today it houses the Neue Galerie, which I have often visited to view its exhibitions of  late nineteenth century and early twentieth century German and Austrian art.  Coming from the subway, I never viewed it from across the street and as a result failed to appreciate what a marvel of architecture it is; I discovered this only now, in preparing this post.

Even today, surrounded by taller buildings, the Miller
residence, now the Neue Galerie, stands out.
Gryffindor
Dalí with an ocelot.  No ocelot
at Bonwit Teller.     Meanwhile fashionable upscale stores were coming in, among them Lord & Taylor in 1914, Saks Fifth Avenue in 1924, and Bergdorf Goodman in 1928, all of them clothing retailers catering to an elite clientele.  By the 1930s they were enticing shoppers with lavish window displays.  One memorable incident resulted in 1939, when the artist Salvador Dalí was hired by Bonwit Teller, another high end clothing retailer on Fifth at 56th Street, to do two Surrealist displays.  One display included a buffalo head clamping a bloody pigeon in its jaw, while the other featured a bathtub lined with black Persian lamb and filled with water, and a scantily clad mannequin with real red hair stepping into it.  When the store learned that shoppers on the sidewalk were scandalized, not by the decapitated head and other eerie details, but by the scantily clad mannequin, it replaced it with a store mannequin properly attired in a suit.  Walking by the store the following afternoon, Dalí saw the alteration of his work and was infuriated.  Entering the store, he went to the window and wrenched the bathtub free of its moorings.  As he did so, the tub slipped from his grasp and crashed through the window onto the sidewalk, along with the artist himself.  This unplanned Surrealist demonstration astonished onlookers and led to Dalí’s arrest for malicious mischief, but the judge let him off, making allowances for artistic temperament.
     Bonwit Teller closed in 1990.  Though I myself never set foot in it, I have a story to tell.  When I was a graduate student living on campus at Columbia, the advent of summer brought an exodus of Columbia College students and an influx of public school teachers from all over, but especially from the South, to take courses at the Columbia Teachers College.  There was always a contingent of gay men among them and they made contact with the regulars like myself.  So it was that, in the summer of 1954, I got to know a good-looking young man named Jim, very personable, who had a teaching job in his home community, a small town in the South.  Ours was a social friendship, nothing more, and the second week I knew him he had a tale to tell.
     A young woman from a wealthy family in his home town had arrived in New York for a shopping tour and asked him, an old friend, to escort her to Bonwit Teller, which he was glad to do.  When they entered, she immediately asked for a consultant.  This set the tone for their visit, for it said Money.  A well-dressed older woman was summoned, and the girl announced that she and Jim were engaged, and she needed a whole new wardrobe.  The engagement was news to Jim, but he played along.  “From then on,” he told me, “the you-know-what was flying all over the place.  ‘What a lovely young couple!’ the staff kept murmuring.”  Over the next two hours the consultant, having learned the presumed fiancée’s needs and tastes, showed her a vast array of fashionable outfits, from which she made a large selection; money was clearly no object.  “Would the gentleman also like to see some clothing?” the consultant then asked.  “No,” said the girl, “he already has his things.”  She was then given the bill and wrote a check that was immediately accepted without question.  How the store had checked her credit was a mystery to Jim and me, but she left with a load of high-priced outfits, having arranged to have the rest shipped home.  So ended Jim’s tale, my only glimpse into the world of high fashion and its workings.  I warned Jim that the girl was obviously after him, but, not having seen him in later years, have no idea how the story ended.  Being a young gay man in a small Southern town posed problems enough; as he got older, they would only increase.  Maybe he ended up marrying her and, like many married men, lived a double life.  I think he could have pulled it off.
     I have set foot in Saks Fifth Avenue just once, when relatives from Indiana were visiting and chose to go there.  We weren’t there for long, but I have two vivid memories.  First, a salesgirl sprayed the women with a perfume – just a dash of it, done very courteously with a warm smile -- so as to give them a sample of one of the products.  Second, the men’s room on the second floor had wood paneling and, at eye level just above the urinals, original art.  Which struck me as the ultimate in – in what?  Elegance?  Sophisticated interior design?  Pretension?  Take your choice.  How the artists would feel about it, if they knew, I hesitate to say.
     By the late 1920s Art Deco skyscrapers were also going up in Manhattan, marking a sharp break with the Beaux Arts style and anything smacking of the Old World and the nineteenth century.  Prominent among them was the Chrysler Building at Lexington and 42nd Street, the tallest in the world for all of one year, until the 102-story Empire State Building at 34th and Fifth was completed in 1931, holding that distinction for the next forty-two years.  To make room for this, the most famous skyscraper in the world and a magnet for would-be suicides (the building staff take elaborate measures to forestall them), the original Waldorf Astoria was demolished.  The Empire State’s distinction in height ended in 1973, with the completion of the World Trade Center towers, two big boxes that in my opinion weren’t particularly needed and never matched the elegance of the Empire State Building.  That building is so much a part of New York that, when passing that way, I used to walk through the ground floor just to soak up the atmosphere, which is probably impossible now, given post-9/11 security.  I have always preferred it to the Chrysler Building, but my partner Bob sees it differently; he prefers the Chrysler, seeing in it a touch of fantasy, whereas the Empire State strikes him as strictly business without frills.  As for Beaux Arts vs. Art Deco, I like both; the library and Grand Central have a sumptuous Old World magnificence, and the skyscrapers have a soaring New World thrust and  grandeur.


At sunset.  But at any time of day it dominates.
Daniel Schwen
As seen from Fifth Avenue.
Banfield     Meanwhile John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the son and heir of the Standard Oil magnate and philanthropist, was at his own expense building Rockefeller Center, a complex of fourteen commercial buildings in Art Deco style bounded by 48th and 51stStreet, and by Fifth and Sixth Avenue, a project of breath-taking magnitude that was begun in 1930, pursued through the worst of the Depression, and completed in 1939, with further subsequent additions.  This was, to my knowledge, the only grandiose project in  twentieth-century New York City that Robert Moses was not involved in.  (For Moses, the Hercules of Parks, see post #78.)

      A must-see for visitors, Rockefeller Center screams BIG BIG BIG, but then, so does the city.  I take the Center in small bites, one feature at a time.  And there are many features: a cluster of soaring skyscrapers; at ground level, flags of many nations flying; on the Fifth Avenue side just across from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, a four-story-tall, seven-ton bronze sculpture of Atlas bearing the heavens on his shoulders; a sunken plaza that becomes an ice skating rink in winter; and, dominating that sunken plaza, another huge bronze statue, this one gilded, representing the Titan Prometheus bearing stolen fire to mortals.  The installation of a giant Christmas tree towering above Prometheus and the rink is an annual event widely hailed throughout the city, its lighting witnessed by thousands, while thousands more watch on TV.  In winter I love to watch the skaters from above, and in summer, the gardens planted in the so-called Channel between La Maison Française at 610 Fifth Avenue and the British Empire Building at 620 Fifth. 
Michael Barera      When the Atlas was unveiled in 1937, some critics complained that it looked like the Italian dictator Mussolini, then at the height of his power, and one artist suggested that it looked like Mussolini thoughthe looked.  More recently, a blogger has called it creepy, because it’s a huge pagan nude just across from a church, but I dismiss his objection, since he likens it to a “cereal killer” moving in across from a police station.  As for me, both massive sculpted Titans are a bit too Art Deco, too brazenly big and modern; I prefer Michelangelo’s heroic nudes, the serene and very unfleshy statuary adorning the portals of French Gothic cathedrals, and for bigger-than-life figures, Rodin.  Yet undeniably, the Titans are somehow appropriate for the setting, a grandiose complex that matches in scale and magnificence that other complex on the Upper West Side, Lincoln Center.







Skaters, Prometheus, and the tree.
Gabriel Rodriguez
     But a magnificent library, fancy stores, tall buildings, and an overwhelming cluster of Art Deco structures aren’t the Avenue’s only distinction, since Upper Fifth Avenue from 82nd to 110th Street is lined with museums both old and new, now ten in all, earning it the name of Museum Mile.  To mention all the structures of that mile would require one or several posts, far more than can be undertaken here, so I’ll mention only those I have visited: the granddaddy of them all, the Metropolitan

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, main entrance; the beginning of Museum Mile.
AradMuseum of Art at 82nd Street, presenting a Beaux Arts façade with neoclassical features, through whose labyrinthine halls I have often wandered; the Neue Galerie, mentioned above, at 86th Street; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum at 88thStreet, a strange spiral-shaped affair designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; the Jewish Museum at 92nd Street, where I went once to see Sarah Bernhardt memorabilia; the Museum of the City of New York at 103rd Street, whose collections I have visited and whose library I have used; and finally – a new museum that I have yet to visit, but which now ends Museum Mile, the Museum of African Art at 110th Street, opened in 2012.

Frank Lloyd Wright's snail, the Guggenheim, forming a sharp contrast with
everything around it.  Which is probably what the architect intended.
Ad Meskens
     So the history of Fifth Avenue goes from muddy country lane to Millionaires Row to Museum Mile, an amazing trajectory accomplished in a mere century and a half.  The Avenue is absolutely essential to the city’s image as a center of fashion and culture; who could think of New York without it?  As for real estate values, in 2008 Forbes magazine ranked it as the most expensive street in the world.

     Note on Frank Lloyd Wright:  I have seen another of Wright’s curious spiral-shaped works, the Dallas Theater Center, where a play of mine was given a staged reading long ago.  What accounts for this architectural obsession?  In his childhood maybe he was frightened by a snail.  But the results are remarkable.
     Marianne Moore in the Village:  Old Village buildings often bear a small plaque giving historical information about them and, being a history buff, I stop to read them.  Last Sunday I encountered one on a nine-story residential building near the PATH entrance on Ninth Street:  “35 West 9th Street.  Last home of Marianne Moore, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, baseball enthusiast, and lifelong New Yorker.”  I had no idea that she had been a resident of the West Village.  Glad she could afford the rent.
     Electioned out:  Last Tuesday was primary day for New York voters and, yes, I voted,  but frankly I’m all electioned out, tired, tired, tired, and fed up.  We Americans are so proud of our democratic elections, but things can go too far.  For weeks our mailbox was crammed with glossy appeals from candidates, and as the magical date approached, we got endless phone calls as well, some recorded and some not, the first especially annoying, since there was no one to shout back at.  On the night before the election, the phone was ringing every eight or ten minutes, until I finally took it off the hook.  As for the mail, at first I made an effort to scan it and absorb a few facts, but as it piled up I finally discarded all incoming appeals, no matter who from, till the wastepaper basket was overflowing.  Especially culpable were the women candidates for Manhattan borough president: Jessica Lappin, Julie Menin, and Gale Brewer, who obviously have too much money.  My revenge: I didn’t vote for any of them.  In fact, I didn’t vote for Manhattan borough president at all, having no idea what the position involves.  Nor for male district leader.  Is there a female district leader?  A transgender district leader?  Who are these people, what do they do, and why must I or anyone vote for them?  A bit of democracy is fine, but let’s not overdo it.  Yes, I’m all all electioned out, tired, tired, tired, and fed up.  And this was just the primary; the real election lies ahead. 
     Wienie roast:  The above note was written before the election results were in.  It seems that our new mayor is Bill de Blasio, whose fifteen-year-old son with an Afro did him a world of good on TV.  As for Anthony Weiner, the would-be comeback kid asking for a third (or fourth? or fifth?) chance, after his resignation from the House following revelations of his e-mail sexploits, he got only 5 percent of the votes.  Following his concession speech, he seems to have given a reporter the finger (the middle finger, that is), which is not the most genteel of gestures.  Adieu, Anthony.
     Coming soon:  Next Sunday, The House of Death, the Mystic Rose, and Avenoodles.  After that, Who Really Runs This Country? with a glance at conspiracy theories and one of the richest men in the world.
     ©  2013  Clifford Browder

86. Walter Winchell, a New Kind of Terrorist

Winchell in 1960, with his signature fedora.     "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea!  Let's go to press."  Along with this, the sound of a telegraph key, giving a sense of urgency.  So began the broadcast that I heard so many times back in the early 1940s. The voice was crisp, terse, vibrant; it cut you like a knife.  A series of facts followed at breakneck speed, each one fired like a bullet.  The speaker's style was energetic, unique, differing greatly from the quiet dignity and smugness of H.V. Kaltenborn, the self-proclaimed dean of American newsmen, and the orotund pronouncements of Gabriel Heater, whom my father christened "the angel Gabriel," and who announced importantly, "Good evening, everyone, there's good news tonight!"
     The vibrant, cutting voice was that of Walter Winchell (1897-1972), whom I knew only from his staccato performance on the radio, but about whom I would in time learn abundantly more.  He seemed the epitome of the New Yorker, brash, self-confident, abrasive.  Indeed, he was born to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia and grew up in East Harlem, escaping poverty first by performing in vaudeville and then by becoming a newspaper columnist.  By the mid-1920s he was making a name for himself as a Broadway gossip columnist reporting on the rich and famous, their romances and marriages and divorces, but he had connections to mobsters as well.  In 1929 he was hired by the New York Daily Mirror, where in time he launched the first syndicated gossip column, and a year later he made his debut on radio.
     Can a gossip columnist have too many contacts?  In Winchell's case, yes.  His gangster connections soon made him fear for his life because he knew too much, so in 1932 he vamoosed to the fair clime of California, only to return a few weeks later with a newfound enthusiasm for G-men, Uncle Sam, and the flag; soon he was a close friend of J. Edgar Hoover, whose FBI had never looked so good to him.  By the time I first encountered him in the early 1940s his column was carried by hundreds of newspapers nationwide, and his radio audience surpassed that of the most popular comedians of the day.  He was then at the height of his power and influence.
     In print and on the air Winchell bent, stretched, enriched, and abused the English language, putting a stamp on it all his own.  Two people in love were "sizzling" or "garbo-ing it," newly marrieds were "welded" or "lohengrinned" or "merged," and a divorced couple were "sharing separate tepees."  A pregnant woman was "infanticipating," and the happy parents would soon join "the mom and population."  Other Winchellisms include "sextress," "messer of ceremonies," "shafts" (legs), "debutramp" (debutante), "Chicagorilla" (gangster), and "giggle water" (liquor).  He referred to Broadway as "Baloney Boulevard" and the "Hardened Artery" of the city, and to Times Square as  "Hard Times Square."
     Some of his quips were also memorable: "Nothing recedes like success."  "Gossip is the art of saying nothing in a way that leaves practically nothing unsaid."  "I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it secret."  "Hollywood is where they shoot too many pictures and not enough actors."  "An optimist is someone who gets treed by a lion but enjoys the scenery."
     Winchell's columns and broadcasts were meant to shock and surprise, and sometimes to infuriate.  He was, or pretended to be, a moralist, judging the fools and villains out there, vast numbers of nefarious persons and events.  From 1930 on he was a regular at the Stork Club, which later moved to 3 East 53rd Street, where it became New York's most prestigious nightclub.  Holding court like a prince at Table 50 in the ultra exclusive Cub Room, Winchell summoned athletes, movie stars, debutantes, and royalty into his august presence, where he plied them for information about themselves and others.  They went because they were afraid not to.  A hostile Winchell could skewer you with scandal, impale you on barbs of scorn.  So they wooed, flattered, and cajoled him, giving him tidbits of gossip he could use.  Just as Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons dominated Hollywood, he held Broadway in a reign of fear.  The syndicated columnist was a new kind of terrorist, hobnobbing with celebrities, learning their secrets, exercising vast power by threatening to tell all.  Few of us are without haunting deep fears and reservoirs of shame.  Winchell and his Hollywood counterparts knew this and used it without pity.
     In the 1930s Winchell eulogized President Roosevelt, who invited him to the White House,  and J. Edgar Hoover, who gave him tips from the FBI.  One of the first to denounce Hitler and pro-Nazi groups in America, he also supported civil rights for African Americans and attacked the Ku Klux Klan.  So far, he would seem to have been on the right side of history.  But after World War II that  changed.  As the Cold War loomed, he became an ardent supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy and, like him, detected Communists everywhere and saw himself as the nation's savior.  When the New York Post ran a series criticizing him, he counterattacked viciously, labeling it the"Compost," the "Postinko" and the "Postitute," and calling its columnists "presstitutes."  In 1951 the singer Josephine Baker asserted that she had been refused service at the Stork Club and that Winchell, who was in the restaurant, had refused to come to her aid.  Winchell insisted that he knew nothing of the incident, which may have been the case, but he was attacked by others, and rival columnist Ed Sullivan announced that he despised Winchell as symbolizing evil and treacherous things in America.
     I never encountered Winchell face to face, but my friend Ken told of an encounter with relish.  It happened at Lindy's restaurant, another legendary midtown haunt at 51st  Street and Broadway, made famous by Damon Runyan's stories.  Ken was at a counter in front, buying a wedge of their famous cherry-topped cheesecake to take out, when suddenly all around him he heard awed whispers:  "Walter Winchell ... Walter Winchell ... here comes Walter Winchell!"  Sure enough, striding in like a conqueror, came Winchell.  As he brushed by Ken, he jostled him.  Furious, Ken spun around and delivered a quick kick to his ankle.  Winchell gave no hint of a reaction, but marched on into the nether depths of the restaurant, where he was no doubt persona most grata.  Of all my friends and acquaintances, Ken is the only one who ever assaulted a demigod.

A postcard showing Lindy's, including the famous cheesecake.
     As McCarthy's influence faded, so did the demigod's; he began to be seen as ruthless and arrogant.  The growing popularity of television helped accelerate his demise, since the nervous energy that worked well on radio made him look, in the words of an actor who saw him essaying TV, "like a strange, nervous elf."  His radio show was canceled, he lost his column when the Mirror folded.  By the late 1960s he was a has-been, and in 1969 he announced his retirement, saddened by his son's suicide and a daughter's failing health.  The man once wooed and feared by the famous spent his last years as a recluse at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, far from the Broadway he had loved.  In 1972 he died of cancer; his funeral was attended by one person, his surviving daughter.  Indeed, nothing recedes like success.

The Stork Club
Billingsley in the Cub Room, 1944.
Would he have let you in?
     The famous Stork Club was owned and operated by Sherman Billingsley (1896-1966), a native of Oklahoma where, before establishing himself in New York, he served fifteen months for selling illegal booze.  In 1929 the ex-bootlegger with gangster connections opened the Stork Club as a speakeasy on West 58th Street.  How Billingsley came up with the name is a mystery, since he later had no recollection of it.  His gangster involvement is said to have led to his kidnapping and the murder of the rival mobster responsible, following which Billingsley bought out his gangster partners and began to operate a bit more respectably ... and safely.  The first club was closed by the authorities in 1931, after which he moved it to East 51st Street and then, in 1934, after the repeal of Prohibition, to its final location at 3 East 53rd Street, where it became the famous Stork Club of cafe society history.  Walter Winchell was an early regular, proclaiming it "New York's New Yorkiest place," and his column brought many patrons flocking, as did Ethel Merman, with whom Billingsley had an affair, and who brought in the theater crowd.  In gratitude, a waiter was assigned to her just to light her cigarettes.
     Soon, movie stars and other celebrities, the wealthy and the notorious, show girls and politicians and playboys, and an assortment of international riffraff were mingling there and being reported on by Winchell and other columnists.  It was the meeting place of power, money, and glamour, but also of people watching people, celebrities being watched by non-celebrities.

     If it was hard to gain entrance to the main dining room, it was even harder to access the inner inner sanctum of the Cub Room, reserved exclusively for recognized celebrities who could party there unannoyed by fans.  Seated at Table 1 in a plain or pinstriped suit with a flashy tie and a welcoming grin, Billingsley, his receding dark hair neatly combed, presided carefully, using hand gestures to indicate to the staff who deserved attention, who deserved special attention, who deserved little attention at all, and who should be got rid of as soon as possible.  This was where Winchell held forth at Table 50, summoning the rich and famous for brief interviews where he gleaned useful tidbits of gossip.  Among the guests over the years were Lucille Ball, Tallulah Bankhead, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Sinatra, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Judy Garland, Ronald Reagan, the young Kennedy brothers, Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, Grace Kelley, and a good friend of the owner named J. Edgar Hoover.  A house photographer recorded their presence and rushed his photos to the tabloids.  But not every big name got in.  Among those banned from the premises were Humphrey Bogart and Jackie Gleason, exclusion from its hallowed precincts being also a distinction of sorts.
     But Billingsley wanted more than just celebrities; he wanted everyone.  His uniformed doorman with a solid 14-karat gold chain at the entrance was the gatekeeper to elysium, allowing a few of the hoi polloi in as well: a college boy and his date, a Chicago businessman with his wife (or girlfriend), a stray tourist from just about anywhere.  These lucky few paid handsomely for the privilege of having dinner and dancing to one of the club's three bands, and then going home to tell friends that -- miracle of miracles! -- they had been admitted to the Stork Club, as proof of which they might display a stolen ashtray.  It was better than winning a lottery, and all their friends could then dream of going themselves to New York and maybe, just maybe, getting past the gold chain barring entrance to the Stork Club.
     How did Billingsley keep the big names coming?  Through extravagant gifts: diamond- and ruby-studded compacts, champagne and other liquors, French perfumes, flashy ties, even automobiles.  Often the gifts were made specially for the Stork Club and bore the club's name and logo.  Also, at Christmas the regular patrons received a case of champagne.  Nor was it a bad place to work for the staff.  A bartender received a new Cadillac from a grateful customer, and a headwaiter a $10,000 tip from a tennis star.
     The Stork Club's golden years did not last forever.  The times of trouble began in 1951, with Josephine Baker's charges of racism following an incident that has been variously reported.  Whatever the truth of the incident, Billingsley harbored certain Wasp prejudices, was leery of blacks, Jews, the Irish and Italians.  In 1956 the club lost money for the first time, and in 1957 the unions tried again to organize the club, having already organized the city's other well-known clubs.  Billingsley resisted, and many employees joined a picket line outside that continued until the day the club closed.  This situation cost the club many patrons who refused to cross a picket line, and business steadily declined.  Billingsley grew more remote and paranoid, fired staff arbitrarily, alienated even his friends, and impoverished himself spending large sums to keep the club open.  Finally the last band was dismissed, replaced by recorded music playing for a dwindling clientele.  When, in 1963, the Stork Club advertised a hamburger and french fries for $1.99 in the New York Times, it was clear to all that the end was near. The club closed in 1965, and one year later Billingsley died of a heart attack.
     A television show bearing the club's name and hosted by Billingsley had run from 1950 to 1955, and the club appeared in several movies, including All About Eve (1950), where Bette Davis and other characters are seen in the exclusive Cub Room.  There was even a television drama entitled Murder at the Stork Club, likewise aired in 1950, with Billingsley playing a small part in it.  All of which shows the club's prestige in its heyday.

     Me and the Stork Club:  Once, just once, I set foot in the legendary Stork Club.  I was in midtown with some fellow graduate students when my friend Ken (yes, him again, so knowledgeable about the elite and their haunts) suggested that we have a drink at the Stork Club bar, which was open to the hoi polloi.  So we went.  There, so close to the inner sanctum frequented by celebrities and moneyed out-of-towners, and the inner inner sanctum of the Cub Room where the elite could revel undisturbed, we knew ourselves to be on the fringe of grandeur, on the very threshold of forbidden pleasures.  But I knew as well at a glance that the East Siders crowding round the bar were different from the West Siders that I had encountered in and around Columbia.  They were better dressed, but also more exclusive, not to say snobbish.  They gave us a glance or two, for we were unknown to them and they couldn't figure us out.  This delighted me, though we were really of no significance to them.  Still, there I was at the Stork Club!
     Thanks to Ken I also set foot in the Latin Quarter on Times Square, where we sat at the bar and watched Mae West spin out her familiar quips backed up by a pageant of muscle men.  And thanks to him again, I once found myself sitting at a table in the back of Sardi's on West 44th Street, the theater crowd's hangout, with the singer who had played the executive secretary in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.  And sure enough, people recognized her and came over to congratulate her on her past performance.  Without Ken's urging I would never have stuck my nose in any of these haunts of the elite, for I would always be an outsider there and had no inclination to become, or pretend to be, an insider.  New York is many worlds; one has to sniff out one's own.
     Vivaldi in the subway:  For the last three Wednesday mornings, coming back from the Union Square Greenmarket, I have been astonished to hear Vivaldi in the subway station there.  And not just recorded amplified music, but a real-life violinist playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which I dearly love, with the rest of the orchestra recorded.  And this in a crowded, noisy station.  Most people hurry past, a few stop momentarily, and I now linger, watching as she deftly manipulates her instrument, completely absorbed in what she is doing.  Last Wednesday I took her card and, when she finished “Autumn,” asked if I could mention her in my blog; she said she would be delighted.  She is Susan Keser, a concert violinist, with a website: newyorkviolinist.com. And she’s good!  Vivaldi in the subway: one more example of what makes New York New York, and why, with all its faults, I love it.
     Blog to be published:  I’ve just signed a contract with Brown & Sons, a new small press, for the publication of a segment of this blog (length at this point undetermined).  There will be both a print version and an e-book, with emphasis on text; illustrations will be limited.  I’ll post updates as publication nears; it will take some time.
©  2013  Clifford Browder

85. Colorful New Yorkers: The Mad Poet of Broadway, Fernandy, and the Mephistopheles of Wall Street

The Mad Poet of Broadway:  McDonald Clarke (1798-1842)

In his younger days, most definitely
effecting a Byronic look.Strollers on Broadway in the 1830s often saw a tall form lounging past with a shredded blue cloak and a red handkerchief, a melancholy gazer at the pavement whose soul-deep sighs seemed to make of him, in this city of bustling doers, a singed angel or gentle demon.  “Who is he?” asked passing ladies, touched.  McDonald Clarke, they were told: the Mad Poet of Broadway, a moonbeam-weaver whose head, by his own admission, turned on the pivot of his heart. 
An orphan, he had always hoped to find in a woman the love he had missed as a child.  Years before, in a spurt of youthful ardor, he had eloped with an actress of seventeen on the very night when she was to open in the role of Ophelia.  Past midnight the couple were routed from their wedding bed by the bride’s angry mother and even angrier manager.  While the mother threw clothes on the girl and yanked her homeward, the burly manager, out of pocket from a refund of ticket sales, beat the poet several shades of purple.
A week later they eloped again.  For two months they passed balmy nights in parks, wrapped in the poet’s great blue cloak, or if it rained, took refuge under the roof of a market.  One cold, stormy night, homeless, penniless, they knocked at the mother’s door: no answer.  Spying a rain barrel, they put a board across it, climbed up, and were reaching toward a second-floor window when the board split, dumping them in the barrel below.  Suddenly, while they splashed and sputtered, the mother dashed out, grabbed her daughter’s hair, ducked her, ducked her again, then snatched her out and hauled her in the house.  As the door banged shut, the poet was left shuddering in the barrel.  Her marriage annulled, the girl soon returned to the stage.  Clarke’s friends denounced her, but he himself defended with zeal “she who in tender folly dared mingle the moonlight of her own destiny with the midnight of mine.”
For years afterward he haunted the pavements of Broadway in a blue cloak and red neckerchief,  effecting a Byronic look and role as the doomed outsider, his reason slightly zigzag.  He penned odes to gravestones and Melancholy, or in brighter moments to chestnut vendors, organ grinders, and a host of Fair Unknowns.  In the taverns at night he was welcomed by actors and writers who plied him with hot rum punch that kindled his fantasy, fuzzed his speech, and sent him lurching homeward.  But where was home?  Evicted from his lodgings, he had slept for months in a hearse, and when expelled from there, on tufts of grass among the tombstones of Trinity Churchyard.  Meanwhile poems of his somehow crept into print: rhymes clanked, meters limped; a soft soul shone.
Smitten by a banker’s daughter glimpsed at a window, he mooned for two years, his passion the joke of the town.  Finally, urged on by friends, decked out in a freshly laundered cloak and with a borrowed walking stick, he had knocked at the father’s door, announced himself as a suitor.  Enraged, the citizen had spun him about and kicked him down the stoop.  Bruised and mocked again, he had endured, his brain more zigzag than ever, writing poems to winding sheets.  
Yet at times in the bustle of Broadway he and he alone might notice a young girl, smirched and barefoot, selling baked pears or peddling cakes on the street.  He would drop to his knees, greet her, and pry out her story.  Often learning that she was an orphan like himself without a decent home, he would announce that her woes were at an end.  Taking her by the hand, he would lead her on a trek uptown to Bond, the most elegant of streets, where merchants and bankers resided in handsome red-brick houses with marble street-front trim.  Climbing the steps of one of them, he would pound on the shiny brass knocker, and when a maid answered, ask to see the lady of the house.  The maid might give a look but would fetch her.  When the lady rustled her satins to the door, the poet would bow deep and declare, “Madam, God has pleased to make you a trustee of his wealth.  It is His, not yours.  Take this poor orphaned child, wash her, feed her, clothe her, comfort her in God’s name.”
Then, with a flourish of his tattered blue cloak, he would turn and depart, leaving the little girl puzzled, the lady stunned and perplexed.
The penniless poet frayed on through the years, erratically kind, mothlike, a host to fleas and angels.  Jotting poems to maidens on handkerchiefs, he proclaimed critics, landladies, and kings of cash pimples on the forehead of Creation.  Doom-laden, he groped toward seeds of light.  One evening in Trinity Churchyard, shivering in the wind, he informed a querying watchman: “McDonald Clarke is dead.  Three nights ago on this very tombstone, he dashed his brains out.  The storm that night was the tears Heaven shed for him.  His body was revivified by God.  Before you behold Afara, archangel of the Almighty!”
They lodged him in a cell in the Tombs, pending transfer to Bloomingdale Asylum.  By morning he was dead – of brain fever, the prison doctor reported.  Rumor had it that having turned on a faucet in his cell and flooded it, smiling, he drowned.

Fernandy:  Fernando Wood (1812-1881)


      To Gotham, in the fifty-fifth year of the century in the Age of Go Ahead, came word that the solons of Albany, replete with rural wisdom, had 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 orgies), liquor should be banned throughout the state and public drunkenness forbidden.
       Temperance: in Gotham the word had a grit-and-dust feel, a chalk taste.  At the thought of it, the Irish in their grog shops, downing tumblers of cheap liquor, muttered dark oaths.  At the hint of it, the Germans in their beer gardens, clinking steins, scowled under frothy noses, while behind the façades of brownstones (certain brownstones), genteel profanity glanced off the rims of stemware over delicate wines.
       All eyes turned to the mayor.  Tall, lithe, erect, dapper in a trim black frock coat with a brushed hat, tight gloves, and a walking stick, Fernando (“Fernandy” to his friends) Wood was a blue-eyed, soft-voiced master of the glib smile, a man of principle (and interest).  Though hatched by Tammany, an I-rose-from-nothing-you-can-do-it-too rabble pleaser, he had astonished the respectables when he put the police in uniform, chased the whores off Broadway (into decent side streets), closed saloons on the Sabbath (unlicensed ones stayed open), and enjoined the aldermen, who were known as the Forty Thieves, to be leery of franchises, go easy on the vouchers.  For this display of mayoral energy without precedent, he had been christened the Municipal Hercules.
       But at the first word from Albany of temperance, the mayor was sore vexed.  Long ago his first enterprise had been a grog and grocery shop near the waterfront, catering to thirsty stevedores and the desperate classes, whose votes he later reaped.  Since then, in spacious tile-floored barrooms, before gilt mirrors backing bars adorned with cupid-crowned clocks and nippled Venuses, over the years His Honor, through the ins and outs of politics, had quipped and glittered in his cups.  Would Hercules enforce the law – he whose proclaimed credo was to spurn “I cannot” and say “I would”?  Consulting a lawyer, then more lawyers, then more, he finally announced that as mayor he would enforce this act, however needless and impolitic, but would give full attention to exceptions, technicalities, and the rights of citizens, violating which, officers would be called to strict account.
       At this announcement, Gotham winked, nor did the city’s tippling notably decrease.  Within a year the law was voided in the courts, whereupon Gotham cheered, and the Sabbath quiet was tainted more than ever by the din of groggeries that spilled out reeling drunks on the street.
        Soon thereafter the mayor was up for reelection.  “Anyone but Wood,” said the temperance men.  “Anyone but Wood,” said the Know Nothings, despising the foreign hordes the mayor favored.  “Anyone but Wood,” said the shiny new Republicans, who schemed his prompt retirement.  “Anyone but Wood,” said Mr. Greeley of the Tribune, decrying the city’s infestation with thief, ruffian, and harlot, to cope with whom, he charged, the decent faced a cruel dilemma: buy a sword cane or move to Connecticut.                  Meanwhile the mayor promised cleaner streets, better housing, bigger parks, while offering free eats with liquor to the multitude, who esteemed in his sleek countenance no mirror of their own shabby selves, but a paragon of affluence and power.  Into his campaign chest dropped the sudsy coins of barkeeps, bank notes from brothel owners, winnings of gambling den proprietors, and crisp bills from the deft fingers of abortionists.  Ever pliant to the public mood, he kept his own dark counsel, but daily in saloons, on docks, and in the street smiled into grubby handshakes and boozy greetings, then went home to an adoring wife, scrubbed, cologned himself, and changed his clothes.        
      Against him on election day stood a Know Nothing, a Republican, a Reformist whose bowels ached for change, and a disgruntled Tammanyite, no two of whom agreed.  Trooping to the polls, along with high-minded, dry-tongued critics, were merry hosts of Sabbath smashers plus bone boilers and horse skinners from the slums, and Tammany stalwarts shepherding pollward flocks of newly minted citizens, almshouse decrepits, and furloughed denizens of the county jail.  All day the mayor’s whisper squads spread smear and slander, aided at the polls by Dead Rabbits whose fists and scowls discouraged opposition voters.  In the Fourth Ward, ballot boxes were smashed; in the First, a citizen had his nose shot off (“Yer looks better widout it,” said a Rabbit), while citywide, wherever knives and brickbats reigned, the understrength police (the mayor had furloughed half of them) kept prudently aloof.
      Result: despite temperance and Mr. Greeley’s dreams of honest government, he whom enemies now labeled King of the Dead Rabbits and Father of Dock Rats was reelected.  In decorous brownstones decent citizens cried fraud, while holders of horsecar franchises, tipplers and gamblers, cartmen, stevedores, and hot corn girls made jubilee.
      Thereafter in this tear-down, build-up city where traffic screeched, maiming pedestrians, and streets stank with cholera-breeding filth – this city where garment makers stitched by candlelight, while speculators in California gold dust thrived, and moralists inveighed against grime, grog, and riot, as the veiled wives and daughters of the privileged sought out Madame Restell, the lady of solutions – presiding over all, glad-handed, waving jauntily to festering and feisty multitudes, the mayor, soft-stepping in his trim black frock coat, silver stickpin, and tight gloves, smiled.


The Mephistopheles of Wall Street:  Jay Gould (1836-1892)
His puny frame well clothed.            From across the street Selover, a brawny six-footer, rushed over and confronted him.  “Liar!” he shrieked, grabbed his lapels, shook him, pushed him against a railing by the sidewalk, hoisted him over it, held him above the eight-foot drop.
            “Liar!  Liar!  Liar!”
            With each shout an iron fist bashed his head.  Dangling, the small man fended off the blows weakly, wailed piteously.
            “Goddam bastard liar!”
            As the blows rained, a crowd gathered, protested.  Selover let go; his victim dropped into the basement area and collapsed.  The towering Westerner glared, stalked off.  A barber rushed out of a basement barbershop, helped the battered man to his feet and up the steps, recovered his hat and pen.  Stunned, trembling, the victim staggered off.
            Boasting of frontier justice over drinks, Selover announced to the press: “Jay Gould is a liar, a cheat, and a scoundrel deserving of public disgrace!”
            Rumors flew of Wall Street pools and quarrels; no hard facts emerged.  Gould said nothing, pressed no charges.  Offended in the physical, that gross, alien world where he was not at ease, never again would he venture on the street without a bodyguard.

            Pale as the light of December, Jay Gould, puny-limbed, dark-hatted, with a masking black thicket of beard, walked soft, talked soft, clean and neat as a wasp.  Hatching schemes, he sat at his desk by the hour, his gaze vacant, his only movement the tapping of a pen.  When the schemes burst, prices on Wall Street leaped or dropped, markets cracked, fortunes broke.  If, in the hurlyburly, men cursed or threatened him, he vanished up the Hudson on a yacht. 

            To oust him from Erie, shareholders and U.S. marshals had used a crowbar to force the locked door of his presidential office, pursued him with a notice of his removal as he dodged behind tables and chairs, and when he took refuge behind a locked door in another office, served the notice through a transom; finally he left and resigned.  No matter; within a few years he was lord of ten thousand miles of railroad, worth ten, thirty, fifty million dollars, and was said to control newspapers and banks.

            Many a Wall Street mystery could be explained, it was thought, by entries in the books of his old brokerage firm.  After a wrangle and a rift between them, his partner had snatched the books away and stored them on his farm in New Jersey.  One day, in the partner’s absence, a party of rough men appeared at the farm, intimidated the hired man on the premises, seized the books, and left.  The books were never seen again.

            To some his beard looked devilish; they called him the Mephistopheles of Wall Street.  In a rare interview he said: "I am credited for things I have never done, and abused for them.  I have the disadvantage of not being sociable.  Wall Street men are fond of company and sport.  When business hours are over I go home and spend the remainder of the day with my wife, my children, and books of my library.  My inclinations are domestic.  They are not calculated to make me particularly popular on Wall Street."
            At intervals he retired to his estate up the Hudson, a Gothic castle of white Sing Sing marble, towered and turreted, with pointed windows and vaults, pinnacled roofs.  In this massive stonework mansion, richly furnished and remote, he installed his family.  The children romped, had everything.  But his loving wife couldn’t understand why they must live in a castled palace, walled, with armed guards round the clock.  Nor why sometimes at dinner, his body gutted by fire of thought within, he sat with bowed head, exhausted, picking at his food.


Lyndhurst, Gould's mansion near Tarrytown.  In his time, a well-guarded castle. 
 Today, a landmark open to the public.
Urban
            Inspecting his Western railroads, he stared numbly from the observation car at the dusty track receding behind him, ignoring ríos, arroyos, gushing mountain streams, and pine-clad pinnacles.  “This trackage, these vast distances mean nothing to me,” he wrote his wife; “I miss you more than words can tell.”

            Alone, in felt slippers, he spent quiet evenings in his library, and mornings in the largest greenhouse in America, tending rhododendrons, camellias, hyacinths.  “No man,” wrote a lady writer, “can be wholly bad who is a friend of the orchid and the rose.”

            With his brain-sucked body rested, he returned again to the city, picked at flaws in contracts, reared up peaks of schemes.  Once more on Wall Street prices surged, plunged; he had made another killing.  Editorialists raged, financiers slammed on desks fists with hard gold rings.  A coward,” said some; “Unmanly,” said others; still others whispered (falsely), “A Jew.” 

            A letter came: “Gould, I will shoot you dead in a week. – A Victim.”  He sighed, gave it to the police.
            At times, scheming at his desk or reading botany, he must have thought of his old friend Jim Fisk.  Jim, who could glad-hand reporters and politicos, joke with them, drink with them, wangle from them whatever he wanted.  Genuinely liked by bellboys, chorus girls, clerks and workingmen, thugs.  A torrent of energy, a font of bonhomie, whom no one had ever bullied or wanted to.  Smarter than chain lightning, who liked to make Rome howl.  His opposite.  His best, his only friend:  “Don’t fret your gizzard, Jay.  For you, I’ll go my bottom dollar!”  Jim Fisk, murdered years before.  Jim Fisk, dead and gone.
            On Wall Street, Jay Gould was always alone.  To him, humor and warmth were denied.  No passer out of perfectos, slight and frail, in a world of bullies what could he do?  Fight them with his mind.  Lure them with spruced-up stocks and options, web them in technicalities, outscheme them with receiverships, floating debt, proxies, stun them with lightning strokes in the market.  He had a knack for it, and once he hatched a scheme, his brain ticked feverishly.  They hated him, threatened him, roared the rage of the duped and the beaten.  Puny, coughing already from TB, on Wall Street he towered.                       For hours in his greenhouse the most hated man in America breathed, caressed Orchidaceae imported from every nook of the world, marveled at their curved, lipped petals – streaked, tufted, crimped – like taloned green birds, like gaping jaws of pink-spotted snakes, blood-tinted moths, spiders: so intricate.          
The Jay Gould Mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx.
Anthony 22         The slap heard round the world (a small world):  Local elections are coming up soon in New York City and, being local, there will probably be a small voter turnout.  Still, I have been following them with some interest, partly because I've met several candidates at the Abingdon Square Greenmarket on Saturday mornings; the all-important primary is next Tuesday, September 10.  So let me share my take on a recent incident.  In the latest issue of the WestView News, a monthly neighborhood newspaper giving news of the West Village, George Capsis, the publisher, gives his version of a recent incident that has attracted much media attention.  He explains that recently he lost his wife of 55 years to cancer and feels that, had St. Vincent's Hospital still been functioning in the West Village, he could have spent more time with her in her last days; instead, he had to spend an hour and a half commuting each way to a hospital in the distant Bronx.  As a result, he has very strong feelings about those who, in his opinion, didn't do enough to save the hospital, the only hospital in the Lower West Side of Manhattan.  One of those he holds responsible is Christine Quinn, the former City Council member from this district now running for mayor.  Hearing of a Quinn rally in front of the now half-demolished hospital on West 12th Street (not far from my apartment), he went to it.  Quinn was not on hand, but he saw two of her supporters, former State Senators Tom Duane and Brad Hoylman, whom he also deemed at fault.  Incensed, he shouted at Duane.  Then, seeing Hoylman staring at the ground, he reached out to pull his head up, whereupon Hoylman, thinking it a slap, pulled back and announced, "You need to be escorted out of here."  Turning, Capsis saw a young man who seemed  ready to do the escorting, so he slapped him lightly, so he says, on both cheeks; to Capsis's astonishment, the young man "began crying like a girl and ran off."  This incident was immediately reported widely in the media; in the New York Times's version, he slapped both Hoylman and the young man.  Other versions added a slap to Duane, which Capsis emphatically denies.  This story could well be dismissed as a tempest in a teapot, but my sympathy goes out to the unnamed young man, who had nothing to do with St. Vincent's closing.  The sudden, unforeseen slap may have triggered some painful childhood memory, some humiliation of long ago that caused him to react instantly as he did; to say that he was crying "like a girl" is judgmental and insensitive.  In my opinion, Capsis owes his victim an apology, and I intend to tell him as much.  There is a simmering resentment in the West Village over the loss of our only hospital, and I share in it, but nothing excuses the assault on an innocent bystander.  So much for politics on the local scale in New York.
          Coming soon:  Next Sunday, Walter Winchell, a New Kind of Terrorist, plus a glance at the Stork Club and the ex-bootlegger who ran it, luring the rich and famous to its privileged confines, guarded at the entrance by a uniformed doorman with a solid 14-karat gold chain.  In the works: Fifth Avenue, from Goats to Greatness, with a look at those whose mansions came to line it, including the infamous Madame Restell and the Mrs. Astor and the annual Astor Ball.

©  2013  Clifford Browder






            

84. Rudolph Bing, Big Daddy of the Met

     When Vienna-born Rudolph Bing (1902-1997) came to the Metropolitan Opera in 1949, to observe its operation prior to becoming general manager the following year, he found a beautiful auditorium with a world-famous Diamond Horseshoe that gave box holders excellent views of each other, but a host of problems: 20 percent of the seats with limited or obstructed view of the stage; limited public areas without adequate soundproofing, so that latecomers had to be seated at once, climbing over those already seated; cramped and dirty backstage areas, so that every change of scene had to be done on the main stage while the audience waited, serenaded by banging noises behind the curtain; scenery half-covered with tarpaulins stored temporarily outside on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk, exposed to the rigors of the elements; tiny dressing rooms with bad plumbing; ancient and flimsy stage sets, so that when a soprano took a deep breath, the castle behind her could be seen to tremble; chorus, ballet, and orchestra all crowded into ill-ventilated common rooms; and undisciplined stage crews who showed up when they felt like it, talked behind the drops during performances and, worse still, smoked, the whole place being a tinderbox.  Many of these problems would be solved only with the move to the new house in Lincoln Center in 1966, sixteen long years later.
     When he assumed the duties of general manager in 1950 – a position he would hold until 1972 – what kind of immediate problems beset him?  His memos tell the tale: 
·      In the last act of Carmen, Mario del Monaco and Kurt Baum must use rubber knives, not real ones, since they so throw themselves into the role that Rise Stevens, singing Carmen, is terrified. ·      A stool should be placed in the new elevator so the old man running it doesn’t have to stand all the time. ·      Box office and ushers must stop regarding the patrons as a nuisance. ·      The machine for special effects for Don Giovanni costs too much and must be returned. ·      The paid claque has occasioned complaints from subscribers and must be eliminated.  (It never was.) ·      The orchestra must stand the first time the conductor enters the pit. 

And on and on.  And all this in addition to dealing with temperamental performers, a budget-conscious board, and entrenched and demanding unions, as well as touring this country and Europe to recruit promising new singers and remind established ones of the glory of singing at the Met.
     Who was Rudolph Bing, the man who, day in, day out, had to cope with these and a thousand other problems?  He came with solid credentials, having been the manager of the Glyndebourne Festival in England and the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland.  Photos show a tall, slender man of about fifty, his receding hair neatly combed, always dressed conservatively and never garishly, with a necktie for daytime rehearsals, but dark formal wear for special occasions at night, his black bowtie perched above an immaculate shirtfront like a neat little butterfly, always placed properly, never the least bit awry.  Obviously an Old World gentleman who  exuded dignity and authority, and also, when necessary, charm.  I have never seen a photo of him in shirtsleeves or with an open collar.  For Rudolph Bing, the Met was a very special place where one should dress appropriately. 
     He was also, by all accounts, an autocrat, and it was just as well, for who else could deal with board members and singers and conductors, and keep one of the greatest opera houses in the world running efficiently and, one hopes, brilliantly.  Level-headed and patient, he had to be reigning monarch, diplomat, arbiter, psychologist, and troubleshooter all rolled into one.  But he could also be sharp: when told that a conductor with whom he had had difficulties was his own worst enemy, he quipped, “Not while I’m alive.”
     When he first witnessed opening night in 1949, he was appalled by the audience, many of whom, he soon learned, graced the Met with their presence only this once in a season: café society of the lowest order, gossip columnists, celebrity-seekers and clowns looking eagerly for any freakish occurrence that would be publicized in the press and the new medium of television.  Worse still, openings were reserved for the Monday night subscription audience, socially prominent patrons who paid no more than other subscribers.  So he at once removed the opening night from the subscription program and sold tickets for it separately and at a substantially higher price.  The head of the board was furious that his well-connected friends should lose this perquisite, but Bing insisted.
      One segment of the audience that Bing esteemed highly were the standees, whom he saw as the only source of genuine enthusiasm in the house, an enthusiasm that could become infectious.  Whenever the house resounded with exciting and well-deserved ovations, it came from the standing room, inspired the artists, and enhanced the whole tone of the evening.  As a result, he was determined that the standing room space should not be curtailed.  And when standees lined up for hours at a time for the opening night of a new season, he went out personally to serve them coffee.
     I have vivid impressions of the standees of the mid-1950s, for I was one of them.  Stealing time from my graduate studies in French at Columbia, I would get a standee ticket and wait patiently to be admitted to the house.  Usually I stood in the back of the house, and once, standing there, I was lucky enough to be given a ticket by a woman who had to leave after the first act of Boris Godunov.  For the rest of the evening I found myself seated in the middle of the twelfth row with probably the best view in the house, watching George London perform admirably in the lead role, and a spirited mazurka that filled the stage in Act III, set in Poland. 
     But I wasn’t always so lucky.  Standing for London in Don Giovanni, I found myself on the wrong side of the theater for the dramatic scene where the Don is dragged off to hell by the ghost of the Commendatore, whom he killed in the first act.  Only when London played briefly toward the center of the stage could I see his brilliant silver-clad form, stark against a dark backdrop, staggering in vain resistance against the relentless summons of his victim.  The old hands, of course, had all positioned themselves on the other side of the standing room.
     The mix of standees could be quite picturesque.  Once when I was standing in a crowd of them well up front on one side of the stage, an outrageously flamboyant gay standee arrived and was greeted warmly by the regulars.  A sailor in uniform was also on hand, having chosen to stand because it was the only way he could glimpse the fabled interior of the Met.  “Jesus, these fairies!” he exclaimed to me.  “There’s no excuse for that.”  But fifteen minutes later he was listening as another standee patiently explained the story of the opera.  This standee too was gay, but the sailor had no inkling and listened patiently.
     The Met fare was predominantly Italian, with some French thrown in, because that’s what the audience wanted, but Bing tried to do German and Russian as well.  When he first came, he thought of doing opera in English, but subscribers emphatically preferred to hear the operas in their original language, and he realized too that international stars might mispronounce English, to the amusement or indignation of the entire audience.  He also entertained the notion of occasionally presenting a new work of opera, but soon learned that, after a few performances well attended by the composer’s friends and supporters, they’d be playing to an empty house, except for some loyal and long-suffering subscribers.  The Met audience was not adventurous; they wanted the tried and true.
     And who was that audience?  One might be surprised.  My partner Bob’s parents, who lived in Jersey City, had a subscription in both the old house and the new.  Bob’s father, a subway carpenter, had learned long before, during the Depression, that after work he could pick up tickets at the Met box office for a reasonable price and so, without any musical tradition in his family, acquired a taste for opera.  He had a keen analytical mind, could appraise a singer’s voice very accurately, commenting on the high and low registers.  Bob’s mother, on the other hand, lacked this ability, but being German by birth she had a rich musical heritage from childhood and appreciated music on a deep emotional level.  Two very different ways of listening, both legitimate.  Bob inherited both.  He and his mother often heard the Met’s Easter season performance of Parsifal, listening silently, hand in hand, in a very deep and moving communion.
     Me and music:  I lacked this deep affinity with music, and if I came to love both instrumental and operatic music, it’s nothing short of a miracle, since I never learned to read music (still haven’t), couldn’t sing on key (still can’t), and dreaded music class as my worst subject in grade and junior high school.  For two dreary years, in seventh and eighth grade, I was tormented by a gray-haired little harpy, mean, tight, and dry, who professed to be a music teacher.  I still recall my dread as the class ascended the steep stairs to the third floor, where she held forth and terrorized. 


Yes, the little black dots go up and down, meaning that
the music rises and falls, but what about all that other
stuff?  Worse than algebra!
     Miss Kraus (not her real name) had the best students sit in back and worst ones in front, so they could benefit from her personal and acerbic attention; I was well toward the front.  Moving about the room, she would listen closely to each of us, and if she detected a flaw, she would stop the singing and require the offender to solo, so she could correct him (it was almost always a “him,” as she had it in for adolescent males), while referring to her victim as “this boy.”  Her criticism was edged and wounding; she never hesitated to humiliate you in front of the class.  I’ll grant her a keen sense of beauty, musical and otherwise, but of the few bad teachers that I had, she is the only one I cannot forgive.  I can still see that mean little witch, her lips pressed tight to a pitch pipe, as she surveyed her captive audience.  She once mentioned in passing how, during her childhood in Texas, she had almost been stuck in quicksand, and I have pondered ever since: God put that quicksand there for a purpose.  Why didn’t it do its job?
     Let us ascend now from the trivial to the sublime.  If Miss Kraus had her hands full with a bunch of us, Rudolph Bing had plenty to cope with in managing the Met's stellar singers.  Lauritz Melchior, on the plump side but still one of the best Wagnerian tenors in the world, simply refused to attend rehearsals; if a conductor needed to communicate with him, he could make an appointment to see Melchior in Melchior’s apartment.  Bing was more effective when Franco Corelli, running out of breath while Birgit Nilsson sustained her tone, stalked off the stage in a tizzy.  Informed, Bing rushed to Corelli’s dressing room, where he heard Corelli and his wife screaming because when, in anger, he slammed his hand down on the dressing table, he had picked up a tiny splinter that cost him a drop of blood; the wife was calling for an ambulance.  Bing calmed them, then told Corelli that, to get even, in the love scene in the next act he could bite Miss Nilsson’s ear.  This idea so delighted Corelli that he told Nilsson what he intended, thus unsettling her without the trouble of actually doing it.  Renata Tebaldi was not given to histrionics, but could be quietly and firmly insistent; Bing said she had “dimples of iron.”  On the afternoon of a matinée, Giuseppe di Stefano’s wife phoned to say, once again, how sick he was; in that case, said Bing, he was going to send an ambulance to take the singer to a hospital.  Within an hour di Stefano, hale and robust, was at the theater.  But on another occasion Bing had no solution: when Leonard Warren collapsed onstage during a performance of La Forza del Destinoand died.  But the opera world has little time for mourning; the next day Bing was on the phone arranging for a baritone replacement.
For all their ups and downs, I sense real affection
here.  She was, in some ways, a little girl who
needed Big Daddy.     No singer was more difficult to deal with than Maria Callas.  Bing first heard of her in 1950, with stories of the remarkable range of her voice and the amazing diversity of the roles she could play.  Protracted negotiations began, with much discussion of fees, schedules, and repertoire.  When he met her in Florence in 1951, he was surprised to find her fat and awkward.  Subsequently she lost fifty pounds and became the svelte, dark-featured, strikingly beautiful woman who would conquer the operatic world.  Negotiations dragged on, but Callas ended up signing with the Chicago Lyric Opera for 1954 and 1955.  Finally Bing flew to Chicago, where the Lyric Opera managers were most definitely not glad to see him, knowing that if Callas signed with the Met, Chicago would hear her no more.  Sign she did at last, but while still in Chicago she was served with a summons by a man who claimed that she had long before signed an exclusive management contract with him, which meant that in New York her earnings would have to be carefully sheltered from the claimant.  In the end her then husband, Giovanni Batista Meneghini, insisted on being paid in cash before each performance; annoyed, Bing finally paid him in five-dollar bills, to make the wad as burdensome as possible.
Callas shrieking at the process server who
 served her with a summons backstage in
Chicago.  Widely circulated, this photo
 earned her the name of the Tigress.     Callas’s 1956 debut at the Met in Norma was less than brilliant, but by now the public’s interest in her had reached a fever pitch.  On the Saturday matinée following the debut, she sent word from her dressing room that she was unable to go on.  Rushing to her, Bing found that she was genuinely ill, but after a few words of encouragement from him she agreed to perform, thus forestalling a riot in the theater.  She then had obligations elsewhere, but agreed to return for future seasons.  In the interim she walked out in mid-performance in Rome, with the President of Italy in the audience, provoking a firestorm of criticism abroad.  Further complications developed, arising in part from Callas’s jealousy of a rival soprano, Renata Tebaldi, who also had commitments with the Met.  Finally the negotiations broke down, and the ill-informed press blazoned the headline  BING  FIRES  CALLAS.  After that there was little love between them; according to his memoir, in Milan she actually canceled a performance, for fear lest he be in the audience.  But in time both mellowed, and after she shed her husband Meneghini, always a difficult go-between, they became friends again.  In his memoir Bing emphasizes that Callas was in fact quite girlish, with an innocent dependence on others when she didn't feel she had to be wary. When Tebaldi sang an opening night Adriana Lecouvreur at the new Met in 1968, Callas was a guest in Bing’s box.  Afterward Callas agreed to go backstage to see Tebaldi; when they met, the two rivals fell into each other’s arms amid an amplitude of tears.
     There were no tears shed in Bing’s engagement with the critics, whom he viewed as frustrated musicians or conductors, ill informed and nasty.  He was well aware that good reviews get little attention, whereas bad ones get a lot.  Reviewers, he insisted, fault the Med for inadequate rehearsals, without ever having bothered to attend one.  Some of them would complain of a singer’s faulty diction in French or German, without themselves knowing a word of the language mentioned.  But Bing too could be harsh.  When columnist Dorothy Kilgallen reviewed the opening night production of the 1961-62 season, Girl of the Golden West, describing it as the story of a Negro saloon keeper and a Jewish cowboy (Leontyne Price and Richard Tucker), he was furious, and decreed that la Kilgallen should never again set foot in the hallowed precincts of the Met.  And to my knowledge, she never did.
     The move to Lincoln Center was preceded by endless negotiations and debate.  One faction on the board wanted a 5,000-seat house, which Bing knew would be far too large, taxing the singers’ lung power, dwarfing certain productions, and guaranteeing a lot of empty seats; even the 3,800 seats that he ended up with struck him as excessive.  Complicating matters was Bing’s admitted ignorance of architecture, and the architects’ and engineers’ ignorance of opera.  Some board members wanted a “popular” house with few boxes, but Bing fought for the boxes as traditional in an opera house.  There must be no seats with an obstructed view, he emphasized, and the acoustics must be perfect.  He was bitterly opposed to the City Center Opera’s also moving to the new site, deeming it an inferior company and fearing its low-priced competition – opposition that he later regretted, finding that the two houses were quite compatible and even mutually beneficial.  The move cost far more than projected, but Bing got from his board everything for which he could demonstrate a need.  When the new house opened in 1966, it had all the backstage facilities required, a splendid and acoustically sound interior, and a glass façade behind high arches, giving at night an impressive view into the interior, with its grand central staircase, and paintings on either side by Chagall.  I have seen that façade at night many times, its central location dominating the whole spacious plaza; it is indeed magnificent.




      When not being Big Daddy to the world's most renowned and temperamental opera stars, Bing lived quietly with his wife Nina at Essex House on Central Park South and rarely entertained there.  His entertaining was done at the general manager’s box at the opera house, though he rarely invited singers or conductors currently performing at the Met, or board members or donors either.  Instead, he preferred guests safely removed from the world of opera, chiefly members of the diplomatic corps, especially from the U.N.  The mayor also had access to the box, and John Lindsay brought such stellar guests as Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, the king of Morocco, and Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel.  Courteous and urbane, Bing surely could exchange small talk – or talk not so small – with all of them.
     By the early 1970s Bing was ready to retire from the Met.  The problems and crises were predictable, the work had lost its challenge.  When he stepped down in 1972, Sir Rudolph (a British citizen, he had been knighted by the queen the year before) tried his hand at teaching, didn’t like it, then found more congenial employment at Columbia Artists Management.  His wife died in 1983, and four years later he surprised everyone when, at 85, he married a woman of 47 who already had three marriages to oldsters under her belt, and three hospitalizations for psychiatric causes; the tabloids ate it up.  But in 1989 a court annulled the marriage, deeming Sir Rudolph too affected by Alzeimer’s to enter responsibly into such a serious commitment.  He died in 1997.
     There is little doubt that Rudolph Bing was one of the great general managers of opera, producing time and again – especially in the early years -- memorable productions with singers and conductors of the highest order.  His memoir gives an idea of the difficulties he constantly faced and often – though not always – overcame.  “There are two sighs of relief every night in the life of an opera manager,” he said.  “The first comes when the curtain goes up.  The second comes when the final curtain goes down without any disaster, and one realizes, gratefully, that the miracle has happened again.”  For twenty-two years his whole life was the Met, where under his supervision the miracle happened over and over again.
     Me and opera:  Though my knowledge of opera lacks the breadth and depth that my partner Bob and our friend John display, I will impose my likes and dislikes anyway.  Here goes!
·      My favorite opera: Lucia di Lammermoor.  A tough choice, given the competition.  Tomorrow it may be Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos or something else.·      The most impressive production I’ve ever seen:  Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten with Leonie Rysanek at the new Met, Karl Bohm conducting.  It was epic, almost cosmic, taking full advantage of the new house’s huge stage and advanced technology.·      The most painful scene to watch:  Long ago, the presentation of the rose in the City Center’s Der Rosenkavalier.  The attendants raised their right arm in salutation, then were obliged to hold the arm up throughout the entire scene.  Of course their arms sagged, then stiffened, then sagged again.  Painful for them to do, painful for the audience to watch.·      The most ludicrous production: Lohengrin, as attempted ingloriously by a provincial company in Besançon, France, in the late fall or winter of 1951.  Besançon, where I was studying, was, in Gallic parlance, a trou, a hole, and any opera company that played there had to be at the bottom of the heap.  I sat with the other students up near the heavens, where we could see the Lohengrin, an elderly  who should long since have been put out to pasture, waiting in the wings for his entrance.  The company’s technical skills were such that, in the last act, where the swan is transformed into a young boy, the flat pasteboard swan was simply pushed over and a boy ran onto the stage.  But the high point of the night had come in the first act when a stagehand, needing to fix something onstage, crept out on all fours behind some scenery, thinking himself unseen by the audience.  But he was creeping in front of some lights that cast his shadow, greatly magnified, on a backdrop.  At the sight of this huge creeping shadow, the students howled, setting the tone for the evening.  As we all left afterward, one of the French students remarked, “On a bien rigolé!” – which comes off as, “We’ve had a blast!”  Indeed we had.·      The house where I always had a good view of the stage, where every scene was skillfully directed, and where I paid the least: the Amato Opera on the Bowery, now, alas, deceased.  So what if the stage was tiny, the orchestra a piano and a handful of other instruments, and the chorus’s entry down the main aisle so close that they brushed you in passing and almost sat in your lap?  That was all part of the charm of it, and somehow it all worked.  Anthony Amato made no claim to be a Rudolph Bing, but he directed his performers with skill; they actually acted!  The voices weren’t of the caliber of the Met’s, but Bob usually assured me that one or two had real promise, might have a distinguished career.  I miss the Amato keenly.


Gone but not forgotten.
     I have asked Bob for his three most exceptional performances, for he is much more knowledgeable than I am.  Here they are:
1.    Zinka Milanov in Andrea Chénier, her farewell performance at the old Met.2.    Magda Olivera in Tosca at the new Met.3.    George London and Leonie Rysanek in The Flying Dutchman at the old Met.

     Source note:  Much of the information in this post comes from Rudolph Bing's memoir, 5000 Nights at the Opera, published in 1972.  It is quite readable and conveys the excitement and woes of managing a major opera house.  The illustrations are excellent.

     Coming soon:  Next Wednesday, another post on Colorful New Yorkers: The Mad Poet of Broadway, Fernandy, and the Mephistopheles of Wall Street.  Next Sunday, September 8: Walter Winchell, a New Kind of Terrorist (with a glance at the super-exclusive Stork Club, where I once got partway in).  In the works: Fifth Avenue: from goats to greatness, and how Mrs. Vanderbilt outmaneuvered Mrs. Astor with help from Bo Peep and the Electric Light.  

©  2013  Clifford Browder

83. Colorful New Yorkers: Diamond Jim and Texas Guinan

Looking a bit glum.  Maybe Lillian had just
rejected him ... again.

      Diamond Jim Brady (1856-1917) is remembered as the most prodigious eater and the most jewelry-adorned man-about-town of the Gilded Age.  Born to a poor Irish family on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, his father a saloon keeper, he started work at a young age as a hotel bellhop and messenger, studied the wealthy patrons, their talk and dress and manner, and set out to imitate them and become one of them.  One of these men took an interest in him, sent him to school to learn bookkeeping and penmanship, then offered him a job in baggage at Grand Central Station.  There he rose quickly to station agent and then general manager of the station, and in time became a salesman of handsaws, and then of railroad supplies, charming his customers as he sold them everything from seat cushions and hydraulic breaks to steel undercarriages.  Remarkably successful in this line of work, he became, with the help of investments in the stock market, a millionaire many times over.  If he sat in his office doing business from 9 to 5 daily, after that he gravitated, as he put it, to "where the white lights glowed."
     A perennial and gregarious bachelor, he was a familiar figure in the Broadway night life, an eager dancer and big tipper, and a frequent patron of the upstairs poker and baccarat tables at the Waldorf-Astoria.  Often dining with fellow lovers of the night, including attractive women above all, he would consume no alcohol but, so legend has it, vast amounts of food.  His breakfast was said to consist of eggs, breads, muffins, grits, pancakes, steaks, chops, fried potatoes, and pitchers of orange juice.  In midmorning he'd devour two or three dozen clams or oysters, then lunch at Delmonico's or some other fashionable restaurant on more oysters and clams, lobsters, crabs, a joint of beef, pie, and more orange juice.  Then, after an afternoon snack of more seafood, he'd typically dine on three dozen oysters, a dozen crabs, six or seven lobsters, soup, steak, and for dessert a tray full of pastries.
     Did he really consume such huge amounts of edibles, or has legend exaggerated his culinary prowess?  One restaurant owner described him as "the best twenty-five customers I ever had."  And a broker friend told of seeing him consume a pound of candy in five minutes.  When he died of a heart attack years later, doctors examining the body are said to have found that his stomach was six times the size of that of an average person.
     What was indisputable was his affinity for jewels ("my pets," he called them), especially the diamonds -- some 12,000 of them -- that gave him his nickname.  He wore them on his buttons, watch, belt buckle, scarf pin, eyeglass case, rings, tie pins, cane, and cuff links.  In the handle of his umbrella shone a gem worth $1500, but the prize of his collection was a 35-carat emerald surrounded by six 14-carat diamonds, the whole made into a ring worth $20,000 (about $420,000 today).  He rotated his pets, displaying diamonds one night, rubies the next, and emeralds the night after that.  And in his pockets, they say, he kept a stash of loose diamonds.  "All that glitters is not gold," Shakespeare opines.  True enough in this case, it was diamonds.  When Diamond Jim went out on the town, he absolutely glittered.  Garish?  Vulgar?  The incorrigible poor taste of the nouveau riche?  Said Brady, "Them as has 'em, wears 'em."

   One of his best friends was actress and singer Lillian Russell, the reigning beauty of the day known for her voice and style and magical stage presence, as well as her hour-glass figure (a wasp waist with amplitudes above and below) and feathered hats.  Theirs seems to have been primarily a long-term friendship, though he evidently proposed more than once and was turned down, Lillian explaining that marriage would ruin their friendship.  If Jim remained a bachelor, it was wisdom; man about town that he was, he wouldn't have been a very good husband.  And Lillian, going through three marriages until she stuck at last in the fourth (she believed in marriage until divorce do us part), was probably not the ideal loving wife, and may have seen in their friendship a needed bit of stability.  What they shared was a love of life and good food, Lillian's appetite all but matching his own, and he generously helped support her lavish lifestyle, which included a bike custom-made for her by Tiffany, its handlebars inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and its wheel spokes displaying her initials set in diamonds.  Which goes a long way toward explaining why they call this the Gilded Age.

Lillian and her gem-studded bike.
Of course one notices the hat.
     But cycling may not have been quite his style.  In 1895 he was the first New Yorker to acquire that newfangled contraption, an automobile, then had his chauffeur drive him in town at a preannounced time and place, so his fellow citizens could gawk.
     The bluebloods of Manhattan would not have welcomed Diamond Jim or Lillian in their elegant parlors, he being the son of an Irish saloon keeper, and she an actress, and both of them guilty of the shameless display of wealth.  But Jim and Lillian didn't care; they were having too much fun.
     An aside on dreads:  Respectable families of the time nursed two haunting dreads: (1) That the son would fall in love with an actress; (2) That the daughter would elope with the coachman.  Good-looking young coachmen must have had trouble finding work.
     In time Diamond Jim's eating habits caught up with him and he was beset with gallstones, heart problems, diabetes, and stomach ulcers.  In 1917 he died of a heart attack, leaving money to various charities, $1200 to his favorite Pullman porter, and the bulk of his fortune to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
     The true confirmation of a legend in this country is its embodiment in a Hollywood movie, and both Diamond Jim and Lillian make the grade, Jim in the 1935 film Diamond Jim, starring Edward Arnold, and Lillian in the 1940 film Lillian Russell, starring Alice Faye.  I saw them both as a child and recall being quite indignant that the Lillian Russell film including some new song about an evening star that smacked of modernity; a budding history buff, I wanted "After the Ball" and others of that vintage, and not some romantic nonsense about an evening star.  (Wherein I erred.  I learn now that the evening star song was indeed of the period!)
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      Another lover of the nighttime Broadway scene was Texas Guinan (1884-1933).  Born in Waco, Texas, to Irish-Canadian immigrants, she later convinced the press that she had ridden broncos, rounded up cattle single-handed on a ranch, run off from school to join a circus, and in 1917 gone to France to entertain U.S. soldiers before they confronted the fearful Hun in battle.  Also, she told of receiving a medal from General Joffre during the battle of the Marne -- an interesting detail, since that battle occurred in 1914, long before we entered the war.  All of this was baloney; she was a gifted liar.
     A mediocre singer and slightly less mediocre actress, she started out in vaudeville, touring the vast hinterland of America, charming audiences less with her warbling than with her Wild West spiel and witticisms.  In 1917 she came to New York, where she landed roles in silent films -- 300 of them, she claimed, though it was really 36 -- and even appeared on Broadway.  But if she hoped to streak cometlike across the firmament of Gotham, so far her career had shown less flash than fizzle.
     All that changed in 1920, with the advent of Prohibition.  Prohibition in the feisty, guzzling Babylon on the Hudson?  Ridiculous!  Impossible!  Fuhgedaboudit!  Almost overnight speakeasies began opening all over the city.  Tired of "kissing horses in horse operas," in 1922 Texas, then 38, sensed her true vocation.  After working up her act as M.C. in two high-class joints, she teamed up with Larry Fay, a nightclub owner with the right underworld connections, whose El Fay Club on West 45th Street featured opulent décor, boisterous entertainment, and abundant overpriced alcohol.  Backed up by a scantily clad chorus line, Texas lured a wide range of patrons that included Wall Street financiers, Ivy League college boys, celebrities, politicos, and mobsters.  Why did they flock?  Because the El Fay Club had something that no other speakeasy had: a bejeweled blonde named Texas Guinan.
     Who came?  Ring Lardner, Damon Runyan, Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan; Harry Thaw, the murderer of architect Stanford White; Jimmy Walker, soon to be the fun-loving mayor of New York; and a host of others.  "Hiya, Suckers!" Texas would say by way of greeting, and the patrons would chorus back, "Hiya, Texas!"  Armed with a clapper and a police whistle, clad in ermine and sporting an outsized hat, she would circulate among them, sowing wisecracks far and wide; they loved it.
     There was just one catch: this business was illegal.  Whatever Larry Fay's connections were, they didn't prevent the police from raiding his club, then another that he opened to replace it, and then, when that one too was raided, yet another.  Texas, now a celebrity, presided over each of them, and as a result was jailed repeatedly, jewels and furs included, as recorded by the tabloids of the day, but she was never in for long.  "I like your cute little jail," she remarked, upon release from a night in Durance Vile.  "And I don't know when my jewels have seemed so safe."  As for serving liquor, she denied ever having done such a reprehensible thing; the patrons must have brought the stuff in.  The publicity attending these inconveniences brought still more patrons to the next club she opened; they couldn't get enough of Texas.
     Finally Texas decided to break with Larry Fay and strike out on her own.  Appalled at the prospect of losing his meal ticket, Fay threatened her, so Texas hired some bodyguards and acquired an armored car.  Chastened, Fay sent her flowers and good wishes for her new club, the Club 300, which opened on West 54th Street.  It immediately caught on, became a place the elite simply had to be seen at.  On July 4, 1926, some four hundred of them crowded in to celebrate champion golfer Bobby Jones's return from a triumph in England.  Following Jones's lead, others joined him in dancing the Charleston, among them the captain of a Cunard liner, two U.S. senators, and an ex-president of Cuba.  Then, at 3:00 a.m., five policemen in evening clothes and two policewomen disguised as flappers announced that the club was being raided.  Music and dancing stopped, celebrities vanished, and Texas was arrested and then released upon posting bail, whereupon she went home to the West 8th Street apartment that she shared with her aging parents.
     The 300 Club soon reopened and was frequented by George Gershwin, Pola Negri, Al Jolson, Irving Berlin, Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow, John Barrymore, and others, a perfect roster of Roaring Twenties celebrities.  Then, on February 16, 1927, an army of policemen raided her yet again -- Texas's sixth raid.  At the 47th Street police station she entertained a multitude of arrested patrons, reporters, photographers, police, and federal agents in renderings of "The Prisoner's Song," a hit tune of the day, sparking up a party that lasted for nine hours; the public read about it in the morning papers.
       Of course the club reopened yet again, but the next challenge came from a different quarter when Aimee Semple McPherson, the celebrity revivalist, left her home base in the City of the Angels to convert the wild and  wanton city of New York.  Like Texas, Aimee was a superb self-promoter and performer, her services on occasion featuring such embellishments as flying angels, a camel, a police motorcycle.  When it came time for the offering, she would announce, "Brothers and sisters, I don't want to hear the clink of small change.  I want to hear the rustle of those dollar bills!"  Now, white gowned, perfumed, and glamorous, she survived the spectacle in a Village dive of the Black Bottom, then fast supplanting the Charleston as the most popular dance of the day, and toward 3 a.m. made a beeline for the Club 300.  The queen of West Coast revivalism confronting the queen of East Coast speakeasies in her den of iniquity?  Yes, it really happened.
     Undaunted, Texas urged her guests, "Give a hand for the brave little woman!"  Sister Aimee and Texas stood arm in arm, and as the patrons cheered wildly, the new arrival urged them all to look to the well-being of their immortal souls, invited them to attend her meeting later that day, and graciously departed.  So that afternoon Texas and her chorus girls, all properly clothed and in furs, showed up at the Glad Tidings Tabernacle on West 33rd Street, and with cameras clicking, joined in the prayers and hymns, and listened quietly to Aimee's soaring exhortations.  Some accounts have Texas converted by Sister Aimee, but this is nonsense; Texas simply escorted her girls back to the club.
     With 1929 came the stock market crash, and the Roaring Twenties dwindled to a whimper.  In her clubs, each one closed in time by the law, the crowds had long been thinning, and the free spenders of recent years now vanished.  "An indiscretion a day keeps the Depression away," quipped Texas, who in 1931 took her troupe to Paris, only to be sent back home by the French government, who wanted no competition for their own performers in these new hard times.  Desperate, she and her troupe toured the provinces -- a comedown after years of glory -- but in Vancouver she suffered an attack of ulcerated colitis and died there on November 5, 1933, age 49, just one month before the repeal of Prohibition.  Twelve thousand attended her funeral in New York.  A fitting sendoff, since she had said on her deathbed in Vancouver, "I would rather have a square inch of New York than all the rest of the world."

     Coming soon:  Next Sunday, the Titan of the Met (with an account of the fiery Callas, and my choice for the most ludicrous opera production ever staged).  Next Wednesday, more Colorful New Yorkers: the Mad Poet of Broadway, Fernandy, and the Mephistopheles of Wall Street.  Warning: These projections are tentative and assume no more mysterious disappearances of drafts, such as have plagued me recently.  But last Sunday's post on war profiteering had the most views in one day to date: 184! 

©  2013  Clifford Browder

82. Who makes money when America goes to war? New York City, 1861-1865.

     When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Southerners, convinced that "cotton is king," predicted that New York City, deprived of cotton and other Southern products, would soon see grass growing in its streets.  But the city saw no more grass in its streets than usual -- which meant next to none --  for the government now found itself suddenly in need of every kind of supplies and rushed to obtain them.  Since Washington, Baltimore, and even Philadelphia were thought to be too close to the theater of war, New York was where, in the East, contracts were offered for, among other things, Springfield and Enfield rifles, cannon, bayonets, boots and shoes, uniforms, wagons, mess pork, kiln-dried cornmeal, prime Rio coffee, rice in stout oak barrels, and quantities of "good hard soap."  Needless to say, patriotic New Yorkers rushed to oblige.  "You will rake in hugely," one patriot had written another at the outbreak of war, and events proved him outrageously right.  Of the three categories of New Yorkers who profited from the war -- contractors, speculators, and bounty brokers -- let's have a look first at the contractors.

Contractors


     What might an enterprising commission broker with the right contacts manage to accomplish?  Quite a bit, as for instance five thousand barrels of not quite prime mess pork delivered to the commissary general at a thumping price in regulation solid oak casks bound each with two iron hoops; a subcontract, bought from the brother-in-law of a captain, for six thousand overcoats of wool that he satisfied with the best cheap shoddy on the market, which, dyed sky-blue, might – or might not – turn spongy if exposed to heavy rain; and twelve thousand pasteboard and shingle-stiffened boots passed with a wink by the inspector – a smooth deal topped off afterward by a toast at the Astor House bar to the “old flag, the true flag, the red, white, and blue flag” by himself and the inspector, clinking glasses with the assistant quartermaster general.  And if the boots did fall apart in the rain, he had a ready explanation to any investigating committee: "Gents, those articles were meant for the cavalry!"
      And how might a contractor accomplish all this?  Not just by scanning the assistant quartermaster general's announcements in the papers.  It was just as useful to mingle with contractors and subcontractors, commissary agents and quartermasters, and brokers of every breed and spiel at the Astor House Hotel on busy Broadway, where rumors circulated and deals were hatched over a brandy and soda or a gin sling in a spacious but crowded barroom with a long curving bar backed by huge mirrors in thick gilt frames.   
     That all was not well, that outrageous prices were being paid, and often for substandard goods, soon became apparent.  The young J.P. Morgan loaned money to a dealer who bought defective carbines from a government arsenal for $3.50 each and then resold them to the government for $22.  Morgan has been denounced for this deal ever since, but he may have been only a creditor.  Steamboat operator Daniel Drew chartered two almost obsolete steamboats to the government for seven hundred and eight hundred dollars a day, and Commodore Vanderbilt, never to be outdone by others, chartered four steamships to the government at the astonishing rate of two thousand dollars a day.  Meanwhile it was rumored that Mayor George Opdyke had made a fortune through secret partnerships with contractors.  The influential politician Thurlow Weed accused him of making fraudulent claims against the government, prompting Opdyke to sue him, but the mayor failed to convince the jury.  Meanwhile Weed himself was lining his pockets with commissions for letting out government contracts.  To sensitive nostrils the aroma of corruption was rank.  
     Subsequent Congressional investigations would uncover some interesting facts: supplies furnished by a supplier without prices being predetermined and without competition, the "fair mercantile profit" allowed by the quartermaster being 40 percent; contractors realizing huge profits by subletting contracts to other parties who assumed all the responsibilities and risks, yet themselves realized profits matching those of the original contractors; an alleged government agent who purchased a buggy and horses, then took them for himself and disappeared without paying the seller; an inspector who reported rejecting 500 or 600 felt overcoats out of 6,000 because they were too thin; and vessels chartered without inspection of their boilers, the government relying completely on the seller's word for their condition.  Yes, someone -- a lot of someones -- were raking in hugely.

A carriage today in Central Park.  Not too different from the carriages back then.
Rainer Halama
     And they were spending hugely.  Parading in shiny equipages on the Drive in the new Central Park, with uniformed coachmen, and liveried footmen sitting erect in rumble seats, were what came to be known as the Shoddy Aristocracy, the women in brocaded silks and thousand-dollar camel's-hair shawls, and bonnets with frills and lace and ruffles and maybe a stuffed hummingbird on top, while their silk-hatted escorts sported velvet coats, gold chains, breast pins, and gem-studded rings.  And at their balls and receptions the hostesses greeted their multitudes of guests, some of whom they barely knew, in low-cut dresses edged with fluted ruffles, smiling under top-heavy tiaras, or towering pyramids or waterfalls of gold-powdered curls, often augmented with imported horsehair and adorned with amber or pearl or jet or garnet beads, or small seashells, or gilt coins jingling in flashy profusion.    The simplicity of the old Knickerbocker society of years past was gone forever; Shoddy reigned supreme.


Speculators

     "The battle of Bull Run," said a financier, "makes the fortune of every man on Wall Street who is not a natural idiot."  He knew that the North's initial defeat meant a long war was inevitable, with vast government expenditures, a flood of paper money, and rising prices for all goods generally.  He at once bought 75,000 shares of stock, since stock prices too must go up.

     The gentleman was right.  As government contracts proliferated, railroads saw their profits soar, businesses paid off debt, provisioners were swamped with orders, industry thrived, and the stock market surged.  War, it turned out, was good, very good, for business and certainly for the stock market.  By 1863 the public had flocked to Wall Street and everyone was up to their ears in speculation: merchants and their pallid clerks, feisty steamboat skippers, waiters, dowagers reclining on cushions in carriages at their broker's door while their servants fetched quotations, and clergymen who in one quick scoop in the market could top their salary for a year.  There were markets also for mining stocks and petroleum shares, an Open Board providing continuous daytime trading of stocks, countless minor fly-by-night markets, and a number of evening exchanges, so that New York, alone of all the cities in the world, had facilities for trading stocks twenty-four hours a day.
 
     The prospects and prices of stocks were talked of in clubs, on the street, in theaters, and in the most respectable of brownstone parlors.  Brokers reaped huge profits, their members lost their voices on the trading floor, and their clerks toiled at their desks until late at night.  Successful speculators in rich silk vests dined regularly at Delmonico's on partridge stuffed with truffles; but since what the market giveth, the market taketh away, the same parties might be seen a few weeks later shuffling in seedy clothes, breakfasting on hash and coffee, or panhandling: "dead ducks" in the parlance of the Street.  But for every warrior laid low on the Wall Street battlefield, a dozen fresh recruits took his place.

Wall Street in the 1860s, looking east from the corner of Broad.
The temple-like building on the left is the Custom House, now Federal Hall.
     But the rage for speculation involved much more than stocks.  There was a Cotton Exchange and a Corn Exchange, and speculation in wool, dry goods, grain, lumber, sugar, coal, pork, and molasses.  But nothing matched the speculation in gold.  At the outbreak of hostilities gold went into hiding as the public, beset with uncertainties, hoarded it.  Then, in 1862, the government started issuing greenbacks, paper money unsecured by gold and backed only by the credit of the government.  Wall Street took note: gold was esteemed but in hiding, whereas greenbacks were plentiful but risky, good only if the North won the war, since otherwise they might be repudiated and become worthless.  So what should a patriotic Wall Streeter do?  Speculate!  With every Union defeat the price of gold in greenbacks would go up, and with every Union victory it would plunge, dancing in savage counterpoint to the fortunes of the nation.  Gold!  The very thought of it, the very sound of the word made the blood race, the brain quicken.  Buy gold if the North is winning, but dump it if the North is losing.  Get the news before anyone else, and trade, trade, trade!


A cartoon attacking the Lincoln administration, with the Secretary of the Treasury
in shirt sleeves on the left, cranking a machine to turn out greenbacks.  Lincoln
is seated in the center rear, remarking, "All this reminds me of a capital joke."
     And trade they did, feverishly.  Every bulletin from the battlefields sent gold up or down, and fortunes once amassed over years or decades could now be made -- or lost -- in months, weeks, or days, even minutes.  "Gold is going up!" preached the brokers.  "Fortunes can be made!"  To get word first of a battle, big operators bribed telegraph men and secretaries to the great in Washington, but even small traders saw their profits grow.  On the street stable boys sported diamonds, and former coal shovelers were seen driving the fanciest of rigs.  How could one not buy gold?  It was the chance of a lifetime, an opportunity to be seized at once, or missed and regretted for the rest of your life.  Driven from the stock exchange, which lacked facilities for their expanding operation, the gold traders took refuge in an ill-lit den called the Coal Hole, then in Gilpin's News Room nearby, and finally in a home of their own, the Gold Room on William Street, where traders shrieked and traded in a frenzy surpassing anything seen before on Wall Street.  At news of a Northern victory, exultant bears sang "John Brown's Body"; at news of a defeat, bulls whistled "Dixie" and whooped.  Gold surged to 220, 250; brokers predicted 300.  While multitudes fought and died on the battlefield, in New York City greenhorns from the provinces and veteran Wall Street traders were locked together in the perfumed thorny garden that was gold.  It hit 285.

     "What do you think of those fellows on Wall Street who are gambling in gold at such a time as this?" the President asked Governor Curtin of Pennsylvania in April 1864.  "They are a set of sharks," replied Curtin.  "For my part," said Lincoln, banging his clenched fist on a table, "I wish every one of them had his devilish head shot off!"

     All through 1864 the fever continued.  Rubbing elbows on Wall and William Streets were displaced Southerners, quirky Yankees, and Westerners in broad-brimmed hats, their moods and fortunes rhythmed by the dance of gold.  With Grant hammering at the gates of Richmond, the big operators had  agents on either side of the lines; for them even sooner than for Lincoln in the White House, couriers galloped, telegraphs clicked.  Atlanta fell, Sherman was marching to the sea.  Gold plunged, rallied, plunged.

     On William Street that winter a mass of traders huddled under black umbrellas, ankle-deep in slush, collars up, scarved against the whip of the wind, their eyes riveted on an overhead indicator announcing the latest price of gold.  Inside the Gold Room, brokers exhaling winy vapors and tobacco shrieked, jostled, and gesticulated, buying and selling a metal they had never seen, dealing only in certificates and statements of account -- paper, shadows of gold!  An observer might well have called the whole scene insane, even hellish, as demonic faces sang "John Brown's Body" or "Dixie," while onlookers stood on chairs and screamed.

     The madness ended only with the final defeat of the South.  Gold never got to 300; it plunged.  A few were rich, many were poor.  The public deserted Wall Street.  The Gold Room experienced -- for a while -- an unearthly calm.  It was over.


Bounty brokers

     The bounty broker was a new species of war profiteer who came into existence with the initiation of the draft in 1863.  Any male liable to be drafted could buy an exemption for $300, which meant that from then on it would be a rich man's war but a poor man's fight.  In New York the result was the Draft Riots of July 11, 1863, when for three days angry Irish mobs ruled the streets, burning draft offices and lynching blacks, whom they blamed for the war and the draft.  The riots ended when troops fresh from Gettysburg rushed back to patrol the streets, but the only way the government could get more men for the army was by imposing quotas on each state and county.  To fill these quotas, the federal, state, and local governments began offering bounties for volunteers.  The bounties were for any recruit who presented himself, but brokers began rustling up recruits by offering them a portion of the bounty while keeping the rest for themselves.  Some recruits agreed to the arrangement voluntarily; others did so out of ignorance.

     Who were these bounty brokers?  In New York City, anyone accustomed to providing live bodies to whoever needed them, as for instance boarding house runners paid by a boarding house to grab arriving immigrants off the gangplank and coax, cajole, or drag them to the boarding house, while fighting off rival boarding house runners if need be; some immigrant were all but torn asunder in the process.  Tammany stalwarts also came naturally to such work since, for a remuneration, they had ushered drunks, moochers, almshouse invalids, asylum denizens, and inmates of the county jail to polls on election day.

     Imagine, then, a seasoned bounty broker in 1864 who, with the war still raging and a triple bounty from federal, state, and county governments available, had five recruits in tow: three farm boys green as apples, a broken-down actor too fond of the joy of gladness, and a loony with a torn slouch hat, a week's stubble of beard, and a dirty-sock smell all about him.  (No, I'm not exaggerating; these things really happened.)  The farm boys, whom he or an agent of his had lured off their farms upstate with promises of glory, of being a hero whom their grandkids would one day worship, were no problem, if he could just keep them quiet while he boarded them cheap in the city, waiting for the bounties to go up again; he could always send them to Barnum's Museum to see the hippopotamus or the educated rats.


Recruiting in City Hall Park, 1864.  Federal, state, and county bounties were all available,
totaling $677, with another $100 for veterans.  Also, $15 in "hand money" for anyone
bringing in a recruit, which explains some of what's going on.
     The other two would be a challenge.  The drunk was an old hand at the game, having enlisted and deserted three times, but he would have to be sobered up and his red nose chalked a bit, with maybe a dash of mint spray in his mouth, and no chance at a swig of the stimulating.  As for the loony, he would need clean togs from a gents' furnishings, a bath and a shave, and a touch of coal tar to darken his gray hair.  Then, if he could disguise his limp and manage to walk a few steps straight, he might squeak by the surgeon, especially if the provost marshal was hard up for recruits, and the surgeon a pal of the broker's, maybe someone he'd liquored with a time or two in the past.

     Not all brokers were as discreet as the one just imagined.  Some of them kidnapped boys, seized unwary immigrants, used force, or befuddled their "recruits" with drink.  Under the influence, many a potential recruit became convinced that he could lick Jeff Davis and Stonewall Jackson combined, then woke up a day later in uniform on an army base, wondering how he ever got there.  Among those accepted with a wink by surgeons, the press reported, were cripples, lunatics, boys of fifteen or sixteen, men over sixty, soldiers discharged for a physical disability, and men with an "incurable disease," probably venereal.  Of the $300 bounty offered by New York County (i.e., New York City), it was estimated that only $100 usually went to the recruit, the broker getting the other $200.  The most enterprising brokers got rich.

     But not all recruits were naive; some enlisted repeatedly, getting the bounty for themselves and then deserting, so they could enlist and get the bounty yet again, a practice known as bounty jumping.  The authorities of course got wise to this and determined to prevent desertion.  A farm boy who enlisted upstate out of patriotism told how he and some eight hundred others were marched through the streets of Albany under strict guard, while onlookers viewed them with disgust and small boys, taking them for bounty jumpers, jeered at them and pelted them with mud balls.  Taken by steamboat to New York, they were marched down Broadway to the Battery, where a steamship awaited them.  When four broke loose and tried to escape, hoping to disappear into the slums of the city, the guards shot all four dead.

     When news came to the city on April 3, 1865, that Richmond had fallen at last with Lee in full retreat, everyone knew the war was almost over.  Immediately lawyers and merchants and clerks poured out of offices to celebrate; flags were flown from public buildings and churches and hotels; cannon boomed; soldiers were surrounded by crowds who thanked them for their service and handed them wads of cash; banks and the Gold Room were deserted; traffic stopped; men estranged for months clasped hands and shared the joy; and Wall Street reverberated with the strains of hymns and patriotic songs.  Only a few held aloof, aware that their best days were over: the bounty brokers, who muttered in their beards, wondering how a patriot now could make an honest living.


War profiteering today

     So who are today's contractors, speculators, and bounty brokers?

     Regarding contractors, one need only google "war profiteering, Iraq" to be inundated with info.  Here are a few salient facts:
The giant multinational Halliburton, one of the world's biggest oilfield service companies, billed government agencies for $17.2 billion in war-related revenue from 2003 to 2006 alone.  It didn't hurt its prospects that Dick Cheney, Secretary of War under George H.W. Bush (Papa Bush), then bridged the gap between Bushes by becoming Halliburton's chairman and CEO, and subsequently served as vice president under George W. Bush (Baby Bush) from 2001 to 2008.Veritas Capital Fund, a private equity fund, got $1.44 billion through its DynCorp subsidiary for training Iraqi police forces.  It didn't hurt its prospects that its top honcho, Dwight M. Williams, was a former chief security officer in the Department of Homeland Security, with close ties to a number of defense agencies.Perini Corporation got a $650 million contract, and URS Corporation some $792 million in fees, for environmental cleanup work in Iraq from the government.  It didn't hurt their prospects that the wife of financier Richard Blum, who controls both companies, is Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who serves on the Senate's Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee.The construction and engineering giant Bechtel got a huge no-bid contract worth $2.4 billion to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure.  Among its accomplishments: shoddy school repairs, and failure to finish a large Basra hospital on time and within budget.  Blackwater, a private security firm, got lucrative government contracts worth millions to guard officials and installations, train Iraq's new army, and otherwise support coalition forces in the country.  Blackwater guards were subsequently involved in a number of random shootings in Baghdad, resulting in the death of Iraqi civilians, and the firm's expulsion from Iraq.  This protean company has now changed its name -- again -- to Academi, and in its new persona hopes to get more work in Iraq.  (Its past names: Blackwater USA, Blackwater Worldwide, Xe Services.  It says something about a company if it feels the need to keep changing its name.)And so on and so on; the list is endless.  No further comment is needed.
Vice President Cheney, 2003.
A patriot who has lots to smile about.
     As regards speculation, I know of nothing matching the gold speculation of the Civil War, but that may simply reflect my ignorance.  As for bounty brokers, they do not exist now as such, for there is no draft and therefore no compulsion to fill up quotas.  But how about quotas for volunteers?  In Michael Moore's 2004 film Fahrenheit 911 we see two recruiters planning to find volunteers in a shopping mall frequented by the less affluent.  Whether they have quotas is unclear, but their recruiting obviously targets lower-class Americans, leaving those better off untouched, rather like those who in the Civil War could buy immunity from the draft for $300.  As always, a rich man's war but a poor man's fight.  So there is today, after all, a counterpart to the bounty brokers of the Civil War.     





     Coming soon:  Next Wednesday: Diamond Jim and Texas Guinan -- he of the 10,000 sparklers, and she who, jailed for the sixth time when her speakeasy was raided, remarked, "You have a cute little jail."  Plus a glance at Jim's pal Lillian ("Luscious Lillian") Russell, displaying her hourglass figure on a bike.  Next Sunday: The Titan of the Met.  Can you guess who?  Opera buffs will know.  He had his hands full with Maria Callas.  (I don't mean literally!)  In the offing (among other topics): Fifth Avenue and the Mrs. Astor, and the brownstone that was labeled the house of death.  (The perfect note to end on.)

©  2013  Clifford Browder